Two Owen Barfield philosophical dialogues reviewed: Unancestral Voice and Night Operation

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/reviews-of-unancestral-voice-and-night.html

You are living in the most bizarre and insane world - ever

I think you should realize this for a fact - especially younger readers who have known nothing different, and who do not read old books to discover the fact.

It has become very difficult, apparently impossible, for people to become aware of the very extreme strangeness of what is taken for granted here and now. This awareness was actually sharp and strong even as recently as forty of fifty years ago - especially in relation to Man's relationship to nature - but (for all the official and media yammering about 'the environment') current culture shows little awareness even of this obvious fact.

Contemporary Man does not even know what he wants or needs - to the point that great efforts are expended on mocking, subverting or destroying those remaining few activities and things which provide reality and goodness and connection.

Already in the mid twentieth century there was the strangeness of so many people spending so much free time reading newspapers and magazines, listening to radio or watching the TV - now this type of activity has expanded to fill almost every waking moment... and it seems a line has been crossed at which the strangeness is no longer apparent.

Indeed, the perception of strangeness appears in those brief periods when not plugged into the media when the mobile phones must be put aside for a few minutes or hours: weird is normal, and normal is aversive.

And humans are social and sexual; and our social and (especially) sexual lives are now almost wholly artificial, saturated in artificiality - to the point where normality is seen as bizarre, and indeed evil.

The casual assumption , possible because of such gross ignorance and disdain for the past and other societies, is that we, here, now have got things right and at last understand what it is to be human (neither a man nor a woman, for starters!)  - while everybody at every other time and place were being crudely hoodwinked.

I type this, sitting at a computer screen, linked to the world via the Internet, engaged with it in some kind of subjective fashion - expecting some kind of feedback... how very bizarre. What a weird, doped, detached life we lead - even our antidotes to this disaffection or alienation are themselves modern, technical and artificial - mass distractions and entertainments, mass music, pharmacology, intoxicants, travel, going to big buildings, participation in mass online conversations, mixing with crowds of strangers and the rest of it.

It is not too much to call this world insane, in a fairly-strict sense of psychotic - i.e. living from subjectivity, cut-off from reality, and with no insight.  But when everybody is psychotic - then who makes the diagnosis?

This truly is the Most. Bizarre. World. Ever.

And we should not lose sight of the fact.

Henry Harpending has died

http://www.unz.com/isteve/henry-harpending-rip/

Henry was a valued penfriend and semi-colleague over the past several years - and I was extremely pleased to be asked to contribute a blurb to his 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, co-authored with Greg Cochran - since I regard this as one of the most significant volumes of evolutionary biology of the past generation.

He was also an important figure in developing the Life History approach to studying human behaviour.

Furthermore, Henry seemed to me a person of unusual decency and human warmth; in the face of even more than the usual share of political correctness witch-hunting experienced by honest researchers into in human evolution, he exhibited strength but without any detectable bitterness.

**
NOTE: I was last in contact with Henry in the autumn of last year, when he told me that he had suffered significant and permanent brain damage from an insidious and undetected brain bleed as a consequence of taking the new anticoagulant Xarelto/ Rivaroxaban.

This is a known side effect of this agent that has been all-but concealed from physicians and users (presumably for the usual marketing reasons).

I mention this so that others may profit from Henry's appalling experience, and learn to be much more distrustful of the claims for new and still patent-protected pharmaceutical agents. 

The invisibility of metaphysics to modern Man

It is a striking and intriguing aspect of modern intellectual life that metaphysics is invisible to almost everyone - despite that it was the very first type of philosophy and formed the basis of the subject (off and on) from the Ancient Greeks onwards.

Metaphysics refers to the fundamental assumptions - and therefore it is by definition not susceptible to proof or disproof nor does it depend on evidence. Even this by-definition fact is beyond modern Man.

This may be evidence of a decline in both average and peak intelligence, since it was only ever the most abstract thinkers who could engage with metaphysics.

Or, it may be due to a loss of introspective ability - although superficially modern people are far more introspective than people of the past; alternatively it may not be the loss of introspective ability so much as the belief that introspection is insignificant, merely 'subjective'.

The mainstream metaphysical beliefs of modern Man (because of course he has them, even if he does not know that he has, and denies the fact) are therefore utterly invisible.

(The most obvious example of invisible metaphysics is the theory of evolution by natural selection; another would be the assumption in physics of fundamental randomness - and therefore non-causality; another (related to the preceding) would be that a human life has no objective purpose or meaning.)

Modern man can only observe the consequences of his own metaphysics; but without even the slightest comprehension that these are necessary and predictable consequences of his own assumptions!

Lessons of the current mass migration into The West

1. Continuation of the current type of mass immigration into Western nations will certainly and rapidly destroy Western civilization.

2. This is so clear and so obvious that we must assume that everybody knows it for a solid fact. To quibble, debate, or ask for 'evidence' is merely acquiescence to distraction from reality.

