Mystery Dream Theatre

I wanted to say theotre, but it would look like a typo. 

Picking up where we left off, Thomas says that

The act of the believer is not terminated at the enunciable statement but at the thing, at the revealed mystery itself. 

Or in other words, as the object of the intellect is intelligible being, the object of faith is the Mystery? Or something?

after descending from faith to theology to know its details and its various treatises, the theologian will experience the need to ascend from theology to faith, to ascend to the divine source of this science (Garrigou-Lagrange) 

That theologian being Thomas himself, alluding to the well-known mystical experience in light of which everything he had written was a pile of horse... food. They call his philosophy "precritical," but that's a pretty harsh criticism. 

I suppose this means that the object of theology is on the one hand God and/or revelation, but it also has its object in the teleological sense of the word, in that its ultimate end is the sort of infused contemplation experienced by St. Thomas, which is "a kind of beginning of eternal life" -- or of eternity while you wait. 

Note also that faith is an ascent to ultimate reality, whereas theology is a descent from it. 

Theology is all well and good, "provided that it is inspired not by natural curiosity but by the love of God," which again goes to its proper end or telos. 

Speaking of which, that's the end of the book. But here's an aphorism: 

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

Elsewhere in the book G-L makes the point that in the end, our choice is quite literally between God and radical absurdity. Interestingly, if the latter is the case, then anything and everything we write is likewise so much straw, but what a difference!  

Come to think of it, all non-Raccoon philosophies end in a reductio ad absurdum if rigorously pursued to their (il)logical end. Frankly, most philosophies are soph-beclowning with their very first step out of the box. I know this in hindsight because I once believed a number of them but now understand them to be so much horse... food.

If I were going to sketch a cosmic flowchart in which to situate ourselves, at the top would be intelligible being in contradistinction to unintelligible being or intelligible non-being, which is to say, an absurdity or a dream, respectively. 

Now, is it possible that reality is a dream -- i.e., something we simply dream up, both collectively and individually?

Yes and no. Either way, humans have always suspected that dreaming has some significance, and I agree. I'm not referring to such-and-such a dream, but rather, dreaming as such, or the dream-mode of cognition. 

It reminds me our lengthy review earlier this year of McGilchrist's The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, but it also reminds me of Matte Blanco's Bi-Logic, especially as applied to God and religion in Bomford's The Symmetry of God. And of course it reminds me of Finnegan's Wake, which presents all of human history as one long and crazy dream.

Is he wrong?!

Let's stipulate that the world is a dream that takes place between immanence and transcendence, or between (¶) and O respectively; these two symbols (or pneumaticons) are empty placeholders, much like algebraic variables, until we fill them with dream content.  

Does this plunge us into relativism and subjectivism? Yes! and No! Details to follow. 

The Right Side of Mystery

Although Garrigou-Lagrange is criticized for being excessively rigid, intransigent, and formulaic -- they even called him the sacred monster of Thomism -- he has his softer side. He's not all dogma, syllogisms and deductive logic. 

Rather, he cautions us against being "Like a child who studies the piano and cannot yet fathom what gives the works of the masters their value," and of coming "to a halt too readily at the formulas without seeking to pass through in order to thereby reach the Divine Reality signified, in order to penetrate and taste the revealed mysteries."

So, the formulas are not for their for own sake, rather, in order to penetrate and taste the Mystery which can never be contained by manmode language, because it's up there and we're down here. I do my best, but 

When we aim high, there is no public capable of knowing whether we hit our target.

Moreover, to each his own. Not everyone responds to the same material in the same way. Truth is true, but speaking it is analogous to painting, and there are realists, impressionists, abstract expressionists, et al. Which school is best? Whichever one gets the job done.

Yes, but what's the job? We -- or the Aphorist, rather -- touched on it yesterday, but here are a couple more:

The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning. Even if it does not say what that meaning is.

And 

Strictly speaking, the work of art does not have a meaning but rather a power. 

So, not only is the power anterior to the meaning, in a certain sense it is the meaning. 

Now, transpose this to religion. Especially in a western world conditioned by scientistic materialism, we want it to make sense in those terms -- to contain it in the wideawake and cutandry -- which is to underlook the power of the mystery. But 

If God were the conclusion of a rational argument I would feel no need to worship him.

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

Christ is the truth. What is said about Him are mere approximations to the truth.

Why do some religions persist while most fade away, like species that go extinct? 

Authentic works of art explode after their time, like forgotten artillery projectiles on a battlefield.

Likewise authentic works of religion, to say nothing of authentic revelation. It's why the Bible continues to have such explosive meaning, some parts more than others. In any event, the Bible is only the signifier for a signified that must again be penetrated and tasted. 

The Bible is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters him.

Note the present tense. It is what God wants to say, channeled through you and I (or through I, period). 

Continuing with what G-L says above, he speaks of the great spiritual masters -- for not every great saint is a great theologian -- who didn't necessarily undertake a conceptual analysis (or synthesis) of the dogmas of the faith, nor deduce various theological conclusions, but who

profoundly lived upon these mysteries precisely by passing through the formula so as to go on to the Divine and Living Reality that they signify.

"How many simple but profound Christian souls live upon these mysteries more, perhaps, than many theologians!" Sometimes I wish I were one of them. But you know how it is:

Created reason is absolutely subject to uncreated truth.

Which is why God has seen fit to hide the Mystery from the tenured but reveal it to babes.

Which is not to say infantile. As St. Thomas says,

The act of the believer is not terminated at the enunciable statement but at the thing, at the revealed mystery itself. 

Before which we are indeed like a babbling child, which is an 

aphasia go through before the noesis in your head becomes real. Ascent you a son, amen for a child's job! 

Nonsense.

Correct!

Too old, older than Abraham, too young, young as a babe's I AM.... A godsend, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' yes. 

Words words words. 

In its superior simplicity, faith is like an utterly simple circle.

O.

The teachings of the greatest theologians, seeking to explain the dogmas of faith, are like a polygon inscribed within this circle, so as to elaborate its content and riches.

The number of potential polygons is literally infinite. Am I wrong?

 We've circled a lot of goround in this post. Where does it leave us? I'll let Schuon play us out: 

The man who rejects religion because, when taken literally, it sometimes seems absurd... such a man overlooks one essential thing, despite the logic of his reaction: namely, that the imagery, contradictory though it may be at first sight, nonetheless conveys information that in the final analysis is coherent and even dazzlingly evident for those who are capable of having a presentiment of it or of grasping it.

