*
Most writers know roughly what they mean in their first draft, and in the process of revising and re-drafting they try to get closer to that known meaning.
But what is natural and spontaneous in history seems to be almost the reverse of this.
*
Original intention counts for very little, the specifics (an image, a turn of phrase) of an incident stay the same; but the interpretation of the incident may be radically altered or even reversed.
This pattern is often seen through traditional oral transmission of narratives, it is seen in the mass media, and happens in many movies that adapt books - the specifics may be retained but their meaning transformed.
*
I have seen this happen with a couple of maxims during my life.
When I was a child the story of King Midas - everything he touched turned to gold - was regarded as a cautionary tale of greed leading to (potential) death (since his food and drink were also turned to gold).
But nowadays, 'The Midas Touch' is regarded as something desirable - it means the ability to make money in any situation.
So a successful entrepreneur is described as having the Midas Touch, like it was a good thing to have.
(Presumably for modern people the benefits of wealth are now regarded as greater than survival!)
*
"Shooting yourself in the foot" used to mean a deliberate act of relatively-minor self-wounding, with the aim of being invalided away from the front line of a war.
Someone shot themselves in the foot on purpose, but pretended it was an accident.
*
But it now the expression means almost the reverse - having shot oneself in the foot is used to mean an having accidentally self-inflicted harm - rather as British people use the expression 'scoring an own goal' - referring to a situation in which a Soccer defender perhaps tries to pass back to the keeper, or kick the ball into touch - but accidentally scores a goal against his own team. Or - for US readers - the baseball-derived equivalent term might be an 'unforced error' - used generally to mean a gratuitous piece of incompetence.
So a corporation which launches a new brand which collapses and damages the company is nowadays sometimes described as 'shooting itself in the foot', since the company was harmed by a action which the company itself initiated - despite that the harm was accidental.
*
In both Midas and Shooting in the Foot, a striking detail is preserved, but its meaning is transformed.
And this seems to be quite normal for human memory: we remember striking things in a photographic (eidetic) fashion, as static and detached units; but we do not remember what they mean.
The contextual meaning of a unitary and static memory has to be supplied by our current selves, and the context often changes.
*
Thursday, 19 April 2012
Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Everyday miracles versus official miracles
*
Most people imagine that a miracle is detectable when normal explanations are impossible.
Rubbish.
That may be regarded as a suitable criterion for establishing an 'official' miracle - for instance in the bureaucratic process by which a Saint is recognised.
However, there is no requirement that a miracle be diagnosed by exclusion.
A miracle was either the explanation, or it was not - it is a matter of what really happened.
And miracles are purposive - they are matters of revelation, of faith.
An aware Christian is, or ought to be, aware of, convinced of and grateful for 'everyday' miracles in their own experience; but it is a profound error to try and use these miracles in public argument, as proofs (or, especially not, in claiming spiritual status) - because this leads to argument, to rational and empirical defence of miraculous status.
Everyday miracles are to be treasured, not used; best never mentioned, never described nor discussed.
*
Most people imagine that a miracle is detectable when normal explanations are impossible.
Rubbish.
That may be regarded as a suitable criterion for establishing an 'official' miracle - for instance in the bureaucratic process by which a Saint is recognised.
However, there is no requirement that a miracle be diagnosed by exclusion.
A miracle was either the explanation, or it was not - it is a matter of what really happened.
And miracles are purposive - they are matters of revelation, of faith.
An aware Christian is, or ought to be, aware of, convinced of and grateful for 'everyday' miracles in their own experience; but it is a profound error to try and use these miracles in public argument, as proofs (or, especially not, in claiming spiritual status) - because this leads to argument, to rational and empirical defence of miraculous status.
Everyday miracles are to be treasured, not used; best never mentioned, never described nor discussed.
*
Let's be clear - the ruling intellectual elite are psychotic, not ignorant
*
They do not need information, they need curing...
(and their cure would involve shock treatment: orthodox religion).
*
It is not sensible, therefore, to imagine that confronting the ruling intellectual elite with information would be valuable, on the assumption that if they only knew the facts then they would behave sensibly.
More facts don't work with psychosis - new information will simply be misinterpreted, just like the old information.
And it is not sensible, therefore, to imagine that reasoned argument will be helpful; psychosis is, precisely, irrational.
*
They first have to want help; have to acknowledge their whole world is built on wilful falsehood piled upon wilful falsehood on a scale so vast and pervasive as to dwarf comparison...
*
But how can psychosis ever recognise the ocean of falsehood in which it swims?
Simple. The psychosis is itself caused by forward movement through the ocean of falsehood.
Merely stop swimming, and the cure will be spontaneous.
*
They do not need information, they need curing...
(and their cure would involve shock treatment: orthodox religion).
*
It is not sensible, therefore, to imagine that confronting the ruling intellectual elite with information would be valuable, on the assumption that if they only knew the facts then they would behave sensibly.
More facts don't work with psychosis - new information will simply be misinterpreted, just like the old information.
And it is not sensible, therefore, to imagine that reasoned argument will be helpful; psychosis is, precisely, irrational.
*
They first have to want help; have to acknowledge their whole world is built on wilful falsehood piled upon wilful falsehood on a scale so vast and pervasive as to dwarf comparison...
*
But how can psychosis ever recognise the ocean of falsehood in which it swims?
Simple. The psychosis is itself caused by forward movement through the ocean of falsehood.
Merely stop swimming, and the cure will be spontaneous.
*
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
The paradox of libertarianism: Libertarians are the purest Leftists/ Liberals
*
It is interesting that libertarians (such as I used to be) are regarded, and often regard themselves, as being on the political Right; when in actuality they are Leftists or Liberals - indeed Leftist-Liberals of the purest type.
*
The transition between being a socialist and a libertarian is merely quantitative; indeed, quite smooth, logical, painless and natural - I underwent it myself and so did many others whom I have known, read about and observed.
But, in contrast, the transition between (secular) libertarian and (religious) reactionary was a wrench to undergo - profound, qualitative, and painful.
To move from libertarian to reactionary is to move from far Left to Right.
*
Libertarianism is merely a different means of attaining the same end as socialism. Both are utilitarian (greatest well-being of the greatest number), seeking to promote happiness and minimise suffering.
The main difference is concerning methods: socialists favour the direct system of a central command economy while libertarians favour the indirect system of market competition.
*
Why - if they are so similar - then is socialism so much more politically successful than libertarianism? Why is it that libertarians, when they attain power - which is rarely - always revert to socialism?
Simply because socialism is proximately more successful, more successful in the short term and selfishly - while libertarianism is an argument for long term and general goods.
Libertarians must persuade people that things can get better in the long run and further down the line only by being allowed to get worse in the short term - yet libertarians have no rationale by which to persuade people to take this nasty medicine rather than avoid it.
When the libertarian promise is based on hoping for jam tomorrow, then they will be beaten by socialists offering jam today.
*
Thus socialism can assemble self-interested pressure groups who are fighting for their own specific and immediate benefits (and to avoid taking the nasty medicine, which others deserve more than they) - whether material benefits, power, votes or whatever; while libertarianism is reduced to abstract, theoretical and remote benefits for society as a whole (yet without having any argument as to why anybody should care about 'society as a whole', except their own 'enlightened' self-interest - which can be served more certainly by more direct means).
The here-and-now specific good, continually subverts the abstract, distant general good - hence socialism effortlessly outcompetes libertarianism in the political arena.
Yet both are trying to do the same kind of thing. Both are on the Left, but libertarianism is further to the Left on logical grounds.
*
Another difference which favours socialism over libertarianism is that socialism provides a better arena for moral grandstanding - since socialism validates direct and coercive state intervention, the credit for which accrues to socialists.
Libertarians praise the market for good stuff when it happens (peace, prosperity, science, the abolition of slavery or other - real or alleged - forms of systematic oppression); but socialists praise... themselves.
...Naturally, socialism is more popular.
*
In sum, libertarianism is the ideal of socialism minus the graft - yet libertarianism offers no strong reason for any specific person to refuse graft. Thus, the ideal of libertarianism exists only among the powerless, and itself reinforces powerlessness.
*
The big difference, the qualitative difference between Left and Right, is therefore between on the one hand the Libertarian-Liberal axis which ultimately seeks worldly goods and to organize things in accordance with subjective satisfactions; and on the other hand the Religious Reactionary axis, which ultimately seeks unworldly (transcendental) Goods and to organize things accordance with reality - a different matter altogether.
*
It is interesting that libertarians (such as I used to be) are regarded, and often regard themselves, as being on the political Right; when in actuality they are Leftists or Liberals - indeed Leftist-Liberals of the purest type.
*
The transition between being a socialist and a libertarian is merely quantitative; indeed, quite smooth, logical, painless and natural - I underwent it myself and so did many others whom I have known, read about and observed.
But, in contrast, the transition between (secular) libertarian and (religious) reactionary was a wrench to undergo - profound, qualitative, and painful.
To move from libertarian to reactionary is to move from far Left to Right.
*
Libertarianism is merely a different means of attaining the same end as socialism. Both are utilitarian (greatest well-being of the greatest number), seeking to promote happiness and minimise suffering.
The main difference is concerning methods: socialists favour the direct system of a central command economy while libertarians favour the indirect system of market competition.
*
Why - if they are so similar - then is socialism so much more politically successful than libertarianism? Why is it that libertarians, when they attain power - which is rarely - always revert to socialism?
Simply because socialism is proximately more successful, more successful in the short term and selfishly - while libertarianism is an argument for long term and general goods.
Libertarians must persuade people that things can get better in the long run and further down the line only by being allowed to get worse in the short term - yet libertarians have no rationale by which to persuade people to take this nasty medicine rather than avoid it.
When the libertarian promise is based on hoping for jam tomorrow, then they will be beaten by socialists offering jam today.
*
Thus socialism can assemble self-interested pressure groups who are fighting for their own specific and immediate benefits (and to avoid taking the nasty medicine, which others deserve more than they) - whether material benefits, power, votes or whatever; while libertarianism is reduced to abstract, theoretical and remote benefits for society as a whole (yet without having any argument as to why anybody should care about 'society as a whole', except their own 'enlightened' self-interest - which can be served more certainly by more direct means).
The here-and-now specific good, continually subverts the abstract, distant general good - hence socialism effortlessly outcompetes libertarianism in the political arena.
Yet both are trying to do the same kind of thing. Both are on the Left, but libertarianism is further to the Left on logical grounds.
*
Another difference which favours socialism over libertarianism is that socialism provides a better arena for moral grandstanding - since socialism validates direct and coercive state intervention, the credit for which accrues to socialists.
Libertarians praise the market for good stuff when it happens (peace, prosperity, science, the abolition of slavery or other - real or alleged - forms of systematic oppression); but socialists praise... themselves.
...Naturally, socialism is more popular.
