If Christ is the Answer, What is the Question?

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

Okay, but... what kind of truth? And excuse me, but what was the Question?

While we're on the subject of Augustine in particular, we are more generally on the subject of Christian philosophy. 

Now, some people think that, properly speaking, these two cannot coexist in the same head, since philosophy considers the whole scope of reality in an impersonal manner, with no preconceptions, while Christianity obviously limits itself up front by certain principles and axioms, for example, the doctrine of creation (including the special creation of the human soul), of monogenesis (all men are brothers, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it), of free will, etc. 

In fact, a whole lotta things must first be true before Christianity can even be possible. To cite one obvious example, deconstruction cannot be the case, because if it were, no stable communication would be possible between God and man. Scripture in particular would mean anything and nothing.

Which reminds us of an important aphorism:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

A vision of reality outside of which religious language is meaningless. There are many such worlds, the world presumed by deconstruction being just one of them. But we will insist that there is only one reality. And one human nature. And a surprising link between them.

As for the Christian world, there is great disagreement about the role of philosophy. At one extreme are those who claim that revelation completely overrides and obviates our vain philosophizing, while at my extreme is a person who will go so far as to insist that non-Christian philosophy is an impossibility and an absurdity; or, to put it a bit less bobnoxiously, that philosophy from our end is crowned and perfected by revelation at Godsend. 

I'm not even the first to suggest this. In an essay called Is There Such a Thing as a Non-Christian Philosophy?, Pieper answers "no, there is no non-Christian philosophy!," at least insofar as "we understand by philosophy what the great originators and fathers of Western philosophy... understood it to be." Which is to say,

It is wisdom as God possesses it: God alone can be called wise in the full sense; He alone has "the answer," the interpretation of reality from one angle (namely from Himself); no one but God knows what the philosophical question deals with: the whence and the whither, the origin and the goal, the design principle and the structure, the meaning and the organization of reality as a whole.

I just read a somewhat tedious book called Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator, but let no one say I don't eat my vegetables. It has a chapter on the relationship between scripture and philosophy that reminded me of the second aphorism cited above. Levering quotes N.T. Wright to the effect that "Western orthodoxy"

has had for too long an overly lofty and detached view of God. It has always tended to approach the Christological question by assuming this view of God and then fitting Jesus into it.

This goes to a genuine problem -- again, of revelation at one end and philosophy at the other, and is there a way to harmonize them? Which comes first? It's easy enough to say "God," but what if, for example, God communicates in a language or modality that we cannot understand? 

Thus, it seems that revelation is limited up front by man's (philosophical) capacity to understand it. God must condescend to our manner and mode of understanding him.

Am I wrong?

Let's take an obvious example, the word "God." Supposing we have no earthly conception of God, what can it mean that he communicates to us, and how could we recognize it? 

But supposing we do have a conception, then how do we relate the two? For example, Jews have a particular conception of the job requirements of the Messiah, and reject Jesus on that basis. Moreover, just as we can point to OT passages that confirm our view, Jews will point to others that contradict it.

For Wright, it "is not that we know what the word god means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that." Rather, the converse: that we must "somehow allow our meaning for the word god" to be reoriented around Jesus.

Now, Jesus is scandalously particular, whereas philosophy deals in universal principles, abstract concepts, timeless generalities, and transcendent truths. Which is another way of saying Logos. But the central claim of Christianity is that the universal Logos is particularized in a single man at a certain point in history. Which is again a scandal to the (purely) philosophical mind.

In the book, there are a number of discussions as to whether the purpose of scripture is to convey stable propositional truths, or to, for example, reveal God's love for us, or to provide a means to relate to him, or, more generally, to override our presumption that reality can be reduced to formulaic truths. 

Obviously the latter goes to how Protestants (at least the original ones) view scripture. It is not for us -- i.e., our depraved minds -- to understand it, rather, just accept it. 

But one can obviously go to the other extreme -- say, Jefferson's deism that excises the parts that don't fit into a preconceived philosophical template.

I like to think there's an easy solution to this problem of universals and particularity, of abstract and concrete, of propositional truth and the truth of relationship. Indeed, I can probably express it in two words, Incarnation and Trinity, the historical truth of the former revealing the propositional truth of the latter.

Levering cites one scholar who 

distinguishes strongly between biblical "particularists" and what might be termed philosophical universalists. The latter do not pay sufficient attention to God's actions in history as narrated by scripture; instead, they presuppose certain philosophical attributes of God and then impose those attributes upon the God of the biblical narrative. 

Well, don't do that. But don't just throw out the philosophical baby with the scriptural bathwater. Or is it the scriptural baby with the philosophical bongwater? My point is that we need both, in a kind of ascending dialectic.

I guess it all goes back to Gödel: from our end, any philosophical system will contain assumptions or axioms that cannot be justified by the philosophy. Understood. But this doesn't mean we should just chuck philosophy, rather, try to harmonize it with God's Own Principle, AKA the Logos. 

Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in terms of its parts.

It reminds me of the old gag that God becomes man that man might become God. Well, the Logos becomes particularized that the particular might become universal, which is none other than the process of theosis or sanctification.

About this cognitive dialectic or spiritual metabolism we have in mind, the Aphorist says

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

Supposing ultimate truth is not only a person, but irreducible person-in-relationship... well, let's just say that, thanks to the Incarnation of the Logos, 

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Which circles back around to the aphorism at the top, and threepeat as necessary.

Who Do I Say That I Am?

For a thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and the dawn of the Renaissance in the 15th century the torch of civilization in western Europe was carried mainly by the Christian church.... 

The supreme synthesis was achieved toward to the end of the period, in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who produced a vast, capacious world-view harmonizing what were then the major thought-systems (Magee).

Vast, capacious, and harmonious. My kind of cosmos.

At the beginning of that millennium of dominance is Augustine, who "was arguably the outstanding figure in philosophy between Aristotle and Aquinas, a period of some 1,600 years" -- again, a long time to be The Man. 

In order to have been The Man for that long, there must have been something appealing about him -- not just the content, but the style. He must have been a congenial companion. No one can be popular for that long without being fun to be around. 

Here I must admit that I've only read the Confessions and dabbled in some other works. I'm hardly an expert, and you're probably not either, so let's learn something.

Looks like I'm right about his congeniality: Augustine is "one of the most attractive personalities in the history of philosophy." Then again, why does philosophy attract so many unattractive and unpleasant personalities? Probably because a lot of people who do a lot of thinking have nothing better to do. Social rejects, rejected for good reason.

