Home » Human nature and political left vs. right

Comments

Human nature and political left vs. right — 57 Comments

  1. In the context of this discussion, I recommend reading what I believe to be a very undervalued book by the late Israeli Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jacob L. Talmon, an “anti-Marxist” scholar whose book I’ve recommended here before.

    The title of Talmon’s 1952 work is, “The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,” and it analyzes leftist ideology, and what Talmon termed “totalitarian democracy” and “political Messianism” as they originated and played out in the French Revolution.

    How those on the Left believed that given the lofty nature of their goal–their march toward Utopia, and the salvation of all mankind–that nothing and no one should be allowed to stand in their way–and, in fact, that any person who blocked their march, who stood in their way should, as a last (or perhaps as a first ) resort be eliminated, be killed.

    See the Introduction to Talmon’s 1952 book here at https://www.panarchy.org/talmon/totalitariandemocracy.html

    Thus, all those who, as these leftists saw it, were too stupid to “understand where their true interests lay,” who suffered, as Marxist ideology has it, from “false consciousness,” should be “forced to be Free,” as those on the Left defined that Freedom.”

    Isn’t people being “forced to be Free” by those on the Left, what we are seeing happen all around us, in the age of political correctness, and Identity politics?

  2. I’ve known leftists who don’t seem to believe in the basic goodness of humankind. They just happen to believe that they themselves know best and therefore should have power and control over flawed humanity, that they themselves can put the correct restrictions on other people so that they themselves can get the results they deem “good.” If people are innately selfish, for example, they must be forced to share. If they are innately racist, they must be forced to check their privilege. Don’t let re-education camps fool you; the instruction is not necessarily meant to gently persuade. Sometimes the goal is to tell the attendees what is the expected behavior for them, and what is the penalty for non-compliance.

    Yes, I think that whereas the traditional progressive was Rousseauian in outlook, as Snow on Pine describes, and thus backed-in to their totalitarianism, the old fashioned kind are increasingly replaced by a type of “liberal” which can no longer deny that humans have certain more or less fixed dispositions or preferences, and that these preferences, some of them of life and death import, may collide in ways that cannot be resolved through education and dialog.

    Which is why in more recent decades liberals have been casting traditionalists as not merely benighted, but as “Neanderthals”; i.e., irredeemable moral and intellectual dregs of the species, properly slated for actual extinction or replacement, with themselves as the soaring, imaginative vanguard which has a duty to the future to politically cull and reshape the herd through various managerial techniques. One even sees this admission developing, although it is made more or less in passing, in as early a work as Rawls’, “A Theory of Justice”.

  3. Speaking of political nature and human left vs right:

    https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/06/oberlin-college-hit-with-maximum-punitive-damages-capped-at-22-million-by-law-in-gibsons-bakery-case/

    The jury just rendered its verdict on punitive damages in the Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College case.

    Daniel McGraw, our reporter in the courtroom, reports that in addition to the $11.2 million compensatory damages awarded last Friday, the jury awarded a total of $33 million in punitive damages, which will probably be reduced by the court to $22 million because of the state law cap at twice compensatory (it’s not an absolute cap, but probably will apply here). That brings the total damages to $33 million. We will have the breakdown soon. The jury also awarded attorney’s fees, to be determined by the judge.

    In closing argument, Gibson’s lawyer Lee Plakas argued:

    “Why is the country watching you. Because the country agrees that what happened to the Gibsons should not happen to anyone, but could happen to everyone.”

    ”Colleges are watching us and you. Because they all know the way colleges are run will be affected, and by your decisions, they will be”

    Defense attorney Rachelle Kuznicki argued:

    “We cannot change the past, we can learn from it.”

    “This will impact people who had nothing to do with the protest …, it also means less students who are not able to afford a college education will be able to do so.”

    A: no college administrator should retain employment who does not know the difference in usage between “less” and “fewer”; I extend that to their attorneys.
    B: the entire purpose of leftist activism is to “impact people who had nothing to do with the protest” — examples too numerous to link, but three guesses about how many people at Oberlin support reparations for US slavery.

