Racist Thing #110

January 7, 2020 – 5:24 pm

Sanitation.

(Hat-tip: Twitter follower @BirddogJones.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Racist Things | Comments (4)

Wha Daur Meddle Wi’ Me?

January 6, 2020 – 7:57 pm

Here’s a thing Donald Trump and I have in common: we both had Scottish mothers — mine from Glasgow, and his from the Hebrides.

Here too is a thing that the Scots and many of the peoples of the Middle East have in common: they are tribal societies from remote places. In such circumstances — and this is especially true of herding cultures in which one’s wealth is movable and easily stolen, and one is far from the organized legal institutions of the State — cultivating a reputation for ferocious retribution for willful injury or public insult is necessary to avoid being preyed upon. (The “honor culture” of the backcountry American South is due to its having been settled by fiercely independent Scots-Irish colonists in the 1700s.)

This prickly spirit is alive and well in Scotland (or at least it was when my mother and Mr. Trump’s were growing up there). I have no doubt that it is alive and well also in the Middle East. Strength and honor are respected; weakness and appeasement are despised.

Back in 2007, I wrote a post about a poem my mother used to read to me, about one “wee Jock Elliot” (a glossary of terms is here):

Ma castle is aye ma ain,
An’ herried it never shall be,
For I maun fa’ ere it’s taen,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wi’ ma kit i’ the rib o’ ma naig,
Ma sword hingin’ doon by ma knee,
For man I am never afraid,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Oh, ma name it’s wee Jock Elliot,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Fierce Bothwell I vanquished clean,
Gar’d troopers an’ fitmen flee;
By my faith I dumfoondert the Queen,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Alang by the dead water stank,
Jock Fenwick I met on the lea,
But his saddle was toom in a clank,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Oh, ma name it’s wee Jock Elliot,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?

Whar Keelder meets wi’ the Tyne,
Masel an’ ma kinsmen three,
We tackled the Percies nine –
They’ll never mair meddle wi’ me.
Sir Harry wi’ nimble brand,
He pricket ma cap ajee,
But I cloured his heid on the strand,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Oh, ma name it’s wee Jock Elliot,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?

The Cumberland reivers ken
The straik ma airm can gie,
An’ warily pass the glen,
For wha daur meddle wi’ me?
I chased the loons doon to Carlisle,
Jook’t the raip on the Hair-i-bee,
Ma naig nickert an’ cockit his tail,
But wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Oh, ma name it’s wee Jock Elliot,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?

Ma kinsmen are true, an’ brawlie,
At glint o’ an enemie,
Round Park’s auld Turrets they rally,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Then heigh for the tug an’ the tussle,
Tho’ the cost should be Jethart tree;
Let the Queen an’ her troopers gae whustle
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Wha daur meddle wi’ me?
Oh, ma name it’s wee Jock Elliot,
An’ wha daur meddle wi’ me?

I rather suspect that Mr. Trump’s mother may have read her boy that poem as well. So, for those of you trying to understand that Reaper strike on Qassem Soleimani the other day, perhaps it suffices to note that he pricket our cap ajee, and got his heid cloured.

It’s a Scottish thing, you see. But I have a feeling it translates quite naturally into Farsi, too.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (2)

Their Move

January 6, 2020 – 12:34 pm

Lewis Amselem, a.k.a. “Diplomad”, has put up a rousing post on the Soleimani hit. Best of all, I think, was the bit at the end:

Now is the time openly to tell the Iranians that we do not want war, but they should want it much less. We should openly tell them that we will dismantle their oil production, their ability to generate electricity, to distribute water, to conduct financial operations, etc. We should tell them that their navy and air force are forfeit in the case of an action against us, and that we will degrade their ability to conduct all types of military operations. We will smash their proxy forces without mercy. On the other hand, we are open to talks with Tehran and stand ready to discuss all topics without preconditions. Meet us.

We also should quietly, once the current cloud of dust settles, tell the clowns in Baghdad that we are leaving. They are not worth the life a single American.

Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (8)

Many A True Word Hath Been Spoken In Jest

January 5, 2020 – 11:45 pm

I hate awards shows, and never watch them (full disclosure, though: when I was nominated for an engineering Grammy in 2004, I did go) — but I rather have to hand it to Ricky Gervais for tonight’s monologue at the Golden Globes, which was splashed at once all over social media. You can watch it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Keep It Simple

January 4, 2020 – 8:13 pm
This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress.

In a recent post, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the answers that scientific materialism has offered for some difficult questions. One of these questions is about the astonishing fine-tuning of the physical constants of the natural world:

To understand this it’s important to keep in mind what’s called the “Anthropic Principle”. This is the common-sense idea that, since uninhabitable Universes would have no inhabitants, and therefore no observers, we should not be surprised that the Universe we see around us has whatever it takes for us to be able to live in it.

But the question still wants answering, and cosmologists have come up with two related possibilities. The first is that, rather than there being a single Universe, there is in fact an infinite collection of them — a Multiverse — in which every possible assortment of laws and constants is represented, at random, in some universe or other. The Anthropic Principle tells us that we could only be alive to ask these questions in a Universe that has things set up “just so”.

The other idea (which is really just a variation of the first, but differs from it in abstruse cosmological details) assumes a single, infinitely vast Universe, in which all the possible laws and constants are instantiated in different regions. The Anthropic Principle, as above, does the rest.

Is this persuasive?

It posits, on no evidence, that there are unseeable regions of reality in which the laws and constants of Nature are different — but even that isn’t enough: in order to get the statistical part of the argument to work, we must also assume that all possible configurations of the laws and constants are instantiated somewhere in the Multiverse (in order to give the Anthropic Principle the scope it requires). It doesn’t appear, though, that the laws and constants of Nature vary over time; this is, after all, why we call them laws and constants. Why should we believe they vary over space, or between Universes? Indeed, why should we believe in other Universes at all, except as a gimmick to account for the unlikeliness of the world we find ourselves in?

It seems impossible to explain the fine-tuning of the physics of the Universe without having it either being done “by hand”, or by imagining this infinite (and infinitely variegated) Multiverse that we cannot see or touch. Which is the cleaner assumption? In the absence of a third suggestion — and I’ve never heard one — it seems one or the other must be true. But both of these models must be taken on faith. How to choose?

I might have mentioned another issue: the quantum measurement problem. Let me sum it up briefly:

The old model of the world at the smallest scales was simple and intuitive: matter was made of tiny particles. An atom, for example, had a nucleus, made of protons and neutron, and was surrounded, like a little solar system, by orbiting electrons. Each one of these particles, though unseeably small, was a definite thing in a particular place at any given time.

But QM insisted that we replace this easily grasped model with something crazy: that all those little particles spent their ordinary lives not as actual particles at all, but rather as a cloud of mathematical probability, evolving according to a mathematical formula called a “wave function” — and what’s more, much of the time their behavior was not like particles at all, but rather as waves, with diffraction, constructive and destructive interference, and so on. What’s more, an electron actually has no definite position at all until someone actually measures its position. Prior to a measurement, all we can say is that there will be such-and-such probability of finding the electron in a certain place. When we make a measurement, the wave-function “collapses”, and all we have left is a measured electron in some actual spot. (It gets much weirder than that, too, but I’ll leave it there.) And QM made it clear that we shouldn’t think that the electron was in a definite place all along, and we just didn’t know where — in reality, the electron was nowhere in particular at all until we measured it and forced it to choose a place.

Now, all that’s bad enough, but the most troubling question is this: what constitutes a “measurement”? Apparently, until a conscious observer takes a look, the electron exists as a cloud of probabilities, and behaves like a wave, but the act of observation collapses it into a particle. But what’s so special about us? Prior to the observation, the electron interacts with the rest of the world in its wavelike form. But if we are just ordinary parts of the material world, what makes our observation any different from any other interaction? Nobody can say. Yet somehow it does.

This is the “measurement problem”. Erwin Schrödinger focused our attention on how bizarre it all is with his famous cat-in-a-box thought-experiment. It has perplexed physicists for a century now. (For a clear and readable overview of the problem, I recommend Nick Herbert’s excellent little book Quantum Reality.)

Most physicists don’t worry much about the measurement problem. QM is just so fantastically good at describing the microworld that they just shrug their shoulders and get on with it. The great Richard Feynman said “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

For consciousness to have a significant place in physics, though, is inherently troubling for hard-core scientific materialism, and so some physicists have tried hard to come up with an explanation. One of the more rigorous attempts was by a man named Hugh Everett — but his model is fantastic in its own way.

Everett’s proposal, which is called the Many-Worlds interpretation, says that rather than a measurement causing the collapse of the probability cloud into a single actuality, what happens is that at every instant when a measurement could be made, every possible outcome is actualized in a different Universe. Any particular observer simply rides along with one of these infinitely forking paths. In this way, it only seems that our measurement forced the world to make a choice, when if fact it makes every possible choice.

To call this “many” worlds is an understatement; it implies the existence of a staggeringly, unimaginably astronomical number of mutually undetectable Universes, forking off in every direction at an equally unimaginable rate. But by denying consciousness a special role that scientific materialism can’t account for, it saves the day!

Does this sound familiar? It’s quite the same thing, offered for the same reason, as the multiple Universes that are imagined into existence to answer the question of the fine-tuning of the constants of Nature.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day who is a highly intelligent atheist. On the question of the existence of God, he made a common criticism of faith: that believing in something without any evidence simply won’t do. He said that, because of the difficulty of proving a negative, as a basic point of logical practice the burden of proof is on someone who asserts that a thing exists, rather than expecting the other side to prove that it doesn’t.

I replied that another time-honored principle of practical reason was Occam’s Razor: “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.” If you have two answers before you — one requires that Ptolemaic epicycles and countless imaginary worlds, and one that doesn’t — then you should, ceteris paribus, prefer the simpler one.

Compare the answers on offer by scientific materialism for the questions of the physical constants and the measurement problem, both of which assert the existence of infinities of unseeable Universes, with the model in which a Creator set up the actually existing natural world just as we find it, and in which our consciousness — the primary fact of human existence — is special, and makes a difference.

What say you, Brother William?

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Religion | Comments (14)

Pop! Goes The Weasel

January 3, 2020 – 9:43 pm

Everybody’s abuzz about this Qassem Soleimani business. I don’t have much to say about it, but I’ll say this:

First, it’s amusing that some parties seem so persnickety about the legality of striking down a man who made his career in terrorism and assassinations all over the globe.

