Month: January 2026

Political Posts and Substack Articles

For my polemical offerings, mainly on political topics,  go to my Facebook  page.  Essays of a calmer and more philosophical sort on a wider range of topics can be found at my Substack site.  Here is my latest Substack upload, which is less calm and detached than most.  Things are heating up here and elsewhere in the world.   Who could be bored?

This, the mother site, MavPhil Gen IV, will feature more technical writing.  But, per usual, there will be overlap, repetition, and some cross-posting. As for repetition, repetitio est mater studiorum.

The Role of Politics in the Life of a Leftist

A  friend of mine is the principal partner in an  accounting firm.  He told me that when Trump won in 2024, one of the female CPAs in the firm, a Democrat but very good at her job, was so distraught that she had to take leave time.   We both found this passing strange*: had Trump lost, my conservative friend and I would not have been pleased, but we would have taken it in stride.  The CPA’s behavior is not atypical. We all know lefties who reacted similarly. Why is this? Here’s my theory.

Although leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager and others who do not share my concern for precision in the use of words,  it substitutes for religion in the wholly secular psychic economy of leftists.  Because leftist politics is the most important thing in their lives, their “ultimate concern” to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich, in the way that religion is the most important thing in the lives of the truly religious, leftists freak out when their candidates lose. The feel that they are losing everything, or at least the most important thing.  If the very meaning of your life is wrapped up in ‘progressive’ politics, and an uncouth America-first braggart of a billionaire,  a crude unclubbable gate-crasher, a crass self-promoter, a man with no class, wins all seven swing states and the popular vote to boot, your world comes crashing down. The degree of freak-out and world-collapse will of course vary from individual to individual. An extreme case is that of Rosie O’Donnell who self-deported to the Emerald Isle where she spends her days obsessing over the Orange Man. Poor Rosie thought the grass would be greener there; it turns out, however, that the legal weed she enjoyed in LaLaLand (Los Angeles)  was not to be had in Ireland.  “In 2008, O’Donnell said that she was not an alcoholic, and had temporarily given up alcohol to lose weight. She wrote on her blog: “‘Cause I was drinking too much, ’cause I didn’t want to any more, ’cause it is hard to lose weight when drinking, ’cause I can never have only one.”[177] She started drinking again following President Trump’s first election victory in 2016, revealing, “I was very, very depressed. I was overeating. I was overdrinking … I was so depressed.”[178]

My theory also helps explain why leftists are so vehement and unhinged (as witness Robert de Niro’s shameless histrionics) in their blind hatred of  Trump.  If politics is (or rather functions as) your religion, then, since religion presents to us saintly and divine beings such as Jesus Christ meek and mild*** for emulation, lefties thoughtlessly suppose that political figures should satisfy a similar need: they should be polite, conventionally nice people that our sons and daughter should be able to admire and look up to.  Leftists, most of then anyway,  want a POTUS who plays a quasi-religious role, something like a Sunday school teacher.  (And not just leftists; Never-Trumpers do as well.) Now the last such Sunday-school POTUS was James Earl Carter, and you recall what a disaster he was. A good man, a nice man, but a lousy POTUS. Wasn’t he involved hands-on with Habitat for Humanity?  Can you imagine Trump being so involved? He’s a builder, but not that kind of builder.

In sum, two main interconnected points:

A. For the secular left — and most leftists are secularists — politics plays in their lives the all-important roles that religion plays in the lives of the truly religious.  This explains why they get so excited about politics and why they are so crushed when their ‘progressivism’ suffers setbacks.

B.  And because progressive politics is (or rather functions as) their religion, lefties look to politics to satisfy their need for people to look up to and emulate.  Since Trump doesn’t fill the bill, they hate him mindlessly and won’t give him credit for the numerous great things he has done for the USA and indeed the whole world, where Midnight Hammer is an example of the latter.   He’s not a ‘nice man’ by cat lady standards.  He doesn’t look into the camera and smile like the fraudulent and phony Joey B or clown around like Kamala. He scowls. I call it the Scowl of Minerva.

__________________

* It’s an ersatz or substitute religion, where ‘ersatz’ and ‘substitute’ function as alienans adjectives. See here for more on such adjectives.

