The Permanent Things and Evolution

The roots of the American order have withered far more than Russell Kirk described them, Kirk's watering alone did not and will not bring the tree back to life. The tree also needs sunlight and richer soil, which means the moral order and the civic order need to affirm and understand the religious and scientific dimensions of evolution.

The projected Theoevolutionary Church defines itself as Conservative because we seek to build upon the Permanent Things that Russel Kirk so eloquently spent his life writing about. The conservative order is not a closed ideology, it changes. Permanence needs refreshing and renewal. We believe that evolution is the sunlight and the soil needed, in addition to Kirk's watering of the American order. Otherwise the order will increasingly become disorder.

The Theoevolutionary Church brings evolution to the understanding of both the moral and civic order, evolution to God requires both. Moral and civic order need to be seen in both their Inner and Outer Paths. The Inner Path is deeply traditional, but the God seen inwardly must be evolved to in the Outward Path, and this is the deepest renewal we affirm.

The Meek and the Strong

Those who follow the Inward Path are said to inherit the earth (the meek), and those who follow the Outward Path will inherit the stars (the strong). But working together they will evolve and inherit the cosmos and Godhood. These old terms "meek" and "strong," need to be understood as more evolutionary terms.

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible

Is James Lovelock greatly exaggerating to make his point or does he have it right? Here is a piece of an interview from the Guardian.

"Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. “But this is the real thing.”

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

Our Servile Congress

Why did our present Congress, which was voted in primarily to stop the Irag war, refuse to stop the Irag war? Because the private power of lobbies are now stronger than the power of our lawmakers and our courts. This is most alarming.

It seems that the fear of being fired, of being sacked, unemployed, or of even being rendered unemployable, eg,. “You will never work in this town again,” is the threat that made our Congressman accept their servile position with the lobbies. We can now substitute the term “master” for lobbies and “servant” for our Congressman.

Where is the courage to change this situation? Perhaps only the necessity of basic, outright survival can bring the courage to stand up to the lobbies and return to our original Constitution ( see Ron Paul.)

Belloc and Barack

If Hilaire Belloc were alive today he might conclude that if Barack Obama and his brand of socialism prevail, it will be the global capitalists who are to blame. When a few elite global capitalists own or control everything and treat most people unfairly and unjustly it usually leads to the line of least resistance as a reaction by the people: socialism, where supposedly the state owns everything.

A better solution would be to put property and the means of production in the hands of as many local families as possible, but this is the more difficult solution and people usually prefer the easier socialist solution—led on by those who supposedly gain from socialism.

This is how we can blame the neoconservatives (never really conservative) and global capitalists for the coming servile socialist state. Perhaps the flexibility of our system of two parties allows for a give and take, and true localism will one day return. The return to our original Constitution (again, see Ron Paul) is the Conservative option, other options seem too radical and usually lead to another servile state.

The Alchemy of God

What better than evolution can discern how one essential part could be logically deduced from another thing? This way we can see how God might be defined as the accumulated parts expanded into a Whole much greater than the parts.

The “alchemy of God” could describe evolution of the phenomenal world to Godhood, we may dimly know the process, but our “philosopher's stone” does not know the “supersubstance” which defines God.

And we need to know the “Cause.” The urge for rejuvenation or the need for anything else is not the cause since God needs nothing.

Left and Right Hand Path Synthesis

The Inward Path is Traditional, atavistic, magical, right brain, synthesizing, unconscious, before language, subjective, biological. The Outward Path is mystical, theoretical, scientific, left brain, abstract, analyzing and also biological.  They work together in the Theoevolutionary Church because the Inward Path and the Outward Path are both grounded in biology and spirit, although they take subjective and objective paths to the same goal. The Soul and Spirit Within are encased in biology.

Theoretical, mystical God leads to concrete biospiritual God and vice versa. That which is described in words, in abstract language, in spirit, also exists as concrete materiaspiritus Being. The subjective biological evolves to the objective spiritual and becomes one.

Spirit thus requires the earth and the earth requires spirit as male and female require one another, to continue the evolution of biology to Godhood. The Theoevolutionary Church is also thus a combination or synthesis of patriarchy and matriarchy.

Reflections On The Constitution, Distributism, And Empire

The return to the Constitution, advocated by Traditional Conservatives and Ron Paul seems to be the American way of affirming Hillaire Belloc's Distributive State. Putting property and the means of production in the hands of as many families as possible makes people as happy and secure as people can be, given the realities of life.

Regarding "Empire" in this scheme, the Roman Empire seems to have transformed into the Catholic Church, the Empire-that-became-the-Faith shrunk down to a small core in the Dark Ages, and rose again and fell again, to this day. We are not speaking here of the capitalist global “empire,” which is, for the most part, an aberration in the long history of Western Civilization. Now it seems that our future will see Europe and America eventually split into small states and ethnostates to survive the ongoing destruction of the Western world. Should this mean the end of Empires?

When "Empire" is defined as small, separate, states lightly guided by Subsidiarity or light Federalism, this is an Empire we can affirm—some insist that this was the scheme of the Roman Empire, which continued with the Church. This can harmonize with the American Constitution. Small states can cause broken down Globalism to yield to small agriculture and small manufacturing, which can be guided by the ethics of the Church.

But we would go further, and slowly, transform the Church, as the Church transformed the Roman Empire, to reconcile religion with science, by combining the Outward Path of Evolution with the Traditional Inward Path of the Soul.

