It seems like no more than common sense that humans would function better in this mortal life by concentrating on this mortal life and ignoring spiritual speculations - but it is not true.
When humans started to believe that biology explained Man, they found themselves demotivated so profoundly that they have almost stopped reproducing - and have stopped even wanting to have children.
So biology thwarted biology.
It might have been thought that common sense would work better if unfettered and unconfused by 'theology' and 'religious mumbo jumbo' - yet we live in a society where the absence of common sense is so extreme, that experientially-obvious falsehood and frankly delusional psychosis is, more every year, enforced by the government, law, rulebook and media.
Clearly, if Man fails to consider his mortal life in the wider perspective of survival beyond death, then he becomes so confused and demoralized that he will lose even this mortal life.
When Man fails to interpret his function in a religious perspective, he will lose his grasp of even the bare concept of functionality.
It seems the natural must be sustained by the supernatural - and now we know this maxim is not just as a theory, nor a Chestertonian paradox; but we know it by direct personal and civilizational experience...
Except that the truth of the maxim is being daily confirmed by the very fact that we fail to see and comprehend those proofs which lie so abundantly scattered all around us, and inside our despairing souls.
Saturday, 8 August 2015
Friday, 7 August 2015
Postmodern irony is strong enough to subvert, but too weak to motivate
Errr... that's it, really.
Richard Rorty, the premier (or at least most comprehensible) philosopher of postmodernity, asserted that we should consciously adopt an ironic attitude to 'truth' (as he regarded truth) - in other words, he promoted the idea that nothing is really real, that all discourse is merely conversation and we can say anything about anything (so long as we are amused and stimulated), that the best morality is the minimization of here-and-now suffering (physical and mental)...
And so on. In a nutshell he said - but in this he was only articulating the consensus of modern public discourse and modern 'leadership' of all modern powerful institutions - that we can build our lives, including our most fundamental beliefs (that is our 'final vocabularies', as he termed them - our moral bottom line) on ironic detachment - on parenthetical 'truth', 'beauty'. 'evil' - he believed that we can and should (or should I say 'should') live our lives in speech marks...
Well, yes we can; but is it enough? By perpetual rotating relativism in the mass media, our culture has successfully imposed irony throughout public discourse - in sum we can be detached about anything, we can be playful about goodness, truth, virtue, beauty... but the deliberate un-realism, the irony, also necessarily becomes habitual, cannot be confined, and spreads to corrodes our positive emotions - our sense of being alive, of life having meaning and purpose, our basic motivations.
That is it: Irony is easy, and easy stuff is net evil.
It is easier to destroy than to sustain and create, easier to snigger than have courage, easier to do nothing or distract ourselves than to do something, easier to engage in moral pandering and showboating than to face facts and make tough decisions, easier to pretend that ugly is beautiful than to make beauty, easier to hate selfishly than to love responsibly, easier to have sex than make love, easier to have fun than have children, and so on... when the only 'difference' between these is in ironic quotes.
Richard Rorty, the premier (or at least most comprehensible) philosopher of postmodernity, asserted that we should consciously adopt an ironic attitude to 'truth' (as he regarded truth) - in other words, he promoted the idea that nothing is really real, that all discourse is merely conversation and we can say anything about anything (so long as we are amused and stimulated), that the best morality is the minimization of here-and-now suffering (physical and mental)...
And so on. In a nutshell he said - but in this he was only articulating the consensus of modern public discourse and modern 'leadership' of all modern powerful institutions - that we can build our lives, including our most fundamental beliefs (that is our 'final vocabularies', as he termed them - our moral bottom line) on ironic detachment - on parenthetical 'truth', 'beauty'. 'evil' - he believed that we can and should (or should I say 'should') live our lives in speech marks...
Well, yes we can; but is it enough? By perpetual rotating relativism in the mass media, our culture has successfully imposed irony throughout public discourse - in sum we can be detached about anything, we can be playful about goodness, truth, virtue, beauty... but the deliberate un-realism, the irony, also necessarily becomes habitual, cannot be confined, and spreads to corrodes our positive emotions - our sense of being alive, of life having meaning and purpose, our basic motivations.
That is it: Irony is easy, and easy stuff is net evil.
It is easier to destroy than to sustain and create, easier to snigger than have courage, easier to do nothing or distract ourselves than to do something, easier to engage in moral pandering and showboating than to face facts and make tough decisions, easier to pretend that ugly is beautiful than to make beauty, easier to hate selfishly than to love responsibly, easier to have sex than make love, easier to have fun than have children, and so on... when the only 'difference' between these is in ironic quotes.
Thursday, 6 August 2015
We don't have geniuses any more - so, what do we have instead?
There have been two things going on.
The genius-type was an Endogenous personality^ - which I have defined as both highly intelligent and inner-directed, inner-evaluated, inner-motivated (in other words, with some aspects of the Psychoticism trait as described by HJ Eysenck).
Intelligence has declined a lot, so there aren't many people nowadays with the extremely high intelligence which was characteristic of geniuses 150-200 years ago. I think that the decline has been considerably more than one, and perhaps two standard deviations or (very approximately) 20-30 modern IQ points.
In practice, this lower average intelligence means lower peak intelligence, which implies that the modern genius would be less of a genius than in the past - this can be seen in both the arts and sciences.
But the modern genius and the social selection mechanisms have also changed so as to exclude the
genius personality type.
This is due to factors both deliberate and accidental. Deliberate, because the Endogenous personality was usually a man of European descent; and inadvertent because of trends such as increasing the length of formal education, increasing the required number of educational certifications, allowing more cheating in educational evaluations; and more committee decisions regulating the workplace, more and more-complex bureaucracy, and the expansion of the public sector with domination of the state.
So, what has replaced the genius of yore? At best, we still have geniuses, but just on a smaller scale.
More often we have people who among the most intelligent of the population, but externally-directed, socially-orientated and using established evaluative criteria - in sum, people who are utterly lacking in real creativity, but clever enough to fake it by extrapolation, selection and recombination. Thus we get fashions rather than breakthroughs.
Mixed-in are a few charming psychopaths, who may be intelligent or not - but they are out-for-themselves, and have too short an attention span ever to achieve anything original
So that is what we now have instead of geniuses, to replace geniuses: careerist drones and plausible con-men.
^http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-endogenous-personality-what-does-it.html
The genius-type was an Endogenous personality^ - which I have defined as both highly intelligent and inner-directed, inner-evaluated, inner-motivated (in other words, with some aspects of the Psychoticism trait as described by HJ Eysenck).
Intelligence has declined a lot, so there aren't many people nowadays with the extremely high intelligence which was characteristic of geniuses 150-200 years ago. I think that the decline has been considerably more than one, and perhaps two standard deviations or (very approximately) 20-30 modern IQ points.
In practice, this lower average intelligence means lower peak intelligence, which implies that the modern genius would be less of a genius than in the past - this can be seen in both the arts and sciences.
But the modern genius and the social selection mechanisms have also changed so as to exclude the
genius personality type.
This is due to factors both deliberate and accidental. Deliberate, because the Endogenous personality was usually a man of European descent; and inadvertent because of trends such as increasing the length of formal education, increasing the required number of educational certifications, allowing more cheating in educational evaluations; and more committee decisions regulating the workplace, more and more-complex bureaucracy, and the expansion of the public sector with domination of the state.
So, what has replaced the genius of yore? At best, we still have geniuses, but just on a smaller scale.
More often we have people who among the most intelligent of the population, but externally-directed, socially-orientated and using established evaluative criteria - in sum, people who are utterly lacking in real creativity, but clever enough to fake it by extrapolation, selection and recombination. Thus we get fashions rather than breakthroughs.
Mixed-in are a few charming psychopaths, who may be intelligent or not - but they are out-for-themselves, and have too short an attention span ever to achieve anything original
So that is what we now have instead of geniuses, to replace geniuses: careerist drones and plausible con-men.
^http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-endogenous-personality-what-does-it.html
Group selection and WD Hamilton
WD Hamilton, one of the deepest thinkers on evolutionary theory, himself believed in group selection - this comes up repeatedly throughout his Narrow Roads of Gene Land. And this is a fact which people need to recognize and take seriously.
I was trained-up in the 'group selection does not exist'/ selfish gene school of Dawkins - and the Selfish Gene was a clear explanation of some insights from GC Williams and WD Hamilton. I arrogantly regarded all group selection explanations as naive and superficial - I saw the task of modern evolutionary theory as being to find the true selfish gene mechanisms to explain all apparent instances of group selection.
It was only when I read Hamilton's Narrow Roads, that I began gradually to realize that Dawkins, and mainstream evolutionary theory, has been highly selective and indeed deceptive in its advocacy of Hamilton's work - simply taking what it liked, and rejecting what it didn't.
(This ignoring applies especially to Hamilton's lifelong deep concerns over dysgenic change under modern selective, and not-selective, conditions.)
So belatedly, and much influenced by Michael A Woodley, I came around to acknowledging the validity of group selection - even when we are unsure of its mechanism.
After all, there is a mass of prima facie evidence of group selection! For more than a century, group selection was accepted by everybody (including people much smarter than ourselves) as the obvious explanation for many phenomena.
Why should we always assume that group selection can be, must be, an illusion that should be explained-away by selfish gene mechanisms? There is no good reason.
If we accept the validity of some of Hamilton's selfish gene work, then it is reasonable to accept the validity of his other work in which he used group selection explanations.
Group selection should not be regarded as an explanation of last resort, used only when all possible selfish gene selection explanations have been eliminated - but as a mechanism which is relevant in some situations, and not in others. the proper question to ask is what is the most plausible selective explanation for a given situation under consideration - sometimes this will be a group mechanism, other times not
The task is not to deny group selection, but to discover the mechanisms by which it works - by which adaptive genetic change can result from selection of the group. This is, in microcosm, a version of one of the main problems of evolutionary theory - which is how high level cooperation is maintained in the face of lower level selection mechanisms which tend to dismantle it.
(see The major Transitions of Life by Smith and Szathmary - 1995 - for an account of the multi-level problem -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_Transitions_in_Evolution ):
One example is that natural selection within the body tends to produce neoplasms, such as cancers; thereby undoing the adaptations which enable the existence of multicellular organisms with specialized and cooperative cells. It is a problem to understand how multi-cellularity evolved when neoplasms were continually being produced.
That is what is lacking at present - one or more simple, comprehensible physiological and molecular mechanisms that enable group selection. There seem to be inklings of this in the literature, but the whole thing has not yet crystallized.
My hunch is that there is some kind of active/ purposive mechanism or process involved, or more than one such mechanism/ process - which is aimed-at higher organization and cooperation, and which under some circumstances can overcome the well-understood tendency to dis-integration.
This post is adapted from a comment at:
http://pumpkinperson.com/2015/08/02/w-d-hamilton-believed-in-ethnic-genetic-interests/
Wednesday, 5 August 2015
How to try being a Christian
If you think that you want to be a Christian, try allowing yourself to think as a Christian (as best you may) - and without continually and deliberately blocking or checking your Christian thoughts with questions and critique.
That is, allow yourself to think like a Christian for at least a few hours.
Then, and only then, you can look back and question and criticize the experience - taken as a whole.
Because what matter is Christianity-as-a-whole - that is what Christianity actually is.
Christianity is not a collection of detached fragments. Indeed, nothing is a collection of detached fragments.
No discourse - whether science, law, a poem - ever makes any kind of sense when chopped-up and examined one piece at a time (which is what people so often do with Christianity). The detached fragments do not and never could have free-standing validity.
So Christianity ought to be understood and evaluated in a big enough chunk that its viability has a chance to become apparent. Then, and only then, can our decision be informed.
A few hours of solid trial of what it feels like to think as a Christian... It is a lot to ask in a busy life, but surely it is worth it.
That is, allow yourself to think like a Christian for at least a few hours.
Then, and only then, you can look back and question and criticize the experience - taken as a whole.
Because what matter is Christianity-as-a-whole - that is what Christianity actually is.
Christianity is not a collection of detached fragments. Indeed, nothing is a collection of detached fragments.
No discourse - whether science, law, a poem - ever makes any kind of sense when chopped-up and examined one piece at a time (which is what people so often do with Christianity). The detached fragments do not and never could have free-standing validity.
So Christianity ought to be understood and evaluated in a big enough chunk that its viability has a chance to become apparent. Then, and only then, can our decision be informed.
A few hours of solid trial of what it feels like to think as a Christian... It is a lot to ask in a busy life, but surely it is worth it.
Is reading Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy bad for Christians, or bad for people-in-general?
I have been reading (and listening to audio readings of) Rudolf Steiner for a few months, under some kind of inner compulsion - while feeling rather little benefit from it, and seeming to waste quite a lot of time.
...But getting no harm, I think - because when Steiner is wrong - as he so often is - he is typically so bizarre, so 'silly'; that I seem to just shed it like water off a duck's back.
It is worth remembering that when CS Lewis died in 1963, both of his two legal and literary executors were utterly dedicated Steinerite Anthroposophists.
(These were Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood - Barfield was the leading British Anthroposophist intellectual - later mentoring Saul Bellow among many others; Harwood was Headmaster of a Steiner Waldorf School - both had been at Oxford contemporary with Lewis.)
Lewis had no interest in Steiner, and saw no merit in him; but saw no significant harm in him either - and this was after observing the effect of forty years of full-blown Anthroposophy on two very close friends. For those of us who regard Lewis as a beloved and mostly-reliable spiritual guide, this must be significant.
But just recently, after banging my head against Steiner apparently fruitlessly, I have been rewarded by some worthwhile insights and clarifications which I perhaps would not otherwise have received. So my time was not wasted, but well spent!
Which just goes to show that instinct sometimes knows more than reason - or something of the kind...
...But getting no harm, I think - because when Steiner is wrong - as he so often is - he is typically so bizarre, so 'silly'; that I seem to just shed it like water off a duck's back.
It is worth remembering that when CS Lewis died in 1963, both of his two legal and literary executors were utterly dedicated Steinerite Anthroposophists.
(These were Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood - Barfield was the leading British Anthroposophist intellectual - later mentoring Saul Bellow among many others; Harwood was Headmaster of a Steiner Waldorf School - both had been at Oxford contemporary with Lewis.)
Lewis had no interest in Steiner, and saw no merit in him; but saw no significant harm in him either - and this was after observing the effect of forty years of full-blown Anthroposophy on two very close friends. For those of us who regard Lewis as a beloved and mostly-reliable spiritual guide, this must be significant.
But just recently, after banging my head against Steiner apparently fruitlessly, I have been rewarded by some worthwhile insights and clarifications which I perhaps would not otherwise have received. So my time was not wasted, but well spent!
Which just goes to show that instinct sometimes knows more than reason - or something of the kind...
Tuesday, 4 August 2015
The Left has evolved, continues to evolve, to defeat Christianity
It is important to know what the Left is, and that it has evolved.
(See references below)
The Left is now mainstream, and almost universal, in the West - e.g. in 2010 Britain had a Leftist 'Labour Party' government replaced by a Leftist 'Conservative Party' - and there is absolutely no difference between them in terms of Leftism - indeed, in legally-'redefining' marriage - it was the Conservative government which forced into legislation the biggest piece of extreme Leftist legislation in recent decades.
So, at present in the West; the Left is essentially everyone with power in public life - the only non-Leftist groups are relatively-small traditional religious denominations.