Augustine was obviously not a social reject. To the contrary, he burned that candle right down to the nub. 

He rejected his mother's Christianity as an adolescent, but subsequently embarked upon "a philosophical quest that was to take him through several different intellectual positions," before -- to plagiaphrase the poet -- returning to the place where he started and knowing it for the first time. More generally, 

What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from (Eliot).

Granted, but why is that. And how?  

Every post is a new beginning, starting from nowhere and ending in your head, if I'm lucky. If not, it's just from my head to a different place in my head. Or perhaps a larger head -- mind expansion, as the hippies used to say.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning (ibid.).

Exactly. That right there is what in the past we've called precision poetry. 'Scuse me while I look that one up. November 17, 2017. Nothing much there we can use today, except to repeat that

Precision poetry is not only possible, it is necessary. This is because truth and beauty converge and are ultimately two sides of the same reality.

At the moment I'm flipping through the complete works of Eliot, and he manages to get all the serious poems done in under 145 pages. That is admirable concision -- what the Aphorist calls finishing before making the reader sick. 

I wish I could do that -- indeed, it's my One Big Wish -- to boil down the previous 4,000 posts into, say 300 pages. And instead of inducing nausea, to end in a massive guffah-HA! experience.

But that's my problem. Back to Augustine. Eventually he became "a fully-fledged philosophical Sceptic," but later became skeptical of his skepticism, so join the club. He then wrote the Confessions, which is "the first autobiography in the modern sense." 

In the past we've touched on why such a venture would have been impossible prior to this, because what we call the modern self is a Christian development, precisely. We devoted a number of posts to a review of an important book called Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Looks like I'll have to reread them. 

Siedentop writes that the

intense account of Augustine's relations with himself and with God [in the Confessions] has led some to attribute the birth of the individual to Augustine.

Along these lines, he quotes the historian Peter Brown, who characterizes the Confessions as "a manifesto of the inner world":

Men go to gape at the mountain peaks, at the boundless tides of the sea, the broad sweep of the rivers, the encircling ocean and the motions of the stars; and yet they leave themselves unnoticed; they do not marvel at themselves (Augustine). 

He's not wrong. But there is a right way and a wrong way to go about this, the latter involving a vertical closure sealed in ontological narcissism and aggravated tenure. Schuon describes the right way:

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

Imagine There's No Imaginaton

It's pretty hard to do.

The imagination is the only place in the world where one can dwell.

Certainly it is where I like to dwell, and thanks to retirement, it is where I spend most of my timelessness. This blog is a kind of journal of that timelessness, because someone has to do it. I'm not an artist, but then again, I like to think I provide a service. Like any other artist. 

Appearance is not the veil, but the vehicle, of reality.

Now, vehicles are for movement, in this case, the vertical kind. Unless I'm missing something.

In the beginning is the Word: it seems that the world is made of language -- or that language is the bridge between immanence and transcendence. Conversely, the senses cannot make that leap, and can only register horizontal, surface-to-surface sensations on the immanent plane.

On the one hand, even before the appearance of Homo sapiens, transcendence is always here. But it must await humanity in order for it to be entered, articulated, and mapped herebelow. 

Imagination takes place in the great In Between, or what Voegelin needlessly calls the metaxy -- needless because it's just a Greek word for the same thing. In any event, we can imaginatively open ourselves to the Beyond, or be enclosed in immanence, in which case we drive our vehicle into an ontological ditch of non-being:

CLOSED EXISTENCE or CLOSURE: Voegelin's term for the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments [AKA roadblocks] to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental (Webb).

The pull of the transcendental. No need to push. In that case, beam me up!   

Given this ubiquitous vertical pull, it seems that we aren't like a ship in the doldrums, as it were, waiting for the wind to propel us. 

Come to think of it, in the new universe discovered by Einstein, what we call gravity is a curvature in spacetime. Used to be that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. But nowadays it's also the longest distance, since if you proceed in the opposite direction you'll eventually wind up at the same point.  

So there's a kind of gravitational attraction -- the Pull -- but there's actually a mutual attraction. It seems that the big O depicted below is attracted to us as much as we are to it, tracing the arc of a great circle route or something: 

[T]he presence of a massive body curves space-time, as if a bowling ball were placed on the rubber sheet to create a cuplike depression. In the analogy, a marble placed near the depression rolls down the slope toward the bowling ball as if pulled by a force. In addition, if the marble is given a sideways push, it will describe an orbit around the bowling ball, as if a steady pull toward the ball is swinging the marble into a closed path.

And here we are.

About bridges, the Aphorist says that

The bridge between nature and man is not science, but myth.

And that 

The world is only interesting when it is mirrored in man's imagination.

Which is what we call Art, I suppose.

Imagination is the capacity to perceive through the senses the attributes of the object that the senses do not perceive.

Music, for example, is an "object" that is perceived through the senses. But the senses do not reveal its transcendent nature; hearing is not listening, just as touching is not grasping or seeing perceiving.

Man is spirit incarnate.... But the object of his existence is to be in the middle: it is to transcend matter while being situated there, and to realize the light, the Sky, starting from this intermediary level. 

It is true that the other creatures also participate in life, but man synthesizes them: he carries all life within himself and thus becomes the spokesman for all life, the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit (Schuon).

So, here we are, situated in matter while transcending it, and there's not a thing we can do about it. Indeed, not to boast, but

The very word “man” implies “God,” the very word “relative” implies “Absolute” (ibid.).

The Aphorist reminds us that  

Values are not citizens of this world, but pilgrims from other heavens.

Or hells. To which people are also attracted, or rather, which exert their own annoying pull.

Perhaps transcendence could be doubted, if error, ugliness and evil were not its incontrovertible shadow.

Ultimately,

The vulgar epistemology of the natural sciences is a burlesque idealism in which the brain plays the role of "I."

It's vulgar because it is like imagination imagining there is no imagination, when in fact -- and principle -- it's the only place to really be, or to be real, precisely. 

How is it that there is such a thing as the self, the I that knows and loves and finds fulfillment in communion with other I's (Varghese)?

For in reality, immanence and transcendence are but bipolar "directions" or pointers, and we can never (in this life) arrive at the place where they point. Although C.S. Lewis was not wrong in wishing to find the place where all the beauty comes from, i.e., "my country, the place where I ought to have been born." 

