Uncle John's Band: The Short Bus to Flatland - Revisiting Secular Transcendence

Cleaning up the central category error at the root of the entire post-Enlightenment West as the sun is setting on that web of lies. As things fall apart, it is imperative to understand what went wrong. And it is necessary preparation for a different kind of challenge.

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.

Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check regularly and it will be up there.

Time for another short post to clarify and update a central Band concept. That would be secular transcendence - one of our earliest insights. As the Band has played on, the early posts recede into the past and initial ideas have stretched in unforeseen directions. But the early concepts remain fundamental - just hard to sum up now.

Lay down the marker - secular transcendence is not only central to our project from almost the beginning, we would contend it is the intellectual sin of the modern era. So it's worth cleaning up for that reason, but there is another, more immediate purpose too.

Right now we are engaging in preparations with a new collaborator for a confrontation between our ontological hierarchy and vertical Logos and the reality theory of the world's smartest man. We will describe more as it unfolds - we're only just at the point where we are willing to state that much.

The point is that his raw intellectual firepower has forced us into different ways of thinking and reading to compensate. And this has included fortifying our key concepts before entering his kaleidoscopic mental world.

So a mix of old and new thoughts and pictures heading in an all-new direction. Some groundwork...

The Band's approach is fundamentally empirical. Not as an -ism, but in recognition of human existence. When we come into the world, all we have is sense data. We react to sensory inputs long before the idea of assigning words to things has even occurred to us. The newborn cries at the shock of light and air, then calms with warm contact. Pure sensory response. From there, our understanding of what Heidegger called being-in-the-world follows.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, 1842, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art

The Band started when we realized that the entire culture connected with the "postmodern" West was a mass of lies. Not that there were lies in it, or that some lies were tolerated in the name of balance - though those are both true. That the foundational cultural assumptions were based on things that were empirically false. And that we could only pretend they weren't because of the massive material surplus we enjoy - the unearned largess we call mouse utopia. And that the degradation of human culture and stock aren't isolated mysteries, but a direct consequence of near-total collective delusion that the lies are true. So course-correction becomes impossible.

Hence the motto what can we know and how can we know it?

What else is there to do in a world of motivated and skilled liars, where narratives shift as fast as t.v. pictures but always downward morally, and magical thinking, cargo cults, and flight from responsibility abound? Go back to basic empirical knowledge and build out. It's literally how we grow up into the world.

There is a debt to that early Scientific Revolution in our approach. Not the setting up of experiments - ontological speculation and historiography aren't quantifiable in that way. But the larger epistemology where "theory" is induced from observation and tossed or modified when it doesn't match empirical data. Therefore our ideas are evolving, but tend to remain true to the original observation to some degree. But it also means that the initial forms are fairly simple - an inference drawn from observation to clarify our own analytical journey.

Original version of the ontological hierarchy with the limits of discernment between levels of reality and vertical logos included. The deontology - moral interaction of ontology and epistemology - component isn't there. Nor are the secondary manifestations we've explored like art.

It's perfectly serviceable for avoiding applications of faith to material things or trying to define ultimate reality by logic. But that's all it was initially intended to be.

The ontological hierarchy reflects the basic reasoning that led us to the awareness that there are different levels to reality and that these correspond to different knowledge domains. It wasn't intended to be a comprehensive reality theory. Simply a convenient way to keep knowledge in order and avoid the mammoth epistemological category errors that got us here.

Errors like teleological materialism - a perennial favorite and the whopper that first led us to secular transcendence. In fact, it's the gaseous foundation of a lot of the big lies that the current precipice is built on. Huge category errors that defenders will sink into idiocy before conceding. The pattern looks like this.

Despite the oxymoronic name, a reality theory is an attempt to provide what is also called a ToE or Theory of Everything. Secular transcendence is a ToE without any attempt at logical coherence - just whatever pieces of whim, legitimate knowledge, will to power, and whatever else plastered together and changing from moment to moment. The ontological hierarchy isn't a reality theory of any kind - it presents some universal relationships but is far to simplistic to even pretend to account for everything.

