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Another experience of synchronicity
This past week we discussed the synchronicity-related phenomenon of the “double,” in which a word, name, or other subject comes up which one does not normally encounter or has not encountered in a long time, and then shortly afterwards the same word or subject appears again.
Here is another experience along those lines, which occurred just after that thread.
But first a little background. Kristor and I have a running friendly discussion about the length of his comments and his use of obscure or unusual terms in his comments, with me asking him to keep his comments to a reasonable length and not to use words that I don’t understand and that most readers probably won’t understand. Sometimes my pleas to him work, sometimes not.
Well, in the recent entry about whether Randianism provides a basis for ethical behavior as ordinarily understood, Kristor sent a comment in which he used the word “eschaton,” then concluded the comment with this:
But even they, the moral exemplars, will fail to meet the moral standards of virtue they have themselves discerned. So must we ever ask, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
If men were morally perfect, libertarianism would have a shot at working.
I wrote back to Kristor:
I’ve posted this.
I was about to congratulate you for finally using a Greek term I understand, but then you used an entire Latin phrase without translation. It’s not even in my Latin phrase book.
Does it mean, “Who will govern the governors?”
Kristor replied:
Yes. It is a hugely famous Latin phrase, from Juvenal. The problem obsessed the authors of the Federalist. The Constitution is an attempt at an answer. Here’s a bit from Wikipedia on it.
The essential problem was posed by Plato in The Republic, his work on government and morality. The perfect society as described by Socrates, the main character in this Socratic dialogue, relies on laborers, slaves and tradesmen. The guardian class is to protect the city. The question is put to Socrates, “Who will guard the guardians?” or, “Who will protect us against the protectors?” Plato’s answer to this is that they will guard themselves against themselves. We must tell the guardians a “noble lie”. The noble lie will assure them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege; they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it.
I replied:
But you should not use foreign phrases that not everyone will understand. I had to guess at it, and apparently my guess was incorrect. I guessed, “Who will govern the governors?” But evidently the more accurate translation is, “Who will protect us from the protectors?” If you use a foreign phrase, you need to provide a translation.
Kristor replied:
But you did translate it correctly. Your translation is widely accepted. “Watchmen,” “Guardians,” “Protectors,” “Governors:” all are used. The phrase is a touchstone for conservatives, because it nails the central, fundamental problem of all political theory. I figured almost all your readers would recognize it. I would guess that it is about as widely understood in the original Latin as “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” is in French. In fact, I did provide a translation at first, but then reconsidered and removed it before I hit “send,” because I worried that your readers might think Kristor was condescending to them by providing the translation.
It was a judgment call.
I replied:
But I didn’t recognize it. :-)
The next day I wrote to Kristor telling him what had happened next:
In my most recent reply to you I said, concerning the Latin phrase about who will govern the governors:
But I didn’t recognize it. :-)
Actually I had it in my thought to say more: I wanted to say, please don’t assume that everyone knows what you know, don’t use foreign phrases that not everyone will recognize/understand. But I felt the point had already been made, so I didn’t say more.
Now, Kristor, guess what happened next?
I got back into bed (this was in the early morning hours), and to help fall asleep I opened up Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, which happened to be beside my bed. I read the novel about three years ago when the movie with the then-new James Bond played by Daniel Craig came out. I came upon it by chance on my book shelf a couple of days ago, and put it next to my bed, thinking to glance at it in an idle moment.
Well, I got back into bed, and to help fall asleep, I opened the book to a random page, which was page 12. At the top of the page, M, the head of MI5, is in the middle of reading a memo from Head of S (Soviet affairs) about the Secret Service’s plan to destroy Le Chiffre, a Communist agent in France. The memo tells how Le Chiffre lost a large amount of money that Soviet Intelligence had given him for spy work, which he then invested in brothels which were subsequently closed by the French government, and now he is in desperate trouble with his Communist overlords if they find out that he threw away for personal purposes the money they gave him. Here is the top of page 12 to which I randomly opened the book:
Barely three months later, on 13 April, there was passed in France Law No. 468685 called Loi Tendant à la Fermeture des Maisons de Tolérance et au Renforcement de la Lutte contre le Proxénitisme.
When M came to this sentence he grunted and pressed a switch on the intercom.
‘Head of S?’
‘Sir’.
‘What the hell does this word mean?’ He spelt it out.
‘Pimping, sir.’
