Fake Young People

I took the title for this post from Bruce Charlton's recent discussion about old age, and the lack of lived wisdom that comes through in our culture. While I don't think elders were ever extensively revered to youth culture in the modern West, I do believe there were was a time when there were pockets of individuals that were able to transmit a certain degree of cultural inheritance that had significant influence. There was a reciprocity in this intergenerational relationship where the older generation was seen as valued as they bequeathed their life long gifts to the younger generation. But today, much of this has diminished as all generations are complicit in their denial of what is truly wise.

First, the older generation has refused to age gracefully. Instead, they fight it on every level. They make every attempt to keep their bodies young through strenuous exercise, health remedies, and cosmetic surgery. Sexual decline is manipulated through drugs. Recreational time is spent on travel, frivolous activities, and socializing. Their minds defer to youth culture, and the need need to “always stay young” by being in touch with whatever is novel. Instead of inspiring wisdom for the youth, it inspires pure vanity. The young will comment about how so-and-so looks great for their age, and yet it does little to impart any purpose for growing older other than making every attempt to delay the appearance of it. (sidebar: I speak from personal experience on this, as I am guilty of some of this vanity.)

The younger generation, although more innocent in regards to time, have their part to play. As they've grown up with internet culture, generational hierarchies of respect and reverence have collapsed. Images have taken over deep ideas. The youth are more prone to learn from memes and video clips than from perusing books. And if they read anything, it is rarely the classics. It's not that they stay outside of any ideas, it is more like they have become indoctrinated into the shallow ideas that permeate the stream of culture. Every so often, a viral father figure like Jordan Peterson will appear on the scene and inspire something that has been lost. Still, this needs to be made more pervasive for the impact to be enduring.  

Jacques Barzun once articulated as to what makes a nation. He says, “A large part of the answer to that question is: common historical memories. When the nation's history is poorly taught in schools, ignored by the young, and proudly rejected by qualified elders, awareness of tradition consists only in wanting to destroy it.” It does seem this is what we are up against on a socio-political scale. How are we to impart tradition if those with experience don't live it themselves?

It seems getting older should really be about embracing the transition—instead of struggling against it—all while cultivating and deepening our spiritual, intellectual and moral growth and maturity. Only through embodying any sort of depth, will we be able to inspire it. Chesterton said, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” If we really want to be alive and youthful, we really need to, as David Bentley Hart once quipped about wisdom: recover our innocence at the far end of our experience! We can do this not by being pompous or didactic towards our ideas about life, but by being possessed by faith and reason.

We all know getting old isn't easy. We may see health issues begin the creep in, we lose attention from others as our appearance dulls, we may find ourselves lacking energy, and we tire of the need to keep up appearances that may have led us astray from what we really wanted. So it's easy to see where curmudgeonliness, shame, and regret can take hold if we are not centered! Or maybe we have been too enamored with our life's successes and refuse to allow for our demise. The bottom line is getting old is truly a time to prepare for death. It doesn't mean we stop living, but the finiteness of time gives us urgency towards life's significance. 

Despite all our advances it health care technology, we are still given a finite amount of time—and that has been the case for thousands of years. The Bible says explicitly, “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years.” If you look at today's life expectancies, we have not moved too far off this scale. It is as if the human body has a generally defined time limit. So while youth may be wasted on the young, do we really want to allow old age to be wasted on staying fake young? It may be better we accept our days remaining and use them to impart our traditions and gifts among the youth who can truly hear/see, and prepare our transition to God's eternal home. 

Persons as Mystery (and Not Problems to Be Solved)

Frank Sheed says, “A Mystery is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an inexhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be water for the mind's thirst.”

Persons are mysteries. They are not questions to be solved, or an ambiguities to the resolved. If they were, that would mean persons would be like problems that could be finitely determined. As such, that would end thought as well as the creative impulse to understand and wonder. It doesn't mean a person can't be understood, but like any mystery it can't be understood completely. There is something to a person that is inexhaustible and endlessly knowable. 

Today's secular world loses sight of this. Instead it prefers to see persons in terms of collectives or groups of collectives. This undermines the dignity of the person, and reduces the freedom he/she has to choose good and evil. We are very good at hiding this, because acknowledging sinful choice requires something of us. As Stanley Jaki notes about having sin move to the background: “moral responsibility is dulled so that sinful acts may not cause psychic trauma if they do not cause physical discomfort.”

As such, persons are seen as dependent on impersonal forces around economic conditions, social constructions, and systemic prejudices. Since persons are determined by outside forces, the mystery gets lost. Persons are now problems to be solved, where creativity gets stifled as these solutions can be seen simplistically through the eyes of packaged ideologies. Is this justice served, or just an approach to solve a problem and move on?

There is no doubt that modernity requires something of us to solve issues. After all, the whole impulse is about the perfectibility of man. But man can not be perfected when the mystery won't allow for monocausal origins. Moreover, social ills are always deeper than the materialistic plane will allow for.    

Rod Dreher notes,

“What we call social justice today, in a contemporary secular way, defines itself wholly in materialistic terms. The individual becomes nothing more than a bearer of his identity, within the cosmology of identity politics. Justice is determined mechanically, as if judging the affairs of men was no different than herding sheep or sorting butterbeans. Social justice, understood in this way, becomes monstrous.” 

Our material problems are truly spiritual solutions. As such, we need to recover the deeper metaphysic of persons as mystery, with the dignity to make choices and that those choices are rooted in something beyond the person himself. It does not mean that our choices will resolve the problems we endure, but that the nature of what we endure has meaning beyond the choice.

Living Not By Lies, Dying to Know Truth

Spending holidays with family is good way to know what ground you stand on. Sometimes it feels a tad shaky, but when you hear something that doesn't sit well with Reality you can find yourself standing up straight pretty quickly. I suppose that's what gets us closer to Truth, as it only happens some of us when we get a whiff of lies. Apparently, that's how it happened to Chesterton when he met someone with nihilistic tendencies he coined as the Diabolist. If we met this guy today, he'd probably be too commonplace to notice, and yet Chesterton was shocked enough by him that it propelled him to know its opposite—the Good and the True.

