Friday, March 11, 2011
Good Post by Roosh V.
I think Roosh V gives the definitive account of why some men are refusing to "grow up". I think there's more to life than screwing in Dad's basement, but if I had his philosophy..........
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Hymonwitz's snowflakes.
Much to the disgust of some of the men in the manosphere, I have lent some support to Hymnowitz's assertion that some men are stuck in permanent adolescence. I suppose where I and Hymnowitz differ is that I also assert that the the standards of women have also fallen and that many of them are stuck in a permanent adolescence as well.
Psychologically, adult maturity can be thought of the completion of a process starting in childhood, when the individual is solely focused on his self and finishing in late adolescence when the the just mature adult is able to engage in society as a socially conscious member. The narcissist can then be thought of as someone who is stuck in adolescence, someone who has not matured.
Apparently my town is hosting a conference on Personality Disorders. One of the main speakers will be Dr Jean Twenge, a psychologist with an interest in Narcissism. According to Dr Twenge Narcissism is on the increase and compared to generations before, much more prevalent now. Some people might assume that this is simply the old just whining away as the old are prone to do, but Dr Twenge has studies which go back to the 30's which show a definite change in the prevalence of this anti social vice. The changes are objective. To quote Dr Twenge.
The Narcissist is self absorbed and frequently overrates their own self worth and achievements. Being so focused on themselves ,they lack empathy towards others, especially when their actions hurt them. It's a profoundly solipsistic vice, turning the individual in on themselves to the exclusion others. When a Narcissist loves, it's the love of percieved benefits from the other, not the love of the other.
What Dr Twenge has also noted that combined with an increase in narcissism has also been loss of sense of control, the modern narcissist loves themselves and their achievements but feels not in control of their lives. In other words, when something bad happens to them its someone else's fault.
To quote Twenge,
In the space of two generations women, Hymnowitz's "mature women" have become as narcissistic as men.
Twenge, in her papers, goes on to speculate about what has caused this rise in narcissism. She is more nuanced than most and recognises that it is multifactoral but puts a good deal of blame on modern psychology, with its emphasis on self-esteem, especially the unearned variety. Twenge also notes that narcissism seems to vary amongst races and cultures. With Blacks having the highest rates, followed by whites and then Asians. Interestingly she blames a lot of the current financial troubles, not just on the banks, but on a narcissistic society that feels it was owed more than it made and is unable to see its own complicity in its misfortune, preferring to blame the "Bankers" for everything. Once again the avoidance of responsibility.
Personally, I think the Modern Anglo culture of individualism(which is malignantly creeping throughout most of the West) is probably to blame a lot for this phenomena. The endless emphasis on personal rights instead of community obligations tends to reinforce the idea of being a "special snowflake" to whom everyone owes a living. Not having a community also enforces the ideal, multiculturalism, creating societies devoid of a common identity, tends to reinforce the notion of everyman for himself.
What really interests me is the rapid female "advancement" in narcissism to which feminism must be given its rightful due. It's continual emphasis on right's without responsibilities I think, is the prime accelerent in this case. Mark Richardson recently put up a post which illustrated this quite nicely, it's also why the Modern U.S/Canada/UK/Australian girl is such a risky bet. Hymnowitz's female maturity seems elusive.
The political implications of this rise in narcissism are troubling and I really don't want to go into them further now, but just how considered is a vote by man who refuses to acknowledge that he is responsible for anything and yet is "owed something". The future is going to be ugly.
Psychologically, adult maturity can be thought of the completion of a process starting in childhood, when the individual is solely focused on his self and finishing in late adolescence when the the just mature adult is able to engage in society as a socially conscious member. The narcissist can then be thought of as someone who is stuck in adolescence, someone who has not matured.
Apparently my town is hosting a conference on Personality Disorders. One of the main speakers will be Dr Jean Twenge, a psychologist with an interest in Narcissism. According to Dr Twenge Narcissism is on the increase and compared to generations before, much more prevalent now. Some people might assume that this is simply the old just whining away as the old are prone to do, but Dr Twenge has studies which go back to the 30's which show a definite change in the prevalence of this anti social vice. The changes are objective. To quote Dr Twenge.
If we assume that the NPI still has a normal distribution, this shift in the mean score means that there are now more college students at the top end of the original distribution. For example, 24% of 2006 college students score 1 SD above the 1979–1985 narcissism mean, compared to 15% during that original data collection. (One SD above the 1979–1985 is a score of 22, representing someone who answers the clear majority of items—22 out of 40—in a narcissistic direction.) It is also interesting to note how recent means compare to data collected on a sample of celebrities such as movie stars,
reality TV winners, and famous musicians (Young & Pinsky, 2006). This celebrity sample had a mean NPI score of 17.84, not much higher than the 2006 regression equation mean of 17.29. Thus, recent college students approach celebrities in their levels of narcissism.
(Egos Inflating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory )
The Narcissist is self absorbed and frequently overrates their own self worth and achievements. Being so focused on themselves ,they lack empathy towards others, especially when their actions hurt them. It's a profoundly solipsistic vice, turning the individual in on themselves to the exclusion others. When a Narcissist loves, it's the love of percieved benefits from the other, not the love of the other.
What Dr Twenge has also noted that combined with an increase in narcissism has also been loss of sense of control, the modern narcissist loves themselves and their achievements but feels not in control of their lives. In other words, when something bad happens to them its someone else's fault.
To quote Twenge,
Two meta-analyses found that young Americans increasingly believe their lives are controlled by outside forces rather than their own efforts. Locus of control scores became substantially more external (about .80 standard deviations) in college student and child samples between 1960 and 2002. The average college student in 2002 had a more external locus of control than 80% of college students in the early 1960s. Birth cohort/time period explains 14% of the variance in locus of control scores. The data included 97 samples of college students (n = 18,310) and 41 samples of children ages 9 to 14 (n = 6,554) gathered from dissertation research. The results are consistent with an alienation model positing increases in cynicism, individualism, and the self-serving bias. The implications are almost uniformly negative, as externality is correlated with poor school achievement, helplessness, ineffective stress management, decreased self-control, and depression.and,
The results clearly support the alienation model outlined in the introduction. As individualism has increased, locus of control has become more external. These data cannot determine the exact origins of the increase in externality; however, several trends seem relevant. Greater cynicism and alienation leads people to believe that their personal actions mean little. Blaming others for negative events has also become more popular, and people are less likely to believe that anyone can be a success despite obstacles in the way. Rather than leading to independence, the increasing individualism of American culture has led people to believe that there is little they can do to change the larger world.Twenge has noted that the level of narcissism has risen for both sexes but to quote Twenge again,
These data also suggest that the outside environment has a strong effect on children. This is contrary to the usual view of children as isolated within their homes and influenced primarily by their families. Children as young as age 9 demonstrate change over time in locus of control, probably because of changes n the larger social environment. Of course, the effect of the larger environment might be mediated by the children’s parents; if parents become more external over time, they may pass these attitudes along to their children. The cynical cultural lesson that one’s fate is determined by outside forces apparently reaches children at an early age
(It’s Beyond My Control: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Increasing Externality in Locus of Control, 1960–2002)
We also analyzed single-sex means when they were reported. Because not all studies reported means broken down by gender and some unpublished single-sex means were obtained directly from authors, these analyses represent a subsample of the data that may
not be representative. Thus, these analyses should be interpreted with caution. College men’s NPI scores are not significantly correlated with year (b5.16, ns; k544, d50.12), but college women’s scores are (b5.46, po.002, k544, d50.28). The sex difference in
NPI scores has also declined, b5 .46, po.001; k543 (we conducted this analysis by computing the effect size d for sex differences and weighting the regression by w, the standard weight for d). In 1992 (the first year for which sex difference data were available), men scored 0.45 standard deviation higher than women on the NPI, but
by 2006, men scored just 0.15 SD higher. Thus the sex difference in narcissism has declined from half a standard deviation (a medium effect size) to one-seventh of a SD (a small effect size)
and
The most recent college students score about the same on the NPI as a sample of celebrities (Young & Pinsky, 2006). The change is linear and steady, with the correlation significant when the analysis is limited to certain years only. It also appears that women are driving the increase in narcissism, consistent with the finding that the generational
increase in agentic traits and assertiveness was stronger for women
(Egos Inflating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory )
In the space of two generations women, Hymnowitz's "mature women" have become as narcissistic as men.
Twenge, in her papers, goes on to speculate about what has caused this rise in narcissism. She is more nuanced than most and recognises that it is multifactoral but puts a good deal of blame on modern psychology, with its emphasis on self-esteem, especially the unearned variety. Twenge also notes that narcissism seems to vary amongst races and cultures. With Blacks having the highest rates, followed by whites and then Asians. Interestingly she blames a lot of the current financial troubles, not just on the banks, but on a narcissistic society that feels it was owed more than it made and is unable to see its own complicity in its misfortune, preferring to blame the "Bankers" for everything. Once again the avoidance of responsibility.