‘This is not the Berlitz School of Languages, Head of S. The next time you want to show off your knowledge of foreign jaw-breakers, be so good as to use a crib. Better still, write in English.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
M released the switch and turned back to the memorandum.
So, no more than 15 minutes after my e-mail to you and my further unstated thoughts about not using foreign phrases that people won’t understand, I opened a book at random to a passage that expressed the exact same thought that I had stated (and had thought about stating) to you.
Kristor replied:
Dollars to doughnuts you will see “who will watch the watchers” everywhere in the next 48 hours, either in Latin or English. Of course, now that I’ve said this, it won’t happen. ; )
I really think there is something to all this. I mean, I really think that there is a germ of truth in the double, in telepathy, numerology, geomancy, the I Ching, etc. All of these practices presuppose that “each atom is a system of all things.” In no other way could the fall of a bunch of yarrow sticks be meaningful, about anything whatsoever. But the fall of the yarrow sticks must be meaningful, in every way, because that is the only way that it could coincide coherently with the rest of the world. It’s the only way we can have a world. If the world is really coherent, then everything in it is linked to, and informed by, everything else—this is Mach’s Principle, which finds expression in relativistic physics in the form of Einstein’s notion of the inertial frame of reference. Thus, we must in principle be able to ask the yarrow sticks any question whatsoever, and by looking at them properly and carefully, derive intelligence that points to an answer. In principle, we should be able to do this; in practice, it’s a different matter. We now see these connections between things only as through a glass, and darkly. But the mystics and shamans of all spiritual traditions report that in the mystical ascent to heaven, they were shown the whole of what is, and they saw in it immediately, all at once, and in perfect detail absolutely everything there was to know about it. So St. Francis looks at the fall of the yarrow sticks in China and clearly understands everything they mean, while we see only glimmers, no matter what we look at.
- end of initial entry -
Jeff W. writes:
Last night I went to sleep thinking about Ambrose Bierce and his “Devil’s Dictionary,” and how he disappeared in Mexico. This morning, while reading the news on the Internet, one of the first things I came across was Ambrose Bierce’s excellent definition of education: “That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.” Prior to this, I had not thought about Ambrose Bierce for years.
I would also like to add a Calvinist/Christian point of view to this discussion. I believe that all the understanding we have is what God gives us, and nothing more. I don’t believe we can move past our limits on our own power. As we grow in faith, however, God adds to our power of understanding. God also speaks to us in many ways: through feelings, through thoughts of unknown origin, and through events. Through remarkable coincidences, unlikely events, and acts of providence, God makes his presence known.
Trying to seek guidance from tarot cards, yarrow sticks, ouija boards, etc., I view as vain and self-deluding human efforts to overcome limits that God has set. We should instead put our trust in God and have faith in his providence, rather than vainly trying to divine the future so as to gain some personal advantage from knowledge that we should not and, in reality, cannot have. We are wise only when we seek God’s will, and do God’s will as he gives us the light to see it.
LA replies:
I don’t think that Kristor was recommending the use of Tarot or I Ching for personal guidance or reading the future; rather he was pointing out that the correspondences one encounters when using I Ching are part and parcel of the same phenomenon of interconnectedness that is seen in experiences of the double and of synchronicity in general.
Brandon F. writes:
I thought about you and the previous discussion you had on this subject just yesterday when I had what I think was just one of “those” moments.
I did my usual browsing through web news sites in the morning coming across a section called “pictures of the day” on the Christian Science Monitor website. There was a picture of a gorgeous red-winged black bird that really caught my eye. I must have stared at it for at least a minute admiring the wild beauty of this creature. Several hours later I was wasting time in a used bookstore and saw a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I have read a couple of times but not in years. It was $5 so I grabbed it and went to wait on a friend for lunch. The first few pages of the book referenced red-winged black birds at least five times.
Karl D. writes: Okay. This is getting creepy. Maybe us VFR readers are beginning to have a collective psychic connection. This morning I thought of a friend I have not spoken to in quite a while. This made me think of a gift he had given me. The gift just happened to be a copy of “The Devil’s Dictionary” which I took from my shelf, blew the dust off and skimmed through for the first time in years! Get out of my head you guys! Tell me there is nothing to this? This almost tops an experience I had as a teenager.