Suppose we go there, it is a going to or going back? 

Gosh. It's all very trinitarian when you think about it, isn't it? And faith isn't a leap in the dark, but rather, a leap into its Light:

[T]he doctrine of the Trinity is the breathtaking truth that makes sense of all other truths, the luminous mystery that illuminates all other mysteries, the dazzling sun that allows us to see all things except itself (and this is not because of darkness but its excess of light) (Varghese).

All other mysteries?

Yes, because "Every time we think..., we manifest, however imperfectly, the beginningless-endless act of knowing," of "generating and spirating that is the Trinity." 

And 

Only a consciousness and an intelligence free of any limitation whatsoever could serve as an explanation for the existence of any consciousness and intelligence in this world (ibid.).

Imagine that!

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

Who Do You Say that I Am? And Why?

As per the usual custom, after hitting the publish button yesterday I picked up a book at random and it proceeded to comment on the post. 

In this case the book is called The Christ Connection: How the World Religions Prepared the Way for the Phenomenon of Jesus. Recall that the post touched on philosophical Cynicism and Scepticism, and this book is full of both. 

Indeed, the very first paragraph of the preface characterizes the book as "a journey through the religious history of humanity," with our fellow travelers falling into "one of three categories: religious believers, skeptics, and seekers of ultimate truth." I'm all three, but perhaps I'll be less of the second by the end.

For both skeptics and seekers, the only thing that counts is evidence. So what would constitute evidence in the present quest?

Good question. We are entitled to evidence, especially for extraordinary claims, although the threshold of proof differs for this or that person. A crusty old cynic demands more than a credulous yahoo, so I need a lot. 

Again, not much of interest happens philosophically between Aristotle and Augustine, so the book turns out to be timely, going to the "philosophy of Jesus":

Augustine was arguably the outstanding figure in philosophy between Aristotle and Aquinas, a period of some 1,600 years (Magee).

That's a rather long time to be top dawg. I certainly respect him, but he's never been my alpha intellect. Just not my style, exactly. I'm too... something. Whatever I am too much of, I know it when someone speaks to it. 

Anyway, back to the evidence -- the evidence for Jesus. Is there any? Of course there is. In fact, there's as much if not more evidence for Jesus as there is for most any other person of antiquity. But that's not really the question. 

Rather, the real question is more like Who do you say that I am? In other words, he obviously walked the earth, but who was he? Here again, it's easy enough to read the gospels to examine his philosophy, but who do you say he is? And who do you say he is?  

I think about it this way: there is plenty of primary evidence for his existence, but there is also a kind of secondary (and tertiary) evidence, and the latter kind turns out to be more consequential. Indeed, Jesus says as much, i.e., Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

Now,  just because we are among those who have not seen, this does not mean there is no evidence for our belief. Rather, it's just a different kind of evidence -- the secondary or tertiary kind.

Bob, you're being annoyingly cryptic. What are you talking about? Well, the Aphorist says exactly what I mean regarding secondary evidence:

When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples.

In other words, he left behind transformed people, and it is this transformation I am calling "secondary evidence." And although it is secondary in time, it is actually more important than the primary evidence of his (mere) historical existence. 

Put conversely, his existence in the flesh would have scarcely mattered absent its transformational impact upon those who saw, knew, and touched him. They became utterly different people, and of course this requires an explanation.

For example, if we want to be skeptical about this secondary evidence, we could say that the transformation of his disciples was really a conspiracy that they came up with in order to dupe people, gain followers, and found a new religion -- yes, a brilliant plan to be persecuted and martyred. How fiendishly clever!

Later in the book there is a chapter on all of the alternative explanations for the transformation of the disciples, for example, the "Passover Plot," whereby Jesus planned his own fake death in order to back up the claim that he had risen from the dead. Don't laugh, because it was a popular book, and indeed, my own secular Jewish father-in-law was a believer. 

The whole "quest for the historical Jesus" begins in the 18th century. For example, we're all familiar with the so-called Jefferson Bible, which consists of the teachings of Jesus with the supernatural and miraculous elements excised from the text. 

Some of these researchers go so far as to even deny the primary evidence for Jesus' existence, but no serious historian believes this anymore. "In fact, Marx and Engels made the nonexistence of Jesus a dogma of Marxism," speaking of profoundly unserious historians.

Then there was a guy named Ernest Renan, who "argued that Jesus was a moral teacher whose mission failed and whose teachings have been misrepresented by a repressive church." Another popular and even appealing idea was that between his appearance in the temple as an adolescent and his public ministry at around age thirty, he traveled to India and learned all about Buddhism and Hinduism. 

Unfortunately there is no evidence for this. Which is more than enough evidence for Deepak, who has actually published two books on the subject.

Anyway, back to the evidence. If the secondary evidence is the transformation of the apostles, what we are calling the tertiary evidence is the ongoing transformation of present day followers, but also of the Church itself. Indeed, the mere fact that such a poorly run institution has survived for 2,000 years is an argument for miracles. After all, if it can survive Señor Bergoglio, it can survive anything.  

Before ending this preliminary examination of the evidence, let's consider a few more aphorisms:

Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference.

The ongoing relationship between Center and circumference is the tertiary evidence, precisely.

By the way, some researchers suggest that Christianity (like any other manmade religion) is just an exercise in wish fulfillment. For my part, if I were going to invent a religion to suit my desires, it would not resemble Christianity. But 

Christian doctrines have the implausibility of objects we do not construct, but that we stumble across. 

Unlike, say, the Koran,

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

Again, it is a source of tertiary evidence, supposing it encounters, touches, and transforms us in the now.

To be continued... 

Premodern and Postmodern Nihilism

Yesterday we spoke to the post-maturity of progressive demopaths who pretend to defend human rights while destroying them. Today we will speak to the post-reality of the postmoderns. Starting at the beginning, Landes asks precisely "What was the 'modern' that postmodernism claimed to go beyond?"

Good question: what was so wrong with modernity that couldn't be fixed with more of it? Seems like we were on a pretty good trend from ancient to premodern to modern. Why blow up the whole train and the tracks that got us here? Let them answer the question of what is post- in postmodern:

According to them, it was the Western "grand narrative" of the conquest of nature through objective science, rational (phallo-logo-centric) discourse, and its world-transforming technology.

Excuse me, but technology and penises? Really? And how can postmodernism be a narrative that isn't one? Easy: just throw out your phallocentric logic, and anything is possible. 

