And now for something
completely different –
I'm posting this in order
to archive it in an at least semi-permanent way. It's an excerpt
from a very long letter written by a student of philosophy and
theology to a friend, with the stated goal of clarifying “the most
fundamental principles”. He cautions that “since I wrote a very
broad outline of everything, I must excuse myself for, as you say,
'being very concentrated while still very meager in its coverage of
everything'”, and adds that “the prime aspects are nature,
authority, and truth”.
“Also, as you read this,
you will see how, in regard to the [Catholic] Church, I agree or
apply to it an expression of Chesterton regarding things in general:
that any that are worth doing are worth doing badly. If this holds
true for homemade music, art, and cooking, how much more if the
Church really is what it claims to be and is doing what it claims to
do. Then one could claim it to be worth a multitude of human errors,
sins, etc. on the part of the weak men who steward it, especially
since without it all the men would be far worse and we'd be without
its effects. Of course, one must believe in the Church to believe
this...”
There follows brief
discussion of things such as politics, centralization of power,
multinational corporations, banks, economics, medicine, and
globalization, as examples of what are called, in Thomistic terms,
“The Accidentals”. The writer says “I want to back up and view
the whole diseased situation in its historical precedents, and in
principle.”
So, to get to the heart of
the matter, here is the essay – and those who have read any of St.
Thomas Aquinas will recognize some of the terminology and concepts.
Overall, it's what I would call a “deep dive” into the
fundamental issues of our time, and their historical, theological,
and philosophical subtext.
To use a mixed metaphor –
wade in, and take one bite at a time.
--------------- O
----------------
The
Essentials,
a.k.a. what I think might be part of the general problem:
So,
where should I start? Well, you mentioned that you read Ayn Rand,
who, as I’ve heard, is at least partially Aristotelian and,
consequently, emphasizes the natures of things. (BTW, if I pull off
this argument, I’m still not taking time to demonstrate each point
because each one could be another letter [or a book].) Now, without
going into deep philosophical descriptions, we can say that something
has a unique nature if it is a coherent reality (whole) with a stable
essential character that resists change regardless of accidental
changes; although certain accidental changes accumulated can give
rise to a substantial change that produces (or is) a radical
transformation that creates either fusion, reconfiguration, or
disintegration. [I’m assuming that so much of all this is old news
for both of us, but I must run the basics through my head before the
consequences.] [No desire to be “teachy” here.]
Now,
the good for a given whole, from a sheep to a man, is what is
necessary for its ideal fulfillment, i.e. of its end or
purpose. Since without a proper end or purpose, the truth of
a nature is an incoherent idea, since a nature’s configuration
defines an end, without which everything goes, since nothing would
have any basis for claiming natural or moral rights, i.e. the
goods necessary for the fulfillment of a now non-existent end or
purpose. Thus, the truth, or better, The True, is the nature
of each and the whole of things as they are. The Good is the
end of each and the whole of things. The Beautiful if the
fittingly ordered state of each, several, and the whole of things.
The subsidiary portions, obviously, or intermediate ones, are truths,
goods, and beautiful parts; each group only being fittingly named
insofar as it flows from and leads to one or all of the so-called
transcendentals: The Good, The etc.
Now
from several ancient moral and philosophical traditions [note how
this is quite easily a non-divine-revelation-based argument, but one
perceivable by man’s reason and heart] we may gather similar
conclusions; namely, that in man’s case, if we’re wise enough, we
learn that his ability to know first principles, to deduce deep
understanding of the universe in a way that infinitely surpasses all
other material beings [infinite: because if you stack up an infinite
number of non-humans, you will never get the most basic rational
insight of the most ordinary man], and to seek ends and purposes far
beyond any utilitarian or purely material goal, demonstrates beyond
reasonable doubt that the good, true, and beautiful which he can seek
and know are a world away from power, honor, riches, or pleasure; in
each case, man can sacrifice without rational contradiction each of
these lesser goods for whose that are better = fulfilling his
nature in a higher = nobler way, i.e. in fulfillment of the
capacities of intellect rather than his senses and appetites.
By
sacrifice, I don’t mean he ought to do away with them, but only
that he is capable of putting them aside.
Most
men noticed that, whereas animals seek the goods proper to their more
limited ends, which even at their height, basically amount to
physically pleasurable goods, man was able to refrain in a
non-determined freely willing way either from goods of the physical
part of his nature solely, or also those of his spiritual part.
