Month: March 2010

Marxism is based on a purportedly scientific narrative that describes the relationship of capital with labor, that says nothing about agrarian economies. Since all his city dwelling corevolutionaries were killed, Mao had to change the doctrine. In so doing, he negated the whole of actual Marxism. This demonstrates that he was not fulfiling a historical necessity, so much as using History as a rhetorical rationalization to implement his OWN policies.

Skillful propaganda, of the sort both Lenin and Mao used–when you get people hooked–is like a drug, where people want to be told what to do. Once this is in place, if your story–say class warfare–doesn’t work out, you change the story, so that people can be led in circles for lifetimes. For the people following, you can consistently generate feelings of usefulness and goodness, since they are doing what they are told, and part of the story they are told is that your doctrine partakes in some essential way in “goodness”.

Leftism really does have many of the structural attributes of a cult, in which people are turned into simulacra of human beings. Whatever you say, they do, without question.

Marxist have this idea of History. They say “History dictates that we do x, y, and z”. This occupied the place in a propagandized populace of God. What History says, is like what God says. You can neither deny it, nor oppose it. It is, you are told, a factual reality, denying which makes you a lunatic.

Once you do this you can rationalize anything. History dictated our own Manifest Destiny. The real, actual process is simple: decide what you want to do, then base it on some non-material, unaccountable force.

The interesting thing about Conservatism is that both the Federalists AND the Democratic-Republicans can be viewed, from different angles, as having represented conservatism.

In some respects, Conservatism bears a resemblance to religious fundamentalism. You look back to the supposed “good old days”, and reject proposed innovations on that basis. The Federalists were looking back to their heritage as Englishmen, and a strong executive was simply an analogue of a King and Parliament (that consisted solely of aristocrats).

The Democratic-Republicans (called simply “Republicans” most of the time back then; this was the Party Jefferson founded) were looking back to an age before strong kings, when feudal lords and farmers ruled the countryside without interference from outside their small realms. One could even take this back, perhaps, to the Germans (Goths, if you will). The less government, the better. One later Republican–John Randolph–went as far as to say that the best legislature is that one which spends all their time sleeping, and that government best that governs not at all.

The interesting thing about Fundamentalism, is that they are almost invariably looking back to an era that never actually existed. They are looking back to a period when people articulated principles which they held, in theory, but which–being human–they frequently failed to actually follow. Jefferson’s anti-slavery rhetoric is so compelling one could easily forget he owned slaves his whole life.

Fundamentalism, then, is actually a sort of cultural creativity which capitalizes its legitimacy by appealing to a mythical past, which can consist of whatever most suits the case you are trying to make.

I find this unsatisfying. Can we not look back, see what SHOULD have been the case–understand what we would want, today, to be the case–and pursue it, without lying to ourselves? Can we not take the PRINCIPLES they articulated, and define them anew, in our current context, knowing we are equally likely to fail, but in new and better ways?

This is what I like to call Liberalism. I see nothing at all with trying to improve the world. In fact, I view that as our job. We simply have to be smart about it, and this includes circumspection, study, and gradualism. These, themselves, are conservative values, but the intent, I would argue, is what the Liberals (when I say this I mean Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others of their temperament) had in mind.

Well, as I suspected might happen, I have now run into another version of events than that described by Bevin Alexander, a few posts earlier.

Listening to The Teaching Company’s History of Conservatism, he points out that while the profitability of slavery was declining, that a doctrine of the inherent MORALITY of slavery had come into being. On this account, slave-holders were not just people living off the forced labor of others, but rather agents of moral elevation, and paternalistic guardianship.

Remember, now, that the absolutely overwhelming majority of Southerners held no slaves at all. Those who did were the equivalent to the Captains of Industry in our own time. Figure out what the nicest, priciest part of your city is, and that is where they lived. Quite literally, they believed themselves to be aristocrats of the British variety, and held not just black people, but most white people around them in contempt.

This contempt was expressed in a fundamental conceit that their role in life was to take care of their “inferiors”. In the British formulation this was the “White Man’s Burden”.

Here is the interesting part: they argued that because people are not born equal, that some are meant to rule. Now, socialists reject this, of course. They hold, rather, that all people are born equal and–here is the kicker–it is the role of the STATE to MAKE them equal, by “hatchet, ax, and saw”, as that Canadian philosopher Neil Peart put it.