On the Disenchantment and Re-enchantment of the World

To review, yesterday we examined the soundness of concluding I am from I think, and found it wanting. This is because a deeper principle is required, absent which there is no link between intellect and being (or I and am).

This link is pretty darn important. If it doesn't exist, then we can never escape our heads and know anything certain about extra-mental reality: there is no basis for the ergo sum 

without surreptitiously presupposing the ancient axiom: "The object of the intellect is being."

Absent the link to being, one could only say I think therefore I am thinking. And even this wouldn't be certain absent the principle of identity (non-contradiction), for "if reality can, at bottom, be contradictory," then is and is not would be indistinguishable, as in, I am therefore I am not. But commonsense realism affirms that

it is not only INCONCEIVABLE for us, but is indeed REALLY IMPOSSIBLE IN ITSELF that any given reality would simultaneously exist and not exist.

This is not simply a "logical law of the mind," but a necessary law of reality. Bottom line: "The point of departure for knowledge is not the cogito," rather

It is being, as well as the first principle which it implies: the principle of identity / non-contradiction.

Such a small point, but what massive consequences, for it points to the convergence of the laws of thought and the laws of being. It is not just in our heads that "reality cannot at once be reality and non-reality." No: the principle of identity applies to both thought and being. 

Nevertheless, "the whole of modern subjectivism" is founded on the denial of this first certitude. And here we are.

But even Kant would never say "perception is reality." Rather, that perception is perception (of appearances), and reality is unknowable. 

But even God obeys the the law of non-contradiction, in that he can't create "that which is manifestly absurd (like a square circle)." Such a thing is "obviously UNREALIZABLE outside the mind, whatever God's power may be." 

Having said all this, is there anything redeemable in subjectivism, relativism, postmodernism, et al? For as they say, philosophies are generally true in what they affirm but false in what they deny. Therefore -- if I'm following myself -- an integral philosophy will make room for both; it will not be a strictly either/or affair, but rather, both/and.

Again, Garrigou-Lagrange highlights "the real extra-mental impossibility of something which would exist and not exist at one and the same time from one and the same perspective," and of the need to resolve "our intellectual evidence into sensible evidence," or in other words, to be able to cash our concepts into real being.

Something in me rebels against such an unambiguous, cutandry, and wideawake worldview, for where's the magic, the poetry, the mystery? Certainly we need reality -- today more than ever -- but darn it, we also need mystery, enchantment, imagination, etc. 

Now, supposing we need these airy fairy things, what is their ontological status? If the object of the intellect is being, what is the object of the sense of mystery? Perhaps  

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

Historically speaking, we have evolved from enchantment -- the "enchanted world" -- to the disenchantment of scientism, positivism, and naturalism, and I've been thinking about this for a long time. 

For example, way back when I was trying to come up with an idea for my dissertation, I considered The Re-enchantment of the World -- not in an unhealthy, delusional way, but as the marker and synthesis of a kind of "higher health" -- you know, THE RELIGION THE ALMIGHTY & ME WORKS OUT BETWIXT US.

We're veering into a whole 'nuther post but the Aphorist has some preluminary ideas for where it seems to be headed:

Without aesthetic transfiguration all of reality is pedestrian.

When religion and aesthetics are divorced from each other, we do not know which is corrupted sooner.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what is says.

The laws of biology in themselves do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is perception of a special order of realities.

And speaking of non-contradiction,

Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows how.

Perhaps we could say that there are good and bad -- or higher and lower -- forms of disenchantment and of re-enchantment (the New Age movement, for example, being an unhealthy perversion of a genuine human need). In any event, more to follow. 

Reality Dysphoria Syndrome: Philosophy and Its Alternatives

That notion into which all our conceptions are resolved is being; in short, something either is or is not the case -- not just in our heads, but in the extra-mental world. Thus, intelligible being must be the beginning and end of all philosophy.

Was that so hard? 

When I say "philosophy and its alternatives," what I mean is that any true philosophy must be a philosophy of being. If it isn't, then not only is it not a philosophy, it's not even really anything, because it's certainly not about our knowledge of reality: "Being, the most universal notion, is presupposed by all other notions," and the first principle we derive from it is "Being is being; non-being is non-being."

I know: crazy! 

But all the real craziness -- both retail and wholesale, individual and cultural, clinical and tenured -- is founded on the denial of this principle: of the intelligibility of being to our intelligence, or that being is fungible to truth. 

Example. Might as well begin at the beginning of modern (which is to say, anti-realist) philosophy, with Descartes. More to the point, I'm reading an essay called The Thomist Critique of the Cartesian Cogito -- the old "I think therefore I am."

Now, the whole point of Descartes's famous gag was to arrive at a principle that presupposes no others, i.e., to found his hyper-skeptical philosophy on the solid rock of what assumes nothing and cannot be denied.

How's that going?

Turns out that I think therefore I am indeed assumes a prior principle -- specifically of non-contradiction -- otherwise Descartes "could think and, nonetheless, not exist, if it were possible that one and the same thing could be and not be." 

Among other principles, the cogito assumes that "whatever thinks is" and that "it is impossible that one and the same thing simultaneously be and not be." Seems almost embarrassing to have to remind Descartes that he cannot (for example) simultaneously be and not be Descartes, and that his famous cogito simply assumes the premise that "Whatever thinks, is," which could not be the case were the principle of identity not true. 

Schuon says much the same thing:

In the Cogito ergo sum all is lost, since consciousness of being is subordinated to the experience of thought; when being is thus blurred it carries thought downwards with it, for if it is necessary to prove being, it is necessary also to prove the efficacy of the intelligence, hence the validity of its conclusions, the soundness of the ergo. 

So, let's get real (and at the Real): "once the principle of contradiction [AKA identity] has been placed in doubt," then the cogito might just as well mean I think therefore I do not think, or I exist and therefore do not exist. In short, it holds "only if it is contradictory to think and not think at the same time."

I'm not a trained philosopher. What am I missing here? If thought is not ordered to being, then he's only affirming a tautology at best: I think, therefore I think. At best, because it could also mean I think therefore I don't think, or, I think therefore someone else is thinking.

And according to Schuon,

the modern idealists do not wish to admit anything but a subjective form of evidence because, for them, the intellect knows itself before knowing being.

But once you deny the link between intellect and being, there's no getting back to being, and you are no longer engaging in what we call philosophy, rather, one of its many alternatives and counterfeits, e.g,, misosophy (hatred of wisdom), philodoxy (love of opinion), cranio-rectal exploration, etc.

