The Social Pathologist

Of Swine and Pigmen.

2012-02-09T22:27:00.000+10:30

Whilst in New York my family and I decided to make a visit to the financial district. We passed Trinity Church on the way to Wall St and some remnants of the Occupy Wall St crowd were there. They were fenced in a very small area calling out to passers by. They were the usual nose-studded rent-a-Socialist types who looked like they need a wash. They seemed pleasant and friendly enough, still a visceral contempt stirred inside me. Not because I had any problem with them protesting against the corruption and idiocy of Wall St but because their solution was even more idiotic and corrupting. Should these guys ever get into power, I thought, my family and I would be considered the near equal to the pigmen as objects of their rage.

Socialists, like lawyers are the natural enemy of the medical profession.

We moved on and spent the morning exploring the financial district. The architecture of the district was quite spectacular though I was surprised at just how small the district actually was; somehow I always imagined the centre of the financial world to be physically bigger. Still, the joy in appreciating architecture is in the details. As I wandered around the district I walked past a street sign, on it was written Maiden Lane.

I remembered that Maiden Lane was the name of the holding company that the Fed set up to receive toxic assets after the collapse of Lehman Bros. Though I was not looking for it, the thought of Maiden Lane triggered an association with the Fed which in turn led me to the conclusion that it must be close by. I pulled my guidebook out of my bag and soon realised that all I had to do was walk about a hundred meters and I’d be there.

I have an interest in Architecture and recognised the Fed building immediately, but before I could say anything to my family, my son pointed it out as a building that looked like Gringotts, the bank in the Harry Potter novels. To the casual passerby there was little to indicate that here was one of the temples of global finance, if not the epicentre. There was very little in the way of signage on it except for a small plaque, but observant onlookers would have noticed that there were something peculiar about this particular building. Unlike other buildings in the immediate vicinity, two policemen appeared to be on permanent guard duty and there were more than the usual number of CCV cameras (discretely positioned) monitoring it. Here at the temple of Bernanke, I thought of GBFM and his secretive tapings; except here the tapings weren’t so secretive.

It was an imposing building that did not want to be noticed, still, in the spirit of GBFM, I wanted to get my photograph on it’s steps. The two policemen eyed me as I approached them. They were OK with me getting a photo on the steps and then ignored me. I wanted a record of being at the Lion’s den.

There was a slight incline uphill as we walked away from the building and approaching us from a downhill direction were three men in the early twenties. They were walking three abreast occupying the whole of the sidewalk and it was apparent from their appearance that they expected people to get out of their way: they were not moving for anyone. It’s not that these people were thugs; they were worse. They were immaculately dressed and their overall bearing gave them the appearance of being “financial types”. From the expression on their faces they conveyed the impression of uninterrupted and effortless success, of supreme arrogance, self-assuredness and power. They were pigmen.

They wore an expression that I’d seen before. On surgeons who’ve never lost a patient, on men who’ve broken hearts but never had their hearts broken, on the fabulously gifted who’ve never known loss or hardship. Men who knew incredible success and no loss: they were invincible.

My wife could see that we were going to collide with them and she stepped off the sidewalk onto the road. However the expression in their faces stirred both a simultaneous sense of revulsion and instinctive defiance in me; I was not going to yield.

As they rapidly approached I braced myself for impact; they giving no hint that they would move. A the last possible moment, seeing that I wasn’t moving, they attempted to make an opening, with the pigman to right of me trying to get between me and the wall. However, it was too late and our shoulders collided. It was quite a heavy blow, which affected him more than me. I turned around expecting to be abused by them and steeled myself for their onslaught but they continued their march downhill, not even turning back. It was all over in an instant, as if nothing had happened.

It was an event of no significance and yet if felt like it was. The sky was grey, the mood somber and the Fed sinister.

Still, somehow it felt like an omen.

The Class Divide.

2012-02-01T23:53:00.000+10:30

Another one of the impressions that America left me with was with regard to the class divide. Compared to Australia, I certainly felt that there was a far more overt stratification in society. The effect was most marked to me in both Los Angeles and Charleston. Now, I don't have a particular problem with societal stratification (provided that people can live decently) but one of the things that struck me about America was that there appeared to be a subtle caste like structure in place, with the workers being the inferior class of human beings. I want to emphasise that it was a subtle phenomenon.

To give you an example of what I mean; in many places when I struck up a conversation with some sales member or supermarket cashier, they initially seemed taken aback that I wanted to speak with them in a normal social way. The impression that I got was that they were somewhat unsure as to why a customer would want to speak to them on a social level. I found many of these people to delightfully warm, helpful and quite conversational. However, I could not help but form an impression that many of them did not get spoken to unless someone wanted something from them.

Don't get me wrong, this sort of stuff happens in Australia as well. For one of my summer jobs I worked as a cleaner in the local mall and noticed that people treated me differently whilst I was in uniform and when I wasn't. The thing is, the effect seemed more pronounced in the U.S.

The other thing that I noticed was that people who appeared to be wealthy wanted to be recognised as being "apart" from the rest. Once again, I've noticed this phenomenon in other parts of the world and at home, but it appeared to be far more overt in the U.S. (The other place where I noticed similar behaviour was in Eastern Europe, where the wives of the biznis men behaved in a similar fashion) Apparently wealthy women would barge in front of you, not acknowledge your existence and bark orders to the sales staff and I can tell the difference between prole rude and snob rude. These were snob rude.

Overall I got the impression that in the U.S. there seemed to a subtle "successful caste" and "prole caste" and that the successful caste wanted to emphasise the difference. Now in Australia, as commentator Horst noted, we do have an entrenched culture of "tall poppy syndrome" with the effect that the rich or successful are far less likely to assert any superiority. As a popular local beer commercial emphasised, "Australians sit in the front seat of the taxi" apparently both an allusion to our society's egalitarianism and by implication the un-Australianess of doing so otherwise. Like all popular myths, it is just that. But I have to admit the class divide seems much smaller over here.

This egalitarianism has both negative and positive effects. On one hand, it does tend to enforce a cultural equality, on the other, it suppresses any form of excellence. (Which is usually appreciated and rewarded outside of Australia). America, on the other hand, seems to have a culture which accepts and rewards success almost to a degree that Australia doesn't. On one hand, it seems to attract the best and brightest to your country, both for their benefit and for the benefit of America. On the other hand, it does seem to create a bigger class divide.

Tipping

2012-01-29T00:28:00.000+10:30

One of the big differences between the U.S and Australia is the practice of tipping. Now in Australia, the practice is becoming more prevalent than it used to be but it still not common, so I was quite interested to see how the custom influenced the service I received. These are my thoughts.

Firstly, I managed to get into conversations with some of the waiting staff and they informed me that their official wage, which was paid by the employer, was somewhere in the vicinity of 2-3 dollars an hour. Now look, I know that these people can earn quite a bit in tips, but there is something fundamentally wrong with paying a person that rate in a first world country. For a forty hour week, that equates to an official salary of 80-120 dollars a week. Now I understand that people who work in high end restaurants can earn quite a bit, but its those people in the roadside diners that worry me; in many of those places there didn't seem to be much through traffic.

As far as I was concerned "tipping" was not really an option since if I was unhappy with the service (an inconvenience) the person would have a significant portion of their wages docked. There seemed to be an asymmetry in cost to the waiter in favour of the customer. This would be alright if all customers are reasonable but some are not.

The net result was that a lot of the waiting staff were working quite hard to get that tip and laying on the charm quite thickly; so thickly that it appeared at times contrived, especially when the waiters appeared tired. Staff were quite attentive but once the bill was paid and the money was "extracted", staff sort of disappeared. Something that doesn't seem to happen at home.

Once again, I found the whole experience a bit off-putting in the end. Eating out felt like a simple commercial transaction.(Except in the South) You could never be sure if the waiting staff were being nice to you because they were genuinely nice or that they were being fake in order to earn some cash. I felt that the whole system of tipping compelled the waiting staff them to what we in Australia call, "kiss arse" in order to earn a living. It was a sort of trade-off in dignity for the dollar.

It's one thing to tip a man when he doesn't need it and its another thing to tip him when he does. In the first instance there is no compulsion to give, in the second there isn't as well; and yet there is. In the first instance your giving a man a bonus, which in no material way harms him when he does not get it. In the second, your providing him with his living wage which to a degree is obligatory.

The other issue at play is the independence of the waiter. The customer is not always right, he is not always nice and sometimes can be a pain in arse. The waiter should be able to refuse his business if a certain minimal standard of behaviour is not shown towards him. The whole tipping system subordinates the waiter to the customer. The whole system seems to enforce a subtle attitude of "the man with dollar must be kowtowed to". Subtle, but pernicious.

I understand that many people think that tipping provides an incentive towards superior service but compared to Australia, where the waiters are paid at least a minimum wage ($15.50 an hour), I did not notice any real improvement in the table service.

The Fat of the Land.

2012-01-25T11:13:00.000+10:30

Prior to traveling to the U.S. we had been told by many that the U.S populated by huge numbers of “fatties”. The truth be told, my own impression was that the U.S was just as fat as Australia, and on that measure I did not feel too far from home. Still there were some subtle differences. The average young U.S. man seemed less lean than the average Australian, whilst the average U.S. woman seemed slightly leaner than the average Australian. Subtly, Your fatties looked less healthier than ours Compared to Europe, both countries have serious problems with obesity.

Obesity, is of course, a complex problem being a product of genetics, diet and energy expenditure. What I want to concentrate on here is the food. Now, I’m not particularly into organic foods and don’t mind some pesticide or applied fertilizer; I don’t approach food like a biochemistry assay and I’m not a gourmet. What matters to me is taste and quality, and I like to know that the animals were treated well before they were slaughtered. However after eating in the U.S. I did get the impression that “junk’ food was the staple and fresh produce was a premium product

Quite a few U.S. bloggers have lamented the state of U.S nutrition and I’m the emerging “Paleo” trend. I initially thought that their commentary was a bit over-the-top but after my travels I want to fully endorse them. Never have I eaten so badly as I have in the U.S.

Firstly, the supermarkets. I actually like visiting supermarkets whilst traveling in foreign countries, as it gives a good index to the cost of living compared to Australia and it also gives a good idea of what locals like to consume. Comparing Australian to U.S supermarkets, I would say that:

1) In the U.S., processed food (meals in a can, frozen dinners, breakfast cereals, chocolates etc) were much, much cheaper than in Australia.
2) With regard to cost, fresh fruit and vegetables were on par.
3)However on average, the quality of the fresh fruit, meat and vegetables seemed lower than at home. Whole Foods was very good but not superlative.
4)Big supermarkets tended to have a good selection of foods.
5)Smaller supermarkets tended to resemble the supermarkets in Eastern Europe, with a very large selection of processed food and a small selection of fresh produce.
6)Alcohol was much cheaper in the U.S.

With regard to restaurants, food, in mid level, “sit down” , non-chain type of restaurants was generally quite good. Expensive restaurants all over the world generally provide good food. Where the the food was quite bad was in the roadside type chain restaurant and chain-diner. While the portion sizes in most roadside diners and chain restaurants were generous, the quality of it was extremely poor. It was fatty, but in a bad way, and it all seemed to possess an underlying bland factory processed taste. In Las Vegas I discovered that scrambled eggs and pancakes came out of a bottle. Much like the man who fed himself on McDonalds for a month, I was beginning to fell unwell by the end of my trip. My children were actually craving vegetables by the end of the trip. ( BTW, what is it with orange cheese?)

What I found very hard to find was food that was cheap, reasonably healthy and tasty. In Australia, for example, its really easy to find stores which sell fresh tasty rolls and sandwiches, using fresh ingredients and crusty breads, even in small regional centers. In New York, I ended up grabbing a sandwich at the Deli section of Whole Foods or Pret-a-Manger, not because I wanted to, simply because everything else that was “grab and go” was utter crap. Aside from the huge portion sizes, obligatory melted cheese and complementary fries, nearly all of the food had that same factory processed taste. I never thought that I would eat better in London than in New York.

With regard to regional variation. I quite liked the food in the South and can’t rave enough about Jestine’s Kitchen in Charleston. The food there was calorie laden, and probably ‘bad” for me, but unlike most food I had tried, it was incredibly tasty. I know that the South is “different”, but then again, I got the impression that most American “specialty” restaurants were quite good, it was the mainstream day-to-day stuff that was bad. That’s the problem. It’s a problem because people make food decisions not only on taste, but on time and economic factors. A tired mother working two jobs trying to keep afloat in the U.S. economy has to buck the economic and time pressures she is under if she wants her family to eat well. A certain amount of time and economic affluence is required to eat well.

It not only that, what we put into our bodies is just as important as how it tastes and can’t but help feel that part of reason for feeling unhealthy by the end of our trip was because of stuff I ate. Like my kids, I developed a craving for “healthy food”. As mentioned earlier in our post, I notice that the American obese looked more unhealthy than the Australian. Just as grain fed beef tastes different to ranch cattle, was the Australian obese “healthier” than the American because of dietary composition?

Overall, I got the impression that whilst good food is available in the U.S., it is a relatively difficult to find premium product. The other impression that America left me with, was that the quality of food was being driven down to the bare minimum by the sole metric of the capitalist imperative: the minimal acceptable quality which generates a profit. Compared to the Italians and the French, the Americans on average have much much lower acceptable standards when it comes to the quality of food.

Arbeit Macht Sie Frei.

2012-01-18T23:21:00.000+10:30

My first impression of America, upon landing in LA, was just how tired everyone looked. From first day of our visit to our last, this overall perception of worn out people was everywhere in the US. It was obvious that everyone was working quite hard, but it was also obvious that they had been working quite hard for a very, very long time.

The other thing that surprised me is just how many people were working two jobs. Now it’s quite common in Australia to see young people working two jobs to get ahead, but what surprised me is just how many older people (40’s and above) were working two jobs. It appeared that a lot of the older people were working to stay afloat, and not to fall between society’s cracks; there seemed to be this invisible whip continually lashing them. Americans, in my opinion, were very hard workers.

What also surprised me is just how many older people were working in the “hamburger flipping” type of industries ( A phenomenon that is beginning to appear in Australia as well). In Australia, and in my experience of Europe, these jobs are considered workforce “entry level jobs” and are still the province of younger people, whilst in the U.S., the majority of the service staff that I met were above the age of thirty. They were all working what I would consider anti-social hours and all of them looked worn out ..... and trapped.

The overall impression it gave me, was of a worn out society that was barely holding itself together. I must confess it shocked and saddened me. Everyone seemed overworked. Everyone also seemed grimly resolute to the task. It appeared to me, that to most Americans, this was the only way things could be.

One of the most interesting conversations I had was in the bowels of the Hoover dam. Whilst being taken through an access tunnel, our tour guide asked us we were all from. Two groups were from Australia and another from France. We got into a discussion about vacations and explained to him, that on average, Australians get four weeks paid leave a year. I think the French said that they got five. He clearly looked pained at our responses. He told us that he only got one week and that his employers were trying to take it away from him. He was clearly an intelligent man and wanted to travel but was unable to do so due to his work commitments. It dawned upon me at that time that perhaps one of the causes of American insularity is the simple fact that many Americans simply do not have time time to leave their country, trapped by the obligations to their employers.

Now in Australia, I see a lot of small businessmen who work just as hard and I have seen that look of work-weariness before. I know the toll that it places on human beings. My experience has taught me is that everyone seems to have a work threshold, that once crossed, becomes socially and personally destructive. A man is not only a means of production, but he is also meant to be a husband, father and a member of the community. A healthy man balances all these duties, and healthy society gives him room to balance them. Men devoting all their times to work have no time to devote to the other obligations in their life. Men working long hours become harsh and irritable, they make mistakes, they opt for quick snacks instead of proper meals, working hard for their families, they don’t ever spend time with their them, eventually finding themselves alienated from the ones they have devoted themselves to.

It appeared to me that whilst America had fully internalised the Protestant work ethic it had neglected any concept of the right to leisure. Labour laws, in the end, are a reflection of society’s values. In America, it appeared that leisure was perceived as either an opportunity cost amongst the go getters, or an frivolous luxury amongst the miserly. And amongst those who would like to take some time off for a rest, it appeared that American culture offered them no legitimacy. It was a society that seem geared toward the primacy of work and production and you were either with the program or you were not.

What I Saw in America.

2012-01-18T00:07:00.000+10:30

My family and I have recently completed a nearly four week holiday in the United States. Over the next few posts I hope to write about the impressions that the country left on me; not all of them positive. I found it difficult to articulate these impressions for a while and upon return to Australia, picked up G.K Chesterton’s book on his experience of the U.S. He visited it in the 1920‘s and 30‘s, and surprisingly, I felt that many of his observations still hold true to today. Whilst he was very polite in his writings about the U.S., I could not help but form the opinion that the country disquieted him, seeing in it something that was toxic to the ideas of Christendom.

Americans, I have found, find it very difficult to take criticism of their country objectively and tend to impute malice towards the critic. And it is true that there are a lot of malevolent critics of America. I am not. Sometimes its very difficult to see the problems from “inside” and that what’s needed is an outside view, and that’s what I’m trying to provide. I am convinced that one of the big problems of the U.S is it’s cultural insularity. Roosh V is on the money when he urges people to travel and I think it is its very important that young American men of the Right ( who will be its future advocaes) get out and see the world. Not so much as to remake the U.S in the image of another country, more to be able to compare how other people live; in many instances better than in the U.S.

Nearly all of the Americans that we met appeared to be fundamentally good and decent persons, and in many ways, better than a lot of the Europeans and Australians. If I had to generalise however, I would say that the higher up the food chain an American was, the less I tended to like him. Prole America in its failures seemed more human that corporate America in its success. What distressed me the most however, was the erosive destruction of the American people by an economic system that seems to be literally grinding them into the dust. After visiting the U.S. the “we are the 99%” movement is very easy to understand.

As a result of this trip I feel that I understand Roissy a lot a better, especially with regard to American women; they really are different compared to other women of the world. My appreciation of Ferdinand Bardamu has also grown, as I feel he is quite accurate in his critiques of American society.

Service Announcement.

2011-12-12T23:31:00.000+10:30

Just a brief note to my readers that I will be not posting for the next five weeks, as I'm off to "the home of the brave and the land of the free."

I'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a safe and prosperous New Year.

Romantic Adultery

2011-12-08T23:06:00.001+10:30

One of the curious feature of our decarnalised view of romantic love is that its intellectual underpinning permits a lot of moral evil to fly under the radar. One of the themes raised in Dalrock’s post, concerned the subject of porn. In the movie, Fireproof; one of the justifications that the “heroine” uses to leave her husband is because of his consumption of it. The movie presents her grievance in a sympathetic and justified light and several commentators on Dalrock’s blog felt that this position was both unjust, and that divorce was a disproportionate response in any case. As commentator Grerp put it:

I don’t like porn. It’s dehumanizing, and the industry grinds already broken people up for its own profit. But it sounds like Caleb was only dabbling in it – which is worthy of a trip to the confessional, rather than divorce court. Clearly Katherine was dissatisfied with the bargain she’d made and wanted a “Christian” excuse to get out. Porn use was it.

It’s the “Christian excuse” part of the comment that warrants further elaboration. I think that Grerp’s comment is rather perceptive in that in that many Christians equate porn to a type of adultery. I imagine it all harks back to the biblical view that looking at a woman with “lust in your heart” is equivalent to adultery and therefore suitable grounds for divorce.

In my post, Anaemia, I argued that traditional Christianity had decarnalised sex, and I imagine that part of porn’s opprobrium is due to the fact that it is inherently and explicitly “fleshy”, It’s not about plot, it’s not about feelings, it’s all about the sex. Porn is all about “carnality” But what’s really interesting is that this “decarnalised” view of sexuality raises a curious dichotomy.

Theses comment from Grerp:

The thing that annoys me about these sorts of narratives[Ed:Fireproof] is that they are crafted in such a way that it is hard to make a specific judgment because the info isn’t there, but they stand in for a reality that would not be hard to judge. So we don’t really know much about Caleb’s porn habits, and it appears that Katherine didn’t actually sleep with the doctor. But IRL she probably would have slept with him and we would know what Caleb’s real proclivities are. In a similar way, Harlequin romances are chock – absolutely CHOCK – full of single mothers who aren’t single mothers. Or aren’t single mothers of their own doing. They’re the aunts who’ve suddenly inherited children and are trying to do the right thing or widows whose husbands have suddenly died. Or they had to get divorced because he became a raging monster/drug dealer overnight, etc. This sort of narrative allows readers who might disapprove of single motherhood to still enjoy reading the rescue of a single mother by a handsome, well-funded hero who’s always wanted to be a father. Read enough of these things and you start thinking that all women are mere victims of circumstance. And from there it’s only a short leap to believing that they all have a right to be rescued. (To be fair, within the genre, this is changing somewhat. Now you have single mothers who are choosing to be single mothers, whether by sperm bank or ONS, because they are *independent women who can take care of themselves* but who might still like to have a white knight take care of some of the peskier problems of life. Fully entitled to the rescue that’s not a “rescue,” though.)

and

Another thing I’ve noticed about romance novels that is still more troubling is that the female characters in them have become more realistic – older, fatter, more career oriented, sexually experienced – while the male characters have become hyper masculine. This Batman-obsessively-pursuing-Liz-Lemon narrative is obviously total wish fulfillment (read: delusion) on the part of female romance readers.

My reply to Grerp:

Isn’t a Harlequin novel a female version of porn? I mean for most guys porn is a fantasy, but so are romantic novels for women. The whole idea of the romantic novel is to get the female reader to identify with the heroine and have a bit of fantasy adultery. True, that female porn places far less emphasis on those “yucky” anatomical bits and much more emphasis on “feelings”, but in the end both partners consummate their affections as assuredly as Linda Lovelace did with her lovers. Both “art forms” have fantasy adultery as their end point.

The question is why does our society look down with opprobrium on men who look at porn but at the same time not give a second thought to women churning through the Mills and Boon? It appears that as long as artistic depictions of adultery don’t involve any genital display, then its O.K.

Most religious folk, myself included, will intuitively recognise porn consumption as a moral wrong, and it still attracts a degree of opprobrium from non-religious polite society, but why is there no condemnation of decarnalised fantasy adultery? Porn, being so overt, is easily recognised as a moral evil, The problem is, that a lot of poison can fly under the radar if its not recognised as such and because romantic love is desexualised some of the more pernicious effects of the romantic novel are not recognised. To quote commentator Grerp:

My view is that there isn’t anything wrong, intrinsically, with a love story. People have been telling, and hearing, and reading love stories for thousands of years, and readers who read them aren’t wanting to commit adultery any more than people who play video games really want to kill someone. The problem is that a steady diet of even the “clean” romances will set you up with overly high expectations regarding relationships between men and women. The fact that romance novels have become more ubiquitous and regularly read indicates that something is wrong between the sexes and that women are getting their emotional needs met outside of human interaction.

I think she has a very good point. Just as porn seems to influence sexual expectations, so does the romantic novel influence the female expectations of a relationship, and yet our society seems relatively indifferent it.

In Fireproof, the disaffected spouse forms a close relationship with a doctor, something which is portrayed in a sympathetic light by its Christian producers. But as commentator Brendan noted:

Men don’t want to meet the women in porn, they don’t want to have affairs with them or with other women. Porn is an aid to masturbation for men. I’m not a big fan of it myself, but it isn’t at all like flirting with a real life person of the opposite sex in a romantic/sexual/emotional way. The latter doesn’t always lead to affairs, but is pretty much always the gateway to an affair. It is treading on thin ice, and in the case if you fall through it isn’t “virtual adultery” or “lusting in the heart” — it’s good, old fashioned “fucking someone else” adultery. Porn viewing, by contrast, does not lead to adultery. Now, if Caleb were perusing personals sites, or Ashley Madison, or Craigslist or something like that, it would be comparable to what Katherine was doing. Viewing porn for masturbation purposes is not — it’s sinful, but a sin of a very different order than the kind of sin that is the natural gateway to real, physical adultery.