** The phrase “passing strange” originates from William Shakespeare’s Othello, where Desdemona describes Othello’s dramatic war stories as “strange, passing strange,” meaning extremely strange or very unusual.  In Early Modern English, “passing” functioned as an intensifier, equivalent to “exceedingly.” [AI-generated]

*** Agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  Lambs are meek and mild.

Pray for Light or Pray for Faith?

I

One day in the ’90s, standing in my kitchen, I suddenly prayed, “Lord, give me light!” The ‘reply’ came just as suddenly, “The light comes later.” This is an example of an inner or interior locution. Grokipedia:

Interior locution is a concept in Christian mysticism, particularly within Catholic theology, referring to a supernatural form of private revelation in which a divine message or communication is received directly in the intellect or soul, without audible words, external sounds, or sensory involvement. This inner “voice” or infusion of knowledge is distinct from exterior locutions, which may be heard aloud by others, and from visions, which involve imaginative or corporeal imagery; instead, it operates purely on a spiritual level, often providing guidance, reassurance, or enlightenment during prayer or spiritual trials.

The above definition is accurate. How do I know? I have read the great mystics (Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Avila et al., and the best of the commentators Augustin Poulain and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, to mention just two. An article of mine on Poulain here.)

I hasten to point out that while the experiencing of an inner locution cannot be doubted, at least while it is occurring, one reasonably can and perhaps ought to doubt the source of the experience. I petitioned the Lord for light (knowledge, enlightenment, understanding),  and I ‘received’ an ‘answer.’ But from whom? From the Lord?  Which lord? Lord Krishna? Lord Jesus Christ? That it was Jesus  cannot be read off from the experience itself.  Such a reading goes beyond the phenomenology of the experience.  On another occasion, while in deep meditation, I ‘heard’ the locution, “I want to tear you apart.” Presumably that was not from Jesus Christ or any good denizen of the Unseen Order.  But neither does it follow that it was from a demonic agent. The experience qua experience is neutral on the question whether there are any demonic agents.  On a third occasion, during a solitary desert hike, pondering a certain course of action, the ‘message’ was: I am with you. As far as the phenomenology shows, that ‘message’ could have been from Christ or it could have been from a demon impersonating Christ or from the depths of my own psyche.

II

The above is preliminary to my title question. Spelled out, what I am asking myself is whether I should be praying for light (infused contemplation, verification of faith contents, objective certainty) or praying instead for a deepening of faith, and a strengthening of the will to go forward by faith,  That I pray at all shows that I have some faith. (Can you imagine Richard Dawkins or Galen Strawson or Daniel Dennett or David Stove  praying while they are or were healthy?  When Stove got sick and near death, his stridently cocksure atheistic convictions began to totter.)  Pondering the question of whether I should be praying for infused contemplation or for a deepening of faith while remaining (relatively speaking) ‘in the dark,’ I imagined a conversation between me and God.  What follows is of course not a report of an inner locution, but a made-up story.

I pray, “Give me light, Lord!” The Lord replies:

Look man, I’ve given you enough light in the form of what you call glimpses, vouchsafings, peeks behind the veil, intimations of Elsewhere. I’ve given you enough light on which to go forward.  The human predicament is probationary and penal.  You want it to be full of light. But part of your probation is to see if you can hold out in the dark. The light comes later!

Plato saw the world  for what it is: a speluncular chiaroscuro of light and dark, a shadowland in which substance is rarely descried but easily denied.  So now your test is to live by faith. To quote one of your favorite philosophers, “There is light enough for those who wish to see and darkness enough for the contrary-minded.” (Pascal)  Even men of far higher spiritual rank than you such as Augustine and Aquinas were permitted the visio mystica on rare occasions only. You yourself have written about the mysticism à deux of Augustine and his mother Monica when they shared the vision at Ostia.

And you know that monks in monasteries have spent long lives without experiencing infused contemplation. So settle down in the dark, listen, wait, and stop asking me for light. 

 

 

Life’s Fugacity

As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate. This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate. When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us. But to us on the far side of middle age the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time’s tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?

Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade. Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life. You go from womb to world, and from helpless infant to cocky youth. Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.

In the third decade, biological growth over with, one typically finishes one’s education and gets settled in a career. But there are still plenty of changes. From ages 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.

But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places, and from age 50 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address. And it won’t be long before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Tempus? Fugit!

For the New Year

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:
For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — which thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
Nietzsche found it very difficult to let looking away be his only negation.  And so will I.