Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
I have quoted Tillich on this subject before now. I return to it as a strategic opportunity in view of the grand conflict playing out in front of us, within us, and for us. Educated and otherwise thoughtful persons see afflicting them irrationality which drives personalities ranging from bar tenders to four star generals and admirals to ignore or deny their duties in favor of declaiming fixedly and without self-criticism visions on matters off their graze and not in their ken.
This is irrationality which has no sense of time or history but thinks it knows exactly what should be happening now that is not. Of course, it is destructive, and deliberately so. So it has no honor, only loudness.
In such times — which occur now and again — quiet is sought. Quiet for self-examination, self-scrutiny, self-awareness, the acquisition of strategic conceptual advantage over the vicissitudes of life and their perpetrators.
One disengages at least mentally and emotionally, pulls back from immediacies, and circles around behind the clamor, the irrationality, to grasp the cool and cooling wisdom of its predecessor: knowledge, love, and — what comes to the same thing — rationality.
The untoward, the unrighteous, the irrational,
depend for their existence on the preexistence
of the toward, the righteous, and the rational.
This hooking maneuver for strategic conceptual advantage builds self-confidence, which is blessed and dearly bought with effort. Its aim is to gain strategic leverage on the gods of space, those noisy visions of the irrational.
Endemic irrationality indicates a presence of devotion to the gods of space. VDH has listed some current names of these gods, these nauseous dreams and visions:
the Green New Deal,
reparations for slavery,
abortion redefined as permissible infanticide,
open borders,
packing the Supreme Court with liberal justices,
the abolition of the Electoral College and ICE,
free college tuition,
the elimination of student debt,
Medicare for all,
a wealth tax,
a 70 percent top marginal income tax rate,
a 16-year-old voting age,
voting rights for ex-felons,
and on and on.
These are all visions, programs, plans, dreams, hubbub in space but outside time and history. They are not enabling stories about what has happened or is happening. They are not improving histories. They ignore, nay, shun actual histories because these would deface or even depose them. They are, rather, plans and demands against circumstances of life — mostly legal and institutional — their proponents see and hear or see and hear about.
The gods of space seduce but they cannot produce.
The gods of space make war against time. We note them making war on institutions and other systems of life not of their making even when those institutions and systems benefit them. We see and hear them making war on Christianity and Hinduism. (Making war on Judaism is making war on Christianity.)
Making war against time itself makes sense to the gods of space, even though it does not make sense objectively, because time infers God, Who is more than the gods and cultivates history to emerge in Himself.
The gods of space are compelled to attack religions — even though doing so is stupid — because religions’ very being are stories about God and men in search of one another in time and for a reason. The substance of religions is corporeal and temporal, and very human.
Religions, which revere the God of time and therefore history, elevate humanness. They have a high view of man. The gods of space — the day’s big dreams: Salafi-Shiite Jihad, Socialism generally — disparage and diminish humanness, deeming it not what it should be, not acceptable as is, not worthy of approval unless transformed into something other than what it is, something approved by the fabulists of Salafi-Shiite Jihad/Socialism generally. Jihadis and other Socialists, the hydra of raucous irrationality afflicting normal persons among us, have a low view of man. This is why their handiworks end in misery for most and fortune for few. Their growth-medium is space, not time.
The God of time begins with, “Dearly beloved . . . .”
Clamor ↑
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: Donohue: This is not easy work; but it is the work that stands as the foundation of a civil society.
Traitor. The Church stands against civil society, judging it. It is the leaven that raises the lump. Donohue thinks he and his Augustinian (!) institution [Villanova] are the lump. Traitor.
Update 2: No monolithic story (conspiracy/collusion) to hold them together so each is looking to his laurels. The wall has been breached, the entrapped force has broken out of the encircling force. Or rather, the encircling force has realized that it never met itself, and the force it thought it had encircled has walked through the opening into into open field and started a run to its own purposes, to include forming at least a partial counter-envelopment of the force which only ever partially encircled it.
Update 3: A lion finds a bull stuck in the mud and soon devours it. Feeling full of himself he starts roaring and bellowing. A nearby hunter hears the din, comes over, and shoots the lion.
Update 4: Andy McCarthy: It is the politically accountable president, not the administrative state, who determines the nation’s intelligence needs.
Update 5: Fine irony in that last paragraph, and true.
I search in analyses for a sense of the unexpected, the omnipresent reality of the unknown, the outside-doctrine and probably unknowable, capable of appearing in the midst without being announced and sometimes without leaving a calling card. For me it is getting to be that analyses lacking that sense seem weak by way of being rigid.
Irony is enlightening so long as it is not sarcastic. But paradox is enlivening. It has a soft corporeal component irony does not.