Personally, I think the Modern Anglo culture of individualism(which is malignantly creeping throughout most of the West) is probably to blame a lot for this phenomena. The endless emphasis on personal rights instead of community obligations tends to reinforce the idea of being a "special snowflake" to whom everyone owes a living. Not having a community also enforces the ideal, multiculturalism, creating societies devoid of a common identity, tends to reinforce the notion of everyman for himself.
What really interests me is the rapid female "advancement" in narcissism to which feminism must be given its rightful due. It's continual emphasis on right's without responsibilities I think, is the prime accelerent in this case. Mark Richardson recently put up a post which illustrated this quite nicely, it's also why the Modern U.S/Canada/UK/Australian girl is such a risky bet. Hymnowitz's female maturity seems elusive.
The political implications of this rise in narcissism are troubling and I really don't want to go into them further now, but just how considered is a vote by man who refuses to acknowledge that he is responsible for anything and yet is "owed something". The future is going to be ugly.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Hymnowitz Interview
Kay Hymnowitz was involved in a live chat over at the Wall Street Journal. I've excerpted some of the comments and for those who are interested, added some commentary.
Ms. Hymowitz, Your essay draws a number of generalizations from anecdotal evidence, and while it may not be far from the mark, let me respond with an anecdote of my own. I'm a 20-something guy with a bachelors from Harvard and (soon) a law degree from Columbia. I eat healthy, work out, am reasonably good-looking; I have a job lined up at one of the top firms paying $160,000 per year; and I'll be clerking for a federal judge. And after spending years looking for the classy, ambitious, and charming gal that your essay proclaims to be the norm, I've all but given up the hunt. I've met girls at bars and parties, through blind dates and friendly set-ups, and here are the results of my own informal survey. At least two-thirds are far more interested in the "hookup scene" than I am, and couldn't care less about "sensitivity" or "smarts." The other third is either looking to be a Stepford wife, or is so inflated by her own sense of accomplishment that the only suitable match would be a billionare financier or a royal prince. So to put the question back at you: where have the good women gone? [SP: This was my experience as well when I was dating. Lot's of girls acted cheap, but what used to disgust me the most were the women who would not give me the time of day before I was a doctor but were fawning over me after I became one. I suppose they saw me as a potential income stream. In order to "screen" for this type, when people asked me what I used to do, I'd reply "Human Resources".]
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Sunday, February 27, 2011
Thoughts on Kay Hymowitz's Immature Men and Good Women.
The two articles (Link 1, Link 2) penned by Kay Hymowitz have certainly generated a lot of comment in the manosphere, most of it being idiotic. Hymowtiz's assertion, that men are stuck in pre-adolescence, in my eyes at least, certainly has some truth to it. The Western Male today seems a pale counterpart of his father.
The vigorous response by the manosphere to Hymowitz's article seem to follow several common themes. Namely:
1) Hymowitz is a feminist.
2) Hymowitz is correct in that men are pre-adolescent but they have become that way because of women's behaviour. (In other words, male culture is the product of female punishment and rewards.)
3) Wanting to get married is not a determinant of maturity.
4) Marriage is a bum deal for men and that's why men are opting out.
While some of these points certainly have a small degree of truth to them none of them really counter her claim that lots of men are stuck in an extended adolescence and are therefore unattractive to women who want to get married.
Many of the manosphere totally missed the point of her article. Nowhere did Hymnowitz say that men should be forced to marry, her lament was that the pool of marriageable men from which women could choose from was so small. At the heart of her article is the claim that many of today's Western males are unattractive as long term mates, in other words, there are few marriageable alpha's. Hymowitz did not say that the older frat boy should marry, in fact she clearly saw that such a man was a poor long term mate, it just that men who are "beta providers" and who live in star wars inspired decor are also sexually unappealing.
The prime cultural exemplar of Hymowitz's contention was George Sodini. Here was a man with a responsible job, house, normal BMI and with a desire to find a permanent mate; all features which Hymowitz ostensibly mentions as the traits of an ideal man, yet was completely invisible to women.
He ticked all the right boxes with regard to "responsibility" yet is still considered a loser by women, and therefore unmarriageable, because he had no alpha features.
This view of course syncs with the Roissyite view that many men are beta's and therefore sexually unattractive to women. It's therefore a bit rich seeing Roissy's accolytes attack Hymnowitz when she states that beta males are unattractive whilst alpha men are. Her post essentially channels Roissy.
Where She and Roissy differ however is on the subject of Marriage of a marker of a responsible male. Personally, I think Roissy is perfectly correct in his position provided you're a hedonistic atheist. (Though that may be open to debate.) If you're a Christian male on the other hand, marriage is a desired state of affairs and a sign of adulthood.
A useful thought exercise would be to ponder what if Hymnowitz could get her dream and have all men alpha up. The results will probably be to her expectation. Roissy has written about this before:
No, what keeps the alive the hopes of today's modern women is a pool of supplicant betas who will do what it takes to secure thesexual love of a woman and will agree to any terms.
Where Hymowitz errs, is in the assertion that today's woman is in some way more "mature" than the pre-adolescent male upon which she rightly heaps her scorn. She labours under the illusion that the modern woman is some sort of prize that men will aspire to. Hymowitz has framed her argument in such a way that would be laughable to the good men of the past.
Men and women of the past would both agree that men today leave a lot to be desired, but the fall in quality has been most marked amongst women. From the vantage point of the past, the modern woman today is vapid, slutty, superficial, unfeminine and hence extremely poor quality material.
What marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood is the gradual assumption of responsibility, maturity and independence. What separates the child, the adolescent and the adult is the increasing influence of reason over emotion. The mature adult takes his emotions into account but is not ruled by them. Enter the concept of the Rationalisation Hamster. The concept needs to be understood as the cognitive mechanism by which thought is subordinated and aligned to emotion. The function of this "hamster" is to provide a superficially plausible (if not logically consistent) series of thoughts to align and justify whatever action is required by the emotional state. It is effectively the thought process of an immature adolescent.
The "triumph" of modern Feminism has been to culturally and legislatively legitimise this rationalisation hamster. Marriage is no longer seen as a reciprocal relationship amongst two people, but rather a flexible arrangement of convenience based on the emotive state of the parties. The logic of abortion as a woman's rights issue (ignoring the rights of the father) is another example. The furthering of women into fields that they are totally unsuited to, such as the military, police and firefighting services yet another. Feminism has also been able to reframe feminine identity; what previous generations would have thought trampy and flighty, modern feminism has been able to portray as mature.
When Hymnowitz points to the Star Wards nerds, all I can think of is the "mature" female SATC equivalents. I admit that men sitting in mom's basement jerking off to online porn are pretty shallow, but so are the women who spend their lives shopping for bags, clothes whilst riding the carosel waiting for the enabling supplicant whom will provide them with lifestyle to which they are accustomed. People from a less enlightened age would consider a person who endlessly obsesses about their looks, the latest pair of Jimmy Choo's and who Brad is dating now, pretty superficial. It's the pot calling the kettle black.
One of the recurring comments from the men that are "players" is how the experience of women leads to a contempt of them. It's an interesting phenomenon since wouldn't experience of these wonderful, empowered, educated SATC types at least lead to fond recollections and a overall impression of female goodness? The common explanation is that these men are unable to bond and are narcissistic. However another explanation is never considered: Perhaps these women aren't worth bonding to. Perhaps they are nothing more than an esotrogen toy and without their sexual potential would be ignored by men. Perhaps the reason they are dumped so often is that they have no qualities which lead men to love them. It's a thought.
The problem with Hymowitz's article is not its assertion, which I agree with, but its balance. The shortage of good men is portrayed against a surfeit of good women. But she should have asked around more. It's not just a problem of an abundance of loser men, as any committed male committed Christian who wants to get married will tell you, "Where have all the good women gone?"
(Another example of the "Mature and accomplished behaviour, check out Dalrock's Single in the Suburbs.)
The vigorous response by the manosphere to Hymowitz's article seem to follow several common themes. Namely:
1) Hymowitz is a feminist.
2) Hymowitz is correct in that men are pre-adolescent but they have become that way because of women's behaviour. (In other words, male culture is the product of female punishment and rewards.)
3) Wanting to get married is not a determinant of maturity.
4) Marriage is a bum deal for men and that's why men are opting out.
While some of these points certainly have a small degree of truth to them none of them really counter her claim that lots of men are stuck in an extended adolescence and are therefore unattractive to women who want to get married.