You have, on the one side, the People. These are the ones you are trying to help. You help them by making them equal. You make sure no awful nasty rich people live off the backs of others.

On the other side, you have the State. The State doesn’t really “exist”, per se. It is sort of like God; it guides through an innate wisdom, that far surpasses that of “the people”, and thus SAVES them from all the terrible things that would happen but for the guidance of the State.

And who runs the State? The intellectuals, the modern slave-holding aristocrats. Socialism, pushed to the limit, is the political process of turning the world into plantation owners and slaves–literally, in the case of Cuba.

When you reject Reason, you reject peace, and you reject justice. If you watch carefully, this is the invariant pattern.

When people no longer have prices, they are assigned numbers.

When the right to private property is lost, people become property.

The Leftist creed is actually “Speak power to truth”.

When you do something you don’t want to do, because it needs to be done, you are practicing courage. Running into a burning building or field of fire is but a short step away. Daily habits matter.

The price of success is failure.

Action precedes affect.

Religious people view the person as a unit of morality–specifically moral conformity; socialists view the individual as a unit of consumption and work. I want to make the individual a unit of perception. There is nothing lasting in what you do, other than the qualitative Gestalt it impels. If you sin–however you define it for yourself–then you have to atone it through correcting the problem or mourning your loss of your past innocence, and trying to recreate it through resurrecting yourself back up to the type of person you were before you “fell” or better. The alternative is to suppress it through self deception, which in turn decreases your ability to understand the world as it is. The rejection of morality, itself, is a type of self deception, in that I don’t think any of us can simultaneously live as social beings, and reject morality (except sociopaths, who are arguably not truly social beings at all). You have to play games and tell lies to yourself. This creates internal emotional and intellectual barriers that conflict with the free play of emotion, and all the spontaneous joy and creativity that go with it.

For the same reason Socialists reject formal morality, they also fail perceptually, in that the whole project arises from perceptual errors, that are followed by self deceptive rationalizations. It is simply not possible to create a just society, that is not comprised of just individuals, and to the extent you make individual virtue tangential to the project (remember, the intent is to remedy differences, many of which arise as a direct result of the fact that some people are smarter, more industrious, luckier, or more honest than others), you will fail to create a social order whose units are moral.

Take the example of formal Communism. You implement it, and people resist it. They see no reason to share the fruit of their hard work with others without adequate recompense. They see no reason to work hard in factories without adequate food or pay. So you use force–mass arrests, deportations, and executions–to change society, then rationalize it as having been necessary. Then it still doesn’t work because people still don’t believe in it, so you use brainwashing and other forms of psychological manipulation. Maoism–built on the practical experiences of the Soviets–is in large measure a study of the careful use of propaganda and horizontal peer-to-peer social coercion.

The more force you use–which includes violence to the truth–the more you crush the possibility of individual perception and goodness, and the less likely you are to build a dynamically just society: a good society. What you get is an atomized mess that only operates when the Commissars are out with whips, and then only temporarily. This is the “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” phenomena.

These things have formal, cognitive roots which can be traced.

Dogmatic, proselytizing atheists want to focus on the negatives of religion, because why would you think about the positive aspects of something you’ve rejected? Their task, as they see it, is not a balanced assessment, but destruction.

Any group of people that will abuse language for the sake of power, or will suffer violence to language and truth, are capable of actual violence. This is the significance of the AGW phenomena, in that it is not just a perversion of science, but of principle, and once you’ve lost your compass, anything is possible. If you will lie once, you will lie twice. If you will accept power you have not earned once, you will do it twice.

All perception should be understood as a sort of momentary art, that has to be destroyed almost immediately. I like the analogy of the Tibetan’s use of butter and sand for art that is created, displayed, and then ceremonially destroyed. No static formulation of Truth can ever reach, in the abstract, the full demands of practical necessity. Logically, this rule itself would admit of exceptions, but in so doing validate itself. Think that three times fast.

It is interesting to note that Social Darwinism was apparently a key component in later British Imperialism, although it was cloaked in the outwardly benign doctrine of the paternalistic “White Man’s Burden”. We forget, now, but Britain as a matter of historical record once presided over the largest empire ever created in human history. They had Canada, Australia, much of Africa, India (now, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh), possessions in the Caribbean, and de facto control of much of China. That list is no doubt less than complete.