Real philosophy is the philosophy of the Real, otherwise it's some version of ontological auto-proctology.

Now, "to be intelligent," writes Schuon, "is to be realistic."

I know: crazy!

But "On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity" -- an infirmity apparently contracted from Descartes, but which I suspect goes back to the real patient zero (Adam), and which has taken many forms throughout history, for example, the radical nominalism that continues to plague these anti-intellectual times. This “esoterism of stupidity” is quite literally the "suicide of reason."

It is only too evident that mental effort does not automatically give rise to the perception of the real; the most capable mind may be the vehicle of the grossest error (Schuon).

Thus "The paradoxical phenomenon of even a 'brilliant' intelligence being the vehicle of error."  

For example, nominalism affirms that there are no essences, rather, only conventional names for things; thus "man" and "woman" conform to no male or female nature, so a man might as well be a woman, a terrorist a freedom fighter, objectivity racist, etc.  

"I think." Do I? I guess sometimes, but more often than not, it's just "thoughts are." I have no idea where they come from, nor do I really know what this "I" is. What about the "therefore"? What can we really say?

Thoughts float in and they float out, into and out of some sort of sensorium of consciousness we conventionally call "I," therefore... what?

We need to dig down a little deeper into this whole subject, but that's enough words for today...

Anticipations of Hell

Just some random passages from this essay called Truth and Indifferentism, presented with or without my commentary, starting with this:

when Christianity disappears from society, "it becomes an evil and cutthroat place," an anticipation of hell through despair and universal nausea. 

Item: "Compared with not attending any religious service, attending a religious service once a week has the same effect on happiness as moving from the bottom to the top quartile of the income distribution." So, the nausea and despair are not about financial affluence but spiritual impoverishment.

Recall the freethinker's manifesto:

beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other methods such as logic, reason, and empirical observation.

Well, first of all, Gödel. In other words, man qua man always transcends any logical system.

Second, man is indeed the rational animal, but he is only rational if he is ordered to his proper end. Our freedom

lies in the power to choose the means that lead us to our true final end, and not the power to choose what turns us away from it. Likewise, reason is a faculty for reasoning correctly and not awry; it is a faculty for knowing truth, by avoiding error as much as possible.

But not everyone uses this freedom rationally or responsibly, to put it mildly, e.g., "Freedom for Palestine!"

Of course, they cannot be free because they are not rational. After all, they freely chose to be ruled by irrational monsters. 

[It] is not true that all men, nor even the greater part of them, seek truth and virtue. And if one grants the freedom of teaching the errors that flatter desire and pride [not to mention bloodlust], a great portion of mankind would no longer find the saving truth.... St. Thomas had said likewise: "The majority of men follow their senses rather than right reason."

Which is precisely why the Palestinian terrortories are an anticipation of hell, for, among other things, hell is anyplace where there is no reason. Like a pro-Hamas rally. 

Back to the rights of truth: "To prefer freedom to truth is obviously to favor license, the source of all disorders." 

All? I suppose so, because freedom is again ordered to truth. Supposing it's ordered to something less, then it is dis-ordered, precisely.

Which we all learn in elementary school but systematically unlearn in college, if not before. I was a screw-up in school, but even I knew that my test answers were wrong because they weren't ordered to truth. Then again, I very much valued freedom over truth, a situation that took many years -- and decades -- to reverse itself.

I guess you could say that my head was an anticipation of hell. Again, truth is the conformity of judgment with being. If you believe otherwise, then you're well on your way to your head being annexed by hell:

true freedom only exists when it prefers, above itself, the truth that is its foundation, as the good is a true good only if it is founded upon truth, and the truth upon reality, that is, upon being and the nature of things. Truth consists in affirming what is and denying what is not. 

Truth is a property of being. Without it, there is neither a true good, nor a true freedom for choosing the true good in preference to evil, which is only an apparent good.

Truth is a property of being. What a wild idea! But if this isn't the case, then hell -- in one form or another -- is around the corner.

Many philosophers no doubt think this is dogmatic, or rigid, or "pre-scientific," otherwise they'd all be Thomists. As mentioned a few posts back, I agree that it must be the worst philosophy, except for all the others. But philosophy as such can never map being, the former being finite, the latter infinite. However, we can prevent our philosophy -- and our heads -- from being a cheap imitation of hell:

The devil is essentially incapable of recognizing that he is wrong, unless an admission to that effect is in his interest; so it is error become habitual that must be right at all costs, even at the cost of our intelligence and, in the last analysis, of our existence... 

The Devil -- like his communication arm, the liberal media -- is often wrong but never in doubt.

So, "the principle freedom that we must defend" is that of fulfilling our obligation to the true, the good, and the beautiful, which, unless one is very careful, all lead away from hell and back to God.

Recall that a "freethinker" is someone "who forms their own ideas and opinions rather than accepting those of other people, especially in religious teaching.... free thought is strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief systems."

Which reminds me of how the affluent woke can afford to entertain all those wacky luxury beliefs that result in disaster for the poor and underprivileged. Analogously, the cognitively underprivileged need

a power that sustains weak intellects against strong ones, delivering them from the most terrible oppression: oppression of the mind.... Neither peace nor freedom is possible outside the truth.

Gosh. I'm old enough to remember when academia was only an anticipation of hell instead of the real thing. But now the humanities have become the sub-humanities.

Freedom from Truth, or I Once Was Found But Now I'm Lost

About our "free thinking" friends who insist that "beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority," and who adopt "their own ideas and opinions rather than accepting those of other people."

First of all, it is helpful to be informed of certain universal principles of thought before setting out to think, otherwise you can waste your life thinking thoughts that are not true and cannot possibly be true. For example, it's nice to know about the principle of non-contradiction, without which one arrives

at complete nihilism in the order of being, as well as the order of becoming and in the orders of thought, truth, error, opinion, desire, and action (Garrigou-Lagrange).

For example, "Can Kant simultaneously be Kant and not be him?" No? Then you understand the principle of non-contradiction, not just as a rule of thought but as a rule of reality, of being. Which, it turns out, is no small thing, because it means that thought conforms to being after all -- that intelligence is relative to intelligible being, otherwise there is no bridge from inside to outside, subject to object. 

Pff. To accept the "Kantian poison" is "to pour sulfuric acid into an excellent wine."  

Back to the essay on Truth and Indifferentism. A "free thinker" affirms his right to think what he wants, but again, what about the rights of truth? Can there really be a right to deny it? 

We would like to recall here the rights of truth, without which, obviously, there would be neither true freedom, nor a true human life worthy of the name...