    Some relevant commentary:
    ttps://hotair.com/archives/2019/06/13/oberlins-lament-dont-let-malicious-social-justice-defamation-put-us-business/

    Oberlin’s attorneys earlier called college officials to plead poverty, noting that the $11 million award for damages to the Gibson’s bakery business was large enough to get the point across. There’s no need to “pour gasoline on fires,” Oberlin’s vice president argued during testimony, and a real chance that the college could be forced to shut its doors:

    Even if the school was in poor shape, though, that’s not an argument for taking it easy on them. It’s more of an argument that the school should have been a lot more careful about facilitating a rhetorical lynch mob in the first place. When Oberlin coddled, pandered, and encouraged the torches-and-pitchforks assault on the Gibsons, they should have calculated that the fire could burn them down as well.

    There is a price for slander and defamation, and schools had better be very very careful about stoking mobs rather than educating adults. Their endowments might depend on it.

    Cue Orwell: “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” Inside the Whale (1940)
    https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Orwell

    Forward Covington Catholic!

  4. I’ve been seeing that quote by Orwell for years, and decided to look up the context.
    Turns out it’s also relevant to the divergence of ideologues.

    http://orwell.ru/library/essays/whale/english/e_itw

    But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism. Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ (incidentally this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war):

    To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
    The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
    To-morrow the bicycle races
    Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

    To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
    The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
    To-day the expending of powers
    On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

    The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good party man’. In the-morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle ‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men — I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means — the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot. The warmongering to which the English intelligentsia gave themselves up in the period 1935-9 was largely based on a sense of personal immunity. The attitude was very different in France, where the military service is hard to dodge and even literary men know the weight of a pack.

  5. “the salvation of all mankind–[required] that any person who blocked their march, who stood in their way should… be eliminated, be killed.” – Snow

    Sort of like that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” justification that the old anti-war protestors used to complain about?

  6. A: no college administrator should retain employment who does not know the difference in usage between “less” and “fewer”;

    Can someone for making a grammatical error? Pretty frivolous.

    The real reason to fire people in this circumstances is for manufacturing this controversy (Raimondo), taking it to trial (Varner), and not putting a stop to the GC when she wanted to take it to trial (Ambar).

  7. Two roads, travelled by different classes —
    https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/12/why-are-the-western-middle-classes-so-angry/
    Why Are the Western Middle Classes So Angry?
    By Victor Davis Hanson| June 12th, 2019

    Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists.

    What are the popular gripes against them? [we all know the list]

    One common gripe framed all these diverse issues: The wealthy had the means and influence not to be bothered by higher taxes and fees or to avoid them altogether. Not so much the middle classes, who lacked the clout of the virtue-signaling rich and the romance of the distant poor.

    In other words, elites never suffered the firsthand consequences of their own ideological fiats. [hence the two roads — one with luxury transportation, one travelled by shank’s mule]

    Elites masked their hypocrisy by virtue-signaling their disdain for the supposedly xenophobic, racist or nativist middle classes.

    The middle classes became nauseated by the constant elite trashing of their culture, history and traditions, including the tearing down of statues, the Trotskyizing of past heroes, the renaming of public buildings and streets, and, for some, the tired and empty whining about “white privilege.”

    If Western nations were really so bad, and so flawed at their founding, why were millions of non-Westerners risking their lives to reach Western soil?

    How was it that elites themselves had made so much money, had gained so much influence, and had enjoyed such material bounty and leisure from such a supposedly toxic system—benefits that they were unwilling to give up despite their tired moralizing about selfishness and privilege?

    In the next few years, expect more grassroots demands for the restoration of the value of citizenship. There will be fewer middle-class apologies for patriotism and nationalism. The non-elite will become angrier about illegal immigration, demanding a return to the idea of measured, meritocratic, diverse and legal immigration.

    Because elites have no answers to popular furor, the anger directed at them will only increase until they give up—or finally succeed in their grand agenda of a non-democratic, all-powerful Orwellian state.

    Two roads also implies, eventually, two end points.

