Trump 2.0? Eh... not likely

OK folks, time for a reality check. Trump says he's running for president in 2024. Fine. Presumably he'll be running as a Republican. Fine. (I guess he could run as an independent – he might even get on the ticket!) But consider a few of the hurdles he will have to face. He can stage all the rallies he wants, but when it comes to “debates”, guess what – it's the party that decides who gets to participate, and the Republicans could simply refuse to let him in the door. That's number one. Then we have the primaries. Did you know that there is no requirement for primaries? It's not in the Constitution, or anywhere else. The party can decide to have a primary, or it can just skip primaries altogether and go right to the convention. Then there's the small matter of convention delegates and how they're selected. The state committees can simply refuse to send any pro-Trump delegates. And then, in the wildly improbable likelihood that Trump wins a plurality of votes in the convention, they can simply be declared null and void, and the convention can become “brokered” (formerly known as “the smoke-filled room”).

Now this, of course, is all predicated on the premise that high-ranking Republicans have... um... you know, those particular masculine anatomical parts, which they have demonstrated, over and over again, that they do not possess. But really now – does anyone actually expect Orange Man to rise again from the depths, like Godzilla, and take over the Republican Party again? Or for them to allow it to happen? This is, of course, the recurring nightmare of the Republican mainstream – not of the Democrats, note, despite all their wailing! They know it's a lost cause, but it's more fun to pretend it's not. (They've gotten so used to running the Fear Machine that they can't resist using it on themselves.) So all of the hand waving, running in circles, and nervous breakdowns in both parties are no more than theater (but if it keeps the MSM busy for 2 years that could be a good thing). The Republicans have had enough of show biz. They'll nominate some gray nonentity who will be certain to lose to Joe Biden (even if the latter is ruling from an oxygen tent at that point), and thus be able to return to their comfort zone of powerlessness.

(But – BTW – don't think that BLM and Antifa are going to take this sitting down. They are primed and ready for the next fight. Expect them to show up in force at any Trump event until this quixotic candidacy is terminated, either voluntarily or by force.)

Autism and Asperger Syndrome

The question arose as to whether one could, or should, label a certain individual "autistic".  Here are my thoughts on the matter.

Autism vs. Asperger Syndrome

I think this reflects an unfortunate problem with terminology. This is nothing new with the medical profession, which is always redefining ailments, sometimes for good reasons based on research and clinical observations, but sometimes with an agenda – typically having to do with things like research funding, medical insurance, certifications (of doctors, hospitals, medical schools), etc. – even politics. Everyone wants to “belong” – to be part of the “in group” – and medical professionals, being only human, are no different.

Autism:

It wasn't all that long ago (as recently as the 1960s, and maybe more recently) that “autism” described a well-known set of symptoms and conditions. It was typically diagnosed at an early age (pre-school or even infancy), and found more in boys than in girls for some reason (I don't think they've figured out that part of it yet – it probably has to do with differences in brain and neurological structures). Typical symptoms included inability to relate emotionally (and therefore socially) to others, including one's own parents... no signs of affection... minimal or no verbal communication... low threshold for over-stimulation (by lights, sounds, other people, activities, etc.)... what verbalization there was tended to be “flat”, i.e. uninflected or monotone... a tendency toward repetitive activity (concentrating on one thing for hours at a time)... physically passive in some cases, in other cases a tendency toward rapid, random and unfocused movements... basically just out of contact, in their own world much or all of the time. (Paradoxically, while not showing signs of obvious affection, some autistics can be physically “clingy”, which I take to be based on need for contact comfort.) (Think about it – if you don't understand the world and it doesn't understand you, some sort of physical comfort and security can be good.)

And this was – as one might imagine – a pretty easy condition to spot. The problem came not with diagnosis but with notions as to causality. For a long time, blame was placed on “cold, uncaring, non-nurturing” mothers – this has been debunked, fortunately, but it caused a lot of stress and heartache in many families. (If anything, there might have been some degree of causality in the other direction, i.e. the mother of an autistic child might have distanced herself to some degree as a matter of emotional defense, as if to say “if the child doesn't care about me (or anyone else) why should I care, or pretend to care, about him?” Thus, a way of avoiding or lessening chronic emotional stress and frustration.)