Second, I’m having a hard time seeing the legal issue here. We struck Mr. Soleimani in Iraq, where our forces are deployed at the invitation of the Iraqi government. Mr. Soleimani was there as the commander of a hostile military force, and had just organized an attack on our embassy. For us to retaliate against a dangerous enemy was well within the scope of the U.S. mission.

Third, it’s worth noting that given the choice of siding with the Chief Executive of the United States, a great many over on the Blue side of the aisle would prefer to stick up for a man who organized the killing and maiming of thousands of American soldiers — not to mention political dissidents in Iran — and for the unholy regime that signed his paychecks. I don’t recall hearing any such fuss from them when Barack Obama vaporized a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in similar fashion.

Fourth, there seems to be some concern that now the Iranians are really going to be angry at us. They weren’t already?

Fifth, this may well be an importantly destabilizing event as far as the internal affairs of Iran are concerned. That would be just fine with just about everybody, except perhaps Valerie Jarrett and a few others I could think of.

Sixth, it’s refreshing to see a U.S. Commander in Chief treating our mortal enemies like mortal enemies, instead of sending them pallets of Benjamins in the dead of night in the hope that they’ll make nice.

Seventh, I doubt very much that this will lead to war. I’m hoping for a Mideast foreign policy in which we no longer attempt to convert seething Islamic snakepits into little Denmarks, but are resolved to make sure they understand that we are prepared at all times to cause excruciating pain if they try to harm us.

If I were Donald Trump, I’d have two words for Iran right now:

“Any questions?”

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (11)

Happy New Year!

January 1, 2020 – 12:37 pm

Buckle up, everybody – I have a feeling 2020 is going to be an eventful year. “Interesting”, even.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Service Notice

December 28, 2019 – 9:33 am

Taking a little holiday break. Back soon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Merry Christmas!

December 25, 2019 – 11:35 am
By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

An Inconvenient Truth

December 23, 2019 – 6:13 pm

I’ve just read a fine paper by Nathan Cofnas, a doctoral student in philosophy at Oxford, on the censorship. suppression, and misrepresentation of scientific and philosophical inquiry into the heritability of intelligence and the statistical distribution of intelligence in different human populations.

The gist is this: that a great deal of evidence has already been gathered in support of the commonsense idea that intelligence (along with other cognitive qualities) is indeed substantially heritable, and will naturally be distributed somewhat differently among long-isolated populations subjected to greatly different selection pressures. Efforts to “falsify” this hypothesis, meanwhile, have not succeeded, and have in fact met with stubborn failure. Mr. Cofnas argues that the evidence from genetics and neuroscience is likely, before long, to become overwhelming, and that the responsible thing for scientists and philosophers, as well as cultural and political leaders, to do is not to try, with increasing desperation, to sweep the truth of human diversity under the rug, but rather to think about its moral and social implications, and how to adapt ourselves and our societies to it all honestly and fairly.

Mr. Cofnas considers first the science itself, and then the moral and philosophical questions it naturally raises. Are there truths we shouldn’t seek? Perhaps, says Cofnas, but this isn’t one of them — and like it or not, research into genetics and neuroscience is going to proceed anyway whether we like it or not. The truth will out.

Moreover, there is a question of justice:

Linda Gottfredson observes that “currently, racial parity in outcomes is often treated as the ultimate standard for fairness and lack of parity as a measure of White racism”. Those who deny that there is evidence in favor of hereditarianism are forced to conclude that phenotypic differences between groups “must be artificial, manmade, manufactured. Someone must be at fault”). However, if hereditarianism is true, then it may be that no one should necessarily be blamed for different average outcomes among groups. There is no theory of justice that says it is right to falsely blame a group of people for wrongs they did not commit because confronting the exculpatory evidence causes us discomfort.

The paper was published in the journal Philosophical Psychology. I expect that Mr. Cofnas is already feeling the heat for writing it; it was brave of him to do so. Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in HBD | Comments (19)

Hang ‘Em High

December 20, 2019 – 6:34 pm

Some good news: a major MS-13 bust in Long Island.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (7)

Repost: What Is The Right?

December 19, 2019 – 6:39 pm

Looking out over the rubble of our political system today, I’m reminded of a post from 2015, in which I argued that the political struggle of Right versus Left is not a contest of different policy preferences, but something far more basic, and more universal, even than human existence itself: the struggle against entropy, against things “running down”.

Take, for just one example, the current battle of nationalism vs. globalism — or, as David Goodheart framed it, of “Somewheres” vs. “Anywheres”.

A classic example of entropy is to put a drop of ink in a glass of water. For a little while, the ink sits there as a tiny dark spot in clear water — but come back the next day, and thermal diffusion has scattered the ink, and all that remains is a glass of slightly blue water. The original configuration is highly specific — the ink is here, and not there — while the end state is simply a random distribution. The important thing about this is that out of the uncountable trillions of possible states of ink-in-water, nearly all of them are indistinguishable random states. The initial, highly ordered condition of a bright blue drop in a glass of clear water is infinitesimally rare — and the inexorable tendency of every system in the Universe is to randomize, to decay, to “run down”. And so it is with everything interesting, valuable, or productive in the world.

The initial condition of the world in the modern era was like the drop of ink in the glass of water: distinct cultures, like drops of differently colored ink, in homelands scattered around the globe. In a bigger, slower, cooler world, such distinctness could persist, and until recent historical times it made the world a blooming garden of genuine diversity. It should be easy to see that ease of travel and instantaneous communication would naturally have a diffusing, entropic effect — but the current fetish for open borders and mass migration is entropy on methamphetamine. And who supports it? The Left, and militantly so. Who stands against it? The Right.

So I’m reposting, just below, a four-year-old item about all of this, entitled What Is The Right?. (It refers in turn to some earlier posts, but it stands up well enough without editing, I think.)

The point for today, as we survey the battlefield on the morrow of this astonishing presidential impeachment, is that there can be no compromise with decay.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

In our last Open Thread, our resident liberal gadfly Peter, a.k.a. ‘The One Eyed Man’, left a comment citing the late Richard Hofstadter to the effect that the political Right (in particular, the “dissident” Right whose views are often summarized in these pages), exhibits a “paranoid style”.

Several of us responded in the ensuing discussion. But each time I read the original comment, and the Hofstadter passages it quotes, the more perfectly paradigmatic it all seems of the unreflective perceptual biases of the Left.

In particular, where the analysis goes off the rails is in the way that it mischaracterizes the traditionalist Right’s view of the Left in this conflict of ideologies:

“The enemy [i.e., as cited here, the influential man of the Left] is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed, he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way.”

But this is not how those of us on the dissident Right see this at all. Correctly understood, the core features of modern Leftism are not an exogenous historical anomaly, brought about by the individual will of aberrant masterminds to “deflect the normal course of history”, but are instead an entirely predictable social and historical force, perfectly consistent with a coherent understanding of human nature and the pitfalls of democracy. A movement toward the Left, and ultimately toward despotism and collapse, is the “normal course” of history, in exactly the same way that the “normal course” of a river is to run downhill.

Indeed, the phenomenon is even more general than either history or human nature: in conformance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is in fact a manifestation of entropy — of the wearing down of complex and specific structures, the destruction of the particular in favor of the general, and the relentless erosion of all of the gradients, distinctions, and disequilibria that are the only possible source of usable energy, and therefore useful work, in any system.

The ‘One Eyed Man’ quotes, as an example of right-wing “paranoia”, our commenter Whitewall’s likening of the Left to “termites, roaches, bed bugs, ticks, mold, radon’. But these comparisons are more than an expression of simple revulsion: all of these things are agents of decay, of disorder (in radon’s case, the actual decay of atoms themselves). In this way, Whitewall’s remark reveals an implicit understanding of the Left as, above all, an entropic historical force.

So: if the Right seems Manichaean, it is because the Right correctly perceives its role not as one side in a contest between two equally contingent, and arbitrarily chosen, approaches to government, but rather as a bulwark against entropy itself: against disorder, decay, and the “heat death” of the civilization it seeks to defend. Hofstadter’s emphasis (like Peter’s) is on political compromise, and to this he owes his reputation as a level-headed centrist. But the historically literate Right understands that any compromise with entropy is ultimately futile, because all such compromises are necessarily a unidirectional movement toward greater disorder. (We understand also, to our sorrow, that disorder always wins in the end — but to preserve what we can, for as long as we can, clearly requires nothing less than our best efforts.)

None of this is to say, of course, that there aren’t clever, charismatic, and extremely dangerous people on the Left, with resentful or self-serving motives and destructive intentions. But they are specific, particular, contingent phenomena — opportunistic infections. The focus of the reactionary Right, on the other hand, is on a universal, natural process, by which order yields to disorder; the political Left is merely its aspect in human societies.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (9)

JM Smith On Reason

December 17, 2019 – 2:30 pm

A theme of some recent posts here has been the limitations of reason. Reason is a machine: if properly maintained and frequently inspected, it does what it does well enough, but like any machine it can only do some things and not others. Moreover, it is in the nature of this machine not to deal very well with what lies outside its competencies. By default, the machine tends to assume that if it cannot digest such things comfortably they simply do not exist; and if it can somehow accept them as input, but cannot sort them reliably into True or False, they are either ejected as garbage, or, more dangerously, they are marked False anyway and sent along to the output tray as if nothing had gone wrong.

The cardinal rule for the proper use of machines is to know what they do well and what they do poorly, and to use them only for things they do well. Readers of a “certain age” will remember that a popular sage once gave us the same advice:

Professor J.M. Smith has picked up this theme — that we must confine our reliance on reason to those areas where it will provide help and not harm — in a recent essay. An excerpt:

When I say that Reason is ruthless, I mean that it respects nothing but itself, and that when it is let off its chain, it will therefore chew to pieces anything with which it disagrees. To see what this means, you have only to look at any specimen of modern architecture. Reason chewed away any ornament that did not answer the demands of Reason, and the naked box that remained was utterly inhuman.

The post is brief, and sharp. Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy | Comments (10)

This Thing All Things Devours

December 14, 2019 – 11:50 pm

I’ve just read Propaganda (1928), by Edward Bernays. Bernays, who died in 1995 at the uncommonly advanced age of 103, was the founder of the modern era of marketing and public relations. (Some would call this a “science”, as it does have an empirical and experimental side.)