Chesterton was also astute to fact that the Good and True needed to be recognized through the veneer of cultural ideas of moral superiority: “We are altering, not the evils, but the standard of good which is the only standard by which any evil can be detected and defined.” Today's woke progressives adhere to the idea the good is redeemed by acknowledging privilege and demanding normalization and redemption to the marginalized. The evil is baked in the half-truths to the notion that justice can only be served to those victimized in group identities over the individual and universal. Therefore the system must be in control to serve justice—since nothing else can be: not I, not God. 

How does this differ from Chesterton's standard of Truth: which is always consistent, changeless, distinctive, whole, and of course, good!? Well for one thing, his version of Truth is so much more freeing! Yes, we know the Truth will set us free; however, the inverse is almost more important, in that in order to find Truth, we must be free to begin with. Sadly, the soft totalitarianism of cancel culture does not permit this to be the case. Since the system is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and fill in your favorite marginalized group phobia here, you are not allowed speak out of line with the tolerant (ironically intolerant) woke that knows best. (I suppose if your foundational pillars are fragile, then best to rule out disagreeing voices that may blow them over.)

Chesterton distilled some other essentials about Truth: that it is fun to put those ideas to the test and “that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy” (when does this ever happen with the left?). 

As such, it would seem to me the Truth should be on the short list of things worth preserving in this world. So that takes us to Rod Dreher, whose book Live Not By Lies takes on this very topic. Once we know Truth, we need to protect it, or conserve it (hence, the political movement known as conservatism). But it appears this is the least of our worries since we now don't understand ourselves “to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who travelled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness as the ultimate goal.” Hence, our values have become more therapeutically driven, and therefore very few are prepared to suffer for what matters.

Dreher notes, “We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.” This is the nature of soft totalitarianism—it does not terrorize us into surrendering our wills to the state like its harder form does—instead it lures us in with the therapeutic promises that will permit one a shallow happiness.

But real happiness requires more. We must love (and want to redeem) our neighbor, but as they are in the likeness of God. Unlike the woke social justice of today that divides LGBTQ+, BIPOC, women, and white European males, “Christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people—rich and poor alike—to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with Christ.” 

The answer to this problem is a spiritual one: it starts with acknowledging the sin in each of us, the gift of suffering, and the gratitude for existence. Once we know this, we can die for it.

From Common Sense to Collective Non-Sense

Tocqueville famously said, “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.” It's a good insight to a country that once put its emphasis on common sense realism. Yes, the intellectuals can explain things better, but it does not mean they have the depth to understand Truth. Take Rousseau, Marx, Foucault—good intellectual masturbators, bad lovers of Reality. In fact, the intellect is quite the trickster and can take us further away from Reality. 

I'm reading this short, but interesting book by Robert Curry called Common Sense Nation. So what exactly do we mean by common sense? It's true some may say what's common sense for you is not the same for me (especially if you studied in a left-leaning humanities department). In capturing the what we believe to be fundamentally true—or the axioms necessary for us to reason—we are pulling from and formed by many sources. Some of us these apriori sources are from lived experience, tradition, sentiments, observations, and culture. There are also the more innate sources of our conscious if we are open to our deeper instincts and intuitions. All of these aspects are prior to even philosophy—consider this the basis of Reason (of the whole person) verses reason (as just the intellect). 

And just because you can't really say it eloquently, does not mean you don't know it elegantly. I recall Rudolf Steiner, having been born into a working class family, never lost his appreciation for the lives of the common folk and for what he called the “peasant wisdom.” He often saw more wisdom in the peasantry than he did among intellectual elites, where he found too much arrogance and a lack of open heartedness and simplicity.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila says it best: “Reality can not be represented in a philosophical system.” Or at least not the way philosophy is depicted these days. There is a way to philosophize that goes beyond mere intellectual rumination—where we turn our view towards the totality. Josef Pieper discusses this as a philosophy with a Christian orientation—which was never based on a system, but a Person:

 “Christian philosophy is more complicated because it does not permit itself to arrive at "illuminating" formulations through ignoring, selecting, or dropping certain areas of reality; and this is because, placed in a fruitful state of unease through its glimpse of revealed truth, it is compelled to think more spaciously and, above all, not to be content with the superficiality of any rationalistic harmony.” 

But the bad news is we eventually got away from sensibilities that were common, and educated people in more sophisticated theories of rationalistic harmony—and often even disharmonious. Take today, the individual with agency and universal values as objective truths have been undermined by the idea that we are impotent to external forces (the “system”). We are all now just victims of social constructions. The only way out is to dismantle the system, and subjugate the individual to the new utopian power grab. 

Curry lists out some of the self-contradictory premises that has resulted from postmodernists, which in turn, often creates problems not based on reality... 

• On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad. 
• Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.
• Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others. 
• Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows, and opposing views are not tolerated.

Friedrich Hayak once said, “The savage is not solitary, and his instinct is collectivist.” The irony of “progress” through postmodernism is that is has turned us back, away from our common sensibilities and without the gratitude for the fruits it bore. Moreover, collectivism is contrary to common sense realism, as it counters the spontaneous creative order and wisdom in existence. The new borg is taking shape, and soon resistance will be futile.

Unfinished Business

We are always unfinished. Since we are finite beings, we can never be complete since only that which is Infinite is complete. But maybe Frank is finished...

I got a charge out of watching this video. It takes dharma hootspa to put yourself out there, and display your firewarts and all along the path. But is Frank really 100% complete... Enlightened, Cooked?

He certainly did have a breakthrough to the Infinite. It appears his channels are opened up and he is no longer the sole doer. He may now has aligned his will to the Will of the Absolute; however, he is still a human being.

