How We Inherit & Propagate the Fall; & How We Can Begin to Stop

The Fall is at bottom an error about the relative importance of our selves versus God. It occurs when we put first in our lives anything other than God – who is, of course, by definition for everything whatever the most important thing of all. When we put God first, everything else then takes its proper place in our affections and attentions, and our wills are not deflected from their true and proper course. Then we give everything other than God its proper due, and justice prevails; so then does peace. Our lives go rather well, then, all things considered.

But whenever we dethrone God in our hearts, we mess up our judgement of things, and so deflect our will from its rightful course. So doing, we ruin the whole shooting match, even if only subtly. We cannot then but injure our fellow creatures, by mistreating them – whether or not advertently.

To dethrone God in our hearts is in one way or another to enthrone ourselves. It is to put our judgement about what is important, and thus our will toward our own desires that by our deformed judgements have themselves been deformed, ahead of his.

To dethrone God in our hearts is to be selfish.

When You have Conquer’d My Yet Maiden Bed

A coed awoke in the wee hours last Saturday morning and found a young man beside her in bed. The police report does not say that her door had been broken down, or even that her dorm room had a door, but the laws of physics and probability suggest that the same young man was very likely in her room, and perhaps even in her bed, when the coed fell asleep.  But passions cool and a single bed grows narrow as the night grows long, so by the wee hours the young man was no longer wanted and the coed told him “to leave.”  She was, it seems, in the same mood as Lady Macbeth when that grand dame said,

“Stand not upon the order of your going,
But go at once.”

When One Sex Attacks The Other, Both Lose

Many feminists describe the history of humanity as a male tyranny, oppressing and maltreating women at every opportunity. Their name for this is the “patriarchy;” a name now intended to send a shudder down the spines of all who hear it.

Having suggested this characterization of the totality of human existence all that is needed is evidence. Then, in an instance of what is called “confirmation bias,” a selective search is made for unpleasant things ever done to women, not worrying about similarly horrible things perpetrated against men, nice things about men, or nice things men have done for women.

The result is an ugly and repellent account of the way men and women are connected to each other.

A list of male contributions in architecture, art, music, literature, philosophy, poetry, theater, medicine, math, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering – the provision of the water coming out of the kitchen tap and showerhead, plumbing, roads, hospitals, the phone in your pocket, you name it, would present a more positive picture of the male input to humanity.

Thanks to anti-male propaganda it is possible to read Facebook posts where one woman casually comments to the other that “men suck,” and is met by bland agreement by a married woman.

It is a Cold Wind that Blows from a Strange Country

“When I see Indians approaching, I hardly know whether it is for good or evil; and therefore, never feel entirely at ease in their society.” Amos Andrew Parker (1835)

Modern men naturally mangle the meaning of the Latin proverb “familiarity breeds contempt” to make it justify their addiction to novelty.  A modern man grown weary of his wife might, for instance, mutter the line in the hope it will lend dignity to his ally-cat adulteries.  But his solecism would make no sense to a Roman, for whom the full proverb was “too much familiarity breeds contempt,” and for whom the true meaning of the proverb was that it is always a mistake to treat inferiors as equals because they will lose respect and begin to hate you.

Colin Wilson Redivivus: A Plea

New Aristeia Edition of Colin Wilson’s Age of Defeat

Aristeia is a small start-up press in London whose initial project, undertaken in collaboration with the Joy Wilson and Colin Wilson Estate, is to return to print in a uniform edition Wilson’s “Outsider Cycle.” People of my age and my intellectual proclivities will likely remember Wilson (1931 – 2013) as the author of non-conformist philosophical books that took the modern condition to task and as a prolific novelist whose Ritual in the Dark, Necessary Doubt, The Mind Parasites, and The Philosopher’s Stone, among others, rehearsed the non-fiction arguments with allegorical verve. Wilson’s first book, the non-fictional Outsider, appeared in 1956 and became a surprise bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Wilson’s emergent currency even got him on the cover of Life Magazine.