Bernays makes clear his opinion that the great mass of men are docile and unimaginative: that they do not form their own opinions, but must be led to ideas and preferences by experts who can guide them to a desired mindset by the precise manipulation of influences. (Bernays was himself was the modern-day prototype of such an expert, and made a very good living at it.) To him the public was a “herd”, and he was a shepherd-for-hire.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Ruminations | Comments (5)

Fog In Channel, Continent Cut Off

December 14, 2019 – 4:49 pm

Wellfleet Harbor this afternoon:

 

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (0)

Over There

December 12, 2019 – 10:10 pm

Outstanding news: it looks like the Right has won a major victory in Britain’s national elections today.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

This Is Far From Over

December 11, 2019 – 12:02 am

Here’s an interview given Tuesday by Attorney General Barr. He discusses the Inspector General’s report, and reminds us that it was limited in scope and power, and that the full investigation is the one being conducted by John Durham. (Mr. Barr tells us not to expect anything from that until mid-2020.)

Eighteen minutes in, Mr. Barr says this:

I think our nation was turned on its head for three years… based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press — and I think that there were gross abuses of FISA, and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI. And the Attorney General’s primary responsibility is to protect against the abuse of the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus and make sure it doesn’t play an improper role in our political life. That’s my responsibility. And I’m going to carry it out.

Strength to your arm, sir. (And we must remember always that if Hillary Clinton had been elected, none of this would ever have seen the light of day.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

Racist Thing #109

December 9, 2019 – 3:05 pm

Physics.

By Malcolm | Posted in Racist Things | Comments (2)

Drive Home

December 8, 2019 – 5:17 pm

Unless you’re au fait with the musical genre known as “progresssive rock”, you’ve probably never heard of the British musician and producer Steven Wilson. He’s best known as the leader of the now-defunct band Porcupine Tree, but he’s also made quite a few records on his own. I admire his work, which is always good and has moments of real brilliance.

While much of what he’s done is hard and edgy, he’s especially good at writing sad and beautiful songs. Here’s an example, from his solo album The Raven That Refused To Sing. It features a gorgeous solo by guitarist Guthrie Govan.

(Headphones or good speakers, please.)


 

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (3)

The Parallel Postulate

December 7, 2019 – 2:18 pm
This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress.

Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d come to see that there were essential questions to which it provided no good answers — and that the “scientism” it was built upon, despite its protestations to the contrary, nevertheless required the very thing it claimed so ardently to reject: faith. Moreover I’d come to see that it explained the Universe by explaining away the very things that constitute almost the entire universe of human experience. The resulting explanandum was a rump Universe, shrunken and dessicated, and in human terms hardly worth explaining (or living in) at all.

In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton sums this up:

I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

In my earlier post I wrote:

Where, then, does all of this leave me? It seems there is no process of pure reason that will settle these ultimate questions, and so I must either believe nothing, or rely on faith. To believe nothing, though, is a good deal harder than it sounds: it’s easy, perhaps, when one is young and can defer the question while focusing on practical matters, but as one’s shadow lengthens, and the distractions of youth and middle age fall away, the great mysteries come increasingly to the fore. I would like very much, in the time I have left, to be able to believe something. But if pure Reason cannot tell me what to believe (and it is Reason itself that has convinced me it can’t), and so belief must be built upon Faith, then where should Faith be placed? Such are my stubborn habits of mind that I am still, in some way, hoping that Reason will help me adjudicate between the competing prospects. But I’m starting to see that this isn’t really how it works — the harder I try, the more I see the limits of Reason.

My secular friends are horrified that I would even be asking these questions; it is to them self-evident — a matter of faith — that there can be no true account of things that extends beyond the naturalistic model. I understand this well, because it was exactly my own position until very recently; and even now I am making no certain claim to the contrary. But there is faith on either side: the choosing of axioms is, by definition and by logical necessity, prior to reason. This means — and such is the power of habit, especially habits of belief, that it has taken me all my life to see this — we are radically free to choose such axioms as do not lead to obvious contradictions with truth.

So, at this time, feeling rather exhilaratingly liberated, I am simply re-examining my axioms, to see where it leads. Trying the other day to explain this to a shocked friend, I hit upon an apposite metaphor:

For roughly two thousand years, we understood geometry according to Euclid’s Elements. Even in the fourth century B.C., the basics of formal reasoning were understood: you adopt a foundation of unproven axioms, and then build upon them an expanding (and potentially limitless) structure of theorems. That the axioms themselves are unproven is a matter of logical necessity; were they provable, it would have to be in terms of even more fundamental postulates, and so your original axioms would now be theorems. At some point, the regress has to bottom out in postulates that we simply take as given — or, to put it another way, that we take on faith.

The theorems of Euclidean geometry rest on a set of five postulates. They are:

1) A straight line segment may be drawn from any given point to any other.
2) A straight line may be extended to any finite length.
3) A circle may be described with any given point as its center and any distance as its radius.
4) All right angles are congruent.
5) If a straight line intersects two other straight lines, and so makes the two interior angles on one side of it together less than two right angles, then the other straight lines will meet at a point if extended far enough on the side on which the angles are less than two right angles.

One of these — the fifth — has troubled mathematicians from the beginning. It can be restated as:

In a plane, given a line and a point not on the line, at most one line parallel to the given line can be drawn through the point.

This postulate feels true, but it seems so much more complicated than the others that it ought to be a theorem, not an axiom. But try as they might, geometers were never able to derive it from the other axioms — and it was so deeply embedded in the centuries-old theoretical edifice of geometry that everyone just left it alone.

But in the eighteenth century, mathematicians (beginning with Lobachevsky) finally found the courage to attempt a geometry that rejects this postulate. It seemed like a crazy experiment, expected to lead in no time to absurdities and self-contradictions — but it turned out to be internally consistent, and enormously fruitful. What’s more, it has since turned out that this “non-Euclidean” geometry appears to be the actual geometry of the Universe. Who knew?

Well, that’s all I’m trying here: I am, late in my life, questioning the “fifth postulate” that has been a part of all of my theorems to date. That postulate is the one shared by all of my secular friends: there is no God.

I have no way of knowing whether this postulate is true or not; the essence of postulates is, after all, that they are unprovable. Such was the depth of my embedding in the secular, scientistic model that it has taken me till now, believe it or not, fully to understand that this was in fact just an axiom like any other; an unprovable thing to be taken on faith for the sake of theorem-building. Even now, my faith in the postulate has been displaced, not by certainty in its opposite, but only by doubt.

Doubt is not faith. But it can be awfully liberating — and now, at 63 years old and with plenty of time on my hands, I find myself free to try out, if only provisionally, a different postulate: God exists.

Why not see what sort of world-geometry that leads to? What can I possibly have to lose?

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion, Ruminations, Reason and Philosophy, Inner Work | Comments (26)

Angelo Codevilla On The Unraveling Of America

December 4, 2019 – 1:37 pm

In a recent item at American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla acknowledges that America is divided beyond the possibility of reconciliation.

[R]estoring anything like the Founders’ United States of America is out of the question. Constitutional conservatism on behalf of a country a large part of which is absorbed in revolutionary identity; that rejects the dictionary definition of words; that rejects common citizenship, is impossible. Not even winning a bloody civil war against the ruling class could accomplish such a thing.

This echoes what I wrote a month ago:

Does all this talk of civil war seem overheated? Ask yourself: looking at the current chasm in American politics, the fundamentally incompatible visions of America the two sides hold, the degree of dehumanizing hatred they show for each other, the bloody damage already done, and the implacable fury with which they grapple for every atom of power, can we imagine some way forward in which the Right and Left just “bury the hatchet” and “hug it out”?

Of course not. This fight continues, and intensifies, until either one side is destroyed, or we work out some kind of divorce.

Mr. Codevilla’s essay is short, and sharp. Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (1)

Michelle Obama in 2020?

December 1, 2019 – 9:11 pm

With the Democratic slate of candidates looking weaker by the day, a lot of people are whispering about Michelle Obama entering the race. She would be a much stronger opponent, I think, than any of the current crop of hopefuls, and the idea of her getting in has some on the Right worried.

I don’t think she’ll come in. She is quite possibly the only person that could beat Trump in 2020 — not one of the others stands a chance, I think — but there is too great a chance that she could lose. It would make a terrible dent in the Obama halo if she were to run and be beaten by Donald Trump, and I think that she and her husband will decide that the risk is too great. Barring some major “black swan” event, the Democrats are simply not going to take back the White House in 2020.

The reasoning seems obvious to me. Trump is a one-off — there really isn’t anybody like him — and Michelle Obama is only 55. Four years from now there will be no Trump in the picture, and it is not at all obvious that there is anyone out there who can carry the torch for the GOP after Trump relinquishes it. The best way for Team Obama to play it — if they have any desire even to try, which they very well might not — will be for her to enjoy her vast and newly acquired riches, bide her time, and let things ripen for 2024.

Michelle Obama might be a very valuable “hole card” for the Democrats. It would be folly to play it when Trump has such a strong hand.

That said, I hope she makes the fatal mistake of failing to read this post, and getting in four years too soon. I would much prefer to see her lose now than win in 2024.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (6)

Beautiful Lies, And A Vulnerability of Academia

November 30, 2019 – 7:03 pm
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Beautiful Lies.

In the comment-thread of our previous post, J.M. Smith discusses status in academia:

I’m a professor of human geography, a discipline that lurched left en masse. The movement was just starting when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and was all but completed within twenty years. One reason human geography shifted is that human geography is a relatively low-status discipline, and so thought it would get more respect if it became a hotbed of transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism. When I was an assistant professor, I once lunched with two very young women professors in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Science, and they were on fire to make PRTS a hotbed of transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism.

Professors want status, just like everyone else, so low-class fields ape high-class fields, and low-class academics ape high-class academics. Of course there are a few cranks, some of whom practice a high-status crankiness, and few of whom practice a low-status crankiness, but academia greatly prefers conformists over cranks.

Not only do professors want status, they acquire status through the peer-review process. This may sometimes select for truth, but mostly selects for conformity. After all, peer-review is just peer-pressure for professors. I’d like to think there are some hard sciences where a maverick professor can have reality on his side, but through most of academia, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder is other professors.

