Top-notch background music - John Lewis playing Bach's preludes and fugues

John Lewis was the pianist for the legendary MJQ - Modern Jazz Quartet - that is to say, among the 'tastiest', coolest and most elegant of jazz pianists; and in this album he plays JS Bach's preludes and fugues with some genre-appropriate improvization, sometimes sparingly accompanied by bass, drums, violin, guitar etc. It makes for wonderful background music for working on the computer - or an excellent introduction to Bach's keyboard music.

(The effect is broadly much like Jacques Loussier - who I would also recommend - but better; since Lewis was a great musician, Loussier merely a very fine one.)

The Reality of Imagination

In reading Owen Barfield, I have become more than ever before aware of what he regarded, all through his life, as the key question: In what way is Imagination true?

Because - following the Romantics especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in-line with Rudolf Steiner - Barfield argued that Imagination was true; and not just true but the primary and indispensable truth for our time.

Therefore it is our task - now, at this point in human history - to understand what it means and implies to say and believe that Imagination is real and true.

And the reason that this is important is that it is our way out from the modern condition of despair arising from nihilism and alienation.

The first step, as we live in the world, is to notice the power of imagination - and rather than dismiss it as mere fantasy or subjective whim - to believe it is real and true. And then to discover what this means.

So, we read Tolkien... or some other book or poem or play; or see a beautiful landscape, or church; or whenever our minds in some way, any way, come alive with apprehension of some-thing - and then do not dismiss these (do not snub it, mock or sneer at it, refrain from satire - do not take it lightly) we need to hold to these feelings as true.

True in some real way, a source of knowledge.

What to do next, how to understand the knowledge, how to check it... these are secondary factors. But the primary one is to regard the power of imagination as the power to apprehend real, solid, valid truth.

That is just the first step - but for some, perhaps many, it must be the first step.  

Evaluating the Mormon Church 185 years on - a pretty straightforward business! But for many Christians it leads to a paradox...

When Mormonism came out, it would have been easy and natural to assume it was a fraud.

Because, if the facts of its origin are known and the implications understood - it seems like Mormonism either has to be true or a fraud - bearing in mind that 'true' does not mean, cannot mean, and never has in any circumstances meant something-like 'correct in every microscopic detail when each is detached and examined separately'. True-overall - or a fraud. 

But 185 years down the line Mormonism does not look anything like a fraud, quite the opposite.

Therefore to the unprejudiced eye it seems a pretty straightforward matter to believe Mormonism is true (given that the choice is between truth and fraud) - assuming that one has had a personal revelation to that effect, there seems no reason not to accept that personal revelation as valid.

(For any Christian to believe must be a choice, it is an opt-in situation - my point is merely the double-negative that 185 years down the line, there is no compelling reason not to believe - if one feels in one's heart, having prayed for guidance, that the LDS church is true.)  

At least, that is how is feels to me - to believe in the truth of the CJCLDS should not be psychologically or logistically a big deal - because after 185 years experience and knowledge, to believe that the Mormon church is valid is easy, not strange, nor a thing rationally difficult to justify! 

What is strange and difficult to justify; is to believe on the one hand that the CJCLDS is a fraud, and yet on the other hand that it is also what it clearly is: a good and beneficial organization. 

Although strange and difficult, this 'on the one hand and on the other' paradox is, of course, precisely what many people do believe: that is, many people do not believe the truth of the CJCLDS (implicitly they believe it was built upon a fraud - even if the fraud may have had noble intentions) but they do believe that the Mormon church is, nonetheless, a good thing. 

Logical or not; this paradox is simply a factual state of affairs, I know of several people in the above situation - indeed perhaps most people who are informed about the CJCLDS think that it is, paradoxically, both fraudulently-founded and also good.  

The paradox is quite real, and the paradox is also quite common. I am not sure whether it is a stable psychological state - or meta-stable and liable to flip into either faith on the one hand, or a more consistent (but less honest) view of pretending that Mormonism is fraudulently-founded and therefore evil (despite appearances). 

