Month: March 2010

In studying the issue, one hears often how Conservatives look to the past for inspiration, and “Progressives” to the future. On the one hand, on this stereotype, we hear the demand that everything should remain the way it was, or as close to it as possible. We see sentimental evocations of past eras that we have likely not understood at all.

On the other, we hear strident calls for the new and better; for the eliminations of the hatreds and prejudices that informed the past, and the implementation of a new and better human civilization, unchecked by the ignorance of the past.

To me, Liberalism–true Liberalism–is about the freedom to do what you want. In my own case, I recognize the need for shared cultural themes, understandings of what is Good, and symbols we can rally around. At the same time, I recognize that Fundamentalism–of which one could argue many Conservatisms represent types–usually creates a NEW myth, based simply on the structure of a time we have misremembered.

We remember our Founding Fathers as idealists and revolutionaries. They were that. They were also racists, on our own terms, sexists, and elitists.

To me, though, the point is to look at what they were trying to do, what the ideals were upon which they were acting. One can look, too, at their historical context, one in which slavery had until then been a universally accepted phenomenon–Polybius, a Greek slave in Rome, is one of our best resources on the structure of the Roman Republic, upon which our own Constitution is modelled–and in which most ignorant people were in fact deeply and profoundly ignorant.

There is nothing in Liberalism which rejects idealism. Quite the contrary. Conservatism, though, wedded to Liberalism–my own political position, if forced to choose one–is the idea that we need to proceed with caution. That we want to be careful to keep what needs keeping, and that as we move forward some things we have cherished, will be seen to have been actually detrimental.

The role of Goodness, as a concept, is what ties all of this together. I personally like the vision of moving “forward” to something like the Shire or Rivendell in Tolkien’s novels. I would like to see the best parts of living in harmony with nature, combined with the best parts of modern technology. I see all of us breaking apart the monolithic media outlets, and an ubiquitous Federal Government. I would like to see this basic model spread over the Earth, with technology used to raise everyone to safety, and the level of wealth they want, consistent with sustainability (which is clearly a propaganda theme, often, but hardly to be faulted in principle).

I do believe global peace is possible without global governance. For the time being, though, we need most to be sheltered from those who claim they can do us the greatest good.

It is impossible to set a political philosophy on a firm foundation without deciding first what the point of living is. If you don’t know, then you are worse than useless: you are dangerous. To be clear, politics is the art of government. How we are ruled can vary from one extreme–that of a single man or woman who holds us all in his or her power–to another, that of radical anarchy, where everyone governs themselves, which practically is only possible in conditions of very low population density or–theoretically–extremely developed moral sensibilities.

As I have set the problem down, the first existential problem is why you should continue living in the face of difficulty. It is possible to continue living out of habit, but I feel it is very difficult to live HAPPILY without an answer or answers to this that you find congenial. The second problem is, having determined to live, what you should do.

This first set of questions constitute what I call the Meaning system. Every culture has to have one, and for the culture to be coherent as such, the answers need to be shared generally, as interpreted in mildly different ways by different people. Religion, of course, is the paradigmatic Meaning system.

The second set of questions deals with what I call the Truth system. One need not have reasons for doing what one does–indeed, I would argue that virtually every way of living is largely contingent, and that the decision to assume an identity of any sort is more important than the reasoning–but it does help in social settings. How do we agree on what is worth doing, as a group? How do we agree on what is True? Science, of course, is the default answer in our modern world, where Religion was in the past.

Only then do we get to Politics, which deals with the acquisition and disposition of power. I perhaps need a better word than politics, since it comes to us from the Greek polis, and presumes relatively liberal conditions, which of course were not present in the time of the Pharoahs, nor in Maoist China.

Leftism, in many respects, is an answer to Atheism. Leftists seek to find in the collective what they find difficult or impossible to achieve on their own: shared meaning, purpose, shared truth. And it is in the SEEKING of a better world that they find these desirable shelters from what we might term the “Existential Wind”. This is important, since for them the Messianic zeal which their committment to a better world provides for them is soteriological: it constitutes their salvation, as good as they expect to get.