Professor Smith makes an important point:

If I ran a restaurant and the reviewers hated me, I could succeed by appealing to the market of diners. If I were an actor and the reviewers hated me, I could succeed by appealing to the market of movie-goers. If I am a professor and the reviewers hate me, I am a failed tenure case because all my manuscripts were rejected and student evaluations don’t matter.

This is a vulnerability that is, perhaps, unique to academia. One would imagine — naively, as it turns out — that academia ought to be the place, above all, where “truth is great and will prevail”. That the academy is, instead (with the exception of mathematics and the hard sciences), the place where truth is in fact subordinate to ideological faddishness says a great deal about how little of the modern curriculum actually touches upon topics about which there even is objective truth, or at least an objectively correct interpretation of facts.

I realize that I haven’t explained how something like transgressive Foulcaldian poststructuralism becomes high-status…

Most likely it is because it is entropic; it flattens and equalizes and breaks order (structure) into rubble. In doing so, it multiplies opportunities for the exercise of power — and by obliterating all discriminations of quality and merit, it enables the success of resentful mediocrities. This is always at the heart of egalitarian activism: finding a way to get your hand on the collar of your superiors — and if that’s your aim, it helps if you can pretend that there is no basis to consider them your superiors in the first place. It has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

The universal acid of post-Enlightenment skepsis, which casts such corrosive doubt on everything that no cultural vessel can successfully contain it, has brought us at last to the futile and paradoxical triumph of a doctrine whose central truth is the nonexistence of truth, and which seizes the apex of cultural status by attacking status itself.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (12)

Beautiful Lies, Cont’d

November 29, 2019 – 8:50 pm
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Beautiful Lies.

I’ve been thinking some more about the Curtis Yarvin essay we looked at a couple of days ago.

There were good comments on the previous post. A couple of readers pointed out that, despite Mr. Yarvin’s assertion of the scarcity of sociopaths in the general population, many political systems (and in particular ours, I think) tend to make them float up to positions of power. Others questioned the idea that the aim of a well-functioning society’s “truth market” should be expected to generate actual truths rather than useful beliefs that may or may not be true. I think both of these are excellent criticisms, and I wonder what Mr. Yarvin would say about them. (Perhaps he would not quibble over true-versus-useful, but would say that in general beliefs are most useful when they do in fact correspond to reality. But of course there are many, many counterexamples. As Mencken noted, the average man believes “that his wife is pretty, and his children smart”.)

Here’s something else that left me dissatisfied with the essay: it purported at the outset to present a model that would explain not just the pervasiveness of error in distributed societies, but the system-wide coordination of that error, on puzzlingly short timescales. It didn’t, though.

Writing as Mencius Moldbug a decade or so ago, Mr. Yarvin used the term Gleichshaltung to describe this curious synchronization:

Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.

There are two explanations for this synchronization. One, Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because they both arrive at the same truth. I am willing to concede this for, say, chemistry. When it comes to, say, African-American studies, I am not quite so sure. Are you? Surely it is arguable that the latter is a legitimate area of inquiry. But surely it is arguable that it is not. So how is it, exactly, that Harvard, Stanford, and everyone else gets the same answer?

I’m afraid the only logical alternative, however awful and unimaginable, is the conclusion that Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because both are remoras attached, in some unthinkable way, to some great, invisible predator of the deep—perhaps even Cthulhu himself.

Certainly, the synchronization is not coordinated by any human hierarchical authority. (Yes, there are accreditation agencies, but a Harvard or a Stanford could easily fight them.) The system may be Orwellian, but it has no Goebbels. It produces Gleichschaltung without a Gestapo. It has a Party line without a Party. A neat trick. We of the Sith would certainly like to understand it.

The essay I refer to here — A Brief Introduction To Unqualified Reservations — is long (to put it mildly; it’s really a short book), but in brief, what it says about this is that it is the universities that tell the politicians and the press what to think, and the politicians and the press, in turn, tell us what to think. And the universities swim left. As Robert Conquest reminds us, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” (I’m not so sure that the press isn’t in the driver’s seat some of the time too, but let’s not quibble.)

Why is that? Well, that’s a story of its own. But the question here remains: if the universities synchronize everything else, what synchronizes the universities? How is it that Harvard and Stanford settle on exactly the same “beautiful lies” at exactly the same time? Everything flips over all at once — gay marriage, for example, was well beyond the pale always and everywhere throughout all of Western history, until suddenly enthusiasm for it became not just acceptable, but mandatory, in what seemed like no time at all. If you were away camping for a week, you missed it. How did that happen? It really was as if someone had flipped a switch. Who was it? Where’s the switch?

If the system really is distributed, and everything else we’ve talked about is true, then there must be some critical threshold at which it suddenly becomes apparent to everybody upstream of culture, all at once, that some New Thing is now a profitable object for the excitement and gratification of thumos — that is, a path, direct or indirect, to power and status. What distinguishes such a threshold — what makes one New Thing “go critical” while another doesn’t — would be worth understanding.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Society and Culture | Comments (5)

Humans

November 29, 2019 – 1:52 pm

The other day I was out for a walk in Prospect Park and ran across this:

I was reminded of this, which is 39,000 years old:

Some things never change, I guess.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (1)

Happy Thanksgiving

November 28, 2019 – 11:42 am

We all have a lot to be thankful for, even in these uncertain times (and when were the times ever not uncertain?).

I’m grateful to all of you for reading and commenting. Enjoy this special day — my favorite holiday of the year.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Beautiful Lies

November 27, 2019 – 3:51 pm
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Beautiful Lies.

Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. “Mencius Moldbug”, has published the second installment of his five-part “Clear Pill” essay series over at The American Mind. The new essay is about how coordinated, pervasive error enters the national culture in distributed, democratic societies — i.e., without the top-down influence of centralized, authoritarian control.

The essay is long — in true Moldbuggian form, longer than it needs to be — but the gist is this: that, in contrast to authoritarian societies in which public opinion and permissible narratives are controlled and synchronized from above, some other mechanism must be at work to achieve the same effect in democracies. Mr. Yarvin’s essay is an attempt to provide a theory for this.

We read:

Logically, either liberal democracies are inherently free from pervasive error or some other mechanism can cause pervasive error in liberal democracies.

Liberal democracies have no dictator, no center, and no point of coordination. We’re looking for a mechanism which could cause pervasive error without central coordination: Gleichschaltung without Goebbels.

In the 21st-century Western model of government, elite consensus is set by a market for ideas. This consensus narrative drives public policy, which exists within the reality of the consensus. If this market somehow malfunctioned…

Let’s posit that a normal First World civil service will always implement reasonable policy relative to the truth in which it operates. Yet if the market for ideas fails, and generates a delusional narrative, policies that are competent and reasonable within this illusion may prove incompetent and unreasonable in reality.

Good so far. We can see this happening all around us.

Let’s focus, therefore, on the integrity of the public narrative—which is generally developed outside the civil service proper.

On a helicopter there is a part called a “Jesus nut,” because it holds the rotor to the driveshaft. This little steel ring is all that stands between you and the next world. In the modern democracies, markets for truth perform a comparable function. They are all that stand between us and Orwellian mass delusion, homicidal or otherwise.

Anything this important is in a very real way sacred. And indeed many seem to engage their spiritual instincts with these markets. This is understandable but erroneous. Don’t pray to the Jesus nut—inspect it for cracks.

A market for ideas is a machine. The purpose of the machine is to reject error and discover truth. The presence of pervasive error in the output tray of the machine indicates malfunction. This malfunction is an engineering failure and can be debugged as such. No mystical sentiment at all needs to be engaged.

Yarvin asks how, exactly, a crowd-sourced idea market — in which the “crowd” consists of top-tier elites and influencers — detects truth. His opinion is that it does so by using beauty as a proxy for truth:

Every idea market is an aesthetic device. It selects for the most beautiful ideas—according to the taste of its audience. A market measures desire; desire is beauty in action. And by measuring beauty we measure truth, because truth (like my man Keats said) is beautiful.

Seen from an aesthetic perspective, every idea is a story. A marketplace of ideas is a market for stories. An idea can be any kind of story, factual or fictional; even a song or a film. All creative markets are affected by the phenomena we will describe. But the most important idea markets are those which claim to tell a story, both true and truly illustrative, about the real world. Abusing English only slightly, we may term these histories. The definition is broad enough to include all of science—or, as once it was known, natural history.

Our consensus narrative of reality is the output product of the machine which is our market for beautiful histories. From the perspective of our collective epistemic security, the integrity of this mechanism is of the highest possible importance.

It is easy to see the exploitable vulnerability. Is a market for beautiful histories always a market for veracious histories? Yes, because truth is beautiful and lies are ugly. And—no, because other qualities might also be beautiful. These qualities cannot cancel the Keats effect. But if they could overpower it, the result would be a beautiful lie.

Is beauty really what an idea-market must use to detect truth? I’m not so sure, but Mr. Yarvin seems to be “all in” on this:

An idea market can only measure truth by measuring beauty. If beauty is not truth, we assume, beauty is truth plus white noise. Given a sufficiently large audience of high average quality, these individual quirks of taste will cancel out, leaving only the consistent, high-quality truth promised in the brochure.

This assumption had better be true! If deviations from truth are not white noise, but their own coherent signal, averaging will not filter them out at all. These signals will pass through the market and emerge in the output, competing with truth.

Any such competing aesthetic signal is an attack vector on the integrity of any truth market. Only beauty can be measured. Any divergence between truth and beauty can be exploited.

“Only beauty can be measured.” Is that true? (Related question, I suppose: Is it beautiful?) I can certainly agree that beauty can (and does) introduce bias — but to the exclusion of everything else? I doubt it; especially in a crowd-sourced system such as is described here. But to accept for now the article’s argument, maybe bias is enough. There’s certainly no question that the aesthetic appeal of a proposition can, because we are emotional beings, affect its truth-valence. In this way, we might come to prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth.

Next comes the question: What can give a proposition emotional appeal? What, in addition to truth itself, might make some of the competitors in the idea-market more beautiful than others? Here Mr. Yarvin draws on the classical Greek concepts of thymos (which I’ve usually seen spelled thumos), pistos, and agape. (Loosely translated, these mean spirited ambition, loyalty/honor, and altruistic empathy, respectively.) That which appeals to any of these will be colored with emotional appeal, and so, when ideas are set loose in the elite’s marketplace, there is a security flaw: we may overrate them enough to successfully bias the market against more truthful ideas.