The cross best represents us as a point on the vertical and the horizontal. We are always unfinished morally, intellectually, and aesthetically as we are often encountering changes that requires us to adapt to the circumstances. There is an awakening to the transcendent—a realization! And before and after we also awakening our minds to new ideas, we're awakening to inhabiting new ways of being with others, we're also awakening to more mature ways of building our character. But maybe this is easier if we exhaust the seeker, or maybe not.

Take Georgia.... 

She may not be awakened in the transcendent sense, but she seems to have awakened to the façade of certain ideologies she had been indoctrinated into. I myself have been on this road and it took years to see through it. It does seem this sort awakening has to go beyond the intellect. There is something deeper for us to intuit, similar to how we can also open to the transcendent, but not necessarily the same. 

How we get there can't always be determined by just the facts. I recently read a couple compelling books, here and here, as to how applied postmodernism is undermining truth in the quest to be politically correct—where critical theory, feelings, anecdotes, and platitudes are taking the front and center. The authors fall into the secular classical liberalism camp and therefore focus on objective truth based on science, which is objective on one plane; however, never filling in the entire story on all planes. We have to leap beyond the information where we can find a unity of knowledge that coheres and integrates. And in order for this to occur, we need to inhabit an epistemic humility to what we don't know.

Human reason is not always transparent to itself. In fact, the point of departure where we stand on something lies buried in the unconscience or preconscious. To change that worldview, always requires an awakening or the faith to be open to reality. 

Sadly, more diverse ideas do not necessarily bestow more truth, as many clever concepts can take us further away from Truth. But there can be metaphysical complementaries to ideas; freedom and equality being one set—and each side can be distorted through libertarianism and leftism. But the tensions need to exist in their essence, as to meld all ideas to one would be its own form a totalitarian stasis. The dynamism comes in the polarities—that are not to be negated—but can be lived differently from a higher order. As to where we lean will always be a reflection of our imprint that is brought to bear in this existence.

The Concentric Center

In perusing David Walsh's terrific book, you would find that he approaches the transcendent through an existential lens that is based on no particular tradition for much of the read. Until you get to one section that he titles “Christ is Center”. This is where some folks may roll their eyes, and say to themselves this has become a Trojan horse, and it's not for me. After all, “There is no stupid idea which modern man is not capable of believing, as long as he avoids believing in Christ” (Dávila).

Walsh says “the mode by which we recognize the truth of any of the revelatory traditions: their symbols resonate with and extend our own experiences. We not only confirm them, they confirm us.” We are always beginning from experience! Even Reasoning is not just information processing—it's really an existential thing. And yet “experience is only half of experience” (Goethe). If we're too closed off upon ourselves, we'll have the horizontal experience of life—without the richness that grounds and elevates it. It is only in knowing the verticality of transcendence that makes all other experience possible.

So back to the Christ is Center idea. Walsh elaborates, 

“More than a teacher and a symbol pointing toward a reality, Christ is the reality itself. This is the defense of the historical Jesus. It makes all the difference in the world to realize not only that the divine suffering of evil is the path of redemption, but the fullness of that participation of the God in the suffering of evil has historically taken place.”  

The experience of the horizontal and vertical have been consummated through a face—and our participation in that divine nature has happened in a particular time and place; and radiates over the whole of history. “As such, it is the center from which its influence extends throughout human existence from beginning to end.”

I do believe Walsh pulls from Karl Rahner here in the move from the generic experience of the sacred to the specificity of what God has disclosed to us in the form of revelation. The experience matters, but it is also disclosed as the story that completes all stories. This does not discard other spiritual traditions. “The mystery of the plurality of sources of revelation continues even when the fullness of revelation has occurred.” Christ does not depart from these sources, but only fulfills them. If there one thing that does present us with something more complete, it is nature of God coming for us as us. The flesh and blood draws us in inwardly through his presence in time and beyond time. While the “transfiguration process is complete”, there is also “the patient unfolding of its mystery over time.”

So while the Center holds it all together, there is a plurality of symbols that extends the transcendent through all cultures and individuals within history. While the explanations may be abundant in their interpretations, “there would not even be such a phenomenon if there were not first a sense of that higher reality whose attraction draws us in its pursuit.” The drama of this recognition occurs at a point in time with Jesus, and is recapitulated in its ongoing occurrence right in this moment as Christ.

Guarding Ourselves from the Mystery with Secularism

Change is happening all the time, and always against the backdrop of something changeless. That's why Truth is both revealed as always-known and recapitulated as ever-new. We understand something to be absolute and eternal, yet how that gets creatively expressed can be brought to light in many forms. There are as many ways to manifest Truth as there are people to bear it. The problem these days there are less who can handle the Truth!

So instead of surrendering to the self-mastery that Truth requires, we chase shadows of Truth that may have some partiality to it while manipulating us further from it. At best we can find merit with the impulse towards something beyond oneself. David Walsh notes that,

“each generation begins with the same faith in the goal for which it seeks and struggles to explain its inspiration to itself. The fact that none of the accounts becomes definitive does not signify failure. In each of them living contact is made with the source of the movement that underpins them. By straining toward the transcendence of reach we gain a greater sense of its reality.”

We may not know what we need, but we know somehow we're not going to come by it through what we want. We may aim for the peak experiences of everyday life as the final goal, when those were only unveiled to get us beyond our material selves. Instead, we scatter about chasing states and erecting idols who can inhabit them for us. How many human relationships have been invested with such a burden too heavy to bear? How many ideologies have been fabricated by political leaders to create the illusion of paradise on Earth as a pursuit? Since we are restricted to our material selves, we can't do anything but to institute happiness through secular goods unto ourselves and others. Despite these utopian impulses, “we are not made to attain a paradise within time.” Moreover, if we remove human weakness, are we “also removing human beings as well?” The point to what draws us deeper to the horizon of the inexhaustible mystery of transcendence was never to put our finger on it in this world, but to point us toward the goal that is beyond all finite characterizations. “If we focus too insistently on the attainment of our final fulfillment in the here-and-now, then we will distort the meaning of all lesser goods.”

