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.
I would like to make a brief comment on what I view as the principle purpose of life.
Many have heard of Friedrich Nietzche’s “Will to Power”. Structurally, what this notion did for him is create the possibility of motion outside of the morass of materialistically inspired nihilism he saw around him. If God didn’t exist, so the argument went, then everything was meaningless.
Meaning is a qualitative structure. It is a sense within a person or group of purpose grounded in a sacred belief. It is meaningful to give your life to Jesus, or to your country, or to your family.
The motion of materialism is to equate all apparent sentience, activity, and what would have formerly been viewed as moral decision based on free will, with biology. Within this ideology, we are effectively animals with instincts that don’t differ, qualitatively, with those of ants. None of us have souls, and our apparent freedom is an illusion.
On this reading, the only way to be honest, is to admit the ethical imperative given in your biology, which is the preservation of your genes, through being the fittest, most powerful person on your block. An uebermensch (lit: “Above-man”).
Self evidently, morality in this regard is a mistake, and mercy something for lesser mortals. Only the truly great man will be able to rise above the pedestrian, bourgeois distinction of Good/Evil. Since it promotes weakness, and womanish–read non-Darwinian–virtues like compassion, Christianity is held in contempt.
The Will to Power was in effect a heuristic by which those who wanted to be free, who wanted to follow Nietzche’s reasoning into places he never went himself (spending much of his time crying on his sister’s couch), could judge their actions. Power was to act according to one’s own wishes, without regard to tradition, normal understandings of morality, or petty sentiments like mercy and compassion.
Logically, the end of the aspiring “Superman” was to rule the world. This is the summit. Once you are there, you never need to apologize to, kowtow to, or even acknowledge in any way ever again anyone who does not advance your immediate aims.
Yet let us zoom in on this World Emperor, sitting on his thrown. He is sad. Why? Because he is alone. Why is he alone? Because he subordinated the desires of everyone else to his own, and because he disabled his ability to interact with his fellow humans on an honest level, which would have enabled him to find other souls that could touch his own. To be superior, is to be alone. You can find people to surround you, but their ability to touch you are directly proportional to your capacity for vulnerability, and to giving in to the purportedly womanish virtues like tenderness. Once you do that, you have effectively renounced the Will to Power.
Hitler never loved Eva Braun.
The limit case of this is described by the Marquis de Sade, whose work should be burned in its entirety–but which hasn’t– and whose remaining value is to give us an inside look at the mind of evil.
Sade, who spent most of his life in jail both for real and imaginary crimes, dedicated himself to the destruction of traditional notions of morality. He shared with Richard Dawkins not just an atheistic stance, but an open, flagrant, and aggressive hatred of God, and every human institution and relic that flowed from conceptions of God. He described God as the most horrific invention ever to flow from the mind of man.
Like Nietzche, he found in power his salvation. Since he was precluded by lack of money and freedom from committing the crimes he imagined–and its not clear he would have had the stomach to do so anyway–he focussed his drive to power not on actual physical crimes, but on writing books intended to corrupt people. Napoleon understood this, and jailed him for that reason. He also banned his books, some of the most famous of which were not published until well after his death.
If we return to our sad Emperor–who in his solititude is not altogether emotionally different than Sade in his cell–he can do two things. He can renounce power, and again value connection, harmony, love, compassion, kindness, mercy, tenderness, and all the other virtues which seemingly oppose the doctrine of Power. Or, he can take his actual power to its limits, and begin to use it to destroy others.
He can find solace in the visceral sensations occasioned by sexual activity, and even more so by gratuitous cruelty. He can live his life, in effect, getting high. Since there is nothing he cannot do, everything is permitted. In effect, this is the life lived by Uday and Qusay Hussein, who had rape rooms, who murdered people and tortured them with impunity, and who took whatever they wanted.
What, though, we might ask is the point of this? Is this the best possible life? By what criterion do we decide that power alone is worth pursuing? What is wrong with the tender virtues?
My contention is that neither Nietzche or Sade (or their many fellow travellers; I am using what amount to Ideal Types in my argument, since I can cover more ground) thought through what they were doing. They were superficial, and cowardly.
