Freedom, Morality, and New Year's Revolutions (1.03.11)
In short, only a new year's revolution will suffice. If time is automatically turning around and returning to its source, then it's not really necessary for us to turn around. Rather, in order to renew ourselves and gain a new start, all we have to do is ride the absurcular coattails of time, and perhaps throw in a human sacrifice for good measure. But if you are a neo-pagan embedded in profane time, then so too are those nasty habits you are resolved to change. In this regard, most problems are ultimately spiritual problems in disguise, for example, using food for every reason other than that for which it is intended in order to fill some void or satisfy some hidden impulse.
True, since Jesus was probably born in the spring, Christmas was grafted onto pagan winter festivals. However, this was not in order to imitate them, but to sanctify them -- to cleanse them of their pointless cyclicality and introduce some linearity and teleology into the situation. Once the implicit idea is promulgated that a single human life forms the axis of history and the center of the cosmos, then we are no longer half-conscious, quasi-animal beings embedded in the rhythms of nature, but awake to the irreversible, future-oriented nature of time and therefore life. Well, some of us, anyway.
Yes, this does merge with our discussion of free will, for free will is an irreducibly spiritual faculty dropped into voidgin nature from above. You might say that free will is like the seed that makes our lives potentially fruitful. But like any seed, the proper conditions are required for it to grow and thrive.
Now, as Bolton points out, there is no such thing as absolute freedom on the human plane. In fact, such an idea is a priori metaphysically absurd, since freedom can only meaningfully exist within a context of restraint or limitation. To exercise freedom is to transcend limitation, not to abolish it or pretend it doesn't exist. It is to use limitation as a springboard to vault oneself "higher" or "deeper" into this thing we call reality (which we actually co-create).
For example, let's say we wish to be radically linguistically free. We will not advance our freedom by abolishing the limitations of alphabet and grammar, but simply destroy our ability to speak meaningfully. If you do this, you will not be more free, but less free, since you will have no freedom to move about within the higher dimensional semantic space that is disclosed by language, but built upon stable rules. At best, you will have a meaningless sort of horizontal freedom in which you are only at liberty to rant and gesture, like a dailykos diarist.
This is why, in order to properly speak the language of O-bonics, linguistic precision is so necessary. You will notice that when you pick up most any "new age" type book -- in fact, unfortunately, many conventional religious books as well -- the language conveniently goes "wobbly" just at that critical juncture when you most need it. These frauds use language in such a way that they make you feel as if the fault is within you, not them. Philosophers and academics pull the same thing all the time. But if you truly understand something, then it shouldn't be difficult to find the words to convey that understanding to another, at least assuming adequate communication skills, along with good will in the reader. (I might add that where the new agers use fuzzy language to conceal their ignorance, the conventionally religious often fall back on overly rigid and saturated formulas to cover over their lack of understanding.)
As Polanyi explained, true freedom results from a higher level exploiting the freedom left over by the boundary conditions of a lower level. This is why even a machine cannot be reduced to a machine. Rather, in order to create a machine, we employ the boundary conditions of physics and chemistry to manufacture something with a purpose, say, an automobile engine. With the engine, we are free to travel from here to there, but only because of the stable and deterministic boundary conditions of physics and chemistry.
Speaking of which, one of the reasons the Mohammedans are so unfree is that their metaphysics does not permit the existence of unvarying boundary conditions free from Allah's constant meddling. In other words, instead of a rational universe that operates along the lines of fixed principles, they imagine that Allah is intervening "vertically" at every moment to directly cause everything. This is also why they are so fatalistic, which only undermines everything that religion is here to mitigate, which is to say, fate. The purpose of religion is to make us more free, not less free. But that freedom can only exist in a cosmos with predictable boundary conditions with which to build upward and inward.
By the way -- and I suppose this isn't a peripheral point -- this is why it is so absurd to suggest that liberals are "pro-freedom." I mean, we already know that this isn't true in fact, what with speech codes, political correctness, racial quotas, confiscatory taxes, etc. But these things only flow from the fact that liberalism is anti-freedom in principle, since it celebrates the elimination of all the time-tested boundary conditions -- i.e., spiritual values -- that have made Western civilization so extraordinarily successful. Truly, liberals are dreadful.
