The lovely Nina and I are on the road again: back to Vienna to visit our daughter and the wee bairns, and to celebrate Nina’s birthday (it’s one of those “big ones”). We’ll back in about two weeks, though I may post a thing or two from abroad.
Please feel free to browse our vast archives (5,007 posts!), or try the ‘Random Post’ link at upper right.
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s the latest insanity from the Ministry of Truth: woke math.
It’s easy to see why mathematical literacy has to go: numbers don’t lie.
Curtis Yarvin, alias ‘Mencius Moldbug’, seems to be getting back in the game. He discontinued his enormously influential blog Unqualified Reservations years ago (it has now been archived and reorganized here, minus the comment-threads), and seemed for a while to have tried to keep his head down, concentrating on his (apparently quite successful) computer-science career. But his identity had been revealed, and his writings made him radioactive. (Among other things, he found himself barred from some tech conferences once word got out that Mr. Yarvin was indeed the notorious Moldbug.)
Something seems to have changed. I don’t know if it’s just that the battle lines are so clear these days, and his cover so thoroughly blown, that he feels he might as well just come out and fight; perhaps he has also made enough money that he no longer feels the need to worry about career suicide. Whatever it is, he appears to be finding a place for himself in the Claremont Institute orbit. Not long ago, for example, in a post about Michael Anton’s review of Bronze Age Mindset at the Claremont Review of Books, I mentioned that Mr. Anton had been given the book by Mr. Yarvin. It interested me very much to know that they were friends — they both understand that the problem of good government is, at bottom, an engineering problem, but my impression had been that Mr. Anton (and Claremont/Hillsdale generally) has far more confidence in the American Founding and Constitution as an acceptable solution than Mr. Yarvin, who has leaned more toward monarchy than republicanism, does. The tension between the Moldbuggian critique of the conspicuous failures of our democratic republic to continue to provide anything close to good government, and the view of the Founding as given by Mr. Anton and Thomas West (in which the disease now afflicting us is due not to some liability in the founding principles themselves, but in our abandonment of them) is something I’ve been stewing over for a while now.
Now Mr. Yarvin has written a series of essays for The American Mind, a Claremont publication. The first has been published, with four more forthcoming. In this one, Yarvin describes a form of scepticism he calls the “clear pill” (keep in mind that it was Yarvin as Moldbug who gave us the now-ubiquitous metaphor of the “red pill” in its political context). He also outlines and contrasts two kinds of despotism: a familiar kind in which repression and coercion are used to force a single official narrative down the peoples’ throats, and another, sneakier type that gives the people a choice between two narratives — a skillful bit of “stagecraft” that tends to make people choose which one they will believe, rather than asking the right question, namely whether either of them is true. (Parents of little children all know this trick: rather than just ordering a child to eat an apple, it’s much better to present, say, an apple and a peach, and offer the tyke a choice. The former arrangement is obviously, even to a three-year-old, naked coercion, whereas the latter neatly solves the problem by stagecraft — giving the child the illusion of freedom.)
It’s good to see Curtis Yarvin back in harness. (I guess we should stop calling him ‘Moldbug’.) I won’t say more about this essay for now — it’s just the first of five parts, and I’ll wait to see what he has to say. You can read it here.
And if you’ve never read any of his original writing (which was a bolt of lightning when it first appeared, and was the seed around which the “Dark Enlightenment” coalesced), you have waited too long. You can start with his “Gentle Introduction” — the “Red Pill” — here.
From Sean Davis, reporting at The Federalist:
Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.
The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”
How convenient. More here.
Given the accusations leveled against Donald Trump for asking Ukraine to assist in corruption investigations, readers might like to have a look at this:
The White House, November 10, 1999.
To the Senate of the United States:
With a view to receiving the advice and consent of the Senate to ratification, I transmit herewith the Treaty Between the United States of America and Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters with Annex, signed at Kiev on July 22, 1998. I transmit also, for the information of the Senate, an exchange of notes which was signed on September 30, 1999, which provides for its provisional application, as well as the report of the Department of State with respect to the Treaty.
