Culture

Mars and What People Are Doing Down Here On Earth-A Few Links On Perseverance And A Mild Critique Of Liberal Idealism

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On Mars, Curiosity Rover helped establish the existence of flowing, liquid water on the Martian Surface some billions of years ago. This water would have been highly acidic, pooling up in the lower places, and probably (from what I currently know) not part of a water cycle with condensing and precipitating water (rain).

Long ago, Mars had enough of an atmosphere to support this liquid water, but lacking the size and electro-magnetic field generated by Earth’s core, Mars slowly had all the water molecules combine with other particles blasting away at the surface from space. Slowly, the water dwindled, as the atmosphere drifted away, and so the temperatures dropped.

So did protection from the Sun’s radiation.

Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.

Worth thinking about.

What are you doing with your imagination?

‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’

Jezero crater, where Perseverance has landed, has both inflow and outflow channels, like a holding tank. There is a deposit plain near the inflow channel. If you’re going to go digging in the Martian dust, digging through what was once muck, hoping to find some evidence of microbial Martian life, Jezero crater is as good place as any to do it.

I noticed a tear in my eye watching video of the rover touching down. So much hard work. So many deep dreams and aspirations made into reality. A functional robotic exploratory team is slowly being built, with little outposts on other worlds.

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For those who didn’t ask, Dear Reader:

Liberal Idealism–>I want to live in a free and human world, constantly progressing, full of human compassion, equality and justice. People, and people like myself, are generally good. Our change is good, and ought to be in charge–Output 1: Technocratic Bureaucracy–>Process 1: Change-focused ideas are in positions of key institutional leadership and authority (conserving certain elements of the past according to liberal ideals, excluding others). Science is invoked by many non-scientific actors. Process 2–>Institutional Capture by Ideologues and True-Belief from radical-change agents who believe that no authority is legitimate, and that it’s all power and no truth.–>Behind the Scenes: The people dedicated to an institution’s mission and purpose are fighting with the people who control the promotions within the institutions, and the loudest activist voices often win (see Jerry Pournelle).

Examples: See the NY Times, many Grant Foundations (Ford, Poetry), and many colleges and universities. See also, Health and Education departments. Most Liberal publications are now negotiating with the radical discontents within them. Such radicals, when not claiming collectivist supremacy, claim, from within the postmodern morass, a certain kind of feeling-first irrationality and primacy of Self (an irrational and mystic response to the ‘oppression’ of reason and the sciences).

Deeper Reasons Why: The Liberatory model of freedom (freedom against the oppressor, supposedly for the ‘victim’ and ‘oppressed minorities’) is an utopian and ideological model. Such a worldview has profound authoritarian/totalitarian implications. The ‘personal is political’ makes all areas of life (knowledge, sports, break-rooms) into political arenas. The Utopian promise of people actually getting along is pushed ever further into the future at the cost of people…you know….getting along in the present. Mediocre people and bad ideas are in charge. The easiest outlet for blame is anything standing in the way of progress (religion, tradition, liberal dissension, those who conserve).

What the Liberal idealist (and many anarchists) likely get wrong about human nature: People need ‘low-resolution’ ideas to make sense of reality, hierarchy, death, uncertainty and fear. This is an emergent feature within ourselves, and ignored at our peril. Human behavior, in aiming to be morally good and true, must be restrained, honorable and focused on consent. If such ideas and behavior are not incentivized into models of authority, then worse men, and the worse in men, will come to be in charge.

The more religious, frontier and freedom, flag and country type of America I once knew (with all its flaws) is looking more like a minority position these days.

Any pushback is welcome.

Some interesting links:

Shelby Steele and his son, Eli, have made a documentary about the killing of Michael Brown, and what happened in Ferguson. A lot of what seems to be the truth is not what many people claiming to have the truth are saying. Many of those people are in charge:

Who can afford to speak out?

Maybe if you’re a Stoic living on the fringes, whose needs are lesser than the punishment exclusion can bring. Maybe if you don’t have anyone directly dependent on you for love, security and safety.

Maybe the people with ‘F-You’ money who actually say ‘F-You’. The really well-to-do and the academic. I’m not holding my breath.