But so too are so-called libertarians who imagine they are faithful to reason but who actually erode its spiritual foundations. On Dr. Sanity's website there was a particularly disturbing example of this by an infrahuman commenter who ironically goes by the name of "A. Rational Human."
In this regard, there is no question that Randian objectivism can serve as a sort of philosophical disinfectant, clearing away so much dysfunctional and magical ideology. But if that's where you remain, then at best your mind will achieve a sort of adolescent cleverness, in which you are able to use the intellect to deny it -- or to confuse truth with method. Clearly, the most important truths are "above" reason, not subject to it (i.e., to lower, mechanical reason, not to Reason as such, i.e., the intellect or nous which "perceives" truth directly, not discursively). Transcendent truths are intrinsically true. Just because we can't reduce them to some intellectual pygmy's O-nemic, a-gnostc, and irony-poor idea of reason, that's no sane reason to throw them out.
Doing so results in moral and intellectual insanity, which is distinct from the purely emotional kind only in appearances. Such a person is just as crazy, but is able to "pass" as normal under the Reign of Quantity. Below are some examples; that this cretin says he's 70 years old only adds to the irony, because his life is a late-term celestial abortion (even though there is almost always time to "turn around," transcend nature, and embody Reason; it's just that this person's language reveals such a willfully bleak soullessness, that it is probably too late for him):
"The fact is the fetus is a total parasite by any rational understanding of the concept. It exists by virtue of what its host provides it.... If a fully formed and functioning human cannot own another human, how can a total parasite that is nothing but a POTENTIAL human own its host?
"It makes no difference if the needy one is an actual human, a potential human, a tree, a cockroach, or the earth itself.... Parasites enter the body as a result of voluntary and specific actions of the host: eating food, walking barefoot on infected soil, breathing, living with animals.... They live off the substance of the host. Sperm is NOT of the woman's body and enters by an act of sex. The fetus lives off the substance of its host. Its only a matter of rather irrelevant detail and not difference in fundamental principles.
"Not only is the woman considered nothing but a growth media and slave to the result for 20 years (sic) but also her life is to be sacrificed in the name of 'protecting' life. My my, what a really a 'loving' Christian idea. To save a life we must insist that the life of the mother be destroyed and that she has no choice in the matter.
"As for DNA, the father contributed only one half the chromosomes for the FIRST cell. The mother provides everything else up to and including birth. Give him one set of chromosomes to the father and his contribution is more than totally returned. The remaining 6 to 10 pounds came from the mother.
"I know the scientific method and by that method I can discover what is true and what is not. Belief is for those who want fantasy and myth to be true and to be able to evade what is in fact true. Science is for those who want to KNOW what is true."
Yes, beneath ignorant and beyond creepy, irrespective of how you feel about Roe vs. Wade. Only a lost or dead soul could argue that abortion is actually a good thing because it eradicates parasites from our midst. Any intact soul knows that human life is sacred and that abortion is at best a necessary evil, but an evil just the same. A celestial abortion is also a calamity, but at least it's self-administered, i.e., cluelesscide. To forget what cannot be unknown is not a basis for life or liberty.
Now, where was I. Yes, not only does true spiritual freedom depend upon the boundary conditions known as eternal values, but it requires knowledge of those values. For example, A. Rational Human Being possesses no vertical freedom for the specific reason that he is utterly ignorant of the boundary conditions which make it possible.
As Bolton explains, "the same observation applies to all morally bad or defective actions. Their necessarily lower degree of freedom argues a lower degree of responsibility and guilt, or would do so if there were no such thing as culpable ignorance. Some such previous failure of free will is normally a necessary condition for worse things." And as Augustine recognized, "the saved in Heaven would no longer be able to sin, owing to their will having become perfectly free" (Bolton, italics mine).
Even if only interpreted allegorically, the point remains: we are only truly free to choose the good and know the true, unless lies and truth are interchangeable.