Many of the manosphere totally missed the point of her article. Nowhere did Hymnowitz say that men should be forced to marry, her lament was that the pool of marriageable men from which women could choose from was so small. At the heart of her article is the claim that many of today's Western males are unattractive as long term mates, in other words, there are few marriageable alpha's. Hymowitz did not say that the older frat boy should marry, in fact she clearly saw that such a man was a poor long term mate, it just that men who are "beta providers" and who live in star wars inspired decor are also sexually unappealing.
The prime cultural exemplar of Hymowitz's contention was George Sodini. Here was a man with a responsible job, house, normal BMI and with a desire to find a permanent mate; all features which Hymowitz ostensibly mentions as the traits of an ideal man, yet was completely invisible to women.
He ticked all the right boxes with regard to "responsibility" yet is still considered a loser by women, and therefore unmarriageable, because he had no alpha features.
This view of course syncs with the Roissyite view that many men are beta's and therefore sexually unattractive to women. It's therefore a bit rich seeing Roissy's accolytes attack Hymnowitz when she states that beta males are unattractive whilst alpha men are. Her post essentially channels Roissy.
Where She and Roissy differ however is on the subject of Marriage of a marker of a responsible male. Personally, I think Roissy is perfectly correct in his position provided you're a hedonistic atheist. (Though that may be open to debate.) If you're a Christian male on the other hand, marriage is a desired state of affairs and a sign of adulthood.
A useful thought exercise would be to ponder what if Hymnowitz could get her dream and have all men alpha up. The results will probably be to her expectation. Roissy has written about this before:
No, the solution is to give the New Girl Order *exactly* what it wants: Game, and an army of cads that practice it. Force feed the beast until it is choking on its own gluttony. The emissaries of the Great Lie must have the consequences of their ignorance and treachery shoved down their throats. In time, the unabashed pursuit of hedonism and the embrace of Darwinistic nihilism (two potent forces which, coincidentally, happen to have truth and pleasure on their side. Exhibit B: God is dead) will raze the neoliberal monolith to the ground, and from the ashes the eternal human cycle will begin anew, strengthened and revitalized. A complete reconciliation with our tragic destiny gives us the only chance to avoid it.On the other hand, what alpha Christian male wants to be sloppy sixth's to the modern shrew? The problem for this type of guy is the lack of quality women out there. He wants to get married but the pickings are so slim. Hymowitz thinks that today's average girl is "quality" product, however I think that there is a fair amount of legitimate disagreement as what constitutes quality No matter what her career achievements, a woman who has ridden the carousel and perhaps made a few trips to the abortuary is not quality material from a Christian point of view. A mature and responsible christian male would think such a woman is high risk material for infidelity and divorce and by-pass her. If there were an en masse movement to alpha up, the following would happen. The hedonists would pump and dump while the Christians would become more choosy; the pool of marriageable suitors for women would shrink.
No, what keeps the alive the hopes of today's modern women is a pool of supplicant betas who will do what it takes to secure the
(Something to aspire to long term?)
Men and women of the past would both agree that men today leave a lot to be desired, but the fall in quality has been most marked amongst women. From the vantage point of the past, the modern woman today is vapid, slutty, superficial, unfeminine and hence extremely poor quality material.
What marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood is the gradual assumption of responsibility, maturity and independence. What separates the child, the adolescent and the adult is the increasing influence of reason over emotion. The mature adult takes his emotions into account but is not ruled by them. Enter the concept of the Rationalisation Hamster. The concept needs to be understood as the cognitive mechanism by which thought is subordinated and aligned to emotion. The function of this "hamster" is to provide a superficially plausible (if not logically consistent) series of thoughts to align and justify whatever action is required by the emotional state. It is effectively the thought process of an immature adolescent.
The "triumph" of modern Feminism has been to culturally and legislatively legitimise this rationalisation hamster. Marriage is no longer seen as a reciprocal relationship amongst two people, but rather a flexible arrangement of convenience based on the emotive state of the parties. The logic of abortion as a woman's rights issue (ignoring the rights of the father) is another example. The furthering of women into fields that they are totally unsuited to, such as the military, police and firefighting services yet another. Feminism has also been able to reframe feminine identity; what previous generations would have thought trampy and flighty, modern feminism has been able to portray as mature.
When Hymnowitz points to the Star Wards nerds, all I can think of is the "mature" female SATC equivalents. I admit that men sitting in mom's basement jerking off to online porn are pretty shallow, but so are the women who spend their lives shopping for bags, clothes whilst riding the carosel waiting for the enabling supplicant whom will provide them with lifestyle to which they are accustomed. People from a less enlightened age would consider a person who endlessly obsesses about their looks, the latest pair of Jimmy Choo's and who Brad is dating now, pretty superficial. It's the pot calling the kettle black.
One of the recurring comments from the men that are "players" is how the experience of women leads to a contempt of them. It's an interesting phenomenon since wouldn't experience of these wonderful, empowered, educated SATC types at least lead to fond recollections and a overall impression of female goodness? The common explanation is that these men are unable to bond and are narcissistic. However another explanation is never considered: Perhaps these women aren't worth bonding to. Perhaps they are nothing more than an esotrogen toy and without their sexual potential would be ignored by men. Perhaps the reason they are dumped so often is that they have no qualities which lead men to love them. It's a thought.
The problem with Hymowitz's article is not its assertion, which I agree with, but its balance. The shortage of good men is portrayed against a surfeit of good women. But she should have asked around more. It's not just a problem of an abundance of loser men, as any committed male committed Christian who wants to get married will tell you, "Where have all the good women gone?"
(Another example of the "Mature and accomplished behaviour, check out Dalrock's Single in the Suburbs.)
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Natural States.
"Five minutes of alpha is better than five years of Beta"
(Commentator Whiskey)
A common theme running through the "manosphere" at the moment is with regard to the deplorable state of modern woman. The average Western Woman, after marriage, is percieved a frumpy, fat, fickle and frigid. The accumulating sexual undesirability of the married western woman is reason enough for many to eschew marriage and pursue a life of "pumping and dumping". And to be fair, there does seem to be some justification for this view.Then of course, there is the female view. Once again, a common theme running through "girly-world" is that there is a shortage of "good men", that is marriageable men. It needs to be understood that these complaints are voiced by both promiscuous and chaste women. The conventional manosphere analysis is that this turn of events is solely the result of feminism and hypergamous female sexuality. These social phenomena have eliminated the incentives to get married and hence men are "opting out". Now its worthwhile considering who exactly are these men opting out.
By opting out, we mean men who don't want to get married to other women. (We'll exclude the homos)
From a sexual point of view, these men can be divided into the following groups.
1) Asexual men (rare)
2) Sexual men with the ability to get regular sex. (Alpha)
3) Sexual men with the inability to get regular sex( Beta-Omega)
Next we consider what a woman means by a good man. In girlspeak a "good man" is a man that ignites all of her desires. Considered as a group of attributes, the ideal man has none that are unattractive. The "goodness" of a man declines as do his attributes. Now it also needs to be understood that a good man is not a convenient man, a man who despite his obvious flaws, serves some purpose in marriage. For example, an unattractive beta schlub who is a good provider may be a convenient suboptimal mate but he is no way ideal or good. Given today's liberal divorce laws she may choose to "trade up" if the opportunity so presents.
Hence when women refer to the shortage of "good men" they are really referring to the group (2) individual, the men who are sexually attractive and who don't want to commit. The group (3) individual is not really a "good man" from a woman's point of view, he is sub-optimal. So when group (3) men talk about "opting out of marriage" they're deluding themselves, since they really weren't first choice in the marriage market to begin with.
The reason I bring this up is because over at Mark Richardson's there has been an interesting discussion going on with regard to opting out of marriage. There is the usual analysis with regard to the matter but its my contention that maybe in some instances the female critics may have a point.
I urge you to have a look.
With the modern redefinition of marriage(a relationship based on an emotional state) and the sexual revolution it is to be expected that women would gravitate towards the alpha males in a form of soft polygamy. The main losers of course in this arrangement were the non-alphas. Whilst I can appreciate a lot of the Beta-Omega pain and angst, a lot of them seem to bear anger towards women for the result, especially the more traditional types. In their view women are bad for wanting alpha males and a society works best when it restricts female choice and channels women through rigid laws and mores, towards beta males. (A doomed concept since our knowledge of hypergamy leads to the conclusion that this state of affairs will lead to tepid sex)
Seeing, that when women are given a free choice, they want to "alpha up", the losers of the arrangement yearn for a time when women were forced to "beta down". This of course is not what happened in the past. Their view of traditional society is wrong.
Social mores and customs did limit the alpha access to women, but it did have a flipside, society also expected men to become alpha. The naturally beta/omega male was not left to his own devices, he did not live as he saw fit, rather society expected him to behave as a man. The beta male, was through shame and social pressure "alpha'd up". The metro-sexual and gay cultures would have been fringe movements in the 40's as the average man displaying those features would have been beaten up. As I said before, there was strong social pressure to alpha.