3. Mass immigration is the consequence of spiritual despair and self-hatred among Western populations and especially their elite leadership.

4. Given the nihilistic nature of mainstream modern secular ideology, spiritual despair and self-hatred is a rational response - indeed, it is the only rational response.

5. Therefore, The West cannot and will not be prevented from destroying itelf - whether by mass immigration, sub-fertility or by some other means - while it holds to the modern secular ideology.

6. Therefore, the West will destroy itself, because (at a profound spiritual level) The West believes it ought to be destroyed; unless (before this happens) the West experiences a mass spiritual awakening of sufficient power and suitable nature to cure its deadly despair.

Chesterton versus Belloc - the good and bad types of Catholic Intellectual

The authors GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are usually bracketed together - indeed, their friend and sparring partner George Bernard Shaw called them 'the Chesterbelloc' and described an imaginary beast of that name.

(There was, for several years, a kind of road-show travelling around England in which Belloc would Chair no-holds-barred but always good-natured (no-offence-taken) debates between GBS and GKC.)

But while GKC and HB were great friends and allies, and their Roman Catholicism and political views were almost identical, each man has a very different flavour: indeed each could be used to characterize a typical type of modern intellectual Roman Catholic.

To me Chesterton comes across as warm-hearted, sunny, positive - he seems like one of the most likeable men in the history of English literature, and the spirit of his writings breathes generosity. His writing pours-out like a volcano - unpremeditated, unrevised, of amazing evenness and high quality; tackling every subject, yet always the same in essence.

Belloc, on the other hand, has a hardness and a darkness about him. His writing (although also extremely abundant) often gives the impression of being worked-over and contrived. His best work is probably the light verse, especially the Cautionary Tales for Children, which are unsurpassed in their surreal fluidity, the brilliant humour and perfect technique... simply brilliant - but which are deliberately 'nasty'. Belloc's essays and best books like The Path to Rome and The Four Men are very fine - but strike me as unspontaneous, and hard edged - like a wood-cut, or perhaps a steel engraving.

Put simply, Chesterton represents a Merry England style of Roman Catholicism which brings to mind an idealized version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - or William Morris's News from Nowhere plus vulgarity and religion. For Chesterton, God is primarily about Love and Beauty.

That is, Chesterton dreamt of a colourful, semi-chaotic, lusty and noisy life of vivid and flawed characters engaged in all manner of activities - a society of people who often get carried away into extremes by their love of each other, and of beauty, science, medicine, learning and other positive things. But also a society in which there will be phases of reflection, repentance and renewal and unification of the apparent-chaos. However, Chesterton loves 'life' so much that he would not want unity at the cost of vigour, or love.

This Chestertonian vision is, indeed - for me, by far the most appealing vision of what Roman Catholicism could perhaps be.

And it is the basic vision to which adhere all whom I judge the best Roman Catholics that I 'know' (mostly as penfriends, authors, bloggers).

But the Bellocian type of Roman Catholic is also common among intellectuals, maybe commoner. It is a Roman Catholicism which is strong, hard, strict - and not so much warm as either hot or cold: it is the Roman Catholicism of Southern Europe of the past few centuries - harsh sun and black shadows; periods of routine and inertia interrupted by extreme violence.

Bellocism is, for me, that Catholicism of a man who is not naturally 'a good man', and who was not really motivated by love. Belloc held-onto to Roman Catholicism with a grip of iron and was valiant in the defence of Christendom; but I don't think he was motivated by love - rather (usually) by anger, irritability, and a strong streak of harsh authoritarianism enjoyed for its own sake.

The Belloc type of Roman Catholic is also common online - they get the greatest satisfaction, seem to take, indeed, a bitter delight, in excoriating other ('heretical') Christian denominations. These Bellocians seem attracted to Roman Catholicism primarily by its clarity: the authority structure, the uniquely comprehensive and logical theology, the apparent ability to provide a clear answer to any question.

Their general stance of Bellocians is what I term 'legalistic': their ideal is that God is primarily about power and truth in unity. The church understand this, and tells us exactly what it is essential to do (and not to do) in any circumstance, and therefore obedience is by far the most important Christian virtue. Their primary role in the Christian life is allying themselves with legitimate authority and against disobedience.

Now, of course, this characterization of legalism as 'Bellocian' is an unfair exaggeration; and Belloc the man in his later life practised a simple, humble faith which struck all who saw it as sincere. He also joined in with the Chestertonian hurly-burly lifestyle with vigour - albeit, there always sounds like an element of aggression in Belloc's 'noisyiness' - an element of attention-seeking and self-assertion which was absent from Chesterton (who, by contrast, seems innocent, schoolboyish, even when describing drunken revellings and hi-jinks).

But in his prime as a public figure, Belloc did indeed create the general impression I describe - and the, harsh, hard-eyed, cold-hearted legalistic style and emphasis is one which is all too common among those who describe themselves as traditionalist Roman Catholics.