The Treaty is one of a series of modern mutual legal assistance treaties being negotiated by the United States in order to counter criminal activities more effectively. The Treaty should be an effective tool to assist in the prosecution of a wide variety of crimes, including drug trafficking offenses. The Treaty is self-executing. It provides for a broad range of cooperation in criminal matters. Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state.
I recommend that the Senate give early and favorable consideration to the Treaty and give its advice and consent to ratification.
William J. Clinton.
This treaty was ratified on 18 October 2000.
Mencius Moldbug:
[W]hen we identify progressive secularism as one thing and Protestant Christianity as another, we have basically just walked up to one of the most dangerous intellectual pathogens in Western history, said “how ya doin,” invited it to a wild hot-tub party and promised to deactivate our immune system for the evening. Is this safe epistemology? I think not.
In the wake of poor Greta Thunberg’s horrifying public enthrallment*, and the accelerating religious (yes, religious) hysteria of the Democratic Party, I invite readers to have another look at the critical final transition of Puritanism’s explicitly theistic “errand into the wilderness” into the totalizing cryptoreligion we suffer under today. The last stage of its larval, theistic form was the adoption, by the West’s Protestant elite, of the First World War as a religious crusade, described in revealing detail in a book I reviewed a couple of years ago.
Read that post here.
* I offer a term for the hijacking of a young brain by this voracious meme-plex: cordyception.
This seems timely: here are the two latest installments of John Batchelor’s ongoing conversation with historian Michael Vlahos about the darkening clouds of civil war. In these two segments (twenty minutes in all), the two discuss messianic and millenarian revolutionary movements, past and present.
Things do seem to have ratcheted up a bit, even in the past week. It all deserves further comment.
So:
In 2014, the Obama administration backs a revolution in Ukraine, intended to turn that nation away from Russia. Joe Biden, then vice-president, becomes the administration’s go-between with Ukraine. That makes Biden a powerful guy, as far as Ukraine is concerned. Biden’s kid Hunter ends up being on the board of a corporation over there, and gets millions siphoned into his bank account.
Next thing you know, there’s a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into corruption involving the corporation that’s funnelling money to Biden’s son. Biden goes over there and tells Ukraine that if they don’t fire the prosecutor, he’ll block a billion-dollar U.S. loan guarantee. Within hours, the prosecutor is fired. (There’s audio of Biden boasting about this.) That’s obstruction of justice at the highest level.
Now, the president of the U.S. is said to have called Ukraine asking them to look into this. There are no threats made, nor goodies offered — just a request for an investigation.
And this is a Trump scandal?
The militant Islamist group Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, is also one of the world’s biggest organized-crime cartels, dealing in drugs, weapons, and money-laundering on a global scale to support its jihad. During the Obama administration, the DEA mounted a massive investigation, and was prepared to mount an enormous legal assault on the syndicate — which was deeply engaged in criminal activities in the U.S. — but the initiative was stymied by the White House, because the president feared that it would interfere with the deal with Iran that he and John Kerry were trying to put together.
The investigation was called Operation Cassandra. (How apt that name would become was, I’m sure, not apparent at the time.) I remember Andrew McCarthy talking about it on the John Batchelor show some time ago — I’ll try to find a recording — but I’ve just run across a detailed report of this fiasco at Politico.
As Edmund Burke said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” (Or, in this case, to be prevented from doing anything.) Read the sad story here.
The New York Times, fresh from beclowning itself over the weekend with a shameless (and journalistically indefensible) partisan attack on Brett Kavanaugh, gave further evidence today that the once-respected paper is truly in the toilet: a “woke” piece about the oppression of women by — I am not making this up — the “poo-triarchy”. Here’s the “head”-line:
We read:
Poop shame is real — and it disproportionately affects women, who suffer from higher rates of irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. In other words, the patriarchy has seeped into women’s intestinal tracts. Let’s call it the pootriarchy.
