There are (functionally) zero intellectuals in modern society - the basis of New Leftism and Political Correctness

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To be a real intellectual is to be highly intelligent; and to be highly intelligent entails having high 'general intelligence' (or 'g') which is (as a generalization - that is to say when looking at group correlations) general to all specific cognitive functions such as the various academic subjects, general knowledge, reading ability, problem solving, learning for examinations, and the special IQ tests.

(g was discovered by noticing that all these cognitive measures correlated positively with each other in group studies.)

To be gifted in general is in contrast to being gifted in particular; to have a general cognitive aptitude - regardless of context - is to think in a way which does not depend on context; to be able to think in a way which applies across all cognitive contexts is to think abstractly - that is, to abstract from the specific and deploy the general.

So, whatever it is, intelligence is about abstraction.

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Intelligence is not is what intellectuals do, it is what intellectuals are. It is not something switched off and on as required - it is the way that intellectuals think.

And since being intelligent is about abstraction, so intellectuals are abstractors - not by choice, but by their very nature.

Abstraction is the pair of spectacles through which intellectuals perceive the world.

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Thus intellectuals have devised, and in general supported, the trend towards abstraction in public discourse which has characterized modernity.

This has been largely pernicious, because as a rule only intellectuals can operate in the realm of abstractions. So that when public discourse has been made abstract, non-intellectuals can only accept it or reject it - non-intellectuals cannot understand abstraction and they cannot evaluate abstraction.

And when intellectuals have - en masse - abandoned their responsibility to understand and evaluate the abstractions which other intellectuals have introduced into public discourse - then there is corruption and wickedness.

And when intellectuals lose their intelligence, then nobody at all can understand and evaluate abstractions - so society at large can only have cheer or boo abstractions - implement them blindly and uncomprehendingly; or reject them lock-stock and barrel: they cannot work with them.

That is precisely the situation of current modernity.

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Our society has been saddled with abstractions from earlier generations which the intellectuals of modernity partly cannot, and partly will not, understand. Public discourse concerning these abstractions therefore merely amounts to hooray or boo.

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Political life is dominated by abstractions such as democracy, equality, justice, rights - these are not only not understood - but there is no effort to understand them: they are slavishly or cynically implemented - or else rejected. Either way, the process is inarticulate and instinctive merely. 

Our society is utterly dominated by bureaucratic power, and utterly rejects the validity of personal power; and public discourse is utterly incapable of recognizing, comprehending or modifying this situation.

Art (high status art) has been for a century and more, dominated by abstraction. Nobody likes it and nobody can use it except as a career path. Art, which was great, has been destroyed as a force for good.

Science too has been destroyed by 'peer review' - a vague abstraction, vaguely defined and never evaluated, little more than a buzz word - yet dumbly implemented and dumbly cheered as science is converted to nothing more than cynical, lying bureaucratic careerism - so uncritical that it loses the capacity even to notice what has happened. Science is now merely another something to cheer or to boo.

Abstract 'physics-like' concepts of the Christian God have been inherited from past intellectuals, some (at least) of whom could work with them: perfection, infinite, omni-potent/-scient/-present/, paradoxical formulations of the Trinity. Modern Christians, including modern Christian intellectuals as a class, can only defend or attack these formulations, they cannot comprehend or critique them - and they cannot use them in their personal lives.

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Past intellectuals made and gave society some good things some bad things. But modern intellectuals, as a class, are not intellectuals but pseudo-intellectuals. They occupy the social niches of intellectuals, but they are not intellectuals: they either will-not or cannot, but certainly do not do abstraction.

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In general, modern intellectuals merely defend socially-dominant abstractions. Since their position depends on a (false) status as 'abstraction experts', and since modern intellectuals are (as a class) corrupt and incompetent careerists merely - modern intellectuals tend simply to defend those abstractions which seem likely to maintain their (false) status in the short-term.

Such is the situation. Modern (pseudo-) intellectuals are nearly all corrupt and overwhelming incompetent in the abstract realm - yet that is what they are for. They cannot and/or will not perform the intellectual work to know abstractions; but are too dishonest to admit the fact, and too incompetent even to comprehend the fact.

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Modern society is being killed by abstraction, and modern so-called intellectuals are cheering-on the process.

It would seem an easy matter to improve things by discarding the murderous abstractions and dealing instead with specific persons and specific situations - but this is the one thing which intellectuals are united to oppose: and the intellectuals are the rulers.

(Rulership being a social position passively inherited from their predecessors - with institutions such as schools and colleges replacing genetics.)

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So modernity is not just stuck, but being actively goaded towards destruction by supposed-ntellectuals who are clever enough to pursue their short term status, but too dumb and dishonest to understand what is going-on or even to know that they don't understand it.

Societies primary problems are regarded as incomprehensible or insoluble even in situations where the problem is simple, the answers obvious. Meanwhile the modern intellectuals occupy themselves on shadow games using abstract concepts like counters; playing a game for which they cannot learn the rules - and they wouldn't play by the rules even if they had learned them.

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Consequently, speaking functionally - there are no intellectuals at all in modern society: that is to say, modern society has no class of persons who actually do the job of understanding and evaluating abstractions.

Instead there is a class of pseudo-intellectuals who at most pretend to do this job; and often deny that this job even needs doing - and do something different instead. (Especially Leftist political advocacy under other names and disguises.)

Since the social role of intellectuals is now being performed only by incompetent pseuds and lying fakes, nobody is doing the job: the job is not being done.

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Absolute abstractions can make people crazy

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There are some words, quite a lot of them, that name absolutes - and they can drive us crazy.

We can, it seems, quite easily get to the point where the abstraction takes over from immediate reality, such that the absolute requires nothing short of absolute submission to... to what?

To the absolute truth of the absolute.

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An example:

Properly speaking, equal means the same - and 'the same' means no more than that things are in the same category - to say that humans are equal before God, or the Law, or whatever, means only that they are members of the same category.

Thus, there is a relationship with God which is characteristic of humans, and the category of humans includes (for Christians) men and women, children and adults.

The word equal is doing no necessary work here (or anywhere else), but instead - by its pseudo-mathematical and un-human precision, making our brains go into convulsions.

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But in politics, equality has become an absolute abstraction.

As an absolute 'equality' comes first, as an abstraction it can never be known whether any specific reality matches up to the absolute value of being wholly 'equal'.

Because we cannot measure the concordance between reality and an absolute abstraction, yet hold the absolute abstraction as primary - equality becomes a concept which requires absolute submission.

Even to discuss the reality, achievability or degree of equality is an appalling thing - because equality is absolute.

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Substitute for equality 'justice', we see the same.

There are many examples: freedom, democracy, human rights, poverty, oppression...

There can be, there is, often a gross dissociation between a person's adherence to what would seem to be the implications of equality, or justice and their actual lives (both outer and inner). But once the absolute abstraction holds-sway, then that doesn't matter - because of course there never can be any proportionality between an absolute and reality...

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To refuse to submit to a concept like equality is to insult equality.

To refuse to say the right things about equality, to put equality first, to swear by the concept of equality... such things are seen as a gross act of aggression against society.

What matters is submission to the concept: public, and preferably private, submission to the validity of the idea in all its abstract purity.

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In philosophy the 'omni' words when applied to God are similar absolute abstractions.

In terms of human understanding, to have 'total' power, knowledge, extent doesn't mean a thing.

We could imagine power, knowledge and extent which had no definable bounds, but our minds implode at the matter of absolute power, knowledge, extent...

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And in religion these unimaginable incomprehensible absolute abstractions operate in an analogous fashion to equality and justice in modern politics...

People are not required to understand the omni words, because they are un-understandable; they are not required to live-by the omni words, because their implications are abstract and disconnected from life.

People are required to submit to the omni words; because to do otherwise is seen as insulting God (to whom these absolute abstractions have been linked).

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So these omni words, and the absolute abstractions which lie behind them, come to rule religions; despite that nobody knows what they mean, and nobody even knows what it would mean to live by them.

It should be possible to make a one-sided rejection of omni attributes; to say, that don't make sense... and leave it it that.

But anybody who challenges an omni attribution is assumed to be stating the opposite as an alternative in philosophical terms.

And the opposite to an absolute abstraction is a terrifying thing, not least because it is necessarily perceived as incomprehensible and as craziness-inducing as the abstraction to which it is put in opposition...

So to oppose an approved absolute abstraction is to be perceived as proposing something so vast and total as to be mind-numbing in its horribleness.

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So we recurrently get the situation in which submission to the official absolute belief system, in all its abstract perfection, becomes the hallmark of orthodoxy, and indeed in practice the one and only absolutely (!) required mark of orthodoxy.

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For some religions that is appropriate, but not for Christianity.

For Christians, the essence is the personal relationship with God: that is the essence, not the whole thing, but we must work outwards from that.

And we cannot work outwards from a personal relationship to meet an absolute abstraction - if we try to do this, if we insist on doing that - at some point we will leave behind the personal relationship.

For all matters of doctrine, the  Christian hopes and aims to achieve a conviction in his heart; to understand is to have that conviction - and that conviction is of the form of a personal relationship.