Dissatisfaction with critique, zombified leaders, and awakening real people

I keep doing it myself and I wish I wouldn´t - critique on the basis of observations and assumptions shared by the mainstream world - trying to persuade leaders to reconsider and reform...

The place we want to be, the thins that need doing, include the recognition of the unseen world, adoption of a different metaphysical basis for life, and of course repentance -- any wise policies and good results lie on the other side of repentance.

Where to start? What to aim at?

An opening of the eyes to see the world afresh - that is what is wanted, and that can happen, has happened to plenty of people. But is this a going back? I have thought so, now I think not. It isn´t that we cannot go back, so much as that we do not really want to - not really... at any rate we do not want it enough for it to happen.

We must repent and go forward, then - and into unknown territory.

The thing it, we don´t know much about things at the large scale, we don´t even seem to know the basics - therefore we must proceed in ways that cannot be derived from or argued for using existing secular public discourse. The forces at work are essentially imperceptible, insofar as our normal perceptions are concerned.

Culturally, we are self-zombified. We see, touch, hear, taste, smell - but are dead inside.

And the leaders are the worst. Have you ever looked into the eyes of the elite leadership class? Or people in the mass media? There is nothing behind them. It is not that they are shielded, but that they open onto nothing.

There is something terribly wrong. Are they even human? At any rate there is no point in trying to change them, argue with them, reform them, bring them to a new life and repentance... We will simply be sucked into that void behind their eyes...

We need to be awakeners; and awakening does not proceed by normal means. Indeed, we have no idea how to do it, or how to measure whether it has been done - at least not by publicly agreed and verifiable means.

Therefore, what we need to do is not impossible, nor is it easy - rather, the chances of success are incalculable. We just need to do it.

Do what? Are you asking for general advice, asking for a plan? That would be a mistake. Even if you were given a plan you would not follow it and neither would anybody else.

The proper question needs to be about yourself and what you personally need to do, and I can´t tell you that - nor can anybody else, because it is significantly unique.

Errors in metaphysical thinking - doing more than one thing at a time

Yesterday´s post was about how the starting point for metaphysics - once the subject has been raised - must be intuition. This is the only path to subjective certainty.

But people typically become distracted by trying to answer other questions at the same time. For example, they want to be not just intuitively certain, but for there to be no possibility of any error - they want to eliminate the possibility of being wrong. It is a case of 100 percent accuracy and completeness of undistorted knowledge forever... or nothing. Not surprisingly, adding this requirement destroys any possibility of anything, indeed adding such conditions eliminates every form of knowledge ever known (at least in this mortal life).

Another error is to notice that my intuition differs from the intuitions of others. But this is, of course, a feature not a bug, otherwise there would be no need for intuition and each person could be fed the same knowledge - or, more likely, have it built-in. It is precisely because each person needs to know for himself, from the depths of his primary thinking; that intuition is required. ´Other people´s knowledge´ is not enough, and in a sense not relevant (or, not necessarily relevant, anyway).

The point is that intuition is the starting point - a necessary start but only the start - of a virtuous cycle of knowledge. Once we have intuited the validity of some source, then we can begin to learn - but at each important step we need to test knowledge by intuition, again and again - and this potentially modifies pre-existing knowledge in many ways.

It seems clear this is how Christianity is supposed to work, and that the imposition of official knowledge by coercion is an historical error and corruption. Christians are meant to be learning and evaluating - not just blotting-up stuff because other people say so. For example, the validity of authority needs to be known intuitively.

(Of course the institutions of Christianity are legitimately allowed to insist on knowledge and behaviours for membership, but the individual ought also to be evaluating them by intuition - e.g. by personal revelation - because otherwise the individual does not really know.)

The same process must be applied to our own motivations, these require intuitive evaluation - and very often this will reveal that the true self is not at work, but instead some other partial and externally-manufactured self.

Intuition is therefore part of various cycles of trial and error, and evolutionary progress or corruption, in practice.

But this ought not to distract from the fact that a starting point is necessary, and the primary thinking of the true self - which I am terming intuition - is the proper starting point.

Primary thinking is the bottom line for human evaluation, so why do people reject it?

I have been reading William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudolf Steiner and William Arkle recently, and one thing upon which they are all clear and in agreement is that all evaluation rests upon primary thinking - that is intuition, or the thinking of my true and essential self; thinking which has nothing behind or beneath it (and that is how we know it).

This comes before even spiritual and religious thinking, because it is what validates spiritual and religious thinking; and without the validation of primary thinking we are merely responding to external stimulation, compulsion or habit. In the end, everything must be tested and confirmed by primary thinking - this is a task of mortal life.

Why then do we doubt this? Because we have been confused, and have been sold an incoherent alternative. At various times people have been indoctrinated with the notion that some abstraction like religion, politics or science is or ought to be the bottom line - but this is simply nonsense as well as being alienating. How can such labile, diffuse, imprecise and undefined things be the bottom line for anything?