These
spiritual goods included the contemplation of the nature of
the whole universe working in harmonious unity; his own nature, and
the highest limits of its potential; and the identity of the
necessary sufficient cause of the intelligently ordered, beautiful,
and thus rationally coherent universe. Indeed, Plato & Aristotle
both rejected the insult to man’s reason which was the mythology of
the multiple gods, usually little more than glorified humans with
superpowers; some even originally human. It was clearly absurd that
there was more than one, that they were contingent and humanoid, and
that they were subject to change and imperfections and even wounds.
None of this was remotely fitting or possible for the One who, to be
called God, had to stand outside contingent matter which was always
subject to other causes, outside of change and thus time, and who
would have to be the source of what was, and the ordering principle:
quite literally, the source of all truth & beauty and thus
goodness.
Now,
going on , since I must restrain my love of all these topics in order
not to leave you with a thesis instead of a letter.
So,
let’s see… Given this aforementioned freedom of man, it was
quickly realized that if men went the path of their lower appetites,
they got addicted/habituated to those types of goods having priority;
and the reverse was true for the higher goods. Internal disorder,
i.e., the rule of the lower powers over the higher was realized to be
the major factor. Virtue was proposed as a right-ordering of these
powers, and man was presented with the choice between moral order in
justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude; or denying the
fulfillment of his nature, negating his proper, higher end by turning
to baser satisfactions in isolation.
As
you know this all resulted in a flowering of the roots of all the
sciences, initiated, by Aristotle himself, with the support of his
adventurous alumnus, Alexander. Not that Thales and his colleagues
hadn’t been doing any exploring, but they and others were each
trying to identify various elements or material occurrences with a
universal, simplistic, and quite insufficient material cause. Of
course, their inquiries remain admirable first attempts and are
enjoyable reading. Now, to the learned few at least, material beings
were considered rationally intelligible, the result of formal
principles acting upon matter which, though ever changing, expressed
the forms from which it took its various individual species, each
having a proper nature & thus proper goods for it, and a definite
right order proper to it which, if well expressed, was its proper
beauty.
Thus,
science had rationality beyond the identification of mere
appearances. Yet, the ancients were still highly speculative in
their approach. This sometimes led to using the wrong natural
principle for an explanation without sufficient experiment, such as
the principle of gravity or unequal weights which Galileo corrected.
They didn’t worry too much about this because the most enjoyable
and highest knowledge lay in the principles themselves and the region
of the immaterial/spiritual substances hat made material existence
rationally possible, metaphysics [not, of course to be confused with
the frequent esoteric connotation]. Thus, science took on its
classical definition as “an organized body of knowledge founded
upon fundamental rational principles [contradiction, sufficient
reason, excluded middle, identity, etc.], and productive of knowledge
of the causes of things”.
Fast
forward to the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire. Why
did the Church bother to preserve scientific knowledge when the world
was collapsing? Why did generations of monks spend lifetimes copying
rare, rescued manuscripts? Very often they were, at least at the
beginning, quite ignorant of what they were copying out. It wasn’t
often for immediate use. The explosion of scientific interest, and
the widespread growth of experimentation was so fervent and rapid
because it was fueled by the desire to understand every part of the
world better, in order to understand the Scriptures better, in order
to understand God’s revelation of Himself in the world as indicated
in the Scriptures; and especially (and here we must speak of
Christianity on its own terms if we are to understand it) as
manifested in the words and deeds of the incarnated second Person of
the triune God. [Please excuse my throwing in a divine mystery
without accompanying explanations for now. Though, if you ever wish,
I’ll write you an intro to Christianity on its own terms. That
would be fun!]
This
motivation created a fairly sacred regard for truth of all kinds, in
whatever subject it could be found. Wherever a church was built, a
school often followed, because, for men to be fully men, they needed,
as Aristotle had said, to know first the truths of things more
knowable to us, closer to us, in order to rise by means of them to
things more knowable in themselves, more purely intelligible, but
more remote. Unlike the ancients, the Medievals had no desire to
remain speculative, and they immersed themselves in concrete
experimentation. The roots of the sciences, crowned by philosophy,
were relaid. Also, let it be noted, methodical doubt that forced
reason to recheck itself was in full use by the Scholastics, as can
be seen in such works as the Summa Contra Gentiles of Aquinas.