This is the recent version with morality. The color key is on the left.

This one leaves out the limits of discernment. Consider all the other things missing...

Levels of discernment aside, how - figuratively speaking - do the transitions between levels happen? How do spatial relations symbolize meta-existential ones? What about semiotic filtering in knowledge creation? Self-embodiment in the object of enquiry? Subjectivity in general? Temporality? Everything else you would want from a ToE?

The thing is, we aren't interested in theories of everything. Our own inferences tell us that the fundamental "basis" against which reality exists - the first cause, the Creator, the undifferentiated grounds for differentiation, "what came before time?", ultimate reality - is only knowable by faith. Meaning that logic or observation can't tell you anything about "it" qua "itself". Even our words are insufficient.

All the towers of logic and annals of observation are pointless here. They can tell you that ultimate reality has to exist, at which point they hit a barrier. The literally can't comment.

The way a tumbleweed or windsock are indices of air movement but can't break down the chemical composition of the air or map global weather patterns. It's a category error to ask them to.

This is exactly the sort of quick clarifying reference that the ontological hierarchy makes easy.

But as our investigations continued into different areas of culture and knowledge continued, we noticed more and more places where this same relationship pattern applied. Morality, art, actual science - the hierarchy really was mapping some fundamental truths about knowledge and reality.

This makes sense, because it starts with our own material limitations and how these curtail what we can know. Out shortcomings are built in. And this is significant enough that it became necessary to think about the hierarchy as something more than shorthand for cognitive sorting.

Andrew Judd, Hands of Time

A scan of the epistemology page will show we've been thinking about time and temporality for a while. It appears the sequential nature of thought and experience establish temporality - however described - as an ultimate limit of our discernment. Which is why we can't "get" past it, even imaginatively.

So we still aren't interested in reality theory.

What we have become convinced of is that Christian metaphysics and morality provide a better and more empirically-consistent account of ultimate reality than any alternative we've seen or been able to concoct. Ultimately, that's our choice, since ultimate reality is known on faith. But everyone places faith in something, whether they admit it or not. And if you are going to place faith in an alternative, at least show that it better accounts for the fullness of the human condition over the last, say. two thousand years.

That was quick.

What we are thinking of is a more complete ontological hierarchy. With the empty spaces worked out. Not as a reality theory, but a set of theoretical relationships that clarify our relation to reality that preexists and exceeds us.

Starting with not pretending the created subset subsumes the creating superset.

This same holds for all our concepts - observational inferences that help us stay on track regarding what and how we can know, but not a universal philosophy. That comes from faith. But confronting an actual reality theory - and one of very high intensity - has made us aware of the strength of our ideas and the need to refine them. And that includes mining through the old posts where they were first worked through, bringing them together, and updating them. This gives linkable references and nice baselines for work in progress. We already did this for the hierarchy. Now it's time for old friend...

Still don't like the term - too many syllables for slick rhetoric. It's the idea that matters though.

This was our first really useful concept and the thing that made us confident that the Band was the right vehicle. It started with observation inferred into a simple consistent pattern. We were looking into the theoretical-academic background to postmodernism and noted a suppositional error as retarded as the philosophy itself in Marxism. That reality is purely materialist - atheistic and non-supernatural - but history is somehow teleological. This is impossible, and nothing can follow - anymore than the most intricate equation has meaning is the first step assumes 1+1=3.

Benoît-Louis Prévost after Charles-Nicolas Cochin, frontispiece to Diderot's Encyclopédie, designed 1765, Bibliothèque des arts décoratifs, Paris

Logically absurd, but rhetorically powerful, combining the old seduction of human knowledge with the thrilling promise of a new age dawning. The Enlightenment was when it really came into its own, with Truth" as a Baroque-style religious vision, acquired by purely human means.

It is literally secularizing transcendence.