Since all finally rests on the base of intuition, then primary thinking can and should be used to validate all general and specific knowledge claims; life indeed becomes a succession of such evaluations - a building of certainties concerning purpose, meaning, relation, structures and processes and everything else.

Thus intuition is (or should be) how we choose our religion (a necessary choice), and then what is authoritative within that religion as such matters arise and become urgent. It is how we appropriate to ourselves all essential aspects of that religion, and deal with uncertainties, and also evaluate our own (always somewhat imprecise, incomplete and distorted) previous answers.

This ability to clear away superficial thinking and plumb our own depths, to commune with the divine in ourselves and outside ourselves (as seems to be the explanation for this validity - which itself may be validated by prior intuitions) -- this becomes an essential activity in life.

And how to achieve this becomes a vital project for each of us, as we seek the best method for our unique self, in our unique circumstances - e.g. prayer of some type or another, some kind of meditation, some kind of artistic practice, some kind of conversation or consultation... whatever it may be.

Why were people made so weak?

People ask this about God - why did he create us so weak, feeble, easily swayed, prone to wickedness and self-indulgence?

The question cannot be answered until we have an understanding of our metaphysics, our own basic assumptions about the structure and purpose of reality. Once we know that, the question can be answered.

From my assumptions, humans were not made or created to be weak but that is what each of us is intrinsically and necessarily. We start-out weak. We had a pre-mortal spirit existence before we chose to be born into mortal incarnate (embodied) life; and during this pre-mortal life some became stronger than others such that some are born stronger, others weaker.

Some people have more to learn. Presumably the weakest are among those who have the most to learn, and that is why they are here, and why they wanted to be here - if you are weak, you are among those who stand to benefit most from the experience of life (i.e. benefit most in terms of strength and goodness).

(Think of someone whose innate weakness was in terms of proneness to addiction, and who by great effort overcomes it by choice, through faith in God and Alcoholics Anonymous - what an amazing and spiritually-valuable amount that person has learned from the experience of mortal life.)

Mortal life is part of the process of experience and learning by which we may (if we choose well) become stronger persons (stronger in love, goodness, resolve etc - and stronger as individual and unique persons participating in relationships).

It is not possible for God to make mature and strong persons as a finished product, because an essential part of that maturity and strength is a consequence of living, choosing, experiencing.

Mortal life is a tough school, but it is a school for divinization; God´s love is tough love - because that is what most of us require, because we are weak.

So God did not make us deliberately to be weak, instead that was how we began - how God ´found us´; and this world and this  mortal life is one of the ways in which we may become stronger, in preparation for the next stage of post-mortal resurrected life.

Jacob Bronowski interview - the utopia of work?

This is a fascinating interview from 1973 with Jacob ´Ascent of Man´ Bronowski, who was at the time and for many years afterwards a great hero of mine. I watched and rewatched Ascent of Man many times, read and re-read his books many times -- indeed in about 1997 I even contacted his daughter offering to write a proper biography (she rebuffed me and said there was already somebody on the job; although a biography still has not appeared).

Bronowski was a man with great qualities as is, I think, apparent here - also a man of rather significant limitations as is also apparent. But the interview itself is remarkable. This is prime Saturday evening TV with Britain´s best known ´chat show´host ever, and the pace and depth of the discussion is remarkable. Partly this was how things used to be, partly it was due to the way that Bronowski, by strength of character and natural authority, was able to impose his own agenda on mere ´entertainment´.

It can also be seen how the scope of public discourse has been shut-down since - in relation to the discussion of race and intelligence (and bearing in mind, as is obvious enough, that Bronowski was a man of the left - close to being a pacifist and a communist or communist sympathizer like the great scientists JD Bernal and JBS Haldane, both of whom he mentions).

What you get from this is some real Old Left philosophy, based on atheism and an ingrained radicalism such that history is seen as a prolonged conflict between progressive enlightened forces, and theocratic dogma. For instance Bronowski wrote an influential book about the poet William Blake, which paints him in highly political terms and essentially ignores Blake´s blatantly obvious and in-your-face incandescent, visionary, mystical, heretical Christianity´.

For whatever reason, in the discussion of artistic bohemianism and how it contrasts with his image as a scinetist, Bronowski doesn´t mention his time on Mallorca in the 1930s living as a young poet with Robert Graves and Laura Riding, and with a mistress Eirlys Roberts (who later founded The Consumer Association) -- a life of fairly extreme bohemianism by the standards of that time. A touch of the whitewash there, perhaps?

But most telling is the near-final remark on his idea of utopia. Bronowski amplifies his point that he deeply believes that people want to work rather than be idle but are thwarted by the lack of meaningful work - so his utopia is a world where everybody has a satisfying job which he or she is good-at. This absurdity is a view which I shared as a teenager (under the influence of people from Bronowski´s generation) but by the time I was twenty had had thoroughly purged out of me by a crushing avalanche of counter examples from personal experience.