No Duality between environment and living things in evolution

When evolution is explained solely as the environment forcing adaptation upon living forms, with different pressures coming from different environments making species different from one another, what seems to be left out is the drive to live and evolve. Does the Cause emanate from the environment?

The environment is not merely “forcing adaptation” on living things as if it were an outside force, the environment is made up of living and past living things, with all of them nevertheless in competition, all driven by the same will to live, or more precisely, the will to Godhood, and this helps define what the Soul does. There is not a duality here between that which forces adaptation and that which evolves.

Who will attain Godhood? God seems to “wait” to see, like a Kosmic coach, and perhaps God sometimes helps those along who find or follow the better paths to Godhood.

Gabriel --Russian icon

Why we should return to our Constitution

A return to our Constitution would bring a return to the Traditional moral base on which our laws are based. This would help balance what we see taking place in society today between our morality and our actions. Things are now very unbalanced and causing greater and greater instability, as Hilaire Belloc pointed out many years ago in “The Servile State.”

If returned to, our Constitution would eventually return the ownership of government and property to the people, as power is Constitutionally split and local, and State power and Capitalist power is kept light and distributed among the regions, the states and the people. Contrary to the Socialists and Capitalists (no matter what they may claim to support their elitism), power and property are not evil, nor are they God, it is control and ownership of power and property by a very few---be they Capitalist, the State, or a combo of both---which causes our dangerous disequilibrium.

Are the global capitalist forces too great to permit a return to our Constitution and thus a return to morality? The Ron Paul movement thinks not. More power to them.

Our Position On the Environment

Our position on the environment and ecology is that the material world is the stuff by which we evolve to God, and therefore it demands respect and reverence, as does the guiding Soul-Within. This seems to be a reverence for the environment deeper even than the radical environmentalists.

The Reconciliation of New and Old Theology

The Subjective and Objective

Evolution eventually can tie the material to the spiritual, the subjective to the objective, thinking alone cannot do this, and contrary to the New Age, true connection to the Soul-Within does not make us God. Only evolving to God allows us to join God. In this way we are not so much flawed as incomplete. God is Subjective-Objective-In-Himself, we are subjective-objective-becoming.

In the Evolutionary Christian Church the subjective is represented by involution, the Inward Path to Soul-Within, the objective is represented by evolution, the Outward Path to God activated by the Spirit within. This is how the incomplete subjective-objective reaches the complete Objective-Subjective-In-Himself through evolution.

Hegel thought that anguish is present only when there is opposition to what ought to be, to the real, to the affirmative, and we can agree with that thought.

The State In the Theoevolutionary Church

The community, the people, are "spiritual" in that the state and religion are reconciled in the evolution of the people to God. But the state is local, i.e., not a big Hegelian state, at the most a small ethnostate, since this is is how the material-spiritual evolves best to God, as sociobiology most recently has suggested, and as Conservatism has been saying all along. In this sense religion is involved in the state, loosely tied to the Universal Church which helps guide--- through Subsidiarity and Beyondist knowledge--- local varieties of people to evolve to Godhood.

In the Theoevolutionary Churchthe sacred and secular disconnections are this way overcome. The community makes explicit in evolution what has been implicitly understood in religion. The extremes of the Enlightenment and Pietism are also overcome. And we see here how a people's concept of God reflects its concept of the state.

Prediction and theTheoevolutionary Church

A human action is possible if it doesn't violate the laws of nature and evolution; if it does the action is not possible.

The action is practical if it doesn't violate Tradition, it is impractical if it does.

However, something impractical is possible if it doesn't violate the laws of evolution.

This is related to predicting future technology, which is possible if it doesn't violate the laws of physics, although some things may take longer than others to happen. (see Michio Kaku on future technology, City University of New York.)

Therefore, the Theoevolutionary Church is possible and even practical because it does not violate the laws of evolution or Tradition, since it combines evolution (science) and religion, joining the two paths: Outer and Inner Paths.

World Population Trends

Here is some stark reality on world population trends from the ever courageous Pat Buchanan. "The Way Our World Ends."

Paleoconservatism Survives The Collapse

Recent studies on the collapse of civilization coming in from many fields, biology, engineering, economics, complexity theory, political science, ecology, as well as American Paleoconservative thinkers, the New Right in Europe, and of course the traditional Subsidiarity structure of the Catholic Church, all point to a decentralized, localist, Paleoconservative philosophy, which if applied could have saved us from collapse, and will be the surviving natural structure after any future collapse.

( Here is a review of the “New Scientist” issue on the collapse from Slate. )

Agendas in the Humanities

On Standards of Beauty

Every movement has an “agenda.” Foucaultian criticism, which took over the Humanities Departments in our colleges and universities, sees only power agendas behind the great works of art. Yet the Foucaultians have their own agenda which is seen in how they interpret art works usually in more or less Marxist political directions, and often only for personal, professional advancement.

The traditional standards of beauty, handed down in the West for centuries, show principles of beauty that do not merely affirm the agendas of the Christian West, but affirm the agendas of the Classical world as well as other Traditional civilizations. To eject from our culture the traditional standards of beauty with their long human history in favor of a Marxist reductionist agenda makes no sense, unless one is virtually some sort of criminal.

We almost instinctively know the standards and principles of beauty found in what is generally lovely, handsome, pretty, fair, and which is more deeply described as balance, clarity, moderation, simplicity, restraint, proportion, and ultimately in affirming the sacred and the Divine. These principles of beauty must and will be recaptured, since they reflect the cosmos itself.

(Here is a good essay on art, “Beauty as an Essential Characteristic of Civilized Culture” by Kevin Cope)