*
In sum, libertarianism is the ideal of socialism minus the graft - yet libertarianism offers no strong reason for any specific person to refuse graft. Thus, the ideal of libertarianism exists only among the powerless, and itself reinforces powerlessness.
*
The big difference, the qualitative difference between Left and Right, is therefore between on the one hand the Libertarian-Liberal axis which ultimately seeks worldly goods and to organize things in accordance with subjective satisfactions; and on the other hand the Religious Reactionary axis, which ultimately seeks unworldly (transcendental) Goods and to organize things accordance with reality - a different matter altogether.
*
Monday, 16 April 2012
Ye shall know them by their fruits - Bad Vestments
*
Just thought I'd share one of my favourite blogs:
http://badvestments.blogspot.co.uk/
Things coming to a point?
*
Just thought I'd share one of my favourite blogs:
http://badvestments.blogspot.co.uk/
Things coming to a point?
*
Kelham Theology - Curriculum - The will of God in the World
*
Kelham Hall had interesting teaching methods
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/kelham-theology-teaching-methods.html
But even more interesting, and much more important, than the methods was the matter: the curriculum.
*
Fr Herbert Kelly wanted Kelham not to teach theology as a subject, but to teach everything through theology - in principle everything including soccer (which was played to a high level at the college).
But this means a different way of doing theology than prevailed in that era.
*
Kelly asked "What does God do?" and would not accept the answer that God does "everything" in general because that (for most people) means that God does nothing in particular, and therefore can be ignored.
His answer was that what God does is History.
But not history as taught in the universities nor as practised by secular historians: Kelly meant a history which aims to discover the workings of God.
*
Theology taught via the history of the Church seen in terms of the operation of the Holy Spirit was, then, the first and main focus of Kelham teaching.
First, because Kelly believed that the first adult intellectual discipline we master, also masters us - so it is vital that the first intellectual discipline is the most important.
*
History as the Will of God in the World. And seen in terms of large general movements, since "God's will is always primarily the universal will'.
*
But why history?
Because "We do not know what God is doing, and still less what he is going to do, for these things God keeps in his own hands. He does not allow us to know what he has done. There is first the revelation of himself in the Gospel, and then the revelation of this power in history".
*
The aim, then, was to find the Holy Spirit at work - but not in our own lives, since that would encourage self-centredness.
But to seek the Holy Spirit at work in the broad sweep and great movements of history, which might be studied with greater objectivity.
*
The Bible (naturally being another major focus of study) was thus seen as a record of what God has done - the mystery of God's will.
*
Alistair Mason concludes that: the stress on God's real power in history is Kelham's own.
The special nature of Kelham's (and Kelly's) achievement was that it did not remain merely theoretical, a matter of an unrealised educational ideal, but was practised for several decades with undeniable effectiveness and success.
***
The best example of something that seems like Kelham Theology from my own experience is Charles William's book The Descent of the Dove - which is precisely described as the operations of the Holy Spirit in the history of the Church, seen from the perspective of the Church of England.
Was Charles Williams therefore influenced by Herbert Kelly in his greatest theological work?
Probably, I would guess - but perhaps not directly; maybe through the shared lineage of FD Maurice and George MacDonald.
And it may be necessary to add for a modern audience, that the study of history as the will of God in the World necessarily includes the operations of those personalised and purposive wills which which oppose the will of God - whether conceptualised as Satan, devils, demons, a malign force or whatever...
Kelham Hall had interesting teaching methods
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/kelham-theology-teaching-methods.html
But even more interesting, and much more important, than the methods was the matter: the curriculum.
*
Fr Herbert Kelly wanted Kelham not to teach theology as a subject, but to teach everything through theology - in principle everything including soccer (which was played to a high level at the college).
But this means a different way of doing theology than prevailed in that era.
*
Kelly asked "What does God do?" and would not accept the answer that God does "everything" in general because that (for most people) means that God does nothing in particular, and therefore can be ignored.
His answer was that what God does is History.
But not history as taught in the universities nor as practised by secular historians: Kelly meant a history which aims to discover the workings of God.
*
Theology taught via the history of the Church seen in terms of the operation of the Holy Spirit was, then, the first and main focus of Kelham teaching.
First, because Kelly believed that the first adult intellectual discipline we master, also masters us - so it is vital that the first intellectual discipline is the most important.
*
History as the Will of God in the World. And seen in terms of large general movements, since "God's will is always primarily the universal will'.
*
But why history?
Because "We do not know what God is doing, and still less what he is going to do, for these things God keeps in his own hands. He does not allow us to know what he has done. There is first the revelation of himself in the Gospel, and then the revelation of this power in history".
*
The aim, then, was to find the Holy Spirit at work - but not in our own lives, since that would encourage self-centredness.
But to seek the Holy Spirit at work in the broad sweep and great movements of history, which might be studied with greater objectivity.
*
The Bible (naturally being another major focus of study) was thus seen as a record of what God has done - the mystery of God's will.
*
Alistair Mason concludes that: the stress on God's real power in history is Kelham's own.
The special nature of Kelham's (and Kelly's) achievement was that it did not remain merely theoretical, a matter of an unrealised educational ideal, but was practised for several decades with undeniable effectiveness and success.
***
The best example of something that seems like Kelham Theology from my own experience is Charles William's book The Descent of the Dove - which is precisely described as the operations of the Holy Spirit in the history of the Church, seen from the perspective of the Church of England.
Was Charles Williams therefore influenced by Herbert Kelly in his greatest theological work?
Probably, I would guess - but perhaps not directly; maybe through the shared lineage of FD Maurice and George MacDonald.
And it may be necessary to add for a modern audience, that the study of history as the will of God in the World necessarily includes the operations of those personalised and purposive wills which which oppose the will of God - whether conceptualised as Satan, devils, demons, a malign force or whatever...
How do we learn stuff?
*
You have to know something already to learn something new - starting from nothing you can get... nowhere.
This has been confirmed in computer science; but was already known for animal behaviour. For animals to learn new material, they need to begin with inborn instincts.
A blank slate just stays a blank slate because interpretation must be constrained - an infinite universe has infinite interpretations: attention must be focused, interpretation of experience must be somewhat like a multiple choice exam.
*
One way of understanding how we know something is the idea of microcosm, which is related to the idea of the world being a nested hierarchy.
The idea (a metaphysical framework, not a scientific discovery) is that the world is constituted of similar wholes, the larger containing the smaller.
For example, the idea of an organism such as a human extends both upward and downward: human society is (or can be) like an organism and the cells of the body are also like an organism. Insofar as we understand the nature and workings of the human organism, then we are able significantly to understand human society (which contains many human organisms) and the cell (many of which are contained by the human organism).
This is an hierarchy because the larger contains and organises the smaller levels - and because although the smaller influences the larger, this principle of organisation is - overall - in the direction of larger organising smaller.
*
So, we come into the world equipped with knowledge of the world because we are a microcosm of the world.
Thus, we know about the world because we know about ourselves; we know about our relation to the world, because we know about the relations within ourselves.
In a sense, of course, this only moves the problem one step backwards - how do we have knowledge of ourselves and the relationships within us?
Yet, in practise, modern man does not have a problem with the idea of us knowing about ourselves, this seems natural to us - so, the metaphysical principle of microcosm does some explanatory work - it does not leave things unchanged.
*
But the metaphysical principle of nested hierarchies at each level of which the lower is a microcosm of that above it, is precisely one of the most powerful and traditional methods of reasoning about the transcendental realm, and of answering philosophical questions about man's place in the universe.
This can be seen in nearly all ancient systems of knowledge.
Yet modern man - supposedly - rejects this principle; and asserts that there is no similarity between different entities and not hierarchy of organisation but each entity and level may have fundamentally different properties.
*
As a metaphysical assumption this leads to self-refutation, because each item of asserted knowledge stands alone and with no relation to any other item of knowledge - such that instead of the traditional nested hierarchy of similar entities that is traditional knowledge, the totality of knowledge is merely a disordered heap of unrelated factoids - and, even worse, none of these factoids have any validity since there is no reason to assume that a human could validly know anything about anything.
*
So, modern thought is incoherent and the attempt to live by it leads to nihilism.
There is no rational alternative but to return to the much derided idea of nested hierarchy as the basis of understanding.
And no difficulty about it either - since that is exactly how humans do interpret the world - spontaneously and without teaching: human anthropomorphise the world, that is humans naturally see the world as instances of humanity writ large or in microcosm, and their relations with the world as relations within such an hierarchy.
*
It all makes sense - so why was it rejected in favour of nihilistic incoherence?
Well, this is a good candidate for theological explanation - for an explanation in terms of the power of the Holy Spirit, and the power of that which opposed the Holy Spirit, in human history.
*
You have to know something already to learn something new - starting from nothing you can get... nowhere.
This has been confirmed in computer science; but was already known for animal behaviour. For animals to learn new material, they need to begin with inborn instincts.
A blank slate just stays a blank slate because interpretation must be constrained - an infinite universe has infinite interpretations: attention must be focused, interpretation of experience must be somewhat like a multiple choice exam.
*
One way of understanding how we know something is the idea of microcosm, which is related to the idea of the world being a nested hierarchy.
The idea (a metaphysical framework, not a scientific discovery) is that the world is constituted of similar wholes, the larger containing the smaller.
For example, the idea of an organism such as a human extends both upward and downward: human society is (or can be) like an organism and the cells of the body are also like an organism. Insofar as we understand the nature and workings of the human organism, then we are able significantly to understand human society (which contains many human organisms) and the cell (many of which are contained by the human organism).
This is an hierarchy because the larger contains and organises the smaller levels - and because although the smaller influences the larger, this principle of organisation is - overall - in the direction of larger organising smaller.
*
So, we come into the world equipped with knowledge of the world because we are a microcosm of the world.
Thus, we know about the world because we know about ourselves; we know about our relation to the world, because we know about the relations within ourselves.
In a sense, of course, this only moves the problem one step backwards - how do we have knowledge of ourselves and the relationships within us?
Yet, in practise, modern man does not have a problem with the idea of us knowing about ourselves, this seems natural to us - so, the metaphysical principle of microcosm does some explanatory work - it does not leave things unchanged.
*
But the metaphysical principle of nested hierarchies at each level of which the lower is a microcosm of that above it, is precisely one of the most powerful and traditional methods of reasoning about the transcendental realm, and of answering philosophical questions about man's place in the universe.
This can be seen in nearly all ancient systems of knowledge.
Yet modern man - supposedly - rejects this principle; and asserts that there is no similarity between different entities and not hierarchy of organisation but each entity and level may have fundamentally different properties.
*
As a metaphysical assumption this leads to self-refutation, because each item of asserted knowledge stands alone and with no relation to any other item of knowledge - such that instead of the traditional nested hierarchy of similar entities that is traditional knowledge, the totality of knowledge is merely a disordered heap of unrelated factoids - and, even worse, none of these factoids have any validity since there is no reason to assume that a human could validly know anything about anything.
*
So, modern thought is incoherent and the attempt to live by it leads to nihilism.