With the dismantling of communal culture, what we are seeing in the first world is default to a more primitive state. Perhaps humanity's default setting. Man devoid of social norms assumes his natural state, a small pool of alphas, a mean of betas and a tail of omegas. For most men, being "themselves", will mean being unattractive to women.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
PC: The Rationalisation Hamster in Religious Thought.
PC seems, to my eyes at least, seems most entrenched in what could be best described as the Protestant countries of Europe, and it's my belief that that the two are more than just casually linked.
It's my belief that that Protestant culture effectively puts into place conditions which allow PC to thrive.
As a Catholic, I have doctrinal differences with the Protestant religion, but perhaps Protestantism's most malign error lays not in its doctrine but in its understanding of man, namely in his capacity to think. It's what Paul Gottfried described as the "rationalist fallacy". The belief that everyman is a profound and clear thinker, able to objectively look at the facts without bias; It's the myth of the rational everyman.
The truth is that men are rational when things are simple to grasp, immediate and concrete in concept, but as the subject matter become more remote, abstract and non-pressing so does the capacity of men to rationalise well about them. In this regard, religion is more likely to be prone to intellectual errors simply due to its subject matter than the house plumbing.
Religions can be though of being both pure and applied, in that the real world application of the religion may sometimes be at odds with the divine message. The average man's conception and practice of religion may be at odds with the theology, simply because he does not understand or is incapable to bringing together separate strands of thought.
For example, Protestant critics of Catholicism frequently lay the charge the Catholicism is a form of crypto-paganism with Catholics worshiping other deities beside God. They, of course, base this charge on their observations of Catholics and their relation with saints, relics, and the Mother of God. "Pure" Catholic theology recognises that the only proper object of worship is God, however as a Catholic, I can understand the Protestant claims because many of the faithful behave in manner that justify them. Simple men, trying to grasp the complexities of Catholic thought, corrupt it into neo-pagan forms. They carry crucifixes for good luck, and celebrate, rather too fervently for my liking, saints and relics. This subject deserves several posts on its own, but suffice when Catholicism becomes corrupted it assumes a pagan flavour.
Just as Catholicism, in corruption, assumes a certain flavour, so does Protestantism. When a Catholic goes theologically bad, he goes pagan and become superstitious, when a Protestant goes bad, he becomes utilitarian and "ethical". It's not Protestantism per se which fosters political correctness but its practical corruption by the common folk.
In theory, the Protestant has a personal relationship with God, a good and reflective religious life, and free of Papal Authority, the Protestant is free to read the bible and apply it to his life. The assumption being that the average Protestant can do this objectively, logically and without bias. And it is true that amongst rigorous and honest thinkers, this can produce quite holy men, the problem is though that rigorous thinking is always exceptional in any society and in the end what happens is that average Protestant behaves like the average catholic, he pretends that he thinks and muddles things up.
The Rationalisation Hamster whilst nearly supreme in women also operates to a degree in men and the end result of its operation is contingent upon the cultural milieu in which it operates. In a religion that allows you to self-interpret the bible, strong willed men and women of shallow thought and objectivity will frequently find that their interpretation aligns with their feelings (Quelle surprise!); The end result is social sanctified practical utilitarianism. Once again this not Protestantism as it is meant to be, but its corruption by the average thinker.
This effect was mitigated somewhat whilst church attendance was practiced. The preacher, usually with some theological training, could sway the most shallow thinkers and prevent the most stupid errors by providing a convincing argument, but as church attendance has faded, the average man has been left with his own thoughts. The ship is adrift.
Religion is the basis of a society's culture and in a Protestant culture without a defacto central authority, morality becomes aligned with feelings. The Good God becomes the fluffy-bunny God in rudderless protestant cultures, because in the end, the human rationalisation hamster ensures that morality aligns with desired feelings. (Some people enjoy being miserable. Is Puritanism the inevitable product of miserable religious people in Protestant culture?) The religion goes "soft" and it's in this cultural milieu that PC establishes its roots.
However it would be a mistake to assume that a Protestant cultural environment causes political correctness. It doesn't. For PC to really establish itself something else is needed.
The second factor that needs to be considered is the societal cognitive process. i.e how a society as a group thinks. Now it needs to be understood that very few people, in any society, are independent thinkers, most people think along the lines that they have been taught. Here the pernicious effect of cultural Marxism rears its ugly head. The entrenchment of Marxist thought in our universities means that the products of that system--our future governing/managerial class--think along Marxist lines. This does not mean that the products of our universities are explicitly Marxist, rather the graduates tend to interpret life through the Marxist perspective In effect, what the universities ensure is that graduates end up with a de facto Marixist rationalisation hamster.
A digression. The Left is far more represented by graduates of the arts and the social sciences than by the STEM majors. Why? In my opinion, it's the strict empiricism of the STEM courses that provide a de facto inoculation against structuralist thinking; it's very hard to find oppression in chemistry or physics. Thinking along stucturalist lines in these disciplines results in failure.
PC can then be thought of a fusion product, resulting from the convergence of abuse of Protestant Christianity into "Christian-fluffy-bunny" utilitarianism and Marxist cognitive interpretation.
It's my belief that that Protestant culture effectively puts into place conditions which allow PC to thrive.
As a Catholic, I have doctrinal differences with the Protestant religion, but perhaps Protestantism's most malign error lays not in its doctrine but in its understanding of man, namely in his capacity to think. It's what Paul Gottfried described as the "rationalist fallacy". The belief that everyman is a profound and clear thinker, able to objectively look at the facts without bias; It's the myth of the rational everyman.
The truth is that men are rational when things are simple to grasp, immediate and concrete in concept, but as the subject matter become more remote, abstract and non-pressing so does the capacity of men to rationalise well about them. In this regard, religion is more likely to be prone to intellectual errors simply due to its subject matter than the house plumbing.
Religions can be though of being both pure and applied, in that the real world application of the religion may sometimes be at odds with the divine message. The average man's conception and practice of religion may be at odds with the theology, simply because he does not understand or is incapable to bringing together separate strands of thought.
For example, Protestant critics of Catholicism frequently lay the charge the Catholicism is a form of crypto-paganism with Catholics worshiping other deities beside God. They, of course, base this charge on their observations of Catholics and their relation with saints, relics, and the Mother of God. "Pure" Catholic theology recognises that the only proper object of worship is God, however as a Catholic, I can understand the Protestant claims because many of the faithful behave in manner that justify them. Simple men, trying to grasp the complexities of Catholic thought, corrupt it into neo-pagan forms. They carry crucifixes for good luck, and celebrate, rather too fervently for my liking, saints and relics. This subject deserves several posts on its own, but suffice when Catholicism becomes corrupted it assumes a pagan flavour.
Just as Catholicism, in corruption, assumes a certain flavour, so does Protestantism. When a Catholic goes theologically bad, he goes pagan and become superstitious, when a Protestant goes bad, he becomes utilitarian and "ethical". It's not Protestantism per se which fosters political correctness but its practical corruption by the common folk.
In theory, the Protestant has a personal relationship with God, a good and reflective religious life, and free of Papal Authority, the Protestant is free to read the bible and apply it to his life. The assumption being that the average Protestant can do this objectively, logically and without bias. And it is true that amongst rigorous and honest thinkers, this can produce quite holy men, the problem is though that rigorous thinking is always exceptional in any society and in the end what happens is that average Protestant behaves like the average catholic, he pretends that he thinks and muddles things up.
The Rationalisation Hamster whilst nearly supreme in women also operates to a degree in men and the end result of its operation is contingent upon the cultural milieu in which it operates. In a religion that allows you to self-interpret the bible, strong willed men and women of shallow thought and objectivity will frequently find that their interpretation aligns with their feelings (Quelle surprise!); The end result is social sanctified practical utilitarianism. Once again this not Protestantism as it is meant to be, but its corruption by the average thinker.
This effect was mitigated somewhat whilst church attendance was practiced. The preacher, usually with some theological training, could sway the most shallow thinkers and prevent the most stupid errors by providing a convincing argument, but as church attendance has faded, the average man has been left with his own thoughts. The ship is adrift.
Religion is the basis of a society's culture and in a Protestant culture without a defacto central authority, morality becomes aligned with feelings. The Good God becomes the fluffy-bunny God in rudderless protestant cultures, because in the end, the human rationalisation hamster ensures that morality aligns with desired feelings. (Some people enjoy being miserable. Is Puritanism the inevitable product of miserable religious people in Protestant culture?) The religion goes "soft" and it's in this cultural milieu that PC establishes its roots.