One part of that imperialism whose history I found particularly interesting was that, having conquered Bengal in eastern India, they used that land to grow opium, which they then sold to the Chinese. When the Chinese banned opium sales, and started confiscating their crops, the British invaded China, and quickly forced her to terms. This invasion was by regular British Army and Navy forces, who were acting for the explicit benefit of official drug dealers. History is an interesting thing.

I’m reading a book which makes the following arguments. I have not fully validated them, but the premises are interesting. According to the author (whose name I forget), the primary reason that the Civil War moved forward was that Lincoln, first, ordered Virginia and North Carolina to invade South Carolina, and secondly refused to adopt the Crittendon Compromise, which would have allowed slavery in New Mexico, but otherwise prohibited it anywhere it didn’t already exist.

In considering slavery, it needs to be noted that for most Southerners slavery wasn’t profitable, and would likely have passed away due to economic factors alone. It is cold-hearted to put it this bluntly, but you can’t lay off slaves when economic conditions decline. All moral issues aside, most plantations–despite the fact that they “owned” their laborers–did not do well financially. Jefferson, a tobacco farmer, never seems to have had a profitable year in his entire life.

Arguably, the Civil War set back the process of racial equality, in that the sheer destruction of the war hardened existing prejudices into the active hatreds we saw in the formation of the KKK. Lincoln was a master orator and man of principle, but the question can be asked: did he, in the end, accomplish the greatest good with the resources he had? He did preserve the Union, but there may well have been other methods that would have done the same. You have to be judged by what you actually did, not what you were trying to do. The question is not saying whether Lincoln was good or not, but to understand what happened, so we can learn and make better decisions now.

I looked it up (I actually made these notes a month or so ago). The book was “How America got it right”, by Bevin Alexander. He proposed we would have been much more intelligent had we recognized the market forces pointing to an end of slavery, and simply used U.S. Treasury funds to buy the freedom of the slaves at a suitable point. Since they were defined as property, and property rights were protected under the Constitution, that would been simultaneosly the most prudential and most Constitutional remedy. This could have been done very early in our history.

He makes this interesting point: “In 1860 just 10 percent of white southerners owned any slaves, and only 4% owned ten or more.” In effect, the main opposition to the emancipation of the slaves arose from a small group of aristocrats. The rest of the South fought, in the end, because their homes had been invaded.

He also said this: “In 1830. . .a Southern planter had to invest $750 to produce the same revenue that a factory owner gained by investing a dollar. This disparity became all the greater with the extension of the railroads in the 1840’s. If slavery had been voted out, plantation owners would have diverted their resources from agriculture to industry, the South would have industrialized at the same pace as the North, and the Southern aristocracy would have disappeared in short order.”

There is a point between war and appeasement where principled self assertive patience pays dividends. The roots of the “War between the States” went back at least to the Revolutionary War. I do not feel the end outcome warranted the deaths of 650,000 men, and the destruction of American cities and countrysides, and the generalized poverty and associated crime that follow all wars. This will always remain a complex topic, and it is of course never possible to state with certainty what the outcome would in the end have been, had other paths been chosen.

Thinking about the idea of building space within a habit. All of us have certain things we need to do. All of us have the daily task of organizing our activity. How does one integrate spontaneity within a recurring activity?

It seems to me this is, first of all, the task of a sacral order. The Catholic Church, for example, recognizes different types of time. There is Ordinary Time, and what I think they call Holy Time; certainly there are Holy Days (whence holiday).

On some level there is an element of sacrifice in a formal order. If I have a role–as a husband, or father, or son–then my time is not fully my own. Ritual and socially assigned responsibility is itself is a sort of trap. But is it not possible to free yourself?

Habit, it seems to me, need not be habit. Every day is different. Every moment of time in every day has the potential to open up to unique and wonderful perceptions and insights. It is quite possible to be spontaneously happy mopping the floor, or picking up dog poop.

To simply go through the motions is to be dead, but there are still some things you have to do. The simple fact is that if you are alive, you are not in a rut; you can’t be, since every day is new.

It does seem to me, though, that few people do this, and quite often I think people perceive anyone who doesn’t follow a fixed path–the joker chasing the butterfly–to be a dunce.

These are not original ideas–Buddhism, for example, includes mindfulness as a basic part of its program–but the word I want to emphasize is SPACE. How do you create space within a confined place? That is the question I want to answer.

It has to do with what you do with your perception. For me, it seems to help to physically relax, slow down, and breathe, all of which are very old ideas.

Why, I wonder, aren’t we taught them in our schools?

