Bruce Charlton's Notions

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The New England transcendentalists were a loose group of thinkers and writers gathered around Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord Massachusetts - the best known of the group is Henry David Thoreau who was some 13 years younger than Emerson and also lived in Concord.

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For quite a long time - especially from about the mid 1990s to mid 2000s - Emerson and Thoreau, and their extended group were the focus of my reading.

This was mainly a personal project, involving collecting books, and a pilgrimage to Concord in 1998. But I did complete a publishing project related to this:

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/preface-bettina.html

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Looking back on the New England Transcendentalists (NETs), I now perceive that they were the glorious beginnings of the slippery slope down to disintegration and nihilism. In other words, Emerson was exactly what his most vehement critics said he was.

Emerson, though, was a prime example of a familiar phenomenon among creative geniuses - he was brought-up as a very devout Christian, strongly influenced by a strictly puritan aunt - then he became a Unitarian minister which was strictly not a Christian, and finally he became a transcendentalist (although seldom using the name).

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What is, or was, a transcendentalist?

My understanding is that a transcendentalist believes in the reality of transcendent Good (or, at least, some aspects of transcendent Good) despite not believing in God - or, at least, not a personal god, not believing in salvation.

So Emerson believed in the reality of transcendent beauty, and chose to devote his life to this - but the choice was based on the fact that this made him happy, rather than that the choice was 'right'.

As for morality, although - like all humans - Emerson had much to say about moral issues - this seems to have been, ultimately, a personal matter - perhaps aesthetic above all.

As for truth - Emerson told the truth as he saw it, for the length of time it took to write the sentence; and then another, then another. There was no conception that these truths corresponded to a stable reality - the only 'reality' was the intense moment. (Which is itself an incoherent belief.)

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Yet Emerson was a man of great sweetness of nature: he had no reason to be Good, by his philosophy, yet he was Good - although his philosophy was, it turned out, pernicious.

So perhaps Emerson was a Good man who, by his lectures and writings (his 'job' was that of a travelling lecturer) probably did net Evil.

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As for Thoreau - compared with Emerson he was an even greater writer, but a much simpler thinker.

I have come to regard Thoreau's philosophy as an exercise in self-justification, especially a justification of self will - of selfishness - of getting the maximum pleasure with the minimum of work.

Thoreau saw life as a battle between the self and society - society wants the individual to expend huimself in socieatal goals - it was the hjob of the individual to do the minimum of these imposed duties compatible with his health and survival.

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Thoreau took hedonism to the level of an art form - his own hedonism took the form of contemplation of nature including scientific study, and writing.

For much of my life Thoreau was a hero, and I would not concede that his philosophy was one of near-solipsistic selfishness, yet it was.

Thoreau took Emersonian transcendentalism, and - less constrained by personality and less grounded in tough puritanism - and ran with it. In doing so he created a body of prose writings of the first rank - yet almost poisonous to modern man.

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So I am now exceedingly ambivalent about the NETs. The allure of Emerson and Thoreau, as transitional-figures of genius remains powerful; their overall tendency and effect, I now regard as pernicious.

So I take the NETs much more selectively than in the past. I used to try and go deep into Transcendentalism, my approach was immersive (I can recall many immersive moments!) - convinced that it was the highest path if only I could understand and attain it.

Nowadays I see transcendentalism as incoherent, and unstable yet tending towards nihilism. It tries to believe in the reality of the transcendent - yet without belief in the reality of God (or gods) or divine revelation there is no reason to believe in the transcendent.

Emerson tried to argue that the transcendent could either be intuited, or become the subject of 'scientific' knowledge (e.g. his lectures on the 'natural history' of the intellect) - but this was not true, and disagreement cannot be resolved.

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Without God the transcendent becomes merely a subjective assertion - backed up only by rhetoric or propaganda, temporary alliances - hence, in the face of the trend of modernity, transcendentalism is weak, unstable, pointing down a slope towards materialism and nihilism, and self-indulgent yet self-justifying hedonism.

...Held back for a few decades by Emerson's natural goodness and Thoreau's literary genius, but then descending unimpeded.

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The main causes of dementia are probably Alzheimer's pathology (plaques and tangles), Lewy Body pathology (associated with Parkison's disease) and multiple strokes (atherosclerosis).

But much of the clinical pathology of dementia is very likely associated with delirium/ acute confusion added on top of the dementia: dementia greatly increases the susceptibility to delirium.

And delirium is, in principle, treatable, improveable.

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Just think how often it is observed that demented patients get better from time to time (not completely better, but much improved), and have good days, or a good few hours.

This strongly suggests that these 'good times' are the clinical picture of dementia without the delirium - and that most of the time the patients are delirious.

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In an old and degenerate brain, it takes but little to flip into delirium - drug treatment and interactions, an infection, dehydration, lack of sleep or disturbed sleep, trauma, underlying tumour, autoimmune disease, or subtle degrees of any disease - hormonal, of a major organ system, and so on..