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The Christian must strive above all to love God; but we cannot love an absolute abstraction, only a person.

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Ask an abstract question, and you'll get an abstract answer

It has been a problem of theology since the early days of the Christian church; that people ask abstract questions and get abstract answers. 

The problem is that all abstractions are on the one hand 'models' of reality, not reality itself - and consequently they have an unreal and unsatisfying quality about them; so that 'human psychology' remains unsatisfied by abstract explanations, at a deep level*.  

Yet the identity of abstraction is typically un-clear, and the meaning of infinite likewise. So, this is an explanation that does not explain - rather, it layers incomprehension (mystery) upon incomprehension; while apparently explaining. 

What about the power of God? For Christians, God is the creator. Because 'creation' is an abstraction, this, statement invites explanation of what exactly is created - from what? Orthodox theologians say that God creates everything (except God himself) from nothing (termed creation ex nihilo). 

But creation ex nihilo is an assertion of something beyond natural human experience and understanding. Indeed, the concept of a phenomenon of creation ex nihilo seems to have arisen among Greek philosophers, who were abstractly reasoning about ultimate causes. Before this, there was no such concept, and certainly there was no such concept for the ancient tribal Hebrews who wrote the Old Testament. 

Therefore, to explain the abstract property of creation in terms of an abstract ultimate is not to 'explain' but to layer abstractions, and to create intrinsic mystery. If abstraction is regarded as the real-reality, then we get a root un-clarity that becomes definitional; as happened with orthodox Christian theology.

As another example: How great is the power of God? 

Power is an abstraction - and indeed, it is very difficult to provide as satisfactory definition of power. But in trying to explain the scope of God's (undefined) power, the philosopher finds it impossible to conceive of a clear boundary to God's 'power'.

(...Especially if the philosopher is already assuming that God is capable of creation ex nihilo; which seems to suggest that God can make anything thus do anything.) 

So the abstract philosopher then reaches for another abstraction and states that God's 'power' is 'infinite' - i.e. that God is omnipotent. 

This layering of abstractions - which abstractions are then taken as definitional - then creates all sorts of (as I would regard them artifactual) problems. Especially when it comes to explaining the presence of evil in a reality created from nothing by a Christian God axiomatically described as wholly good. 

(In that a wholly-good God, that created everything from nothing, and was of infinite power - would seem to be incapable of creating evil.) 

The apparent conclusion was that there is no evil in reality, that therefore the apparent evil which Men observe must be an illusion... 

And at this point, the philosophers - leaping from abstraction to abstraction, layering one upon another, and taking each abstraction as definitive - have apparently demolished Christianity!  

I am, myself, in search of clarity; and I am not satisfied by explanations that create mystery, and then rationalize mystery on the basis of asserting that ultimates are intrinsically mysterious. 

And, further, rationalize this by asserting than anyone who seeks (or even attains) clarity of understanding is necessarily misguided. 

A clear explanation is then regarded as a false explanation; an over-simplification, an instance of childish, human-sized, perhaps 'anthropomorphic' modelling of reality - on the basis that the philosophers have pre-decided that only abstractions can capture reality.  

For myself, this is an error traceable back to an original prejudice in favour of abstractions; which probably relates to the Platonic assertion that this earthly world of time and change is illusion; and real-reality lies elsewhere in a world of timeless-hence-changeless ideas, of archetypes: that is, a world of abstractions.  

My point here is (as so often!) that we get-out what we put-in, if we start with abstractions, we will end with abstractions; and noticing that primary (i.e. metaphysical) assumptions structure and dictate reasoning and what counts as 'evidence'. 

I believe that these abstractions are essentially alien to the core of Christianity, and have deformed and distorted Christianity since its early years. 

Christianity was originally common sense, simple and clear; as it was taught, explained and exemplified by Jesus - especially in the most-authoritative source of the Fourth 'John' Gospel; was later picked-up and rapidly, but wrongly, inserted-into a framework of pre-existing, not-Christian, philosophical and abstract modes of explanation. 

This led to all kinds of insoluble paradoxes, which were then explained-away (but not actually explained) by further abstractions; and the paradoxes were dealt with by re-labelling incoherence as mystery. 

It is such factors which led me to trying to understand Christianity is a simple, natural, spontaneous, and (so far as possible) non-abstract way - while accepting that language is itself an abstraction. 

So we can only take the process so far as to point-at a direct and intuitive comprehension in non-linguistic thinking. 

By this, I find that clarity is attained only when regarding reality as consisting of Beings in personal relationships (an 'animistic' world view); which is therefore the primary assumption of my own metaphysics.     

*Wittgenstein seems to have noticed this problem with his early (Tractatus) philosophy, and tried to resist it in his late (Philosophical Investigations) philosophy - but without much success!

Implications of the opposite of abstraction being experience (and experience being thinking)

I've been reading Rudolf Steiner and listening to his ideas being expounded; and realise that a fundamental problem is that Steiner tended to end with abstraction. Although he stated that reality consisted of living Beings; these were explained in their nature and effect using abstractions.

The opposite of abstraction - and the nature of reality - is experience (i.e. the experience of Beings) - thus reality is within-time, and happens through time; experience is process not category. 

Abstraction (as in my sentences above) is usually the fate of human discussion and exposition, since these are conducted in language, and language is abstract. We can use language to point-at experience, to describe the context of experience; but of course this will be secondary.

It is perhaps this that makes people sake that mystical experience is ineffable, un-expressible - but that is true of all experience, so the property of ineffability is not distinctive to the mystical. e.g. We cannot capture being-in-love - or any other emotion - in language.

Behind all abstraction, language and any other form of interpersonal communication there is direct, unmediated experience, a 'knowing' that is potentially a shared experience of Beings. And this is going-on all the time, in all of us - but nearly always unconsciously.

In other words, our true and divine self is always there; even when it is never attended-to. Because the real self is not inside us, so much as a perspective on reality. Reality is universally accessible, but each of us has a perspective on it; and we can only come to know reality in a linear and sequential fashion.

So, in a way, the real self is like a peephole opening onto the totality of reality (the underworld, the dwat, the collective conscious and unconscious...). Of course it is more than just a peephole; because the real self is also the source of real freedom; and a producer of (uncaused) thought; and potentially the mans of our participation in divine creation.

But in terms of our ability directly to know, we might imagine it as a peephole through which we can incrementally discover everything there is to know, eventually (but of course, that everything will keep growing, and we may contribute to it)- but always from our unique perspective.

There is an abstraction for you! A crude and simple abstract model of reality - looking through a peephole at the ocean of reality that is always everywhere and within... As such it is certainly false - both ridiculously partial, and seriously distorted. What, then is the point of it?

By my understanding, much of our learning - nowadays in this mortal life - is a matter of becoming conscious of something that is already happening, but beyond our awareness. Thus, the abstraction is helpful if or when it draws attention to some neglected reality that we may then - by experiencing it in our thinking - come to know for ourselves.

However, probably only when we come to know it for ourselves. Abstractions at the level of abstraction - and locked into that level by the need for language in public discourse - are a lethal tyranny for the soul.

And all public discourse, all institutions and organisations, operate solely at the level of abstract language or other symbolism; and so are always partial and distorted - always false. This is a big lesson that we need to learn - it is one of the big lessons of our time.

And our learning is assisted by the fact that our institutions and their leaders are so obviously corrupt and increasingly evil that we are quickly learning that they are wrong - and the abstract laws, rules and guidelines by which they attempt to control us are also wrong.

And if we want to know what is right we can derive it only from that which is validated by direct personal experience. and we are wrong.

 

Mapping the causal pathway leading to political correctness

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1. Abstraction. People of high intelligence have a tendency to think abstractly rather than 'instinctively' - and perhaps this may be especially so in some human groups which have evolved extra-high intelligence over the past couple of thousand years - such as the populations in Europe and East Asia.

2. Secularization. Loss of belief in the ultimate nature of reality as transcendent and other-worldly - therefore a focus on this world.

- This probably relates to a strong abstracting tendency. For example, highly abstract people - when they are religious - tend to believe in a non-personal God, and in the ultimate reality of abstract forces or processes such as evolution.

- Abstraction is also productive of nihilism: i.e. to the belief that there is no ultimate reality. Since the power of abstraction depends on the vicissitudes of mental functioning, to the abstracting mind all is intangible, changeable, disconnected from spontaneity, from common sense, from emotional-underpinning. Life tends to be perceived as a solipsistic play of shadows, momentary distractions, meaningless sufferings and equally meaningless pleasures.   

- Abstraction is very useful in some situations in some societies - but it is like a mental pathology in other circumstances.

3. The combination of abstraction and secularization leads to an elite world view (including a morality) which is materialistic (this-worldly) and which explains things in terms of abstract forces and dispositions.

4. The purest, most idealistic morality from this perspective is therefore an abstract but non-transcendent spirituality of the material.

- A clear early example is Marxism, which is all about economics - about the production and distribution of material goods. Yet at the same time, material production and distribution is explained abstractly, and linked with a spirituality. The end result is that in Marxism the matter of the production and distribution of material goods becomes the highest level of human moral concern.