La Fête de la Raison, 1793, engraving, 9.5 × 15 cm, Bibliothèque nationale de France

Pierre-Antoine Demachy, Festival of the Cult of the Supreme Being, 1794, Carnavalet Museum, Paris

The French Revolution was when this really came into its own with perverse idiocies like the Festival of Reason and Cult of the Supreme Being. Note how the beast system holds the Enlightenment up as the dawn of a new era of human Progress! while conveniently leaving this crap out.

Realizing that secular rationalism is just inverted, self-fluffing, ersatz religion raises troubling questions about the satanic imagery all over popular culture now.

The problem for the modern philosophies of secular transcendence is that they need contradictory things to be true. Capitalism, Marxism, Progressivism they all are impossible without a) materialist ontology and b) supernatural teleology. As they should be because they're fake. The point is that they are doomed from the jump - no matter how many surplus resources are squandered on keeping them afloat - because they're founded on a self-detonating category error.

Giving us the beast system - where metaphysics are both outlawed and existentially necessariy. Secular transcendence doesn't really solve the problem, but it does lie and pretend metaphysical properties magically inhere in the physical world. Material causes had to be invented for things that are not ontologically knowable through material means. Without any evidence and often in direct contradiction to empirical evidence. Misplacing the metaphysical in the physical is the transcendent in the secular. Secular transcendence.

Constantino Brumidi, The Apotheosis of Washington, 1865, fresco, United States Capitol Building, Washington

And because secular transcendence puts the metapysical in the physical, the reverse also holds. Circumstantial things get imagined into absolute abstract certainties.

Washington presides over a Godless heaven in the Capitol - a revolutionary leader reimagined as tin god of hollow civic nationalism.

James Ferguson, Grand Orrery, circa 1780, yew, brass, ivory, steel

The Enlightenment's "natural laws" have proven little more than projected knee-jerk anti-Christian sentiment from "thinkers" unworthy of the name. A central Enlightenment theme is pretending the positive cultural aspects of Christianity were naturally occurring. Because the world has an eternal Creator, these cretins made up an eternal physical universe - obvious retardation notwithstanding.

That's where secular transcendence started. With the identification of a fundamental self-erasing onto-epistemological error that precedes and renders moot any subsequent argument for the fitness of the system. Then it became a matter of further refinement and asking what else could it apply to...

Well, there's Progress! - the empirically nonsensical idea that "things" just keep "improving". This applies to Marxist "thought" as well, but is the core lie of Modernism. It's not a fixed teleology like Marxist celestial city, but open-ended. Ever improving, ever growing, flying cars and and Mars colonies by the year 2000...

Albert Robida, Le Sortie de l'opéra en l'an 2000 (Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000), around 1902, hand-colored lithograph, Library of Congress , Washington, DC

The problem with this branch of the secular transcendence moronathon is mathematical. The world is finite and endless progress isn't. The belief that infinite progress can be maintained in a finite world is misplacing an absolute within material limits. And that is the transcendent in the secular. Secular transcendence.

We sometimes refer to it as the infinite water in a finite bucket problem...

The epsistemological and ontological falsehood that something superseding the natural can be contained within it. By analogy, it is the same problem as attempting to pour an infinite stream into a finite container.

This is the terminal flaw in Progress! - you can only grow for a finite time in a finite geography. Then you have to switch to debt. But that is also finite, so what next? We're about to find out.

Yet we all implicitly learned and internalized some variation on this. Even social justice is an attempt to keep Progress!ing after it's become obvious that the material improvement part is over. Most still believe in it to some extent - at least to the degree that they think it possible that fixing the system can repair the damage the system has done. Why is that? Because the reality we live in is too big and interconnected and the fake realities of beast media and tech glamour is so pervasive people can't see it.

Amelia Askey, Dirty Boots, oil on canvas

Simple problems are easier - if wearing shoes into the house wrecks the carpet, you stop wearing shoes in the house and the carpet is preserved. Binary thought patterns are the easiest to grasp.

But our entire system is built on the Enlightenment ur-secular transcendence - that finite, subjective, limited human minds can grasp timeless, absolute Truths. The carpet, the shoes, the house, the means to have them - all the choices are taken within the terms of the beast system. "Retirement options" are beast system financial instruments. "Education" is beast system debt for indoctrination. News and entertainment go beyond lies to construct entire false mentalities and world views. To see outside of this glamour requires unusual perspicacity. Or true Christian faith.

