Beyond Eliot's Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot's earlier view of the world seems to have been brought on by the philosophical errors of F. H. Bradley's idealism, Eliot's miserable marriage, and his reading of Parisian French poetry. But Eliot's thinking eventually led to his so-called deliverance in Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot's poem “The Wasteland” eventually led to the religious conversion of the “Four Quartets.” Along the way he renounced his American citizenship, and also won a Noble prize.

Eliot was an important man, an important poet, but to my mind, he was not enough. I sympathize with Eliot, but his solutions did not save Western civilization. He helped sink Western civilization further down in the Great Spiritual Blockade. Other men sensing the same wasteland chose Marxism or Scientism or Existentialism, which also did not save Western civilization.

I believe we have to move beyond the solution of Eliot's Four Quartets toward theological materialism, which is the deepest kind of conservatism, based in the biological and superbiological evolution of material life to real supermaterial Godhood.

As I have written here, the transformation of the material into the supermaterial comes not the way some modern physicists have attempted to save religion by turning the quantum world into the spiritual world, but by the opposite, by understanding the spiritual world as the supermaterial world. One day a new theory will reveal the deeper material reality behind the subatomic world. Quantum mechanics is a form of materialism (electrical?) yet to be fully defined.

The revealed religions center on the Inward God not the Outward God. The Inward God is the experience of the mirror image of Outward God (opposite Plato), which is a supreme supermaterial living object, or objects, evolved to in nature. Both Paths are conservatively contained within the Twofold Path of theological materialism. The Spirit-Will-To-Godhood and Godhood are not immaterial entities, as they are in Aristotle, Aquinas, Eliot, and even in Darwin.

The cosmos is arranged so as to be able to evolve Gods who evolve in the natural world, beginning with the Primal Material, probably from inorganic and natural causes. But those natural causes include the material-activating Spirit-Will, which ever seeks eternal representation, or Godhood, and evolves forward with many starts and stops and backward goings along the way, shaped by outside selection and natural evolution.

This realism actually reverses many religious and philosophical views of reality, which essentially worship concepts and sacred words, and consider concepts and words as real, and real material objects as unreal. Spiritualism and much of philosophy consider material objects as unreal and unreal concepts as real.

To attain Godhood we must evolve in harmony with the laws of real nature, activated by the material and then supermaterial Spirit-Will-To-Godhood. This can bring science and materialism legitimately back to religion. What has come before in religion and philosophy can be retained but considered as incomplete glimpses or experiences of real Godhood, which all life strives to evolve toward.

I have said here often, I don't believe we can stop the decline of the West by a revival of fascism or communism, although that may happen for a time in an attempt to create order out of our disorder. The world is now too crowded with distinct, competing, ethnic cultures for a single dictatorship over all to be successful. Eventually human nature will reassert itself and break back up into a natural ethnopluralism.

Human nature takes its shape from the genes and from the reaction of genes to the environment, but the shape does not venture beyond the shape of the genes without getting pulled back. There have been many cultural schemes which tried to go beyond the shape of human nature and they did not work and caused greater suffering.

Human nature remains kin-centered, gender defined, age-grading, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

This natural view of human nature strongly suggests that ethnopluralism is the best way to prevent the demise of the United States and the West, with ethnostates for distinct ethnic cultures, protected by some sort of federalism.

It is fortunate that our Founding Fathers set up a separation of powers and states in the U. S. Constitution which could accommodate---if we have the wisdom to do so---the saving grace of ethnopluralism.

It is a long road from here to there but nothing is more important than preventing our demise. If we survive we can continue the sacred evolution of life toward Godhood.