A Few Thoughts On Trump And Many New Moral Orthodoxies-The Glorious Dawn Of The (S)elf

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From my humble, small ‘c’ conservative position, Trump was better than many alternatives, although the Federal deficit is now frightening. His anti-China tendencies have been nationalistic; coming from a more pro-union, working man perspective dating to his experiences in 1980’s New York City. Whatever you think of such ideas, Trump’s pushed, and reacted against, a lot of where future political action will be, namely with the citizens who work hard, save, and play by the rules. Mostly isolationist on foreign policy and liberationist on the economy, Trump’s had his influence.

He’s also challenged much Liberal Idealism directly (humanists and universalists, progressives and global internationalists and MUCH of the mainstream-media these days). For this, Trump will not be forgiven.

I would also include in this telling many Left-Of-Center ‘Ism-ologists’ (environmentalist bureaucrats and lawyers, feminists, race-industrialists) and ‘Wokists’ beneath them (SJW’s, identitarian and New New Left ‘woke’ activists). Such folks not only disliked Trump, but have openly HATED him. Trump was the uncouth, fascistic authoritarian trashing the traditions of our fair Republic [addition: don’t worry, they’ll take great care of it]. He simultaneously played the role of old and new heel quite successfully,

Trump’s also, from a position of character, in my personal opinion, kind of a piece-of-shit (as in a Jake-The-Snake Roberts old-school WWF heel). You could maybe trust him if you went in on the USFL together as stakeholders, but, then again, maybe not. He’s taken slights personally, often sinking to the level of most opponents. He’s been a womanizer for many, many years. He seems to claim credit for successes in a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing way and often shifts the blame of failures onto others. He’s used ‘lawfare’ in the past to achieve his aims..

Nevertheless, here we are, at the perpetual glorious dawn of the (S)elf, Dear Reader.

I expect a lot of what I see as overbuilt Federal institutions to continue having, at least partial, if not complete, capture by second and third-raters willing to endorse new moral orthodoxies.

From my position, I see new moral orthodoxies as insufficiently grounded in the tragedies and comedies of human nature to produce much mid and long-term institutional success. I may trust individuals I know (love your family, trust but verify with colleagues), but I don’t, in aggregate, trust even [principled] progressives to stand-up for the pursuit of truth as explained and understood by the sciences against mobs of ignorance. The production-line of ideas from the radical activist, to high ‘-Ismologist’, to Liberal Human Universalist continues.

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Imagine yourself in a waiting room with an assortment of strangers. There’s some small-talk, some smiling, and some awkward tension (depending upon the reasons for which you might be waiting). A lot of the new ‘woke’ ideology takes as fuel the awkward tension of such strangers thrust together; these motley crews of friendly and not-so-friendly strangers in need of unifying ideas.

After liberation usually comes a new set of emergent rules and orthodoxies.

It still seems vast swathes of moral sentiment and public opinion have trouble aligning with positions of leadership and institutional authority these days, all across the board.

Some new links and a past quote:

British Historian Tom Holland sees the moral roots of the Christian faith as producing most of the new radical offshoots. For the Left, The Nazis are the devil (having rejected salvation and forgiveness). It’s always 1939 or so. For the Right, the current moral crisis is a rejection of belief, tradition and faith for atheism, liberal idealism and various dangerous ideologies coming out of the postmodern soup.

As for my thinking, the Platonic model found in the Republic (one of many models I’m using), keeps me up at night:  Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic can be found here.

Repost-Have Some Green Onions

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Are deeply tragic and exiquisitely-timed comedic writers having trouble finding newer audiences within older forms?

What effects are the distance-shortening and attention-altering technological networks having on more traditional arts?

‘The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.’

—George Santayana

English writers Ian McEwan and Martin Amis have a discussion; a bit about writing, a bit about personal habits and audience attention spans, but also about this past century’s ideological fever dreams.

You might just recognize some of these living and dead horses:

AC This idea of belief systems comes out in both of your books, doesn’t it – what people will do in the name of the beliefs that they’ve constructed or developed.

MA Yes: it’s a world in itself that – belief systems. Ian’s been talking about religion, but also ideology. Although what I discovered when I’d gone on reading about the Holocaust over the last 25 years is that in the Russian case, very pedantically following various Marxist tributaries and deviations, the ideology remained very strong.