If - and this may well be impossible - all these potential causes of delirium could be checked and treated, restored to normal - I suspect that much of the apparent 'dementia' would be relieved.

Yet perhaps simple things are possible.

Greater attention to encouraging regular and restorative sleep (in particular) and hydration, and much greater attention to the perils of drug treatment might help many specific individuals?

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This matter of a super-added psychopathology in dementia is usually conceptualised in terms of 'depression' - yet this is misleading.

In the first place, mainstream psychiatry has no coherent concept of what it means by 'depression' - so this is not an explanation at all, but rather a suggestion for 'antidepressant' treatment.

If the problem is delirium, then many 'antidepressants' are likely to worsen the problem, due to their anticholinergic side effects - psychological drug side effects are much commoner and more significant (and harder to rule out) than commonly realized.

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On the other hand, there are many records of specific demented patients (of various types) having benefitted very obviously from electroconvulsive/ electroshock therapy - and ECT very probably has a general anti-delirium effect:

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/ect-antidelirium.html

In particular, ECT seems to help some patients with 'Lewy body'/ Parkinsonian dementia - where the fluctuating, delirious and psychotic component  is especially marked.

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The take-home message is that much of the clinical pathology associated with dementia is probably not caused directly by the irreversible dementia process but is secondary to the microscopic damage caused by the dementing process, and the result of potentially-reversible delirium - an acute confusional state which will sometimes clear away to reveal a much less-severely impaired person.

The measure of dementia pathology is the patient at their best, in a 'good spell' - all the rest is likely due to super-added delirium.

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The Orthosphere notion was doing reasonably well, it seemed, until we named ourselves.

Immediately Daniel at Out of Sleep ceased blogging, a few days later Bonald at Throne and Altar threatened to slow down blogging soon (hasn't happened yet...) and now the man who suggested the concept of a 'sphere' - Proph at Collapse: the blog, has put us on notice that he will become an infrequent blogger...

So what began vagely resembling a sphere - or more like a cube - is now a two-dimensional object - an ortho-square of daily-bloggers; or, if Bonald fulfils his threat, an ortho-triangle...

(And this includes unilaterally forcing the label upon View from the Right and Thinking Housewife.)

The new article in Brussels Journal called Rise of the Orthos

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4904

was, it seems, written just in time - because at this rate there will soon be nothing much left to write about!

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Not that all monarchies are better than all non-monarchies - that would be silly.

Not that nations should be ruled according to the hereditary principle - the position of Byzantine Emperor was not hereditary, and that empire lasted 1000 years.

Certainly not that monarchy makes people wealthier, more powerful, freer, more secure or any other worldly thing - who knows?

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Simply, that divinely-ordained monarchy is the proper form of Christian government; rulership by a monarch who explicitly rules by the will of God and in His name.

That this is potentially the best form of government from a Christian perspective, from the perspective of salvation.

This does not mean that (somehow or another) putting a Tsar in place to rule a secular, materialist, hedonic society such as our own would necessarily work well; it means, rather, that the kind of society which is wanted would resemble that of Byzantium or Holy Russia in that it would be primarily Christian: Christianity would permeate Life - and such a society would and should be a monarchy.

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How to we get from here to there, given that the mass of the population in modern worlds simply want to live the life of the barnyard - wants to live in a state of 24/7 pleasure or distraction?

Who knows? - I certainly have no plans.

Quite likely it won't happen.

If it does happen, it will be due to prayer and providence, not to plans and theories.

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But Christian monarchy is not pie in the sky - such societies have existed.

They were not worldly utopias, they were not the kind of life that modern people seem to want.

They were simply the best form of Christian government attainable in this fallen world - very far from perfect, but much better than the alternatives.

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Some links to previous entries on monarchy: 
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/12/sacred-monarchy-by-fr-michael-azkoul.html
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/07/byzantine-theocracy-in-brief-steven.html
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/12/authority-under-divine-monarchy-versus.html

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I am reading Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne (1636-74) - so far I have probably read only about a quarter of them - and am overwhelmed by the conviction of having encountered one of the great books of my life.

It is a similar feeling I had with Pascal's Pensees which I found only 18 months ago. Pascal seemed, very obviously, one of the great thinkers of history - I feel the same about Traherne.

Already I could say that Traherne is the English Pascal.

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Traherne has a special appeal for me because he is English, indeed Anglican - and I have never before encountered such holiness, sanctity, in the Church of England.

And with Traherne it is expressed through gorgeously beautiful prose - indeed it is for the beauty of his writing (prose and poetry) that Traherne is chiefly known.

Although his works were lost and only rediscovered in the past century or so, he is firmly embedded as a canonical writer in English Literature - albeit of the second rank (behind, say, Milton and Donne - along with, say, George Herbert and Izaac Walton).

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So I bought Centuries to read for sensous pleasure - they are four and a bit series of a hundred prose-poems - about one and a half meditation per page.

