Variations on a Theme of Reality

More variations on a theme of Schuon. But I ended up having little time to improvise on it. Too many distractions. In any event, first the theme. Maestro:

♪♫ Man's spiritual alchemy comprises two dimensions, or two phases, which can be designated by the terms "doctrine" and "method," or "truth" and "way." The first element appears as the divine Word, and the second as the human response; in this sense the truth is a descent, and the way an ascent. ♪♫

This is pretty much what I was driving at with our old friends (↓) and (↑). Schuon is already pretty abstract, and I'm just abstracting from the abstraction and distilling the essence from the essential.

Right away this reminds me -- remember, we're just improvising here -- of something Nasr says in The Essential Schuon: that his writings "are characterized by essentiality, universality and comprehensiveness."

As to the first, "they always go to the heart and are concerned with the essence of whatever they deal with."

Or in other words -- and this is something we are always striving for as well, otherwise why bother writing? -- he tries to reach "to the very core of the subject he is treating" and go "beyond forms to to the essential formless Center of forms," in what amounts to "a journey that is at once intellectual and spiritual from the circumference to the Center."

Circumnavalgazing the whole existentialada, we call it, or sayling 'round the unsayable sea of being. Verticalesthenics. Same difference.

Essence. Exactly what does it mean? "The intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, that determines its character; a property or group of properties of something without which it would not exist or be what it is; the basic, real, and invariable nature of a thing or its significant individual feature or features."

Something is essential if, when we remove it, the thing to which it attaches is no longer itself. This has many important applications, for example, what is the essence of the United States?

In order to address that question, we need to go meta, or become even more abstract and essential, for philosophy itself split in two some 700 years ago with the development of nominalism. The, er, essence of nominalism is the denial of essences, precisely, such that anyone who talks about them is talking about nothing, or certainly nothing real.

In truth, one cannot not be an essentialist, for reasons implicit in the above paragraph -- i.e., that without a notion of essence, one can't even speak of its denial. It's ultimately a variant of the postmodern "there's no such thing as truth" gag. Nominalism, like relativism, Darwinism, and scientism, is soph-beclowning.

Of course, Richard Weaver's Coon Classic Ideas Have Consequences is on just this subject.

Nominalism expands the world in a certain sense, in that everything becomes an individual instance of itself. But this is only a horizontal expansion, with no way to organize it from above.

Some people have described a bad acid trip this way: it is as if every moment becomes a catastrophic novelty, with no way to make sense of it. Psychosis has been characterized this way as well: nonstop nameless dread -- and dreadful because nameless.

In reality, it's a complementarity. Much of the history of philosophy involves some guy grabbing at one end of a complementarity and running with it. Looked at this way, a strong realist is as wrong as a strong anti-realist. For reality is a tapestry of form and substance, or music and geometry, or spirit and matter, or boxers and briefs, whatever.

But denying universals denies everything transcending experience, thus denying one's own denial. Which is an affirmation of universals.

Much of what we call "fake news" (as well as liberal fakademia) is a result of messing with concrete facts, abstract universals, and the space in between. When a Republican is caught redhanded, it's a Culture of Corruption. When a Democrat is so caught, it's just an aberration, and besides, being a Democrat has nothing to do with it. Obama? Vigorous executive. Trump? Fascist usurper.

The other evening Tucker Carlson was trying to get a Planned Parenthood executive to say whether or not a fetus is a human being. Fascinating, in a creepy way. We all know what the answer is, but she simply could not or would not say it. She was the very essence of anti-humanism.

The Good News: Ye Are Gods! The Bad News: Ye Are Gods!

As you all know by now, I am fascinated by the idea that God creates man "in Our image, according to Our likeness" -- not just for the Trinitarian implications, but for what else it implies about man and God.

It seems that most Christians instinctively limit its meaning, for fear -- and the fear is not misplaced -- of hubristically equating man and God. So various theologians have placed sharp constraints around the concept, such that any similarities are completely dwarfed by the differences, almost to the point of rendering our deiformity meaningless.

It's as if the idea is too hot to handle, so it is essentially explained away or at least downplayed.

In a way, it reminds me of the daring rhetoric in the D of C: that all men are created equal, period. For a while this was unproblematic, until people began taking it literally and demanding that it be respected. It prompted, on the one side, the abolitionist movement, and on the other -- and for for the first time -- theories of racial inequality in order to justify slavery as a positive good.

Interestingly, the Orthodox east never got hung up on the whole image-and-likeness business. Rather than seeing it as problematic, they saw it as the whole point of the Christian innerprize, AKA theosis.

Now, before you just assume your divine status, bear in mind an important characteristic of God: that nothing and no one is more humble. D'oh! There goes your grandiosity, narcissism, will to power, and self-glorification. Those traits decidedly do not apply to the Christian God.

It reminds me of something I read the other day by this fellow Jesus, about turning the other cheek, offering one's tunic, and generally loving one's enemies. In trying to make sense of it, it occurred to me that Jesus is setting an impossible standard, and properly so. In other words, it's as if he's saying: sure, you're in the image of God. Now try acting like it!

Again: d'oh! Not so easy.

Not to make invidious comparisons, but it's easy to act like, say, certain prophets who extol violence, polygamy, and oppression. No need to get into details, but you know what I mean. (For example, compare the two very different meanings of "martyrdom.") It is not so easy to act like the God who gives himself utterly, right up to and including the Cross -- again, an almost impossible standard. But this very "impossibly" is the Divine Standard.

D'oh! Maybe I don't want to be godlike after all.

Back to Orthodoxy for a moment. I recently read a book called Everywhere Present that touches on this subject. For example,

The doctrine of the Incarnation teaches us that God has become man and dwelt among us. In the God-man Christ Jesus, heaven and earth, are united, and the distance between God and man, of whatever sort, is overcome.

That's the Good News. But it is intrinsically intertwined with some Bad News -- bad for the selfish ego, to be exact, for whom it is nothing less than a death sentence.

So yes, you are like gods (John 10:34). But it all comes down to the meaning of "you" -- or, more precisely, "I". His listeners didn't like the sound of that, so they tried to grab him "but He escaped out of their hands." For awhile, anyway.

Elsewhere Freeman writes that "Jesus did not come to make bad men good; He came to make dead men live." What, by dying?

D'oh!

We've mentioned before the idea that Jesus is simultaneously our icon of God and God's icon of man. Now, what is an icon? It is not the material thing; rather, the material is meant to be transparent, i.e., to reveal something it is pointing toward (this being the difference between idolatry and iconography).

The plain truth of the matter is that God is an icon-maker. He first made man "in His own image." And in becoming man, the man He became is described as the "image of the invisible God."

All of the above was provoked by a short passage in The Play of Masks, that "it goes without saying that God is indeed 'obliged' to be faithful to His Nature and for that reason cannot but manifest Himself" via creation; in other words, God cannot not create without failing to be God.

Again, this may sound like a "limitation," but it is really quite the opposite. To think otherwise is to place eternal sterility and eternal fecundity on the same plane -- as if any rational being would choose the former over the latter. I see God's inexhaustible creativity as his eternal divine delight.

A Big Difference here is that God obviously cannot "fall" from his nature. Rather, that possibility is uniquely reserved for man. Animals cannot fall anywhere, nor can mere matter. And the only reason man can fall is because there is somewhere to fall from, which is none other than the image and likeness referenced in paragraph one.

"Only man," writes Schuon, "participating in the divine liberty and created in order to freely choose God, can make a bad use of his freedom under the influence of that cosmic mode that is evil." Our very form predisposes us to return to our "divine Prototype," but it seems that we are situated in the context of cosmic energies that flow in both directions. Thus,

"The 'dark' and 'descending' tendency not only moves away from the Sovereign Good, but also rises up against It; whence the equation between the devil and pride."

Which brings us back to the contrary equation of divinity and humility. You might say that God's emptiness -- his kenosis -- is our fullness, but we can only maintain the fullness by giving it away, so to speak. So, grace is kind of a hot potato. If it comes your way, don't get caught trying to hold on to it, but give it away immediately!

Not sure if this post was a case of celestial co-creativity or just terrestrial rambling. "Emptying oneself" has two very different connotations.

The Inane Reciprocity of the Liberal House of Mirrors

Here's a provocative claim: "Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God" (Schuon).

This is consistent with the gag by Voegelin above our comment box, that The quest, thus, has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

In other words, you can spend your life searching for your self and not find it. Or worse, your punishment will consist in finding and being stuck with your self, precisely.

The point is, man qua man lives in the vertical space between Herebelow and Thereabove, or the metaxy.

It reminds me of something the Aphorist says: that If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors. As such, To believe in the redemption of man by man is more than an error; it is an idiocy.

It is customary to regard Republicans as the stupid party and Democrats as the evil party. But beneath the evil of the latter is the metaphysical idiocy alluded to by Davila. Republicans may be idiotic, but they're not usually that idiotic.

As it so often happens, I'm reading another (so far) excellent book on the history of progressivism that goes to just this idiocy.