In terms of relating to the world, autistic people typically showed little or no competence, and therefore could never be left to their own devices for long, and certainly could never have been expected to live independently or make a living. So they always had to be cared for by others – and since they were incapable of showing much appreciation for that care, it could be a cause of frustration on the part of the caregivers.

But here's an interesting part. Some autistic individuals showed remarkable talents in certain very narrowly defined areas – especially music, and particularly piano playing. They could do things like hear a piece played on the radio or a record, and reproduce it perfectly on the piano after just one hearing. Some were also very good at certain mathematical operations, figuring out calendar dates, counting by just glancing at an array of objects, etc. – all having to do with numbers, you'll notice. Numbers in the basic sense, not concepts or theories or models, just plain numbers and things that had a mathematical basis. They may also show remarkable abilities in memorization – things like sequences of cards, phone books, train schedules, etc. So in that sense they (some, but not all) had extraordinary abilities in a very limited area, but when it came to everyday things not so much (being unable to dress themselves or perform any but the most rudimentary personal care actions, e.g.).

So this was the picture when it came to autism and autistic individuals – easy to spot, well-defined set of symptoms, incapable of independent living, and so on. And as to treatment, the best bet was always to find things that they would respond to, that would “wake them up”, so to speak – and let them spend time with those things, and not worry about the rest. And the condition, however it came about, was not amenable to cure – it was a fixed condition, basically, which would persist throughout adulthood.

Asperger Syndrome:

Now – somewhere along the line, someone decided that that substantial group of people who were, among other things, socially awkward, “shy”, over-sensitive to sounds and light, who avoided crowds (and other people in general, in some cases), who enjoyed finely-detailed activities and could concentrate on them for long periods of time, who tended to be socially isolated or prefer the company of others like themselves, who tended to be uncommunicative or, on the other extreme, talk people's ears off about some very narrow topic, who could be somewhat OCD – and so on – had a “syndrome” called Asperger Syndrome.

Now, this was all well and good, in that it, for one thing, provided a basis for understanding that there were people who were simply “that way”, and that while intensive therapy or interventions weren't generally called for, certain kinds of support and, if you will, “benign tolerance” would make life easier for everyone. The danger, however, was that once you define something as a “syndrome”, you, by implication, are saying that a person isn't “right”, or that they're handicapped in some way, or need help, etc. In other words, they're no longer on the same spectrum with “normal” people but need to be given special attention (which should be positive, but which can also be negative). On the plus side, Asperger “types” can be relieved of the burden of thinking that something is seriously wrong with them, or that it's their fault, or if only they'd get their act together, etc. And in the social sense, Asperger types can form interest groups of various sorts without feeling like a bunch of geeks and losers.

So it's a mixed bag, but overall I'd say the definition of the syndrome has had beneficial effects. It enables people with the syndrome to feel better about themselves, to pursue their interests and emphasize their strengths without feeling like underachievers in other respects... and it enables other people to accept them as they are, and likewise appreciate their strengths and talents, and be willing to overlook areas in which they aren't quite up to par.

The Bad Marriage Between the Two

Everything could have been fine at this point, except that someone – over-functioning in the “syndrome” and terminology department – decided that, because of the observable similarities in symptoms (some, but not all – and certainly not in severity) between autism and Asperger's, they had to be lumped together on a “spectrum”, which became known as the “Autism Spectrum”. So, number one, they're taking a rare subset of people (autistic) and grouping them with a not-at-all-rare subset (Asperger's) and, in effect, calling them all autistic. What sorts of motivations went into this? Well, for one thing, there's the simple matter of money, i.e. funding for research, treatment, therapy, etc. – not to mention health insurance. There was always money in autism, because it was rightly considered a serious condition – but there was little or no money in Asperger's, other than the opportunity to sell books. But lump them together and call it autism, and the money starts to flow. (This may sound a bit cynical, but the extent to which “science” can be tempted by money has been demonstrated many times over the years – and more than ever in these times, with obsessions like “climate change”, gender fluidity, etc.)

Secondly, there's a political, or let's say social, angle to it all, the notion being that autistic people, and their parents and caretakers, won't feel so bad about their situation if they now feel more “mainstreamed”, and therefore accepted. If the truly autistic were a small minority before, they can now feel like members of – still a minority, but a substantial one.