The Left is, in its origin, the reaction against Western Christianity. Which means that Leftism is not a specific set of doctrines or beliefs, but a reaction against a religion - and therefore the Left has changed, and evolved - and become a very different thing at different times and places in history.
But many people are confused by the fact that the Left has changed. For example, it is said that the US or the UK are 'communist' countries... This is true in one sense, but completely false in another - because modern Leftism in the West is up-front very different from Soviet, or Chinese Communism.
The fact is that throughout the success of Leftism in the West, Leftism has evolved; and this is no accident, but is in fact the primary reason for its success. The Left responds to the situation, and as it succeeds in defeating Christianity it changes its strategy in order to eradicate the latest problem.
Leftism was initially very clearly anti-Christian (often anti- the established church). The biggest change in the Left happened in the mid 1960s. (But of course there is a grey area, and change was gradual - even though it was swift.) Up to the sixties, Leftism was about 'rational' economics - nationalization, planning, meritocratic equality of opportunity etc; but after the sixties the Left was about culture - and in particular the sexual revolution - equality of outcome, and the fluid agenda of antiracism, feminism, and more recently the multi-culti/ diversity/ inclusive agenda.
This was a massive change in doctrine - and a change from a revolution to establish an eternal utopia; to establishing a state of permanent revolution with no end-point.
My point is that the Left has evolved and transformed - but there is continuity, and that continuity is that the Left is an opposition, a reaction - the Left is 'against' not for. And the main thing the Left is against is Christianity (real traditionalist Christianity, of any type); and against everything to do with Christianity.
Why else is the redefinition of marriage regarded by both sides as such a major victory for the Left? It is a major victory because it represents a massive blow against Christian morality - more exactly it all but completes the elimination of Christian morality from the legal systems of the West.
(Of course, another strategy of the Left has been to subvert the Christian churches, to make them non-Christian, indeed anti-Christian. Most mainstream self-identified Christian churches have been reconstructed - as evidenced by their support for the sexual revolution and redefinition of marriage. Indeed one of the greatest triumphs of the Left has been thereby to discredit Christianity as being the original source of the Left! So that in some secular circles - among those who imagine themselves to be opposed to Leftism - Christianity is damned when it succeeds and damned when it fails! Damned for being a cause of Leftism, damned for weakly capitulating to Leftism!)
But if the Left are currently obsessed by redefining marriage then who else in The West would care about traditional marriage (i.e. real marriage) except Christians? The Old Left, pre 1965 - would have considered a focus on sexuality and identity politics trivial and immature - they were focused on rationally restructuring society, encouraging and exploiting technological breakthroughs, efficiency and effectiveness...
The modern emphasis on this issue and other sexual issues is revealing of the covert and often unconscious agenda of the 'New' Left, which reveals what it shares with Old Left - that the Left is not for anything in particular, but it was, and still is, orientated against Christianity, especially Christian morality - and that is why and how the Left has evolved.
The Left becomes whatever is effective against Christianity, even when that Christianity is residual. Over the decades, the Left has evolved to defeat one defense of Christianity after another. And it has been able to do this precisely because the Left is indifferent to what kind of society it creates, and is indifferent to what level of chaos and destruction it engenders - it simply changes its attack until it finds something effective against Christianity, and if the attack fails the Left will change again.
There Left has no consistency or coherence, and no need for consistency or coherence - consistency and coherence just get in the way of attacking Christianity by any and every means.
The Left evolves, and Christianity is what the Left evolves around.
References:
http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk/
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
(See references below)
The Left is now mainstream, and almost universal, in the West - e.g. in 2010 Britain had a Leftist 'Labour Party' government replaced by a Leftist 'Conservative Party' - and there is absolutely no difference between them in terms of Leftism - indeed, in legally-'redefining' marriage - it was the Conservative government which forced into legislation the biggest piece of extreme Leftist legislation in recent decades.
So, at present in the West; the Left is essentially everyone with power in public life - the only non-Leftist groups are relatively-small traditional religious denominations.
The Left is, in its origin, the reaction against Western Christianity. Which means that Leftism is not a specific set of doctrines or beliefs, but a reaction against a religion - and therefore the Left has changed, and evolved - and become a very different thing at different times and places in history.
But many people are confused by the fact that the Left has changed. For example, it is said that the US or the UK are 'communist' countries... This is true in one sense, but completely false in another - because modern Leftism in the West is up-front very different from Soviet, or Chinese Communism.
The fact is that throughout the success of Leftism in the West, Leftism has evolved; and this is no accident, but is in fact the primary reason for its success. The Left responds to the situation, and as it succeeds in defeating Christianity it changes its strategy in order to eradicate the latest problem.
Leftism was initially very clearly anti-Christian (often anti- the established church). The biggest change in the Left happened in the mid 1960s. (But of course there is a grey area, and change was gradual - even though it was swift.) Up to the sixties, Leftism was about 'rational' economics - nationalization, planning, meritocratic equality of opportunity etc; but after the sixties the Left was about culture - and in particular the sexual revolution - equality of outcome, and the fluid agenda of antiracism, feminism, and more recently the multi-culti/ diversity/ inclusive agenda.
This was a massive change in doctrine - and a change from a revolution to establish an eternal utopia; to establishing a state of permanent revolution with no end-point.
My point is that the Left has evolved and transformed - but there is continuity, and that continuity is that the Left is an opposition, a reaction - the Left is 'against' not for. And the main thing the Left is against is Christianity (real traditionalist Christianity, of any type); and against everything to do with Christianity.
Why else is the redefinition of marriage regarded by both sides as such a major victory for the Left? It is a major victory because it represents a massive blow against Christian morality - more exactly it all but completes the elimination of Christian morality from the legal systems of the West.
(Of course, another strategy of the Left has been to subvert the Christian churches, to make them non-Christian, indeed anti-Christian. Most mainstream self-identified Christian churches have been reconstructed - as evidenced by their support for the sexual revolution and redefinition of marriage. Indeed one of the greatest triumphs of the Left has been thereby to discredit Christianity as being the original source of the Left! So that in some secular circles - among those who imagine themselves to be opposed to Leftism - Christianity is damned when it succeeds and damned when it fails! Damned for being a cause of Leftism, damned for weakly capitulating to Leftism!)
But if the Left are currently obsessed by redefining marriage then who else in The West would care about traditional marriage (i.e. real marriage) except Christians? The Old Left, pre 1965 - would have considered a focus on sexuality and identity politics trivial and immature - they were focused on rationally restructuring society, encouraging and exploiting technological breakthroughs, efficiency and effectiveness...
The modern emphasis on this issue and other sexual issues is revealing of the covert and often unconscious agenda of the 'New' Left, which reveals what it shares with Old Left - that the Left is not for anything in particular, but it was, and still is, orientated against Christianity, especially Christian morality - and that is why and how the Left has evolved.
The Left becomes whatever is effective against Christianity, even when that Christianity is residual. Over the decades, the Left has evolved to defeat one defense of Christianity after another. And it has been able to do this precisely because the Left is indifferent to what kind of society it creates, and is indifferent to what level of chaos and destruction it engenders - it simply changes its attack until it finds something effective against Christianity, and if the attack fails the Left will change again.
There Left has no consistency or coherence, and no need for consistency or coherence - consistency and coherence just get in the way of attacking Christianity by any and every means.
The Left evolves, and Christianity is what the Left evolves around.
References:
http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk/
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
Monday, 3 August 2015
The Left is a (self-) deceptive enemy of Christianity
Is the Left the enemy of Christianity?
Of course it is! - how much objective evidence do you need? And not merely the enemy, but the victor against Christianity.
Yet somehow this plain fact is not obvious, is unclear, is indeed denied both by the Left (the victors) and Christians (the defeated).
Is not this strange?
What, then, is 'an enemy'?
An enemy is not someone with whom you disagree (hardly anybody wholly agrees with anybody else, after all) - but the enemy is somebody who attacks you, who wages war on you, who tries to destroy you (or destroy something about you which is important to you).
I think this makes matters a bit clearer. The Left is the enemy of Christians because it attacks Christianity and has been attacking Christianity for a very long time.
(Indeed, the Left has by now defeated 'official' Christianity - which currently exists as a kind of Vichy regime or puppet government, with a Quisling leadership.)
However, there is the problem of covert enemies - enemies who pretend not to be attacking or waging war or trying to destroy; and secular Leftism/ Liberalism is one of these kinds of enemy.
Indeed, the Left does not itself really understand that it is specifically anti-Christian, is built-upon anti-Christianity more than upon anything else. Thus, the Left denies that it is the enemy of Christianity, and individual Leftists do not feel themselves to be the enemy of Christianity.
And this is something that Christians (and specifically Christians) find it very hard to deal with!
For example, the Left simply cannot see the truly massive torment and slaughter of Bishops, Priests, Monks and devout laity in the Russian revolution as having been a deliberate and focused attempt at annihilation (what people nowadays tern genocide). They regard it as merely collateral damage from an ideological/ political difference.
Nobody doubts that the Nazis wanted to destroy the Jews - because they said they did; but Communists deny that they wanted to destroy the Christians - indeed, it is quite possible that individual Soviet Communists (who imprisoned, tortured, slaughtered millions of Christians, because they were Christians) did not even feel in their hearts that they were anti-Christian - they simply regarded themselves as implementing an abstract ideology.
Much the same applies to the modern politically correct Left - they see themselves as fighting for abstractions such as equality, social justice, diversity, inclusion... and the fact that Christianity and Christians (and not other religions) is has been and is being (one way or another) all-but annihilated in the Western nations is a somewhat unfortunate, albeit necessary, unintended consequence.
This also explains why the wholesale 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide of Christians in Africa, the Middle East and parts of South Asia is of no interest to Western Leftists.
(For about 15 years we have been living through numerically and geographically perhaps the harshest period of explicit Christian persecution in 2000 years - especially the near elimination of Christianity from much of the Middle East - but the West has not even noticed!)
A tribe is united against an enemy who openly attack and explicitly wages war on them - and the tribe of Christians has often been united - tragically, all too often one tribe of Christians against another - and there is of course one enemy of exactly this type: to regard them as an enemy of Christianity, all one has to do is believe what they say.
But the prime enemy of secular Leftism is altogether a slipperier thing for Western Christians to understand, because the sustained culture war against Christianity is unacknowledged and denied by the enemy even as they attack, even as they wage war, even as they defeat mainstream Christianity - even as they are dancing in the streets and on the mass media to celebrate the latest triumphant elimination of Christian morality from Law!
Christians are up-against an enemy who denies that they are an enemy, an enemy who does not even know that they are our enemies - an enemy that reframes their sustained and strategic attempt to annihilate Christianity under a variety of abstract universal concepts.
Christians are up-against an enemy which attacks by making rules that are only accidentally, only contingently, only unintendedly interpreted to be applied to Christians specifically... and which are - it just happens, in practice - seldom or never applied to other religions.
At every stage of the war against Christianity there is a self-denial and also a public denial of any strategic intent to attack Christians.
So Christians are put into the position of - as it were - telling, or persuading, dominant secular Leftism that it is our enemy! - in the face of sincere protestations from Liberals that they are nothing of the sort!
And this is something that Christians, and Christians specifically, find it very hard to do.
I mean Christians find it hard to label others as their enemy when that enemy denies any specific hostile intent, and especially when those enemies do not even feel hostile intent. This seems like picking a fight, seems like judging the hearts of Men - seems, in short, an unChristian sort of thing to do.
My understanding is that this Leftist strategy of denial evolved by a kind of natural selection over many generations; it evolved because it is what works best against Christians.
I mean Leftism evolved to be maximally lethal to Christianity in the context of what was a more-or-less Christian society - therefore the weapons and defences of Leftism are optimized for use against Christians, and the forces of the Left are all aligned against Christianity: the Leftist cannons are all pointing at Christians!
(And this also, perhaps, explains why the Left is so utterly helpless, suicidally helpless, against other and non-Christian religions, who attack from a different direction and under a different flag.)
The Left has evolved to destroy Christianity, while denying that that is what it is doing; and while being unaware that that is what it is doing.
Modern Western Christians have been defeated by an enemy who has never acknowledged that it is an enemy of Christianity - not even to itself.
(This post is modified from a comment at https://bonald.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/ecumenism-and-vatican-ii-for-the-tribal-catholic/#comment-18932)
Of course it is! - how much objective evidence do you need? And not merely the enemy, but the victor against Christianity.
Yet somehow this plain fact is not obvious, is unclear, is indeed denied both by the Left (the victors) and Christians (the defeated).
Is not this strange?
What, then, is 'an enemy'?
An enemy is not someone with whom you disagree (hardly anybody wholly agrees with anybody else, after all) - but the enemy is somebody who attacks you, who wages war on you, who tries to destroy you (or destroy something about you which is important to you).
I think this makes matters a bit clearer. The Left is the enemy of Christians because it attacks Christianity and has been attacking Christianity for a very long time.
(Indeed, the Left has by now defeated 'official' Christianity - which currently exists as a kind of Vichy regime or puppet government, with a Quisling leadership.)
However, there is the problem of covert enemies - enemies who pretend not to be attacking or waging war or trying to destroy; and secular Leftism/ Liberalism is one of these kinds of enemy.
Indeed, the Left does not itself really understand that it is specifically anti-Christian, is built-upon anti-Christianity more than upon anything else. Thus, the Left denies that it is the enemy of Christianity, and individual Leftists do not feel themselves to be the enemy of Christianity.
And this is something that Christians (and specifically Christians) find it very hard to deal with!
For example, the Left simply cannot see the truly massive torment and slaughter of Bishops, Priests, Monks and devout laity in the Russian revolution as having been a deliberate and focused attempt at annihilation (what people nowadays tern genocide). They regard it as merely collateral damage from an ideological/ political difference.
Nobody doubts that the Nazis wanted to destroy the Jews - because they said they did; but Communists deny that they wanted to destroy the Christians - indeed, it is quite possible that individual Soviet Communists (who imprisoned, tortured, slaughtered millions of Christians, because they were Christians) did not even feel in their hearts that they were anti-Christian - they simply regarded themselves as implementing an abstract ideology.
Much the same applies to the modern politically correct Left - they see themselves as fighting for abstractions such as equality, social justice, diversity, inclusion... and the fact that Christianity and Christians (and not other religions) is has been and is being (one way or another) all-but annihilated in the Western nations is a somewhat unfortunate, albeit necessary, unintended consequence.
This also explains why the wholesale 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide of Christians in Africa, the Middle East and parts of South Asia is of no interest to Western Leftists.
(For about 15 years we have been living through numerically and geographically perhaps the harshest period of explicit Christian persecution in 2000 years - especially the near elimination of Christianity from much of the Middle East - but the West has not even noticed!)
A tribe is united against an enemy who openly attack and explicitly wages war on them - and the tribe of Christians has often been united - tragically, all too often one tribe of Christians against another - and there is of course one enemy of exactly this type: to regard them as an enemy of Christianity, all one has to do is believe what they say.
But the prime enemy of secular Leftism is altogether a slipperier thing for Western Christians to understand, because the sustained culture war against Christianity is unacknowledged and denied by the enemy even as they attack, even as they wage war, even as they defeat mainstream Christianity - even as they are dancing in the streets and on the mass media to celebrate the latest triumphant elimination of Christian morality from Law!
