The funny answer would be that I don’t have enough time to write my essays so that they would be shorter and easier to understand. Ordinarily, there would be some serious truth in that—even so great a writer as Blaise Pascal could say:
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. [See Blaise Pascal.]
Some serious truth indeed, but Pascal wrote when Western Civilization was on an upward slope, likely because of increases in intelligence during the difficult periods which followed the High Middle Age. A high percentage of literate human beings of the West were more intelligent during the periods of history when, to put it bluntly: God, through the world He created, was applying brutal selection standards to men and women, young adults and children. Being more intelligent, they also—generally—took more ready advantage and better advantage of any opportunities for learning or for entering into more deeply interesting situations.
I’ve written on various aspects of this subject regularly, often starting with Jacques Barzun’s claim that the West hit a peak, of sorts, in literacy around 1500. His book, From Dawn to Decadence tells the story of the West as it then entered a period of decline—with higher-level innovation (think of Einstein and Tolstoy and not even the best of ‘middle-brow’ thinkers) dropping off greatly after the generation at the peak of their creative activity in 1900 or so. (Barzun’s peak was actually for high-quality literacy among French peasants, a mere shot across the bow apparently ignored by the intellectual, cultural, religious, and other leaders of that country and of the entire West.)
The truth of the matter is simply stated but would lead to an essay as long and as complex as any I’ve written since I started my blogs: Acts of Being which is still active and To See a World in a Grain of Sand which is still up as an archive but dormant for years as far as new writings are concerned.
That simple truth? I write in the way I feel forced to write in order to prevent the sorts of deformations to the information and speculations I wish to communicate. More than that, I myself have to struggle for words and ways of phrasing which maintain the thoughts I have inside of myself. Often, my complex and complicated prose is the result of experiments in being true to those inner thoughts only partly expressed in words. A weak but indicative analogy: those painters who say they throw colors onto the canvas and then scrape away the excess.
We live in a truly Orwellian world—in some ways and not so much in other ways. The world is Orwellian in that advanced technology is being used to push into our minds new words, new meanings for old words, simplifications for older ways of speaking which allowed for the sort of complex and nuanced thoughts and speech which are resistant to propaganda, new models of the world to replace the Christian models of the West. Likely it is that a more complete analysis by a new Orwell would identify the various working methods of political propagandists, marketeers, public relations specialists, and ideologically corrupt scholars and academics and public-school teachers.
The world is not Orwellian in that there is no tightly administered command and control center for these various processes of corruption of language and, thus, of thought. The Invisible Hand guides morally well-ordered communities of somewhat ordered or well-ordered individuals to form complex economies and polities, communities of trust and requiring little in the way of policing beyond, so to speak, the issuing of citations. In a sense, the Invisible Hand is but a dim perception of the processes by which God is forming the Body of Christ. But that Hand, or its sinister counterpart, can also organize criminal communities, including those inside the American government and inside the banking industry and… Lots of places. As I’ve claimed before: there is no Deep State or overriding Conspiracy but rather has the modern world been turned into a battleground of criminal gangs of various sorts, with Latin American drug-lords and street-gangs and the partly mythical Mafia being weaker sorts.
It’s all very complicated. So is my writing as I seek to say things which are so hard to say in a language stunted and twisted and deformed to the needs of marketing campaigns, including those ideological campaigns carried out in our intertwined entertainment and educational
I’ll end with another claim about my writing. I need to fight the deformations of our current ideological forms of English not just to truly say traditional truths but also to propose new truths in a way that I can control—partly and for now. If I’m truly pointing to new truths, then I’ll have no long-term control over them; my own expressed thoughts sometimes surprise me and I’m sure that others will find new angles and new content and…
Where do these “new truths” come from? What are they? They come from the Creator through His works, through His effects in this world and all the realms of Creation the human mind and spirit can see and understand much—however uncertainly and vaguely. For example, the story of the “origins” of mankind in the Bible makes no clear claims that humans were really a special creation outside of nature. Partly because of St Augustine’s endorsement of that view, in The City of God and other writings, that speculative understanding of the Biblical narratives became established as the “only possible understanding,” as the Truth. In fact, Augustine considered also the possibility that man rose from a lower species. It was the rejected option which has proven true and we Catholics and some other Christians ritually chant, “I believe in evolution,” before going back to discussions of human being which reject evolution.
Stanley Jaki, OSB considered Augustine’s mistake to be the most important and most damaging act of intellectual cowardice in history. I’ve argued we need to correct this mistake in various ways; I’ll not make another such argument here. Rather will I point out that our efforts to hold on to something clearly not true have deformed the languages used by Christians to speak and think of our own beings, of our relationships to each other and to God; we have made that mistake so much a part of our mental furnishings that we can speak of our acceptance of evolution and then of a thoroughly inconsistent claim of a special creation in a state of grace followed by a fall into a state of sin.
If we accept biological evolution, that means we did not fall, rather are we rising from our knuckles. Heck, our backs are still more suited, in some ways, to crouching animals than to upright animals. Our various problems resulting from this rise from our knuckles, such as lower-back arthritis and sciatic nerve irritations, should convince us of this.
So it is that backs and hips mostly adapted, but not completely, to upright living can have a bearing on our understanding of the Bible, a bearing on our theological beliefs.
Yet, our languages—oh-so Modern and oh-so falsely twisted to deform both theological and scientific beliefs—don’t allow us to speak the truth in a greater and more consistent way. We see our spiritual and worldly mistakes and crimes as being the result of a fall from a state of grace rather than seeing them as an inherent part of the processes by which God has created and continues to create, has sustained and continues to sustain, friends for His Son—a double-good result according to Genesis. And those processes, perhaps more fundamentally and perhaps not, also create and sustain a world He has declared good.
So it is that we refuse to advance to a richer and more accurate understanding of God in His role as our Creator, as the Creator of all that exists that is not Him. Though, there is even a sense in which God creates Himself: He is his own Self-sustaining Act-of-being. But He doesn’t create Himself from anything which is not Himself nor from anything which is more fundamental than Himself, as He creates this world from a seemingly strange and abstract form of being described by, and perhaps being, the formalisms of quantum physics. And then He creates living creatures from the inanimate thing-like being which is shaped from that strange `quantum being’.
I’m doing my best to speak and think my speculative versions of greater and more consistent truths. And so it is that my thoughts and writings are more complex and more complicated than will be needed in a few generations to speak and think of such truths in simpler ways.