I was shocked to learn that Gorbachev, just as the whole empire was crumbling, was up all night reading Lenin, saying, “The answer must be here.” But in Hitler’s case, in the German case, there was no ideology. There were two or three ideas: Lebensraum – extra land empire; hallucinatory anti-Semitism; and just wanting to stay in power – and that was it. People weren’t attracted to Nazism because of its ideology; it was a sort of rallying cry for sadists and that was all it was meant to be.

IM Yes, those black flags of Northern Iraq are another case – it acts as a great attractor for every available would-be torturer. Psychopathia is thinly spread through all populations and they just need their historical chance, don’t they?

AC And why are novelists drawn to it?

IM We love things going wrong.

McEwan mentions the death of the inductive novel, or novel as puzzle to reason through, perhaps requiring greater and deeper attention which is occupied elsewhere.

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Are you willing to go on this type of journey with a good artist?  From this Playboy interview with Vladimir Nabokov:

Nabokov: ‘On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there was a moment, in 1950, and again in 1951, when I was on the point of burning Humbert Humbert’s little black diary. No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.’

Is the artist supposed to solve a puzzle or ask you to help solve his puzzle?

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On that note, serial, narrative fiction and reasoned problem-solving meet with you-know-who:

by Colin Angus Mackay

“I must take the view, your Grace, that when a man embarks upon a crime, he is morally guilty of any other crime which may spring from it.”

–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A discussion of deductive and inductive reasoning here, as it might relate to solving crimes (which is highly dramatized in our culture, perhaps partly due to Holmes).

Strange Maps has this.

221B Baker Street page here.

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In the meantime, once you’ve thought long and hard about a problem, find a groove and settle-in.

Have some Green Onions for Christmas.

Alas Arecibo, Old & New Media Thoughts And A Link To Heather MacDonald

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Alas, Arecibo. So many findings.

Maybe we can start thinking about building a telescope on the dark side of the moon?

There are reasons for hope and optimism.

This, perhaps, is one of the more important developments in recent history: Reusuable rockets mean much cheaper payloads mean much cheaper space travel:

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On to other things…:

Ladies and Gents, here are my two cents: Getting political means having a principle and choosing a position about moving around limited resources. This competition is formalized through the political process, with boundaries set by our Constitution, from elections to lobbying to policy implementation to street-level politics. Washington D.C.’s a two-party town where the business is politics, and where there are some decent people and some pretty ugly people looking to be celebrities.

For old media outlets like Fox/CNN, getting political means serving a product to viewers once you’ve made certain ideas and political opinions an explicit part of your business model. This might work better during periods when our Republic has deeper reserves of institutional competence and public trust.

For NPR, who claim to speak for all the public, it means having some built-in incentives to neutrality and impartiality, but also similar capture by highly political actors and loud-Left activists, while succumbing to the same incentives of audience feedback-looping and gang-like rivalry we’re seeing elsewhere.

Merely gesturing towards your high ideals probably won’t put the genie back in the bottle, especially if politicizing your personal life and then formalizing this into a political coalition is your path forwards.

For the new, increasingly walled media gardens of Google/Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, it means creating and innovating the technology upon which people increasingly communicate, but also increasingly dealing with the politics of Washington D.C. and the politics of…people.

Business decisions are usually the primary guide, but all are subject to the biases of the people within them and the places in which they operate. In my opinion, it would have been nice if more of them choose the harder, higher road of more speech.

The restrictions could get pretty serious, pretty quickly. Follow the money.

What I expect: The older and more principled Left (Weinsteins, Greenwalds, Taibbis) have already moved to different platforms. As much as I don’t agree, there will likely be an American cultural and political center further Leftward, with a slower-growth economy and more ‘class’ resentment than before. The New-Old Left will push back, somewhat, against the New-New identitarian Left:

Ever more vigilance against the inherent autoritiarian/totalitarian consequences of the radical Left (unresolved philosophical foundations) will be required, as they push up into a new majority which will involve increasing technocracy.

Beware the Men Of System.

For me, the Trump split is a sign of the fracturing of the old Republican coalition, the likely movement of Christian America to a minority or a plurality, and people who’d like a more limited government into a fighting minority.

Basically, I’m okay with religious belief as an agnostic, would like a limited government, and support the 1st and 2nd amendments vigorously.