There is no rational alternative but to return to the much derided idea of nested hierarchy as the basis of understanding.
And no difficulty about it either - since that is exactly how humans do interpret the world - spontaneously and without teaching: human anthropomorphise the world, that is humans naturally see the world as instances of humanity writ large or in microcosm, and their relations with the world as relations within such an hierarchy.
*
It all makes sense - so why was it rejected in favour of nihilistic incoherence?
Well, this is a good candidate for theological explanation - for an explanation in terms of the power of the Holy Spirit, and the power of that which opposed the Holy Spirit, in human history.
*
Sunday, 15 April 2012
Clever Sillies and transcendental leapfrogging
*
I came across the phrase 'leapfrogging' only a few days ago - apparently meaning the Leftist practice of ignoring experience - the concrete, obvious and near at hand; and leaping over it to the ideology - abstract, remote and far away (usually only experienced via the mass media).
Leapfrogging can also be conceptualized as a focus on the second order while taking for granted the first order: which is a kind of definition of Leftism and a reason why Leftism only emerges after the primary problems have ceased to be pressing.
Leapfrogging is indeed part of the very essence of Leftism - hence a potentially useful shorthand term.
*
(Soviet Communism made a core principle of leapfrogging - it was the true Communist's duty not to alleviate specific instances of distress or injustice, since this might delay the revolution which would end all distress and injustices. Indeed, many modern revolutionary Leftist groups go further, and try to create distress and injustice, disorder, violence, death - in the belief that this will bring forward the revolution that we be a final solution. That seems like a wild extreme of leapfrogging, yet this wild extreme is propagated actively - albeit covertly - by elites active at the highest levels of national and world government.)
*
Thus Leftism ignores and leapfrogs the problem of economic production (making stuff, doing stuff) in favor of the remote problem of distribution (moving stuff around); Leftism ignores education (learning stuff) and focuses on access to educational institutions and credentials; Leftism ignores duties and harps upon rights; ignores truth in favor of process - and so on.
*
This is ultimately a product of Clever Sillies, of high IQ, abstracting and systemizing intellectuals whose abstracting tendency is compulsive (unless restrained by transcendental religion); since only those of high IQ can quickly and flexibly deploy the practice to an open-ended range of problems and issues.
*
Intellectuals are trained - especially by the highbrow mass media, but also by educational institutions, to ignore the obvious conclusions and seek behind them.
Only by ignoring the obvious and moving behind it, can intellectuals demonstrate to themselves and others their superiority. This is the strategy of the modern elite mass media - indeed that is pretty much all that it does now.
The mass media takes an event, leapfrogs over the obvious and traditional interpretations (often without mentioning them) and reframes the issue for the elites. To favor the obvious interpretation is therefore to lack the intelligence to make this move, or deliberately to refuse to make it.
*
Leapfrogging is therefore the prime mechanism of evil.
Since evil is the destruction of Good - Good is truth, beauty and virtue which are all obvious and common sensical (inbuilt, Natural Law).
Leftism leapfrogs over beauty into modern art, leapfrogs ugliness to modern architecture, leapfrogs virtue to hypocrisy, leapfrogs moral selfishness to reinterpret it as an act of revolutionary virtue (and leapfrogging the evil of revolution into the possibility of heaven on earth).
And so on and on, 24/7.
*
Every act of Leftist leapfrogging is an assertion of the superiority of arbitrary and open-ended culture over unified and transcendental reality.
And for secular Leftism (and Leftism is intrinsically atheist - and insofar as any person is really Leftist to that extent they are atheist) every leapfrog is an act of destruction of the Good: an act of destroying spontaneous Natural Law (the universal sense of Good and evil).
Leftism is the main strategy of evil in modernity - and it is a strategy devised and implemented by intellectuals.
Intellectuals are therefore the main force for evil in modernist societies.
*
The repentance (or replacement) of the intellectual elite is the necessary pre-requisite of awakening; otherwise the primary and pressing problems that threaten to destroy us will continue to be leapfrogged, rather than solved.
*
I came across the phrase 'leapfrogging' only a few days ago - apparently meaning the Leftist practice of ignoring experience - the concrete, obvious and near at hand; and leaping over it to the ideology - abstract, remote and far away (usually only experienced via the mass media).
Leapfrogging can also be conceptualized as a focus on the second order while taking for granted the first order: which is a kind of definition of Leftism and a reason why Leftism only emerges after the primary problems have ceased to be pressing.
Leapfrogging is indeed part of the very essence of Leftism - hence a potentially useful shorthand term.
*
(Soviet Communism made a core principle of leapfrogging - it was the true Communist's duty not to alleviate specific instances of distress or injustice, since this might delay the revolution which would end all distress and injustices. Indeed, many modern revolutionary Leftist groups go further, and try to create distress and injustice, disorder, violence, death - in the belief that this will bring forward the revolution that we be a final solution. That seems like a wild extreme of leapfrogging, yet this wild extreme is propagated actively - albeit covertly - by elites active at the highest levels of national and world government.)
*
Thus Leftism ignores and leapfrogs the problem of economic production (making stuff, doing stuff) in favor of the remote problem of distribution (moving stuff around); Leftism ignores education (learning stuff) and focuses on access to educational institutions and credentials; Leftism ignores duties and harps upon rights; ignores truth in favor of process - and so on.
*
This is ultimately a product of Clever Sillies, of high IQ, abstracting and systemizing intellectuals whose abstracting tendency is compulsive (unless restrained by transcendental religion); since only those of high IQ can quickly and flexibly deploy the practice to an open-ended range of problems and issues.
*
Intellectuals are trained - especially by the highbrow mass media, but also by educational institutions, to ignore the obvious conclusions and seek behind them.
Only by ignoring the obvious and moving behind it, can intellectuals demonstrate to themselves and others their superiority. This is the strategy of the modern elite mass media - indeed that is pretty much all that it does now.
The mass media takes an event, leapfrogs over the obvious and traditional interpretations (often without mentioning them) and reframes the issue for the elites. To favor the obvious interpretation is therefore to lack the intelligence to make this move, or deliberately to refuse to make it.
*
Leapfrogging is therefore the prime mechanism of evil.
Since evil is the destruction of Good - Good is truth, beauty and virtue which are all obvious and common sensical (inbuilt, Natural Law).
Leftism leapfrogs over beauty into modern art, leapfrogs ugliness to modern architecture, leapfrogs virtue to hypocrisy, leapfrogs moral selfishness to reinterpret it as an act of revolutionary virtue (and leapfrogging the evil of revolution into the possibility of heaven on earth).
And so on and on, 24/7.
*
Every act of Leftist leapfrogging is an assertion of the superiority of arbitrary and open-ended culture over unified and transcendental reality.
And for secular Leftism (and Leftism is intrinsically atheist - and insofar as any person is really Leftist to that extent they are atheist) every leapfrog is an act of destruction of the Good: an act of destroying spontaneous Natural Law (the universal sense of Good and evil).
Leftism is the main strategy of evil in modernity - and it is a strategy devised and implemented by intellectuals.
Intellectuals are therefore the main force for evil in modernist societies.
*
The repentance (or replacement) of the intellectual elite is the necessary pre-requisite of awakening; otherwise the primary and pressing problems that threaten to destroy us will continue to be leapfrogged, rather than solved.
*
Saturday, 14 April 2012
Two kinds of human anti-evolutionism: macro and micro, religious and Leftist
*
There are two prominent kinds of anti-evolutionist in public life - and by which I mean people who deny the applicability of evolution by natural selection to some aspect of humans.
*
Macro anti-evolutionists deny the reality of 'macro' evolution - by which is meant the 'origin of species' - and therefore the use of natural selection to explain the distinctive essence of what it is to be human.
This is related to the idea that the basic forms of living things are 'given', and that natural selection may modify these basic forms - but cannot create a new form nor change one form into another.
This macro anti-evolutionist may be religious - believing that the forms are created by God or gods; or may be one of a non-religious school of biologists who regard form as just a part of the way things are, primary reality, without speculating on how these forms arise or where they come from. For instance suggesting that the forms happen to be mathematically-stable attractors.
This latter group includes many eminent biologists such as Goethe, D'Arcy Thomson, the earliest geneticists, Conrad Waddington, and some of the recent chaos/ complexity theorists.
It should be noted that the only substantive difference between the religious and non-religious 'formalists' is that the religious give a general account of the origin of the forms - and how it is that human may have knowledge of them; while the non-religious say nothing about these matters, accepting the reality of their assertions and avoiding the subject of why their assertions (e.g. their ability to identify forms) should be regarded as valid.
*
I am, nowadays, sympathetic to this idealist or 'formalist' group since on the one hand they have a strong empirical basis for denying that natural selection can lead to genuine novelty at a formal level - because there just aren't any strong and solid examples of this happening; and more fundamentally because natural selection formally depends upon the prior assumption of forms, and the process of NS operates within already existing concepts of form.
In other words, we may observe or impute a selection process when seeing differential reproductive success leading to a stepwise modification of a form, and a change of function leading to enhanced reproductive success.
But such observations always begin with a definition of form, with identification of a form - changes of which are tracked.
*
The big question, therefore, is whether natural selection is an open-ended process, unconstrained by form, which can lead to stepwise change to the point of creating novel forms; or whether natural selection is constrained by forms - that it can lead to stepwise changes only within the boundaries of forms.
Micro-evolution is about natural selection producing change within the bounds of form; macro-evolution is about natural selection producing change of form.
Or, natural selection within the bounds of form is adaptation; while natural selection yielding diversity of form is )in a general sense) speciation.
Darwin's assertion was that adaptation may, indeed does, progress to speciation; that a form may undergo adaptation to the point that it changes form. This is used a metaphysical assumption, outside of science and framing science - but it is not a discovery made by science.
*
Micro-evolution or adaptation within forms seems certainly to be happen - since there are innumerable examples of human selection of animals and plants (especially in agriculture) leading to heritable modifications of function; and if human selection can purposefully change functionality over the space of a human lifespan, then presumably analogous change could result from nature doing the selection over a longer span of generations.
So, there are many religious people, and a minority of biologists - some of whom are highly prestigious, who believe in the reality of micro-evolution or adaptation; but who are skeptical about macro-evolution of new forms (such as a new genus, order, family or some similar large scale and fundamental modification of form).
They do not accept the assumption that adaptation leads to speciation.
*
But another group of evolution sceptics actually deny the reality of adaptation or micro-evolution in humans, they deny that human functions, especially psychological functions, can incrementally be modified by natural selection - and these are mostly secular Left wing political adherents who must (for ideological reasons) deny the reality of sexual and racial differences.
*
Or rather, secular Leftists do not straightforwardly and honestly deny that adaptation can occur in humans - rather, they make an assumption that all humans are essentially the same everywhere and throughout historical time - and any differences are superficial and non-heritable ('environmental'); and then demand a literally-impossible standard of evidential certainty before they will overturn this assumption of universal sameness.
