Here Come the New Gods, Same as the Old Gods

We're in the midst of defining our terms, and doing so -- unlike our slipslopery competitors, whose allegiance is to power and not truth -- with precision.

Widespread violence, injustice, and tyranny are always preceded by attacks on language, such that fidelity to the dictionary is resistance to tyrants. Logocide is prelude to genocide, every time. After all, if you believe someone is a Nazi and fail to eliminate him when you have the chance, that makes you complicit in Nazism.

Similarly, accusations of "white privilege" are just a linguistic license to kill, since the slander bypasses the conscience, legitimizes envy, and sacralizes the violence that follows. This is just the latest iteration of a vertical anti-tradition extending all the way down to Genesis 3, when our archetypal human father is heard to exclaim,

You've got the wrong guy! It was the woman! It's her fault! And, -- with all due respect -- you gave her to me, so if we're laying our cards on the table, it's really your fault, is it not? Besides, the serpent was already here when I arrived.

You've no doubt noticed that the spasm of sociopathy to which we have been treated over the past week has been seeded and nurtured for over half a century by a race-obsessed media-academic complex that is drenched to the bone in lies.

If lies of this magnitude were susceptible to correction by fact, logic, or principle, they would have vanished long ago. But, as expressed in words that purportedly have no expiration date, -- or so we have heard from the wise --

He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Timeless truth, or at least it has stood the test of 2000 years. That's a pretty good track record.

Coming at it from another angle, Paul claims in 2 Cor 3:17 that "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

In a free country such as ours, inequality is an inevitable consequence of freedom. It's called the right be different, or in other words, who you actually are. You and I are unequal to everyone else, because we are individuals: we are free to be ourselves, and our self is utterly unique. Which is why it is written (by the Aphorist):

Freedom is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.

Indeed, what is the point of freedom if one is only free to be like all the other Don Lemmings and media-hackcrities, as in the diabolically misnamed "diversity," or "multiculturalism," or all those other totalitarian cults of noetic and pneumatic uniformity?

At this point we're way past the R & D and marketing phases, and are deep into the application: novel religion, same old gods. Imagine bowing before criminals and psychopaths to earn some sort of redemption? This is such a spiritual regression that it would represent a genuine leap in being to conduct a proper sacrifice and smear its blood on our doors in the hope that BLM will pass us by.

Enough insultainment. Back to our definitions.

Regarding the above-noted criminal blackslide into primitive appeasement of the angry and vengeful gods, Voegelin would insist this goes precisely to the reason why the discovery of monotheism by the ancient Hebrews was such a literal leap in being. It was a leap because it cleansed the cosmos of mere human projections in the form of gods, and situated the absolute principle outside and beyond the cosmos.

It will take awhile to explain exactly why this was such an advance, but we're running out of time, so we will only be able to strike a few preluminary sparks.

Speaking of our Hebrew friends and vertical relatives, Exodus, expressed abstractly and in principle, is "the process of transcendence." It goes to "the universal calling of humanity" toward "open existence in the metaxy oriented toward its transcendental pole."

Metaxy? Needlessly esoteric term IMO, for it is simply "the experience of human existence as 'between' lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge" -- or, as we prefer to express it, (¶) <--> O, with the arrows representing the metaxy, AKA the in-between.

This goes to the necessity of open existence, specifically, a vertical openness to the transcendent pole, failing which the mind and soul suffer ontological shrinkage and become pathological. It is a chronic condition of low T -- not just of Testosterone but of Transcendence.

Leftism is by definition a pathologically closed world, since it is predicated on the denial in principle of transcendent reality. Thus, they inhabit a "second world," which is "a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby 'eclipse' genuine reality."

"Eclipse?" It is "the voluntary, perverse closure of consciousness against reality" (although I would say that it is more often unconscious, unless I'm misunderstanding something). It necessarily results in a kind of anxiety, since reality always persists despite our efforts to deny and evade it. This, in my opinion, is one of the sources of political correctness, which is an enforcement mechanism of the Lie, or the verbal glove over the mailed fist.

I'll leave you with a couple of haunting images, first of the hideous anti-Bob:

Followed by the genuine Bob of freedom and space age transcendental living:

My Cosmos is Bigger than Yours

The order of history is the history of order. Let's try to understand what Voegelin means by this palindromic gnome, or gnomic palindrome.

First, as mentioned in yesterday's post, order is synonymous with cosmos, while history is... what, exactly?

It must be the Order as it evolves through time. Perhaps we can visualize the process. Imagine a horizontal line which represents time as it moves from its ground to its meta-temporal telos and attractor, the latter situated outside or beyond time; it is bisected by a vertical line, except it is more of an ovoid space that expands and differentiates as it moves along the horizontal axis.

Having said that, this is no linear or ineluctable process a la Marx or Hegel. For one thing, we can never arrive at the right hand attractor, only be perpetually attracted by and to it. Foreclosing the space between -- let's symbolize them (¶) and O -- doesn't actually move (¶) foreword, but rather, leads to a host of problems herebelow. And that is putting it mildly.

Voegelin famously referred to this as immanentizing the eschaton, which is always a bad idea, perhaps even the Worst Idea Ever. Why? Why is it such a bad idea? What, aside from being impossible, is wrong with Utopia?

Put it this way: yes, we could actually create paradise on earth. However, it would last only a nanosecond until typology kicked in and kicked us out again.

In other words, we have a problem, and the problem is called human nature. Yes, there is a solution, but it must -- obviously -- involve "solving" the problem of human nature. Absent that, then we can no more create paradise on earth than we could reassemble a broken spider web by hand.

Let's get back to our visual image. Bear in mind that the O on the right side isn't God per se; rather, let's keep it unsaturated and experience-near, and simply affirm that this is the attractor to which man is always attracted by virtue of being a man.

This of course goes to the fundamental difference between animals and man, being that the former can know nothing of the divine attractor at the end of history, as they are plunged in neurology and bound by instinct. A small cosmos -- similar to academia, only with no stupid and dysfunctional ideas.

Perhaps we should emphasize here that we are not "speculating." Perish the thought. If we were, then everything about which we have written for the past 3,500 posts would be no better than any other philodoxic Babble of Tenure. (A philodoxer is a lover of opinion, man.) No, we are always trying to describe the objective and empirical facts as given to us by our expounding cosmos.

At this point I will defer to Voegelin, Sandoz, and Webb for some scholarly back-up. The following are selected more or less at random, because if I try to locate the Perfect Illustration, we'll be here all morning; to a large extent, all of this is intuitive, but nevertheless objective. Or better, it is noetic (never confusing noesis with Gnosticism!).

Correction. This actually is perfect (or as perfect as we're going to get on this imperfectly perfect morning: Webb has a glossary that defines our terms with precision. Let's begin with the cosmos, which is

the whole of ordered reality including animate and inanimate nature and the gods. (Not to be confused with the modern conception of "cosmos" as the [merely!] astrophysical universe.)

"Gods"? Yes, of course. Imagine what we would be excluding if we were to ignore them! For we'd be leaving out the whole conception of reality as experienced by premodern (and postmodern pagan) man, which is a lot of people for a long time -- much longer than we've been here. And to leave mind and intersubjectivity out of the cosmos is obviously a non-starter, too crude an approach to ever take seriously.

In this regard, it reminds me of what psychotherapy would be like if I were to ignore everything that happened to the patient before the age of 18. In a way, this is the problem, as people inevitably attempt to rationalize away the non- or irrational components of development, which results in various symptoms down the line.

Back to the cosmos: it

Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into immanent "world" and transcendent "divine ground."

Oh my. This is getting complicated. Let's start with "transcendent." What does it mean, exactly?

to go beyond, surpass. General term for that which extends or lies beyond some set of limits; may be relative (beyond some particular limits) or absolute (beyond all possible limits). The opposite of "immanent."

Again, man qua man exists in the differentiating space between immanence and transcendence. This differentiation can be experienced noetically or pneumatically (or it can be pathologically denied or compacted). Noetic differentiation is

the process by which one moves from compact consciousness to a more differentiated, conceptually articulated awareness of the inquiring consciousness and its structure... and its orientation toward the transcendental pole of the tension of inquiry toward Truth as such.