Supposing freedom is higher than truth, then truth is ordered to freedom rather than vice versa, "as though yes and no could be true at the same time." Which leads directly to "my truth" and "your truth" because FREEDOM, or something.

Pff. "God cannot regard with equal benevolence two contradictory doctrines, the true and the false." The latter is permitted, but "the freedom of teaching error as well as truth is a freedom of perdition." Which is no exaggeration, considering the intellectual and spiritual hell of academia. 

To speak of an "academic freedom" that is prior to, or detached from, academic responsibility -- i.e., our obligation to the truth -- is to speak like an ass: "Complete liberalism leads to complete tyranny." Supposing 

one would like today to defend freedom of teaching without going on further to speak about the rights of truth, the defense of true liberty (as something distinct from license) will be deprived of its foundation. 

"Colonization." Pff. Free minds have been colonized by ideology, and truth deprived of its proper rights:

The modernists denied the traditional definition of truth [the conformity of judgment with being], as well as the ontological and transcendent value of the first notions and first principles of our intellect.

No longer (so they say) does the mind reach being -- AKA reality -- but rather, only the ever-changing appearances. Likewise, as a consequence of being plunged into subjectivism and relativism, "Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him." Pff. Everything evolves except the theory of evolution.

Which denies the principle of non-contradiction alluded to above, for it is to simultaneously affirm absolute mutability and immutability. But the first principles of thought "are absolute, immutable truths and not only truths that are relative to the mentality of a given age."

These principles are primordial certitudes of our natural intelligence, diamond-like certitudes that resist... all the sophisms of ancient skepticism or of modern relativism. 

Which is why the truth sets you free. Otherwise you're conflating freedom with just being lost in the bewilderness. To be continued...

Free Thought, True Thought, and Personal Thought

I can't believe I didn't come up with this title first: You're Going to Miss Reality When It's Gone. It's another way of saying that you mustn't take is for granted, especially when the culture is forcing you to acknowledge and even celebrate what patently is not and cannot be.

However, upon reading the actual essay, I see that I don't agree with the author, who characterizes himself as a "freethinker," defined as

an epistemological viewpoint which holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other methods such as logic, reason, and empirical observation.... 

a freethinker is "a person who forms their own ideas and opinions rather than accepting those of other people, especially in religious teaching." In some contemporary thought in particular, free thought is strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief systems.

I understand the sentiment -- for I am not only as, but much more, skeptical than the next guy -- but freethinking is of no value whatsoever in the absence of truethinking, i.e., the conformity of our judgment with being.

Nor can reality be reached by "logic, reason, and empirical observation," for the first two rely on data which must be furnished by extra-logical and trans-rational means, while empirical observation is only the beginning of knowledge, not the end, otherwise the senses would be superior to the intellect that abstracts from them, and which knows ontological principles and perceives metaphysical truths directly.

In short, there is (obviously) much more to reality than the appearances conveyed to us by the senses. Rather, reality is what is behind, or underneath, or above, the appearances, precisely.

"The validity of a logical explanation," according to Schuon, depends upon

the prior knowledge which this demonstration aims at communicating, and it is clearly false to take as the point of departure, not a direct cognition, but logic pure and simple.

Logic in and of itself is by definition tautological, for it cannot furnish its own premises:  

hence it cannot attain to the universal and the transcendent by its own resources; a supralogical -- but not “illogical” -- dialectic based on symbolism and on analogy, and therefore descriptive rather than ratiocinative, may be harder for some people to assimilate, but it conforms more closely to transcendent realities.

Is it actually possible to be a "freethinker" -- which implies freedom from all assumptions, axioms, traditions, and preconceptions? It's a little like being a "free musician": just pick up an instrument and blow. Forget about music theory, or aesthetic vision, or assimilating a tradition.

In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely,” as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible (ibid.).

Although the rationalist "draws his inspiration from a pre-existing system," this  

does not prevent him from thinking in a way that he deems to be “free”-- falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth (ibid., emphasis mine).

Truth and freedom. Evidently, the necessary relation between these two transcendental rascals isn't obvious.

Coincidentally, all of this is discussed in an essay I read yesterday called Truth and Indifferentism, by Garrigou-Lagrange. 

Speaking of whom (and he's just a single example), if the ideal (freethinking) epistemology rejects authority, tradition, revelation, dogma, etc., then why is he so brilliant while soph-styled freethinkers are such epistemological muddlebrows and philosophic dilettantes at best? Clearly, freedom is a necessary condition to get at the truth of being, but not a sufficient one. 

Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that freethought is always mingled with pridethought, for which reason the Aphorist says... so many things that the post will probably be hijacked, so we'll have to get to the essay tomorrow. Vis-a-vis "freethought,"

To educate man is to impede the "free expression of his personality."

Educating the individual consists in teaching him to distrust the ideas that occur to him.

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

Freedom from tradition? Well, for starters, my tradition says this about freedom, and it's one of my favorites:

Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, [boom] there is liberty.

Thus

The prestige of freedom in a society that professes scientific determinism is a Christian holdover.

Otherwise you have no intellectual defense against, say, "Islamist freedom," which is the freedom to murder Jews. Some freedom! 

The idea of the "free development of personality" seems admirable as long as one does not encounter individuals whose personalities were freely developed.

 Dávila didn't have to see San Francisco to know that

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

And that 

Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything.

Ultimately because  

For the last two centuries the man who believes his prejudices are conclusions is called a "free thinker."

But let's get down to the real epistemological issue: 

The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In a universe that results from a free act.

And who can engage in a free act except a person? Thus three conclusions, first,

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

Second,

The permanent possibility of initiating a causal series is what we call a person.

And finally -- for it follows from the first two -- 

Truth is a person.

This is what both my common sense and my tradition tell me. My tradition also teaches that truth cannot contradict itself, and that all truth is a reflection of the one truth.

Where does this leave us? I suppose with the conclusion that I am not a freethinker per se, but a person who thinks freely, but only because freedom converges upon the truth of being, and is required in order to freely discharge our obligation to the truth. To quote G-L,

We would like to recall here the rights of the truth, without which, obviously, there would be neither true freedom nor a true human life worthy of this name....

Details to follow in the next post.

The Rights of Truth and Obligations of Man

Schuon often said something to the effect that there is no privilege higher than truth, all others being number two, or lower. And while unsuccessfully looking up the exact wording of that quote, I found a paper by Schuon called No Activity Without Truth, touching on many of the items on this morning's implicit agenda. For example:

In the face of the perils of the modern world, we ask ourselves: what must we do? This is an empty question if it be not founded upon antecedent certainties, for action counts for nothing unless it be the expression of a knowing and also of a manner of being. 

