One path through the postmodern landscape lies in cultivating some appreciation for math and the sciences, direct observation and statistical analysis within the social sciences, and plumbing the depths of a good humanities education (you know, the stuff universities pretty much ought to be teaching).
Receiving or pursuing such an education doesn’t necessarily require religious belief, nor does it necessarily dislodge religious belief.
Aside from the craziness of love, dedication to family, the pressures of work and career, the inevitably of sickness and death, such cultivation can prevent against the sublimity of nihilist and existentialist despair, the Romance of collective primitivism, and the dangers of ideological possession (quick to judge, quick to be judged, forever resentful).
Many readers of this blog don’t necessarily share my views on the importance of limited government and economic growth, tolerance for religious belief and skepticism regarding political idealism (joining an ‘-Ism’ is only the beginning, as hopes soon follow into politics and visions of the good, the true and the beautiful).
You have your reasons.
In the meantime, here are some links gathered over the years from the New Atheists and many independent-minded thinkers of the Left pushing against many excesses of the American and Global Left.
It’s pretty clear to me that many mainstream publications and political debates occur downstream of many intellectual debates.
-James Lindsay offers a cogent account of his experiences in the Atheism movement, and the emergence of Atheism Plus. He attempts to use moral psychology (he mentions Jonathan Haidt) to explain many religious-seeming elements of the woke, social justice crowd.
-Larry Arnhart, of Darwinian Conservatism, continued his careful reading of Jonathan Haidt’s work, to which Haidt responded.
-Daniel Dennett from 1998: Postmodernism and Truth
‘So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’
British thinker Roger Scruton’s conservative vision was partially informed by his work as a philosopher (Kant/Hegel/Schopenhauer and German Idealism particularly). He was also informed by his return to the Anglican church over the course of his lifetime. Scruton advocated a rebuilding of the family and small, local communities around such belief, practicing as he preached, via Scrutopia.
He remained skeptical and wrote clearly about the dangers of ideology; why so many intellectuals end=up Left-of-Center, as well. He lived, mostly ostracized during his lifetime, from all the usual positions a man of his ability might otherwise hold.
First Of Three Charles Test Lectures Hosted By Princeton University-In the Q & A afterwards, Scruton receives about as pointed a post-lecture questioning on his metaphysics as I’ve seen.
In the final moments, Robert George also posits that Scruton’s four presented categories actually rather resemble Aristotle’s Order of Nature and three of them Aristotle’s Practical Reason.
Interesting presentation by an interesting thinker, indeed.
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U.S. journalist Rod Dreher has moved from Catholicism to Orthodox Christianity, after many crises of belief. He’s also worked in the journalism industry for much of his life. He has one foot deeply in the Orthodox community, and another in contemporary, mainstream liberal thinking, from which he draws an audience. He’s been particularly harsh on what’s going on inside the Catholic Church, and the reckoning he believes needs to happen there.
In his new book, he’s been predicting soft totalitarianism to come fast and hard, and for religious believers to retreat and get ready for civil disobedience. “Wokeness” will come for its tribute; the new technocracy making new rules we all must follow.
Dreher’s also not liking the fusion of anti-Left fringe politics, Trump, and claiming religious means to political ends at the moment. It’s gettin’ pretty crazy out in the public square:
Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug and Unqualified Reservations), worked in computer science, has career Washingtonians in the family, and has retreated to different type of conservatism.
Here’s an introduction presented by a 3rd party:
A brief, unqualified summary (let me know what I’ve gotten wrong): What drives the civilizational trend towards the Left, consistently and over generations? Entropy, for the most part. Things fall apart.
Rules and hierarchies require heroism and courage during their formation, they settle down into somewhat functional instutitions, then eventually decline into chaos over longer periods of time. Such are the laws of nature itself.
Technology is also driving progress, very quickly now.
Most ‘progressives’ claim the mantle of progress, but are prone to post-Englightenment Idealism and capture by dangerous ideologues. They are much, much better at tearing things down then they are building things up.
Sure, you only want to follow (S)cience. Of course (R)eason is on your side. Progressives tend to claim liberation (over freedom and responsibility), usually without too much consideration for a suitable replacement to current institutional arrangements, usually running aground upon the dark parts of human nature.