Along these lines, one of the problems with a state-funded indoctrination is that nowhere in the course of it will you learn the truth about your state-funded indoctrination: it is a vertically closed system that cannot (or at least will not) look at itself. It takes no chances, so it excludes transcendence entirely under the tendentious guise of "separation of church and state."

Obviously, the progressive state doesn't want you to know the truth about itself. It reminds me of a story linked to Drudge yesterday, that in China it is against the law to criticize Martyrs of the Communist Revolution. The difference between us and them is that no one here needs to enact such a law. Rather, the educational establishment takes care of it without having to be coerced.

The promethean nature of progressivism was apparent from the getgo in the late 19th century. The prometheanism consisted precisely in what was said above about collapsing the metaxy and attempting to redeem ourselves, i.e., for the state to lift us by its purloined lootstraps.

Nor was this a solely secular project. If only! Rather, there was plenty of help from Christianist do-gooders, busybodies, and control freaks who understood everything about Christianity except its whole point.

Example.

The progressives' urge to reform America sprang from an evangelical compulsion to set the world to rights, and they unabashedly described their purpose as a Christian mission to build a Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

This was the infamous Social Gospel that morphed into heretical liberation theology and various other iterations. You might say that Social Justice Warriors are the same old irritating Social Gospel Warriors, minus the Gospel.

For the SGWs, salvation no longer applied to the individual. Rather, "society was the proper object of redemption," and "sin was no longer a matter of inborn immorality." In short, "sin was social in cause."

Is it just me, or does it smell like sulphur in here?

Another clever trick was to displace the invisible hand of the market to the very visible and clumsy hand of the State: "The social gospel economists, who opposed free markets but not divine purpose, relocated Him to the state."

True, God works in mysterious ways, but the greatest mystery of the progressive administrative state is how it managed to staff itself with all those thousands of angelic beings who look after us so selflessly.

Nor was there any need to wait around for Christ's return in order to fashion our new Kingdom of Heaven right here on earth. Rather, "Christian men and women, providentially equipped with science and the state, would build it with their own hands. In other words, the social gospelers believed they already held the blueprints for social and economic redemption."

So, how did that work out? They will never tell you. Which should tell you how things worked out.

In order to accomplish their mission, progressives needed of course to rid us of the Constitution and its underpinning of natural law. If there is a natural law, then it constrains what progressives can do to us, so it has to go.

Interestingly, and for the same reason, they were also quite explicitly opposed to the idea of natural economic law -- you know, little things like supply and demand, the knowledge problem, and incentives. Virtually all of the early progressive eggheads imbibed this nonsense via post-graduate study in Germany, where they prided themselves on their distinction from the primitive and old-fashioned nonsense of British classical economics.

These newly credentialed zealots "returned from Germany with their evangelical zeal to redeem America" mingled with "the latest ideas in political economy and informed by a working model of economic reform."

So, the worst in religion combined with the latest in tenured nonsense. The result was an aggravated activism that has continued afflicting us down to the present day.

Eh, that's about it for today. Still adjusting to the state-sponsored theft of that extra hour of sack time.

Beautiful Monsters, Righteous Swindles, and Privileged Malcontents

Where are we? In the overall scheme of things, I mean. While our posts may take their time getting there, they usually have a deeper point or at least trajectory.

In this case, our theme has to do with political philosophy, which must begin with a proper definition of the human person. Thus, we've essentially been touching on "principles of human nature," including our intrinsic rights, duties, and capabilities.

It cannot be overemphasized that the left, as usual, has some very different ideas of where to start. For example, there is no place for "human nature" in leftism. If there were, then this would undermine their whole project, which ignores human nature when it doesn't attack it outright.

Even so, you will have noticed that a leftist is never consistent with his principles. Rather, he will have the audacity to appeal to "human nature" when it is expedient to do so -- for example, it would never occur to them to force a Muslim caterer to do business with a homosexual bathhouse. Religious freedom, and all that.

But a principle, in order to be one, applies universally, which is to say, at all times and in all places. This metaphysical inconsistency reveals the true principle that animates the left: power, or better, will (through which power is exercised).

It is the same with other transcendentals, by the way. As Dennis Prager often points out -- and not in a polemical way, mind you -- truth is simply not an important value for the left. What really animates the left are things like equality, race, class, gender, "social justice," "microaggressions," and the right to use the wrong bathroom.

Recall that man is characterized by intelligence, free will, and sentiment, which are adequations to the true, good, and beautiful, respectively. Although these three converge upon the One, it is nevertheless the case that Truth must predominate, at least herebelow. As Schuon often says, there is no right greater than that of truth.

Consider the alternatives. We might begin our political philosophy with beauty, but it is doubtful the resultant system will last long. Many ideas of the left are superficially attractive, but unfortunately catastrophic in their application.

In order to ignore the entirely predictable catastrophe(s), the will is brought into play. Impossibility is no barrier, just a nuisance. Look, if you are publicly willing to amputate your private parts in order to prove you're a woman, what won't you do to demonstrate the impossible?

Consider, I don't know, ObamaCare. What a beautiful idea -- that everyone, solid citizen and lazy bum alike, can have affordable and quality healthcare, with no tradeoffs and no losers! However, being that the idea in no way comports with reality, it must be forced to do so via Will, i.e., taxes, subsidies, penalties, regulations, manipulations, bribes, and threats.

Probably a mistake for Republicans to try to rescue the Democrats from their impending shipwreck. Let their principles play out against the shoals of reality, so people can learn a priceless lesson they will never forget -- that abstract beauty and perverse willfulness are no way to organize a healthcare system.

It reminds me of the 1980s, when the left had another beautiful idea for dealing with the Soviet Union: unilateral disarmament. Or how about before that, in the latter half of the 1960s, when Love was thought to be the answer. Well, yes, no shit. But not detached from truth! Not to belabor the analogy, but remember Hitler's dog. To love what is hateful is as dysfunctional as cherishing the lie as truth (or celebrating the ugly as beautiful).

If Truth exists, then it is our obligation to know it, right? This is a fine example of what we might call a "natural duty," for the duty follows logically from the premise. Human intelligence is a rare privilege, but the privilege imposes obligations that can only be ignored at the soul's peril.

But what if, like deconstructionists and the like, one begins with the principle that truth either doesn't exist or is inaccessible to man? What happens is institutionalized irresponsibility, AKA journalism and tenure, the fake news of the MSM and false truth of liberal academia.

Getting back to truth and obligation; again, supposing truth exists, then we are obligated to know it. But even prior to this is an epistemophilic drive to know truth. It's built into us. To paraphrase Schuon, as animal instincts are their intellect, for man, intellect is our instinct. In short, we are born to know -- which means that our minds are in conformity -- at least in potential -- to the nature of things.

Now if truth is what we are compelled to know, then "virtue" is what we must attain, for as intellect is to the True, will is to the Good: "Virtue is what we must love, become and be" (Schuon).

Here again, man is intrinsically obligated to "be good," so to speak. This is woven into the very fabric of our being, as is truth. With the exception of sociopaths, everyone wants to be good; and even sociopaths convince themselves they are doing good as they understand it.

What do we call people who will the bad and call it good? I can't think of a particular word, but they are certainly moral idiots. Take the Islamists, who are motivated by a strict conception of the good. Or, closer to home, take our liberal fascists, who are motivated by their own perverse ideas of "social justice."

But this again goes to the priority of truth, for "social justice," as Hayek pointed out 75 years ago, isn't just a meaningless phrase, but often a malevolent phrase that means the opposite of what it pretends to mean, AKA injustice. The Aphorist said it well: 'Social justice' is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right; and the adjective that serves as a pretext for all swindles.

So, left wing justice is a theft and it is a swindle. Other than that, it's the highest and most progressive form of justice there could ever be!

As to the academic left, it has become notorious for disseminating knowledge with no truth, thus uprooting the intellect's very reason for being. "When all is said and done," writes Schuon, "reason becomes an infirmity" for such ignoramuses who pretend to knowledge.

Oh, and speaking of social justice, in the same book, Schuon has a few choice Remarks on Charity. These also go to the left's prior denial of human nature:

"One has to beware of turning the beneficiary of charity into an insolent protester, incapable of appreciating another's generosity; the man who does not know how to say 'thank you' whole-heartedly, and without concerning himself with the psychology of his benefactor, is a monster."

When is the last time one of these monsters thanked us for our civilization, for our system of government, and for disproportionately funding their dysfunctional schemes? Instead, we are relentlessly accused of being "privileged," when truly, they are privileged to live in our world.

Intelligence is Not Enough

In the essay Prerogatives of the Human State, Schuon outlines an intriguing little schematic vis-a-vis our humanness. Recall that man is primarily defined by intelligence, freedom, and sentiment, corresponding to the True, Good, and Beautiful, respectively.

He then outlines what these characteristics entail in combination; for example, intelligence + will = "capability." As mentioned, he is quite compact here, not really drawing out the implications. But if you think about it, if you combine what you actually know with the will to accomplish something with it, the result is a hybrid called "capability."