I continued to hold modified versions of this view for quite a while longer but was forced to abandon it when I realized that I was actually talking about myself and a tiny minority of others who are creatively motivated - and in fact hardly anybody is self-motivated, even under ideal conditions. Nearly everybody would prefer not to work. At the very least, most people need a strong social ethos of work to ´want´to do it, nearly everyone does work for rewards or to avoid punishments; and not for intrinsic satisfactions.

But the idea that such would be any kind of utopia is quite extraordinary now! - yet in 1973 was not unusual (as evidenced by the round of applause from the audience) and indeed the ecology (EF Schumacher) and self-sufficiency (John Seymour) movements added a considerable boost to this idea from around the time of this interview and for several years (Andre Gorz was another proponent). I mean the idea that the main political imperative ought to be the provision of Good Work. I think the idea came from the early socialists, reformers, and builders of model communities - perhaps especially William Morris.

I think this view was possible because that generation had been brought-up religiously, so their aethism carried a strong residue of belief in transcendental goods such as beauty, virtue, and honesty - values which Bronowski mentions specifically. And indeed he did indeed adhere to them and defend them strongly; furthermore he developed an integrated philosophy of life based around transcendentals which he expressed powerfully in his books and The Ascent of Man.

The trouble was, the next generation of cradle atheists abandoned all transcendental goods, and became selfish, short-termist and expedient in their actions. They knew about the transcendentals - in theory they approved of them - but lacking any deity could see no reason why they should adhere to them when it was inconvenient or risky. Thus we get the current world of lying careerist bureaucrats and lying public relations pundits which has swallowed-up professional science and the arts (and everything else large scale) until almost nothing remains.

They (we) became unprincipled cowards and slackers - and why not?... When God is dead and was never alive, religion a manipulative lie or a pathetic delusion, and fanatical religiousness (in practice, specifically Christianity) is seen the primary source of all evil through history and continuing (as Bronowski, and his like, taught us most thoroughly).

Anyway - I recommend this interview as containing a great deal of good material, and also revealing the seeds of error and pride which have led to such a pathetic collapse of art, science, politics and all serious human endeavour - in a way which would certainly have appalled Bronowski; although he would most likely have misdiagnosed its cause.

William Arkle´s Foreword to billarkle.co.uk

I very nearly called this web site 'The Play of William Arkle', and then I felt that it would sound rather too casual for most people and even an insult to the endeavour that is brought to the resolving of the mysteries of life.

The reason that the word 'play' suggested itself is that the journey of understanding seems to lead from the level of human survival as a personality in this world, through to a spiritual view that takes survival of our spiritual self for granted and then on again into the appreciation of the all encompassing smile of our Divine Creator.

This Divine Smile says a very simple thing, which is that the everlasting nature of its Spirit can have only two options, either it remains in its Absolute condition of Blissful non-action or it can engage in action through the creation of play grounds. This means creating theatres of time, space and lots of things from a condition of no action or time or space or things.

Our Creator felt that the first choice of no action could becoming boring because there was no adventure, surprise or growth involved. The livingness of The Spirit felt itself to be in need of such adventure as an expression of joyful love and fun. So the second choice came about purely for the exercise of joy and love and fun.

The only word I could find to cover the activity of joy and love and fun was the word play, but unless it is approached in the right way the word does not carry the correct significance. And thus the whole of this web site is a journey into the understanding of The Creators view of the word play.

You will find that my own earlier understandings moved gradually into this way of talking about our reality. It seemed to become more and more light hearted while being able to sympathise with all the conditions of growth which can feel to be the conditions of fear and anxiety. Thus the big game of life at play has conditions within it which can descend to the very opposites of its initial intention.

These opposite conditions are the result of our Creator deciding to give us the Gift of being able to become real players in our own right at this adventure which is being undertaken. This is why the picture book was called The Great Gift and why the writings in it referred to God as being our friend in this one life endeavour. Later on this was changed to the expression God, The Player Friend'.

As for me, I have kept the name William Arkle. I like the name because it implies that my will is doing its best to be a small expression of the Ark of Life, The Heart of the Creator Friend. However my close associates now find me calling myself Billy The Kid.

http://www.billarkle.co.uk/billintro.html

The above short piece was written a few months before William Arkle died at the age of  about 76. It is an extraordinarily luminous, joyous, and apparently naive piece of writing - life-affirming and without a trace of bitterness.

How many people who have lived to 76, in the twentieth century - serving in the 39-45 war - and who have worked as an obscure and almost unknown artist, philosopher, painter and a religious visionary and teacher - could write in such an uncompromising fashion at the end of their lives? I have read many biographies and autobiographies and I cannot think of any other example.

At the end of his life the commonplace word ´play´has - for Arkle - become charged with such a depth of meaning that it has become central; earlier the same thing happened for ´friend´ (becoming a friend of the creator as the ultimate goal not just of mortal life but the principle for the organization of the universe and all reality).

Arkle makes little concession to the prevalent pessimism and despair. He all but laughs in the face of horror and suffering.