And that’s what I think is curious. Why is overt fantasy sexuality viewed as an obvious evil whilst real intimate(non-sexual) friendship with another member of the opposite sex whilst married, not? I think it’s because we’ve so stripped our feelings from our sexual natures, through ascetic decaranalisation, that we believe that intimate friendships in with the opposite sex are completely possible without a sexual element eventually making its way into the picture. Romantic love is ultimately completed in sexual union, and the decarnalised view of romantic love so downplays the sexual component of it that it causes people to adopt the heuristic of thinking of sex and love as two separate things. Therefore it's perfectly understandable how “Christian” producers could portray our heroine as doing nothing wrong even though she has exposed herself to the real possibility “old fashioned” adultery. Whilst her husband is considered adulterous by looking at fantasy images.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Elementary Forces.

2011-12-05T23:54:00.002+10:30

Dalrock recently put up another thought provoking post. He gives a commentary on a truly awful film, Fireproof. The film is about the breakdown of a marriage and its story is typical of many marriages. You can go over to his site and read about the details of the movie and his commentary, but I thought it would be worthwhile to make a few comments of my own, especially on the subject of love.

A while ago I wrote a post on the subject of "parasitic lovers". It appears to me that a lot of marriages today are an arrangement of mutual benefit between two parasites ; each staying in a relationship only as long as they are a recipient of some benefit from the host. As soon as the host stops providing the benefit they move on. Another name which I've seen to describe the phenomenon is "Hedonic Marriage".

"Hedonic Marriage " really should be seen as a "fruit" of the modern culture and it is the end consequence of viewing marriage as a sort of "contract"; an exchange of goods. I suppose it is the natural consequence of the "Me" society; a view which places the happiness of the individual above else, even above the happiness of those about them. It's inevitable that in such a culture its constituents will want to emphasise their rights whilst dismissing their obligations. It is the underlying motive behind social atomisation.

Symbiotic love, on the other hand, recognises that's its own well being is contingent upon the well being of the host. Even at its basest level, the recipient of the host's benefits recognises that if they wish to continue receiving them, they've got to ensure the well being of the host. Unlike parasitic love, it is the love that binds.

Conservative Tectonics.

2011-12-02T11:00:00.001+10:30

I get the impression that I'm persona non grata at several traditionalist websites. I can understand their position as many of my comments are decidedly nontraditional. As I've argued before, in previous posts, part of the problem with current modern predicament is traditionalism, which paradoxically provides the "life force" for leftist ideas. For example, the traditionalist idea of creating a social structure which subordinates women to exclusive domesticity innervates the feminist movement by reaction. Happy women, like happy workers, are not militant except by injustice; and societal structures which rub against human nature are ultimately percieved as oppressive. Sure, there are individuals who are objectively evil and wish to destroy what is good, but evil ideas, much like weeds, can only grow in the fertile soil of discontent.

My contention, and that of G.K. Chesterton and Whittaker Chambers, is that traditional society, whilst good overall, had several "structural anomalies" which produced profound discontent. It's also my contention that traditional western society could have survived intact (albeit in different form) had it changed in a way that accommodated those pressures without compromising the foundations upon which it was built. The problem was that it didn't, and it created the pressure cooker situations from which radicalism emerged. Of course, traditionalists deny this; attributing to outright malice the motives of their opponents. This has the dual convenience of entrenching their own sense of moral superiority and permits the avoidance of any self reflection as to their own part in the state of affairs.

Therefore the traditionalist is always always harking to reset the system to "initial conditions". The problem is that initial conditions generate the same pressures that radicalised society in the first place, and thus the seeds of revolution are re-energised again. Tradition is the midwife of modern radicalism.

And I think this is why conservatism has failed in the 20th Century; it's failed because it's hitched it's star to traditionalism. I mean, what Negro would want to go back to traditional society? What intelligent woman would? Or even your average worker? How many of them would want to return to peon's existence that was the lot of the worker in early industrial capitalism? Is it any surprise that the main advocates of traditionalism are reasonably prosperous white males?

Practical, that is political Conservatism, has realised that a return to initial conditions is political suicide and hence has to accommodate the wishes of the electorate. The net result is that modern political conservatism gradually morphs into liberalism by incorporating many of liberalism's ideas as a matter of political expediency. Indeed, today's conservatism would be regard as leftist radicalism by the conservatives of a century ago. The question is, why does it morph liberal?

It's my contention that modern liberalism is the only "new ideas" generator out there at the moment. The problem is, because of the liberalism's intellectual underpinnings, it's highly likely the solutions proffered by it a likely to wrong. Conservatism, strongly influenced by traditionalism, doesn't generate new ideas because all the "solutions" were worked out years ago by our forefathers. There's no need for any new thinking as all the thinking has been done for us before; it's a question of defending. Conservatism is always on the back foot.

But it's worse than that. Because people don't want to return to "initial conditions" traditional conservatism becomes an exercise in defensive irrelevance. Russell Kirk may have been admired and read amongst thinking conservatives but no one else cares. From James Kalb's recent essay:

The canonical writers weren’t much help even among conservatives. Kirk’s romantic Burkeanism never had many adherents. Weaver and Voegelin, from most people’s perspective, were off in an ivory tower. And favoring the free market over socialism has gotten some traction, but it’s not enough for an overall conservative movement.

Now, I've had philosophic differences with Mr Kalb, and I think I'm "on the nose" with him, but being a man of ideas and not personalities, I've got to applaud him for his this essay: Liberal Values and the Seduction of the American Right. It appears that Mr Kalb has had a shift in his thinking, and it's a shift in the right direction. Commenting on the failure of Conservatism:

We’re in a political hole because we’re in an intellectual hole. If the problem is what people think makes sense, then we have to change or at least challenge accepted understandings in a very fundamental way.

and,

So much for the good. With respect to the true, it’s evident that we need the concept of transcendence, of something that exceeds what we can say or know. The point of talking about truth is that what we say about almost anything is certainly incomplete and might be altogether wrong. That shows we need “truth” as a higher point of reference. It’s an ideal standard that we can’t altogether attain, but can’t do without.

Our debate with the liberals is not over preference choices, rather, the conservative understanding of reality implies that certain things are, or are not, in accordance with the "truth" of reality: Things are either right or wrong. Truth is the idee fixe of the Conservative, tradition is the idee fixe of the Traditionalist. Now, it's true that there may be truth in tradition, and the Conservative is happy to embrace tradition where it is true, but where tradition is in error the conservative will ditch tradition. Of course, by framing conservatism as traditionalism, this immediately pushes him outside of the conservative fold. Both the Left and the Right hate him.

The task then, for the modern conservative, is to look at history and ask, "Where did it go wrong"? "How can we change without compromising our core principles"? Even more importantly; What are our blindspots?" The most effective attack is the one that is not foreseen.

The fundamental error of thinking conservatism has been its assumption of the infallibility of tradition. This is the intellectual hole which conservatism has fallen in to and has effectively rendered it irrelevant. This is why any "Right Renaissance" is not going to occur within the mainstream right but rather outside it. It won't be the academy but the in the blogosphere where the right is reborn. This is not because I'm some technological junkie, rather because the internet provides a forum where all the "odballs" can debate and thrash the ideas out. Orthodox conservatism permits no such discussion. To quote Curtis Le May, speaking of American military culture in Fifties and Sixties:

We must-but do not-have a defense organization which permits controversy, which permits the "unthinkable" condition to be debated freely, which permits the screwball idea to come forth, and which tolerates the maverick officer. The Andrew Jacksons, the Zachary Taylors, the Ulysses S. Grants, the George Deweys, the Alfred Thayer Mahans, the Billy Mitchells, are not nurtured in orthodoxy. They are not products of a party line. And we have not infrequently called on them to save our shirts.

(Curtis Le May, America is in Danger. )

It is only after the traditionalists have been nearly ground into the dust that their prodigal sons will come back to save them.

Anaemia

2011-11-27T21:54:00.000+10:30

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated - into vice.
Nietzsche

A commentator on my previous post made the following remark.

At least to this social conservative, you're going to have to work harder to sell the idea that hypergamy, as it is generally expressed, is not a vice. Here's a piece I wish I'd written, that does a splendid job of pointing out the trouble with 'alpha' behavior. I cannot believe that it is right and proper for women to select for that. It strikes me as something akin to men fetishizing breasts to the point of liking implants - it's a particularly unnatural and dangerous form of superficiality. If that is what it is, not only should it not be pandered to; it should be denounced left and right as the character defect, the symptom of the Fall, that it is.

The commentator links to a website which gives a good critical assessment of "Bad Boy" alpha-behaviour. From the link:

Who can provide for and defend the community. That is the one and only thing that will matter to anyone. For the men, they need to know that their fellow survivors can count on them to fight should the need arise. For the women, they need to know that the men they're now relying on can defend them. In today's world, the ability to provide is not valued at all; men that can provide for a family are a dime a dozen in the eyes of, well, everyone. There is no need, it's implied, for the providers anymore. What there is a need (nay, a desire) for are men that really can't provide, but can only push all the right buttons.

and,

The "jerk" is merely a man that says and does the right things that make a woman attracted to him. What is interpreted as "jerk behavior" is really a casual disregard for the opinions of others, a willingness to do what one wants, and a lack of fear when saying what's on one's mind. This comes across as "strong, capable provider", but women can be much more easily deceived than men in this respect: beauty is harder to change than behavior. Whereas a woman can easily attract a man with her beauty, a man must use his personality and charisma to attract a woman. Women, however, can be fooled into thinking a man is an Alpha when he is nothing more than a jobless tool because what attracts them is not based on appearances, but on actions. A man may change his behavior to hide who he really is, but to the worldly woman this is undetectable and irrelevant: "he just feels right."

I think what horrifies many Social Conservatives with regard to Game is that it would appear to advocate behaviours which are immoral, corrupting and exploitative. Furthermore, the sight of a nice young girl throwing herself with abandon and at "bad boy" whilst a "nice boy" is ignored intuitively strikes them as wrong. Social Conservatives operate within a moral universe where virtue should be rewarded and vice punished, and to them there seems to be something perversely wrong with a young girl physically giving herself to a man with attributes which seem so totally contrary to the Christian teaching and even prudent common sense. The SoCon intuits that there is something wrong with this picture, and indeed there is, but his intellectual foundations preclude him from coming to an accurate diagnosis. Their only explanation seems to be that the girl was either manipulated or that she lacked moral agency. Game then, is seen as a manipulative technique or something that works on women who aren't quite right; for example, women with low self esteem.

And then there is this:

Hello everyone, i have been married to my husband just over a year but we have been together for around about six years. I love my husband a lot and care for him so much. But unfortunately when we get intimate i am not turned on or even want to have sex. We used to be so passionate and the sex has been fantastic! But the last half year has just suddenly fizzled. And when we discuss it, it's obvious it's not him but me. We find it hard to talk about, as he is normally really upset about it so we normally just ignore the issue. My husband is 10 years older than me, i am in my mid 20's. He is very handsome, intelligent and very loyal to me, so i am not sure why this is happening. I am not at all interested in other men or sex with anyone else. My libido must be so low! I have been hanging around my uni friends (females) a lot more than usual and going out (as we are all graduating), but this is not because i want to meet anyone but more because i just want to get out and away from the situation. Any advice or help or discussion would be very much appreciated as i feel really lost at the moment.

This is not an atypical case, and a cursory search of the internet will find many similar stories. In fact, one of the more common problems seen in General Practice (Family medicine) is that of the woman who presents because of a low libido, and who feels guilty about it. These women have husbands who are hard working, loyal and treat them well, They want to be able to sexually satisfy and feel a desire for them and don't know why they can't. They are not hoping to hop onto the carousel, rather, what they want is for their sex drive to return to normal.

Now, it's quite true that in some cases circumstantial stressors such as financial difficulties, young children, illness, etc. can be contributory factors towards a diminished libido, however in many instances no cause is found. (In my experience, biochemical factors are rarely at play). On the other hand, how do you explain this?

I can completely relate to everyone who says that they aren't attracted to their husband anymore. I am in the same boat, except for I have no reason except for something inside me, to not be attracted to my husband. He is great he sends me flowers, writes me love notes, talks to me all day while we work, we are true soul mates in every way, he is a great husband & father, but for some reason when it comes to intimacy I just don't want it with him. I know I have what it seems to me is the perfect husband and I'm not attracted to him, he hasn't let himself go we are best friends and do everything together, so I'm not quite sure what is happening. I know it's me, their isn't anything wrong with my sex drive because I want to have sex just not with him and I can't figure it out.

I've been having feelings towards another man I work with, nothing has happened becuz I can't cheat on my husband but it makes me wonder why I have sexual feelings for someone else other than my husband, I wonder what I'm missing from my marriage to see it in someone else.

Now, if there were an organic cause to this lady's problem then there should be a universal reduction in libido, instead, what we find is a specific reduction which is directed toward her husband but not toward other men. Note too, that the woman is herself totally perplexed by this state of affairs; she has no insight into her condition and does not want to ride the carousel. (Note to MRA advocates, the women here aren't consciously lying). Why is she--despite wanting to--not attracted to her romantically perfect husband and yet is still attracted to other men?

The terminology of love has been mangled quite a bit so what I want to make some clear definitions.

Conjugal love: The romantic and sexual love for a member of the opposite sex.

Eros: Contemporary use of term has sexual connotations, but here I'm using it in the philosophical sense where Eros referred to a type of love where the lover both wanted union and took delight in the object of his affections. Unlike our modern usage of it, Eros was a type of love that could apply to non-sexual matters. For example, Plato felt that the love of philosophy was erotic since the philosopher both desired knowledge and took delight in it. The important aspect of the concept here is that Eros recognises and delights in the inner beauty of the object comprehended. From the Wiki Link above:

Ultimately, Plato considers Eros to be a longing for wholeness or completeness, a daemon whose aim is to reach wisdom without ever owning her. In that sense Eros is synonymous with philosophy, which literally means the love or desire of wisdom. And since wisdom is the greatest of virtues, Eros is therefore the desire for the greatest of goods. However, it is important to note that for Plato, the object of love does not necessarily have to be physically beautiful. In fact the greatest of goods will be eternal, and physical beauty is in no way eternal. If he achieves possession of the beloved's inner beauty and goodness, the lover's need for happiness will be fulfilled, because happiness is the experience of knowing that you are participating in the Good.

The conceptually broad nature of Eros doesn't really help us when it comes to conjugal love. Since conjugal love deals with a particular type of Eros; an Eros directed towards a specific person which is meant to ultimately result in a physical sexual fleshy consummation. C.S. Lewis, in his "The Four Loves", describes this love as erotic(conjugal) love as being comprised of both Eros and Venus (the sexual appetite). I think a far better description of it would be to describe Erotic love as being composed of both Eros and Libido.

Now Libido needs to be understood as the sexual appetite: the desire to have sex. It is an appetite who's origin is in our biology; our flesh. It is an involuntary subconscious physiological response to the appropriate stimuli. To put it crudely, given the appropriate signals, it's what makes us horny.

Therefore: Conjugal Love= Eros + Libido.

To understand what is fundamentally wrong with the romantic conception of love, and how it injures conjugal love, it needs to be recognised that our modern conception of it has been strongly influenced by the ascetic religious traditions of the West. A tradition which denigrated the sinful nature of the body whilst elevating the spiritual nature of it. The Pagan and Christian ascetics were constantly warring against the flesh, seeing it as an impediment to sanctity, and many of them wanted to deny it its legitimacy. Fasting, flagellation and chastity were considered signs of an elevated spiritual nature, and over time, an association between goodness and bodily denial permeated into high western culture and our traditional conception of romantic love was formed. Romantic love is Sexual Love stripped of Libido: it's all Eros, in the philosophical sense. To quote C.S. Lewis again:

It has been widely held in the past, and is perhaps held by many unsophisticated people to-day, that the spiritual danger of Eros arises almost entirely from the carnal element within it; that Eros is " noblest " or " purest " when Venus[Libido:Ed] is reduced to the minimum The older moral theologians certainly seem to have thought that the danger we chiefly had to guard against in marriage was that of a soul-destroying surrender to the senses. It will be noticed, however, that this is not the Scriptural approach. St. Paul, dissuading his converts from marriage, says nothing about that side of the matter except to discourage prolonged abstinence from Venus (I Cor. vii,5)

C.S. Lewis. The Four Loves.

This is what Nietzsche meant by his comment. He recognised that ascetic Christianity hadn't killed Eros(Conjugal love) completely, rather the sexual element of it, Libido, was turned into a vice. What was considered legitimate by the ascetics was an anaemic version of conjugal love: Romantic love. It was lots of "contemplation" of the other's beauty with hardly any legitimate sexual desire. Legitimate love was something far less fleshy and far more platonic. And the whole subject of sexual desire was consigned to the filthy habits of the morally corrupt and was not a subject worthy of serious thought. And so whilst the West was well aquainted with vice it was rather ignorant of libido especially the female component as the feminine was considered higher and more pure than the masculine. Traditionalists use this conceptual framework when it comes to approaching sexual relationship matters.

Take the following situation. Our nice Taylor Swift girl-next-door is standing next to Tommy the thug and is feeling a fire in her loins. She knows that he is not good for her yet she is incredibly attracted to him. She knows he is bad but doesn't know why he makes her feel really, really good. She doesn't register that her attraction to him is not a choice but a physiological response: It is flesh speaking to spirit. A battle ensures between her reason which knows Tommy is bad, and her flesh, which knows Tommy is good. If the Rationalisation Hamster is strong, within a few minutes, Tommy has his hand up Taylor's skirt.

Taylor's in heaven; it's her five minutes of alpha.

Pushing aside the moral considerations of the act, Taylor's actions mystify the Tradtionalists. Tommy is clearly not a good friend to Taylor, and his abusive behaviour in no way follows the romantic script. Two seconds of rational calculation will show that Tommy is not interested in any long term relationship, so why is Taylor apparently acting against her own self interest? Taylor's actions are a mystery to them. Their only explanation is that Taylor either lacks moral agency( low self esteem, low IQ, depressed, intoxicated, etc) or is morally deficient. The are so invested in their delegtimisation of libido that it never occurs to them to consider that libidinous aspect of Taylor's actions, so invested are they in their romantic model.

The problem with the ascetic romantic conception of love is that it's premised on the fact that consummation will occur given sufficient platonic contemplation by the lovers and the importance of sexual characteristics and behaviour as a prelude to consummation are dismissed. An understanding of what it takes to get "horny" or even conjugally interested, is effectively discouraged as a subject of polite conversation. The net result of this cultural practice is that Western society cannot rationally assess female sexuality preferring to work with a conceptual model that ignores the reality of female sexual desire. Now this is is the mainstream Kool Aid that is sold to young men through the media and through the Conservative religious institutions. The meme traps timid guys into thinking that it gives them a chance with a woman without needing to display some overt masculine qualities, whilst religious guys who have a pair, "are struggling to behave like nice gentlemen" on the advice of their religious leaders. It's a double poison since it stops the beta male from "alpha-ing" up and emasculates the religious guy who is naturally alpha. The winners are the rakes. The losers are the good guys and the women.

Furthermore, operating within the frame of romantic love automatically subverts the woman's libido by making the man a supplicant of her affections. Sure, a woman may be quite flattered by all the romantic attention she is getting, but after a while the libido kicks in and the desire for a man emerges. Romantic love subverts the natural power dynamic which fires a woman's libido as the man is told he must be supplicant to gain her affections; she gets to be in charge. Contrary to Christian teaching, she has assumed headship of the man. You can't make this stuff up.

The fact that women get hot and horny for alpha males is not because of any deficiency in moral reasoning, it's because their libido's are "wired up" that way. The strongly arousing feelings of attraction are not an aberrations but are a pre-determined physiological response. Now, when "Gamers" say that "attraction is not a choice" they are basically asserting two millenia of Christian teaching on the subject of appetite:

It means the inclination of a thing to that which is in accord with its nature, without any knowledge of the reason why such a thing is appetible.[ED] This tendency originates immediately in the nature of each being, and remotely in God, the author of that nature (Quæst. disp., De veritate, Q. xxv, art. 1). The appetitus elicitus follows knowledge. Knowledge is the possession by the mind of an object in its ideal form, whereas appetite is the tendency towards the thing thus known, but considered in its objective reality (Quæst. disp., De veritate, Q. xxii, a. 10).

Libido is the sexual appetite. What this passage implies is that God himself has implanted the hypergamous nature of a woman's libido. This does not mean that God permits adultery or fornication, rather, their sexual response is designed to be elicited in the presence of alpha behaviour. No alpha, no libido it's as simple as that. Blaming women for being sexually attracted to bad boys is just like feminists blaming men for being attracted to beautiful feminine women.

This is what I think horrifies the SoCons and the Feminists; in that the flesh is indifferent to their own conceptions of virtue. Now it's one thing to say that the appetites need to be controlled, but it's another thing to deny the appetites the legitimacy of their natures. SoCons think that their is something wrong with a woman who starts feeling sexual around a bad boy ( I used to think the same), the problem here is that SoCon's conflate moral beauty with sexual beauty. The problem with the girl who runs off with the bad boy is not the nature of her sexual desire, but in her self control; she is imprudent. Being attracted to him is not wrong, it just is. Running away with him is the wrong thing to do from a moral point of view, but it's perfectly understandable from a sexual gratification one.

Biology is not destiny (Something SoCons seem to forget) and human beings can exercise control over themselves. Whilst attraction is not a choice, choosing whether to follow through on the impulse is. What makes the woman a good Christian is that she resists her desires, not that she has them. But what also needs to be remembered is that the Good Christian woman can't will her desire ex nihilo in the absence of a hypergamous mate, and the sexual anaemia of many marriages is due to too much romance and not enough hypergamy.

But the other issue that doesn't get far enough mention in the manosphere is just how much happier women are when they are in a hypergamous relationship. Women who were cranky and miserable are suddenly much more fun to be around with. The beneficiaries of "Game" aren't just men.

The task then for today's Christian thinkers is how to incorporate the insights of hypergamy within the context biblical marriage. The SoCons will say that can't be done and they point to the hedonism of many of many of Games practitioners. I think commentator Thursday was absolutely correct in his view that many of Game's critics are "associationist" thinkers; conflating the lifestyle with the knowledge. These would have been the same people who would have denied Plato and Aristotle any influence in Christian thought since they were Pagans. Men like Keoni Galt and Dalrock have shown that it is possible to be hypergamous whilst remaining in a stable marriage with benefits for both parties.

(Hat tip to Robert Brockman II who directed me to the artist, Alex Gray, who painted the image.
Here is a NSFW image which I think is highly pertinent to our discussion. Yeah, I know it's New Age but it helps with the conceptualisation.)

A Few Points.

2011-11-21T21:24:00.002+10:30

This is a religious post, so whilst I'd encourage my atheist readers to have a look at it, I can understand them if they don't.

