Month: January 2011

I was thinking about it this morning, and it seems to me many atheists–with Richard Dawkins being an obvious example–seem to have this ambivalence about God. They doubt God’s existence, but also seem simultaneously to be angry with Him, for the pain and suffering in the world. The outgrowth of these contradictory trends is often de facto sadism, in which tremendous effort is expended to uproot the faith of other people, without subsituting anything in its place of value. One reader commented that Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene” had put him into a ten year depression. Dawkins replied something along the lines of the “the truth is what it is”.

The stance, in some cases, is approximately what I tried to convey in my version of the Grand Inquisitor, by having Sade say “there is no God, and He hates you.” Logically, this is a nonsensical statement. If there is no God, there is no hating. This seems clear enough. But psychologically, I think this gets close to the actual intention of many proselytizing atheists. I think in their heart of hearts they fluctuate between conceptions of “No God”, and ANTI-Theism, in the sense of hating any God who could create such a world.

Logically, a scientific mind, in evaluating the nature of the universe, would start from science. They would quickly come across any number of promising pathways indicating survival of death, latent order, and the interconnectedness of all life.

But they don’t do this. They start from Christian, mainly, theological discussions. Why? Why not Hindu narratives? The task, after all, is theoretically to discover what IS, not to interrogate cultural artifacts that are extraneous to science.

What I think one has to see, in the end, is a CULTURAL narrative, not one of science.

Theodicy is easy enough. One can simply posit that people choose the lives they live before they are born, that all decent people go to heaven, regardless of their beliefs, and that we are regularly aided by advanced spiritual beings. To this should be added the important caveat that pain is not always undesirable. To develop a richer qualitative structure, you need it.

Athletes are some of the happiest people you will meet, in general. Yet, the nature of their pursuit is “agonism”, or competition, which is to say daily hard training.

Pain is not the enemy. Nor is pleasure. It is meaninglessness of the sort modern atheists have done so much to advance.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703466704575489592929851132.html

I forget the name of the entity which is the umbrella for this group, but is this not a money cartel? Why shouldn’t banks compete among themselves to lend money? What would we think if the car manufacturers of the world got together, and fixed prices? What would we think if all the coal or gas producers got together, openly, and fixed prices?

Our financial system is sheer lunacy. It is a power elite using the rules of the system to accumulate money they don’t need, to the collective detriment of the rest of us.

And looking forward, the reality is that the world has an enormous amount of debt, which is growing. The money to cover that debt will be created. Yet, creating it will be harder with larger reserve requirements. It’s hard not to believe that a cliff is being created here, which they know full well we will fall of of in due time.

As I say constantly, what we need to do is not create more money, but increase the value of the money already in existence.

Graphic, gratuitous depictions of violence on television and in the movies . . . encourage young viewers to act more aggressively, desensitizes them to real-world violence and instills a distorted, pessimistic worldview. Media violence also makes children more restless, more fearful and less creative.

They are trying to brand guns a social disease. Why not look at one obvious root of the social disease of violence (which is present, too, in nations with strict gun controls, and which did not exist here 50 years ago) and take the logical step: put warning labels on all violent media, indicating to parents that violent TV, movies, and video games cause real social ills, and retard many children from full social maturation?

Personally, I view smoking as far less injurious than teaching children to take pleasure in gratuitous violence and cruelty. We all die, but need not live our years in the middle in fear and cynicism.

To the previous post I will add that Truth Synchrony is nothing more or less than erecting boundaries, the creation of a here and a there. In this stage of our BIOLOGICAL evolution, I think we need that.

And given the capacity we have also developed for the use of Reason, there is no reason to think that difference and peaceful coexistence are incompatible. This is a fiction foisted by Socialist, whose own Truth Synchrony demands the abject submission of all differing views. It is like religious intolerance, with the difference that a study of history yields few examples of any creed so violent and dogmatically opposed to difference. The Huns, perhaps. But they just liked to kill people. They never claimed it was for their own good.