Perhaps entropy has already done its work by the time progressives are in ascendency.
‘The Cathedral’, for Yarvin, is the current establishment with an inner party (Democrats seeking to balance atop the ball of ‘progress’) and an outer party (Republicans seeking to counter the Democrat party atop the ball of ‘progress’).
What can you achieve within such a vision?
Not much, Dear Reader. If you’re conservative and choose the revolution route, you’d really better be prepared. Bloodshed ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Compliance is a more reasonable option, according to Yarvin. Don’t challenge the mildly corrupt political and cultural elite authority directly, but don’t really believe in them, either. Go along to get along and build good alternatives all the while, should your opportunity arise.
Are you convinced?
—
On that note, some folks on the Left are claiming some kind of renewal is required.
I think it’s telling that many good minds on different parts of the political spectrum are seeing themselves as requiring of new thinking and action relative to American institutions.
As I currently see events, a self-directed life and the freedom to live such a life is a blessing of the Enlightenment, indeed. However, much Enlightenment thinking has helped produce many Shrines-Of-The-Self which currently dot the landscape, and which come with many downside risks.
Reserving judgment about such Shrines (should they exist), I suspect many in the West feel a tidal pull towards Romanticized-Modernized-Postmodernized visions of Nature. The triumph of the individual artist is key, revealing and having revelations, creating anew by casting the old aside. Towering genuises abound.
Many are European.
Generations and centuries later, such ideas have also saturated Western civil society enough to create many of our familiar tensions: Some individuals are in a process of fully rejecting religion, science, and many products of reason in favor of modern mysticism, ideology and the nihilist denial of objective reality.
I think other individuals in the modern world have placed a lot of hope and meaning into political ideals and political movements gathered around what I’ve been calling the ‘-Isms’ (feminism, environmentalism, racism etc. Here, basic human desires form into group identity. Such movements have important moral truths to offer and arguably freedoms for all (such is always the claim), but they don’t come without costs, dangers and downsides either (spin-cycles of utopia/dystopia as Eric Weinstein points out in the video above).
I consider these movements to be in serious need of critique, resistance and context, especially in dealing with hard problems of human nature like war and conflict, potential evil, and the incredible difficulty of maintaining legitimate moral decency aligned with positions of authority.
Process can often matter as much as outcome.
Last but not least, still other individuals have been taken up into radical movements staying true to the totalitarianism and misery guaranteed within doctrines of revolutionary praxis. Such individuals are busy activating beneath the deeper bedrock of secular humanism and liberal thinking, pushing upwards.
The Weinsteins are engaged in a lot of the pushback:
That mathematics, the natural sciences and evolutionary biology offer profound truth and knowledge should go without saying. We are living within expanding knowledge-frontiers of the natural world, explaining empirically observed patterns and relationships within that natural world, and actively disrupting most old models many of us have long since internalized.
This is what free and rigorous thinking, often at great personal cost, can offer to an open and free society. May it long continue.
I don’t know if I’m with the brothers Weinstein when it comes to their radicalism regarding all current institutional arrangements, but I could be persuaded by their ‘panther-in-the-china-shop’ model of reform. Frankly, many of our most important institutions are proving over-inflated, cumbersome, and full of rot: Buffeted as we all are are by migration and mass communication, global labor markets, and very rapid technological rates of change.
***Perhaps if there’s a spectrum of change, I fall more on the conservative side. At the moment, I’m skeptical of the defense of experts and expertise (despite the truths), the panther-reformers (despite our common interests), and the populist discontent so active in our politics right now (boiling over, but accurately, I think, representing many of the fissures and chasms in civil society).
I should add that I think much that’s being conserved is arguably not worth conserving at any given time, but I doubt any one of us, nor any group, has accesss to full knowledge of what should stay and what should go. In fact, I’m pretty certain one of the main points of good governance lies in prohibiting any one of us, nor any particular faction, no matter how reasonable, to have very much power for very long (and it’s definitely the job of good people and the good in people to keep the demagogues, zealots, career bureuacrats and grubby strivers from too much power).
Let me know what I may have gotten wrong. Any thoughts and comments are welcome.
As always, thanks for reading. That’s a blessing in and of itself.