Maybe you disagree?

In the meantime, let a thousand Gretas bloom. [They’re coming…]

In my view, if you’re not getting a lot of reality and human nature right from the jump, reverting to authoritarian and hare-brained means of control once you co-opt institutions is a feature, not a bug.

Utopia and dystopia tend to go hand-in-glove.

In Seattle the City Council Of Nine is where the radical action happens.

Via the City Journal:

‘In October, the Seattle City Council floated legislation to provide an exemption from prosecution for misdemeanor crimes for any citizen who suffers from poverty, homelessness, addiction, or mental illness.‘

Don’t count on some journalists to support your right to speak, as they….speak. Other ideas, incentives and pressures matter more to them:

If you’re thinking diversity is enough to unite a Nation under its laws, in order to keep things civil and not violent, I have my doubts.

Heather MacDonald has a new book out, and I think it’s generally correct about what mid to longer-term solutions might actually unite us: ‘The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture‘

Thanks for stopping by, and to everyone that has!

It Says So Very Much And So Very Little- Medical Correctness & Some Links

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Here’s the view through a radical lens at The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and most respected medical journals. Keep this in mind the next time there’s an important announcement to the public from a respected institution.

It doesn’t exactly inspire public trust to have obvious anti-scientific ideologues operating within institutions which depend upon scientific discovery and authority.

Via Mick Hartley: ‘At The Intersection Of Ecological Feminist And Marxist Economics‘

‘Planetary health views human health from the perspective of multiple intersecting systems.’

Dear Reader, within this first sentence alone, I’m hovering, ‘Gaia-like’ out of my postmodern body in space, able to witness all humans criss-crossing, ant-like, beneath my transcendent vision. Standing upon the shoulders of Marx, verily, I gaze down from the position of ‘Director Of Budget’ at whichever institution I shakedown choose.

Oh, how I will lecture you!

In a mighty display of my educational credentials (justifying so much pseudo-scientific gobbledygook), I might quote something like the following:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . .

Such lines sprinkled in casual, high coversation demonstrate that I am no mere anti-technological, Neo-Romantic ideo-crat, worpshipping Gaia with a thousand inchoate thoughts. Nay, my yearly salary alone commands respect as an intellectual anointed by ‘The People’ to bend all of (H)istory towards a New Age.

Come and sign this ‘social contract’ with our blood.

Theodore Dalrymple on Medical Correctness here.

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Some partial solutions require repairing what a good humanities education CAN do:

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As posted:

More here.

Link sent in by a reader.

Interesting paper presented by Erika Kiss, beginning about minute 32:00 (the whole conference is likely worth your time for more knowledge on Oakeshott).

According to Kiss, Oakeshott’s non-teleological, non-purposive view of education is potentially a response to Friedrich Hayek, Martha Nussbaum, and Allan Bloom, in the sense that all of these thinkers posit some useful purpose or outcome in getting a liberal education.

Hayek’s profound epistemological attack on rationalist thought is still a system itself, and attaches learning to market-based processes which eventually drive freedom and new thinking in universities. The two are mutually dependent to some extent.

Nussbaum attaches liberal learning to ends such as making us ‘Aristotelian citizens of the world’, or better citizens in a democracy, which has struck me as incomplete at best.

Allan Bloom is profoundly influenced by Straussian neo-classicism, and wants love, classical learning, honor and duty to perhaps be those reasons why a young man or woman should read the classics. This, instead of crass commercialism, the influences of popular music, deconstructionism and logical positivism.

On this site, see: Mark Pennington Via Vimeo: ‘Democracy And The Deliberative Conceit’

A taste of her Nussbaum here. Also, see: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

Via C-SPAN-The Historical Context Of Allan Bloom

…Timothy Fuller At The New Criterion: ‘The Compensations Of Michael Oakeshott’John Gray At The Literary Review Takes A Look At A New Book On Michael Oakeshott: ‘Last Of The Idealists’

R.I.P. Walter Williams

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R.I.P. Walter Williams. From Reason:

I’m saddened to write of the death of libertarian economist Walter E. Williams. He passed away Wednesday morning at the age of 84, less than a day after teaching a class at George Mason University, where he worked for 40 years and helped transform his department into a highly respected center of free market scholars.‘

The deep injustice came first, and Williams channeled his conceptions of freedom towards the political economy. If you can get a job in a relatively free market, provide for yourself, network, learn and grow, then at least you have these pathways forwards.

