The World is a Haunted House
You may not have noticed that we live in a Haunted House.
Four things haunt us: the sublime, the awful, the moral, and the salvific.
When we see the sublime, we know beauty; when we see the divine, we know awe; when the whisper of the conscience pierces the soul, we see virtue in all its undeniable glory, and we know, to our woe, that we have violated it; and, rarely, we hear dimly the laughter of the living water running, whose drop can wash that stain away.
This is properly called a haunting, because, like the footsteps of a ghost, none of these things are obvious, literal, nor easily grasped.
Imagine the smallest fragment of what our one small world contains: Blue icebergs floating in an arctic sea whose skies of darkness and cold flame will see no dawn until spring; stormwaves in midocean rising as tall as walking hills that roar and vanish; bright comets like stars with beards hanging above silent cedar trees.
Regard also the vast canyons where the earth was split in eons before man; volcanoes hidden under black and boiling plumes of smoke; sunsets stained vermilion and red like the pyre of dying emperors.
See the raging stallion, trained in war, whose nostril flares at the scent of blood and whose ears prick up at the brazen cry of the bugle; hear the stampedes of cattle surrounded by the thunder and dust of their own footfalls; sense hunting cats crouching motionless in the dark, eyes bright as pennies.
Imagine the myriads of living things, stranger than any imagined alien from outer space, invisibly swarming and multiplying in the bloodstream; contemplate the galactic superclusters, whose spiral cosmic formations look so eerie alike to double helix strands found in the nucleus of every living cell; ponder the chessboard clarity of the Periodic Table of Elements, or the spartan elegance of equations governing Newtonian mechanics, Mendelian genetics, or the electromagnetics of Maxwell.
The picture a fair-faced damsel in a wedding dress, white as snow with lace, who blushes more delicately than any pink rose, demure with beauty that pierces the heart like a sword; imagine the travail of childbirth; picture holding in your own arm a baby girl more precious than the cosmos; think of all the joy and sorrow, strife and victory that lie in wait for her until the day when she, too, if heaven smiles, might be a bride as fair as her mother.
See in your mind’s eye also a quiet graveyard in the moonlight, headstones overgrown with moss, and between the tangled shadows of the trees, the glass-less windows and bell-less tower of an abandoned church.
If you stand where the poppies grow thick on the untended grave, and see the marks, blotted out by years of rain like tears, where the letters carved perhaps by his loved ones wrote the name of the dead man, and you realize you cannot read them, then perhaps you will read the true message all gravestones speak: one day, you also will so rest.
A soul not sick with its own self love, or drunk of cynicism, beholding the sublime beauty, power and wonder nature, feels a profound sense of humility and smallness. This opens the gate to gratitude.
There is a meaning to the universe, in these examples and countless others, which the spirit of man can see.
Art is the mirror the soul holds up to nature. When art is created with the proper skill and craft, some glimpse of the truth that nature holds, particularly the truths literal words cannot capture, is captured.
Speaking as an artist myself, one of the first things to see in nature is that Man is not like the rest of nature. A poem or picture merely praising the pastoral beauty of nature, no matter how pretty, says nothing truly profound. But when man portrays a picture of man in nature, now the comedy and tragedy of the human condition is reflected in the work of art.
Such works approach the central paradox of life: that nature is fair but cruel, that the natural world is more grand and awesome than a cathedral, but that we are foundlings left before the doors. We are natural creatures, but, strangely, we are estranged from nature.
For one thing, while birds sing and beavers build, man alone crafts art. If beasts and birds have any conception of beauty, or hunger for it, there is no sign of it.
For another thing, man sees not only the sublime beauty in nature, but also that a power beyond nature inhabits it.
The natural reaction to the sight of beauty in nature is not merely appreciation, as a man might admire a pleasing wallpaper pattern, but the feeling of humility and admiration, if not awe, a man feels in the presence of art.
It is difficult, if not absurd, for a man to admire the artistic genius in a work of art, while thinking that there is no artist, no genius, and that the work was not wrought. It is hard to admire the design in nature while denying the designer.
It leads, if not to a logical paradox, at least to an oddity in one’s emotional nature, something like colorblindness.
(What hues the eyes of old beheld which modern eyes see not!)
The pagans of old peopled the wood with naiads, the waters with nymphs, on hilltops saw shaggy satyrs dancing, gods and goddess on dark mountains hidden in clouds, or dwelling among the midnight stars in midwinter skies.