We know well enough the effects of sleep deprivation: it makes clear thinking harder, decreases energy levels, increases stress levels/irritability.

But what about the chronic inability to rest in a foundational an unalterable Truth construction?

One can posit accurately, I think, that a part of our biological inheritance is a need–a biologically rooted need–for synchronization with a group. Now, a continuum exists between animals, say insects, whose behavior is almost entirely instinctual, to monkeys and dogs, whose behavior is a mix, to humans, whose behavior is largely volitional. No other animals in nature, that I know of, take 15 years or more to mature socially. This is because of the enormous quantity of mutable information that has to be ingested to inhabit our biocultural niche, information that can change in as little as years.

[Note: I have never seen any reason to object to the putative history of mankind evolved by the evolutionists. What I object to is the mechanism offered. I think we exist within measurable but non-obviously-manifest biological fields, that retain information, and which react as systems to changing environmental circumstances. Natural Selection happens, but non-randomly.

The view we are to accept, today, is that biological systems “fall together”, consistently, and across centuries. The image I have is this: take a time lapse picture of a building being built, and eliminate all traces of the people building it. It will appear to build itself, and great precision will be possible with regard to what the building materials are, what order they come together in, and how replication of the structure happens. This view would be internally consistent, and wrong. I think that is where we are at.

Forget “evolution”, which is to say the purported mechanism of speciation through random change coupled with random benefit: every time ANY living creature comes into being, we can trace the same “intelligent” guidance that presumably has facilitated the gradual decrease in entropy in our biological systems over the millenia. It is inconceivable to me that DNA can both contain the raw material, and the instructions for the use of the raw material. There is an architect, albeit not one modelled on Greek sculptures of Zeus. Digression completed.]

Having posited this need for belonging, can we not frame this need as the need for what I suppose I could term Truth Synchrony? In order to feed this need to belong, we need a relatively EXACT match, or we suffer the fate of a dog left alone in a cage too long.

As I commented in my paper on atheism, it seems to me that if all our social emotions are artifacts of “evolution”, then clearly and ineluctably the religious sentiment–ubiquitous in human life–is instinctual.

Why not conflate the religious instinct with the need for Truth Synchrony? What becomes obvious is that atheists, far from having transcended this instinct, have laid themselves completely open to it, such that their vociferousness is considerably in excess of all but the most immoderate religious adherents.

If Communism was and is a collective madness, then it is one that takes as its starting point the very worst elements of the religious instinct, which in the Christian world at least contained the seeds of its own transcendance. Love recognizes no creed. It is non-local, and applicable anywhere, even if the specific use of the crucifixion is not.

Clearly, in sum, I feel we need to believe. If we fail to take care in what we believe, we are liable to stumble and fall into much worse dogmatisms than those which characterized the religious wars of old.

God may not be clearly manifest, but neither are History, Matter, and the People, if by the People is intended an abstract group with no nameable members.

I was thinking the other day: what do we call something which is in constant motion, but whose motion is precise, predictable, and programmable? Answer: a machine.

What is the goal of the Communists? The eradication of personal difference. Of stable personal identity which is separate from the State.

Ponder what was done, especially, by the Chairman Mao Obama’s short term Ministry of Propaganda Director Anita Dunn found so attractive. They took people away who objected, say, to Communist Party officials taking bribes, or abusing their position for sexual favors, or who insisted on the right to free speech, or the right to bequeath their possessions to their children, or who objected to the mass murder of supposed “bourgeoisie” by Communist Brownshirts. Think of all the things you don’t like about your boss, or community, or church, or neighbor, or the local cops and make speaking out about it a criminal offense.

They ship you off to a camp which literally tries to reprogram your mind, as if it were a machine. They developed very well tested techniques, which included mild starvation, hard labor, chanting slogans, and confessing your “crimes” in front of others, and begging for forgiveness. What was the goal of the whole thing? To make of society a machine, which would perform whatever task the leaders wanted, when they wanted it, without question.

