Author: White Whale

The following is pretty basic to my philosophy–which if it isn’t obvious is my own creative reaction to challenges in my own life–but I wanted to make it clear.

One of the principle challenges we face in life is the formation of an identity. This is made harder in conditions of constant flux, which reject the past, don’t plan the future, and whose constant noise and distortions make clear thinking and feeling of ANY sort difficult. Our TV’s and computers are our shrines; we talk to others through them, and are talked to; and everyone lives in a cave in isolation from their neighbors. This is all too often the case, in any event.

You “form” yourself by choosing principles: things you believe in. By establishing what you will and will not do, you create a shelter from constant change and the anxiety of never knowing who you are. It is a form of protection. Now, the exact content matters much less than the fact that you CHOSE them. They may be the same as what your parents chose, but you own them when you consciously recognize them as claim them.

What this shelter allows is greater clarity with respect to the world, and greater capacity for enjoying the countless small moments in life when calm emerges, and you can breathe easily.

I choose to believe in an after-life–nothing in modern conceptions of reality precludes it, and careful examination of the large quantity of actual evidence permits an intelligent person to conclude in favor of its likelihood–but what I believe applies equally to someone who does not. I have tried hard to scale my ideas in this way.

“Sin” is the process by which you renounce parts of yourself, in exchange for some momentary convenience or pleasure. You renounce yourself when you violate your own core principles. Even if you have never made them explicitly clear to yourself, you have them (unless you are a sociopath), and you KNOW when you violate them. You can choose to ignore the promptings of your better angels, but the system will always have been disturbed.

If you do anything but mourn your sin, and atone for it, you have altered yourself qualitatively. You have renounced a part of the identity and following simplicity that formed who you were. This increases your confusion, and makes telling the truth more difficult, until you confront the reality of your own sin.

This has nothing at all to do with Heaven and Hell, or external moral codes: the codes that interest me, and which matter, are the codes all of us AS INDIVIDUALS have adopted.

My personal belief is that there is no real difference between this life and the next, EXCEPT that you can no longer lie to yourself in the next. All your shortcomings, and self acknowledged failings will fill you, and you will no longer be able to push them away, or disown them. This is a type of hell, because when you internalize a sin, you cut some part of yourself off from humanity, and are correspondingly isolated not just from others, but from Beauty.

This may sound like so much BS, but I’m quite sincere in this. I choose to carry on in the face of difficulty not because I am particularly strong, but because my perception is keen that to do otherwise is to create MORE suffering for myself than whatever momentary challenge is facing me every could, no matter how bad it is.

Hopefully that is clear. If not, I will do better the next time.

I keep getting emails about the “end of America”. Philosophically, I am in full agreement that we have become something less than the responsible, virtuous human beings which the Liberal doctrine that informed the creation of our Republic anticipated. We are clearly degraded, having surrendered large parts of our freedom at regular intervals since at least the 1930’s. We fail to see this, since our schools teach our children there is no right and wrong, and virtue something war-mongers and hypocrites talk about. All our kids need to do, they are told, is never render an opinion that offends ANYONE, and that is all the virtue they need.

Clearly, these are real problems. At the same time, none of these disasters will happen in the next year or two. To some extent, I support the rhetoric, because to spur action you need to spur a sense of urgency. At the same time, we need to remain calm, and THINK.

Who DO we want to be? What is our goal? How do we overcome the complacency and incompetence of our formerly Mainstream Media?

This battle has been a long time coming, and will be a long time in winning. This is not a time for running around shooting our guns in the air. It is a time for planning, then patiently and consistently acting, and not stopping until we win, or can no longer move.

The logic of the thought of men like Ray Kurzweil is that, since the brain is a computer, that the contents of our minds can be decoded, copied, and reinstalled into a more durable structure than the organic one within which we evolved.

If we move on to the “Matrix”, new skills can be downloaded, and any experience you can imagine is possible, in utter and complete safety. You need never fear death, and your power for experience is unlimited. Many people, including–if I’m not mistaken–Bill Gates, admire Ray for the daring of his ideas, and are of course cautiously sanguine that they can live long enough to see what I believe he calls the Singularity, when man the biological machine becomes man the durable machine.

This is the optimistic side of things. The shadow side of this is asking the simple question: if skills can be downloaded, why not ideas? Why could some person or group not take control of the process and make of all of us their playthings? Let us posit, for the sake of argument, that the intent was outwardly and rhetorically benign, as in Mao’s China, where brainwashing (food deprivation; carefully directed peer pressure; exhausting work; and constant slogan chanting) was purportedly for the “liberation” of the person under the thrall of Capitalistic and Imperialistic ideas.