Girls aren’t born with poo shame — it’s something they’re taught.
“Taught”? Well, not by me, though as a cisgendered white male I’m sure my protestations will fall on deaf ears. I swear, though: I seriously can’t remember the topic ever even coming up at any of our weekly Patriarchs planning sessions; we’re usually way too busy figuring out new ways to keep women’s salaries down below that 77% mark, discussing techniques for interrupting them at business-meetings, strategizing about making sure they doubt their aptitude for math and science, researching methods for crushing their self-esteem, etc.
Meanwhile, what’s with this picture accompanying the article?
Finding myself with nothing interesting to say tonight about the passing scene (I’m beginning to worry that, after almost five thousand posts, I may well have said it all already), I’ll take a moment to plug a YouTube channel I’m keen on.
This will be of interest only to a small subset of readers: drummers and aspiring drummers. If that isn’t you, check back again soon, by which time the Muse may have returned my calls, and I will have found something new to say about the usual topics.
But if you are still here, then I will recommend to you the instructional channel of one Rob “Beatdown” Brown, which is here.
I’ve played drums since sixth grade or so, and was pretty serious about it until my early twenties, at which point I started working at Power Station Studios in New York City. From that point on drumming had to take a back seat, for a variety of reasons: no free time to be in bands or even to practice, no place to keep a kit in my tiny apartment, a single-minded focus on becoming the best engineer I could be, etc. So from that point on it was always a hobby (although I did play the odd part here and there in the studio, including replacing a drum track on a live Rolling Stones album in which a technical problem had made the original track unusable).
Last year, though, I came away from my annual musical gathering on Star Island feeling pretty shabby about my playing — I’d really neglected to practice enough, and it showed. So I resolved to do something about it.
Enter Rob Brown. I knew that YouTube was a rich resource for musical coaching, and when I found Rob’s channel I knew I’d struck gold. He is an outstanding player himself, and has a teaching style that approaches even the driest of exercises — rudiment drills, for example — from an intuitive, feel-based angle. Given that I’ve been playing for about fifty years, I’m no beginner, and there are somethings I do very well already — and his channel has something for every level of drummer. In just the few months I’ve been working through his videos, every aspect of my playing has improved.
So if you are a drummer, and if you aren’t Peter Erskine or Jack DeJohnette, etc. (if so, hi guys), you should go and have a look.
Here’s an amusing story:
Ship With Climate Change Warriors Caught in Ice, Warriors Evacuated
To quote Philip K. Dick once again: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” The problem with the modern Left’s new religion is that, having shot Heaven down from the sky, they are forced into extravagant beliefs about the world we actually inhabit, and about the people who inhabit it — beliefs that are easily tested against objectively existing natural facts.
Meanwhile, here’s a peer-reviewed possibility to consider: that climate models are rubbish.
I’m gradually getting better from that debilitating chest-cold I came down with on Monday, and thought I was well enough to take on the Blank Page once again. So I sat down to write, and … nothing. (Maybe in another day or so.)
So, instead, I’ll direct you to a review, at CRB, of a most unusual book I read earlier this year: Bronze Age Mindset, by an unknown author writing under the pseudonym “Bronze Age Pervert”. 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.)
The review is by Michael Anton, who says he was given the book by a dinner-guest: none other than Mencius Moldbug!
Read it here. I’ll have something of my own to write about soon, I’m sure.
I see that the Kakistocracy blog, which Bill Vallicella had linked to just yesterday, is gone. That’s bad: the author, Porter (who used to comment here occasionally), had exceptional sharpness of mind, wit, and pen.
Porter, if you should see this: what happened? Drop me a line.