If you erase all qualitative differences–say that of Christian versus Jew versus agnostic, versus atheist, versus athlete versus bookworm, versus introvert versus extrovert, versus Italian versus Irish versus political versus apolitical, etc–then what do you have left? Seriously: what do you have left? What holidays do you celebrate and why? Is there somewhere to go on Sundays to build community?

What the revolutionaries will tell you is that they will build holidays for you. That the church that matters is that of the “revolution”. Yet, none of this is organic. Nobody gets to choose it. If you don’t like it, then you are force fed the doctrine until you accept it, or they kill you. How is this compatible with anything good in human life?

The simple reality is that human communities are creating constantly. We are constantly building, in an organic way, sustainable cultural forms that people can live with. Socialists reject all of this. All that NEEDS to happen is non-interference, but what does happen is that any and all claim truth claims that anyone wants to make are rejected, if they differ at all from the Party line.

Fundamentalism, for example, is always something that looks forward. It looks like it looks to the past, but what is it, really? It is a solution for the present, based on what seems to have worked in the past. It looks forward.

In my view, there is no more fundamental evil or cruelty than attacking people’s sense of meaning. This is something that is, invisibly, in a constant process of renegotiation, throughout our lives. As something that attacks, explicitly, people’s sense of self and meaning, Communism is the most atrocious, horrible doctrine ever invented in human history.

The Nazis just killed people they didn’t like. The Communists killed far more, numerically, but worse still in my view (I believe in survival of death) were their efforts to derange the minds of ordinary people, to sap their sense of self, of personal will, and all the comforts that identity can provide.

Communism is a form of Satanism, where Satan is a symbol of that force in human life that conflates creation with destruction, and which exalts in the inflicting of pain.

I have probably said this, but Sade was consistent in choosing, mainly, to inflict pain through books. He was, of course, largely constrained from realizing his demented desires by lack of money, and by spending most of his life in jail. At the same time, the deepest, most profound cruelty is that of attacking people in their moral sensibilities. I do believe in Hell–I have seen it–and feel that it’s most horrible depths are reserved for people like him.

Only slightly less culpable are those who should have seen him and his ideological descendants, like Sergei Nechaev, for what they are, and chose not to.

There’s a time to do a lot of questioning, and certain times to just let things go. I like to listen to Judas Priest sometimes (and Rush and AC/DC, and a smidgeon of the very vulgar Tenacious D).

To the point here, I was listening to the lyrics of “Breaking the Law” (very 80’s looking video linked on the title), and thinking: “this is the direct outcome of socialism.” Long term unemployment. A sense of meaninglessness. A frustration with a Nanny State that promises the sun, moon and stars, and can’t even deliver healthcare (even though it is “free” if you can get it). Profound and unrecognized indulgence in self pity.

If you think back to the history of loud music, the really angry, nasty stuff started in the mid to (really) late 70’s, with groups like the Sex Pistols leading the way. What was going on then? Leftism. Through determined indifference to the plight of the South Vietnamese people, and a lack of a sense of national pride and honor, leftist media hacks were able to convince the American people the war was lost, and that we should retreat, even though we were ideally positioned to end the war the same way the Korean War ended.

To this add pervasive attacks on moral norms, religion, patriotism, then in England combine it with long term unemployment, and increasing dependence on a Nanny State. None of the talking heads on TV made sense. Nothing seemed to make sense. Hence: anger.

I had thought some time ago to entitle my chapter on the 60’s “From flowers to skulls”. What happened was that the high ended, adulthood happened, and the hippies found they didn’t believe in anything. Now, we see their children with the same obsession with death prefigured by the Grateful Dead.

“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” began in Woodstock. I am quite convinced of it. If you hew to no chosen moral order, you will get lost. This seems clear enough.