Upon what basis would ANYONE decide who other people should be? When you look at the field of evolutionary biology, what one sees is a reckless disregard for the consequences of and direction of their work. Their basic position seems to be that morality is a product of evolution, even though phenomenologically it is quite clearly presented as moral postulates, which are discussed in groups. If we are discussing ourselves, there is no “out there”. What we are doing, even if their ideas are correct, IS the product of evolution, and they are doing it incompetently.

There is, moreover, this subtle and barely detectable sadism latent in their proclaiming from the tops of the University buildings the LABORATORY death of God. They know these ideas are unpleasant to most people, but they don’t care. For THEM, for the scientists, these ideas animate and drive them. They can act on them. They can grow through them, intellectually. It is a fascinating puzzle, to be solved.

For everyone else, though, it is an ontological, existential problem, dumped without further ado in their laps, on the way to the next conference or book signing.

Structurally, this is comparable to the obvious point that Socialism is a solution to the problem of Meaning FOR INTELLECTUALS. They are the revolutionaries–the professionals that Lenin insisted must lead all revolutions–but they are never the workers. And they don’t actually solve problems for anyone but THEMSELVES. They acquire, through their cultish political devotion, a reason for living, but are unable to offer it to anyone else. This point escapes them, though, in their narcissistic Abstractionism.

The Buddhists, who arguably put together the most clever philosophy in the public history of humankind, considered time, space, and Self to all be discontinuous. Take time and self: what if you woke up somewhere you had never been, and forgot who you were? Who are you then? Simple: you are who you decide to become. This is the real “you”.

I offer up three core principles: the Rejection of Self Pity, Persistence, and the systematic and principled quest for understanding. These things can be transported to all places and all circumstances. You need have no name for God–in my view, God is everywhere, and everywhere knowable.

We need to understand that the inner and outer life of man both matter. The doctrine of Scientism rejects the former, while its adherents short-sightedly claim they are Humanists of one sort another. At a minimum, that they are NOT engaged in something that will damage humanity, and which will probably help it, somewhere down the road.

As our problems become larger and larger, we seem to be getting dumber and less wise. This need not continue, but one must first recognize the pattern to be able to fight it. We live in a world of fog and zombies right now.

I played Ultimate (frisbee) tonight. Our team had white shirts, and the other black shirts. Ultimate is a pretty loose sport, where there are no ref’s (calls are made by players, and negotiated), and tonight they forgot to even time the first half. We took our best guess.

When it came time to choose our team names for the evening, the one black player on our team suggested “the KKK”. The captain chimed in and decided on White Power. The black team (who won, by the way, by 1 point) was the MLK, Jr.s, which they changed to Team X, after Malcolm.

Now, had he had the slightest sense that any of us was racist, this name would have bothered him, but he didn’t (I presume). It seems to me that individuals, interacting with one another, tend over time, out of common decency, to reach accomodations with one another. It is possible to demonize people you don’t know, but quite hard to hate people you do know.

Social change of this sort is gradual, as people feel one another out, slowly realize that the other group is not evil incarnate, then realize they have all the same fears, problems, and hopes that everyone else does. This is the attribute of social movement that I consider to be a type of “self organizing system”.

There is no way to rush this process. It seems to me that the Civil War and Reconstruction set the cause of black equality back several generations. Clearly, EVERYONE, pretty much, in the nation was racist back then. Lincoln was racist. Many abolitionists were racist. Northerners and Southerners were both racist.

For their part, Southerners looked (in theory, which of course did not apply when horny slave owners were sneaking into slave quarters, as Jefferson apparently did; or when cruel men used their power to inflict pain on their slaves simply because they could) to their slaves as parents do their children. They feared their slaves–likely for good reason–but also did often express, in apparently sincere terms, affection for them. It seems to me that–given ideological and economic justification–they could have found their way to integrating their blacks much sooner than the 1960’s.

It is of course impossible to say what would have happened had, say, the Crittendon Compromise been adopted–or the conflict confined to the secession of South Carolina–and the Civil War averted, but it is quite clear that–in losing–the honor of Southern men was deeply offended. Since they were raised from birth to value honor above all else, this created a culture of resentment, anger, and vindictiveness. I was not alive back then, and have not read extensively in the literature, so this is based solely on psychology, but it seems not unlikely that the KKK was born of something like the impulse men at the bottom of a social hierarchy feel when they come home and kick their dogs, or beat their wives. Shit flows downhill, as the saying goes. They lost their honor–they were overrun by carpetbaggers and Yankees–but since they were at least still superior to the blacks, the maintenance of that hierarchy became for them something like a religious and sacred act. Outwardly, it was justified as such, but I think hatred and anger were the real motivations, which I do not think they always were.