As finite beings we must work within our pregiven limits or we will just fall prey to endless choices of incoherent self expression. “In every moment we remain free, although never utterly free of all direction.” The secular modern project ensures that is our right as autonomous human beings buffered from anything but our reasoning selves. We think we create our own meaning! And yet, the “illusion that we could from a superior vantage point critique all positions had proved a cruel self-deception.” And by thinking “we could see through all things we ended by no longer having anything to see.” We are free to respond to existence and the order that it is given, but we can't create existence. “Our freedom is a drama enacted between the poles of certainty and uncertainty.”  

“The more we respond to the glimmerings that at first attract us faintly, the more they become beacons of light irradiating the path before us with unanticipated intensity.” We are never completely autonomous, as grace will always impel in ways we will never fully understand. We can always reject it in defiance and to assert our autonomous will, but ironically that only will restrict our true freedom even more so.

Change will happen, but for it to be true progress (or transformation for ourselves and our loved ones), it always must happen against the backdrop of some ultimate standard. Otherwise, it is just change, but to what ends? “When there is no divine judge to measure our actions, then all restraints we choose to impose are merely arbitrary: everything is permitted. ... What enables us to judge the gap between ideal and reality is that we continue to possess the reality of the ideal.” But we can't force this ideal as gods, as that will only reduce us to less than persons. We must see through our manipulation of truth, to be available for the Truth that was available in the beginning!

As Walsh says,

“Not being gods, we can acknowledge God and receive from him the gift of participation in the divine life. Once freed from the impossible burden of providing our own meaning to ourselves, we can accept the surpassing divine outpouring of reality. By accepting the gift of transcendent life as our goal we have at the same time received the gift of meaning within this life.”

* All quotes are from David Walsh's excellent book Guarded By Mystery. I can't recommend this book highly enough!

I Don't Trust You, And I Won't Verify Why

Science is powerful tool, but today it appears to be threatening to certain segment of society. If you have a poor narrative that you live by, and the data doesn't speak for it, then the data gets tossed out. Now for that matter, the baby gets tossed out too. After all, science was created by some privileged European dudes. So what do they know? They never suffered victimhood or belonged to disenfranchised tribe. 

So retro-elitists like Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton should have known better what wokeness would have come to light in 2020. But instead they focused on concepts like observation, skepticism, making hypotheses, and testing & experimentation. So much for these twits.

But without error correction to our ideas, we are doomed to failure. Error correction is the basis for science, as well as everything we do. We all have biases and misinformation, so being vigilant through scientific tools is necessary to break away from what we believe to be true to knowing what we don't know.  

But there is one area where the postmodernists may have a point on the shortcomings of science: once we leave the harder sciences (STEM) and move to the softer sciences (social sciences), it is harder to determine causation. We have now entered the territory of studying the human being in all his or her magnificent glory interacting within society, and when it's all said and done, it can be a cluster f--- to figure us out. 

Here we find the power of science is in isolating variables and finding one key relevant factor that changes the game. We now know that the more Trump speaks, the more people get infected with Covid. Or maybe that is just a correlative. But never mind, facts fit narrative so it must be true!

The reality is the challenges we face in society involve massive multi-variable systems. Not to mention, science has little to say of the moral, ethical or spiritual sense of what guides our inner selves. So if free will can't be isolated to a variable, then what good is it to the scientist. 

“The problem with science is that without rules that generalize from experience, we have nothing more than a catalog of data, but inductive evidence can never tell us with certainty that our generalizations are correct” (Manzi). So we gotta start with some ideas—which means you can never remove the scientist from the science. This was Polanyi's big point: all knowing is personal. 

And as we move from physics, to biology, to human behavior, causal density increases significantly to the point where we land on a mass of (almost) free willing persons within multi-complex systems. And at that's when the scientist is going to have to make a stand somewhere—and where some reliable tacit knowledge (through tradition and experience) is going to have to be invoked where trail and error has no place.

That's also why error correction can't stop with the science, but must be part of the process of the scientist themselves. We must always be aware of the intelligibility and coherence of the converging principles he or she is working from. Otherwise, we can be left with skewed data (flawed by omission more than commission) shoehorned into a correlated narrative that may be counter to reality.  

Still, where the postmodern woke go wrong is we will always need to trust the tools and the tooler, as long as we verify too. We need to make sure the thesis/conclusion is cohesive and non-contradictory while the person proposing it is worthy of belief in their proposal. And while science is never the end of the story, it can scaffold us closer to a higher truth. But without the tools of science all together, we can easily regress to impulsive idiots.

“When we do science, we reject the Aristotelian idea of “essence,” but when we think about what we love, essence is everything. So, we need to think strategically while remaining aware of our ignorance, and we need to exploit the power of trial and error while remaining aware of the essence of what we are trying to protect.” — Jim Manzi

Protest Thyself, Too!

“A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk is but a tickling cymbal, where there is no love.”  — Francis Bacon

We live in interesting times. Come on, they are always interesting. But maybe not always so crazy. What has happened to our inverted culture? Psychological projections run amok “the other.” The media has us believing there is racial brutality everywhere. Education has us believing we should self loath for perpetuating this brutality. Guilt is all abound, and the white person becomes a slave to a narrative of self-abasement. Black people are used as ponds to get approval and alleviate this pain for the white person. It does nothing for black people, and it creates a culture of victimization. It also allows the virtue-signaling white “noble sufferers” to wield power and control. The white sufferer can now be empowered to bully others for their perceived complicity. It's a viscous cycle that is divorced from data (facts) where things are not so bad in reality, but evidently pretty bad in our heads.

I have never been called to protest that much. While I may not be civic in nature, when it comes to protests it's rather I don't feel authentic in group fear mongering. It's often a collective indoctrination for those who can't think for themselves, or an outlet for those that need to project infantile emotions that can't be moderated in a silent room. 