Before it is possible to envisage any kind of remedial activity, it is necessary to see things as they are, even if, as things turn out, it costs us much to do so; one must be conscious of those fundamental truths that reveal to us the values and proportions of things. 

If one's aim is to save mankind, one must first know what it means to be a man; if one wishes to defend the Spirit, one must know what is Spirit. "Before doing, one must be" says the proverb; but without knowing, it is impossible to do (emphasis mine). 

Bingo. This means that, practically speaking, the rights of truth are prior to the rights of man, for if there is no truth -- including the truth of man -- then natural rights go out the window, deprived of their sufficient reason. 

To put it inversely: supposing you have a real, unalienable right -- any right -- then God exists. And supposing truth exists, then we have a "natural obligation," so to speak, to know, defend, and adhere to it. It's the least we can do, given the great privilege of knowing it. Ingratitude is base.

Thus it is no coincidence that we see our rights eroding before our eyes due to the very nature of radical secular left. It's baked in, once you take that first step into the ontological swamp of the left. 

Recall that among our first principles is the controversial one indicating that what is is, and what is not is not. Schuon touches on it here:

In our time one has often heard it said that in order to fight against materialism -- or materialist pseudo-idealism -- a new ideology is needed, one capable of standing up to all seductions and assaults. 

Now the need for an ideology, or the wish to oppose one ideology to another, is already an admission of weakness, and anything undertaken on this basis is false and doomed to defeat. What must be done is to oppose truth purely and simply to the false ideologies, that same truth that has always been and which we could never invent for the reason that it exists outside us and above us. 

We don't need no steenking ideology, rather, just the universal and timeless truths that are prior to the fictive maps invented by pneumapaths of the left:

To cut off man from the Absolute and reduce him to a collective phenomenon is to deprive him of all right to existence qua man.

The left proposes to save mankind by denying what -- and why -- man is. That's not a bug, rather, an axiom.  "It is precisely" man's 

intellectual superiority that the social egalitarianism of the moderns fails to take into account.... to the objection that man is distinguished from animals by his "culture" we will answer that the completely profane and worldly "culture" in question is nothing more than a specifically dated pastime of the human animal; that is to say, this culture can be anything you please, while waiting for the human animal to suppress it altogether. The capacity for absoluteness which characterizes human intelligence is the only thing conferring on Man a right of primacy...

Recall what I said about the diabolical events of October 7 being like a giant sword cutting through history, perverse and malicious goats to one side, healthy sheep to the other. It's not as if this cosmic sword created the division, rather, only revealed -- and continues to reveal -- it. It's also generational, in that the younger the goat, the more cutthroat: among the 18 to 34 crowd, 73% are pro-genocide.

None of this is new, rather, just the actualization of one of man's permanent possibilities. If we can ascend, then we can also descend. In Vedantin metaphysics these vertical trends (or "gunas") go by the names of "sattwa" and "tamas," respectively. The latter

is the guṇa of imbalance, disorder, chaos, anxiety, impurity, destruction, delusion, negativity, dullness or inactivity, apathy, inertia or lethargy, violence, viciousness, and ignorance.

Is that a bullseye, or what? The question is the ontological status of the gunas: are they just a Hundu thing, or the Hindu way of speaking of a universal thing? I suspect the latter, as there's a lot of convergence with what we in the west have typically identified as "diabolical tendencies."  

Speaking of which, this post was partly provoked by an essay called "White Logic" and "Jew Physics", about the battle over language -- or rather, the left's endless war on language as such:

the battle for language is not restricted to governments. Newspeak develops wherever a totalist ideology emerges -- it is, in fact, a necessary characteristic of the ideology. Such battles for language dominance are ongoing all the time, and the chief locus for these battles is the university campus, that petri dish of leftist ideologies.

But the ideology has clearly escaped the petri dish and has spread into the deep state, into its journalist-stenographers, and onto the streets.  

Eight year olds, Dude: 

Because this childlike assertion is nowhere acceptable for modern discourse, an entire vernacular is constructed to prop it up, and mantras are repeated ad nauseam to establish a faux legitimacy. In fact, the endless repetition of bombastic assertions is characteristic of all social-justice themes. 

And while they deny God, they cannot live without a Devil: they

generate a “devil word” to represent (or constitute) a ubiquitous enemy. This enemy is defined only by the fact that it opposes the totalist orthodoxy. Political scientist John Wesley Young characterized this as a technique to “coin or borrow a devil-term and tack it on indiscriminately to all of one’s adversaries.” He also noted that “the technique involved here requires little sophistication but much malice.”

You can't say it doesn't work. But only on the bovine and/or cunning:

it attracts and works for only two types of people -- those stupid enough to actually believe it (the storm-trooper class) and those who don’t believe it but see it as a useful tool to achieve their vision (vanguard puppeteers)....

The dullards and malcontents among us are always anxious to acquire by coercion and bullying what they cannot gain by merit. Because of this, their simple-minded doctrine is attractive for a certain type of disaffected bureaucrat. Today’s enemies of science, logic, reason, and progress have established beachheads on almost every campus in America.

It's "the critical-racialist oeuvre of paranoia, hyper-narcissism, pseudo-science, and magical thinking that would take us back to a pre-medieval world of superstition, sorcery, and shamans" -- which tracks with what was said above about those descending tamasic energies.

I'm going to pause here, because this has gone on a bit long already. 

Ontological Laughter is the Best Medicine

 Shall I compare thee to a Sumerian deity? Nah: 

A new examination of skulls appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia. Palace attendants, as part of royal mortuary ritual, were not dosed with poison to meet a rather serene death. Instead, a sharp instrument, a pike perhaps, was driven into their heads.

The recovery of about 2,000 burials attested to the practice of human sacrifice on a large scale. At or even before the demise of a king or queen, members of the court -- handmaidens, warriors and others -- were put to death. 

Having said that, "Shoving a pike into someone's head does seem like an effective way to kill them, though." 

The point is, there are religions that are not at all funny, without even the possibility of being so. Why is this? What went wrong?

I wonder: do religion and humor coevolve? For laughter coincides "with an openness to the unlimited." In the Ultimate Joke, "What laughs is That which transcends all limitations by its utter superiority":

laughter may be a spiritual door by opening onto a level of reality that shatters the illusions of egoic self-importance.... the capacity to be able to laugh at oneself presupposes at least a minimal degree of dissociation from the ego, and this dissociation must presumably involve a self-transcendence of some kind (Laude). 