People have been warning against this stuff for awhile.
The levers used to drive change within the West come with many destructive and destabilizing consequences. I’m generally sympathetic to the lenses Douglas Murray uses to view current events:
Many mainstream publications and outlets now help to promote an ideological vision which justifies violence, upheaval, and radical change. You’re either part of the problem, or part of the solution. You’re either for today’s righteous moral crusaders or against today’s righteous moral crusaders.
Violence is justified against you, by individuals swarming in a mob, because you’re preventing (M)an from moving towards his (H)istorical ends, the (P)eople rising up against the (O)pressor and (F)ascism, creating the utopia (no place) to come.
The authorities won’t necessarily protect life and property, so Main Street could become lawless:
Many universities and foundations, governmental and corporarate bureaucracies, now harbor similar ideas within them. Policies, programs, novels and articles are spun out of knowledge claims which generally don’t hold up, drowning out the pursuit of truth.
Many tech platforms are following similar logic (Youtube is mainstreaming and monetizing).
A ‘Unity‘-making American Left cohort has splintered away, in order to defend freedom of speech, a more working-man Left, and the pursuit of truth through the mathematical sciences. I don’t share in these political views, but I’m guessing a decent middle could be built here.
Ted Cruz is a Constitutional Conservative (U.S. Senator) and Eric Weinstein is what I’m calling a New, New Left independent thinker (pro speech, pro-mathematical sciences, pro-change, anti-identity).
A classically liberal cohort, to which I’m more sympathetic, is also pushing against the collectivist, identitarian politickers, and will remain prime targets for radicals. Liberals often didn’t stand up to the ’68 radicals in American universities, and often don’t now, but there’s always hope.
I’m guessing Great Britain, with it’s more entrenched class structure and particular history, is further Left than the U.S. on many of these issues, but as to how to push back against the ideological capture within institutions, this isn’t a bad example:
And if you have any small ‘c’ conservative political views…bless your heart:
This Wendell Berry quote, from on “tolerance and multiculturalism,” from his essay “The Joy of Sales Resistance”, has stayed with me:
‘Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven’t been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on.’
And…:
‘Here our account of the disposition to be conservative and its current fortunes might be expected to end, with the man in whom this disposition is strong, last seen swimming against the tide, disregarded not because what he has to say is necessarily false but because it has become irrelevant; outmanoeuvred, not on account of any intrinsic demerit but merely by the flow of circumstance; a faded, timid, nostalgic character, provoking pity as an outcast and contempt as a reactionary. Nevertheless, I think there is something more to be said. Even in these circumstances, when a conservative disposition in respect of things in general is unmistakably at a discount, there are occasions when this disposition remains not only appropriate, but supremely so; and there are connections in which we are unavoidably disposed in a conservative direction.’
Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism In Politics And Other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991. Print.
“Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”
Ted Cruz is a Constitutional Conservative (U.S. Senator) and Eric Weinstein is what I’m calling a New, New Left independent thinker (pro speech, pro-mathematical sciences, pro-change, anti-identity).
Of Note: Weinstein focuses on the years 1971-1973, where he pins a crucial slowdown in American economic growth, continuing today, which would help explain many changes we’ve been seeing in our lives. This would include the calcification and cratering of our political parties and the dysfunction in many of our social and educational institutions. It seems that everyone’s fighting more over less, and perceiving less all around, thus fighting more.
Previous generations, used to good returns on personal effort, relying upon institutional stability, were accustomed to generally playing by the rules in big companies, universities, law firms, and rent-seeking investments; generally climbing hierarchies and getting ahead.
Of course, if the theory is accurate, we have a lot of other potential contributing variables depnding upon your principles and point of view.
Mine include a longer sweep from Romanticism to Modernism to Postmodernism and increasingly atomized Western Selves living in ‘the modern world’. I tend to focus on 1960’s counter-culture rebellion (now probably the ‘culture’) moving towards radicalism in universities, education and media. In my own family, I’ve seen a subsequent move away from religious belief, and more broadly out in the ‘culture’, movements away from W.A.S.P culture and civic nationalism.
Let’s not forget the many obvious technological changes in networks and automation going on around us, either.
Which maps are you using?