Wait -- cut off your ontological johnson? 

Some things are too stupid to critique, so I'm tempted to move on -- back to our survey of philosophical starters and nonstarters. To be sure, postmodernism is one of the latter, but I had wanted to proceed in order. There are rules. 

In the book we're using as a template, there are chapters on the Cynics and Sceptics, but postmodernists are the opposite: naive, credulous, and parochial. They're also dickless, but it's nothing to boast about.

Actually, the Cynics weren't cynical in our sense of the word, but were surprisingly dudish: "They were what we would now call dropouts" who embraced "a basic, simple life." However, they eventually went too far and became more than a little nihilistic, advocating "no government, no private property, no marriage, and no established religion."

But Diogenes went even further than John Lennon's most florid imaginings. He

aggressively flouted all the conventions, and deliberately shocked people, whether by not washing or by dressing, if at all, in filthy rags, or living in a burial urn, or eating disgusting food, or committing flagrant acts of public indecency. 

A pederast? It doesn't say. But given his retrograde attitude, he would likely have had no compunction to steal a valued item, nor does it say whether he purchased the burial urn, but it's not like you can rent one. Even the most modestly priced receptacle is a hundred and eighty dollars, but they range up to three thousand. And there's no Ralph's anywhere.

Well, say what you want about the Cynics, at least it's an ethos. Unlike the Sceptics. These dipshits beliefed in nussing! NUSSING! 

Recall that Socrates knew that he didn't know anything, but at least he believed "that knowledge was possible, and, what is more, he was bent on acquiring some." But the Sceptics maintained "an active refusal to believe anything." 

In a way, they confronted the same problem as the postmodernists, in that there were so many conflicting narratives on offer, why not jettison the whole belief in narratives? 

Seeing "the diversity of opinions that are to be found among human beings," they essentially said fuck it:  

For almost everything believed by the people in one place there seem to be people somewhere else who believe the opposite.... The best thing was to stop worrying and just go with the flow, that is to say swim along with whatever customs and practices prevail in the circumstances we happen to find ourselves in.

Truly truly, confined to such a worldview, strikes are gutters and gutters are strikes, and who can say there's any objective difference, even in a league game?

Nevertheless, no one is wrong about everything. Gödel smiles: 

[Pyrrho] pointed out that every argument or proof proceeded from premises which it did not establish. If you tried to demonstrate the truth of those premises by other arguments or proofs then they had to be based on undemonstrated premises. And so on it went, ad infinitum. No ultimate ground of certainty could ever be reached. 

Is he wrong? Yes he is, because Gödel's point is not that we cannot know truth, rather, that we can know truths that we cannot be proved with mere logic. Big difference.  

True enough, reason per se is tautological:

What a valid argument proves is that its conclusions follow from its premises, but that is not at all the same as proving that those conclusions are true. 

This constitutes a vicious epistemological circle, such that "every 'proof' rests on unproven premises," from "logic, mathematics, and science" to "everyday life." 

Having said that, some arguments are better than others. And the best argument of all is that we can indeed know a great deal about everything -- which is to say, Being -- but that we can never know everything about anything, not so much as a single gnat.

And for the same reason. In other words, the same principle accounts for our capacity to know being but never know it fully, for then we would be this principle, which is to say, God.

That's Not Empathy, That's Post-Maturity

Democracy is a miracle, considering human psychological disabilities (Eli Sagan, in Landes).

I'll go one step further: considering human psychological abilities. In fact, Landes implicitly says as much:

[I]n the twenty-first century, some of the most determined, even dogmatic cognitive egocentrics come from the most progressive, empathic circles of warm thinkers and activists. For there are two major variants to cognitive egocentrism: the unempathic projection of ill-will and the overly empathic projection of good will. 

In reality, neither variant is truly empathic, because neither recognizes the actual thoughts and feelings of the other person or group. At best, the second variant is presumptuous or condescending.

It is also self-evidently immature, since genuine empathy involves the ability to place oneself in the other fellow's sandals or under his soiled keffiyeh. Pretending a jihadi psychopath is just like the rest of us makes one clueless at best, not empathic. 

Likewise pretending Islam is a Religion of Peace, or that jihad doesn't exist, or that the Koran doesn't mean what it says about Jews and Christians, pigs and dogs. Empathy is not masochism. 

I'm also reminded of something Ogden says:

In the paranoid-schizoid position, everything is what it is (i.e., events speak for themselves), whereas in the [more mature] depressive [AKA historical] position, nothing is simply what it appears to be (events do not have intrinsic meaning).

At the extremes this implies on the one hand immaturity, but also something like "post-maturity," or overshooting the mark -- for example deconstruction, whereby everything means anything (e.g., the "living Constitution"). 

In fact, Landes refers to the latter as eisogesis which involves "aggressively reading outside meaning into a given text," or "imposing meaning" onto it (in contrast to standard exegesis).

Recall the odious Rashida Tlaib, who claims that From the river to the sea is just "aspirational." Never mind that it is the aspiration to genocide, precisely. 

Elsewhere Landes defines cognitive egocentrism as "projecting one's mentality into others," and properly speaking, projection is an immature defense mechanism, not an indication of maturity. 

In fact, Landes uses the term "demopath" to describe "enemies of human rights invoking them in order to destroy them." Thus, there's a whole lotta demopathology going on, especially among the young and immature.

Again, that's not empathy. It's not even Stockholm Syndrome. Nor is it even standard issue Jew hatred, rather, the same pomo or poco (postcolonial) stew of factors that motivates older progressives, which is to say, some combination of ignorance, stupidity, indoctrination, status anxiety, conformity, mental illness, and diabolical influence. 

That's what progressives are made of, and there are no other ingredients. For example, their smugness -- their facial punchability -- is really a reflection of status anxiety, while their bizarre characterization of conservatives is just projection (which is in turn a reflection of psychological immaturity). Likewise the ubiquitous intellectual dishonesty.  

The Golden Rule is a fine thing, but it only works with one's psychological cohort -- in other words, with people at roughly the same level of emotional maturity. To take an extreme example, it wouldn't have worked for the Jews vis-a-vis Hitler -- Gandhi's idiotic advice notwithstanding (speaking of insane demopathy). 

