Dr. Godwin is familiar with Eric Voegelin's treatment of this subject. He seems to be aware of Eric Voegelin's work more generally.
It turns out that I regard Eric Voegelin as the single greatest philosopher of the Twentieth Century. So I can't begin to tell you how thrilled I am that Dr. Godwin appreciates him, too. Along with other favorites of mine: e.g., Robert Rosen, A. N. Whitehead, Aristotle among others....
You wrote: “Regarding Second Realities. [your post #69] Dr. Godwin is familiar with Eric Voegelin’s treatment of this subject. ..”
Yes, Eric Voegelin calls it: “immanentizing the eschaton”.
“How the Word is Flushed When the Weird Becomes Flesh”
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-word-is-flushed-and-weird-becomes.html
In The Religion of Eternal Racism and Eternal Sexism, Bruce Walker addresses a sort of paradox, that is, the left’s embodiment of “eternal” principles, when the whole point of the left is that — in the turgid but accurate phrase of Eric Voegelin - it “immanentizes the eschaton,” meaning, in plain Raccoon lingo, that it collapses the vertical into the horizontal, which dispenses with the “permanent things” of the transcendent realm altogether. As a result, all that is left for the bereft left is a horizontal, temporal, and material struggle “below,” which necessarily pits one group against another, based solely upon the lust for power. Any cynical “humanist” will tell you that this is simply the way of the world. See: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/the_religion_of_eternal_racism.html
This is because, in the absence of absolute principles to guide them, humans are reduced to something slightly below the animal kingdom, in that we have their form but not their nobility, restraint, and common sense. Rather, we are like “animals gone wild,” somehow liberated from our genetic program to undo nature’s delicate balance and wreak havoc on the planet. Any good “environmentalist” will tell you this.
My point is that the left can have no “eternal principles” on pain of immediate and final self-refutation. Therefore, it must obscure its absence of principles with constant tactical maneuvers that change from day to day, week to week, and year to year. Obviously, if you deny what Schuon calls the higher “principial” realm — which contains the absolute and eternal metaphysical principles of which this lower world is an instantiation — you can only live in a kind of “absolute relativity,” which, if you give it a moment’s thought, is intrinsically absurd. Frankly, it is metaphysically impossible, as relativity would then be absolute, thus negating itself. Obviously, cultural and moral relativism are intrinsically absurd and self-negating as well.
Walker highlights this absurdity of the left, in that it hews to faux-eternal principles which can never change irrespective of what actually happens in what they ironically call “reality,” being that reality for them is reduced to the flatland, material world. For example, Walker asks, “How many ‘civil rights’ leaders talk as if racism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? How many feminist leaders talk as if sexism is an immutable, eternal characteristic of American society? The mere passage of years, the mere enactment of statutes or adoption of polices, the decades long public relations campaign against bigotry — none of this can be allowed to make a difference” (emphasis mine).
But why does the left embrace a kind of bitter and reactionary anti-theology, in which they hold to such a negative view of the world despite what actually occurs here? As Walker writes, “the sins of America are a religious article of faith to self-appointed black leaders and to self-appointed representatives of the female sex.”
But here again we can see that the left is not guided by true principles, for example, the truly eternal principle that “all men are created equal.” Rather, for the left, “it is crucial that the sin is not racism or sexism, but specifically American (or, perhaps, Western) racism and sexism.” If the crimes aren’t committed by white Westerners, feminists aren’t interested. They will yawn “when told about honor murders, female circumcision and the imprisonment of rape victims,” so long as non-Christian people of color are responsible. “The catechism of the Left is that America is evil,” not that rape or honor killing are evil.
So the true motive that animates the left is not a “positive” principle such as equality, much less liberty, but an anti-principle. And this is why it takes such diverse forms, as the leftist must always fool you (and, more importantly, himself) into believing that he is defending eternal principles, principles in which he doesn’t actually believe. For example, the left universally believes that it is proper for the government to discriminate on the basis of race, “gender” and “sexual orientation”, and that failure to do so should be illegal. Not surprisingly, the party of trial lawyers loves these kinds of laws, because trial lawyers are the group that most benefits from this crass power grab in the guise of a principle.
The left once unanimously maintained that we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But the fact that they so readily abandoned this principle shows how they are always rooted in tactics, not principles. Likewise, up until the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the left was a vocal supporter of Israel, whereas now all of the wholesale anti-Semitism in the world emanates from the left (including, of course, the Obama campaign (cf here). http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/03/020124.php
America’s founders were (among other things) political mystics, in that they did not “deduce” the spiritual principles upon which the country was founded, but saw into the realm where they eternally abide. The intellect “sees” these principles with absolute certainty, “light to light,” so to speak.
See: On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding by Michael Novak
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1893554686/103-0073253-5764633?ie=UTF8&tag=onecosmos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1893554686
As Schuon explains, “Metaphysical truths are by no means accepted because they are merely logically clear, but because they are ontologically clear, and their logical clarity is only a trace of this imprinted on the mind.” Here again, this kind of higher truth is “not held to be true — by those who understand it — because it is expressed in a logical manner, but it can be expressed in a logical manner because it is true, without — obviously — its truth ever being compromised by the possible shortcomings of human reason.”