Mr. Yarvin illustrates this, convincingly enough, with a look at climate science — making, along the way, the important point that the same effects of ambition and loyalty-to-the-master that might make us leery of Exxon scientists’ reporting on climate change would also apply to any other scientist affiliated with any institution or faction whatsoever. The only exceptions to this are truly abstract disciplines such as mathematics, whose truths are by their nature orthogonal to society and politics:

[W]e actually know nothing about anything, except math and super-hard science.

The conclusion, then, is that there is a design flaw in the way our distributed system detects truth:

Any despotism is the tyranny of error. No one sensible could possibly mind a benevolent dictator who was also always right.

Distributed systems are hard. It’s amazing when they work at all. We shouldn’t be surprised to see failure modes. But nor should we have to live with, or be ruled by, pervasive error.

So we should admit that distributed despotism is caused by the way power poisons truth markets. Putting a truth market in power is unsound political engineering. A previously reliable machine will start to evolve pretty lies. This is a slow and degenerative process which cannot be reversed.

Putting a church in charge of the government is not putting God in charge of the government. Putting a truth market in charge of the government is not putting truth in charge of the government.

Returning to our original comparison between centralized and distributed despotisms—dictatorship and democracy, platypus and man—it’s remarkable how these very different systems converge on the same “track-aligning” effect, repressing thoughts that challenge the regime, promoting ones that flatter it. Yet distributed evolution does often uncannily mimic central design.

Power is power. Through some pyramid of bureaucrats, the Central Committee ordered Havel’s greengrocer to display in his window their official slogan: “workers of the world, unite.” Do not our stores have such slogans in their windows? I see them every day; don’t you? They even come preprinted in all the right colors.

Yet our slogans are not so standard, nor our cadre so pyramidal. This is no flaw of power, but its dazzling perfection. The entire system, whose objective strength we just compared to the Czech secret police, formally does not exist at all. Very cool.

Yarvin closes with this:

We end (for now) with a paradox on a long horizon. Consider this cycle:

— The intellectual command economy rules. Public opinion is directed by a dogmatic bureaucracy, rife with pervasive error, systematically incapable of changing its mind.

— An unofficial free market for truth evolves. This market cannot be poisoned by power, because it has no power. It develops a higher-quality product than the official narrative.

— A new epistemic elite arises. The old intellectual bureaucracy, smart enough to sense its own inferiority, hands power to the new truth market. A new golden age begins.

— Dogmatic bureaucracy returns. Slowly and inevitably poisoned by power, the once-vibrant civil society slowly ossifies into a dogmatic bureaucracy, evolving more and more pretty lies until pervasive error is again the norm.

Western civilization has been repeating this story over and over for roughly the last half-millennium. At each step in the cycle, there is no clear way to prevent the next.

There’s much more; you should read the whole thing, here. In particular, I didn’t touch on Mr. Yarvin’s discussion of agape, and I have questions about the apparent misfiring of empathy that seems to be a hallmark of the modern West. (I’ll save those for another post, though.)

The most obvious criticism of this model is the one I mentioned above, and is really not a criticism of the idea of the vulnerability of a crowd-powered truth-market to emotional bias: it is the idea that the effect is so overwhelmingly strong — “only beauty can be measured” — that it defeats rational methods of truth-checking our ideas. After all, Mr. Yarvin assumes that it’s obvious to us that much of what drives policy consists of “beautiful lies” — and so it is. How is it, then, that he and we can see them, while “elites” can’t? I suppose his answer would be that we who see them are the ones who are not in a position to be biased toward them by ambition, or loyalty to our particular masters, or the appropriate concept of altruism. And perhaps it is so.

Mr. Yarvin acknowledges that his is a sympathetic position, in that he doesn’t suppose that the affected elites are knowingly, and cynically, promulgating these beautiful lies as lies; he gives them the benefit of the doubt:

A lie is not a fiction; it pretends to be true. All the tilt in the world cannot make a truth market endorse a naked fiction.

Of course, some people are sociopaths. They actually find lies inherently pretty, useful, or both. Sociopaths are rare and hard to wrangle, and it is hard to imagine a pure audience of them. There are always enough sociopaths to fill a niche, never enough to fill a room. So it is hard for sociopaths to sway a market. (If you imagine that there is some party, tribe, class, or nation of sociopaths, this is very sad and you should stop.)

…[Arguments against those who promulgate pretty lies] are too often stated as indictments, implying systemic mens rea. This deep factual error is deeply enfeebling… I, too, dislike progressives. But they are normal people, not evil zombies.

Once you’ve read the article, here’s an exercise: consider the prevailing “beautiful lie” of our age, namely “Diversity is our strength”. How, according to Mr. Yarvin’s model, did the action of thumos, pistos, and agape cause the truth-market machine to produce such a bad result? What was the input — historical, social, or otherwise — that led to such faulty output?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Service Notice

November 24, 2019 – 8:43 pm

Sorry for the thin content here lately. Now and then I just don’t have much to say: I’ve written 5,030 posts over the past 14 years, and sometimes I feel as if anything I’d write would, at this point, just be repeating myself. (And then the muse grants me her favor once again, and I’m back to clogging the Internet with blather and heresy. Soon, I hope.)

Obviously there is the impeachment circus to comment on, but I don’t really have a lot to say about that, other than to note, first, how astonishingly flimsy the whole thing is and how deranged the Democrats are to do what they are doing; and second, how surreal the partisan divide has now become: we have moved way beyond any hope of normalization or reconciliation. Over the next twelve months, as Schiff, Nadler, et al. try to hound Mr. Trump out of office, the Barr team reveals the results of its investigations, and we descend again into the quadrennial hysteria of a presidential campaign, the American cauldron will seethe and boil with a vehemence that we haven’t seen, perhaps, since the 1850s. And: no matter what happens in the election, things won’t simmer down.

Back soon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

Spiders From Mars

November 20, 2019 – 10:38 pm

Staying on message from our Bowie post of a few days ago, here’s a story about Life On Mars  —  and not just lichens or something, but bugs.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (1)

Poetry Corner

November 19, 2019 – 12:20 am

Steve Sailer famously said that “political correctness is a war on noticing”.

There are patterns to reality so stubborn and prevalent that they enable us to make more or less reliable predictions. This is “induction”: reasoning, from accretion of the particular, to general rules that we believe in with increasing confidence as the data accumulate.

When we do this about people, though, we get ourselves in trouble with the guardians of political correctness, even though the regularities are often as persistent as any we find elsewhere in nature. (There are exceptions to this prohibition, of course, as any heterosexual white male can tell you these days).

I thought a little doggerel might help sum things up, so here it is:

“I’m fine with induction,
When it brings me good news –
But I’ll raise quite a ruction
When it breaks my taboos.”

 

By Malcolm | Posted in Marginalia | Comments (1)

And Now For Something Completely Different

November 17, 2019 – 12:33 am

A little while back I had David Bowie’s 1977 song Heroes — probably my favorite of all his songs, and that’s saying something — stuck in my head. I thought it might be fun to go downstairs to the studio and see if I could knock it off on my own.

Here’s a rough mix of the result. (All instruments and vocals by yours truly.)

 

P.S. Headphones or proper speakers, if you’d be so kind — please don’t listen on those ratty little laptop speakers. Thanks.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (9)

President Pete?

November 14, 2019 – 11:23 pm

I see that Pete Buttigieg is now leading the pack of Democratic candidates in polls for the Iowa caucus.

I don’t think Mr. Buttigieg, should he win the nomination, will do very well at all against Donald Trump in the general election. It should go without saying that we would not even know his name if he were not gay (I’m sorry, but please don’t kid yourself that this isn’t so, any more than Barack Obama would have leapt into the White House had he been white), but I remarked to myself a while back that I think he might even be a more plausible candidate if he actually seemed more gay than he does. We’re used to that sort of gay man, and it’s kind of mainstream now.

As it happens, the same thing occurred to none other than “Bronze Age Pervert”, who I’ve mentioned here recently. In a recent podcast he had this to say:

But you see, [Buttigieg] is more disturbing to a normal American than let’s say a gay queeny guy would be. I think that gay effeminate queeny guy, by now most people would be – if they’re not OK with that, at least they’re tolerant, at least they’re understanding.

But a so-called masculine gay of this type – [Buttigieg] isn’t exactly “masculine.” It’s something else. It sets off serious psycho-alarms for most people not caught up in the way of delusion of the pseudo-polite society… I may talk about this another time, but among homosexuals, the so-called gay top – excuse me for talking such things, but this isn’t a family show, after all – but the so-called gay top is far more disturbing than the queeny effeminate gay.

We have already recognized this phenomenon in robotics; we call it the “Uncanny Valley”. I hope you will forgive me for applying this metaphor here — Pete Buttigieg is, after all, not a robot — but I think that when it comes to a great many ordinary American voters, a similar psychological mechanism will be in play, and it won’t help his chances.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

Hard-Hitting Journalism From The Beeb

November 13, 2019 – 10:08 pm

Commenting on our previous item about immigrant gangs in Sweden, and the wave of bombings and shootings they have brought to that previously peaceful nation, reader “Whitewall” offered up this link, from the BBC:

Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on?

The first subheading asks:

Who is to blame?

If you thought they might actually tell you, ha! — you’re new at this. Instead, we get:

“Bangers, improvised explosives and hand grenades” are behind most of the blasts, says Linda H Straaf, head of intelligence at Sweden’s National Operations Department.

Oh! I thought there might have been people to blame.

“It’s very new in Sweden, and we are looking for knowledge around the world,” says Mats Lovning, head of the National Operations Department.

For criminologist Amir Rostami, who has researched the use of hand grenades in Sweden, the only relevant comparison is Mexico, plagued by gang violence.

“This is unique in countries that pretty much don’t have a war or don’t have a long history of terrorism,” he says.

Gosh, what changed?

… 25 people were hurt when a block of flats was targeted in the central town of Linkoping…”If it was targeted then to be honest it makes us feel safer, because then the attack was not aimed to harm the public,” says Ms Bradshaw, hoping it was not a random attack.

Well yes, that’s a blessing. Almost as good as no gang bombings in your neighborhood at all, really.

The article finally does, it seems, ask the pressing question:

Who are Sweden’s criminal gangs?

Yes! That’s what we want to know!

Here’s the answer:

Swedish police do not record or release the ethnicity of suspects or convicted criminals, but intelligence chief Linda H Straaf says many do share a similar profile.