This particular 'and therefore' ignoble consistency is distressingly common among mainstream Christians. I mean, a willingness to believe that - because they regard it as fraudulently founded, therefore the obvious goodness of Mormonism 'must be' a fake. What follows is too-often a spiteful willingness and desire to believe all sorts of malicious lies and gossip and misrepresentations about Mormons; to infer all sorts of wicked and covert motivations - in sum to indulge in negative prejudice which already-assumes that which it ostensibly sets out to discover: i.e. the wickedness of the CJCLDS. 

Today's 2 X 2 Table is therefore:

Mormonism is:

True and Good
True and Evil
A Fraud and Good
A Fraud and Evil

To say the CJCLDS is True and Good is to be a believer; to say it is a Fraud and Evil is to be dishonest about 185 years of knowledge and experience. 

The two apparent paradoxes are True and Evil - which might theoretically be found in someone who  believed the CJCLDS had become corrupted - perhaps one of the other Mormon-descended groups such as the erstwhile Reformed Latter Day Saints. And the other paradox is Fraud and Good - which is the position being discussed here. 

So, this is a challenge for decent, honest, mainstream Christians (note: the challenge is not for Mormons!) -  I mean those many Christians who do not believe Mormonism is true, but who do believe it is good.

The challenge to make an explanation for your honest beliefs: an explanation for the reality of the Mormon church 185 years down the line - an explanation that describes how goodness can come from fraud, and what that explanation entails and implies. 

This is no easy matter, and I have never yet seen it convincingly done - and until it has been done we will not know whether it is possible to do. 


Note: By contrast with belief, which ought to be straightforward; becoming an active member of the CJCLDS is a further step, and very big step - for instance, I am a believer in the truth of the CJCLDS, and I did not find this a big or scary step to make once I had become a Christian - but I am not a church member. 

How to find motivation in a world where resolution is derailed by pleasure?

An inability to find motivation is extremely common - the usual solutions are distraction (for the masses) or careerism (for the elite).

The deep problem is that most people are exogenous (not endogenous) personalities - their drives, evaluations, motivations, purposes etc. come from outside, from society, from other people; and society is not providing motivations.

Why not? Because society is secular and the public sphere (whether in school or college, or in the mass media, or in conversations between friends) does not describe life as having any purpose or meaning or any special role for us as individuals.

All that people pick-up is that life is about seeking happiness or satisfactions, or doing stimulating or cool things - enjoying oneself.

But these are just short term psycho-physical responses, and they do not motivate, they do not provide a shape or direction - indeed quite the opposite, because a life conceptualized in terms of achieving pleasurable short-term responses will repeatedly derail and sabotage any long term purposes or understandings.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that spiritual reform is not only vital, but urgent; and ought to be each persons first priority today -- because without it, lacking it, there cannot be any progress at all towards anything better -- at most we might steel ourselves to a few hours or days of resolute motivation in a particular direction... until some chance emerges of something pleasurable now - at which point the quest is abandoned.

The purpose and meaning of life in two sentences - unpacked

In a simple phrase we can say that the great longing in the heart of the Creator before creation began was the longing to give birth to individual children who would eventually become His friends in the everlastingness of the Divine Spirit which He himself exists in. The whole of creation is thus His method of bringing this about and it requires Him to give and us to receive the "great gift", which is the reality and conscious understanding of our own individualised Divine Being. 

http://www.billarkle.co.uk/greatgift/text/divinelove.html


In a simple phrase we can say that the great longing in the heart of the Creator 

God has passions, God has wants, these drive the universe of reality


before creation began 

Everything created is affected by God's longing


was the longing to give birth to individual children who would eventually become his friends in the everlastingness of the Divine Spirit which He himself exists in. 

Men and women are those children. God's deepest hope is that eventually some of us choose to 'join Him' at a level and in such a way that we could be described as having a relationship of friendship: that we could 'grow-up' from childhood to adulthood in deity, and take up a relationship with God as we might imagine by extrapolating from the relationship between a parent and a child in the most perfect of loving families. This process of 'divinization', or theosis or spiritual progression is the purpose of life. 


The whole of creation is thus His method of bringing this about 

Created reality is organized around this purpose, that is the meaning of everything


and it requires Him to give and us to receive the "great gift", which is the reality and conscious understanding of our own individualised Divine Being. 