- Marxism was the first large scale morality of altruism - in which altruism was made abstract and involuntary (in replacement for the earlier personal and voluntary 'noblesse oblige', alms-giving and philanthropy).

- So, Marxism therefore removed virtue from the individual and from the realm of choice, and made morality a socially-imposed abstract process. Under pure Marxism there were no good individuals, only the good society.

5. Political correctness takes this process further than Marxism, by extending the concern with the production and distribution of material goods to include the production and allocation of psychological goods. So that PC is concerned by such matters as happiness, suffering, status, respect and self-respect.

- However, since PC is materialist, these intangible psychological factors require operational definition in terms of material proxy measures: so that happiness/ suffering may be equated with income and wealth, or with the results of surveys such as happiness ratings or crime levels, or with measures of health;  status is equated with occupancy of certain jobs, or attendance at specific educational establishments, or possession of educational certificates, and so on.

6. Therefore the abstract spirituality of materialism is underpinned by concrete measures of a material nature; such that the monitoring, prediction and manipulation of these material measures is equated with the (intangible) psychological states with which they are taken to be causally-correlated.

- Following the pattern of Marxism, in political correctness there are no good individuals, and no good individual choices or decision; only impersonal and mandatory procedures or mechanisms can be morally good.

- Immoral individuals are such for their necessarily-selfish defiance of impartial procedure, which is seen to open-up infinite possibilities of disaster, chaos, corruption.

- Such individuals are guilty not for what they actually do, nor for the actual consequences of their actions, but for their failure to submit to objective and involuntary process.

7. Meritocracy. All societies are meritocratic to a degree - although the nature of the merit varies. Throughout the twentieth century 'merit' became equated with intellectual ability and attainment - and a society developed in which the intellectual elite were the ruling class.

- Almost all the main social functions therefore became dominated by intellectually selected personnel; but especially public administration (and to a lesser extent democratic politics), education and the mass media.

- Intellectual meritocracy allowed the pathology of abstraction to operate un-checked at the highest levels of social organization, expanding and changeing without effective feedback from common sense and spontaneity.

- And also without reference to religious morality.

8. Also throughout the twentieth century, there was a massive expansion in the bureaucracy - and the linkage of all bureaucracies with public administration. So the modern society became interconnected by a bureaucratic web of laws, regulations, subsidies and coercive sanctions. And these bureaucracies became less personal - with all major decisions being taken by committee, and by vote.

9. The mass media also grew to occupy ever more of the time and attention of the population.

10. So by the late twentieth century the interconnected bureaucracy and the mass media meant that the intellectual meritocratic elite could impose their morality upon the rest of the population - and political correctness was established.

- A positive feedback loop was established, by which 'PC reality' - as defined by the interconnected administrative bureaucracies and the mass media - feeds back into the abstract secular psychology of the ruling intellectual elite to enhance the detachment of PC from instinct and spontaneity; and the intelligentsia amplified the abstracting and impersonal systematizing signal to the bureaucracy and media.

- Cut off from normal psychology and from inconvenient truths, the hermetically-sealed system of PC expanded exponentially. 

- And all unchecked exponential processes destroy themselves.

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God is a Being, not an Object: What we term "objects" are actually abstractions

There are no 'objects' (in the usually understood sense) but only Beings (and parts of Beings) on the one hand -- and primordial, unknowable, chaos on the other hand. 

(In other words, that which is not a Being, or of-a-Being - is unknowable.) 

What we think of as 'objects' are actually 'abstractions' - abstractions which exist in the thinking of Beings.

So we can oppose God-as-a-Being, versus God-as-an-Abstraction that has either been derived from our-selves (who are Beings) - or else an abstraction deriving from other Beings. 

God as an Abstraction is wrong, because such a conceptualization does not seek a relationship between Beings; which is what Christians (ought to ) believe. It is confused; because we are first making an abstraction, then trying to relate to that abstraction as if it was a Being... 

But an abstraction is not a viable and relatable Being, but only a model of a Being (simplified, distorted, incomplete). 

Doing this with God is analogous to trying to have a good/ alive/ ongoing personal relationship with your wife while regarding her primarily as 'a woman'; or with your son while he is being considered as essentially 'a son'. 

If we try to relate to (the-Being-of-) God as if he actually, truly was a collection of abstract attributes; then we will Not be able to relate to God as the person, the Being, that God truly is.

Derived from a comment I made at Francis Berger's blog. 

Outsourcing understanding: What explains mass devotion to ethical abstractions such as economic equality or "the environment"?

It has been statistically normal for so many generations that the mass of people have some kind of principled, ethical devotion to an abstraction - that the extreme strangeness of it gets unnoticed. 

An early form was Marxism/ Communism, which asked people to devote their lives - even sacrifice their lives - to the almost mathematical abstraction of global economic equality. And, in vast numbers they did!

Yet how very weird it is that modern people - people who naturally and firmly believe that the universe has no purpose or meaning but happened by accidents, and that life and Men evolved by the blind workings of natural selection - should care strongly about the abstraction of economic equality, or justice. 

Something that can only be measured by research and which concerns remote strangers, of whose existence they know only vaguely by unreliable report.

The particular abstraction about which the masses (mostly) care varies through time, almost arbitrarily; and indeed people and institutions may profess several or many abstract principles, regardless of whether these cohere or contradict. 

Nowadays, the analogous ethical concern to Marxism is with that abstraction called "the environment", and in particular with abstractions to do with supposed concentrations of carbon dioxide, and theories and data to do with its generation and effect on the abstraction of global climate. 

So we have the phenomenon of people who argue strenuously that they are themselves merely higher animals or naked apes, whose lives have no relevance or relation to the universe - and that everything which exists does so because of "physics"... 

And yet these same people regard it as an urgent moral imperative that they themselves, and everybody else, and indeed every living being on the planet! - be organized and regulated in order to maintain a certain average global temperature - because that is best for "the earth"! 

The Big unasked question is: From whence cometh this moral imperative? 

Why should creature of the kind modern people assume themselves to be, and living in such a pointless and indifferent reality as modern people assume the universe to be; express (and sometimes live-by) the conviction that we have a moral duty towards abstractions as Communism or 21st Century Environmentalism? 

This is surely a bizarre combination. In the first place, why do people feel a binding morality for anything at all? But secondly: why for such remote abstractions? 

(It has often been observed that many of those who care for "the people" are indifferent or actively cruel to actual human beings around them; and that a "passionate" devotion to "the environment" has led to gross destruction of nature - and its replacement with technology, in and around the same people's actual homes and work-places.)

There is no explicit and coherent answer, and there can be none. 

This bizarre situation must arise from unacknowledged and implicit causes; not from acknowledged fundamental beliefs.

The fact that people regard themselves as moral, and live in pursuit of these abstract moral abstractions; suggests that there is a deep but denied basis for "morality" at work unconsciously and invisibly. 

My best guess is that it is exactly because the basis for our actual mass morality is inexplicit, unconscious and denied. 

And this secondhand nature of values also explains the fact that the actual mass morality is highly arbitrary and unstable, and reactive rather than innate. Public morality changes in line with the perceived needs of the ruling authorities; and when these needs change, morality changes. 

The mass of people have simply got used to living with the mismatch between mandatory and aggressive superficial abstract moral beliefs on one hand; and on the other, an explicit and supposedly science-based rejection of any basis for such beliefs.

To assert that one can have a meaningful and purposive personal life in a random and undirected universe of determined or selfish entities; is something that is so general as to seem like common sense.   

This situation has been building-up for a couple of centuries - and the tacit assumption is that therefore it doesn't really matter. Even though people don't understand why they should care about the survival and equality of the human species; or the survival and temperature of the planet. 

In particular, people don't have any understanding of why they should care more for these remote secondhand abstractions than they care about the people and life around them. 

But a vital part of this modern world-view is that understanding is itself outsourced. 

In other words; people have become used-to the idea that "other people" - experts and the like - will do their understanding for them! 

That, after all, is what churches have mostly told the masses for centuries (millennia?), and that is the basis of the division of labour that underlies modern industrial society.  

To live one's morality and get one's strongest values amidst incomprehension, incoherence and even stark contradiction; is therefore regarded as just another component of the modern human condition. 

Very few are immune to this socially-endorsed habit of outsourcing values; as can be seen by the willingness of so-many Christians to accept incomprehension/ incoherence/ contradiction as articles of faith... 

And thereby not only to take their faith secondhand; and to prize institutional/ social loyalty and obedience as their highest religious value -- but to regard this delegation of responsibility for life-itself as necessary (as well as sufficient) to being-a-Christian. 

An end to abstraction - the problem of indirect communication

We are dying of abstraction, of the Ahrimanic - manifested as the global, totalitarian, bureaucratic-media system. The only escape from abstraction is in the personal, and in direct communication - which is that 'shared thinking' which exists in the realm of universal reality (but to say that is itself an abstraction). 

What this means is that there is here-and-now a problem with all actual and possible indirect communications, for example using language (or pictures, or other symbols - anything which entails perception, interpretation of perceptions etc) - for example This. 

What you are reading now is exactly the kind of problem I mean.

 

I have talked about the primacy of intuition; but I see now that intuition goes further than I had realised. Because there is no such thing as the objective. All knowledge is personal, all knowledge includes the 'subjective'... 