This is presented as if it were a higher form of scientific integrity - a purist stance that requires a higher standard of evidence... Nonsense! It is merely rigging the evaluation method to generate the results you want.
*
The assumption that all humans are essentially the same everywhere is therefore a metaphysical - not scientific - assumption: an assumption standing outside science and framing science.
Certainly it refutes spontaneous beliefs, common sense and the historical wisdom of mankind.
Denial of micro-evolution has reached almost psychotic extremes in relation to men and women, where there are many Leftist social science academics, journalists, politicians etc who refuse to acknowledge even quantitative differences in functionality between men and women.
For such people, to assert the reality of qualitative differences (e.g. between men and women) is regarded as simply abhorrent - malicious, vile, hurtful, aggressive, stupid, dangerous to the Leftist project and 'therefore' (according to such people) necessarily untrue.
*
Secular Leftist anti-evolutionists will deny even universal human experience, obvious knowledge and common sense; for instance that offspring (strongly) tend to resemble their parents and such resemblances are heritable, that some of these heritable differences have functional consequences, and these functional consequences may lead to robust average differences in the numbers of surviving and reproducing offspring.
The fact that humans who have spent multiple generations in different environments (which include men and women in any society where the experiences of the sexes are stably non-identical) are (at the group level of averages) superficially, internally, psychologically, biochemically and genetically different is taken to be wholly accidental and irrelevant - contingent.
*
So it turns out that the much demonised and despised religious anti-evolutionists who are skeptical about macro-evolution of humans are in plain fact much more scientific and empirical than are those numerous and influential secular Leftists who challenge the solid, and indeed observable, reality of human adaptation or micro-evolution.
The religious anti-macro-evolutionists who acknowledge within-form adaption are indeed within the historical mainstream of biology in their focus upon form as primary; the secular Leftist anti-adaptationists are chucking-out biology altogether in favour of a political ideology which ignores the most basic level of reality-testing.
And yet, these same secular Leftist anti-adaptationists whose denial of the obvious is delusional by a strict definition, regard the religious anti-macro-evolutionists as knuckle-dragging, ideologically-blinded anti-scientific fools, beneath contempt...
*
(The scientific 'crime' - or solecism - of creationists is that they introduce divine explanations into science and this is an error, because science properly operates within a framework of religious explanations, but does not include religious explanations. Science just is that type of explanation which does not use religious explanation. By contrast, secular Leftists stick to the rule of keeping their ideology outside of science, structuring the interpretation and application of science yet unmentioned within the science. Because they usually stick by this simple but counter-intuitive rule, anti-micro-evolution secular Leftists are often able to get-away-with outrageous dishonesty and distortion of science, whereas religious anti-macro-evolutionary more often blunder by trying to slip divine explanataions inside the science.)
*
Since it is secular Leftists who control public discourse we find public discourse in the extraordinary, and scientifically indefensible, position of asserting that on the one hand macro-evolution is necessarily real and the essential form of the human species certainly arose by natural selection - which is an incremental accumulation of adaptive changes; yet on the other hand denying that micro-evolution, adaptation, has occurred within the human species.
In other words, the speculative and uncertain aspect of Darwinian natural selection is accepted as necessary, as dogma (to reject which is to move outwith the bounds of legitimate public discourse); while the empirically and experientially verifiable aspect of Darwinism is at the same time rejected.
(This is the way that Leftism works: skepticism or outright denial of the obvious and primary, dogmatic belief in the interpretative and secondary.)
Secular Leftists thus believe in speciation but not adaptation; they believe that humans arose by natural selection, but also that - once humans had arisen - natural selection does not apply to humans!
*
The situation is extraordinary, obviously incoherent, and yet it is the everyday underlying assumption of respectable interaction, and it is a mandatory belief: imposed by harsh sanctions.
The situation with respect to evolution is therefore revealing of the objective nature of our society: that our society in its public discourse just is ideological, totalitarian, anti-religious; and it reveals that ours is a society in which where politics utterly dominates and trumps logic and science.
Ours is a society in which logic and science must work within politics such that logical and scientific contradictions are allowed - are indeed required - but not political contradictions.
And it reveals that ours is a society where the ruling, dominating, structuring political ideology is secular and Leftist.
*
There are two prominent kinds of anti-evolutionist in public life - and by which I mean people who deny the applicability of evolution by natural selection to some aspect of humans.
*
Macro anti-evolutionists deny the reality of 'macro' evolution - by which is meant the 'origin of species' - and therefore the use of natural selection to explain the distinctive essence of what it is to be human.
This is related to the idea that the basic forms of living things are 'given', and that natural selection may modify these basic forms - but cannot create a new form nor change one form into another.
This macro anti-evolutionist may be religious - believing that the forms are created by God or gods; or may be one of a non-religious school of biologists who regard form as just a part of the way things are, primary reality, without speculating on how these forms arise or where they come from. For instance suggesting that the forms happen to be mathematically-stable attractors.
This latter group includes many eminent biologists such as Goethe, D'Arcy Thomson, the earliest geneticists, Conrad Waddington, and some of the recent chaos/ complexity theorists.
It should be noted that the only substantive difference between the religious and non-religious 'formalists' is that the religious give a general account of the origin of the forms - and how it is that human may have knowledge of them; while the non-religious say nothing about these matters, accepting the reality of their assertions and avoiding the subject of why their assertions (e.g. their ability to identify forms) should be regarded as valid.
*
I am, nowadays, sympathetic to this idealist or 'formalist' group since on the one hand they have a strong empirical basis for denying that natural selection can lead to genuine novelty at a formal level - because there just aren't any strong and solid examples of this happening; and more fundamentally because natural selection formally depends upon the prior assumption of forms, and the process of NS operates within already existing concepts of form.
In other words, we may observe or impute a selection process when seeing differential reproductive success leading to a stepwise modification of a form, and a change of function leading to enhanced reproductive success.
But such observations always begin with a definition of form, with identification of a form - changes of which are tracked.
*
The big question, therefore, is whether natural selection is an open-ended process, unconstrained by form, which can lead to stepwise change to the point of creating novel forms; or whether natural selection is constrained by forms - that it can lead to stepwise changes only within the boundaries of forms.
Micro-evolution is about natural selection producing change within the bounds of form; macro-evolution is about natural selection producing change of form.
Or, natural selection within the bounds of form is adaptation; while natural selection yielding diversity of form is )in a general sense) speciation.
Darwin's assertion was that adaptation may, indeed does, progress to speciation; that a form may undergo adaptation to the point that it changes form. This is used a metaphysical assumption, outside of science and framing science - but it is not a discovery made by science.
*
Micro-evolution or adaptation within forms seems certainly to be happen - since there are innumerable examples of human selection of animals and plants (especially in agriculture) leading to heritable modifications of function; and if human selection can purposefully change functionality over the space of a human lifespan, then presumably analogous change could result from nature doing the selection over a longer span of generations.
So, there are many religious people, and a minority of biologists - some of whom are highly prestigious, who believe in the reality of micro-evolution or adaptation; but who are skeptical about macro-evolution of new forms (such as a new genus, order, family or some similar large scale and fundamental modification of form).
They do not accept the assumption that adaptation leads to speciation.
*
But another group of evolution sceptics actually deny the reality of adaptation or micro-evolution in humans, they deny that human functions, especially psychological functions, can incrementally be modified by natural selection - and these are mostly secular Left wing political adherents who must (for ideological reasons) deny the reality of sexual and racial differences.
*
Or rather, secular Leftists do not straightforwardly and honestly deny that adaptation can occur in humans - rather, they make an assumption that all humans are essentially the same everywhere and throughout historical time - and any differences are superficial and non-heritable ('environmental'); and then demand a literally-impossible standard of evidential certainty before they will overturn this assumption of universal sameness.
This is presented as if it were a higher form of scientific integrity - a purist stance that requires a higher standard of evidence... Nonsense! It is merely rigging the evaluation method to generate the results you want.
*
The assumption that all humans are essentially the same everywhere is therefore a metaphysical - not scientific - assumption: an assumption standing outside science and framing science.
Certainly it refutes spontaneous beliefs, common sense and the historical wisdom of mankind.
Denial of micro-evolution has reached almost psychotic extremes in relation to men and women, where there are many Leftist social science academics, journalists, politicians etc who refuse to acknowledge even quantitative differences in functionality between men and women.
For such people, to assert the reality of qualitative differences (e.g. between men and women) is regarded as simply abhorrent - malicious, vile, hurtful, aggressive, stupid, dangerous to the Leftist project and 'therefore' (according to such people) necessarily untrue.
*
Secular Leftist anti-evolutionists will deny even universal human experience, obvious knowledge and common sense; for instance that offspring (strongly) tend to resemble their parents and such resemblances are heritable, that some of these heritable differences have functional consequences, and these functional consequences may lead to robust average differences in the numbers of surviving and reproducing offspring.
The fact that humans who have spent multiple generations in different environments (which include men and women in any society where the experiences of the sexes are stably non-identical) are (at the group level of averages) superficially, internally, psychologically, biochemically and genetically different is taken to be wholly accidental and irrelevant - contingent.
*
So it turns out that the much demonised and despised religious anti-evolutionists who are skeptical about macro-evolution of humans are in plain fact much more scientific and empirical than are those numerous and influential secular Leftists who challenge the solid, and indeed observable, reality of human adaptation or micro-evolution.
The religious anti-macro-evolutionists who acknowledge within-form adaption are indeed within the historical mainstream of biology in their focus upon form as primary; the secular Leftist anti-adaptationists are chucking-out biology altogether in favour of a political ideology which ignores the most basic level of reality-testing.
And yet, these same secular Leftist anti-adaptationists whose denial of the obvious is delusional by a strict definition, regard the religious anti-macro-evolutionists as knuckle-dragging, ideologically-blinded anti-scientific fools, beneath contempt...
*
(The scientific 'crime' - or solecism - of creationists is that they introduce divine explanations into science and this is an error, because science properly operates within a framework of religious explanations, but does not include religious explanations. Science just is that type of explanation which does not use religious explanation. By contrast, secular Leftists stick to the rule of keeping their ideology outside of science, structuring the interpretation and application of science yet unmentioned within the science. Because they usually stick by this simple but counter-intuitive rule, anti-micro-evolution secular Leftists are often able to get-away-with outrageous dishonesty and distortion of science, whereas religious anti-macro-evolutionary more often blunder by trying to slip divine explanataions inside the science.)
*
Since it is secular Leftists who control public discourse we find public discourse in the extraordinary, and scientifically indefensible, position of asserting that on the one hand macro-evolution is necessarily real and the essential form of the human species certainly arose by natural selection - which is an incremental accumulation of adaptive changes; yet on the other hand denying that micro-evolution, adaptation, has occurred within the human species.
In other words, the speculative and uncertain aspect of Darwinian natural selection is accepted as necessary, as dogma (to reject which is to move outwith the bounds of legitimate public discourse); while the empirically and experientially verifiable aspect of Darwinism is at the same time rejected.