What seemingly very few people can say in public:

‘Several years ago, Project Baltimore began an investigation of Baltimore’s school system. What they found was an utter disgrace. In 19 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, out of 3,804 students, only 14 of them, or less than 1%, were proficient in math.‘

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As always, many incentives created by good intentions (well-meaning idealists and do-gooders, people who want better) and less good intentions (union leaders, corrupt politicians, ideologues), can become an impediment to learned liberty,

If people have turned their high ideals into a kind of religious practice, and their religious practice into a political ‘community’ promising to help you, you’ve been warned.

Natural rot and corruption aside, such political coalitions consistently open up high idealists to ideological attack by the further Left (older Marxist or newer, more identitarian).

Outcomes not intentions-what people do, not what they say–If you don’t expect others to share in your own interests, choices, habits and character, your relationship will tend towards the shallow. Real respect is earned, with a mixture of fear and admiration.

Related On This Site:  Repost-From The Spiked Review Of Books Via The A & L Daily: ‘Rescuing The Enlightenment From Its Exploiters’… Repost-From The Spiked Review Of Books: ‘Delving Into The Mind Of The Technocrat’

Arnold Kling From The Library Of Economics And Liberty: ‘My Perspective On The Budget Fight’

Why Do People Move To Cities? From Falkenblog: ‘The Perennial Urban Allure’…Megan McArdle At The Daily Beast: ‘The Technocratic Dilemma’

Are these the enemies of the future?: Virginia Postrel At Bloomberg: ‘How The Elites Built America’s Economic Wall’…

Can economic freedom and free markets reconcile the moral depth of progressive big-State human freedom?:  Milton Friedman Via Youtube: ‘Responsibility To The Poor’…A Few Quotations From F.A. Hayek’s: ‘Why I Am Not A Conservative’…libertarians share a definition of liberty

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Ken Minogue From ‘The Liberal Mind’, Denis Dutton On Geoffrey Miller and Good ‘Ol American Jeff Koons Again-The Celebrification Of Art & Politics

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Ken Minogue from the preface to ‘The Liberal Mind‘

‘Liberals engage the right mood by contemplating the experiences of those they take to be oppressed, in what I have called “suffering situations.” You might think this an admirable altruism amid the selfish indifference of the mass of mankind, and there is no doubt that it has often been sincere and that it could at times mitigate some real evils. But the crucial word here is “abstract.” The emotions are elicited by an image, as in the craft of advertising. The people who cultivate these feelings are usually not those who actually devote their time and energies to helping the needy around them, but rather a class of person—liberal journalists, politicians, social workers, academics, charity bureaucrats, administrators, etc.—who focus on the global picture.’

Pg xi

I would add that while I have my doubts about the religious true-believer and salvationist, I have particular doubts about the Neo-Romantic Environmentalist, the secular, progressive do-gooder, and the high liberal globalist shuttling between academy and government.

Satire beckons.

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The late Denis Dutton on Geoffrey Miller’s book: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

‘The centerpiece of Miller’s argument is the making and appreciating of art. Miller’s idea of art, as we might expect, is wide-ranging and popular, drawn more from everywhere in culture: dancing, body-decoration, clothing, jewellery, hair-styling, architecture, furniture, gardens, cars, images such as calendars and paintings, creative uses of language, popular entertainments from religious festivals to TV soaps, music of all kinds, and on and on. Miller’s discussion is less focused on the high-art culture of modernism and postmodernism, since it anyway distinguishes itself against popular taste.‘

Of course, there will be all manner of reductionism (art=sex) and popularized idiocy (Bach + brain-scan = pop-neuroscience) to follow.

There’s something about both our cultural tilt towards (S)cience-ifying every aspect of life (stretching out these new fields of knowledge) as well as the popularized explanatory journalism (Jesus Christ not another think-piece) which are worth thinking about.

Witnessing the outcomes and consequences of such truth and knowledge claims downstream, some quite possibly more true than others, invites skepticism.

In the meantime, enjoy the show?