I’m back from my annual musical get-together on Star Island, but am in no shape for writing just yet. It was a fantastic weekend — we spent the days working out the more difficult material, and hosted performances/parties for all the other guests on the island every night into the wee hours — but after four nights of going to bed at 2:30 a.m. and getting up at 8 or so for breakfast (not to mention liberal consumption of adult beverages every evening), I was completely exhausted, and ended up coming down with a nasty chest cold during a long day of travel yesterday.
I’ll be back in harness in a day or two.
I’m off to my annual musical retreat in the far-flung Isles of Shoals. Back on Tuesday, if we aren’t all washed out to sea by climate change.
Engineering firms have a difficult problem to solve: the laws of the actually existing world upon which their products operate are unsentimental and unforgiving. The judges of an engineer’s work are not feelings or opinions, but the simple and ruthlessly objective criteria of success or failure, and the stakes are high. If a bridge is not designed in conformance with the iron laws of physics, it will collapse — and people will die. If the software controlling an airliner’s aerodynamics crashes, so will the plane — and people will die. And so on.
Philip K. Dick summed it up neatly: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” And so the problem leaks out of the engineering itself, into the human-resources department of engineering firms: in order to produce reliably engineered products, they need reliable engineers. As far as the company is concerned it doesn’t matter in the least what they look like, or where they come from, but they have to be smart enough, and experienced enough, to know how to do what they will be asked to do, and to know all of the many ways that the real world — which works tirelessly in every age to break everything to pieces — can make their product fail.
This sharply narrows the field of candidates, and another class of stubborn realities — the uneven statistical distribution of the requisite aptitudes, dispositions, and specific cognitive qualities among the sexes and various human populations, as well as the varying habits and preferences of diverse cultures — becomes apparent. Most companies have some wiggle-room here: they can alter their products, and even relax their standards, to accommodate prevailing fashion. Engineering firms can’t do that, though, without inviting catastrophe, because they must satisfy not only their customers, but the immutable laws of physics and logic. So the demographics of tech companies naturally mirror the unequal distribution of these necessary qualities and inclinations in various human groups.
Those who have the talent and inclination to be good engineers share some other characteristics as well: they generally like the work and are willing to put in long hours getting it right. I can tell you from long personal experience that doing good engineering can be deeply rewarding and well worth the effort, and the best engineers take a lot of pride in their work. They don’t generally need to go looking for self-fulfillment elsewhere — and I can assure you that what other engineers respect, and what their employers value, is nothing more or less than the quality of the work. If you can deliver the goods, it usually doesn’t matter if you are male, female, black, white, gay, Asian, or anything else. The lead engineer of the software team I worked on for many years was a black man from Jamaica, and he was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met (and a wonderful boss besides).
So, you see, it’s intrinsic to the job that those who excel at it are going to be a certain type of person: intelligent, hard-working, and good at logical, quantitative, and abstract thinking. And, perhaps most importantly of all, they have to get used to having their ideas and models refuted, as a matter of routine, by contact with the real world.
That last part’s a big deal. Engineering is not for ideologues. If you can’t abandon a cherished belief because it just doesn’t work in the real world, you shouldn’t be an engineer. You can’t impose your wishes on physics, or mathematics, or logic; they exist objectively, and they just are what they are. If you don’t think there even is an objectively existing world — if you think that everything is a “social construct” — then I’m sorry, but you should not be designing bridges. And so it is that the iron laws of nature specify, in turn, that engineers will be — must be — a particular sort of person. There’s no such thing as black engineering, or white engineering, or gay or feminist engineering, relative to some subjective, identity-based “truth”. There’s only one objectively existing world out there: the one that’s going to try to break whatever it is you’re building. And there are only two kinds of engineers: good ones and useless ones.
With all of that in mind, here’s a story from the Daily Mail, in which a black female Google mobile-app developer (who, it should be noted, has produced on the side an app called Sutrology that “shows sex positions and relationship compatibility based on zodiac signs”) registers an ideological gripe about these stubborn realities:
‘They hire someone who’s exactly like them, but black’: Google engineer claims that Silicon Valley hires the ‘whitest black candidates’ in new podcast interview
What’s her beef? I have bolded the relevant passages:
[Google employee Bria] Sullivan said that she believes Silicon Valley companies ‘hire someone that meets exactly their qualifications and I feel like this is a problem‘.