Christians are up-against an enemy who denies that they are an enemy, an enemy who does not even know that they are our enemies - an enemy that reframes their sustained and strategic attempt to annihilate Christianity under a variety of abstract universal concepts.
Christians are up-against an enemy which attacks by making rules that are only accidentally, only contingently, only unintendedly interpreted to be applied to Christians specifically... and which are - it just happens, in practice - seldom or never applied to other religions.
At every stage of the war against Christianity there is a self-denial and also a public denial of any strategic intent to attack Christians.
So Christians are put into the position of - as it were - telling, or persuading, dominant secular Leftism that it is our enemy! - in the face of sincere protestations from Liberals that they are nothing of the sort!
And this is something that Christians, and Christians specifically, find it very hard to do.
I mean Christians find it hard to label others as their enemy when that enemy denies any specific hostile intent, and especially when those enemies do not even feel hostile intent. This seems like picking a fight, seems like judging the hearts of Men - seems, in short, an unChristian sort of thing to do.
My understanding is that this Leftist strategy of denial evolved by a kind of natural selection over many generations; it evolved because it is what works best against Christians.
I mean Leftism evolved to be maximally lethal to Christianity in the context of what was a more-or-less Christian society - therefore the weapons and defences of Leftism are optimized for use against Christians, and the forces of the Left are all aligned against Christianity: the Leftist cannons are all pointing at Christians!
(And this also, perhaps, explains why the Left is so utterly helpless, suicidally helpless, against other and non-Christian religions, who attack from a different direction and under a different flag.)
The Left has evolved to destroy Christianity, while denying that that is what it is doing; and while being unaware that that is what it is doing.
Modern Western Christians have been defeated by an enemy who has never acknowledged that it is an enemy of Christianity - not even to itself.
(This post is modified from a comment at https://bonald.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/ecumenism-and-vatican-ii-for-the-tribal-catholic/#comment-18932)
Sunday, 2 August 2015
The abstract conception of God - thoughts prompted by commencing Philip K Dick's "Valis"
I read quite a few Philip K Dick novels and stories back in the early 1980s, and have always regarded him as one of the very best science fiction writers - although no more than adequate as a prose artist. But I have never re-read any of his books, and indeed to some extent avoided them - as one does with effective dystopias.
Partly this was due to a very unpleasant 56 hour weekend stint as the solo doctor resident and on call in a psychiatric hospital; when I made the mistake of reading the powerful Time Out of Joint during the gaps between clerking and treating psychotic patients.
The novel is about a man for whom the paranoid delusion of all the society being organized around him is literally true - and I found it very unsettling to read the novel then talk with people who believed themselves to be in more or less the same situation - which set me to wondering about myself... It was, altogether, a very meta-Philip K Dick situation, like being inside one of his dystopias.
What I retained from the totality of PKD was a suffocating sense of the meaninglessness of life - life in general - which was brought into awareness (but not created) by the artificiality of his technologically enwrapped (and often off-world) environments. A world where the difference between a robotic animal and a real one, between a replicant android and a human, is almost impossible to discern - a world where the animal or human is not significantly different from a robot or replicant: both equally arbitrary and mechanical.
I have just bought and begun reading Valis, a novel which was written shortly before Dick's death and which is a semi-autobiographical account of his later years of brooding on an experience of his which was either a divine enlightenment or a psychotic break or some combination.
The events of the first chapters (which are all I have read) depict a burnt-out Californian society of the early 1970s, in which the protagonist and his circle are all ex-druggy, hippy, hedonistic types suffering from heavy casualties of extreme loneliness (existential isolation), suicide, psychosis, neurosis and nihilistic cynicism - so it is not an enjoyable read, so far!
But what is portrayed is metaphysically the avant garde of what has (minus the LSD) since become mainstream in The West. In the first place, it is the futile struggle of people who have rejected God, the soul, the afterlife etc to find meaning in a world of mortality which they have further degraded by mechanistic explanations; but in the second place (so far) there is the almost-equally-futile attempt of people to escape from this dead-ly set of metaphysical assumptions into a very abstract conception of God.
The protagonist has (like Philip K Dick) experienced a kind of revelation - which may or may not be from God - involving a pink beam of light; and this is interpreted (so far) in terms of physicsy ideas of God as 'information'. Friends of the protagonist with 'simple' Christians faiths (a cancer patient who has a rosary beside her bed) are rejected as a faith of naive wish-fulfilment which does not take seriously the metaphysical problem of suffering... the striving is clearly for a very pure, abstract, physics-like faith in a God who fits in with the world of computers, information, archives, science, technology, psychoactive drugs and so forth.
What seems impossible for the hero is a faith based on God as primarily our loving, heavenly Father. That simple thing seems difficult, or impossible, to picture or believe - instead the abstract God is no sooner proposed than He gets bogged down in abstract metaphysical dichotomies concerning omnipotence versus helplessness, goodness versus suffering, meaning versus meaninglessness... any solution to these problems seems contrived, arbitrary and unconvincing.
So on the one hand there is the visceral nature of human (or animal) suffering - a friend plans and kills herself calmly and without passion, a friend's cat runs out under the wheel of a car and is crushed, a friend dies after pain, blindness, deafness from cancer and radio-/ chemo-therapy and so on... While pitted against this is a very abstract, intellectual, information-theory, pink light beaming across the void type of understanding of God.
There is a gross mismatch between the nature of the problem, and the search for a solution. The proper answer, which is to understand God not a a set of abstract metaphysical properties but as our Father, and other people as His children and our siblings, and other things in the environment as being alive-like-us (rather than us being dead-like-them)... the protagonist is pre-immunized against these obvious and effective and satisfying answers and explanations as being too obvious, too simple, too much in conformity with what we would most wish.
The frame for explanation has narrowed from eternity to... well not even to the span of the mortal life of Men; rather it has narrowed to the span of the mortal life of one single consciousness... Then this assumed frame (a frame which was not really possible, and certainly not mainstream, until very recently in human history - and only in a minority of people and situations) has been accepted as utterly compelling - and any other frame is regarded as simply childish and stupid...
How could this happen? How could such a very socially and historically contingent world view ever be supposed to be entailed so strongly that to deny it is seen as foolish and unintelligent and weak?
What evidence is there that the people who adhere to the atomistic, alienated nihilism of the 1970s drug-devastated Californian milieu have a superior wisdom and insight almost all humans who dwelt in other times and places?
There is a truly cosmic level of arrogance, of pride, about all this - is there not? Combined with a truly cosmic level of condescension that amounts to despising almost everybody, everywhere and at all points of history.
In sum, a staggering degree of evil.
Yet, this evil metaphysical system spread from California to the rest of the West, where it now rules supreme and is enforced upon us a million times every day at every level of public discourse from the government, civil administration and legal system down through education and health care to the all pervasive mass media and casual human interactions.
PKD was certainly a canary in the coalmine, with respect to noticing and describing and diagnosing. I will be very interested to see whether he was able to solve - through the course of this novel - the deep problems he so acutely experienced; but I fear that he will not. Simply because he was looking in the wrong place, and had ruled-out or rejected the right place.
The one place where he would not search happened to be the place the answer was hidden - because he already 'knew' the answer and had rejected it. Indeed the whole edifice of evil PKC depicts was built upon this prior rejection.
And the evil was experienced as inescapable precisely because - given that a priori rejection - the evil was inescapable; just as you cannot escape from a burning building if you have already decided that the fire escape is the one and only route that leads nowhere.
Partly this was due to a very unpleasant 56 hour weekend stint as the solo doctor resident and on call in a psychiatric hospital; when I made the mistake of reading the powerful Time Out of Joint during the gaps between clerking and treating psychotic patients.
The novel is about a man for whom the paranoid delusion of all the society being organized around him is literally true - and I found it very unsettling to read the novel then talk with people who believed themselves to be in more or less the same situation - which set me to wondering about myself... It was, altogether, a very meta-Philip K Dick situation, like being inside one of his dystopias.
What I retained from the totality of PKD was a suffocating sense of the meaninglessness of life - life in general - which was brought into awareness (but not created) by the artificiality of his technologically enwrapped (and often off-world) environments. A world where the difference between a robotic animal and a real one, between a replicant android and a human, is almost impossible to discern - a world where the animal or human is not significantly different from a robot or replicant: both equally arbitrary and mechanical.
I have just bought and begun reading Valis, a novel which was written shortly before Dick's death and which is a semi-autobiographical account of his later years of brooding on an experience of his which was either a divine enlightenment or a psychotic break or some combination.
The events of the first chapters (which are all I have read) depict a burnt-out Californian society of the early 1970s, in which the protagonist and his circle are all ex-druggy, hippy, hedonistic types suffering from heavy casualties of extreme loneliness (existential isolation), suicide, psychosis, neurosis and nihilistic cynicism - so it is not an enjoyable read, so far!
But what is portrayed is metaphysically the avant garde of what has (minus the LSD) since become mainstream in The West. In the first place, it is the futile struggle of people who have rejected God, the soul, the afterlife etc to find meaning in a world of mortality which they have further degraded by mechanistic explanations; but in the second place (so far) there is the almost-equally-futile attempt of people to escape from this dead-ly set of metaphysical assumptions into a very abstract conception of God.
The protagonist has (like Philip K Dick) experienced a kind of revelation - which may or may not be from God - involving a pink beam of light; and this is interpreted (so far) in terms of physicsy ideas of God as 'information'. Friends of the protagonist with 'simple' Christians faiths (a cancer patient who has a rosary beside her bed) are rejected as a faith of naive wish-fulfilment which does not take seriously the metaphysical problem of suffering... the striving is clearly for a very pure, abstract, physics-like faith in a God who fits in with the world of computers, information, archives, science, technology, psychoactive drugs and so forth.
What seems impossible for the hero is a faith based on God as primarily our loving, heavenly Father. That simple thing seems difficult, or impossible, to picture or believe - instead the abstract God is no sooner proposed than He gets bogged down in abstract metaphysical dichotomies concerning omnipotence versus helplessness, goodness versus suffering, meaning versus meaninglessness... any solution to these problems seems contrived, arbitrary and unconvincing.
So on the one hand there is the visceral nature of human (or animal) suffering - a friend plans and kills herself calmly and without passion, a friend's cat runs out under the wheel of a car and is crushed, a friend dies after pain, blindness, deafness from cancer and radio-/ chemo-therapy and so on... While pitted against this is a very abstract, intellectual, information-theory, pink light beaming across the void type of understanding of God.
There is a gross mismatch between the nature of the problem, and the search for a solution. The proper answer, which is to understand God not a a set of abstract metaphysical properties but as our Father, and other people as His children and our siblings, and other things in the environment as being alive-like-us (rather than us being dead-like-them)... the protagonist is pre-immunized against these obvious and effective and satisfying answers and explanations as being too obvious, too simple, too much in conformity with what we would most wish.
The frame for explanation has narrowed from eternity to... well not even to the span of the mortal life of Men; rather it has narrowed to the span of the mortal life of one single consciousness... Then this assumed frame (a frame which was not really possible, and certainly not mainstream, until very recently in human history - and only in a minority of people and situations) has been accepted as utterly compelling - and any other frame is regarded as simply childish and stupid...
How could this happen? How could such a very socially and historically contingent world view ever be supposed to be entailed so strongly that to deny it is seen as foolish and unintelligent and weak?
What evidence is there that the people who adhere to the atomistic, alienated nihilism of the 1970s drug-devastated Californian milieu have a superior wisdom and insight almost all humans who dwelt in other times and places?
There is a truly cosmic level of arrogance, of pride, about all this - is there not? Combined with a truly cosmic level of condescension that amounts to despising almost everybody, everywhere and at all points of history.
In sum, a staggering degree of evil.
Yet, this evil metaphysical system spread from California to the rest of the West, where it now rules supreme and is enforced upon us a million times every day at every level of public discourse from the government, civil administration and legal system down through education and health care to the all pervasive mass media and casual human interactions.
PKD was certainly a canary in the coalmine, with respect to noticing and describing and diagnosing. I will be very interested to see whether he was able to solve - through the course of this novel - the deep problems he so acutely experienced; but I fear that he will not. Simply because he was looking in the wrong place, and had ruled-out or rejected the right place.
The one place where he would not search happened to be the place the answer was hidden - because he already 'knew' the answer and had rejected it. Indeed the whole edifice of evil PKC depicts was built upon this prior rejection.
And the evil was experienced as inescapable precisely because - given that a priori rejection - the evil was inescapable; just as you cannot escape from a burning building if you have already decided that the fire escape is the one and only route that leads nowhere.
Saturday, 1 August 2015
Choose your religion - or else religion will choose you
It is interesting that, at root, so many groups of people - whether that be in religion or in politics, actually offer explicitly what they are able to give. It is a kind of basic honesty, that seems to bind even the worst people and groups.
I have commented on this in religion - it is surprising how little most religions offer their adherents. Christianity offers far more than any other major religion (as Pascal noted - the only coherent reason for not wanting to be a Christian is that you think it is untrue - otherwise it offers far more than any rival religion or ideology), and even within Christianity some denominations offer more than others.
This is surprising in the sense that I would have supposed that there would be a lying bidding-war between religions, each striving (or pretending) to offer a more wonderful life or afterlife than the rivals.
Somehow this doesn't happen.
For example, modern liberal Christianity might be supposed to be offering its adherents more than some traditional types - in the sense that there is no Hell, and no strict rules about sex, fasting, attending Church etc.
But in fact liberal Christianity offers its adherents nothing at all - no miracles, no answered prayers. no healings, no experiences of contact with the divine, no afterlife, no resurrection of the body...
The advertised fate of a liberal Christian is that same as that of any other secular modern person - a purely subjective 'god' and extinction at the point of death.
Something similar applies to politics. The secular Left parties are, of course, fundamentally dishonest - but they are strangely honest about what they offer and what they do not offer.
They offer a focus (ie. lots of talk, lots of bureaucracies, lots of taxes) on themes such as equality, diversity, inclusiveness and so on. By means of affirmative action - preferences according to sex, sexuality, race, religion, ideology - the Left indeed offer a bit of the actuality.
But interestingly Leftist parties do not offer greater economic efficiency and growth, better science and more breakthroughs, an impartial legal system, greater military power, civil peace and public good behaviour, control of borders... or any of the things that the Right offers.
Of course the Left does make an occasional, sporadic (and dishonest) claim to fix anything and everything - but over time, day by day, in terms of strategy and propaganda the Left hardly mentions such things, avoids the subject, changes the subject. It is very obvious indeed that the Left is not going to do any of these things, and the Left don't make any serious or sustained effort even to pretend that they will.
Why don't they just say they will deliver on such matters? Why don't they pretend they will do everything? Perhaps because they are averse to these other 'goods' - certainly they are uninterested by them, don't like the subjects to be discussed... but then, that itself seems to suggest that they do not want to be put into a position of lying about them.
It is as if even these habitual and fundamental liars are constrained by some basic truth: if and when the Left has ruined a society by imposing equality, destroying Christianity, wrecking the economy, subverting marriage, breaking-up families, and encouraging unrestricted mass immigration... or whatever - then they can at least claim that they were merely doing what they said they would do!