In
contrast to the ancients, they believed in equal human dignity on
account of God’s equal love of all men, and the same origin of all
men in the first parents. At the same time, they still shared the
principle that natures had a right to their fulfillment, and, though
men were uniquely free to reject the proper goods of their nature,
absolutely speaking, such a rejection should be prohibited and made
up for. For Aristotle, someone who from ignorance or habituation
could not understand the proper goods of their nature, needed to be
ruled and even enslaved in order to assure their better fulfillment.
Truth had all the rights, and error none; and no one had a right to
be wrong, let alone teach others the same.
We
have an excellent example of what was meant: in our care of the
mentally ill or retarded. We don’t give them a right to be
excessively incorrect about their proper goods, and harm themselves.
We even enslave them against their will; sometimes they even request
enslavement, i.e. the substitution of their disordered faculties for
those of another, even by force. Addditionally, we attempt to
immerse them in a rightly ordered (beautiful)
environment in order to, if possible, ease their faculties back to
reality. And we do all this simply for their rudimentary well being.
But the ancient philosophers and Medievals considered the knowledge
of the existence of natures, their proper ends, their purposes as
determined by their intelligent design, and, most especially, man’s
proper end and his rights to the material & immaterial goods
necessary to attain it; especially knowledge, to be infinitely more
crucial; especially since he only had one life to get it right.
This
was a certainty that there were the most essential, really real
things in front of us. The reality of sense knowledge wasn’t taken
for granted in the sense that it would have had to have been proven;
rather, the senses worked, because they were made to convey
information to the intellect which was for the purpose of
understanding sensory data and the realities it showed and implied.
Everything worked, and everything was real. The lack of
artificial environments was of constant assistance to those men, who
were reminded that the Sun was hot, grass was green, gravity is
unforgiving, & we all die, and then what? This was true realism,
as opposed to the agnostic cynic who says, “look… I’m just a
realist”, and means, rather crudely, that day-to-day survival is
all there is.
Now,
these truths had almost never before been enough to persuade rulers
in almost any culture to give them priority over the typical
motivations for obtaining power & honor. What had to come first
was the successful conversion of successive barbarian kingdoms to
Christianity, after which, even the rulers, certain of having an
immortal soul, were more easily, but not always, convinced to their
obligations for their own good and then that of others. The Church
taught them that they only had true authority if they conformed
themselves sufficiently to nature’s demands in ensuring the proper
development of their citizens, protected and not dominated by their
arms. Authority, from the Latin auctor, had to flow from a
bond with the origin of things, and thus their nature &
proper goods. Aquinas demonstrated that a law that broke with
nature, which break renders it unjust, was not a law at all, because
of no authority. Even and especially the men directing the Church on
earth, who were supposed to be the models of obedience to the truth,
had no right to change it. (Of course, this deals with the question
of divine revelation, which must be for a different letter.)
All
the same, authority was not power, and was strictly dependent on and
found its limits in obedience to a ruler’s duty for his people;
outside that duty, a ruler had no authority, and, all the while, he
had to respect the other forms of natural authority so long as they
were properly exercised, such as that of parents in their families,
rulers of other countries, and the ministers of religion. Did men
habituated to power and honor and wealth and all the pleasure it all
brings easily raise their minds and hearts to these truths? Not
without great struggles or a very good education; sometimes still
not.
The
basis of culture, as Josef Pieper beautifully argues, was leisure,
i.e. it was the goal; leisure strictly speaking. Art, music, poetry,
literature were not only goods in themselves (in so far, however, as
they also were conformed to the truth, & order & thus beauty,
and thus were sources of authority themselves), but, most
importantly, they were tools of contemplation by which man wondered
at, and explored, and grasped the truth of things. As with all
fruits of contemplation, they became tools of instruction for others
and not simply methods of experiencing refined pleasures. Again,
Aquinas, one of the greatest philosophers and theologians of the
ages, and speaking for the high Middle Ages, concludes: “Nothing
is in the intellect which isn’t first in the senses.” Man, body
and soul, and only fulfilled, i.e. happy (since happiness was not
random pleasure but true fulfillment), had to use both aspects of his
nature to reach the goal. Pleasure was a reaction to any desirable
good, and was always notoriously misleading; the only certain path
was to know the truth and follow it. In this was, all that
was materially productive or useful in that basic sense was never an
end in itself, even scientific knowledge, which was easily capable of
being relegated to an entirely non-contemplative sphere by
considering it only for the sake of material progress, i.e.
technology, as if progress were an end in itself.