James R. writes:
You’re a well-educated man so if I were to use that Quis Custodes phrase, I wouldn’t have provided a translation, either. I’d have (incorrectly) assumed you’d know it. My solution when I come across things like that I don’t know is to run them through a search engine. I don’t say this as a pedantic slot telling you what to do.
It does bring to mind though my reading of older books from a more civilized time: Even ones written in the interwar years (1920s through 1930s), there will often be phrases in Latin or even Greek, with no translation provided, not even in a footnote (if the book has footnotes), even when the subject isn’t related to Rome or Greece. Educated people were just expected to know and understand. Sort of as with Biblical allusions from the same era or before.
Of course now we have our own cultural references made in books or blogs or wherever that people simply understand and we probably don’t notice half the time that they are what they are and a later era won’t comprehend them because they won’t see the cultural context; and a lot more “knowledge” is out there, doublings and triplings of what is written and known, our own technical dialects, &tc. But whenever I read these older books and come across such a reference and don’t understand it, I always have a feeling I’ve come face to face with part of what we’ve lost, our disconnection with our own tradition, knowledge educated people in our civilization Ought to have, but which we’ve been stripped of—often quite deliberately.
LA replies:
But do all readers know the Juvenal phrase? When I use a foreign prhase, I generally provide the English along with it. It’s simple considerateness. People should not have to go looking in a dictionary to understand what I’ve written.
Occasionally I will use a Latin phrase that I like without translating it. I’m fond of the expression a fortiori (Toynbee uses it repeatedly in A Study of History, that’s how I came upon it and learned it), and have used it at VFR without translation. I guess in that instance I expect/want people to look it up and learn it. I guess I figure, because I looked it up, others can look it up too, and also I feel it’s something that people should know. So there’s not complete consistency here, I admit.
Hannon writes:
I wrote down these notes on two related phenomena while the “double” discussion was underway. I think it ties in here, judging from Kristor’s extrapolation to broader metaphysical meaning.
Sometimes I am trying to leave a place (home, work, a party) and some influence noticeably persists in acting against my decision. I will get into an “involuntary” conversation that delays or a series of distractions will occur, all the while I am thinking that I really must be leaving. I am trying to leave but circumstances keep holding me up. Then, at the last minute, something important will occur, such as meeting a person of interest I would have missed if I had left when I tried to leave, or getting an out of the blue phone call from an old friend. The timing of it all is striking, almost as if it were choreographed. I have learned to try to recognize these situations and not to resist them so that I can allow things to unfold as it seems they are destined to unfold, even when my ego-self has other ideas. The consequence of succeeding in breaking away against these indications is learning later that I did in fact miss something or someone that now represents a loss.
Another phenomenon, not dissimilar to the first, happens in conversation. I will have a strong desire to make a point while someone is talking and I am looking for any opportunity to burst out with my thought or opinion. These are usually thoughts that I recognize at the time might be a mild social risk to share, but of course they seem, simultaneously, to be ever so important to communicate. Every time I think I can speak, some serendipitous action “intervenes” or others talk and frustrate my timing. It seems that something is working to prevent me from saying what I want to say at that time. When I do finally blurt something out under these conditions it is invariably a faux pas. I have learned, similarly, to abide these indications and not to resist the phenomenon. It always brings better results.
So, in both cases, it seems to me that there is a “force” that acts as a helpful nudge under certain conditions. I suspect that many others have these occasional experiences, but do they recognize them? It may be more a matter of a realization that is manifested strongly or weakly in different people. In other words, the same forces may be acting on everyone in roughly the same way, but the awareness of them is variable, both in individuals and between individuals.
Just some thoughts. I would be curious to know if you have had anything like these events occur in your experience.
LA replies:
That’s very interesting. But no, I don’t recall experiencing anything quite like that.
LA to Hannon:
I’m posting this.
On another point, if I may play English teacher for a moment, take a look at the posted version of your comment. See where I’ve corrected split infinitives and added commas. Commas are generally needed between independent clauses.
I’m not saying split infinitives must never be used (though I personally never use them), but when they are easy to avoid, they should be avoided.
Sometimes it seems people go out of their way to split the infinitive. Thus you wrote:
I have learned to try to recognize these situations and to not resist so I can allow things to unfold as it seems they are destined to unfold…
There is no reason for this. The correct form, and much stronger English, is:
I have learned to try to recognize these situations and not to resist….
