Ideas Have Consequences

Richard Weaver Explained Our Cultural Predicament Over 70 Years Ago | The Russell Kirk Center

I've read and reviewed this book at least three times and pulled it out for reference a few times most years. The review linked above is excellent, and while everyone left or right ought to read the fairly short book, not reading the linked review is hard to forgive. 

This book was first published in 1948 and it is scary to see how far we have tumbled down the predicted cliff toward the ultimate demise of Western Civilization since then.

Weaver points out that without first principles, there is no way to know where we went astray or why, and he is very clear and simple on the causes.

"This was a change that overtook the dominant philosophical thinking of the West in the fourteenth century, when the reality of transcendentals was first seriously challenged."

Since man moved away from the idea of transcendentals to the idea that "man as the measure of all things", the Whig theory of history quickly developed -- "the belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development".  Today this banner is carried by "progressives" -- the firm belief that a drop of hootch excreted from the still today is better than 40-year-old Scotch.

"For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest, but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state." 

At least he isn't always his own bartender! Weaver links transcendentals primarily back to Plato, although the connection with religion obviously seeps through. For the common man, the doctrine of Christianity is what would be infinitely more beneficial to both the eternal soul and temporal existence here on earth than the worship of the relativist pagan state.

"The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of nature and the destiny of humankind.  The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses."

"The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably -- though ways are found to hedge on this -- the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of man is the measure of all things .... The witches spoke with the habitual equivocation of oracles when they told man that by this easy choice, he might realize himself more fully, for they were actually initiating a course which cuts one off from reality. Thus began the "abomination of desolation" appearing today as a feeling of alienation from all fixed truth". 

"Nominalist" meaning denying that things that transcend the physical universe exist. ("matter" is all there is) Not simply however "god" -- since our own abstract thoughts and to some degree language stretch the old meaning of "physical".

It is a book I could go on and on quoting from, but that breaks my promise to explain what the book means to me and encourage others to read it.

Ideas set humans apart and make us what we are. When we are focused at the highest levels of our brain --- reason, abstraction, ultimate, patterns, relations, connections, etc., we are most human in the sense of unique from animals -- with an eternal soul, a soul that wants those transcendentals. It drives us to look for ultimate and eternal causes, the explanation for WHY things are as they are.

When I was in college, a favorite professor described the difference between the university and the vocational school up the hill as basically "Down here we learn WHY the computer works as it does, up the hill they learn only HOW to operate or program following a specific path, not the reason why that path may be optimal, easy, efficient or what alternatives there are to the specifics being taught".

When there are no transcendentals (ultimate reasons "why"), it is hard to defend one view from another, and we arrive at "my truth and your truth". It is all relative -- it is todays sense data that counts, because it is assumed that is all there is. The physical shared reality (although that is less certain than it once was). We may be able to do a lot of "technology", but as is also covered in the book, much of it will only do more to distract us from that which is of ultimate value.

"Ideas" is a critical book about first principles to understand the universe, our place in it, and how to reach for "the good life", as in the spiritual life that has eternal meaning (although it is not a "religious" book).

"Ideas" is a cornerstone of what I'm re-reading and attempting to weave together as my personal "Canon of Christian Conservatism" at this point in my life -- the basis of what I have come to believe about life, the universe and everything! It was previously discussed here, as well as here.

At its base "Ideas" is "God" (transcendence), Yes or No, and what is likely to happen to both you and your civilization depending on how you choose!

The linked review closes with this, and I shall as well; 

A year before he died, Weaver wrote that “[t]he past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism.” Sixty years later, the trend Weaver feared has further advanced in all Western countries. He did not live to see the progressives of the 1960s gradually infiltrate and takeover in the West’s cultural institutions and produce a cultural decay that makes the world of 1948 seem like a glorious age of conservatism. And he did not live to see the culture of abortion on demand, euthanasia, widespread acceptance of pornography, the sexualization of children, the normalization of deviance, and other maladies that afflict our contemporary world. Ideas–especially bad ones–do, indeed, have consequences.