I felt that I should clarify a point with regard to my last point. Unlike Dalrock, I don't believe that there is a collusion between Feminists and Social Conservatives. People need to understand that the two movements are, at their core, fundamentally opposed to each other. I personally think that the claims about Social Conservationism deliberately assisting Feminism are wrong. Rather, the traditional mainstream conception of femininity is synergistic with Feminist conception of it. Indeed, the more I think about it, the ascetic romantic conceptions of Gender may have laid the groundwork for feminism. Gender is rooted in biology, not spirit, and hence any weakening of the legitimacy of biology strengthens an ascetic conception of it.

The reason I wanted to make this comment is because I'm Catholic and pro-Christian, and many of the manosphere crowd are profoundly hostile to both, and I want to clearly disassociate myself from them. In identifying a weak point in mainstream Christianity I hope to assist it, not destroy it which does not seem to be the case with a large portion of the manosphere, who seem to feel that some sort of western renaissance can occur without the foundation stone of European Culture: Christianity.

Some commentators have (on other sites) have accused me of painting a caricature of Western tradition.
I suppose Benedict's Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, should be mentioned here;

This is due first and foremost to the fact that man is a being made up of body and soul. Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of eros can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness. The epicure Gassendi used to offer Descartes the humorous greeting: “O Soul!” And Descartes would reply: “O Flesh!”.[3] Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature. Only thus is love —eros—able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur.

Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed [ED]. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere.

Benedict here acknowledges the existence of anti-corporeal tendencies in the Christianity (I presume here he means all of Christianity. Catholicism had its puritanical elements as well as the Protestant and Eastern Orthodox religions). So, I suppose my fellow Catholics who feel I'm being revisionist with regard to the Church may want to take the matter up with the Pope. The impression I get, from a historical perspective, is that the Catholic Church has been trying to re-emphasise the legitimacy of the body recently. JP II was particularly active in that regard.

The Feminist in Every Social Conservative.

2011-11-19T20:14:00.000+10:30

Dalrock has recently put up a post (with a very interesting comment thread) which I feel should be commented on.

Many commentators have noted the synergy between social conservatism and feminism. To quote Dalrock

The underlying feeling is; who cares, so long as they man up and marry these women once they are done riding the carousel. It turns out however that the men themselves very much do care. This is an extremely long time we are expecting men to go before marrying. During this time we have the unspoken expectation that they will work their tails off to be ready to act as a provider while not getting too used to being single. Each decade we have pushed the envelope a little further, and we expect each new generation of men to simply suck it up a little more and fill in the gaps. One can argue that they should have beat another man to the punch and married one of the small number of chaste young submissive women who were looking to marry. But this is just shuffling the deck chairs around. At the end of the day this will only determine which men marry in their early to mid 20s and which ones are forced to wait it out; the overall numbers won’t change because the change is being driven by the choices of women, not men.

Social Conservatives and Feminists have been pretty happy with this deal for the last 40 years. What could possibly go wrong?

To be fair to the Social Conservatives, I don't think any of them supported the feminist project and its hedonic imperatives, and many of them, if given a choice, would turn the clock back to a traditionalist conception of society. In other words, a society which contained the pre-conditions for militant feminism. What traditionalist's fail to understand, is that traditional society had it's inherent structural problems and it was these problems which gave birth to feminism. (But more on that later)

Although ostensibly, they are two totally opposed movements, Feminism and Social Conservatism both share a commonality which many fail to grasp. Both movements have a warped view of female sexuality; a warped view which ensures a synergy between the two streams of thought. Both feminism and social conservatism share an effectively similar conceptual understanding of woman which ignores her "flesh"; both are in essence ascetic movements.

The first thing that needs to be affirmed is that HYPERGAMY IS NOT A VICE, rather, it is the NATRUAL ORDER OF FEMALE SEXUAL DESIRE. Now hypergamy needs to be understood as not only as "mating up" in terms of resources and social status, but also as including mating with a sexually attractive mate. As Lady Hillingdon demonstrated, all the social and material resources in the world don't matter if a man lacks the carnal nature of hypergamy. Hypergamy needs to be though of a socio-sexual concept, not a solely a materialist one.

Commentator David Collard puts it as follows:

It seems possible to me that women are built to bond to the first man who masters her [ED]. In a healthy society, this will be a Mr Alpha-Enough who is her first and only lover, and for whom she is expected by social pressure to become Mrs Alpha-Enough. The problems develop when this process fails and she is left permanently bonded to such a man in her mind but in reality married to Mr Another-Guy. Or not married at all.

This is where Roissy’s “five minutes of alpha” being better than a lifetime of beta comes into play.

Now, it should be apparent why feminists deny hypergamy, because the whole feminist edifice crumbles at acknowledgement of its existence. Once you acknowledge that a woman's happiness is innately tied to a man who is capable of exerting socio-sexual dominance over a woman, then the whole idea of power-equality gets thrown out of the window.

On the other hand, the Social Conservative denial of hypergamy is more difficult to detect. Social Conservatives don't deny that women want to "mate up", but what they deny, or effectively downplay, is the sexual dimension of hypergamy: the importance of alpha. For a variety of reasons, Social Conservatives have a real problem in acknowledging female sexuality. Religious puritanism, historical paternalism and enforced female silence on the matter have engendered a conservative cultural conception of womanhood that paints a picture of the ideal woman as being relatively asexual. Sure there is much approving talk about beauty and love in the context of feminine identity, but as soon the subject of overt female sexuality becomes mentioned, the conservative approval is far more muted or outright critical.

If you look at it, pedastalisation, which is linked to the concept of romantic love, is really an expression of conservative anti-carnality. Women in mainstream conservative thought are are "above" the grubby desires of men, their purity and beauty as a sex, seems to disassociate them from any form of bodily function. It is a disconcerting thought to imagine the beautiful princess as moving her bowels or passing wind; and yet she does. Dante in his admiration of Beatrice never really raises the subject of tinea or body odour, because mention of such fleshy maladies brings Beatrice back to earth and out of the heavens. The flesh makes us real. So entrenched is the traditional conservative ~~pedestalisation~~ idealisation of women that that it shocks them when a woman's "fleshiness" is made evident.

Game, which is basically and understanding of female sexual desire, is attacked by Conservatives with pretty much the same language as used by its feminist critics, seeing it as some form of manipulation. It shocks the conservative that the pretty Taylor-Swift-like girl actually has desires of sexual ravishment. Indeed when sweet Taylor gets carnally intimate with Tommy the thug, the only explanation that the conservative gives is that Taylor was manipulated into performing the depraved acts. Never does the Social Conservative acknowledge that the woman is finding the manipulation extremely pleasurable and that she is allowing herself to be manipulated. There seems to be a failure to recognise the moral agency of women when it comes to sexual matters because the ideal conservative woman is relatively asexual (except when it comes to reproduction) This, of course, plays into directly into feminist hands when they wish to avoid the moral consequences of their actions.

The hi-jacking of Christianity by its ascetic-members has tended to downplay the carnal component of male /female relationships, instead focusing on the moral virtues. Christian romantic love, as formulated by these gnostics, was all agape and no eros. Love in this context effectively become a relationship between two disembodied souls, and practically, this is manifest in how Christians give each other marital advice. Its all about care and communication, treating each other fairly and justly, but far less talk about looking sharp, keeping in shape and eliciting sexual desire in each other. In fact, a lot of the ascetic-Romantic conception of love seems to be premised on the fact that corporal reality doesn't matter. For example, if a husband were to say that he doesn't find his obese wife--who still loves him-- attractive, opprobrium will usually be directed towards him and he would be attributed with moral fault. Apparently, according to the ascetics, love is meant to conquer all, including obesity, halitosis and flatulence.

This Social Conservative position stems from the rather too dominant ascetic's streak in Christian tradition, which was evidenced in the love of mysticism and hatred of earthly reality. These types tend to conflate Christ's sacrificial love with erotic love, which are two separate things. I can chose to sacrifice may life for a woman, but I can't choose to have an erection in the presence of an unattractive woman. Sexual attraction is not a choice, it's a physiological response, and the fact that the flesh is indifferent to moral virtue puts the ascetic types into a tizzy.

Whilst Social Conservatism and Feminism are two different ideological currents, both share the same effective conception of female nature; a nature that devoid of fleshy biological sexuality. Hypergamy strikes at the core of feminism in flatly refuting it's gender equality and it strikes at Social Conservatism by upturning it's conception of the feminine; a conception that is central to its understanding of sexuality. What the Social Conservatives fail to understand is that their conception of de-sexualised femininity--as if erotic didn't matter-- effectively provided and continues to provide the ideological justification which feeds feminist beast.

If a feminist says she wants to pursue a traditional masculine career such as a lumberjack, a conservative will grasp at all sort of reasons why a woman shouldn't be a lumberjack, usually arguing some sort of functional limitation. All it takes to prove that a woman can successfully perform the function, is for a woman to successfully perform the function; demolishing the Conservative's argument. If we admit the erotic dimension to the question however, we could rather successfully argue that masculine jobs make a woman sexually unattractive by masculinising her. Taking on a masculine job is the equivalent of voluntary hirsutism (NSFW). But this of course pre-supposes that a sexual argument is a culturally valid type of argument, something which social conservatism dismisses from the outset as a "base approach" to the subject.

Thoughts on Romantic Love.

2011-11-16T11:11:00.004+10:30

There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made.

G.K. Chesterton

Recently, I was commenting at a conservative religious site(I'm not linking to it) about the subject of Game. The host of the site was critical of Game, considering it to be anti-Christian at heart. Like most conservatives, the host could find nothing good about it, confusing the hedonist imperatives of some of its proponents with the actual teachings of Game.

I've often felt that one of the reasons why churchy types find game objectionable is because of its emphasis on getting a woman sexually aroused; and many churchy types point to this aspect of game when they criticise it. On the other hand, women who respond to game are frequently viewed negatively, as if there was something wrong with them. Even amongst a fair portion of the manosphere there is a lot of criticism of women who find players attractive.

I've been mulling over this point for a while, as I've often felt that there was something wrong with this line of reasoning. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the problem is not with the women but with their critics. The problem, I think, is in our cultural conception of romantic love.

There has always been an ascetic element in Western Culture which has viewed the pleasures of the flesh as morally suspect. Now, it's my belief that Christian culture has been hijacked by these ascetic types, and whilst Christianity has admittedly always warred against the flesh, the puritan aspect of it has seen this war as a war of extermination instead of subjugation. Subjugation at least recognises the validity of flesh's existence whilst keeping it under control, extermination denies the flesh's right to exist. And it appears that this puritan element of Christianity has had the upper hand in shaping our understanding of human sexuality and love.

Romantic love, as idealised, was always above the waist. Somehow, it was always a tender and romantic thing. Fluids, smells and noises were never mentioned; and the idea of a man and woman, shagging each other senseless, doesn't quite fit the fit the picture of romantic love. Indeed, one of the things about much romantic love is that it lacks a "physicality", instead, being something that exists on another plane.

This romantic view of love, was also contingent upon their being a romantic lover; a lover who was courteous, considerate, gentle and kind. And it was this romantic masculine ideal that became progressively entrenched in Western Culture, particularly amongst the middle class males. The resultant product was a consciously desexulised man, whom whilst "nice" to his wife, did nothing actively to satisfy her carnal nature.

Just as hunger predisposes the existence of bread, so do our carnal desire predispose the existence of a worthy lover. If we assume that average woman is in possession of a least some form of carnal appetite, then this implies that there is a man out there that can satisfy it. The problem is that the good man--at least defined by the puritans-- could not satisfy it, since he had been taught that the flesh was base and love is on a "higher plane",. The only man who could satisfy this carnal nature was the bad man: Puritan romanticism was the midwife of the "bad boy".

Now, women get a lot of heat in the manosphere for wanting to satisfy their carnal desires by sleeping with bad boys, in other words, the man-o-sphere is criticising women for doing what comes to them naturally. (See note below) However if we think about what is considered the ideal woman; the mother, the madonna and the whore, we find that there is a whorish dimension to the ideal woman's personality. What the manosphere is effectively doing is criticising women for being sexual. It's puritanism in another form.

What I'm not advocating here is sexual abandon, rather, rather a acknowledgement of the legitimacy of female carnality within the context of Christian marriage. A lusty but faithful wife is a good wife, not abnormal or impure in some way. If we recognise the legitimacy of this female carnality it becomes incumbent upon husbands to cater to it. Not in a sense of being a slave to a woman's desires, desires that are natural, rather recoginising that they are legitimate needs. Needs, that if not catered to, will give an opportunity for someone else to do so. The usual Christian response to sexual frustration is re-emphasise the importance of the vow and pay lip service to the frustration, what we never hear is the Christian emphasise the legitimacy of the husband or wife's sexuality. Sexuality here does not imply the simple mechanical action of sex, rather the whole gamut of features which stimulate the partner's desire. When's the last time you've ever heard a minister/priest/religious figure criticise a woman for letting herself go or the husband for being a wuss? The whole ascetic conception of romantic love is that it will conquer all, and that sexuality is not that important.

But as long as Christians keep peddling this "asexual romantic" version of marital love, they are undermining the foundations of that institution. Firstly, by ignoring carnal legitimacy, they are promoting an institution that pseudo-legitimises sexual frustration. This does not mean that every Christian marriage is sexually frustrated, rather, if sexual frustration occurs in marriage it is not viewed as big deal and effectively ignored. The good Christian puts up with it and his faith is constantly tested, the bad Christian seeks satisfaction outside the marriage or deligitimises the institution or the culture that put him in that predicament. Strengthening christian marriage will come about only when there is a recognition of the legitimacy of its carnal component, not in the context of making babies, but as appetites in themselves which seek satisfaction. Wives injure their husbands and their marriages when they ignore this dimension and husbands injure their marriages when they fail to satisfy their wives' carnal natures. The current bad boy fetish is because the "good guys" are hyposexual.

Viewed in this light, a beta male, is simply hyposexual male from a woman's point of view. And this raises the second problem with the "romantic" view of love; it's an attack on concept of gender identity. Now, if our sexuality is part of our identity, then masculinity must be defined, at least partially, by what women find attractive. That which sexually arouses the woman is masculine, and that which sexually arouses the man, is feminine. Our gender identity is the complement of our opposite's sexual appetite. Traditional "hyposexual" romantic love is an attack on our gender identity since it legitimises a lover which ignores our sexual needs: Being manly doesn't matter, only being nice and kind and loving, any asexualised man will do.

The solution to this problem is to reassert the carnal nature of male-female love and legitimise it. Romance is important, but so are our fleshy needs. Romantic love needs to be alpha'ed up.

(For those Aspergy types. A woman who has taken a vow of marriage subordinates her desires to the marriage, hence if she breaks her vows for whatever reason she is the guilty party. But the degree of her culpability is contingent upon the actions of her partner. A partner who has been objectively neglectful of his marriage, in whatever sphere, bears some of the blame as well. Wussy and nice men aren't completely innocent. A man has to have a pair.)

Addendum:

Hayley, over at Hayley's Halo seems to be thinking along parallel lines:

Also, I think the other, not-really-acknowledged part of it is that for all the admonishments for young, Christian women to look forward to the day God brings them to the special man God has picked out Just For Them, a lot of young, Christian women just don’t possess the suite of wifely skills that would increase their marital prospects. Sure, there are hyper-organized young women whose idea of heaven is The Container Store, but there are just as many, if not more, slobby girls out there whose rooms look like hurricanes blew through them. A lot of girls don’t know the basics of cooking. A lot of girls don’t clean…much. They don’t iron, they don’t decorate, they don’t know how to look for bargains or budget, they don’t know how to dress themselves with both dignity and style. Some of these skills come with time and experience, but a lot of girls can only offer their youth and their love for Jesus. That’s just not enough when it comes to marriage, but so much churchly advice does these girls wrong by teaching them that Mr. Right will be identifiable by his love for her good heart alone and that he will arrive in God’s Perfect Timing. So just keep on being frumpy and praying, because God can see your beautiful heart even if those sin-blinded men out there
who are probably addicted to porn and as a result can’t see your true beauty
can’t. Is this really the best way to offer hope to unmarried women? [Or men, Ed.]

A Beta Tragedy.

2011-11-10T23:28:00.000+10:30

A vastly underrated movie (I wonder why?). Duval and Douglas deserved Oscars (or at least some legitimate acting award) for their roles. I'm not saying this lightly, but it's probably one of the greatest movies of the 20th Century.

The last minute of this clip is especially worth watching.

The thing about this movie, is that Douglas is clearly the looser of the new world order, and while we may be sympathetic to his plight, there is clearly something wrong with him. Still, as damaged as he is, he is still less damaged that "winners" of our current society. In my mind, the real hero of this movie is Duval, who finally finds his manhood. He does this by restoring himself as the head of his family, protecting it, and leaving the morally corrupt organisation that employs him. Unlike Douglas, who in a mounting rage eventually reaches a point of self-destruction, Duval manages to find new life.

Authenticity

2011-11-08T23:12:00.003+10:30

Gucci Little Piggy ran a post the other day on the subject of the Men's Rights Movement and the adherents of Game. It was pretty much the same stuff that has been rehashed on the rest of the blogosphere. But one of the commentators, Harry, most likely a troll, raised what I think is a toxic contemporary issue: that of individual Authenticity. I've edited some of Harry's comments to get to the gist of his argument:

I want to find women who concede that who I AM is a value. I do not want to have to ADAPT to what SHE considers a value. I do not need a woman who does not see ME as a value to become *ideologically contrite* – I simply do not wish to be with her. A self-respecting man does not wish to be with people who do not see HIM (the genuine him) as a value.

and:

Right, and ADAPTING to female group preferences by faking what I think, feel, value, and believe, is NOT honestly presenting myself, is it? Yet you say this is part of game – to the extent that it is, the concept of HONEST GAME is a contradiction.

I would not insult the interviewer because it is not relevant to the interview. Honesty pays attention to context – you do not pointlessly volunteer information that is not relevant in that particular context. If the interviewer ASKED me, however, I WOULD be honest.

Being authentic does NOT mean volunteering every thought that is on your mind regardless of context. It DOES mean being honest when asked, and not disguising your true thoughts in context where it is appropriate to reveal who you ARE (social interactions).
See what I am getting at?

You make a GREAT point that a job does not NECESSARILY involve degrading yourself. I believe FAKING myself involves degrading myself. If a job required that, I would not do it. If a job required me to PRETEND to think otherwise than I do, I would not do it.
Its the same with women – if she requires me to pretend to be who I am not, I do not want her.

Harry's arguments, like all great heresies, contains an element of truth. Most men would agree, that one of qualities which define masculinity is independence, and Harry's contention that men shouldn't bend to the will or tastes of others would superficially seem quite correct. However, like a lot of mental pathologies, it's a good idea that has been taken out of context and taken too far. The question that needs to be asked is, is changing of self, in response to the desires of others, always wrong? Does a man diminish himself in someway by acquiescing to others?

It's an idea that's rooted in solipsism, an idea that assumes that uniqueness and goodness are the same, and that conformity is someway an evil. It is a profoundly anti-social concept and an inconsiderate view, in that it denies the legitimacy of other peoples desires, especially those desires that are in themselves legitimate. It's boorishness masquerading as high principle.

The reason why I raise this issue is because of one of the subtle unndercurrents that bobs up occasionally in the Game and MRA communities, namely, the illegitimacy of a woman's desires. There somehow seems to be this meme that keeps rearing its head, that a woman is somehow in the wrong for wanting an alpha male. There seems to be this disapproval amongst quite a few men, especially in the MRA community that a woman is somehow evil for wanting an alpha male.

Now, there seems to be fair amount of scientific evidence that suggests that women involuntarily find certain traits sexually attractive and that this response is relatively hard wired: Attraction is not a choice. Therefore is a man somehow inauthentic by changing himself in someway to satisfy a woman's desires.

I mean, if we flip the script for a moment, would we criticise a fat woman for loosing weight in order to make herself more attractive to her mate? Would we criticise a woman who instead of spending all the household finances chose to restrain herself in order to keep her husband happy? Would we criticise a woman who dressed in skimpy lingerie, to keep her husband happy, even though she normally would be quite happy in her standard cotton underwear. Would we say that she is inauthentic or comprimising herself in such a way? Most normal people would say that such a woman is a good woman for doing these things.

In fact, her changing to satisfy her husband has made her more womanly. We become more ourselves when we are considerate of the legitimate desires of others. A man who can push his wife's sexual and emotional buttons is more manly than one who can't. It's therefore incumbent upon men to ensure that they make themselves attractive to their partners. Men and women are complementary. We were made for each other and we aren't ourselves when we pretend that the other does not exist or matter.

Of course, it would be the radical feminists who would be the first to disagree with this line of thought (It's why I suspected that "Harry" was a woman). Their line of reasoning, is that any "sacrifice" a woman makes for the sake of a man is somehow a loss of her "identity". It's the same argument made by Harry and some the MRA types. In fact, a lot of MRA thinking has the same structure as feminist thinking, and sometimes I wonder if the MGTOW types are really the male versions of Andrea Dworkin. What happens when sexual desire needs to be sated and women are off the radar? It becomes a choice between celibacy and Homosexuality.

We can't be fully men without recognising that being a man involves being able to satisify the desires of a woman. Think about it.

Intuition.

2011-11-04T10:49:00.000+10:30

Much conservative thought, particularly religious, is of the opinion that the great turning point in the West, the turning point which has led us to the current doleful social predicament, was the West's embracement of the Enlightenment. Commentator Brandon, sent me this link, where the author argues the superior intuitive case for Christianity. Here the author argues that Christianity becomes fundamentally weakened when it bases itself upon rationality. Now, I haven't singled out this author for any particular criticism, rather he is a good expositor for what is an increasingly vocal faction of the conservative movement; the anti-rationalist movement.

Somehow, there seems to be this idea floating about in conservative circles, that native intuitive goodness is somehow corrupted by thorough rationalism. My response to this line of "reasoning", to use an Australian colloquialism, is it's bullshit.

This idea, of the intuitive innate goodness of people, is what is at the heart of the most socially destructive impulse in our society: the cult of sentimentality. Born of the Romantic movement, the cult of sentimentality, which places personal intuition above logical reasoning and empirical data is the main motive force behind moral relativism. Furthermore, it's the same claptrap as pushed by Rousseau and his hair brained friends: that of the noble savage. So it's somehow funny to see a conservative site, particularly a religious one, push the crypto-Rousseauian Kool-Aid with its imprimatur.

The religious Right has a problem with the enlightenment, believing that it was the beginning of the great turning away from God. This of course is a superficial and incomplete understanding of the time. Reason, as St Thomas reminds us, is not opposed to the faith, rather the two are complementary. Good reasoning, St Thomas argued, serves to illuminate the faith. Bad reasoning, on the other hand, is the enemy. The Enlightenment would not have been a problem if its worst elements lived up to its ideal. Rather, many of it's chief proponents couldn't recognise a rational idea if it struck them in the head. The problem with the enlightenment, especially in the French instance, is that reason became subordinated to the romantic notions of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It was in this era, that "feelgood" politics made its rebirth after being banished from Europe since classical times.

The Jacobin faction of the Enlightenment never had a problem suppressing an idea or fact that didn't sit with their political program. Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was perhaps the premier example of a good rationalist thinker in those times, yet the Jacobins -the great upholders of "reason"- had no problem having him guillotined. (Symbolic, don't you think?) The party of reason lopping of the head of society's most reasoned man

A critical eye will see that the enemy is not the good reasoning which came out of the Enlightenment but the bad. The Enlightenment didn't just give us atheism, but it gave birth to the forces that gave us anaesthetics, antibiotics, electricity and sewerage. Think about that for a while.