For example, I may have the will to accomplish any number of things, but lacking the requisite intelligence, be incapable of seeing them through. Conversely, I may have the intelligence to accomplish them, but be too lazy, with the same result. Either way I am rendered one of the millions of Incapables. And our universities -- in particular, in the humanities -- specialize in cranking out baskets of Incapables, don't they?

Next, sensibility + will = "character." Since intelligence is not in the equation, it is obviously possible to be a decent person with average or below average intelligence. Likewise -- obviously -- intelligence is no guarantor of decency and good character.

Finally, intelligence + sensibility = "scope." This is a subtle one, because it explains how even the highest intelligence -- say, Albert Einstein -- combined with the wrong sensibility results in shallowness, or narrow-mindedness, or just the credentialed foolishness of the tenured. Conversely, the power and profundity of a great artist are a result of intelligence and sensibility.

Speaking of which, I just read a book -- When Reason Goes on Holiday -- that is filled with examples of how high intelligence minus sensibility = a warped and perverse scope. It's really quite remarkable. One of the worst cases is Bertrand Russell, whose "genius" no one can doubt. Which only goes to show what genius is good for in the absence of other ingredients for making a functioning human.

The book begins with a gag by physicist E.T. Jaynes to the effect that "It is curious that the greatest intellectual gifts sometimes carry with them the inability to perceive simple realities that would be obvious to a moron." Curious, yes, but as common as dirt.

One of the left's largely unstated objections to Trump must surely be that he has a very different sensibility from their own refined tastes. But what of the sensibility of a man who is actually intimate with Al Sharpton -- who values his advice and invites him into the White House on countless occasions? My sensibility would induce vomiting at the prospect of spending time with Al Sharpton. Then again, it would induce the same at the prospect of, say, beimg forced to read the speeches of Barack Obama.

The volume is appropriately titled "We Are the Change We Seek," an ungrammatical tautology that is as vacuous as the man himself. Let's see what some of the reviewers say. This ought to be insultaining.

Read it? Hell, I lived it; all eight pathetic years. I'd rather read a transcription of a bowel resection than be subjected to any more of his doublespeak.

I'm treating it as a good object lesson for the grandkids in critical thinking, the diagnosing of logical fallacies, and the dangers of accepting political speeches at face value.

I find the ultra soft & strong Quilted Northern more enjoyable. Not only was this product harsh and scratchy, it was nonabsorbent and difficult to read as it swirled towards its rightful place in my permanent library of all of Obama's works. I hope the memoir, for which Penguin Random House paid upwards of $65 million, is printed on better paper.

Sesardić describes one of those little ironic pranks of history, in that he, being that he grew up under a communist regime, learned to value "intellectual integrity and the uncompromising pursuit of truth." Note that "intellectual" is a modifier of "integrity," which goes to what was said above about sensibility and character. Reading such thinkers "helped us preserve our sanity in the world of constant lies that surrounded us."

In stark contrast, we live in a free society that is nevertheless permeated by fake news, malignant ideology, and tenured nonsense. A couple of posts ago, for example, I linked to the website of the American Psychological Association. I am surely an American Psychologist, but their sensibilities could hardly be more different from mine. There is literally no place for a conservative or traditionalist mental health professional in their cramped and ideologically conformist world.

Here is an example of Bertrand Russell's political genius: "In every part of the world the source of war and of suffering lies at the door of US imperialism. Wherever there is hunger, wherever there is exploitative tyranny, wherever people are tortured and the masses left to rot under the weight of disease and starvation, the force which holds down the people stems from Washington."

Okay then. Sounds like one of the sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Einstein was another piece of work. Of Lenin, he said that "I admire a man who has thrown all his energy into making social justice real, at the sacrifice of his own person." Yes, a perfect example of Christian self-sacrifice. "Men like him are the guardians and reformers of the conscience of mankind."

Well, he certainly reformed the conscience. Out of existence.

Wittgenstein is another Big Brain of the previous century. "The atmosphere of Stalinism contained something that attracted him." What might that be? "A total destruction of early twentieth century social forms was required (he thought) if there was to be any improvement." Eggs and omelets. How'd that work out?

Let's not even talk about Heidegger.

Back to Schuon: capability (intelligence + will) bears upon "administrative qualification, organizational skill and strategy." Character and decency have more to do with "courage and incorruptibility" than just a hi IQ or ambition. And a profound and powerful scope is surely not a consequence of intelligence alone, or all smart people would be creative geniuses, when most of them end up being cognitive drones.

That's about it for today. Terrestrial duties call.

Barking Up the Right Tree

I suppose it's easy to get confused, being that man can know stuff that only a god could know. For example, man knows we inhabit a cosmos.

Like anyone could know that! Animals surely don't know anything about it. Rather, they live enclosed in their sensations, feelings, and instincts. The most intelligent among them may push the envelope but never achieve transcendence, such that they observe themselves from above and wonder why they're barking about nothing again.

That's a question I often ask my dogs: what are you barking at? There's nothing there!

Come to think of it, that's a question I often ask of liberals: what are you freaking out about? There's nothing there -- no fascists, no racists, no anti-Semites, no misogynists, no attacks on free speech. Like my dogs, they have no understanding that those things exist in their own heads.

Continuing with our main theme, we've been trying to specify what it can mean to say that All Men Are Created Equal. From one angle, No Man Is Created Equal, since we are created individuals. Therefore, each person is a special case. Nevertheless, we are entitled to ask: a special case of what, exactly?

In other words, we might say that man has two essences, one general and one particular. The particular essence is your unique and unrepeatable identity. However, this identity is a variation on a more universal theme. We ended yesterday's post with a delineation of the characteristics of man as such, including total intelligence, free will, and disinterested sentiment.

For example, my dogs are intelligent, but they do not possess total intelligence -- which is why they do not understand that we live in a vastly wider and deeper cosmos. The cosmos is the totality of objects, events, and laws, both interior and exterior, vertical and horizontal, past and present. Man has access to each of these dimensions, which is what it means to have dominion over creation.

Dominion connotes sovereignty, supremacy, ascendancy, dominance, superiority, preeminence, hegemony, authority, etc. In short, it again implies something godlike. No wonder man falls for the ruse and imagines he has dominion over creation, but with no one having dominion over him.

In Prerogatives of the Human State Schuon elaborates what it means to have total intelligence. This intelligence applies both horizontally and vertically. The former discloses the phenomenal realm and basically corresponds to science. You might say that if something there is knowable, then science can damn well know it.

The problem is, science has long since forgotten the Christian roots that render this boast comprehensible; which is to say that existence and intelligibility are two sides of the same coin. And that coin is called "creation."

Science also ignores vertical intelligibility, which is to say, "the metaphysical, hence principial, order" (Schuon). In other words, it ignores the very principles that render itself possible.

Which is okay, up to a point. We don't expect plumbers to understand the physics of laminar flow. Rather, we just want them to fix the leak. Likewise scientists. We don't expect them to dilate on the existence of God or the rights of man. Just make sure the planes stay in the air and the internet works. Leave vertical cogitation to the experts.

Now to say "total intelligence" is not to say that man "knows everything." Rather, it is to say that everything is knowable. To turn it around, if it isn't knowable, then it's not a thing, precisely. It is no-thing, an impossibility, an absurdity.

Similarly, to say that man has free will is not to say he is unconditioned and has no constraints. Freedom is not its own sufficient reason -- an error of libertarians -- but rather, has a source above. For just as the purpose of intelligence is to know Truth, the purpose of freedom is to choose the Good. Nor is this merely a subjective preference. Just as we don't create truth, nor do we invent the good.

"[T]o love a reality worthy of being loved is an attitude of objectivity," writes Schuon. Again, Hitler's dog no doubt loved him as much as my dog loves me. This is because dogs are unable to be objective with respect to the objects of their affection. In other words, they are unable to conceive of a disinterested love: they cannot love something because it is worthy of being loved, which is reverence.

I've never even met George Washington, or Winston Churchill, or Abraham Lincoln, but I revere them. I get nothing tangible out of the relationship. Rather, it's just the spontaneous recognition of a kind of hierarchical order.

Returning to the question of man's total intelligence, it couldn't be total if it resided in man alone. Rather, if that were the case, then we would be no less enclosed in an epistemological circle than any other animal. The situation would be just as Kant suggests: trapped in the forms of our own sensibility and whatnot.

But if you think about thinking for just a moment, you quickly realize that "Human intelligence is, virtually, the certainty of the Absolute" (ibid.). You might say that our intelligence is sponsored by something or someone that is its sufficient reason. Just as there is a "ground of being," there is a ground of knowing, and ultimately they are the same ground.

"The essential question is that of knowing, on the one hand, what the loftiest content of the spirit is, and on the other, what the deepest substance is." In other words, the highest intelligence conforms to the deepest intelligible.

"From this may be deduced the following definition: integral and primordial man is the Intellect and consciousness of the Absolute. Or again: man is faith and the idea of God; immanent Holy Spirit on the one hand, and transcendent truth on the other."