(One could ask, terminology-wise, whether rather than coming up with the “autism spectrum”, they couldn't have just called autism “high-level Asperger's”. It would have made no less sense, but the political and social impact would have been less.)

Plus, there's a pretty good chance that most truly autistic people don't care one way or the other what “spectrum” they're on; some of them don't care about much of anything at all. But the much larger number of people who are Asperger's types, and who know it, and now find themselves on the “autism spectrum”? I can't imagine that's very good for their morale or self-esteem. But we're talking politics here, right? So non-preferred groups always have to make sacrifices, like it or not, in order to benefit preferred groups. (And the fact that this is all about naming, and nothing else, makes it especially cruel and unjust. Terminology can change overnight, and someone who is “sick” one day can be declared “well” or “normal” the next, and vice versa.)

But is it true that autism and Asperger's are similar? Well, yes – in terms of the types of symptoms, but certainly not in degree – and also not in terms of the nuances, or fine points. And also not in terms of the variety of symptoms that might be exhibited by any one individual – Asperger's types have a much more varied repertoire, if you will, within the bounds of that syndrome, whereas true autistics are much more limited. Overall, you can point to social issues, attention factors, mathematically-based interests, responses to the environment, preferred vs. non-preferred activities, and so on. But in terms of self-care, ability to operate in society, ability to earn a living, and so on, it's a world of difference, and it does no one any favors to pretend that it's nothing more than a matter of degree. Plus, one can point to many examples of high-achieving individuals – world-class achievers, in fact – in things like math, physics, music, chess... even the performing arts... and also art, engineering, computing and automation (a veritable den of Asperger's types), and so on. Many have risen to the top of their field. Can the same be said of the truly autistic? No. Some have made contributions – Temple Grandin comes to mind – but this is exceptional. (There's a history of what have been called “idiot savants”, or “calculating boys” who can perform remarkable math operations in their heads with amazing speed – and the chances are those have been largely autistic individuals. The question in those cases was always, given that they have amazing talent in one specific area, is there anything else they can do well, or do at all? And the answer was frequently no. All their brainpower was focused on one thing.)

I also suspect – although exactly how one would measure this is a good question – that if you arrayed all the Asperger's types and the truly autistic along the same scale, you'd get a gradually downward-sloping curve starting at the low end (next to the “normal” population), and there would eventually be a gap, followed by a “bump” or miniature bell curve representing the truly autistic (with their own spectrum, although much narrower than the Asperger's spectrum). In other words, you would find few if any cases where a person was part-Asperger's and part autistic – and I think this would reflect significant differences in brain physiology.

Some Thoughts on the Keeping of Family Histories

(from recent correspondence)

I think that people who have a family history that's been recorded and preserved in whatever way are lucky.  Of course some people -- the rich and famous -- have to live with a family history that might not be all that savory, but that everyone knows about, so a lot of their effort is devoted to living it down, or making up for it in some way -- paying society back for the offenses of their parents, ancestors, etc.  The children of rich and powerful tyrants frequently become humanitarians of some kind, for example -- Robert Kennedy may be an example.  But for others it's just too overwhelming and they either sell out and become an inferior version of old dad, or just go off on a different tack entirely.  (It's ironic that the rich and famous are, like it or not, "public people", and they have to go to great lengths to keep anything private.  The rest of us kulaks are so private we have to expose ourselves on Facebook and Twitter.)

But for us ordinary folks it seems like delving into family history can only be a good thing, even if some of the events were negative or even tragic.  The idea of "where I'm from" is important to a lot of people, especially -- I would say -- if they grew up in a traditional, intact family in a coherent culture.  They know about their past to some extent but would like more of a connection -- more material.  But even for those who didn't, there is a need to find "roots", some sense of grounding or place.  And look at the way "hyphenated Americans" go to great lengths to dig up info on their ancestors in the old country.  I almost think that, for many people, just being "American" isn't enough -- they need to feel like part of something older, more traditional, and more solid.  This is, as the stereotype has it, a nation of immigrants -- but just calling it that implies that it still is, even for people who have been here for many generations.   They still have the immigrant mind set.  (I observe that the only European-origin group that is never hyphenated is people whose ancestors came over from England.  There are no "English-Americans" (if there were, I would be one).  But there are Irish-Americans, so they have yet to be fully assimilated after 175 years.)  