(This is the way that Leftism works: skepticism or outright denial of the obvious and primary, dogmatic belief in the interpretative and secondary.)
Secular Leftists thus believe in speciation but not adaptation; they believe that humans arose by natural selection, but also that - once humans had arisen - natural selection does not apply to humans!
*
The situation is extraordinary, obviously incoherent, and yet it is the everyday underlying assumption of respectable interaction, and it is a mandatory belief: imposed by harsh sanctions.
The situation with respect to evolution is therefore revealing of the objective nature of our society: that our society in its public discourse just is ideological, totalitarian, anti-religious; and it reveals that ours is a society in which where politics utterly dominates and trumps logic and science.
Ours is a society in which logic and science must work within politics such that logical and scientific contradictions are allowed - are indeed required - but not political contradictions.
And it reveals that ours is a society where the ruling, dominating, structuring political ideology is secular and Leftist.
*
Friday, 13 April 2012
Kelham Theology - teaching methods
*
Kelham Hall was the home of the Society of the Sacred Mission - a Church of England monastic order which was founded by Fr Herbert (HH) Kelly in 1894.
SSM grew to become one of the biggest and most important of the men's religious societies in the C of E, and provider of perhaps the best theological education that the church has ever known.
All this before a catastrophic collapse of demand through the 1960s and the closure of Kelham Hall in the early 1970s.
(A small and scattered residue of professed members of SSM still remains.)
*
I have been reading SSM: history of the Society of Sacred Mission by Alistair Mason (1993) - I will abbreviate this as SSM-Mason - which I found to be a superb book.
One of its revelations was the detailed account of Kelham's course in theology, which it provided to young men aiming-at ordination; who lived under annual monastic vows in a residential and immersive environment.
The quality of the Kelham education in theology was remarkable.
*
The Kelham course was better devised, and covered more, than any other course available. Also the students thought harder than ordinary students elsewhere. SSM-Mason, p89
...the long SSM course... was a great achievement. Very ordinary students did more and better theology there than at any other institution in the history of Anglicanism. SSM-Mason p93.
*
What were their methods at Kelham Hall?
1. In the first place, the course was designed as a free education for a skilled working class intake - the children of artisans who had not been to Public (i.e. private) schools, and had not attended universities - the boys usually began in their mid-teens, and as young as 15. The course therefore included (but was not restricted to) relatively elementary academic teaching (e.g. teaching from scratch, from zero knowledge, Latin and Greek).
2. But within this group Kelham was very selective; accepting only a small fraction of applicants and expelling about half of those they did accept (for bad behaviour, or for academic failures).
3. The course was long - six or seven years. This meant that the students had plenty of time to master difficult content and to go through a very large and high level curriculum thoroughly and without haste - and yet with plenty of time for many and frequent daily hours of attendance at religious services, for household chores, and organized sports. Every hour of every day was organized, pretty much.
4. The method of teaching seems to have been, on weekdays, as follows:
- An hour per day of classroom training, e.g. in Latin and Greek.
- An hour lecture per day - especially systemtic theology/ dogmatics and the complete history of the Christian Church. These lectures were reproduced in typescripts and collected into booklets.
- Five hours per day of book work to read-up the subjects of the day's lecture and to prepare...
- One essay per week, which was read and marked by staff.
*
My conclusion is that excellent academic results at an advanced level are possible with students of only moderate natural ability and with very little background, cheaply and with few facilities; but that this requires what seems nowadays a very tough - almost 'military' - regime, and that most students be considerably younger than is normal at present.
*
Kelham Hall was the home of the Society of the Sacred Mission - a Church of England monastic order which was founded by Fr Herbert (HH) Kelly in 1894.
SSM grew to become one of the biggest and most important of the men's religious societies in the C of E, and provider of perhaps the best theological education that the church has ever known.
All this before a catastrophic collapse of demand through the 1960s and the closure of Kelham Hall in the early 1970s.
(A small and scattered residue of professed members of SSM still remains.)
*
I have been reading SSM: history of the Society of Sacred Mission by Alistair Mason (1993) - I will abbreviate this as SSM-Mason - which I found to be a superb book.
One of its revelations was the detailed account of Kelham's course in theology, which it provided to young men aiming-at ordination; who lived under annual monastic vows in a residential and immersive environment.
The quality of the Kelham education in theology was remarkable.
*
The Kelham course was better devised, and covered more, than any other course available. Also the students thought harder than ordinary students elsewhere. SSM-Mason, p89
...the long SSM course... was a great achievement. Very ordinary students did more and better theology there than at any other institution in the history of Anglicanism. SSM-Mason p93.
*
What were their methods at Kelham Hall?
1. In the first place, the course was designed as a free education for a skilled working class intake - the children of artisans who had not been to Public (i.e. private) schools, and had not attended universities - the boys usually began in their mid-teens, and as young as 15. The course therefore included (but was not restricted to) relatively elementary academic teaching (e.g. teaching from scratch, from zero knowledge, Latin and Greek).
2. But within this group Kelham was very selective; accepting only a small fraction of applicants and expelling about half of those they did accept (for bad behaviour, or for academic failures).
3. The course was long - six or seven years. This meant that the students had plenty of time to master difficult content and to go through a very large and high level curriculum thoroughly and without haste - and yet with plenty of time for many and frequent daily hours of attendance at religious services, for household chores, and organized sports. Every hour of every day was organized, pretty much.
4. The method of teaching seems to have been, on weekdays, as follows:
- An hour per day of classroom training, e.g. in Latin and Greek.
- An hour lecture per day - especially systemtic theology/ dogmatics and the complete history of the Christian Church. These lectures were reproduced in typescripts and collected into booklets.
- Five hours per day of book work to read-up the subjects of the day's lecture and to prepare...
- One essay per week, which was read and marked by staff.
*
My conclusion is that excellent academic results at an advanced level are possible with students of only moderate natural ability and with very little background, cheaply and with few facilities; but that this requires what seems nowadays a very tough - almost 'military' - regime, and that most students be considerably younger than is normal at present.
*
I am being tortured by street musicians
*
All of whom play looped-versions of what is supposed to be the first sixteen bars of the 'Romanian' Anniversary Song...
*
(You know the tune if not the name.
It is beautifully sung here by the genius tenor Andy Williams
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekduN2N0eTY )
*
...except that these versions are played by one finger on an accordeon, 'un-barred' in tempo, and have variable numbers of notes before repeating, and repeating, and repeating...
A particularly pernicious form of noise pollution.
*
All of whom play looped-versions of what is supposed to be the first sixteen bars of the 'Romanian' Anniversary Song...
*
(You know the tune if not the name.
It is beautifully sung here by the genius tenor Andy Williams
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekduN2N0eTY )
*
...except that these versions are played by one finger on an accordeon, 'un-barred' in tempo, and have variable numbers of notes before repeating, and repeating, and repeating...
A particularly pernicious form of noise pollution.
*
Diseases are caused by the kinds of thing that cause disease
*
There are lots of common diseases for which the cause is not known - coronary heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, most cancers.
When a disease cause is unknown, then all kinds of weird ideas may become established as to the cause, and some of these are tenacious.
Many people imagine that myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) are caused by cholesterol, or fat - but these are not the kind of things that cause disease.
Many people imagine that 'depression' is caused by neurotransmitter abnormalities - such as low serotonin - but this is not a cause of disease, at most (if true, which it isn't) it would be a biochemical marker of disease and not a cause.
*
Diseases are typically quite simple and (at least since about 1900) quite common-sensical, once their causes are discovered.
Most diseases of which causes are known with confidence are caused by infections and parasites, and by various kinds of trauma - physical trauma, chemical trauma (poisoning), by accidents in development (it almost impossible to construct a human being perfectly and without defects), and by the accumulation of damage (this includes most cancers - the cancers of older age).
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/what-kind-of-pathology-causes.html
'Genetic' causes of disease are simply a member of the class of developmental problems - an example of how difficult (impossible) it is to build something as complex as a human without some errors.
*
So, for example, it is likely that the mid-twentieth century epidemic of heart disease was probably caused by some infectious agent - not known; at least, the broad facts fit those of an infectious disease, and as a basic assumption, infection is the most likely cause.
For humans, as large complex animals, invasion and colonisation by infectious parasitic agents is the basic problem in life, considering that we could not, until recently - and even now only very partially - do anything much about the way we are made, or the accumulation of damage.
As well as the damage of micro-organisms and parasites, there are problems with the body's 'immune' reactions to these invaders - and these probably cause another whole set of 'autoimmune' diseases; which may include eczema, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and many of the other diseases that are improved by 'steroids' (glucocorticoids).
*
So we have the two greatest drug class discoveries in medicine in the mid-twentieth century: 1. the antibiotics, which can cure infections; and 2. steroids, which can cure pathological immune responses, i.e. pathologies in the bodies own response to infection.
*
What about diet?
In this broad brush approach, the most obvious factor is that humans are harmed by insufficient food: starvation is a major cause of disease throughout human history, probably the major cause in many societies with dense populations.
It seems that humans can live a full lifespan on a huge range of diets, so long as the food does not contain too much poisonous or infectious stuff.
The most striking thing about diet is how little dietary components matter to life expectancy, so long as there is enough food.
*
Tobacco smoke is, of course, a toxic agent - or rather, an agent including toxic properties - and the cause of most lung cancers; and also toxic are many other drugs including alcohol and prescribed drugs.
Many drugs - such as penicillin, digitalis, caffeine, opium - are indeed plant toxins evolved to poison animals who eat the plant.
Plant seeds, stems and leaves are usually poisonous to animals unless they are protected by a physical barrier (such as shell, bark, tough 'skin'); because stems and especially leaves are exposed, and the plant doesn't want its reproductive cells to be eaten. e.g. Tobacco is from leaves, caffeine from seeds, and so on.
*
So, there we have it. The causes of disease. If in doubt, assume one of the above.
*
There are lots of common diseases for which the cause is not known - coronary heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, most cancers.
When a disease cause is unknown, then all kinds of weird ideas may become established as to the cause, and some of these are tenacious.
Many people imagine that myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) are caused by cholesterol, or fat - but these are not the kind of things that cause disease.
Many people imagine that 'depression' is caused by neurotransmitter abnormalities - such as low serotonin - but this is not a cause of disease, at most (if true, which it isn't) it would be a biochemical marker of disease and not a cause.
*
Diseases are typically quite simple and (at least since about 1900) quite common-sensical, once their causes are discovered.
Most diseases of which causes are known with confidence are caused by infections and parasites, and by various kinds of trauma - physical trauma, chemical trauma (poisoning), by accidents in development (it almost impossible to construct a human being perfectly and without defects), and by the accumulation of damage (this includes most cancers - the cancers of older age).