Power,
also, without authority was limitless in its application since
obligation based in truth is its only reasonable boundary. Otherwise
power is, as usual, simply the tool of the will of the strongest, or
it makes up endless self-defined obligations which impel it,
“regrettably”, to extend its jurisdiction & penetration.
I
should briefly note, to wrap up this development, that the Church
would have had no power at all if its authority had not been almost
universally recognized. Its greatest spread occurred, in fact, after
the fall of the [Roman] Empire; it could not be spread by power but
had to convince men’s minds & hearts. So how? Part of the
answer is too theological for this argument. But something can be
said. Already men of all past ages had been rationally
certain of the necessity of a spiritual existence after bodily death,
not only because the soul could not be intelligibly subject to decay,
but because a process of reward and punishment was a rational
imperative which alone rendered coherent the simultaneous existence
of an innate human moral intuition so universal that even children
could intuit principles of justice; and, of unredressed moral evils
which clearly opposed fundamental natural principles that had their
origin necessarily in the uncreated intelligence that was their
source.
I
say all this to emphasize that, not only did it seem more rational,
more coherent to believe in the afterlife, but its denial rendered
the whole world as known by experience absurd, i.e. an ordered whole
that, absurdly, had no justification or explanation. The only
rational conclusion was body & soul, nature &
obligation, & happiness only in a rational coherent end.
Now,
in brief, what did the Church add? The divine revelation it
claimed and for which it offered proofs changed the goal entirely,
raising it far higher than the most ambitious had dared, higher than
reason could have ever induced or deduced. Such were its claims that
a direct revelation from God was strictly necessary to support them,
i.e. to be their source. Namely, that God was a substantial union of
three essentially identical Persons [Sorry, more mysteries]; that man
had initially rejected God, breaking with his own nature, and
creating a permanent imbalance in it which inclined him toward
disordered desires, evil. Moreover, that man’s only hope lay in a
process of purgative reordering toward God as Truth, Goodness, &
Beauty Himself; a process only possible by divine helps in the soul.
That God so loved creation that He himself entered into it and
adopted men into the intimate life of the Persons of God. That He
took on human nature to bear witness to the truth of it all and to
perform a profound act of humility, obedience, & love, as a man,
toward God. That, by this act of His life and death, he also set an
example of the purification and love to be achieved.
Now,
all of this seems hardly able to win out over men’s ordinary
desires, let alone enable them to suffer egregious tortures and death
for its sake. But so it was. And the careful records of the Roman
trials and executions bear witness to it along with accounts of
marvelous phenomena that occurred during many of the same, i.e.
miracles, phenomena far beyond any possible human capacity to effect.
The Church, as you may imagine, has been careful to double check
such things. In our own day, you can refer to the miracles of
Lourdes, France, and similar places, all confirmed by boards of
agnostic or even atheist doctors. Why mention miracles? Because the
whole history of the spread of the faith is full of them. Rationally
speaking, men and women wouldn’t have abandoned royal kingdoms,
great wealth, sensual pleasures, family, etc. for centuries in order
to follow a slightly convincing set of esoteric theories. And the
whole of the Western world converted. Culturally, this meant that,
despite the ever present failings and malice or at least sinful
concupiscence in men, the whole order of the new society was largely
founded on and shaped by a certain hope, i.e. a hope that was
certain, one pursued not only by the practice of the natural virtues,
but by virtues called supernatural or Christian, since their modes
and ends were so far elevated above the noblest morals of the past
that it was firmly held that divine assistance in the soul was
necessary to practice them. Thus, their faith and hope were also
raised above all naturally knowable and realizable modes and ends;
not in earthly happiness and perfection, but in preparing to die
perfect in order to live with God. For the first time, a special
degree of temperance, mercy, justice, and charity appeared in the
world, forever changing what was meant by these old words.
All
of this was constantly corroborated by experience; not the mysteries
of faith, but that the world, seen through the eyes of reason
enlightened and elevated far above its capacity for understanding and
wisdom by faith [not rendered obsolete and deceptive by it:
Protestants and Lutherans, esp.], became quite reasonable and not at
all absurd, even in regard to suffering [cf. Albert Camus, The
Rebel]. Under these conditions alone, the universe seemed
intelligible and full of love and hope, and metaphysical rebellion
was erroneous.