This country has always been ideally suited for the adventurous -- pioneers, speculators, prospectors, etc. -- the iconic "lone gun" (Clint Eastwood) -- the man (or woman) with no past -- either rootless or perfectly content to leave the past, and even family, behind -- and for good reasons sometimes, let's admit.  (I used to joke that whenever some psychic does a "past life reading" for someone, that person always seems to wind up being a descendent of some European royalty.  No one is ever found to be a descendent of a horse thief.)  ("Cross my palm weez silver, und I vill tell you you are ze long-lost heir to ze trone of Bessarabia") 

Don't Even Think About Running for President in 2024 (if you're a Republican)

 

The conventional wisdom among the conservative commentariat is that Trump and his family, and various members of his administration, are being hounded by the government (at all levels – federal, state (NY and Florida), and local (NYC)) in order to insure that he doesn't run for president in 2024. With all due respect, I disagree, and here's why.

#1, he'd be out of his mind to run (even assuming he's not in jail by that time, or some law or Constitutional amendment hasn't been dredged up to render him disqualified) given the treatment he received the last time around – from the day of his announcement through the campaign, and though his entire time in office, and even afterwards up to the present day. (I made some related comments in a blog post, “4 More Years? Really??”, July 28, 2020.) Trump may have some less-than-stellar personality traits, but I don't think masochism is one of them.

#2, if Biden managed to win against Trump in 2020, he can win against him again in 2024. Period! Or – whoever the DNC chooses to replace Biden can win likewise. The counterargument is that Biden (or whoever) would, in 2024, be running not only against Trump but against his (Biden's) own record during his first term – which, to the same commentariat, is considered dismal, to put it mildly. The problem there is that Biden has not lost a bit of support, either politically or among the electorate, since his inauguration. His fan club in the mainstream media are unstinting in their support and in running interference for him, and have yet to publish, or broadcast, any “news” which would be detrimental to him or his administration. (If Reagan was the “Teflon president”, then Biden is the “new improved Teflon president”. Not only does nothing stick, nothing even gets close.) To put it another way, Biden is a roaring success at this point, going from one victory to another – and as long as the faithful continue to believe this, he's good to go for 2024. (And it's hard to imagine anything that could cause the faithful not to keep believing. I mean, if a simple comparison of the way things are now with the way they were in January 2021 isn't sufficient, then nothing is.)

#3, even if Trump returned from political Siberia and staged a comeback not unlike that of Napoleon when he returned from Elba, would he attract any support outside of his hard-core MAGA constituency – the ones who attend his rallies? My sense is that his former supporters among the Republican mainstream have suffered enough – they have a chronic case of “Trump fatigue” that will not be eradicated. (And this is not Trump's fault, by the way – it's just that they're tired of the endless domestic warfare that Trump's being in the White House led to and sustained for more than four years.) (Call Trump fatigue the flip side of Trump Derangement Syndrome, if you like – both very much with us, especially now that the latter is official government policy.) And if his erstwhile supporters among Republicans are demoralized and worn out, imagine where the “independents” who voted for him in 2016 stand; they don't even have any party loyalty to hold them together. They were the first to jump ship, and are nowhere to be found at this point.

So, bottom line, the Democrats have nothing whatsoever to fear from Trump in 2024, and I think they know it. If he should dare to run, they could run the proverbial yellow dog against him and the dog would win. So it's not about Trump at all, is it? At least not in terms of the election of 2024. So if it's not about him, what is it about, other than playing to the paranoiac crowd?

There are two factors motivating the War on All Things Trump. One is simple vengeance. Trump deserves to be punished severely, and in perpetuity, for even having run for president and – even worse – for having won, and – even worse – for managing to stay in office for a full four-year term, despite two, count 'em, two impeachments – not to mention being accused of treason and being Putin's lapdog, along with countless other crimes. Lest we forget, his candidacy started out as a joke (to the media), and no one except Anne Coulter took it seriously – at least in public – until the morning after Election Day, when the sky fell and the pillars of the temple crumbled to dust. Privately, of course, the counter-candidacy drive was on from day one, with various elements of the Obama administration taking a leading role.

And then there was the humiliation of Hillary Clinton, Empress-in-Waiting, who never hurt a fly and in no wise deserved such shabby treatment as to be defeated by this big orange guy from New York City (just down the road from Chappaqua, to add to the insult).