So it's a matter of barking up the right tree -- the one whose roots are aloft and branches down below -- not greedily snatching at the wrong one and pretending to be God.

Equal How?

That all men are created equal obviously cannot mean that they are equivalent. If that were the case, then we would be justified in treating them as replaceable ants -- or, as in Lenin's (I think) charming phrase, "bags of wet cement."

So there can be a problematic side to that little claim. In fact, looked at from one angle, we could say that the differences between left and right hinge upon the meaning and implications of "equal."

"Equality," writes Hayward, "is the central obsession with much of the intellectual class, though it is understood in simplistic terms, measured quantitatively, and used chiefly as a cudgel against existing institutions and social structures" (emphases mine).

I emphasize those three words because they go to what we've been saying about demonic influences on the left: simple instead of hierarchical; quantitative instead of qualitative; and cudgel instead of reason. The result is the obliteration of the vertical, which redounds to a kind of worthless equality.

But as the Aphorist writes, Every non-hierarchical society is divided into two parts; and When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited. In fact, he has another aphorism that goes to simplicity: A vocabulary of ten words is enough for a Marxist to explain history.

And the left always gives an implicit sanction to violent coercion, since it is the doctrine that teaches that what is yours is mine. Resistance to handing it over is not tolerated.

It reminds me of VP candidate Tim Kaine's son being arrested for violence at a Trump rally:

It took three cops and a chemical spray to subdue the youngest son of U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, Saturday after he was identified as one of the counter-protesters who allegedly used fireworks to disrupt a rally in support of President Donald Trump at the Minnesota State Capitol.

My son has known to "use his words" ever since... ever since he learned how to speak, really. Isn't one point of words to symbolize actions? He's never resorted to picking up the cudgel to get his way. If he ever did that, he knows it would constitute prima facie evidence of failure as a human being (his and probably mine as well). Wouldn't it be nice if the son of a U.S. senator could be the recipient of the equality and justice he preaches by doing some hard time in prison?

The proposition that "all men are created equal" is "the most problematic and mischievous phrase in American political thought," such that "understanding the nature and limits of equality is the most crucial intellectual and political task of our time" (Hayward). More particularly, the problem is "how to keep modern majorities from transforming equality into reckless egalitarianism, the age-old bane of democracy."

Shifting gears for the moment, last night I was thinking of how ironic it is that Schuon's conception of Man strikes me as so much deeper than anything I learned in graduate school. Being that I am a "licensed psychologist," I ought to know better than anyone else what a man is, right?

Wrong!

Left to psychological knowledge alone, I wouldn't only be ignorant -- as in lacking knowledge -- but positively filled with nonsense. It is no coincidence that the American Psychological Association is at the leading edge of left wing lunacy -- of redefining deviancy as normality, and vice versa.

I just looked up their website, and it's really quite repulsive. Notice the absolute obsession with sexual deviancy: "Bullying and Safe Schools for LGBT Students," "Transgender and Serving in the Military," "The Lives of LGBT Older Adults," "Happy Together: Thriving as a Same-Sex Couple in Your Family, Workplace, and Community." Excuse me but WTF?

I'm trying to think back on who and where I was (vertically speaking) when I entered graduate school in the early 1980s. Did I have any ideas about Man when I commenced? Not really. Frankly, I don't think I had any principles at all, at least explicit ones.

One of the first courses I took involved various models of the mind. Each week or so we'd cover a different theory: behaviorism, psychoanalysis, gestalt theory, et al. There wasn't even any discussion as to which one was correct, because it was assumed that no one could know that. Rather, all we have are models that help make sense of the phenomena. (Recall Fr. Rose's comment to the effect that It is corrupting to hear or read the words of men who do not believe in truth.)

I remember the professor using the analogy of a watch. Imagine we couldn't open the watch to see what's going on inside. All we can observe is the phenomena of the second, minute, and hour hands moving at different rates of speed. Therefore, we propose models to account for how that is happening -- similar to how early astronomers came up with various models to account for movement of the stars and planets.

Let's get back to first principles. In what sense can we say that All Men Are Created Equal? As I was saying the other day, Schuon's The Play of Masks presents his ideas -- which he would never claim as his own, being that they are timeless, universal, and pre-existent -- in the most compact and concentrated way possible. The first chapter is called Prerogatives of the Human State, and is not only vastly superior to any merely "psychological theory," but the proper ground of any such theory.

Try this on for size: "Total intelligence, free will, sentiment capable of disinterestedness: these are the prerogatives that place man at the summit of terrestrial creatures."

Boom! At a stroke he cuts through centuries of error and walls of tenure. Man can know truth, otherwise his intelligence is pointless (and not even intelligent); he is free and therefore responsible -- he has intrinsic rights and corresponding duties; and he may stand outside and above himself, proving transcendence.

This is the sense in which all men are created equal: "Total intelligence, free will, disinterested sentiment; and consequently: to know the True, to will the Good, to love the Beautiful."

We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident Yada Yada

Over the weekend I read Randy Barnett's Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People, which covers some of the same ground as Steven Hayward's Patriotism is Not Enough. Both books dig down to the underlying principles that divide left and right, one in terms of constitutional law, the other in terms of political philosophy.

For Barnett it comes down to three words: we the people. In our republic, this is where sovereignty ultimately resides. But not so fast! For us, "we" refers to the individuals who constitute the people, whereas for the left it refers to the people as such, i.e., to majoritarian will.

Except when it doesn't. A deeper problem with the left is that it is completely unprincipled, in that it will appeal to the majority when it is convenient to do so -- as in Hillary winning the majority of votes in 2016 -- while appealing to some daft principle when it is in the minority -- e.g., "sanctuary cities."

If we dig a little deeper, the question is whether rights are prior to government, or whether government gives rise to them. It is rather remarkable that we even have to have this conversation, because the founders made it clear that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights, for which reason governments are supposed to be instituted to secure them.

A government that fails to accomplish this is illegitimate and therefore a candidate for revolution (i.e., the failure to secure our natural rights is precisely when revolution is a natural right).

Government itself has no "rights," only powers, both specific and enumerated. These powers are "on loan," so to speak, from their owners. Nor can their owners vote these rights away, because again, they are unalienable. Therefore, we cannot, for example, vote to render ourselves slaves of the state, but the left never stops trying.

Yes, we are condemned to freedom, a reality to which the left cannot reconcile itself. For the cost is just too high, or at least they are unwilling to pay it.

This is all obvious, and I wouldn't belabor it if it were obvious to everyone. But what were once "self-evident truths" are no longer self-evident and certainly not true (for the left). The problem is, because the founders were dealing with self-evident truth, they felt no need to even defend it. Instead, they yada yada-ed right over it.

But for the left, the absence of any explicit defense is taken as a lack of evidence -- at best, just a grandiose and pretentious rationale for those slave-owning aristocrats to do what they wanted to do. Or in other words, self-evident truth devolves to an all-too-evident will to power fortified by White Privilege.

Hayward reminds us that this was the state of play in political science at mid-century, before the rise of the conservative intellectual movement. There wasn't even a pretense of respect for the founders. Barack Obama was only the most recent president to criticize the Constitution as old and in the way (of progress!), while Woodrow Wilson was the first. The Declaration didn't even enter into it, the reason being that individual liberty is an annoying barrier to the will of the state.

Hayward points out that there was a widespread belief among liberal and progressive academics that America didn't even have any tradition of political philosophy! Rather, one had to look to Europe for all those bright ideas that continue to nourish the left's malignant fantasies.

In reality, the Declaration of Independence crystalizes a sublime and literally unsurpassable political philosophy, as famously expressed by Calvin Coolidge -- and recall the historical context, in that Coolidge came right after the progressive Wilson, so it can be read as a righteous pimp slap to that racist autocrat:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern.

But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.

No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Once one reaches an ultimate truth, no progress is possible. Which is why self-styled progressives are so preposterously named. However, this is not to say things remain static. Rather, it is as the Aphorist describes vis-a-vis religious thought, which "does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper."

Since this truth is from "on high," so to speak, it will take time for it to instantiate -- i.e., for it to become the reality (like yeast in the dough). This is true of anything, in that time is required in order for the essence (or potential) to fulfill itself in actuality. This is "progress" of a sort, but it is vertical progress. Stripped of its verticality, then it no longer has any ground or foundation.

Which is why the left literally cannot see these truths that were so self-evident to the framers. What we call "natural rights" are a quintessentially "supernaturally natural" phenomenon. They are nature pointing to its supernatural source. But if one arbitrarily eliminates the supernatural up front, then the natural -- the essential -- is likewise eliminated.

Remember, man qua man can have no meaning, no purpose, no vector. He only has these things with reference to his vertical source. So this is the real reason why the left denies natural law and natural rights, not to mention the natural responsibilities that must exist prior to having rights. For who is insane enough to give rights to fundamentally irresponsible people? That would be like, I don't know, giving a state to the Palestinians.