This means that there is no such thing as 'detachable knowledge'.  

All information is contextual, and the context is a Being - i.e. personal. So it is not possible to speak, write or otherwise indirectly-communicate knowledge to anyone; as if knowledge could be removed from subjectivity and moved-around or stored: it can't.

 

Even the most apparently objective 'fact' is not a fact; but is only a part of the unit of meaning; because the unit of meaning is in consciousnes, in thinking, entails a Being. 

The true knowledge is active, current, always-personal.

This matters acutely because we are spiralling down into a sub-human, sub-real hell of abstraction and system; and if we base our primary knowing on anything in this abstracted world, we will we taking the side against God. 

 

Thus, I may have a valid intuition, but I cannot communicate it to you or anyone else without a near certainty of falsity. This applies even to 'simple facts'; but especially seriously to fundamental truths, to living realities. 

I can have sure intuitions about here and now, what is happen-ing; but not about any detached item of knowledge concerning past or future. 

True knowledge cannot be 'stored' - for example in written words, or recordings, or pictures - because this leaves out the interpretation and understanding. 

 

I have written a great deal about metaphysics; but even metaphysics is a part of the Satanic world (the Establishment world working against God and creation, and against The Good)- because metaphysics is words, symbols... abstractions: metaphysics is just a model of reality. 

Metaphysics is not reality itself. 

 

There is perhaps a role for a different, rival metaphyiscs than mainstream materialism; and such an alternative can serve to break the 'spell' of materialism. ...Can show us that The System is wrong, or at least that alternative and more coherent systems are possible. 

Perhaps some of my earlier blog posts - and this can - can be so considered...

But any such spiritual metaphysics can only be a temporary phase en route to no-metaphysics-at-all as the basis of a person's belief. And the direct communication of simultaneous, here-and-now, shared thinking as the only valid method of interpersonal knowing.

 

This is the situation into which we are compelled by the progressively totalising corruption of The System; and by its alignment against God. 

We are dying from abstraction

*

Our culture is dying, is killing itself, from abstraction.

We take abstract concepts like equality, freedom, justice; concepts which nobody understands - and we use these remote and un-understood abstractions to 'problematize' - to challenge, question, subvert, invert and destroy - perfectly obvious and commonsensical realities such as men and women, marriage and families, love and hate.

*

We denigrate obvious realities, comprehensible to everybody; and subordinate them to un-understood abstractions, comprehensible to nobody.

We replace sex-differences between males and females which are understood even by very young children; with 'gender', which is an abstraction that means nothing or anything (amounting to the same thing).

We take the idea of Father and Mother, which are spontaneously known by small children - and render them taboo, render them evil and unusable in public discourse - and replace them with... what? Abstract gibberish about 'equality' (a concept that nobody can define operationally, and never has).

*

As Christians, we must escape these nets of abstraction; we must bring our explanations back to that which is common sense and comprehensible to a child.

Christianity is a story, with characters; and behind it is God who is a character, a person, who participates in the story - and if we don't think of God as a person, then he might as well be nothing, for all the good it will do us.

*

Christianity began to lose its grip on the human imagination when it began to ridicule and subvert God as an old man (perhaps with a beard) in a place called Heaven, who is our loving Father, and we his children.

Yet that is about as much as we can understand about God, and certainly our true understanding is of this kind; and if we replace this kind of understanding with something abstract about omnipotence, omniscience, unchanging eternity and the rest of it - then we simply remove God from our life.

The abstract God becomes something like gravity or magnetism or 'evolution' - all the qualities that might make us love and willingly obey God are dissolved away.

*

Christians must be bold to be simple-minded and simple in expression and simple in explanation; and humble to acknowledge that that is all that we can truly comprehend and live-by.

*

Abstractions are not more true, because we cannot handle abstractions in the way that we quite naturally handle stories about people. Indeed, it is doubtful whether humans can handle abstractions at all - except briefly, in very specific spatio-temporal and subject-limited ways (e.g brief eras of mathematical and scientific genius).

Christians must therefore never answer a concrete question about God with an abstraction - must never pretend to clarify a comprehensible problem with an incomprehensible solution.

(The questioner may be silenced, but they will never be satisfied. And it will inculcate a habit that is not just bad, but potentially lethal to salvation.)

If we do not understand life - including salvation - 'anthropomorphically', as a story about of the motivations and relationships of people, then we have eschewed understanding of life.

*

To sweep aside God our perfect loving Father in favour of a God of abstract attributes operating in a universe of matter and forces, is not only to break the wholeness of this world and sever our relation to it; it is to open the gate to infinite error and uncorrectable sin.

*

Good Vibrations? High Frequencies?

It is common in spiritual writing over the past decades to discuss the raising of consciousness, the evolution of Man towards divinity, in terms of a higher Vibrational state, or high Frequency communications. This is done by many authors and thinkers - including some that I greatly respect (such as William Arkle).

It goes along with several other physics derived terms used in spiritual discussion - Energy is one popular one (especially in Alternative Healing) and of course Light - which is used often in the Bible...


There is a question of the extent to which these are intended to be literal or metaphorical. However, the work of Owen Barfield on the development of language tells us that this literal versus metaphorical distinction may be an artefact of modernity - and not an aspect of reality.

Reality may be, and probably usually-is, both literal and metaphorical; in the sense that literal factuality does not capture the 'symbolism' or meaning of facts, while the symbolism tends to discount or ignore the question of factuality.

So, I recall reading in the Russian Orthodox literature about light emanating from Saints being both literal and symbolic. My understanding is that such glowing could, in principle, be photographed or filmed - and was, in that sense, 'objective'. On the other hand, demons may, it was said, appear in the guise of brightly-glowing angels... so light is not 'evidence' of Goodness.


The question about Frequency/ Vibration is whether there is supposed to be a literal, factual aspect to the description; is high frequency consciousness something that might, in principle, be measurable by a device? Some New Age thinkers clearly suppose so.

But the perspective of Barfield and Rudolf Steiner was that objective phenomena are always and inevitably known via consciousness; and when consciousness is different, what is objective is different. This would include physical records such as photographs, videos, readouts... in reality they are interpretable, know-able, only by human consciousness, and when human consciousness changes, so does our knowledge of such records.

(Perception is thus bound-up-with knowledge.)

In other words, there is no-such-thing as objectivity separable from human consciousness.


This suggests that there may in reality be something describable as a frequency or vibrational state of consciousness, and this attribute may be perceptible or even measurable in some states of consciousness but not others.

On the other hand, I question whether this physics-based way of describing and discussing life and consciousness has in fact been effective - whether this way of speaking and writing is a good idea? My objection is that it is abstract, in the sense of being the opposite of personal.


There is a major divide among those interested in religion ad spirituality between those who seek to escape persons and regard reality as abstract; and the opposite. In general, the movement through human history is to regard higher, more true religion as being abstract. Probably because we all start out, as young children, seeing the world as animated and conscious (everything significant as alive and purposive, motivated - everything as quasi-persons) - then growing-up and becoming intelligent and wise is seen as an incremental process of abstraction.

We mostly regard the abstract as real, useful, generalisable; the personal as childish, unintelligent, crazy... and indeed children, mentally handicapped and psychotic people are often and characteristically 'animistic' in their thinking. (Paranoia, in the technical sense of self-referential delusions, is the natural state of the naive human.) 


To discuss spirituality in terms of Vibrations, Frequency, Energy and Light are all ways of abstraction. Abstraction has been the trend for hundreds, even thousands, of years... And how is this abstraction working out, thus far?...

Well, abstraction is alienation, disconnection; it is to understand God as a series of attributes or properties, God's goals as akin to setting-up a machine, a computer, a force-field... a complex system. It is to see persons in terms of how they serve abstractions; virtues in terms of how we interact with a system; sins and vices as disruptions to our efficient functioning.

In sum, such language feeds an understanding of the universe as unalive and unfolding with inevitability and impartially... when, surely, as Christians we ought to be understanding reality in terms of persons, not the universe; in terms of personal aims, wants, needs, hopes... and of course love?


The recourse to physics concepts as a key metaphor or and the bottom-line factual-symbolic primary description of life, is a thing fraught with hazard; at least for the modern mind.

It is, at any rate, something I am working on noticing and expunging from my own thinking. The intent being to replace it with a conscious animism, an aware knowledge of reality as ultimately - factually-symbolically - consisting in living conscious Beings.

Such an animism is regarded as objective, meaning (as objective always does, in reality) shared perceptually between those of the same quality of consciousness. Those of a different quality of consciousness (such as the mass of modern people, and indeed the naive and child-like, would not and could not perceive this reality of reality-as-Beings.

That is to be expected....


(Note: Reality consists of Beings; including parts or components of Beings... Not everything in reality is a conscious Being in its own right; just as our right thumb, a lymphocyte in the blood, or a calcium ion in our nervous system are not individual Beings, in their own right. Yet everything not itself A Being, is part-of A Being.)

Purposive evil is complex and strategic... (And this is good news!)

Good is simple and immediate - in the sense that good ends are a consequence of good means; and goodness here and now is the route to good futures.