And they are indeed a sensuous delight.

What I was not expecting, what bowled me over, was the profundity of the spirituality: here is a man speaking of the highest things and with the greatest authority.

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Try reading the sequence from 34-51 in the First Century. For preference, print it out and read slowly.

It begins with poetry, stays poetic throughout, and it is profound teaching - indeed it feels like 'the secret of life'.

http://www.spiritofprayer.com/01century.php

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Modern people are typically nihilist, yet do not behave as nihilists - rather they are intensely (albeit selectively and in an unbalanced fashion) concerned with moral issues.

They are relativists who do not believe in the reality of reality, believe that life is merely about pleasure - yet they are altruistic, kind, passionate about (some kinds of) injustice and so on.

How is it possible to live in such a state of obvious contradiction?

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What makes this paradoxical state possible is, I think, pride.

Pride is highly valued and positively encouraged in modern society - under names such as self-esteem, and in processes such as self-development.

Much of modern education, 'therapy', self-help, lifestyle journalism etc is about making people 'feel better about themselves' - i.e. pride.
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People therefore believe contradictory things because they feel themselves superior to the need for consistency, indeed inconsistency is evidence of their superiority.

For example, a person with nihilistic beliefs, one who thinks all behaviour is a contingent result of blind evolution, may behave altruistically - and doing this makes him feel good about himself:


'Look at me, I believe in nothing, I could be utterly selfish and short-termist - and yet I do these good things - how impressive is that?!'

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Modern man is therefore his own Nietzschian hero of self-will; he sees himself as creating his own system of meanings, values and purposes by the sheer strength of his own mind.

'I did it my way' is the favourite song of the modern world.

Each individual consumed in self-worship, constantly amazed at his own remarkable ability to defy logic, to shape the world to his own desire; to hold himself suspended above the void of his own nihilism by the sheer strength of his own pride...

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Some reflections on Parkinson's disease, and the related Lewy body dementia; which are the second most common cause of degenerative brain disease (after Alzheimer's) - increasingly common in the developed world, probably due to the 'ageing population'.

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The current medical treatment of Parkinson's disease seems to be extremely poor.

It is based around L-dopa, which seems to be a miracle cure at first, for a short time, but then almost always produces severe side effects and/or loses its effect.

It looks as if L-dopa is just too powerful a drug (almost a pure neurotransmitter), and the brain responds by 'fighting' the drug - i.e. the brain's homeostatic mechanisms are seriously destabilised by L-dopa, and the patient veers between hyperstimulation and 'freezing'.

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On the other hand, electroconvulsive therapy/ ECT/ electroshock has been shown to be effective in some patients with Parkinson's disease in numerous trials - yet this fact is virtually unknown.

ECT is a much safer treatment than L-dopa. And even if it wasn't, Parkinson's is an extremely severe and debilitating illness - indeed people have had experimental brain surgery and transplant procedures (albeit with little success) for Parkinson's.

So there seem no valid reason not to try a course of ECT in Parkinson's, and maintenance ECT if it produces significant benefit.

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There is very strong evidence (mostly from studies of tobacco smoking) that nicotine is preventive of Parkinson's disease, and sometimes helps treat it. This is rational, given that nicotine indirectly increases dopamine activity.

Nicotine can be safely given with skin patches with minimal side effects (for most people).

Why is nicotine not used in prevention/ early-treatment of Parkinson's?

Why is it not even tried?

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There is also evidence that caffeine (coffee) is preventive of Parkinson's disease, and there is also a rationale for this because caffeine is a mild psychostimulant with dopamine boosting actions.

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So, in Parkinson's disease we have a very serious and common disease with hopeless conventional treatment - we have in ECT a powerful treatment which almost certainly helps some people, even with severe PD - and we have in nicotine and caffeine two non-prescription treatments which almost certainly prevent the illness, and improve the early stage of the illness.

Why are they virtually unknown, why don't people try them?

Obviously, if they are tried and they don't work, or make things worse; then stop.

But why not try, especially when current treatment is so bad?

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With ECT there is a very obvious prejudice against the treatment - a fear and horror which is ignorantly and dishonestly stimulated.

At root, probably this is because ECT is opposed by Big Pharma who want people to take ineffective/ harmful medication instead of an effective physical treatment. Drugs are marketed to the tune of 1000 dollars per head of population in the USA. IN a competitive world, with a rate of turnover and change, simply by not being marketed, agents drop out of use.

With nicotine and caffeine there is the problem (folk belief, media manipulation) that these drugs are supposed to be 'bad for you' according to the mainstream mass media ideas of 'health promotion'. There is therefore an underlying discomfort in recommending for health reasons a lifestyle or treatment associated with smoking and drinking strong coffee.

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Whatever the reasons, the complete uninterest in effective treatment for people with very severe, common, debilitating, distressing, progressive disease is altogether typical of modern society.