Or just say philo-sophy, properly speaking; it is intellectual differentiation within the ovoid space mentioned above. It is complemented by pneumatic differentiation, which is more spiritual than intellectual:

the awakening of the soul both by and to the experience of the pull in the tension of existence toward the pole of transcendental perfection; the emergent realization of the absolutely transcendent character of that pole.

In other words, it is the discovery of monotheism, which was one small step for Abram, one giant leap for mankind, but from which it is but a small step back into paganism, scientism, materialism, leftism, et al. Just don't, okay? We have enough problems.

To be continued, of course.

Methinks Thou Dost Protest and Loot Too Much

Yesterday's bewilderness adventure concluded with the alibi that "this is such a big subject, in a way the biggest of all."

Okay, we'll bite: what's the subject?

The subject is order, and order is everything, literally. For the past several weeks we've been trialoguing with Voegelin, whose entire corpus comes down to unearthing and disclosing the order of Order; as he put it, "the order of history is the history of order," and no, this isn't just a mystic bromide worthy of the Sphinx:

Incidentally, our Democrat mayors are straight-up HEROES:

Now, Order is another word for Cosmos, and the Cosmos is indeed One (order is synonymous with the unity of plurality, or the reality beneath appearances).

The alternative to Order -- or in Good Times, its complement -- is Chaos. Chaos is generative -- or contributes to generatively -- up to a point, the reason being that the world is (or should be, in order to properly function) an open system, and an open system operates at the border between order and chaos, such that too much of either is a bad thing: sclerosis and compression at one end, dissipation and dissolution at the other.

Aphorisms:

Order paralyzes. Disorder convulses.

The former goes to the progressive state that is evoked to contain the barbarous consequences of progressive thought.

Legislation that protects liberty in minute detail strangles liberties.

But only for ordered souls. Disordered and criminal types will crash straight through the legislation, for example, rioting and looting while not even wearing proper face masks!

The price of absolute freedom would be a vulgarity without limits.

CNN should change its name to VWL.

According to modern man, oppression begins when any filth is prohibited.

Agreed. I get the looting, but...

Why all the cursing, whether via signs, graffiti, or thug-on-the-street interviews? The disordered freedom of the uncaged beast, one supposes.

Freedom is the dream of slaves. The free man knows that he needs refuge, protection, and help.

It reminds me of that idealist for whom it was insufficient to see bears at the zoo, but wanted to live intimately amongst them. Like the deeply progressive business owners of Santa Monica, he found out too late that he needed refuge, protection, and help.

The freedom to which modern man aspires is not that of the free man, but that of the slave on a holiday.

The question is, is this a slave rebellion or slave holiday? Either way,

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain.

Invisible chain? Yes, of course. It becomes evident the moment one of them opens his or her mouth (and I'm not just talking about the journalists, but the protesters and rioters as well).

It is difficult for you or I do identify with the chronic frustration one must feel to be such a stupid person in such a complex world.

The temptation to simplify and vilify, and to act out on these, is enormous. Why else would the Adversary tempt these weak-minded souls in this way? Like any form of intoxication, to be drunk on Victimhood is liberating -- the downside being that it requires imaginary oppressors.

Under the best of circumstances, politics is the organization -- AKA, ordering -- of hatreds. Encourage the haters to act on, instead of argue about, the hatred, and here we are. For a normal person the result is disorder. Not so to the left, for

Leveling is the barbarian’s substitute for order.

Our progressive class encourages rebellion in the name of "freedom" while imposing the burden of law (not to mention lawlessness) on the restavus. As Iowahawk so aptly put it,

We live in a nation of laws in the same way people on 'Hoarders' live in houses of cat food boxes.

This post has spiraled out of control and lost any semblance of order. Back to our truly cosmic thesis, that the order of history is the history of order. Whatever do we mean by this?

Tomorrow.

Apocalypse Now & Always, or Listening to the Barbarians

Yes, what are they trying to say? They keep insisting they want to be "heard," but not one of them -- protester, rioter, or looter -- is able to express a coherent thought. Perhaps that's part of the problem. Like children who are unable to put their thoughts and feelings into words, they act out.

However, if you ask the child what it is he's acting out, he won't know. Which is again the point of the acting out. It is indeed a kind of "speech," of symbolic communication, but it is the task of the therapist to interpret and put it into words. Acting out simultaneously veils and reveals; or, the revelation is hidden in the veil, and is veiled to the person who is using it to hide himself -- his conflicts and motivations -- from himself.

Our political system -- any political system -- is predicated on the ability to sublimate feelings into words and ideas, such that the battle takes place on a higher and less deadly plane. Thus, what we are seeing play out -- or act out -- has nothing to do with politics, but rather, is a form of what Voegelin calls "anti-politics." And it has been going on for at least 50 years, except it has taken this long for it to reach this grotesque tipping point.

Couldn't agree more with this sentiment by Richard Fernandez:

To the question 'where did the destructiveness come from?': it was there all along. What was once dinner party nihilism has lost its inhibitions. The riots are a 'coming out party' for all the doctrines taught in many a school.

One of the replies points out that

The rioters' view of the world came from Marxist professors in schools and colleges, with approval and support from media and Hollywood. How many murders and burning buildings does it take before that viewpoint sounds a little less crackpot?

But why would anyone burn a church, of all things? Wrong question:

One of the intriguing aspects of this outburst is a rage against religion, excepting those seen as hostile to Judaism or Christianity, that seems part of the drama. There is a special odium reserved for it, a kind of ritual desecration, which is key to understanding it.

Christianity is odium to these Marxian asses. Maybe they'll try to burn down a Muslim Mosque or Hindu temple. We'll see. The Night is young. And the darkness will be with us for a generation or two.

Which reminds me. In a few posts of yore, we pointed out that it took some 40 years or so for the new ideas of the 1920s to bear their toxic fruit on a culture-wide basis in the 1960s. In the '20s these progressive and nihilistic ideas were reserved for the elite, and the events of the Great Depression and WW2 temporarily slowed their metastatic spread into the tissues and organs of society.

I wonder if we can similarly reverse-imagineer the present crisis and discern its more distant roots? What ideas were being propagated 40 years ago, in 1980? That's a Big Question, much bigger than can be covered in the space of a post.

However, do not despair. God has given us a deeper way to understand any manmade crisis, because any such crisis is every crisis repeated ad nauseam. The archetypal and interpretive key is provided by typology, such that the apocalypse -- which of course means unveiling -- is always now.

Looked at this way, the pathological ideology of the 1960s was just a variant of the spiritually deformed ideas of the 1920s, as the present sickness is just a reflection of those. Really, it comes dow to One God, One Cosmos, One Human Nature, One Fall, One History, rinse and repent.

Not to veer off into the mother of all tangents, but this for me is the uncanny appeal of Finnegans Wake, the overarching theme of which is the same returns, only in diverse forms. It is "a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind," through which it is simultaneously

Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple.... And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace (the Skeleton Key).

For over half a century, state-run leftist seminaries have been inculcating children and permanent adolescents with the idea that we are just random products of natural selection, animals no different from any other. At last, the trousered baboons are acting like naked apes!

We've moved on from abstract theory to practical application, and it's not going away any time soon, for what's the alternative when you've successfully devalued, demonized, debunked, deconstructed, and destroyed it? Their obtuse secularism isn't presented as one among many, but the only acceptable religion.

Only God can help us, and I mean that literally, although certainly not in the manner our barbarian opponents are even capable of understanding. Rather, the only way they can understand religion and spirituality is through the broken and distorted lens of their own broken and distorted minds.

About the anti-politics. This shouldn't be understood as the opposite of politics, rather, the negation of politics. People keep saying the protesters have a "political message." No they don't. The message, such as it is, is embedded in an ideological second reality, which, no matter how real, is nonetheless an unreal pseudo-reality or dreamworld. It is a lie, only all the more fervently believed for its absence of truth. Truth needn't shout, nor does it descend into incoherent nonsense when given the opportunity to be expressed.

Sandoz provides an illuminating passage by Václav Havel, who knew something about leftist tyranny:

Ideological pseudo-reality... is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works as long as people are willing to live within the lie.

As such, our task as human beings, everywhen & where

is one of resisting vigilantly, thoughtfully, and attentively, but at the same time with total dedication and at every step and everywhere, the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power -- the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.