Since this is my blog, I am going to think out loud for a moment, too: why are our young people not taught to expect to inhabit a role–a space–as adults? Since this is a liberal society, they can choose that role, but in our larger social order, they need to take a place, for our society as a whole to continue thriving (if it is thriving, culturally, which is another question).

It seems to me what our young are implicitly taught is that adult responsibilities can be postponed at least into their late 20 or even 30’s; and some postpone them indefinitely. Should colleges not be much more serious places?

Why are fun and responsibility necessarily construed as opposites? It is the result of the doctrine that roles are NECESSARILY confining, which makes adopting the mantle of responsibility something that is done reluctantly, and in the spirit of a dog having to come inside, after having had its run outside. This is stupid. It is unwise. And it leads almost inevitably to unnecessary sadness and resentment.

It seems to me that the model of the German research university–that you have to do original research on some topic to earn your Ph.D–is not applicable, and often harmful, when it comes to the Humanities. What we see so often is silly ideas like postmodernism applied to old texts, just so that someone can study Mark Twain and still get their degree.

It seems to me that liberal arts, broadly construed, ought to foster coherent thinking, broad knowledge, and common sense morality. To the extent that people are applying some sort of Positivistic understanding to our culture, they are CREATING culture, and not doing a good job of it, if we measure it by the caliber of thinking being fostered in our graduates.

Far more helpful would be simply maintaining existing knowledge–for example, reading Shakespeare as human beings living in a world that is often strange–rather than trying to apply the same sorts of analytical methods that scientists use.

To be clear, progress itself is virtually impossible to define for most academics, outside of the drumbeats signalling their desire for all of us to abolish our individual differences in favor of a content free tolerance and political submission into a collectivist ideology.

Where, in our modern world, can one find something comparable to the Lincoln-Douglas debates? You are either in or out, and the two never meet. This is anti-liberal education.

I go out of my way to find places where contentious topics are being discussed, and there to stake out a clear position, which I then defend. This makes me stronger as a thinker, and VERY often leads me in new directions in my thinking. I highly encourage it, and anyone who isn’t doing this often is not reaching their potential; not even close.

A common pattern I see is the argument that I am wrong because I am not in the middle. This is offered with no substantive comment on my own views, or a demonstrated understanding of the opposing position. One can offer this comment without even reading or understanding anything of the issues involved.

This argument itself–the fabled “the truth lies somewhere in the middle”–is an argument that can be used on itself. Upon what basis can I not argue that the middle of THAT argument would necessarily lead us to conclude that sometimes the truth does NOT lie in the middle?

Or take this statement: “All valid truths admit exceptions.” If this is true, then sometimes there ARE truths which do NOT admit exceptions.

The point of discourse is to examine individual, discrete situations and problems. Always, always, always philosophy has to have to do with solving concrete problems. That is how I define it, so that truth–my truth, obviously–admits of no exceptions; it is tautological.

But this claim can, itself, be criticized, do you see? So often, I see the argument that my opponents do not need to take a position, since the position “the truth lies in the middle” is sufficient. But that, itself, is a position, which they DON’T defend. If you are talking, you can’t not take a position. You can say “I have no position”, which is fine and honest, and if that is true, genuine learning, communication, and progress can happen. That is still a position, though.

What is taught in our supposedly higher centers of education is that tolerance is a universal necessity–it is the only virtue beyond question–and the “truth in the middle” position is integral to that. Yet, if you are merely parroting it, you are not thinking.

The essence of a genuinely liberal society, one in which both ideological and cultural diversity are valued, is negotiation. It is where the parties themselves come into a parley, each with a position, and each of whom walks away having offered up some compromise, but without giving up who they are and what they value completely. Practically, the truth DOES often lie in the middle, but to reject a priori the possibility of truths which are absolute in their context–given the evaluational criteria in place–is to reject rationality altogether.

I will add that there is a reductio ad absurdum here. If I sit at a table–say in Petrograd in 1919 or so–and argue that 10 million class criminals should be murdered, and someone else says that none should die, the truth is not that 5 million should die. And in point of fact, setting out radical positions is a common negotiating technique among people whose chief aim is getting as much of their way as possible, while pretending to be reasonable. You simply ask for 2-3 times whatever it is you want, then settle for what you want, and maybe a bit more.

People without moral compass, or organizing principles are virtually defenseless against this tactic. Indeed, if your only belief is that the truth is in the middle, you will get screwed every time.