  8. I have written here before about the dangers of the attitudes discussed in your guote above.

    About historically illiterate, inexperienced, often idealistic and politically naive people—more often than not the young—who have had no actual, on the ground experience with the inevitable end state of Socialism/Democratic Socialism i.e. Communism in thin disguise.

    (I include Nazi Germany here as one of my examples because, although a lot of people want to forget or disguise it, the acronym NAZI does, in fact, stand for the “National German Socialist Workers’ Party”).

    About how, lacking any real experience of Socialism/Communism—with the lack any real Freedom, things like political violence ending in torture and murder—see Cambodia, the old U.S.S.R., China, North Korea, and Nazi Germany, the all enveloping surveillance and control mechanisms of actual dictatorship—see China, the U.S.S. R., North Korea, and Nazi Germany, with Party members as the elite and superior to all others—see the old U.S.S.R., North Korea, China, and Nazi Germany, hours spent in line to get often absent basic necessities, economic collapse and inflation/deflation—see the old U.S.S.R., and Venezuela, re-education, public humiliation and forced confessions—see China’s Great Proletarian Revolution and its Red Guards, and the old U.S.S.R., drab, crowded, run down Socialist housing—see the former East Germany, work/death camps—see the old (and perhaps today’s) U.S.S.R., North Korea, Cambodia, and Nazi Germany, etc. etc., can invent a benign, fantasy “Socialism” in their heads—say, like the glowing propaganda picture that is painted of the Socialism at work in Scandinavia—which can lead them to make disastrous decisions with bad, even deadly consequences.

    They are the people who very likely believe Bernie when, as he did yesterday, he tells them that “Democratic Socialism “ is the high-minded path of ”Compassion,” “Justice,” and “Love.”

    But, in reality, as a recent saying goes, “you can vote yourself into Socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.”

  9. We’re really talking here about human nature as presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — whose ideas led directly to Robespierre and onward to Pol Pot. Nature vs Nurture. If you postulate that it is society that corrupts the innocent, sinless child then you may end up believing that if such influences are removed…. the natural Goodness of the child will prevail.

    The contrary view may be found in “Lord of the Flies” and the Marquis de Sade, etc, and is much less pretty to contemplate.

  10. As to your statement on charity, I have heard a number of people take the Scrooge position that the gov’t has taken over responsibility for the poor (using taxes), so in effect they have already “given”. Most charities in the past were via religious institutions (either formally or informally). Such institutions seem to be under fire from the gov’t AND the popular culture. The advantage to the old system was that it was targeted toward those really in need. The disadvantage was that local prejudice could exclude some.

    Once the gov’t takes something over, it is really difficult to revert.

  11. Starting at that fundamental divide, each road diverges more and more from the other, getting further and further apart, until the people traveling each road can no longer even see or easily communicate with each other.

    neo: I responded to Snow on Pine:

    Is this so? From what I can tell, it’s more that people become less interested in communication. It is more trouble to communicate with people outside one’s worldview, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

    I don’t think the problem is communication but motivation. At one time I wasn’t equipped to understand American conservatives or abstract expressionist painters for that matter. I wouldn’t say my understanding of either is complete, but I’m not in the dark and don’t consider them malevolent others.

  12. Oh, and I can now communicate, after a fashion, with American conservatives and abstract expressionists, though the latter are hard to find these days.

    They still seem kind of strange and I’m not sure I trust them.

  13. To quote Churchill, “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

    When confronted with the dreadful, the murderous result–the butcher’s bill–paid by the people whose misfortune happened to be that they came under Communist rule–the proponents of Socialism/Communism always have a facile answer.

    Thus, they say, well, “the implementation was not complete, or it was botched.”

    But this time–this time–the Socialism/Communism we are proposing to become the law of the land will not be botched, it will be done right, and boy, will it be great.

    It is truly amazing to me that anyone could be so naive, that they would accept this excuse and rosy prediction–after an estimated death toll of a hundred million plus people killed–due to the half dozen times when true Socialism i.e. Communism was tried to be implemented.

    Haven’t enough people died already, their misery and deaths proving that true Socialism i.e. Communism is a wrong and murderous, a disastrous path down which to travel?