'Individualized Divine Being' - means that the only or best way in which God's purpose may be achieved is because each person has is not only his or her unique human self; but that self is a partially divine being - this is the gift we inherit from our Father. 

It is a gift - it is not something we are forced to accept, understand, believe to be true... indeed we could not be forced to accept the gift in any way that would fulfil its purpose, Everything must happen by choice. 


That we are partially divine beings makes us capable of choice, and that we are partially divine beings means that our Destiny can only be chosen, and can be rejected. That Destiny is one of relationship with God and joining-in with His work and plans - along with others of His children who make that choice to accept the Gift. 

Behind all this is that the created reality exists in Time and an unfolding thing, as a series of experiences and choices - any spiritual progress toward divinity is experiential and incremental. 

The fact of theosis operating by necessary and cumulative human choices, based on our experiences, means that the nature of reality is such that God probably could not make things to be 'already' exactly as He wishes them to be - but that we are living in a reality which is en route to an ideal (and that ideal may itself be a process leading to something ever higher, more complex, more loving, more relational). 

The world never has been perfect; rather reality was and is designed to give the necessary experiences to God's children. Some 'imperfections' are due to the need for these experiences, others are real imperfections/ horrors are due to our own choice to reject - or other people' choices to reject, God's plan - which is for reality to be based on loving relationships.


(The most ideal and loving human family is our best model of God's aim: the most ideal and loving Father is the best model of God's nature and wishes for His children - on the assumption he hopes for these children to grow-up and become as he is. Once we understand this to be the essence of God's longing and the explanation of our condition - we must choose whether to accept or reject it.)



Going further than the above quote, and bringing-in other aspects of Arkle's insights: Since everything depends on choice - Good and evil are defined in terms of acceptance or rejection of God's plan for a reality of loving relationships. This plan can be, and presumably is, rejected - either partly or wholly. 

A person might reject the plan of relationships - and choose to live in solitary, blissful love (something like Nirvanah) - or a person might choose to reject love (this rejection is termed Pride) and either remain in an ultimately-solitary state of love-less-ness; or engage in relationships with those who have also also rejected love (this is termed Hell). 

So we have (another) Two-by-Two matrix of choices: Love, Rejected Love, Relationships, Rejected Relationships 

Love + Relationships = Heaven 

Love + Rejected Relationships = Nirvanah

Rejected Love + Relationships = Hell

Rejected Love + Rejected Relationships = Ultimate solitude

A timescale for human extinction - a speculative extrapolation from mouse utopia

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/if-humans-are-recapitulating-mouse.html

I would not advise reading the above post if you are feeling despondent, especially not if you are also English.

Note - Sorry! I initially posted the wrong link for this post: now corrected.

The Sweetness-Strength Matrix

There are four possible combinations of Sweetness/ Hardness and Strength/ Weakness

Sweetness and strength
Sweetness and weakness

Hardness and strength
Hardness and weakness

Some self-identified Christians are strong but lack sweetness - and no matter how strict their observance, how devout their lives, how obedient they are to legitimate authority - their hardness leads them to serve themselves and not God. (These are the Pharisees.)

Some self-identified Christians are sweet but lack strength - and no matter how lovingly they speak, their weakness leads them to serve the world and not God. (These are the Liberals.)

Some self-identified Christians are hard and weak - these are petty and spiteful individuals; but so unpopular that they seldom do harm to anybody but themselves. Since they lack admired qualities - in their own eyes as well as the world's - they are only one step of insight and acknowledgement away from humility and repentance.

The biggest danger is to have one positive quality without the other - Love or Courage but not both; and to convince oneself, and others, that this is superior: this is what is most needed here and now; and for the sweet-weak to despise strength (the average modern Christian or idealist secular Leftist); or the hard-strong to despise sweetness (the 'strict' Christian legalists and inquisitors or Nietzschian secular Right).


There are four possible combinations - but only sweetness and strength together will suffice. We should ask ourselves - do we have both? Does our church have both? And if we lack one, we should seek the other.