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/what-kind-of-pathology-causes.html
'Genetic' causes of disease are simply a member of the class of developmental problems - an example of how difficult (impossible) it is to build something as complex as a human without some errors.
*
So, for example, it is likely that the mid-twentieth century epidemic of heart disease was probably caused by some infectious agent - not known; at least, the broad facts fit those of an infectious disease, and as a basic assumption, infection is the most likely cause.
For humans, as large complex animals, invasion and colonisation by infectious parasitic agents is the basic problem in life, considering that we could not, until recently - and even now only very partially - do anything much about the way we are made, or the accumulation of damage.
As well as the damage of micro-organisms and parasites, there are problems with the body's 'immune' reactions to these invaders - and these probably cause another whole set of 'autoimmune' diseases; which may include eczema, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and many of the other diseases that are improved by 'steroids' (glucocorticoids).
*
So we have the two greatest drug class discoveries in medicine in the mid-twentieth century: 1. the antibiotics, which can cure infections; and 2. steroids, which can cure pathological immune responses, i.e. pathologies in the bodies own response to infection.
*
What about diet?
In this broad brush approach, the most obvious factor is that humans are harmed by insufficient food: starvation is a major cause of disease throughout human history, probably the major cause in many societies with dense populations.
It seems that humans can live a full lifespan on a huge range of diets, so long as the food does not contain too much poisonous or infectious stuff.
The most striking thing about diet is how little dietary components matter to life expectancy, so long as there is enough food.
*
Tobacco smoke is, of course, a toxic agent - or rather, an agent including toxic properties - and the cause of most lung cancers; and also toxic are many other drugs including alcohol and prescribed drugs.
Many drugs - such as penicillin, digitalis, caffeine, opium - are indeed plant toxins evolved to poison animals who eat the plant.
Plant seeds, stems and leaves are usually poisonous to animals unless they are protected by a physical barrier (such as shell, bark, tough 'skin'); because stems and especially leaves are exposed, and the plant doesn't want its reproductive cells to be eaten. e.g. Tobacco is from leaves, caffeine from seeds, and so on.
*
So, there we have it. The causes of disease. If in doubt, assume one of the above.
*
Thursday, 12 April 2012
If it is so easy to become a Christian, why is it so hard to stay a Christian?
*
Why is it so hard?
We would expect it to be hard to remain a Christian due to original sin - due to the selfish pridefulness of humans. Yet the business seems even harder than that.
It seems that events conspire to turn us away from God.
*
And that is the answer: events do conspire, there is personal purposive evil in the universe.
Belief in the reality of fallen angels, the devil and demons - personal and purposive evil - is a necessary part of Christianity - and is indeed an aspect of natural law (i.e. the innate and spontaneous human understanding of reality).
If we omit this belief - and the temptations to ignore, deny or delete the devil from theology have never been stronger - then we do not sufficiently understand the world, we underestimate the difficulties of life, of salvation.
*
And this matters, it matters a great deal. The original sin of humans can, of course, be stretched to explain evil; but will probably prove inadequate to explain evil adequately for us to navigate life to salvation.
Especially in the world as it is now where so much conspires to turn us away from God.
*
(This is sin, to be turned away from God, and towards the world and ourselves. Sin is not like breaking the law, it is about this orientation. Christ was free from sin not because he didn't break any religious laws, but because he was always turned towards his Father and resisted all attempts to turn him away.)
*
To live in a world of endemic, pervasive, expanding sin - and yet not to acknowledge the reality of, and guard against the activities of, personal, purposive evil is not sophisticated nor is it a higher form of Christianity - it is to deny clear and explicit Christian teaching, and passively to aid the plans of the enemy.
*
Why is it so hard?
We would expect it to be hard to remain a Christian due to original sin - due to the selfish pridefulness of humans. Yet the business seems even harder than that.
It seems that events conspire to turn us away from God.
*
And that is the answer: events do conspire, there is personal purposive evil in the universe.
Belief in the reality of fallen angels, the devil and demons - personal and purposive evil - is a necessary part of Christianity - and is indeed an aspect of natural law (i.e. the innate and spontaneous human understanding of reality).
If we omit this belief - and the temptations to ignore, deny or delete the devil from theology have never been stronger - then we do not sufficiently understand the world, we underestimate the difficulties of life, of salvation.
*
And this matters, it matters a great deal. The original sin of humans can, of course, be stretched to explain evil; but will probably prove inadequate to explain evil adequately for us to navigate life to salvation.
Especially in the world as it is now where so much conspires to turn us away from God.
*
(This is sin, to be turned away from God, and towards the world and ourselves. Sin is not like breaking the law, it is about this orientation. Christ was free from sin not because he didn't break any religious laws, but because he was always turned towards his Father and resisted all attempts to turn him away.)
*
To live in a world of endemic, pervasive, expanding sin - and yet not to acknowledge the reality of, and guard against the activities of, personal, purposive evil is not sophisticated nor is it a higher form of Christianity - it is to deny clear and explicit Christian teaching, and passively to aid the plans of the enemy.
*
Wednesday, 11 April 2012
Magical thinking in secular modernity
*
As I well remember from my own experience, moderns and progressives like to imagine that they are hard-nosed, rational, empirical. Yet magical thinking abounds.
It is abetted by the abstractions which underpin public discourse.
Clever people like to imagine that they are comfortable and competent in the world of abstractions; yet in my experience they are merely complacent and confused.
*
Think of 'education'. People talk a lot about the effect of education. The effect, for example, of attending college upon earnings. They gather data, study correlations...
And at the end of the day they claim that being signed up for a place called a university for three or four years enhances earnings.
The magic comes because these people really ignore, yes they do, whether the person attends college (as contrasted with working in a bar and going to parties), whether they study anything valuable - they ignore whether the place called a university is even trying to educate students and if so then in what?
Indeed, we get a situation when people really do simply sign onto the books of a college, and where the college simply lays on some random cluster of modules which they claim are academically relevant - and play around with experiments in 'delivering' these modules... and everybody imagines that somehow, something (which we can't define) called education must be going on; and everybody is terribly surprised, offended or angry when the people who have been through this 'process' seem not only to have gained nothing by it but are made worse in their general habits and exhibit a decline in useful skills.
*
Since there is no modern definition of education, the concept - the word - serves as a black box to obscure that 1. we do not know what is going-on - if anything - in modern schools and colleges, nor do we know whether it is good or bad. 2. we do not care what is going on. 3. Nonetheless we assume that something terribly important is going on - important enough that we sacrifice vastly to make sure that ever-more of it goes on for ever-more people.
Education is is a bogus discourse about abstract masses; but what could potentially be understood is at the level of individuals and their experience - their culture, skills, habits.
From that perspective it is clear than many, most, indeed the majority of individuals deteriorate in college, are damaged and corrupted by college.
From that perspective (of teachers in classrooms) it is clear that most of the official stuff that goes on in college, sometimes all of the stuff that goes on in college, is not even trying to do anything in particular at all.
*
Or 'immigration'.
This is a subject treated in a wholly magical and wishful manner.
Immigration is about getting new neighbours.
Now, is there anybody who imagines that it does not make any difference who your neighbours happen to be?
Is there anybody who would be indifferent if the new neighbour was someone who had been a gangster, torturer, professional thief. Would we expect a change of location to change them into someone indistinguishable from ourselves?
Is there anybody who would be indifferent to whether there was one new neighbour arriving, or ten or one hundred new neighbours? At some point - imprecise but definite - people cease to be new neighbours and become displacers.
Is there anyone who would be indifferent to whether the new neighbours took nothing - or whether the new neighbours in effect extracted money from your wallet to keep them in comfort (perhaps greater than your own), and to build new houses and schools (perhaps better than your own).
Yet the word, the concept, of immigration ignores these specifics - such that the abstracting intellectuals are astonished and revolted by the selfishness of anyone who tries to re-introduce reality.
Immigration is not just an abstraction, it is a compulsory abstraction - which cannot be allowed to be broken-down into specific elements. Experience and personal knowledge can be allowed to have no relevance to the concept of immigration.
In reality, it would (almost) be accurate to state that there is no such thing as 'immigration' - immigration as such is neither good nor bad - the reality is that it is (almost) entirely a matter of the characteristics (character and abilities as revealed by behaviour) of the people that are immigrating and the quantities.
The concept of immigration therefore serves almost entirely to obscure reality; and the obscuration is mandatory.
*
'Economics'.
What the heck is economics, and how on earth have we come to a situation where people seriously believe that when you are in debt, the way out of debt is to borrow more and spend more?
It is obvious that the multiple layers of abstraction of economics, the treatment of complex matters in gross aggregation, combined with the vast size and inertia and specialised interdependency of modernity - that economics has become psychotic, operating in a world of fantasy; a folie a thousands of crazed colleagues.
Economics not only assumes, but it necessarily assumes that all human beings are the same - are interchangeable units.
It assumes, for example, that differences in skills are due to education. So that the way to create more skills is to have a more educated work force. If there are more people spending three or four years at a place called a college and at the end emerging with a piece of paper called a degree - then that means more skills. If there are more people called doctors, that means more skills.
But education, as we see above, is a black box - so economists have said nothing: worse, they have corrupted discourse such that the assumption is now that certificated 'skill' is an actual skill, that people called doctors are doctors (as the word used to be understood) - and it needs to be proven that a degree is worthless (rather than the common sense idea of assuming that it is worthless unless proven otherwise).
It is assumed that economic proxy measures of resources are real, even when all the incentives are to create fake resources.
It is assumed that people can have more useful stuff per head without either working harder at making useful stuff or being more efficient at making useful stuff.
If we were talking about a comprehensible sized entity - like a village - then we would realise that coercively moving more stuff around from person to person is not the same as creating more stuff.
*
Economics as it is, is not just nonsense, but it actually prevents people from seeing the obvious.
The link between believing, policy, implementation, and effect measurement is so loose that it is irrelevant - not just slightly irrelevant but completely irrelevant; such that apparently refuted theories like the Soviet-style Command Economy are currently and actively being re-tried on a vast scale.
If communist economics has not been refuted and discarded, then nothing ever can be refuted or ruled-out! - and economics is unconstrained.
*
And that is the problem with education, immigration, economics and other abstractions - they are unconstrained.
They cannot be refuted because they are made-up stuff based on nothing.
It is like debating a Freudian analyst (something I used to try and do) - the whole thing is elaborated nonsense, and there was no way into it.
Freud had just said stuff, which was then regarded as axiomatic, and the following generations built arbitrarily higgledy piggledy on top of it. Then everybody discussed the result earnestly and treated it seriously and were very grave and concerned at the idea that it might be neglected or discarded.
*
The magical thinking of modernity is pernicious because it chucks out the natural spontaneous transcendentalism that is intrinsic to humans - chucks out the soul, gods or God, the reality of reality and The Good (objective truth, objective virtue, objective beauty) - regards these as so much arbitrary made-up stuff, disproven, left-behind, naive, silly, embarrassing...
