Reaction Is About Universals; One's Life Is About Particulars

An interesting back-and-forth with Anissimov is discussed at Outside In.

Reaction is neither a destination nor an ideology.  This writer is a proud Reactionary (in he hopes and suspects the most offensive sense of the term) but recognizes that Reaction ain't much to live one's life for - or by.

Neocameralism and Identitarianism are by nature not goals to be achieved but intellectual frameworks/models that illustrate values to which societies (or in some ways individuals) might aspire.  And while these two streams of Reaction do differ on important priorities,  each is only inherently true or good or right inasmuch as reality is explained by it.

The Neocameralist and Identitarian subscribe to -isms.

Having stared long enough into the abyss, we at Deductive Prosecutions aren't fond in general of subscribing to -ism's, particularly those conceived of in the past few centuries.  The few -ism's we deem worthy of deliberation in some intuitive sense are not only irrational but explicitly so.  Deductive Prosecutions subscribes to... the -ism Shlomo Maistre was born as/with.

True Reaction is not so much philosophy as it is understanding of how the real world works.  A Reactionary's pursuits in the temporal realm are guided by his understanding of the universal laws by which the social fabric of humanity evolves over time.  Man does not adhere to universals, but to particulars, and while a diluted Reactionary may seek out meaning in understanding Reaction, the complete Reactionary seeks out the understanding of Reaction for the sole purpose of more capably recognizing, measuring, and pursuing the particulars of his own life.

Although all communication is action, no two actions are created equal.  Debate does not a society form.  Indeed, less theorizing tends to indicate (and indirectly lead to) more orderly society.  Insofar as Reactionaries seek to build cohesive, orderly, and efficient societies, note that there is no philosophy sufficiently well analyzed, argued, or articulated to render the unifying, healing, and conserving effects of blind beliefs less instrumental to achieving such an end.

Secular Religion Is Terrestrial

A core principle of Reaction has surfaced in an article entitled "The Rise of Secular Religion" by David P. Goldman at The American Interest.

Today’s American liberalism, it is often remarked, amounts to a secular religion: it has its own sacred texts and taboos, Crusades and Inquisitions. The political correctness that undergirds it, meanwhile, can be traced back to the past century’s liberal Protestantism. Conservatives, of course, routinely scoff that liberals’ ersatz religion is inferior to the genuine article. 

[…] 

What Bottum calls the “re-enchantment and spiritual thickening of reality” is the subject of the book. It is an elusive quarry, for it is not a simple task to show that self-styled rationalists entertain a firm belief in the modern equivalent of ghosts and witches. For the post-Protestants, “the social forces of bigotry, power, corruption, mass opinion, militarism, and oppression are the constant themes of history” against which they must array themselves 

[...] 

The desire to be redeemed from sin (redefined as a social fact) identifies the post-Protestants as children of the Puritans. That insight is what makes his new book a new and invaluable contribution to our understanding of America’s frame of mind. Just what is a secular religion, and how does it shape the spiritual lives of its adherents? Bottum deftly peels the layers off the onion of liberal thinking to reveal its Protestant provenance and inherited religious sensibility. The Mainline Protestantism that once bestrode American public life never died, but metamorphosed into a secular doctrine of redemption. And that was made possible by the conversion of sin from a personal to a social fact in Walter Rauschenberg’s version of the social gospel. Bottum writes,  “The new elite class of America is the old one: America’s Mainline Protestant Christians, in both the glory and the annoyingness of their moral confidence and spiritual certainty. They just stripped out the Christianity along the way.” By redefining sin as social sin, Rauschenberg raised up a new Satan and a new vocabulary of redemption from his snares.

Progressivism is, indeed, secular religion; a religion in every way sans self-identification.

Man is possessed of two natures - the celestial and the terrestrial (a la Origen).  The former is good and elevates him to understanding by the grace of that which is a priori (chiefly memory - the engine/basis of knowledge).  The latter is evil and degrades him to the brutes by the grace of that which is a posteriori (chiefly time - the engine/basis of experience).

Each man's celestial nature (personality traits, inclinations, prejudices, intuitions) is the consequence of his understanding of/interaction with those particular memories he inherited at conception.  When Duns Scotus argued for G-d by a posteriori knowledge he planted the seed of tabula rasa in European culture, for if even G-d is known not a priori then nothing is so known and in denying a priori knowledge Scotus unleashed the terrestrial soul by renouncing the celestial one.