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No small irony for my dead horse: Many at the Atlantic are supporting rather obvious Democratic party positions, often Statist, while increasingly being co-opted by the loudest voices with an agenda to push (critical and race theorists and writers, politicizing the personal).
It’s kind of Orwellian to ask poetry to serve ideological goals, but my guess is having a poet who isn’t black or isn’t (B)lack would be racist these days, once you’re playing the game.
Perhaps this gives Atlantic writers special insight into the CCP in China and Artificial Intelligence. An explicitly Communist, increasingly calculating and expanding State apparatus is utilizing the latest technology for control, driven somewhat by ideologues.
Well, it might hit a little closer to home, anyways.
I just want to find good poetry, and not play the game.
Also, I’d like to find out what is going on in China.
—
As posted, long ago. All the foundations seem to get co-opted:
‘The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them out. The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that resists innovation.’
Has the institutionalization of poetry done it much good?:
‘Lilly’s contribution (and contributions) to the Poetry Foundation are the only reason it is what it is today. In other words, it’s not through any intrinsic or hard-earned merit that the Poetry Foundation is surviving and flourishing today, but because of a drug baron’s fantastic wealth.’
Maybe it wasn’t Emerson that kept Whitman going, but rather, the thought of returning to his tenure track position after a long hiatus. Yet should there be no state funding at all of poetry…only patronage?
How might Nietzsche figure in the discussion (was he most after freeing art from a few thousand years of Christianity, monarchy and aristocracy…something deeper?), at least with regard to Camille Paglia. See the comments: Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful
As to some responses to the responses: The Weinsteins are ahead of a likely new Left, supporting freer speech and thought, the pursuit of truth and new knowledge through the sciences, but also visions of sometimes drastic and radical social change (they’re on the Left).
I find myself somewhat sympathetic to their outside-looking-in critiques of much insitutional overbuild as well as those rolling over on speech (many in our universities, many in our media outlets, many in HR departments, many in our bureaucracies).
It would have taken very strong individuals and principled leadership in our institutions to resist much decay, inertia and bad incentives, apart from the radical speech capture, but here we are.
Oh, I’ll take a crack at it.
A) Heads of Newsrooms/Liberal magazines hired young hip kids to get clicks.
B) Those kids terrorized everyone else outside of the media liberals who hired them & held immunity no one else had.
The actual problem is that we have a new bunch of “speech regulators” (not in the legal sense, not usually at least) who are especially humorless and obnoxious and I would say neurotic — in the personality psychology sense of that word. I say let’s complain about the real problem, namely the moral fiber, emotional temperaments, and factual worldviews of the individuals who have arrogated the new speech censorship functions to themselves.
Many middle-of-the-road folks carrying something (a marriage, a job, reasonable thoughts, military duty, kids, a spot on the school board), seem to be realizing that many radicals driving social change aren’t necessarily leading us to a better place, but are leading us to a different place, which can include justified violence, mob logic, as well as speech and thought prohibitions.
Rod Dreher, writing for a liberal newsroom audience and a deeply religious audience, generally from the Right, on the Harper’s letter here:
Overall it’s a good letter. As I said, the people who signed it range from the center to various reaches of the Left. It’s exactly the kind of thing that people of the Right ought to welcome from men and women of good faith to our Left.
Take people guided by ideas at their word, and when they don’t allow your words, you’ve been warned.
“It has often been said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools; it would be more accurate to say that socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.” —Theodore Dalrymple
Strands of a New, New Left are likely forming out of the excesses of identitarianism. From anti-trans TERF feminists, to many anti-establishment, anti-Boomer types (anti- sisterhood of the travelling ‘bourgeois’ pantsuit criticism), the identity-center is probably not holding.
A new strand of radical chic is all about ‘it’s not race, it’s class’ traditional Marxism, combined with lots of Democratic Socialist sympathies (Bernie over so many ‘neo-liberal‘ sellouts).
It probably takes some familiarity with deeper traditional roots (stable family environment), as well as a decent mind and a good education to play the part of the possibly doomed, tragically-hip art and cultural critic.