For as Sandoz says, "the second realities of the ideologues cannot withstand scrutiny" -- which is precisely why they must shriek, loot, and act out. "Free government is a historical rarity and the greatest political challenge; ochlocracy [mob rule] is its viral disease, inviting the socialist demagogue and constantly threatening every liberal democracy with extinction."

So don't wonder what's going on, for mob rule is just leftism by other means, as leftism is just mob rule veiled by ideology. Writing twenty one years ago, Sandoz asked the non-rhetorical questions, "how many decades and generations of systematic miseducation can we endure? How much abuse of our heritage through neglect, ignorance, and mendacity can we bear without experiencing disintegration and collapse" into civilizational chaos and the authoritarian response it demands?

By Jove, I think we have an answer!

Sorry about the rambling and non-linear style, but it's such a big subject, in a way the biggest of all. We'll take another stab at the beast tomorrow...

Ideas Have Riotous Consequences

People generally think of ideas as good or bad, correct or incorrect, brilliant or stupid. They don't -- especially in our age of stupidity, AKA relativism -- think of them as intrinsically pathological.

However, among Voegelin's principle themes is that thinking is indeed subject to disease and decrepitude, and that when this happens on a widespread basis, culture follows. We are seeing this play out on TV in real time -- on TV if you're lucky enough not to reside in a Democrat stronghold, unlucky if you have to live amidst the savages.

One question is whether or not the left will finally appreciate the consequences of their ruinous ideas. No chance. Ideas are easy to change, political religions, not so much.

About the religiosity, the following passage caught my attention yesterday:

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything....

The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide "These are the lies we will tell today." No, that would be too crude and honest.

Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they've chosen to live their lives.

It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully.... [It's] the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don't even know they're true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything (Stephen Hunter.)

One thing I noticed yesterday is the knee-jerk quality: everyone compulsively repeating the same lies, over and over.

Why? Why the constant proselytizing and virtue signaling, the conspicuous conviction that these are fine people with good intentions, with a handful naughty people taking advantage of the situation?

A few bad actors couldn't, for example, turn a Tea Party rally into a dress rehearsal for the collapse of civilization. I don't see Asian Americans rioting over the widespread and systemic legal discrimination against them by our most expensive looniversity bins.

A few notes to myself from over the weekend. Those who understand them will require no explanation. For those who don't understand them, no explanation will be sufficient, although I will no doubt expand upon them tomorrow, when I have more time:

Secularization is the process whereby Homo religiosus convinces himself he isn't.

Every war is a religious war, especially if it's irreligious.

Not a clash of civilizations, rather, of reality tunnels.

Under threat, a worldview will defend itself with violence.

Uncritical thought elevated to first principle is intrinsically pathological.

Leftists don't have ideas. Ideas have them.

In a world run by the left, who knows how to be a victim knows everything.

And who has mastered self-esteem has mastered everything.

In poor countries the wealthy are fat. In wealthy countries, the looters are disgustingly fat.

Paranoid people don't wonder about the meaning of life.

Trump's barbaric nationalism is an insult to glorious tribalism.

Progressivism is a lawsuit against reality by Perfection.

The left won't rest until all America is a university campus.

Black isn't a race, it's an ideology.

Leftism turns have-nots into will-nots, and will nots into why not, the police won't stop me.

Natural rights are never zero sum. Invented rights are whiner take all.

The demonstrators are ANGRY -- unlike most people, who learn their feelings can't change reality by the age of five, and move on.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for brokenhearted beta-men to virtue signal.

If you can politicize a perennial problem rooted in human nature, the left has a career waiting for you in politics, academia, journalism, activism, or criminality.

The rioters are showing with great persuasiveness why, despite the most thorough precautions, there will be the occasional tragedy of a George Floyd. Given the vast numbers, statistical aberrations are inevitable. Some people who never touch a cigarette will die of lung cancer.

Let's begin with the bottom line: if reality is the tension between immanence and transcendence, then default to one side or the other is intrinsically pathological, because it denies the proper form and end of man -- no different than if we were to, say, pretend man can live without food or oxygen.

One can always hold the theory that man is an angelic being who doesn't require nutrition, but what can't go on won't go on. The question is, will the person admit his error, or even acknowledge the fact that he is putting food in his mouth?

It is identical vis-a-vis any deformed ideology: it can last awhile, but not forever. It is difficult to say exactly when the present ideology under which we are forced to live fully crystalized into a pneumo-cognitive totalitarianism voluntarily internalized by the majority of citizens.

Having lived through the disease process, I can identify certain accelerations or "leaps," especially during the past two decades, e.g., the attempt to overturn the 2000 election in Bush v. Gore, the ascendence of Obama and his vile race war, the second and ongoing effort to deny a peaceful transition of power in 2016, the open attacks on free speech, the gender hysteria, the rise of social media facilitating the instantaneous transmission of pathological hatred and stupidity, the total politicization of the Narrative Media...

As I said, to be continued tomorrow...

Q & A on the Riots with Señor Dávila

These are more than riots, they're a revolution!

Revolutions do not solve any problem other than the economic problem of their leaders.

Yes, but surely you acknowledge racial injustice?

In order to enslave a group of people the politician must only convince them that all their problems are a consequence of racism, sexism, or class.

Wait -- you don't want social justice?

“Social justice” is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

I get it. You don't want The People to be liberated.

For a couple of centuries, “to liberate man” meant to facilitate mob behavior.

But Americans have every right to air their grievances!

It is customary to proclaim rights in order to be able to violate duties.

I get it. You just don't tolerate people who don't look like you.

Unlimited tolerance is nothing more than a hypocritical way of giving up.

But I heard the mayors of Minneapolis and Atlanta criticize the rioters.

The smile with which the pig hears the one who criticizes the mud!

These aren't mobs, they're courageously standing up for minority rights!

Minorities that become majorities continue to believe they are brave.

Unity now! Together we're stronger!

The revolutionary is ultimately an individual who does not dare to rob by himself.

What about my rights 'n stuff?

In order to corrupt the individual it is enough to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses.

But life is unfair! The world owes me a living!

We only know how to carry ourselves with decency in front of the world when we know that we are owed nothing. Without the pained grimace of a frustrated creditor.

Last night I heard Don LeMon and Fredo Cuomo point out that it's simplistic to characterize the conduct of the rioters in negative and judgmental terms. One man's looting is another man's retail therapy.

The arguments with which we justify our conduct tend to be more stupid than the conduct itself.

It's not arson -- it's the fire of freedom and justice!

Activism burns without giving light.

Don't you think it was wise for Mayor Jacobin Frey to give the rioters space to blow off steam?

No one grants humanity certain extreme liberties except someone indifferent to its fate.

One thing I don't get -- why do they burn down their own cities and businesses?

The liberal is capable of sacrificing even his interests to his resentment.

And cleaning up this mess is going to cost billions.

Every “liberator” finally passes on the bill.

So, what's really going on here?

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence.

You don't think they're frightened?

The frightened liberal is a bloodthirsty animal.

But if this isn't really about the police, who's to blame for urban squalor and unrest?

With the generosity of his program does the liberal console himself for the magnitude of the catastrophes it produces.

Any final thoughts?

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.

The Dis-covery and Re-discovery of Reality

Time enough for a brief post for which several titles come to mind, including Where is Reality? and Between Matter and Neurology, the latter being the unending answer to the permanent question of the former. Man is in essence an abiding (?), and philosophy begins -- and ends -- in (?!).

Why, you may ask, do I keep harping on this? We get it, Bob. Reality exists, and can only exist, in the great In Between -- in the quasi-infinite space between immanence and transcendence. Life is a bewilderedness adventure, an exodeus, an expansion into the endless frontier, a careful documentation of our ignorance, multi-undisciplinary circumnavelgazing, ad gnoseam. Move on.

Well, I can't. There's an old gag about how even the most exalted egghead generally has One Big Idea that he spends his life rediscovering in various ways. Is it possible this applies to me? That I too am exalted?

Hmm. I'm almost afraid to look, but let's glance back at the very first article I ever published in a -- back off, man, I'm a psychologist! -- scholarly journal in 1991, the same year I got my license to cure souls and save mankind.

Indeed, it looked at the time as if Bob were off to a promising career. Which leads to a host of ancillary questions: what on earth went right? How and why did Bob abandon a life of distinguished mediocrity for an anonymous plunge into eccentric psycho-cosmography?