Bent over a computer screen in a brightly lit coffee shop it is easy enough to believe all accounts of ghosts and visions and supernatural visitations are hysteria.
It is easy to convince oneself all observations of the order, wonder, beauty and majesty of nature are misinterpretations of the blind products of undirected, natural forces.
Easier still (for the implications are dreadful indeed if one does not) to urge oneself that all accounts of signs and wonders, prophecy and miracles, are products of fraud, gullibility, or some act of mental negligence in examining the evidence.
Such is the spirit of the modern age: a spirit that does not believe in spirits.
This is the most narrow parochialism of all, because the victims thereof imagine they are the most broad, cosmopolitan, well-read and hence the least parochial generation of history.
The vast majority of our neighbors have no idea that they were cheated in school of any possibility of getting a decent education. Curiosity, love of learning, and all true wisdom is driven from the gullible soul of the student trapped in a modern school. Not just education he was promised was taken from him, but even the hunger for education. Worse, he has never even heard the rumor that there might be things he does not know that are worth knowing.
Modern education has undone utterly the learning of Socrates, who knew that he knew nothing, and so was called the wisest of men by the Oracle of Delphi.
Socrates was humble, and so sought wisdom by asking questions.
For modern men, the Oracles of their own Self Esteem tell them that no one knows anything because there is nothing to know and no trustworthy way to know it, aside, perhaps, from scientific facts. Knowing this, they then conclude they know everything, and need seek no longer.
Modernity is arrogant, and so utters dull lectures, and forbids questions.
Modern history texts have been bowdlerized, edited, and censored. Unless one makes a particular effort to read the older texts, the curious omissions will never be noticed.
Machiavelli, in his DISCOURSES, pens a short chapter titled Before Important Events Happen in a City or a Province, Signs that Foretell Them or Men Who Predict Them Appear
He begins:
How this comes about I do not know, but both ancient and modern examples demonstrate that no serious event ever occurs in a city or a province that has not been predicted either by fortune tellers, revelations, extraordinary events, or by other celestial signs.
Machiavelli then repeats the sober historical reports of the signs and wonders the presaged the coming of King Charles VIII of France to Italy, the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the exile of Piero Soderini, in ancient times, the Gallic invasion of Rome.
He concludes:
It may be, however, as some philosophers maintain that the air is filled with intelligences, who, by means of natural abilities foresee future events, and, having compassion for men, warn them with similar signs so that they can prepare their defenses.
I offer the testimony of Machiavelli merely because is the famed as being the most cynical and worldly author of the age. In some ways, he is the author of our age: any writer or thinker who proposes that the efficiency, rather than the morality, of an action or policy justifies it, speaks in echo of Machiavelli.
Livy, Herodotus, Tacitus, or any ancient historian, medieval chronicler, including notable atheists like the Roman poet Lucretius, reported the rare and startling events when the supernatural stepped into the nature.
We have just as much evidence that Caesar was stabbed to death in the Senate as we have evidence that his wife foresaw the event in a dream, because our sole source of information is the same historians who report both events.
Historians, starting at about the time of Edward Gibbon, decided to cease reporting the miraculous events that touched or foreshadowed great historical events. This was not because of some change in the quality of evidence or the reliability of the witnesses. It was merely a change in fashion.
Modern men, of course, cannot contemplate the thought that the air is filled with intelligences, not because any observation or experiment has proved anything on the point one way or the other, because even the idea that their own brains possess intelligence is held in doubt.
Ancient men, using the instrument of reason, doubted pat conclusions, and questioned them. Modern men doubt the instrument, and so question nothing. They never escape pat conclusions.
Modern men ponder and judge and weigh the evidence and decide that their brains are biochemical machines that operate thoughtlessly, without the free will we all think we have, in a predetermined fashion.
Of course, if so, then human brains are computers programmed by no programmer, who are programmed to believe the delusion that they are not programmed.
Were the modern theory true, then the delusive belief in free will is a biological quirk of the human brain not found in any other primate. It serves no conceivable Darwinian purpose, and could never evolve in a species without free will. Logic says there can be no need to deceive someone, and misguide his decisions, who makes no decisions. There is no point in present false evidence to an empty court room where no trial is being held. There is no jury to mislead.