And then there was the fact that, once in office, he tried to run the government like a business, and actually make changes that were more than merely cosmetic. And this, of course, was a wake-up call for the bureaucracy, AKA the Deep State, which marshaled its forces in an all-out effort to thwart, neutralize, or at the very least ignore his every initiative – with signal success, I might add. But the fact that he didn't back down – no “walking back”, “clarifying”, or “reconsidering” with this guy -- caused the derangement to boil over into public view (the impeachment hearings providing a prime example, where one petty bureaucrat after another got up and said that they considered it their patriotic duty as Americans to sabotage any Trump programs).

So yes – for breaking all the rules, and never apologizing, Trump deserves all he's getting, and more. And clearly the “numbers” didn't count, i.e. the various measures of the success of his initiatives which continued to mount up, and which the mainstream media and the Democrats could only answer either with “It's a lie” or “It doesn't matter”. (Although it's funny how Biden and his minions spout the same sorts of numbers every day, and we're all expected to believe them without question.)

That's the punishment-vengeance-vendetta piece, perfectly understandable in this day and age. America at its finest! An entire administration devoted to one thing, the punishment of the previous administration. Can you say “banana republic”, class?

The second factor is, if you will, less emotional and more strategic, and that's to show anyone foolish enough to consider running for president on the Republican ticket in 2024 what will happen to them if they go through with it. Well, number one, they won't win for many of the same reasons Trump couldn't win, even if they are identified as never-Trumpers, anti-MAGA hatters... untouched by the outrages of the Trump “era”... pure as the driven snow. For one thing, the Democrats are the majority party now at the federal level at least, and it's delusional to think otherwise. So a Republican with all the finest anti-Trump credentials – let's say a reincarnation of John McCain – and not festooned with Trump cooties – has very little chance, because they will inevitably be lumped in with Trump anyway and called his clone, or Trump 2.0, or some such. (Plus, the chances are that their kids' nanny's brother-in-law once changed the oil in one of Trump's cars, and that is sufficient evidence to find the hapless candidate guilty as charged.) (This is no exaggeration. It's the way things operated on a daily basis in the Soviet Union, and in Mao's China.)

Now – one could ask – if the Democrats are sure-fire winners in 2024, why bother to intimidate the Republicans into... maybe even giving up and not running at all? If the Republicans managed to bring Abraham Lincoln back to life and put him up as a candidate, might they not stand a chance? Well, let's just call it “insurance”. The fact that the Democrats have an iron grip on the voting process (polls, machines, ballots, counts, novel voting procedures, and so on) in many states and in all major cities might have swung an election, or more than one, in the past. Nowadays it would be seen as redundant – a case of “overkill”, if you will. But the mechanisms are in place, and they have to be kept up to snuff – after all, there are state and local elections to think about, not to mention elections for Congressional seats. Besides, the intimidation factor trickles down to the state and local level; political correctness is now the law of the land, and there is no elective office so trivial or obscure that it will escape the attention of the PC police if anyone tries wandering off the reservation. (And, lest we forget, the sacred duty of any true believer in totalitarianism is not just to defeat those who disagree, but to exterminate the disagreement. This is right out of “1984” and is as true today as it ever was.)

So, bottom line-wise, who in their right mind would want to put themselves and their family through all that? The mainstream media have tasted blood, and they're unlikely to cover their fangs for any future Republican – not even for the ilk of Liz Cheney, a sheep in wolves' clothing who is more anti-Trump than most Democrats.

So basically, you can count anyone who proposes running on the Republican ticket in 2024 as (1) delusional, (2) masochistic, and (3) ready for the funny farm. But this doesn't mean plenty won't try, since those qualities seem to typify Republican politicians these days.

So now we know what's really behind the new, improved witch hunt being staged against Trump and anyone who had even the slightest, most trivial connection with him. (Note that not only his lawyers are being called up before Congressional committees, but their lawyers, and their lawyers. Before long half the legal profession will be headed for federal prison (and come to think of it, that might actually be regarded as a good thing).)

Then, given all of the above, why is the conservative commentariat insisting that it's all about keeping Trump from running in 2024? I think it's basically about denial. In their world, the following propositions actually have some truth value:

1. Trump could win if he ran in 2024.

2. Some other Republican could win in 2024 if Trump chose not to run or was prevented from running.

3. The Republican Party represents the majority opinion among the American citizenry.

4. Biden's record will count against him in 2024.

5. Trump is still, in some mysterious way, the leader of the Republican Party (in this, at least, they agree with the mainstream media).