Tom Wolfe on Max Weber on one conspicuous use of art in the ‘modern’ world:

‘…aesthetics is going to replace ethics, art is going to replace religion, as the means through which educated people express their spiritual worthiness…‘

Don’t worry, ‘ethics’ on the fly, in universities and in journalism is everywhere these days, and beneath that, some crazy new true-believers.

Hmmm…..

As posted, please check out Jeff Koons (if you thought the celebrification of politics was striking, culturally, this happened quite before with the celebribrification of art):

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There’s always been a bit of the showman about Jeff Koons; the kind of young man who could put on a bow tie and try to give many museum-goers their time/money/aspirations’ worth at the membership desk.

This blog forgives people trying to explain what their art ‘means,’ exactly, but confesses to pleasure in seeing Koons put on the spot under the suspicious eye of an ornery old Robert Hughes.

I don’t fault Koons for finding himself firmly within modernism, searching for universal forms and broader historical context within those confines, but I admit it’s nice to see him held to account for his bullshit, and perhaps the broader, deeper bullshit he shares with many modern and postmodern artists: Pursuing novelty and recognition and thus making art into a business and often commercializing it, aiming for celebrity while offering meta-critiques on celebrity, making the personal and private very public (masturbation into social commentary, sex into meta-critques of religious shame, ‘culture’ and pornography).

Two quotes by Hughes that stood out:

‘Religion is diminished into celebrity..a kind of reverse apotheosis.‘

‘This alienation of the work from the common viewer is actually a form of spiritual vandalism.’

It’s tough to say that art is really about religion (though much clearly is), but rather more about an experience Hughes wants as many people as possible to have, and that such experiences can elevate and expand.

Aside from the above, there’s something that strikes me as not just late 20th century-modern about Koons, but also very American

Don’t Get Caught Out In The Cold, Now-Real Jobs & The Common Touch

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Theodore Dalrymple’s got that ‘common touch:’

“Ah,” he replied, “my job was to estimate whether you were an honest man.”

Insurance!

Dalrymple finishes with:

‘As Dr Johnson told us, we need more often to be reminded than informed.‘

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So you want to be in charge of everyone else in our Republic?

There’s been a lot of change, broken ladders, and new rules lately.

You’d also better learn the language of the learned these days, demonstrating care for the latest moral cause (believer or not).

I’m sympathetic to the following (which is where politicians will zero-in like heat-seeking missiles):

‘Real jobs.’

Real jobs make you physically tired, offering useful skills and knowledge through experience, and possibly a decent living if you’re willing to do the work.

You meet all kinds of people, see some dark stuff, get tempted by your own impulses and desires, and share in a few moments of profound kindness and giving.

Competence is a high bar:

This blog holds out hope that a reasonable equality-of-opportunity approach can be maintained out of the mess of grade-inflation, watered-down standards, political dipshittery and competitive meritocracy that has come about.  I suspect the rise of helicopter-parenting and over-monitored kids has a lot to do with fewer perceived opportunities and more intense competition for those opportunities.

The new society doesn’t account for everyone, of course. Social planners never can. Some of the old guard have their pants down.

James Delingpole and Carbon Mike have a discussion about what bottom-up networks can do, the importance of economic and political liberty, the erosion of common sense, and how the software tools are available to bypass the bigger players.

There is a lot of room for disruption online, outside of the old media dinosaurs, and the new media walled-gardens.

But beware: A new big-corporation, big-government, further Left academy and ‘scientific’ media landscape is likely being formed before our very eyes.

For whichever reasons you might disagree, or might know something to be untrue, don’t get caught out in the cold, now:

Ken Minogue (R.I.P.) at Standpoint Magazine from March 2009: ‘To Hell With Niceness.’

Minogue:

‘Many social conditions have been identified as part of the change, but behind most of them, I suggest, is a massive change in our moral sentiments: notably, a rise in the currency of politicised compassion. This is a sentiment so much part of the air we breathe that it does not even have a name of its own.‘

and:

‘This sentiment is not, of course, the niceness and decency that we rightly admire when individuals respond helpfully to others. It is a politicised virtue, which means that it is focused not on real individuals but on some current image of a whole category of people. Correspondingly, it invokes hostility towards those believed to have caused the pain and misery of others. Public discussion thus turns into melodrama.’