By contrast, we see more clearly Now, then ever before, that Purposive Evil is complex and strategic... Why? Because evil ends must incorporate good means.

(Purposive Evil refers mainly to Satan and the demons, and their human servants and personifications - and to a lesser extent to those in charge of the long term plan for the subversion, destruction, and ultimately inversion of good.) 

If something approaching pure and immediate evil can be imagined - it would be utterly short-termist and self-gratifying; thus all evil in the world would be at war with each other and there could be No long-term increase of evil. Evil would, no doubt, to be found all over the place - including every human heart... But each little spark of evil would consume itself, and compete with each other spark. Evil would be a constant background but would not increase.

For evil to increase (which is the plan of Satan) then it must be woven with good over the short term to ensure the expansion of evil over the long term.


But this is a complex business - since it is desired (by purposive evil) that the proportion of evil should increase over the long term.

If we think of the admixture of good as the price paid for the long-term strategic triumphal expansion of evil - then part of the plan is that this admixture will increase in the percentage of evil as time goes-on.

So that in the early days of Leftism, it was mixed with considerable good (compassion for the poor, despised and enslaved) - so there were good socialists, even real and great Christian socialists... But after several generations the dominant Leftism has diminished and diminished the proportion of goodness until it is fuelled mainly by resentment, envy, despair... There is still goodness permeating and woven in - but as a much smaller proportion than five generations ago.

Abstraction is an evil - in an ultimate sense. (This writing, here and now, is an abstraction - and one can see the problem.) Because abstraction is a complex strategic tool - abstraction is dishonest about the ultimate nature of reality - it 'models' reality - for some long-term purpose... this abstraction (like evil) sacrifices short term goodness in pursuit of something long-term that is referred to as a good; yet that is not the way of goodness...

By contrast good is personal. Hence Jesus.

Anyway... my point here is that evil must be complex and strategic if it is to increase; and that this is a great weakness of evil.


We look around at the complex strategies of evil in the world today, and we are bewildered - and may feel intimidated by its sheer complexity and interlocking nature. What can we - such small and simple creatures - do against such an edifice?

Well, the real implication is the opposite. Evil has built this edifice slowly over generations because that is what is necessary for the expansion of evil in the world.

In sum - it is very difficult to be strategically evil. Simple good will destroy it; even simple evil will destroy it! The business of corrupting humanity to invert good and evil - such that we will reject salvation and embrace our own damnation... well it is is extremely difficult to manage, and innumerable things to to go-as-planned for it to succeed.


Thus evil is the part of global government, of international trade, of a single all-pervading and interlinked bureaucracy, of a populace locked-onto mass media 24/7... It is all terribly complicated, inter-dependent, terribly brittle.

Each individual person who is motivated by good can, potentially, inflict very considerable damage to strategic evil - simply by being good here and now; just doing the right thing - a tactic that is simple and obvious, and requires no Master Plan. 

This is one message of The Lord of the Rings... Evil is a vast and complex network, the product of many decades of planning, organising, building... Good is 'merely' a couple of hobbits and their friends; doing good things in specific here-and-now situations (assisted by divine providence); and (yet) triggering avalanches of consequences destructive to the vast-and-imposing, but actually-fragile, edifice of evil.

Incoherent thinking can now be permanent because of Modern Man's rejection of animistic thinking (also incapacity and disinclination for rigorous abstraction)

It is striking that Modern Man is now in a situation where he is incapable of detecting and reacting-against even gross incoherence among his beliefs and actions. 

Mainstream narratives might reverse over the space of days; and continue to fluctuate - yet Modern Man carries on respecting and obeying institutions that, one would have though obviously, are indifferent to truth and addicted to dishonesty. 

(The capacity for people to believe and act-upon arbitrary assertions, contradictions to common-sense and direct personal experience, and massive lies; are among the more remarkable aspects of this pervasive disorganization of thought.)

This seems to be something recent, and related to Modernity - since there are no historical examples of such gross incoherence. 

I think the reason is that historical Man was, substantially, an animistic thinker - who regarded the important entities of this world as living Beings with consciousness and purpose. He would allocate these beings according to their inferred motivations (eg. benign or hostile) and evaluate the world in accordance with these assumptions. 

Ancient Man might turn out to be mistaken about imputed character of beings, might 'blame' entities for doing things which Modern Man regards as otherwise-explicable (as when a tree falling might be blamed for murdering a child). But it was easy to keep track of the 'logic' of things; and to see whether they made overall sense - easy; because this style of thinking is spontaneous and natural to human beings. 

Such 'anthropomorphic' thinking is altogether absent from official, media and public discourse. Modern Man has been entrained to reject personified ('anthropomorphic') thinking as childlike and primitive. 

We have been taught that that instead Men ought to think in terms of abstractions - such as those derived from science, mathematics, economics, sociology, management etc...

The always-implied and sometimes explicit use of abstractions occurs primarily when the leadership class desire to make their choices seem entailed, objectively-necessary; as when The Science is claimed to dictate a course of action. Or when it is convenient to portray some decision or event as impersonally caused; or some unpredictably 'random' event.

Such abstractions are also readily introduced whenever required to displace blame away from the leadership class or their favoured individuals or groups. 

Yet there may be a switch back to animistic/ blame thinking - i.e. to imputing character and intent to persons or groups - whenever convenient for the purposes of scapegoating dis-favoured individuals or groups. or simply for firing-up public discourse - e.g. inducing fear, anger, hatred, resentment, despair...

In other words; one major source of endemic and persistent incoherence in the thinking of Modern Men, is switching back and forth between animistic and abstract modes of reasoning. 

The usual 'answer' proposed is that animistic thinking needs to be more-completely excluded; with the idea that abstraction is more rigorous and objective, and ought to be sufficient. So if The Law becomes incoherent and unpredictable because of imputed motivations and natures (i.e. anthropomorphism rooted in different attitudes to different individuals or groups); the call is typically for greater coherence between laws and objectivity in implementation of laws.  

Yet, somehow, this never happens, but instead the opposite; and the situation gets ever-worse. 

This is because a minority of people are capable of abstract thinking, and therefore cannot be convinced by it. Furthermore, of those capable of abstraction, extremely few will deploy it by aiming at absolute truth all of the time and in all things; and instead nearly-all abstractors will use their ability for reasons of personal expediency - to promote their own short- or long-term interests. 

And the reason that so few people will use abstraction truthfully is that - in our Godless, unspiritual, hedonic society - there is no ultimate or personally-compelling reason to be truthful.

To live by truth entails someone valuing truth 'transcendentally' - that is; above, beyond, and more-than the he values the risks and benefits of this worldly gratification. Such an attitude to truth is rare historically, and largely confined to a minority of people in some Christian societies - or those who have been raised with such Christian values. 

Such a minority included scientists from the 1700s to the middle 20th century in Britain; and indeed many academics and scholars in this same period. But there are (so far as I'm aware) no such groups of significant size or influence nowadays.   

Furthermore;  even in these most-selective of truth-driven groups, the strict truthfulness only applied to specific sub-areas of human existence not to life as-a-whole. So - even when scientists were completely honest in relation to their scientific work; they were not so honest, and might indeed be dishonest, in other areas of human life: religion, interpersonal relations including sexuality, money dealings... 

My conclusion is that in a world where abstraction is impossible and unwanted; if we are to attain coherence of thinking that is also sufficiently strong and motivating to dominate our lives - there needs to be a conscious and deliberately-chosen restoration of animistic thinking.

We need - as our bottom line understanding of reality - to regard this actual world as consisting of many living Beings with consciousness and distinctive motivations; engaged in purposive relationships. 

The above argument is based upon pragmatic considerations; but (of course - as I have often said), I believe that ultimate 'metaphysical' reality indeed primarily consists of Beings in relationships; and that abstractions are At Best only secondary, selective and summarized Models of animistic reality.

This is a living universe, created by a personal God; and we would do well to remember and affirm the fact. 

   

Basic metaphysical assumptions - before the Christian

I have been engaged in a discussion in comments at the Orthosphere during which I was invited/ challenged to describe my metaphysical beliefs - expressions of those primary assumptions regarding the ultimate nature of reality; upon which all other discourse depends. 

This is, in the context of blog comments, not really possible. But on reflection, I think that near the basis of my thinking is the understanding of 'creation' as consisting of Beings and the Relationships...

(Beings are alive entities, conscious, and capable of relationships.) 

And the further assumption that Beings are not all that is; because there is also what might be termed negative chaos - which is unformed, unorganized, un-ordered stuff that is neither understandable nor describable.   

I have chosen this group as my metaphysical assumptions because I regard them as a description of what Men spontaneously and naturally believe in our early childhood (and the earliest human societies): that God-given, built-in knowledge. 

In other words, I regard 'animism' (so-called, and in some way) as true. We began believing animism - but passively, unconsciously, without having choice; and our destiny is to return to animism - but this time by active conscious choice.  

Christianity came after animism; but instead of being conceptualized in animistic terms; Christianity has nearly-always been explained by abstractions. 

This abstractly-explained Christianity is an error, and therefore would best be discarded and superseded - and replaced with Romantic Christianity. 