Note: The key is not really to possess sweetness and strength - because to a considerable extent, these depend on how we are made - but to value sweetness and strength. No matter how we are made, we can value sweetness and strength; and we can repent hardness and weakness.

Wallflower, Wallflower...

Wallflower, wallflower, growing up so high
All the little children are all going-to die
Except [Johnny Smithson] - he's the only one
Fie for shame! Fie for shame!
Turn your back to the wall again


I remember this chant from my childhood, together with vague memories of a game that went with it involving some kind of dropping-out of one kid at a time until the last one was left - perhaps the one who was going to die?

It always struck me as a sinister and unlucky song, and I was very reluctant to sing it, or name anyone as the 'except' person who was not going to die - because of the people I was not naming.

But it has that strange, uncanny power about it that some nursery rhymes retain - the product of being orally-transmitted folklore, handed down among children one generation after another.

High IQ genes versus low IQ genes

The following is a draft from a chapter in a book on genius I am co-writing with Ed Dutton:

High-IQ genes versus low-IQ genes

At a genetic level, intelligence may reduce because of a reduction in high intelligence genes in a population and/or as an accumulation of intelligence-damaging mutations in the population.

Differential fertility would lead to a decline in intelligence by a reduction in the proportion of high IQ genes in the population. This happens from a combination of the relatively less intelligent people having on average the most children, and the most intelligent people having very low fertility. Since the most intelligent people are sub-fertile, with less than two offspring per woman, the genes which have made them the most intelligent will decline in each generation - first declining as a proportion of the gene pool, and then declining in absolute prevalence. 

For instance, when there is a woman with ultra-high intelligence who has zero children (which is the most usual outcome among ultra-intelligent women), then whatever it was about her genes which made her so intelligent is eliminated from the gene pool: this is the loss of ‘high-IQ genes’.

But our suggestion of mutation accumulation involves that the additional mechanism of an accumulation of what could be termed ‘low-IQ genes’. So, as well as there being a decline in intelligence from the reduced proportion of high-IQ’ gene, there is also a reduction in in the proportion of low-IQ genes: an increase in the proportion of ‘low IQ genes’ in the population.

High IQ genes have (presumably) been selected for in the past because they increased intelligence, and thereby (under ancestral - especially medieval - conditions) increased reproductive success.

But low IQ genes are not, in general, a product of natural selection: rather they are spontaneously occurring deleterious mutations, which happen with every generation due to any cause of genetic damage (e.g. electromagnetic radiation, chemical damage), or errors in replication.

These mutations will, if not eliminated, accumulate generation upon generation. Therefore when they have accumulated, the low-IQ genes were not 'selected for'; rather it was a matter of lack of selection, relaxation of natural selection. ‘Low IQ gene’ therefore usually means something like a genetic mutation that – in potentially a wide range of ways, by impairing almost any aspect of brain structure, organization or functioning; actively-damages brain processing speed and efficiency, hence reducing general intelligence.

In technical terms, the selection mechanism for eliminating these spontaneously accumulating low IQ genes is mutation-selection balance. The idea is that mutations spontaneously occur and need selectively to be eliminated. In other words, by some means, those organisms which have damaging mutations must fail to reproduce, so they will not hand-on the mutations to the next generation. The process needs to be perfect, over the long terms, otherwise the accumulation of damaging mutations will eventually prevent reproduction and damage survival to cause extinction (the term for this extinction is mutational meltdown).

The term mutation-selection balance refers to the fact that the occurrence of mutations must be balanced by the elimination of mutations: natural selection (including sexual selection – mate choice) must be powerful enough to sieve-out all the deleterious mutations. If natural selection is not strong enough to do this, then mutations will accumulate, brain function will be damaged, and intelligence will decline.  

Each spontaneous mutation has about a fifty-fifty chance of damaging brain function, because the brain depends on a very high proportion of genes to develop normally and make its structural components, its proteins, enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters and so on. Thus the brain is a large ‘mutational target’ (as Geoffrey Miller has termed it) – and will usually show up, in a quantitative fashion, the amount of mutational damage a person has. In other world, high intelligence requires ‘good genes’ – where good genes means a genome low in mutations; conversely a high mutational load will cause low intelligence.

