Harbal wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 9:09 pmI should pay more attention to your reading list, and less to my own intuition and sense of right and wrong, you mean? Before you complain about my resistance to your influence, tell me how persuasive you find my point of view.
As I've said many times: "I am here for my own purposes". As an example you have (in the post I quoted from) explained your orientation and, indirectly, the *trajectory* that brought you to your declared position. You ask me to answer your question "How persuasive [do] you find my point of view"? and my answer is "Very persuasive" when I understand the trajectory of ideas and the social movement (which I shorten to 'social engineering') that has created Our Present.
Very persuasive ... and I intend to work against it (specifically in my own self).
This Present presents itself as *inevitable* and also (as you said earlier) as *right* (and as I say *righteous*) and the sets of attitudes and interpretations that inform it trundle on from year to year and decade to decade. But not with a conscious, intended result but rather, in my view, as something semi-conscious -- and here I make reference to an *inevitableness* that is not so much a structured creation but more an unconscious result or outcome (consequence is another word I could use).
What interests me in what you say is the phrase *intuition and sense of right and wrong*. I recognize that you prefaced it with *my* and I certainly understand and respect your view. However I will say that I am very uncertain if *the average man* or just *someone in the street* is actually
capable of defining what is right and wrong. Here, naturally, I refer to *structures of authority* as a counter-insinuation to the notion of intuited senses of good and bad. And again I refer to Robert Bork who, among different pointed critiques, noted that one of the intense influences of the 1960s youth movement was the *intuited* and felt belief that it was right, proper and good to tear down established hierarchies of value as the very notion of
authority was challenged.
I know of course that any reference I make to
authority -- and indeed this is very true for our entire civilization -- will involve reference to religious authority. And that means, of course, reference to the metaphysics about which authority figures spoke and also the base upon which their views and ideas were constructed. You can pick any particular area -- say the definition of marriage or the proper education of a child though the list will be endless -- and ideas that arise from our traditions of metaphysics will show themselves evident.
Once the original and inspiring sets of beliefs begin to become dissolved, step by step and also inevitably, the structures that were built begin to disintegrate. At first, it might not be recognized as something *destructive*, and indeed it might seem to be and might be felt as *constructive* just as the relaxation of a stricture might *feel* to be relieving. But my view is that it is later, when a general decadence and dissolution has shown itself, that it is then that one notices what happens when the structures of value are falling apart.
My view is that this is super-evident in our present. And as I have said I also believe that many people notice this, do not know precisely what the causes are (the causal chains that have led to it) and that they struggle to *make interpretations* -- often wildly and spontaneously -- about why things are as they are. Simultaneously they also -- this seems inevitable -- put forth what they see as remediation of the decadence and breakdown. That which will arrest it and correct it.
I do not imagine that I have to point out to general readership here that the cultural battles of our day center upon these questions. And also notice that the trend is toward *confrontation* on many different levels; from the family and community level up to the global and geo-political.
Should I pay more attention to your reading list?
Beyond any shadow of any doubt of any sort at all, yes.
A thousand times yes. I am not
less convinced of this when I first came back on to PN I am
a hundred times more certain. But the *certainty* that has been solidified is for me alone. I cannot mystically transfer it to another. Could I prove it
to you? I do not think so. Why? Your desire, your purpose,
your project, is to negate that such a thing is necessary. So if you are an locomotive moving along a track you will keep moving along the lines established by that track.
I all hinges back to *education*.
resistance to your influence
There is more to be gained from seeing *influence* in a more abstract manner. Just as I try to point out that *your ideas* are not really yours but something produced in you (and in all of us) by processes of cultural engineering, so it is that in order for there to be a recovery from the result of these revolutions, the original and more substantive and more value-oriented base has to be recovered. The original reasoning and the logic (logos) has to be rediscovered, re-cognized and re-hierarchized.
And so yes, this is definitely a process of education and re-education. And that is what I take *reading list* to mean.
I return again to my original statement. It has not changed. And I do not see how it could be changed without a very definite and a very real destruction
of value.
What I said is that it is necessary for our society as a whole to realize that the marriage of a man and a woman in a productive, family-oriented relationship should be, must be, seen as of a superior category to a sterile homosexual union. A given homosexual must and should see this and must not elevate his/her union to a level that it should and must not occupy. The direction of culture -- our culture -- should and must reorient itself toward the family (and if you wish the word *traditional* can be inserted there as a qualifier). As I said: homosexuality exists, and homosexuals exist, but they should, and we all should, down-play and restrict those performances (like pride parades) that celebrate sterile unions. There are a thousand different avenues by which the influence of homosexuals and homosexual choices are presented in our culture. It is best if these are down-played and (I struggle for the proper word) repressed.
The other area -- it is actually somewhat larger and more important -- has to do with the issue and question of general sexuality, sexual ethics, sexual practice, and all the rest which has come up here. I recognize that sexuality, once it is let out of its restraints, literally *goes wild*. This is inevitable. It puts me in a difficult position to define and defend a sexual ethics which is centered around marriage and family -- I have certainly lived the larger part of my career outside of those restraints -- but I am here defending the better ethic, the better way to live (though I have no way to influence any other person). In my case I find the best defense of this in Catholic social doctrine.
But all of this is constructed upon ideas, presuppositions and metaphysics that are (largely) rejected today. I understand this. But again I am *only here for my own purposes* and I have clarified what these are
for myself.
There are two directions then: One tends away from any level of restraint. At an extreme it breaks down all the restraints against all *forbidden areas* that were ever defined. The Foucaultian tendency (within the sexual domain) I might call it. The other, obviously, is established on a very different set of principles, interpretations and also values, and certainly these would be defined as *traditional*, though that is a word that has a prejudicial tone in it.
Nevertheless all that I can do here is to point out that the two poles exist and make efforts to explain why I align myself with one and not the other.