Then modernity makes-up new stuff, lots of new stuff, ever more and newer stuff; a truly arbitrary and unfounded set of assumptions; then extrapolates unconstrainedly from these assumptions, and then builds systems which are insufficiently systematic to cohere - and then regards the end result, this random heap of constantly-changing nonsense, as real!
So modernity regards education, immigration and economics as real; and the common sense natural way of thinking of historical humankind and the majority of the world (even now) and the views of the non-intellectuals as being childish nonsense.
Modernity disbelieves in magic, yet establishes magical thinking as the unchallengeable core of modernity.
*
As I well remember from my own experience, moderns and progressives like to imagine that they are hard-nosed, rational, empirical. Yet magical thinking abounds.
It is abetted by the abstractions which underpin public discourse.
Clever people like to imagine that they are comfortable and competent in the world of abstractions; yet in my experience they are merely complacent and confused.
*
Think of 'education'. People talk a lot about the effect of education. The effect, for example, of attending college upon earnings. They gather data, study correlations...
And at the end of the day they claim that being signed up for a place called a university for three or four years enhances earnings.
The magic comes because these people really ignore, yes they do, whether the person attends college (as contrasted with working in a bar and going to parties), whether they study anything valuable - they ignore whether the place called a university is even trying to educate students and if so then in what?
Indeed, we get a situation when people really do simply sign onto the books of a college, and where the college simply lays on some random cluster of modules which they claim are academically relevant - and play around with experiments in 'delivering' these modules... and everybody imagines that somehow, something (which we can't define) called education must be going on; and everybody is terribly surprised, offended or angry when the people who have been through this 'process' seem not only to have gained nothing by it but are made worse in their general habits and exhibit a decline in useful skills.
*
Since there is no modern definition of education, the concept - the word - serves as a black box to obscure that 1. we do not know what is going-on - if anything - in modern schools and colleges, nor do we know whether it is good or bad. 2. we do not care what is going on. 3. Nonetheless we assume that something terribly important is going on - important enough that we sacrifice vastly to make sure that ever-more of it goes on for ever-more people.
Education is is a bogus discourse about abstract masses; but what could potentially be understood is at the level of individuals and their experience - their culture, skills, habits.
From that perspective it is clear than many, most, indeed the majority of individuals deteriorate in college, are damaged and corrupted by college.
From that perspective (of teachers in classrooms) it is clear that most of the official stuff that goes on in college, sometimes all of the stuff that goes on in college, is not even trying to do anything in particular at all.
*
Or 'immigration'.
This is a subject treated in a wholly magical and wishful manner.
Immigration is about getting new neighbours.
Now, is there anybody who imagines that it does not make any difference who your neighbours happen to be?
Is there anybody who would be indifferent if the new neighbour was someone who had been a gangster, torturer, professional thief. Would we expect a change of location to change them into someone indistinguishable from ourselves?
Is there anybody who would be indifferent to whether there was one new neighbour arriving, or ten or one hundred new neighbours? At some point - imprecise but definite - people cease to be new neighbours and become displacers.
Is there anyone who would be indifferent to whether the new neighbours took nothing - or whether the new neighbours in effect extracted money from your wallet to keep them in comfort (perhaps greater than your own), and to build new houses and schools (perhaps better than your own).
Yet the word, the concept, of immigration ignores these specifics - such that the abstracting intellectuals are astonished and revolted by the selfishness of anyone who tries to re-introduce reality.
Immigration is not just an abstraction, it is a compulsory abstraction - which cannot be allowed to be broken-down into specific elements. Experience and personal knowledge can be allowed to have no relevance to the concept of immigration.
In reality, it would (almost) be accurate to state that there is no such thing as 'immigration' - immigration as such is neither good nor bad - the reality is that it is (almost) entirely a matter of the characteristics (character and abilities as revealed by behaviour) of the people that are immigrating and the quantities.
The concept of immigration therefore serves almost entirely to obscure reality; and the obscuration is mandatory.
*
'Economics'.
What the heck is economics, and how on earth have we come to a situation where people seriously believe that when you are in debt, the way out of debt is to borrow more and spend more?
It is obvious that the multiple layers of abstraction of economics, the treatment of complex matters in gross aggregation, combined with the vast size and inertia and specialised interdependency of modernity - that economics has become psychotic, operating in a world of fantasy; a folie a thousands of crazed colleagues.
Economics not only assumes, but it necessarily assumes that all human beings are the same - are interchangeable units.
It assumes, for example, that differences in skills are due to education. So that the way to create more skills is to have a more educated work force. If there are more people spending three or four years at a place called a college and at the end emerging with a piece of paper called a degree - then that means more skills. If there are more people called doctors, that means more skills.
But education, as we see above, is a black box - so economists have said nothing: worse, they have corrupted discourse such that the assumption is now that certificated 'skill' is an actual skill, that people called doctors are doctors (as the word used to be understood) - and it needs to be proven that a degree is worthless (rather than the common sense idea of assuming that it is worthless unless proven otherwise).
It is assumed that economic proxy measures of resources are real, even when all the incentives are to create fake resources.
It is assumed that people can have more useful stuff per head without either working harder at making useful stuff or being more efficient at making useful stuff.
If we were talking about a comprehensible sized entity - like a village - then we would realise that coercively moving more stuff around from person to person is not the same as creating more stuff.
*
Economics as it is, is not just nonsense, but it actually prevents people from seeing the obvious.
The link between believing, policy, implementation, and effect measurement is so loose that it is irrelevant - not just slightly irrelevant but completely irrelevant; such that apparently refuted theories like the Soviet-style Command Economy are currently and actively being re-tried on a vast scale.
If communist economics has not been refuted and discarded, then nothing ever can be refuted or ruled-out! - and economics is unconstrained.
*
And that is the problem with education, immigration, economics and other abstractions - they are unconstrained.
They cannot be refuted because they are made-up stuff based on nothing.
It is like debating a Freudian analyst (something I used to try and do) - the whole thing is elaborated nonsense, and there was no way into it.
Freud had just said stuff, which was then regarded as axiomatic, and the following generations built arbitrarily higgledy piggledy on top of it. Then everybody discussed the result earnestly and treated it seriously and were very grave and concerned at the idea that it might be neglected or discarded.
*
The magical thinking of modernity is pernicious because it chucks out the natural spontaneous transcendentalism that is intrinsic to humans - chucks out the soul, gods or God, the reality of reality and The Good (objective truth, objective virtue, objective beauty) - regards these as so much arbitrary made-up stuff, disproven, left-behind, naive, silly, embarrassing...
Then modernity makes-up new stuff, lots of new stuff, ever more and newer stuff; a truly arbitrary and unfounded set of assumptions; then extrapolates unconstrainedly from these assumptions, and then builds systems which are insufficiently systematic to cohere - and then regards the end result, this random heap of constantly-changing nonsense, as real!
So modernity regards education, immigration and economics as real; and the common sense natural way of thinking of historical humankind and the majority of the world (even now) and the views of the non-intellectuals as being childish nonsense.
Modernity disbelieves in magic, yet establishes magical thinking as the unchallengeable core of modernity.
*
Tuesday, 10 April 2012
Evil must be *invited* into the heart, like a vampire into the home
*
Supposedly, a vampire cannot come into a house unless invited; evil is much the same with respect to the human heart.
It seems likely that humans are intrinsically protected by a kind of natural innocence - but that this protection is breached if evil is invited.
This still applies, now as ever, but temptation in the modern world resembles having a lifelong series of vampires ringing the doorbell and requesting or demanding admission; some apparently beautiful, others viscerally sexy; some dominant and demanding, others dependant and desperate...
Sooner or later, most people will be worn-down or taken off-guard say yes; invite the vampire into their home - evil into their heart.
But once the vampire is inside it may be much more difficult to get rid of it.
Not least because you may be bitten and yourself become a vampire: one whose pleasure is to prey upon the innocent, to corrupt the Good.
*
Supposedly, a vampire cannot come into a house unless invited; evil is much the same with respect to the human heart.
It seems likely that humans are intrinsically protected by a kind of natural innocence - but that this protection is breached if evil is invited.
This still applies, now as ever, but temptation in the modern world resembles having a lifelong series of vampires ringing the doorbell and requesting or demanding admission; some apparently beautiful, others viscerally sexy; some dominant and demanding, others dependant and desperate...
Sooner or later, most people will be worn-down or taken off-guard say yes; invite the vampire into their home - evil into their heart.
But once the vampire is inside it may be much more difficult to get rid of it.
Not least because you may be bitten and yourself become a vampire: one whose pleasure is to prey upon the innocent, to corrupt the Good.
*
What reactionary Christians need most are multiple worked-examples
*
We learn a difficult and alien way of thinking such as mathematics by working-through multiple examples - doing lists of calculations.
Eventually, with intelligence and hard work, the language of mathematics becomes spontaneous.
*
We get the same training in Leftism from the mass media, civil administration, mainstream educational institutions, the arts... we are given multiple worked-examples of how to think in a difficult and alien way that leaves-out God and the transcendental; leaves out objective morality, objective beauty, the imperative for truthfulness; is cynical about purpose and meaning; leaves-out the soul, the soul's survival after death...
and is predicated (without argument) on the assumption that maximising the short term pleasure and minimising the personal suffering of ourselves is the primary goal of individual life; and maximising the short term pleasure and minimising the suffering of approved groups is the primary goal of public policy .
*
So, when a news story is discussed, when a government policy is described, when an educational topic is introduced, when a novel or movie is plotted, when a poster is designed... each is a specific worked example of Leftism; thus by being taken-through multiple concrete instances we are being trained in the way of thought that is Leftism.
*
Leftism (and atheism) is as unnatural as mathematics, indeed much more unnatural (albeit much easier) since its dominance is so recent and localised; yet secular materialist Leftism is so pervasive - and so attention-grabbing and addictive - that this artificial perspective has made it almost impossible for many modern intellectuals to think in a way which was perfectly natural and spontaneous for scores of generations.
*
Modern intellectuals need to be trained to think spontaneously and naturally!
More importantly we need to be trained to think in a way that is amenable to Christianity; because the secular materialist Leftist way of thinking is utterly hostile to Christianity.
To such an one, to the trained modern intellectual, Christianity is simply absurd and incomprehensible.
*
The secular modern way of thinking simply excludes that which is necessary for Christianity to make sense.
Just as mathematics is learned by worked examples of of mathematical principles applied to multiple concrete situations; so the modern intellectual needs to learn Christianity by worked examples of Christian belief applied to multiple concrete situations.
*
Worked examples of Christian belief in practice (especially, in practice under conditions relevant to modern Christians) are therefore a vital supplement to learning Christian principles.
Reactionary Christians can perform a valuable service for each other by displaying (orally and in writing) multiple 'worked examples' of Christian beliefs in modern practise.
This means it is not going to be enough to state Christian principles (the basis of belief), nor is it enough to state the results (the necessary beliefs), but Christians should be showing the workings.