This is all by way of an attempt at a slightly deeper analysis of what and who man is, for as Jaffa believed, "the most fundamental political question is the nature of the human soul" (Hayward). This simply doesn't arise for the leftist, who will immediately ask: what soul? What human? (Since there is no fixed human nature and certainly no immaterial soul.)

To be continued...

Flat and Explosive

Almost time to move on to the next subject, except I don't really have a particular subject in mind.

Let's conclude our little investigation into the satanic fingerprints on the hysteria, paranoia, and violence of the contemporary left with a crack by Schuon that summarizes in a sentence or two what it took us a dozen posts to convey. He adverts to various 19th century strands of humanist thought that were

"intended to achieve a perfect man outside the truths which give the human phenomenon all its meaning. As it was of course necessary to replace one God by another," the whole trend gave rise to "a new ideology, one equally flat and explosive, namely the paradoxically inhuman humanism that is Marxism."

As an aside, the book from which that is extracted, The Play of Masks, is one of Schuon's last; it was published in 1992, and while he lived to 1997, his final works consist mostly of poems.

At any rate, I've been rereading some of his late works, and they are so concentrated that it is as if he were attempting to pack the whole existentialalda into as compact a tortilla as possible. There is scarcely a wasted word, let alone sentence.

Thus, in the little passage referenced above, every word counts: one cannot conceive of a "perfect man" in the absence of conformity to the truth that renders perfection (i.e., sanctity) possible; one cannot eliminate the Absolute without substituting a false one in its place; a humanism in the absence of the divine devolves to human animalism; and a "flattened" ideology becomes "explosive" because it is essentially the Revenge of Denied Verticality.

The bottom lyin': "The internal contradiction of Marxism is that it wants to build a perfect humanity while destroying man." Which only happens everywhere it is attempted. I would certainly widen out our perspective to include fascism and Nazism in the mix, for in the end there are really only two alternatives: ordered liberty and top-down tyranny.

This tyranny occurs necessarily if we begin by denying human nature. Which the left does by definition in insisting that man has no nature, precisely.

The left claims that man is defined by his race, or class, or gender, i.e., that essence is posterior to existence. This may sound eggheadish, but it really goes to the... essence of the distinction between left and right: the left begins with existence, while we begin with essence. The rest is commentary.

For example, our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, makes some bold assertions about man's essence: first, that he is created; second, that creation entails certain intrinsic rights; and third, that it is the purpose of government to preserve and protect said rights.

Conversely, for the left there can be no "self-evident truths," since there are no evident ones -- except perhaps the self-beclowning truth that truth is inaccessible to man. If man is "just anything," then there is no barrier to forming a government that treats him as such.

The left is "half right," in the sense that there is no such thing as Man in reference to man only. Nor is there any such conceivable thing as God.

Instead, what we have down here is a God <--> Man dialectic or complementarity. Don't misunderstand me: God is in no way dependent upon man, except insofar as he wishes to be known by man. Then he "puts himself in Man's hands," the ultimate expression of this being the Incarnation.

In short, God "coon-descends" in order to commune-icate in a mode accessible to man, and it is in the resultant space that divinity -- and divinization -- occurs.

We know what happens when we eliminate God from the complementarity: "its absence brings about incomparably worse abuses than its presence," although there will always be abuses, man being what he is. Man cannot bring about heaven on earth, although hell is always within reach.

We might say that God too is "within reach," although beyond our grasp. God is beyond our grasp because only God can grasp God.

In fact, this is equally true of everything, that is, every intelligible existent. As we have mentioned before, we can only know things because they are created; but we can never know them completely for the very same reason, i.e., that complete knowledge is reserved for God.

In any event, human happiness depends upon our being in conformity with the nature of things -- their nature and ours. "Integral meaning and happiness" are "anchored in man's deiform nature without which life is neither intelligible nor worth living." Man is at once rendered stupid and pointless.

Here again, this is literally true, and the most efficient way of saying it. For Camus, for example -- a quintessential existentialist -- the only serious philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide.

True, not to make this personal, but I am Sisyphus, and every post is a new rock I attempt to push up the hill. But the hill is real, and it is outside and above me. If an existentialist is to be true to himself, there can be only an imaginary boulder which he rolls around on horizontal ground. In this flatland ontology, man, boulder, and hill are all ultimately meaningless.

But explosive.

A Void is Not a Home

Feeling a little... wooly this morning. This shaggy post is the result.

We left off with the idea that the left is an inverted parody of divine creativity. And it's either one or the other: as Fr. Rose says, "It is quite clear now that the Revolution and God can have nothing to do with each other," such that the left's mission "cannot be completed until the last vestige of faith in the true God is uprooted from the hearts of men and everyone has learned to live in this void."

The aforementioned Void can even resemble the Divine Plenum from a certain perspective. On the one hand, "Finite beings produced from the plenum by God are non-existent prior to his creative act of will." In short, God is "the sole active ground of all contingent existents, of all things that stand out from" it (Creel). Man is only Something -- or better, Not-Nothing -- because God Is.

Remove God from the equation, and man is necessarily reduced to an absurd nothingness. But at first, it seems that man -- both individually and collectively -- revels in this bracing liberation from: wheeee!

But sooner or later we will look around for the to, only to discover that it doesn't exist -- that we are liberated into nothingness, precisely. It's like escaping from Alcatraz Prison -- wheeee!-- only to die of hypothermia upon plunging into the bone-rattling currents.

Which reminds me of something Schuon says to the effect that modern man is, as it were, encased under a thick and impenetrable sheet of ice that builds and builds like a glacier, separating him from his vertical source. "Mistaking the ice that imprisons us for Reality, we do not acknowledge what it excludes and experience no desire for deliverance; we try to compel the ice to be happiness.”

Or to compel the Nothing to be Something. Which it can never be. Nor can the Something ever be Nothing; rather, it can only tend in that direction without ever arriving there. To arrive there would be to successfully arrive at a Counter-God, but this is analogous to radiating light eventually forming a "counter sun." Not gonna happen in this cosmos.

But unlike sun rays, human beings have freedom of will, such that they can attempt to create and worship a counter-sun, such that they will call this darkness Light (or Enlightenment).

In this universe -- which, properly speaking, is no longer a uni-verse -- "there is neither up nor down, right nor wrong true nor false, because there is no longer any point of orientation" (Rose).

One is tempted to say that this is the world of "fake news," but it isn't even that, because the counterfeit must be parasitic on the very genuineness the relativist denies.

In reality, they're just murmurandoms from the void. Sometimes they might even be "true," but they are not written because they are true, because this would connote adherence to a principle that cannot exist for these purblind darklings.

Finally man hits the cosmic bottom and arrives at "nothingness, incoherence, antithesis, hatred of truth" (ibid). For you or I this would represent a depressing development, and it is a depressing development.

So, how does the nihilist deal with the depression? By a frenetic activity designed to pull others down with him. Thus, "the first and most obvious item in the program of Nihilism is the destruction of the Old Order" -- its laws, institutions, and customs.

Everything must go! "Effective war against God and His Truth requires the destruction of every element of this old order; it is here that the peculiarly Nihilist 'virtue' of violence comes into play."

Here again, this violence represents an inverse parody of God's creativity: "appeals to violence, and even a kind of ecstasy at the prospect of its use, abound in revolutionary literature."

Which the left absurdly projects into conservatives, as if we are the howling fascist mobs that wish to violently shut down dissent!

I heard one leftist compare our forthcoming southern wall to the Berlin Wall -- which is only to confuse a home with a concentration camp. Would you trust your political future to people who can't make that elementary distinction?

The Inverted Parody of God's Creation

Let's continue our plunge into the demonic abyss of the left with an observation by Fr. Rose: the "endeavor to Nihilize creation, and so annul God's act of creation by returning the world to the very nothingness from which it came, is but an inverted parody of God's creation."

This would appear to be a Big Clue as to what is going on: The Inverted Parody of God's Creation. Therefore, by knowing how and why God creates, we may gain an insight into why the godless left "creates" -- which is to say, destroys.

For example, God is motivated to create -- or so we have heard from the Wise -- out of love. Therefore, we may reliably deduce from this principle that the nihilist must be motivated by hatred. And if we examine the world (or turn on the news) to seek confirmation of our thesis, it isn't difficult to find. For it is only everywhere.

Let's dig a little deeper into God's motivations. Although God is free to create this or that world, I don't believe he is "free" -- in a manner of speaking -- to create "nothing," or to not create at all. This is because creativity is in the very nature of God. We all have a thing, and creativity is God's.

Analogously, being that God is good, we could say that he is not free to be evil. These sound like limitations, but they aren't in reality, since nothingness and evil are privations.

Therefore, we might say that, paradoxically, we are "more free" than God himself, being that we may choose between good and evil.

But here again, choosing evil can only be a kind of parody of freedom, just as "false knowledge" can only be a parody of truth. Man is free to know truth or error, but we do not conclude that this renders him wiser than God. Likewise, we are free to love evil, but this doesn't make us more loving than God. Hitler's dog loved Hitler. Does this mean that Blondi was morally superior to us?