This explicitness is odd, on the face of it; because the Left do lie about many, many things, for years and decades, and they get away with lies because the Left is the mass media, and modern populations are addicted to the mass media. But there are some things that they don't lie about...
The same basic and overall honesty applies to the more Right Wing Left parties (all mainstream modern politics is extremely Leftist, by world historical standards, so it does not make sense to call mainstream conservative, republican, libertarian type secular groups 'Right' wing parties, they are merely slight less Left wing than their rivals: the only truly Right wing parties are religious parties that want to run society on religious line, i.e. ultimately according to religious priorities and evaluations) - and it also applies to idealistic secular Right wing theorists, self-proclaimed reactionaries, for instance.
I refer to these groups as basing their appeal on Common Sense: they are characterized by common sense policies on economics, the law, immigration - their claims are that they will make things more efficient, more effective, make their nations more secure and powerful, make their societies more peaceful, favour their own native people and races rather than other people and races etc.
The problem is this mainstream or idealistic secular Right wing politics is so deadly dull, boring, pedestrian, prosaic, small minded, selfish. In a word sensible!
It really is. This is not an illusion. Secular 'Right' politics presents its vision of Life very lucidly (and honestly) as an ideology that drains away everything except... functionality. It offers a future of highly efficient nothing.
(Does this explain why people have a horror of sensible people and parties? That if the secular Right got what it wants, if we really were sensible in a secular world, people would mean nothing, life would mean nothing, Men would be just so many cogs in an abstract machine. In our personal lives, among those we love, we do not want people to be sensible about us.)
Mainstream (secular) Rightism offers more of what we have already had - especially a generation or two ago, when things were far more sensible than now - increasingly prosperous, powerful, rational, fair etc. social systems whose aim is... increasingly prosperity, power, rationality, justice etc.
The secular Right offers a nightmare of means but no ends. The vacuum of ends is indeed proclaimed as a virtue, as freedom, as individuality - there isn't even an attempt to claim that there is any point to the secular Right vision - its utter pointlessness is proclaimed as a benefit.
The West has been more sensible than any other society in the history of the world. We have had sensibility, and we have been made plausible offers of even-more sensibility - and we have rejected it: decisively.
So modern life is divided between these options - Common Sense versus Leftism - and Leftism has won. The public have decided that they prefer lying and nonsensical but very-slightly idealistic, very-slightly and very-vague Utopian Leftist dreams over the sensible, value-free, dead, dull functional efficiency offered by the Right - because even a glimmer of idealism is preferable to deadly, dull, functional efficiency; any values (however feeble) are preferable to no values.
There is no way out of this unless or until a truly Right party emerges (i.e. a religious party) which offers more than the Left to feed the ineradicable religious hunger in Men's souls. Eventually this will emerge - one religion or another will displace the Left, because the religions have so much more to offer - and in a broad brush sense, each probably religion delivers what it offers.
We will easily see this when it happens, there will be no doubt or uncertainty about what is happening, it will be an extraordinary shock - because the whole tone and content of public discourse will change utterly.
There will be a vision presented, and the vision of any religion is qualitatively different from any vision presented by modern politics. The concentration of discourse - the mass of what people talk and wrote and read about - will move to the divine, to the divine plan, and to the afterlife.
Suddenly the concerns of modern mainstream Western politics will seem pathetically dull, shallow, trivial when compared with the scale and scope of a religious perspective.
And this could happen very quickly indeed, in just a few weeks a religious fever could - and indeed will - sweep through the West.
It will happen quickly because there is nothing to stop it happening, no resistance to it happening, because the alternatives are so utterly feeble.
The devastation this will undoubtedly cause to the normal running of society will, quite suddenly, seem unimportant - people will be filled with, pumped-with, motivation and they will find it intoxicating and overwhelming - they will realize that the secular society is pointless.
When they glimpse a vision of purpose, and this vision begins to spread, they will embrace it, they will be fuelled by it, swept-up in it - they will want more of it whatever the cost - and the cost will surely be immense; but that will not stop it happening, because the idea will be that any cost is worth it.
The stability of the modern secular West is extremely feeble, requires continual vast and expanding expenditure of bribes and propaganda. The West is indeed 'metastable' - which means there is a much more stable configuration into which it could move at any point - and that configuration is religion.
All the main Western political and social trends are draining away stability, all the satisfactions of modern life are ephemeral, there is less and less motivation because there is less and less reason to be motivated.
The modern secular 'religion' (ideology) is that each of us is alone, life has no meaning, and when we die we are annihilated. Really, it is not difficult to offer more than that! Any religion offers more. Any religion could displace the West.
The question will be which religion, or religion, suddenly emerges - which will be the one or ones that suddenly sweep an particular Western nation or region or ethnic group - what will be on offer that suddenly makes secular politics - whether of the Left or secular Right - seem trivial, shallow, pointless - which religion galvanizes people with a sudden motivation so strong that all the substitutes of the past two hundred years will be discarded with hardly a glance back at them,
I am not asking for speculation on which specific religion, or which various religions, will suddenly emerge and within weeks sweep aside two centuries of triumphant secularism - because in a metastable state nobody knows.
Also this process will not necessarily be good, may well leave things much, much worse than they have been. May be - in terms of health, happiness, comfort, convenience, pain and misery - an absolute disaster.
The religion that wins in some places, or in most places, may be a very bad one, by Christian standards.
But that will not stop it happening. Unworldly, non-rational mystique, magic, and religious idealism are utterly irresistible to alienated, nihilistic secular politics. Religion will spread like wild-fire, perhaps like fiend-fire - but the only remotely effective resistance to Hell-fire will be Heavenly Fire.
There is a message for each and every Western person:
Choose your religion, or else religion will choose you.
I have commented on this in religion - it is surprising how little most religions offer their adherents. Christianity offers far more than any other major religion (as Pascal noted - the only coherent reason for not wanting to be a Christian is that you think it is untrue - otherwise it offers far more than any rival religion or ideology), and even within Christianity some denominations offer more than others.
This is surprising in the sense that I would have supposed that there would be a lying bidding-war between religions, each striving (or pretending) to offer a more wonderful life or afterlife than the rivals.
Somehow this doesn't happen.
For example, modern liberal Christianity might be supposed to be offering its adherents more than some traditional types - in the sense that there is no Hell, and no strict rules about sex, fasting, attending Church etc.
But in fact liberal Christianity offers its adherents nothing at all - no miracles, no answered prayers. no healings, no experiences of contact with the divine, no afterlife, no resurrection of the body...
The advertised fate of a liberal Christian is that same as that of any other secular modern person - a purely subjective 'god' and extinction at the point of death.
Something similar applies to politics. The secular Left parties are, of course, fundamentally dishonest - but they are strangely honest about what they offer and what they do not offer.
They offer a focus (ie. lots of talk, lots of bureaucracies, lots of taxes) on themes such as equality, diversity, inclusiveness and so on. By means of affirmative action - preferences according to sex, sexuality, race, religion, ideology - the Left indeed offer a bit of the actuality.
But interestingly Leftist parties do not offer greater economic efficiency and growth, better science and more breakthroughs, an impartial legal system, greater military power, civil peace and public good behaviour, control of borders... or any of the things that the Right offers.
Of course the Left does make an occasional, sporadic (and dishonest) claim to fix anything and everything - but over time, day by day, in terms of strategy and propaganda the Left hardly mentions such things, avoids the subject, changes the subject. It is very obvious indeed that the Left is not going to do any of these things, and the Left don't make any serious or sustained effort even to pretend that they will.
Why don't they just say they will deliver on such matters? Why don't they pretend they will do everything? Perhaps because they are averse to these other 'goods' - certainly they are uninterested by them, don't like the subjects to be discussed... but then, that itself seems to suggest that they do not want to be put into a position of lying about them.
It is as if even these habitual and fundamental liars are constrained by some basic truth: if and when the Left has ruined a society by imposing equality, destroying Christianity, wrecking the economy, subverting marriage, breaking-up families, and encouraging unrestricted mass immigration... or whatever - then they can at least claim that they were merely doing what they said they would do!
This explicitness is odd, on the face of it; because the Left do lie about many, many things, for years and decades, and they get away with lies because the Left is the mass media, and modern populations are addicted to the mass media. But there are some things that they don't lie about...
The same basic and overall honesty applies to the more Right Wing Left parties (all mainstream modern politics is extremely Leftist, by world historical standards, so it does not make sense to call mainstream conservative, republican, libertarian type secular groups 'Right' wing parties, they are merely slight less Left wing than their rivals: the only truly Right wing parties are religious parties that want to run society on religious line, i.e. ultimately according to religious priorities and evaluations) - and it also applies to idealistic secular Right wing theorists, self-proclaimed reactionaries, for instance.
I refer to these groups as basing their appeal on Common Sense: they are characterized by common sense policies on economics, the law, immigration - their claims are that they will make things more efficient, more effective, make their nations more secure and powerful, make their societies more peaceful, favour their own native people and races rather than other people and races etc.
The problem is this mainstream or idealistic secular Right wing politics is so deadly dull, boring, pedestrian, prosaic, small minded, selfish. In a word sensible!
It really is. This is not an illusion. Secular 'Right' politics presents its vision of Life very lucidly (and honestly) as an ideology that drains away everything except... functionality. It offers a future of highly efficient nothing.
(Does this explain why people have a horror of sensible people and parties? That if the secular Right got what it wants, if we really were sensible in a secular world, people would mean nothing, life would mean nothing, Men would be just so many cogs in an abstract machine. In our personal lives, among those we love, we do not want people to be sensible about us.)
Mainstream (secular) Rightism offers more of what we have already had - especially a generation or two ago, when things were far more sensible than now - increasingly prosperous, powerful, rational, fair etc. social systems whose aim is... increasingly prosperity, power, rationality, justice etc.
The secular Right offers a nightmare of means but no ends. The vacuum of ends is indeed proclaimed as a virtue, as freedom, as individuality - there isn't even an attempt to claim that there is any point to the secular Right vision - its utter pointlessness is proclaimed as a benefit.
The West has been more sensible than any other society in the history of the world. We have had sensibility, and we have been made plausible offers of even-more sensibility - and we have rejected it: decisively.
So modern life is divided between these options - Common Sense versus Leftism - and Leftism has won. The public have decided that they prefer lying and nonsensical but very-slightly idealistic, very-slightly and very-vague Utopian Leftist dreams over the sensible, value-free, dead, dull functional efficiency offered by the Right - because even a glimmer of idealism is preferable to deadly, dull, functional efficiency; any values (however feeble) are preferable to no values.
There is no way out of this unless or until a truly Right party emerges (i.e. a religious party) which offers more than the Left to feed the ineradicable religious hunger in Men's souls. Eventually this will emerge - one religion or another will displace the Left, because the religions have so much more to offer - and in a broad brush sense, each probably religion delivers what it offers.
We will easily see this when it happens, there will be no doubt or uncertainty about what is happening, it will be an extraordinary shock - because the whole tone and content of public discourse will change utterly.
There will be a vision presented, and the vision of any religion is qualitatively different from any vision presented by modern politics. The concentration of discourse - the mass of what people talk and wrote and read about - will move to the divine, to the divine plan, and to the afterlife.
Suddenly the concerns of modern mainstream Western politics will seem pathetically dull, shallow, trivial when compared with the scale and scope of a religious perspective.
And this could happen very quickly indeed, in just a few weeks a religious fever could - and indeed will - sweep through the West.
It will happen quickly because there is nothing to stop it happening, no resistance to it happening, because the alternatives are so utterly feeble.
The devastation this will undoubtedly cause to the normal running of society will, quite suddenly, seem unimportant - people will be filled with, pumped-with, motivation and they will find it intoxicating and overwhelming - they will realize that the secular society is pointless.
When they glimpse a vision of purpose, and this vision begins to spread, they will embrace it, they will be fuelled by it, swept-up in it - they will want more of it whatever the cost - and the cost will surely be immense; but that will not stop it happening, because the idea will be that any cost is worth it.
The stability of the modern secular West is extremely feeble, requires continual vast and expanding expenditure of bribes and propaganda. The West is indeed 'metastable' - which means there is a much more stable configuration into which it could move at any point - and that configuration is religion.
All the main Western political and social trends are draining away stability, all the satisfactions of modern life are ephemeral, there is less and less motivation because there is less and less reason to be motivated.
The modern secular 'religion' (ideology) is that each of us is alone, life has no meaning, and when we die we are annihilated. Really, it is not difficult to offer more than that! Any religion offers more. Any religion could displace the West.
The question will be which religion, or religion, suddenly emerges - which will be the one or ones that suddenly sweep an particular Western nation or region or ethnic group - what will be on offer that suddenly makes secular politics - whether of the Left or secular Right - seem trivial, shallow, pointless - which religion galvanizes people with a sudden motivation so strong that all the substitutes of the past two hundred years will be discarded with hardly a glance back at them,
I am not asking for speculation on which specific religion, or which various religions, will suddenly emerge and within weeks sweep aside two centuries of triumphant secularism - because in a metastable state nobody knows.
Also this process will not necessarily be good, may well leave things much, much worse than they have been. May be - in terms of health, happiness, comfort, convenience, pain and misery - an absolute disaster.
The religion that wins in some places, or in most places, may be a very bad one, by Christian standards.
But that will not stop it happening. Unworldly, non-rational mystique, magic, and religious idealism are utterly irresistible to alienated, nihilistic secular politics. Religion will spread like wild-fire, perhaps like fiend-fire - but the only remotely effective resistance to Hell-fire will be Heavenly Fire.
There is a message for each and every Western person:
Choose your religion, or else religion will choose you.
Friday, 31 July 2015
The Satanic British Establishment
Just a brief comment - mainly for non-British readers - concerning the continual drip-drip media coverage of gross, systematic sexual abuse of children - mostly boys - among the British Establishment going back to the middle nineteen sixties.
The basic theme emerging over the past several years and continuing, is that Sir Jimmy Savile was not unique, but simply the most extreme example of a widespread practice - and indeed the fact of Savile surviving and thriving for decades intrinsically entailed exactly that he was merely representative of a much wider culture.
This involves senior politicians and government officials, as well as people in the media and entertainment and enforcement agencies - and indeed the picture painted is one of large scale, organized, multi-centred, strategic paedophilic abuses and toleration/ reward of abusers among hundreds of men and women (e.g. Margaret Thatcher and The Queen - both personal friends of Savile, and patrons and promoters of other abusive figures named in the media) in positions of decisive power and influence. Not one single massive conspiracy, but a significant number of large local set-ups - each protected by different modes of what might be termed Establishment Privilege
The scale of the activities is, frankly, astonishing. At the very least, considering that paedophilia is regarded by the average Briton as just about the worst of all crimes, this represents a remarkably 'tolerant' and socially-dissonant subculture among the ruling Establishment (including and involving the pinnacle of the Establishment, the most prestigious and powerful figures), since it is clear that 'everybody' (who was anybody) knew (or had heard of) what was going-on - but nothing ever was done about it. Indeed, many of the alleged abusers were rewarded with status, fame, power and money - all the rewards that the Establishment could confer.
Given the dishonesty of the mass media, and the fact that the evidence comes only from the mass media - is all this true? Did all these Establishment figure really engage in such grossly immoral (and criminal) activities, and were they really protected from exposure and prosecution?