‘And when I was saying there’s like a hiring problem, a lot of what people are asking for is they don’t realize that they’re asking for a white person, they’re not specifically doing that, but only for the most part, mostly white people will qualify for the criteria that they give, and they might find a black person that does, and it might end probably not going to be the type of black person that is actually going to do the thing that we want because it’s what they want.
What, exactly, is “the thing we want” isn’t made clear, but clearly, it isn’t the “thing” the company exists to do, namely to make reliably well-engineered products that people actually want to use. Who, one might ask, is working for whom here?
More here.
We hear all the time — it’s a favorite trope of our current crop of Democratic candidates — that the United States has a shamefully high percentage of people living in poverty.
Not so fast, say the authors of a new study. Where these accusations go wrong is that they measure only paychecks, and not all of the other benefits that low-income Americans receive. A far better way to assess poverty is not income, but consumption of goods — and when you do that, America comes out looking very well indeed:
On average, a person among the poorest 20 percent of Americans consumes more goods and services than the average person in Canada, Greece, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, Slovenia, Slovakia, Israel, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Chile, Hungary, Turkey, and Mexico.
(Cultural, psychological, and spiritual poverty is quite another matter, of course.)
Learn more here.
Our friend and commenter, the indefatigable JK, sent along a link to a story that’s attracting lots of attention today: climate “scientist” and rent-seeking fearmonger Michael Mann has lost his libel suit against the Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball.
Dr. Ball had expressed in public his belief that Dr. Mann’s infamous “Hockey Stick” graph — which artfully flattened the historic temperature record in order to suggest that a recent warming spell was an unprecedented calamity brought about by human activity — was a flim-flam put together by a Procrustean torture of the actual data. He went so far as to make the amusing suggestion that Dr. Mann, rather than being at Penn State, ought to be in the “state pen”.
Mann sued Ball for libel, but as the trial dragged on year after year, Mann steadfastly refused to “show his work”, presumably because it would reveal him to be just the fraud that Dr. Ball had said he was. Now the clock has run out, and the court has ruled in favor of Dr. Ball — and has, for good measure, held Mann liable for all the court costs as well.
It isn’t over quite yet — Dr. Mann has 30 days to appeal — but the ruling in favor of Dr. Ball certainly does “warm” the heart.
More here.
Back in 2009, Mencius Moldbug, in Part 1 of his seminal Gentle Introduction essay, took up the question of the curious ideological synchronization (he used the heavily freighted word Gleichschaltung) of our universities and other cultural institutions.
[W]e can see easily that Harvard is attached to something, because the perspective of Harvard in 2009, while wildly different from the perspective of Harvard in 1959, is not in any way different from the perspective of Stanford in 2009. If a shared attachment to Uncle Sam isn’t what keeps Harvard and Stanford on the same page, what is? It’s not football.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.
This idea of an awakened Cthulhu behind the coalescence and synchronization of what Moldbug called the “Cathedral” has exerted a pull — perhaps I should say a Call — on neoreactionary thinking ever since. Today I have for you a recent essay from Thomas Bertonneau examining the orgiastic, sacrificial cult of modern Leftism through a Lovecraftian lens. The parallels are many, and are easily as horrifying as Lovecraft’s original story.
Read it here.
The New York Times has a spot of bother in the PR department today: its chief political editor is in hot water for blatant anti-Semitism.
There isn’t a peep about this at the paper’s website (not surprising, I suppose, given that this is the same rag that bent over backwards to cover up the Holocaust) — or, for example, on CNN. Can you imagine what the reaction would be if it were Fox News’s political editor instead?
There’s no hypocrisy here, though, because the mainstream media are only following a simple and consistent principle, one that I first pointed out in the spring of last year:
Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always.