So, verticality. But there is also "transcendence from below," and one is reminded of how the Islamists laughed while committing their sadistic atrocities on October 7. According to Rob Henderson,

Sadism is sincere enjoyment from inflicting harm.

Baumeister writes, “The question of whether people enjoy harming others -- and, if they do, the question of how much evil can be explained by this pleasure -- is the single most elusive and vexing problem in the entire topic of evil....  for sadists, they derive pleasure from using power to hurt others. When they inflict pain, the victim’s cries serve as validation of their own being, their importance, their power.”

But a "Christianized" sense of humor is precisely an inversion of the sadistic power-driven Islamist kind: most conspicuously, the Beatitudes

almost exclusively focus on this spiritual reversal, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted, blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." This aspect of inversion of terrestrial values and “wisdom according to the flesh” is eminently highlighted by St. Paul’s admonition concerning the “foolishness” of the world and the “foolishness of the Cross”...

The wisdom according to the world is nothing but “self-deception” because it is based upon an illusory identity, that of the “old man,” an identity that is constructed out of the nothingness of the world. Christian “foolishness” is the first phase of a therapeutic treatment that aims at the restoration of true wisdom.

Laude asks "How can Christians be both 'in this world' and 'not of this world'”? The answer is "intimately connected to a sense of play and folly," like an ontological pun, or something. 

What about ontological sickness? Sounds serious. What is it, and is there a cure? "What could be called 'ontological sickness'" is

the association of other realities to God with all the spiritual and moral consequences that this association involves... 

So, idolatry? Thou shalt have no other gods before me, because supposing you do, you're entering a world of pain, and one that isn't remotely funny. Unless you think there's something amusing about inflicting suffering upon others, as with the Sumerians or Islamists. 

Some other passages from the book:

laughter may specifically serve as a weapon in a kind of moral and spiritual warfare. The devil can laugh at those whom he misleads, and the saint, too, may laugh in return at the devil’s final discomfiture...

He who laughs last will be the one who first laughed: Alpha and Omega. Which reminds me of the clown:

the clown is the human locus of an electrifying meeting of opposites. These extremes may be situated on the same level of existence..., [but] they may also be vertically connected, as the highest and the lowest, the noblest and the vilest.... The clown is a celestial being who reflects the heavens in a reverse way, as if in a grotesque mirror...

Extremes may be vertically connected, as the highest and the lowest. Does this not describe the Incarnation?

Does this imply that salvation, or redemption, or awakening, is comedy gold? "Such an understanding of laughter is apparent"

particularly in Zen where illumination is not infrequently connected with laughter.... there is probably no higher recognition of the spiritual dimension of laughter than that which associates it with a coincidence between the outburst of laughter and the shift in consciousness itself.... laughter may erupt simultaneously with the springing forth of an insight into one’s relativity, and into the ridiculousness of one’s ordinary existential “posturing.”

In this connection, the experience of satori is often associated with a loss of equilibrium that is akin to burlesque and bursting laughter...

More generally -- and tying the room together -- 

On an essential level, this funny, paradoxical, and often violent junction of opposites and disparate realities is nothing less than an esoteric allusion to the confrontation of the individual limitations entailed by the human state with the Absolute....

[I]ndividual existence, because of its radical distinction from “nothing,” tends to vest itself with a sense of absoluteness. Nearly every human falls into the trap of usurping the throne of the One...

Back to the sickness that has no name, or rather, many names, from original sin to avidyā to being stuck inside Plato's cave: the soul, "divorced from the spirit or disconnected from intelligence,"

absolutizes the individual status of man and the passions that ensue from it, thereby severing him from his Creator by claiming an illusory metaphysical independence. All disorders, imbalances, and forms of degeneracy result from this existential error and, in a sense, all sicknesses are manifestations or symbols of it.

Ontological laughter is the best medicine, or something.

Laughter and Spiritual Warfare

Been diving into Divine Play, Sacred Laughter, and Spiritual Understanding, and I think I'll just pull out some quotes and comment on them. Or not, depending.

This first one is interesting, because it reminds us that the whole of salvation history begins with a laugh -- with an epic guffaw-HA! experience:

upon hearing from God that he will be given a son, Abraham “fell upon his face, and laughed”.... 

Moreover, "The anglicized name 'Isaac' is a transliteration of the Hebrew name יִצְחָק‎ (Yīṣḥāq) which literally means 'He laughs/will laugh.'" One scholar

considered Abraham’s laughter as an “axial” experience, that is, a mode of direct awareness of God’s transcendence, a laughter quenched at the very source of the divine.... Such laughter involves an abrupt shift of metaphysical level...

I used to always laugh at inappropriate times. Maybe I was on to something, for 

The relationship between laughter, metaphysics, and mysticism is a rich and fascinating domain that has been little studied. One of the reasons for this situation lies in the fact that religious phenomena are most often considered as a “serious matter” while laughter is often thought to be mere entertainment and is not usually envisaged by the majority as bearing any relationship to religion. Laughter smacks of profanity, and even profanation. 

Now, this conventional understanding of the matter is, as has already been indicated, highly partial. As with all other human phenomena, and in fact more than most, laughter opens onto the realm of spirituality.

So there. And I'm not the only one, for 

Christ’s teachings are indeed imbued with a sense of humor that permeates the entire worldview that he imparted to his disciples.

How so? The argument 

lies in stressing the nonliteral character of many, if not most, of the Christic teachings. This nonliteral and parabolic mode of expression is consonant with certain modalities of humor... Christ’s way of understanding the world and expressing spiritual truths presupposes a radical distancing from immediate, conventional, and literal perception. Now this is precisely the hallmark of a comic apprehension of reality that is in conformity with a sacred perspective.

A nonliteral and parabolic mode. This would explain why literalists and fundamentalists of any kind -- whether secular or religious -- are never funny.

As alluded to in yesterday's post, humor itself is very "incarnational," in that it reaches deeply into the body, resulting in an involuntary physical release. Well, 

inasmuch as the Christ takes flesh, he must be witness to the ambiguities of the human condition and thereby indulge, albeit moderately, in the humor of terrestrial existence.

Can't be human without humor. I wonder: can AI ever be truly witty? I don't know the answer, but it's hard to see how, since wit always takes place at a meta-level of language, and therefore transcends any programming. And  

if humor and laughter can be defined as the “awareness that nothing is important in an absolute way,” the man who recognizes that the Absolute, or God, is “no-thing” is in the best possible metaphysical situation to smile with sparkling wit and to engage in hearty laughter at the foolishness of earthly “trade."