We have much to learn from him.

Why is a change of consciousness necessary for modern Christians?

Because too many people are operating from false selves - that are merely automatic processes built by our interactions. Only the true self is free.

The true self is free, and nothing else is free. It is unique, thus all free thought is unique - it is also a child of divinity so the true self is godlike and in relationship with deity and all other true selves among our siblings (men and women, also angels and demons).

If we are not thinking from our true selves, we are just responding robots - we are automatic and we are existentially isolated.

There is a chosen state of unfreedom that is the entombing of the true self within automatic responses, stimulations. Such a person is a true slave - such a person has enslaved himself to the environment. (True slavery is a mental choice - a physical slave may have complete freedom in thinking from his true self.)

Another state is to choose freedom but deny relation - to cut-off the divine relation with deity. This is a complete freedom without meaning - it is total isolation.

To accept unfreedom is either mental slavery or isolation.

(We are born free, but from our freedom choose unfreedom - this is usual, it happens sometime in childhood, adolescence, or as young adults. There is temptation, and mostly people choose to succumb. And they know it. They could escape - but pretend they cannot, that there is no escape -- or that there is nowhere to escape to...)

It is our task to live in freedom and in relation, live in thinking located in the true self. The enemies are confusion, hedonism, cowardice, dishonesty... pride. Freedom is a state of simplicity and clarity - unique and potentially universal. And there are no shortcuts to it, no standard methods, no single or safe path.

We must reach our unique freedom from our unique circumstances - this is a quest, an adventure, it is happening now.

Only from a condition of freedom can we be Christian.

Sporadic blogging for a while...

I currently have rather poor and infrequent internet access, so blogging and comment approving will be sporadic for a while.

Sorry to my regulars.

Back soon!

The dopey complacency of modern Man - Nobody who is truly ignorant of sin can protest their ignorance

Nobody can protest their ignorance of sin - because to say it is to mean the opposite. Yet modern people are continually using this excuse (often on behalf of others, but we know what they really mean)!

The main problem in modernity is related to the sexual revolution - that is where the assault has been focused. Sexual sins are not the most important sins of themselves - but in our civilization they are the most significant sins because they are taught as virtues.

There is a moral inversion evident in the sexual arena - and it has now become illegal, against employment rules, and a matter for social ostracism to argue in favour of Christian sexual ethics: to state that these ethics are true.

The profound spiritual sickness of modernity is evident in our passive, zombie-like acceptance of morally outrageous teachings and behaviours in the sexual domain - of lies, evasions, inversions and the rest of it - these are matters of daily, hourly, experience going up to the top level of all major organizations.

Clearly, those who teach and lead are most deeply at fault, but we are all born with a moral compass (what CS Lewis called The Tao) which is why all past societies had very similar moral intuitions - so when such matters are systematically violated (for the first time in human history) then we all know what is going-on, we don't need to be told; and our protestations of ignorance or innocence merely compound the morass, and add dishonesty to the account of our corruption.

We are not talking about subtle hair-splitting here! We are talking about the fact that we live in a society which first lost its moral compass, then reinstalled it with the North and South reversed.

The fact that we placidly stumble through daily life - numbed by distractions and distracted by intoxications - being kind here and there, and feeling compassionate about things the mass media tells us to feel compassionate about... well, all this is sleepwalking into oblivion.

But it is more like the intoxication of drug addiction than sleepwalking, because we are culpable for our state - we choose to live in this un-responsible way. 

Instead of our life being theosis, towards divinity - trial and error, repentance and striving - life is an incremental degeneration which we have renamed progress. Well, it doesn't fool anyone - most importantly it does not fool ourselves - as can be seen by the objective evidence of demotivated nihilistic despair all around - the evident (although feebly-denied) self-hating, self-destroying, suicidal conviction which has gripped the whole developed world and which is being implemented, daily, by the elites - with barely a glimmer of protest, because - after all - what is worth saving?

True enough. That is not the problem - the problem is that those who make the world so meaningless and despair inducing that it is not worth saving, prevent (to the best of their power) Christians from doing anything about it - they focused their declining powers on enforcing their nihilism, and on hunting out and extirpating or else subverting and corrupting all residual Christianity, and nearly all that remains of virtue.

(Specifically, they use one or two virtues to destroy the others, by a kind of rotation - compassion to destroy justice; kindness to destroy faith etc.  After all, it is the good in evil which allows evil to prosper. But in each cycle - each turn of the wheel - there is more evil, less good.) 

The dopey complacency of modern man is hard to tolerate: 'Oh, we aren't really that bad - our intentions are good.' - This is a hopelessness which spells the end of hope; because intentions are not good - there are indeed no intentions at all in any sense of a goal to life. How could there be intentions when a Man's life is seen to be, taught to be, an accidental and meaningless blip terminated by oblivion?

There can be no divine revelations for modern Man...

Because Modern Man knows that there can be no divine revelations.