Hannon replies:
Thanks, that is helpful advice. I knew I should have paid closer attention in English classes in junior high school when they were diagramming sentences.
LA replies:
Start now! Look up syntax and diagramming sentences. It’s all on the Web. There is no single subject more important.
Hannon replies:
This is simply amazing. I searched for “sentence diagramming resources” and the first offering was “hedgeschool” something. Here is the very first thing stated on the site’s home page:
“Sentence diagramming may seem a small matter, but clarity of thought is essential to maintaining Catholic Christian civilization.”
Seeing that my quest was, in a manner of speaking, a traditionalist errand, this seems yet another instance of the aforementioned synchronicity.
Kristor writes:
Lawrence: This is two quite different comments in one message, so please don’t be put off by the length of what follows. That said, I try to forestall accusations of prolixity by providing two versions of the message. The first I have mercilessly hacked, the second I have fully expressed.
Version I: terse
Comment I.1:
Jeff W. is quite right. It is not only vain, but dangerous, to try to divine the future from the behavior of creatures, because the correspondences we see everywhere in that behavior arise in the first place only because of a prior divine coordination. Seeking wisdom from the order implicit in a bunch of yarrow sticks? Should we not rather go to its source? For, not being God, the yarrow sticks cannot have got things completely right. Creatures correspond to each other only insofar as they first correspond to God. So we should look first to God to discover our proper correspondence toward other creatures. If we do otherwise, we are likely to organize ourselves erroneously. I.e., badly; sinfully; painfully.
Not that we should not try to be scientific. Indeed, as practical beings we have no alternative. And it is both delightful and spiritually salutary to discern, understand, and appreciate the correspondences that do indeed pervade nature, insofar as we do so as part of a superordinate endeavor to comprehend and align ourselves with the Logos of the world. The vices of knowledge are posterior to its virtue, from which they have fallen. So there are virtuous antipodes to the vain and errant wizards, magicians and seers whom Scripture condemns: the sages, the mystics, and the prophets.
Comment I.2
I was struck by James R.’s comment about reading old books and encountering unfamiliar terms that their authors (and, evidently, their readers) took as commonly understood. I’ve learned a lot about intellectual history by trying to understand such terms. Such terms embody and transmit knowledge. I owe them a lot, so I honor them; and when they are the apt to my rhetorical purpose I freely use them, so as to extend their influence upon the future, that the wisdom they embody may not forever vanish. And it is striking how many of our terms, familiar or strange, are in foreign languages: zeitgeist, déjà vu, eschaton. Even Anglo-Saxon words are fossils of cultures and times quite foreign to ours, and their full import is obscure to us. But is this not the source of the great charm of etymology? Just as meaningful correspondences pervade reality, so they pervade the linguistic departments thereof. Language derives its meaning from the meaning of reality. So take any word, and follow all its connections to other words, and you will eventually find that you have delineated a complete and adequate philosophy, schooled and refined by millennia of experience, that is therefore admirably attuned to the world as it really is.
Take then the Latin word “tradition:” speaking across. Tradition is how our ancestors teach us what they have learned, at such great cost. As our patrimony, it is the medium of their paternity. And in the final analysis, our entire language is composed of terms for concepts that at some point in our history were novel and then, because they trenchantly expressed a new discovery about the truth of things, became traditional. So language per se just is tradition, speaking to us across the ages.
This is why adherents of radically inadequate doctrines—materialism, liberalism, nominalism, Darwinism, atheism, etc.—have such difficulty expressing their doctrines without implicitly contradicting themselves. Not only by their terms, but by their very grammar, our languages frustrate the expression of obtuse doctrines.