Nor, by the bye, could such deluded non-volitional robots be deluded into debating or defending or believing such a false belief, or any belief at all, since only volitional creatures can debate or defend or believe anything.
Free will likewise has no purpose whatever in a universe that lacks an objective moral law above, beyond, and behind nature.
It is indeed, the great boast of modern philosophers, who assert that we live in just such an amoral and subjective universe, that the free will is an ultimate and absolute good, which cannot be bound by moral law, or anything else. They not only confess that life is meaningless, but boast of it, claiming each man is now free to invent his own meaning, to go beyond good and evil, and invent his own moral order for himself, each man as he sees fit.
Such moderns take the lack of guardrails protecting children from the brink to be a lack of prison walls preventing us from soaring.
Such so-called freedom of ideologues allegedly inventing new moral codes, does indeed feel like flying for a time, once one swan dives over the brink. The sad history of the Twentieth Century confirms such flights of fancy are but brief.
This leads us to the next point:
The same oddity that haunts the aesthetic sense of man, the ability to see and to crave seeing the sublime beauty in nature, also haunts the moral faculty.
Even a cursory inspection of the accounts anthropologists, historians, and travelers reveal of other civilized nations in any generation displays a remarkable similarity not merely of the laws and principle informing the moral sentiments of a people, but of the clear sense of a tragic failure to adhere to those laws and principles.
There are two shocking facts about the human conscience that demand an explanation, and which modern philosophers go to absurd lengths to avoid explaining.
The first is its origin. No animal possesses a moral sense. A dog can whimper with guilt when it knows punishment is coming, or bark with joy when praised by a beloved master, but this is sense of shame or pride, not a display of virtue or vice. Beasts don’t sin.
How the conscience enters the human experience during the alleged transition from simian prehuman ancestors is a question waved away by inventing an alleged Darwinian benefit to self preservation or to fertility that springs from the possessing a conscience, but which the social instincts of pack hunters or insects lack.
Such explanations are the drunk who seeks his dropped carkeys under the streetlamp where the light is good, rather than under his car, where he dropped them. The explanation explains nothing it means to explain.
Asserting that awareness of a moral code is useful for improving the survival odds of the hunting band is like asserting that possessing the complex lenses and muscles and neural infrastructure of binocular vision is useful. And yet no worm living in the eternal darkness of the sea bottom ever evolved an eyeball. In an environment with no light, there is no Darwinian advantage to evolving an eyeball.
It is also simply untrue. Barbaric life does not reward fine moral sentiments. Self-sacrifice, altruism, honesty, something morality often demands, cheat Darwinian imperatives. These virtues neither aid in attempts to kill foes nor to outrun predators nor to woo mates.
The question being asked is what is the origin of the moral imperative to obey moral imperatives. Why be good?
Much vain ink has been spilled, including by writers both lucid and learned, attempting to show how goodness is useful, or efficient, or beneficial to society, or to posterity, but the painfully obvious fact is that, all to often, it simply is not. A martyr acts from selfless, not selfish, motives, but from the point of view o the Darwinian calculus, he is suffers the same negatives incentives as a suicide.
Meanwhile, a ruthless conqueror with a thousand concubines and slavegirls, such as Genghis Khan, can spread his genes by rape and rapine across whole landscapes for millennia. And, unless we credit the claims of Clovis or Dan Brown, Christ left no heirs. Who was more pure and obedient to moral law?
Morality is not to be found in nature, and no juggling of hypothetical incentives can produce it.
If morals were merely self interest rightly understood, there would be no more struggle to seek the long term good for oneself than there is to set aside money against a rainy day. Pity to the sons of a defeated enemy would be not only immoral, but inexplicable: lions kill the cubs of rivals for the quite pragmatic reasons, with no sign of any moral qualms.
The second oddity to note is that no race of man has produced a moral code to which he can adhere.
Look at the confessions of the righteous soul in the Egyptian book of the dead. Look at the moral imperatives urges by Greek philosophy or mystery cults. Look at the words of Norse witches, Jewish prophets, Chinese scholars, Hindu sages: the sinners found in the hells, real or imagined, of Nastrond or Yomi-no-kuni or Gehenna are guilty of the same categories of crimes.
The final thing that haunts the whole history of man is the yearning for salvation, the hunt for the means to escape the fate of brave Achilles, now a shade twittering like a bat in the gloom of the realm of Hades.