All in all, it's mostly a misuse of energy.

Paul Tillich acknowledged we are always projecting, but he also acknowledged there is a Screen we can't project. But it seems we forgot about this: “Imagine a 10 x 10 x 10 foot room. In the center is a 1 x 1 x 1 foot cube. All the Insanity in the World is in the Cube. I am this Cube. But even more Importantly, I am the Room” (anonymous social media post).

The Screen or the Room is the focal point that shows how divided we are, not just among each other, but mostly in our own hearts. We are all complicit to Sin; however, we are never going to alleviate our transgressions until we take a good heart look at ourselves.

Thomas Merton noted, “If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” It's not just about the police, Trump, America's history, or white people. There is something deeper within the human condition: the ability to inflict harm onto ourselves and others is part of history and it has never been isolated to one group. All ethnicities, races, creeds and skin colors have “practiced” it.

All our ancestors, over thousands of years, have dealt with minority status in one form of another. Those in power have corrupted, as that is what power does when it is in the hands of the fallible human. The difference is from where we identify with this fallenness: are we the weight of history, or do we bear the weight of history? And from Whom can save us from it.

Complacent Gadflies

Our ancestors from ancient and medieval times always had a preexisting tragic view of life, and not a therapeutic view of life that people have today. And that tragic view of life assumes we are here to struggle for a finite time of existence, and therefore risk and loss are always part of life. Shit happens, and we die (and we definitely die so we'd be better to live from that context).

In recent times, we've have so much comfort made available to us to the point where many can't relate to struggle. When that happens, you're also less likely to assume any risk and more willing to transfer it to the state. We can see it with this pandemic. I'm not going to risk getting this virus (assuming I can), and the government better protect me with as much security and safety it can (or it can't...hence the looming debt crisis we are creating). This isn't austerity, but recklessness. And it doesn't make for a resilient and dynamic society in the long run.

In all this pursuit of comfort, we have fallen into an underlying restlessness. Ross Douthat discusses this from the angle of decadence. And decadence may not always look the way you'd expect. We may think that a decadent society would eventually fall into utter chaos and evil, but it seems it's more likely it would fade into whimper of cultural and economic stagnation.

Douthat notes, “A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that just makes the same movies over and over again might be. A society run by the cruel and arrogant might not be decadent; a society where even the wise and good can’t legislate might be. A poor or crime-ridden society isn’t necessarily decadent; a society that’s rich and peaceable but exhausted, depressed, and beset by flares of nihilistic violence looks closer to our definition.”

So we may not see the dystopian apocalypse played out in so many films, but something much more boring. Let's even consider this current lock-down playing out: it is painfully dull. 

This even explains all the outrage culture and tribal polarization, mostly playing out in the online world (even before the pandemic). 

“In an age online frenzy, there is an understandable fear that some kind of cultural-political cascade will carry our society downward into a similar kind of civil strife. But it may be that the nature of our decadence, our civilizational old age, makes that scenario unlikely, and that our problem is a different one: that our battles are sound and fury signifying relatively little; that even as it makes them more ferocious, the virtual realm also makes them more performative and empty; and that online rage is just a safety valve, a steam-venting technology for a society that is misgoverned, stagnant, and yet ultimately far more stable than it looks on Twitter” (Douthat).

The real issue with decadence is the inability to see our lives are more than about us. There has to be something more to live for than our own safety or comfort. If that's our primary aim (safety first!), then we lose our ability to truly be creative, resourceful, and resilient. We live in fear of losing the material things that matter least, and never aspire to the immaterial riches that matter most once we lose those material things anyways.

UK Post-Punk Soul Sounds — 80's Style!

Time for a lighter post. When I look at my musical preferences, much of it seems a bit eclectic, but I've never been accused of being musically sophisticated or drawn to technical proficiency. I often find myself gravitating to soulful, majestic melodies and off-beat song structures that move me viscerally. I'm also guilty of a romanticized, wistful nostalgia that can verge on sentimentalism on my worst days.

The blue-eyed soul/synthpop sounds of the UK also fell into a romanticized nostalgia for the 1960's R&B soul music that originated in the states and before making its way over the pond. In the 1980's, this movement was located primarily in Northern England, and eventually made its way to other parts of the UK while taking on other influences from jazz, funk, reggae, and punk.

This refashioned post-punk soul sound in the UK had less divide between black/white music/musicians than the US at the time. Certainly many of the blue-eyed musicians took on front and center, but there were always more diverse musical lineups supporting these acts. I just want to highlight a few gems that come to mind...

The king of the mod revival in 80's (a subculture movement unto itself that had more emphasis around jazz, scooters, and 60's fashion) was Paul Weller. Certainly his work with The Jam and his solo stuff continues to inspires generations, but it was his diversion to the more soul-ridden The Style Council that caught my attention. You take a song like “Shout to the Top,” and you'll find an urgent rhythm filled with gorgeous melodies and high-caliber craftsmanship. I never tire of this song, and it's always a highlight at his live performances:

I actually first heard about Orange Juice after reading Simon Reynold's Rip it Up and Start Again since they did not have much exposure in the US. Reynolds says, “Orange Juice talked and acted in ways that broke with rock's rebel swagger and postpunk's militant solemnity. They were literate, playful, witty, camp.” As I explored their music, I found myself loving Edwyn Collin's infectious voice, and the jaunty jangle guitars and choppy rhythms. Their debut single “Falling and Laughing” draws you with its unabashed romance and Collin's shy and sensitive vocals. It's so pure in its sacred confession for love: 

More recently, I watched this short film about Dexy's Midnight Runners that explored all the incarnations of Kevin Rowland's band and various projects. I've always enjoyed their music in the early 80's, more specifically their first major hit “Geno” and the album “The Celtic Soul Brothers” that contained the mega-hit “Come On Eileen.” But I was less familiar with their follow-up commercial failure, 1985's “Don't Stand Me Down.” In this project, Rowland got away from his Irish vagabond look from the prior album, and decided to take on an investment banker like appearance. In the following delicious 12 minute song, “This is What She's Like” there are these interesting comical dialogues that take on subjects like the ruling class, while at the same time trying to cheekily be a part of it. The song maintains this epic quality of high-energy folksy violins & mandolins and soulful vocals that has been a staple in much of his work. This is probably a forgotten classic:

Covid Conspiracies and the New Age of Mistrust

Crisis brings out the best and worst in us, so why should this pandemic be any different. What is different these days is our relationship to trust. Because if you can't trust in God, then you certainly can't trust yourself. And then forget trusting all the other authority figures out there. And that's not the say some authority figures, like public health experts, can't be wrong. In fact, they're often wrong! But to see it through the lens of deception, paranoia, and deluded hubris says more about the viewer than the viewed. 