Wait -- a licensed psychologist? Don't make us laugh!

The greater the importance of an intellectual activity, the more ridiculous is the claim of certifying the competence of those who exercise it. A diploma of dentistry is respectable, but one of philosophy is grotesque (Dávila).

I suppose you could say that I abandoned licensure, certification, and societal validation for a vertical career that has no point. Lo and behold, it's working! I may be grossly misgodded, but at least I'm not grotesque.

Back to the article. Interestingly, it doesn't just confirm the hypothesis that I keep rediscovering the same thing; rather it seems that in the intervening 29 years I have become that which I discovered, or at least increasingly so. Whether this is a good or bad thing, it's too soon to say. Ask again in 29 years. Perhaps distinguished mediocrity would have been the more prudent path.

About "becoming what I discovered." A few selected passages:

Because it is difficult to visualize a domain such as the mind with dimensions of more than three, we tend to rely upon mental models derived from the sensual (primarily visual), explicate world. This in turn leads to the erroneous conclusion that explicate knowledge can disclose the truth of our being.

However,

One of the perils of this form of psychic cartography is that contained within the map is a tacit structure of ideas and concepts which tends to become self-confirming: thought is thus excised from its deeper source and becomes a self-generating and closed loop. With this approach the unknown is foreclosed, and what may appear to be "discoveries" will in fact be merely verifications of one's hidden assumptions about reality.

At the time, I had never heard the name "Voegelin," but what I have just described -- i.e., cognitively and spiritually closed loops -- is another way of talking about ideological pseudo-realities and gnostic dreamworlds built upon ontological lies, i.e., not lying "about" reality but living in a lie about reality. It is analogous to an MSM news silo, only with lifetime tenure.

The silo is the matrix or reality tunnel from which only our second birth from above can begin to save us. It's the beginning of a new order of difficulties, but at least the difficulties are real and no longer imaginary: an engagement with, instead of a flight from, reality. The majority of what is given to us as knowledge, news, and information is clearly a dispersing, crystalizing, or twittering flight from.

More timeless (or fixated) autoBobography from 29 years past:

Thought begins first of all with a creative perception, which is always part of a more encompassing flow from which it has been abstracted.

Doesn't that way lie madness, postmodernness, and other dodgy subjectivisms? No, because

an enormous amount of thinking must take place before the suspension of thought can lead to a generative insight and discovery. Without this preparation, suspension of thought will merely generate undisciplined observations and chaotic and inconsistent interpretations.

But here again we must meet in the middle and not default to the other pole: "with training and preparation, our minds can become circular, saturated, and unable to perceive the truly novel." In short, we must maintain what Voegelin calls the "balance of consciousness," defaulting neither to the transcendent nor immanent poles.

In the article, I also spoke of vertical defense mechanisms, so to speak, which are ultimately defenses against God (or at least the transcendent pole or ground that inevitably leads back to him). Supposing we have an objective map of the world, it may lead to a situation whereby "the unknown is defended against through the possession of knowledge."

Which is none other than what Voegelin calls a second reality, "a fictitious world imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby 'eclipse' genuine reality" (Webb).

Nurture and Nurture's God

Talk about rude: that silly title just now broke into my head and demanded that I honor it with a post! I don't like to reward bad behavior, but my head is otherwise empty this morning, so might as well.

Nor are we in the habit of quoting John Paul... Sartre around here, but he was surely right about one thing: that there is no such thing as human nature, because God doesn't exist.

Except God does exist. As they say in France, T'oh!

via GIPHY

Thus, score one for our perspicacious Founders, who acknowledged that we are indeed endowed by our Creator with, you know, the thing. No Creator, no human nature, no natural law, no unalienable rights, yada yada. France may roll that way, but we don't. Except for the left, which would like for us to roll over like the French army.

This goes to the most fundamental principle distinguishing the left from reality, bearing in mind that it necessarily takes numerous forms. It does so necessarily because reality -- obviously -- is one, while alternatives to it are literally infinite.

For example, in reality you are either a man or a woman (with a handful of tragic exceptions that prove the rule). Deny this reality and you have LGB... then QT... followed by IA... and let's not forget U and C... not to mention 2, P, O, and the controversial SA. We might just say QWERTY as a synecdoche for the entire alphabet, but this unjustly excludes the numbers, to say nothing of the symbols... Let's just go straight to nominalism and say that every person is zir own gender. (If the Incarnation is the Best Idea Ever, then nominalism must be among the Worst.)

If human beings have no nature, this is not "liberating," but rather, the opposite, for it means we are so many bags of wet cement to be shaped in the manner seen fit by the state.

Marriage, for example, is quintessentially in the nature of things. Not so, says the Supreme Court: marriage is between any two -- for now -- people -- for now -- who love the state! But if anyone is free to marry, then no one is. Which is the whole point: to destroy the institution of the family, because the state is a jealous god and frowns upon the existence of mediating institutions between it and its subjects.

Now, back when I was growing up, words were still used to describe reality. This was before they were used to create, distort, and redefine reality.

Reality. You will have noticed that there is an exterior (objective) reality and an interior (subjective) reality; and if you notice a bit more deeply, that there is a relationship between these two.

In fact, there is always a relationship, such that we can never identify either pole without the other. If you don't believe me, try imagining what the world looks like with no one there to see it; or, at the other end, imagine what consciousness is like with no object or content. Apart from its complement, each is just nothing, and nothing doesn't exist.

Therefore, we must regard the categories of subject and object as arrows that point to and define one another without ever reaching that to which they point. Human existence always takes place, and can only take place, in the dynamic and generative space between these two poles.

If this sounds suspiciously subjectivist, well, it is and it isn't. It would be if there were no such thing as human nature -- or, at the other end, if there were no such thing as the laws of nature. In other words, there is objectivity at both ends; but there is also subjectivity (or interiority) at both ends, and these interpenetrate one another in the act of knowing.

Let's crank down the abstraction or put down the bong for a moment, and apply this to plain old reality. In his A Government of Laws, Sandoz writes that "whatever the political order may be, the fundamental requirement is that [it] be a fit habitation for human beings."

Again, if there is no such thing as human nature (because no God), then there is no proper political order and no necessary habitation for our flourishing: representative democracy and free markets are no better than fascism and communism.

How did that work out?

Yes, but why did it not work out? And show your work!

Speaking of which, A Government of Laws is all about showing the work of the founders, in that the subtitle is Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding. Let's consider some of their work, the better to understand how and why the left rejects it in favor of an alternative metaphysic.

Let's start with Aristotle, who understood that

if we are to devise an optimal, or at least a moderately satisfactory order for men, we must understand who it is that will occupy this habitation so as to be able to judge its fitness for human occupancy (Sandoz).

Obvious, no? Indeed, one must have an advanced degree in political science in order to not understand this on a metaphysical level, or in other words, to be fundamentally wrong in principle. For the rest of us, we want a political order that reflects human nature.

Which is precisely what Madison rhetorically asked: "what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"

(Not "of" but "on," which is to say, based on a consideration of who and what man is; no government could be a literal reflection of man, since he is reflected in art, religion, science, and countless other activities, so the state would have to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnicompetent. Which, incidentally, touches on why "the notion of saving mankind through politics is, indeed, not only mistaken but ultimately disastrous.")

So, the political order isn't exactly "man writ large." Rather, it's more like a structure that permits man to WRITE and LIVE LARGE, or to become who he is: "the nature of man is displayed in the man who fulfills his potential as a human being and lives as a mature man.... This discloses the horizon for human endeavor and human actualization" (ibid.).

Ever wonder why the left infantilizes citizens and encourages immaturity, dependency, and emotionality? Well, wonder no more. It's all bound up with their initial assumptions about a de-divinized world and the absence of human nature. In reality, human beings are hierarchically structured such that there is a

series of grades from the bottom (so to speak) up to the point where he participates in the divine being as his own true self. Noetic participation in divine being distinguishes man from all other beings, insofar as man thereby has something of the divine in him (ibid.).

We're god-paddling in rather deep waters at the very edge of the subjective horizon, at the limits of our capacity to remain buoyant, so we apologize for any lack of clarity and/or linearity. We'll take another dive into the same waters in the next post...

Fairy Tales of the Media and Opium for the Tenured

Here's a thought: "There are, and always will be, aspects of our existence that require for their expression and exploration the analogical language of myth. Philosophy, mythology, and religion, from this point of view, are linked in essential continuity" (Webb).