  14. When you are making the ultimate omelet, you don’t care how many eggs you break. It seems that it’s always the ultimate omelet being made.

  15. Snow on Pine: A Churchill tidbit:

    Winston Churchill repeated a grade during elementary school and, when he entered Harrow, was placed in the lowest division of the lowest class. Later, he twice failed the entrance exam to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He was defeated in his first effort to serve in Parliament. He became Prime Minister at the age of 62. He later wrote, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up.

    https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/OnFailingG.html

    Edison said inventing the electric bulb took on the order of a thousand attempts. Why should socialists give up after a dozen or so failures?

    Do you really believe you can’t communicate with socialists? Or they can’t communicate with you?

  16. They don’t give up because cost (in other people’s lives and treasure) is no object.

  17. If there ever was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” it’s Bernie Sanders, and the others who are advocating for “Socialism.”

  18. No offense to Snow on Pine, but, Neo, I think your distinction is much more relevant and common. I hear and read many who state circumstances as SoP did, but I don’t think that way and I don’t believe most others do either.

    I don’t believe AOC thinks people are perfectable, certainly not folks on the right. She thinks they (those on the right) are selfish and greedy and heartless or clueless or both. But if we make her our Boss she’ll sort us and reward the good and punish the bad. Many on the left hate their fellow man and what legions of us gone. Out of their way.

    It is as you write, Neo.

  19. DNW’s first comment describes fascist leftists I encounter.

    They are our betters, The Elites.

    And, as Hillary stated, we are irreedeemable.

    To use the omelette analogy. We are not the eggs broken to make the omelette. We are the bits of shell that must be removed and discarded before whisking the eggs.

  20. “What we have here is failure to communicate.”

    Seems to me, there is a great deal of preaching to the choir by those assuming the choir needs to be educated. Let a hundred of artfldgrs blossom. But perhaps we rubes are a bit more up to date than some of our more long winded betters may imagine.

    Advise from an old farm boy, if your comment is longer than the post, you might think about engaging in some brevity. BTW, this comment is too long. 😉

  21. parker,

    “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal

    “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

    “Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.” – Louise Brooks

    “The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.” – George Burns

  22. Why should socialists give up after a dozen or so failures?

    Do you really believe you can’t communicate with socialists? Or they can’t communicate with you?

    This is fun. Reminds me of when I planted myself in the blind spot of progressives.

  23. Rufus T.

    Chuckled at the Pascal quote. Thanks.

    huxley in the blind spot of progressives, is that like playing dodge ball with the Europeans when separated by a lot of salty water?

    My mind tells me I can sleep deep below the raging bastard of tinnitus. May all find peaceful sleep and blue skies in the morning.

  24. I tend to fall in line with Snow on Pine on this. I once had the opportunity to engage in an excellent debate with a bright young college student on the death penalty. As with every good debate, we peeled away all of the peripheral layers to expose the core differences in our points of view. In this case, we arrived at exactly the difference that S on P described. She thought all humans were food and that their lives were valuable. I know from sad experience that humans exist who do not posess sufficient empathy to ever coexist within a social matrix. These are dangerous and uncivilized beasts that can never be permitted to exist among us. In fact their very existence diminishes our race. Our very racial survival demands that we cull such miscreants from the gene pool.

    However, there is another fundamental premise about human nature that must be included in this discussion: “All humans men (humans) are created equal.” Now, I know what Thomas Jefferson really had in mind when he wrote that. He grew up in an aristocracy. That was a statement that directly challenged the status quo. But, I don’t think he ever intended that statement to be taken literally. Clearly, we are not all equal. Some are stronger, some are faster, some are smarter, and some are more beautiful. In fact, he meant that all men should be equal in the eyes of the law. However, the concept of egalitarianism took hold in Western Culture as an ideal despite the obvious evidence to the contrary of the proposition.