Contrary to what might be imagined, modernity cares little for functionality, is all-but indifferent to effectiveness.

So it really is possible for effective, safe and available treatments of a common and severe illness to languish, unused; despite that anyone with Google Scholar could find out about them in five minutes...

This is the actuality of the information revolution: knowledge hidden in plain sight.

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I think many people can grasp that ultimate belief is ultimately a matter of choice (I mean, belief is not compelled).

But the dispute is about the stance from which choice is made.

Three possible stances are modern, natural, metaphysical.

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1. From where modern society places people, in a world where the public and professional arenas are thought systems which assume that all explanations are materialist, then atheism is the rational choice.

People simply believe what their job, the media, the law, what everybody assumes - that everything is to be explained with material causes and consequences.

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2. But if we start from the natural man, who has not been raised in a modern society - we get to the various kinds of natural religion ('paganism') from where Christianity is - if not compelling - very appealing.

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3. Or, if we start from a genuine engagement with metaphysics (true philosophy - that is, reflection on the basic nature of the world) then also we get fairly close to Christianity - to a place, at least, where Christianity is a plausible continuation.

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Modern man is in an unique position from which the choice of Christianity seems arbitrary - since this position already assumes the irrelevance of natural religion and basic metaphysics.

What modern man fails to recognise is that skepticism about the relevance of both natural religion and metaphysics leaves no ground for knowledge.

Modern man is therefore a nihilist, and by choice; but without realising that he is a nihilist - he has no possibility of rational knowledge, by his assumptions, yet he will not accept that his assumptions destroy all possibility of knowledge, and he continues to claim and act upon his assumptions as if they were obvious knowledge - so obvious that he is incredulous that anyone can think otherwise.

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This is the predicament: that modern man is a nihilist, but does not recognise the fact. Modern man believes he has grounds of knowledge for his beliefs, yet by his own assumptions he has no grounds.

Modern man thinks himself a realist above all other things, yet he denies that reality is real.

All that modern man means by 'reality' is that which he believes would, if contradicted, cause him suffering.

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The modern choice of atheism is not perceived to be a personal choice - it is perceived to be merely an acceptance of 'reality' as reality is expressed through all of the powerful modern social institutions.

All of the powerful modern social institutions rule-out Christian explanations (indeed rule-out all non-materialist explanations).

The actual evaluations, the grammar of modern society is non-religious.

This is why it is absurd to imagine it is necessary or desirable to separate Christianity from Secular society.

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When the explanations of politics, social administration, law, science, education, the military, the mass media etc all implicitly assume the irrelevance of Christianity - then why is it surprising that Christianity is perceived to be irrelevant?

Why is it then surprising that God is perceived to be an unnecessary hypothesis, when God is as (a matter of fact) an excluded hypothesis in all the public domains of modern society?

Modern society has placed us, as individuals, in this situation - God is excluded from the social bloodstream, atheism is active at a minute, capillary level.

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My general perspective is that modern Christian evangelism should (probably) focus on addressing the alienation of modern man, rather than on ethical issues - that what requires emphasis is the mystical, existential, even metaphysical aspect of Christianity, with sin conceptualized as being turned-away-from God rather than as a list of rules.

And the Christian mystical perspective being described not in terms of what makes you happy, but what is real and therefore productive of meaning, purpose and relation with the universe.

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For instance, that when an orthodox Christian looks at the stars he knows that the Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork;

whereas for a secular modern like Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) the stars induce the cry:



"I'M SIGNIFICANT... screamed the dust speck."

This cartoon perfectly encapsulates the overweening spiritual pride and underlying utter nihilism of modern, secular man.

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I was led to this idea of focusing on the mystical partly my my own response, when an atheist, to Christian ethical teaching.

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Not by its own choice, Christianity has been brought into conflict with the modern world primarily on matters of sexuality and reproduction.

Naturally, therefore, among-ourselves, Christians must say NO to many things which the modern world first tolerates then encourages.

And this can be done rigorously, and through argument, since Christians share a belief in both natural law and revelation.

(Natural law being the spontaneous, instinctive human morality and spirituality - common to mankind).

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Yet, the fact the Christians must strive to resist modern sexual and reproductive ethics in their internal operations, does not mean that this can effectively be done in the social arena.

It is precisely the triumph of modernity that in the social arena there is no belief in, indeed denial of, not just Christian revelation, but even natural law.

Without even a common basis in natural law, how can specific matters of sexual and reproductive ethics be discussed from a Christian perspective?

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The answer is sexual and reproductive ethics cannot now be discussed from a Christian perspective - but only from a secular and hedonic perspective, concerned with this worldly individual happiness and misery.

Yet to discuss sexual and reproductive ethics from the perspective of what makes people happy or miserable, is precisely to reinforce the secular hedonic perspective.