No profile in particular, mind you, just “similar”.

For some reason, the article then mentions… immigration. (Given what we’ve been told so far, I can’t imagine why this would be relevant in a piece about “Swedish gangs”, but there it is anyway.)

Ideological debates about immigration have intensified since Sweden took in the highest number of asylum seekers per capita in the EU during the migrant crisis of 2015. But Ms Straaf says it is “not correct” to suggest new arrivals are typically involved in gang networks.

Whereas it would be correct to say that gang networks overwhelmingly involve new arrivals. So we won’t say that.

It is just fantastic to see how much of modern “journalism” consist of not saying things that everybody knows. (And by the way, whatever you do, don’t mention Eric Ciaramella.)

Serious question: How much longer can this go on?

By Malcolm | Posted in Immigration, HBD, Society and Culture, Rubbish, Jihad | Comments (2)

“Swedish”

November 12, 2019 – 9:46 pm

Denmark has now instituted border checks with Sweden in response to Sweden’s inability to control its tide of violent crime. According to The Guardian:

Denmark has temporarily reinstated checks at its border crossings with Sweden after a spate of bombings and shootings in the Copenhagen area that authorities say were carried out by members of Swedish gangs.

The spot checks at ferry ports and on trains and vehicles crossing the Øresund bridge separating the Danish capital from Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, were aimed at “preventing serious and organised crime from spreading”, the police said. All travellers should be prepared to show identification, they added.

Lene Frank of the national police said: “We are targeting organised crime and aim for normal travellers to be affected as little as possible by the border control. Officers will be focused on cross-border crime involving explosives, weapons and drugs.”

You’re probably saying to yourself: “But I thought the Swedes were just mild-mannered, peaceful people who drive Volvos and shop at Ikea. What’s all this about ‘Swedish gangs’?”

You don’t hear, for some reason, that these gangs — for example, “Shottaz” and the “Death Patrol”, who like to resolve their differences with AK-47s and hand grenades — are made up of Somali Muslims and other recent African and Mideastern immigrants. To The Guardian, though, they are simply “Swedish gangs”.

Makes sense, I suppose. People might get ideas.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Immigration, HBD | Comments (5)

Back

November 12, 2019 – 8:42 pm

I’m back in Wellfleet, after an interesting weekend in Baltimore.

It’s snowing here — on November 12th. The temperature is supposed to drop well down into the twenties overnight.

I have a feeling, on no particular authority, that it’s going to be a long, cold winter.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Service Notice

November 7, 2019 – 10:40 pm

I’ll be in Baltimore this weekend at the annual conference of the H. L. Mencken Club, and driving back to Cape Cod on Monday. Should get back to business here after that.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Vlahos On Civil War, and a Repost From June On Taxonomy

November 5, 2019 – 7:06 pm

Michael Vlahos, who for years now has been discussing with John Batchelor the possibility and growing likelihood of a third American civil war, now has a new article up at The American Conservative. He writes about the steps that lead to a crisis of constitutional legitimacy, at which point the outcome is determined by a struggle of force. We are well along the way, and may already have crossed the “event horizon”.

Does all this talk of civil war seem overheated? Ask yourself: looking at the current chasm in American politics, the fundamentally incompatible visions of America the two sides hold, the degree of dehumanizing hatred they show for each other, the bloody damage already done, and the implacable fury with which they grapple for every atom of power, can we imagine some way forward in which the Right and Left just “bury the hatchet” and “hug it out”?

Of course not. This fight continues, and intensifies, until either one side is destroyed, or we work out some kind of divorce.

I repost below a post of my own, from June of this year, about the forms of civil war, and the nature of “event horizons”.
 

*        *        *

 

In David Armistead’s fascinating and insightful book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, the author distinguishes three kinds of civil war: “successionist”, “supersessionist”, and “secessionist”.

Successionist civil wars are those that are fought over which individual shall sit atop a nation’s institutional hierarchy. The king dies. Who will succeed him? In this sort of war the body of the nation’s government and institutions are not at issue, only which head shall wear the crown. History is replete with these conflicts, such as the War of the Roses.

In supersessionist civil wars, the form of the nation itself is at stake. The population has divided itself into two bitterly antagonistic parts, fighting not over the crown, but for the territory the nation occupies. Such a civil war might pit a monarch and his loyalists against rebels who want to replace the whole system. Think of France in 1789, or Russia in 1917.

In a secessionist civil war, the population occupying one part of the nation’s territory declares itself a separate body, and seeks to sever itself from the rest — taking the territory along with it. That’s what happened in America’s so-called “Revolutionary” war.

What’s the difference, then, between a revolution and a civil war? After reading Armistead’s book, it seems to me that “revolution” is just a name that the victors sometimes give to a successionist (e.g., 1688), secessionist (1775), or supersessionist (1789) civil war that the rebels win. It makes the whole thing sound more “glorious”.

Civil war, then, is a genus with (at least) three species. This raises the question: if we are heading into another civil war in America — Civil War III — what type is it?

We generally haven’t had problems with succession in America, until recently. Elections have been ugly at times, but we’ve always had a peaceful transfer of power. (That’s no small thing!) But starting with the 2000 election, that’s been changing — and the election of Donald Trump has been bitterly contested since the day it happened.

What has also been happening in recent decades, and accelerating briskly, is the division of the American population into two distinct bodies. One seeks to conserve and restore the traditional nation and institutions, while the other despises it all, and wants it gone. It seeks to displace or replace the founding ethnic and cultural stock, the Electoral College, much of the Constitution, and the fundamental American idea of a limited government that exists only to secure our natural rights, while maximizing liberty otherwise. Because the two factions disagree not merely about questions of leadership and policy, but about the very axioms of nationhood, citizenship and the purpose of government that define the polis itself, there is no basis for comity or compromise. Moreover, the visceral antipathy between the two sides grows deeper, and more dehumanizing, every day: we’ve already reached the point where many people, especially on the Left, reject any possibility of comity or fellow-feeling for their political and cultural opponents. This all falls very squarely into the supersessionist category.

When things really get hot, however, the nation may well break apart — it’s far too big to be well-governed at the level of centralization that has already occurred — and a general bloodbath might perhaps be averted by some sort of regional, secessionist process. It’s hard to see how that can work, though, as Red and Blue are so hopelessly intermingled, county by county.

Here’s something else to think about: when you’re heading into a civil war, you don’t always know, at the time, that you’ve crossed the point of no return. To say when a civil war actually became inevitable is only possible in retrospect. Because I’ve “never metaphor I didn’t like”, I’ll draw one from astrophysics:

Surrounding a black hole is what’s called the Schwarzschild radius. In a sense it’s the “surface” of a black hole; it’s the distance from the singularity at which the gravitational pull becomes so intense that the escape velocity equals the speed of light. Once you cross it, you can’t get out: nothing, not even light or information, can escape. All spacetime paths within the Schwarzschild radius must pass through the singularity itself. But this fateful boundary isn’t a hard surface of any sort — in fact, if you are falling into the black hole yourself, you might not even notice as you cross it. It’s just that once you have, you are headed for that singularity, whether you like it or not. There’s no turning back.

What all this means is that it’s too soon to know what species of civil war the next one will be, or whether it might still be avoided. (I’m not very optimistic about that, but I suppose we may still be flying just outside the fatal boundary.) Only time will tell. As I’ve written before, a civil war is nothing to hope for — but keep your powder dry.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (5)

Morsels from GKC

November 4, 2019 – 5:42 pm

I’ve been reading Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Reading in the Kindle makes it possible to highlight passages, and pick them up online (which saves a lot of copying by hand). Here are some of the ones I’ve selected so far:

‣   If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

‣   The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

‣   Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

‣   Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist… and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

‣   The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid… [A]nother symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.

‣   The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

‣   A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed… the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

‣   [T]here is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin. That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.

‣   Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), “All chairs are quite different,” he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them “all chairs.” [Note: here GKC places blame for our condition on nominalism, just as Richard Weaver did in hos book Ideas Have Consequences. See this post from three years ago.]

‣   Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.

‣   Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.

‣   We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star… We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

‣   I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

‣   But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Apophthegmata, Reason and Philosophy, Religion | Comments (1)

Does Belief in Natural Law Require Belief In God?

November 1, 2019 – 10:23 pm
This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding.

The Bronze Age Mindset discussion at The American Mind has become a symposium.

Of particular interest to me at the moment is Dan DeCarlo’s entry, An Epic Pervert, because it takes on, albeit in passing, something that I’ve been stewing over for some time now: is the natural-law/natural-rights theory of the American Founding sustainable without belief in God? The question has bothered me rather acutely since reading Thomas West’s The Political Theory of the American Founding, and since engaging with the book’s reviewer, Michael Anton, by email (and in these pages), a year ago.

In a conversation about this in an online forum, Bill Vallicella suggested one could assert that natural rights are philosophical abstracta:

Why not say that natural rights are just ‘there’ independently of the dictates of gods or mortals, and independently of their being respected or violated? Analogy: there are necessary truths, among them, the truths of logic and mathematics. A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds. Consider a world W in which there are no minds and no physical items either. Is the true proposition that there are even primes true in W? It is plausible to say Yes. But if the proposition is true in W, then it exists in W. (Anti-Meinong: an item x cannot have a property unless x exists.) Now if a truth can exist in the absence of mind (whether finite or divine) and matter, why can’t rights?

Think of a right as a kind of abstract object. If abstracta in general can exist apart from mind and matter, why not rights?

He continued:

From a practical-political POV, bringing God into political discussions in a pluralistic society is not advisable. It only incites leftists. For example, it is a mistake to bring God into the abortion debate since a powerful case against abortion can be made without the invocation of any religious premise. Why poke a pig with an unnecessary stick? Similarly, don’t say we get our rights from God. Stick to the negative claim that they don’t come from the state or from the Squad. Just say that rights such as the rights to life and liberty are natural, not conventional, and then go on to explain what could go wrong if rights are viewed as conferred by whomever is in power.

The problem with all of this is that it diverges dangerously from the political theory of the Founding. After all, it’s right there in the Declaration: “…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”

The problem is this: we hear all the time that America is unique in history in that it is a “proposition nation”: a nation built on an idea, rather than the usual basis of ethnic kinship. But if that’s all that’s available to hold the nation together — we are told, loudly, every day, that it cannot possibly be anything else, and that to think otherwise is “deplorable” — then we need to be clear about what that ideas is. Thomas West has made an extremely compelling argument that the political theory of natural law and natural rights is the essential principle of the American Founding. But if this “proposition” is all that we have, then it needs either to be accepted as an axiom, or demonstrated as a theorem. Is this possible in America today?