*
My suggestion is that it would be very helpful if Christian bloggers should show - in multiple worked examples - how they personally get from general beliefs to concrete behaviours, in multiple, specific worked examples.
*
We learn a difficult and alien way of thinking such as mathematics by working-through multiple examples - doing lists of calculations.
Eventually, with intelligence and hard work, the language of mathematics becomes spontaneous.
*
We get the same training in Leftism from the mass media, civil administration, mainstream educational institutions, the arts... we are given multiple worked-examples of how to think in a difficult and alien way that leaves-out God and the transcendental; leaves out objective morality, objective beauty, the imperative for truthfulness; is cynical about purpose and meaning; leaves-out the soul, the soul's survival after death...
and is predicated (without argument) on the assumption that maximising the short term pleasure and minimising the personal suffering of ourselves is the primary goal of individual life; and maximising the short term pleasure and minimising the suffering of approved groups is the primary goal of public policy .
*
So, when a news story is discussed, when a government policy is described, when an educational topic is introduced, when a novel or movie is plotted, when a poster is designed... each is a specific worked example of Leftism; thus by being taken-through multiple concrete instances we are being trained in the way of thought that is Leftism.
*
Leftism (and atheism) is as unnatural as mathematics, indeed much more unnatural (albeit much easier) since its dominance is so recent and localised; yet secular materialist Leftism is so pervasive - and so attention-grabbing and addictive - that this artificial perspective has made it almost impossible for many modern intellectuals to think in a way which was perfectly natural and spontaneous for scores of generations.
*
Modern intellectuals need to be trained to think spontaneously and naturally!
More importantly we need to be trained to think in a way that is amenable to Christianity; because the secular materialist Leftist way of thinking is utterly hostile to Christianity.
To such an one, to the trained modern intellectual, Christianity is simply absurd and incomprehensible.
*
The secular modern way of thinking simply excludes that which is necessary for Christianity to make sense.
Just as mathematics is learned by worked examples of of mathematical principles applied to multiple concrete situations; so the modern intellectual needs to learn Christianity by worked examples of Christian belief applied to multiple concrete situations.
*
Worked examples of Christian belief in practice (especially, in practice under conditions relevant to modern Christians) are therefore a vital supplement to learning Christian principles.
Reactionary Christians can perform a valuable service for each other by displaying (orally and in writing) multiple 'worked examples' of Christian beliefs in modern practise.
This means it is not going to be enough to state Christian principles (the basis of belief), nor is it enough to state the results (the necessary beliefs), but Christians should be showing the workings.
*
My suggestion is that it would be very helpful if Christian bloggers should show - in multiple worked examples - how they personally get from general beliefs to concrete behaviours, in multiple, specific worked examples.
*
Monday, 9 April 2012
Do Leftists really intend evil, or it is just an accident?
*
The bad news is that Leftists really do evil on purpose and it is not a matter of good intentions accidentally gone astray.
How do I know this?
Because they do not correct their errors.
*
E.g. Leftist policies destroy marriage, and when this destruction is obvious they do not repent and undo the policies but continue to add new policies which continue to destroy marriage. Therefore, the policies are intended to destroy marriage.
*
Any policy which leads to harm and yet not repented and reversed was, we must infer, done deliberately - with intent to harm.
When Leftism leads to communist totalitarian evil, and the result appears again and again, then we must conclude that this is deliberate.
We must first learn to recognise evil - and this means we must acknowledge the reality and commonness of evil intent - of planned, unrepentant, recidivist evil.
*
The bad news is that Leftists really do evil on purpose and it is not a matter of good intentions accidentally gone astray.
How do I know this?
Because they do not correct their errors.
*
E.g. Leftist policies destroy marriage, and when this destruction is obvious they do not repent and undo the policies but continue to add new policies which continue to destroy marriage. Therefore, the policies are intended to destroy marriage.
*
Any policy which leads to harm and yet not repented and reversed was, we must infer, done deliberately - with intent to harm.
When Leftism leads to communist totalitarian evil, and the result appears again and again, then we must conclude that this is deliberate.
We must first learn to recognise evil - and this means we must acknowledge the reality and commonness of evil intent - of planned, unrepentant, recidivist evil.
*
Sunday, 8 April 2012
First we must recognise evil
*
We must recognise the evil that is so prevalent and pervasive. We are reluctant to do so, because it seems to be judgmental and blaming; yet it must be done.
The traditional and all but universal belief in purposive evil is perhaps necessary for this, including the prevalence and pervasiveness of demonic influences.
Purposive evil is working through people, including ourselves, but pretending it isn't and that all bad things are inadvertent is simply untrue.
Bad things happen due to bad intent, yet the intent may be coming through people rather than originating within them.
Indeed, surely this is normal. This is the way that evil becomes so common, so normal. The person who does evil has a clear conscience, having merely said yes to the promptings of evil...
*
We must recognise the evil that is so prevalent and pervasive. We are reluctant to do so, because it seems to be judgmental and blaming; yet it must be done.
The traditional and all but universal belief in purposive evil is perhaps necessary for this, including the prevalence and pervasiveness of demonic influences.
Purposive evil is working through people, including ourselves, but pretending it isn't and that all bad things are inadvertent is simply untrue.
Bad things happen due to bad intent, yet the intent may be coming through people rather than originating within them.
Indeed, surely this is normal. This is the way that evil becomes so common, so normal. The person who does evil has a clear conscience, having merely said yes to the promptings of evil...
*
First we must recognise evil
*
We must recognise the evil that is so prevalent and pervasive. We are reluctant to do so, because it seems to be judgmental and blaming; yet it must be done.
The traditional and all but universal belief in purposive evil is perhaps necessary for this, including the prevalence and pervasiveness of demonic influences.
Purposive evil is working through people, including ourselves, but pretending it isn't and that all bad things are inadvertent is simply untrue.
Bad things happen due to bad intent, yet the intent may be coming through people rather than originating within them.
Indeed, surely this is normal. This is the way that evil becomes so sommon, so normal. The person who does evil has a clear conscience, having merely said yes to the promptings of evil...
We must recognise the evil that is so prevalent and pervasive. We are reluctant to do so, because it seems to be judgmental and blaming; yet it must be done.
The traditional and all but universal belief in purposive evil is perhaps necessary for this, including the prevalence and pervasiveness of demonic influences.
Purposive evil is working through people, including ourselves, but pretending it isn't and that all bad things are inadvertent is simply untrue.
Bad things happen due to bad intent, yet the intent may be coming through people rather than originating within them.
Indeed, surely this is normal. This is the way that evil becomes so sommon, so normal. The person who does evil has a clear conscience, having merely said yes to the promptings of evil...
The demonic addictiveness of atheism
*
The young person is an atheist because Christianity stands in the path of what makes him happy; the old person remains an atheist because Christianity offers eternal happiness - which he now despises as beneath him.
The first is an atheist because he is a hedonist who lives for pleasure; the second because he is a stoic who regards himself as advanced beyond any concern with pleasure.
The atheist youth is too proud to be bound by the conventional knowledge and petty rules of former generations and insists on doing it his own way; the atheist geriatric is too proud to admit the hope less ness of the life he has created for himself.
(The demons laugh at the triumph of pride. The transformation of a youth who will risk anything for the chance of pleasure to the elder who will sacrifice everything to reject the promise of happiness.)
*
The young person is an atheist because Christianity stands in the path of what makes him happy; the old person remains an atheist because Christianity offers eternal happiness - which he now despises as beneath him.
The first is an atheist because he is a hedonist who lives for pleasure; the second because he is a stoic who regards himself as advanced beyond any concern with pleasure.
The atheist youth is too proud to be bound by the conventional knowledge and petty rules of former generations and insists on doing it his own way; the atheist geriatric is too proud to admit the hope less ness of the life he has created for himself.
(The demons laugh at the triumph of pride. The transformation of a youth who will risk anything for the chance of pleasure to the elder who will sacrifice everything to reject the promise of happiness.)
*
Sunday, 1 April 2012
The metaphysics of Truth
*
Is there such a thing as truth? Can humans comprehend it? What is true? What kind of thing is truth... etc.
For these to be meaningful questions requires metaphysical principles (either explicit or implicitly).
Is there such a thing as truth and can humans comprehend it?
*
Yes and yes - because it is not coherent to deny truth nor to deny that humans can comprehend it.
To deny truth or say that humans cannot comprehend truth is simply to claim as a human that you know that it is the truth that there is no truth or that humans cannot comprehend it.
So we must assume that there is truth and humans can discover it.
The only alternative is non-cognition.
*
This is not a discovery, it is not a consequence of experience, nor science, nor of any kind of investigation...
It is a simply rational necessity that humans acknowledge the reality of truth and its accessibility to humans.
Everybody is born knowing this stuff, everybody in the world and throughout history does in fact know it and live by it.
(Everybody in the world and though history, that is, except a statistically insignificant minority of clever silly intellectuals who have exchanged this obvious metaphysical basis for nihilistic, self-refuting and self-destroying psychoticism. I mean people just like myself and nearly all of the readers of this blog - for at least some period of our lives - and the entire ruling elite of the West.)
*
OK - that is sorted out (really, it is sorted out - no need to dwell further on it).
Next thing is on that basis we can investigate the nature of truth (e.g. that it must be eternal and universal), how humans in fact get to know the truth, limitations on knowing the truth - and stuff like that.
But such investigations are underpinned by the absolute metaphysical assurance that in principle there is a truth to be known and we can know it.
*
Is there such a thing as truth? Can humans comprehend it? What is true? What kind of thing is truth... etc.
For these to be meaningful questions requires metaphysical principles (either explicit or implicitly).
Is there such a thing as truth and can humans comprehend it?
*
Yes and yes - because it is not coherent to deny truth nor to deny that humans can comprehend it.
To deny truth or say that humans cannot comprehend truth is simply to claim as a human that you know that it is the truth that there is no truth or that humans cannot comprehend it.
So we must assume that there is truth and humans can discover it.
The only alternative is non-cognition.
*
This is not a discovery, it is not a consequence of experience, nor science, nor of any kind of investigation...
It is a simply rational necessity that humans acknowledge the reality of truth and its accessibility to humans.
Everybody is born knowing this stuff, everybody in the world and throughout history does in fact know it and live by it.
(Everybody in the world and though history, that is, except a statistically insignificant minority of clever silly intellectuals who have exchanged this obvious metaphysical basis for nihilistic, self-refuting and self-destroying psychoticism. I mean people just like myself and nearly all of the readers of this blog - for at least some period of our lives - and the entire ruling elite of the West.)
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OK - that is sorted out (really, it is sorted out - no need to dwell further on it).
Next thing is on that basis we can investigate the nature of truth (e.g. that it must be eternal and universal), how humans in fact get to know the truth, limitations on knowing the truth - and stuff like that.
But such investigations are underpinned by the absolute metaphysical assurance that in principle there is a truth to be known and we can know it.
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