This article (‘Conspirituality’ — the overlap between the New Age and conspiracy beliefs) by Jules Evans hits on some high points on this topic. We see the makers of 5G, along with Bill Gates, are part of a global eugenics plot by the Illuminati puppet masters. And forget about the forthcoming vaccine that may mitigate measures, as that is part of the plan to inject nano-surveillance devices in all of us. I do have give kudos for such far reaching imaginations, albeit distorted ones at that.

And here comes the nub of the issue: we have undermined the sober metaphysics of traditionalism for the intoxicated magical-thinking of paganism. Whether it's the pollyannaish view that we are the chosen ones to usher in a new global consciousness, or a pessimistic view that we are the clever few who are on to the Establishment's plot to take humanity down, it all comes down to a lack of trust in a unifying God—where good and evil is seen within ourselves rather than between ourselves.

It's not that New Agers don't believe in God, they've just reduced Him into a silent partner. Mix in some ‘benign schizotypy’ that is validated through internet culture, and you've got a religion of disorder.

Thomas Merton was on to this back in his day before all of this craziness, when he said:

“The notion of dogma terrifies men who do not understand the Church. They cannot conceive that a religious doctrine may be clothed in a clear, definite and authoritative statement without at once becoming static, rigid, and inert and losing all its vitality. In their frantic anxiety to escape from any such conception they take refuge in a system of beliefs that is vague and fluid, a system in which truths pass like mists and waver and vary like shadows. They make their own personal selection of ghosts, in this pale, indefinite twilight of the mind.” 

Merton then goes on to say that: “They take good care never to bring these abstractions out into the full brightness of the sun for fear of a full view of their unsubstainability.” That may have been true in his time, but certainly not now. Today, their lack of modesty is taken over by an overzealous pride—albeit sometimes couched in the anonymity of debased social media chatter. 

Such hubris by conspiracy types is used to overcompensate for their fragile relationship to Truth. Without a vertical authority, they have no leg to stand on since there is no Source of intelligibility holding them up. As such, these views are often fragments of a disordered mind that can not rest in a Father's trusting embrace.

Free to Be an Island Unto Ourselves or Be with God

David Walsh says, “Men generally know what they should do; they simply refuse to do it.”

It's like we are condemned to Truth and to distort it at the same time. It's probably like the song says: if loving you is wrong, [then] I don't want to be right. And I've chosen the wrong on more occasions I want to admit outside the sacrament of reconciliation.

Often the deep answers to life are not complicated, but rather simple. That doesn't mean they are easy. We have many competing interests and motivations, sometimes conscious and sometimes not, taking on our deeper conscious. We'd often rather fight or flight than fall in line in Truth. And there is no good reason for it.

Walsh notes, “The deliberate choice of darkness and self-destruction, in the face of the appeal toward light and self-actualization, knowing full well the futility of the choice as incapable of changing the outcome, is a radical unintelligibility.” Yes, I think that's a fancy a way of reiterating Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

And yet, sinners gonna sin.

Moreover, this “discloses the precarious character of our exercise of freedom.” From the get go, our freedom in never really autonomous. We are always responding to something beyond our control—such as a pandemic or a crazy girlfriend or a nasty tweet. Sometimes these forces can even be supernatural, making the need for grace to be every more present. Yet, man has a funny way of picking himself by his bootstraps to attain a haughty self-sufficiency. Grace be damned, he thinks.

Thomas Merton says, “We get tired of this “faith” that does not do anything to change reality. It does not take away our anxieties, our conflicts, it leaves us a prey to uncertainty. It does not lift all responsibilities off our shoulders. Its magic is not so effective after all. It does not thoroughly convince us that God is satisfied with us, or even that we are satisfied with ourselves (though in this, it is true, some people's faith is often quite effective).” Which just goes to show you, that our freedom is “a drama enacted between the poles of certainty and uncertainty” (Walsh). So we'd rather be an island unto ourselves—where we can be certain of our insanity rather than be uncertain of a God who is with us.

The first choice always has to be taken alone. Walsh insightfully expounds,

“The mystery between our freedom and and the knowledge that structures and directs it is that the latter emerges only to the extent that it is actualized. The more we respond to the glimmerings that first attract us faintly, the more they become beacons of light irradiating the path before us with unanticipated intensity. A reality that had previously seemed to offer us unlimited choice now works to constrain us within its imperious demands. Not that we ever lose the capacity to turn our backs on the higher life that calls us. But the more we respond in fidelity to its appeal, the less attractive the option of closure appears to us. We have been “captured” by the strength of that higher reality. The option of turning aside is always there, but why would we want to exercise it when it means the loss of the only reality that counts? A human soul grows to the point that it begins to measure itself and all that it does in light of the truth of that higher reality. Rejection can still occur, but what can pull us back to a life of falsehood and meanness? The attraction of virtue and the emptiness of vice have become unmistakably clear, to the point that we might even say we have no choice.”

The first choice becomes the no choice, indeed. Our free will becomes Thy will.