  25. I just finished binge-reading nearly all of Legal Insurrection’s posts on the Gibson vs Oberlin trial.
    At one point, either McGraw, Jacobson, or a commenter pointed out that the two parties were on two very divergent roads, and would never agree on the points they were disputing.
    Which is true.
    Gibson’s tried several times to just get the college to put out a statement saying they did not have a history of racism, as claimed on the flyer & student organization letter (and never backed up with any evidence), and clear their reputation; while the college demanded that the store owners call the college first, rather than the police, in any further crimes involving students — essentially giving them a free pass — and then they would deign to transact business with the store again.

    Evidence on the first couple of days showed that the charges of racism were totally false; later, information surfaced that the college got a lot of communications from the community to that effect and ignored them.

    As Professor Jacobson himself said, after reading the trial reports, I am SMH over the obtuseness, and arrogance, of the college’s administration, and the incompetence, and arrogance, of their attorneys.

    There were some pretty good zingers from the witness stand, and the Gibsons’s lawyers were brilliant.

  26. Continuing my comment above. Sorry, I pushed the button by accident…

    If we start with the assumption that all people are equal, then in a fair society, all of the outcomes would be equal. For such a person, the evidence of unequal outcomes is proof that the society is unfair. It also justifies the resentment of underperformers for those who overperform the average. In turn, that resentment makes a very large percentage of the population vulnerable to populist politicians.

    So, for me, the roots of most of the political divisions and evils of the western world are the twin fallacies that all people are inherently good and that they are all equal.

  27. om on June 13, 2019 at 10:19 pm said:
    They don’t give up because cost (in other people’s lives and treasure) is no object.
    * * *
    And Oberlin pushed the Gibsons into a defamation trial because they are spending other people’s money — lawyer and expert witness fees easily hit several hundred thousand dollars, and now they will have appeals and eventually paying the judgment against them — since the costs won’t come out of their own pockets.
    Although, if Oberlin’s trustees are at all sane, they will sack the lot of them.

  28. AesopFan,

    ” (and never backed up with any evidence) ”

    Tawana Brawley, Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, MO, the University of Missouri, Andrew Breitbart’s $100,000 challenge to John Lewis …

    And Stacy Abrams is the Governor of Georgia, Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin, Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist…

    As Ronald Reagan said, “They know so much that isn’t true.”

  29. I’m wondering where the stupid idea that people are inherently good got started. Until fairly (in historical terms) recently, everyone understood that the basic rule of human conduct was, as Thucydides put it, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” Was it Rosseau? Marx? And why would anyone believe humans were inherently good when all of human history shows the opposite?

  30. The commentary here should be shown in every high school civics class (oops, I forgot that civics is no longer taught in high school).

    Thank you Snow on Pine, AesopFan and others.

    My simple mantra: “Beware of those who promise to make Heaven on Earth, for they will stop at nothing to eliminate anything or anybody whom they perceive as standing in their way.”

  31. huxley on June 13, 2019 at 9:32 pm

    I did not know that about Churchill. The other thing I did not know about him was that as a younger man, he was the architect of the battle of Gallipoli fiasco. After WWI, the elites in the U.K. considered his career to be finished.

    Never, never give up. I’ll say.

  32. I apologize if this has been presented by Neo already, or extensively commented on before. If it were, I probably commented on it myself, but simply don’t recall. LOL

    But in rereading it – and it is nearly topical, postdating the election of Trump – I was struck by its continuing relevance to the matter at hand.

    That matter, is the relationship between the granting of the concept of a human nature or at least of “natural kinds” and real categories, and human sanity. A granting which brings with it the possibility of logic, and practical reason, and at least some potential for constructive order and freedom.

    The denial of real categories (radical nominalism) whatever the originating impulse, seems to eventually express itself socially in raving chaotic nihilism, and the impossibility of communication as definitions are dissolved, and terms corrupted into meaningless, emotive, rhetorical gibbering at the service of a fulminating mental instability and rage.

    Is there a relation between a disordered psyche and emotional instability and hard core nominalism?

    From February of last year.

    https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269251/my-sister-kate-destructive-feminist-legacy-kate-mark-tapson

  33. Read the article at the link that DNW has just put up above, it’s quite something.

  34. I’ve nearly finished Thomas Sowell’s “The Quest for Cosmic Justice.”

    In the last chapter he quotes at some length from a speech by Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in 1838.