Certainly, I have zero experience of this kind of activity in my own circles, not even the rumours of such activities. But then, I am not, nor ever have been, in this elite. If it is true, then it must have been confined to a secret and ruling elite subculture. Furthermore, the exploited children were mostly drawn from the chaotic subcultures of children's homes, runaways, the wild children, the borderline mentally handicapped, mentally ill, drug users, prostitutes, trafficked, uncared-for and so on - and again I have very little knowledge or contact with such groups.
On these grounds it is possible to deny that their was any such problem, and that the whole thing is a media invention - or at least a wild exaggeration based on just a handful of genuine cases. The question is why are such things being exposed now by the mass media and the police? It looks like some kind of inter-Establishment war, a war of evil versus evil, but this is not something I understand.
On the other hand, the current media coverage is piecemeal, presented as a series of isolated 'scandals', and does not draw general conclusions as I am doing.
Unfortunately, I have come to believe that it is true; and that there really was, probably still is, a monstrously wicked cult of child sexual abuse among the Establishment, which thrived in an environment of mutual protection of privilege. And since I think this is true, then it casts an horrific retrospective light on the British Establishment of the past half century.
This stuff is so grossly abhorrent, that comparisons with Caligula and Nero spring to mind; and in general the sense is one of Satanic influence among a group that have lost their religious faith and embraced a socio-political ideal of sexual revolution - in which one barrier after another to sexual gratification has been dismantled.
Indeed, this seems to explain the Establishment push behind the sexual revolution - the tolerance, indifference and approval of sexual adventuring and experimenting - and the fact that so many people were so easily blackmailable by the Establishment to keep quiet; with an all-seeing surveillance state and manipulable laws, backed by the irresponsible and irresistible destructive power of the mass media.
At any rate, while I do not seek to persuade others of the validity of this analysis, my working assumption is now that the British Establishment of the past couple of generations was far, far worse than anything its erstwhile (mostly Leftist) detractors ever alleged of it - its moral authority is utterly exploded, there has been a failure to recognize and enforce even the most basic level of human decency.
To a lesser or greater extent; this taints all of those who are a part of that Establishment, and who have been rewarded by the Establishment - especially the 'Honours' System of medals, knighthoods, life peerages and the like. These self-styled honours are coming to seem like badges of complicity.
I cannot allow much in the way of 'good intentions' from such people - rather, it fits with a policy of deliberate, strategic subversion of public morality, especially sexual morality. And this policy has been extremely successful - the depraved Establishment have substantially succeeded in eroding the basic decency, the traditional virtues, of the British public.
A topic worthy of George Orwell and one which Orwell would instantly have recognized; and lacking an Orwell, a story of the British people that perhaps never will be told.
The basic theme emerging over the past several years and continuing, is that Sir Jimmy Savile was not unique, but simply the most extreme example of a widespread practice - and indeed the fact of Savile surviving and thriving for decades intrinsically entailed exactly that he was merely representative of a much wider culture.
This involves senior politicians and government officials, as well as people in the media and entertainment and enforcement agencies - and indeed the picture painted is one of large scale, organized, multi-centred, strategic paedophilic abuses and toleration/ reward of abusers among hundreds of men and women (e.g. Margaret Thatcher and The Queen - both personal friends of Savile, and patrons and promoters of other abusive figures named in the media) in positions of decisive power and influence. Not one single massive conspiracy, but a significant number of large local set-ups - each protected by different modes of what might be termed Establishment Privilege
The scale of the activities is, frankly, astonishing. At the very least, considering that paedophilia is regarded by the average Briton as just about the worst of all crimes, this represents a remarkably 'tolerant' and socially-dissonant subculture among the ruling Establishment (including and involving the pinnacle of the Establishment, the most prestigious and powerful figures), since it is clear that 'everybody' (who was anybody) knew (or had heard of) what was going-on - but nothing ever was done about it. Indeed, many of the alleged abusers were rewarded with status, fame, power and money - all the rewards that the Establishment could confer.
Given the dishonesty of the mass media, and the fact that the evidence comes only from the mass media - is all this true? Did all these Establishment figure really engage in such grossly immoral (and criminal) activities, and were they really protected from exposure and prosecution?
Certainly, I have zero experience of this kind of activity in my own circles, not even the rumours of such activities. But then, I am not, nor ever have been, in this elite. If it is true, then it must have been confined to a secret and ruling elite subculture. Furthermore, the exploited children were mostly drawn from the chaotic subcultures of children's homes, runaways, the wild children, the borderline mentally handicapped, mentally ill, drug users, prostitutes, trafficked, uncared-for and so on - and again I have very little knowledge or contact with such groups.
On these grounds it is possible to deny that their was any such problem, and that the whole thing is a media invention - or at least a wild exaggeration based on just a handful of genuine cases. The question is why are such things being exposed now by the mass media and the police? It looks like some kind of inter-Establishment war, a war of evil versus evil, but this is not something I understand.
On the other hand, the current media coverage is piecemeal, presented as a series of isolated 'scandals', and does not draw general conclusions as I am doing.
Unfortunately, I have come to believe that it is true; and that there really was, probably still is, a monstrously wicked cult of child sexual abuse among the Establishment, which thrived in an environment of mutual protection of privilege. And since I think this is true, then it casts an horrific retrospective light on the British Establishment of the past half century.
This stuff is so grossly abhorrent, that comparisons with Caligula and Nero spring to mind; and in general the sense is one of Satanic influence among a group that have lost their religious faith and embraced a socio-political ideal of sexual revolution - in which one barrier after another to sexual gratification has been dismantled.
Indeed, this seems to explain the Establishment push behind the sexual revolution - the tolerance, indifference and approval of sexual adventuring and experimenting - and the fact that so many people were so easily blackmailable by the Establishment to keep quiet; with an all-seeing surveillance state and manipulable laws, backed by the irresponsible and irresistible destructive power of the mass media.
At any rate, while I do not seek to persuade others of the validity of this analysis, my working assumption is now that the British Establishment of the past couple of generations was far, far worse than anything its erstwhile (mostly Leftist) detractors ever alleged of it - its moral authority is utterly exploded, there has been a failure to recognize and enforce even the most basic level of human decency.
To a lesser or greater extent; this taints all of those who are a part of that Establishment, and who have been rewarded by the Establishment - especially the 'Honours' System of medals, knighthoods, life peerages and the like. These self-styled honours are coming to seem like badges of complicity.
I cannot allow much in the way of 'good intentions' from such people - rather, it fits with a policy of deliberate, strategic subversion of public morality, especially sexual morality. And this policy has been extremely successful - the depraved Establishment have substantially succeeded in eroding the basic decency, the traditional virtues, of the British public.
A topic worthy of George Orwell and one which Orwell would instantly have recognized; and lacking an Orwell, a story of the British people that perhaps never will be told.
Thursday, 30 July 2015
Books are (mostly) bad, but necessary
A sign of cultural decline is the fetichistic valorization of 'books' - as when people praise books as a class, or say that it is good when children read books.
But most books, especially most new books, are not just not-very-good but are very-bad-indeed - not merely in terms of being badly written, but by having bad topics, promoting bad attitudes, encouraging immorality and attacking virtue.
Take a look at the display window at your local new bookshop, or on an internet supplier - take a look at the best seller lists - books as a whole are pernicious, many are indeed evil. Books do a great deal of harm.
Yet books are also everything good, and all-but indispensable to our salvation in a public sphere that is so hostile to Good-ness - except that it is a small minority of books we are talking about mostly old books - and these are books that you will usually have to find for yourselves; because good-for-you books will only seldom (and unintentionally) be thrust at you in the same aggressive way that bad-for-you books are.
The good books are there, and they are easier to get at than ever before - but even the best of books does only half the job and the other half must be done by the reader. Perhaps the main danger to Good books is being taken lightly, gulped and swallowed so fast as hardly to be noticed - and never re-read.
If a book is worth reading, it is worth reading more than once. If you read and enjoy a book, but have no wish to re-read it, don't kid yourself: you are been dissipating your time. If you have never re-read a book then you might as well have been watching TV.
There are exceptions to this rule - some people remember after one reading - but even they cannot get much from a good book - a good book, a worthwhile book, has too much in it, to be assimilated by a single reading.
But most books, especially most new books, are not just not-very-good but are very-bad-indeed - not merely in terms of being badly written, but by having bad topics, promoting bad attitudes, encouraging immorality and attacking virtue.
Take a look at the display window at your local new bookshop, or on an internet supplier - take a look at the best seller lists - books as a whole are pernicious, many are indeed evil. Books do a great deal of harm.
Yet books are also everything good, and all-but indispensable to our salvation in a public sphere that is so hostile to Good-ness - except that it is a small minority of books we are talking about mostly old books - and these are books that you will usually have to find for yourselves; because good-for-you books will only seldom (and unintentionally) be thrust at you in the same aggressive way that bad-for-you books are.
The good books are there, and they are easier to get at than ever before - but even the best of books does only half the job and the other half must be done by the reader. Perhaps the main danger to Good books is being taken lightly, gulped and swallowed so fast as hardly to be noticed - and never re-read.
If a book is worth reading, it is worth reading more than once. If you read and enjoy a book, but have no wish to re-read it, don't kid yourself: you are been dissipating your time. If you have never re-read a book then you might as well have been watching TV.
There are exceptions to this rule - some people remember after one reading - but even they cannot get much from a good book - a good book, a worthwhile book, has too much in it, to be assimilated by a single reading.
Wednesday, 29 July 2015
Pleasure and suffering as an essential evaluation system in life - the connection between the real self and the world
Pleasure and joy, pain and suffering - these are what link us to the world. On the one hand they should not be ignored, while on the other hand they should be treated as means not ends.
If we live without taking any notice of pleasure and suffering, if we extinguish them or cut ourselves off from them - then we cut-off our soul from life, we do not experience life as real - life becomes a theoretical exercise.
We imprison our real self and leave the false self to deal with the world.
But if we regard pleasure and suffering as the purpose of life, accept passively that we should do what gives pleasure and avoid that which gives pain - if we are drawn-through life passively by our psychological responses - if our goal becomes to act strategically to amplify pleasures and avoid suffering... then we surrender agency and become a thing which is caused; merely part of the clockwork.
By living hedonistically, maximizing that which yields happiness and minimizing sources of misery - optimizing our position on the joy-pain axis... we have identified-with our false self.
And if we succeed, we become our false self - we become a bundle of instincts and conditioned responses.
What needs to be done is recognize that pleasure and pain are senses; and senses are a means not an end.
Pleasure-suffering navigates us through life as does sight or hearing. Our purpose in life is neither to devote ourselves to sensory gratification, nor to ignore the senses, but to use the senses. The same applies with pleasure-suffering - we must use these feelings.
We need to:
1. Notice when we experience pleasure or misery
2. Reflect on the source of these feelings
3.Interpret this as evidence of what our real self wants or needs
So, when it comes to our emotional state and the world, we need to Be Aware, Contemplate, then Interpret.
Say I eat ice cream and experience pleasure. To say: I eat ice cream and experience pleasure, therefore I need to arrange my life to eat more ice cream - is error.
To say: I eat ice cream and experience pleasure, but this means nothing - is another error.
To say: my task is to find-out what the pleasure of eating ice cream means - is wisdom.
(So long as meaning is understood in the largest terms - and meaning is not merely 'explained-away' as contingency.)
To say that any source of pleasure and suffering - such as ice cream - is unreal and irrelevant is an error - because this is our connection with life. But to wallow in memories of past ice creams and indulge in fantasies of future ice creams is also error.
Wisdom is to meditate and contemplate upon the phenomena; to consider why ice cream yields happiness, what kind of ice cream, what conditions for eating it - we should introspect concerning what goes through the mind, connotations, memories triggered, people and places associated, what hopes and dreams there are.
We need to know how ice cream makes us feel good and in what way 'good'.
The eye and ear help us navigate the mundane world, but pleasure and suffering help us navigate the higher world, the spiritual world. They are our spiritual senses, essential, indispensable evaluations - despite that the evidence they provide is partial and biased, and would mislead us unless that evidence was interpreted.
Our task is to recognize the information and interpret it.
To yield to pleasure and suffering would be like a moth flying into a flame - but to reject and ignore pleasure and pain would be to walk through life in a blindfold.
If we live without taking any notice of pleasure and suffering, if we extinguish them or cut ourselves off from them - then we cut-off our soul from life, we do not experience life as real - life becomes a theoretical exercise.
We imprison our real self and leave the false self to deal with the world.
But if we regard pleasure and suffering as the purpose of life, accept passively that we should do what gives pleasure and avoid that which gives pain - if we are drawn-through life passively by our psychological responses - if our goal becomes to act strategically to amplify pleasures and avoid suffering... then we surrender agency and become a thing which is caused; merely part of the clockwork.
By living hedonistically, maximizing that which yields happiness and minimizing sources of misery - optimizing our position on the joy-pain axis... we have identified-with our false self.
And if we succeed, we become our false self - we become a bundle of instincts and conditioned responses.
What needs to be done is recognize that pleasure and pain are senses; and senses are a means not an end.
Pleasure-suffering navigates us through life as does sight or hearing. Our purpose in life is neither to devote ourselves to sensory gratification, nor to ignore the senses, but to use the senses. The same applies with pleasure-suffering - we must use these feelings.
We need to:
1. Notice when we experience pleasure or misery
2. Reflect on the source of these feelings
3.Interpret this as evidence of what our real self wants or needs
So, when it comes to our emotional state and the world, we need to Be Aware, Contemplate, then Interpret.
Say I eat ice cream and experience pleasure. To say: I eat ice cream and experience pleasure, therefore I need to arrange my life to eat more ice cream - is error.
To say: I eat ice cream and experience pleasure, but this means nothing - is another error.
To say: my task is to find-out what the pleasure of eating ice cream means - is wisdom.
(So long as meaning is understood in the largest terms - and meaning is not merely 'explained-away' as contingency.)
To say that any source of pleasure and suffering - such as ice cream - is unreal and irrelevant is an error - because this is our connection with life. But to wallow in memories of past ice creams and indulge in fantasies of future ice creams is also error.
Wisdom is to meditate and contemplate upon the phenomena; to consider why ice cream yields happiness, what kind of ice cream, what conditions for eating it - we should introspect concerning what goes through the mind, connotations, memories triggered, people and places associated, what hopes and dreams there are.
We need to know how ice cream makes us feel good and in what way 'good'.
The eye and ear help us navigate the mundane world, but pleasure and suffering help us navigate the higher world, the spiritual world. They are our spiritual senses, essential, indispensable evaluations - despite that the evidence they provide is partial and biased, and would mislead us unless that evidence was interpreted.
Our task is to recognize the information and interpret it.
To yield to pleasure and suffering would be like a moth flying into a flame - but to reject and ignore pleasure and pain would be to walk through life in a blindfold.
Tuesday, 28 July 2015
The destruction of civil society by the Left
Going back to the early 1990s, there emerged a considerable literature and a political movement concerned with Civil Society - which was the layer of organized social life between the government and the family: churches, professions and guilds, charities and clubs and the like.
This movement came in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and most of its satellites and colonies in 1989, and the break up of that empire into 'democratic' nations. The idea was that totalitarianism had been characterized by the destruction of civil society (either annihilation - as with many Christian churches, or take over by the state).