However it would be a mistake to assume that a Protestant cultural environment causes political correctness. It doesn't. For PC to really establish itself something else is needed.
The second factor that needs to be considered is the societal cognitive process. i.e how a society as a group thinks. Now it needs to be understood that very few people, in any society, are independent thinkers, most people think along the lines that they have been taught. Here the pernicious effect of cultural Marxism rears its ugly head. The entrenchment of Marxist thought in our universities means that the products of that system--our future governing/managerial class--think along Marxist lines. This does not mean that the products of our universities are explicitly Marxist, rather the graduates tend to interpret life through the Marxist perspective In effect, what the universities ensure is that graduates end up with a de facto Marixist rationalisation hamster.
A digression. The Left is far more represented by graduates of the arts and the social sciences than by the STEM majors. Why? In my opinion, it's the strict empiricism of the STEM courses that provide a de facto inoculation against structuralist thinking; it's very hard to find oppression in chemistry or physics. Thinking along stucturalist lines in these disciplines results in failure.
PC can then be thought of a fusion product, resulting from the convergence of abuse of Protestant Christianity into "Christian-fluffy-bunny" utilitarianism and Marxist cognitive interpretation.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Aquinas's Razor.
As mentioned in the previous posts, the faith-sense faculty lacks acuity. We see "through a glass darkly" with it and are liable to mistake error as a truth. The task then is how to discern if the conviction is true or not? St Thomas gives the following advice:
What I think St Thomas is getting at here is that faith and empirical evidence cannot contradict. Either our understanding of one or the other is wrong. Reality is seamless fabric.
Now since our physical senses have the capacity to "sense more clearly" the reality about us, our physical senses can be used as a tool to prune away erroneous faith conceptions. So when the Catholic Church authorities tried to assert that Galileo was heretical in his astronomical claims, they were wrong, in that their assertion conflicted with Galileo's observed facts. In layman's terms, factual evidence trumps faith. In fact, faith which is contra to factual evidence is a wrong faith. In some instances, it doesn't necessarily mean that the faith-sense is wrong, rather our understanding of some matter of the faith may be. The Bible is a guide to conduct, not an astronomy text.*
It follows then that science is not opposed to faith which reflects reality, but to erroneous conceptions of it. The battle is not between science and religion but science and bad religion. Faith must be coherent with observed reality.
*( It's funny that Fundamentalists bash the Church about this issue. Because here is a clear instance of the Church asserting sola scriptura on the issue and they got it wrong)
The gifts of grace are added to nature in such a way that they do not destroy but rather perfect nature. Thus the light of faith which is infused to us by grace does not destroy the natural natural light of reason divinely given us. And although the natural light of the human mind is insufficient to manifest what is manifest through faith, nonetheless it is impossible that what has divinely given us by faith should be contrary to what is given us by nature. One or the other would have to be false, but, since both come from God, God would then be the author of falsehood, which is impossible. Rather because there is some semblance of the perfect in the imperfect, the things known by natural reason are likenesses of the things given in faith.
( Exposition of Boethius's On the Trinity, Question 2. Article 3)
What I think St Thomas is getting at here is that faith and empirical evidence cannot contradict. Either our understanding of one or the other is wrong. Reality is seamless fabric.
Now since our physical senses have the capacity to "sense more clearly" the reality about us, our physical senses can be used as a tool to prune away erroneous faith conceptions. So when the Catholic Church authorities tried to assert that Galileo was heretical in his astronomical claims, they were wrong, in that their assertion conflicted with Galileo's observed facts. In layman's terms, factual evidence trumps faith. In fact, faith which is contra to factual evidence is a wrong faith. In some instances, it doesn't necessarily mean that the faith-sense is wrong, rather our understanding of some matter of the faith may be. The Bible is a guide to conduct, not an astronomy text.*
It follows then that science is not opposed to faith which reflects reality, but to erroneous conceptions of it. The battle is not between science and religion but science and bad religion. Faith must be coherent with observed reality.
*( It's funny that Fundamentalists bash the Church about this issue. Because here is a clear instance of the Church asserting sola scriptura on the issue and they got it wrong)
Friday, February 04, 2011
Whittaker Chambers
As a result of his conversion, he gave up his job, his friends and reputation, to "rat" out on his former communist buddies, particularly Alger Hiss. The Hiss trial was America's version of the Dreyfuss affair and polarised the nation. Although Hiss was convicted, one certainly gets the impression reading American history that "polite society" was on the side of Hiss. It was glamorous left v's stodgy right. Chambers may have been right but he was boring, Hiss evil, but stylish. American society preferred the stylish.
I've not done much reading on Chambers but from what I have, he and I seem on the same "wavelength". I've just ordered a couple of his books and hope to have something intelligent to say about him in the near future but his own description of his "turn from the Left" is a clear example of the faith-sense in action.
But I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss's apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design." The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.
(My bold typing)Once again, as in C. S. Lewis's conversion, an involuntary conviction took residence in his mind. A thought which he had not willed and a though which he actively tried to suppress. Many who fail to understand religion rationalise that the religious experience is created in order to satiate some type of psychic need. Clearly, in this instance, Chambers had none and in fact was surprised by the ideation; his psychic needs tended in the opposite direction. The proposition with regard to his child's ear was not some form of rational construction, rather the thought, "popped" into his head the same way the vision of the coffee cup in front of me "pops" into my mind: it was sensed.
The atheist has no idea how unsettling to the mind the experience is, how unwilled, and how "out the blue" it. And how sometimes the sensing individual will do all he can to "rationalise" the experience away. I was tired, bad onions, too much to drink, etc and I suppose with enough effort a man can suppress it. But more often than not, it forms a vague conviction.
As a result of his experience, Chambers became a Christian, but he never did settle on one denomination. It appears that he did not really care all that much about the theology of God, only the reality(and the implications) of His existence. Communism, and its parent atheism, were incompatible with that view.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Some More Thoughts on Faith.
In the previous post's comment section, commentator Brockman asked the following:
1) There is such a thing as objective reality.
2) Catholicism is the "most right" religion.
3) Theft is intrinsically wrong.
4) Moral precepts bear the same relation to reality as physical things. The wrongness of lying is as real as the keyboard in front of me.
5) The non-perfectibility of man. (The doctrine of Original Sin)
6) The existence of God.
First a bit about myself. Without this faith sense, the person who would be my closest intellectual mirror is Roissy. My natural tendencies drift towards atheism, hedonism and objectivity. To a certain degree, my religion runs against my grain. Now, whilst I was indoctrinated in some of the above beliefs as a child, there is no way that I would accept any of them if I thought they weren't true. In my adolescence, I held them as convenient beliefs, to be ditched when necessary, I was an effective situational ethicist.
If, for example, God didn't exist, life would be eventually meaningless. But as much as I would hate that meaninglessness, it would be a fact of life; something I'd have to get used to. Comfortable thoughts are useless if they are lies, and I'm repelled by the thought of believing in bullshit and living my life according to it. I religion is a lie then despair or hedonism are the only logical choices left.
Rationally, all the propositions listed above fall short of logical certitude and there is room for rational doubt in all, but this faith sense tells me that the above are true, not because of probabilistic calculations, but because I intuitively experience the truth of the them. Stripped of its religious connotations and thinking about it as an epistemological mechanism, it as a faculty which lets you recognise truthful propositions which cannot be demonstrated according to strict empirical criteria.
Another non-religious example that worth thinking about, is how can we prove that we are not connected to the Matrix?(A movie which illustrates Berkeley's subjective idealism) There is no objective way as self referential systems cannot validate themselves. Yet I know that I'm not connected to the Matrix, I know that matter is real and exists independently of my being. When I'm dead, the atoms that make up my body will still exist, they are not figments of my imagination. Still I cannot logically demonstrate this, the only way of Berkeley's Matrix is not with logic but with faith. It's this faith sense that asserts convincingly that the world is real.
For many people faith=religion, whereas it really should be faith=sense, the religion is a derived product from the sense.
Commentator Thursday made the following comment:
Yes and No. It's not necessarily a religious experience. It's more often than not an unwanted intellectual conviction. More factual than emotive. The C.S Lewis example in the previous post, illustrated this phenomenon quite nicely, in that Lewis was being nagged by something that he didn't want. In the end he acceded to the conviction that there was a God: there were no angels, fairies or mystical visions. In Lewis's case, it seems to be an effect that operated through rationality.
The thing is though, that faith seems to be doled out by God arbitrarily, he "calls" us through it. That's why the phenomenon is so incomprehensible to those who don't have it. Being outside this subjective experience they cannot relate to it. The question is though, does this subjective experience have any bearing on reality or not? It would appear however that the insights gained from Christian faith seem to correlate rather well with human happiness and well being on objective measures. It's either a series of extraordinarily consistent "lucky guesses" or there is something to it.