Though it is by intent, to renounce is not to expel by effect; and indeed Progressives seem to rediscover their very own natures on a regular basis!  Hence the embarrassing parade of (scientific!) beliefs - in social contract theory, natural rights, Keynesian economics, human neurological uniformity...

The effect, though not the intent, of renouncing man's celestial nature is to align spiritual ascendence with time - the engine of a posteriori.  And so it is that secular religion must, by virtue of valuing latter eras more highly than foregoing ones, shed all those trappings of tradition and habits of heritage that a civilization make.

An Ode To Power

And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

The Old Quarrel - By Way Of Introduction

Hmm.

Permit me, tender reader, to reintroduce myself.

It has been said that there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry.  Understanding how man's notions of philosophy and poetry have evolved since this observation was first made illustrates not only the veracity but also the irony of it.

It’s not that some regard rhetoric, once known as poetry, as futile or revelation, once understood to be philosophy, as instructive; it’s that they are inherently so.  To the extent that its basis in divine revelation remains intact and pure, rhetoric is, in fact, poetic.

The rhyme, measure, and meter of prose accord inasmuch its author recognizes his inherent incapacity to wield rhetoric for anything but the ultimate detriment of virtue.  This recognition is only manifestly apparent to he who knows why truth is sooner beauty than beautiful, for the inspiration of universals cannot be articulated but only recollected, experienced, and - at best - understood.  And so it is that rhetoric, mere imitation of understanding, corrodes admirably little when conveyed with sufficient restraint, prudence, and humility to be mistaken for poetry.

Understanding, which is man’s grasp of the divine, is simple in its purity but complex in its infinite relations, extensions, implications, variations, and connections.  By recording in writing a single proposition one captures for subsequent reflection an intuition with, however impure, some semblance of meaning and, posed properly, an intuitive process, which in evincing the means by which the proposition was intuited illustrates not only its self-evident veracity but the majestic unity of all things.  This is sublime to behold, which perhaps demonstrates why the purpose of this endeavor in rhetoric is not so much to convince the reader so much as it is to please the writer.

Since rhetoric is the fount of no original meaning but can at best only illuminate those truths more intimately understood in better, earlier ages by men possessed of more holistic, incisive, and fundamental intuition in well enough imitating the form of revelation to evince its function, this writer’s conceited pride swells with pretension when his works are derided as archaic or anachronistic.  Let us examine this matter further.

The earlier the age, the more simple, elementary, even naïve man’s languages may seem, but appearances can be deceiving.  After all, man proclaiming the definition of a word is sooner an effect than a cause of that word’s meaning, as man does not assign definition so much as recognize one, since all his language is mere representation of intuitions, embedded on the very soul with which he was born, that he recollects.

As sin begets sin, so disruption begets disruption.  Since language imitates understanding, which - by virtue of the various limits and weaknesses marking any temporal understanding of the spiritual realm beyond - diverges in its particular deficiencies from man to man, the disruption man renders language by employing it is inevitable.  This harm man deals language in using it, like all disruptive forces, obfuscates – in this case, words’ meanings and pronunciations, warranting not only the construction of new ones, which necessitates the use of more words to convey less meaning, but also the demarcation of the timbre, inflection, tone, amplitude, harmony of old ones to secure their identity against the vagaries of individual inclinations that in solitude drift without cause or end, but in mutual reciprocity check, reinforce, and anchor each other; of this collective interaction is prejudice born, which in defining certain particularities of linguistic precision, come overtime to define an accent, dialect, or language.

In this way we see why languages become both fewer and less verbose as one ventures back towards humanity’s dawn and how the laconism of earlier languages betray a profundity of thought increasingly difficult to not only fully understand but even simply recognize.

Whereas sufficiently fundamental intuition could have once been conveyed with so few words so as to remind how a single Hebrew word could mean both inspiration and intuition, this writer confesses a peculiar pride born of his capacity to understand why for himself such discursive prose is as elegantly clarifying in pursuit of that same end as it is eminently gratifying.  Though he has sought to cleanse himself of sophistry - and with no small degree of pride claims some success in that task - this writer nonetheless accepts his stain of sin as a consequence of his being and embarks upon writing not as proud enunciation of truth or even virtuous proclamation of insight but only as pleasurable vice.

In other words, tender reader, in revealing its inherent futility mental masturbation is actually quite productive.

All is One.