Even if a Christian were to prove that, say, easy divorce usually led to misery - he could never prove that it always and necessarily led to misery, and the very act of evaluating in terms of here and now misery (or happiness) is precisely the evaluation used by the secular modern world; and precisely not the primary evaluation of Christianity.

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So Christians can merely say what they believe (answer NO whenever the matter comes-up), stick to what they believe (still say NO even when persuasion or coercion is brought to bear); yet decline to explain their sexual and reproductive ethics in terms of secular hedonism

- simply to state that this is how things are from a Christian perspective; in light of natural law and revelation.

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This is, of course, how other and non-native religions always have behaved in The West when trying to hold-out against pressure - not explaining; but instead saying, in effect 'it is not our custom', we cannot comply, we are commanded to refuse this.

And this has indeed proved far more effective than trying to fight coercion using the enemy's weapons.

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In sum, Christians need to internalize that we are living in an alien culture which cannot understand us.

When resisting that alien culture, there is therefore no way to explain the true reason for resistance; merely the fact of it.

Those who truly want to understand must first become Christian.

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From an e-mail by Kristor:

Comparative religion is useful to me in that it helps me limn the Religion of Adam, the religion naturally proper to natural man, which I take (and the Fathers took) to be Christianity.

The key thing is this.

If as a scholar of religion you approach Christianity as but one errant creature among many, as rather a taxonomist than a metaphysician, then you are on the road to Hell, or at least to nowhere (is there a difference between nowhere and Hell?)...

But if on the other hand you approach other religions as defective/partly successful & right approximations of the True Religion you are trying to discover and comprehend and practice, as rather a metaphysician than a taxonomist,

...why then you are almost bound in the course of your studies to arrive at the conclusion that orthodoxy – traditional Christianity, of whatever lobe of whatever “lung” – is the historical instantiation of that True Religion, and is thus the True Church...

(understanding the Church as extending throughout the cosmos (and indeed beyond it),

...and thus ipso facto throughout all human history, so that Christianity simply must be present incipiently in shamanism and animism, and in high paganism of the Neo-Platonist/Pythagorean sort, as in high Hebrew polytheism (El & His Son YHWH plus his pantheon of angels);

...and so that it is present at least partially in any religion that succeeds at informing a virtuous life of true human flourishing, or at fostering wisdom (however “merely” practical that wisdom).





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One insight I get from reading Thomas Traherne (1637-1674) is that we habitually ignore and downgrade the paradisal, the heavenly aspects of our everyday lives.

There are moments of sheerest delight, of perfection - yet they barely register, or we shrug them aside to get-on with something else, or we persist in looking-forward to something else. 

Yet for the Christian these are foretastes and glimpses of Heaven.

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The moments should not, need not be, grasped at nor 'reflected' upon - they are permanent, and they will continue to do their work. However, they certainly ought not to be slighted, mentally-denigrated, shoved-down and subordinated to worldly concerns.

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That sitting with the family around the dinner table, chatting and laughing; that looking up to see Venus, the crescent Moon and Jupiter in a blazing line across the evening sky - that was not trivial, but one of the most important moments in your earthly life. To be treasured in eternity.

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This is the title of a 'book' I have 'finished' in the past couple of days - and sent to the publishers for consideration.

The title is pretty self-explanatory (I hope) - the 'book' is about the (utter) degradation of science by dishonesty. 

(I say 'book' because it is only about 28,000 words - although even 28K is 'meaty' compared with Thought Prison.) 

This is probably as good a point as any to gather views on the book, since it may help to give me an impression of how far I have succeeded in my aims - and any problems can easily be fixed at this stage.

So... if any of this blog's regular commenters would like to be what-I-believe-is-termed a beta-reader for this book, then please send me an e-mail.

(I'm not asking-for nor wanting a copy-editor nor a sub-editor - but rather a few descriptive impressionistic critical sentences.) 

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The complete and utter feebleness of libertarian ideas (I am speaking as an ex-libertarian) comes from the fact that they are up-against religion: the religion of political correctness.

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The 'secular right' agenda is lukewarm except where it is nationalist: cosmopolitan libertarians are simply not doing politics.

Because of the feebleness of their conviction, libertarians and right wing secular hedonists will sell-out as soon as they get a sniff of power, as soon as anyone offers to buy them off, or as soon as they are threatened.

Indeed, observation and experience shows that people will not sacrifice anything of significance to support sensible secular, materialist, pragmatic, libertarian right wing policies.

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(And anyone who imagines libertarians will sacrifice in support of their supposed ideals, should try sticking their neck out and getting into trouble in support of libertarian ideas, and just see how much effective support rallies to them... Libertarians idea of a bold political stance is to sign their names to a sternly-worded multi-author letter - although most will not risk even that...)

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By contrast, large numbers of religious folk will sacrifice comfort, prosperity, time, money and other resources to pursue their goals.

And the same applies, at a much lower level, to the Leftist religion of political correctness.

Political correctness is the feeblest of religions, as religion go; but any religion will beat no religion.