Frankly, I don't think this statement is controversial at all. In fact, we could turn it on its head and affirm that man qua man always lives within a mythological space or structure, even -- or especially -- when he convinces himself he doesn't.

I say "especially" because no one is more faithful (or better, credulous) than the man who believes he isn't. A stark raving atheist, for example, who has no faith in God, will always be found to have blind faith in something else -- in scientism or some other modern primitive superstition.

To grab at the most conspicuously low hanging fruitcakes that come to hand, is there anyone more mythbound than a Marxist? I am hardly the first to point out that Marx and all his retarded progeny live in a perverted space of inverted Christianity, featuring paradise, original sin, revelation, apocalypse, redemption, salvation, and countless demons. I well know about the demons, because I am several of them (i.e., white, Christian, male, cisgender, armed, etc.).

Bear in mind that our implicit mythological structure is indeed a structure and a mythological one at that.

Or, put it this way: the explanatory stories we tell ourselves are both structured and logical, although the structure isn't necessarily linear nor the logic Aristotelian. Rather, the former is vertical and the latter symmetrical and bi-logical.

That last book is NOT recommended. I just linked to it to show that I'm not alone. However, I glanced at one of the reviews, and this is helpful:

What Matte Blanco proposes is that there are two co-existing modes of being, one homogeneous indivisible mode and another heterogeneous dividing one. So we human beings live in two realities at once, merged in one being, which in turn produces the actual behaviors going from normal, neurotic, schizophrenic, psychotic and so on.

Now, human beings habitually collapse these two modes and dimensions, which is how one can end up living inside an unexamined, reified mythology that seems self-evident to the one living in it.

If you've ever wondered why leftists are so smug and superior, this is why: because you are so stupid that you can't even see what is self-evident, e.g., that President Trump is a Russian agent, that he conspired with Ukraine to defeat Joe Biden, that blacks who support Trump aren't actually black, et al.

You and I could spend all day recalling similarly malignant myths -- that the US and USSR are morally equivalent... or just say Feminism, Patriarchy, Homophobia, Islamophobia, Xenophobia, etc., each one the title of a simplistic mythology that organizes an otherwise chaotic world.

Alternatively, just survey your own past and consider all the idiocies you once believed with all your heart and mind, but have since discarded. What was that all about? How is it that so many things you believed to be self-evidently true turned out to be self-evidently false? What would have become of you had you not discarded these psychospiritual malignancies and still lived in one those reality tunnels?

Like anyone, I am sometimes a bit nostalgic for the past. But I always project my current self there, and forget about the cramped reality tunnel I inhabited at the time (different ones in different developmental times). Actually re-entering those mythic spaces is nearly impossible -- analogous to trying to "remember" what it felt like to be a pre-linguistic primate. Supposing you are successful, "you" are no longer there to experience it.

Back to the reviewer:

Matte Blanco says it is extremely improbable that psychical phenomena can be described in terms of only three dimensions. The main hypothesis is that the mind can be better understood and explained by using a multidimensional model which relies on a bi-logical or symmetrical-asymmetrical relationship, between conscious and unconscious.

Yes. One must always look at the phenomena from no fewer than two angles. Think, for example, of a great novel or film, in which the plot takes place on one plane, while the theme not only occurs on another level but is the sufficient cause of the plot, even if the theme is never worked out consciously. In fact, the plot may be the conscious elaboration of an unconscious theme or structure. Which is actually a good definition of myth.

Lately I've been trying to dig down to the ontological foundation of all this. This foundation isn't in the distant past -- or not only there -- but also in the here and now. In other words, we again partake of this vertical structure at all times, because reality is this vertical structure.

Nor should we collapse this structure and pretend to have arrived at an unambiguous, once-and-for-all answer. The result won't even be a myth. Rather, some mediated fairy tale or tenured opiate.

Speaking of getting to the bottom of our cosmos, we'll leave off with this passage from The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, not forgetting that in the grand scheme of things we are those same men on that same adventure, i.e., still dwelling in the dark as (Plato's) cavemen:

The imagery of myth "is nothing less than a carefully chosen cloak for abstract thought." And try as he might, the modern barbarian "does not quite succeed in becoming a scientific object to himself. His need of transcending chaotic experience and conflicting facts leads him to seek a metaphysical hypothesis that may clarify his urgent problems."

The Narrative is just a reality tunnel propagated by the mythstream media and enforced by political correctness and other institutions.

Breaking the Fifth Wall & Living on the Right Side of History

Viewed from the inside, or from below, it seems that history is a jungle. Or a maze. Or a blind alley. How then can anyone presume to speak of the "right side of history"? If such a side exists, it could only be seen from outside, or from above or beyond history -- by a god, or an Obama.

Alternatively, the beyond-history would have to enter history and disclose its own meaning, direction, and telos. Supposing this occurred, we might even be able to demark history with, say, "BCE" (Before the Centration Event) and "AD" (Annus Diametros).

Hold that silly thought for a moment. In Hope and History, Pieper discusses how "theology expands the scope of empirically accessible history into a realm of trans-empirical reality" and "testifies to the conviction that the history we can experience derives its meaning... from being anchored in a more comprehensive, universal structure..."

Time could never be "complete" from within itself. In terms of pure temporality, one moment is no different from any other, and they just keep coming. The second hand on your clock knows nothing of qualities, just identical units of space.

Like history, time could only be complete in reference to something beyond time, and this something would have to be qualitative (I would say personal, but we'll leave that for another post). And again, it could also be complete if the transtemporal Beyond were to somehow pay us a timely visit.

This reminds me of the theatrical convention of breaking the fourth wall, when the actor steps out of the play or film and directly addresses the audience in a "metatheatrical" manner.

Analogously, what if the playwright could break the fifth wall (or ceiling rather, i.e., time) and enter his own play? Is there a name for such a meta-metatheatrical occurrence? Besides incarnation?

Note that we're not talking about the play simply submitting to the playwright, because this happens anyway; rather, in this case, the playwright submits to his own play -- i.e., the creator becomes subject to his own creation, even while remaining wholly playwright.

In our cosmos, I suppose a prophet is someone who breaks the fourth wall in a big way, whereas the Incarnation breaks the fifth wall in a final way, such that it stays broken once and For All.

Now, if the fourth and fifth walls cannot in principle be broken, then this has certain dire implications, for I don't see how such elementary human realities as freedom, science, or creativity would be possible. Put another way, if human beings can grasp even the most trivial truth, we have broken the fourth wall of the cosmos. We are prophets with a message to deliver.

In the past I have said something to the effect that either natural selection explains man, or man explains natural selection; and if the latter, then natural selection doesn't explain man. Why? Because, in effect, man has broken the fourth wall of natural selection. If natural selection is true, then one of its players can't leap off the stage and begin telling the monkeys where they came from!

Pieper writes that "human existence takes place wholly and utterly within the force field of an infinite, trans-historical, and 'creative' reality," such that "what can be experienced of the here-and-now could never be identical with the totality of existence." Rather, again, "the end, and also even the beginning, of human history as a whole and of individual biography, must necessarily remain beyond our empirical grasp."

Nevertheless, we do -- all of us -- receive bulletins from the eschaton, or we couldn't be human. In other words, a human is human because he lives downstream from his own telos, and the discovery of this vertical stream is the event of human awakening. I know, I know, all of this no doubt sounds a bit woo woo, but I mean it literally: man is a longing for what surpasses man, and that's just the way it is:

Man is not a mundane object to be examined and grasped within the confines of a concept; rather, he is a process in which a center of mystery attempts to illuminate itself reflexively....

[M]an as such is constituted by a relation to infinity, a transcendental dimension within his very existence and without which he could not properly deserve the name of "man."

He is man, in other words, by virtue of the presence within his experiential field of the divine pole that draws him, and by drawing him -- insofar as it does so effectively -- constitutes him as the being that tends toward the divine -- toward the light of truth, toward beauty, toward love, toward all possible perfection of being (Webb).

Anyone living on that side is on is the right side of history. And on our side.

Alternatively, I Have a Point & I'll Never Get To It

Either way, the point is the unending tension between two knowable unknowns: immanence and transcendence. No one in principle can ever "know himself," any more than the eye could ever see itself. Nor can God ever be known. Rather, both the immanent self and transcendent God are known in the knowing.