So, God has his "limits," in the sense that he is limited by his nature, a nature which is characterized by love, truth, beauty, unity, and other transcendentals. Another of God's limits is "existence." You might say that he is "constrained to exist," indeed, he is the only thing in existence that is so constrained. In other words, the rest of us are contingent: we may or may not have existed. Only God exists necessarily.

However, just as creation as such must exist, even if this or that particular creation is contingent, might we say that God must exist, even though this or that God is contingent? Here we are verging on heretical ground, and yet, there is a basis for thinking this is the case, if we draw the Eckhartian distinction between God and Godhead.

To back up a bit, we would again say that God is constrained to exist in some form or fashion. But prior to his existence is his sheer being-ness, or better, his "beyond-beingness." Of course I could be wrong, but I am drawn to the idea that beyond-being "crystalizes" in form of God's being.

Or perhaps we are just touching on the distinction between Godhead and Trinity, the dialectic between the oneness of God and his personhood (or his trans-subjectivity and his intersubjectivity). You might even say that the archetypes of verticality and horizontality exist in divinas, as they say. As does "relativity," God being "relative" to Godhead (and indeed, the Persons being relative to one another).

Which reminds me of something that brings us back to the main subject, the evil of the left. Having just read Steven Hayward's highly recommended Patriotism is Not Enough, I've been thinking about the intrinsic instability of liberalism that causes it to descend toward the abyss of nihilism.

The real question is, what is the nature of man? This question must be asked before any political theorizing, for if one arrives at the wrong answer, then the resultant system will be a nightmare, more or less (or sooner or later). Think of the nightmares that have resulted from believing that man is "socialist man," and proceeding to impose this definition on him.

Now, it is surely telling that for the left this is a nonsense question, for man either has no nature or has only a contingent one conferred by history, or culture, or "power," or privilege. It is precisely this "definition" of man that allows a man to pretend he is a woman.

Note again the paradox in this definition: that man is liberated from definitions, and thus more free even than God. God is constrained by his nature, but leftist man is completely free of his!

But if we follow the logic laid out in paragraph two -- the logic of inverse parody -- then what the left calls "freedom" must in reality be a form of slavery. Could this be the case? Well, if I am not mistaken, the Bible often compares sin to slavery. Conversely, "the truth sets you free." From which we may extrapolate that leftist equality sets you on fire.

Is there an appropriate equality that is in divinas? Why yes, glad you asked. It is of course between the Persons, who abide in Love. Now, what might this have to do with the nature of man -- that question we must ask prior to our political theorizing?

I obviously don't have time for an exhaustive excursus into the subject, but if we trace contemporary liberalism down to its roots, we might find a Lockean individualism favored by conservative liberals (especially libertarians), or the nature-less non-entity favored by the progressive left.

But real human nature is trinitarian in structure, such that one will find no "individual" beneath or behind it. Rather, our nature is to be relational; we are intersubjective right down to the ground (both vertically and horizontally), such that the I-We is an irreducible complementarity (as is the I-God vertically).

This in turn is grounded in the natural family; or rather, the natural family is its expression herebelow. Man cannot help being trinitarian, for he is constrained to be so. But this is precisely what releases his nature and therefore his real freedom.

The leftist alternative again devolves to nothingness. For example, the left posits the existence of special "group rights" that end up effacing the individual. A Clarence Thomas, for example, must be destroyed. Under the guise of increased freedom, he is not permitted to be free. Nor is Milo Yiannopoulos or any non-leftist woman.

As we've said before, it ultimately comes down to the choice of God or Nothing. If one is intellectually honest, there can be no alternative. For a while, the Nothing will feel "free," but this is because it necessarily begins closer to God. But as a ray of light becomes increasingly distant from the sun, so too does leftism end in a cold, dark, and lifeless universe.

God's freedom is not like that, for it is, among other things, hierarchical. But this goes to the difference between, say, the ordered liberty of the founders vs. the freedom of anarchy, which is no freedom at all.

Out of time. Not sure we got anywhere today, but we'll keep trying on Thursday (probably no post tomorrow). If nothing else, I guess we learned why this blog will never be popular.

God May be Known by His Absence

"Nihilist rebellion," writes Fr. Rose, "is a war against God and against Truth."

Which, by the way, is one of the more convincing proofs of God. In short, God may be known -- "unKnown" -- by his absence, an apophasis of which I frequently remind the young master. Where you see shadows, look for the Light without which the shadows couldn't exist. Where there is godlessnessness, there lurks the God of Irony in the background.

For which reason the old Meister remarked that "the more they blaspheme the more they praise God."

Thankfully there is a whole lotta blaspheming going on these days, which is precisely How We Get More Trump.

It is difficult to conceive of something more nihilistic than the drive to eradicate human sexual differences, AKA the Bathroom Wars. When we speak of "natural rights," this is generally because we are able to make distinctions that are "in the nature of things" and thereby available to any man whose soul is relatively intact.

These universal distinctions include, for example, parent and child, husband and wife, individual and group, and member and outsider. It is not coincidental that the left wishes to eradicate each of these, for example, via the redefinition of marriage, open borders, and now their preposterous Bathroom War.

Last night Tucker Carlson interviewed a spokesthing for the ideology of gender over biology, and it was the usual evisceration.

The spokesthing was insisting that words trump biology, such that if I say I'm a woman, then that is what I am. This itself, if true, implies some shocking properties of language, but this is not a new idea, as it forms the basis of magic. For example, the etymological meaning of abracadabra is "I create as I speak."

Which is another way of affirming that In the beginning is the Word, and the Word is with God. Except that this word is with (and of) godlessness. And that this godlessness, if you follow the logic, simply elevates its speaker to godhood. Which is precisely the distinction between magic and religion: magic is a misappropriation of divine magic in order to aggrandize the personal ego.

So, for example, "God created them male and female." But godlessness overrules the Creator and his stupid biology and maintains that we can choose either one.

Now, you will notice an extreme irony at work here. Note again that God creates us male and female. The godless still retain God's categories of male and female, but insist that we get to assign them based upon our own superior wisdom. So once again God and his categories are affirmed in their denial.

It reminds me of the old story about an argument between God and a scientistic atheist:

God was once approached by a scientist who said, “Listen God, we’ve decided we don’t need you anymore. These days we can clone people, transplant organs and do all sorts of things that used to be considered miraculous.”

God replied, “Don’t need me huh? How about we put your theory to the test. Why don’t we have a competition to see who can make a human being, say, a male human being.”

The scientist agrees, so God declares they should do it like he did in the good old days when he created Adam.

“Fine” says the scientist as he bends down to scoop up a handful of dirt.”

“Whoa!” says God, shaking his head in disapproval. “Not so fast. You get your own dirt.”

Similarly, we might say to the biology deniers: Not so fast. Get your own genders!

Here we see that there cannot really exist a literal nihilism, for what is Nothing but the more or less distant echo of Something? What can nothing be but the negation of something? Likewise, what can absolute relativism be but a blackhound tribute to the Absolute? What is materialism but a pronouncement -- a wacky pronouncement -- of Spirit?

"Nihilism, in a word, owes its whole existence to a negation of Christian Truth; it finds the world 'absurd,' not as a result of dispassionate 'research' into the question, but only through inability or unwillingness to believe its Christian meaning" (Rose).

Did you ever wonder why the left is so irrationally frightened of Trump? It calls to mind the old gag that if you strike at a king, you had better kill him.

Analogously, if you strike at God, you'd damn well better kill him too. The left has been striking at God for over a century, and as recently as 9:00 PM EST last November 8 considered the matter settled. God was, if not dead, then grievously wounded. This was not supposed to happen, "progress" being a one-way phenomenon.

Along these lines, Rose observes that "no Nihilist is so blind that he fails to sense, however dimly, the ultimate consequences of his action." Thus, "the nameless 'anxiety' of so many men today testifies to their passive participation in the program of antitheism." This is merely a fall from their own imaginary height; or from a faux being that evaporates into non-being upon contact with Truth.

The Aphorist says that In order to challenge God, man puffs up his emptiness. In order to avoid the sense of falling into non-being, the atheist maintains his counterfeit center by fighting God:

"To the man afflicted with such Nihilism, the sense of falling into the abyss, far from ending in passive anxiety and despair, is transformed into a frenzy of Satanic energy that impels him to strike out at the whole of creation and bring it, if he can, plummeting into the abyss with him."

George Soros and his minions have their marching orders.

Existential and Essential Threats

Dennis Prager often talks about how concern for the soul has morphed into an obsession with the body, i.e., with health, fitness, diet, etc. If the soul is the form of the body, then in these soulless times people are left with only the husk, unconcerned with -- if they are aware of it at all -- the fate of the kernel.

There must be considerable overlap between these soulless utensils and the radical environmentalists who confuse heaven and earth, thereby displacing notions of sin, purity, armageddon, and apocalypse to hysterical fears about the weather.