    Lincoln worries about “threats [to our gov.] from within” by “men of ambition” whose

    Towering genius disdains a beaten path. — It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.

    A few sentences later, Sowell states the following, probably from a perspective from within an elite university.

    The intelligentsia have exactly the same incentives as Napoleonic politicians, even if the glory they seek is not necessarily direct political power in their own hands, but only the triumph of their doctrines, the reordering of other people’s lives in accordance with their visions, a display of their own intellectual virtuosity, or simply a posture of daring in the role of a verbal dandy.

    (Italics mine. Is that one too cynical, or just accurate?)

    To oversimplify, it can be very fashionable to scorn all traditions, and exhilarating to wreck them in pursuit of a grand new vision. Even for the followers that have not helped to build the vision, once they have gone past the emotional phase of resentment and victimhood, they don’t see any downside.

    Did Lincoln think emancipating the slaves was rash in 1838, or do I misunderstand? And Sowell quotes it nonetheless.

  35. Roy said ” She thought all humans were food and that their lives were valuable.”
    Well, she’s right, you don’t want to waste food.

  36. Richard Saunders–People want to believe that people are “inherently good” because, that view of human nature is so much more flattering than what the actual facts on the ground demonstrate about the real general essence of human nature.

    Its sort of like the disappointment and shock that all of those primatologists/anthropologists must have felt, when the news broke that observations actually showed that Chimpanzees–our closest living relatives, out of whose biological imperatives and social structures human beings evolved— deliberately stalked, killed, and ate their fellow Chimpanzees.

  37. I think these coupled passages, TommyJay, may better be understood to point toward Woodrow Wilson than to be aimed in any measure at slavery as an historical object as such. Of course Lincoln can only indicate Wilson (i.e., someone like him) prospectively, whereas Sowell can see him in old film and history books.

  38. As I have mentioned here I am not formally religious, nor am I a churchgoer, but examining my world-view, values, and ideas, it is obvious that the Christian teachings I pretty unconsciously absorbed as a child–however rudimentary and devoid of higher theology or “hell and brimstone” teaching they were—created that world-view and values that I hold.

    As the saying goes, ”as the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined,” and, in my case, this is true. That essentially Christian viewpoint is the lens through which I view the world, how I make sense of it; the program I consult to see what the game is, and who the players are.

    As I later learned, Christian theology sees each one of us as a “fallen creature’” as a fallible being prone to bad behavior—in Christian terms a ‘sinner”—and in need of God’s grace.

    As I see it, this mindset performs the vital function of helping to keep our human fallibility front and center in our minds, and helps to keep our hubristic, Promethean tendencies in check.

    We do need boundaries, and as uncomfortable, stuffy, confining, faulty, and even sometimes as unfair as they might have been, they were there for a reason, they served a specific function.

    They were protective walls, designed to keep out the uncontrolled anarchy and violence that awaited outside their perimeter.

    But today we live in a society in which the formerly ubiquitous Christian teachings that were all around us and embedded in our society and culture—taught explicitly in church on Sunday, but also present—explicitly and implicitly—in our schools, in our literature, and entertainment, in public discourse, in virtually every aspect of our society and culture, and in our lives—which created a framework for our society and culture, informing, directing, and setting the boundaries and expectations for how we lived those lives, has increasingly—and very deliberately—been pushed out of the public square, and is vanishing from our lives, more and more quickly and fully receding toward the horizon like the tide; a sign—if we are smart enough to recognize it—of the Tsunami that is very likely to follow.

    The former boundaries have eroded and, in some cases, seem to have just about vanished.

    As I see it, then, in the West’s increasingly unbridled, Post-Christian societies, our tendencies toward hubris and towards seeing ourselves as Promethean in nature—“modern,” “scientific,” without bounds, and no longer subject to any “superstitions,” to any archaic rules or moral codes—have increasingly become more voiced, and more common—are on their way to very likely becoming dominant.