Which also means that certain "arrows" or vectors are built into the nature of things, which I believe goes to the mystery of time.

For what is time but a direction? Yes, it is also a flow, but it never flows backward. Just as spatial immanence points to transcendence, the temporal present points to a future that is also a knowable unknown. Freedom, in the fullest sense, is a combination of the two movements. Put conversely, neither temporal (horizontal) history nor present (vertical) illumination are inevitable or complete.

In both cases -- space and time -- we should focus on the knowable links, or fruitful relations, between the two unknowables: what Voegelin calls the metaxy is to space as the present is to time. History is unknowable in part because there exists freedom in the luminous space between man and the transcendent ground. We might say that mere duration intertwines with human choice, resulting in history (since bare time isn't history at all, just change).

Compare this to, say, dialectical materialism, in which what happens must happen. Although this sophistry is a form of "historicism," it fundamentally removes history from time, and should be called "dehistoricism."

This has practical considerations, because it explains why leftism is always and everywhere so ahistorical. It's not that they're ahistorical because they're leftists; rather, they're leftists because they're ahistorical. Not only do they immanentize the eschaton, they horizontalize the vertical and then wonder where all the fun went.

Moreover, cosmically speaking this is the literal opposite of "progress," because it reverts to a con-fusion of realities that history has differentiated (de-fused). You'll even hear certain tenured yahoos say they prefer paganism to Christianity, and then wonder why it results in tribalism, oppression, sacrifice, uniformity, loss of individuality, in short, a barbarous world of identity politics unfit for human habitation, like an armed college campus:

The tensional movement in consciousness develops as a striving for attunement: we seek attunement with truth as far as we can. If we do not attain it with some degree of satisfaction, then there is discord and misery in our own being. We become what is variously represented as evil, unjust, and unhappy men. The higher capacities do not master the lower. Such men may be a walking civil war... (Webb).

And talking civil war, or maybe you don't pay attention to the MSM. In any event, "Man's existence is not primarily an external or phenomenal reality but rather the In-Between existence of participation" (ibid.).

This In-Between existence is our permanent condition: "Somehow we participate and must participate in both the temporal and the spiritual, if we are to live lives esteemed to be fit for human beings" (ibid.).

The choice is ours, even though there's really no choice, any more than we can choose to ignore gravity. We can, but not really, for the person who denies reality is nevertheless subject to it -- as is true of the atheist vis-a-vis God, a subject to which we will eventually circle back.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's try to actually clear it up. I'll start with Pieper, because he's the clearest and most concise of the various authors I'm attempting to juggle here.

Recall the title of the book: Hope and History. History isn't only "in" time, but it is the form of human temporality; there is no such thing as a human without history, as the two come into existence simultaneously. But hope can only occur in the present. While it reaches forward, it is first a "reaching upward" toward the transcendent. Again, it is fundamentally a link between two great knowable unknowns.

This is about as clear as it can be said:

The one who hopes, and he alone, anticipates nothing; he holds himself open for an as yet unrealized future fulfillment while at the same time remaining aware that he knows as little about its scope as about its time of arrival.

Again, hope flourishes in a space of vertical openness (o) toward the transcendent (O). You've no doubt noesissed that history conceals its own meaning from us, and can never never be comprehended from within. Which calls to mind a cryptic aphorism by Señor D:

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.

I hate to end this discussion right in the middle, but then, where else could it possibly end? But there are errands to run and nuisances to check off the list, so we'll try to clear things up in the next post.

I Don't Have a Point, and I'm Getting To It

I suppose the bottom line -- presented to you at the top -- is that faith, hope, and love aren't so much verbs as they are interdimensional links between immanent and transcendent objects (or subjects). Each of these functions to lift us out of our paltry and pneumatically sophicating existence into a dynamic and fruitful relationship with the source and ground of being.

I might add that these aren't in the realm of the "ought"; or, to the extent that we ought to cultivate them, it is because they always are. We could never invent them if they didn't already exist, but -- like truth or beauty -- we can certainly deny them. Pieper:

fundamental hope (singular) is not directed toward anything that one could "have" but rather has something to do with what one "is," with one's own being as man...

Homo viator: man is always on the way to himself. And Genesis 3 is a mythological account of how we are inevitably in the way of ourselves.

This is absolutely consistent with Voegelin. In fact, he says it in so many ways and in so many contexts, that it seems to have been his One Big Idea.

But by the very nature of this idea, it can never be simply presented in a cutandry manner, because it is necessarily participatory, such that one must explicate by demonstrating; or, as in, say, music, the demonstration is the explication: hearing is believing.

Now hear this: the links -- call them (F), (H), and (L) -- alluded to above disclose a real (as in reality) tension

which one may resist but which one does not dream up. It manifests not as a proposition to be proved but as an appeal to be responded to and a force to be trusted.

As an experience it has an immediacy that makes it palpable, even if this is an immediacy that can never be arrived at once and for all but will have to be endlessly pursued through a lifelong process... (Webb; I've also taken the liberty of making the past tense present for the sake of clarity).

We'll no doubt amplify it later, but I'm sure that the most abstract way to describe this endless process is O → (¶). Again, this isn't how the world "ought" to be structured, it is how it is structured. And the most vital component to re-member and re-cognize is the →.

Or better -- and you will understand this too as we proceed -- we have to see it as a spiraling process with two distinct movements that are ultimately resolved into one. Not only will this become clear to you, but you'll understand its necessity by the time we're done with all this endless nonsense.

Consider: "The reality that [discloses] itself [is] not an object to be looked at but a life to be entered." It is not primarily intellectual but existential -- or, intellectual because existential: the philosopher must "live in the truth and participate in the reality of which he [is] in search" (ibid.).

Not to re-belabor the point, but this isn't just "advice." Rather it simply is. Nor is it "paradoxical" except when viewed through the lens of a prior unexamined belief about reality. It is not difficult to believe. From my perspective, your belief -- scientism, atheism, leftism, et al -- is literally impossible to believe. These -- or any -- ideologies aren't just wrong but literally delusional. Literally.

Nevertheless, we are free to deny the O → (¶) process. We are "presented not with a simple fact but with an invitation, a call to decision."

I don't want to jump too far ahead, but this is undoubtedly the same decision one must make with regard to Christ. Or, for that matter, the same decision faced by Abraham, Moses, Mary (believe all women!), Paul, and other luminous sparchetypes who just said Yes.

In Voegelin's case, "If he did decide to trust it, he could live in its truth, but he would know it only in the dark glass of trust, hope, and love" (ibid.).

Which is why, I think, he can never get to the point, but never stops getting to it. Could it be that I too am in the same attractor, in that my point is the endless getting to it?

It's all about the Exodus, isn't it? Or rather, the Exodus from is always an Introdeus to. It is "the conscious realization and willing acceptance of the tension of existence with its transcendental dimension" (ibid.).

Okay then. I think I'll stop for now and pick up the endless thread in the next post.

Hope and Reason

Reading Voegelin can be exhausting. Is there a shortcut to a quick fix to a lazy man's workaround to the bottom line? Life is short and his books are looooong -- over 2,000 pages just for his magnum opus, Order and History.

In contrast to the title of the book we're discussing -- The Voegelinian Revolutions -- Voegelin himself averred that

The test of truth, to put it pointedly, will be the lack of originality in the propositions.

In fact, he was no revolutionary, but rather, a counter-revolutionary who wanted to restore King Reason to his throne over the Dominion of Commonsense. For him, modern philosophy had been derailed in the modern era, and he simply wanted to get it back on track, for when it is off the tracks it is no longer even philosophy (since it is no longer oriented to its proper end). Rather, it is reduced to philodoxy (love of opinion) if we're lucky, misosophy (hatred of wisdom) if we're not.

Let's pull back to the ultimate wide angle, or Big Picture. God understands as well as anyone that few of us have the time, ability, or inclination to devote our lives to thinking our way back to him. Therefore, he makes the burden easy, with a light yoke to sweeten the deal: Incarnation.

Now that is radical. And revolutionary. No philosophical tracts to digest, no costly academic studies, no pitting one ideology against another to try and figure out which one is closer to the truth. Instead, just a person and a relationship, and all this entails.