Experience IS Reality

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

As I "wind on down the road" (rendition of which tugs at the heart of a Boomer), my thinking and writing become less linear, so for the VERY few that have followed my musings for the nearly 2 decades of blogging, some repetition will be seen. (usually with updates)

A the linked is a likely important article that I may return to and dig deeper into. Apparently, the physical universe can be replaced with "a conscious entity" and at least this new model still "works" (makes rational sense).

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.

"Ontological" meaning "exists in the context of these philosophical assumptions".  Our Western standard ontology is Materialism ... everything is "matter" (although Quantum Wave Theory postulates that everything is actually waves (no particles). 

There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. 

Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. 

They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. 

Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

It's always intriguing to me that a super intelligent guy, so non-traditional he is willing to question the MOST fundamental aspects of the nature of existence, still finds "evolution " as somehow a worthy explanation for how we came to be (or "not to **BE** as in being physical", but rather "be" as experience only in his model) in a non-physical reality. It is always possible that the computer desktop "just evolved" after all. Actually, if you are an evolutionist, the development of the computer and the desktop metaphor is simply evolution still operating in what we have no doubt mistakenly labeled "consciousness", meaning "something special", but in evolutionary "reality", it is just more evolutionary adaptive algorithms ... a mathematical model. 

Gefter: A mathematical model of consciousness.

Hoffman: That’s right. My intuition was, there are conscious experiences. I have pains, tastes, smells, all my sensory experiences, moods, emotions and so forth. So, I’m just going to say: One part of this consciousness structure is a set of all possible experiences. When I’m having an experience, based on that experience I may want to change what I’m doing. So, I need to have a collection of possible actions I can take and a decision strategy that, given my experiences, allows me to change how I’m acting. That’s the basic idea of the whole thing. I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at.

This may be a "little deep" ... a reference to this post on "The Matter with Things" may help understand this a bit more. 

So, a mathematic attempt to understand consciousness replaces "the world" with "a conscious agent" and it all works ... and it doesn't give him any inking that God would fill that "conscious agent" role quite nicely?

The discoveries of quantum mechanics, the mystery of consciousness and things like the insane small amount of information that seems to be coming in through our optic nerves for us to create what we are "seeing" all point to some fundamental misconceptions about what "observed reality" is -- if it "is" in a material sense (ontology again) at all! 

"I think, therefore I am" was always tenuous -- perhaps, a universal consciousness is reality, and "I" am an illusion. Perhaps when God speaks to Moses and says "I am that I am" he was really de-referencing the THAT!  (C++ programming, the "this pointer" is the pointer to the object itself) "I'm THAT" I am" ... the ultimate base of existence. 

"Somehow the world affects my perceptions". There is always a "somehow" in there somewhere! 

The Soul of The World

The Soul of the World | Princeton University Press

After "Face of God" and this fine effort, I'm a confirmed Scruton fan. In "Soul", Scruton continues his analysis of what it means to be human as opposed to atoms, cells, chemicals and adaptive evolutionary programming.

"I know that I am a single and unified subject of experience. This present thought, this pain, this hope, and this memory are features of one thing, and that thing is what I am. I know this on no basis, without having to carry out any kind of check, and indeed, without the use of criteria of any kind -- this is what is (or ought to be) meant by the term "transcendental". The unity of the self-conscious subject is not the conclusion of any inquiry, but the presupposition of all inquiries. the unity of consciousness "transcends" all argument since it is the premise without which argument makes no sense."

The paragraph is a bit longer than "I think therefore I am", however that added length much improves on the famous Descartes statement. 

As humans, "we" have to start somewhere, meaning we have to find some way to postulate that we actually exist from "nowhere". If we sit quietly, focus on only "our" breathing, watching our breaths happen on their own, our thoughts come and be acknowledged/dismissed as "we" return to watching our breath, our emotions pass through us as we acknowledge them and gently return to calm attention on our breath, the question arises as to "what or who" is doing the watching?