It is true that the mind can play tricks due to a variety of internal and external factors and that the insights gained may not reflect reality. That's why the Church fathers instructed that everything be put to the test as they understood that it was a sense with poor acuity. Faith may cause an assertion of the unprovable but the insight is false if it asserts the falsifiable; since faith and truth cannot contradict. If after having a few beers, you were to suddenly develop the insight that God said it was alright to fornicate, you would be contradicting a substantial amount of Christian tradition. Therefore either Christian tradition is wrong and the Christian conception of God is wrong, or you're wrong. A lot of the mystical experiences, drug induced or not, are immediately rejected by this type of analysis.
I'm not a biblical scholar but I do understand that there were may other gospels circulating around in the early Christian period. That fact that the Chruch only settled on four tells you that a lot of the "mystical" experiences felt by the early believers were felt by the Church leaders to be rubbish.
Question: Can you come up with a short list of statements, your knowledge of which comes largely or entirely through this extra sense, rather than through normal senses, indoctrination, etc?Sure. In My personal case, some of the propositions are:
Clearly there could be some statements which one person believes because of indoctrination -- "I believe Jesus rose from the dead because authority figure X told me to believe in it (or else!)" -- where another might believe because of the extra sense -- "Well, I read this old book, and this part about Jesus really seemed completely inescapable".
1) There is such a thing as objective reality.
2) Catholicism is the "most right" religion.
3) Theft is intrinsically wrong.
4) Moral precepts bear the same relation to reality as physical things. The wrongness of lying is as real as the keyboard in front of me.
5) The non-perfectibility of man. (The doctrine of Original Sin)
6) The existence of God.
First a bit about myself. Without this faith sense, the person who would be my closest intellectual mirror is Roissy. My natural tendencies drift towards atheism, hedonism and objectivity. To a certain degree, my religion runs against my grain. Now, whilst I was indoctrinated in some of the above beliefs as a child, there is no way that I would accept any of them if I thought they weren't true. In my adolescence, I held them as convenient beliefs, to be ditched when necessary, I was an effective situational ethicist.
If, for example, God didn't exist, life would be eventually meaningless. But as much as I would hate that meaninglessness, it would be a fact of life; something I'd have to get used to. Comfortable thoughts are useless if they are lies, and I'm repelled by the thought of believing in bullshit and living my life according to it. I religion is a lie then despair or hedonism are the only logical choices left.
Rationally, all the propositions listed above fall short of logical certitude and there is room for rational doubt in all, but this faith sense tells me that the above are true, not because of probabilistic calculations, but because I intuitively experience the truth of the them. Stripped of its religious connotations and thinking about it as an epistemological mechanism, it as a faculty which lets you recognise truthful propositions which cannot be demonstrated according to strict empirical criteria.
Another non-religious example that worth thinking about, is how can we prove that we are not connected to the Matrix?(A movie which illustrates Berkeley's subjective idealism) There is no objective way as self referential systems cannot validate themselves. Yet I know that I'm not connected to the Matrix, I know that matter is real and exists independently of my being. When I'm dead, the atoms that make up my body will still exist, they are not figments of my imagination. Still I cannot logically demonstrate this, the only way of Berkeley's Matrix is not with logic but with faith. It's this faith sense that asserts convincingly that the world is real.
For many people faith=religion, whereas it really should be faith=sense, the religion is a derived product from the sense.
Commentator Thursday made the following comment:
This is essentially the argument from religious experience. The problem is that such experiences do not interpret themselves. They may reflect something real, or they may be the mind playing tricks on itself.
There also seems to be the problem that such experiences seem to be artificially inducible. IIRC, scientists have induced mystical experiences through stimulating certain parts of the brain. But one need not refer only to modern science: the use of drugs in religion has a long history
Yes and No. It's not necessarily a religious experience. It's more often than not an unwanted intellectual conviction. More factual than emotive. The C.S Lewis example in the previous post, illustrated this phenomenon quite nicely, in that Lewis was being nagged by something that he didn't want. In the end he acceded to the conviction that there was a God: there were no angels, fairies or mystical visions. In Lewis's case, it seems to be an effect that operated through rationality.
The thing is though, that faith seems to be doled out by God arbitrarily, he "calls" us through it. That's why the phenomenon is so incomprehensible to those who don't have it. Being outside this subjective experience they cannot relate to it. The question is though, does this subjective experience have any bearing on reality or not? It would appear however that the insights gained from Christian faith seem to correlate rather well with human happiness and well being on objective measures. It's either a series of extraordinarily consistent "lucky guesses" or there is something to it.
It is true that the mind can play tricks due to a variety of internal and external factors and that the insights gained may not reflect reality. That's why the Church fathers instructed that everything be put to the test as they understood that it was a sense with poor acuity. Faith may cause an assertion of the unprovable but the insight is false if it asserts the falsifiable; since faith and truth cannot contradict. If after having a few beers, you were to suddenly develop the insight that God said it was alright to fornicate, you would be contradicting a substantial amount of Christian tradition. Therefore either Christian tradition is wrong and the Christian conception of God is wrong, or you're wrong. A lot of the mystical experiences, drug induced or not, are immediately rejected by this type of analysis.
I'm not a biblical scholar but I do understand that there were may other gospels circulating around in the early Christian period. That fact that the Chruch only settled on four tells you that a lot of the "mystical" experiences felt by the early believers were felt by the Church leaders to be rubbish.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Giving Nietzsche Eyes
"I'll provide another scenario. A secluded island of peoples that have no contact with Christian missionaries or the bible. Are they born Christian? Do they believe in Jesus or Jehovah? No, again goes to prove that without teachers or missionaries, Christianity like other pagan religions will die out. The only people who perpetuate the "faith" is its followers."
Consider a community of blind men who are strict empiricists. From their perspective, lacking the sense of sight, they would be unable to verify the existence of colours, and any statements with regard to colour, shape or pattern would be,from their point of view, unempiric and hence unscientific. Statements concerning visual phenomenon would be unable to be verified and hence would be articles of faith; a body of knowledge belonging to the category of superstition.
Now suppose a sighted man, literally a visionary, told them about the phenomenon of colour, how could they discern if they were telling him the truth or not? They can't, because they lack the sensory capacity to confirm the subject in question.
The core idea behind empiricism is that perception is the window to reality, and that any understanding of reality must be perceptually confirmed.
People say that seeing is believing. But seeing is not believing; thinking is believing. Seeing is knowing; everything else is emotive hope, probabilistic guess or reasoned theory.
Commentators Brockmann and Neitzsche have put forward the argument that without sensory input of any kind, a man would fail to be Christian, and that religious belief is conditional upon personal circumstances. Their view is partially correct. Men inherit their faith from their ancestors and certainly, for the unreflective man, faith is a circumstantial habituated practice.
The reflective man however has a problem. He questions and challenges his faith, and if logically consistent, finds that there is nothing in the Universe which supports his view. Thieves prosper, the good are murdered, and the completely innocent suffer tremendously. Empirically, there is no way he can confirm that Gay Marriage and Adultery are objectively wrong. Statistically he may be able to find data that supports a respective religious vision, but he cannot find any data the confirms a creed. As commentators Brockmann and Neitzsche imply, ought cannot be derived from is and hence the implication that transcendent truths are unknowable, and therefore arbitrary fairy stories; cognitive products of the imagination for whatever reason.
They are, of course, logically correct.
And yet they are wrong.
Because their understanding of the human perceptual capacity is in error.
I wish to illustrate what I mean by starting off with a passage of biblical text. Not because I want them to believe in the veracity of the Bible, but because the text succinctly explains the difference between believers and non-believers and problem of Modernity.
As it is written: God hath given them the spirit of insensibility; eyes that they should not see; and ears that they should not hear, until this present day.
(Romans 11:8 Douay-Rheims)Note the term insensibility, the inability to sense or perceive. This is not a play on words, as different translations of text refer to same phenomenon. The Christian fathers did not think of faith as a cognitive process but a sensory modality. In their view, unbelief was not the product of faulty thinking, it was the product of insensibility; a perceptual failure.
To them, faith was a sixth sense; an eye or ear-like faculty which allowed us to perceive non-physical realities. When the Christian fathers asserted that men should not commit adultery, they were not plucking something out of thin air or making a rational calculation based up their value preferences; they were being empirical.
Where the strict empiricists(and quite a few Christians) go wrong, is in assuming that the phenomenon of faith is a cognitive process, the end point of some form of emotive or faulty rationalisation, instead of a sensory phenomenon.