The Flammarion engraving, from Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère météorologie populaire, 1888.

The insane popularity of this anonymous print is a sign of a population desperate for deeper knowledge. It's also a sign of pathological collective narcissism to think finite, temporally-limited human subjects are privy to the fundamental secrets of the universe.

What we see are temporal patterns - fleeting things with some contextual predictive value, but hardly revealing of cosmic order. Secular transcendence is the fiction that these patterns and tendencies are actually universal laws - objectively true and higher than empirical, natural reality.

Like seeing a face in the clouds and thinking you know what the universe looks like. It's kind of a pale dude with poofy hair...

On the surface it just looks like a mistake. But when you are onto-epistemologically awake, you see the deeper inversion. Something fleeting, temporal, and contingent taken for something unchanging and timeless.

This brought us to another concept we called the Philosophical Bait and Switch - another rhetorically tone-deaf but descriptive name.

The Bait being the promise of some snake oil salesman to peddle universal truths... like the worship of Reason in the French Revolution - seen here on the high altar of the altar of Notre-Dame.

Auguste Christian Fleischmann, Idolatrous feast celebrated in the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, where the Jacobins had an actress sit on the altar, November 10, 1793, etching pub. Augsburg, 1793

The Switch comes when the fake universal turns out to be subjectively-limited, circumstantial contingencies.

Like "Reason" really being a costumed whore - circumstantial anti-Christianity ironically revealing the substance of the whole charade.

Lenin's Tomb might be the purest Marxist image of secular transcendence. Note how these fake transcendences are just reified contemporary ideology. It's why they seem so ridiculous historically.

But whether it's possible in reality has no bearing on whether people decide to believe it as an article of faith. Faith-based knowledge can be just as wrong as any other. And from that first basic timeline in grade school - they even have it in many places outside the West - the Renaissance is the rebirth that leads to the Enlightenment, the end of superstition, the limitless Progress! of Modernity, today's flying cars...

Ooops.

The Band has learned through observation that this default assumption of endless progress is so strong that even people who can understand the infinite water and bucket quandry and how it applies are unmoved.

Although more are beginning to see as stagnation gives way to increasing degradation.

There are two causes for this getting as bad as it has - one is general to the human condition and the other historically specific. The first is a series of technical innovations of varying worth that have allowed us to ride a series of temporary advantages on a finite structural-environmental curve. The other is what we call belatedness - or if you like other terminology, call it in medias res. The human condition of being born into a reality that is already ongoing and already vastly beyond you. It's the beginning of that journey of the senses we mentioned at the outset.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Youth, 1842, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art

The Philosophical part is the fact that this this sort of bait and switch appears to be the basis of all Enlightment and post-Enlightenment "critical" thought. It's how you get things like American Constitutianity - the fetishistic worship of a 18th-century piece of paper in that place where commitments to God, family, and nation should be. The fake Enlightenment-era misconceptions of Colonial English writers posing as transcendentals have objectively failed their stated purpose.

Calling something "eternal" does not excuse vigilance and effort in protecting your culture from corruption and inversion. If anything, false faith in papers distracts. Look at the eternal honorifics. Who really thinks of Napoleon the man at all anymore?

The thing to remember is that while secular transcendence seems like it's utterly ubiquitous once you're aware of it, it is just a simple observation. A rule of thumb. Metaphysically, it's a simple binary - the material, physical secular and the immaterial, metaphysical, transcendent. Meaning transcending the material.

Compare that with the two onto-epistemological divisions above the material in our ontological hierarchy. A single "transcendence" in secular transcendence is broken down in the hierarchy as abstract and ultimate realities. This is because they weren't formulated as interlocking planks of a ToE. They were shorthand observations that clarified some relationship about reality. This is one place where ST can be refined, because if they are both true reflections they will correspond. Take a look at this older graphic -

There are some problems here. When we put this together, our understanding of temporality was less developed. We hadn't begun to confront the difference between the abstract-level infinite "timelessness" that is still conceivable in human temporal terms, and ultimate-level eternal timelessness that isn't. We've come to consider this a major issue in why secular transcendence is so appealing. Secular transcendence is misaligned reason and reasoning is empowering. Real transcendence is only known by faith.