Note: The opposite of this metaphysics about Beings is what I term 'abstraction' - a term that includes all descriptions that ignore or exclude the fact of creation being made-of Beings. Nearly all of traditional and classical philosophy and theology (as well as all of modern mainstream discourse, in all social functions and institutions) falls-into this category of abstraction. Abstraction is fundamentally wrong in all instances - but abstraction may provide those more (or less) useful models of reality by which law, science, technology, medicine etc. are administered. 

The opposite of Abstract is... Personal (*not* 'concrete')

This is the essence of what I am currently trying to get across - a break point with the usual way of considering things.

Abstraction (pretty much) IS Positivism... and Positivism is what we are trying to escape. This, at least, is the case when Positivism is reconsidered as meaning Abstraction.

We start out as Personal - when we are children. As human culture (so far as we know) started out as personal - animistic, anthropomorphic, everything alive, conscious, personal.

Abstraction was introduced by (?) the Ancient Greek philosophers, and it grew initially in and from a situation of unconscious and spontaneous personalism. Thus the AG's advocated abstraction, but they were (by our modern Western standards) very animistic in their thought, behaviour and language (this last being well attested by Owen Barfield in his 1928 book Poetic Diction and elsewhere).

Since then Western Culture has become more abstract and less personal until now public life is wholly abstract - to the point that even in the Mass Media the personal is wholly abstract... that is my interpretation of the identity politics which has taken-over in the past 50 years: even people are now wholly (abstractly) representative of the class/ sex/ non-sex, race, religion of whatever. (As in the foundational feminist phrase The Personal Is Political.)

OK, it may be agreed that modernity is too abstract - a matter of models and symbols... but most people would regard The Concrete as the Opposite of The Abstract; I'm here pointing out that it is the Personal which is opposite.

So we must apparently become Personal instead of Abstract - but, I would emphasise, Not by trying to go back to being unconsciously and spontaneously and passively Personal, like a child or a putative simple hunter gatherer...

This times and in the future it much be a choice, a choice or decision that must be consciously and freely made. We need to decide that Personal is how things Really are: that deep-down and objectively things are ultimately Not abstract, but that they Are instead personal.

So we live in a reality, a universe, a world, where things are persons, things are beings - beings are persons... at bottom and root we have living and conscious beings.

This entails that mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology are not really real; these are (more or less use-full) simplified (= ultimately and always false) models.

(Same applies to the abstractions of managerialism - all those processes, measures, stats and targets - they aren't The Bottom Line they are plain wrong.)

It's a big change I am asking and advocating; but I think this is exactly what is demanded, what we need to do - by divine destiny. It's where we are all going, sooner (this mortal life) or later (after mortal life)... although we can, of course, always deny it; because we can (we are free to) deny anything...

The problem of abstraction - when you get rid of common sense, the mind is open to limitless manipulation; but escape destroys civilisation

The rottenness of our modern world goes very deep. I'm not saying its all rotten - but the strength of modernity derive from its weakness; the early steps are beneficial - but there is a positive feedback at work, and you can't stop after a few steps - and the end of the line is insanity and nihilism.

This is big topic and I will - no doubt - need to make multiple attempts at expressing this insight.  Here goes...

If we start out in the primal situation; people's knowledge is very direct, personal, experiential. We believe things because we have experienced them, or because we have been told them by people whom we believe because they are family. (Kids seem to be naturally credulous, from which I infer that they have an inbuilt expectation of being surrounded by benign people.)

Anyway, as culture becomes more complex, we get socialised into ignoring direct experience, and believing that which is abstract: what comes-down to us from the hierarchy of power, status, wealth. Eventually, what comes-down is what we Must believe; and any direct knowledge which conflicts with this Must be ignored.

The socially-approved abstract is increasingly mandatory, the direct and personal is increasingly forbidden. 

Conversely, the primal situation is again direct - one in which we believe in the soul, pre-mortal existence and continuation of identity post-mortally, beyond death (usually some kind of reincarnation is natural. And, on this basis, resurrection is a specific type of reincarnation-into-divinity) because we personally have experienced these things... we believe in spirits, the supernatural, 'magic' and so on because we know them in our lives.

Then at some point - our society demands that these things must not be believed - because they cannot be directly perceived or (we are told) detected or measured by science. (And, insofar as anybody says they do directly know such things, they Must Be deluded, self-decieved, lying, manipulating, drunk, hallucinating, or just plain crazy.

We must believe in 'science', and since science is nearly-all about things of which we have no knowledge, and are unobservable - this in practice means we must believe 'scientists'...

But who are 'scientists'? Scientists get defined by those with power. And anyway we only know what they say as reported by teachers or the mass media... So yet again we have to ignore direct knowledge and accept what comes-down to us.

My point is that we live in a system that requires we ignore direct knowledge and believe abstract stuff about which we know absolutely nothing. Whatever happens to us, whatever we experience, whatever we work out for ourselves - is, by definition and in advance of any specifics, completely irrelevant.

OK. Now, you may also notice that this system of mandatory abstraction, forbidden direct knowing, once established, can be - has been - subverted to evil. The mandatory abstractions can be... Anything! And no matter what we personally experience or work-out cannot (by advanced definition) ever be challenged under any circumstances.

My first point is that This is precisely and without exaggeration the world we actually live-in, here and now.    

My second point is that if we want to escape this world of abstract lies, we need to reject an awful lot of stuff that we take for granted, and upon which our civilisation depends. 

If we want to escape this world of lies, we need to pull down civilisation as well - because everything that supports and sustains civilisation is susceptible to, is abstract and authority-based; and therefore (now, in this world of demonic domination) always-and-increasingly trending towards evil, ugly, lies.

If the direct and personal is the only escape from open-endedly dishonest abstraction; if civilisation depends on abstraction; we can only escape demonic domination by also (not intentionally, but inevitably) undermining civilisation.

Since all knowledge is incomplete - what is the difference between directly apprehended ('mystical') knowledge and 'communication'?

In response to a recent post - commenter CCL posed an important question about the incompleteness of knowledge. I had asserted that what is known of reality directly and without communication was true; whereas anything communicated was indirect, selective, biased and necessarily untrue.

Yet even the directly-known reality is incomplete, since we have limited capacity for knowledge, limited time and experience - and ultimately because unless we already know 'everything' including all possible relations of things, then we cannot know anything, absolutely.

This analysis would seem to suggest that, since both direct and communicated knowledge are both incomplete - and incomplete in unknowable ways; mystical knowledge is in principle prone to wrongness for similar reasons to communication. It might be inferred that since both are incomplete, and because the entirety the reality can never be know; we can never really know anything about anything!

But this paradoxical conclusion derives from an unstated assumption which is that true knowledge of reality is being defined in an abstract and absolute fashion - and having set-up this abstraction of infinite and perfect knowledge we then find that any actual knowledge is, by comparison with supposed infinite perfection, always and necessarily deficient...

Yet the abstraction of infinite and perfect knowledge has no necessary reality! It is merely something we have said or thought: a ghost - a vague un-understood, indefinable notion which we then find has apparently invalidated even the knowledge that there is such a things as this supposed infinite and perfect reality!

(In other words; even if there was such a 'thing' as infinite and perfect knowledge, how could a finite and falwed creature such as myself or anyone else ever know that it was indeed real and true?)

I realise that such infinite, perfect abstractions have been the bread-and-butter of philosophy and theology for some two and a half thousand years - but neither that duration, nor the great eminence of the names who wrote as if they really solidly understood such abstraction, does not lend them ultimate validity in face of the intractable paradoxes that result from them.

One way that people try to get-around this paradox is to posit a God who comprehends all infinite perfections (the 'omni' God that is infinite in all respects - knowledge, power, presence etc.). But even such an incomprehensible, un-understandable and non-Biblical entity as the omni-God does not overcome the problem of how you and I could know for sure of that God's reality.

The answer is that knowledge is neither absolute, nor infinite, nor perfect; but is always relative to capacity, experience etc. Truth is a full understanding to the limit of our capacity - attained by direct apprehension, or 'mystically' - but our capacity (etc.) for knowledge may increase.

A being of far greater capacity and experience than ourselves - such as God, the creator - is capable of far greater knowledge. And as the capacity and experience of God increases through time, and the work of his children, so God's knowledge will increase.

Since all beings are finite, there is no absolute-truth, knowable solely by abstract definition, lying somewhere infinitely beyond actually-known-truth. Or rather - there is no reason why we must believe, by metaphysical assumption, that this is a correct description of reality.

Let us then assume that knowledge is Not to be regarded as an abstraction (capable of infinite perfection) - and instead assume that Creation consists of actual Beings (alive, conscious, with purposes), including God the creator, in relationships with one another. Let us assume that that is the ultimate reality.

In other words, let us assume that the basic understanding of children (and - apparently - of the most ancient type of tribal societies) has this basically correct; that the true metaphysics is built-into us; and it is our job to become aware of it and to understand it - rather than to reject it in favour of man-made paradoxical abstractions.

Not Process but Provenance - (and Polarity is an abstraction of creative-being)

I have belatedly realised (such things always take me a t-herribly long time) that the modern world is being duped - wholesale - by the fake assertion that process is the ultimate source of validity; whereas in fact provenance is the basis of truth...