Update 6: One long-standing explanation for the decline [in murders] is civilian MD/Nurse learning from military MD/Nurse advances in trauma surgery/care incidental to battle wounds. Causes what would be murders to be charged as lesser crimes.
I have a pet theory and another related to it. Pet theory: when people are happy overall with what they see and hear — where happy overall is contentment seeing and hearing others’ happiness — they entertain fewer impulses to attack said others.
POTUS Trump, for example, is clearly, consistently happy seeing others who are happy. He sincerely wants others to be happy and just as obviously expends his energy trying to remove obstacles in the path of that epiphany.
My related theory is this: that as happiness increases, discretionary spending decreases. So much spending is sedation for some sort of heartache.
POTUS Trump may not understand that, as he succeeds cultivating a general happiness, the economy declines. As for example, GM closing a plant.
I prefer that decline to a general unhappiness, as between 2009 and 2016, and roving provincial unhappiness, as between 1965 and 2009.
Update 7: Entertainers mostly are carnival-type people, love attention, want to be loved, which means they identify internally with the dispossessed, aka trailer trash. Usually, they and their children are dissolute and unthinking in their manners of living and especially partying. There are exceptions.
This case reminds me of an internal mob-type squabble. Somebody ratted out somebody for some petty reason internal to their circle, which includes much of the nation’s IC and practically all of its academia. Whoever ratted has juice in the IC sufficient to get the targets of their spite hauled up on what for that crowd are petty charges. A tempest in a tea cup relative to the vast corruption eviscerating the USA from front to back.
This admissions case is an internal affair between members of the same crowd some of whom got angry at their comrades for some petty reason and decided to make a federal case out of it. A complete distraction from the big tent and the main ring of the circus inside it. That would be, wait for it, what the clergy residing in the nation are doing. There is the true corruption, the true evil in the land.
Update 8: Creation and evolution are a both and, not an either or. Additionally, evolution is just one of three simultaneous and ineluctable processes. The other two are, involution and devolution. Where any one of these three is, the other two are. They are inseparable. And the three of them together still do not describe fully much less explain the complexity of life.
Update 9: Well, the universities will not do it. They are run by control freaks (faculty and admins) and populated by control freaks (students of all degree programs), and control freaks need their subjects ignorant and cowed. Ending free speech is an onramp to a freeway to making that happen. And faculty and admins are not going to take it? If control were your goal and a quick and easy means of getting to it was open to you, you would shun it?
Maybe this is a major reason requests for admission to universities remain high: students want to improve their skills for controlling others.
Update 10: Some day, some counselor will get the bright idea that law is meant to serve man, not man law. On that day will emerge a will to sketch out the contours of freedom on the far side of the sickening low-mindedness and unrefined impulses of Boomers and their progeny.
Update 11: I believe that gender identity is a fraud perpetrated by psychiatry, the likes of something the United States and other nations hasn’t experienced since the lobotomy era. As a result, I have returned to my male birth sex.
Update 12: OTOH, how much of the insanity wafting through modern minds IS result of spending years, especially young years in a baked condition? I estimate quite the main part of it. And who ever talks even about the possibility?
A nation’s staying power rests on the character and pursuits of her people, not on her mere military institutions.
Update 13: A. T. Mahan: In England, the decline of discipline had been followed by an economical policy as to material, gradually lessening the numbers and injuring the condition of the fleet; and after the little flare-up and expected war with France in 1678, the king gave the care of the navy to a new body of men, concerning whom an English naval historian says: ‘This new administration lasted five years, and if it had continued five years longer would in all probability have remedied even the numerous and mighty evils it had introduced, by wearing out the whole royal navy, and so leaving no room for future mistakes.’
Update 14:
watt
From the Villanova statement: “Diversity and inclusion are not accessories in higher education today, they are at its core.”
Once this is the premise, all is lost. There is no arguing. I’m basing this in part on the book “Diversity: The Invention of a Concept” suggested by Scott in a recent post.
PS: >>Sigh<< It looks like another book purchase suggested by Scott here…
David R, Graham to watt
Correct. Exclusivity is at the core of higher education. It is the core, also the corps. We exclude stupidity, sloth, promiscuity, arrogance, violence, treason, incompetence, hatred, ignorance, special consideration, noise, ugliness, presumption, lying, cheating, stealing, toleration of any of the foregoing, etc.
The end of education is love, and love is the world’s most exclusive power. Witness the first few strophes of the Decalogue and then get back to me about diversity, if you dare.
Update 15: We Will Never Fix Campus Indoctrination Until We Cut College Subsidies
Update 16: Andrew C. McCarthy: Hillary Ruins The Plan
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