The reality is that all of us crave innocence in some form or fashion. Those who live normal childhoods think back with fondness and nostalgia at the joy and pleasure of simple things like playing tag, or snowball fights, or playing house, or just walking outside on a beautiful Fall or Spring day. In our daydreams, all of us want to be innocent.
But we aren’t. None of us are perfect. There is likely not a Christian on the planet who can be found who is perfect in their love, compassion, faith, and mercy. Some people see this and reject Christianity as a whole for this reason.
Morever, once you adopt Science as your ethical system, you slowly lose all ability to use traditional standards of morality–particularly those anchored specifically in religion–and justifying doing the right thing becomes harder and harder. Your criterion for the purpose of life is Truth, but you ignore the fact that within the Philosophy of Science Truth is unknowable except provisionally. You can speak functionally about what is true experimentally, but this does not permit blanket ontological statements of Truth with a T.
For this reason, I view the doctrine of Scientism–that all answers about everything come from Science and only from Science–to be a form of power mongering. It is a cultural landgrab that is allied to that of Sade, and I think it no coincidence that the language of prominent Scientistic apostles like Richard Dawkins so often approaches that of Sade in venom.
The net fact is that our experience preceded our understandings. To invert this, I can say that the doctrine of Darwinism (my understanding) dictates what emotions I can feel (my subjective experience). For example, I can choose to believe that compassion is a relic of the need for group cohesion to survive. This means that compassion is in some respects “unnatural”, in that its expression is a function of biology, and not individual will. For all intents and purposes, this is the take that the Nazis had on biology, and used it to justify their actions to coerce evolution to the next stage through the mass slaughter of inferior peoples.
Darwinism for this reason, as an ethical system, leads immediately down the Nietzchean pipeline into the Will to Power.
Here is the crux of the matter: I believe there is equally a Will to Joy, or Goodness. This is the Will to Innocence, beauty, love and all the emotions that have, deep, lasting effects, and which actually do work to mitigate our solitude. It is a sense that can and has been expressed differently in various peoples, times, and places.
When we fail to do what is good, this is a form of repression. It is Qualitative Repression. Failing to meet our own duties with respect to what we consider to be the Sacred causes us pain. Some people don’t want to meet that pain–neither Sade nor Nietzche or any other evil human being does–so they fly away from it, and justify their cowardice by making cowardice a virtue. This is Qualitative Repression. They push back the noble feelings they cannot keep from their minds by constantly contemplating or committing crimes.
If we add to this Freudian notions of repression, we see how the argument comes to be made that NOT indulging yourself is the crime, since self restraint is somehow artificial, and licentiousness of various forms what constitutes “virtue.”
Qualitative Repression, then, is to be opposed to Quantatitive Repression. We understand readily the sex instinct, and believe we understand the effects of that. However, since there is no place holder for the notion of Quality in a universally leveling materialistic Scientism, the notion of Qualitative Repression–or of the need to express noble ideals in action, has not caught hold yet.
But I do share with Abigail and John Adams the basic idea that we are meant to be Good, to do Good, and to rejoice in everything. When I use the word Meant, I am not claiming to have unlocked the secrets of the universe. Neither can any scientist. Not one of them can find any piece of matter which is ONLY matter anywhere in the universe, or any linear explanation for the undisputed facts measured by Quantum physicists.
No one can claim that what the human race has always done need be what it always will do.
No one can measure free will, since to do so one would have to be external to the system, and no humans are. Morever, if we are limited in our decision making capacity, there is no reason to limit it further by recourse to scientific theories of unproven merit. There is EVERY reason to use our logical faculties to develop ideas which work to foster our happiness, and joy.
“Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”
John Adams.
Liberal Arts curriculums, when they were first rolled out, were intended to educate our citizens to run our Constitutional Republic well. Such programs were meant to foster the virtues of their graduates, sharpen their wits, develop the capacity for self expression and rational argumentation, and provide them with a broad base of knowledge by which to better help our nation navigate the stormy seas of growth and coexistence with hostile nations.
This they did splendidly for quite some time. Then approximately in the 1960’s, the whole thing went to hell. A storm front blew in from Europe which rejected virtue, per se, outside of conformity to the collective, and that effectively ended the capacity for rational thought of most of our Humanities professors.