Regarding absence of empathy, 

People raised in cultures that are predominantly organized around cooperative rationality cannot imagine any other rationality: So when people use violence it must be that they are driven to it by desperation or searing injustice, and they will stop when given justice. No one, we think, could possibly prefer war (Landes).

Think again. Or rather, for the first time.

What is a little odd about progressives is how they assume the best of our enemies, but imagine -- to the point of delusional ideation --  the worst of conservatives, e.g., racism, sexism, fascism, et al. 

The former fails to see what is obviously there, while the latter sees things that aren't -- or, as was said above, the overly empathic projection of good will and the unempathic projection of ill-will, respectively.

Oh well. Life's Rich Pageant.

Once Upon a Time There Was a Caliphator Coming Down the Road with a Bomb Strapped to His Chest

Caliphator: one who believes that in our day, in this generation, Islam will triumph over all other religions and establish a global Caliphate, i.e., a participant in an apocalyptic millennial movement (Landes).

So, crazy. But why? What makes millions of people believe in the impossible? 

And of course, just because it's impossible, this hardly prevents them from causing great damage to reality -- not just the lives lost or ruined, but the billions of dollars that must be spent to manage this primitive menace, to keep the Caliphators from flying planes into buildings, setting off suicide bombs, warring with their neighbors, etc.

Way back in the early days of the blog, there were many posts on the failure to synchronize our calendars, what with Christendom existing in the 21st century, Islam back in the 7th. Even if they're living in the 10th or 15th, that's still a lot of catching up to do. 

Problem is, the Caliphators also want to synchronize the calendars, only by turning ours back. 

Now, outside human experience, time is just time: it has no qualities, but rather, is just quantitative duration, a measure of change, except with no one there to notice that things changed. 

In order for time to be noticed, one must partially transcend it, and this is what humans do, some of us more effectively than others. 

Again, we've had many posts on the subject of developmental time, but yesterday's post got me to thinking about it again, because Caliphator time is very different from... what shall we call our time? I don't know, but something will pop into my head as we proceed.

Suffice it to say that the time of physics is not the time of humans, let alone that of God, who is of course "outside time," but not completely, otherwise he wouldn't be here with us. In this regard, he's like us, only more so. Indeed, you could say he's even more in and out of time than we are. Or just say Emmanuel, God with or amongus.

Schuon says some things about time that touch on our way of looking at it, for example, "Concrete time is the changing of phenomena; abstract time is the duration which this change renders measurable," which is what we mean by the distinction above between mere clock time and human developmental time.

Regarding developmental time, think of how an infant must experience time versus how a child or adult does -- and everyone in between, both healthy and pathological. 

Even thinking about these differences makes me suspect I've bitten off more than you'll want to chew. Nevertheless, let's keep chewing, even if we won't be able to swallow it all in a single post, much less digest it.

Unfortunately for readers, the first name that pops into my head is Joyce -- no, not (yet) Finnegans Wake, but rather, a certain portrait of him as a child. On its first page he tries to paint a verbal picture of what it is like to exist in what Piaget would call sensorimotor time, perhaps on the cusp of language acquisition:

the sensorimotor stage "extends from birth to the acquisition of language." In this stage, infants progressively construct knowledge and understanding of the world by coordinating experiences (such as vision and hearing) from physical interactions with objects (such as grasping, sucking, and stepping). Infants gain knowledge of the world from the physical actions they perform within it. They progress from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought toward the end of the stage.

What must that be like? Don't you remama the infanity? Joyce does:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.... 

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.... 

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father.... 

Mine too! I also remember the rough stubble. On my father, that is.

"Joyce called the new way a presentation of the past as a 'fluid succession of presents.'" 

There is no past in the book: only a continuous present with a style that shifts to follow every curve in the fluid continuum, expressing or "discovering" it (Anderson). 

Explain this Important Quote:

These first lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represent Joyce’s attempt to capture the perceptions of a very young boy. The language is childish: “moocow,” “tuckoo,” and “nicens” are words a child might say, or words that an adult might say to a child. 

In addition to using childlike speech, Joyce tries to emulate a child’s thought processes through the syntax of his sentences and paragraphs. He jumps from thought to thought with no apparent motivation or sense of time. We have no idea how much time goes by between Stephen’s father telling him the story and Stephen wetting the bed. 

Moreover, the way Stephen’s thoughts turn inward reflects the way children see themselves as the center of the universe. Stephen is the same Baby Tuckoo as the one in the story his father tells, and the song Stephen hears is “his song.” As Stephen ages, Joyce’s style becomes less childish, tracking and emulating the thoughts and feelings of the maturing Stephen as closely as possible. 

Eventually we learn-- some of us at any rate -- that we    

are separate from the environment. [We] can think about aspects of the environment, even though these may be outside the reach of the child's senses. In this stage, according to Piaget, the development of object permanence is one of the most important accomplishments. 

Object permanence is a child's understanding that an object continues to exist even though they cannot see or hear it. Peek-a-boo is a game in which children who have yet to fully develop object permanence respond to sudden hiding and revealing of a face. By the end of the sensorimotor period, children develop a permanent sense of self and object and will quickly lose interest in Peek-a-boo (Wiki).

This is much more important than you might suspect, but in order to explain why, we'll have to go even more irritatingly far afield, into Winnicott's theory of transitional objects:

One of the elements that Winnicott considered could be lost in childhood was what he called the sense of being -- for him, a primary element, of which a sense of doing is only a derivative. The capacity for being -- the ability to feel genuinely alive inside, which Winnicott saw as essential to the maintenance of a true self -- was fostered in his view by the practice of childhood play. 

More to the point, 

Playing can also be seen in the use of a transitional object, Winnicott's term for an object, such as a teddy bear, that has a quality for a small child of being both real and made-up at the same time. Winnicott pointed out that no one demands that a toddler explain whether his Binky is a "real bear" or a creation of the child's own imagination, and went on to argue that it's very important that the child is allowed to experience the Binky as being in an undefined, "transitional" status between the child's imagination and the real world outside the child. 

For Winnicott, one of the most important and precarious stages of development was in the first three years of life, when an infant grows into a child with an increasingly separate sense of self in relation to a larger world of other people. In health, the child learns to bring his or her spontaneous, real self into play with others; in a false self disorder, the child has found it unsafe or impossible to do so, and instead feels compelled to hide the true self from other people, and pretend to be whatever they want instead. Playing with a transitional object can be an important early bridge between self and other, which helps a child develop the capacity to be genuine in relationships, and creative.