Consider these old pictures. Material reality is empirically clear - we can see, describe, and measure it. But it is unclear and imperfect. All measurements have uncertainty, no history finds the beginning, all structures decay, nothing lives forever, all judgments are contingent, all information fields incomplete.

The angle will not be precisely 90.00000 to infinity degrees. The measure has built-in uncertainty, and there are micron-level imprecisions in every cut and join. The abstract principle of Pythagoreas' Theorem applies, but each iteration has minute variations. Which is fine. The whole issue of secular transcendence arises from absolute mathematical precision not physically existing in the material world. It needs to be close enough.

We can conceive of abstract quantities and relationships that aren't limited my the imperfections of materiality, but they aren't materially real. Translating the abstract into the material adds "real" at the cost of "ideal".

"Perfection" is an abstraction. In the imperfect material world, we operate in shades of gray...

And shades of gray matter. We still like this comparison between imperfect representations of Pythagorean geometry. Neither have perfect angular precision, but only one attempts to align with higher truth and order:

It's why reasoning is required to bridge absolute precepts and the vagaries of material life in the valley of shadow. The frame doesn't have to hit each measure with the absolute mathematical precision of the equal sign. It just has to be close enough for stabile function.

This is what we mean when we describe absolutes that don't physically exist - like perfect measures and real infinity - but are conceivable in terms of things that do. If you look at the two pictures above - one of them is clearly closer to ideal Pythagorean geometry. We can judge degrees of imperfection against an abstract standard. This is because they are still sequential and segmented - differentiated, and therefore understandable in temporal thought. A number line that keeps going "forever". Angles that literally don't deviate by 1/googleplex of a degree. They can't exist, but we can picture them in terms of things that do - like a sort of Platonic ascent.

Ultimate reality is different.

Thought is inherently relational, temporal, and differentiated. And any differentiated thing is differentiated against a "ground" that frames it's meaning. Something that subsumes and exceeds it. Super-temporality?

Sounds like God. But if temporality is needed for thought, there is no way to access ultimate reality qua ultimate reality directly.

This is a fundamental ontological distinction with implications for how secular transcendence plays out, but isn't that important to the general pattern. It will matter for specific cases whether it's faith or logic being misused, but both are human category errors where some form of eternal is wrongly applied to the temporal. And from the perspective of time-bound, finite, human subjectivities, which notion of the eternal is wrongly applied is secondary.

Marco Battaglini, Nihil Difficile Amanti Puto, airbrush, acrylic, digital on canvas, 21st, century

If we are going to refine secular transcendence, start with the broad working definition -

pretending eternal things are properties of material reality - either social or physical.

And if our destination is a confrontation with a reality theory is the life work of a 200 IQ, refinement of our own vision is more than convenient. It is essential. Gotcha games and pre-programmed mantras don't work against information processing at this level. The amount of material brought to bear at once and the uncanny nimbleness that such massive flows combine and shift in scale and direction is unsettling. Like balletic movement from a mastodon.

It quickly becomes clear that this is something... different.

It's beyond obvious that conventional critiques - from midwitted traps to standard discursive appeals are substantively useless. It has literally forced the Band's usual conductor to develop a new way of reading to process the associative density and larger structure holistically.

It's also inspired the first collaborative project lead.

An effective counter has to be multifaceted. Combining internal - like argumentation - and external - like epistemological and semiotic assumptions - together. One might say in telic recursivity. Only not self-generating.

And a multifaceted response means thinking more carefully about superficially simple relationships like secular transcendence. The working definition is a start. Time to get refining. And that means looking back at our two types of timelessness.