What people tend to forget is that the Enlightenment didn't just give birth to the scientific age it also gave birth to the Romantic movement as well. This my friends, is where the rot sets in. People tend to forget that the flame of the Romantic movement was lit by the enlightenment. The real damage to Western society was not made because of the the appeal to reason, but rather the retreat from it. The Enlightenment put a bullet into the head of the Classicist.

It appears that at the time of the Enlightenment, European culture underwent a bifurcation.
Rationalism, after a brief period of universal vogue, was carried over into technical culture, where it made tremendous strides, whilst romanticism was carried over into the rest of Western culture. Western society becomes schizophrenic at this point, on one hand it becomes hyper-rational in some of its facets (the facets where it is immensely successful) , and irrational in others. The culture that could be quantified advanced, whilst the culture that couldn't declined.

The romantic movement was an justification of intuition over reason. Noble feelings trumped grubby details, and it was better to be agreeable and nice than disagreeable and good. Worst still, was it to be right and boring. How you felt about anything is all that mattered. This movement has culturally entrenched and is one of the motive forces behind political correctness. Sentimentality is its public manifestation. Readers are urged to consult Dr Daniel's writings on the subject.

The problem with Romanticism is that habituates an individual towards irrationality. Once again to quote Theodore Dalrymple:

an important feature of sentimentality — one that is disastrous in deciding policy — is the mistaking of a wish for the fact. We would like there to be some better method of dealing with criminals than imprisonment, therefore there is, and must be, such a method. Another important distinguishing feature of sentimentality is that it often manifests itself in a conspicuous display of feeling greater than that which is actually felt by the person displaying it. The sentimentalist often wants to deceive himself as well others. One might almost say that sentimentality is the tribute that indifference pays to compassion

and,

The disregard of the most obvious but disturbing reality in favour of wishful thinking and the desire to appear, both to oneself and to others, as more compassionate than one really is, in short sentimentality, has been characteristic of British social policy for decades. It has led to the police being more assiduous about victim support than about preventing crime or detecting those who have committed it; it has led to the admission in our courts to the ultimate manifestation of psychotherapeutic kitsch, the victim impact statement, in which the victim of a murder is turned by his close relatives into a martyred hero, ex officio as it were, as if what were wrong with murder were the loss of a charming smile or a wonderful sense of humour, with the unpleasant and brutal implication that the murder of charmless or humourless people is a lesser offence. There has long been a dialectical relationship between sentimentality and brutality.

and,

Sentimentality is hardness of heart, or even contempt, masquerading as feeling. It is to sympathy what incontinence is to urination (except, of course, that it is voluntary, and is vastly more destructive). It is mental and emotional laziness, a refusal to discipline the gratifying glow of self-regard by deeper reflection.

Now it's important to introduce another strand of conservative thought at this point. Amongst the New Right there is a notion that Christianity is one of the corrupting forces of the West, and surprisingly, it's a line of reasoning that I have some sympathy with. However I don't think it is Christianity which is the problem, but the romantic interpretation of it. Christianity becomes a societal toxin when enough of its members stop being good and start being nice. To the romantic Christian, Jesus talks about Hell but never really means it, because he is a nice person and intuitively, how can the God of Love send anyone to Hell? Jesus is always accepting, despite biblical texts clearly demonstrating that acceptance was secondary to repentance. But as the good theologians of the past recongised, Hell and judgements are logical necessity which flows from a common sense reading of the biblical texts. Jesus is not nice, Jesus is Good:There is a difference.

Soft Christianity is not Christianity, it's sentimental pseudo-Christianity. It's a Christianity which places no demands and gives no rebukes; it's a Christianity without balls, and in the end, facilitates evil. The thing about good Christianity, is that it is a bit like instrument flying, in that it is counter-intuitve. Turning the other cheek rubs against the grain, but so is refusing to the feed the dogs with food that is meant for the children. The thing is that Christianity is not a wholly intuitive religion, and resting it on the foundations of intuition, corrupts and eventually destroys it. From the above mentioned blog.

I vividly recall a public debate I witnessed as a twenty-year-old college student. The debate was between an Ivan Karamazov-styled atheist and a Thomist. I was quite prepared to side with the Thomist, because I was a very reluctant agnostic at the time, but I had to admit at the end of the debate that the Thomist had not made a very good case for God. By relying solely on the Thomistic proofs for God’s existence, he left the more human side of the argument to the atheist. When the Thomist took the panoramic, philosophic view of Ivan Karamozov’s seven-year-old girl being beaten with a knotted rope, he left me and most of the audience with a decidedly hostile opinion of religious faith. “Apparently,” I thought, “there is a type of atheism that is purer and cleaner than some people’s religion.”[Ed] It was some years later before I saw a different side of God, through the good offices of Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare.

Our author's "logic" in this instance was purely emotional and naturally intuitive. His disgust at the Thomist was intuitional, not logical. A world without pain can only exist if God takes away the freedom of men to be bastards. Sin is the logically corollary of freedom, no matter how disagreeable this logical outcome is. The existence of a God in a world of pain is counter intuitive and repulsive, whilst an atheist who rambles, no matter how incoherently, against pain in the world is agreeable. Guess which side wins when the culture justifies the validity of emotion above rationality?See where intuition leads?

The problem is though, that sometimes that the early stirrings of religion seem intuitive and valid. And it appears that the early Church fathers worried about this a lot. Their answer seemed to be that our intuition was very unreliable, and hence intuitive insights should be put to the test. The test here being a thorough analysis, and not some uncritical acceptance or primacy of feeling. They wanted to logically analyse the phenomenon to see if it had any validity.

Faith, as I have asserted before, is not a product of cognition, but a vague empirical perception, and it is a perception which must maintain coherence with our understanding of reality. This implies a test both for rational and empirical ontological coherence of the phenomenon. An intuition which disregards reality is not the faith, it's fantasy. A religion which therefore disregards reason or even slights it, is likely to be wrong.

I mourn for Cambria. Cambria has yielded.

Cognitive Psychology and Democracy.

2011-10-20T22:00:00.002+10:30

I've spent the last week surveying the field of cognitive psychology. And whilst I had very little faith in Democracy prior, my reading has pretty much destroyed what little faith left I had in it.

The underlying, almost unspoken assumption in democratic theory (and economics as well) is that the average voter is both rational and objective, able to weigh and prudently consider the appropriate issues when it comes time to vote. Unfortunately, cognitive science seems to have accumulated a rather large body of empirical evidence which shows that most peoples' thinking processes aren't rational but intuitive. And as the cognitive scientists show, intuitive thinking is not rational thinking.

Keith Stanovich's book, What intelligence Tests Miss, provides an incomplete yet reasonable survey of field, and the emerging evidence strongly suggests that the average man is instinctively a cognitive miser (intuitive thinker). Now, intuitive thinking is not irrational thinking, rather it needs to be thought of as "roughly rational". It's "judgements", being determined by our affect and not by the laws of logic or data: The answer feels right.

For example, when asked which is heavier? A ton of bricks or a ton of feathers, a lot of people will instinctively state the feathers, and afterwards correct themselves. It appears that our mind forms associations, and uses these associations in a as the basis of an intuitive logic. Bricks are heavier than feathers and therefore the conclusion of the intuitive logic . It's only after consciously analysing the question that we realise that the two are the same. I'm not a Darwinian HBD type of guy, but you could see how this type of logic could come very handy in survival situations. In threatening situations, time is often of the essence, and sitting around trying to work out what is going on may have been counterproductive from the survival point of view. Sometimes its smarter to run first and think later.

Now, most cognitive psychologists seem to view cognitive miserliness in a negative light, seeing it at a sub-rational and "defective" form of thought, however, I view the matter differently. Given the almost universal prevalence of this type of thinking, it needs to be thought of as the default cognitive process of mankind. It's an efficient and computationally light type of thinking that is sufficient for the day to day tasks of life. We do things more by "feel" than by "logic". In fact, what probably happens is that logical actions which were cognitively appropriate for certain circumstance, become habituated, and applied to other similar circumstances. Most times this is inconsequential. Most times.

None of this is really new stuff. Advertisers have known for years that the way to convince people to buy their product was not to argue about it rationally but to present it in such a way that people would associate it with positive things. Apple Guy is cool. Windows Guy is a nerd. Getting into the complex details of the operating systems is only going to alienate a lot of the customers. Go with what the cool guy is buying because I'm not a nerd: Advertising is the manipulation of intuitive logic.

What cognitive psychology does show is that rationality takes some effort, and for most people it is an uncomfortable exercise. Hence, rationality tends to be deliberately avoided and as a result, is poorly exercised: The average man is deliberatively sloppy. From a systems point of view, this does not really matter s much when a man is the only person who suffers from the consequences of his actions, the real danger arises when this type of man is able to infect the governing process of the system as in a democracy. A irrational system is a system that will fail.

To the rational man, there is always a tradeoff between government spending and taxation, but to an intuitive man there is no such logic. To the intuitive man, when it comes time to vote, promises of lower taxes and higher social security payments are "no brainer", because both concepts are associated with pleasant thoughts, and hence there is no intuitive cognitive dissonance. Taxes, especially those paid by ourselves are always intuitively bad, no matter how justified, and are often resisted. Politicians who point out "inconvenient truths" are voted out in favour of the "feel good" politician. Sugar coated poison is preferred to bitter medicine. Democracy fails because the hard, yet necessary, decisions are intuitively wrong.

But the failure is not only political, it's cultural as well. The law is an both a reflection of culture and an agent of its change. When moral questions are put to the public vote, the intuitive mind wins over sober reflection. For example, the abortion argument was initially argued on "tough case" grounds, such as the rape victim impregnated, or the horribly deformed fetus. Even strong anti-abortionists can sympathise with the women in these circumstances, but rational (religious) thought would forbid the abortion whilst intuitive thought would permit it. In the end, a democracy votes for a utilitarian morality which ultimately corrupts the society.

Democracy fails because the underlying foundation of democracy, that man is a rational animal, is wrong. Very few men are consciously rational. It's not my opinion, it's an empirical fact.

Potpourri

2011-10-16T21:03:00.000+10:30

A few things people may be interested in.

Tasks that do and don't correlate with IQ.

And one that probably didn't get much publicity by the mainstream media.

Income and Ideology: How Personality Traits, Cognitive Ability, and Education Shape Political Attitudes.
Good Study from Denmark. Basically, intelligent wealthy people are right wing, intelligent poor people, Left.

Jonathan Haidt gives a very good presentation showing just how biased the cognitive psychology crowd is. He ends up getting a serve from our favourite Nobel Laureate. Apparently he is an expert on cognitive psychology as well.

With regard to bias, this study gave conservatives quite a bit of consternation:
Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism, demonstrated differences in experimental performance based on political ideology.

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in generalneurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greaterneurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

There was much self congratulatory press amongst the liberal crowd, which was probably premature. Now, I personally don't have a problem with the experimental data, it's the interpretations that I have a problem with. Now another set of researchers have looked at anterior cingualate activity and found that it is involved with the "policing" of conflicting information. From a review paper:

How should we interpret the anterior cingulate activation? There are two main views of the primary role of the anterior cingulate in cognition. One view is that it is an area of the brain that notes unusual events or errors in the environment. The other view is that the anterior cingulate is involved ininhibiting responses. Either of these two views indicates that in our experiment, participants are treating data that are inconsistent with their plausible theories in ways that are different from consistent information. From the perspective of science education these data clearly show that just presenting students with anomalies will not produce conceptual change. What the results of these two experiments show is that prior belief in a theory influences the interpretation of data in a highly specific way. Specifically, data inconsistent with one’s expectations are treated as errors and thus not easily incorporated into one’s knowledge representation. [Ed]

Yep, liberal brains are more active in suppressing novel data that doesn't accord with preconceived views.

Finally, I managed to track down this interesting paper; The role of cognitive resources in determining our moral intuitions: Are we all liberals at heart?

Once again, the data is good, the interpretation is not. What the study shows, is that conservatives begin to morally reason like liberals only when their cognitive resources are preoccupied with something else. My take on it, to put it very bluntly, is that a liberal is a conservative with half a brain.

Intelligence is not Rationality.

2011-10-10T22:09:00.002+10:30

Unlike most of the HBD crowd, I don't hold IQ in nearly the esteem that they do. Medicine attracts a lot of highly gifted people, people who still manage to do incredibly dumb things. Still, any fair observer of the literature out there cannot but agree that IQ is a strong correlate to worldly success.

It's therefore with some interest, that I've had the pleasure of acquainting myself with the works of Dr Keith Stanovich, Professor of Human Development and Applied Psychology of the University of Toronto, who has much to say on the subject of intelligence and rationality.

Stanovich is critical of the unquestioning acceptance of the IQ test. Unlike other detractors, he does not claim that the tests are not valid measures of intelligence, or that there are different types of intelligence, rather, Stanovich recognises that the IQ testing is valid for the determination of intelligence but misses the mark with regard to rationality. Rationality, according to Stanovich, is an all-together different thing to intelligence, and unlike most critics of IQ testing, is able to prove his case with some conviction.

Here is an easy-to-read article he wrote for Scientific American.

There is a good YouTube video of him presenting his ideas. (Warning, it's about an hour and a half long). His use of George Bush in the early part of the video, as an example of the limitations of IQ testing--Bush was reputed to have an IQ in the 120-130 range--is reason enough to watch it.

He also has a home page where numerous papers of his are available for those who are interested.

One of the very surprising findings of his research is that high IQ, is in many instances, either weakly or not at all correlated to rationality, as it appears that high IQ individuals are just as able to irrationally "solve problems" as their low IQ peers. The cause of rationality failures amongst the high IQ crowd seem to cluster around cognitive biases, information lack and "cognitive miserliness ". There also seems to be some evidence of cognitive limitations in rationalisation. All in all he provides a convincing, and more importantly, empirically justifiable argument.

There is also a kindle version of his book, What Intelligence Tests Miss. I'm off to read mine now.

Stenosophic Liberalism.

2011-10-09T23:54:00.000+10:30

In my previous post, commentator KJJ made the following comment:

Have you considered Jonathan Haidt's examination of the moral reasoning of "liberals" and "conservatives"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt#Moral_Foundations_Theory

It dovetails with your concerns about overoptimization for one set of priniciples.

Whether by custom or nature, liberals tend to overoptimize for the "caring" and "fairness" virtues, while conservatives have a broader moral palette.

Haidt has noted that liberal populations tracks with major trade centers, especially longtime port cities.

This suggests to me that liberalism is the default governing morality for a diverse, commercial society in a time dominated by global trade.

And so our policies end up being set by specialists in equality and utilitarian analysis, with traditionalist concerns going by the wayside.

I'd like to thank KJJ for the link to Jonathan Haidt, whom I'd not heard of before. Haidt's specialty is the psychology of morality, particularly with regard to how people come to moral determination. He began by analysing the moral codes of many different cultures and was able to identify five common meta-themes. They are:

Care for others, protecting them from harm.
Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.
Loyalty to your group, family, nation.
Respect for tradition and legitimate authority.
Purity, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions.

Haidt notes that the meta themes had different functions. Care and fairness seemed to related to our personal relationships with one another, whilst loyalty, respect and purity are group binding virtues.
Now, he is not the first person to have identified these themes. C.S. Lewis, in his book the Abolition of Man, recognised this concordance amongst religions which he described as the "Tao of Life". (He had a few more categories than Haidt). What Haidt notes is that loyalty, respect, and purity are virtues necessary for group binding. But what Haidt then proceeded to do is analyse how liberals differ from conservatives when it comes to moral determinations. The result is fascinating :

Haidt discovered when it comes to moral discernment, Liberals tend to weight Fairness and care above all else, whilst conservatives tend to weigh all elements equally. He described liberal moral reasoning as being a "two channel" [Ed: parameter] determination whilst conservatives were five. Conservatives take more factors into account at coming to moral determinations than liberals do: They are more multiparametric.

Now, Haidt doesn't ask why liberals are less "parametric" than conservatives, he simply registers the fact, but it does demonstrate that there are different cognitive process which separate the two. Now, it's my theory that multiparemetric analysis is computationally intensive and a high "broad" IQ is harder to achieve than than a "thin" high IQ. It would appear that there is now some evidence for this hypothesis in an experiment performed by Wright and Baril. In this experiment, conservatives defaulted to a liberal morality when they were intellectually distracted or cognitively exhausted. In other words, conservatism is a computationally intensive exercise. Liberalism is intellectually undemanding.

Previous research on moral intuitions has revealed that while both liberals and conservatives value the individualizing foundations, conservatives also value—while liberals discount—the binding foundations. Our control group displayed this same pattern of responses. This study examined two alternative hypotheses for this difference—the first that liberals cognitively override and, the second, that conservatives cognitively enhance, their binding foundation responses. We employed self-regulation depletion and cognitive load tasks, both of which have been shown to compromise people’s ability to effortfully monitor and regulate automatic responses. In particular, we were interested in determining whether, when the ability to monitor/regulate their automatic moral responses was compromised (either by exhausting their cognitive resources or by distracting them), liberals would give more moral weight to the binding foundations or conservatives would give less. What we found was support for the latter: When cognitive resources were compromised, only the individualizing foundations (harm/fairness) were strongly responded to by participants, with the binding foundations (authority/in-group/purity) being de-prioritized by both liberals and conservatives. In short, contrary to Joseph et al.’s contention that the “…automatic moral reactions of liberals could be similar to those of conservatives”, we found that the automatic moral reactions of conservatives turned out to be more like those of liberals.

Haidt gives a very good talk on the subject here. It's well worth the look.

Some thoughts on Stenosophism.

2011-10-07T10:06:00.000+10:30

For those who are interested, I just thought that I would try to clarify by what I mean by Stenosophism.

Stenosophism needs to be thought as a form of cognitive provincialism. It is where the mind is limited to grasping the familiar, concrete, proximate and immediate; and it has a hard time stepping outside these boundaries. It does not mean stupid or low IQ, rather it refers to an individuals "breadth" of understanding: their ability to see the context of things. Stenosophism needs to be thought of as "Narrow IQ", a sort of cognitive aspergism.

IQ for many people is a proxy for intelligence, but nearly all of us know individuals who are of very high IQ and yet failures in their lives. Dorner listed the example of Mozart, a musical genius who was unable to transfer his talents to finance, dying a pauper. Indeed, Mozart is a good example of stenosophism. His enormous intellectual ability seemed to only to apply to the musical sphere of his life, outside that, he really didn't do that well. Another example was Nikola Tesla, a super brilliant physicist/engineer, who ended up dying alone and near penniless in hotel room in New York. Linus Pauling, though a brilliant chemist, was idiotic when it came to Vitamin C and Fluoridation. And it needs to be remembered that it's not only the high IQ end of the spectrum that has this problem. During the 1930's for example, thousands of otherwise intelligent professional men and women believed that Stalin was some emissary of world peace despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Bruce Charleton has a good name for these type of people, the clever sillies. Lenin thought them "useful idiots".

The phenomenon of the clever-sillies is easily understood you merge the concepts of IQ and stenosophism. High IQ, with narrow "breadth of view" produces a man who is extraordinarily brilliant in his specialty but a bit of failure outside it. Likewise, a man with moderate IQ but broad contextual perception seems pretty good at all things but he won't be winning any Nobel prizes. In my experience, and I don't have any scientific evidence to back this up, it would appear that "perceptual breadth" peaks somewhere between and IQ of 120 and 130. Note, this does not mean that people with an IQ of 120-130 all have a broad perceptual breadth, rather, the perceptual breath of the human race peaks in that IQ band, and that within that IQ band there is a normal distribution of it: A lot of people with an IQ of 120 will be narrow and a few will be really broad. Above an below this range, the "perceptual breadth" is narrower.

Graphing this ability would yield the following (note, they are drawn for conceptual illustration only and are not exact):

Note, that IQ "width", i.e the ability to do multiparametric analysis peaks at the 120-130 range, but if we were to look at that population within that rage we would get the following:

We see that within the 120-30 range , there vast majority of people are below the "4" range and only a very few above. The group of people in the 5-6 range, who are a small number, are humanity's best generalists, since their ability to perform multiparametric analysis is better than their higher IQ superiors.

In my experience, it would appear that at lower IQ's there may be a broader perceptual range than compared to the highest levels, but there is not enough intelligence to tie it all together. However, over the 130 IQ range, the rapid acceleration in problem solving ability comes at the expense of contextual breadth: It's a trade off, and one with pretty significant implications.

The scientific method, with its reductionist approach--which aims to limit the effect of confounding variables--is profoundly suited to the stenosophistic mind. Perhaps one of the reasons why the scientific method is so powerful, and has become so widespread, is because of its reductionist approach which is suited to the average stenosophistic mind. Science is easily understood because the variables involved in an experiment are usually "limited".

Specialisation is likewise suited. Specialisation is to knowledge what Adam Smith's division of labour is to production. By getting a man to devote his brain to only a small intellectual field, he is better able to master it due to his limited intellectual breadth. Specialisation and the scientific method "worked" because they were suited to human cognitive limitations with regard to its "breadth": Narrow minds are suited to narrow specialties. Naturally, those of a high IQ were most likely to be the supreme specialists in any particularly field.

But the problem with the divide and conquer approach is that knowledge tends to become fragmented, especially amongst those who are foremost in their field. The end result being, that the specialists, whilst very good in their specialty, aren't that great outside it. This is not itself bad, provided a specialists limitations are recognised, but people tend to think that high IQ people have an understanding and competency across the board, ............and this is not good.

Our society tends to assume that high IQ individuals are high IQ across the board. The opinion of Nobel Prize physicists is given far more weight, let's say with regard to regard to arms reduction, than a professional soldier. It's because we assume that just because the physicist has a Nobel prize and hence has a higher IQ he is smarter than the soldier and is able to solve "military problems" better.

In the real word, reality is not neatly fragmented like in the academic disciplines, but integrated, and hence, the specialist is frequently unable to see the practical limitations and other conflicting variables that impact upon his knowledge. In other words, he may be giving us useless real world advice. The problem then is of too much specialisation and not enough integration: we need to bring back, to a degree, the legitimacy of the competent generalist; the guy who see's the big picture and who can relate the parts to the whole.

But the problem, is that the best generalists have IQ's of around 120, whilst the specialists have IQ's above that. Guess who progresses up the academic ranks? Guess who gets all the all the important jobs, and as such, influence on social affairs? The conflicting advice that we get in papers and in the media is due to the fact that our system is biased against the "Broad IQ" individuals. No one see's the big picture because the world rewards, and is run, by small picture men.

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

(W.B. Yeats)

Vox Homer

2011-10-02T12:15:00.001+10:30

Thought is also always rooted in values and motivations. We ordinarily think not for the sake of thinking but to achieve certain goals based on our system of values. Here possibilities for confusion arise: the conflict between treasured values and measures that are regarded as necessary can produce some curious contortions of thought-"Bombs for Peace!" The original value is twisted into its opposite. Motivations provide equally ambiguous guidelines. There are those who would say that what counts are the intentions behind our thinking, that thought plays only a serving role, helping us achieve our goals but failing to go to the root of the evils in our world. In our political environment, it would seem, we are surrounded on all sides with good intentions. But the nurturing of good intentions is an utterly undemanding mental exercise, while drafting plans to realize those worthy goals is another matter. Moreover, it is far from clear whether "good intentions plus stupidity" or "evil intentions plus intelligence" have wrought more harm in the world. People with good intentions usually have few qualms about pursuing their goals. As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained harmless often becomes dangerous, especially as incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the qualms of conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people with bad intentions. The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify the most questionable means. [Ed]

Dietrich Dorner, The Logic of Failure.