What might have seemed axiomatic to most people in 1776 no longer does today. In a secular, pluralistic and deeply divided society, in which tradition means nothing and every cherished principle is to be brought into the dock and made to account for itself, it’s not enough just to say “I have discerned these natural rights to be abstractions that simply exist, as a brute fact.” After all, whoever you’re arguing with can just say in response, “Well, I don’t think they exist at all”. What then?

The Founders knew very well even that even in their own time, some sort of argument was needed in order to persuade the skeptical, and they had three. They were:

1) That the laws of nature, and therefore natural rights, were established by “the God of nature”: that because God exists and created the world, that he would also create laws by which it would be ordered. These laws are discoverable by reason, and can be trusted (and should be obeyed) because they come from God, the Creator of the world, the perfect exemplar of goodness, and the possessor of absolute wisdom about what is best for us.

2) That natural law is perceptible by our moral sense;

3) That the natural law is discoverable by reason, by considering the natural “fitness of things” — in particular the conduciveness of liberty to happiness. Under this head is the idea that while it is right and just for God, in his infinite omniperfection, to be sovereign over all men, men themselves are alike enough in their imperfections that none has an inherent right of sovereignty over another.

Three readily apparent objections are possible:

Argument 1) rests upon belief in God. This was not controversial in the late 1700s, but it is today. (Back then, someone making a political argument would try his best to adduce Divine grounding; now it’s something that one tries to avoid.)

Argument 2) doesn’t tell us why we ought to obey our moral sense, or whose moral determinations are to be believed.

Argument 3) immediately descends into utilitarian arguments, definitions of “happiness”, etc. (In an email to me, which I posted here, Michael Anton answered, in much the same way that Professor West does in his book, the question of just why it is that the obvious superiority — in wisdom, intelligence, character, and education — of some people over others does not give them as much of a defensible claim to sovereignty as, say, a parent has over a child. It is a good argument, but it is, however, a practical argument rather than a natural-rights argument, and the consequences of completely abandoning the idea there may be some justifiable discrimination in the popular distribution of sovereignty — some Democrats have seriously suggested extending the franchise to sixteen-year-olds — may in practice be worse than the toleration of some natural inequality. This difficulty is of course made much worse by the admission en masse of people with no natural aptitude for, or experience with, the forms and duties of republican government.)

Professor West, in chapter 4 of The Political Theory of the American Founding, takes up each of these arguments in turn, but allows that each one, running into the objections above, falls short of compelling agreement. Even 3), which he seems to think the strongest, can only be held, in Kantian terms, as a weaker sort of imperative (my italics):

In Kantian language, it leads to a hypothetical imperative (if you want to be happy, obey the laws of nature) rather than a categorical one (it is your moral duty to obey the laws of nature). The laws of nature, founded in reason’s judgment of what is useful for human life and happiness, become morally obligatory only when they take on a juridical or legal character. If moral laws are not commands, they are only suggestions…

I do not doubt that the founders believed in the sacredness of the rights of mankind. However, we must acknowledge that reason does not lead to moral absolutes, even if political life depends in some sense on the belief in moral absolutes.

And that’s my question: if the political life of a “proposition nation” depends upon belief in its propositions, and if all of those propositions rest upon a foundation of natural law and natural rights — i.e., discernable moral absolutes — then how can it survive without a compelling basis for belief in that foundation? And doesn’t belief in the American foundation, given the weakness of arguments 2) and 3) above, require belief in God?

Along with many of the other Founders, John Adams certainly thought so:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The more pluralistic the society, and especially the more secular, the less chance there is of any sort of common agreement about the content of America’s essential principles — or, more to the point, about why we should believe in them at all. I am not at all confident that this can be fixed.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion, Reaction | Comments (8)

The Blessings Of Diversity

October 30, 2019 – 4:44 pm

Heather Mac Donald has an article up at The New Criterion about racial preferences in college admissions, with particular attention to a case making its way to the Supreme Court that cites Harvard’s discrimination against Asians. Ms. Mac Donald argues that current SCOTUS jurisprudence on racial preferences is an incoherent mess, and that when the Court takes up this case it should simply chuck out its precedents and start over.

The article begins:

On September 30, a federal district court judge in Boston upheld Harvard’s use of racial preferences in undergraduate admissions against the challenge that they discriminate against Asian-Americans. The case — Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College — will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court, the fifth time since 1978 that the Court has been asked to rule on racial admissions preferences. The Court should accept the appeal and, for the sake of its own institutional integrity, throw out its entire jurisprudence regarding college admissions. Pro-preference jurisprudence is an abomination, filled with patent fictions, logical contradictions, and vast gusts of rhetorical vapidity that should make any self-respecting jurist weep with despair. Its only purpose has been to paper over the vast academic skills gap between black students, on the one hand, and white and Asian students, on the other. In so doing, court doctrine has perpetuated the very problems it purports to solve.

You should read the whole thing, here. As usual, Ms. Mac Donald’s analysis is comprehensive, richly supported by data, and witheringly critical of the vaporous idealism, missionary zeal, and patronizing pieties of our prevailing secular religion.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Curtis Yarvin On “Bronze Age Mindset” And The Deep Right

October 29, 2019 – 12:05 am

Curtis Yarvin is back again at The American Mind. This time he is offering his own review, pace Michael Anton, of Bronze Age Mindset. (Have you read this book yet?)

Yarvin is aflame here. In this essay he argues that what truly drives culture — and downstream from culture, politics — is art: that cultural and political systems die when their aesthetic is exhausted, and that the birth of whatever is to succeed them is limned and adumbrated by the revolutionary act of imagining a new aesthetic of irresistible power and excellence.

Art, in the broadest possible sense—some might say content—is the bloodless weapon that can replace the world. The world cannot be won by force. She must be seduced by greatness.

Bronze Age Pervert, says Yarvin, knows this:

Like his ancestor Nietzsche, BAP is not “for” this, that, the other thing. His book is not a lecture but a fire. It does not teach, it burns; it is not words, but an act. And it has no message. But it does have a theme. The theme of Bronze Age Mindset is the smallness of the modern world—in mind, in space, in time.

A central theme of BAM is just this: that the aim of all life — or at least of everything that transcends what BAP calls “yeastlife” — is to master the space it inhabits. In Yarvin’s reading, BAP understands that the space a man of genuine life and awareness — and a culture appropriate to such men — must inhabit is not this shrunken, navel-gazing bubble of presentism that we see sawing off the past all around us, but the great space of all human ages. The review concludes:

The ocean is much larger than its surface. Most of it is an empty desert. As a mass of meat, a mere human army, the deep right is tiny.

Yet as a space—artistic, philosophical, literary, historical, even sometimes scientific—all fields that are ultimately arts—the deep right is much larger than the mainstream.

If we compare just the books published in 1919, to those published in 2019, we see a far wider range of perspectives. Almost all present ideas are also found in the past; but almost all ideas found in the past have vanished. Like languages, human traditions are disappearing—and a tradition is much easier to extinguish than a language.

The mainstream mind looks at its own bubble through a fisheye lens. The bubble is almost everything. All of outer space, all of history, is a tiny black fringe around it. This fringe is, of course, completely uninhabitable.

Yet in an even lens, the past is much bigger than the present. The deep right operates in deep history; it accepts no temporal or geographic boundaries. It thinks, with Ranke: all eras stand equal before God.

And if all eras are equal, so then are their ideas. Until we accept the prerevolutionary world, the old regime before this old regime, as valid and legitimate, we are not yet in contact with the true vastness of free intellectual space.

The theme of Bronze Age Mindset is that if you think your mind is broad and open, you are wrong. It is a tiny, hard lump, like a baby oyster—closed hard as cement by nothing but fear. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

This message cannot be said. It must be shown—performed. And the only way to show it is for one author, a character yet more than a character, to display mastery of that space — the whole immense space of mind and time and space outside our increasingly absurd little “mainstream” bubble.

In time this will no longer be enough. In time, every no will have been said. A yes will be required. To escape is not just to escape, but, in the end, to build.

But every beginning belongs to itself. Now anyone can look out, outside the bubble, to see a fire burning in deep space, where nothing can live and no fire should be. And that, for today, is more than enough.

This is getting interesting. Read the review here. Also: BAP now has his own podcasts, here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (8)

The Lynching of Michael Flynn

October 27, 2019 – 3:24 pm

With a hat-tip to the indefatigable “JK”:

Michael Flynn’s new attorney, the formidable Sidney Powell, has filed a devastating motion-to-dismiss in the distinguished general’s defense. It lays bare the disgraceful chicanery that the government engaged in to set him up — a sickening and abusive conspiracy, for political ends, by rogue agents in the Justice Department.

Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Our Unbiased Press

October 25, 2019 – 11:36 am

Last night I noted that the DOJ’s investigation of the Russian-collusion hit-job had become a criminal investigation. The story was originally reported by the New York Times, which still pretends to be a “news” outlet.

It is, of course, nothing of the sort. Were the Times in the business of impartial reporting, it would have given us such facts as it had managed to discover, and left the political spin to the reader. Instead we get this headline:

Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation

“Its own”? No, the investigation is into the machinations of the previous administration’s DOJ, under a completely different team of people, and a different president. By choosing this headline the editors are trying — desperately — to cast the investigation as an obvious absurdity, and to make it seem to be nothing more than distraction, a “wag the dog” PR scam by a president under withering attack.

There’s a sub-headline, too, that takes us already from news-reporting to partisan editorializing:

The move is likely to open the attorney general to accusations that he is trying to deliver a political victory for President Trump.

(To be as charitable as possible, I suppose one might say that this is actual reporting, because those “accusations” are going to come from … the New York Times.)

The story begins:

WASHINGTON — For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it.

“Repeatedly attacked…”? To quote a well-known Russian: “Who? Whom?”

“Even months after the special counsel closed it.” Well — if the Russia “investigation” was a hoax, and illegal (which the newly opened criminal investigation suggests that it may well have been), and it was aggressively pursued throughout the first two years of the current administration, with enormously destructive effect, then was Mr. Trump, who has known all along that the charges he was persecuted with were false, supposed to just forget about the whole thing once the special counsel closed it? Would you?