President Trump made an encouraging remark yesterday about the possibility of ending the nation’s lunatic policy of granting U.S. citizenship to any child whose mother managed to get her uterus onto American soil, by any means whatever, before giving birth.
“We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship,” the president said. It seems he is considering revoking the policy, at least as it applies to “birth-tourists” and illegal aliens, by executive order — which should be perfectly within his Constitutional powers, as the policy of giving away citizenship in this way originated not in any act of Congress, but in the Executive Branch’s Department of State.
The reaction from the Left has been just as you’d expect. Laurence Tribe Tweeted that “This fuxxxng racist wants to reverse the outcome of the Civil War, for God’s sake.” Kamala Harris suggested that Mr. Trump “should ‘seriously’ consider reading the Constitution.”
Well, what does the Constitution say? Both Tribe and Harris are referring to the post-Civil-War Fourteenth Amendment, the purpose of which was to confer full citizenship on former slaves and their children. It says this:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
The key is that qualifier “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, which was inserted to distinguish between former American slaves and those aliens and visitors who were the subjects of an external sovereignty. To imagine that the framers of this amendment, or those who ratified it, ever intended it to apply to any pregnant woman who manages to sneak across our borders, or to a Chinese national who pays a visit to the Northern Marianas a day before delivering her child, is, in the etymologically literal sense of the word, preposterous — it reads a (still controversial) opinion of the present day into the deliberations of the past — and I’m sure that both Mr. Tribe and Ms. Harris know it. In their hands the Fourteenth Amendment is simply another bayonet on the political battlefield; a weapon they have picked up from the wounded body of the enemy.
For a more detailed look at the issue, read this.
Mr. Trump should make the executive order, and let the courts have a go at it. Truth, justice, and history are on his side.
A young man by the name of Joshua Lawson, who is a graduate student at Hillsdale College, has written a vigorous response to the New York Times’s Orwellian project of “reframing” all of American history as a Marxist narrative of racial oppression. The essay is published at The Federalist.
Mr. Lawson provides moral and historical context:
Slavery was and is an abomination. The ownership of one man over another is an affront to both natural law and our God-given inalienable rights as human beings. It is an evil part of America’s past—as well as that of nearly every nation on earth. The fact that slavery has a universal heritage does not absolve American slave owners, but it does provide a necessary historical context.
During the 17th century, slavery was, sadly, an accepted part of life throughout the world. By A.D. 1619, slavery had existed for more than 5000 years, dating back at least to Mesopotamia. At the time the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish and Portuguese had been enslaving blacks and native peoples in the New World for more than 100 years. Native American tribes had been enslaving each other for who knows how long before that.
What’s notable about the United States is not that its citizens held slaves, but that the West’s crusade to end slavery began after Jefferson penned the aspirational words of America’s founding document…
… Slavery wasn’t abolished until 1834 in the British Empire, 1848 in French colonial possessions, 1858 in Portuguese colonies, 1861 in Dutch Caribbean colonies, 1886 in Cuba, and 1888 in Brazil.
The pace of abolition was even worse in the non-Western part of the world. Barbary pirate slavers from North Africa enslaved more than a million Europeans until the end of WWI, three times the number of Africans sold to America. Slavery wasn’t abolished in China until 1910 (but was still practiced until 1949) and didn’t completely end in Korea until 1930. Qatar allowed slavery until 1952, Saudi Arabia and Yemen until 1962, and Mauritania until 1980—nearly 200 years after it was abolished by the state of Massachusetts.
Using the latest reliable figures from 2016, the Walk Free international human rights organization estimates that on any given day 40.3 million men, women, and children will be victims of modern-day slavery in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Tragically, that number is a low estimate, given the lack of reliable data from Arab states and the prevalence of slavery that still exists there.