Democratic political theory places a particular importance in checking the power of government, fearing that the untrammeled exercise of power is the pre-condition of eventual tyranny. Therefore, the constitutions of Western governments place checks and balances on the exercise of governing power. The threat of malevolent government is easily recognised, what's not recognised however, is the threat of the benevolent yet stenosophistic mob.

Stenosophism's evil lays in frustrating the goal of its possessor, through an inability to grasp the complexities of the situation, and hence act appropriately to achieve his goals. So while the actor may have good intentions, his actions produce unintended effects. Being on the side of the angels is of no merit if a man's actions have resulted in the ruin of the temple.

Now one of the many problems with recognition of evil is the common misunderstanding of evil as being associated with malice. But malice itself is of no harm unless it is expressed in act; an act which results in the privation of the thing being acted on. What matters then is not the intentionality behind a an act but the consequences of it. Hence, men acting with incomplete knowledge are more likely to harm than make better. This isn't rocket science. For example, we don't ask the passengers to fly an aircraft, no matter how competent they feel or how sincere their intention to fly well; we demand a suitably qualified pilot. Pilots' knowledge of the reality and complexities of flying gives them a greater understanding of the consequences of their actions: something the passengers don't have.

Now, it's quite possible for the pilot, despite all his training, to crash the aircraft, but the odds are far less likely than if we were to give a random passenger control of the aircraft. Now, this may sound like a silly example but it isn't. Everyone recognises the importance of airline safety but very few recognised the importance of government survival, yet government survival is far more important than flying an aircraft. A country can survive without an aviation industry, but it can't survive without a government. Think about who controls your social security, regulates the banks, conscripts your children and polices your streets.

Even Austrian Economics, that great bastion of individual choice, relies on the common good of property being protected by the existence of government. It the government fails so does property, and the world quickly descends into a Hobbsian state. Tyranny is not the only fear of the constitutional thinker ( Essentially as social "systems engineer"), so is self destruction.

John Boyd, a military strategist, thought about system destruction in the context of military operations quite a lot. His way of beating the enemy was to assess the situation (gain a greater grasp of reality) and then act accordingly. One the implied methods of attack, according to his theory, was to get the enemy to become disorientated with regard to reality and to act in such a way that contrary to his interest. The ideal Boydian strategist then, should be able to get the enemy to shoot himself in the head voluntarily and eagerly by perceptual manipulation.What you want, if you wish destruction, is for the enemy to eagerly pursue actions which are contrary to his goals.

In my opinion, Boyd had some flaws with his theory, and one of them was the failure to recognise that most humans simply don't have the capacity to fully grasp reality: It's a hardware problem. You can teach people all you want about system stability, but the proof of it is in being able to apply it in practice; there has to be a functional ability there.

The stable democracies of the west were initially set up with a limited franchise, as the respective constitutional architects were well aware that limiting the power of a irresponsible or evil monarch was of no benefit if political power was passed onto to an irresponsible, stupid or evil mob. They wanted political power wielded by responsible hands to ensure system stability as they were well aware of both the malice of kings and the stenosophism of the proles. Something that seems to be forgotten in today's deification of the common man and unquestioning approval of the universal franchise. A lot of righties, who otherwise vigourously defend current democracy, fail to note that the leftward shift of modern culture is correlated with the expansion of the voting franchise.

Now, how you limit the franchise is open to honest debate. Personally, I'd like the qualification to be based on a proven ability of an individual to successfully manage their own affairs. A man who can't get his own stuff together has no right lecturing me on mine. Bankrupts, adulterers, criminals, people who still have a mortgage, certain welfare recipients, those who are not paying taxes, people possessing too much wealth, etc, would all be excluded the franchise in my scheme things. The point here is not where you draw the line, but in recognising that a line needs to be drawn. To many people on the right worry endlessly about the responsible and limited government power without paying any attention to responsible voting: not recognising that one is impossible without the other.

Democracy fails when the imprudent prevail.

Stenosophism: Short term smart, long term stupid.

2011-09-26T23:25:00.001+09:30

One of the findings in Dorner's book is that human beings seem to have a hard time recognising temporal relationships. Causal relationships which are closely linked in time are far more easily recognised that events that are separated by weeks and years. Most human beings are short term orientated, concentrating on the concrete, here and now and the ability to abstract and take the long term view seems rare. I am unaware of any mainstream political or economic theory which takes this into account, which is strange because of obviousness to anyone who has to deal with the public. (which makes me think that many theoreticians have limited public contact, especially with the proletariat)

The extinction of the Passenger Pigeon is an interesting example that illustrates this phenomena. No one actually set out to exterminate the Passenger Pigeon, a bird of once amazing superabundance, but each hunter with a gun, and each farmer, who destroyed its habitat on his own private land, ensured that in the end the species became extinct. It was a classic tragedy of the commons result.

It's a phenomenon that doesn't seem to get much intellectual attention from the Right, especially from the free market advocates, which is a shame.

Many of the intellectual Right harbor the same intellectual pathology of the Left, namely that of the assumption of the rational man when modelling human choice. Political theory, much like economic theory does not spend much time discussing the reality of the stupid man, which is a shame, since many of the problems in these disciplines are better understood when assuming that the bulk of the actors in question are morons.

It needs to be remembered that Dr Dorner's experiments were done on college graduates, people from the right hand side of the bell curve and his findings make for depressing socio-political prognosis. If the smart half of the bell curve has a hard time understanding things, what hope in hell does the left hand side of the curve have? Dorner's findings show that even with the assistance of instruction, many people can't grasp even moderately complicated issues, especially if they're temporally separated. The end conclusion of his work-and anyone who has spent any time try to explain complex subjects to the public-is that the the vast bulk of humanity is cognitively limited.

Now we need to understand what is meant by cognitively limited. It does not mean low IQ, what it means is the inability to see inter-relationships amongst disparate variables. It's the inability to perform multiparamentric analysis that marks the cognitively limited. The "small picture" takes precedence over the big one, because the big one is unable to be grasped. (And here we're not even talking about ill will, just simple lack of ability). This has important financial implications.

The problem lays with the concept of rationality. The man with limited cognitive ability acts rationally with regard to the data that he has but he has an incomplete data set: He operates within a smaller, more local universe. The problem then with rationality is that it needs to be qualified. Rationality for most most people is "small picture" rational, and very few people are "big picture" rational. As far as I'm aware, no one seems to have given a name to this limited from and rationality, which I propose be called Stenosophism: (gk steno=narrow, sophia=wisdom)

In a completely free market, the price discovery mechanism is the end result of the transaction between the seller and the buyer. In such a system, capital is dynamically allocated according to expected profit, and as such, the capital structure will reflect the cognitive abilities of the participants. Short term success is incidental to long term sustainability since the factors that influence long term sustainability have not even been grasped. Herein lays the origin of the business cycle.

Bubbles arise because the stenosophists literally don't see the bubble forming. Ponzi schemes appear perfectly rational to the cognitively limited, as today's small profits are more real than tomorrows abstract massive losses, and capital is allocated according to their limited understanding of events which is ultimately unsustainable. The small pool of people who do see the bubble are ignored and the very forces that unleash the bubble prevent it from being stopped. (The Austrian concept, that artificially low interest rates send the wrong "price information" to participants certainly fuels the fire, but smart investors can arrive at their own determination of the true interest rate. It's the unthinking that accept them at face value).

The tragedy-of-the-commons type of outcome comes about from the "stenosophistic" utlisation of the commons. The long term sustainability of the common is not even entertained by the user, rather the here and now is all that matters. No one actually set out to wipe out the Passenger Pigeon, yet everyone did.

Now, because the vast majority of market participants are stenosophistic, it means that most market decisions are "small picture" decisions and long-term-big-picture type of market goods have a hard time surviving is a stenognostic market place. Alfred Kahn wrote about it with regard to the "tyranny of small decisions". Here lays a paradox of the free market, being completely free to chose might mean less choice. It's called market failure.

Ferdinand Bardamu copped a lot of heat from Chuck Ross with regard to his defence of the public ownership of private utilities. I feel that Ferdinand's position is, to a degree, justified by the stenognostic nature of the market. Apart from monopoly concerns( A different and yet important issue) most shareholders are short term orientated. Today's CEO do not usually have lifetime commitments to their companies and are rewarded on short term performance, and most customers are seeking to switch to the provider who will provide initially the cheapest short term supply. The entire market place is geared toward short term profits at the expense of long term economic sustainability. Investment in maintenance and contingency capital are long term expenses which are frequently sacrificed for short term boosting of profit. The net result that that the service becomes unreliable and run down, and given the monopolistic nature of utility provision, expensive.

This also raises the subject of economic efficiency. What do we mean by efficient? For the stenognostic it means short term efficiency, and such a man can always find "savings" in any traditionally run business by cutting away all the "fat"; except the that "fat" is frequently long-term essential, and all the stuff that was trimmed ends up eventually needing to be replaced (always at greater expense). Corporate restructuring, thy name be stenognosis. The saga of the Boeing Dreamliner is a classic example of this form of corporate stupidity. (The link in the story is definitely worth a read.). Note, the CEO who made the decision to outsource has gone to Ford. Boeing is stuck with the costs of his decisions.

The problem is fundamentally that certain necessary utilities, because of their common-good-nature, need to be managed in such a way to ensure their long term provision in an environment that rewards and punishes in the short term: The market has to be protected form itself and therefore a degree of regulation of the market is necessary to stop it from doing stupid things, especially with regard to common-good community assets. In a free market, ownership of a community-vital asset is not contingent on having benevolence and wisdom. It stops being of of purely personal interest when it becomes an essential community interest.

The Logic of Failure.

2011-09-18T23:20:00.000+09:30

Let me first begin by saying that this is a very good book, not for its writing style but for the scientific data it presents with regard to human cognitive limitations. The problem with authors that write well, is that frequently their books are more appreciated for the quality of their expression rather than the subject matter dealt with. Two authors particularly come to mind: Orwell and Mencken, both of whom seem to be remembered more as literary figures rather than political theorists. This is a shame since both had made profound insights into modern "populist" politics which seem to be overlooked, as the authors are considered more writers than theorists: their writing considered more "art" than "science".

Dietrich Dorner's writing style ensures that he will not suffer the fate, as his book reads more like a technical report on human cognitive limitations rather than a literary work, and as such, is less likely to be dismissed as opinion rather than fact.

David Foster at Photon Courier, to whom I'm indebted for bringing to my attention this book, has a very good review of it over at his site which I would suggest that you read. He gives a good rundown of some of the experiments that Dorner ran and of their results. My interest is mainly in his conclusions and with the sociological implications of the results.

If we could summarise Dorner's findings they would be:

1) Most people are terrible at dynamic multiparametric systems analysis. Even when there are only a limited number of variables, most people can't get it right.

2)People have a terrible time in understanding events that are related but are temporally separated. If action x results in result y immeadiately, the cause and effect link is grasped relatively easily, but the further the separation of effect from cause, the less likely the link is to be grasped.

3)People have a hard time keeping situationally orientated, tending to focus on the big picture at the expense of the details, or vice versa.

4) Most people have a hard time understanding the situation. Either acting too quickly, acting too slowly, ignoring data that doesn't fit their mental model or making data up to provide a coherent model. In both cases the mental model is chosen over the reality of the situation. Reality denial, in some form or other is integral to many people's cognitive model of the world.

The bottom line is the most people trying to understand reality do it poorly. The real kicker in Dormer's studies is that the participants are university graduates and professionals, people from the right hand side of the IQ curve. While he did not explicitly study IQ vs multiparametric task performance, he noted that there seemed to be no correlation between IQ and task success. (Personally, when this matter is looked into, I feel that Muliparametric ability will peak at about the 120-130 range, dropping off rapidly at either end: either stupid or Aspergy, See Roissy, Question 15.)

Another interesting finding in Dorner's book was with regard to what happened when attempts were made to help people overcome their cognitive limitations through training and instruction. Dorner describes the experiment in detail:

We divided the Greenvale participants into three groups: a control group, a strategy group, and a tactics group. The strategy and tactics groups received instruction in some fairly complicated procedures for dealing with complex systems. The strategy group was introduced to concepts like "system ... .. positive feedback," "negative feedback," and critical variable" and to the benefits of formulating goals, determining and, if necessary, changing priorities, and so forth. The tactics group was taught a particular procedure for decision making, namely, "Zangemeister efficiency analysis."'

After the experiment, conducted over several weeks, the participants were asked to evaluate the training they had received; figure 39 shows the results. The members of the strategy and tactics groups all agreed that the training had been "moderately" helpful to them. The members of the control group, who had received training in some nebulous, ill defined "creative thinking," felt that their training had been of very little use to them. The differences in the evaluations are statistically significant. If we look at the participants'
actual performance as well as at their evaluations of the help they thought they got from their training, however, we find that the three groups did not differ at all in their performance.

Why did the participants who had been "treated" with certain procedures think this essentially useless training had been somewhat helpful? The training gave them what I would call "verbal intelligence" in the field of solving complex problems. Equipped with lots of shiny new concepts, they were able to talk about their thinking, their actions, and the problems they were facing. This gain in eloquence left no mark at all on their performance, however. Other investigators report a similar gap between verbal intelligence and performance intelligence and distinguish between "explicit" and "implicit" knowledge.' The ability to talk about something does not necessarily reflect an ability to deal with it in reality.

You can't put in what God's left out.

If we think about this last experiment for a minute, its findings are profoundly disturbing. It would appear that theoretical problem solving knowledge does not necessarily translate to practical problem solving knowledge. Buisness school graduates do necessarily make good businessmen. Perhaps one of the reasons why Western economies are faltering at the moment is because there are thousands of graduates from business schools occupying positions in senior management who can "talk the talk" but cannot "walk the walk".

Dorner's book also has implications for political theory: Take for example democracy. It would appear that the average man is suited to understanding simple and immediate problems and such would vote intelligently on such issues, but what about complex issues with long term consequences? Democratic government, given human cognitive limitations, is surely to fail over the long term since the bulk of men are not able to grasp the long term consequences of even moderately simple decision. Democracy (even tyranny) is ultimately corrupted by its own stupidity. Indeed as Dorner points out earlier in his book:

Can we as citizens ever have a complete understanding of the issues on which we are asked to pass judgment on Election Day? We would have to spend all our time reading, studying, and reflecting to reach sound decisions about nuclear power, military spending, immigration, economic policy, health-care reform, and so on and so on. No one can do that. We have to work, eat, and steep sometime, as well. And it Is not just the normal citizen who lacks time to gather information. Politicians faced with the need to make a decision will rarely have time to digest even readily available information, much less to pursue new lines of inquiry.

And yet, it is vital that citizens, or a least the people that make the decisions, do have an understanding of reality, otherwise the wrong decisions are made and civilisations eventually collapse. The problem is though, as Dorner has shown, that even if you limit your decision making to the right side of the bell curve there is only a small number of people that can think appropriately. The ability to perform dynamic multiparametric systems analysis is rare. In a democratic system, where it ultimately boils down to mob opinion, the system is biased toward the stupid, or more charitably, the intellectually limited. Each iteration of the democratic process more accurately reflects the mob mindset. To quote Mencken:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Mencken wasn't being cruel or vindictive in his quote, rather the a reflective consideration with regard to the operation of cognitive limitation in a democratic system leads to the same conclusion. Conservative thinkers are rightly concerned with the subject of human nature, but area that has been neglected is human cognitive limitation. Our constitutions are designed to thwart malice, but there's no defence against stupidity.

Unintended Economic Consequences.

2011-09-12T20:23:00.002+09:30

From the book Before the Deluge: A portrait of Berlin in the 1920's.

The survivors smile now at the madness of 1923[Ed: Wiemar Hyperinflation], but the destruction of an economy brings considerable suffering to the poor and the helpless, and even though the inflation made everyone poor, it made some people poorer than others. Louis Lochner, who arrived in Berlin during this period and eventually became bureau chief for the Associated Press, got the usual first impression of "cafe's crowded with stylishly garbed ladies" but soon found a different story on the side streets off the fashionable boulevards. "I visited a typical Youth Welfare Station," he said later. "Children who looked as though they were eight or nine years old proved to be thirteen. I learned that there were then 15,000 tubercular children in Berlin; that 23 percent of the children examined by the city health authorities were badly undernourished." The old were equally helpless. One elderly writer named Maximilian Bern withdrew all his savings, more than 100,000 marks, and spent them on one subway ticket. He took a ride around Berlin and then locked himself in his apartment and starved to death. "Barbarism prevailed," said George Grosz. "The streets became dangerous. . . . We kept ducking in and out of doorways because restless people, unable to remain in their houses, would go up on the rooftops and shoot indiscriminately at anything they saw Once, when one of these snipers was caught and faced with the man he bad shot in the arm, his only explanation was, 'But I thought it was a big pigeon.'"

The fundamental quality of the disaster was a complete loss of faith in the functioning of society. Money is important not just as a medium of economic exchange, after all, but as a standard by which society judges our work, and thus our selves. If all money becomes worthless, then so does all government, and all society, and all standards. In the madness of 1923, a workman's work was worthless, a widow's savings were worthless, everything was worthless. "The collapse of the currency not only meant the end of trade, bankrupt businesses, food shortages in the big cities and unemployment according to one historian, Alan Bullock. "It had the effect,which is the unique quality of economic catastrophe, of reaching down to and touching every single member of the community in a way which no political event can. The savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out at a single blow with a ruthlessness which no revolution could ever equal.... The result of the inflation was to undermine the foundations of German society in a way which neither the war, nor the revolution of November, 1918 nor the Treaty of Versailles bad ever done. The real revolution in Germany was the inflation." [Ed]

"Yes, the inflation was by far the most important event of this period," says a seventy-five-year-old journalist, a woman who still lives in Berlin. She is white-haired and rather large, and she nibbles cookies as she talks, forgetting that it is already two in the morning. "The inflation wiped out the savings of the entire middle class, but those are just words. You have to realize what that meant. [Ed]There was not a single girl in the entire German middle class who could get married without her father paying a dowry. Even the maids-they never spent a penny of their wages. They saved and saved so that they could get married. When the money became worthless, it destroyed the whole system for getting married, and so it destroyed the whole idea of remaining chaste until marriage.

"The rich had never lived up to their own standards, of course, and the poor had different standards anyway, but the middle class, by and large, obeyed the rules. Not every girl was a virgin when she was married, but it was generally accepted that one should be. But what happened from the inflation was that the girls learned that virginity didn't matter any more. The women were liberated."

(Before the Deluge, Otto Friedrich)

I don't imagine that there has been an economics textbook which has linked the supply of money with the promotion of chastity, and yet in 1920's Germany it did have an effect. The economic theory of the time did not predict it, neither would it predict it today. But that's what happens when a specialty takes too reductionist a view of it's operation. It's not just about prices and efficient capital allocation, it's also about people.

Whittaker Chambers: Epilogue.

2011-09-07T23:19:00.000+09:30

Whittaker Chambers died in 1961, never completing his epilogue to Witness. After his death, his wife and his friend Duncan Norton-Taylor, rummaged through his correspondence and papers and collated some of them into the book Cold Friday, which I imagine was their attempt to finish what Chambers eventually meant to do. The book received some moderate praise from the right but overall it received a lukewarm reception, and like Chambers, was quickly forgotten.

The rejection of Chambers on the Left is easy to understand, as the Left's ideological position is based on the rejection of God. Of course there are many Christian Leftists, but that is simply to acknowledge that there are many stupid Christians who are unable to follow a train of thought to its logical conclusion. The real worry is why Chambers is effectively ignored by the Right.

It's my opinion that Chambers failure to gain traction on the right stems from the fact that Chambers was preaching a message no one wanted to hear: The West was dying because it turned it's back on God. This of course is an incomprehensible and in fact repugnant message to the majority of men, of both Left and Right, who view the world through the twin lenses of Positivism and moral relativism(i.e uncritical tolerance). The sad fact of the matter is that the majority of the Right is just as Positivist as the Left, where they differ is on how best to implement their vision of a better society.

Lip service is given to the religious "fundies" of the right, but essentially every social reform that has weakened Western society, divorce, promiscuity, abortion, sexual license, militant feminism, multiculturalism etc, have not been checked, even when Conservatives have achieved power. The fact of the matter is that for many conservatives these things don't matter. All that matters is the economy (materialism) the rest is window dressing. Religious invocations for most Righties are practically irrelevant if not repugnant. The modern Right is part of the disease.

The thrust of Chambers message is that there will be no revival of the West until men turn back to God and Chambers's value lays in showing why this is so. However a return to traditionalism will not suffice since its inability to react to the technological and social changes of the late 19th and Early 20th Centuries was intrinsic to the turning away from God in those times and in the embracement of ultimately ruinous ideologies.

Whilst Chambers felt that he left Communism to join "the losing side" it appears that he did not loose all hope. Amongst his papers was found what is presumed to be the forward to the book he never wrote:

Spring has come to us again-a spring that I scarcely expected to see. Twice at night the wild geese have passed over. There may have been three such flights, since one night I dreamed that I saw hundreds flying overhead, so in the way we bear so much without ever quite waking to its meaning, I may have heard these wild geese honking without waking. The first flight, the venturesome, was small and the cries so faint that I was scarcely certain at first that I heard even them. The second flight was much bigger and so loud that I roused up, and I saw my wife already standing, listening, in the moonlight at the window. I said: "You hear the wild geese?" and fell asleep again. So my wife and I learned that, somewhat unaccountably, we had lived into another spring.

I began this book deliberately with spring as the point of resurging life because this is a book, in general, about death-the death of an age and the death of a man and what relationship, if any, the experiences bear to each other.

Chambers felt that the West could survive, but only if it returned to its religious roots, and he was under no illusion of how impossible the task seemed. He certainly offered no solutions or plan. The task then of the modern conservative is then to rebuild the temple which he must first do within himself. As the Master said:

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Whittaker Chambers: The Cancer Eating the West.

2011-08-31T09:50:00.002+09:30

(Some explanatory notes. Chambers considered Socialism, Leftism of any kind and Communism to be essentially the same ideologies, differing only in the practical means of implementing their vision)

This is the fact which absolutely sunders the mind of the Communist from the traditional mind of the West-which makes him in the mass a new breed in history. For our breeds, in this sense, are defined by the view we hold, unconsciously or not, of the world and its meaning, and the meaning of our lives in it. Obviously, a breed of men who hold that everything is in violent flux and change, moving by laws and in a pattern inherent in matter, and having nothing to do with God-obviously, that breed of men is different in kind from the rest of mankind. It is closest, in our time, to the viewpoint of the scientist for whom a simple, solid chair represents a form of energy whose particles, seemingly solid and commonplace, are in fact in violent motion. This, incidentally, rather than the "Progressive" elements in Communism which are usually brought forward in such cases, is the instant point of appeal which Communism so often has for the scientists of the West. They feel in Communism the force of a faith based on a material reality which more or less matches their own vision of reality. It is an abstruse view, and the scientists who hold it are lonely men, since the masses of the West cannot possibly understand or sympathize with what the scientists are talking about. The intelligent Communist knows exactly what they are talking about though he may know little or nothing about abstruse physics. Similarly, the scientist may know little or nothing about the niceties of dialectical materialism. Yet each senses that the other's basic view of reality is much the same. The affinity is strong.

This process in history, and this view of it, Communists call dialectical materialism (or, in that Communist shorthand that we commonly call jargon, Diamat). It is dialectic because it deals with quantities of force in motion, sometimes violent, sometimes gradual. It is called materialism because the Communist mind, like the scientific mind, rejects any supernatural factor in his observation of experience. In short, God is rigorously excluded from the equations of changing force in which the Communist mind tirelessly seeks to grasp, to express, and to act on history at any and every moment.