True, it entails a great deal, but instead of starting at the periphery of the cosmos and trying to burrow our way toward the center, the center is given to us at the outset, gratis. Thus, it is literally the ultimate shortcut, although again, the implications are infinite and thensome.

A question: off the top of your head, what would you say is the single best idea anyone has ever had? Perhaps it will be difficult to narrow down the candidates, but I think you'll recognize it when you see it. It has several moving parts, and I am also putting it in the present tense, because that's the only place where and when ideas can actually live:

In the beginning is the Logos, and the Logos is with God, and the Logos is God, and 2) the Logos becomes flesh and dwells among us.

Irrespective of whether to not you agree with it, if you don't re-cognize this as the ultimate idea, then you haven't cognized it at all.

Now I'm going to switch gears, or fast forward a few decades to something attributed to Peter in his first epistle, that we should "always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you."

A reason for the hope. As we know, "reason" and "logos" are synonymous, but that's not my point. My larger point is that hope, properly understood, is the most thoroughly rational way to approach the Logos.

Now lets fast forward another 1,900 years or so, to Pieper's Hope and History, which, for my money, conveys much of what Voegelin is trying to say, only in 100 instead of 10,000 pages.

For starters, why is hope one of the top three theological virtues? How is it different from, say, mere wishful thinking, and why should we cultivate it? And how can it have anything to do with thinking about reality? Isn't the whole point of thinking to purge it of desire, and to look at things the way they are as opposed to the way we want them to be?

Yes, and hope is an adequation to the way things are, precisely. For example, the One Minute Philosopher distinguishes hope from wish by saying that the former "looks to the future, but is rooted in reality as it is."

Thus, reality as it is includes an intrinsic tension that reaches forth to a future that isn't yet. Analogously, think of how the phenomenon of Life Itself by definition reaches beyond the moment and anticipates its own future.

That is an exceptionally weird thing to occur in a heretofore purely physical cosmos, but leave that to the side. My point is that the identical process occurs on the cognitive plane, as our minds reach forth toward truths which they do not yet possess. Continuously. Unless we are mentally and spiritually dead, in which case our minds no longer live in that space of hope that exists between present and future, anticipation and fulfillment.

To live -- or think -- only in the present would be to neither live nor think. In a very literal way, life itself is hope, in that its continuance is always possible but never necessary, nor is hope ordered to the impossible.

Hope can of course be disappointed, but by its nature it is ordered to the possible, not the impossible or the necessary.

Regarding the latter, we don't hope the sun comes up tomorrow, because it will. Nor do we hope it comes out at midnight, because it won't. At the same time, we don't hope for things that are fully under our own control. For example, I don't hope that today I can avoid robbing a gas station, because I won't. I do, however, hope that Cousin Dupree can avoid robbing one, because he just might.

There is a vast middle ground covered by hope, and in a way, this middle ground is everything. It is where we actually live, i.e., not in our neurology or in the physical world, but in the space between.

For example, I hope I can get this post to make sense before I run out of time. I have partial control, in that I have to be here, but it doesn't at all feel as if I have anything like total control. All I can do is keep typing and hope for the best. As Pieper says, "The only genuine hope is one directed toward something that does not depend on us."

Imagine the alternative: that I don't have to hope this post makes sense, because I have a total mastery of the subject right here inside my own noggin. But if that were the case, then I would no longer be reaching out in hope toward the transcendent object, and that would be wrong.

In other words, there isn't just a correct content to thought, but a correct process of thought. And the correct process is always in tension with its own transcendent source and ground.

We're almost out of time, but we'll have much more to say about this process as we proceed. For now I'll leave off with a passage from Hope and History, that genuine hope

appears to have no object that can be found to exist in the world in [an] "objectlike" way. There is, then, nothing specific and concrete that can be pointed to; it is directed toward something "indefinite," "nebulous," "formless," "unnameable"....

This functional hope

tends to transcend all "particular objects" and cannot really be grasped until one stops trying to imagine the thing hoped for. But of course there is certainly "something hoped for," even if its mode of being is quite different from that of all objective goods and all conceivable changes in the external world.

O.

When Intellectuals Attack

If the cosmos is intelligible, then I say we should go the whole hog: that is, if we can understand anything, there's no principle barring us from knowing everything. Come, Icarus! To the sun, and beyond!

Yes, not so fast. There is a difference in principle between anything and everything, because the former occurs within the cosmos, whereas the latter presupposes an extra-cosmic view that only God could possess (we do not say "gods," because pagan deities were always understood to be inhabitants of the cosmos, not the radically transcendent creator of it).

Genesis 3 presents a timeless -- AKA eternally true -- cautionary tale about indulging in any Godlike intellectual pretensions. Rule One for would-be thinkers: don't be an irritating Gnosis-all!

Speaking of which, the last page of Johnson's Intellectuals has a good summary of what's wrong with these babeling kleptomaniacs, who can't help themselves from trying to steal fire from the gods, and who don't know their place in the cosmic scheme of things:

One of the principle lessons of our tragic [20th] century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is -- beware intellectuals.

Note that he doesn't say to beware intelligence, which would constitute an endorsement of stupidity. There is, however, a way for intelligence -- no matter how intelligent -- to go off the rails and transmogrify to evil.

Now, how could intelligence ever become so naughty? Well, this is one of the threads that runs through Voegelin's entire corpus. We'll get to him in a moment, but allow PaJo to finish his point and his book:

Not only should [intellectuals] be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.

Is it any wonder that the great majority of these boneless brainiacs want us to give up the second amendment? It's our last line of defense against the implementation of their homicidal ideas. And why do they all think alike, anyway? If they're such free thinkers, why are universities the least intellectually diverse places on earth?

intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns.... Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value (ibid.).

Ah ha. This is indeed a key point, because, while they imagine they are fearlessly seeking truth wherever it may lead, they are actually fearfully seeking approval -- and avoiding disapproval -- whatever the cost (paid in the coin of intellectual honesty and integrity).

The same pattern is seen in our mainstream media. How is it that they can, in unison, systematically unsee what is by far the most consequential political scandal in the nation's history? Is it a conspiracy?

I don't think so, any more than fish conspire to avoid dry land. We'll return to this idea as well. Johnson is almost finished. The instinct to spontaneously assemble into an intellectual cirque du jerk (pardon the French)

is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion [i.e., the water in which they swim] and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.

A lone intellectual, like a single madman, can only cause so much damage. But when a swarm of them takes over an institution, then we have a problem, because it causes the institution to become a madhouse.

This is how the university has become the Looniversity Bin, and how the deep state has become a political and judicial insane assoulum (Judge Sullivan, presiding over the Flynn case, is just an Adam Schiff in robes, while the impeachment showed Schiff to be a hanging judge disguised a legislator). What can we do about it?

Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.

Now, we've had our share of intelligent presidents, but only a handful of true intellectuals. Among modern presidents I can think of only two: Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama, two of the most dangerous and destructive in our history.

By way of transition, I want to switch gears for a moment and touch very briefly on A Very Brief History of Eternity, as it shares some commonality with Voegelin. For one of Voegelin's central points is that the normative condition of mankind is to live in tension with a transcendent reality that can never be reached but must never be forgotten.

I won't presume to speak for Voegelin, but I would say that human beings necessarily live in a dynamic space between now and eternity; indeed, the passage of time occurs within this space, and in a sense, is what time "is."

To put it another way, eternity and the present moment are as two ends of a single transcendent reality to which human beings have unique access. Animals, for example, more or less live in an "eternal now," but have no conception of eternity.

But the human now stretches forth to eternity, thus illuminating a space of history, creativity, progress, etc. And as Eire describes it, "when we lose eternity as a horizon we can end up with totalitarian, materialistic nightmares."

I agree, but would omit the "can," because materialism -- or any other ismolatry -- forecloses the proper human space and seals us in a matrix of soul-dead journalism, authoritarian tenure, and ideological fantasy. Conversely, the "paradoxical conjoining of the eternal with the temporal," writes Eire, is "the very essence" of Christian metaphysics.

The bad news: we're just about out of time. The good news: I invented a new word: episteleology. It means that temporal knowledge occurs -- and can only occur -- because it is in dynamic tension with the transcendent absolute.

How Not to Be a Human Being

I'm warning you ahead of time that I'm not happy with this post, but I'm trying to tame a bucking corpus, and it's not easy. I keep getting thrown, but this isn't my first rodeo. We'll subdue this beast yet... Besides, it's only blogging, so there's no time to properly edit or polish.