Perhaps there has been much movement away from existing authority towards liberation (often against an oppressor), towards the feminine (often against the masculine), towards emotion (often against ‘rationality’ and ‘(R)eason), and towards ‘niceness.’

Outcomes, not intentions:

‘This does not mean, of course, that there will not be a backlash against politicised decency as its nastier consequences become intolerable.‘

Everyone gets a degree, joins the ‘middle-class’, and our institutions just maintain course?

What about the new moral orthodoxies?

Via Charles Murray via The Harvard Crimson:

‘They wrote that 24 hours had passed, and Kane had not addressed the allegations that he authored racist posts on his website EphBlog over the course of several years under the pseudonym “David Dudley Field ’25.”

Kane denied endorsing white supremacy and anti-Blackness but did not reference the posts in a Friday response on a Gov 50 Slack channel obtained by The Crimson.‘

Repost: Two Links-How To Live And What To Do

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Rod Dreher’s new book, ‘Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents‘, posits that soft totalitarianism is coming fast, and that, once instutional influence is gained by radical Leftists, networks of the openly religious will need to form and associate ad hoc networks on their own, to maintain resistance.

Review here.

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As posted:

Arguably, the influence of religious belief as well as Natural Law/Natural Right doctrines, traditionally profound influences on American civic life, continues to diminish.  So, the thinking goes, we are fast arriving at an increasingly divided civic and political life.  The logic of Left political radicalism becomes ever more entrenched in our universities, media and politics, entrenching a more Right-radical, European-style response.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Rod Dreher (The Benedict Option), points to what he believes are signs of the obvious failure of modern, liberal doctrines to replace the kinds of meaning such religious doctrines have provided.

Here are two recent blog posts containing this worldview of his, about which I’ve provided additional summary and commentary (please let me know what I’m missing).

‘Advice For A Weary Ghost‘-A 35 year-old woman feels empty inside, writing to ‘The Cut‘ for advice.  She doesn’t have a husband and can’t seem to maintain deep, meaningful relationships.  She’s had jobs but not a career.  Maybe it’s not just her.

The adviser promotes a surburbanely popularized vision of the rebellious and Romantically-inspired artistic life, reaffirming much of what Dreher and his commenters see as inadequate for most people, most of the time.

This view, I presume, utilizes the wrong maps to steer one’s (S)oul and inform life decisions.  Perhaps it allows one to succumb to materialist concerns and potentially materialist doctrines (too strongly measuring one’s life largely by economic, professional and outward successes/failures).  It also perpetuates the woman’s confessedly empty, Self-interested pursuits, cutting her off from the happiness of family and loved ones without much to show for it.

The ‘-Isms’ (feminism, environmentalism, political activism etc.) are poor substitutes for a moral, meaningful life.  The Church might just the place to be, but Catholic Church leadership, too, is corrupt and covered with the dust of this world.  There will increasingly be witch hunts upon religious believers by the new SJW believers.

The lady’s probably not going to be an (A)rtist, the lady giving advice probably ain’t so great an (A)rtist either.

Can the humanities become a lifelong source of wisdom and meaning?

‘Manufacturing Consent To Gender Ideology‘-Boys wanting to be girls, and vice versa, is the latest (C)ause. These outliers upon distributions of human sexual behavior, often shunned, mocked and condemned to limited lives, must not only be included in everyone’s moral concern, but celebrated.  Through social activism and protest, they are to become exemplars of the new normal.

Doctrines promising radical liberation, hinging upon revolutionary praxis, go about attacking and reforming current traditions, institutions, laws and arrangements, often grossly mischaracterizing and misrepresenting them to gain advantage. The grudging acknowledgement of freedoms gained through progressive activism and radical thought always come with costs.

And, given the natural ignorance of the human condition, and the basic desire humans have for group meaning, authority, security, identity and purpose, this latest (C)ause which promises liberation, will end-up delivering something quite different.

Cycles of utopianism and dystopianism await, and more disgruntled individuals drifting around aimlessly looking for an ad hoc ethics and politics, sometimes flirting with authoritarian and totalitarian Leftist doctrines as those doctrines become more mainstreamed:

How to live and what to do?

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A reasonable summary and comentary?

Are you convinced of such a vision?