A great example of this "perception"sense in operation, as opposed to cognitive effect, was the motive force behind C.S. Lewis' own conversion to Christianity:
"You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England" (Surprised By Joy, ch. 14, p. 266). (My italics)
Lewis was no gullible idiot. Here, what we see in this passage, is Lewis wanting to rationalise away a perception or experience that he was having. Like someone suffering a sore tooth, which forces itself to their attention, Lewis was being nagged by some form of unwilled sensory stimulus. His conversion was not the product willed rationalisation but of an unwanted experience: The intruding sense of "Him" was felt/percieved rather than willed. Lewis had no choice in the matter, in the same way he had no choice in choosing the colour of the sky.
When a man of faith says murder is wrong, it's akin to him saying an apple is red or the sky is blue. It's a statement of fact rather than opinion. Of course to the "blind" man who believes that all men are blind, there is no such objective thing as redness, saying that the apple is red or the sky is blue is purely arbitrary.
The Church fathers recognised that the "faith-sense" was the weakest of all senses, through which we saw "through a glass darkly", much like looking through a cataract affected eye; broad shapes can be detected but the detail eludes us. I imagine that a very undeveloped form of this faith sense is what explains humanity's default morality. All people have a crude understanding that murder and theft are wrong, and they understand that they are wrong at a deeper level than cognitive explanation, they percieve them to be wrong.
It's this lack of sensory acuity which probably explains the profusion of religions, men have felt the pull of transcendence or mistaken an experience as transcendent, and interpreted the sensation incorrectly, in the same way that a group of nearly blind man can discern human forms but disagree with regard to the identity of them.
The atheist mistake is in assuming that the divisions amongst the religious are due to differing rationalisations instead of differing interpretations. To use our nearly blind group of men analogy, the atheist or rationalist blind man thinks that the man affected with the severe cataracts is making things up, whilst the man with the cataract is trying to understand what is going on. If you were to take a group of men with cataracts and present them with a the image of a person at a distance, one will say its Fred, some will say its Bill and the others will say its Judy, they will all know that they have percieved something even if they are not sure what it is, but the blind men, being unable to perceive, will assume that the cataract affected, are making things up.
What separates the Moderns from the rest of humanity is in this perception of "something else" beyond the five-sense barrier. And Christians ,in particular, should understand that from the atheist perspective (those who lack the faith sense), religion is logically ridiculous. And it is this fact that poses a huge practical problem for conservatives and it also gives an inkling of what we are up against.
When Christopher Hitchins or his ilk argue that faith is just superstition and "fairy stories", they are absolutely correct from their objective point of view. You see, Hitchins et al, live their life assuming with certitude, that there is no such thing as "faith-sight" and any statements with regard to "faith-colours or forms" are arbitrary. The honest ones amongst them are like blind men, who truly and honestly believe that there is no such thing as sight, and any statements regarding such are rubbish. Trying to convince these men, by rational argument, of the existence of transcendent moralities is by logical necessity, going to fail. In order to get the get the militant atheists on side you've got to get them to "see". They literally can't think their way towards religion because good thinking without faith is irreligious. Or to put it another way, arguing with them is like arguing with a blind man about the nature of colour, there is no way you can get him to "see" red.
This "faith-sense", not being a renationalisation process, cannot therefore be experienced by acts of rationalisation. Blind people cannot experience colours by study or by rational argument; they have to sense them.
The only way past this impasse is by some way granting them the ability to "see". The Church fathers also recognised that this faith sense was not "intrinsic" to our being but was rather a bestowed gift of God.* That means petitionary prayer; asking God to give our enemies "sight". This is why there will be no HBD or atheistic conservative revival (they may be able to give the appearance of conservative revival but it will eventually degenerate into leftist decay, it's a movement trying to empty a bathtub with a seive). They are operating within the same sensory frame of reference as do the atheists.
The West is doomed unless men start praying to God for revival and conversion of their enemies. When the monasteries start reappearing, that's when you know it'll all be right.
*(Personally I'm not so sure of this, I sometimes wonder if we all have this sense but that it becomes dulled either by Divine will or by evil human habit or will, i.e the sense is intrinsic to our being.)
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Flowers amongst weeds.
I'm warning the Atheists that this is a religious post.
I don't think that many of my American readers realise just how hostile the contemporary cultural climate has become with regard to religion outside the U.S. Amongst polite society, religious belief is not just intellectually mocked, but it has become a social vice, much like not washing or belching in public. The result of this twin pronged attack is that religion tends not to be mentioned at all in public discourse (except when discourse is critical of it.) Conservatives of the HBD bent--the most successful conservatives and the ones scoring the most social points--do their bit as well, denying religious insight any legitimacy(except where it is subordinate to evolutionary concerns). Amongst the dynamic conservatives at the moment, religious matters are touched briefly and with some embarrassment. The conservative argument is fought on empirical basis alone.
I suppose this areligious flavour of conservatism has its roots in the debates with the left. Conservative thinkers have tried to debate the Left on the Left's terms in the mistaken belief that while Leftist's were irreligious, they were at least objective on more worldly matters. This view of course was false. The Left were never objective. Their objectivity was subjective, subjective to their own prejudices and they simply ignored argument which conflicted with their preferred version of reality. There was no dialogue but lots of debate. Conservatism, shaped by this endless dialogue with the Left, became publicly, practically irreligious.
This is a shame because without religious insight Conservatism is dead.
The Left is the killing the West, and thinking people of all persuasions realise that something is wrong. Detroit just one example of the malignancy of the Left disease and yet unless it is stopped, Detroit is the future for all of us. 20th Century Conservatism has the failed to stop the disease. Indeed God-lite Conservatism is part of the disease. There will be no revival of the West without a religious revival.
I've been meaning to put up this post for a while but could not find a good example to illustrate what I meant till I came upon this post. (Hat tip. The Black Death). Amongst Detroit's cancer is something that refuses to die. (These are images of the surrounding area)
Just imagine the effort and personal sacrifice that went into the building of this church. The care and artistry that lavished upon it, a time when infant mortality was shocking, hunger real and destitution, an ever present reality. That a bunch of peasant Polaks, Europe's rejected, could build such a church in what was effectively the wilderness and against the odds was testimony to the power of their culture to create something magnificent from nothing. As opposed to the modern culture of Detroit, which corrodes everything it touches, their culture was a culture of vitality: The force of life.
It's this "force" that gave the West its vitality and without this force the West will die. The world has gone through prolonged periods of darkness before and on a purely logical level there is no reason why the West go the way of other cultures.
That such a church, built up with much effort, toil and sacrifice; the drama for life's great events and a thing of beauty itself, could be sold for one hundred dollars is proof that the current Catholic church is run by downright morons and cultural aesthetes. The natural way of things when governed by such men is for self destruction. That the Church survives is not due to human agency, as clearly it is manifestly lacking, but is supported by something Divine. As some cardinal, whose name I forget said, "the Devil will never destroy the Church, our own priests have been trying to do it for nearly two thousand years without success." It survives despite the idiocy of its supposed guardians.
The force that keeps this church alive is the force that shaped the West and when this force leaves this church it will die. The name of this force is caritas. In English, the word is frequently translated into the terms charity and love. But these terms do not do concept justice. The best way I can think of it as a will to perfection. (perfection in the Aristotelian sense). This force, expressed in the real world, improves upon it. Reality is not only better, but reality thrives in its action.
If I had to distill the big ideas of the West, the qualities which gave it its unique character, it would be caritas and veritas. Of these two, caritas is more important. Without caritas, veritas is impotent. The world thrives suboptimaly when it has caritas, but caritas becomes supercharged in the presence of veritas. (The West rocked in the 19th Century, it's when the two forces became aligned in Western society) And that's is why conservatism has failed, its concentrated on the veritas instead of the caritas; it's got its priorities wrong.
Looking at Paul's letter to the Corinthians in this light, it assumes a different message. Instead of it being an exposition on love, it becomes a sociological insight. Our society, no matter how technologically gifted it is, no matter what feats it can perform, is doomed to nothingness without charity. The technological fix, no matter how well informed, is doomed to failure. The HBD movement is a dead end. That's not to say that it does not have valuable insights(veritas), but on its own it's not enough. Standing in modern Detroit, St Paul could clearly identify the malady. Where is the love? Would be his comment. Detroit is decaying because of idiocy and indifference, failures of both veritas and caritas. In a sea of desolation, St Albertus survives because of love.
Before you can save Detroit or the West, you've gotta care. Without the love, no matter how informed you are, you don't give a shit.