For this reason, the idea that other people–the workers, minorities, the environment, colonized nations–might not need them is too horrific to contemplate. They sense that some struggle is needed for happiness in this world, but they have rejected the notions of moral improvement, since all morality resides in biology, not spirit. There is no spirit. Therefore, “improvement” as an individual is impossible; one must look to the species, implicitly, although many would not take the metaphor this far, consciously.

Thus what one gets is the strenuous advocacy of abstractions that impinge on real human lives. From moral and emotional necessity, action is separated from effect.

This is how totalitarianism is built. I want to be clear: Lenin was an actual human being. He got tired, he crapped, he collected mushrooms, he liked to play chess. His words, and the actions of others that flowed from his words, had very real effects on 100’s of millions of people, in his own time, and indirectly down to our own time.

We find it difficult to grasp the scope of the suffering that he wrought, but we need to be clear it is what he intended, and he personally oversaw much of it. When the farmers were hiding food, he authorized torture to find it. When they were purging rural communities, he told his Cheka thugs to “get tougher men”.

From small ideas are large ideas built. In the case of Leftism, the rejection of standing moral virtue entailed in the rejection of “bourgeois” tradition and morality means, practically, that you do what you are told, and it is right because you were told to do it. It is the logic of the “Vernichtungslagern”.

This bon mot is actually stolen from Catholicism, which as Dostoevsky saw did share at times much in common with the darkness of Communism: “error has no rights”.

Leftists never evolve their own beliefs systematically, but let me do it for them.

First, life has no inherent meaning. You are born as a biological being whose consciousness is an artifact of biochemical processes whose antecendants stretch back virtually to the beginning of the world. What you think, believe, do: all of these things are determined by your genetics. In large measure, you are a biological robot, programmed for procreation and survival.

You notice, though, as an individual, that the idea of helping others makes you feel good. In one moment you are depressed and listless, then you are on fire with enthusiasm to increase that feeling of being compassionate, and eager to join the fight.

You also feel good being surrounded by likeminded men and women, who are also fighting the good fight. All of you accept the primacy of science as the arbiter of truth, which means that you regard each and every reading of the oracle to be truth incarnate. If the truths vary, you hew to whichever one is most popular.

Politically, you see the power of numbers. You see the power of organization. You recognize, as an Initiate in the Cult of Science, that morality has no higher purpose than the preservation of the species, so morality can be adapted as needed to serve whatever purpose you have in mind.

Practically, as a part of a political group, you are told what to do, and the truths you are given are invariably offered by recognized Initiates, who are either popular experts, or Scientists.

And so you are set in motion. In the past, many such people were claimed as victims of various revolutions. Many rose high in the Parties, and won for themselves little feudal fiefdoms somewhere, complete with serfs and the ability to tax their crops.

But all of this is of a piece. It is a qualitative Gestalt, reached through a process of conscious or unconscious logic, operating on assumptions which for many are too painful to contemplate for too long.

Conservatism is simple. It looks to the past, and uses solutions of proven worth, such as Christianity. Individuals may want to improve the world, but they are not driven by any compulsive need to run from ideas they cannot abide, and cannot escape. Conservatism is stable for this reason. The individuals are stable, and conservative societies are stable.

Liberalism–true Liberalism–is based on the idea that since no final answer to the problems of meaning and truth can be found in this world, that all answers that do not trample on the rights of others are acceptable. It is a logical extension of the doctrine of Christian charity, and our success, as Liberals, has been in large measure due to the sincerity of our religiosity.

Leftists can tell you about every human tribe and race on the planet. They can describe to you all the marvellous and strange things they do. They can, in a situation requiring choice, describe to you with equinimity all the things you COULD do.

What they don’t have the capacity for, though, is moral DECISION. If all moral codes are right, how does one go about picking one? Simple: you don’t. You just try to be nice to everyone all the time and hope for the best.

This is yet another place where I really think the atheistic mindset–very prevalent on the Left–shortens perceptual phases, and prevents the emergence of perceptions that are very readily at hand for Conservatives, who in this country can generally be considered as Liberals, where Liberalism is the doctrine that “my business is my business and your business is your business; and the role of the State is to make sure it stays that way.”