    Emblematic of this Promethean attitude—it seems to me—is the news that, in China, a scientist/surgeon and his team are getting ready to perform the first head transplant, things like genetically manipulated “designer babies” are on the horizon, harmful narcotic and psychoactive/hallucinogenic drugs are increasingly seen as relatively benign and are being “de-criminalized,” and the clamor for totally without limits abortion—including infanticide— grows.

  39. “… or simply a posture of daring in the role of a verbal dandy.”

    That was the part I meant to emphasize. Should have used bold face.

    sdferr: The part about slavery was in some sense completely extraneous to the main point. But I was curious about it and the context in which Lincoln made it.
    ______

    The Mallory Millett interview linked by DNW is amazing. Worth reading the whole thing.

  40. ” … keep[ing] our human fallibility front and center in our minds, … helps to keep our hubristic, Promethean tendencies in check. …

    … boundaries have eroded and, in some cases, seem to have just about vanished. … in the West’s increasingly unbridled, Post-Christian societies, our tendencies toward hubris and towards seeing ourselves as Promethean in nature—“modern,” “scientific,” without bounds, and no longer subject to any “superstitions,” … increasingly become more voiced, and more common—are on their way to very likely becoming dominant.”

    Thus saith the progressive: ‘Because nature (as in the world apart from man) is not “fair”, We will make the life of mankind fair. Because God does not exist, We must become our own God.

    A little problem that arises however when men deny they have a “nature” as in a telos, or objective end. This leaves them forced to ask, “What entity, exactly, are “we” acting in aid of?’, since there is no essential, objectively discoverable, “there” there to man: no essence, no purpose, not even any moral coherence to the would-be God.

    What then is this contingent thing, which would legislate and become God, yet which on its own analysis has no essential nature, no objective purpose, no independent being, and not even a coherent identity?

    Can “it” even be defined, rather than simply described as a transient locus of pointless impulses; an evanescent closed loop accident manifesting in aid of nothing?

    If you take progressive metaphysics seriously – or at least the propositions which taken together imply a metaphysics – when you look at the progressive model of man, there IS NO coherent there, there.

    So what is it then, that would ascend to the Throne, and decree the Law?

  41. For my “Buddhist” acquaintance, Huxley.

    https://thejournalofbusiness.org/index.php/site/article/download/448/352

    Now two things before you bother to click, if you do bother:

    – this is written by an Indian and so you will have to mentally correct for some of the awkward language yourself.

    – this does not specifically explore what methodological practices might be derived for the phenomenological “epoche’ ” from out of Zen meditation, but does implicitly note a kind of parallel.

    It should also be mentioned that neither Phenomenology so far as I am aware, nor I, as I am certain, have any interest in these practices as a means of escaping ‘suffering”; which seems to be the goal of Buddhism in general, if not necessarily abstract westernized Suzuki style Zen in particular.

    We have a situation then, wherein the analysis of consciousness in Buddhism seems to exist primarily in aid of that goal: and where the direct engagement with a more or less unmediated reality develops as a kind of happy side-effect or discovery, which only after the fact reveals itself as a kind of worthwhile goal.

    As the author points out, Phenomenology to the contrary, is focused on knowing; whereas Buddhism is focused on … well, who the hell knows what it is focused on ultimately … on “Nothing” I guess (however you construe that, and its benefits)

  42. Rufus T. Firefly on June 14, 2019 at 8:02 am said:
    ..
    As Ronald Reagan said, “They know so much that isn’t true.”
    * * *
    Simply put, the news has always been fake.

  43. Snow on Pine on June 14, 2019 at 3:06 pm said:
    -People want to believe that people are “inherently good” …
    * * *
    …because then so am I — and no changes to my character or behavior are needed.

    See your comment below on the suppression of the Christian “background radiation” of society.
    Once it’s gone..things will not end well.

  44. Source posts for the PJM article on Pinterest.
    — and the “bottom line” from there, which I meant to include above:

    There’s no easy way out of this mess—perhaps no way out at all. All of the solutions that have thus far been proposed—breaking up the tech monopolies, removing federal Section 230 protections from social media platforms, and creating alternatives to them—are fraught with possible unintended consequences that could make things even worse. Whistleblowers like Cochran offer some hope. Perhaps there are more who will come forward to expose what’s going on in the board rooms and on Slack channels at the Big Tech giants. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll realize that marginalizing half of America is bad for business and change their ways.