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Leftists will sacrifice quite a lot for their beliefs.

Albeit these sacrifices tend to be gradual, quietist and passive - and not to require courage; nonetheless, leftists sit for hour after hour in excruciatingly dull committee meetings (until all their opponents have gone), work hard to buy expensive useless stuff-that-Leftists-like, travel to the right places even when they are unpleasant and dangerous, read miserable newspapers, books and blogs - and watch despair-inducing socially aware movies when the world is full of enjoyable edification, they shell-out vastly in taxes and ask for more taxes...

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In sum, Leftists acquiesce in sacrifice of their own long term security and prosperity, their peace and comfort, sacrifice their own childrens' health and happiness, and the H&H of future generations in pursuit of their self-loathing and self-destroying ideas such as multiculturalism, unrestricted mass immigration, egalitarianism, affirmative action, 'democracy', world government, moral and aesthetic inversion, wholesale propaganda.

In general, real leftists trudge through life under a burden of near paralyzing, un-assuageable and self-stoked guilt which they do their best to amplify and spread - so they certainly feel as if they are sacrificing.

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Yes, political correctness is indeed a sacrificial religion - albeit an atheistic religion of this-worldly nihilistic materialism; from which there is no escape except into distraction or oblivion - albeit the feeblest and most depraved of religions: but religion it is.

When the leftist religion is matched-against a devout, theistic and other worldly orthodox traditional religion it is, of course, utterly crushed - sooner or later, unless it can corrupt the theistic religion to worldly hedonism.

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(The success of leftism derives from its power to corrupt enemies, not from intrinsic strength.)

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But libertarianism is the ideology of minimal sacrifice - it is precisely the ideology of those who want-to-do what they want-to-do, nothing else: and they want it now.

This is why political correctness (as we see all around us) wipes the floor with its right wing enemies.

When a sacrificial religion - any religion, even a feeble one - is pitted-against the mere self-gratifying, individualistic, guilt-shrugging, 'glass bead game'-playing of intellectual, libertarian, cosmopolitan secularism - there can be only one winner.

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*DELETED*

- Oops - this post was intended for my cricket blog, but was inserted here in error. Anyone interested in the esoterica of spin bowling can go to:

http://the-doosra.blogspot.com/2012/01/simon-hughes-blows-fuse-over-doosra.html

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Repentance.

I've said it before, and here it is again.

It is self-deluding to scan our environments, comb the mass media, for signs of hope, for a turn of the tide - if we neglect to watch for repentance.

For a spiritual renewal of society (a Great Awakening) repentance must be the first step.

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There must be a recognition and repudiation of wrongness - then there must be a recognition of our own implication.

(Not, for example, a primary focus on blaming.)

To say: This is wrong, we were wrong.

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You think you see a glimmer of hope? A leader speaks of Christ? But have they repented? When our leaders begin by repentance and tell us just what it is they repent; then we will know they may be serious

(Repentance is necessary, not of course sufficient, deception is possible. Antichrist will surely repent - partially. But piety without repentance is bogus.)

If they repent their own role in the collapse of our society then they may be serious, they may represent a turn of the tide.

Otherwise not.

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(And this is not something subtle - a leader who repents... that is not something one sees every day.

(But I have seen it - Margaret Thatcher publicly repented socialism; the entire US political class repented racism - and has never stopped doing so, even when it became clear that un-religious, unilateral, specific and immoderate repentance had led to evil.

(Whether repentance led to good or not, because of repentance, these were deep, lasting 'religious' movements, not merely political expediency.)

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And that is a thing we should pray for, when asked to pray for The Queen, The President, all those in authority. We should repent our own collusion, we should pray that our leaders also repent. Only then may God have mercy on us (until then it can only be a stay of execution in hope of repentance).

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The Queen gave a strong Christian message in her speech to the Commonwealth this year -

http://tinyurl.com/c7gwx8t

- but the focus was unclear: it was perhaps coded.

I await repentance.

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Thomas Traherne (1636-1674. Anglican priest) - Third Century, Number 5


Thomas Traherne - Third Century, Number 5

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Excerpted and slightly edited from an email by Kristor:

Witchery and sorcery – black magic generally – is just intercessory prayer that is evilly intended.

And intercession needn’t be formal, or even conscious. If I’m envious of someone, or feeling glad about them, it seems quite reasonable that my feelings might have a concrete effect upon them, even if I never express my emotions to them, or indeed even become conscious of them myself.

Everything is connected, and not a jot or a bit is dropped from the signal, however obscured it may be. Every atom, says Whitehead, is a system of all things.

The feeling I have about you, and the feeling you have about me, are concrete, physical aspects of the world. They are not just epiphenomena; so, they must have their complete, due effects upon all other things.

If the world is to be coherent, there is no alternative; the momenta of feelings cannot simply disappear from history, without being accounted for by the rest of the causal order. This is why the very notion of an epiphenomenon is an insult to rationality.