Love is not a value. It is an outcome. If you are serious about being a loving person, you have to have the character for it; otherwise, it is just the warmth of being drunk, that fades just when trust is offered. If this happens enough times, you get the jaded cynicism that the aging hippies cannot recognize for what it is, or its pervasiveness in their children. The moral vacuity at their core is what drives them to NEED the leftist narratives–and following actions–that are doing so much to damage our communities, national security, economic health, and sense of meaning.

Foolish inconsistencies are the hobgoblins of weak characters and insincere minds.

If the only possible cultural truth claim that is unimpeachable is the universal condemnation of hatred, then all individual assertions not made in response to hate, are vulnerable. For example, the desire to see the office party called the “Christmas” Party is vulnerable to the charge of “Christocentrism”. How can one defend any unique, parochial practice, when attacked? You can’t. Every unique cultural claim is intrinsically a claim to cultural superiority, since why do things one way rather than another, unless you feel that way is better?

This is the logic of Egalitarianism, upon which Socialism is based. Although very few of its exponents look that far into the future, the end goal can only be cultural leveling in which all people look, dress, and behave the same.

Now, this is not intrinsically a bad goal. We can posit, for example, alien races that are much more advanced than us, in which all look the same, and communicate with their minds.

Yet, there are two ways to get to this point: sharing commonalities, and eradicating differences. Put only slightly simplistically, through Love and Hate, through Good and through Evil.

How were all those corpses created in the 20th Century–some 100 million or so–created by the “Scientific Socialists”, aka the Communists? Simple: they didn’t fit the Procrustean Bed of the egalitarians. The task the Nihilists set themselves was destruction, the destruction of difference. From this, through some sort of Deus Ex Machina, devised by SOMEONE ELSE was, in theory, supposed to flow the proverbial Millenium. If you destroy enough, the “logic” went, sooner or later all the bad things will have disappeared, and that will mean only good things are left.

This is patent nonsense, at utter odds with common sense humanity. The horrors which flowed from it, though, were and are quite real. People were kept in doghouse sized cages and fed rice with sand in it for years. They were systematically tortured, as for example John McCain in a modified rack, which more or less explicitly mimicked the bed of Procrustes, making a metaphor literal.

It is interesting to me–and sad–to watch the Left’s reaction to the shooting in Tucson. Plainly, this was not PRIMARILY an assassination attempt. He kept shooting. He didn’t just shoot Giffords. He shot, I believe, 16 total people, 15 of whom were not Gabby Giffords.

He plainly did not follow Fox News, Sarah Palin, or the Tea Party. He is a stupid kid, with incoherent views, whose big idea was to go out and shoot a bunch of people and “let the bodies hit the floor”. Psychologically, he seems to fit the mold well of the shooters at Columbine. This was a mass murder, plain and simple, and I think he chose Giffords because she was attractive, successful, and close in terms of geography to him.

Yet, a sychronizing signal has been sent out. Hate has been enabled since the chief propagandists on the left has indicated that a hater has been identified: Sarah Palin and the very loose coalition she sort of leads.

The inability to assert any stable identity claims is enormously frustrating. Who you need to be is a matter of constant change. You have to change whenever the “science” changes. You have to hew to whatever the current political causes is. Your ONLY sense of identity is belonging in that group which has NO stable sense of identity, whose very sense of self is something created in opposition to those who have non-mutable senses of self. You are not a Christian because you are a leftist. You are not a homophobe because you are a leftist. You are not a “richist” because you are a leftists. You are not an imperialist. You are not a racist. You are not a capitalist (actually, you always are, but why let facts get in the way of a good story?).

What are you? You are a NON-HATER. You are the one who heroically opposes all those people out there who are presumed to wake up hating, eat lunch hating, and go to bed hating, because that is what THEY do.

But the problem is that the haters don’t always hate as openly as you would like. Sometimes they try to trick you by sounding conciliatory. Glenn Beck cries, as if he were capable of human emotion. Bill O’Reilly pretends he is telling both sides of the story.

So the opportunity to fight in the cause of anti-hating is not always what you would like.