By
the way, men had a very realistic expectation of priests and
bishops. They knew they were men, and therefore not sinless nor
without disordered inclinations; but the knowledge they passed down,
and the divine helps that they stewarded were too important to
foolishly reject on the basis of their personal habits or failings.
Just as one wouldn’t reasonably reject the laws due to corrupt
judges and teachers, or stop eating because your local grocer was a
perverse man (or a grosser man!).
OK,
deep breath… So why write the past 9 pages? Because, according to
this argument, the Western culture -- Renaissance to modernity -- is,
despite the overweening claims of many of its members to absolute
autonomy with no debt to the past, and no reason to look to it for a
solution to its woes, now insoluble and unsolvable per said
self-entrapping claim above, is not to be understood as a monstrously
incoherent riddle sprung up ex nihilo (or a priori), but rather as
what-in-the-world happened to the culture from the Renaissance on to
render everything unreasonable, absurd, and therefore steeped in
agnostic darkness and its consequences. One might call it a journey
from the most real and reasonable to the least real and reasonable
explanation of the world; or the most real experience of the nature
of things, to the most artificial, alienated non-experience of things
which cannot but give rise to false ideas about almost everything
relevant. Of course, often, the most reasonable explanation is
considered these days only another way to say the most scientifically
validated one by microscope, telescope, or physics engine, as if
understanding was limited to man’s material theories. So, if I
explain the following even as briefly as the aforesaid, I will double
this short argument and perhaps test the tolerance of your interest
in any point I might be making. I might mention a few figures, but I
will attempt to make due with general trends of thought and general
consequences.
Some
have called this movement a reverse of the Socratic turn, so that,
once one has seen the really real nature of things, one turns back
into the cave and ends up knowing nothing but one’s thoughts about
images of the real. I place the beginning at the Greco-Roman revival
So enamored did so many become with it all, especially with its
idealized portrayals of man intellectually and physically, that a
turn away from man as authentically understood within his proper
context, within the nature of the world, of man’s origin and end
and obligations, etc., began to occur. Even Frank Lloyd Wright, a
secular humanist who could only conclude man’s end as in the
triumph of his own natural perfection, restricted strictly to earth;
even he had to admit that this turn was disastrous for architectural
authenticity containing a true expression of man. He insightfully
calls the Renaissance “the setting Sun all Europe mistook for
dawn”. I might need to resort to bullet points or numbers here;
and then, if you find anything worth expatiating, let me know.
The advantage in all future history is that the thoughts of the great
moderns often are a perfecting of the common thought or implicit
assumptions of the era; hemlock goes into disuse for the most part,
and is replaced with incense for the newest demigod.
1.
So, man’s thought turns in on itself, begins to analyze itself,
starts to ignore conclusions with natural wholes as its premises,
and, most catastrophically, begins to doubt the senses as if, because
there’s more than meets the eye, what meets the eye is a deceiver,
or the eye is a deceiver. Notably, scientists didn’t and couldn’t
adapt this radical skepticism of experience upon which they depend
essentially, desiring only to make arranged experiences in which as
many relevant factors as possible are understood. Indeed, the French
have but one word for a normal and a scientific experience or
experiment. Alas, many philosophers, by remaining in their
heads and purposely turned away from the objects of experience,
became convinced that they could coherently claim notions as more
certain if they seemed more to originate in the mind even if they
contradicted the overwhelmingly concrete truths of experience, such
that one could claim that water was not truly or couldn’t be known
to be wet, that substances couldn’t be known, and that cause and
effect could never be concluded from observation; all this while
having to work with daily living in which it was all quite manifest
with no effort at all. They forgot that the raw experience of a
child is prereflective, that one learns of “self” from contrast
with “other than self”, and that all ideas are derived in
relation to and dependent on experience which has never yet refuted
its own existence. These ideas were not above reason, but rather
refuted its foundations.
2.
The result was a massive mess of contradiction, since the desire for
knowledge persisted, knowledge and its benefits, even while they
rapidly dissolved their certainties with such improbable doubts.