From Spiked (traditionally Marxist, pro-Brexit, pro free-speech, anti-identitarian British Left): ‘Meet the anti-woke left:’
‘I’m in New York to try to understand the thinking behind the ‘dirtbag left’. The phrase was coined by Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer, commentator and activist, to describe a loose constellation of American leftists who reject the civility, piety and PC that has come to characterise much of the left.’
Some members of the pro-reason, pro-freedom of speech, pro-science Left in America seem to have taken note, having been ex-communicated from institutional respectability by many of the same enemies: Technocratic-leaning liberal idealists (many counter-culture cultural elites) kowtowing to social justice warriors.
Interesting note: Weinstein picks a weak point: Well-educated, culturally and artistically cosmopolitan aesthetes tend to be out of touch with the populist, working-man proles they claim to support.
There are many staircases up and away from the ‘man-on-the-street.’
Perhaps Tom Sowell’s ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals‘ is worth revisiting, at least to break out of the white savior complex (which manisfests itself both in original Marxist class-warfare and current watered-down identity Marxism).
Frankly, I’m seeing a pretty serious anywhere/somewhere or elite/populist split in conservatism/Republican party politics, as well.
—
A broader point I’ve been trying pin down, is how, with the unspooling of Enlightenment thinking, there has also unspooled an individualism becoming nihilist, postmodern and deeply alone; artfully and glamourously trashy. Out of such an environment, where many hip, avant-garde birds are flying, (S)elves flirt with Romantically primitive collectivism, epistemological faddishness, modern and failed theories of (H)istory like Marxism.
American egalitarianism, based in our founding documents, even as recently as two generations ago, was more able to effectively resist the rather unimaginative class-war critiques of Marxism.
Which kind of center would I like to see hold?
Some previously posted links:
The arts can be one lens with which to look at these problems and places…
Without a stronger moral core, will liberalism necessarily corrode into the soft tyranny of an ever-expanding State?
Since the 60’s, and with a lot of postmodern nihilism making advances in our society, is a liberal politics of consent possible given the dangers of cultivating a kind of majoritarian politics: Dirty, easily corrupt, with everyone fighting for a piece of the pie?
As an example, Civil Rights activists showed moral courage and high idealism, to be sure, but we’ve also seen a devolution of the Civil Rights crowd into squabbling factions, many of whom seem more interested in money, self-promotion, influence, and political power.
The 60’s protest model, too, washed over our universities, demanding freedom against injustice, but it has since devolved into a kind of politically correct farce, with comically illiberal and intolerant people claiming they seek liberty and tolerance for all in the name of similar ideals.
Who are they to decide what’s best for everyone? How ‘liberal’ were they ever, really?
Kelley Ross responds to a correspondent on Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, while discussing John Gray as well:
‘Now, I do not regard Berlin’s value pluralism as objectionable or even as wrong, except to the extend that it is irrelevant to the MORAL issue and so proves nothing for or against liberalism. Liberalism will indeed recommend itself if one wishes to have a regime that will respect, within limits, a value pluralism. I have no doubt that respecting a considerable value pluralism in society is a good thing and that a nomocratic regime that, mostly, leaves people alone is morally superior to a teleocratic regime that specifies and engineers the kinds of values that people should have. However, the project of showing that such a regime IS a good thing and IS morally superior is precisely the kind of thing that Gray decided was a failure.
Thus, I believe Gray himself sees clearly enough that a thoroughgoing “value pluralism” would mean that the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini is just as morally justified as the regime of Thomas Jefferson. Gray prefers liberalism (or its wreckage) for the very same reason that the deconstructionist philosopher Richard Rorty prefers his leftism: it is “ours” and “we” like it better. Why Gray, or Rorty, should think that they speak for the rest of “us” is a good question. ‘
and about providing a core to liberalism:
‘Why should the state need a “sufficient rational justificaton” to impose a certain set of values? The whole project of “rational justification” is what Gray, and earlier philosophers like Hume, gave up on as hopeless. All the state need do, which it has often done, is claim that its values are favored by the majority, by the General Will, by the Blood of the Volk, or by God, and it is in business.’
And that business can quickly lead to ever-greater intrusion into our lives:
‘J.S. Mill, etc., continue to be better philosophers than Berlin or Gray because they understand that there must be an absolute moral claim in the end to fundamental rights and negative liberty, however it is thought, or not thought, to be justified. Surrendering the rational case does not even mean accepting the overall “value pluralism” thesis, since Hume himself did not do so. ‘
Are libertarians the true classical liberals? Much closer to our founding fathers?