Yesterday while listening to the radio in the car, someone said something about "existential threat," and the notion popped into my head of essential threats, i.e., threats to our essence as opposed to our existence. For we can survive an existential threat but lose our essence -- which is the collective equivalent of "gaining the world but losing one's soul."

For example, we purportedly "won" the Cold War in 1991. That had been seen as an existential threat, but it was also an essential threat, being that communism and Americanism are at philosophical antipodes. Prager refers to the "American trinity" found on any coin, consisting of of Liberty, E Pluribus Unum, and In God We Trust, each a reflection of the others.

Conversely, the unholy trinity of the left would consist of illiberal and unjust Equality, divisive Multiculturalism, and a satanically inspired In Man We Trust.

Coincidentally, I'm reading Steven Hayward's new book (his two volume biography of Reagan here and here is indispensable). Apropos of what was said above in paragraph two, he speaks of his bewonderment at "how so many people who are concerned about understanding ecosystems and preserving the right order of wild nature could seem so indifferent or hostile to the idea of human nature and of the protection of human ecosystems." As if those things will just take care of themselves!

One side effect of the devolution from soul to body is the reduction of quality to quantity, or vertical to horizontal. The left is the horizontal party par excellence, not only failing to nurture the soul, but harboring an overt and unrelenting hostility to its very existence.

Thus, Hayward speaks of "the central obsession with much of the intellectual class," which understands problems in the most "simplistic terms" and deploying quantity "as a cudgel against existing institutions and structure."

This is consistent with our last post, which touched on the implicit agenda of the left, which is destruction per se -- in this case, quantity used as a weapon against quality. For example, the left uses any benign instance of quantitative disparity as proof of malevolent discrimination -- unless, of course, the numbers are in their favor, as in academia, the NBA, journalism, or the permanent shadow government.

Similarly, they use raw income statistics to promulgate the fiction that women are underpaid, or crime statistics to advance the lie that blacks are discriminated against in the criminal and judicial systems.

Anyway, because we have tended to focus on existential threats to the exclusion of essential ones, we have failed to take cognizance of the threat to our essence posed by the left. I've only just begun Patriotism is Not Enough, but Harry Jaffa certainly knew that "the most fundamental political question is the nature of the human soul."

For the same reason, he recognized in 1991 how our existential victory over communism could conceal the left's essential victory over us:

The defeat of Communism in the USSR and its satellite empires by no means assures its defeat in the world. Indeed, the release of the West from its conflict with the East emancipates utopian communism at home from the suspicion of its affinity with an external enemy. The struggle for the preservation of western civilization has entered a new -- and perhaps far more deadly and dangerous -- phase" (Jaffa, in Hayward).

Precisely. Looked at this way, the difference between Obama and Bush is just a family squabble between global elites, whereas Trump is the uninvited guest crashing the party.

For example, we've never had an administration that spoke truth to the satanic Powers and Principalities of the UN as Nikki Haley did the other day. That is the kind of firm pimp hand needed to deal with these truly awful human beings.

The same pimp hand, by the way, that Trump is applying to the Democrat operatives in the MSM. He must slap at them and continue slapping until journalistic morale improves.

Hayward paraphrases a formulation by Jaffa to the effect that the fate of the world hinges on the United States, the fate of the U.S. on the conservative movement, and conservatism on the... Republican Party, of all things. I would only add that the fate of the Republican Party hinges on the preservation of the American trinity alluded to above. But in any event, "the Democratic Party is just as intellectually corrupt today as it was in the 1850s" and at every point in between.

For it has no "intellectual" basis at all, only an "anti-intellectual" one. Not anti-intellectual in the sense of uneducated, uncultured, and hostile toward ideas. Rather, they are the enemy of the intellect per se, such that they literally use man's intelligence in order to undermine the intellect -- or use thinking to render coherent thought impossible.

To take one obvious example, this is what Darwinists, sociobiologists, and evolutionary psychologists do when they use the miraculous gift of intelligence to affirm that intelligence is just a side effect of random mutation, ultimately rooted in mere matter -- a flagrantly self-refuting absurdity if ever there was one.

"Nothing," writes Schuon, "is more contradictory than to deny the spirit, or even simply the psychic element, in favor of matter alone, for it is the spirit that denies, whereas matter remains inert and unconscious. The fact that matter can be thought about proves precisely that materialism contradicts itself at its starting point."

In short -- and try to disprove this! -- "the subjective could not arise from the objective, and to believe otherwise is to understand nothing of subjectivity."

In the same book, Schuon mentions how "the internal contradiction of Marxism is that it wants to build a perfect humanity while destroying man" -- again, build existence while destroying the essence.

To exist means to survive. But is the survival worth it if it is only in the material sense? "One readily speaks of the duty of being useful to society, but one fails to ask whether this society is useful, that is to say, whether it realizes man's, and thus a human community's, reason for being."

To ask this question is to indict multiculturalism, collectivism, feminism, and the rest of the left's anti-intellectual arsenal. For "it is the individual, in his solitary station before the Absolute and thus by the exercise of his highest function, who is the aim and reason for being of the collectivity" (ibid.).

If the left prevails in its anti-human mission, it will be a quintessential case of "the operation was a success but the patient died."

"God is Dead and I Hate Him!"

We're still on the topic of the mass hysteria of the left, which cannot be explained with recourse to the usual psychological categories -- which means the mass can't just be "hysterical" but must be drawing upon a deeper source.

While casting about for inspiration this morning, I've been thumbing through an oldie but goodie, Father Rose's Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age. He would certainly agree that the left is diabolically inspired. Which is the point of the book.

He notes that the Revolution -- and the desire for Revolution is what distinguishes the left from classical liberalism -- "has a theological and spiritual foundation, even if its 'theology' is an inverted one and its 'spirituality' Satanic." The revolutionary impulse is destructive and nihilist at its core, although always disguised as a desire for "change."

Destruction, of course, must precede the change, but it turns out that destruction is the change. As Stalin, used to say, "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." But as the rest of the Soviet Union asked, "where's the omelet?"

And it goes without saying that if you like your eggs you can keep your eggs.

Now, "construction" is not possible in the absence of truth. This is as true on the concrete/material plane as it is on the abstract/metaphysical. Just as you cannot build, say, a functioning airplane without knowing about the laws of nature, you cannot have a functioning civilization without knowing about the laws of man. The left starts by denying the latter, but they also have no compunction about meddling with the former (e.g. "climate change," gender nonsense, IQ denialism, etc.).

Rose alludes to the nihilist "revelation" that "there is no truth," which is functionally equivalent to the death of God. Truly, if one is intellectually honest -- and cognitively adequate -- one understands that the choice is between God and Nihilism. There can be no third, except in an imaginary or magical sense.

The other day I read a piece about the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. I don't have the link to the piece, but it mentioned a number of ideas derived from him which the contemporary left has followed to the letter, including:

--There is no truth, only competing agendas.

--All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

--There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

--The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

--Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

--The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

--For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

--When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

Call them planks in Satan's platform. Or Bernie Sanders's Bucket List.

For those who relate to this diabolical madness, "an entirely new spiritual universe opens up, in which God exists no longer, in which, more significantly, men do not wish for God to exist" (Rose). In the words of the Aphorist, The atheist devotes himself less to proving that God does not exist than to forbidding Him to exist.

Nevertheless, The death of God is a report given by the devil, who knows very well that the report is false. And Atheism is the prelude to the divinization of Man (which is when hell breaks loose from its transpersonal restraints).

Formal atheism is merely "the philosophy of a fool," whereas "antitheism is a profounder malady" (Rose). While the former "errs through childishness" and "plain insensitivity to spiritual realities," the latter "owes its distortions to a deep-seated passion that, recognizing these realities, wills to destroy them."

"It may be doubted, indeed, if there exists such a thing as 'atheism,' for no one denies the true God except to devote himself to the service of a false god." You gotta serve somebody, as the poet said.

It is important to note that these hyperkinetic zombies are anything but spiritually "lukewarm." Rather, they are en fuego for the Evil One, a truth easily discerned in the demented faces of their howling mobs.

I suppose there exist some a-theists who are able to live in a fragile equilibrium between God above and infrahuman below. But most fall into an aggressive and destructive anti-theism that worships its own false absolute.

Fr. Rose quotes the anarchist Proudhon, who wrote that "The first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to our nature.... Every step we take in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity." It's called progress.

The Serpent could scarcely have said it better. Bakunin channelled the same Serpent, expressing the view that if God actually existed, "it would be necessary to abolish him."

Man cannot be happy unless his existence comports with the nature of things. But the counter-faith of the left does precisely the opposite; not only does it fail to comport with the nature of things, it is at war with those "naturally supernatural" things.

Thus, the left's spiritual illness revolves around "envy, jealousy, pride, impatience, rebelliousness, blasphemy -- one of these qualities predominating in any given personality." (He left out raw stupidity and refusal to learn -- or more generally, refuse to submit to, or even recognize, one's superiors -- which is often mingled with the others.)

