"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.

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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.