If we differentiate between a temporally-conceivable limitlessness like mathematical infinity and the inconcievable - as in non-temporal and therefore non-sequentially differentiable - ultimate reality, then secular transcendence plays out in different ways. Because two different epistemological modes - abstract reason and faith - are being misapplied. Sometimes at the same time.

Take a fake Enlightenment principle like human fungibility - that anybody can be plugged into the same system and come out the same on the other end. We've all heard variations on this, and when skeptical, get hit with various reasons why [circumstance x] or [condition y] is preventing the system from realizing this universal potential.

There's even elements of truth. The problem is secular transcendence - across the full ontological strata.

Consider....

Use history and ignore the self-fluffers. Where does the idea that people are existentially interchangeable come from? It isn't empirical. No one even looks alike. Nor does it infer logically, which is where abstract "rules" are supposed to come from. It's presented as an abstract-level law then projected downward. And when empirical reality doesn't conform, those pointing it out are attacked.

Historically, the idea is Christian. It derives from the fundamentally equality of all mankind as created in God's image, as possessing souls that are of a higher ontological plane, and equally worthy of salvation through Christ. When Christianity forks from Judaism over the question of the Messiah, one of the differences is the universality. The Old Covenant was based on a chosen people, the New on sacrificial blood.

François Spierre after a Bernini drawing, Sanguis Christi, 17th century, engraving, British Museum

Here's a particularly vivid depiction of the redemptive sacrifice washing the world clean with the blood of Christ. It's open to everyone.

The entire history of social change through applied Christian morality comes from this ontological kinship of the ensouled. Since morality is rooted in Truth, and Truth is rooted in ultimate reality, it is objectively known by faith. Christian law will subject all men to the same expectations. Or at least all Christian men - the religion being the only meaningful qualifier.

On an empirical level, anyone who's run a race knows that God's universal offer of grace doesn't apply to fleetness of foot. Or anything else for that matter. Nor does it have any bearing on inferential conclusions about peoples' collective preferences. What we have is a false abstract making false claims about the material with a false epistemology homologous with faith.

It's a cascade off category errors, all expressing variations of secular transcendence. Minds claiming self-generated absolute knowledge of abstracts and ultimate that it can't have. Thinking about ontological gradients makes us more sensitive to how the broad idea of secular transcendence plays out in human experience. Note how our example started with something that is either true or false depending on where you look ontologically. It then turned it into a fake secular transcendence that commits fundamental errors on every ontlogical level at once.

Bringing us to Flatland.

This is the title of a brilliant old mathematical allegory that we use for the spiritually gelded inhabitants of the materialist secular transcendence that brought us today. It fits so well because the contemporary world is officially agnostic and anti-Christian. It's open to any pop alternate dimension or reality theory you can concoct but not an ontological hierarchy out of temporal existence to God. So it frantically waves any metaphysics away as superstition or aliens and insists on de-moralized, materialist relativism.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, "Worlds within worlds", Fantastic Four 75, June 1968, Marvel Comics

Pop sci-fi has filled the void where ontology once was - postulating any number of alternate dimensions and parallel worlds - the only rule being nothing pointing to actual ontological ascent.

The problem is that they can't deny the necessity of certain metaphysical realities. And there are a bunch of new fake abstract rules and faiths that are imposed for social control. So we end up with a world that claims metaphysical properties while denying the possibility of metaphysical possibilities.

Secular transcendence extended to official contemporary world view.

So secular transcendence opens into a cluster of category errors that share a common misapplication of epistemology to ontology. This means it can take different forms depending on what's being misapplied. It's just a general pattern that indicates the presence of lies, regardless of how any specific case breaks down. There's no point in trying to turn it into a more detailed formula - it's best left as an index of where to look.

A couple of observations.

The system is heading for a considerably more significant reset than asset management restructuring. The entire epochal secular transcendence that post-Enlightenment civilization was founded on - endless Progress! - has run its course.

Secular transcendence tells us attributing abstract ideal qualities to fallen finite material processes is an unsurmountable category error. It is inherently impossible.

It doesn't mean we can't try - we can claim to be doing whatever we want.

It simply means failure of the knowledge claim is inevitable at some point.