I don't think that many of my American readers realise just how hostile the contemporary cultural climate has become with regard to religion outside the U.S. Amongst polite society, religious belief is not just intellectually mocked, but it has become a social vice, much like not washing or belching in public. The result of this twin pronged attack is that religion tends not to be mentioned at all in public discourse (except when discourse is critical of it.) Conservatives of the HBD bent--the most successful conservatives and the ones scoring the most social points--do their bit as well, denying religious insight any legitimacy(except where it is subordinate to evolutionary concerns). Amongst the dynamic conservatives at the moment, religious matters are touched briefly and with some embarrassment. The conservative argument is fought on empirical basis alone.I suppose this areligious flavour of conservatism has its roots in the debates with the left. Conservative thinkers have tried to debate the Left on the Left's terms in the mistaken belief that while Leftist's were irreligious, they were at least objective on more worldly matters. This view of course was false. The Left were never objective. Their objectivity was subjective, subjective to their own prejudices and they simply ignored argument which conflicted with their preferred version of reality. There was no dialogue but lots of debate. Conservatism, shaped by this endless dialogue with the Left, became publicly, practically irreligious.
This is a shame because without religious insight Conservatism is dead.
The Left is the killing the West, and thinking people of all persuasions realise that something is wrong. Detroit just one example of the malignancy of the Left disease and yet unless it is stopped, Detroit is the future for all of us. 20th Century Conservatism has the failed to stop the disease. Indeed God-lite Conservatism is part of the disease. There will be no revival of the West without a religious revival.
I've been meaning to put up this post for a while but could not find a good example to illustrate what I meant till I came upon this post. (Hat tip. The Black Death). Amongst Detroit's cancer is something that refuses to die. (These are images of the surrounding area)
There are only 12 parishioners seated in the pews at the front. There’s room behind them for almost 2,500 more.
There’s no place else like it in Detroit. The way its tattered beauty still shows despite its age, the way a handful of people keep it going despite the challenges, the way its past was wild and sometimes even violent, it’s a lot like the city it has stood in all these years.
“This place is not only a statement about God; it’s a statement about us,” says Bob Duda, 64, part of the Polish American Historic Site Association, the group that takes care of St. Albertus. “It’s like a skyscraper — here we are folks, we’re important, just as important as anybody else. We’re going to be proud of ourselves. That’s why they built churches like this; otherwise they could’ve done it in tents*. It’s a testimony to us and our history and our heritage.
*(Note to Modernist Architects)
Just imagine the effort and personal sacrifice that went into the building of this church. The care and artistry that lavished upon it, a time when infant mortality was shocking, hunger real and destitution, an ever present reality. That a bunch of peasant Polaks, Europe's rejected, could build such a church in what was effectively the wilderness and against the odds was testimony to the power of their culture to create something magnificent from nothing. As opposed to the modern culture of Detroit, which corrodes everything it touches, their culture was a culture of vitality: The force of life.
It's this "force" that gave the West its vitality and without this force the West will die. The world has gone through prolonged periods of darkness before and on a purely logical level there is no reason why the West go the way of other cultures.
That such a church, built up with much effort, toil and sacrifice; the drama for life's great events and a thing of beauty itself, could be sold for one hundred dollars is proof that the current Catholic church is run by downright morons and cultural aesthetes. The natural way of things when governed by such men is for self destruction. That the Church survives is not due to human agency, as clearly it is manifestly lacking, but is supported by something Divine. As some cardinal, whose name I forget said, "the Devil will never destroy the Church, our own priests have been trying to do it for nearly two thousand years without success." It survives despite the idiocy of its supposed guardians.
The force that keeps this church alive is the force that shaped the West and when this force leaves this church it will die. The name of this force is caritas. In English, the word is frequently translated into the terms charity and love. But these terms do not do concept justice. The best way I can think of it as a will to perfection. (perfection in the Aristotelian sense). This force, expressed in the real world, improves upon it. Reality is not only better, but reality thrives in its action.
If I had to distill the big ideas of the West, the qualities which gave it its unique character, it would be caritas and veritas. Of these two, caritas is more important. Without caritas, veritas is impotent. The world thrives suboptimaly when it has caritas, but caritas becomes supercharged in the presence of veritas. (The West rocked in the 19th Century, it's when the two forces became aligned in Western society) And that's is why conservatism has failed, its concentrated on the veritas instead of the caritas; it's got its priorities wrong.
Looking at Paul's letter to the Corinthians in this light, it assumes a different message. Instead of it being an exposition on love, it becomes a sociological insight. Our society, no matter how technologically gifted it is, no matter what feats it can perform, is doomed to nothingness without charity. The technological fix, no matter how well informed, is doomed to failure. The HBD movement is a dead end. That's not to say that it does not have valuable insights(veritas), but on its own it's not enough. Standing in modern Detroit, St Paul could clearly identify the malady. Where is the love? Would be his comment. Detroit is decaying because of idiocy and indifference, failures of both veritas and caritas. In a sea of desolation, St Albertus survives because of love.
Before you can save Detroit or the West, you've gotta care. Without the love, no matter how informed you are, you don't give a shit.
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Merry Christmas.
I know it's not politically correct, but neither am I. None of this "Happy Holidays" crap.
It's Merry Christmas and best wishes to my small band of readers.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Intellectual Ebola and HIV.
First recognised in 1981, the HIV virus is also spread by bodily fluids. Infection initially causes a cold like illness and then the virus apparently seems to do nothing for a long period of time. The host, bearing no stigmata of the disease or any ill effects, carries on with the same behaviours that initially caused infection. Slowly the individual realises that something is wrong as opportunistic infections take hold. Without treatment, the mean time to death is ten years. Untreated, mortality is close to 100%.
The mode of death between the two illness is worth noting. In Ebola, the stigmata of the disease become readily apparent and the patients death is spectacular. In HIV, death's ensnarement is more leisured. For a long while the individual appears unaffected, even healthy initially, dying only years after infection.
The HIV virus is estimated to have killed approximately twenty five million people. Ebola, on the other hand, has killed roughly 1,800.
Two viruses, roughly discovered at the same time and with approximately the same mortality, yet the the death toll of one is four orders of magnitude greater than the other. Why?
Ebola's spectacular viciousness in claiming its victim alerts those unaffected of the danger in their midst. The malignity of Ebola is obvious and individuals can easily recognise the danger approaching and take appropriate steps to stop it. The afflicted are obviously unwell and the unaffiliated flee from them. Ebola consumes it's host before it is able to spread. It path of destruction thwarted by its obvious efficiency in killing.
HIV, on the other hand, is a more congenial fellow. After a mild illness, it leaves its host alone for years, minding its own business and slowly spreading. Bearing no stigmata of illness, the afflicted does not affront anyone and normal precautions are not implemented by others, allowing the virus to silently spread. The threat of HIV is not obvious, yet it kills to a greater degree than Ebola. It's evil is subtle as opposed to Ebola's gaudy display.
HIV is a less apparently obvious killer than Ebola, and its this subtlety which makes it far more dangerous. It's subtlety allows complacency.
Ideas can resemble viruses as well. Some, such as fascism, are seen as malignant early on and thwarted. Others, such as communism, are just as malignant but for many years not recognised as such by huge swathes of the community. Over a hundred million dead trying to implement the Communist idea, that superficially, was meant to make the better place.
What got me thinking about this topic was this comments thread over at Jim Kalb's. Commentator Thursday wrote.
Yes, they do. Slumlord/The Social Pathologist, he who has posited absolute truth as the sole basis for conservatism, and the one who pointed out the Feser article to me, has made the argument that everybody is always the worse for having sex outside marriage. Plus, being raised in church and going to church schools, we were always being told about how the minute you had premarital sex, your life would just fall apart and you would be permanently damaged by it.Perhaps the most dangerous ideas are the ones, which in the short term, seem harmless or are beneficial but which are toxic in the long run. The aim of diabolical genius is to allow tactical victories whilst aiming for strategic defeat. The bovine populace, fixated as it is on the "here and now", never sees anything in particular going wrong in any single or particular act, yet not being able to see the big picture, wonder why society is crumbling around them.
Take radical liberalism for instance. It seems to have wilted both the identity of the West and its ability to respond to external threats. This comment by Steve Sailer deserves quite a bit of reflection.
In WWII and the Cold War, we faced enemies the caliber of Wernher von Braun and Andrei Sakharov. In the War on Terror, however, a strikingly large fraction of Muslim would-be terrorists, such as the recent Underpants Bomber and the Times Square Fizzler, are screwups.
Criminal masterminds turn out to be more common in movies than in real life. Even Osama bin Laden got lucky. A video shows him admitting gleefully that he hadn’t expected the World Trade Center towers to come down. And without George W. Bush’s campaign against airport profiling of Arabs, Mohammed Atta likely wouldn’t have even made it onboard.Conservatives of all stripes bemoan the rise of Islam, but they look at the problem the wrongly. Sailer has got it right. Objectively, the Islamic world would be utterly crushed by a determined West. Islam is only relatively strong because the West's current cultural ideology renders it weak. Islam is opportunistically expanding in the West.
Secular democratic liberalism may yet prove to be Western Society's cultural HIV.
(Image from Life magazine)
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