Playing for Winnicott ultimately extended all the way up from earliest childhood experience to what he called "the abstractions of politics and economics and philosophy and culture... this "third area," that of cultural experience which is a derivative of play."

With this in mind, we're finally in a position to better understand the apocalyptic dream of Caliphator time. But haven't I taxed the reader's patience long enough? I well remember sitting in class, when the time between 2:45 to 3:00 was an eternity. I remember my butt falling asleep, or at least it felt that way, and I don't want to do that you, for you've suffered enough.

We'll end with a passage by Landes and resume tomorrow, when the feeling in your butt has returned:

Caliphators believer that now is the time for Islam to fulfill its disrupted destiny, and where there was Dar al Harb (realm of war, of free / unsubjected kuffar / infidels), there shall be Dar al Islam (realm of submission to Allah and his servants, of dhimmi kuffar).

All because our psychological / developmental calendars aren't synchronized. 

Envy, Paranoia, Shame, and Temporal Distortion

Another cold opening:

From a purely logical point of view, the advantage of positive-sum interactions [is] so great that it's obvious any "reasonable" person would prefer them. Who would not choose cooperation, affection, intimacy, creativity, productivity over violence, coercion, and destructive behavior? Who would not want a world of mutual benefit and prosperity?

Oh, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Hurras al-Din, the Holy Land Foundation, Mehdi Hassan, Sunny Hostin, House Squad members, VP Harris, Hollywood, Harvard, Hitler.... and that's just some of the H's.   

We hear about a "two state solution," but no solution will come so long as there exist the two states of mind characterized by the positive- and zero-sum interactions described by Landes above. 

But there are deeper psychological reasons for these two states of mind, and Landes describes one of them: envy: "Zero-sum attitudes have a close relationship to envy." Moreover, "like shame and vengeance," envy "may be peculiarly human, and play a key role in our evolution."

Except there's no maybe about it: envy is peculiarly human, and deeply intertwined with psychological development (and arrest). 

In the past we've discussed Helmut Schoeck's foundational Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, and Landes does as well: "Envy is a pervasive element of the human psyche and of human societies," and

cultures that resist envy, even in small but significant amounts, become wealth producing nations. When envy dominates a culture, its members mobilize against success.

Like the Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

If memory serves, Shoeck writes of the "envy barrier" that individuals, cultures, and nations must overcome in order to become successful, prosperous, and affluent. 

In particular, socialism -- now called "equity," among other deceptive euphemisms -- is atavistic to the core, resting on what psychoanalysts call "constitutional envy." But you needn't be a psychoanalyst to get the point, rather, just a sharp-penned Aphorist:

The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who covets another's goods but the one who defends his own.

"Having promulgated the dogma of original innocence," progressives conclude "that the man guilty of the crime is not the envious murderer but the victim who aroused his envy" (Dávila).

Churchill also nailed it: "Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy." Except to say that gospel means "good news," and socialism always results in bad tidings.    

As we've said before, Social Justice is just envy with a Ph.D. 

I don't want to veer into a pedantic discussion of psychoanalytic theory, but suffice it to say that there is a hidden but robust relationship between envy, paranoia, dysregulated shame (or shame intolerance), ingratitude, and History -- for individuals sunk into what is called the "paranoid position" are prone to a very different experience of history. 

Permit me to yoink one of my old psychology books from the shelf, The Matrix of the Mind by Thomas Ogden. Better yet, let me just synthesize material from a few stale bobservations from the past:

One of Melanie Klein's most important contributions was the distinction between what she called the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. To achieve the depressive position is to have attained a degree of maturation, integration, and continuity of being that extends both spatially and temporally.

Another very bright fellow, Thomas Ogden, says that a better name for the depressive position would be the historical position, because of its profound effect on one's perception and appreciation of time....

For the person in the paranoid position -- and this is critical -- their current state of being determines their "truth." "History is instantaneously rewritten"....

If you've ever had the misfortune of having a borderline person in your life -- and most of us have -- then you know how this works: "the present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, nonreflective present." You are drawn into the momentary primitive emotional storm of the borderline person, who dismantles time and history. It is simply impossible to argue with such un- or dis-integrated persons, because they constantly throw out arguments from different planes, aggressively unaware of their contradictions.

In contrast, in the depressive position, the person "no longer has access to the kind of Orwellian rewriting of history that is possible in the paranoid-schizoid position."

How convenient: I see that I already wrote a post that asks the question, Are Islamic Terrorists Crazy, Evil, or Developmentally Arrested? Why, it even has 70 comments! I wonder what happened to all my readers?

Let's return to the present, where it is already 11:00. Which means we're out of time, irrespective of whether it is the depressive or paranoid kind. I'll pull it together tomorrow, I promise.

Hamas and Other Normal Humans

Cold opening:

Ultimately, democracy and other demotic polities derive their ability to exist from the (extremely rare) accomplishment of getting a critical mass of "citizens" to take a basically positive-sum approach to "others," to step out of the hard zero-sum, us/them dyad (Richard Landes).

Context: we've been frolicking through the history of philosophy, separating the starters from the non-starters, and we're actually still on the "philosophy" of Jesus. But one can hardly talk about Jesus without bringing in the Jews. If Jesus is the marketing arm of salvation history, the Jews of antiquity were deeply involved in research & development. 

Or, you could describe the same arc as proceeding from tribal to global, particular to universal. Frankly, you -- or God rather -- must begin with a tribe, because man himself begins with tribes. Put conversely, there were no non-tribal men when Abraham walked the earth. 

This is one of those books -- we're speaking of Can "The Whole World" Be Wrong? -- that is so heavily highlighted by yours truly, that it's difficult to know where to begin. I can't just reprint the whole thing. There are rules. 

But one of my points is that those of us who grew up in a Judeo-Christian civilization have no idea how weird -- or W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) -- we are. And I was thinking about this before I read this book, which makes it even weirder, albeit in a different way. 

Those of us who grew up in such a civic culture, dedicated to these positive-sum strategies, tend to take them as axiomatic.

Mistakenly.

I blame the Jews. As does Landes:

[O]ne finds a remarkable overlap with Jewish (biblical and rabbinic) values on the one hand, and modern liberal thought, on the other.

NOT with illiberal progressive thought, which is a denial or inversion or perversion of our Judeo-Christian tradition. 

For example, what could be more perverse than arguing that From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free, when our (Judeo-Christian) concept of freedom is at antipodes to the premodern understanding of the Hamacidal savages? 