This implies a kind of ambiguous, Gödelian condition of simultaneously being inside and outside the linguistic system: we are always immanent and transcendent, whereas AI can't transcend its immanence.   

“The Christian (for Erasmus) is touched by the Infinite and will not only have the last laugh at the end of time: even now he laughs more insanely than the worldlings.”

More generally,

Laughter is therefore indicative, or symptomatic of the sudden encounter between the esoteric and exoteric dimensions of the religious universe.... spiritual laughter may be deemed to result from an incongruous encounter between two different levels of subjectivity, the divine and the human.  

Could AI laugh at its own nothingness in the face of the infinite? Can it transcend the finitude of its programming? Can AI be mentally ill, or perhaps just a little nutty?   

Nuts [the edible kind, but then again...] tend to be associated, in mystical language, with the distinction between the essential core and the accidental shell, thus corresponding to the Gospel’s differentiation between the spirit and the letter.

Which again goes to the gap between the literal and meta-literal, the appearance and the reality:

To see Mâyâ [appearance] as exclusively real amounts to idolatry, fanaticism, and a radical lack of sense of humor.... The notion of Mâyâ -- or its equivalents outside of India -- is thereby central to an understanding of the jokes and tricks that are integral parts of the metaphysical perspective and the esoteric outlook.

So, the ultimate possible joke is the distinction between God and world, Creator and creation, Necessary and contingent being, etc. 

Now, what happens when the Creator himself participates in the joke?

In the spiritual reciprocity between the Divine and the human, the divine “folly” of the Cross -- that is, God’s allowing Himself to be humiliated and persecuted for the sake of men -- is to be responded to by the human “folly” of Christian life.

Folly to the wise, and all that: 

Although the figure of the holy fool has been highlighted in nearly all spiritual traditions, it can be argued that it bears a particular affinity with the Christian spiritual perspective on the basis of the inversion of values that is at the core of the Christic teachings.

But this laughter is also a serious business, because the devil -- in whatever form, but especially progressivism -- hates to be laughed at. Thus, "the fool’s perspective bears a profound kinship with that of spiritual warfare."

As Israel is having to smoke the barbarians out of their holes, we ought to be joking our own barbarians out of theirs, before the problem becomes even more serious. If wokeness is (among other anti-human impulses) a war on humor, then humor is a war on wokeness. 

Silly Discoveries and Important Jokes

Good news on the divine comedy front: I procured a cheap copy of a book called Divine Play, Sacred Laughter, and Spiritual Understanding. Bad news: I'm only a few pages in, not far enough for a post. 

However, it looks like we're onto something with our comment yesterday to the effect that the ultimate basis of humor must lie in the distinction between God and man, or Reality and appearances, and related antitheses such as life and death, health and illness, youth and age, pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, etc. According to the the lone reviewer on amazon,

Laude shows that the comic is integral to religious consciousness because it is founded on a sense of the discrepancy between the absolute and relative, the divine and the human.

Yesterday, commenter Randy highlighted the ultimate gag of the omnipotent Creator incarnating as a helpless infant. Whether atheist or believer, that's a hoot. Or at least folly to the wise, while God himself laughs at the wisdom of the world. For Him -- like us -- academia is Comedy Central. Although lately, Koranimal Planet.

Best I can do at the moment is republish some of the material that followed yesterday's repost, although edited and updated in order to meet the current standard:  

It's odd enough that life should suddenly arise in a lifeless universe, but what about laughter? "On the evolutionary level where laughter arises," notes Koestler, "an element of frivolity seems to creep into a humorless universe governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest."

Which leads to the question: is humor essential to man's nature, or an accident? Put conversely, is an intelligent being without this thing called "humor" conceivable? If Koestler is correct, it would appear not, since it is so bound up with the logic and structure of scientific discovery and artistic creation, and certainly the latter two are essential to man. But is humor just an unintended side effect of these -- a mere spandrel?

If so, the spandrel must have arisen quite early, being that it is so woven into the nervous system. As Koestler writes, "Humor is the only domain of creative activity where a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes. This makes me think of the Law of Inverse analogy, whereby the highest is reflected in the lowest -- as in how, in the reflection of a tree at the far end of a lake, the top will appear closest to us.

Koestler assures us that while the idea "that the Jester should be brother to the Sage may sound like blasphemy, yet our language reflects the close relationship." 

In a too-good-to-check footnote he elaborates on that etymological relationship, suggesting that "wit" is cognate to videre and to the Sanskrit veda, which is in turn related to the ultimate knowledge and the biggest joke of all, which is that Atman is Brahman (or at least not not Brahman), i.e., Moksha-ha-ha.

Koestler writes of "a continuous series" that stretches "from the pun through the play of words to the play of ideas." 

The play of ideas. 

Oh, but it is a game! Only vertical one. 

At any rate, it seems that "getting the joke" is very much related to "solving the problem." I suppose you could say that a joke is a discovery, just as a discovery is a joke. Which makes me want to revisit Polanyi vis-a-vis the logic of scientific discovery, not to mention Bernard Lonergan's Insight.

One difference, according to Koestler, is that the joke generally involves a collision of matrices, whereas a discovery will result from their fusion. Thus, a really important discovery will involve a "permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible."

In contrast, the really important joke... 

Could there be such a thing as an important joke? 

Two words: Joe Biden

But seriously.

The first thing that occurs to me is how, in the Soviet Union, it was only possible to discuss certain important truths in the form of generally mordant humor, e.g., "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

And now that I'm thinking about it, the same would be true of certain vital truths that are not to be discussed or even noticed under a logophobic regime of political correctness.

Note also that "the history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter," only later to be confirmed. You know, they all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round, just as they snickered at Marconi that wireless was a phony. Same with Whitney and his gin, Fulton and his boat, and Hershey and his bar. 

Someone -- was it Whitehead? -- made a point about the scientific revolution really being the "discovery of discovery." Analogously, it seems we're looking for the punchline of punchlines, the merry Mother of All Gags -- or ho ho ho, who's got the last laugh now -- and always?

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Post

Putting the wit into Wittgenstein, 

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Why not? Maybe because "serious" and "joke" are contradictory terms -- unless you're the kind of person who jokes around due to anxiety or awkwardness when things get serious. In other words, humor as a psychological defense mechanism. I've never seriously looked into the dynamics of it, nor do I recall any particularly witty patients. Excuse me while I do a quick search.