What Voegelin spent his life trying to describe is either 1) among the most important discoveries of mankind, or 2) the trivial preoccupations of an eccentric thinker with too much time and intellect. Really, it comes down to whether he is describing objective reality or it's just, like, his opinion, man. I think Voegelin would agree that if it's not the former, then his work is indeed pointless.

What was he attempting? Oh, not much. Only "a new analysis of reality" and "a new science of human affairs"; a "universally significant philosophy of history" that isn't just an ideological projection (i.e., historicism) but reflects the order of the soul in its dynamic tension with existence.

In a postmodern world of spiritual decay and intellectual rot, we are unaccustomed to an approach to human affairs that claims to be both objective and normative, or Is and Ought. Indeed, Voegelin would say that postmodernism itself is literally a disease -- AKA pneumapathology -- more on which as we proceed.

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite subjects in grad school was psychopathology. In the late 1980s it was still possible to affirm that there is a way humans are supposed to be, and that deviations from this norm comprise the essence of pathology, no different from any other organ system. But the left ruins everything, and psychology is one of the most important disciplines to ruin if its diabolical (i.e., anti-divine and therefore anti-human) project is to succeed.

In other words, the left must redefine human nature -- or, more to the point, define it out of existence. And if there is no human nature, then there can be no objective psychopathology. With no telos, sickness and health have no objective basis at all. There is no principle defining them, which leads to a radical individualism -- each man his own species, so to speak, so out the window go the natural law and natural rights that underpin our tradition of classical liberalism.

Nevertheless, human nature exists, so its denial leads to inevitable problems. If a man thinks he is a woman, that's a problem. For him. You can solve the man's problem by pretending it is possible for men to be women, but this only leads to deeper and more widespread cultural and political pathologies and absurdities.

Imagine, say, a thief arguing that he was born greedy and that it is natural for him to steal. In order to accommodate him, we change our laws so that people who identify as thieves are considered a normal variant.

Or, how about pedophiles? Polygamists? Note that we're not arguing that people who are confused about their sexual identity are "bad people." Rather, we are talking about the consequences of calling abnormality normal, or unreality real. Either there exist timelessly true objective standards rooted in human nature, or there are no standards. The left wants it both ways: there are no standards, and the raw power to enforce them.

For Voegelin, philosophy isn't just tenured bloviating, or error on a grandiose scale, or an endless argument leading from nothing to nowhere, but "a form of existence-in-truth." Not "my" truth, but truth itself, which isn't just the only truth worth knowing, but the very definition of truth (in other words, "my truth" is no truth at all). Thus, "the only way to challenge effectively a defective view of history is to provide an alternative that is philosophically sound."

So, just as there exists psychopathology, there are are cognitive and spiritual pathologies. These pathologies are a necessary consequence of spiritual, philosophical, anthropological, and political reality.

Wait -- political reality? You have to be a Constitutional Scholar to understand there's no such thing. In the words of Obama, implicit "in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course..."

The usual straw man, false dichotomy, and overall lazy thinking. In contrast to this foolish approach, Voegelin's "primary commitment" was "to serve truth," wherever it may lead. Obama is typical of an academic mentality that isn't just wrong, but truly deviant. Voegelin contended (way before it was completely obvious) that such "massive illiteracy" -- masquerading as its opposite -- "pervades the educated stratum of society."

One of Voegelin's surprising bottom-line takes is that "the essence of modernity is the the growth of Gnosticism." Which very much reminds me of something Johnson says in his highly insultaining Intellectuals.

To back up a bit, to acknowledge the reality of human nature is to affirm the undeniable religiosity of man. Later we'll get into exactly what we mean by "religiosity," but it can never be eradicated, only denied and transformed. Along these lines, this introductory passage by Johnson is worth pondering:

Over the past two hundred years the influence of intellectuals has grown steadily. Indeed, the rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world.

In one sense this is a wholly new phenomenon. Not so fast! For "the decline of clerical power" merely created a vacuum into which the secular intellectual leapt, and this rascal "was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs." Yes, here comes the new clergy, same as the old clergy, only much worse. This pretentious assoul

proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors.

"The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience" might be "selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide.... men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects," whereby "the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better." No longer "servants and interpreters of the gods," they were substitutes for them.

Yes, magnanimous philanthropes such as Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Mao, et al. But for Voegelin, Marx, for example, isn't just wrong, rather, the quintessence of a spiritually diseased approach to the world, not just unphilosophical but antiphilosophical, revealing a deep and abiding hatred of reality (and of mankind):

The Marxian spiritual disease... consists in the self-divinization and self-salvation of man; an intramundane logos of human consciousness is substituted for the transcendental logos.

Such an approach must "be understood as the revolt of immanent consciousness against the spiritual order of the world. This is the core Marxian idea." At its root "we find the spiritual disease, the Gnostic revolt.... Marx is demonically closed against transcendental reality.... His spiritual impotence leaves no way open but derailment into Gnostic activism," a "characteristic combination of spiritual impotence with a mundane lust for power."

But "one cannot deny God and retain reason. Spiritual impotence destroys the order of the soul," leaving man "locked in the prison of his particular existence."

Marx essentially imagined he'd discovered a loophole in Genesis 3: he "knew that he was a god creating a world. He did not want to be a creature."

To be continued...

I Don't Have the Time... or Space or Intelligence

Ever since my mind unexpectedly came on line in my mid-20s, I've been... haunted is too strong a word... Pestered? Shadowed? Annoyed?

At any rate, there has always been the simultaneous presence of a sense of a hint of an inking that my mind just isn't capacious enough for what I'm trying to do. There's not enough space: you can't fit two gallons of truth into a one gallon cranium.

Either that, or there's not enough raw candlepower: like I'm trying to light the cosmos with solar when I need petroleum or nuclear. I realize I'm not smart enough for the task, but no one else is attempting it, so what am I supposed to do? Ignore it?

Yes, my reach exceeds my grasp, but perhaps this is just an objective description of the human situation. In other words, God is the only person(s) whose reach and grasp are identical.

Would things have turned out differently had my brain been functional back when I was in school?

No, I don't think so. If that had been the case, then I would have simply absorbed all the wrong things. Instead of being filled with a benign nothing, my head would have been cluttered with all the malignant sophistries that dominate the culture: liberal orthodoxy, politico-scientistic religiosity, tenured mythologies, etc. I'd have been sealed in a demonically closed reality tunnel, and perhaps even become an enforcer or gatekeeper of the matrix, as are our media-academic goons.

But then, I also wasted a lot of time wading through so much BS along the way. I've obviously read a great deal, but with no one to guide me, it has been an inefficient and zigzag course. I had to swim upstream for a couple of decades before even spying the source. My son will never have to do that. Rather, I can help him cut straight to the chase: ignore all that, focus on this.

If I had to sum things up at this juncture, my go-to sources would be few. But I always leave one out: Voegelin. He is as important as any, and yet, I've never really taken him on board as an ongoing touchstone -- as I have, for example, Schuon or Dávila -- folks that find their way into nearly every post.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, as alluded to above, I don't have sufficient headspace. He's just so sprawling. If one attempted to master his corpus alone, it would take one's whole thinking life. You'd have to become a Voegelin specialist, which is the opposite of my loose and lazy cosmic generalism. My ideal is Dávila: to be as brief as possible, with a dash of humor or insultainment thrown in. Sharp as a knife, but also twist it a little. With lemon juice.

I don't pretend to be scholar. What am I then? I suppose you'd have to tell me, but I would say, visionary humorist, or metaphysical comedian, or mystic adventure guide, or theological entertainer... Some combination of grave seriousness and utter frivolousness. Sober intoxication.

So anyway, I've been reading a book called The Voegelinian Revolution, which is blowing my mind all over again -- as Voegelin always does. And because he blows my mind, I've never been able to fully wrap it around him. I can't cut him down to size and properly digest him.

But I can try. If ever someone were in need of popularization, it's Voegelin. As with Schuon, even the secondary literature is too serious and forbidding, so followers end up speaking only to one another. He needs a jester. A vulgarian. An interpreter with a clown nose.

But the other thing -- along with insufficient memory and intelligence -- is that there's never enough time. So we'll try to tackle the book tomorrow...