Youtube is balancing interests by moving away from independent content-creators and towards larger, existing media players. Money is probably a main reason, but there’s also this:
‘Wojcicki said that she decided to start prioritizing authoritative sources in the wake of the terrorist attack in Nice, France on Bastille Day (July 14) in 2016.
“I remember reading about it and being just extremely upset and thinking our users need to know about it,” Wojcicki said.’
The human mind infers from known and unknown facts, creating order even when there are no known facts. Gossip, speculation, conspiracy theories, well-made fictions and entertaining lunacy are staples in human affairs, and always have currency.
In fact, ‘they’ is probably one of the most common beliefs amongst any polity.
While I may not agree with Wojcicki, I certainly understand a move by someone in her position towards ‘authoritative’ truth. In fact, old media outlets sold their reputations on layers of fact-checkers, which means ‘The Daily Youtube’ is looking more and more like a reality.
Surely you trust a few algorithms, a class of media and political people, and Ms Wojcicki to decide which gates to open and close?
Surely you trust them to decide which voices get heard and which get banned?
Surely you trust them to decide which ideals our leaders should embody in order to guide our Republic with the consent of the governed?
—
Strangely, at the moment, this might make me more sympathetic to the political extremes or ‘populism’ these days, when it comes to the current media and political landscape.
‘Noble’ profession journalism never so much was, though I suppose it has a place for the essential in our Republic. The essential won’t happen without the right kind of local civic engagement, either.
Here’s an interesting discussion between two people, likely led by opposing political instincts but who find themselves sharing some radical, common ground (right and left, O’Keefe and Weinstein, respectively).
How low should you go, especially if you’re out in the cold with respect to many mainstream media and political institutions?
As posted, someone’s going to be running our institutions and making rules out of a presumed universal and common sense set of assumptions:
Gurri offered an interesting take on matters socio-cultural:
The dilemma is that this present is defined by a radical distrust of the institutions of industrial society, and of the elites that control them, and of their statements and descriptions of reality. The conference organizers got our predicament right. At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority.
Hmmm…:
‘The senior people, largely white and male, seemed to believe that, in punishment for the sins of their fathers, trust had fractured along identity lines. Women today were thought to trust only women, for example. Muslims trusted Muslims, and no one else. Some archetypical essence of “woman” or “Muslim” made internal communications possible, and separated each group from the rest of the human race. It was, to be sure, a disaster of biblical proportions – the story of Babel told in the times of the tweet – and it left the men in charge desperate to put forward individuals of a different sex and skin coloration, to say the things they wanted to hear.
For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts. They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like. Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either. Eventually, the young cosplayers must put away their costumes, take one last sip of Kombucha, and set off, seething with repressed virtue, to make money in the world as it really is.’
‘One remembers Weber’s epitaph for the Protestant Ethic, as he contemplated a devitalised bourgeoisie spiritlessly tending the petrified mechanism their ancestors had raised. Adapted, without apology, it might also be used to depict that petrified Utopia of the New Ruling classes of the East.
‘Rulers without honour, administrators without heart, priests without conviction, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’
There’s a popular narrative that drug companies have stolen the soul of psychiatry. That they’ve reduced everything to chemical imbalances. The people who talk about this usually go on to argue that the true causes of mental illness are capitalism and racism. Have doctors forgotten that the real solution isn’t a pill, but structural change that challenges the systems of exploitation and domination that create suffering in the first place?
No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.
Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me He looked from the back like one more professor.
And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage Which foreigners always note in American men, combined As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical,
Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon, Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there,
Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely? Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something
Maintaining a healthy skepticism:
Previous ‘elite’ links on this site, arriving at some yet predictable, unrealized truths: Via Marginal Revolution via American Affairs: ‘The Western Elite From A Chinese Perspective:’
I expect some muckraking, yellow journalism, and journalists set up for and against politicians as both vie for similar kinds of public influence, depending on circumstances. Such is life.
‘Noble’ profession journalism never so much was, though I suppose it has a place for the essential in our Republic. The essential won’t happen without the right kind of local civic engagement, either.