God Going Viral

“Let me not squander the hours of my pain” — Rilke

So how does an existential event like this impact me? Sure, there is the anxiety and fear. But here are the gifts: reconciling with an estranged father, reconnecting with old friends and girlfriends, checking in with neighbors and people in the community, and the feeling of solidarity with humanity and a deeper love of God.

That doesn't negate the suffering and evil. But is this by chance or intention? Is there a justified reason for such things as pandemics? Well, those our questions above my pay-grade. But for anti-viral shots and giggles, let's take a stab.

You got the people who believe God is neither transcendent and immanent (secularists). Those who think God is transcendent but not immanent (deists). And those who think think God is immanent but not transcendent (pantheists). They all got some excuse for this, but it's either too one-sided or completely incomplete.

If we take the Judeo-Christian perspective, we know God is transcendent. So He is responsible for the first cause of the building blocks for creation. But all those secondary causes: stars exploding, viruses forming, politicians bickering; those are just accidents from one view and God's infinite schema from another. We just can't explain it all as a singular event when there are so many moving parts in God's plan. So viruses just want to do what viruses do. Sadly, politicians do too.

Yet also from the Judeo-Christian perspective, God is imminent and still with us during these trials: “the earth is full of His glory.” As I recently heard Paul VanderKlay say: “Tolkien is not in the Lord of the Rings, but yet he is everywhere in the Lord of the Rings.” So while we have our own agency, it is not in competition with God's agency (strange attractor that it is) either. He's in the play, feeding us lines every so often. There's always the perpetual interplay of freedom and destiny.

Still, as Rutledge notes, evil is not nothing. We can't really just say it is an absence of Good, but more like a negation. She notes, “if we speak of evil simply as absence, we are in danger of abstracting its malign effects, or distancing ourselves from them.” And that's not how we need to engage in this moment. Evil has it's own force, although not ontological as God would be. We can't explain it away, and it has it's own explanation that we can't truly understand. Rutledge says the best response to this is often silence—a silence that may bring closer to an authentic response that words would never accomplish.

So while evil and suffering can make you struggle with God, it can't negate His existence. There's the famous quote by Rabbi Milton Steinberg that sums this point up: “The believer of God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering, the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else. So let me struggle with God.”

Maybe instead of trying to answer the big questions around God's relationship to crises like what we are currently going through, it is probably best to answer what is our relationship as individuals to all of this. As Bishop Barron recently said, let's instead consider “what is the opportunity for love that has opened up to me in this moment?”

It's Not that Modernity Was a Bad Idea, We Just Weren't Ready for It

We are enslaved by a system that despises art and has no room for love and reverence; and so we can be excused if we think sometimes that the end draws near; the soil is stale. Unless there can be a rebirth, our world is doomed, and it must be a rebirth of reverence. — Father Gerald Vann (from Contemplative Day Book)

The looming pandemic crisis is a time to take stock. I have no idea how this will play out, but I am almost certain we are in the midst of a reckoning that we haven't seen in a few generations.

The Steven Pinker's of the world have preached about the better angels of our nature becoming more commonplace through modernity. And there is much to appreciate with Pinker's work. But I think he fails to see as we got better at perceptibly organizing our systems that gave us the mirage of our halos, we also got good at outsourcing our individual wisdom. As Rutledge says, “although it is indeed possible to organize better societies, the project to create a better human being is beyond the capacity of of humankind. The veneer of civilization is very thin, now as always.” 

In the advent of all this informational advancement, we became soft in character. Moreover, we allowed all the mysteries in science and technology to undermine the depth of spirit and religion.

And now we will come to see we are not so advance after all. A hidden enemy will make its way through much of civilization, and while the fatalities will be low percentage-wise, the systemic outcome from this will play out for years within our already fragile institutions.

Am I being too pessimistic? Yes, maybe.

So I will say I do believe we will endure, too. As to whether we make better choices post-pandemic remains to be seen. This young generation, who appear to be less impacted by the virus, will have that opportunity.

In spite of what will come of a new direction, Father Stephen Freeman makes this astute observation: 

“A long litany of slogans enforce the notion that “changing” things, even in the slightest way, is how a life should be measured. It is the very essence of the lie that is modernity. We simply are not in charge of history. Even those who imagine themselves (or whom we imagine) to be the great influencers of current events are not in charge of history. Hitler and Mussolini were not in charge of history. Churchill and FDR were not in charge of history. No one holding political office (nor all of them together) is in charge of history.

God alone is in charge of history.”

Certainly, God could not have offered more testing kits and face masks. But we could have remembered Him more—instead of being preoccupied with silly things. It would have ordered us more to what matters.

I hear a few say prayer will not get us through this, but who said prayer is meant to do anything worldly? There may be other intentions for it that are not of our own. A friend passed along this quote: God provides minimal protection; maximal support.

Sick Souls and the Universal Malady

In a recent conversation with a friend who joined a Richard Rohr group, she was telling me about how much she appreciated the group's avoidance of using terms like ‘sin’ since God is all about love and we are made in His image. On that same note, we often hear of these vague political slogans that sentimentalize humanity: ‘Love is love’, ‘Not me, Us’, or ‘Better together’. This orientation is really not all that new. It is all part of the Gnostic move to cast out distinctions between man and God, and falsely elevate ourselves into guileless mini-gods. 

In her terrific book, Fleming Rutledge says, 

“It is the lazy person's way of receiving data about life, without struggle. It is apparently very important to us to believe in innocence. Such a belief is a stratagem for keeping unpleasant truth at bay; it is a form of denial.”

But in Truth, it is God made us free first, and in that freedom we can choose to make choices. And more often than not, these choices are motivated, as you would expect, by and for the self—leading Solzhenitsyn to recognize the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. It is not us verses them, but us against God.

Rutledge notes, “Sin is not individual transgressions, but a universal malady.” She also points out how the elderly preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead muses, “There is never just one transgression. There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough never seems to heal at all.” Yes, even Chesterton affirmed that “Original Sin…is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” Just look around you, as well as yourself.