Leftist are not Liberals because they want to use coercive power to remake society in the image of their personal biases, rather than let people be. Their own myths notwithstanding, most leftists support attacks on religion, absolutely refuse to negotiate on important issues to conservatives like abortion, and in general are only tolerant to the members of their own tribe, which has very uniform ideological beliefs, external, superficial differences notwithstanding.

The movement of people like Jonathan Haidt is that of adding butterflies to a box, without grasping them in any of the human ways which would otherwise be possible.

I myself am a Conservative Liberal. I don’t fit into his neat little typology. I address individual problems as they arise, on their merits.

I actually saw a writer on “evolution” use this analogy, that since the DNA of fruit flies and humans is so similar, that the proteins really did act like virtual Legos, so that the end results of their actions only differ so much in appearance because different things have been built from them.

If we take the logic of Darwinism, you literally could build life from Legos. You would just have to add motion. They have to move, or no one formation could be more adaptive than another, but over some billions of years in a wind chamber–or water–of some sort not only would static structures be built, but living, moving ones.

To be clear, there is no more or less life in Legos than any other form of matter without spirit. You are, on their rendering, literally just the sum–the pile–of your molecules, none of which possess intelligence, or unique specialness individually or as systems.

I don’t think I have misrepresented this. I think this is literally and accurately the correct idea, applied to an unfamiliar context. I further think it shows, through exaggeration, the improbability that the DNA sequence is both necessary (clearly it is) and sufficient (which I do not believe).

The credo of the loner is “I would rather be alone by myself, than alone with others”. Now, this is not my motto, personally, but I am close enough to this to see it.

How often in our modern world do we feel alone in a crowd? Was it not to describe this that Riesman (if I’m not mistaken) came up with the phrase “The Lonely Crowd” some fifty years ago?

would involve optimization of nervous system activity, coupled with simple ideas which work to facilitate goal directed motion.

I will expand on this before long. It’s a work in progress.

It seems to me one of our biggest cultural problems is that our “media-industrial complex” conspires to prevent calm. Somewhere, a radio, TV or computer is always on, and always speaking, morning, noon, and night.

Economies have both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Socialists focus solely the latter. They focus on the reallocation of resources, while ignoring the creativeness that led to the existence of such resources in the first place.

This was Marx’s error. Like the Mercantilists he posited finite resources, which meant that as competition led to increasing concentrations of wealth, the number of people with money would constantly decrease until almost all resources were held by almost no one, at which point revolution was “inevitable”.

Practically, though–and to the frank disappointment of many intellectuals who derived the meaning in their lives from the contemplation of participating in mass violence–Capitalism does NOT lead to anything but increasing wealth across the board.

This wealth is made possible by the non-material, qualitative factors of creativity, and industriousness in the pursuit of new creation.

I will add that socialism is to society what Marx claimed Capitalism was with respect to the environment: a coercive, abusive force backed ideologically by a narrative justifying such hegemonic pretensions.

I say this often, but one paradigmatic difference between Fascism and Communism is that the former looks out for worlds to conquer, whereas the latter looks first INSIDE, making the civil war the paradigmatic Communist war, only followed upon completion by what we would normally view as Imperialism.

For me, this is nothing less than the rejection of any and all human culture that is unmodified by mutable propaganda. I have defined this elsewhere as Cultural Sadeism.

I think one reason many people seek distractions is that we are conditioned, indirectly, to avoid fully adopting roles: the role of father, of employee, of husband/wife. The basic training is that your goal in life is to fulfill yourself, and since you can never know what lies over the next hill you never commit fully to any understanding of yourself–particularly one which connects in a lasting way with others–you expect to remain fixed.

Yet, this is somewhat maddening, never resting in fixed self conceptions. We need something fixed. I think that is the role of the media: it changes constantly, but it never REALLY changes, qualitatively. You can watch TV your whole life, and never really be altered by it.

You can chase “experience” your whole life–hang gliding, skydiving, travel, sexual conquests–and grow little. I would argue, in fact, that picking a slot for yourself–virtually any slot will do–is THE best path forward, when coupled with awareness.

The Japanese consider an old stone that has gathered moss to be attractive. I tend to agree with them.

I am speaking off the cuff here, but hopefully that makes some sense.