To try to explain Communism and the Communist while ignoring dialectical materialism is like trying to explain a man's actions while leaving out the chief clue to his mind and his motives and general viewpoint. Dialectical materialism is the central fact of Communism. Every Communist is a dialectical materialist. Ultimately, be cannot be understood in any other terms. This does not mean that all Communists are consistent or successful dialecticians. There are millions of Communists in the world and they show the same gradations of intelligence and character as millions of anybody else. There are millions of Christians, too, of whom only a comparative handful are theologians (Communists say: theoreticians). The mass of Christians is held together by a faith in what suffices to explain to them the meaning of their lives and history, although even highly intelligent communicants may be quite vague about the doctrines of their faith, or even specific articles of it. This is made possible because the center of efficacy of their faith is the Cross, using that symbol in its most inclusive sense. The Cross makes them one in faith even though at thinner fringes of Christendom the efficacy of the Cross is questioned or tends to fade. In much the same Way, dialectical materialism is the effective force of Communism, and even when understanding is weak or lacking, it operates as a faith which explains satisfactorily to millions of Communists the meaning of life and history-reality, as Communists say. By this they always mean reality in a state of flux, usually violent. Dialectical materialism is the crux of Communism, and not to understand this means never truly to understand the Communist.

Chambers here clearly puts forward his proposition that what separates the Left from the Right is the metaphysical vision of man. The Leftist vision of man is that of a machine which responds to physical forces which themselves are a product of circumstances. It follows therefore that a man's behaviour may be predicted, in the same way the same way we can make other scientific predictions, by analysing the forces in play at any given moment. There is no free will, there is no choice, only the arrangement of matter responding to temporal forces.

Evil, according to the atheist, is a product of circumstances which are either exogenous such as poverty, violence and oppression or endogenous such as genetics. The social desire to get rid of evil hence resolves around social programs to eliminate social evils, the other stream of leftism (fascism and its crytpo vairant, HBD worship) seeks to eliminate it through better breeding and facilitation of evolution. It's really a testimony to just how much Kool-Aid Western Society has drunk when Fascist and Socialist are seen as the polarities of Right and Left when in reality they are factions of the same team, the materialist vision of man has utterly permeated the ideology of West.

It is this materialist ideology which is corroding the west. Lots of well meaning Righties feel that if abortion could be could be made illegal, porn blocked on the internet and the tax rate lowered that all would be right, but it wouldn't. In the next election the people would rebel, and those laws would be repealed, since the current laws reflect the wishes of the people. That's not to say that legislative reform would not stem the tide for a bit, but inevitably the slide would continue. You can't force virtue onto people, people have got to take it on board themselves.

There is no technological fix which will remedy the corruption of the bankers and politicians, you simply need honest men who are prepared to pay the price. What does it matter if your country can push the world around whilst at home you wife is sleeping with next door neighbour, your kid is a sleazy realtor and your daughter a stripper? The structure is corrupting from the inside. Moral relativism, which flows from atheism, is the poison of the West. There is no political arrangement which will save the West because the salt has lost its saltiness.

Whittaker Chambers: The failure of Conservatism.

2011-08-26T11:08:00.001+09:30

(Germany's children are starving, 1924. Kathe Kollwitz)

In the years when Communism was advancing successfully against the West there were those who believed that its disruptive power was its power to manipulate a Fifth Column composed of non-Soviet Communists, sympathizers, fellow travellers, dupes, opportunist politicians, hitchhiking with Communism as they would in any other vehicle that seemed to be going part of their way-in short, the kind of debris and dust that almost anything with sufficient gravitational pull attracts and keeps whirling around it. I held that such elements, while dangerous, were not Communism's chief power in the West. I held that power to be something else-the power of Communism to manipulate responsive sections of the West to check counteract, paralyze, or confuse the rest. 'nose responsive sections of the West were not Communist, and never had been. Most of the minds that composed them thought of themselves as sincerely anti-Communist. Communism manipulated them, not in terms of Communism, but in terms of the shared historical crisis-peace and social justice being two of the most workable terms. They were free to denounce Communism and Communists (and also anti-Communists) after whatever flourishes their intellectual innocence or arrogance might choose. Communism asked no more. It cared nothing, at this point, about motives. It cared about results.

Unlike Communism, the West held no unified solution for the crisis. In face of the crisis, part of the West reacted with inertia- inertia, in the simple terms of the physics primer, that is, the tendency of a body to remain at rest or in a straight line of motion. But the responsive section offered a solution for the crisis. This solution, whatever differences it assumed from place to place and time to time, whatever disguises Political expediency or preference draped or phrased it in, was always the same solution. It was the socialist solution.[Ed] Derived, as doctrine, from the same source-the historical insights of Karl Marx-the socialist solution differed from the Communist solution chiefly in political methods. One difference consisted in the slower rate of speed at which socialism proposed to apply its solution. Another difference concerned the kind and degree of coercion that socialism would apply to impose its solution. In practice, no socialist government had yet pushed its solution to the point where full coercion must come into play. Therefore, this difference bad not yet stood the test of reality. Otherwise, between the end solution that socialism and Communism both hold in view for mankind-the matured planned economy of the future-the difference was so slight that it would be difficult to slip a razor blade between them.

(Whittaker Chambers. Cold Friday)

Conservative thinkers do not spend much time dwelling on why leftism has made such inroads into society which I think has been a fundamental error in conservative thought. Instead they spend their time try to combat the spread head on, instead of trying to tackle the pathology at its source.

As mentioned previously by Chambers, Socialism (and its bastard brother Fascism) did not arise in a vacuum, rather they were a cognitive response to the social crises of the times. They were an attempt to solve the problem and hence were proactive remedial proscriptions and offered hope. The fact that they were eventual quack remedies is irrelevant in terms of their effect to elicit societal transformation, since what they offered was hope to multitudes in a promise for a better world.

People just fail to understand how bad life was for the bottom rungs of society in the late 19th Century. The massive migrations to the New World by Europe's poor, hungry and homeless masses, in age where ship travel was risky business, and return was very difficult, illustrates just how much people wanted to escape the social situation of the times and just how intense the pressures were. The great migrations of the English to the New World was testament to just how crap life was like in ye Old England. The same could be said for all of Europe.

Chamber's astute observation was in recognising that traditional Europe's response to this problem was nothing: inertia. It resisted any form of change.

Socialism offered a quack solution for the problem, but it did offer a solution. Most men are not profound or elaborate thinkers, judging things by their appearance instead of their true nature's, and faced by a choice of a traditional miserable life or promise for a bright future, it was a no-brainer for most men. To passionate believers in Socialism, Conservatism became the enemy whilst to the less passionate, Conservatism became irrelevant.

Now Chambers appears to have had a different view of conservatism than many conservatives have of it;

I think I have gone beyond the conservative position. I have found that behind it lies something much more steadfast-the conservative spirit, or, if you will, the conservative principle. Ages change, politics shift and slither-the conservative spirit does not change. It adjusts because it is a summation of human wisdom, and in a sense organic, it looks from the fastness of life, and bends or yields to what is passing, but maintains, as the light shines in darkness, what is everlasting because it partakes of it itself.

Note that Chambers felt that conservatism was adaptable whilst keeping a core essence, he was no traditionalist. For Chambers, the traditional conservative position, which was both unyielding and inflexible, was part of the root cause of the crises, the festering sore which seeked a remedy, even a quack one.

Chambers' position however raises an interesting theoretical question. How much can conservatism change before it ceases being conservative? Chambers seems to allude to some underlying "core principle" which underpinned a degree of flexibility. I think Chambers is partially right here in identifying that conservatism is flexible to a degree as opposed to traditionalism which isn't. The mistake I think that traditionalists make is taking the form of conservatism at a particular point of time
and mistaking it as its substance, conservatism is far deeper.

Where I disagree with Chambers is where he places the locus of this Conservatism, seeing it a summantion of human wisdom. This may of been the case in Ancient Rome or Greece, but it is not the Conservatism of the West. The Conservatism of the West is a Christian Conservatism and hence its underlying principle is Christian. If I had to identify this inflexible core in Christian Conservatism it would be rooted in Caritas, the stuff of God operating in Man. Christian conservatism as such is an expression of Caritas. The word is frequently translated into English as Charity or Love, but I feel that it something more ecompassing than the limits that these words place it on it. At its essence, it is not only goodness itself, but in act which flows from it. Caritas is the inflexible principle of conservatism. Local and temporal contingencies will affect the expression of Caritas but its underlying nature will remain the same.

The Christian religions teach that Caritas is a grace given to man by God and its also why there will be no Western revival without a bended knee. No Caritas, no West. It's as simple as that.

Whittaker Chambers. Conservatism in the Age of Machines.

2011-08-24T22:11:00.000+09:30

September 1954

Dear Willi:

History tells me that the rock-core of the Conservative Position, or any fragment of it, can be held realistically only if conservatism will accommodate itself to the needs and hopes of the masses-needs and hopes, which like the masses themselves are the product of machines. For, of course, our fight, as I think we said, is only incidentally with socialists or other heroes of that kidney. Wesentlich[Ed:fundamentally], it is with machines. A conservatism that cannot face the facts of the machine and mass production, and its consequences in government and politics, is foredoomed to futility and petulance. A conservatism that allows for them has an eleventh-hour chance of rallying what is sound in the West......

[Ed: Chambers here discusses some contemporary aspects of rural socialism]

The machine has done this. But every one of my indicted neighbors has sold off his horses and rides his tractor, and sends soil samples to the state college to learn how to up his yields. And not one of them has the slightest intention of smashing his machines or going back to horses and moderate yields-because machine farming is one reality that he can see and feel. Moreover, each knows how absurd it would be for him alone to buck the trend-he would be ploughed under by those who would not go along. The mass of farmers will keep their tractors, and milk more and more cows, until they drop of heart attacks. Only, they will not cut back. Therefore, the machine has made the economy socialistic.

A conservatism that will not accept this situation must say: "We are reactionary in the literal sense. To be logical, we must urge you farmers to smash your machines (not sell them off, but smash them, and buy no more). For, otherwise, you will always get what you wanted; while what you do not want (restrictions, the end of the private domain) will be the literal reaping of what you sowed." But a conservatism that would say that is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy.

.....[Ed:Chambers makes some more comments on rural Socialism in America].........

As you know, most factory workers are farmers manques. Moreover, they rocked to the factories in the first place because even the industrial horrors of the nineteenth century seemed preferable to more than ten hours of haying in a shriveling sun, or cows going bad with garget. I worked the hay load last night against the coming rain-by headlights, long after dark. I know the farmer's case for the machine and for the factory. And I know, like the cut of hay-bale cords in my hands, that a conservatism that cannot find room in its folds for these actualities is a conservatism doomed to petulance and dwindling-first unreality and then defeat. Let the conservative fill barley sacks behind the moving combine for even eight hours in a really good sun, and then load them, 100 , 150 lb. bags, until midnight and he will learn more about the realities of rural socialism (and about the realities of conservatism) than he could ever glean from the late, ever to be honored Robert Taft.

and in a letter to William Buckley(not in the book Cold Friday) he wrote.

The Republican Party [and by implication the conservative movement) will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find, at the back, an old man, fingering for his own pleasure some oddments of cloth (weave and design of 1850). Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel. As your eyes become accustomed to the dim kerosene light, you are only slightly surprised to see that the old man is Frank Meyer.

(Rather apropos with respect to this article at the Front Porch republic which deals with some of the problems of contemporary conservatism. (Intelligent comments thread there) Hat tip, Throne and Altar)

Just as modern life support machines and transplant technologies raise new issues with regard to medical ethics, so did the social changes bought about by technological invention bring forth new social pressures, which may have existed previously but became concentrated to new levels by the massive urbanisation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Whittaker Chambers: The Dying West.

2011-08-22T20:51:00.000+09:30

For some must at last have eyes to see the plain fact that the revolutionary proletariat in the West (including Russia) is not, and never has been, a factory proletariat. The forces of revolution in the West are an intellectual proletariat, disinherited, not in this world's goods with which they are often incongruously replete, but disinherited in the spirit. The revolt of the intellectuals of the West almost without exception begins (no matter how it ends) as the frantic threshing of those drowning in the materialism of the West, a convulsive struggle against the death of the spirit. This is the answer to the fatuous, reiterated question why men like Arthur Koestler or Whittaker Chambers became Communists. For the differences in background, which the shallow world magnifies, are trifling compared to that convulsion of the drowning spirit which carried us, and men like us (each in his own individual way with his own individual rationalization) into Communism, and which makes a second death for those who, recognizing at last that Communism is itself evil, must burst from that second drowning back into a West which has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Hateful home truths! For they invite the West to stop looking at Communism and look into itself. Hateful home truths! (I said them all in Witness.) "Communism is never stronger than the failure of all other faiths"; "Men are by nature conservative; they become revolutionists only by despair"; "Communism did not attract, it repelled me; I became a Communist to escape the dying West."

Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday

Over the last few days my curiosity has been directed toward the history of Fascism. Wikipaedia has a rather good summary on the subject and more importantly, the article has good summary of the on intellectual atmosphere of the times in which the ideology was in gestation. It's important to note that Fascism, like Communism was a response to the social crises of the time. Its aim was to improve the lot of the proleterait. The proletariat, being who they are, were not able to organise themselves, and as such, the response to the crises was organised by the intellectuals of society. Where the Communists and Fascists differed is on how to implement the improvement. Both parties carried on the tradition of the French Revolution, in that the solution to the problem was through a reorganisation of society. The important point here being that both movements were meant to fix the social problems of times.

Both movements had their intellectual origins in the prevailing fads of the times. The influence of Darwin and Nietzsche molded the Fascists whilst the influence of Marx and Engels and Comte influenced the Communists and Socialists. Both movements had rejected God and consequentially the limits that this places on human action. But to think that the problem of fascism and Communism is solely a problem of atheism is the misdiagnose the pathology. The birth of both these malignant ideologies were contingent on the festering sore of widespread poverty in traditional society.

Many people wonder how someone like Hitler could sway the German populace. Various idiotic theories are put forward to explain the phenomenon however it needs to be remembered that Hitler's was a product of the social disintegration of the times (as predicted by Keynes) Hitler's appeal to the Germans lay in the fact that he delivered. He revitalised industry and hence employment, repudiated Versailles, restored national pride, got rid of people that the populace did not like, improved the rights of workers, organised regular holidays for them and generally improved the lot for the average German. For the poor family man, the tradeoff in civil liberties was worth it if his family were not going to starve. After Hitler, the streets were safer, there was work, the nation had a renewed pride and a sense of optimism prevailed. The traditionalist response to Hitler was to turn the clock back, to the way things were. Faced with a failing old world and the promise of a working new, people abandoned the old, enthusiastically. Of course, any pact with the devil will end badly, but most people live a day to day existence and only a very few could see the inevitable end of Nazism.

What I'm trying to get at is that is the old world had festering sores and Conservative attempts to turn the clock back to the way things were will re-open those same sores. All was not right in "ye days of old" despite what traditionalists preached. Conservatives then, need to re-appraise traditional society and work out where they went wrong with regard to the management of it. What Conservatism needs, if it is to survive, is to ditch traditionalism and embrace dynamic Conservatism, a Conservatism that does not deny the truth.

A classic example of this was G.K. Chesterton. No man who has ever read Orthodoxy can accuse Chesterton of being anti-Christian or Anti-West. Still, this passage at the end of What's Wrong with the World is hardly traditionalist:

I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization.[Ed:]

Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

– What’s Wrong with the World (1910).

The old world was sick and needed fixing, despite what the traditionalists said. The few conservatives who were doing some thinking, like Chesterton, were ignored by both the traditionalists and the radicals. The rest they say is history.

The Enemy Ourselves

2011-08-17T09:26:00.002+09:30

August 5, 1954

Dear Bill:

I no longer believe that political solutions are possible for us. I am baffled by the way people still speak of the West as if it were at least a cultural unity against Communism though it is divided not only by a political, but by an invisible cleavage. On one side are the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other side is the enlightened, articulate elite which, to one degree or other, has rejected the religious roots of the civilization-the roots without which it is no longer Western civilization, but a new order of beliefs, attitudes and mandates.[Ed]

In short, this is the order of which Communism is one logical expression, originating not in Russia, but in the culture capitals of the West, reaching Russia by clandestine delivery via the old underground centers in Cracow, Vienna, Berne, Zurich, and Geneva. It is a Western body of belief that now threatens the West from Russia. As a body of Western beliefs, secular and rationalistic, the intelligentsia of the West share it, and are therefore always committed to a secret emotional complicity with Communism of which they dislike, not the Communism, but only what, by the chances of history, Russia has specifically added to it-slave-labor camps, purges, MVD et al. And that, not because the Western intellectuals find them unjustifiable, but because they are afraid of being caught in them. If they could have Communism without the brutalities of ruling that the Russian experience bred, they have only marginal objections. Why should they object? What else is socialism but Communism with the claws retracted? And there is positivism. What is more, every garage mechanic in the West, insofar as he believes in nuts and bolts, but asks: "The Holy Ghost, what's that?" shares the substance of those same beliefs. Of course, the mechanic does not know, when he asks: "The Holy Ghost, what's that?" that he is simply echoing Stalin at Teheran: "The Pope how many divisions has the Pope?"

That is the real confrontation of forces. The enemy-he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.

Sincerely,
Whittaker

(Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday)

Some personal comments:

I feel that this is one of the most important passages in the book. Here Chambers clearly states that Western Civilisation is a Christian civilisation. It needs to be remembered that the philosophical changes embraced by the 19th Century intellectuals did not real gain traction amongst the greater body of "thinking' men till the 20's and 30's and finally percolated down to the mass of western humanity in the 60's with its resultant social upheaval.

Atheism is the enemy and the battle field is the mind of man. Solzhenitsyn, living a different experience to Chambers, came to the same conclusion. Just as the machine and modern economy transformed society, so does atheism transform morals. Thought precedes act.

Any renewal of Western Civilisation will not come from any political arrangement, or through some legislative process, but rather a religious renewal of the West. There is no other way. This is a hard fact to accept, since it would be far easier to sell a political solution than a Christian renewal. With the exception of the U.S. , in most countries, religious devotion is synonymous with mental instability and is political suicide. Trying to legislate Christian morals onto an effectively irreligious world will lead to a backlash against Christianity. This isn't my opinion it's logic.

Men have to be converted first, before they will accept the political program. This is what I think is the thrust of Chamber's message.

Tarawa

2011-08-15T16:19:00.000+09:30

March 2, 1954

Dear Dunc:

Let's talk about the article on the Conservative Position. I do not see how you could be anything but distressed by my slowness in writing it. At the same time, I am putting everything I have into it. Everything I have is far short of the burst of stamina that used to carry me over the hump in past times. But I still have a good deal. Besides, there is on my shoulder an editorial touch much less patient than yours. It is a bony touch and its peremptory command is to finish while there is yet time . . . One has the sense of inditing an epitaph, an obit for the morgue, against the deadline of the patient's foreseeable demise. Or, it may be a kind of ms.[Ed:Message] found in a bottle to be washed up, chance serving, on some unimaginable shore after bobbing in what unimaginable sea of time. So much for climate.

The problems of writing are themselves very great. This is not a problem of waving some sparklers or touching off some rockets in memory of the Middle Ages or the Venetian Renaissance. They provided their own arsenal of fireworks. The problem here is to make people want to read what most people ordinarily never want to read about and what in general others have found so resistant and unrewarding that few have wanted to write about it; and have come off for the most part, even the best of them, rather poorly in their infrequent attempts. To make readers want to read it-that is operational problem No. 1. But that scarcely take us across the doorsill.

The heart of the greater problem is, what makes the Conservative position so unappealing?[Ed] What makes this great central position of mankind so much a skeleton of dried bones? Why, to put it simply, has the Right scarcely a voice that speaks for it with authority or conviction-or without the curse of faint apology? These are facts that must be thought through to the truth that makes them formidable. But these are merely the negative outworks that must be forced by the man who would explore and explain the central position. For there it towers, everlasting, I would say. But it is very difficult to excite people about what is everlasting.

No one is of much help in the matter. Those who have sought to deal with the riddle in the past have, for the most part, it seems to me, largely encrusted it with all manner of distracting error. We must give Russell Kirk an A for effort in The Conservative Mind. But looked at coldly-what confusion is brewed by slamming into one pot John Adams, John Randolph, John Calhoun, James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams, and George Santayana. Informed the book is; worthy it is-a worthy master's thesis. And, faute de mieux[Ed:lack of a better], we do well to push it. But if you were a marine in a landing boat, would you wade up the seabeach at Tarawa for that conservative position? And neither would I.

That is why I am trying to write a conservative position that will make sense to, that will not enrage, a marine as he steps waist-deep into the gunfire at Tarawa. No other is any good or any use. If it can't be done, there is no defensible conservative position, for the conservative postion is not merely an acquisitive position. In my gropings and stugglings through the outworks, I think I have gone beyond the conservative position. I have found that behind it lies something much more steadfast-the conservative spirit, or, if you will, the conservative principle. Ages change, politics shift and slither-the conservative spirit does not change. It adjusts because it is a summation of human wisdom, and in a sense organic, it looks from the fastness of life, and bends or yields to what is passing, but maintains, as the light shines in darkness, what is everlasting because it partakes of it itself.

But all this, of course, is only the backdrop to what must be stated. I hope this will give you some idea of the degree to which I am involved in this task. It is difficult to set logic to music. But logic which does not sing is only more of the same old mouse cheese. I am trying to make it sing so that others will sing it. For if you could excite a boy of draft age with the conservative position as now generally presented, it would be proper to suspect that the young man was a prig or a dud. And not the least of my problems is your businessman, a nonreader.

As ever,

Whittaker

(Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday)

Fault Lines. Part II

2011-08-14T00:09:00.000+09:30

In the previous post commentator JMSmith made the following comment.

He was, as I recall from Witness, and as these passages seem to confirm, recoiling from the enervation of the West. It's like a party that starts to wind down: guests leave because other guests leave. There's no future in it.

I'n all fairness to JMSmith, he has not read Cold Friday where Chambers becomes more specific in what he felt were the Crises of the West;

..... Communism manipulated them, not in terms of Communism, but in terms of the shared historical crisis-peace and social justice being two of the most workable terms.[Ed] They were free to denounce Communism and Communists (and also anti-Communists) after whatever flourishes their intellectual innocence or arrogance might choose. Communism asked no more. It cared nothing, at this point, about motives. It cared about results.

Unlike Communism, the West held no unified solution for the crisis. In face of the crisis, part of the West reacted with inertia[Ed]-inertia, in the simple term-is of the physics primer, that is, the tendency of a body to remain at rest or in a straight line of motion. But the responsive section offered a solution for the crisis. This solution, whatever differences it assumed from place to place and time to time, whatever disguises political expediency or preference draped or phrased it in, was always the same solution. It was the socialist solution. Derived, as doctrine, from the same source-the historical insights of Karl Marx-the socialist solution differed from the Communist solution chiefly in political methods. One difference consisted in the slower rate of speed at which socialism proposed to apply its solution. Another difference concerned the kind and degree of coercion that socialism would apply to impose its solution. In practice, no socialist government had yet pushed its solution to the point where full coercion must come into play. Therefore, this difference had not yet stood the test of reality. Otherwise, between the end solution that socialism and Communism both hold in view for mankind-the matured planned economy of the future-the difference was so slight that it would be difficult to slip a razor blade between them.