Men have been haunted, I say, but this desire to seek the footsteps of Orpheus whose faith can lead his dead wife up the secret pathway back to life. Gilgamesh undertook a similar quest to the other world in the name of his dead friend Enkidu, only to have the secret herb of eternal life stolen from him while he slept by the subtle serpent.
The promise of reincarnation as believed by the Hindu accounts, to the Buddha, was no more than a promise of torment on an endless wheel of pain. Buddha sought a salvation in a means that sound remarkably like dissolution to me, but, nonetheless, the eightfold noble path leading to nirvana promises release not just from suffering, but also from impurity and sin.
The rituals and sacrifices of old meant to propitiate the gods or to ameliorate the sins of man produced only the melancholy of the pagan world, the sorrows of the Jews. Even the finest men in history or myth were not perfect. In the Bible, Moses was a murderer, David an adulterer, Solomon an idolater; and, in the Mahabharata, even Yudhishthira lied.
Whether or not the mystical water of baptism in Christ can wash away the stain of sin that has haunted men forever, or reconcile man with the cruel and beautiful natural world he sees, or reconcile him with the righteous and awful supernatural world he does not see, is a matter for a Spirit mightier than I to tell you. I will not answer that here.
Here I speak only the fact that we are haunted, and of the fact that modernity, by pretending we are not, slowly strangles beauty, virtue, sanctity, and hope from our world.
Some modern men make a whole career of denying that these four haunting things exist at all, or hold any significance if they do.
And yet, somehow, even those who deny them seem to retain some sort of distorted sense of them. A man might say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but he still catches his breath at the scent of a rose, the sight of a rainbow, the sound of a songbird at night.
Those who claim moral imperatives are subjective also hold it to be an absolute moral imperative to tolerate all deviations from Christian morality, but to condemn with absolute fury any lack of enthusiasm for their own perverse speech codes, hiring codes, invisible and unwritten rules of political correctness.
The toleration totalitarians tolerate no smallest deviation from their terrifying and ironclad orthodoxy, and seek to ruin the lives and destroy the livelihood of any heretics. Where they gain political power, genocide results.
Those who scoff at pious acts of worship genuflect before secular altars readily enough, worshipping money or sex or power, asking others to make sacrifices in the sacred name of ecology, or social justice, or utopia.
Those who praise self esteem and deny original sin are eager to do and say what need be done, if anything could be done, to erase the legacy of racism, the stain of other historical wrongs. Those who hold themselves to be spokesmen for the victims are eager to receive the genuflections and ritual offerings, monetary or psychological, to enrich themselves and enhance status, and display their vainglorious pretenses of virtue.
If any man questions whether modernity hates beauty and seeks to drive it from public view, he is invited to enter any modern art museum where a toilet or a can of dung is on display, or, indeed, study what has become of late even of popular entertainment franchises, Star Wars, Star Trek, Terminator, Charlie’s Angels, Dr Who, Supergirl, Batwoman, the whole body of Marvel Comics, the video games that sparked the consumer rebellion of Gamergate.
If you doubt, speak to one who supports and upholds the political theories driving modern art. These men are not shy: they will tell what they intend. To subvert, that is, to undermine, the aesthetic values is in all they do. To substitute noise for harmony, free association for rhyme and meter, disproportion for the Golden Mean, crass vulgarity for delicacy and grace, and in all things to shock and appall and anger the viewer, to daze and mutate him.
Beauty, in a healthy eye, produces profound feelings of gratitude and humility, an awe akin to religious awe to behold the fine and fair things in life, dolorous or joyful. The modern attack on beauty is meant to produce pride, not humility, and hate, not gratitude.
The realm haunted by morality and the realm haunted by the spirits, in Christendom, as in Jewry before it, overlapped. The one Father who made all things made both the seen order of being and the unseen order, as well as establishing the righteousness and virtues for harmony between heaven and earth.
With the coming of that benighted age called the Enlightenment, a vast and vain effort was conceived to place everything, from philosophy to law, on a secular footing. This was done basically to find common ground where Protestant and Catholic could equally agree, or, at least, quell overt mutual enmity.
Secularism freed religion from the worldly chains of kings and politicians, and led, at least in America, to a flourishing of a powerful Christian civilization, albeit, in later generations, to a civilization mesmerized by mercantile concerns and worldly success.