We will discover as millions have discovered throughout history (and millions more have not), that "I", is not our physical body, not our thoughts, and not our emotions. We each "have" all those things, but we, ARE something else. Reality IS experience.

So, if what we experience IS all there is, then how might we think about that?

"There is a culture of long-term thought and abstract conception, represented by Moses; and a culture of short-term pleasure and easy communication represented by Aaron. The first points to the transcendental ground of being the second reduces beings to idols,

In this section of the book, Scruton uses music as the example of how to know the difference. I believe however that this quote goes a long way toward the heart of the matter:

"... the difference is between preventing silence, and letting silence speak. Music in the listening culture is a voice that rises out of silence, and which uses silence as a painter uses the canvas ..." 

Scruton is seeking to capture "the ghost in the machine" of physical creation, as many lovers and believers have before him. (and what are true lovers but believers?) I think we all understand that if we step back and let the silence speak, it DOES speak -- which is why the forces of Aaron work incessantly to make certain we never stop and listen.

"In music as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrangement of objects. And in a hundred ways the result of this is a culture of idolatry in which freedom and personality are obliterated by intrusive images, clamoring for an addictive response."

"We are spirits living in the material world" (as "The Police" once put it). Much of modern man's time is spent trying to anesthetize that knowledge via clicks, games, music, drugs, media, work, relationships, ANYTHING!

"The Fall did not occur at a particular moment in time; it is a permanent feature of the human condition. We stand poised between freedom and mechanism, subject and object, end and means, beauty and ugliness, sanctity and desecration. And these distinctions derive from the same ultimate fact, which is that we can live in openness to others, accounting for our actions and demanding an accounting for theirs, or alternatively close ourselves off from others, learn to look on them as objects, so as to retreat from the order of the covenant to the order of nature."

Why is it critical for the left to cover their ears and scream "safe space! Nah, nah, nah, nah"? Because in a fallen world, even a fig leaf is imagined to provide "covering" of the nakedness of corrupted nature denying it's soul. The unbeliever MUST deny their soul, the pain of it's corruption is unspeakable, so they can ONLY "cover", never account for their fallen state until they accept redemption.

For the lover and the believer, the idea of hiding our true face and soul from others, especially those we love, is painful in the extreme. Many of us must do this in order to maintain any relation at all with family, to hold our jobs, or to interact socially.

The question "Why"? is addressed from I to you. It is thrust upon us in those moments in extremis when the order of creation irrupts around us. It is then that we cry out to God -- who will tell us why we suffer, why we live, and why we die! Within the envelope of nature there are only causes. But for the eye of faith the envelope has a telos, a reason for being as it is. And to have faith is to believe that the worlds teleology will account for my afflictions too. "Irrupts" -- to enter forcibly or suddenly.

In this week before inauguration day 2017, the year of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, I stand in awe of the power of God and of Satan. My sense is that "The Fall" was the "reification" of the spiritual perfection of creation. "Reify" is a dangerous word which I believe holds a paradox within itself. The literal meaning of the word is "to make something abstract more "real" as in "understandable".

Since I believe that what we see as "reality" through our fallen senses is what scientists might call a "quantum flux" and God calls "spirit and truth", the act of "reification" is the act of making MORE FALSE -- making something seem to be more physical, or "quantified", "measured", "real".

In my world view, mathematics is closer to "truth" than engineering (applied physics). Reification as it is commonly used is actually "making a graven image" from a spiritual perspective.

Scruton has helped me immensely in trying to "un-reify" my world ... as in "sanctify", or "recover the spirit".

HIGHLY recommended to those who seek to recover the spirit.

Imprimus, Inside the Transgender Empire

 Inside the Transgender Empire - Imprimis (hillsdale.edu

If you are not familiar with Hillsdale, it is worth your time to give it a glance. I tend to think of it as the Christian/Conservative Harvard ... without the arrogance. 

As always, it is best to ignore me and just go to read the article! 

In case you don't, one of the questions it answers is: "Why Transgender"? 