As some wag once said, “if the Left didn’t have double standards,they wouldn’t have any standards at all.” Lawson calls out the Times for providing an illustrative example:
The entire framing of The New York Times’ effort deserves to be questioned. Reconstructing the American founding to the date of the first slave is a standard the Times is only placing on the United States. Is America’s “newspaper of record” about to embark on a grand venture of politely telling every other nation its celebratory founding is to be recalibrated to the date of its first instance of slavery? No, the Times’ project is deliberately—and solely—aimed at the United States.
Leftists have been engaging in this sort of deception for generations. Between the 1930s and 1980s, every perceived shortcoming of the United States was put under a microscope while the left was largely silent on the atrocities of communist tyrannies.
The left holds contempt and disdain for America’s ideals. In their heart-of-hearts, honest leftists cannot deny the unbelievable success of the United States and its institutions nor the appeal of its founding principles abroad. So, the left’s only recourse has been to mount its arguments by comparing American history to a Utopian standard they never use with any other country.
In my own post on this Orwellian “project” a few days ago, I wrote:
Washington, Jefferson, Madison — where will these names be in a few years if the Times has its way? If it is the duty of True Believers to cast out sin, and the American nation and its Constitution rest upon a foundation of unforgivable sin, then must not that foundation itself be broken up and cast away?
Mr. Lawson makes the same point:
If America is as insidiously evil as the 1619 Project paints, what other recourse but to rip out its cancerous foundations root and stem? Leftists are banking that the outrage caused by the 1619 Project will provide them the political capital required to move to the next stage: a full reconfiguration of America into their image.
In the novel 1984, the Party’s slogan asserted a simple, horrifying principle:
“Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
The New York Times, feeling its grip on the future slipping in the wake of the 2016 election and the failed coup of “Russiagate”, now bends all of its power toward seizing control of America’s past. To do so, though, they must maintain control of the present — and we must not let them have it.
Mr. Lawson’s essay is here.
Problems continue with the site: apparently my hosting service recently migrated the website to a new database, and in doing so corrupted thousands of pages (punctuation symbols have been replaced little strings of gibberish). It appears that the company’s tech support has been outsourced to India (this is what happens when tech companies get too big), and it has been impossible, so far, to get anyone to understand the scope of the problem.
If any of you had any lingering illusions about the New York Times being any sort of impartial “news” agency, you can put them to rest. In an all-hands staff meeting last week, executive editor Dean Baquet announced in explicit terms that, the paper’s propaganda war against Donald Trump having suffered a defeat in the Russian-collusion campaign, it would now pivot to attacking both Mr. Trump and the American nation itself as irredeemably racist. It is committing itself to what it calls the “1619 Project” (named for the year the first African slaves were brought to the North American continent) and will devote the next two years to persuading its readers that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”
This is startlingly irresponsible. At a time when social cohesion is collapsing before our eyes, public discourse is as venomous as it has been at any point in our history, and both historians and laymen warn that we seem to be drifting toward civil war, the Times has chosen to fan the flames of faction and hatred. And where the Times goes, so goes half the nation: what was already a bitterly polarized national election will now become a holy war, and very possibly a race war.
It is apt that this follows by only a few days the essay by Michael Anton that we linked to last week, and from which we excerpted this passage:
This is how the script goes: target a complex system that has been in place for centuries or longer; impose a new agenda in conflict with natural limits; stress that system beyond the breaking point; blame the inevitable reactions less on actual, individual bad actors than on an entire ecosystem of bad people; punish those bad people as a class; impose mass “reeducation” and “training” via ham-fisted propaganda; intensify the stresses on the system even further.
The people at the Times know very well what the effect of this “project” will be: by intensifying the zeal of its own army of cryptoreligious crusaders, it seeks to encourage new extremes of policy and local action against the enemy (i.e., traditionally minded white Americans). It will accelerate the denunciation and repudiation of every aspect of the Founding, and of the greatest names in American history and the national mythos. Washington, Jefferson, Madison — where will these names be in a few years if the Times has its way? If it is the duty of True Believers to cast out sin, and the American nation and its Constitution rest upon a foundation of unforgivable sin, then must not that foundation itself be broken up and cast away? The thing speaks for itself.