The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies… Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. That view factors into the impeachment investigation against him, as does his long obsession with the origins of the Russia inquiry.

How can anyone, let alone a “news” reporter, write something like this with a straight face? The investigation is about the use of the “typically independent” Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against the Obama administration’s political enemies.

The answer, of course, is fear. Even the sainted Obama himself may be within the blast radius of this investigation, and the Times is willing to throw what’s left of its own reputation on the grenade.

This, then, is America’s “newspaper of record” in 2019: Pravda on the Hudson. (We all knew this already, of course, but I couldn’t let this latest example pass by in silence.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

Now It’s Our Turn

October 24, 2019 – 9:31 pm

It appears that the DOJ’s investigation of the origins of the Russia hoax has now become a criminal investigation.

Thank you, AG Barr. And about bloody time.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Bronze Age Pervert: Response To Michael Anton

October 22, 2019 – 8:24 pm
This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding.

A few weeks ago, as I recovered from a bad cold, I posted a review, by Michael Anton, of the book Bronze Age Mindset, by an unknown author writing as “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). At the time I said:

The book is essentially a Nietzschean manifesto — though it describes itself not as a work of philosophy, but an “exhortation” — and it is above all a rousing paean to virility, hierarchy, and excellence, and a call to young men to shake off the bridling and feminizing narcotic of modernity. (You should read it, if you haven’t — take it from me, it’s really something.)

I’ll say it again: if you haven’t read Bronze Age Mindset, you should.

I was keenly interested to see Michael Anton reviewing this book. There is a small intellectual nexus that brackets what I consider the most interesting and fertile corners of the modern Right, and both BAP and Mr. Anton are part of it — along with a few others, including Curtis Yarvin and Thomas West. Between them they address, from different angles the most important political and philosophical questions of this moment in history: What is the place of the American Founding in the 21st century? Is the present crisis the result of inherent defects, or obsolescence, of the founding theory — meaning that we need to move on to something else — or is it that the founding principles remain sound, and that we must (and realistically can) find our way back to them? (In order to answer such questions about the theoretical principles of the Founding, it is necessary first to understand them, and this is why I — and Mr. Anton — think Thomas West’s recent book on the subject is important.) Are the essential American principles of natural law and natural rights sustainable in an era in which transcendent religion is dying? How can we awaken from our collective, hallucinatory fever before stubborn realities — Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings” — with “wrath and slaughter return”?

If I had to boil it all down to the two questions that vex me the most, they are: How on earth did we come to such a crisis? What are we to do?

At any rate, the members of this little “nexus”, interestingly, all seem to be getting together. (It was Curtis Yarvin, for example, who gave Mr. Anton a copy of Bronze Age Mindset.) And now BAP himself has responded, over at The American Mind, to Mr. Anton’s review. You should read the review before the response; if you haven’t yet, it’s here.

Here are some excerpts from BAP’s reply:

The problem Anton or other conservatives must face isn’t that my audience, or the “youth” in question doesn’t accept the principles of the American Founding, but that the left and thereby a large part of the establishment rejected these principles long ago. The left has been saying exactly what they plan to do for decades. They want to destroy your country, instill a death wish in the white population, set majorities against market-dominant minorities, atomize everyone: the British plan in Malaysia and a few other places but now applied domestically within a country.

…The left completely abandoned Americanism in the 1960’s; at this point they’ve also abandoned biological reality. Vitalism is all that is left against their demented biological Leninism. Encouraging health, normality, and physical nobility against their celebration of deformity, obesity, and sexual catamitism must be one of the basic functions of conservatism in our time. It is one of the reasons my message is powerful among many who are fed up with the left’s gospel of wretchedness: what is your plan to take that on?

There is a point at which, if you believe in the reality of nature, you must be ready to talk about actual nature as it exists in the world and not just “Nature” as a safe abstraction. If indeed the religion of our time is the belief in unquestioned human equality, the revolution in the biological sciences, genetics, and population genetics currently taking place will soon completely cut off its legs, even in public. In large part this has already happened, and no one believes in any real biological human equality any longer.

…We are now faced with a left that has embraced a dialectic of racial and class destruction in a context where belief in absolute human equality is professed at the same time that no one believes in it anymore. I don’t see how the vision of the Founders, widely dismissed as white nationalism even by “conservatives” when presented with its reality, has more political potential in our situation than Bronze Age perversion would.

Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (15)

Does Tulsi Gabbard Belong To A Bizarre Hindu Cult?

October 21, 2019 – 3:58 pm

Back in June, after one of the Democratic debates, I mentioned Tulsi Gabbard in generally approving terms. It was the first time I’d ever seen here, and she made a favorable impression on me — especially in comparison to the gibbering lunatics occupying the rest of the stage. A commenter suggested that she had some very odd things in her past, including involvement in a religious cult.

There appears to be something to this, and I just ran across this detailed item about it earlier today. Have a look.

I have no idea whether any of this is true, so caveat lector. But there does seem to be a fair bit of “smoke” here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (4)

William Barr On The Battle Of Religions In America

October 19, 2019 – 9:30 pm

Last week our Attorney General, William Barr, gave a speech at Notre Dame on the assault of “secularism” upon traditional religion. He touched on many of the themes I’ve been brooding over in these pages: the withering effect of the death of the transcendent, the natural-rights principles of the American Founding, and the question of whether natural law and natural rights are sustainable ideas without God (I believe they aren’t).

He speaks about the enormous human cost of the empty place in modern life that once was filled by belief in God. (Did you know, by the way, that suicide among young people is up fifty-six percent over the past ten years?)

Readers of this blog will know that I am myself not a believer, though I am not an atheist either. (See this recent post.) But I have come round to a sure belief that the loss of metaphysically transcendent religion has destructive consequences that may well be fatal for human societies.

Government cannot control the passions and appetites of men without descending into tyranny; it is necessary for the existence of a free republic that the people have the moral and civic virtue to govern themselves. They must push back, hard, against their baser impulses — and a nihilistic metaphysics gives them nothing to stand on. The Founders knew this very well indeed, and so Mr. Barr quotes John Adams:

“We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

One thing that must be understood, however, and that Mr. Barr acknowledges in passing, is that we should not think of this as a war upon religion, but rather as a war between religions: between the grotesquely mutated and deracinated Puritanism of modern-day “Progressives” — which has over the past century or so completely washed God out of its creed while retaining the most fanatically missionary aspects of its original form — and religion as the word is traditionally understood.

Read the speech here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (1)

Amy Wax On Immigration

October 18, 2019 – 8:42 pm

Back in August, the New Yorker ran an interview with Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The interview was, of course, adversarial: Professor Wax, a woman of exceptional intelligence and courage, is an outspoken conservative and defender of traditional Western values and ideas.

In this interview Professor Wax spoke about immigration, and advocated what she calls “cultural-distance nationalism” — which she has described as the view that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.”

She’s obviously right, of course. (Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I made the same argument back in 2013.) Given her prestigious position at one of the nation’s flagship schools, this makes her a threat. Indeed, I’ll admit that it was rather brave of the New Yorker to give her a platform at all, even if it was just to try to hold her up for scorn and ridicule, and to denounce her as — wait for it — a racist. The interview is full of so many “truth bombs” that a few of them likely detonated even in the minds of that magazine’s faithfully partisan readership.

Read the interview here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Immigration | Comments (7)

Home Again

October 17, 2019 – 12:26 pm

The lovely Nina and I are “stateside” once more after a two-week visit with our daughter’s young family in Vienna.

It was wonderful to see them — in particular, to be with our three-year-old and ten-month-old grandsons Liam and Declan gives us great happiness — but as someone once said, the best part of traveling is coming home again, and I couldn’t agree more. It seems as if we’ve been traveling constantly this year, far more than at any other time in our lives, and at sixty-three I’m finding it more and more exhausting. And as for economy-class air travel (our means are modest enough as to preclude more luxurious options): as the Earl of Chesterfield once said about sex, “the position is ridiculous, and the expense damnable.”

It’s just not in my nature to need the constant novelty and stimulus of travel (not that there’s much about Vienna that’s novel for us at this point, having spent so much time in that splendid place since our daughter moved there). I am perfectly content at home, with books and music and woods and sea and sky and the steady comforts of familiar things. (I realize that’s not so for everyone: the ideal retirement always seems to be imagined to be a life of constant travel, and even my Nina is much more of a happy wanderer than I am.)

Anyway, we’re back. I see a lot has been going on that’s worthy of comment. I’ve also got a thing or two to say about Vienna. The place is still a bastion of a rapidly vanishing Western way of life — and even, perhaps, of something even more universal. It will be good to get back to normal operations here, once I’ve rested up a bit.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Ginger Baker, 1939-2019

October 6, 2019 – 4:50 pm

I note with sadness, if not surprise, the death of drummer Ginger Baker. As celebrity deaths go, this is for me a pretty big one: Ginger Baker was my first drum hero, and a big part of why, about fifty years ago, I took up the instrument myself.

Mr. Baker was not, by any account, a likable person. (Apparently Jack Bruce, his bandmate in Cream, once told an interviewer years after Cream broke up that although Bruce was then living in Britain, and Baker in South Africa, he’d written to Baker asking him to move farther away.) He was, however, one of rock music’s all-time greats.

Baker was probably rock’s first “superdrummer”. (Ringo Starr was surely more famous, but he was famous as a Beatle, not for his drumming.) There were two others — Keith Moon and John Bonham — but in my opinion Ginger Baker towered over them both. This opinion was shared by Baker himself, who once said that what distinguished good drummers was the ability to swing, and that John Bonham “couldn’t swing a bag of shit.”

Nobody played like Ginger Baker. Nobody thought about the role of the drum-kit in rock music the way he did. Nobody else brought such rhythmic innovation and complexity to the Top 40, and to the ears (and opening minds) of millions of young listeners. Nobody else would have thought, for example, to invert the standard backbeat the way Ginger Baker did in “Sunshine of Your Love”, and make it seem so obviously correct that most people don’t even realize he did so. (Did you? Go and have a listen.)

Nobody sounded like Ginger Baker — the beautiful thunder of that booming Ludwig kit made every record he played on sound huge, and he understood, in contrast to the hyperactive Keith Moon, the importance of empty space and of stately, simple fills.

Thank you, sir, for all that great music, and for a lifetime of inspiration. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. (Which might not be how things work out, but…)

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (4)