The Iceberg is There: Verbosity Cannot Defeat Reality

Reality opposed smashes the soul.

The credentialed pass the ship as safe, after all, the company has made it safer than the rules say they must, and entire papers can be written on the progress shown in this largest movable object ever built by mankind. “Humanity has conquered nature!” Yet the steel is inferior, the lifeboats too few, and there is an iceberg in the sea.

The road to hell, eternal perdition, is signposted, often with footnotes, with words that explain reality away, but the iceberg is there and the steel is not sound. Titanic sinks. There is a moment of clarity, and the public rallies to act, but soon the public relations flaks, the credentialed talk and talk until somehow the White Star line can continue in business and the band members, who bravely played on, can be billed for their uniforms.

Give the talkers, those with a facility with words, folks with “jobs” in what used to be academic institutions, time and they can explain how what you have seen is not what you saw at all. Imagine the person now paid by a University to tweet tens of times every day some party line or another on the usury extorted from college students. Write a dubious book, have a fellow ideologue write an even more implausible book footnoting the first, and soon an entire web of words, credentialed words exist, that create a fantastic alternate verbal world. That these words cannot stand a request for clarity, honest debate, or even what we all see does not matter. They are compartmentalized from serious criticism until the wordy compartments are breached by the cold water of reality.

Words multiply and a sin against reality is not lacking.

This sin, this verbal dexterity, hides the fact that one has created a society incapable of even reproducing itself. We wish metaphysical reality away with words,  but there is still a law of Nature and of Nature’s God. We talk our way around physical facts, but Nature and Nature’s God is undefeated.

If so, then why complain? Why do an apologetic for the truth, the good, and beauty? If I am confident, as I am, that right reason will prevail, then why defend what is manifest?

The answer is the manifest danger of the verbally dexterous who can make a bad argument good at least long enough for a career and tenure. They might delay necessary changes to avoid tragedy.

Imagine a great liner built badly, but celebrated loudly.  One should show that there must be more lifeboats, that radio operators should be on duty at all times, that steel must be better made, but one would rather do so ahead of the death of hundreds. An iceberg can show that the credentialed are denying reality, but really it would be better to avoid the disaster altogether by embracing reality first. A civilization that talks itself into deifying decadence, denying death, and defending decay cannot long survive. Surely one can argue that every previous culture was wrong and this dreadful thing is a virtue, but there is a reason most places at most times avoided the dreadful.

We might decide, all of us with credentials, that we earnestly wish things were not as they are. “Surely with the proper vocabulary, the right ideology, this ancient vice will be virtue after all?”

And it is not.

The Titanic sank, however inconvenient this may have been to the powerful of the day. Cultures that confuse sentience with competence, ideology with philosophy, and the party line with reality will sink as well. We might decide, instead, to value dialogue, the dialectic, science, and an affirmation of Orthodoxy.