Liberal progressives and most moderns alike harp on about progress,...
𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘶𝘴@_bonaventurian
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Sep 23, 2025
~2 min read
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Liberal progressives and most moderns alike harp on about progress, evolution, as if progress comes necessarilyーas if regress were not possible. This progress they guarantee by developing, not habits, but rules, methods, and mechanical aids. Descartes pioneered this.
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Descartes denied the very existence of habits, and even of faculties distinct from substance. And Leibnitz meditated a machine for thinking and computing, that thus the res cogitans would be dispensed from thinking distinctly. Thus was born the idol of the ideal of advanced AI.
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To this “democratic” conception of science, that assumes any agent with the right rule can follow through to knowledge, we must oppose the “aristocratic” conception, the intellectual nobility arising from persistent, near-permanent, habits of perfection.
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Mental prayer falls under a similar consideration as St. Teresa of Avila reminds us. Methods, while useful for beginners, can never be substitutes for supernatural habits.
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This ought to be thought of much as basic drills and sight-reading practice are useful for the budding pianist, but superfluous before the virtuoso's perfections. If it were such that merely rule-following & method spawned genius, we ought to be replete with Liszts and Chopins.
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The progress expected from mechanical rules and methods, however advantageous in the material and mechanical world, has not prevented mental and moral regress toward lukewarmness of the will and atheism.
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Yockey, looking back over 19th Century liberal determinists, saw them apply a biological doctrine of transmitted heredity to modern crime and insanity yet simultaneously struggled to harmonize this view with universal progress.
A blatant, and insuperable, cognitive dissonance.
A blatant, and insuperable, cognitive dissonance.
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Perhaps it is as simple as Fr. Garrigou had put it, "When God is denied, enigmas increase, and insoluble questions arise." Because in ignorance of the Exemplar by which all is made intelligible as to ultimate truth and purpose, nothing is ultimately intelligible.
