To See with the Heart

Brief notes on flattened dualisms

The deed of naming was Adam’s great task. The fear which fuels Leviathan’s death grip on mass media is due to that power of naming. The mass media (I extend mass media to education and healthcare) retains its power by fixing our attention on its framing of reality. If we are to use different names, names which give true insight because reality is created and upheld by God, then the spell may break and Leviathan’s power collapse.

The collapse of the peasant’s power to name things without bureaucrat apparatchik approval is upheld by a radical social libertarianism, a self-imposed prison of logical positivism where we can say nothing of meaning and therefore must tie our own hands before the schemes of world-builders. 

Marx identified a conflict between value and production as the weak chain which would cause the collapse of capitalism. His self-imposed materialism prevented him from seeing meaning in technological choices, organizational choices. The Hegelian dialectic turned the world into an algorithm for him; he could not imagine the world as a story, let alone have the heart to see it as a fairy tale.

Of course, we do not even have capitalism. The profit motive was detached from the invisible hand (God) by the avarice of men, by their fealty to power and control which wiped away the ability to name any limits. Living beings were stripped of their meaning, reduced to the bare function of reproduction. The Great Chain of Being, the Divine Emanations, was suppressed in favor of nominalism, a logical positivism which at every step empowered a corporate-bureaucratic oligarchy which loathed limits.

This dualistic oligarchy of profit & power leads naturally to social engineering, just as Marx's Communist solution does. Because the combination of profit & power lead to a disinterest in things as they have been made, of which their backers in academia insist they cannot speak, the managers are left only with desire to guide them. Desire demands a manageable, compliant, subservient populace which can be managed as much as any factory product. If it can be made as synthetic and processed as our food, clothing, and medicine, so much the better.

The failure to see the shared core motivations between the economic and philosophical ideologies of the moderns are why sophisticated critics roll their eyes at much of our flattened discourse. But while critics among the masses may use an impoverished vocabulary, it is not wholly wrong. Whittaker Chambers gave lengthy and critical definitions of communism not as economic justice, but as an obsessive redefining of reality for the purposes of control. The goal, just as it is in corporate-bureaucratic oligarchy, is the progressive mechanization of reality, a reframing of our understanding by which greater control can be pursued.

At the core of both philosophies was not the lion laying down with the lamb; it was the power to control the very nature of lion and lamb. What was most profoundly at stake, though unacknowledged in popular portrayals, was who would name reality, because to name is to control.

Mechanization and libertarianism go hand in hand. If man is nothing but chemical equations, why not tinker with such equations? Why not remodel him? By whose authority? Radical libertarianism has been popularly understood as the idyllic or asinine liberty for the common man to set off firecrackers or remove his testicles; in reality it is the quiet triumph for managers to manage the common man to the point of confusion & exhaustion where he not only buys what he is told, but believes he is as meaningless as he is told.

The refusal to acknowledge meaning or making, of the distinctions of virtue or vice, of difference, of beginning and end, of purpose and good, creates this vast shrugging. At first it sounds like something of a celebration (because freedom is a true Good); in the end it sounds like frenzied despair (because responsibility towards reality is also a true Good). Billions of men, told there is no meaning and only consumption, are ripe for making a mass madness which provides a convenient opportunity for the oligarchs to manage us into further docility. Libertarian nominalism has made us the most manageable of creatures.

This crisis commonality, of shared meaning, has led to the great fracturing of our landscape and bodies. We either participate in a culture run to empower the lowest common denominator, ie the music, entertainment, schooling, and medicine all run to maximize self-debasing qualities, or we retreat to cloisters. We are manageable appetites, units marked for euthanasia, or we are solitary witnesses.

This split foisted upon us by the radical libertarianism has led us truly to the world Wittgenstein envisioned, where we dare not speak of what we cannot know. Who are we to speak of meaning in flowers, stars, atoms, time, sex, relationships, prayers? Because we dare not speak Management does. So the mental illness crisis abounds. So the children are educated into sickness. So the old are led into loneliness. So the land is made a chaos, the stars disappeared, the animals factoried, melody vanished, addiction ravaging nearly every mind and soul. The radical libertarian world has become a world free only for madness as its managers permit it in order to establish their own vision of Babel; yet the induced chaos is too great even for them. Surveillance grows linearly but chaos seems to do so exponentially. The devil does not serve nor keep his promises. And in this spiraling madness we glimpse: There is no common centre; there is no binding circumference. Today when the centre breaks it does not even have a place to fall towards; there is nothing left. Hell is the absence of all Quality, it is the broken noise of Formlessness.

Dire analysis aside, perhaps this was all to be. Is sin behovely? Blessed Julian said so. I'm not as certain, but I'm also not committed to treating the mortal realm as something frozen and dead. It does so often seem that here, before the Beatific Vision, we must often leave to return again. So we have had a great leaving. What a leaving indeed! We have left love, responsibility, the land, our hands, our plants, our animals behind. We are on the cusp of leaving our hands, our inherent sex, our natural hormonal cycles, our natural weather patterns behind. Millions are stupefied into leaving their very minds behind via screen or substance addiction. 

Perhaps the centre must be sought anew; perhaps behind the chaos is Reality. Perhaps the radical libertarian era must come to an end; only, the door is blocked by Management. The owner does not want us to leave. The liberty was always his; we believed it was ours only in self-delusion. The Manager has sycophants and goons. They are angry. Suddenly we see the coercion behind the mask of individualism: We have not been good club-goers. We have not truly committed to the Project. If only we take leave of our senses a little more, let them tweak our bodies a little more, leave our babies with them a little earlier, allow them to euthanize us a little younger - then the Project will be perfect. Libertarianism and collectivism looked only at their own idols, not reality - and so they served the same destruction.

We are most in need of a vision of the common good; that the only ones we are allowed to see comes from for-profit entities self-evidently means we do not have one committed to truth (I hold that religious truth is obscured from the people and so is not visible to the average dweller in Leviathan). That social communication is, above immediate face-to-face interaction, almost always dominated and mediated by for-profit entities means we have not had an honest one. That we have not allowed public philosophy to rise above materialist-nominalism means we have not had a reality-tested one. 

What does one do in the face of a Machine made by men and women who dread reality, who lust for control over reality, who will break any living thing to seize what power they can find in it? Is it either Leviathan or silent witness?

There is another way, the way of prayer. It is also called the Communion of Saints, and we do not look at it because we are too sophisticated, too modern; because we hope too much in a lawyer-ruled paradise, because we place our faith in documents, in powerful lenses, in healthcare, in material wealth, in denominational triumph. We miss therefore that which is more real than sight, denser than matter, light upon light.

This world will not be made holy by management. It will not be made beautiful by profit-seekers. It will not be made free by lawyers. It will not be healed by for-profit providers. It will not be made fair by economists. It will not be understood by nominalists.

Those who know those truths are doomed to loneliness only if they so wish it. There is a holy task available to the most humble, the most bereaved, the most exhausted: simply to love and look. The Romance of all Romances is playing out in this world if we have the grace to see it. We may participate at any time by prayer. The dead ask for our prayers; we ask for theirs. Our eyes have been veiled, not only by artificial lights but by our mental framework. Can we see the meaning in stars anew? Can we accept a task which asks us to see what has been hidden by our own misdeeds, to see with prayer, dependent on the clearer vision of the saints?

Can we reject the flattening of the world to see that love is more life than life, the meaning and movement of reality in which Quantity is the servant, not the master, of Quality, of essence and existence?

It is only when we receive and give something other than power that change is possible; the law of love whose language is prayer has not yet been tried outside small corners. But of course it is the only law worth following, the true language worth speaking.