FORWARD TO TRANSCENDENTALISM

1. An age of materialism, realism, naturalism, and idealism is of necessity a secular age, an age dominated by science rather than led by religion; for it is one in which inorganic primacy takes precedence over organic supremacy, and things are accordingly judged or evaluated in relation to their materialistic, realistic, naturalistic, or idealistic worth.

2. Now in an age led or, at any rate, characterized by religion, on the other hand, things are judged and evaluated in relation to the beauty of fundamentalism or to the strength of nonconformism or to the knowledge of humanism or to the truth of transcendentalism (the religious per se), in consequence of which a love of beauty tends to encourage a hatred of ugliness, a pride in strength tends to encourage a humility if not humiliation in weakness, a pleasure in knowledge tends to encourage a pain in ignorance, and a joy in truth tends to encourage a woe in falsity, making one contemptuous, in these various ways, of materialism and realism and naturalism and idealism.

3. Today, however, it is less evident, in face of the ever-burgeoning plethora of technological options, that a hateful or shameful or painful or woeful contempt of materialism, realism, naturalism, and idealism is the norm but, rather, that a sort of inverted contempt of fundamentalism, nonconformism, humanism, and transcendentalism has become the norm for those people who, judged by natural standards, are anything but sane!

4. In fact, such people are sorry testimony to the dominion of Antinaturalism, which twists values from a positive attitude towards matters having to do with organic supremacy to a falsely positive attitude towards things having to do with inorganic primacy, particularly in relation to the artificial constructs and technologies of the contemporary world.

5. But who or what is responsible for this? For turning people away from people and enslaving them ever more securely to the machines and products of the technological present? Precisely the capitalist manufacturers and distributors of these artificial constructs, whose principal concern is to sell them and maximize profits.

6. It matters not to the capitalistic individuals whether a majority of people go insane in their anti-natural estimation of the cultural or moral worth of these products, so long as they continue to express a dependence upon them and prefer them to more natural or organic alternatives.

7. Yet the manufacturers and distributors are themselves likely to be more in favour of inorganic primacy and indifferent, if not hostile, towards organic supremacy than their commercial victims, since they are the 'first movers', as it were, in the production of these artificial constructs, and have a vested interest in selling them in order to become richer and more able, in consequence, to live according to their appetites.

8. Which, of course, means to live under the sway of inorganic primacy to a greater extent than in relation to organic supremacy, given the near impossibility of being able to transcend a professionally-conditioned artificial lifestyle for one more natural in character when, to judge by performance and affiliation, one is more exposed to the insanity of anti-natural evaluations than those less well-off than oneself, and more inclined to take the secular rule of inorganic primacy for granted.

9. Paradoxical indeed would be the man who used wealth accumulated via commercial endeavour to further a more naturalistic lifestyle, independent, to a large degree, of those materialistic or realistic or naturalistic or even idealistic factors which made him wealthy in the first place! That is not the way out of the contemporary dilemma in which evaluations are twisted away from organic supremacy by a hegemonic primacy.

10. Neither, for that matter, is war, or the threat or actuality of violence used against capitalist society by movements or individuals who stand for an alternative society which, by the very nature of their actions, would be less than godly or God-fearing in its people-oriented disposition.

11. You cannot use a symptom of capitalism to cure capitalism, still less expect socialism to remedy evils which have more to do with a fixation on wealth through the absence or rejection of godliness than with this or that particular expression of wealth creation or distribution.

12. Even religion is a thorny issue when the forms it takes are less than genuinely religious, as in the cases of fundamentalism, nonconformism, and humanism, which rather than offering a lead away from the world in a post-worldly direction ... tend to either fall-in with the world, as in the cases of politics-oriented nonconformism and economics-oriented humanism, or to lead back behind the world, as in the case of science-oriented fundamentalism, with consequences only too predictably non-religious as far as the interpretation and health of the soul is concerned!

13. Only transcendentalism, because it is genuinely metaphysical and religious rather than metachemical and scientific or chemical and political or physical and economic, can lead the way beyond the world towards that estimation of things in which truth, and truth first and foremost if not alone, is the principal criterion for assessing the value of life and standard by which, or against which, other issues should be judged.

14. For until truth is sovereign, and recognized as such on the basis of what it stands for, religion will continue to be subject to the reign of beauty or strength or knowledge masquerading as truth, with fundamentalist, nonconformist, and humanist consequences which, while claiming God for themselves, effectively exclude the possibility of truth - and therefore genuine godliness - due to their rejection, in one degree or another, of transcendentalism.

15. I teach the New Transcendentalism, the Social Transcendentalism, which takes over from where socialism leaves off in its concern for people before products, but with the very important addition of transcendental religion ... to give people both a lead and a safeguard against the pitfalls of secular humanism, whose obsessive concern with wealth distribution makes it almost as dangerous to human well-being as the wealth creation which capitalist inhumanism monopolizes, to the detriment of mental and emotional health.