By contrast, civil society was seen as a vital characteristic of a healthy and free society - the idea that Men should have forms of organization that were substantially autonomous was seen as both efficient and also morally necessary.
The idea was that civil societies should be encouraged in the emerging nations of central and Eastern Europe - and indeed elsewhere - so that they might become Free as the West was Free.
What we have seen instead has been the near-complete destruction of civil society in the West - and the process has been all but un-remarked and un-noted as a general phenomenon. Almost all forms of human association have been brought under control of the state, most are irrelevant, participation in civil society is very low and feeble, many churches, professions social hobby groups been severely weakened or become extinct.
By the criteria of 25 years ago, objectively this means The West is not free, and is instead totalitarian.
It happened by a different mechanism than under Soviet Communism - which used direct suppression, making institutions illegal, confiscating their assets. imprisoning their leaders etc. In the West the imposition of totalitarianism was a mixture of subsidy-control and strangulation by regulation.
But if its implementation has been far more successful and complete; the motivation in the West was exactly the same as it was in the USSR - the motivation of Leftist totalitarianism - that there should be one ideology, and that ideology should be imposed by the state.
But of course the modern New Leftist, politically correct ideology is a very different beast than the utopian Socialism of a century ago. Both are destructive of good - destructive of marriage, the family, churches, professions, guilds, self-education, self-organization... all forms of voluntary autonomous cooperation...
But the Soviets wanted to harness the liberated resources and energies to build utopia; whereas the modern Social Justice Warriors have no utopia in mind - they simply want to destroy that which they oppose. And they have succeeded.
At first social institutions are indeed co-opted to the New Left project, usually by subsidies in return for conformity - but sooner or later the external takeover will destroy the institution, because once made-over to fit in with regulations over membership, politically correct objectives, and working in an environment increasingly onerous in terms of regulations and restrictions - the organization all-but loses its proper function, and instead operate merely as a branch of the state civil administration, just another organization dedicated in its essence to inclusion, equality, diversity...
So clubs are closed, churches and charities dwindle or disappear, organized group hobbies are abandoned - the population uses its leisure simply on being entertained, drinking, eating, plugging into the mass media.
The population are atomized, demoralized, demotivated, unable to think or act for themselves. Which is just how Leftism want them to be: because when there is no organization with autonomy - there is no threat.
Note: It needs to be recognized that inclusion, equality and diversity are negative and destructive concepts. They do not point to any end-point - there is no conceivable state of affairs which is inclusive, equal and diverse - so a 'justice' based on such ideals is always and necessarily destructive of whatever is.
This movement came in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and most of its satellites and colonies in 1989, and the break up of that empire into 'democratic' nations. The idea was that totalitarianism had been characterized by the destruction of civil society (either annihilation - as with many Christian churches, or take over by the state).
By contrast, civil society was seen as a vital characteristic of a healthy and free society - the idea that Men should have forms of organization that were substantially autonomous was seen as both efficient and also morally necessary.
The idea was that civil societies should be encouraged in the emerging nations of central and Eastern Europe - and indeed elsewhere - so that they might become Free as the West was Free.
What we have seen instead has been the near-complete destruction of civil society in the West - and the process has been all but un-remarked and un-noted as a general phenomenon. Almost all forms of human association have been brought under control of the state, most are irrelevant, participation in civil society is very low and feeble, many churches, professions social hobby groups been severely weakened or become extinct.
By the criteria of 25 years ago, objectively this means The West is not free, and is instead totalitarian.
It happened by a different mechanism than under Soviet Communism - which used direct suppression, making institutions illegal, confiscating their assets. imprisoning their leaders etc. In the West the imposition of totalitarianism was a mixture of subsidy-control and strangulation by regulation.
But if its implementation has been far more successful and complete; the motivation in the West was exactly the same as it was in the USSR - the motivation of Leftist totalitarianism - that there should be one ideology, and that ideology should be imposed by the state.
But of course the modern New Leftist, politically correct ideology is a very different beast than the utopian Socialism of a century ago. Both are destructive of good - destructive of marriage, the family, churches, professions, guilds, self-education, self-organization... all forms of voluntary autonomous cooperation...
But the Soviets wanted to harness the liberated resources and energies to build utopia; whereas the modern Social Justice Warriors have no utopia in mind - they simply want to destroy that which they oppose. And they have succeeded.
At first social institutions are indeed co-opted to the New Left project, usually by subsidies in return for conformity - but sooner or later the external takeover will destroy the institution, because once made-over to fit in with regulations over membership, politically correct objectives, and working in an environment increasingly onerous in terms of regulations and restrictions - the organization all-but loses its proper function, and instead operate merely as a branch of the state civil administration, just another organization dedicated in its essence to inclusion, equality, diversity...
So clubs are closed, churches and charities dwindle or disappear, organized group hobbies are abandoned - the population uses its leisure simply on being entertained, drinking, eating, plugging into the mass media.
The population are atomized, demoralized, demotivated, unable to think or act for themselves. Which is just how Leftism want them to be: because when there is no organization with autonomy - there is no threat.
Note: It needs to be recognized that inclusion, equality and diversity are negative and destructive concepts. They do not point to any end-point - there is no conceivable state of affairs which is inclusive, equal and diverse - so a 'justice' based on such ideals is always and necessarily destructive of whatever is.
Monday, 27 July 2015
What if I am wrong in my beliefs? - what if I have made a mistake?
Someone may say: "What is the point or use of making resolutions to live by truth if I am wrong about the nature of truth? I can easily imagine that I may be mistaken!"
Wrong question. The important thing to focus upon is the striving to live and striving in the right spirit. Then, when you are mistaken, you are in possession of an infallible force which will turn you away from error, will seize you, and will guide you back onto the right road.
To brood upon the theme of 'but I may be in error' is harmful, demotivating, nihilistic - it is a species of the sin of despair (a sin which will undermine any or all virtues, if given enough rope). It demonstrates lack of inner confidence in the power of the truth, and our capacity to know the truth - it represents a paucity of faith that God really loves us - since a loving God would not place us in a predicament with no way out of it.
While many or most people are prone to brood on the possibility of their own error, this is not - contra the spirit of the age - a virtue; it is not (for example) characteristic of 'a real scientist', it is not a sign of humility, it is not a sign of superiority of insight, or maturity, or sophistication,
The best that can be said about it, as with all sins, is that in the experience of overcoming it much may be learned - and one will have emerged a wiser and stronger man. But that does not excuse the sin of encouraging self-doubt in other people - as so often happens; any more than the fact that overcoming hatred leaves us wiser would make it right to encourage hatred in others.
Our path to truth is selflessly to yield ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit - to striving in the right spirit. Nothing else will take us to the truth, and this will do so.
We must not indulge in self-doubt or we will easily become paralysed from fear of error. Men are not meant to be infallible unerring creatures - we are made to strive in the spirit of love, and we will surely err, and we will need to repent.
But so long as we maintain the right spirit, we cannot fail to return to our path. Self-doubt will not help prevent error, on the contrary it will place us in a frame of mind in which we will err and stray and not notice (as when a failure to act is by default smugly assumed to be the safest option) -- self-doubt will only prevent us living as we should: with faith and love and courage.
Wrong question. The important thing to focus upon is the striving to live and striving in the right spirit. Then, when you are mistaken, you are in possession of an infallible force which will turn you away from error, will seize you, and will guide you back onto the right road.
To brood upon the theme of 'but I may be in error' is harmful, demotivating, nihilistic - it is a species of the sin of despair (a sin which will undermine any or all virtues, if given enough rope). It demonstrates lack of inner confidence in the power of the truth, and our capacity to know the truth - it represents a paucity of faith that God really loves us - since a loving God would not place us in a predicament with no way out of it.
While many or most people are prone to brood on the possibility of their own error, this is not - contra the spirit of the age - a virtue; it is not (for example) characteristic of 'a real scientist', it is not a sign of humility, it is not a sign of superiority of insight, or maturity, or sophistication,
The best that can be said about it, as with all sins, is that in the experience of overcoming it much may be learned - and one will have emerged a wiser and stronger man. But that does not excuse the sin of encouraging self-doubt in other people - as so often happens; any more than the fact that overcoming hatred leaves us wiser would make it right to encourage hatred in others.
Our path to truth is selflessly to yield ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit - to striving in the right spirit. Nothing else will take us to the truth, and this will do so.
We must not indulge in self-doubt or we will easily become paralysed from fear of error. Men are not meant to be infallible unerring creatures - we are made to strive in the spirit of love, and we will surely err, and we will need to repent.
But so long as we maintain the right spirit, we cannot fail to return to our path. Self-doubt will not help prevent error, on the contrary it will place us in a frame of mind in which we will err and stray and not notice (as when a failure to act is by default smugly assumed to be the safest option) -- self-doubt will only prevent us living as we should: with faith and love and courage.
Saturday, 25 July 2015
When you pray for help - and no help comes...
*
The efficacy of prayer is not something which can be established empirically, because there is always another explanation for anything - in extremis anything, no matter how apparently miraculous, can be explained-away by mental illness, mass delusion or lying.
But the validity of prayer does need to be confirmed inwardly and personally by each person - and this is typically by a prayer being grated in such a way that we are convinced (even if, as is usual, we would not be able to convince others - that does not matter, because the prayer was of the nature of a private communication between the prayer and God).
However, not all prayers are granted. Why is this?
In a bigger picture, prayer is one way that we are helped in this life - by the interventions of divine powers. And asking for, and getting, such divine help is one of the important rocks of faith. But why do we not receive more help, since life is so difficult?
Such a question can only be answered if we understand the basic purposes of mortal living, and in particular, why life is some kind of struggle for most people most of the time. If we are able to appreciate that life is a kind of educational process, then we may realise why help is provided, and not provided, in the way it is.
When someone is learning there is a time for help - that is what teachers are supposed to do - and there is a time for solitary struggle - for practise, for grappling with problems, for try, try, try again.
So, one important reason that prayers are not answered will certainly be that we are being required to do something from our own resources, because that is the only way we can learn. In effect, in the unanswered prayer, we were asking the divine powers to 'do our homework' - when this homework was vital to our learning.
Now, this is not the only reason, nor is it always the reason, prayers are unanswered - but it is surely one of the reasons, and perhaps a neglected reason: prayers are not answered, help is not given, when it is important that we do something without help, for our own good: when we have asked for help instead of participating in the learning process that is life.
This does not mean we should not have asked for help in the first place, because we can't always know the nature of the situation (if in doubt: ask); but it does mean that when we have asked for help and received a negative answer, we then acknowledge the validity of that reply, and act accordingly.
*
The efficacy of prayer is not something which can be established empirically, because there is always another explanation for anything - in extremis anything, no matter how apparently miraculous, can be explained-away by mental illness, mass delusion or lying.
But the validity of prayer does need to be confirmed inwardly and personally by each person - and this is typically by a prayer being grated in such a way that we are convinced (even if, as is usual, we would not be able to convince others - that does not matter, because the prayer was of the nature of a private communication between the prayer and God).
However, not all prayers are granted. Why is this?
In a bigger picture, prayer is one way that we are helped in this life - by the interventions of divine powers. And asking for, and getting, such divine help is one of the important rocks of faith. But why do we not receive more help, since life is so difficult?
Such a question can only be answered if we understand the basic purposes of mortal living, and in particular, why life is some kind of struggle for most people most of the time. If we are able to appreciate that life is a kind of educational process, then we may realise why help is provided, and not provided, in the way it is.
When someone is learning there is a time for help - that is what teachers are supposed to do - and there is a time for solitary struggle - for practise, for grappling with problems, for try, try, try again.
So, one important reason that prayers are not answered will certainly be that we are being required to do something from our own resources, because that is the only way we can learn. In effect, in the unanswered prayer, we were asking the divine powers to 'do our homework' - when this homework was vital to our learning.
Now, this is not the only reason, nor is it always the reason, prayers are unanswered - but it is surely one of the reasons, and perhaps a neglected reason: prayers are not answered, help is not given, when it is important that we do something without help, for our own good: when we have asked for help instead of participating in the learning process that is life.
This does not mean we should not have asked for help in the first place, because we can't always know the nature of the situation (if in doubt: ask); but it does mean that when we have asked for help and received a negative answer, we then acknowledge the validity of that reply, and act accordingly.
*
Friday, 24 July 2015
Now the RNLI is corrupt!... Charities plus Mission Creep equals Leftism
*
I don't go looking for these things; but not long ago I reported that the Salvation Army, which was once one of the best charities in the UK (as well as being a Low Church Protestant Christian denomination), had fallen to Leftism -
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-saddest-thing-of-past-25-years.html
Now I have to report the same for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) - which used to fund a 24 hour volunteer sea rescue service around the coast of Britain. This charity has some particular local associations for me since the Grace Darling story of Victorian times - described to all school-children of my generation - happened nearby; and Newbiggin by the Sea - where I spent most childhood holidays - had one of the earliest lifeboats, responsible for saving many of the inshore fishermen.
But 'Conquest's Second Law' proves itself true again: which states that that any organization that is not explicitly Right Wing, will become Left Wing; and the RNLI has now become 'just another NGO', run by the usual politically correct gang of professional managers class and public relations officials.
(It is due to organizational takeover by the lethal combination of volunteer workers with career professional managers, public relations advisers, web designers, and 'Chuggers' (i.e. charity-muggers - trained and paid street collectors), plus donation-grubbing spammers and junk mailers; all sensitive to and influenced by lobbyists, single issue fanatics, Social Justice Warriers, grievance-mongers, and organized activists of every stripe...)
(Actually things are worse than Conquest hoped, since many explicitly Right Wing organizations become Leftist over time - for example this happened to Libertarians and Neo-Conservatives.)
How do I know this? - simply because I saw a blog comment then checked the RNLI website to see how they present themselves, and came across this:
http://rnli.org/aboutus/International/Pages/International-development.aspx
It is not difficult to know when an organization of institution has become Leftist, because they are so proud of themselves that they cannot help but advertise the fact - indeed, if they did not advertise their politically correct moral posturing, there would be no reason to do it - so they can always be relied upon to out-themselves. In my experience, this method is never wrong.
The hyped-up, untrustworthy web pages delighted in describing how the RNLI are 'active' in a dozen third world countries scattered across the globe - apparently providing training in swimming, beach lifeguards and... whatever
- i.e. The usual ineffectual 'aren't I great!' stuff that Leftists like to fund themselves to do, so that they feel better about themselves and have something 'cool' to brag about at parties...
But the specifics of what the RNLI do in Africa, South America, South Asia doesn't matter to me, I am not interested - because they shouldn't be there: they are supposed to be running lifeboats around the coasts of Britain - that it what we pay them for!
We don't want the RNLI to do anything else at all!
Apparently, according to their own websites they are now big on providing beach lifeguards... yes, that's right, the RNLI has expanded its portfolio away from the likes of oilskin clad volunteer car mechanics and shopkeepers risking their lives to haul people out of the deep sea...
...to a slinky wet suit clad version of the Baywatch babes and hunks.
So that is it! - so far as I know there are now no honest, decent national charities in the UK. Not one. (And if you told me about one - I would be inclined to disbelieve you.)
From now on all my donations go to the small remaining number of serious Christian churches - preferably local - especially for evangelical work.
But I shall need to keep an eye on them too - because as soon as they stop explicitly proclaiming Left-taboo anti-sexual revolution doctrines (and sometimes even before that time), they will soon and surely fall to PC.