It was no innate charm of socialism that made millions in the West espouse it, just as it was no innate charm of Communism that recruited its millions. It was the force of the historical crisis that made masses of men entertain the socialist solution, which, in fact, sundered the West.

(To aid the reader, Chambers thought Communism was the aggressive variant of Socialism and Fascism its bastard brother.)

Here Chambers clearly identifies the problem of War and Social Justice as two of the main societal problems of the time. The jingoism of 1914 was replaced by an abject horror and despair by 1918 at the events that had unfolded during World War 1. The world was in turmoil and a sense of failure pervaded. The traditionalists had no solution. The punitive damages imposed on Germany by the Allies lead to some of the financial idiocy of the Wiemar republic with its resultant hyperinflation and societal failure. Bill Bonner described it thus:

Otto Freidrich described the period of German hyperinflation and its effects: “… People carried wages home in huge crates; by the time they could spend even their trillion-mark notes they were practically worthless… There was not a single girl in the entire middle class who could get married without her father paying a dowry… They saved and saved so that they could get married, and so it destroyed the whole idea of remaining chaste until marriage…the girls learned that virginity didn’t matter anymore.”“Against my will,” wrote author Stefan Zweig “I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicles of history.” Zweig lived through the hyperinflation in Germany during the ’20s and sold stories to survive. Later, he moved to Brazil and blew his brains out.

Brutality triumphed because civilized life was smothered by inflation. The Treaty of Versailles condemned the Huns to pay more than 47,000 tonnes of gold in reparations. Taking that amount of real money out of the economy left the Germans with no choice. They had no money left. They had to create it. Result: hyperinflation. The size of the banknotes rose with the crisis. In 1922, the highest denomination was 50,000 Mark. By 1923, the highest denomination was 100,000,000,000,000 Mark. By December 1923 the exchange rate was 4,200,000,000,000 Marks to 1 US dollar.”The German middle class was wiped out. More importantly, the handrails and guideposts wobbled, so there was nothing to hold onto and no way to know where you were going. Businesses, banks, military, police, even the government itself – everything tottered and fell down. In the tumult, war-hardened rabble rolled towards Herr Hitler like loose nuts.

They weren't just rolling to Herr Hitler, they were rolling to the Socialists as well. Chambers, who was visiting Germany at the time, saw it first hand [Ed, shortened for brevity]:

For the inflation was on. This was something the like of which Americans were to know nothing until some seven years Iater in the Great Depression. As an American I had traveller's cheques so that the inflation struck me at first only in the preposterous exchange of a check for a massive roll of hundreds of thousands of marks, and in the necessity of eating meals early because in the matter of an hour the value of the mark had fallen again, and a meal eaten at one o'clock might cost a thousand marks more than a meal eaten at noon. I was in a great city, one of the most orderly and organized in the world. Here, modern civilization had taken form in big solid buildings, street lights streetcars, a flawless subway, automobiles-all the externals of modern life. Behind those impressive appearances life had gone mad. I was reminded of my Grandmother Whittaker's description of an earthquake-when the underpinnings of a world give way, the walls fall out and pipes writhe up from the surface of streets like snakes That had happened in Berlin and all over Germany But the solid form of things stood firm. The earthquake was invisible or visible only in its effects on the victims.

Well-dressed people walked back and forth on the Kurfarstendamm, like any Fifth Avenue crowd. Suddenly, the tears would stream down a woman's face simply as she walked along-the face of desperation, which asked and expected neither pity nor help, for there was no pity or help because there was no hope. The commonest of sights was to see someone snatch a purse and disappear in the crowd which rushed together for a moment, attracted by the victim's cries, and then walked on again with a shrug.

Sometimes I saw another aspect of the crisis that was even more baffling. There would be little knots of furtive figures selling newspapers at some of the street corners. At the appearance of a green-clad policeman, they would break and run. I was told that they were Communists. The Communist Party was outlawed. They were selling Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag). I did not know, of course, that the party was even then stockpiling rifles and machine guns for a revolution that was scheduled to break out in the autumn.

Germany was an extreme case where societal problems had become pressure cooked. But even before the First World War, the massive migration of the tired, poor, huddled masses from the Old World to the New, when sea travel was far more precarious than plane travel is now, showed just how miserable life was for those who left the Old World. The problems of intractable wage poverty, (i.e people who worked long days yet were not able to escape poverty even with thrift), and the effects of the war in terms of the disabled and dead were felt everywhere. These were societal "fault lines" which gave modern ideologies their allure. But there were other fault lines as well. Racial issues, the role of women in society, issues with regard to contraception and so on. Traditionalism failed because the solution to the problem was to go back to the state of affairs which caused the problem in the first place, the traditional world was unable to adapt and was bypassed.

Conservatism failed because it became hidebound to traditionalism.

George Grosz and Otto Dix captured the mood of the times.

(Could be a motto for the doctrinaire Austrian economists)

The Dry Well.

2011-08-11T23:30:00.001+09:30

Whittaker Chambers was both religious and conservative in his youth. In Cold Friday he describes his experience of Columbia University in transforming his outlook on life.[Ed:I've edited some of it for brevity]

It was in the fall of 1920 that I made my way along 116th Street to my first class. Belatedly and reluctantly, I was doing what was expected of every bright youth of my age and class: at last I was going to college. It would have been much more realistic to say that I was stepping across what my geology instructor would soon teach me to call a line of fault-the line along which the seeming-solid surface of the earth was secretly cracked and under pressures and stresses beyond our sight or knowledge would one day, in a twinkling, tear apart, upheave or sink, engulfing cities whole in that readjustment of physical reality that we call an earthquake. Only this line of fault did not run invisibly under our feet. It flawed the whole structure of civilization. Two years before, the first four-year shock [Ed:World War 1]had ended after leveling Europe to a ruin that could not be measured merely by its physical wreckage. For the ruin took place in men's souls before it was made visible in the rubble of cities.

In the crisis of the twentieth century neither Harvard nor Columbia could be other than what it was-a citadel of the mind swaying in the vertigo of a civilization changing (without admitting it) the basis of its faith from a two thousand-year-old Christian culture to the new secular and scientific culture. That is to say, changing the nature of its organism. This change Nietzsche heralded and in part prescribed. To it he gave a useful term: the transvaluation of all values, which is the pedagogue's way of saying that the change was a change in the moral, religious, and intellectual organism of Western civilization. In that revolution (of which Communism, socialism, and related forms are only logical political developments), Western civilization slowly and only half-consciously, and by a process reaching much farther back in time than it is common to suppose, rejected its two thousand year-old Christian faith, which placed God at the center of man's hope, in favor of a new faith, secular, exclusively rational and scientific, which set Man at the center of man's hope. I cannot remember ever hearing the word Communism or the name of Marx mentioned in a classroom. Lenin as a writer of political theory was then locked up in Russian or unread in German. No member of the Columbia faculty was remotely suspect as a Communist. The words Communism and Communist were almost never heard.

There was nothing to tell me the day I walked across the Columbia University campus as a freshman that the path was to lead me into Communism. No member of the Columbia faculty ever consciously guided me toward Communism. Columbia did not teach me Communism. It taught me despair. I loved Columbia and still love it in the physical way with which most men ever after love the campus on which they passed formative years of their youth. In the last decades I have sometimes gone up, to move alone-a foiled circuitous wanderer among the hordes of later alien undergraduates- among its remembered walls and walks (now greatly changed). But as a citadel of the mind, in the second decade of the twentieth century, I found its experience a trap. I thought that I had found the perfect description of it when one day in Hartley Hall I read T. S. Eliot's Wasteland, just published in the old Dial magazine:

And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and
exhausted wells.

Chambers describes an intellectual climate of moral relativism and skepticism which instead of producing a dynamic materialism, effect a culture of despair and nihilism.

It was not the world of twentieth-century politics but the much more basic, pervasive world of the mind and spirit that I discerned was in extremity. The profound sense of the incurable sickness of the world made all men sick. In this mood, the undergraduate (I) wrote:

And we on whom its shadow fills-
sober and containing air
Feel it as tired and late despair
Between enfolding iron walls.

A generation of writers, the clinicians of every age, fixed the mood and the dimensions of the crisis-in four brackish lines of Edgar Lee Masters' epitaph for the Unknown Soldiers:

STRANGER: Tell the people of Spoon River two things:
First that we lie here, obeying their words;
And next that had we known what was back of their words,
We should not be lying here!
The mood was not a discovery of our generation. The first rumblings of catastrophe had been uttered by a generation of giants by contrast with whom we would clearly trace the decline of the human condition and the deepening of the crisis. Ibsen, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Shaw, Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson had foretold us.

It was a mood whose temper Oswald Spengler caught exactly, not so much in his philosophy, which comparatively few men read, still fewer understood, and many recoiled from, but in the tremendous poetry in which he asserted his vision of the crisis of twentieth-century man. It is in almost every line he wrote . . . The mood was implicit in the title of his chief work, The Decline of the West (written just before World War I), and even more expressive in the German version, Der Untergang des Abendlandes-The Down-Going of the Evening Land.

I carried away from Columbia a mood in which skepticism was only one ingredient-a mood that was by no means peculiar to Columbia. It was shared in one degree or another by practically every intelligence and focus of intelligence in the world, and had been for more than half a century. It was a feeling of despair, not always explicit and seldom definite, but running like a wistful theme through any view of life that was not merely practically ambitious. It was the sense of historical sundown the sense that man had reached one of the great jumping-off places-or what was worse, a place where it was impossible to jump because it was the end.

I felt, and most of the men I knew and most respected felt, that the world was too old, that it was late in its night, that that night was very dark, man was very far from home, he lacked inner strength to make the effort, and besides the right way was lost. No one quite knew how or why. Something was radically wrong. No one quite knew what. It was useless to seek an answer from any traditional voice (that was part of the despair), for all the oracles were dumb or lied because in the general darkness they could see no better than anybody else what threatened them, but feared it even more. Most people knew that something catastrophic was happening.[Ed: My italics]

The interesting observation here is that the traditional voices did not help and were of no comfort, even for those seeking it. Indeed, the picture he paints is of the acute perception of the failure of the old order in response to the social crises of the times. Its interesting to note that traditional societies' inability to mount a credible assault on this despair was part of the despair itself. It would appear that people didn't want traditional society to fail.

By the end of my sophomore year at Columbia, I had ceased to be a conservative. I was nothing. God, when He was not an intellectual embarrassment, was an admission or a convention that one conceded for the sake of tradition, civility, or an argument. Truth was wholly relative. Nothing was absolutely true and hence, by inference if not by direct evaluation, nothing was absolutely false. In other words, nothing was absolutely good or bad, though those other words were held to be a little naive or uncouth, just as the word "truth" was avoided in favor of the word "fact." My mind, which from the hodgepodge of my boyhood reading and other influences had begun in adolescence to sort out a crude conservative order, was once more a hodgepodge. Now it was the higher hodgepodge, a spiral nebula which caught up the whirling dust and fragments of literary and philosophical ideas from Homer to Gertrude Stein and the pre-Socratic philosophers to T. E. Hulme. * Insofar as my mind was not a hodgepodge, it was a vacuum. Its law was scepticism.

Here Chambers describes the intellectual environment that pervaded the universities of the West at the time. We also note, at this time that art too broke from its traditionalist conceptions veering into hitherto uncharted waters. The Cubism, Symbolism, Dada and so on were not just an impost on the Western Cultural climate, but a reaction to the intellectual nihilism that had taken hold. In the rejection of the Western Christian metaphysic there was nothing to take its place. This nihlism chafed at Chambers and presumably others like him,

In this disaster, in which the whole fabric of civilization was heaving, I reacted violently at last from that climate around me which enjoined doubt rather than faith, and robbed all action of its energy in the name of uncertainty. I did not believe that life is hopeless. With my deepest instinct, I did not want to be told that there are no ways out of catastrophe and that that does not matter in any case, for it is alike indifferent to the sceptical mind how we live and die since good or ill alike are relative. I wanted to know what the nature of the crisis was. I wanted to know the way out. Everything that was alive and strong in me wanted to know those things and I believed in a solution exactly in the degree to which I was alive and strong. To the same degree I became restless. I wanted to know: "Doesn't anybody know why we are in this mess? Is there nobody alive with the intelligence to figure a way out? For God's sake, somebody give me a straight answer."

and,

At that point, the revolutionary mood takes rise with the feeling: Well if there is no answer, if nobody can say what is wrong, or what to do, let us do something anyway. Let us at least smash something, for our condition is a great stagnant pond where life rots in stinking water, and if we do no more than break the banks and let the water out, we will perform a service to life. That is the mood where the anarchist stops. It is the mood in which Bakanin celebrated destruction as a creative act. But only a child's mind or an arrested mind can stop there. A mind, rounding into maturity, whatever its jolts, lags, and lapses, and however much it may recognize destruction as the first phase of any building operation, must seek a constructive purpose. The answer to death is not more violent death. The answer to death must be more complete life.

and

But in the end, my choice was based, not on the teachings of Marx and Lenin, their historical or economic analyses, or even the faith of Communism and the vision of man's salvation on earth. In the end, I made my choice, because I became convinced that the intelligence and power of the West were no longer able to solve the continuing crisis.[Ed: My italics]

A portion of the men, not all, who became Communists did it for altruistic reasons. Their universities, and the example of their society, with its entrenched inequalities and injustices gave them nothing but despair, and yet they wanted their society to be changed in order to live. In the Anglo-West this escape from the dying West was an acceptance of socialism. In the same way, the horrible nihilism engendered by Weimar Germany pushed men towards the Nazi's. (Rhopke recollected how the Nazi's rallies were full of vigour and spectacle, lingering in men's minds for days afterwards, whilst their oppositions attempts at countering them feeble and weak and quickly forgotten). The West was failing and men were grasping at ideologies in order to live.
We are witnessing this same effect today. The absolute corruption of politics, art and general culture are festering a current nihilism. Anyone who isn't an idiot can see that something is wrong in the West. The Tea Party movement, the fissuring of political parties in the face of unprincipled political leaders, the resurgence of nasty forms thuggish right wing politics, even the actions of Brievik should be seen in the light of this cultural banality and nihilism. The culture is trying to survive and its embrace of malignant ideologies are its death throes. History is repeating
Most men, lacking the intellectual faculties of an Aristotle or Aquinas, did not recognise that in escaping the dying West the solutions that they were embracing were malignant. Even then, being alive in the company of the Devil was better than being dead. .

This is an oversimplification. But in some similar ways this is the form in which the turn
toward Communism takes in the mind of every man or woman who becomes a Communist. It is the crisis that keeps them Communists, sometimes long after disillusionment or discontent with the reality of Communism have set in. Nor does the ex-Communist returning to the world that he abandoned as hopeless,hav any illusions, if he is intelligent and sincere, about the crisis. He does not return to the world because he believes that it is morally healthy or capable of solving the crisis which in fact is deeper than when he left it. He returns because he believes that Communism is evil. The crisis remains and world remains unable to solve it.

The West will only survive if solutions to its problems can be found within the tradition of the Western identity: And that identity is Christian. I'm not pushing this line because I'm a fundy, its because men who've been on the other side have worked it out themselves. The logical consequence of materialism is nihilism which in turn unleashes the forces of societal destruction.

No faith and we're dead. It's as simple as that. Man does not live on bread alone.

How the West was Lost.

2011-08-07T23:34:00.001+09:30

Whittaker Chambers suffered from Heart disease and this following passage was written whilst in hospital recovering from a heart attack. As a convalescent patient, he used to be regularly visited by a Catholic Monk who was visiting the sick. (Whittaker Chambers was never a Catholic). It also needs to be understood that Chambers though Socialism a "de-fanged" version of Communism. It's a long post but I think it's worth sticking with it.

Something quite different first stirred my interest in Father Alan. He was a Passionist monk. I observed with some curiosity his black habit with its broad leather belt dangling the chain of heavy wooden beads and the Crucifix. I observed, too, the black metal insignia of his order, in the shape of a human heart on which were traced in white a Cross and the letters IHS which Father Alan wore over his own heart.

There was nothing distinctive about Father Alan's conversation either. He, too, was under the rule that nothing must be said that might disturb the patient. So he dung formidably to the weather with only prudent ventures about my fellow inmates-the milder, more hopeful, or more amusing cases; for like me, Father Alan must struggle all his days against his sense of the absurd or comic.

But in any wavering along the margin of life there is a need that amounts to a greed, for truth, since in the flux of existence, the crumbling or melting at the touch of all familiar reality, truth alone is felt to offer one austere, stripped handhold across a chasm. One night I decided to cut through the careful irrelevancies of our talk and try to discover what manner of man this monk might really be. I asked: "Father, what am I to answer those people who keep writing me that I was wrong to write in Witness that I had left the winning side for the losing side? They say that by calling the West the losing side, I have implied that evil can ultimately overcome good."

Father Alan studied his hands, which were lying in his lap. Then he glanced at me directly and asked: "Who says that the West deserves to be saved?"

If, in that softly lighted room, Father Alan had burst a Verey flare, he could scarcely have lit up more effectively the ravaged landscape of that No Man's Land across which the 'West confronts its crisis, supposing that it is only an alien enemy it confronts, not knowing that the enemy it confronts is first of all itself.

For Father Alan's question cut past the tern-is in which men commonly view the crisis of our time. It cut past all ratios of opposed power, past the armaments race and the production race, past the atomic weapons, Bombs and the bombers, the guided missiles and the craftily guided policies, the marshalled divisions and the marshalled statistics. It did not ask: Has the West the physical power to survive? It asked: Is the West justified in surviving? Does that West retain within itself what alone in life and history ever justifies the survival of anything, and which is ultimately a play of creative force whose test and whose mandate is that it impels men to die for it, not because they wish to die, but because they feel its shaping power so completely that they would rather die than live without it? So long as men identify themselves with that force to the point where they will to die for it, it is living and provides that inner certitude, greater and more instant than any idea or reasoning, which holds nations upright as they pick up momentum in the terrifying slopes and turns of history. The moment men in masses begin to question that force, at that moment it has began to die. However long the tremor of its decay may take, time will henceforth be no more than a delay. Every civilization embodies a certain truth to which it gives reality. When that truth, which is, in turn, embodied in a faith held religiously whether or not it is wholly religious-when that faith loses its power to inspire men, its downfall is at hand. When that faith and that truth no longer match and meet the reality of men's daily lives, there sets in a radical readjustment of reality whereby men seek to bring the faith by which they live into conformity with the reality they live in.

Thus every social revolution begins with a spiritual and intellectual revolution. Men revolt first in thought, in order to be free to revolt in act. But revolt does not always imply violence. It may simply take the form of a question. When the gap grows too clear between the faith and forms of a civilization and the realities of daily life, masses of men are paralyzed by the discrepancy so that before the old faith they first grow numb, then apathetic, then questioning if not disdainful. They simply by-pass in one degree or other, what no longer corresponds to their reality. It has lost its power to inspire their lives. This happens even if they continue outwardly to conform to the old ways. This is the real crisis of the West and the point at which, across a No Man's Land of apathy, it confronts itself. Communism is only a secondary manifestation of this crisis, although Communism has reached a strength where it complicates and threatens to solve in its own terms the crisis of the divided West. For Communism is not an Asiatic or Russian growth, as some maintain. In its Soviet form, it has been shaped and colored by Russian peculiarities. But Communism is a way of thought and action, a way of reading history and its forces, which was developed in the culture capitals of the West. The growth of its power is inexplicable except as Communism appeals to the divided mind of the West, making each of its advances exactly along the line of the West's internal division, paralyzing each effort of the West to cope with it by touching some sympathetic nerve. The success of Communism, as I have written elsewhere, is never greater than the failure of all other faiths. Just as the threat of Communism is not the true crisis of the West, Communism is not the true revolution of our time. Communism is only one form and one sector of that revolution. The revolution of our time embraces the whole West, and, since, for the first time in history, our civilization, due to technology and science, embraces the whole world, the revolution affects the whole world. This revolution operates on many levels. It is a spiritual and intellectual revolution so that Henry Adams, sitting in his Manhattan club, watching the crowds marching up and down Fifth Avenue, had good ground for believing that they were marching chiefly to the end of a world-his world and ours. But the revolution is also a social revolution, a movement of masses of men, for a greater share of the goods which a technological civilization produces in hitherto unheard of abundance-and which is perhaps the sole justification for the existence of that system. Any attempt to see the revolution in either of those terms without seeing it in terms of the other -any attempt to see it only as a spiritual crisis or only as a social crisis-leads to a confusion of reality.

I opened recently a Fair Dealing magazine to find a two-page spread of American goods with a caption to the effect that this is our answer to Communism, this is what the free world has to offer the restive regions of mankind. It is well to offer this to whatever man needs it. Tactically, and he who receives knows even better than he who gives the degree to which tactics underlies the benefaction-these goods may forestall or defer a loss to Communism. Moreover, that deferment may be of incalculable importance.

But that will not solve the crisis either of the West or of the world. For the complacency which supposes that a crisis of the depth of ours can be solved by a dole fails to grasp that such a solution has thereby raised the other aspect of the crisis-the spiritual crisis-to the point of desperation. At that point, all stand under the judgment which humankind has always known at the moment when the ineradicable spirit bursts the shell that we try to raise between our lives and our inward knowledge that all life is tragic.

A civilization is justified in seeking to buy survival by sharing its material prosperity with a restive world-like any other form of endangered life trying to save itself. But a civilization which supposes that what it chiefly has to offer mankind is more abundant bread-that civilization is already half-dead. Sooner or later it will know it as it chokes on a satiety of that bread by which alone men cannot live. It will, in all probability, know it long before. For it seems to be a law of life and of history that societies in which the pursuit of abundance and comfort has displaced all other pursuits in importance soon cease to be societies. They become prey. They fall to whatever power can rally the starving spirit of man even though the rallying faith is demonstrably worse than the soft complacency that would suffocate the spirit in abundance. The fall is more certain because a failure of spirit leads invariably by some inward influence to a failure of intelligence.

Throughout the years between my break with Communism and the beginning of the Hiss Case, Father Alan's question had haunted me. It rose in its most terrible form when that case began. It was never absent from a day or night of that experience. Against nothing did I have to struggle so fiercely as against it. And nothing set me so apart from those who bore the burdens of that action in more important ways or sealed me off more completely in a circle of loneliness. For, unlike them, I truly supposed that that action was more than incidental, justified in the name of right and of necessity but powerless to affect the deeper crisis of our time which it subsumed in miniature. I never supposed that by my actions in that case, I could do more than give the children of men an infinitesimally better chance against the forces of dissension and darkness that were setting against them. Therefore, I sought to go a little in advance-to give them that infinitesimally better chance.

Every development of that case confirmed my view, and every development afterward added to it.

That is why, later on, when our nightly conversations had become something to which, it seemed to me, Father Alan looked forward almost as much as I, I spoke to his understanding with a freedom such as I would speak to few men. Thus, one night, when our conversation had reached a certain turn, I said: "Two little imps sit at the foot of my bed, one on each post. They sit with their backs to me. But, now and again, one will turn around and grin and say: 'It was all for nothing?' Then the other turns and grins and asks: 'Why go on?"'

But it was not the absence of an answer to Father Alan's question ("Who says the West is worth saving?") that was most appalling. What appalled was the fact that, in its own mind, the West disdained the question, or, if it deigned to admit it to its consciousness at all, its complacent answer would be: yes. Father Alan's question spoke directly to my condition because it implied what we both knew-that at that point the West stood under the oldest and ultimate judgment, which could be lifted only in terms of more suffering than the mind can bear or measure.

And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God;
I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.
Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.*
* Revelations 3:14-17.