Their solution was to make the mind the judge of nature’s reality
vs. reality the arbiter of the mind’s reasonableness. To
facilitate this, enamored by new developments in math and mechanics,
they refused to see coherent substances with their own essential
natures any longer. They wanted to claim that all any object could
be known as, was a machine with essentially disconnected parts which
said nothing about a greater whole. This, of course, disregarded
that anyone who sees a machine immediately is in contact with the
entire context which its existence demands: knowledge, purpose, an
intelligence higher than the machine (since it didn’t arise from a
peat bog, be that peat bog ever so ancient). But it also stripped
everything of any of its reality that couldn’t be measured or
weighed, etc.
3.
Notably, the advantage to denying nature for many was the necessary
denial of obligation along with it; as it was clear, as shown before,
that obligation is wholly derived from natures and the design or
intent behind them. This, matched with the cheapening, or rather
destruction, of the reasonable notion of faith by the Reformation,
which made it anti-rational and guided by personal interpretation,
caused a widespread throwing away of morality on a huge scale united
with a rejection of moral and political authority as a whole. Thus,
the revolutions from France even to Russia.
Although
you know so much of this, I’m enjoying laying it all out on the
table.
In
the midst of it all, Nietzsche wrote as the most honest acknowledger
of what was occurring. But he warned everyone that reason really did
gather all its knowledge from experience, and that, if reason was
right, then all the rational demands of nature were inescapably
obvious: God, morality, objective truth, etc. He even warned
scientists that any certainty of laws and order in things had to come
from a universally real source, and have a meaning. He knew the only
honest rejection had to be of all truth, and reason itself; and this
is what he chose, claiming an impossible standard for knowledge
sufficient to require a mandatory response in terms of those rational
demands. But, he was honest about the conclusions which followed
necessarily from such a rejection: namely, no certainty of truth,
spirit, nature, morals, thus no rights, thus no essential value of
anything, no meaning, no explanations, no purpose, practical
nihilism, absolute agnosticism. He was no atheist, but if God
couldn’t be deduced, then He might as well be dead to us, i.e. “God
is dead”. Only desires remained.
Modern
Consequences:
Well,
now, here we are at last, if I haven’t fatigued you with my
expositions, and driven you to warm yourself by the flames of my
burning thesis.
One
could go on for hours playing the game of
“match-a-modern-contradiction-to-a-metaphysical-error”. So…
ah… metaphysics, in the study of immaterial principles sense. So,
I will limit myself to a general picture and certain major headings.
There are so many factors, but a few basic types of
manifestations and people stand out. First, a rather
inadequate analogy…
The
more brilliant microbiologists teach that the moment a person dies
and loses the unifying agent of their whole makeup [which some would
call the soul], their body, though seemingly still integral,
immediately loses coherence, and most of all that was blood, tissue,
etc., becomes jigsaw puzzles of the elements and chemicals that made
it up, which, seen from a distance appear no different. To the
unmagnified evaluation, disintegration is only confirmed slowly and
in pieces, so that one part can have greatly decayed in one way while
seeming to retain wholeness in another. But, thankfully, I don’t
believe culture will ever be totally dead, since God, the soul,
nature doesn’t dissolve because we reject them (or it). Thus, the
modern era is one of extreme dissonance between what men consciously
believe and what their nature still cries out for. Some succeed in
stifling its voice, but the fortunate, even if ignorant of the truth,
are too sensitive to it to refuse to search thoroughly with a sincere
desire for reality and authenticity. Even those who glut their lower
nature on pleasure, power, honor, or wealth, in order to hush the
soul’s protests, are often driven to madness by the dissonance, by
far deeper and unknown desires; and some even end themselves in order
to stop the pain. Clearly, the truly insane are a different, matter,
of course.
People
1.
The pseudo- “Voltaires”: Those who realize at least
more, much more clearly what they think and what they are rejecting,
and thus no price is too high to stamp out the lies and fables and
naivety of those who still teach objective morals, principles,
absolutes, sources of authority, etc. they want to remake the world
in some form that might be able to exist while stripped of any
thought of nature and its consequences. E.g.:
a.
totalitarians,
b.
financial globalists,
c.
cynical corporate directors,
d.
ideologues of towering pride whose triumph would consist in seeing
their thoughts made into reality,
e.
truly dark souls for whom destruction as a form of refutation of the
real is their mode of metaphysical rebellion in the face of the
absurd,
f.
all the unknown ones who would like to be persons (a -> e) if
they had a chance.