*
I don't go looking for these things; but not long ago I reported that the Salvation Army, which was once one of the best charities in the UK (as well as being a Low Church Protestant Christian denomination), had fallen to Leftism -
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-saddest-thing-of-past-25-years.html
Now I have to report the same for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) - which used to fund a 24 hour volunteer sea rescue service around the coast of Britain. This charity has some particular local associations for me since the Grace Darling story of Victorian times - described to all school-children of my generation - happened nearby; and Newbiggin by the Sea - where I spent most childhood holidays - had one of the earliest lifeboats, responsible for saving many of the inshore fishermen.
But 'Conquest's Second Law' proves itself true again: which states that that any organization that is not explicitly Right Wing, will become Left Wing; and the RNLI has now become 'just another NGO', run by the usual politically correct gang of professional managers class and public relations officials.
(It is due to organizational takeover by the lethal combination of volunteer workers with career professional managers, public relations advisers, web designers, and 'Chuggers' (i.e. charity-muggers - trained and paid street collectors), plus donation-grubbing spammers and junk mailers; all sensitive to and influenced by lobbyists, single issue fanatics, Social Justice Warriers, grievance-mongers, and organized activists of every stripe...)
(Actually things are worse than Conquest hoped, since many explicitly Right Wing organizations become Leftist over time - for example this happened to Libertarians and Neo-Conservatives.)
How do I know this? - simply because I saw a blog comment then checked the RNLI website to see how they present themselves, and came across this:
http://rnli.org/aboutus/International/Pages/International-development.aspx
It is not difficult to know when an organization of institution has become Leftist, because they are so proud of themselves that they cannot help but advertise the fact - indeed, if they did not advertise their politically correct moral posturing, there would be no reason to do it - so they can always be relied upon to out-themselves. In my experience, this method is never wrong.
The hyped-up, untrustworthy web pages delighted in describing how the RNLI are 'active' in a dozen third world countries scattered across the globe - apparently providing training in swimming, beach lifeguards and... whatever
- i.e. The usual ineffectual 'aren't I great!' stuff that Leftists like to fund themselves to do, so that they feel better about themselves and have something 'cool' to brag about at parties...
But the specifics of what the RNLI do in Africa, South America, South Asia doesn't matter to me, I am not interested - because they shouldn't be there: they are supposed to be running lifeboats around the coasts of Britain - that it what we pay them for!
We don't want the RNLI to do anything else at all!
Apparently, according to their own websites they are now big on providing beach lifeguards... yes, that's right, the RNLI has expanded its portfolio away from the likes of oilskin clad volunteer car mechanics and shopkeepers risking their lives to haul people out of the deep sea...
...to a slinky wet suit clad version of the Baywatch babes and hunks.
So that is it! - so far as I know there are now no honest, decent national charities in the UK. Not one. (And if you told me about one - I would be inclined to disbelieve you.)
From now on all my donations go to the small remaining number of serious Christian churches - preferably local - especially for evangelical work.
But I shall need to keep an eye on them too - because as soon as they stop explicitly proclaiming Left-taboo anti-sexual revolution doctrines (and sometimes even before that time), they will soon and surely fall to PC.
*
Thursday, 23 July 2015
Rudolf Steiner's remarkable prophecy of modern times from a century ago
*
I have been reading and listening to Rudolf Steiner for a few months, as if I was searching for something but I did not know what. Today I found it! It is an astonishing, inspired and prophetic essay entitled, rather tangentially, The Work of the Angel in our Astral Body.
The months of rather desultory and aimless exploring served to prepare me so that I could understand this very difficult and concentrated and jargon filled piece - which, as is usual with Steiner, contains much that is bizarre and apparently arbitrary - but my attention was arrested initially by this astonishing passage which foresaw exactly our current situation.
The reason we are in this situation, according to Steiner, is the wrong exercise of our free will to ignore (by sleeping through - in an attempt to return to the immersive spirituality primal animism) or refuse (in the name of a scientism that disbelieves the spiritual altogether) what should have been a step forward in our human evolution: a conscious spirituality focused on Christ.
*
I have now given you a general picture of these things. But what would be the outcome if the Angels were obliged to perform this work without man himself participating, to carry it out in his etheric and physical bodies during sleep?
The outcome in the evolution of humanity would unquestionably be threefold.
Firstly, something would be engendered in the sleeping human bodies — while the ego and astral body were not within them — and man would meet with it on waking in the morning ... but then it would become instinct instead of conscious spiritual activity and therefore baleful. It is so indeed: certain instinctive knowledge that will arise in human nature, instinctive knowledge connected with the mystery of birth and conception, with sexual life as a whole, threatens to become baleful if the danger of which I have spoken takes effect. Certain Angels would then themselves undergo a change — a change of which I cannot speak, because this is a subject belonging to the higher secrets of initiation-science which may not yet be disclosed.
But this much can certainly be said: The effect in the evolution of humanity would be that certain instincts connected with the sexual life would arise in a pernicious form instead of wholesomely, in clear waking consciousness. These instincts would not be mere aberrations but would pass over into and configure the social life, would above all prevent men — through what would then enter their blood as the effect of the sexual life — from unfolding brotherhood in any form whatever on the Earth, and would rather induce them to rebel against it. This would be a matter of instinct.
So the crucial point lies ahead when either the path to the right can be taken — but that demands wakefulness — or the path to the left, which permits of sleep. But in that case instincts come on the scene — instincts of a fearful kind.
Natural science will be totally blind to the event of which I have told you, for if men become half devils through their sexual instincts, science will as a matter of course regard this as a natural necessity. Scientifically, then, the matter is simply not capable of explanation, for whatever happens, everything can be explained by science. The fact is that such things can be understood only by spiritual, supersensible cognition. That is the one aspect.
If a form of medicine injurious to humanity were ever to take root, if a terrible aberration of the sexual instincts were to arise, if there were baleful doings in the sphere of the purely mechanistic forces of the world, in the application of the forces of nature by means of spiritual powers, an unspiritual conception of life would see through none of these things, would not perceive how they deviate from the true path ...
The sleeper, as long as sleep lasts, does not see the approach of a thief who is about to rob him; he is unaware of it and at most he finds out later on, when he wakes, what has been done to him.
But it would be a bad awakening for humanity! Man would pride himself upon the growth of his instinctive knowledge of certain processes and substances and would experience such satisfaction in obeying certain aberrations of the sexual impulses that he would regard them as evidence of a particularly high development of superhumanity, of freedom from convention, of broad-mindedness! In a certain respect, ugliness would be beauty and beauty, ugliness.
Nothing of this would be perceived because it would all be regarded as natural necessity. But it would denote an aberration from the path which, in the nature of humanity itself, is prescribed for man's essential being.
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181009p01.html
I have been reading and listening to Rudolf Steiner for a few months, as if I was searching for something but I did not know what. Today I found it! It is an astonishing, inspired and prophetic essay entitled, rather tangentially, The Work of the Angel in our Astral Body.
The months of rather desultory and aimless exploring served to prepare me so that I could understand this very difficult and concentrated and jargon filled piece - which, as is usual with Steiner, contains much that is bizarre and apparently arbitrary - but my attention was arrested initially by this astonishing passage which foresaw exactly our current situation.
The reason we are in this situation, according to Steiner, is the wrong exercise of our free will to ignore (by sleeping through - in an attempt to return to the immersive spirituality primal animism) or refuse (in the name of a scientism that disbelieves the spiritual altogether) what should have been a step forward in our human evolution: a conscious spirituality focused on Christ.
*
Here lies the great danger for
the age of the Spiritual Soul. This is what might still happen if, before the
beginning of the third millennium, men were to refuse to turn to the spiritual
life. The third millennium begins with the year 2000, so it is only a short
time ahead of us. It might still happen that the aim of the Angels in their
work would have to be achieved by means of the sleeping bodies of men — instead
of through men wide-awake. The Angels might still be compelled to withdraw
their whole work from the astral body and to submerge it in the etheric body in
order to bring it to fulfillment. But then, in his real being, man would have
no part in it. It would have to be performed in the etheric body while man
himself was not there, just because if he were there in the waking state he would
obstruct it.
I have now given you a general picture of these things. But what would be the outcome if the Angels were obliged to perform this work without man himself participating, to carry it out in his etheric and physical bodies during sleep?
The outcome in the evolution of humanity would unquestionably be threefold.
Firstly, something would be engendered in the sleeping human bodies — while the ego and astral body were not within them — and man would meet with it on waking in the morning ... but then it would become instinct instead of conscious spiritual activity and therefore baleful. It is so indeed: certain instinctive knowledge that will arise in human nature, instinctive knowledge connected with the mystery of birth and conception, with sexual life as a whole, threatens to become baleful if the danger of which I have spoken takes effect. Certain Angels would then themselves undergo a change — a change of which I cannot speak, because this is a subject belonging to the higher secrets of initiation-science which may not yet be disclosed.
But this much can certainly be said: The effect in the evolution of humanity would be that certain instincts connected with the sexual life would arise in a pernicious form instead of wholesomely, in clear waking consciousness. These instincts would not be mere aberrations but would pass over into and configure the social life, would above all prevent men — through what would then enter their blood as the effect of the sexual life — from unfolding brotherhood in any form whatever on the Earth, and would rather induce them to rebel against it. This would be a matter of instinct.
So the crucial point lies ahead when either the path to the right can be taken — but that demands wakefulness — or the path to the left, which permits of sleep. But in that case instincts come on the scene — instincts of a fearful kind.
And what do you suppose the
scientific experts will say when such instincts come into evidence? They will
say that it is a natural and inevitable development in the evolution of
humanity. Light cannot be shed on such matters by natural science, for whether
men become angels or devils would be equally capable of explanation by
scientific reasoning. Science will say the same in both cases: the later is the
outcome of the earlier ... so grand and wise is the interpretation of nature in
terms of causality!
Natural science will be totally blind to the event of which I have told you, for if men become half devils through their sexual instincts, science will as a matter of course regard this as a natural necessity. Scientifically, then, the matter is simply not capable of explanation, for whatever happens, everything can be explained by science. The fact is that such things can be understood only by spiritual, supersensible cognition. That is the one aspect.
The second aspect is that from
this work which involves changes affecting the Angels themselves, still another
result accrues for humanity: instinctive knowledge of certain medicaments — but
knowledge of a baleful kind!
Everything connected with
medicine will make a great advance in the materialistic sense. Men will acquire
instinctive insights into the medicinal properties of certain substances and
certain treatments — and thereby do terrible harm. But the harm will be called
useful. A sick man will be called healthy, for it will be perceived that the
particular treatment applied leads to something pleasing. People will actually like things that make the human being — in
a certain direction — unhealthy.
Knowledge of the medicinal
effects of certain processes and treatments will be enhanced, but this will
lead into very baleful channels. For man will come to know through certain
instincts what kind of illnesses can be induced by particular
substances and treatments. And it will then be possible for him either to bring
about or not to bring about illnesses, entirely as suits his egotistical
purposes.
The third result will be this.
Man will get to know of definite forces which, simply by means of quite easy
manipulations — by bringing into accord certain vibrations — will enable him to
unleash tremendous mechanical forces in the world. Instinctively he will come
to realize in this way the possibility of exercising a certain spiritual
guidance and control of the mechanistic principle — and the whole of technical
science will sail into desolate waters. But human egoism will find these
desolate waters of tremendous use and benefit.
This, my friends, is a fragment
of concrete knowledge of the evolution of existence, a fragment of a conception
of life which can be truly assessed only by those who realise that an
unspiritual view of life can never grow clear about these things.
If a form of medicine injurious to humanity were ever to take root, if a terrible aberration of the sexual instincts were to arise, if there were baleful doings in the sphere of the purely mechanistic forces of the world, in the application of the forces of nature by means of spiritual powers, an unspiritual conception of life would see through none of these things, would not perceive how they deviate from the true path ...
The sleeper, as long as sleep lasts, does not see the approach of a thief who is about to rob him; he is unaware of it and at most he finds out later on, when he wakes, what has been done to him.
But it would be a bad awakening for humanity! Man would pride himself upon the growth of his instinctive knowledge of certain processes and substances and would experience such satisfaction in obeying certain aberrations of the sexual impulses that he would regard them as evidence of a particularly high development of superhumanity, of freedom from convention, of broad-mindedness! In a certain respect, ugliness would be beauty and beauty, ugliness.
Nothing of this would be perceived because it would all be regarded as natural necessity. But it would denote an aberration from the path which, in the nature of humanity itself, is prescribed for man's essential being.
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181009p01.html
" If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" - the vacuum after the Death of God
*
That phrase attributed to Voltaire " If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" recognized that God served an indispensable function in the public sphere - and when Nietzsche stated, noticed and advocated that God was now dead - the reality of that death has turned-out to be primarily in the realms of discourse (rather than in the privacy of the individual mind, where God may still, often, be acknowledged).
The other famous phrase of relevance here is attributed to Dostoevsky and states that: Without God everything is permitted. This captures on the one hand the horror of a world in which evil is openly advocated and enforced under the label of Good; and on the other hand the demonic delight, and intoxication, at the endless new possibilities for transgression and destruction that this allows.
But discussion of this whole area of the post-God world has collapsed over the past forty-some years since I came to adult consciousness. When I read that old socialist atheist Bernard Shaw, I found a man who brooded on the absolute need for a 'new religion' to replace Christianity - and this was a theme of his writings for more than half a century: he even tried to launch this religion of Creative Evolution via some of his most successful plays.
So, despite his being a major figure in promoting the evils of Leftism, Shaw was not so much of a fool as to suppose that Man could live without religion.
But we are! - I mean that is the implicit conclusion of a million items per day of propaganda from the mass media, the education system, government officials and corporations. Their message is loud and clear: that God is Dead - and we do not need to reinvent him.
Shaw knew that men must have religion... or else! So did Fritz (Small is Beautiful) Schumacher - whose early works were based on the advocacy of Buddhist Economics, and whose last book was an argument for traditional Thomistic Catholicism.
When I read Robert Graves, I found another author who, like Shaw, was viscerally hostile to Christianity - but promoting his own version of Neo-Paganism (which turned out to be extraordinarily influential is establishing that new religion). Graves was a very strange man with innumerable odd ideas, but he was not such a fool as to imagine that Man could live without religion.
Anyway, here we are! In a world which has no religion, and has lost that understanding shared by Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Shaw, Schumacher, Graves... and indeed everybody who had thought about the subject for more than five minutes: that Man must have a religion.
Is this a paradox - that Man does not have what he must have? If so, the paradox is there for all to see, in the gross incoherence, negativity and destructiveness of modern public discourse.
The answer is that "everybody who had thought about the subject for more than five minutes" knows that Man must have a religion - because we live in a world where nobody from the major leaders of public opinion, the 'intellectuals', from the Politicians to the People - including both the Mandarins and the Masses ever has thought about the subject for five minutes.
Five minutes counts as an impossibly long attention span nowadays. Nobody thinks about anything for five minutes without 'working', or doing, or engaging with the mass media. This was a revelation when I became a medical scientist - to find out that famous researchers had never thought about their subject for five consecutive minutes - and indeed stubbornly refused to do so.