Before the Industrial Revolution, individuals with a higher mutational load, which means a higher load of low-IQ genes (and therefore lower intelligence) had lower-than-average reproductive success due to very high (indeed, probably near total) childhood mortality rates. But since the child mortality rates fell from more than half to about one percent in most of Europe, almost all babies that are born have survived to adulthood, and most of them have reproduced. Therefore, we must assume that there have by now been several generations – in England at least eight generations - of mutation accumulation. And we must also assume that this has had a significant effect in reducing intelligence.

This produces what is truly a ‘dysgenic’ effect on intelligence, since it is not evolved, not adaptive, not a new ability – but instead a lowering of intelligence due to a pathological process; a destruction of adaptive human intelligence caused by an accumulation of damage.   

And although intelligence decline is a sensitive measure of mutation accumulation – it is not the only consequence. Many other human adaptations would be destroyed by mutation accumulation – including evolved human personality types. As well as pulling down human intelligence; mutation accumulation would be expected to destroy the Endogenous personality, to impair human creativity – and would be a further nail in the coffin of genius.

A successful Christian strategy for revival will probably build from currently-successful types of Christianity

It is my contention that Christianity in the West has been all-but defeated by Leftism - and that Leftism is itself a thing which has evolved as an anti-Christian ideology.

This means that modern Leftism has evolved in what was originally a Christian context to damage, subvert, destroy and invert Christianity. Because Leftism evolved in a Christian context, Leftism is pre-adapted to thwart most of the historical strategies of Christianity. 


In other words, when considering strategies to promote the future of Christianity, if a strategy has been tried and failed in the past, if a type of Christianity has been defeated by Leftism; then it is unlikely to work in the future.

(So long as the Leftist West stands. If any type of Christianity survives until after the West collapses, then it may well be in a position to exploit and thrive in the very different post-collapse situation.)

In other words, an attempt at straightforward revival of some past type of Christianity which is currently failing is not likely to work as a strategy for Christian revival in the current context.

How can we evaluate success or failure?

Biologically, any potentially successful and robust religious group needs to have a viable demographic structure: above replacement fertility, an age profile less than forty, a sex profile with about half men (or higher).

If a type of Christianity clearly lacks these (i.e. if it has significantly below replacement fertility, and age structure dominated by the elderly, and is composed mostly of women), I suggest that this is a sign that it has been defeated by Leftism, Leftism has the better of it; and we cannot hope realistically for a Christian revival from such denominations or churches.

Spiritually, since we cannot look into Men's souls we are forced to rely upon objective indicators. So, the viable type of Christianity will demonstrate evidence of devoutness - adherence to a demanding lifestyle, high levels of tithing, church service, missionary activity, strength in the face of persecution etc.

Such criteria could serve as a basis, as a beginning at least, for understanding of what might work (best to pursue several lines of strategy), and perhaps what ought to be done - to trigger and build a Christian revival.


Note: I also think that success is more likely from scaling-up a small but successful group, than from trying to reform a large group that is mostly a failure but contains minority pockets of success. At least, this is what happens with other human institutions. When the successful parts of an organization are in a small minority, it can be very difficult or impossible to reform the organization - unless there are first massive, majority 'cuts' to get rid of the negative, destructive influence of the failing majority. On the other hand, small successful institutions and businesses can often be up-scaled ten, a hundredfold within a very short timescale.  

Christians reclaiming magic, occult and animism from the New Age

It will be easy for readers to misunderstand (or misrepresent) the following; so please read it carefully before jumping to conclusions about what I am advocating - it is somewhat different from what most others who have written on this theme have been advocating.


I came to Christianity late in life and via a decade or so of being a New Agey kind of person (but only in my reading, in my mind and private life - I have never been in any group) - and this grew from a lifelong feeling for myth, folklore, and the like.

From my Christian perspective, and from inside knowledge, it is crystal clear to me now that modern world of 'paganism' is set-up in on anti-Christian predicates, and most of its main writers and advocates are seedy, exploitative, devious and untrustworthy characters - with not many exceptions.