Now liberal arts graduated no longer possess broad general knowledge. Through the intercession of Freudian notions of instinct and repression, they are taught that what formerly passed for virtue–as for example in chastity outside of a loving relationship–was unnatural. They are taught little about history, the process of formal debate and rhetoric, and quite generally graduate with considerably less common sense (which I define as “knowing what you know, and knowing what you don’t know”) than they went in with.
Over time, this has affected our political discourse in such a way that sound bites, 30 second news stories, and conformity dictate a very high percentage of what people believe in this nation.
Manifestly, most conservatives are religious, or pro-business. Very few of those who ought to have widened and deepened both their tolerance and their cosmopolitanism care any more to indulge in non-ironic patriotism, or preach the importance of personal responsibility.
This long term trend will, if not reversed, lead to our eventual complete decline and failure.
I consider the purpose of human life, as it should be protected in our political institutions, to be the cultivation of personal virtue. Certainly, it was to obtain relief from religious oppression that a great many of our forebears came to America. Their intent was not to flee restraint, per se, but to substitute restraints chosen by themselves, for their own perfection, for those imposed by less benevolent governments.
The freedom to choose one’s one manner of virtue–whether it be some form of Protestantism, Deism, atheism, Judaism, Mormonism or something else–is one understanding of freedom. This freedom is consistent with freedom of action and freedom of speech. It leads naturally to freedom of business and economic life, since it implies both some work ethic, and honesty. It lends itself to decentralization, since if people do not abuse one another, they do not need to be protected from one another.
We can in fact posit that the degree of decentralization of government possible is a function of the capacity of individuals to govern themselves and their own passions. Some government will always be needed, since this is not and presumably never will be a world populated entirely by perfectly honest, perfectly rational people. Where this balance should lie is negotiable, and represents the part of the continuum I consider to be political moderation, in which difference of opinion on details are expected, and debate both productive and needed.
To this I contrast Leftism. This doctrine redefines freedom to mean freedom FROM differential moralities, and defines virtue precisely as conformity. Self evidently, the diversity of human genetic material will–absent coercive Huxleyan genetic tampering–always mean that people are different in their innate capacities, and hence likelihood of large scale success. Added to this, in the economic and social spheres, are the relative utilities and drawbacks of different ethical system.
For example, those who love pleasure rather than work will always be outpaced financially by those who value work over pleasure, in a just system. This is an inevitable consequence.
For this reason, absolute human equality is not an attainable goal, without violence.
And violence is of course what we see in the history of efforts to remake man in the image of an obedient happy drone, none of which have succeeded. The 40,000 killed in the French Revolution pale beside the “accomplishments” of the Chinese, Russians, Vietnamese (who killed 65,000 in 1975 alone), and of course Cambodians.
These are the two foundational forms of political life. Freedom FOR virtue, and freedom FROM virtue.
to make an omelet.”
This was the mantra for most 20th Century apologists of Communist atrocities. Yet, as historian Paul Johnson noted, no omelet was ever created. No version of leftist collectivism ever worked, if by “work” we intend to signify an improvement in the lives of the people subjected to diabolical notions of “justice”. People lost rights, got more poor, lost hope, and not infrequently were jailed or murdered. This was the egg breaking part. There was no creative counterbalance to the destructive impulses and actions.
We hear often of past American crimes. Perhaps most blatant is the invasion of sovereign Native American land, followed by what can only rationally be described as colonization. We did in fact create an empire in North America, and did it through the murder and resettlement of many Indians. This part cannot be disputed.
However, this differs not at all from the Communist atrocities, and the great difference is that we did indeed create the omelet. In a history of humanity replete with every sort of horror and violence imaginable, we created an oasis of relative peace, and the possibility of long term growth in standards of living, understood not just economically, but morally and spiritually as well.
If we want to atone for the sins of our forefathers (self evidently, slavery is another such issue), it is pointless do it through self destructive behavior, as many on the Left demand. Rather, let us atone by carrying through the project which succeeded at the cost of so many lives. Let us continue to view ourselves as the City on the Hill, and work for the continuing betterment of humankind as a whole.
If we should choose to fail, there are no nations on this planet with records any better than our own, and both Russia and China have many, many more literal skeletons in their past than we do.