HERE: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1893554686/103-0073253-5764633?ie=UTF8&tag=onecosmos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1893554686
As further explained by Oldmeadow, metaphysical truth “has nothing to do with personal opinion, originality, or creativity — quite the contrary. It is directed towards those realities which lie outside mental perimeters and which are unchanging. The most a metaphysician will ever want to do is reformulate some timeless truth so that it becomes more intelligible in the prevailing climate.”
See: Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religous Traditions (The Library of Perennial Philosophy) by Harry Oldmeadow http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0941532577/103-0073253-5764633?ie=UTF8&tag=onecosmos-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0941532577
Indeed that is the whole purpose of my book and this blog — it’s why I tried to make the book a metaphysical joyread, and to make cosmic truth fun for the whole family! See: One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind & Spirit by Robert W. Godwin http://www.amazon.com/dp/1557788367?tag=onecosmos-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1557788367&adid=09WHWY1FE83RZ5WWS76M&;
Thus, when the Founders said, “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” they were not appealing to mere logic, but to something much higher — something eternal, axial, and principial, in this or any other cosmos. They were not conveying to King George what they “thought” about reality, but they were disclosing and imparting this transcendent reality to the monarch. These principles would still be true if not a single human being were aware of them — which, strictly speaking, is impossible, being that the human, qua human, is the being that is by definition conformed or “proportioned” to the absolute. Humans and humans alone are the cosmic mediators between time and eternity, God and creation, vertical and horizontal — which is why we may know eternal Truth and conform ourselves to it. Or not.
In short, because we possess free will (freedom being one of the Divine attributes reflected in the human being) we may incarnate Truth or uncarnate the Lie. It’s all up — or down — to you.
*****
Dr. Sanity brings attention to the same unprincipled leftist principles in her post Morally Twisted, which gets into the question of why the worthless Palestinians get so much more attention than the worthy Tibetans. Read the whole thing, as it really lays bare the broken moral compass of the left:
See: http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2008/03/morally-twisted.html
“In the holy book of leftist belief, ‘victimhood’ is the most celebrated quality deserving of attention and pity. This is in part because many on the political left have a pathologically narcissistic need to see themselves as ‘champions of the oppressed’, hence the constant need to find and maintain an oppressed class of people to champion. But it also dovetails nicely into the the Marxist dialectic that underlies that ideology. The world is divided up into two groups, you see: the oppressors (i.e., white, male,heterosexual, Republican, Americans or Israelis) and the oppressed (everyone else)....
“Now compare and contrast the Palestinians with the relatively gentle culture of Tibet and the non-violent philosophy of its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. You can also compare and contrast the deliberate brutality of China and its Communist leadership with Israel. China’s brutality and oppression is almost always given a free pass by the left in much the same way they have extended to Fidel Castro and other despotic totalitarian and authoritarian regimes their devoted loyalty and sympathy. Israel, as a Democratic and morally conscious nation actually works hard to spare innocent human life is automatically condemned whenever they respond to Palestinian provocation simply because it represents Western values and is by definition of the neo-marxists of our day, an ‘official’ oppressor. The left always calls Israel’s response to the provocations ‘disproportionate’; but in reality, it is the left’s moral equivalence that is so disgustingly disproportionate.”
posted by Gagdad Bob at 8:59 AM on Mar 26, 2008
Thanks for the ping! bttt
"...The heart of Goldberg's piece involves a discussion of Voegelin's point that progressivism is a political religion and therefore a form of gnosticism."
There's a reason why hardcore leftists -- I mean, the true believers, not just the typical confused or dim Democrat -- are such assouls, since political inclination has more to do with temperament than people might realize. [What sane, happy, rational person could] find his soul's rest in leftism, which is predicated on such anger, envy, bitterness, paranoia, leaden seriousness, deep unhappiness, and general "sourness."?
....what does the Democrat leader have to offer his various tribes except for [Palin], Bush, or Cheney, or Rove, or Halliburton, or the Wealthy, or scary Christians, or Creationists, or White Racists, or misogynists, or "homophobes," or the End of the World? What's left of the Left if you remove these "containers" of projected rage and fear? Only the free-floating rage and fear. ...
....the Democrat party is a coalition of groups, not individuals or consistent ideas. It is a "herd of independent group minds," a Big Chief Crazy Quilt of flocking idiots, journalistic hack animals, buffaloed herds, moveable riots, mass rally crying jags, giant snit-ins and other demonstrations of affect, schools of economic fish stories, snivel rights agitators, cairing allahgators, heards of poor listeners, whordes of sex-workers, feline prides of lyin' shemales, educational kennels of K - 9 kosbags, pods of peaheaded publications, plagues of lawyering locusts, boring nests of teeming tenuremites, coops of chicks who look more like dudes, and gaggles of gaydom and boring Goredom spanning the gamut from goofy weathermen to those who don't know whether they're men. ...."
HERE: Progressivism is a political religion and therefore a form of gnosticism