Of
course, I’m sure that members of all these groups could be acting
in blindness, but the effects of their actions are often the same as
if they knew, since they are often promoting the destruction of all
that came before, for their own projects and ambitions, or ideas, or
pride.
2.
Members of the perennial philosophy, and thus also the perennial
theology: They understand, experience, and acknowledge, to a
greater or lesser extent, nature and its demands, i.e. the nature of
things, the need for sufficient reason, religion, virtue, minimal
moral legislation [i.e. at least some reasonable amount of it, not
simply for general peace, but to assist others to see the truth of
their nature]; natural rights [ones derived from and proper
to human nature].
By
the way, I consider each of these groups as requiring the proviso
that someone would belong, only to the extent that they truly live
predominantly according to its principles.
Here,
one might include (a) many ordinary persons, (b) most peaceful native
tribes, [c] members of religions that are not contradictory to
reason, (d) In a special way, the body of Official Catholic
teaching and those who truly follow it. [I’ve never found
any inconsistency at all between its teachings and all that nature
requires and implies]; (e) many simple farmers, (f) small children.
Here,
happiness is only in fulfillment of nature to one degree or another;
and peace is the tranquility of order in men’s souls, which alone
leads to lasting material peace.
3.
Sincere seekers of truth: Persons uninstructed in all this,
and raised in an environment fairly or even greatly alienated from it
who, whether through contact with nature (with the natural world),
philosophical or historical or other forms of reflective thought, or
even sudden insight or intuition amidst the shadowland of their life,
have grasped the reality of good & evil, of unchanging truths, of
objective beauty of goodness. They realize there is a bigger picture
they never knew, and they set out earnestly to find it. Sometimes,
they even get sidetracked, alas, by the occult, non-religious
spiritualities, or irrational Eastern philosophies, and never find
what they were seeking. But, if they do find it, it changes their
lives.
4.
Hedonists & those insatiable for power and honor:
Usually totally blinded by their particular passion, they don’t
care at all about any picture. Any obstacle, though, to their
endless lust is an object of implacable hatred, regardless of any
analysis. The supreme law for themselves which they don’t allow to
others is “do what you will”; no thought for tomorrow but their
own triumph.
5.
Cynical agnostics: “Look… I’m just a realist…”
Despair of truth, “live and let live” without challenging others;
3 square meals & sports channel or fine arts subscriptions or gym
or bar, and internet about caps their yearning for happiness.
Epitome or mundanity and indifference.
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OK,
my brief thoughts on societal contradictions flowing from the
modern dissonance.
1.
Public Education: A mess, because children of people, and
teachers, from all aforementioned types use it. It’s going to keep
blowing up.
Countertrend:
Healthy forms of home schooling, a flowering of private &
charter schools in those countries where education isn’t entirely
stolen by government.
2.
Law & Politics: The country writ small. On the one
hand, the ambitious, destroying ever more natural freedoms; on the
other, citizens demanding all sorts of random “rights” based on
vastly different ideas of freedom and happiness that have no
objective basis in natural goods flowing from necessity from natural
makeup. Whereas the founders, Masonic deists though they mostly
were, still had in mind “nature and nature’s God”, and
naturally consequent rights. But the fewer the people who
understand nature, the more “rights” will mean “what I can’t
or refuse not to have or do”, or “what I demand to be provided
for me”, or simply “what I feel like doing”.
3.
Poetica: I.e., all those ways in which man reaches
intuitively ahead of reason’s current understanding in order to
express experiences of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Of
course, often used also to bring out reason’s conclusions & to
teach truths.
Arts,
music, literature, poetry, etc.
Now
less and less about truth, goodness, and beauty. Radical
individualism [when not blatant deconstructionism] has greatly made
off with a large part, thus rendering that part unintelligible since
usually either an encoded depiction of the most particularly
subjective sensations or impressions or thoughts; or a studied
attempt to shatter the “imprisoning” intelligible structures of
the art form in order to free it for an amorphous, anarchistic
adulteration of it which rarely leaves it any objective identity.
This often gives rise to a ridiculous elitism and affectations of a
select few connoisseurs of these portions of art, music, etc., who
claim penetrating but incommunicable insight into the subjective
stream of consciousness of the artists.
4.
Science: In very large part engrossed by slavish commercial
or political research in which finding the “good facts” often
takes priority over discovering the true facts. Often used only to
confirm one unnatural agenda after another, or to make us buy things.