(I became a theoretical biologist simply by thinking about the implications of my empirical research for a little while - although, of course, most theoretical biologists never think either, because they are too busy reading other people's papers and doing hard sums.)
So this is the situation. A few generations ago everybody - including atheists and anti-Christians - knew explicitly (and discussed endlessly) that Man cannot live without religion; now everybody 'knows' implicitly (but never discusses) that Man can, should and does live without religion - and indeed nothing else makes any sense to them!
Thus incoherent nonsense caused by not-thinking, has been take-out of Men's heads and put onto display in the world for all to see... but nobody sees it!
*
That phrase attributed to Voltaire " If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" recognized that God served an indispensable function in the public sphere - and when Nietzsche stated, noticed and advocated that God was now dead - the reality of that death has turned-out to be primarily in the realms of discourse (rather than in the privacy of the individual mind, where God may still, often, be acknowledged).
The other famous phrase of relevance here is attributed to Dostoevsky and states that: Without God everything is permitted. This captures on the one hand the horror of a world in which evil is openly advocated and enforced under the label of Good; and on the other hand the demonic delight, and intoxication, at the endless new possibilities for transgression and destruction that this allows.
But discussion of this whole area of the post-God world has collapsed over the past forty-some years since I came to adult consciousness. When I read that old socialist atheist Bernard Shaw, I found a man who brooded on the absolute need for a 'new religion' to replace Christianity - and this was a theme of his writings for more than half a century: he even tried to launch this religion of Creative Evolution via some of his most successful plays.
So, despite his being a major figure in promoting the evils of Leftism, Shaw was not so much of a fool as to suppose that Man could live without religion.
But we are! - I mean that is the implicit conclusion of a million items per day of propaganda from the mass media, the education system, government officials and corporations. Their message is loud and clear: that God is Dead - and we do not need to reinvent him.
Shaw knew that men must have religion... or else! So did Fritz (Small is Beautiful) Schumacher - whose early works were based on the advocacy of Buddhist Economics, and whose last book was an argument for traditional Thomistic Catholicism.
When I read Robert Graves, I found another author who, like Shaw, was viscerally hostile to Christianity - but promoting his own version of Neo-Paganism (which turned out to be extraordinarily influential is establishing that new religion). Graves was a very strange man with innumerable odd ideas, but he was not such a fool as to imagine that Man could live without religion.
Anyway, here we are! In a world which has no religion, and has lost that understanding shared by Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Shaw, Schumacher, Graves... and indeed everybody who had thought about the subject for more than five minutes: that Man must have a religion.
Is this a paradox - that Man does not have what he must have? If so, the paradox is there for all to see, in the gross incoherence, negativity and destructiveness of modern public discourse.
The answer is that "everybody who had thought about the subject for more than five minutes" knows that Man must have a religion - because we live in a world where nobody from the major leaders of public opinion, the 'intellectuals', from the Politicians to the People - including both the Mandarins and the Masses ever has thought about the subject for five minutes.
Five minutes counts as an impossibly long attention span nowadays. Nobody thinks about anything for five minutes without 'working', or doing, or engaging with the mass media. This was a revelation when I became a medical scientist - to find out that famous researchers had never thought about their subject for five consecutive minutes - and indeed stubbornly refused to do so.
(I became a theoretical biologist simply by thinking about the implications of my empirical research for a little while - although, of course, most theoretical biologists never think either, because they are too busy reading other people's papers and doing hard sums.)
So this is the situation. A few generations ago everybody - including atheists and anti-Christians - knew explicitly (and discussed endlessly) that Man cannot live without religion; now everybody 'knows' implicitly (but never discusses) that Man can, should and does live without religion - and indeed nothing else makes any sense to them!
Thus incoherent nonsense caused by not-thinking, has been take-out of Men's heads and put onto display in the world for all to see... but nobody sees it!
*
Tuesday, 21 July 2015
Genetic disruption of optimal sexual development may underlie and facilitate the sexual revolution
*
If the sexual revolution can briefly be defined as the long-term and strategic legalization, toleration, equalization, and now official advocacy and approval of sexuality outwith the context of traditional and permanent marriage - then one extraordinary and neglected aspect is: that it has been able to happen.
In The West, we find ourselves in an extraordinary situation with respect to sexuality - and the single most extraordinary aspect is that a critical mass of people do not find it extraordinary at all!
Plenty of Westerners apparently regard the current situation of moral inversion with bland equanimity - a situation in which the goods and bads, rewards and punishments, official supports and persecutions of sexuality have been turned on their heads... and yet this unprecedented ethos elicits little more than a shrug or a grin from the masses.
It looks very much as if the sexual revolution has been pushing at an open door - and yet, in world historical terms we are in uncharted territory: there never has been a society like ours, now, in which sexual transgression (according to world historical consensus) has been so actively-endorsed at every level from mass media and the arts, to government policy and the workplace.
This is utterly remarkable - yet clearly it is not viscerally regarded as remarkable - it is, more or less, accepted.
*
Why is the extraordinary situation of the sexual revolution accepted so placidly, when it is so extraordinary? Clearly there must be unprecedented factors at work, things that have never before been operative.
I think there are two main plausible candidates: Irreligion and genetic damage.
1. Irrelegion
Irreligion refers to the unprecedented state of incremental mass apostasy from Christianity. We live in a world where religion is not just absent from, but excluded from , the public sphere - and this is something new in human history. Irreligion means that there is no reason - except personal preference, which is labile and malleable - not to do anything.
This means that instinctive feelings of approval or disapproval cannot be ordered; cannot even be rationally discussed - people feel unsure, unconfident; modern people therefore are demotivated, lack the courage of their convictions, and seem unable coherently to oppose anything being imposed from above.
2. Mutation accumulation.
But the lack of resistance to the sexual revolution seems even more profound than this. The impression is not one of a mass of passive people whose instinctive valuations are being violated but lack the clarity and courage to respond; but instead of people whose sexual instincts are absent, weak or disordered - and therefore see no reason not to go along with whatever sexual innovation is being advocated.
The impression is therefore that the mass of people are suffering from a mass of sexual pathologies - such that sexuality is - in multiple ways - weakened, labile, misdirected, futile.
Is this plausible? Yes. There are powerful theoretical grounds for assuming that since the industrial revolution, the extreme reduction in natural selection on humans (mainly, but not entirely, due to reduction of child mortality rates from more-than-half to almost none) must have led to a generation-by-generation accumulation of deleterious genetic mutations - which would be expected to damage social and sexual adaptations before anything else.
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mutation+accumulation
*
Why sexuality?
Because the development of adaptive sexuality is an extremely complex and multi-step linear sequence, with many things that can (and do) go wrong at every step - and only if every step in the sequence has gone well, will sexuality be optimally adaptive.
There is genetics; then (controlled by the genes) multiple waves of multiple hormone-induced changes - primarily in the womb during the earliest and most fundamental development, and secondarily at adolescence and the development of fertility; there are calibrations to the early environment ('life history'), critical learning experiences and adaptations to the socio-political system and others... all of which must successfully be negotiated for sexuality to be 'normal'.
This complex sequentiality of development is why sexuality is a function where genetic damage first and most sensitively shows-up.
*
It might be asked how sexual development could possible be so fragile, considering that - until now - the human species has not died out but has indeed grown in numbers!
The answer is that the errors in sexual development were weeded-out generation upon generation - by mortality rates being heaviest, and near total, among the most genetically damaged in the first place; then by sexual selection and assortative mating as a kind of back-stop - whereby the most genetically-healthy would choose each other and reproduce to yield (mostly) viable offspring - and the least genetically-healthy would be left-out; or mate to yield (mostly) non-viable offspring.
The harshnness and rigour of this historical selection process is hard to exaggerate. It used to be near universal, yet in the past 200 years it has been incrementally all-but eliminated from ever-more of the world.
Thereby the failures of normal sexual development would continuously be being-'purged' from the gene pool - and this was necessary because they were continually incident (mostly due to genetics, but also due to the environment).
*
Our current situation is merely the lag phase in which genetic damage is relatively subtle and apparent mainly in sexual and social behaviour; and it will be followed by more and more obvious and severe dysfunctionalities.
The seeming slowness of sexual and social change - operating over a decades timescale - is merely an artefact of the slow generation time of the human species. There have been only about eight generations since the industrial revolution, even in England where it began; and the increasing longevity of humans further buffers apparent change.
*
So it is plausible that the modern lack of concern at the sexual revolution was enabled, was facilitated, and is more-or-less accepted due to the high prevalence of greater-or-lesser types and quantities of disordered sexuality in the population at large.
In sum, it seems probable that almost everybody in the modern West, and indeed most of the rest of the world (the rapidity of change is likely to vary by population and location) is suffering from genetically-disordered sexuality of varying degrees and types; caused by the unique conditions of the post-industrial revolution on ameliorating the harshness of human selection.
And this would explain how it is that the truly extraordinary and unprecedented modern situation with respect to Western sexuality has met with so little response or resistance.
*
Note: these ideas were developed in conversation and collaboration with Michael A Woodley of Menie.
If the sexual revolution can briefly be defined as the long-term and strategic legalization, toleration, equalization, and now official advocacy and approval of sexuality outwith the context of traditional and permanent marriage - then one extraordinary and neglected aspect is: that it has been able to happen.
In The West, we find ourselves in an extraordinary situation with respect to sexuality - and the single most extraordinary aspect is that a critical mass of people do not find it extraordinary at all!
Plenty of Westerners apparently regard the current situation of moral inversion with bland equanimity - a situation in which the goods and bads, rewards and punishments, official supports and persecutions of sexuality have been turned on their heads... and yet this unprecedented ethos elicits little more than a shrug or a grin from the masses.
It looks very much as if the sexual revolution has been pushing at an open door - and yet, in world historical terms we are in uncharted territory: there never has been a society like ours, now, in which sexual transgression (according to world historical consensus) has been so actively-endorsed at every level from mass media and the arts, to government policy and the workplace.
This is utterly remarkable - yet clearly it is not viscerally regarded as remarkable - it is, more or less, accepted.
*
Why is the extraordinary situation of the sexual revolution accepted so placidly, when it is so extraordinary? Clearly there must be unprecedented factors at work, things that have never before been operative.
I think there are two main plausible candidates: Irreligion and genetic damage.
1. Irrelegion
Irreligion refers to the unprecedented state of incremental mass apostasy from Christianity. We live in a world where religion is not just absent from, but excluded from , the public sphere - and this is something new in human history. Irreligion means that there is no reason - except personal preference, which is labile and malleable - not to do anything.
This means that instinctive feelings of approval or disapproval cannot be ordered; cannot even be rationally discussed - people feel unsure, unconfident; modern people therefore are demotivated, lack the courage of their convictions, and seem unable coherently to oppose anything being imposed from above.
2. Mutation accumulation.
But the lack of resistance to the sexual revolution seems even more profound than this. The impression is not one of a mass of passive people whose instinctive valuations are being violated but lack the clarity and courage to respond; but instead of people whose sexual instincts are absent, weak or disordered - and therefore see no reason not to go along with whatever sexual innovation is being advocated.
The impression is therefore that the mass of people are suffering from a mass of sexual pathologies - such that sexuality is - in multiple ways - weakened, labile, misdirected, futile.
Is this plausible? Yes. There are powerful theoretical grounds for assuming that since the industrial revolution, the extreme reduction in natural selection on humans (mainly, but not entirely, due to reduction of child mortality rates from more-than-half to almost none) must have led to a generation-by-generation accumulation of deleterious genetic mutations - which would be expected to damage social and sexual adaptations before anything else.
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mutation+accumulation
*
Why sexuality?
Because the development of adaptive sexuality is an extremely complex and multi-step linear sequence, with many things that can (and do) go wrong at every step - and only if every step in the sequence has gone well, will sexuality be optimally adaptive.
There is genetics; then (controlled by the genes) multiple waves of multiple hormone-induced changes - primarily in the womb during the earliest and most fundamental development, and secondarily at adolescence and the development of fertility; there are calibrations to the early environment ('life history'), critical learning experiences and adaptations to the socio-political system and others... all of which must successfully be negotiated for sexuality to be 'normal'.
This complex sequentiality of development is why sexuality is a function where genetic damage first and most sensitively shows-up.
*
It might be asked how sexual development could possible be so fragile, considering that - until now - the human species has not died out but has indeed grown in numbers!
The answer is that the errors in sexual development were weeded-out generation upon generation - by mortality rates being heaviest, and near total, among the most genetically damaged in the first place; then by sexual selection and assortative mating as a kind of back-stop - whereby the most genetically-healthy would choose each other and reproduce to yield (mostly) viable offspring - and the least genetically-healthy would be left-out; or mate to yield (mostly) non-viable offspring.
The harshnness and rigour of this historical selection process is hard to exaggerate. It used to be near universal, yet in the past 200 years it has been incrementally all-but eliminated from ever-more of the world.
Thereby the failures of normal sexual development would continuously be being-'purged' from the gene pool - and this was necessary because they were continually incident (mostly due to genetics, but also due to the environment).
*
Our current situation is merely the lag phase in which genetic damage is relatively subtle and apparent mainly in sexual and social behaviour; and it will be followed by more and more obvious and severe dysfunctionalities.
The seeming slowness of sexual and social change - operating over a decades timescale - is merely an artefact of the slow generation time of the human species. There have been only about eight generations since the industrial revolution, even in England where it began; and the increasing longevity of humans further buffers apparent change.
*
So it is plausible that the modern lack of concern at the sexual revolution was enabled, was facilitated, and is more-or-less accepted due to the high prevalence of greater-or-lesser types and quantities of disordered sexuality in the population at large.
In sum, it seems probable that almost everybody in the modern West, and indeed most of the rest of the world (the rapidity of change is likely to vary by population and location) is suffering from genetically-disordered sexuality of varying degrees and types; caused by the unique conditions of the post-industrial revolution on ameliorating the harshness of human selection.
And this would explain how it is that the truly extraordinary and unprecedented modern situation with respect to Western sexuality has met with so little response or resistance.
*
Note: these ideas were developed in conversation and collaboration with Michael A Woodley of Menie.
Monday, 20 July 2015
North East and South West - diagonal regions united by the English Civil War
*
My parents are from the North East of England, and that is where I have lived for most of my life; however, I spent all of my childhood in the South West - and for a long time I was not able to see a link between the two diagonally-opposite regions!
But I later discovered that they were both on the King's side during the English Civil War:
As a teenaged socialist I (of course!) sided with the Parliamentarian 'Roundheads' and Oliver Cromwell - but I soon grew to see the error of my ways, and have been a Royalist-Cavalier sympathizer for my mature adult life; and since I became a Christian I have acknowledged King Charles the First as a Holy Martyr.
Clearly, English geography has had a deep and lasting influence...
*
My parents are from the North East of England, and that is where I have lived for most of my life; however, I spent all of my childhood in the South West - and for a long time I was not able to see a link between the two diagonally-opposite regions!
But I later discovered that they were both on the King's side during the English Civil War:
As a teenaged socialist I (of course!) sided with the Parliamentarian 'Roundheads' and Oliver Cromwell - but I soon grew to see the error of my ways, and have been a Royalist-Cavalier sympathizer for my mature adult life; and since I became a Christian I have acknowledged King Charles the First as a Holy Martyr.
Clearly, English geography has had a deep and lasting influence...
*
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