Allow me to explain... The (modern, fake...) idea is that 'understanding' of something is a matter of being able to describe it in terms of process; and that correct understanding has happened when process leads to predictable outcomes.

So - the modern activity of professional bureaucratic research that calls-itself 'science' claims that valid results are what come-out-of this process of research, and what comes out of this process is intrinsically valid. Science is regarded as The Process.

But, it would be truer to say (although still an abstraction) that science is what comes-out-of scien-tists; that is, out-of individual human creative-beings whose motivation is scientific. Science is what-(real) scientists-do.

Other examples would be my current obsessions of Primary Thinking and Polarity. I have been having difficulties explaining these, including to myself (especially polarity...). And these difficulties are related to my trying to do this explaining in terms of process - which is an abstraction.  I should instead have been trying to understand them in terms of their provenance.

Yet my explicit metaphysical foundation is that ultimate reality is personal, not abstract - my bottom line is that reality is made up of beings (variously alive and conscious beings). Abstractions are therefore merely models - therefore (being models) always simplified and always incomplete and always not-true... no matter how expedient or useful in limited circumstances.

So, trying to explain Primary Thinking in terms of process is always and necessarily wrong - in reality primary thinking is the thinking of that-which-is-primary: i.e. the thinking of our real self, which is a divine self (a son or daughter of God): a self that is in part existent from eternity.

The thinking of this real self is primary thinking - and the validity of the 'products' of divine thinking comes from that provenance: that is from thinking's origin in the real self. Thought that originates-from the real self is valid, and that provenance is what makes thought valid...

And polarity... I have (following Coleridge and Barfield) tried to explain it abstractly, that is as a model... but polarity so-considered is a process; a process consisting of opposed by inextricable centrifugal (feminine) and centripetal (masculine) elements... and so on. And all processes are abstractions, hence wrong.

So, in the end, polarity has not really been understood. And nobody can make a machine or any other model that 'does polarity'... Only beings do it.

Polarity is an abstract model of creativity, and creativity is done by beings.

The ultimate creativity is to create creators - that is, to pro-create, to have offspring. Thus the ultimate reality, of which polarity is merely an abstraction, is the fertile dyad of man and woman; of two complementary beings.

Other types of creativity (literary, scientific artistic etc) are inextricable from the inclusion of beings - a poem without a person to read/ a symphony without someone to hear it... is not a creative product but merely ink marks on paper.

All creativity entails beings. (And beings entail life and consciousness - of some type and degree.)

That is, creativity is also (like polarity, like primary thinking) a matter of provenance, of source and origin...

So, to return to Primary Thinking - we cannot explain it as a process, indeed that is its nature to be inexplicable as a process - else it would not be primary (and instead 'the process' would be primary).

We know primary thinking by knowing that we do it - more exactly, that we have been-doing it: that our real self has-been-thinking. We cannot look-within the process of primary thinking - because primary thinking is what eventuates-from our real self. We know primary thinking by recognising that it has-eventuated - we recognise primary thinking as a product-of our real self, thinking...

Therefore, the deepest understanding is not of (inevitably incomplete and biased) abstract models of processes; but knowledge of the nature of the beings that constitute reality.


Aside: All this is why and how Christians can correctly regard love as primary in God's creation - which would not make sense if ultimate understanding of creation was of the nature of physics or mathematics. Love is primary because beings are primary - thus ultimate reality is alive, conscious, purposive.  

Does hereditary psychology explain broad cultural types and trends?

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I have for more than a decade been using the three stage division of culture set out by Ernest Gellner into simple hunter-gatherer, agrarian and industrial.

I tend to think that the agricultural phase can also be sub-divided into simple agriculture - such as sedentary gathering of large resources (e.g of shellfish), herding, and slash-and-burn agriculture or gardening to supplement hunting and gathering; and complex agriculture with division of labour and re-use of land in annual cycles.

This economic division is not one of desirability or virtue or goodness - but is based on the degree of division of labour and the potential for efficient extraction of resources, and potential for the size of the culture.

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The divisions and transitions are usually explained in terms of factors such as culture or geography or sometimes religion - but the types of society also correspond to what we know of approximate levels of average general intelligence (measured in terms of IQ); rising from about 50-60 for hunter gatherers; 70-80 for simple agriculturalists; 80-90 for complex agricultural societies (with cities, complex technology etc.); and 90-100 plus for industrial societies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

Of course, the average IQ works as a permissive factor (necessary but not sufficient) and of course a society can be kept at less than the level of potential complexity indicated by its average IQ (since there is also an important role for cultural and geographical and political and religious - or anti religious - factors).

And, more confusingly, this refers to the endogenous nature of a society; the type of society it gravitates toward; and  a society can be raised to a higher level of complexity than is endogenous by an interaction with a more complex society, by drawing-upon the organizational and technological resources of a more complex society.

And (related) hybrid states can result from population mixing between types of society (although whether these gene-pool mixings are sustainable over many generations is unproven - so far they seem temporary phases en route to something else).

So my view is that the increased IQ has a variety of evolutionary causes (e.g. see Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark and the 10,000 Year revolution by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending) - and increased IQ itself, in turn, causes cultural change - including religious transformation.

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And, taking this further, religion is stratified in a similar way.

It is the middling societies, agriculturally-based and with an average IQ of around 80-90, which seem to be the most devoutly religious - whether pagan or monotheistic.

Hunter gatherer societies are animistic, with totemism coming-in with simple agriculture along with larger scale organization and technology - and the industrial societies with high IQ have a very abstract religion tending towards atheism.

As average intelligence in a society becomes higher; so religiousness becomes less spontaneous, less intuitive, less realistic, less supernatural, less personal.

This can even be seen at a relatively fine level of discrimination within Christianity, with a gradient in average IQ among the denominations.

http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2008/02/odd-religions-and-iq-discussion-of.html

http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2007/02/agnostics-are-most-intelligent-if-you.html#c7188995979903167979
 
I think it no coincidence that even in Catholicism, the more rational Roman Catholics tend to dominate higher IQ societies than the more mystical Eastern Orthodox.


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This is all a part of my larger thesis that higher average intelligence drove modernization (including industrialization) - but, mainly due to its effect in weakening spontaneous religiousness, is also destroying it.

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And it is part of my belief that high IQ is a curse as well as a benefit.

The benefits are clear, the curse is not appreciated: indeed, high IQ people pride themselves on their disability.

People with a high IQ (high, that is, by historical and international standards; by which I mean above about 90) should regard themselves as suffering from a mental illness - almost a psychosis - since their perception of the world is so distorted by a spontaneous, compulsive abstraction which is alien to humans.

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But high IQ in and of itself (no matter how supported culturally) cannot lead to endogenous industrialization - modernization requires genius: which requires both high IQ and creativity.

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I have not touched on personality here; but much of what I said about IQ applies also to personality.

Complex agricultural societies provide a strong selective force for re-shaping and taming personality, promoting conscientiousness, docility (reducing spontaneous aggression and violence) and reducing spontaneous creativity.

These are the marks of the 'civilized' personality. 

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This is because creativity is based on the loose, associative, primary process, dream-like mode of thinking which is commoner in children or in lower IQ - for instance this is the style of thinking of 'animism' or shamanism among hunter gatherers. However, creativity alone is not genius - it must be combined with high intelligence which enables fast learning and evaluation of the ideas generated.

And this is why genius is so rare: because creativity and intelligence are reciprocally correlated at the population level, yet both must be present in an individual for genius to happen.

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(That is, the reciprocal correlation between intelligence being considerably less than perfectly linear - there are some individuals in the population who  buck the trend - see H.J. Eysenck's book Genius - where he depicts this graphically. And also see http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-are-modern-scientists-so-dull.html where I deploy these ideas.)

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Therefore the combination at an individual level of high genius and high creativity (i.e. potential genius) is very rare indeed, even in the relatively more creative European populations; but even rarer in the less creative East Asian populations - where creativity has been 'tamed' out of the population.

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Genius is necessary for modernity, for industrialization, because it is genius which produces 'breakthroughs'; and modernity requires frequent breakthroughs in order to outrun Malthusian constraints. 

Europeans produced, in the past, the most geniuses proportionately - but why?

I think it was because European society experienced a powerful and rapid selective force towards increased IQ, which left the creative personality trait more-intact than did the longer and slower selection for intelligence which happened in East Asia.

The longer and slower selection in East Asia led to (even) higher intelligence, but a greater taming/ civilization of the personality. 

Consequently the average East Asian personality is both more intelligent (and more civilized) and less creative than the European.

(However, genius is now apparently a thing-of-the-past - even in the West; and therefore - lacking breakthroughs - modernity will grind to a halt and reverse; indeed this has already begun.)

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We should regard high IQ rather as we regard sickle cell anaemia - a useful specific adaptation to certain specific selection pressures in certain types of society, but one which takes its toll in many other other ways and in other situations.

The most obvious disadvantage of high IQ is reduced fertility when fertility becomes controllable. In the past, any effect of IQ on lowering fertility was minimized by the lack of contraceptive technology, and was (at least in complex agricultural societies) more-than-compensated by the reduced mortality rate of more intelligent people.