Here’s an interesting discussion between two people, likely led by opposing political instincts but who find themselves sharing some radical, common ground (right and left, O’Keefe and Weinstein, respectively).
How low should you go, especially if you’re out in the cold with respect to many mainstream media and political institutions?
—
As posted, my biases:
Perhaps the NY Times is loping, mid-transformation, towards the clearing where The Guardian can be found, baying at the moon: Not exactly whom you can trust to commit to facts, but some facts will be gotten right along the path towards equity, social justice, and the coming global worker’s paradise.
It’s true that all institutions have bias, current members tending to signal ‘here’s what matters around here‘, prospective members signaling back ‘of course it matters to me too‘ in hopes of gaining a foot in the door or another rung up the ladder. The less objective and performance-based the core activities of the institutions, the more group loyalty and politics seem to matter.
Unsurprising then, that the latest politico-moral movements should hold sway as they do. Everyone’s a captive until they take a stance.
As for the NY Times, I think this ‘The Hunt’ piece from the Real Estate section sums up my expectations nicely:
‘As conservationists, they decorated almost exclusively with secondhand furniture. The large closets — “the biggest I’ve had in my life,” Ms. Sinclair said — have enough storage space for the craft materials she uses for her feminist tableware line, Oddtitties.us.’
Remember The Maine! The good old days…by malik2moon
Strands of a New, New Left are likely forming out of the excesses of identitarianism. From anti-trans TERF feminists, to many anti-establishment, anti-Boomer types (anti- sisterhood of the travelling ‘bourgeois’ pantsuit criticism), the identity-center is probably not holding.
A new strand of radical chic is all about ‘it’s not race, it’s class’ traditional Marxism, combined with lots of Democratic Socialist sympathies (Bernie over so many ‘neo-liberal‘ sellouts).
It probably takes some familiarity with deeper traditional roots (stable family environment), as well as a decent mind and a good education to play the part of the possibly doomed, tragically-hip art and cultural critic.
From Spiked (traditionally Marxist, pro-Brexit, pro free-speech, anti-identitarian British Left): ‘Meet the anti-woke left:’
‘I’m in New York to try to understand the thinking behind the ‘dirtbag left’. The phrase was coined by Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer, commentator and activist, to describe a loose constellation of American leftists who reject the civility, piety and PC that has come to characterise much of the left.’
Some members of the pro-reason, pro-freedom of speech, pro-science Left in America seem to have taken note, having been ex-communicated from institutional respectability by many of the same enemies: Technocratic-leaning liberal idealists (many counter-culture cultural elites) kowtowing to social justice warriors.
Interesting note: Weinstein picks a weak point: Well-educated, culturally and artistically cosmopolitan aesthetes tend to be out of touch with the populist, working-man proles they claim to support.
There are many staircases up and away from the ‘man-on-the-street.’
Perhaps Tom Sowell’s ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals‘ is worth revisiting, at least to break out of the white savior complex (which manisfests itself both in original Marxist class-warfare and current watered-down identity Marxism).
Frankly, I’m seeing a pretty serious anywhere/somewhere or elite/populist split in conservatism/Republican party politics, as well.
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A broader point I’ve been trying pin down, is how, with the unspooling of Enlightenment thinking, there has also unspooled an individualism becoming nihilist, postmodern and deeply alone; artfully and glamourously trashy. Out of such an environment, where many hip, avant-garde birds are flying, (S)elves flirt with Romantically primitive collectivism, epistemological faddishness, modern and failed theories of (H)istory like Marxism.
American egalitarianism, based in our founding documents, even as recently as two generations ago, was more able to effectively resist the rather unimaginative class-war critiques of Marxism.
Which kind of center would I like to see hold?
Some previously posted links:
The arts can be one lens with which to look at these problems and places…
Without a stronger moral core, will liberalism necessarily corrode into the soft tyranny of an ever-expanding State?
Since the 60’s, and with a lot of postmodern nihilism making advances in our society, is a liberal politics of consent possible given the dangers of cultivating a kind of majoritarian politics: Dirty, easily corrupt, with everyone fighting for a piece of the pie?