The fact that an absolute can be misapplied at all indicates it has some degree of applicability to material subjective reality. The ontological conditions of being-in-the-fallen world. As we put it above, secular transcendence pretends contingent, conditional, transient things have timeless unchanging qualities. And since constant change is a condition of the material, it takes temporary, circumstantial alignment with a desired ideal as the actual presence of that ideal.

So long as the temporary, contingent circumstances continue to align with the desired ideal, the illusion that it is a real absolute ideal in the material world - a secular transcendence - can be maintained.

Adam Cvijanovic, Fun, 2006, oil on panel

This picture is perfect for capturing the apotheosis of stuff - the way the beast system elevates material crap to abstract and even spiritual levels.

Modernity needed the illusion of continual progress to justify replacing logos and organic culture. Every generation richer than it's parents if you just sell out God, family and community! And it was so successful - the illusion is still so strong today - because the chain of favorable illusion-supporting circumstances was so prolonged. Think of the string of external subsidies needed to maintain the fiction of inevitable constant progress, first in the West, then freaking globally!..

Agricultural, Scientific, and Industrial Revolutions set a multi-century pattern of increasing aggregate wealth.

These were all exportable and have spread unevenly around the world. Meaning that the marterial wealth benefits have extended the Progress! myth to other parts of the world as well.

The beast system promotes a globalism that seeks to undo the distinctions and refinements of Creation and reduce the world to the gray goo of chaos. The more secular transcendence the better.

Ages of Discovery and Colonialization enabled unprecedented resource concentration.

It's connected - the technological revolutions brought the power to build huge empires of less advanced people. Being able to wipe out whole civilizations and loot entire continents is the sort of external subsidization that makes Progress! look real while it lasts.

The American frontier was similar - free land and stuff just waiting for someone to take it. The loss of both was material and psychic. There's also an element of historical guilt and impostor syndrome that come with posturing atop theft and lies.

Increasingly massive wars to burn off surplus and reset without seeming to reset.

In real life, progress is finite. Constant war means constant production, and as the wars get more destructive, rebuilding resets the Progress! clock. The sheer devestation of modern warfare - the doctrine of MAD for example - prevented another massive grinder to use up some men, juice patriotism, and keep the economy humming.

Modern 4 and 5G warfares aren't good for business in the same way.

Debt!!!! Oceans of free cash to take the place of the colonies and frontier.

No more places to locust? Just print money from the aether. How is this ignorable in conjunction with all the other indices of social devolution?

Modern infotech and logistics to bottom out production costs.

Just in time supply-chain management, intermodal logistics, global sourcing - the beast will eviscerate national economies to bring down the price of goods. Another illusion of Progress! that is destructive long term.

Realistically, what is the future for any of this?

To ask is to answer. It's done.

We are already at a place where real personal wealth is trending inexorably downwards and a bloated population depends on strained infrastructure for survival. And suddenly, no one pushes material progress anymore. If you pay attention, you see that even the standard techno-utopian boilerplate of beast system sci-fi of just a few years ago is nowhere to be found.

Because it's done. The circumstances have changed sufficiently that temporary contingent conditions no longer align with the desired post-Enlightenment ideal. Read that one again. And considering that the entire monstrous, dehumanizning system of aggregating lies that cut us off from life and logos depends on it...

Something like that. Some have called the Band cynical. They have no idea what we are preparing for.

What happened, starting in the 20th century, was a change on the definition of Progress! from the material-economic to the sociological. Since we've crapped out materially, we can progress morally! Of course this is unstated, since that would declare Progress! to be contingent and not abstract reality. And as with any secular transcendent circumstantial masquerading as a universal, what early promise there was gives way to grim reality. All the various modern forms of "progressivism" that have led from the destruction of the family to banning syrup logos.

Without Progress!, the de-moralized existential bleakness of soulless modern materialism becomes overwhelming - look how many people actually kill themselves over empty economic prospects. But actual material progress is no longer possible collectively. So the pattern is going to be purity spiraling, until that craps out too.