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Prayer then, sorcery whether white or black, is mediated by fields of mutual influence, of co-inherence and superposition. And in principle, fields extend without limit throughout all space, however weakly.

The body is contained by the soul, not vice versa; so also with physical objects and their fields. Physical bodies are the expressions of their fields, the fossils and artifacts of field transactions. In All Hallows’ Eve, Williams writes [p. 142]:


"The high thing which was now in his mind, [Lester’s] body that had walked and lain by his, was itself celestial and divine. Body? It was no more merely body than soul was merely soul; it was only visible Lester."

Lovely: the body as the soul made visible, tangible.

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“Coincidentally,” I have just begun reading Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician, which explores the whole faith healer/miracle worker aspect of Jesus’ ministry.

Lots of info here about the phenomenon of the miracle worker in First Century Palestine. Much (but not all) of faith healing is of course due to the placebo effect – “your faith has made you whole.” But that a man’s faith in a cure has made him whole does not mean that the cure was not objectively curative.

The placebo effect can after all just as easily defeat a cure proven to be effective, as promote a cure that is known to be specious. The most brilliant and incontrovertibly efficacious drug can be completely impotent when the placebo effect is negative, thanks to the patient’s disbelief in the efficacy of the cure, or of the doctor; or thanks to his despair.

If you believe you are beyond help, you probably are, because such beliefs tend to be self-fulfilling.

If on the other hand you believe God can cure you, why, you’re only talking plain common sense, right? Of course God can heal you. But, he can do so only if you turn to him in love and trust. If you don’t do that, you’re rejecting the cure.

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So, faith healing is not rendered bogus or vacuous because the placebo effect is involved. That the patient’s willing cooperation in the procedure is needed to make it efficacious does not mean that the faith healer has done nothing at all, nor does it mean that the thing he has done is not really efficacious, any more than the fact that I choose not to notice a pinprick means I have not really been pricked.

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Ought we, therefore, not to refrain from despair over the prospects of the West, not just because despair is a sin, but because our despair will tend to frustrate the cure that might this very minute be working its way through the dough like yeast?

Ought we not to have faith in a cure, so that we don’t get in the way of that cure?

A cure is possible, after all. Stranger things have happened.

Like the Church. There have been several Great Awakenings in the last 500 years. We could easily be on the verge of another; Great Awakenings are just the sorts of things that flaccid, desiccate, depraved, apostate ages tend to generate.

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Yesterday, I again came across reference to the impact of the Black Death plague on medieval society. It was a quite extraordinary phenomenon: so sudden, so universal, so devastating - and I simply cannot imagine what it was like to experience the death of around half the population within a short time.

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Yet, what is remarkable is how little affected medieval society was.

There are apparently only three brief references to the Black Death in the whole of Chaucer; and the fact of it does not seem to have made much impact on either Langland or the Gawain poet.

It is, in fact, quite easy almost to forget the plague when discussing the history of England. There were 'benefits': apparently peasant wages doubled after the Black Death (due to shortage of labour) and this effect took some hundreds of years to be lost. Indeed, it is the post-plague benefits which tend to get empasised these days.

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Of course, medieval society was segmentary - consisting of many almost-self-sufficient segments or units.

Modern society is by contrast massively interdependent - so the effect of a pandemic would be very different and in some respects probably much more devastating, and much harder to recover from.

In addition, all the non-governmental levels of organization (the trades, professions, churches etc) have been systematically attacked and mostly destroyed over recent decades.

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Anyway, with the impending collapse of the Western economy, organisation and capability (leaving aside culture) - which has been sustaining the world through its food, transport, medicine; there will be some kind of major mortality from disease, starvation or violence - or combinations thereof.

We are faced with the near certainty, the 'necessity' of billions of casualties worldwide, from some cause or another.

And I wonder whether a global pandemic might be the least-worst, most merciful of these options?

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(Although, for the reasons stated above, I suspect that pandemic might lead to massive violence and starvation as well, since modern society - perhaps I mean just British society - lacks the segmentary mechanisms for preventing them.)

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These reflections were prompted by these irony-tinged biological reflections from Greg Cochran concerning the benefits of near-extinction to a species:

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/bouncing-off-the-bottom/

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Note: I am a Christian and an evolutionary theorist, and Cochran is the other one - he is Roman Catholic. However, his IQ is approximately double mine.

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CORRECTION 

Despite the internet meme, which I unwittingly propagated, I have discovered (by asking him) that Greg Cochran is NOT a Roman Catholic: a Christian, yes, but not RC.

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There is conservation, not just of fairness, but of value in general.

In any closed causal system, this must be so. You can’t increase the amount of value that a given state of affairs is capable in principle of expressing throughout its whole future, absent any exogenous inputs of value thereto.

All that you can do is rearrange the value that is already implicit in it. And all such rearrangements use up a bit of the store of available value, dispersing it in such a way that, spread about indiscriminably, it can no longer exert any allure toward a particular terminus ad quem, or therefore motivate any work, any action theretoward.