In the late 1980s, a group of academics, including Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Sandy Stone, and Susan Stryker, established the disciplines of “queer theory” and “transgender studies.” These academics believed gender to be a “social construct” used to oppress racial and sexual minorities, and they denounced the traditional categories of man and woman as a false binary that was conceived to support the system of “heteronormativity”—i.e., the white, male, heterosexual power structure. This system, they argued, had to be ruthlessly deconstructed. And the best way to achieve this, they argued further, was to promote transgenderism. If men can become women, and women men, they believed, the natural structure of Creation could be toppled.

 Any idea of a "natural order" has to be destroyed to make atheism/materialism rational arguments. Order assumes, an intelligence, where materialism, evolution, and leftism require temporal power to be the determinant of any form of "order". "Order" is merely an outcome of random processes, in which the "fittest" (those who survive and obtain power). 

This is the great project of the transgender movement: to abolish the distinctions of man and woman, to transcend the limitations established by God and nature, and to connect the personal struggle of trans individuals to the political struggle to transform society in a radical way.

Many of the "Boomers" like myself never really imagined "Gay Rights", let alone gay "marriage", and the idea of transgender was beyond imagination. Artificial Intelligence and Cyborgs were imagined in a lot of Science Fiction, but it turns out that mutilating a living human is easier than those particular disruptive technologies. (Although we are now making rapid "progress" there as well.)

A lot of strange thought comes from our wealthy elite, who apparently get bored with private jets, yachts, and temporal pleasure. Like mass murderers, they want to "make an impact", and destruction (of Western culture) is a lot easier than improving something. 

One of these people is Jennifer Pritzker, who was born James Pritzker in 1950. After serving several years in the U.S. Army, Pritzker went into business, having inherited a sizable part of the Hyatt hotel fortune. In 2013, he announced a male-to-female gender transition and was celebrated in the press as the “first trans billionaire.” Almost immediately, he began donating untold millions to universities, schools, hospitals, and activist organizations to promote queer theory and trans medical experiments.

As was once the case with the eugenicists, the poor are natural targets for experimentation. 

The Ruth Ellis Center’s marketing pitch is an amalgam of all the usual euphemisms: “trauma-informed care,” “restorative justice,” “harm reduction,” “racial equity,” and “gender-affirming care.” In the name of these things, the Ellis Center and its partners conduct large-scale medical experiments on a population of predominantly poor black youths.

How does all this experimentation on young people work out? 

According to survey data, up to 80 percent of trans individuals suffer from serious psychopathologies and one-quarter of black trans youth attempt suicide each year. “Gender-affirming care” largely f ails to solve these problems, yet the doctors use these failures to justify even more extreme interventions up to the final one: genital reconstruction.

What do the supposedly "innocuous" puberty blockers do to child's mind?  

This medication is called a “gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist” and it comes in the form of monthly injections or an implant. And because it simulates the activity of this hormone, it shuts down the activity of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is this almond-sized structure in your brain, it’s one of the most primal structures we have, and it controls all the other hormonal structures in your body—your sexual development, your emotions, your fight-or-flight response, everything. . . . And I always think that if someone were to ask me, Where is it that you would look for the divine spark in each individual? I would say that it would be somewhere “beneath the inner chamber,” which is the Greek derivation of the term hypothalamus. To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human.

Much of my latest study would cast some doubt on that highlighted assertion, but it doesn't sound like an area we really want to play Frankenstein with.  

Is there a relationship between such drugs and the transgender "male" that killed three children and 3 adults at a Christian school in March? I would surmise there will be less research, or even looking at data for this than there is being done on possible negative effects of Covid vaccinations.

When a flight instructor was asked; "If I'm making an emergency night landing, should I turn on my landing lights"? The response was, "It's up to you". The student replied, "What if I don't like what I see?" 

The instructor replied, "Turn them off". 

It seems that today, we are keeping a lot of lights off, and doing our best to ignore the bad things that stare at us out of the darkness.