As an example, Civil Rights activists showed moral courage and high idealism, to be sure, but we’ve also seen a devolution of the Civil Rights crowd into squabbling factions, many of whom seem more interested in money, self-promotion, influence, and political power.
The 60’s protest model, too, washed over our universities, demanding freedom against injustice, but it has since devolved into a kind of politically correct farce, with comically illiberal and intolerant people claiming they seek liberty and tolerance for all in the name of similar ideals.
Who are they to decide what’s best for everyone? How ‘liberal’ were they ever, really?
Kelley Ross responds to a correspondent on Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, while discussing John Gray as well:
‘Now, I do not regard Berlin’s value pluralism as objectionable or even as wrong, except to the extend that it is irrelevant to the MORAL issue and so proves nothing for or against liberalism. Liberalism will indeed recommend itself if one wishes to have a regime that will respect, within limits, a value pluralism. I have no doubt that respecting a considerable value pluralism in society is a good thing and that a nomocratic regime that, mostly, leaves people alone is morally superior to a teleocratic regime that specifies and engineers the kinds of values that people should have. However, the project of showing that such a regime IS a good thing and IS morally superior is precisely the kind of thing that Gray decided was a failure.
Thus, I believe Gray himself sees clearly enough that a thoroughgoing “value pluralism” would mean that the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini is just as morally justified as the regime of Thomas Jefferson. Gray prefers liberalism (or its wreckage) for the very same reason that the deconstructionist philosopher Richard Rorty prefers his leftism: it is “ours” and “we” like it better. Why Gray, or Rorty, should think that they speak for the rest of “us” is a good question. ‘
and about providing a core to liberalism:
‘Why should the state need a “sufficient rational justificaton” to impose a certain set of values? The whole project of “rational justification” is what Gray, and earlier philosophers like Hume, gave up on as hopeless. All the state need do, which it has often done, is claim that its values are favored by the majority, by the General Will, by the Blood of the Volk, or by God, and it is in business.’
And that business can quickly lead to ever-greater intrusion into our lives:
‘J.S. Mill, etc., continue to be better philosophers than Berlin or Gray because they understand that there must be an absolute moral claim in the end to fundamental rights and negative liberty, however it is thought, or not thought, to be justified. Surrendering the rational case does not even mean accepting the overall “value pluralism” thesis, since Hume himself did not do so. ‘
Are libertarians the true classical liberals? Much closer to our founding fathers?
Cowen mentions something I’ve often thought: Changing institutions to include female representation will have costs and benefits, and change the character of many institutions themselves, and many parts of our civilization (marriage, incentives, parenthood, politics etc). Pretty unremarkable, but a highly charged and consequential topic nonetheless.
Robert Putnam, author of ‘Bowling Alone‘, seems to agree with Charles Murray about what much of what the data highlights: Working-class whites are behaving more like working-class non-whites, and college-educated non-whites are behaving more like college-educated whites.
You don’t have to agree with all of the ideas, but traditional views have their merits:
‘In sum, the Joint Chiefs have taken a clear long-term risk for an unclear near-term political gain, perhaps hoping to diminish budgetary cuts. The question is whether increasing the individual rights of the female soldier decreases the combined combat effectiveness of the killing pack. We won’t know the answer until we fight a hard ground war sometime in the future.’
Something many Boomers probably still take for granted: If you have a sexual, moral and political liberation movement sweep parts of your civilization (generation of ’68), there are gonna be some consequences, good and bad. Some radicals and social revolutionaries (professing to not believe in the legitimacy of any institution) will join and co-opt many parts of the institutions themselves; enjoying the sudden stability, influence and money gained.
The institutions, however, may arguably become less stable, so a previous stability might have been taken for granted by those Boomers.
I usually prize stability, moral decency, slow change, and rule of law (political/economic freedom) more than any one cause.
It’s probably a matter of time until you get a counter-revolution, and what worries me is a less stable system overall.
Subject: ‘Is England Still Influencing America?’ on Hitchens’ book ‘Blood, Class, & Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies‘ when Hitchens’ was pushing the idea that ’empire’ was the primary transmission, apparently due to his ideological commitments at the time. America must have seemed a classless paradise with institutions well-functioning and ripe to achieve justice and equality for the whole world…for some folks in the Generation of ’68.