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But note that for any given moment in a causal order, the amount of value that it can express over its whole history may vary, depending on the decisions made in and as that moment.

There is for a cosmos at its beginning an optimum amount of value that it can possibly realize over its history, provided it follows the optimum pathway forward from that beginning, without error.

If it should ever err, then cosmic history would fall from its optimum path, and would forever thenceforth find itself unable to climb back thereto – again, absent any exogenous inputs.

The value that a given causal order can express – can actualize – is quite path-dependent.

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Once a cosmos has fallen a little bit, and cannot climb back up, it can of course fall still further. And, again, absent exogenous rescue, that is what must sooner or later eventually happen. For, once infect a world with error, and that error never thereafter goes away. It leaves its mark permanently in history, and queers everything after.

To see this, think of a bowling alley where the distance to the pins is, like, 15 miles. The tiniest error at the beginning of a ball’s journey is going to land it in the gutter, sooner or later. No ball will ever reach the pins.

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But even without exogenous rescue, a world may devolve to the general death of heat, and all other values, more quickly, or more slowly, again depending on the path it takes. The bowling ball may land in the gutter almost the moment it is released, or it may roll along beautifully for quite a while. In the latter case, more beauties will be realized than in the former.

So, while there is no way to prevent the eventual utter exhaustion of all the available store of potential creaturely value present in the cosmos at its inception, that process of exhaustion may actualize more beauty, or less. The world is eventually doomed; in the meantime, it may be better, or worse.

From the extensive comments added by Kristor to:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2012/01/conservation-of-fairness.html

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As a new Christian, I found John the Baptist a baffling figure - he is given considerable prominence in the Gospels, yet my tendency was to regard him as having been superseded by Jesus, and therefore somebody that could safely be ignored.

John 1:8: He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

Being a witness doesn't sound very important, at first...

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Yet he was, according to Christ, the best man who had ever lived, up to that point: greater, therefore, than even than the greatest of the Old Testament Prophets:

Luke 7:28 For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist

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Of course the greatness of John the Baptist is not exactly a secret. The church I most often attend is indeed named after him. But perhaps it is hard for us to understand why a 'witness' is so great? It is hard to understand because 'witnesses' are so rare now.

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The key fact, in my understanding, is that John the Baptist was regarded, in the area and at the time Jesus operated, as the holiest man alive.

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This was an era of miracle workers and claimed prophets. How to discern between them?

The answer was to turn for judgement to the holiest man alive.

When John endorsed Jesus as the Messiah, then that was as strong evidence as could be imagined of the truth of Jesus's claims - stronger and more decisive, even, than the miracles and (thus far) partial-fulfilment of prophecies. 

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And this emphasises the problem of our own era, so lacking in holy men, in saints. Who is there now alive of unchallenged holiness to whom we could turn for discernment?

This lack is perhaps why I did not easily understand the greatness of John the Baptist. Perhaps we, as a culture, have forgotten that such greatness did once exist on earth.

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There is, I think, no-one alive to whom we can turn - we must therefore turn to those who have died.

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Modern public culture, and the majority of the intellectual ruling elite, have a total disbelief in miracles.

They will deploy all possible resources to argue-down any possible miracle, especially of course the miracles of Christ; from a basis that miracles are impossible, all phenomena have scientific explanations, and therefore any naturalistic explanation is infinitely more plausible than a miracle.

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In other words, miracles are implicitly being taken as sufficient proof of divinity - especially the God of Christianity (and since God is supposed to have been proven not to exist, then neither can miracles).

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This leaves modern culture wide-open to utter deception by anyone who can credibly prove a miracle. Such a person will be assumed to be a divine messenger, or even a divinity.

The 'miracle' may or may not be real, it may be real or a cunning simulation; but if it can be proven such as to convince enough people, then whoever practised it will be worshipped as a god - since that is the covert assumption behind the utter refusal to regard miracles as real.

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Others who are vulnerable to deception by miracles (real, or indistinguishable from real) are Christians who disbelieve in 'unseen warfare'. This includes many who are prone to regard 'religion' as intrinsically 'good' and spiritual experience as intrinsically true, valid and divine in origin.

Even Charles Williams - a truly great theologian in many respects, whose work I study intensely - did not really believe in purposive evil, in 'the devil' (or found difficulty in doing so).

And this opened-him to the potential evils of magical practice (the quest for supernatural power; in his case poetic power) - at least to some extent and at some points in his life because he lacked sufficient awareness of the possibilities, the likelihood, of demonic deception.

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So, we need a proper understanding of miracles. On the one hand, miracles are real and possible; on the other hand, even real miracles are not necessarily derived from the divine indeed in a time of hedonism, aspostasy and corruption then deceptive (evil tending) miracles (whether supernatural or cunningly faked) are most likely.

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