This was made clear yet again by reading The Book of English Magic by Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate, the text of which gave me a constant impression of camouflaged dishonesty and sordidness: the discernment of the heart warns me that the material described is emanating from an essentially (albeit not wholly) untrustworthy and ill-motivated subculture.


The New Age set-up has claimed for itself a vast swathe of paganistic stuff, and the New Age is mostly a mixture of airy fairy nonsense and nastyness of one sort or another (generally, the usual modern sex, alcohol and drugs stuff) - united only in its explicit and implict 'anything but Christianity is good' orientation; and it is therefore understandable that most Christians regard the whole subject with abhorrence as either fundamentally evil, or just too risky to be worth considering.

But I do not think this attitude is a viable option for modern Western Christians - I think that modern Western Christianity needs to reconnect with its animistic and pagan roots - and therefore the risk must be taken, and the good aspects of (for example) Shaminism, Witchcraft, Druidry, Magic, The Occult, Divinisation, Mediumship, Clairvoyance and so forth must be reclaimed from the New Age into a Christian context.

In this I follow CS Lewis who believed that Christianity was Paganism-plus - crudely put: real Christianity takes paganism and adds to it and completes it. The reason that this is not explicit from scripture is simply that it was so obvious to the people of the time that it did not need to be said.

The error of too many Christians has been and is to try and build a religion on what is distinctive to Christianity, deleting everything which is shared with paganism. This leads to a cold, detached, alienated, rationalistic Christianity that leaves the heart unsatisfied - and enables the New Age to monopolize many natural and spontaneous and good human aspirations.


My view is that it is simply not-an-option for Christians to dissociate from New Age preoccupations - and although it is risky to engage with them, Christians must recognize that there is no such thing as a safe path through life - risk cannot be avoided; and the attempt to avoid risk, is itself one of the deadliest of snares - often leading to a cold, heartless and covertly hate-driven species of pseudo-Christian zeal, which is all-too-common among self-identified Christians of past and present.

What I think would be best is for Christians to engage with this realm of 'paganism' insofar as each is drawn to it for good motivations; and insofar as their powers of discernment of the heart tell them that it is good, sweet and wholesome.

It is this discernment which must be cultivated, used and respected - it is the divinity within us that serves as a compass of good, and it will warn us if we are approaching wickedness or if we have taken a step into wickedness: then we must repent and turn-round to retrace our steps.


This is hazardous, but mortal life is hazardous. Men cannot avoid making mistakes; Men are not built to avoid making mistakes, nor is the world; but we can and should recognize when we have made mistakes; repent, and learn from that experience. We ought not to be afraid of life - and we ought not to be afraid of making a fool of ourselves - and then admitting that we have been fools!

This is not a matter of deliberately putting ourselves into the path of temptation! - a very stupid thing to do; but a matter of following our heart and being guided by our deepest discernment, meditations and prayers. Yes, we can deceive ourselves; yes we need help and guidance from informed others whom we can trust (if we happen to know of any such, but most people do not, and such people are seldom found in mainstream Christian churches) - but self-deception applies in every direction, and temptations into pride are just as strong on the path of strict and narrow 'Christian orthodoxy' as they are in exploration.


I fully recognize that some of the above arguments have been co-opted by Liberal Christians and actually-apostate but self-identified Christians to justify their conformity with the world of mainstream secular Leftism; but that path is taking Christianity into a world of politics and sexual revolution; as if such social and hedonic gratifications were our deepest contemporary need, rather than intrinsic with the very problem which needs addressing.

I am talking about a very different direction - the direction of personal contact with and participation-in the living universe.


Mainstream Christianity is, in general, an incomplete and unsatisfying thing; paralysed by the futile attempt to make life risk-free - and what we need is seldom to be found in any modern Western institutions - therefore of necessity we must explore, as responsible individuals, to find what we need to be alive and engaged with this world.


Note: The above was stimulated by a valuable conversation with the well-known reactosphere/ orthosphere pseudonymous blog commenter 'Thursday'; with whom I met for lunch last week while he was visiting my neck of the woods. 

The natural must be sustained by the supernatural - The biological and common sense illusions, and the absolute necessity of a spiritual perspective

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.

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.

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

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/

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.

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...

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/

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)

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.

  

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.