Says here that

Historically, psychologists framed humor negatively, suggesting it demonstrated superiority, vulgarity, Freudian id conflict or a defense mechanism to hide one’s true feelings. In this view, an individual used humor to demean or disparage others, or to inflate one’s own self-worth. As such, it was treated as an undesirable behavior to be avoided. And psychologists tended to ignore it as worthy of study. 

And 

Humor and laughter were not seen as valuable topics for philosophical or scientific study until the 1980s, perhaps due to their assumed connection to body instead of mind and because laughter, like other bodily functions, is often difficult to control. Humor is also often thought of as “low”-- that is, enjoyed by the people as opposed to the elite.

But "Recently, scientific research on the neuroscience of laughter has showcased the potential intellectual benefits of a brain wired to find humor and the connections between humor responses and common biases and heuristics."

The following explanation of the form of humor may explain why it can be applied to philosophy; in order to "To be in on the joke," one must "Detect an incongruity in its multiple interpretations" and "Resolve the incongruity by inhibiting the literal, nonfunny interpretations and appreciating the meaning of the funny one."

Hmm. I guess this means that the possibility of metaphysical humor is grounded in the inevitable incongruity between reality and appearances, or one appearance and another. The

currently most broadly popular of the major philosophical theories of humor is the incongruity theory, developed by Immanuel Kant. 

Now that's funny. 

Later adherents included Arthur Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard. This theory holds that humor results when our brains perceive two things as coexisting in a manner that does not at first appear to make logical sense and that laughter or humor occurs when the discomfort caused by this incongruity is resolved in some way. 

A simple example of this is a pun. Humor results when we discover that a word that initially appears incongruent in the context in which we first encounter it has another meaning that makes logical sense when a different context is revealed.

Back to the basis of philosophical humor, or humorous philosophy: two things coexist in a manner that doesn't appear to make logical sense, but then a sudden resolution of incongruity results in the guffaw-HA! experience. It seems that in the absence of verticality -- i.e., different planes of being -- humor would be strictly impossible, since there could be no clash of planes. 

Then again, even my dog has a rudimentary sense of humor, because at the moment she is playing with her three-foot long squeaking snake, and for her the squeak never gets old. 

What are some of the most serious -- and therefore potentially humorous -- ontological and existential incongruities we confront? Well, there's the fact that we are alive but someday won't be. That's a rather shocking incongruity. Then there's sickness and health, youth and age, pleasure and pain. There's a lot of humor around sex, because of its many incongruities. There's also civilization vs. barbarism, knowledge and ignorance, in-group vs. out-group. 

How about God and man? In a way, the first joke recorded in the Bible is when God asks Adam "Where are you," and Adam improvises the totally implausible response that "I was afraid because I was naked so I hid myself." As if God hasn't seen you naked.

Death. I'm thinking of a morbid joke about two Jews facing a Russian firing squad, and one of them asks for a blindfold. The other Jew says to him, "Shh! Don't make trouble!"

Considering that Jews are the most persecuted people in history, perhaps this is why -- certainly pound for pound -- they are the funniest, because there's the most potential for incongruity.

Is there humor in the Palestinian terrortories? That doesn't involve persecution of Jews? It reminds me of the old saying that peace will come to the Middle East when Palestinians love their children as much as they hate the Jews. It will also come if they can ever laugh at their own pathetically self-defeating culture, one that "never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity," and that has no idea how far to go in going too far.

The guy quoted above who says humor wasn't subject to serious study until the 1980s is wrong, because I remember blogging about Arthur Koestler's book on the subject, which was published in 1964. It's been almost ten years since that series of posts, long enough to revisit it. The following is from a post that asks, Is God Laughing At Us or With Us?

Does the Creator have a sense of humor? I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion, or humor would be deprived of its sufficient reason. It certainly has no Darwinian utility.

According to Koestler, there are exactly 29 references to humor -- or at least laughter -- in the Hebrew Bible. Interestingly, only two are "born out of a joyful and merry heart," while thirteen "are linked with scorn, derision, mocking, or contempt" -- with the sarcastic ha ha of Nelson Muntz.

I've been reading Koestler's The Act of Creation, which regards humor as the equal of scientific discovery and artistic creation. You might say that each of these three quintessentially human activities has the identical deep structure.

Many people have noticed, for example, that the theory of anthropocentric global warming is a joke. Problem is, it is a bad joke, because instead of seeing an implicit connection between two frames of reference -- in this case, weather and human activity -- it just makes one up. So the humor is forced and not spontaneous. 

Or sometimes the PC [now woke] world forbids seeing the real comedic connection, therefore barring certain subjects from ridicule for the purpose of avoiding threats to power. This article, for example, explains why comedians have somehow failed to exploit the comedic goldmine that is Obama:

We learn this from Jim Downey, the longtime Saturday Night Live specialist in political japery: "If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10...

“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto -- certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature."'

Not a single flaw -- for example, the gulf between his pompousness and vacuity, or between the form and content of his platitudinous pronouncements. Let us not forget 

The charter Choom Ganger, confessed eater of dog and snorter of coke. The doofus who thinks the language spoken by Austrians is 'Austrian,' that you pronounce the p in 'corpsman' and that ATMs are the reason why job growth is sluggish. The egomaniac who gave the queen of England an iPod loaded with his own speeches and said he was better at everything than the people who work for him. The empty suit with so little real-world knowledge that he referred to his brief stint working for an ordinary profit-seeking company as time 'behind enemy lines.' The phony who tells everyone he’s from Chicago, though he didn’t live there until his 20s, and lets you know that he’s talking to people he believes to be stupid by droppin’ his g’s. The world-saving Kal-El from a distant solar system who told us he’d heal the planet and cause the oceans to stop rising. 

Not to mention the smokin' hot wife, the mom jeans, the intellectual laziness, the corruption, the provincial liberal insularity, the straw man arguments, the thin skin, the media sycophancy, the fascination with celebrity trash, etc.

Anyway, Koestler's book is the only one I know of that gives humor its proper due, and treats it with the metacosmic seriousness it deserves (which itself is kind of funny).

The frontispiece of the book has a helpful (?) cosmic cartography that looks like this:

Koestler suggests that "all patterns of creative activity are tri-valent," in that they may "enter the service of humour, discovery, or art" (left, center, and right, respectively), or from the "absurd through an abstract to a tragic or lyric view of existence."

Which I guess goes to the observation by Goethe in the sidebar, that The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.