Before Abraham was, I AM. Nevertheless, what is first in intent is last in execution, so chronologically, Abraham is first:

Abraham and his descendants are given a task that, when successful, results in all the nations of the earth being blessed (ibid.). 

The Bible reminds us that Whoever blesses Israel will be blessed, and whoever curses Israel will be cursed. Big time, if we consider what a curse it would be to have to live in one of those Shiitehole countries where the Sunni don't shine -- which we can recognize with a glance at the world freedom index. Israel is free, and they are attempting to free Gaza from premodern tyranny. But no good deed goes unpunished by the left.

The descendants of Abraham are commanded to pursue high levels of positive-sum behavior regardless of whether those they deal with are trustworthy, even at the cost of suffering a great deal from those who abuse the vulnerabilities that entails (ibid.).

And here we are. 

Wait -- aren't Muslims descendants of Abraham too? Yes, but the line apparently split between Isaac and Ishmael. At any rate, someone dropped the ball, and I don't have time to research it. But Joyce certainly did. It's a motif that runs throughout Finnegans Wake:

Earwicker and his wife have two sons, called in their symbolic aspect Shem and Shaun.... They are the carriers of a great Brother Battle theme that throbs throughout the entire work.... [and] represent a subordinate, exclusively masculine battle polarity which is basic to all of history (Campbell).

I suppose it begins even earlier, with Cain and Abel. But let's focus.

Yesterday's post ended with the observation that an adequate theory of psycho-social evolution has yet to be constructed. So, we need to do something about that. 

For Landes, the development of a positive-sum orientation is a clear evolutionary advance over a negative-sum one, although the latter is a kind of default position that is baked into our genetic makeup. For those of us in the Judeo-Christian stream, things like tribalism, xenophobia, and racism are totally unacceptable. 

And yet, in earlier periods of human history, and for millennia longer than any modern cosmopolitan experiment, the basic structure of social reality (i.e., survival) revolved around a sharp dichotomy between us (band, clan, village, tribe), on whom we depend, and others (strangers) whom we, on principle, mistrust, oppose, even plunder, to survive (ibid.).  

Again, these latter are the default setting, although some of us move on from primitive identity politics. However, those of us who do leave tribalism behind imagine that other cultures have similarly transcended this modality -- somewhat like a bad case of psychohistorical Dunning Kruger.

[W]hat some of us contemptuously dismiss as a xenophobia, has been the overriding and necessary norm for most of the 150 millennia of human experience: "moral tribalism" (Landes). 

In this deeper evolutionary context, you might say that Hamas is totally normal, and that we are the historical freaks. So, let your freak flag fly:

To be continued... 

47 Minutes of Barbarous Tradition

Drawing together the loose threads of yesterday's wooly offering, what I'm trying to say is that our civilization has been so transformed as a result of 2,000 years of conditioning by Christian values, that we may no longer recognize the strangeness of the original message. 

Rather, we take our extremely unusual values for granted, and no longer recognize the messenger. The transformation has been so thorough that many have become deaf to the words of the founder. 

"Imagining our values universal, we can't see just how rare" they are, says Landes. It's why idiots everywhere call for a "two state solution" to the problems of the Middle East, failing to recognize the premodern mentality and value system that undergirds and motivates a civilization untouched by Judeo-Christian values. They are not like us, sorry to say. They are very much in need of the message our own elites have forgotten.

Which is ironic, because it is the diversity crowd that insists the barbarians "want the same things we want," when they actually want the opposite. I'm the one who believes in diversity (which is not the same as endorsing it). It's easy: all you have to do is listen to what they actually say. You can also watch what they do, but then it's too late, as Israel found out on October 7.

A related point is that premodern and postmodern mentalities converge, because both are un- or anti-Christian. And be careful what you wish for -- especially progressive Jews who are finding out the hard way what their secular -- and anti-Jewish -- ideologies have wrought, as in, My God, what have I done?

It's ironic too that the left pretends to believe in the science of evolution, only from the neck down. Multiculturalism teaches that no people or culture are more evolved than any other, except for MAGA voters, who are at the bottom.

Me too vote Republican! -- although I despise them only slightly less than Democrats.

In the spirit of diversity, let's investigate the premodern mindset. That's the subject of chapter five of Landes' Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad. 

By the way, the short answer to the question posed in the title is Yup. A shorter answer is Ha! -- the hollow and bitter kind. 

The whole chapter is flooding me with memories of another chapter in my own life -- this being the early '90s -- when I was a self-styled psychohistorian. 

Come to think of it, I've never fully reconciled that life chapter with the present one, so perhaps this is the opportunity to do so. Back then I was a Man of the Left, and would have -- like any progressive -- placed my retrograde beliefs at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy. Ha! -- the more-than-slightly embarrassed kind.

I was even on the editorial board of the Journal of Psychohistory, and for all I know, may still be. The founder of the journal was a nice man named Lloyd deMause. Sorry to hear that he has passed, but 88 years is a good run. 

Let's learn something. I don't know if it's still something, but in the words of Jordan Peterson, it's certainly not nothing. 

In the 1970s, DeMause began conceiving of psychohistory, a field of study of the psychological motivations of historical events, and their associated patterns of behavior. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations -- past and present -- by analyzing events in childhood and the family, especially child abuse.

His approach didn't make anyone happy, neither proper historians nor neo-Marxist ideologues, since it applied theories of psychological development to cultures, meaning that some cultures are objectively more evolved than others, and We Can't Have That.

The question is, where does the Arab-Muslim Middle East fall on this spectrum? With the help of Landes, we're about to find out, good and hard. 

For deMause, everything comes down to humane parenting, which is certainly part of the puzzle, but this turns out to be too reductionistic if we exclude other critical factors such as genetics. For example, I myself could scarcely be a more humane parent, but my 18 year old son is more than a tad neurotic. Just born that way, I guess. Like his father, come to think of it.

Psychohistorians "suggest that social behavior such as crime and war may be a self-destructive re-enactment of earlier abuse and neglect; that unconscious flashbacks to early fears and destructive parenting could dominate individual and social behavior," and they're not wrong. But nowadays I would again say that this can only be a piece of the puzzle. Cultures are complex, multifactorial, and overdetermined. 

Nevertheless, Golda Meir was certainly not wrong to say that peace will come to the Middle East when Palestinians love their children as much as they hate the Jews -- you know, instead of using their children as suicide bombers and human shields. 