Aristeia has previously put out a new edition of Religion and the Rebel (which bore the brunt of the establishment’s abrupt turn-around regarding Wilson); it has now given us a new edition of the third installment of Wilson’s philosophical cycle — The Age of Defeat. I am humbled to have been asked to participate in this project by supplying an introduction, “Bucking the Whimper,” to The Age, a book that remains as relevant to the West’s cultural decline as it was when it first appeared. Indeed, the book is the more relevant because the situation is six decades worse than it was in 1958.

The Age, along with Religion and the Rebel, is available either directly through Aristeia or through Amazon. The Amazon price is fifteen dollars, which gets the buyer a handsome trade paperback printed extremely legibly on good paper — not to mention Wilson’s rapier-like critique of the post-war anti-heroic and self-de-masculinizing society of Western Europe and North America. I strongly recommend The Age and hope that no few readers of The Orthosphere will take the risk of purchasing it.

On Backward Causation

Time travel stories are lots of fun, but they are famously riven with paradoxes. And that can make it hard to enjoy them. If the future influences the past, is it not then past to that past, and so not future at all?

Such apparent paradoxes arise from a misconstruction of causation. They appear when we misconstrue causation by reducing it only to its efficient and material factors. This is the quintessentially Modern error; which is to say, the nominalist error. Efficient and material causation are essentially temporal, which is to say, strictly mundane (cave: so far, at least, as I have yet understood them). But causation is not limited to effect and matter. There are also, of all events, formal and final causes. And these are not temporally pegged; are not materially or efficiently pegged.

Whereas a concrete mundane thing has some spatiotemporal locus – whence arises its material and efficient causes – its formal and final causes do not. They are, rather, eternal and universal.

The Motive Urge of the Leftward Ratchet: No Pain, No Gain

Virtue signalling – in sharp contrast to virtuous behavior – is free. You get what you pay for. A sacrifice that costs you little gains you little. So the virtue signalers have to keep at it. They cannot ever rest.

The Baneful Sway of French Philanthropy

“A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every country but his own.”*

The centenary of Armistice Day occasioned a good deal of gabble about the evils of nationalism, with the childless President of France, Emanuel Macron, going so far as to denounce it as “a betrayal of patriotism.” I do not see how one can revere the forefathers while reviling their posterity, but that may be because I am, unlike Macron, a father with posterity. What Macron calls patriotism, a more accurate politician called Philanthropy—indeed, in the poem from which my epigraph is drawn, George Canning called it “French Philanthropy.” This was,

AI and the Dehumanization of Man

Strong Artificial Intelligence is the idea that computers can one day be constructed that have the abilities of the human mind. The contrast is with narrow AI which is already with us – that is the notion that computers can be made that can do one thing very well, such as the Watson computer that won in Jeopardy, or Deep Blue that bet Kasparov in chess.

Strong AI, artificial general intelligence, would mean that a robot fitted with a computer brain could move around in the world as competently as a human.  As F. H. George commented to the editor of Philosophy, 32 (1957), 168-169: “finite automata are capable of exhibiting, at least in principle, all the behaviour that human beings are capable of exhibiting, including the ability to act as poets or creative artists and even to wink at a girl and mean it.”[1] This reference to a wink itself has a poetic touch to it that captures a sense of genuine humanity.

Strong and narrow AI is the difference between an idiot savant who can do one thing incredibly well, such as recognizing prime numbers of incredible length,[2] reading two pages of a book simultaneously with over 90% recall like Kim Peek, and someone with enough nous to handle the wide range of tasks that any normal human being has to face; engaging in a lengthy conversation one minute and enjoying a work of fiction the next.