This is why the chance to hate Sarah Palin, with explicit permission from your thought leaders is so wonderful. Once she’s a hater, you are fighting the heroic fight by threatening her, right? You are defending someone, even if you are not sure who.

And to the point, and switching back into my own voice, no evidence AT ALL exists to link Sarah Palin with this mass murder. To the extent there is ANY evidence, it points to the music Loughner listened to, and to his being to the political LEFT of the very moderate Giffords.

So I ask: why the hate? Why so much viciousness, dehumanization, and depersonalization of what would be a debate, if the Left were capable of it?

Why not ask basic questions like: is there any evidence linking ANYONE to the shooting? And having failed to produce any, why does this charade go on?

The answer is quite basic: leftists hate anyone not like them. This shooting created an opportunity to vent some of that hatred in what at least superficially appears to some to be a valid context.

They hate people who retain any of their residual culture and sense of self, in much the way that fat people hate skinny people who can eat donuts and not gain weight. They resent people who are culturally confident in the way that self pitying losers hate self reliant successes.

They resent them, for having something they don’t. That they themselves chose to submit to this sort of tyranny is an irony they cannot permit themselves, without losing the “faith” entirely.

There is nothing surprising in all this. This basic pattern is no different than that that to unspeakable atrocities throughout the world over the last 200 years or so.

What is surprising is that so few leftists wake up and realize how awful they are. That we are all human beings on this planet together, and that any process in which ANY groups is villified as a whole is intrinsically bigoted.

And please note here that I am quite willing to engage in rational debate with any person on the left who wants to. Over the last 6 years or so, I have sought out leftists all over. As an example, I posted, for a time, on the Daily Kos what I felt were reasoned pieces relating to how to solve problems we share in common. Yet, with few and notable exceptions, what I faced was unreasoning hatred. I have been called every name imaginable. For most of them, it was simply inconceivable that anyone could take offense at being called “teabagger”, despite the fact that that term was plainly meant to wound, if possible.

The path forward, however, remains the reconciliation of difference. This is quite different than the ERADICATION of difference. This is gradualistic process, conducted in peace, in which we slowly learn to love one another as unique human beings. This can only be done when we SEE each other as individuals, and eradicate the method of collective guilt by association, and reckless accusation.

What is needed, regretably, is patience. What is needed is something like what Martin Luther King practiced. One could say it is ironic that the methods of MLK would be needed with respect to the Left–which has tried to coopt his memory–but not really: he was a lifelong Republican, having been possessed of both common and historical sense. First the Democrats tried to destroy the black community through Jim Crow and segregation. Now, what they have in fact done is destroy the black community by making them dependent on the ebb and flow of political tides.

We can do so much better. I feel very deeply at times a sense of how tragically UNNECESSARY so much modern suffering is and has been. I can only wonder how Churchill kept his sanity, watching the development of what he always called the “Unnecessary War”.

I’ve said this before, but reading history for me is often like that feeling you get watching a horror movie, when you know what is about to happen, but the person on the screen does not. Had a slightly different decision been made, a life would have been saved.

Our future depends on clear thinking. That is quite impossible to do between the Left and the rest of us right now. This mass murder in Tucson, and the use they have made of it, shows this quite clearly.

Bit rambling, but a bit rambling. No alcohol involved, just a lot of thinking out loud.

It is quite obvious to me that many people are made uncomfortable discussing violence in music, or media more generally. Many remember with fondness, for example, the ending to “Play Misty for me”: “do you feel lucky, punk?” After all the trauma of that movie, the injustice, the failings of our system made manifest, Clint Eastwood shooting that guy is cathartic. Somehow it represents the triumph of true decency over the hand wringing moral mediocrity that somehow descended, like a veil of darkness, over our moral landscape in the 1970’s.

Heavy metal, angry metal, recalls to mind a time of membership in the metal tribe. All your friends listened to the same music, and you all waited in collective anticipation for the release of the new album by whoever you were then most enthusiastic about. What an observer who was astute would have paid the most attention to was not the content of the music, but the quality of the relationships between you that shared passion made possible.

