I hope all of you have been having a good Advent/holiday season. As one of the frozen chosen, this is the time of year to make Scandinavian treats, stave off seasonal affective disorder, and contemplate the incarnation of the Logos.
While Christians have a pretty definitive answer as to what the Logos is, you don’t have to be a Christian to see the value of the Logos. Indeed, the whole idea of the Logos was used by the ancient Greeks and second-temple Judaism before the Christians ever were a thing, so it’s definitely a big-tent concept. In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that if you’re at all on the Right (or at least on the non-Left), you inherently desire a logo-centric life. If you value transcendent meaning over shallow “identity,” if you care about building stable societal structures that last over time, if you value anything that’s true, good, and beautiful, then you’re logo-centric. But first, what is the Logos?
I’ll do my best to not jump into full professorial mode and give a detailed history of thought concerning the Logos. Let’s start with some of the possible translations of the word in ancient Greek. For the Greeks, Logos could mean anything from “speech” to “discourse” to “study,” but the most interesting translation for us right here would be “word.” The function of words is ideally to transmit meaning (assuming we’re not listening to Lil Pump). If you speak a word, it only exists as long as you pronounce it. If you write it down and preserve it, you can read it years into the future.
While both of these methods produce meaning and introduce some meaning into the chaos of the world, they are temporally constrained. A spoken word lives for but a moment, and the written word lives as long as people preserve it. But there was a time when those words did not exist. This created something of a philosophical problem for those dudes in togas. How can any true meaning (i.e. “word”) really exist if all of our human words are stuck in the stream of time? Being stuck in time means that our words either die with us, or die when others stop preserving our words in written form. Behold, the Logos, or the “Word,” if you will. Not just a source of fleeting meaning like that thing you say when you stub your toe, but:
Ok great, so we have a working definition of Logos, but how does it combat chaos? As I talked about last time, chaos from the Future works backwards in time to inject our present with the next Current Thingtm. The Left values the newest, shiniest thing at all costs, and thus welcomes the Future’s chaos with open arms. The Right, on the other hand, fights the Future and seeks to create meaning, stable structures, and goodness for our time in this world. Hmm, stability, meaning, goodness? Sounds an awful LOT like something having to do with the Logos here.
But what about when chaos and disorder raise their ugly heads? As the famously autistic Martin Luther asked about twelve trillion times, “What does this mean?” What gives? Does this mean that the Logos isn’t logo-ing enough? As the meme would ask:
Well done, internet atheist. Your critique of all Western religion and philosophy will no doubt win you massive kudos with your the mole people, but in the meantime us philoso-bros will keep looking for that transcendent meaning, thank you very much. That chaos, evil, and disorder exist in the world doesn’t mean that the Logos isn’t real or that it’s not doing its thing. To be truly transcendent and eternal, the Logos must work both inside and outside our little space-time continuum and thus continually set about reordering the world. This is the eternal return of the Logos.
So what does this all mean for us? Regardless of your religious position, if you’re reading Carpe Forum, it’s safe to say you’re at the very least skeptical of the Left, and hopefully that you’re looking for a place where people are fighting the Future. That means that you’re already on the right (dare I say, Right) track. You are already looking for glimpses of the Logos in the world and in your life. You’re doing this likely because of the extreme lack of interest in anything Logos-related in the current mono-culture that’s being constantly pushed down our throats.
So where does this leave us? How can we live more Logo-centric lives? I think it starts first and foremost with actually giving a shit about those things in life that give us transcendent meaning. Nobody’s perfect, but when we start doing our small parts to embody the Logos, we start to see it working in other parts of the world as well. Faith, hope, love, friendship, giving of ourselves to people in need, receiving help from others when we need it (I’m still working on that one), and not least importantly good food. As Thorin Oakenshield says at the end of The Hobbit, “if more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
So to steal a phrase from Dr. Parvini, what you’re really looking for is sensible Logo-centrism. Meaning, goodness, community, all those things that make life truly worth living. To also borrow a phrasing from another smart dude, the Logos shines in the darkness of the next Current Thingtm, and the Current Thingtm has not overcome it.
Wishing all you a happy Hanukkah, a very Merry Christmas, and a wonderful New Year with even more stubbornly hopeful meditations in 2023!