Two Theories of the Renaissance – Berdyaev’s and Spengler’s

Raphael (1483 – 1520): The School of Athens (Completed 1511)

In the Eighteenth Century, self-congratulatory pamphleteers and encyclopédistes, wanting to effectuate a break with tradition, extol their autonomy, and celebrate what they themselves named the Enlightenment, invented the tripartite historical construction of Antiquity – the Medieval Period – and Modernity.  Edward Gibbon and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel assume this sequence, as do Voltaire and Auguste Comte.  Modernity, the third term, functions for such thinkers as the designation of their own intellectual super-clarity, which they see as the goal and consummation of history.  Hegel, like his successor Francis Fukuyama, believed that the progress of the human spirit had indeed found its goal in his very cogitations and insights, after which further speculation would be otiose.  The Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1874 – 1948), writing in his essay on “The End of the Renaissance” (1922), and in the aftermath both of the Great War and the October Revolution, rejects the construction.  Berdyaev offers a prediction: “The school delineations of history into the ancient, the medieval and the modern, are becoming quickly outmoded and will be discarded from the textbooks.”  Whereas the tripartite construction of history has proven itself quite stubborn despite Berdyaev’s conviction at the time, stubbornness nevertheless validates nothing.  Berdyaev gives his reasons.  Modern history, a term that Berdyaev puts in quotation marks, “is now ending,” he writes, “and there is beginning something unknowable, an historical epoch not yet named with a name.”  An epoch is a break in continuity.  If a new unprecedented phase had broken away from modernity such that “we depart from all the customary historical shores,” then that development would necessarily disqualify modernity from its claim of being the end and validation of all historical processes.  “The world is passing over,” Berdyaev claims, “into a state of flux.”

Berdyaev by 1922 already knew the work of his slightly younger contemporary Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936), the second volume of whose Decline of the West appeared in that year.  Spengler, like Berdyaev, dismissed the tripartite construction of history as a petty conceit of limited minds.  “In fact,” Spengler writes in the Introduction to the first volume of the Decline (1919), “the lay-out of world history is an unproved and subjective notion that has been handed down from generation to generation… and stands badly in need of a little of that skepticism which from Galileo onward has regulated and deepened our inborn ideas of nature.”  Spengler characterizes the tripartite construction of history as “an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme, which has, however, entirely dominated our historical thinking.”  Spengler, like Berdyaev, foresees the abandonment of the construction.  “The Cultures that are to come,” he writes, “will find it difficult to believe that the validity of such a scheme with its simple rectilinear progression and its meaningless proportions… was, in spite of all, never whole-heartedly attacked.”  Positing itself as the third-stage goal of a three-stage development, the cynically self-naming modernity “rigs the game.”  Spengler detects in the construction the traces of a displaced apocalypse; it is “Magian,” he writes, owing its essentially religious character to Persian and Jewish apocalypse and to the later offshoots of these, “the Gnostic systems.”  The construction designs to justify “one’s own religious, political or social convictions” by the method of “endowing the sacrosanct three-phase system with tendencies that will bring it exactly to one’s own standpoint.”

Neither Berdyaev nor Spengler denies the existence of a modern phase in the temporal continuity of the West.  On the contrary, both Berdyaev and Spengler acknowledge modernity as something like a total and commanding presence, inveigling itself dictatorially into every corner of life, but they never assent to modernity’s notion of itself.  Whereas modernity sees itself as Reason or Enlightenment, Berdyaev and Spengler see it as occlusion – as a radical diminution of consciousness far from liberating in any true sense, but rather as oppressive and destructive.  Berdyaev and Spengler view modernity in negative terms, as the cause of violent upheavals.  The two writers also agree on the origins of modernity, the earliest glowering of which they assign, perhaps surprisingly, to the Twelfth Century.  Both Berdyaev and Spengler, mention the work of the monk Joachim of Fiore as a foreshadowing of the modern tendency to close down history by calling it to a halt in the consummative present moment.  Both Berdyaev and Spengler see again in Joachim’s hermetic vision the initial glimmerings of what they commonly regard as the first distinctive phase of modernity – the so-called Renaissance of the Italian city-states beginning in the Fourteenth Century.  Naturally, neither Berdyaev nor Spengler interprets the Renaissance as modernity interprets it.  What then is the real character of the Renaissance? And what is the real relation of the Renaissance to the prevailing cultural dissolution of the modern centuries, according to the two thinkers?