You cannot mandate feelings. You can enact psychologically inept laws, which are then resented; conversely, you can create situations in which the natural tendency of human beings to recognize our collective plight–as perishable beings struggling for survival here, and salvation in the hereafter–is fostered and supported.

Affirmative Action is based on the idea that since we can’t know when racism affected a hiring or promotion decision, that we will discriminate proactively. The effect of it is to create a system which can be gamed, which is understood by everyone. It does nothing to further racial harmony, and no doubt quite often sparks latent hostility and lingering racism which is unnecessary.

There is nothing positive about racism. As Jefferson (admittedly hypocritically; he was apparently making a confession of some sort) argued, slavery is not just unfair to the slaves, but morally corrupting to the slave-holders. In precisely the same way, the systematic assignment of a uniform group of negative traits to a heterogeneous group of people is a type of violence not just to Truth, but to your capacity for common decency. As such, it is awful, and to be shunned.

Always, always, always, though, the question is: how can we reach our goals most quickly and most harmoniously? Slow tactics, that don’t work well are not to be favored over slow tactics that DO work well, or fast tactics that make things worse, even if our emotions demand it. Improving the world requires wisdom, and the capacity for patience, when that is the trait that will best help you achieve your long term aim.

I was standing in the liquor store the other day, and heard a very dramatic monologue on the TV, and turned to see what was on. A handsome actor, with a masculine deep voice, was delivering some sort of ultimatum to someone. He sounded sincere, gruff, no nonsense. His facial expressions were appropriate to the part, and he had considerable gravitas.

Yet, he was an actor. That part may have been written five minutes before filming started. He may have been making it up as he went along, since he had no doubt been filming soaps for quite some time. He knew how he was supposed to look. He knew how he was supposed to sound. And yet, he may have been flamboyantly gay, like Rock Hudson, and had frequent tickle parties at his Malibu home, like that ridiculous Representative from New York, whatever his name was.

Obama, it seems to me, is like this. He is an actor. He is acting the role of President of the United States. He know how he is supposed to sound. He knows the demeanor that is suitable, and how to frame his words. He knows he is supposed to use soaring but generic rhetoric; and of course the overwhelming bulk of the time–if his handlers have any say at all–everything he says is scripted, just as was the case with this soap opera star.

It is a virtual certainty that he had help with his first book “Dreams from my father”. According to a source which is likely Michelle Obama, Bill Ayers was his ghost writer. Leaving aside the significance of that name (the claim, by the way, was made in an authorized biography, by a reputable biographer), let us simply combine that with the clear fact that he was an academic from 1992 to 2004 at the University of Chicago, and never published ONE scholarly paper. The record is quite literally spotless. He left no marks, other than his two books.

He was elected President of the Harvard Law Review, but, again, no records of his writing exist.

Is not the most reasonable supposition that we have elected a soap opera star, smart enough to play the role, but not smart enough to actually be who he pretends to be?

The method of propaganda is to feed your existing biases, then redirect them in the desired direction. Pace, then lead, as the Neurolinguistic Programming folks put it. Propagandists appeal to the affective element of your personality, while convincing you–the target– that the cognitive, rational element is irrelevant, and unimportant.

When you see the claim that “liberals” are governed by emotion, this is the actual reason. They are dupes of effective propaganda. This happens everywhere of course, but is more common on the Left for the simple reason that their policies don’t work, so they need to be sold on levels other than the rational.

This does not make Conservatives rational per se, but what I have found is that I can defend conservative ideas, and cannot begin to defend Leftist ideas. There is a middle, but that middle ends when rational dialogue ends.

Socialism and Imperialism are the same thing. In the latter, you take over countries and impose your will. The Romans mostly left people alone; the British wanted to make them over to Christianity. In the former, you in effect “invade” your own nation, seeking accomodations by force.

The difference is this: in Socialism, you commoditize human beings. They must do what you as the owner of the State say. In Imperialism, people are free to do what they want, provided only that they pay your taxes and don’t object publicly to your rule. There is no overweaning concern with the views of individuals, as such, like there is in Socialism.

The logic of Socialism is the logic of the worst type of Capitalism, in which you just want people to be drones. The Chinese, currently, use actual slaves, almost certainly. You just condemn people as “enemies of the State”, then put them in a prison, where they now work for free. There is no Bill of Rights, or other legal document, which would slow in the slightest anyone who wanted to do that. You could even simply arrest people to increase your head count, then count on them as slaves, being–as they would be–custodians of the State.

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.