Anything which might seem like a communication from the divine, or evidence of the divine, is therefore a mistake. For sure. It is either wishful thinking which is the basis of religion, or a product of terror - which is also (somehow) the basis of religion, or because of ignorance of science and statistics, or because of manipulation of public opinion, or...

Well we know it can't be true; so if there are a lot of people who insist it is true then they must be evil lying manipulators, ignornant fools, or mentally ill. Probably mentally ill - because delusions.

So if Modern Man is sure that divine revelations are not true, then he cannot be convinced otherwise by any 'evidence' at all - no matter how much evidence or of what type: he will deny that it is evidence.

The big question is, where did Modern Man get the fixed conviction that there can be no divine revelations? - because there never could be any evidence for that - yet he is absolutely sure about it.

Depsite that most people in the world today, and everybody in history (and himelf when he was a child) believes otherwise... (i.e. that there can be divine revelations) 

Why then does Modern Man believe with 100 percent confidence it is incomprehensible outrageous nonsense?

Now that is very strange indeed.

Why is there a Brotherhood of Man?

1. Because we are all God's children, and brothers and sisters in our divine potential?

2. Because there are no real differences between people - everybody is equal?

The Genius Famine (my recent book) reviewed on Amerika.org

http://www.amerika.org/lifestyle/the-genius-famine-by-edward-dutton-and-bruce-g-charlton

Sacred Monarchy as a third way - a guest post from John Fitzgerald

C.S Lewis in 'That Hideous Strength' comes close, in my view, to the heart of the matter in the Company's discussion on the rivalry between 'Logres' and 'Britain': 

'It all began,' Dimble says, 'when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the sixth century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it.' 

'Something we may call Britain,' he goes on, 'is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell; a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney - and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.' 

In terms of our country at least, it's the current domination of 'Logres' by 'Britain' that's impeding the change in consciousness and metaphysical understanding that is so badly needed. Is this state of affairs necessarily permanent? By no means. 

You have written before about England's rocks and mountains and the stones of its great Cathedrals possessing a formidable latent power, and I think there's real truth in that. It's worth remembering as well that the course of History is a very deep and mysterious thing. Who in late 1941, for instance, would have predicted that the all-conquering Nazi hegemon would be (literally) dust and ashes a mere three and a half years later? Similarly, no-one in the late-80s, as far as I can remember, apart from the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn, predicated the downfall of Soviet Communism. Things can change very quickly. 

That's my point. But there needs to be a catalyst. A spark. Something to fire the imagination. Something that connects with the mythopoeic vision and understanding we all have deep within us of the true pattern and relationship between the Divine and the human. You have also written about the urgent need for a Christian revival. 

My sense (and I could be very wrong of course) is that this won't come about without a revival and return of what we might call Sacred Monarchy. The three great European Regicides of the last four hundred years - Charles I (1649), Louis XVI (1793), and Nicholas II (1918), each represented huge steps towards the current void our civilisation totters above today. 

Some sort of restoration, I feel, whether on the practical or on the imaginative level, is absolutely essential, I feel, as a first collective step towards the reanimaton of a truly Christ-centred political and social body. The Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight puts it brilliantly here: 'If we cannot resolve our conflicts, we must at least imagine a dimension in which they are, or might be, resolved; which perhaps means, in Christian terms, looking forward, or up, to the advent of Christ in glory. 

Such then, is the symbolic function of the Crown, not only itself dramatic, but also signifying the resolution and purpose of the drama within and beyond which it exists.' 

 It would be a mistake, I think, to focus on things on a too-worldly level - be that on existing Royal Houses like the House of Windsor or on 'hidden bloodlines' and so forth. Monarchy is essentially a spiritual quality. 

Lewis knew this well. I quote from memory: 'A man's attitude to monarchy reveals the extent to which his tap root to Eden remains.' 

No-one showed this better, for example, than J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, a work which has had a deeper impact on the popular consciousness and sown more potential seeds than any number of sermons or political campaigns. 

 I think the proof of all this can be seen in the huge crowds (of all creeds and races, it should be noted) that turned out in Leicester last year in silence to watch the procession and reburial of King Richard III. There was something truly deep and meaningful there which was able to connect with people at the deepest level and cut through everything that divides and trivialises. 

It illustrates that, faced with our current challenges, there is a 'third way' between aimless acquiescence in our own suicide and a repressive, equally godless dictatorship. The King sleeps in his cave still, as in the stories, but he will wake when the time comes around, in both the inner and the outer worlds. Of that I am sure.

Locating the problem? - Don't do it!

I had one of those sudden recognitions the other day about how I had been wasting a lot of life over many years in trying to locate the source of problems - specifically the source of the mainstream of bad things the results of which we see everywhere but the source of which is so elusive. I have written many blog posts on this theme, and a couple of books.

But when something is so real yet so hard to pin down, the cause is likely to be spiritual rather than perceptual - its causes apparent to 'the imagination' (if at all)  - the imagination being our organ of perception of the spiritual - rather than to the five senses.