"This rebellion, this messianic fervor that animates the greatest revolutionaries, being an inverse faith," is driven to destroy its "rival faith." Thus, we commonly see how "doctrines and institutions" are "reinterpreted" by the left, "emptied of their Christian content and filled with a new, Nihilist content" (ibid.).

Which calls to mind Iowahawk's apt description of the strategy of the spiritually intoxicated left:

Combatting Demons and Journalists

While watching President Trump joyfully stick it to the media yesterday, it occurred to me that he is literally fighting with demons -- or at least jousting with nonlocal powers and principalities represented by the media. Recall what was said a couple of posts back about Satan; it works just as well if you replace "Satan" with "liberal media":

"Satan The liberal media is real. That's the first thing. The second thing should be obvious: Satan the liberal media is horrible. But the third thing may not be obvious: Satan the liberal media is also ridiculous. But it is the only ridiculous thing that must be taken seriously."

Well, not the only thing. But certainly in the top two or three, along with the state indoctrination establishment and popular culture. One scholar attempted to quantify the electoral boost given Democrats by the mass media, and I believe it was on the order of at least fifteen percentage points. So, with a fair and impartial media Trump wins roughly 65% to 35%; as does Romney and even the double-dealing McCain.

Who can watch the liberal media and not see that they are ridiculous? Remarkably, the vast majority of Americans see these clowns for what they are, being that trust in them is at historic lows. Which is why it is even more ridiculous for, say, Chuck Todd to suggest that "Press bashing may feel good to folks but when it's done by people in power, it's corrosive. Take off your partisan hats for a second."

The absence of self-awareness is just astonishing, such that it transcends anything mere psychology can explain. The reality is that "Conservative bashing may feel good to your fellow activists but when it's done by powerful media corporations, it's corrosive. Take your partisan head out of your ass for a second."

But this is precisely what the liberal media cannot do. When absence of self-awareness is this deep, this pervasive, and this universal, it makes me suspect something else is going on. How can they all be so blind?

Denial is like a psychic force field around that which is denied. Attempts to look at it are "repelled," so to speak. If you prematurely encourage the patient to look at it, they often "fragment" and spew a lot of disconnected nonsense. It's as if the closer one gets to the denied material, the more it gives off an energy that disrupts psychic continuity and dis-organizes the narrative.

I'm not sure I'm explaining it that well, but imagine flying over enemy territory and being strafed by anti-aircraft fire. It's like that.

I'm trying to find a better explanation. Siegel writes that "integration is the fundamental mechanism of health and well-being," involving "the linkage of differentiated parts of a system" such that "subsets interact with one another."

That being the case, "When we examine various mental disorders, what is revealed is that virtually all of them can be described as clusters of chaotic and/or rigid symptoms that we would say are examples of impaired integration."

Now, someone who is a liberal activist but doesn't know it is rather severely dis-integrated. I'm trying to put myself in their shoes, but it is impossible, for it would be equivalent to me absolutely denying that I am a conservative who writes from that perspective. How crazy, or lacking in insight, or demon-possessed would I have to be to believe that?

Tomberg suggests that there is another kind of integration that occurs in demon formation, that is, an unholy alliance of will and imagination:

"A desire that is perverse or contrary to nature, followed by the corresponding imagination, together constitute the act of generation of a demon." Again, this is the demon that goes on to enslave the parents (Mr. Will and Ms. Imagination) who conceived it.

Tomberg goes on to say that Marxism is the the most consequential modern demon, but he was writing in the early 1960s. Today we would say it is the degenerate neo-Marxism of political correctness, multiculturalism, identity politics, et al.

In any event, "We the people of the twentieth century know that the 'great pests' of our time" are the manmade ideological demons "which have cost humanity more life and suffering than the great epidemics of the Middle Ages."

You could say that the demon is born of a kind of drunken sex between will and imagination: "[I]t is always excess owing to intoxication of the will and imagination which engenders demons."

For the left, it is "a matter of excess -- a going beyond the limits of competence and sober and honest knowledge," by "a fever of the will and imagination to change everything utterly at a single stroke," in turn giving rise "to the demon of class hatred, atheism, disdain for the past, and material interest being placed above all else..."

Certainly there is nothing wrong with wishing to help the poor! But you cannot do so by vilifying the one system that has lifted more people out of poverty than all others combined. That's just stupid demonic.

So, "once artificial demons are generated, how does one combat them, and how does one protect and rid oneself of them?"

Pretty much by what Trump did yesterday, that is, naming and ridiculing them: "Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e. on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent." And "a demon rendered impotent is a deflated balloon."

Which reminds me of the old joke about the man who, after being diagnosed with erectile dysfunction, decided to wear a tuxedo. Why? Because "if I'm gonna be impo'tant, I wants to look impo'tant." Few developments would be healthier for our nation than for the ridiculously self-important media to be rendered impotent.

The journalist arrogates to himself the importance of what he reports on. --NGD

How to Create and Maintain Your Own Psychic Imprisonment

The Devil Card, writes Tomberg, shows how "beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it."

Which is precisely why leftists have degenerated into the demons they have created: they fear fascism but they are the fascists; they detest racism while being race-obsessed; they hate intolerance while being absolutely intolerant of dissent; they attack misogyny while devaluing womanhood; they clamor for unity while sowing division; etc.

The lesson of the card revolves around "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them." It is a kind of inverse analogy of the Creator who is sovereign over his creation, such that the creator of artificial beings becomes "a slave of his own creation."

You might say that the higher man rises (in his own estimation) the farther he falls. Isn't this just Genesis 3 all over again? You have to pay the cost to be the boss, and the cost is measured in our depth of fallenness.

Show me a leftist and I will show you a slave. The black who is persecuted by "white privilege" is simply forging the chains of his own imaginary enslavement. Likewise women who fancy themselves victims of the "patriarchy," or an "LGBTQ community" that imagines we think about them at all, unless they are doing distasteful things in public or in front of the children.

Anyone can be free, but there is a cost. One of the costs is personal responsibility, which is too high a price for most people, certainly on the left. There you find people for whom merely purchasing birth control -- "controlling your own body" -- is too much of a burden, or school choice an intolerable imposition.

Tomberg properly characterizes these demons as semi-autonomous "parasitic entities" that "are to the psychic organism what, for example, cancer is to the physical organism." What is cancer? It is an autonomous, runaway order within one's own order, so to speak. The body can have only one order. Introduce a second order, and chaos is generated.

It is the same with the mind. I am reminded of a crack by Schuon to the effect that "The noble man is one who dominates himself; the holy man is one who transcends himself. Nobility and holiness are the imperatives of the human state." I ask you: when is the last time you saw a leftist who dominates, much less transcends, himself? Rather, we see (as discussed in yesterday's post) intoxicated counter-inspiration.

It really comes down to what the mind is for, doesn't it? Which is really another way of asking what man is for. Which is what? I would suggest that the purpose of man is to think, for if he can't properly do that, then he's not good for much else. But thinking presupposes a great deal, including freedom, responsibility, and a love of truth. Eliminate truth, then thinking is pointless; eliminate freedom and it is impossible; eliminate responsibility and it becomes passionately egotistical.

While looking up that Schuon quote I found some others that go to our subject: "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." Leftists are, of course, moral relativists and multiculturalists. Which means they are worthless men, precisely -- not because I say so, but because this is the verdict they have rendered upon themselves. "Absolute relativism" equates to total stupidity and redounds to unfettered depravity.

"The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

Self-overcoming. This goes to one of the essential divides between left and right: the conservative blames himself for his failures, while the leftist blames "the system" or "white privilege" or some other imaginary construct. The whole purpose of leftism is to externalize agency, in such a way that one's own freedom is projected into malevolent others. For the left, the only truly "free" people are the ones controlling, dominating, and oppressing them in their imaginations, the "one percent," or "corporate America," or whatever.

Last night I heard a bit of a talk by Dennis Prager and Adam Corolla. As we know, for the left, all people of pallor are racist. Corolla equated this to saying that "all people are arsonists." Well, that may be true, but what we care about are people who actually set fires, not people who might theoretically want to set them.

The latter drains the term of all meaning -- as does the left's absurd definition of racism. If everyone is a racist then no one is a racist. As such, Corolla pointed out that there has never been a better time to be an actual racist (or Nazi), since the real racists are lumped in with some of the finest and most decent people in the world.

What essentially happens with the fall? Well, one thing is that the will dominates the intelligence. We "know better," but our willfulness hijacks the intellect and down we go. In the properly ordered soul, the will is "a prolongation or complement of the intelligence." And the intellect must be oriented to, and grounded in, the Absolute, without which it is just a planet with no sun (which is no planet at all, just a wandering fragment of space junk).

Thus, "The way towards God always involves an inversion" (of the willful plunge alluded to above): "from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity."

Basically this means that we operate from the center-out rather than vice versa (and our center is a vertical reflection of the Center). "The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery." But -- to get back to our main subject -- this is precisely the meaning of Diabolos, which is to divide and scatter; and then accuse and slander.