To
restate and summarize, once and for all, a central idea:
Everything is involved in a crisis of the understanding of nature.
Authority and all science, being so intimately united to nature and
its principles, which alone allow for objective induction and
deduction; they must be counterfeited the more nature is
misunderstood or denied. Such counterfeited doctrines can only be
maintained by force since they can’t hold up to experience or
argument. As you know and have written, it all becomes not just
doctrinal but dogmatic and quasi-religious since it has to rely on an
unnatural faith that, incoherently, must allow for rational
dissonance. Dialogue, as you well point out, becomes
increasingly impossible politically, scientifically, ethically,
religiously, philosophically, and historically; because rational
premises and evidence are increasingly absent.
4.5
Food & Medicine: If nature is unintelligibly arranged
without an innate purpose, etc., then, necessarily, the assumption
arises that anything man does to “improve” it according to his
intelligence is undeniably more intelligent. All this besides that a
naturally complex, irreducible, and effective plant medicine that
doesn’t work when stripped down and adulterated is intolerably
unpatentable and inexpensive.
1.5
Education (revisited): Note how, increasingly, leisurely
subjects originally meant to lead men to higher understandings of
truth, etc., are now entirely misunderstood and thence removed from
schools in favor of illiberal versions of math, science, etc. Even
history is suffering… interesting.
5.
Religion: Even many Catholics, lost in all the confusion,
think and act Protestant, or even agnostic! So no place is sacred in
the face of the massive cultural forgetfulness. As for other
religions, they have no future…
Buddhism:
In its pure form, not a religion (liturgical, God-centered), but a
spirituality. More frequently sought after in the West as persons,
believing quite rationally in spirit but not sure where else to turn
(especially not to the Protestants), look into it. Alas, it, like
the modern Western movement, is also a form of nature or world
denial, but a much more reasonable one. Instead of thinking
irrationally that mater is all there is without any basis, Buddhism
says “being other than matter must exist”, i.e. it is much more
real, and, in fact, the only non-deceptive real. Despite the very
solid insights into the greater fullness of being in spirit as
opposed to matter, it ultimately bypasses all the fundamental human
questions, even religion, by a self-negation of man, nature, our
faculties, and reason itself. Thus to be or not to be becomes an
absurd question. Buddha sought to escape suffering by escaping
desire, and now, to escape desire or contradiction, they seek total
abstraction from the real, even from the desire of truth. Because of
this attempt at negative contemplation, they’ve developed a
thoroughly ascetical method in which they wish even to negate thought
and consciousness.
In
the face of overwhelming indulgence, noise, and materialism in the
West, they present an attractively silent, recollected, simple, and
self-mastered exterior; but, alas, they admit their total agnosticism
and complaisance amid the rational contradictions of their beliefs.
So man finds his fulfillment of nature in a lack of any individual
existence in the hereafter. The greatest truth is that there is no
truth that is separate from falsehood, etc., etc. Dialogue, in any
constructive sense becomes impossible or meaningless here. At the
same time, they can present no evidence at all for their premises and
principles, and have to be content with playing absurdist mind games
with themselves in order to accustom their faculties to
simultaneously affirming mutually exclusive claims.
6.
Environment: Without a true answerability to the source and
designer of nature, without a grasp of its innate value, it all
becomes “stuff” for us to use that shouldn’t just be left
laying around doing nothing since it could bring us so much wealth
and power. And who can prove that wrong then? Same for
animals, same for human beings, cf. Nietzsche.
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Meanwhile:
Souls have a need for the infinite. Created for the enjoyment of
the source of all being, they either search it out or kill themselves
trying to fill that hole in their hearts by attempting to squeeze
infinite enjoyment out of the finite. An insatiable, irrational
effort: food, sex, money, power; they exhaust each respective faculty
and then shoot themselves or give up on happiness, truth etc. This
happens with knowledge too and anything which the animal or rational
desires take as objects per se
vs. means. The Sincere Searchers
feel drawn to moderation, intuiting that their real happiness lies
they-know-not-where but somewhere far higher. I will claim that we
in the religious life
live with a heartache
for what we know, in part,
that we are seeking (and what we believe with certain hope). And I
claim that we Catholics commune with the Source Himself,
or Themselves
(Trinity), of true peace.