It would seem that we don’t need just some adjustments and improvements, but we must lay down our arms (to paraphrase something CS Lewis once said). We are agents of Sin; quite good at partaking in it, while poor at breaking its grip.

I feel it in my own bones; as much as I have orientated my life to prayer, meditation, spiritual study, and the sacraments, I sometimes feel my transgressions can’t be overcome by any determination or resolve I may possess. Lately, I have been attending daily mass more often, not so much for anything it can do for me, but to give myself over to what must be done to me in my praise. It gives me a hope that does quantify itself to any particular goal.  

Are there just as many sick souls in the Church as there are outside of it? Probably more, for it is recognition of our sickness that makes the difference. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, first step: admit you are powerless and your life is unmanageable. “The measure of the Church, therefore, is not the presence of sinners. That is not surprising. It is the presence of forgiveness, the operation of grace through the sacraments, and the production (eventually) of Saints” (Paul Williams). I don’t have saintly expectations, but there is hope that the criterion of Truth that will be used to judge me is beyond me. 

From a certain lens, the beauty of our imperfections allows us to be an apprentice and a teacher, being a receiver and giver; as a reciprocal relationship is formed vertically and horizontally. Yes, we are always in relationship and there will always be a hierarchy in that relationship. We admire those who are more saintly than us in many respects, and take an active part in being compassionate to those who struggle with sin greater than us.

But even still, this does not let us off the hook: reconciliation requires struggle. Rutledge takes on that Sin has a twofold aspect that needs to be contended with: 

“(1) Sin is a responsible guilt for which atonement must be made. It follows that the crucifixion is understood as a sacrifice for sin. (2) Sin is an alien power that must be driven from the field. All human beings are enslaved by this power and must be liberated by a greater power.”

The sacrifice made by ourselves and by Christ is “not a weakness, but an alternative mode of power” that can overcome the universal malady. We are all complicit, always, in Sin and yet have been granted the Power to repent and sacrifice ourselves beyond it.

Ain't No Place for Sissies

It was Bettie Davis who coined the phrase “old age ain't no place for sissies.” As someone getting closer to that train stop, relatively speaking she's spot on. Absolutely speaking, I would say seeking God (or allowing God to seek you) tops the list. Too many think they want to find God, wake up, be Self-realized, when it's just ego trying to feel good about what it's doing for itself. (“Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort, but I do not think they will find God.” — Mignon McLaughlin)

While the journey to God may be simple from a certain vantage point, it's not necessarily all that easy. Just take a look at the path Bernedette Roberts laid out that she went through (assumingly similar for many others also)... 

From Bernedette Roberts “The Christian Contemplative Journey”

Sure, there a some priceless experiences. But there are the dark nights, the voids, and all this ending in an annihilation. What ego—in his/her right, contracted mind—would want to go through this? Mine sure doesn't on some days; it would rather stream Netflix, play out lustful thoughts, and fear the Coronovirus.

I recently read a radically honest book by David Carse. He notes, 

“If you're going to do anything, do this. First, figure out whether this waking up, this enlightenment is really something you want. Do you really want to die? Do you really want for 'you' not to exist; and for living to continue, if it does, not as who you know and love as yourself but as a hollow husk with impersonal Consciousness blowing through it? If this is what you want (how can you possibly?) then you are talking about waking up from the false dream of individuality, and then you can proceed. Your thinking, your praying, your meditating, your asking questions at satsang, whatever you 'do,' will be with the realization that what you think you are is illusory, and with the intent of exploding, obliterating, that illusion called 'you.' Can you 'do' this? Of course not; 'you' is a dream character following its role in the dream. But who knows what that role calls for? If that role calls for this character to wake up, then it has to start somewhere, and the character may find itself engaging in things that will ultimately bring about its own death. Not physical death. These are disposable containers; look around, they're being recycled constantly. Rather, real death, as real as death gets. Death of the one who cares.”

Okay, you've got my attention! Carse continues,

“If you decide that what you really want is something other than this complete and ultimate 'waking up,' then bless you. Have a wonderful life; enjoy the incredible edible banquet of material and spiritual and psychological and New Age goodies that are out there. Grow and expand and change and develop and improve your life immeasurably; evolve and become more mature and deeper and wiser and more beautiful. Discover your higher self and your higher purpose and fulfill them. I mean this absolutely sincerely; and even, I notice, with a touch of delicious wistfulness from what's left of the david thing. This is not in any way some kind of second class status; there is no such thing. Take what the dream has to offer; that's what the dream's there for, to be enjoyed. Consciousness only enjoys it, only perceives it at all, through the dream characters, and there have to be some through which can be experienced enjoyment of the whole panoply of the spiritual marketplace. But in that case don't come here talking about waking up; that just doesn't make any sense at all.”

Fair enough. But the issue is once we get a taste or intuition of something more, we can never go back and be the same. It's as if you're selling yourself out for who you're really not. We may enjoy the finite rewards at times, but the restless heart will always endure until the search is over for the infinite. We will always have a felt sense of, what David Walsh calls, “the unspoken irritant of all our aspirations” in the background. 

As such, I'm willing to suffer and sacrifice myself for what is.

⁂

As a reminder to myself, Sister Wendy Beckett (from Spiritual Letters) offers this precious insight:

“Patience is far more profound and more all-embracing than it appears to be. To enter deeply into patience means accepting our lowliness and, equally, his power and will to transform us.

Reality is his message and patience leads straight to it. We seem to see our shabbiness and conclude we are getting absolutely nowhere. It may not be so at all. We long to push ahead, to ‘take it by violence’. But helplessness, accepting the ordinariness of our day is the divine means of purification: all this is painful. So my first word is patience. Affirm his power; wait in trust. And my second is to remind you that pure love is usually experienced as nothingness. If all is his, what is there left for self? So never seek to judge from how it ‘feels’. To go on and on and never see anything ‘happening’: what trust we need!”