Entering Lonergan's Novum Organon
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
— Marcus Aurelius
This introduction to Volume Two of The Long Haul considers two basic questions:
- Is there a language that has a better fit when it comes to understanding current events?
- How can we recover an ideology that protect Western society from those who wish to destroy it?
The primary language is laid out in The Schematic, with Otto Friedman's sixteen socio-political variables grounded in the social science paradigm of social interact forming a secondary conceptual level. The beginnings of a powerful ideology are laid out in our invariant structure of human life-cycles, the idea yet to be realized of an evaluative history belonging in the functional specialty of dialectics, and an initial probe into redefining politics as 3rd level of the human good activities.
This short preface to Volume Two delves into my personal experiences and concerns that give meaning to the problem of exerting control over meaning. As one can quickly notice, my thinking is highly conditioned by Bernard Lonergan's two methodological works: Insight: A Study in Human Understanding and Method in Theology. But the key take-away is a very simple: we experience our world as being chaotic, even though this may be the artificial result of a conceptual framework this is unable to understand what truly is going forward. We may be living in a creative and dynamic moment in history but cannot comprehend the underlying dynamic unity because we simple have inadequate conceptual tools that fail us when it comes to anticipating what is to be known. This is not to say that past insights need to be dumped into the "dustbin of history" in favor of a "new exciting" conceptual scheme. That could be nothing further from the truth. Instead, we need to find the insights that will extend our already remarkable developments even further.
Russell C. Baker
September 28, 2019
The Project: II. Pouring the Foundations