6. The Republican Party has a future on the national level.

Did I say “denial”? “Delusional” is more like it. Also “smoking their socks”. And so on. My expectation for 2024 is very simple: If Biden should choose not to run, what are the Democrats going to do about Kamala Harris? (Who? – you ask. Precisely my point. This should be TV worth watching; the rest is drearily predictable.)

The Eternal Rebel: Beatniks and Hippies

 

(This is an excerpt from some recent correspondence – a bit of social history plus some thoughts on rebels and rebellion.)

There was always a kind of narrative among the free spirits of the 1950s (beatniks, jazz musicians, some authors, artists, etc.) that the regular people -- the "squares" -- just didn't get it.  But they were never quite clear about what Mr. & Mrs. America were supposed to "get".  Sure, the idea was to be hip and cool, and rebellious, but proving that their way of life was somehow superior and not just different?  I didn't sense that so much.  I mean, the hippies did the same thing -- You oughta be like us – "Turn on, tune in, drop out" -- but when asked why, there were no clear answers.  What I suspect is that hipness, and all of its cultural clones and manifestations at various times, is self-sustaining only as long as the vast majority are un-hip.  In other words, what's of value is simply being different -- it's self-sustaining on that basis -- and yet there is a certain predictability, if not outright uniformity, in the way subcultures, over time, choose to act out being different.  The hippies did a lot of what the beatniks had done 15-20 years earlier -- starting with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (or jazz for the beatniks).  But in a paradoxical way, most subcultures depend on the majority culture for support, to some extent -- in other words they really aren't living completely out in the middle of nowhere, off the grid -- although some of the hippie communes came close.  I don't think the beatniks spent much time away from LA or NYC (or the highways connecting the two).

And I'm not saying there weren't alternatives to the world view of the "normal" people.  A lot of the more intellectual beatniks became interested in Buddhism -- Zen especially -- and Hinduism to some extent.  They weren't so hot on monotheism, though -- that was religion for "squares", too hierarchical, too authoritarian, too moralistic, etc.  The Eastern religions were seen as being more along the lines of "doing your own thing".  And this is why they also appealed to the hippies -- with the Beatles making a pilgrimage to India and "love is all you need", the "summer of love" etc. -- all fueled by psychedelics, which were a rarity, but not unheard of, among the beats.  And the few of the old timers made the transition and sort of became icons for the 2^nd time around -- Alan Ginsberg comes to mind, and also William Burroughs.  So what some would call the escapism of the beatniks via alcohol, marijuana, and heroin morphed into hippie-style escapism via marijuana (again) and psychedelics, but also yoga, meditation, and all sorts of New Age practices and modalities.  And a few of them actually did convert and become Hindus or Buddhists -- thinking about Baba Ram Dass and the American Sikhs.  So there was much escaping "from" but also some escaping "to" -- although how long it lasted for most of these folks is another question.  (Some of the last remaining hippies got washed ashore at various Renaissance Fairs.  They're still into marijuana, maybe psychedelics -- Eastern religion not so much.  That takes too much discipline, as it turns out!)

It's a lot easier to escape from than to escape to.  It's basic human nature.  I can tell you what I don't like but may not be certain of what I want (except for less of what I don't like, but that's no help).  The hippies almost had a fetish for being different in every way -- and I imagine it was hard work at times!  Like there were some in Columbia, Missouri who pulled late 1940s cars out of junkyards and put them back on the road because they looked like the car Mr. Natural drives in Zap Comix.  (I kid you not, this really happened.  I saw it with my own eyes. I called them “Freakmobiles”.)  The hippie lifestyle was standardized to a degree I found ironic -- same clothes, same hair, same footwear, same foods (always in the general category of natural, organic, vegetarian... macrobiotic for the true believers), living conditions, etc.  (I think suburban tract houses had more variety in them than most of the hippie pads.)  But this, I think, was a sign of insecurity.  Sure, rebel against the "old folks" -- run away from home, maybe -- but find like-minded people asap!  Strength in numbers, etc.  (And this is still going on -- remember "CHAZ" in Seattle?

"The Essentials"

 

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.