In Europe, secularism produced monsters: the French Revolution and its guillotine, the Russian Revolution and it gulags, the rise of political cults from Germany to China, and the need to adopt words like Holocaust and Genocide to explain the astronomical mass murders secularism naturally produces as its main byproduct on the path to Utopia, a road famously said to be paved with such good intentions.
After the two world wars secularism engendered, the sickness spread to North America, and the mercenary spirit of Capitalism, so useful to man when held in check by Christian sentiment, proved unable because unwilling to check the invading secular ideologies.
Collectivism became the order of the day: mass education, mass entertainment, mass media, mass hysteria, mass expropriation, mass murder.
The idea of a supernatural world behind nature was laughed to scorn. It was not disproved, or even adequately addressed, merely mocked and called out of fashion.
The non-existence of the supernatural is, in fact, a metaphysical theory, but since metaphysics, and all philosophy, suffered the same collapse into the world of the stupid once the theological props beneath it were kicked away, the ability even to find one scholar in a thousand who knows how properly to recognize a philosophical question when he sees it, or address it soberly, is as rare as finding a hippogriff befriending an Arimaspian.
It is also a metaphysical theory trivially easy to disprove by any schoolboy with the least smattering of training in rigorous philosophy. For this reason, such training is not to be found in modern schools.
(The argument is that, by hypothesis, if the supernatural does not exist, only nature exists; if only nature exists, only empirical propositions are true; but the proposition that the supernatural does not exist is not empirical. Which contradicts the hypothesis. QED.)
However, the divorce of the moral realm from the supernatural realm does not stop mankind from being haunted.
All that happens is that moralist now take it upon himself to base morality upon nature, rather than supernature. This has several possible pathological outcomes.
The intellectuals, for example, delight in promoting a secular ideology calling it right and just to fight a Darwinian war for survival of the master race against the slave races, so as to evolve from man to superman. Eugenics, mass sterilization, and death camps result.
Or they retain the concern for the poor and the vision of a war of Armageddon leading to a paradise in New Jerusalem, and erect a satanic mockery of these ideas into an economic theory which, strangely, says nothing about economics but much about Armageddon. Socialism and all its misery, deception, and death result.
Or they retain the idea of the innate dignity of Man found in the fact that we are all Sons of Adam and the handiwork of God, but erect a satanic mockery of justice called “social justice” where all men are born guilty by virtue of ancestral wrongs between some group and some other group, but no man can expiate the guilt, on the grounds that mercy is bestowed only on victims, based on group membership, not on any fact of guilt or innocence. The system as designed punishes the innocent and rewards the guilty. The insanity called Identity Politics results, and endless woe.
At the same time, those men still haunted by the supernatural world, but consigning the moral law to a human conceit, indulge in various pathologies of the New Age, spiritualism, theosophy, psychics, witchcraft, devil worship. All the old enormities and grotesque acts banished by Christendom creep slowly back into the public square.
This includes vile practices upheld in the name of religion, such as female genital mutilation, honor killing, Jew killing, torture, rape, and so on.
There is, at last, a fifth thing that haunts mankind, which, like the other four, is not found in nature, not found in beasts, and serves no possible Darwinian purpose, and so can have no possible evolutionary origin.
That thing is reason.
The ability to speak, over and above the simple signals needed to coordinate tactics when approaching a large game animal, has no possible use for Darwin. What do poets do? What does abstract geometry do? Who ever fended off more predators or bedded more mates because he knew the rules for forming syllogism in formal logic?
The answer that reason produces technology will not do, because evolution stops when the cooperation of Neolithic farming villages begins. If we ignore Victorian exaggerations, we see that Neolithic man was no different physically, and produced artifacts not different in nature, from any modern tribesman. And Neolithic technology can be learned by patient imitation. No Socratic inquiry into the abstract theory of flint napping is needed to make a stone spearhead. Language itself is not needed for anything in life, except for expressing those thoughts that do not exist in the absence of language.
Perhaps the generous reader is willing to allow that the appreciation of beauty, awe at the uncanny, dread of the moral law, and hope in salvation are all unnatural specters that have haunted the life of man since the beginning, but that same reader balks at the idea that reason, which produces such wonders as the flying machine and such absurdities as this essay, is clearly is an outgrowth of animal intelligence, and clearly is useful to man for purely natural reasons.
There is nothing elusive or indirect about reason: it is, indeed, the very opposite of elusive and indirect. Reason is clarity itself. It is rigorous thinking applied to words and concepts subject to precise definitions. It seems nothing like these other things.
