The Sacred and The Estranged

I am not exactly sure how these things go together, or how the estranged might be helped, but rather I am thinking out loud here, liable to tweak these brief paragraphs around some, hoping and welcoming people to think about this with me and GW (though unfortunately, not yet expecting to get any audience to move beyond the transmission model, to a participatory model of knowledge acquisition). Anyway..

GW says:

Interesting that Richard Williamson calls subjectivism what you call objectivism. Pretty much.  Of course, his focus is his own and not yours - he is seeing an atomising, individualising tendency where you see a focus on the object that excludes the self.  Put these together and out pops the self-estranging, individualising relationship of “false Dasein” to the external world we are, as evolving organisms, bound to process.

Something more could be said about that, including the fact that Heidegger’s false Dasien is, of course, a state of witness in Time and Place rather than in Truth (ie, a bit like being socially constructed, but only a bit). So it will operate within negative qualitative parameters, ie, more badly, or maladaptively, at some times than others, and never at the optimum.  Modernism, then, is a grand historical process of turning to the bad.  For you, postmodernism is the process of turning away from the worst of that and towards a more vivifying collective life, while for Williamson sedevacantism and Catholic traditionalism constitute the process of rejecting modernist Rome’s false witness to God and accepting His true church.

There the similarity ends, because you believe that reason, as a trait of the mind, has its place in a true European life, while Williamson insists that only faith and God’s grace can give eternal life.  You are right.

Here is Williamson’s original missive”:

http://stmarcelinitiative.com/email/en-eleison-comments-by-mgr-williamson-issue-cccxc-390.html

Fraser complains similarly against rationalism.

Though he correctly seeks to organize and coordinate “W.A.S.P.” diaspora through a shared rubric (as I propose we do through the DNA Nation) he proposes to do so through reviving the Anglican Church: http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015/1/5/the-dispossessed-elite

I believe that we are inclined to believe rather, and it seems MacDonald as well, that there is no putting the toothpaste back in that tube.

However, while DNA is not exactly thin gruel, it could use the vivification of which you speak and the vision of perfection which you and as Santayana note, orientation toward perfection, a girding and bounding like rocks against which the waves of chance crash.

This is what has me thinking of the sacred, how it has been trampled by the scientism/liberalism continuum, linearity of modernity, reckless experimentalism in pursuit of endless progress. How by contrast the sacred can ensconce those patterns safely which are beyond empirical purview or too precious for the efficiency of empirical, scientific testing.

Again, the postmodern turn sees the wreckage of modernity and allows for the reconstruction of traditional practices ...and the sacral rite, the episode…all of course revisable and modified by new understandings..we can take the best of both traditional reconstruction and modernist pursuit of innovation…. but we CAN take the best of tradition and sacral rite. ..and history….we are not duty bound by a pledge to be original ex nihilo and to endlessly pursue novelty and new invention, transformation without pause and elaboration.

The sacred..going back to the wisdom of the language that Heidegger and Vico valued.. sa – cred..  ..cred.. crede…sounds like something to go by..something in fact, cyclical, involving time and cycles, which if properly observed correspond with credibility.. the ability to establish historical continuity, coherence in protracted warrant… in a way that empirical myopia, focused on arbitrary presentation of the happenstance episode of circumstances does not afford. ..by contrast, the sacral episode re enacted does begin to build that social capital and with that the sacredness of the realm -sac-re-ment (kingdom minding).. sacral episode of re-ligion (reconnecting the realm, the kingdom).
Looking through Vico, one can see him talking about people beginning in religion; and in the etymological sense of religion you can see that having truth, as you know, religion - re -ligion, a re attachment to practices, to a realm of people, particularly featured in the sacred episode, which ensconces the essence (as opposed to the arbitrary) presented by the cycles of time, reconstructing, reconnecting, re, the king (Ital), the relatives, the realm.

Perhaps the sacral episode facilitates culture, the cultivated turn, turning back to the systemic essence and homeostasis of peoplehood..

Sacrament takes evaluation into a pattern of trust, beyond the episode and moment, beyond the life span and relationship even, connecting to the time immemorial pattern.

I have argued elsewhere this does not preclude treating sex in other ways, celebrative or whatever, but the culture must establish this choice for people, very seriously - sex as sacrament, including an option for a single partner for life - even for however small a number who might opt for it, if the culture, the people, are to have agency and authenticity.

It would apparently corresponds with marriage rights for many.

Vico observes the sacral, civilizing episodes of birth, marriage and death. 

Sex as sacrament is not evaluated within the episode or moment, as it might be with those merely attempting to assess, irrespective of patterns, biographical details, and relationship, what is best in a given moment; rather sex is sexy; in tension between dominance and submission (sexy, provided that is not taken too seriously), also a tension between human dignity and animal drive – this is why the nerdy White lady, a bit older, with a few wrinkles, can be more sexy than the tattooed dancer. Sex as sacrament is not limited to an episode, as it would be for those who would like to celebrate a variety of partners. By definition, it would move beyond autobiography, as the sacral entails a time-line not so delimited and unrepeatable as are the concerns of the life-span. Sacrament does, however, take note of family relations, the eroticism of the nobility of one’s partner’s family. Moreover, and ultimately, however, it takes into account and connects with the Europen Cultural pattern, its history and future.