Who Were the Sea Peoples?

One of the most important points Eric Voegelin stressed in his work was that it is always actual experiences that are fundamental: intellectual symbolisms of those experiences are secondary phenomena. And when those symbolisms take on a life of their own, divorced from the actual experience that engendered them, they become "hieroglyphs": the fossils of once living ideas. So, some of my readers may be puzzled as to what I have been on about lately with my multiple posts on "doxa," and why I am using this Greek word to describe... well, what, exactly? The thing is, I had known this term for perhaps a decade before I ever started using it. And for a decade, I was vague about what it meant... and then, about a month ago -- you can probably trace the exact date by looking at my blog posts! -- I suddenly saw what Plato and Aristotle were talking about when they used this term. Since then, I have been trying to present symbols of what the experience I had meant, bu...

without making them bigger than they are : "But it’s the sweltering guitar solo—so good it still moves people to tears—that brought the song into the upper echelon of stadium ballads. Purple Rain , the album and the film, were the magic results of Prince’s limitless imagination and bridged an invisible aural divide, premised on race, that, up until that point, only Michael Jackson had truly managed to transcend. And 'Purple Rain' the song is where it all came together in majestic fashion." Only Michael Jackson?! What about Chuck Berry? Fats Domino? Jimi Hendrix? Harry Belafonte? Sly and the Family Stone? Sammy Davis? Bob Marley? Stevie Wonder ? In my 70% white high school, I recall Innervisions being played in the cafeteria basically every single day of my senior year. Look, we have plenty of racial problems, but "an invisible aural divide, premised on race," is not particularly high on the list: white people in America have listened to lots o...

That we shouldn't depends on human duties, i.e., on the fact we are not "just another animal," notes Wesley J. Smith .

I caught the opening to some television program about vengeance the other night. The voice over went something like: "When we were young, we were taught that two wrongs don't make a right, which we naïvely took for granted. But as I gained experience, I learned that two wrongs don't make a right because they never equal each other." The latter position is presented as be sophisticated view adopted by someone who has been around the block a few times. But it's only "sophistication" lies in rejecting the traditional view: it actually doesn't make a bit of sense. In the tradition view, wrongs are like negative numbers: the more you add, the more negative the result. This "clever" overturning of that view suggests that if only you could get the two negative numbers to exactly equal to each other, then their sum would be positive. In the world of doxa, so long as it's novel you will be thought clever for saying it.

"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.…if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion." -- On Liberty It is all a matter of "opinion," and one can't know there is a tree in the front yard without knowing the "reasons" the other side gives for why there is no tree there.

Periodically, I like to drag a topic brought up in a comment because I think the response to the comment deserves more attention that it would get buried in a common thread. And so now I address the topic, which has sorely puzzled one of our commenters, as to how something can be spiritually true while historically false. To provide a relatively straightforward example of this phenomena, I offer the Circe episode from the Odyssey. As you might recall, Circe was a "sorceress" who offered Odysseus's men a "magical potion," which turned those who partook of it into "swine." Now, I will be so bold as to assert that no actual witch ever existed who literally turned men into swine. But isn't it rather obvious that this story is a mythical symbol of the spiritual reality that there exist women who have a seductive charm that can lead susceptible men to "act like swine" in their presence? Is there anyone who has spent any amount of time i...