But one cannot use reason to justify reason. The thing is taken for granted or not at all. The rationality of reason cannot be questioned except by one using reason already. Even attempts to disprove it, prove it.
Which means it could not have evolved. It is not as if a man possessing simple Aristotelian logic were wondering in the wilderness and encountered men possessing other and inferior forms of logic, such as one where Felapton was possessed no existential fallacy, or another where Fesapo was invalid or a third where Ferio was universal; after many fierce battles and contests over many generations, Aristotelian logic prevails and the others fall into disuse, due to a lack of the alleged genetic foundation for each abortive syllogism and form.
I have no clear and concise argument to make on the point, and the philosophical reasons for my stance are, alas, technical and obscure. Perhaps we can explore them some other time.
For now, I will merely say, that if reason were not also in the category of the specters that haunt mankind, it would not also be under attack by modern secularism. It would not also be rejected as racist and sexist by the social justice warriors.
It would not also be such a threat to the tottering edifice of falsehoods, vainglory, malice and nonsense which props up the intellectual imaginings of the modern mind.
If reason were not their enemy, we would not see them so frantic to deny humanity to babies, masculinity to men, femininity to women, justice to the oppressed, mercy to the weak, prudence to everyone.
We would not see a day set aside to scream helplessly at the sky.
Secularism is also haunted by a specter. They have denied the other five things that haunt us.
Beauty, to them, is in the eye of the beholder. To them, there is no designer of nature because there is no design in nature. There are no believable reports of supernatural events because such reports are disbelieved without looking.
There is no such thing as absolute good and evil because it is an absolute evil to claim that there is.
Those who believe in spirit without morality make themselves into witches, who imagine the spirit world to come and go at their beck and call. Pederasty and cannibalism become a common avenue to darker powers. So history reports. And history repeats itself when its lessons languish unheeded.
Those who believe in mortality without spirit makes themselves into monsters, slaying and killing and climbing to utopia by building a mound of skulls taller than the tower of Babel.
Reason says that reason has an origin, for nothing comes from nothing. Reason cannot arise naturally from unreason because unreason is natural and reason is not.
Likewise, life cannot arise from nonlife; and beauty cannot arise from random brain chemical action.
The conscience cannot arise from brute survival instincts nor from self interest nor from Darwinian intensives for the raw fact that raw facts do not produce duties. The fact that the factual situation might produce an instinct in a man, or an inclination, or an incentive, says nothing about whether he ought or ought not yield to it.
And hope…?
Hope of life beyond life certainly cannot arise from nature, since all nature testifies against it, and in no uncertain terms. Every grin of every skull of every boneyard in the world, not to mention the Law of Entropy, declares that Death, the son of Time, is a conqueror no one escapes.
But without that hope, there is no hope of justice in this world. Too many tyrants, sons, as it were, the the Great Tyrant, Death, himself, have died in bed, surrounded by sons and sycophants.
Without that hope, there is no cause to treat one’s fellow man as a brother, rather than as livestock, either domesticated and hence useful, or predatory hence verminous. The unmarked mass graves in Russia and China testify to the conditions in a land that has lost its hope in the afterlife.
Take up arms, citizens. This is the world the foeman seeks: Transvestites cuddling children at storytime. Witches burning those children, or their own, or selling the organs harvested from the tiny corpses for pay.
They seek a world of collective rights only, hence a world without justice or mercy, where vice is lauded and virtue punished, where all the innocent are condemned, the guilty are spared.
They seek a world where you and your children are regarded as livestock, to be bred or abolished, depending on your genes and your race.
Art banished in the name of free expression, and abomination rampant. Spiritual reality banished in the name of practicality. Humanity banished in the name of progress. Morals banished in the name of tolerance. Justice banished in the name of social justice. God dead. Hope gone. Reason silenced.
For if Reason is not silences, she will point out the absurdity of imagining God to be dead; the first absurdity of many proposed when man attempts to banish the things that haunt him.
For these things do not haunt us because they are not real. They are not elusive because they are ghostly.
They haunt us because we are not real: we are not yet the fully rational and fully virtuous Sons of God our Creator made us to be.
They are elusive because these are eternal truths, and hence we find them too solid and real for words. We emerge, blinking, from a cavern of lifelong ignorance to stand dazed and weeping at the blazing sun.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