On this site, see:

Roger Scruton On Moral Relativism And Ross Douthat On Bill Maher…Catholics, Punditry, Progressives & Rubes-Ross Douthat At The NY Times

Moral Relativism is actually quite hard to define:

Ross Douthat made similar arguments some years ago while promoting his book ‘Bad Religion:‘

‘…what is the idea of universal human rights if not a metaphysical principle?  Can you find universal human rights under a microscope?‘

The Brothers Weinstein put forth one of the deeper defenses of Enlightenment principles I’ve heard while also remaining of the Left, simultaneously pushing against the radical elements of The Left:

Via The New Criterion: ‘The Intolerable Dream’-Don Quixote, The Lone Genius & Bathing Within The Warm Bath Of The (S)elf

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Full piece here.

Of some interest:

‘Having read so many chivalric epics that his brains have “dried up,” the hero decides that he has been called to revive chivalry and restore the Golden Age in this Age of Iron. But as the book proceeded, Cervantes realized that he had hit on something much more profound than a simple parody. The story kept raising ultimate questions about faith, belief, evidence, and utopian ideals. When do we need caution and when risk? Should we seek to transform reality or the way we perceive it? Do good intentions or good results define moral actions? And what is the proper role of literature itself?’

Tilting at Windmills, a reading group of Don Quixote done back in 2007.

On Nabokov’s reading of Don Quixote, via a NY Times article:

What Nabokov’s eyes kept seeing as he prepared his lectures was the accurately perceived fact that the book elicits cruel laughter. Cervantes’ old man who had read himself into insanity and his smelly squire were created to be the butt of mockery. Quite early, readers and critics began to sidestep this Spanish fun and to interpret that story as another kind of satire: one in which an essentially sane, humane soul in a crass and unromantic world can only appear as insane.

If you have any good links, or links to reviews, please pass them along…

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My two cents: I’m currently thinking that the modern ‘Well of The Self’ has deep roots within Romanticism, and the idea that the artistic genius alone must make sense of the world. This lone genius will Return to Nature as cradle, delivering man or (M)an back to himself, and back to his most basic experiences, hopes and a sense of wonder (once with a Christian, now often within a modern, transmogrified metaphysic).

The Romantic genius, to some extent, must turn against the city, industry and technological change, going back to the countryside. The (M)odern Man, a la Eliot, must turn back to the city, man’s industry, and technological change and remake the world anew, so that we may carry our souls forward. The (P)ostmodern man must create entire worlds and meaning for himself, isolated and alienated from all traditions and other people, left struggling against the void.

There are options, of course, and nihilism is clearly one.

If true, one can easily extrapolate from such a vision towards how we’ve ended up not only with individualism, but radical individualism, and a constant negotiation left up to each individual between all existing institutions of authority and moral/immoral legitimacy.

I’m seeing a lot of basic individual loneliness, desperation for group membership, meaning, and search for some kind of relationship between (N)ature and the (S)elf through others and through political tribalism.

This also can lead to the clear and present unstabilizing political dangers of anarchy, radical liberation, and doctrinal certainty forming beneath the reasonableness found within the high, liberal doctrines of Enlightenment (R)eason and (M)an. The social activists and ‘wokists’ on the scene are nothing if not zealous about their ideas. The ‘-Ismologists’ keep promising some kind of ideal world, which always seems to fail in fully arriving (and this failure always seems to be someone else’s fault).

Perhaps many people are inflating politics and the study of politics, the study of people in groups (sociology), and the study of our interior lives (psychology) to idealistic and almost mythic proportions, coming to lean upon these epistemologies, and politics itself, with hopes I do not necessarily share.

It wasn’t so long ago that all sins were to be reconciled with a loving God; a confession in the booth. I’m seeing many of the same human desires, hopes and beliefs now directed at therapists, comedians, politicians and artists, sometimes able to bear significant weight, often unable to do so.

Ah well, Dear Reader.

There’s a lot of wisdom in reading Don Quixote.

Have I convinced you of any of this?

Here’s a stanza from ‘Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird‘ by Wallace Stevens, transitioning from Romanticism to Modernism, wrestling with faith and more modern doubt, staying the course with good Dutch-German insurance-executive sobriety and also lasting late in the night with passionately abstract poetic imaginings:

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

Also:

“The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.“