Which will be sooner than one might think. Conditional material progress does incentivize productivity and make people temporarily better off. Conditional sociological "progress" distracts from productivity. It actively speeds the degredation of the system whose abundance makes it possible in the first place by reorienting priorities away from outputs.

Look around. Who's looking after the infrastructure? This isn't a rhetorical question.

The Band has no way of knowing what epochal change looks like because the current conditions are so unique. Past precedents aren't great. Nor can we do anything about it other than alert those few paying attention. Because the entire fake conceptual foundation that made the modern world possible has already dissipated. Best get a jump on more organic living.

On a less immediate but more fundamental level, secular transcendence clarifies earlier reflections on morality. We had approached the issue from the topic of motivation - internal vs. external, systems, guilt and shame, etc. Important stuff, but only one facet. What about the moral code itself? Secular transcendence cuts through literally centuries of fog to the essential division of all of it.

Morality is either...

Ary Scheffer, The Temptation of Christ, 1854, oil on canvas, Walker Art Gallery

...objectively given external to the self...

This is deontology - morality based on the logical application of external objective Truth.

This presumes the existence an objective ultimate reality against which and by which temporal "things" have moral weight. Where the Good and the True collapse into God or the One depending on nomenclature.

..or...

...subjectively determined by us in some way.

This is moral relativism. There are countless forms but the common thread is the belief that we - individually or in some collective grouping - determine what is or isn't moral.

Objective moral direction means aligning priorities and behavior with the essential nature of reality. And understanding secular transcendence tells us that this is of ultimate reality and beyond empirical or logical knowing. There is a limit of conceptual discernment.

Ultimate reality is the "grounds" against which everything else is differentiated, has meaning, exists. Including time. This means ultimate reality has to be super-temporal, because it has to subsume temporality within it's infinitely greater superset for time to be. And this outside the capacity of the sequential and inherently temporal processes by which we think to even accommodate. Ultimate reality simply is - insofar as speech applies to it - and at this level, the Good, Beautiful, and True are the same. So for us to even conceive of ultimate reality, it has to extend itself temporally. It has to have a temporal "face" we can see...

The connection between us and Ultimate Reality - where it differentiates in a way that is temporally perceptible to us - is Creation.

Gustave Dore, The Creation of Light, engraving for Dore's English Bible, 1866.

Creation can be conceived as the divine "speech act" that makes the eternal conceivable to temporally-dependent abstract cognitive processes of any kind. Prior to that neither "speech" nor "act" is meaningful as we understand it.

This does differentiate the Good-Beautiful-True homology, but lets it be apprehended in a meaningful way.

If morality is the extension of ultimate reality to the material... and ultimate reality extends into temporality through Creation... then morality is necessarily a complex created order. It inherently, structurally can't be "do what thou wilt". Because the intrinsic direction is built into the reality that we join in medias res from the beginning.

As for the individual precepts - these are known by faith. Reason can tell us that there is an objective reality and that it's temporal extension implies directionality. But getting to what ultimate reality "wants" on reason alone is a bridge too far. Meaning yes, objective morality is inherently "religious".

Andreas Brugger, The Sermon on the Mount, around 1800, St. Blasius, Weiler, Germany

Because there is no alternative besides relativism. Anything else is something that subjective, temporally-contingent creatures made up and are pretending is superior to a reality that antecedes them.

At worst, it becomes the luciferian will to power. But even at best, appealing to "the greater good" still places us as a collective above the reality that contains us. And that only holds if we believe in souls. At which point we're back to metaphysics.

What about the appeal to "natural law" - catnip to morons since before Rousseau and now obvious secular transcendence. It fails because it is material and contingent. But it fails empirically too.

Lion Hunting Prey, late Imperial Roman mosaic, 3rd to 5th century AD, private

The law of nature is brute survival of the fittest - no reasoned morality at all. And our intellectual complexity means dealing with complex social orders and motivations that complicate the instinctive patterns of animals in nature.

The clouds of fake moralities that proliferate these days can be confusing. Secrets and third eyes, attractions and NAPs - how does one decide?