[Editor. My highlighting.]

What Chambers is saying here is that West's lack of an ideal, for which it will literally die for, is why it is dying. The materialist vision of man, which by implication seeks to maximise life and hedonistic pleasure, is powerless against ideologies which place a transcendental value above life itself. The reason why there is still fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine is the same reason why the Americans weren't able to conquer the Vietnamese. It's because, in these countries, the combatants prefer to die rather than live like Westerners. Reflecting on the rise of Communism, this exchange between Robert McNamara and Fidel Castro, recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis, is worth recalling.

Robert Mcnamara to Fidel Castro:

"Mr. President, I have three questions to you. Number one: did you know the nuclear warheads were there[Ed: On Cuba]? Number two: if you did, would you have recommended to Khrushchev in the face of an U.S. attack that he use them? Number three: if he had used them, what would have happened to Cuba?"

Castro's response in light of Chambers;

He said, "Number one, I knew they were there. Number two, I would not have recommended to Khrushchev, I did recommend to Khrushchev that they be used. Number three, 'What would have happened to Cuba?' It would have been totally destroyed."

Yes, and he went on to say: "Mr. McNamara, if you and President Kennedy had been in a similar situation, that's what you would have done."

And McNamara's Response?

I said, "Mr. President, I hope to God we would not have done it. Pull the temple down on our heads? My God!"

In a sense, we'd won. We got the missiles out without war. My deputy and I brought the five Chiefs over and we sat down with Kennedy. And he said, "Gentlemen, we won. I don't want you ever to say it, but you know we won, I know we won."

And LeMay said, "Won? Hell, we lost. We should go in and wipe 'em out today."

[Robert McNamara. The Fog of War]

As Juvenal said all those years ago, "For life's sake do not lose your reason to live".

Message in a Bottle.

2011-08-03T22:45:00.004+09:30

Recently, I had the opportunity to take some time off and catch up with some reading. One of the books that I had meant to read, based on snippet of it which I had found on the internet, was Cold Friday by Whittaker Chambers.

Chambers is chiefly remembered for the Hiss spy trial and his book Witness. After his death he was quickly forgotten, except by the curmudgeonly right whom I felt never real got to grips with the full extent of his intelligence. He became, much like Stalin's victims, a footnote of history, an unfortunate product of his time. Whilst recent scholarship has been more sympathetic to his memory, the common conception of him is that of a morally flawed and unattractive man.

This public image of him was first forged during the Hiss case where his unsavory past and pudgy countenance was in start contrast to graceful and impeccable Hiss. Even with Hiss's conviction, which vindicated Chambers, I still get the impression that Chambers was the overall loser of the trial. High friends in Government wanted to vindicate Hiss, as did the majority of the media and the majority of the right type of people. Chambers may have won the battle but he seemed to have lost the war, and a certain odium pertained to Him afterwards amongst "polite society". Though Chambers was a gifted writer, post Hiss case, he fell on financially difficult times and relative obscurity, as did his message. He died in 1961. Cold Friday was a collection of his letters and incomplete works which, after being published, received lukewarm reviews. Pearls before swine.

His writings are easily dismissed as particular to the circumstances of the now distant Cold War and yet they are not. The Cold War was but one manifestation of the great metaphysical battle which has engulfed the West over the last one hundred years. We are still in the midst of this battle and are living in a dark age of man, darkening ever further as the left accedes. Reading Cold Friday, the message that keeps coming through is that the West is dying, as it has been cut off from the source of its vitality.

The population of the West with people from Islamic lands, Multiculturalism, Moral Relativism, Socialism and all the other pernicious ideologies of our times are symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. Just as a human infected with the AIDS virus succumbs to infections that it would normally repel with ease, so is the West unable to combat its current multiple pathologies due to a fundamental weakness of its being.

And the source of the weakness according to Chambers was in a rejection of God which lead to an indifference to truth. It's the same conclusion which Solzhenitsyn came to sitting in the Gulag and it's the conclusion I've come to as well. I have taken this position, not because of any religious fundamentalism, or brainwashing, it's because when you follow the dots backwards, trying to understanding how we got into the current mess, it's the only logical conclusion. Even Orwell, who was no friend of religion, over time began to doubt in the purely materialistic understanding of the universe. Reason, not faith is what forms this diagnosis.

Chambers' value is in the fact that he was able to lucidly see the nature of this battle as he was a combatant for both sides, but more importantly he was a able to penetrate past appearance to the underlying reality of the thing. His savage attack on Ayn Rand, Big Sister Is Watching You, was a classic example. His gift, so to speak, is that he could see the reality of things clearly.

His lurch to the left was driven in part by the injustices and dysfunction of the old world, entrenched cultural concepts which were corroding the very fabric of the society that they were meant to uphold. The leftist solution was initially seen as a tonic and only belatedly did a few realise it was a fatal poison. He was a man who saw the solution for what it was and came back from "hell without empty hands." His writings then, were an attempt to warn his fellow man of the dangers he was drifting towards and of the misery that would follow. He was a lone prophet in the intellectual wilderness of the modern West.

Over the next few posts I plan to put up some excerpts from his book (I believe that it qualifies as fair use) and perhaps discuss some of the points he mentions. Once again, I would urge my readers to go buy the book.

As his son left the farm to register for the draft he wrote:

It seemed to me as I watched him leave that the most important thing I could do for him was to report for him how his father had viewed certain aspects of our reality, what I believed the forces of reality to be, and how I saw their origins and development, which pulverized individual men, and caught peoples, like shovelfuls of corn in a hammermill. My book should be something like what past ages used to call an enchiridion -a little dagger to arm him against the swarming night, a little dagger that might help him to cut his way among the enemies and perplexities of his life. I meant no formidable treatise, for which I felt no competence. What I had in mind was a little book to which he could turn in doubt or trouble, when he could no longer come to me, and catch again his father's voice saying: "This is how it happened to me, these are the conclusions I drew from past experience. This is how experience seemed to teach me that a man should act, this is what a man is and should be against the scale of reality." My reward, never known by men, could be that he might one day say, "In the main, you spoke to me wisely."

I have put off the task too long. Few tasks have been so difficult as to begin this book. How many times I have sat down at my desk to begin it, and have then got up again with that slight feeling of nausea that I have sometimes known in testifying publicly or in much of Witness which is, I suppose, the penalty that the body pays when the will overdrives the nerves. At the root of that feeling is the sense of hopelessness which besets most of those who have sought to carry on the struggle in our time. It can be put in a simple question: Since acts have done so little good, what possible good can more words do? Linked with this feeling is another that goes even deeper. It is the sense of a limit beyond which a man may not wish to drive himself. The effort of recollection forces me to turn back to horrors which no man can come through and live from day to day without putting out of his mind-not by a conscious effort but by that mercy of the mind which sinks what is too heavy to be borne into the grace of forgetfulness. To probe the scar risks each time reopening the wound. One of the best Latin tags says that perhaps at some future time it will be pleasant to remember these things. They can be remembered only in a turmoil of spirit that pushes the mind towards a longing for annihilation.

But the greatest difficulty in writing this book is something else. It lies at the point where the book itself is a parting much more final than my son's walking up a path. I write consciously in the belief that this is probably the last effort of the kind that I shall make, a kind of summary testament, a backward reading of what I have learned from experience to this point. I am haunted by the need for truth, the fear of error, at the point of life when truth has become the one consuming need, since nothing else has real worth. My son must read this as the effort at truth, knowing that I could wish for him only what is good and true.

I have a sense of leaving my son, that chapter by chapter puts us farther apart as if he were a figure compelled to watch from a shore another receding in a little boat.

and,

Time is running out on me. I am rushing on to sixty. This is old age. Of importance, here,
chiefly because, if I do not get my meaning down on paper, I shall die with Witness as my
whole meaning. It is not my whole meaning. . . .

Cold Friday, Whittaker Chambers [Ed: My highlighting]

Two Links.

2011-08-02T21:56:00.000+09:30

Breivik's Brain.

Sailer gets it, but it really should have been titled Breivik's Soul.

The most notable traits of Breivik’s character are a Nietzschean lack of Christian compassion and guilt, grandiose ambition, self-confidence, competitiveness, cynicism, and a lack of normal human emotions. The standard assumption is that he is an unstable individual driven to rage by reading anti-jihad websites such as Gates of Vienna. But I don’t sense a huge amount of anger in the hundreds of pages I endured. Instead, 2083 reads more like a marketing and strategic document—a business plan, as it were—for how to build an ideology and a movement that will win a struggle for control of Europe.

The banality of evil, and

Breivik despises Marxists—they are, to him, the enemy team against which he competes—but he accepts much of their intellectual framework.

The problem is that too many of the right are like Breivik, crypto leftists.

The Highest Combat.

Now we're getting to business.

As Belloc said, The faith is Europe and Europe is the faith. No faith and the West ceases to exist. It simply becomes a geographical location, not an idea.

The Child Care Billy Club.

2011-08-01T22:54:00.001+09:30

Traditionalist conceptions of motherhood when questioned, are frequently justified on the basis that the natural mother child care giving relationship is the best one possible for the child, all other forms of care being inferior and possibly harmful. It's a staple cultural meme of the modern Anglosphere.

As a consequence, women who aren't naturally suited to staying at home caring for the children are torn between suffering themselves at home or making the child suffer by "neglecting" the child's care. Traditionalists of all types are fond of citing childcare studies which prove that child care is "harmful" to children.

The traditionalist brigade don't realise just how powerful this meme is, and just how accurately it strikes at the heart of working woman's anxieties. The meme is used as sort of cultural billy club to women who work, regardless if they want to or are forced by economic circumstances. It also has the benefit of shoring up the traditionalist position, the stay at home mother deriving her moral superiority from being a "better mother" than her working peer. Then, of course, there is always the moral superiority of martyrdom, women who "sacrifice" themselves for their families (just try getting some of them to work for money after their children have left the home) earning near universal admiration for their choice.

This assumption, that with regard to child care, mother at home is the best, seems intuitively obvious and is rarely challenged. It's a defacto assumption.

It's this assumption that is the cause of endless anxiety with regard to long term effects of child care. Scientific studies( of which there are numerous and which are frequently very poorly done) looking into the matter seem to provide conflicting evidence with regard to the long term effects of child care. One way of interpreting this is that more evidence is needed, the other way of interpreting this is that there isn't any effect at all. This paper, by the University of Budapest, is a good review of the research.

Now one are of research that the Traditionalists never seem to mention is with regard to child development is with regard to maternal stress. Here the research is pretty much settled, in that a stressed and unhappy mother is likely to have children with bonding and developmental issues. (I'm not providing any references, just enter the appropriate search terms in Google scholar.) It would appear that a mother's mood is more important than outsourced childcare with a regard to a child's development.

This, of course, poses a problem to the "suck it up" Traditionalist brigade. Unhappy martyr mothers make for unhappy children. It would appear that their stay at home imperative "for the sake of the children" is fundamentally flawed from the point of view of the children. If you want happy and well adjusted children, you've got to have happy mothers. Suffering for the cause, as in really suffering, not just being inconvenienced, is counterproductive.

Maternal happiness seems to be the key of good child development. Buried in the linked review is a rather brilliant study by Barling, Fullagear and Marchl-Dingle.

In a 1988 paper, Barling, Fullagear and Marchl-Dingle go further and describe significant association between mothers’ interrole conflict and children’s behavioural problems. They suggest that both employed mothers uncommitted to their work, and homemaker mothers with blocked employment role commitment are in a stressful situation. Without controlling for intervening factors they suggest that this can affect their parenting behaviour negatively,which in turn leads to behavioural problems of their children.

On a sample of 185 5th and 6th grade children from an elementary school they show that children, whose mothers’ employment and employment commitment were not congruent (i.e. either a homemaker mother with high commitment to work, or a working mother with low work-commitment), were rated significantly less attentive and more immature than those children whose mothers employment status and commitment were congruent.

In other words, when women, who were temperamentally suited to be carers were made to work they became stressed, as did women who were temperamentally suited to work when forced to stay at home. Not only did they suffer, but their children suffered as well.

If we as a society want to raise happy and healthy kids what we need to do is let women find their own mix of work life balance. For most women it will be in a homemaker role, but for some it will be in some form of employment. Both Traditionalists and Feminists need to get off their backs.

The whole point of my blathering about motherhood roles in society, is that it very accurately illustrates the problem between the traditionalist and modern conceptions of it. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation put a lot of women back into the home, where they became miserable and resentful. The traditionalist response to this new phenomenon was to tell the malcontents to suck it up and do nothing. The inability to innovate within the conservative tradition meant that built up social pressures could not be relieved constructively, rather, in the absence of good thought bad thought took it's place. Conservative stupidity was the midwife of Feminism.

Which, in a nutshell, was the problem of the 20th Century. Because Conservatives couldn't solve problems the Leftists did. And they did it badly.

Kristallnacht.

2011-07-25T00:13:00.001+09:30

As the saying goes, history doesn't repeat but it sure it rhymes.

Students of history will recall that title of today's post refers to the events occurring in Nazi Germany on the 9th of November of 1938. In response to the assassination of a German diplomat, Ernst von Rath by a disaffected Polish Jew, Hershel Grzynspyn, the Nazi's unleashed pogroms against the Jews living in Germany. (Ironically, von Rath was being investigated by the Gestapo for his anti-Nazi sympathies)

German society (indeed most of Europe) always possessed a large anti-semitic undercurrent which reverberated with the Nazi ideology. The Nazi's needed a pretext to "get rid of the jews" and the assassination of von Rath provided them with a pretext to get the ball rolling. It's important to remember that had von Rath not been assassinated, some other event would have been made to fit the bill.

For Kristallnacht to occur, there needed to be official sanction to public prejudice: Liberties and Rights were thrown out of the window.

The social climate of Kristallnacht has been on my mind lately, especially in regard to the terrible Murders in Norway.

Here in Australia, the murderer has been reported as a Right-wing extremist, Right-wing Christian extremist, Christian Fundamentalist and so on. The emphasis being on Right wing and Christian. Any normal person would be horrified and repulsed by the events in Norway ( btw, I think he deserves to hang) but what is beginning to worry me is that the media is only reporting on Christians and Rightists only in the context of negative events. The aim being to form a pavlovian assosciation in the minds of the public between Christians, Rightists and evil.

The public is being conditioned by the liberal media to equate Christian and Right=Evil as effectively as the Nazi's peddling of the "eternal Jew". The pogroms are next.

I've had a brief look at the ramblings and the biography of Anders Behring Breivik and it would appear that he is nominally Christian and ideologically similar to Geert Wilders, possessing a weird pro-gay (only in the modern world could pro-gay= Christian) and anti-Islamic form of conservatism. He is pro-Israel which doesn't make him a Nazi. I suppose the closest American equivalent would be an East Coast Republican. This guy seems pretty socially liberal in my reading of things and it seems very difficult to categorise him as anything else than weak right and nominally christian.

Still the media seem desperate to link his warped Christainity and his anti-Marxism to his actions which they otherwise find inexplicable. However his manifesto is available on the internet (I'm not linking to it) and the explanation for his actions are there:

I’ve spent a total of 9 years of my life working on this project. The first five years were spent studying and creating a financial base, and the last three years was spent working full time with research, compilation and writing. Creating this compendium has personally cost me a total of 317 000 Euros (130 000 Euros spent from my own pocket and 187 500 Euros for loss of income during three years). All that, however, is barely noticeable compared to the sacrifices made in relation to the distribution of this book, the actual marketing operation;)

Yep. The bombing and the murders were part of a book launch. It's all a publicity event. I guess his aim was to do something so horrible that all the world's attention would be drawn to him: The media obliged.

This was a narcissistic individual who believed he had special message to tell the world. I imagine that he really didn't want to kill those kids but his important message needed to be heard. Others have said the same thing, still they did not see the need to bomb the city and kill children to get their message across. Apparently he is co-operating with police and telling all. He probably see's himself as a martyr to the cause. Note, everyone else is dead except him. His narcissism was his motivation for evil not his Christianity or his Right wing beliefs.

Still the the role of the liberal media is to slander Christians and Rightists, when it comes to pretext, any idiot will do.

This guy was real dickhead. ( I also note, played World of Warcraft and did not have a girlfriend.)

My condolences to the families of the victims.

Taking Out the Family.

2011-07-20T10:59:00.000+09:30

Kathy Farrelly provided some rather interesting comments to my last post. It was this bit which piqued my interest:

I would be the first to admit that the kids drive me nuts at times and housework is boring as batshit. Sure It would break the monotony if I could get out a bit and do something else..

But it is all about "dying to self" and putting the good of the family above your own wants.

Firstly, I want to go on the record as saying the I like Kathy Farelly based on long running appreciation of her commentary in the blogosphere. From what she has written, she sounds like a good normal woman and a good mother. (This is not a sop to you Kathy, I'm simply calling it as I see it.)

Christian Traditionalists, extolling the virtues of motherhood, frequently place particular emphasis on the self-sacrificial nature of it, seeing it as a particularly Christ like virtue. Traditionalists, who are opposed to the idea of a woman working, frequently assert that women who do work are selfish, fulfilling their own desires at the expense of the family, and as such, love themselves more than their families.

This charge strikes most normal women harshly.

Just as penis size is a source of constant anxiety for men, so maternal ability is for women. Lot's of women, in my experience, are constantly plagued by guilt and anxiety with regards to their efficacy at being a mother. Lots of women who work, are guilt ridden, feeling that they are being selfish by not "being there" and caring for their families. Lot's of women, who stay at home, find solace in their superiority over working mothers because in "denying themselves" they prove themselves to the world as being better mothers than their working others.

They are also supported by a good body of Christian Tradition that sees self sacrifice as the embodiment of love.

This however is misstating the Christian Tradition.

Profound moralists have been concerned with the problem of evil and its recognition. From my reading, the evil most feared is the evil that looks like a good. In my mind, a superficial understanding of maternal-self-sacrifice is one such evil.

Many people who extol the idea of sacrificial love see it as a virtue in itself, which it isn't. Self-sacrifice is only a virtue when it pursues a good, otherwise it is an evil. But it is a very difficult evil to recognise since society, through cultural front-loading, automatically assumes it is a good.

Blatant evil, such as murder, and is easy to recognise and hence repels our primitive conscience, the evils that really hard to spot are those which are agreeable or appear virtuous. One of the most profound comments ever written with regard to human psychology was written by C.S. Lewis in his Srewtape Letters:

Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

The traditionalists have failed to recognise the signposts.

In my experience, contrary to much of the bleatings of the manosphere, many women have put the good of their family above themselves, frequently with detrimental consequences to the family.

The problem is that many women are not suited to being exclusively full time carers of their family, and placing them in this role, though cultural pressure and herd predisposition, places them in a position of chronic stress. Now, some women can cope with this stress whilst and others cannot. The thing about chronic stress is that it changes people involuntarily.

What I'm trying to get at it that many women stick at the motherhood role despite hating it, placing them in a position of constant stress, over time this stress changes the woman involuntarily so that she becomes chronically unhappy (and sexless in many instances), irritable, moody and miserable. This unhappy and miserable woman becomes both a pain to husband and to her children, and interactions with her are stressful. The kids get a disproportionate response to minor transgressions, she's always moody when the husband comes home. The household may be a mess and is a miserable place to be in. In "dying to herself" everyone else gets taken down with her.

The whole point of self-sacrifice is towards an objective good, when the self-sacrifice is causing evil there is a moral obligation to stop it.

For the majority of women, mothering competence is part and parcel of the female identity, admitting that you are having difficulty with mothering is akin to admitting that you are a lesser woman. This is why a lot of women do not seek help when they are suffering from post-natal depression. To them, its an admission of second class female status. To use a male analogy, it's like announcing to the world that you have a small penis. (Perhaps more so, as women are more socially conscious than men.)

Many women have scarified their personal ambitions for the sake of the family and have been able to maintain cheerful and happy homes. Others, forced into the role of motherhood by either traditionalist conceptions or the "modern perfect motherhood cult" have found to their surprise that they have become miserable as have their households. If a woman's self-sacrifice is making her family and husband miserable, it's time for her to stop. Noble vice is not a virtue.

(If libido is in any way correlated with happiness then Kathy seems to be a good wife. :) )

( Some people have criticised me for the unscientific nature of my posts. My posts aren't science papers, but interpretations of the sum of my clinical experience, which by now is considerable. My current patient load is greater than the numbers in many studies and I've had the chance to view many of my patients longitudinally, something few psychological studies have been able to do. What prompted me to blog was Theodore Dalyrmyple. I wanted to back up what he was saying. In my way, of course.)

No Woman's Land.

2011-07-17T21:16:00.000+09:30

Recently I've noticed a few referrals from the Traditional Christianity website, particularly from this post. The author, after gently taking issue with my article, concludes her reply with the following:

Traditionalists can accept that not every woman will find her bliss being a mother, but we don’t have to arrange society to accommodate the few when the majority are wired for domesticity.

If Catherine Hakim's data is correct, and I have every reason to suspect that it is, then the majority of woman are wired for a mix of domesticity and outside employment. The authors contention, that the majority of women are wired for domesticity is wrong. This is not my opinion, it is a fact.

In articles such as this one, the devil is usual in the details and one that pricked my attention was this one;

Our problem is that many feminists will use these outlier women as a reason why we must have all the stuff that Traditionalists don’t like (STDL).

This may look like an innocuous comment, but the logic behind it is a source of much female misery.
Here in Australia, the maternal world is polarised into two groups, the mums who work and then ones who stay at home. Ostensibly each group is happy with its life choice but when you get to know these women better you peel behind the facade and realise that many of them aren't.

As mentioned previously, women are more wired to be heard animals, they are acutely sensitive to group norms and their conformity with them. Women are most happy when everyone's doing the same thing. As soon as someone steps out of line they are ostracised, hence the cliquiness of women. In women, ostracism is an anxiety generating process which settles only by acceptance of the group.

One of Feminism's achievements has been to legtitimise the women who want to work, and this caused a splitting of the heard into two groups. Those who want to work and those who don't. Now, each woman recognises that she both belongs to one group and is excluded from the other, so while there is safety in being with her herd there is anxiety at being outside the other's.

One of the things you notice about talking to working women is that they frequently feel guilt at not being homemakers, the sting of childcare makes them feel like they are a bad mother. On the other hand, many women who are homemakers have expressed to me "their failure of being just a homemaker", especially when the kids have gotten older. Each group of women shames the other.

You don't see this happening amongst men. If one group of males wants to do X and another Y, X doesn't feel angst at Y's choices nor Y at X's. Men generally don't give a damn, since men are wired to be individualistic.

If we analyse the above comment in detail we see the following:

Our problem is that many feminists will use these outlier women as a reason why we must have all the stuff that Traditionalists don’t like (STDL).

Firstly, why does the author feel that feminists and traditionalists cant co-exist seperately? Why must we have all the stuff that Traditionalists don't like? Why do feminist choices imply traditionally repugnant imperative? In other words, why do feminists doing their own thing imply that the traditionalists have to go along with it? Answer: There is safety in the herd.

Suppose we were a traditionalist amongst feminists, citing Catherine Hakim's data to support our case that some women actually want domesticity. We could "flip" the sentence to the following:

Our problem is that many Traditionalists will use these outlier women as a reason why we must have all the stuff that Feminists don’t like (SFDL).

Is something that is not out of place in a feminist tract.

The women most secure in their life choices are those at the opposing poles of female domesticity spectrum, everyone else is caught up in a No Woman's Land of anxiety between these two poles. Guilt about motherhood and work is the hallmark of a majority of women.

Women are bitches to each other.