It's a small thing to ask, but of course, we've been conditioned by those three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, rather than 1,413 years of (fill in the blank) tradition, from Mohammad to Hamas. Say what you want about the latter tradition, but it's different from ours, and we ought to respect the difference.

Psychohistorians accuse most anthropologists and ethnologists of being apologists for incest, infanticide, cannibalism, and child sacrifice.... Some of the practices which mainstream anthropologists apologize for (e.g., sacrificial rituals) may result from psychosis, dissociation, and magical thinking.

Are they wrong?!

I haven't seen the 47 minute video of grotesque Hamasities, but I don't have to. The Palestinians give infanticide, child sacrifice, psychosis, dissociation, and magical thinking a bad name.

But let's get back to Landes. To repeat what was said at the end of yesterday's post, "Perhaps the most difficult thing for Westerners, raised in a positive-sum culture" to appreciate "are the dynamics of cultures that embrace zero-sum values" (Landes).

Conversely, we Christians are all about positive-sum values. Jews are commanded to love the stranger, but Jesus sees and raises the ante, asking us to go so far as to love our enemies, and how absurd is that? 

Nevertheless, that's a prime directive, and we see its entailments everywhere in our culture, from tolerance of different points of view, to respect for victims, to the innate dignity of the poor and marginalized.

Conversely, a zero-sum world is divided into "us and a hostile them." I see that Landes in fact cites an old school psychohistorian, Eli Sagan, whose book I once reviewed, and with whom I even carried on a correspondence. Sagan referred to the "paranoid imperative," which is rule or be ruled, and not in a nice way. "In a zero-sum world, one cannot win without the other losing" (Landes). 

Say, I wonder if I kept any of those old letters from Sagan? Yup. Here's one from 1994, which I haven't looked at since:

I am in total agreement with you that an adequate theory of psycho-social evolution has yet to be constructed. The very first consideration, I feel, is to see that the development of society is more complicated than the development of the psyche, simply because society is more complicated than the psyche. 

Although I still believe that psychic development is the energy and the "engine of history," it is a mistake to feel that society is reducible to psychic dimensions, the attempt at which is psychic reductionism. 

Is he wrong?

An adequate theory of psycho-social evolution. We're still working on it, and will resume the work tomorrow.

Wake Up, For the Kingdom of Meaning Is At Hand

Of course, Jesus is not a (mere) philosopher, but nor is he not a philosopher. I suppose he is philosophy itself, both the wisdom (sophia) and the love (philos), and the love of wisdom. Not to mention the wisdom of love, I suppose. 

But that's not my point, except to say that there aren't many philosophical non-starters worth refuting between Aristotle and Augustine. Why waste our time with the cynics, the skeptics, and the epicureans? The stoics are sound, but all the good bits were yoinked and assimilated into early Christianity by contemplatives such as Origen, Evagrius, and Maximus.

So Jesus it is, but from what we hope will be an angle that is both timely and relevant. As usual, nothing is worked out beforehand, rather, it's just an idea for an idea. Or two ideas, rather.

The first idea occurred to me during a long walk. I was thinking to myself about how ineffective it is to confront some random stranger by telling him he's a sinner and needs to repent right now. People need the truth as much as ever, but perhaps there's a better way of going about it.

Then I thought about the Ten Commandments. I'm just a regular guy, and yet, it isn't remotely difficult for me to avoid, oh, murder, idolatry, stealing, bearing false witness, etc. So if someone tells me I need to stop my sinnin' ways, that may not be the best way of going about it.

The problem here is that I and millions of other civilized members of Christendom have so assimilated the Christian message that we may no longer feel ourselves to be in need of it. For we are already the end-product of a couple thousand years of cultural leavening. 

Pursuing this line of thought, I then wondered what people are most in need of these days. We are constantly told about the crisis of mental health, especially among the young. And what is the nature of this crisis? It antedates the current crisis, and has actually been growing for over a century. 

Let's call it the crisis of meaning, or of identity and purpose, AKA cosmic alienation. It was first diagnosed by Nitetzsche (or rather, perhaps he was the disease he diagnosed), but he had little influence at the time; it was later belaborated by various existentialists before the postmodernists came along and destroyed any possibility of meaning besides raw power. And ate all our steak. 

And here we are. 

When a person is clinically depressed, life seems meaningless. But if life is truly meaningless, how could this not provoke depression? Yes, you could simply be an idiot and not care. Or, one can always turn to drugs, or ideology, or political activism. These converge with what are known as the manic defenses,

the tendency, when presented with uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, to distract the conscious mind either with a flurry of activity, or with the opposite thoughts or feelings. 

A general example of the manic defense is the person who spends all her time rushing around from one task to the next, unable to tolerate even short stretches of inactivity. For such a person, even leisure time consists of a series of discrete, programmed activities that she must submit to in order to tick off from an actual or mental list. 

Anyway, if I'm Jesus today, instead of leading with the sin business, I might say something like Wake up, for the Kingdom of Meaning is at hand. This would perk up my ears and make me curious. Oh? Tell me more.

Then I remembered John Paul's first encyclical, the central theme of which is nothing less than

the centrality of Jesus Christ in human history and as the answer to the human search for meaning and identity. [It] was a reflection on the situation of humanity in the mid-twentieth century that constantly returned to Christ as the true meaning of humanity, the one who reveals us to ourselves. Redemptor Hominis takes up this theme and develops it as the charter of John Paul II’s pontificate. 

So, it seems that the Whole Point of both the encyclical and of John Paul's pontificate was to address this crisis of meaning -- as if to say what we said above: Wake up, for the Kingdom of Meaning is at hand.

Then my walk ended and I settled back in the sanityreum for some *totally unrelated* reading, chapter five of Richard Landes' Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, entitled The Premodern Mindset: Zero-Sum Honor, and it all came together, or rather, came full circle.

I know what you're thinking:

But hear me out: postmodern and premodern converge in what we are seeing on our streets, newsrooms, and university campuses, especially among the alienated young with skulls full of indoctrination.

I should probably save the details for the next post, but let's lay some groundwork. Landes writes that "Perhaps the most difficult thing for Westerners, raised in a positive-sum culture" to appreciate "are the dynamics of cultures that embrace zero-sum values."

Now, Christ must be the first and last word in positive-sum values (this is me talking, not Landes). 

To be continued...