Version II: approaching adequacy, but nowhere near it, there being so many more important things to say …
Comment II.1:
I would echo Jeff W.’s comment about the hazards of seeking guidance or divination from yarrow sticks or Ouija boards or whatever. In fact, right after I sent you the message in which I talked about yarrow sticks, I thought I should send along a post scriptum with a caveat to that effect, but by then duty had taken me away from my machine, and by the time I got back to it I had forgotten. Jeff W. is quite right. It is not only vain (in both senses of that word), but dangerous, to try to divine the future from the behavior of creatures, because the correspondences we see everywhere in that behavior, which together deliver up to us a coherent world, arise in the first place only because of a prior divine coordination. Seeking wisdom from the order implicit in a bunch of yarrow sticks? Should we not rather go to its source? For, not being God, the yarrow sticks cannot have got things completely right. Creatures correspond to each other only insofar as they first correspond to God. So we should look first to God to discover our proper correspondence toward other creatures. When we get this procedure backwards, and seek wisdom first from other creatures that, being finite, cannot be as comprehensively correct as the omniscient God who is the source of all order, we are likely to organize ourselves erroneously. I.e., badly; sinfully; painfully. If we try to comprehend and align ourselves toward the world, period full stop, we reiterate the sin of Adam. This is why Scripture condemns wizards, magicians, seers, and so forth. When we ask an open-ended, open-minded question of nature, we open ourselves to input, not just from God and His faithful servants, but from the demonic and all its works. So science is dangerous, and scientists put themselves at great spiritual hazard. It is not for nothing that the myths of science—Faust, Prometheus, Icarus, Eden—involve damnation.
Not that we should not try to be scientific. Indeed, as practical beings we have no alternative. And it is both delightful and spiritually salutary to discern, understand, and appreciate the correspondences that do indeed pervade nature, insofar as we do so as part of a superordinate endeavor to comprehend and align ourselves with the Logos of the world, aka YHWH. The vices of knowledge are posterior to its virtue, from which they have fallen. So there are virtuous antipodes to the vain and errant wizards, magicians and seers: the sages, the mystics, and the prophets.
Comment II.2:
Second, I was struck by James R.’s comment about reading old books and encountering unfamiliar terms that their authors (and, evidently, their readers) took as commonly understood. I’ve learned a lot about intellectual history by trying to understand such terms. They became common among our forebears by succinctly referring to aspects of reality their own ancestors had thought worth noticing, or by capturing aspects of their contemporary zeitgeist that, while it may since have vanished (thus accounting for their current desuetude) is no less informative now than ever. Such terms embody and transmit knowledge. I owe them a lot, so I honor them; and when they are the apt to my rhetorical purpose I freely use them, so as to extend their influence upon the future, that the wisdom they embody may not forever vanish. And it is striking how many of our terms, familiar or strange, are in foreign languages: zeitgeist, déjà vu, anfractuous, eschaton. Even the humble Anglo-Saxon words that constitute the skeleton of English are fossils of cultures and times quite foreign to ours, and their full import is obscure to us. But is this not the source of the great charm of etymology? Just as meaningful correspondences pervade reality, so they pervade the linguistic departments thereof. Language derives its meaning from the meaning of reality. So take any word, and follow all its connections (through, e.g., conjunctions like “conjunction”) to other words, ancient and modern, and you will eventually find that you have delineated a complete and adequate philosophy, schooled and refined by millennia of experience, that is therefore admirably attuned to the world as it really is.
Take then the Latin word “tradition:” speaking across. Tradition is how our ancestors teach us what they have learned, at such great cost. As our patrimony, it is the medium of their paternity. And in the final analysis, our entire language is composed of terms for concepts that at some point in our history were novel and then, because they trenchantly expressed a new discovery about the truth of things, became traditional. So language per se just is tradition, speaking to us across the ages.
This is why adherents of radically inadequate doctrines—materialism, liberalism, nominalism, Darwinism, acosmism, deconstructionism, relativism, skepticism, physicalism, atheism—have such difficulty expressing their doctrines without implicitly contradicting themselves. Not only by their terms, but by their very grammar, our languages frustrate the expression and promulgation of obtuse and inadequate doctrines. So their exponents find they cannot get by without unprincipled exceptions. Much of the matter of philosophy, and indeed of all human discourse, is therefore to work toward clear and correct understanding of the proper meaning of terms, so that all exceptions are principled. When all exceptions are principled, we shall have arrived at adequacy.
LA to Kristor:
I didn’t read or edit it, I just posted as is.
Kristor replies:
LOL.
LA replies:
Well, your double posting with the advance announcement was an unbeatable gambit, wasn’t it?
Kristor replies:
You make me sound like Sun Tzu or Garry Kasparov. I shall have to remember this strategy: provide an abstract or executive summary, then the full article. If nothing else, it will show you how hard I shall work henceforth to tame my inner Faulkner.
Tame my inner Faulkner. That sounds like Plato or Aristotle, talking about the virtuous man taming the team of thymotic horses of the passions, that provide the oomph through which we get things done. I guess my inner Faulkner is indeed a source of temptation.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 24, 2010 12:02 PM | Send
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