So in complex agricultural societies with a high age-adjusted mortality rates, high IQ is adaptive - because reduced death rates have a more powerful effect on the number of surviving children; but in modern industrial societies with low age-adjusted mortality rates then high IQ is maladaptive because reduced birth rates have a more powerful effect on the number of surviving children (especially when fertility rates among the high IQ have fallen below replacement levels).

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-are-women-so-intelligent.html

Clearly, the social selection pressures which led to increased IQ in stable complex agricultural societies have - for several generations - reversed; and the selection pressure is now to reduce IQ in industrialized countries.

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But, fertility aside, the major disadvantage of high IQ (and one which works faster than genetic changes) is the compulsive abstraction of high IQ people.

High level abstraction, while enabling genius, is also mostly responsible for the profound and pervasive spiritual malaise of modernity: for alienation, relativism and nihilism.

This tendency to ARN among individual intellectuals is amplified by IQ stratification and large population size which creates an IQ-meritocracy; within which abstraction becomes compulsive and mutually-reinforcing and finally (in some people) inescapable.

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So that in an IQ-elite the intellectuals are are often proud of their inability to perceive the obvious, and their lack of ability to perceive solid reality, and their compulsive tendency to live in a changing state of perpetually deferred judgment and lack of commitment.

But these are bad traits not virtues; intellectuals should be ashamed of them, and humble about their deficiencies - not proud of the inability to perceive and stand-by the obvious.

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This is why devout, traditional Christianity is the only hope of the West if it is to remain 'the West' (and of East Asia); but devout Christianity is pushing-against the psychological traits of the intellectual elite which have been strengthening in the West since at least the Great Schism of the Catholic church a thousand years ago.

Christianity is the only hope because it is the only religion which has humility as a virtue; indeed at its core.

(Note: Humility is quite different from submission.)

However, it is possible that modernity would not have happened without this pathology of the elite, the pride at the pathologies of abstraction, this celebration of psychotic delusionality - in which case modernity always-was almost-certainly doomed. 

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It is a big ask that the intellectual elite humble themselves and defer to the world view of those with lower intelligence and less civilized (more violent, impulsive and less hardworking) personality.

Of course, it would be for their own good in the long term and overall (and it would, of course, enable their salvation - which they don't believe-in); but still it is a big ask - especially when intellectuals can only perceive the world indirectly (via abstraction) and relativistically.

And, so far, the intellectual elite are choosing the opposite: choosing proudly to celebrate their sickness, their psychotic delusionality, to embrace and to celebrate alienation, relativism and nihilism - indeed, to regard these psychological defects as signs of greater sophistication and more complex culture.

(As indeed they are, in a sense; but so what?).  

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But, most likely, the intellectual elite will continue to base their self-respect on their psychological deficiencies (rather than their strengths), and will continue to lead their societies back to the agricultural cultural stage, or further.

But this is a choice; and at any time (although it is difficult) intellectuals can choose to admit their own weird incapacities.

Of course, part of being a modern intellectual who dwells in a world of shifting abstractions, is to entertain doubts about the reality of free will.

Nonetheless, the mass of people in the world now and throughout history regard free will as a given - just as they regard the soul as a given, and objective reality as a given.

If intellectuals cannot spontaneously perceive such things for themselves - and I certainly find it very difficult - then they need to admit that this is an inability and not a reflection of reality; that this is their problem - and not a problem in the nature of things.

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(Note: I have slightly edited the above in the interests of clarity - and added a few links.)

Soothing abstractions and evasive professions of ignorance

It is a bad habit of Christians (under tough questioning and the stress of pervasive modern evil) when it gets down to specifics; to take refuge in soothing abstractions and professions of ignorance. 

It is a habit that is pretty obvious to atheists (of whom I was one until 2008), and which certainly looks like evasiveness and manipulation.

It is actually worse than that - because for too-many Christians the tough questions are, even At Root, unsure and imprecise, and for unclear reasons - so that their understanding gets fuzzier and weaker the closer they get to fundamentals. 

This is no basis for a tough and real Christian faith. 

For instance - Heaven. Christianity is 'all about' going to Heaven after we die biologically; so you would assume that Christians could answer straightforward and basic questions such as: 'What is Heaven like?' 

After all, how could anyone know that he wanted to dwell in Heaven forever, unless he had a pretty clear idea of what Heaven was like? 

Who is in Heaven - what kinds of people? How is Heaven 'organized'? And what kinds of thing do resurrected people actually Do in Heaven, on a day to day basis? 

What we want and need are simple, concrete, but general answers that avoid incomprehensible abstraction and eschew evasions. Answers that explain clearly what detail is knowable and why, and what is not knowable and why. 

But Christians are much too eager to open the escape hatches, and avoid the embarrassment of properly-answering such questions (or avoid revealing, and to themselves, their own ignorance) by stating that Heaven is beyond human comprehension and too great to be expressible; or to reach for vast, soaring but uninformative abstractions about light, space, oneness, communion...

Or to take refuge in 'negative theology' by saying what Heaven is Not: such as Not angels with wings playing harps and singing hymns to old man with a beard on a golden throne... 

Yet none of this is helpful in answering the question. 

Another example concerns the two big criticisms of Christianity: the problems of free will and evil. 

The problem that if God created everything from nothing and is omnipotent, then ultimately God is and does everything; so there is no space for free will, and God is responsible for all evil as well as all good. 

Christians know that it is essential for their faith to include free will, or else nobody could choose to follow Christ; nor could evil originate from anywhere except God. But they also regard it as essential to state that God created every-thing and is omnipotent. 

If, after 2000 years, Christians still can't explain clearly (without soothing abstractions and squirming evasions) how evil happens in a good world made by one good God; or how a God that supposedly controls everything allows the most extreme evils; then this is a pretty damning indictment. 

Faced with stark contradiction, Christians often seem perceptibly uncomfortable (squirming) - and 'explain' by reaching for abstraction. Yet abstraction is usually trying to answer an easy question by introducing a difficult (perhaps impossible) answer. 

How can we suppose that we have answered a simple and honest question by pointing-at something so difficult to comprehend that it requires further and more-difficult explanation?

The psychological effect is that the answer is not given into order to clarify understanding, but with the effect of obscuring the problem by soothing it away... 

There are several of these soothing abstractions given prominence in Christianity - such as the orthodox, mainstream doctrines of the Holy Trinity.

The tough question is that if Christians claim that there is one God, how can Jesus also be fully divine? Surely that is at least two Gods? And then, what about the Holy Ghost?...

And if Jesus is God, how can he be a Man? If he is a Man, how can he be God? Such obvious questions arose very early in the history of Christianity. 

The 'answer' is a bunch of soothing abstractions or incantations, with the actual effect of hypnotizing the problem away - by restating the problem as a mystery of three in one, and one in three etc. This is an explanation that is not an explanation at all - it is to answer an easy question with an impossibly difficult answer. 

Yet, after 2000 years, this is become a creedal matter, a necessary article of faith; something that is supposed to have been a decisive and final clarification of a problem so obvious a child can see it.

There is a sense that Christians hope that the problem will go-away if they declare it solved - and for many centuries this was actually true. Christianity held-together, despite the feeble answers...

But it is not true now.   

So, most Christians (for 2000 years) have done this kind of thing all the time - resorting to abstraction and ignorance - and about some of the most fundamental matters of faith.

And this is another deep and debilitating weakness of Christianity - which I am sure has contributed to the catastrophic collapse of the past 18 months (i.e. the worst and most rapid reversal of institutional Christianity since its foundation - and if you have not noticed this, then you are in deep trouble).

It has become very obvious that most 'Christians' do not believe what they say they believe; and have actually abandoned their faith...

By contrast, these same 'Christians' are utterly credulous-of, slavishly obedient-to and defensive-concerning... whatever latest lying garbage is being spouted by government officials, advertisers and the mass media. 

But Christianity is true and real, and there are clear and simple answers to all the tough and simple questions. 

But none of the churches will tell you this - and certainly no other institutions will do so. 

Indeed you will need to work the answers out for your-self - because why should you - how should you - trust anybody else in such times?

In such a situation, old style Christian evangelism - pushing the same old abstractions and evasions - is pitiful; and apparently counter-productive with most people.

In these end times; conversion is a matter of sorting things out for yourself and by yourself to attain answers that satisfy yourself. 

All we can realistically do is provide an example of whatever sort can be managed; and encourage others really to think - for and from them-selves. 

And if you get it wrong, you will soon know; because your un-rooted faith will be swept-away like a bubble in the burgeoning torrent of lies and manipulations; and you will be gathered-into the thundering main-stream, heading down the steepening slope towards Hell.

But if you get it right, you will be separated and poised calmly amidst the maelstrom; realities will glow out from among the filth and be drawn to you (and you to them)... You will inwardly be sustained, energized and en-couraged. 

When you have answered the vital questions to your tested-satisfaction; you can navigate irresistibly through this bedeviled world. 

You can navigate towards a Heaven that you already understand well-enough to desire; eternally to participate in divine creative work that you yearn to join-with; following a Jesus whom you know sufficiently to love.