    Don’t hold your breath.

    https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/11/tech-insider-blows-whistle-on-how-pinterest-listed-top-pro-life-site-as-porn-bible-verses-censored/

    Project Veritas has received and published documents from an insider at Pinterest. The documents, which include product code, Slack messages, and internal policies, reveal terms and websites that Pinterest apparently censors.

    In an interview, the Pinterest insider who leaked the documents explains how the company censors pro-life and Christian content on the website.

    “I was pretty surprised,” said the Pinterest insider in an interview, when s/he discovered that pro-life group LiveAction.org was added to a “porn domain block list.” The insider explained that the “block list” was intended to be a collection of pornographic websites that Pinterest uses in order ensure that pornography cannot be posted. LiveAction.org is not a pornographic website, instead it is the web domain of a prominent pro-life advocacy group.

    The insider explained that websites on a “domain block list” cannot be linked in posts made by users. While investigating, Project Veritas tried to post the LiveAction.org link on Pinterest and failed to do so, receiving an error message that read, “Sorry! Your request could not be completed.” Project Veritas reviewed the list of websites from the “porn domain block list” and was able to confirm that along with LiveAction.org, websites like zerohedge.com, pjmedia.com, teaparty.org and other various conservative websites were also listed. The majority of the document lists pornographic websites.

    Project Veritas also received a large text file titled “Sensitive Terms List.” The insider said the file contains search terms that Pinterest considers

    “sensitive,” and that the terms are modified in search results according to different value assignments. According to the insider and supporting documents, terms are assigned an “abusive,” “sensitive,” and “brand unsafe” value.
    Some of the actions that can be taken on search terms include: blocking auto-complete results in the search bar, providing an advisory message when a term is searched for, removing the term from recommended or trending feeds, and blocking email or push notifications. Search results are also modified based on the values that are applied to terms.

    Project Veritas reviewed the “Sensitive Terms List” and discovered that Christianity-related terms like “christian easter” and “bible verses” were marked as “brand unsafe.” The insider explained to Project Veritas in an interview that such terms are removed from auto-complete search results.

    Another document Project Veritas received was a screenshot from an internal Slack channel at Pinterest, where Public Policy and Social Impact Manager Ifeoma Ozoma instructed others to monitor the platform for “white supremacist” content from individuals like conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens. Three days after Ozoma’s message, the terms “ben shapiro muslim” and “ben shapiro islam” were added to the “Sensitive Terms List.”

    The insider explained to Project Veritas that in addition to removing content it wants to censor, Pinterest also “hides” materials from users on their home screens and search results. The insider added that there is also “silent removing,” which means the content is removed but there is no notice to the account who posted the material that it was removed.

    Said the insider:

    “I think when public policies don’t match with how social media companies are actually implementing them, people have a right to know, people have a right to that transparency. And the thing is one person can make all the difference… one person can bring transparency to big tech.”

    They incude an example of what happens when you type “bible vers” — none of them even make sense: “bible versus tattoos” — really?

    The insider has either been fired or placed on administrative leave.
    I wonder how Pinterest found out so fast who lratted them out — the DOJ doesn’t seem to be able to discover any of the government’s leakers.

    https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/11/pinterest-insider-fired-part-2-coming-soon/
    “Project Veritas has learned that the brave insider at Pinterest who exposed their methods of censoring conservative and religious content has been fired. This morning, Project Veritas published documents and an interview with the insider showing how Pinterest banned Live Action, suppresses Christian terms, and censors other pro-life content.”

  45. “Is there a relation between a disordered psyche and emotional instability and hard core nominalism?” – DNW

    That article on Millett was nearly unbelievable.
    We talk about leftism being a mental illness, but I always thought it was just kind of a joke.
    Not any more.

  46. Ray,

    Funny…

    No more edit function.

    I hope that wasn’t the only takeaway from my comment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>