It has often been remarked that group challenges–with war being both the most extreme and obvious example–cause cohesion among individuals that is stronger in some cases than family itself.

I have thought in the past that sometimes what connnects us is shared pain. By this I mean a sort of qualitative gestalt: not all pain is equal. The “pain” of a rich kid is different than that of a middle class kid, which is different than that of a poor kid. It is different for a Mexican and white kid and black kid. Yet much of it is also the same.

I think to a comment made by a boss I had who was in a fraternity, that the brotherhood was just never the same “after they stopped using the paddle”. Everyone who underwent that ordeal had that pain–that very specific, secret pain–in common with everyone else, and knew it.

It has often seemed to me that suburban white kids who seem to wish they were “ghetto thugs”–you know, the kid in the car wash next to you listening to some profanity laced rant at 4x what would be a coureous volume–are actually wishing they could relate to that type of pain, that of the “hood”.

It’s unclear to me how many people feel genuine, deep happiness and fulfullment. I don’t think it is very many. I get moments of joy, and am not sure what to do with it. It’s not my ambient sound. To be clear, I have very good days, and look back with them with satisfaction, and wonder why I don’t feel like this more than I do.

Inverted, one often sees reference in song lyrics to people wanting to feel pain, so they know they are alive. In one Lady Antebellum song the lyric is, I believe: “I’d rather hurt than feel nothing at all”. Nine Inch Nails:

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real

There are many examples of this. What are they really asking for? What is the goal? Is it not a remediation of confusion and loneliness?

If we relate through our pains, then masochism becomes a means of reaching out to others, on a primitive emotional level (that might actually be a good substitution word for both subconscious and unconscious). If we hurt one another, then we bond, somehow.

It is a short step from this to evil, though, which is hurting OTHERS, so YOU can feel.

Returning to my original point, ask yourself how long it takes when you meet someone new for you to start comparing notes with respect to the media you consume: what movies you like, what music you listen to. Media is so much a part of who we are. Most kids from 12 or so on nowadays have access to it 24/7, except when in school. They can watch movies, listen to radio, listen to their iPod, download YouTube videos, etc.

I’ve commented on this often, but in a plastic world, where so much is new, where ideas are new (science as paradigmatic but mutable Truth system), social trends evolve constantly, where obedience to Truth Authority but not critical thinking is taught in schools, where people move from State to State–what do you hold on to?

This is the route to “subculture”. This is how and why tribes form, of for example Nine Inch Nails (NiN) fans. Now, Reznor’s music is clearly emotionally disturbed. But it would not be fair to extrapolate from that that the culture of those who admire is NECESSARILY entirely negative. Some of these kids probably do experience genuine feelings of belonging, warmth, and, yes, happiness. There are other, better paths to this outcome, but all social systems have to be evaluated both in terms of negatives and positives.

For such a group, if for some reason they no longer had NiN to bind them together (I have said this often, but the root “religio” means “to bind”), they would fall into despondancy. Many of them cut themselves anyway, and wind up on anti-depressants, but this does not mean that in some ways the music is not positive for them.

Thus in evaluating our common culture, what makes the most sense, where I see the most strategic promise, is in trying to build and support a different set of foundational premises upon which our worldview rests. The countless little tribes out there MEAN something to the people who belong to them. They are the result of self organizing social systems, themselves the results of worldviews based on foundational premises. To achieve a better result, the path is not banning this that or the other thing, as horrible as it might seem. The path is, in my view, encouraging scientists to do actual science. To be honest, and reputable. To do their jobs properly.

As things stand, the assumptions of our Truth Elite are Materialism, Meaninglessness, and Egalitarianism-as-moral-philosophy. None of these aspects of the dominant worldview are consistent with the best empirical data we have. Yet alternatives are suppressed ruthlessly, despite the manifest shortcomings of the dominant view. This needs to change.

People of goodwill in universities need to assert themselves, and stop working for patent evil.