*

It is not that we cannot know such matters - probably we can in principle know almost anything (over time, across a vast timescale, with properly directed effort) - it is rather than the causes, once known cannot be pointed-at - and people (me too) are driven to wild abstractions in order to try and express insights.

We don't know the source, but the problem itself is (more or less) that metaphysical assumption of materialism, of denial of God, of spiritual factors being unreal... of focusing on the perceptual world and the goings-on in it as if they were the only things that exist or that matter. 

The civilization has turned away so decisively from the spiritual world that even among the people, groups, religions who make the most of not turning away; whatever they may say, we can see that they have turned away - and are actually in thrall to materialism, secularism, and the dominant ideology. This is one way of understanding why secular Leftism, political correctness, progressivism and their companions of statism and bureaucracy are so utterly dominant everywhere... in the New Age, the counter-culture, ultra-radicalism and nearly all people in nearly all religions (including Christianity). 

This is a much deeper matter than people making the wrong political choices - this is a flaw deep in our own souls - this is something which poisons each of us right inside.

*

There is a world of meaning around us, we used to know this (as children, and in earlier eras) and a world of divine communications directed at us; and we are walled-off from it so completely that we are unaware of it and deny it in our lives even (perhaps especially) when we refer to it with our mouths - those few who become aware of it nearly always explain it away (delusions, hallucnations, imaginations, wishful thinkings or pathological dreads) and (by their behaviour and stance) trivialize it.

There is a selective blindness, deafness and general insensibility at work here. It goes further than ('mere') atheism - but poisons our ability to be religious in any way, or spiritual in any way - everything is reduced to lifestyle options and stimuli - including all spiritual discourse.

The extent to which this is the case is truly terrifying when glimpsed - there are vast and primary forces at work around us and in us, and yet we are (both as individuals and more so as cultures) almost entirely unaware of them; yet we perceive them, implicitly and in horribly distorted forms, in the tidal movements of our era.

*

Nobody has satisfactorily explained the insanity which emerged to general visibility in the later 1960s, apparently at a very specific time in between 1966 and 1968. Something happened, something good tried to get-out; and something went horribly wrong.

Everyone senses that there were some good and important impulses or insights buried in all that - but the outcome in terms of understanding and human behaviour has been appalling: people became dead-eyed sleepwalkers, zombies, cyborgs... cut-off from the primary currents of reality, and whose every effort to comprehend and transform and improve was poisoned at source by gross distortion of perspective based on gross insensibility.

All attempts to do something positive are poisoned at source - either by the mainstream distortion, or else by the distortion of denying the irreversible significance of these tidal forces of good which have emerged in such distorted ways.

We cannot, it seems, go back - because to go back requires denying the destiny of the underlying forces; but we (obviously!) cannot go forward in the ways that we are doing.  

*

Well, where it came from is not really the point - because it is now everywhere - I can feel it swirling in myself as I write, as if like a toxic fog!

This goes beyond cyclical theories of civilization - this is not part of a cycle, it has not happened before.

It goes beyond a mere failure to do what ought to be done (of course we fail, people always fail) - it is something new, this kind of blindness to what should be done and also to the fact that we are not doing it, and also to the fact that we are not trying to do it, and also to the fact that our attempts to make matters better are actually making them much worse.

*

So what then? What am I asking myself to do instead - what should I be striving for?

Two things: perception and clarity.

I need to perceive reality, including all the important 'spiritual' things which are there and active but excluded from awareness. And secondly I need clarity about these spiritual things - what is needed is not something passive, vague, dreamy, partially-glimpsed - nor something abstract, detached, observed; but instead an active, purpsive, willed, clear headed and fully-conscious and heart-felt kind of perception.

This is not easy to do, it is not clear how to do it, it is not obvious how to maintain this psychological-&-spiritual state once achieved - but that is what is required. It is what we are supposed to do, destined to do - indeed, it is something we ought to have done some time ago (generations ago); and it was our complete failure to do it, which is the ultimate source of the all-pervading problem. 

Mormon economics

A fascinating post on a subject I didn't know very much about:

http://www.millennialstar.org/nearly-every-lds-prophet-has-spoken-out-against-statism/#more-19641

What is interesting is the idea of an economic system which is subordinated to Christianity, and in accordance with Christian principle - which is how things should be in a well-ordered society.

The other example of Christian economics, which I know much better, is Distributism in relation to Roman Catholicism - this was a system devised by Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, made popular again in the 1970s by EF Schumacher (from whom I discovered it), and which still has its modern advocates - such as Joseph Pearce.

People often get confused by analysing these Christian economic systems using Right/ Left secular economic comparisons - which leave out the essential and primary religious superstructure.

But Christian and secular economics are as different as chalk and cheese, because the aim is different: Christian economics is ultimately aimed at assisting (or at least not harming) the salvation of the people, and all proximate economic aims should ideally be in harmony with this.