Half the nation, of course, rightly sees this crusade as a holy war against everything they honor and cherish, against everything that their fathers labored to build for their children, and that many of them fought and died for. They will not go quietly. They will react, and they will fight back. And so the flames will rise.
But let’s say the Times and the adherents of its Jacobin cult carry the day (they won’t, but let’s just say they do). The ancien regime is toppled, the Constitution discarded as nothing more than a manual of injustice, the names of the Founding Fathers disgraced and stripped from the nation’s books, places, and currency. Then what?
The lesson of civil wars and revolutions throughout history is that it is far easier to burn a civilization down than to build one up; one pile of rubble is more or less the same as another. When your dreams come true, Dean Baquet, and you are standing at last upon the rubble of what was once the United States of America, I hope you will forgive us for asking: what now?
Still having problems here: all my old posts with block-quotes (thousands of them) now have broken character-encoding for various punctuation marks. I believe this is due to a database migration that Bluehost did recently (though I could be mistaken). They are looking into it.
Michael Anton has published an outstanding essay at Claremont’s American Mind — his best, I think, since his influential “Flight 93 Election” piece back in 2016.
The essay begins with a discussion of the mainstream-media narrative surrounding mass shootings, and of the collaboration of the pseudoconservative pundits he calls the “Vichycons” in support of that narrative. But this is just a preamble to the most important part of the essay: a piercing analysis of the great battering-ram the Left is using to break the ramparts of the traditional American nation.
This is how the script goes: target a complex system that has been in place for centuries or longer; impose a new agenda in conflict with natural limits; stress that system beyond the breaking point; blame the inevitable reactions less on actual, individual bad actors than on an entire ecosystem of bad people; punish those bad people as a class; impose mass “reeducation” and “training” via ham-fisted propaganda; intensify the stresses on the system even further.
The beatings will continue until morale improves. But morale never improves and so the beatings never cease. The beaters know this, and relish it.
I’m not going to post further excerpts here; you must go and read the whole thing. We have all understood for some time now that this is the strategy we are up against, but I think you have never seen it all laid out with such clarity and force. Read it, and share it.
The essay is here.
The site’s having problems: comments are not working. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Update: There seems to be a problem with this WordPress theme. I may have to switch to another one.
Update: Fixed. Back soon.
…there’s no place like home. The lovely Nina and I are back from our little trip abroad. We visited Slovenia and Croatia with our daughter and her young family, who had driven down from their home in Vienna to meet us, and we had a fine time getting to know these beautiful places a bit — but as they say, the best thing about traveling is coming home.
We are weary from the time-change, and from yesterday’s long day of travel, and we have a lot to do do to get our house back in order after having put all our stuff away to rent the place while we were gone. But it’s good to be back to familiar things (in particular it’s nice to have a proper shower that isn’t a tub with a little hose, and to have ice available at the push of a button), and to have access to my computer again.
I will be getting the blog up and running again in the next day or two. In particular there are a couple of outstanding essays I want to share with you.
Sorry about the near-total lack of content here. We’ve had a steady stream of houseguests, and I’ve hardly been online at all. I’ve paid as little attention to the news as possible, and have spent my scanty solitary time reading (Bruce Catton, Thomas West, and Forrest McDonald), working on a couple of mixes in the basement studio, and practicing my drum rudiments in preparation for this year’s musical retreat to Star Island. What’s more, the lovely Nina and I will be out of the country for a couple of weeks, and I’m not taking my computer, so the blog will be probably be idle until mid-August.
As for current events:
I’ve been hearing a lot about Robert Mueller’s Congressional testimony yesterday, but I didn’t see any of it, so I can’t comment — other than to say that it appears to have been a big disappointment for the Democrats, which is always good news. Even Trump himself must be getting tired of all this winning.
Glancing across the pond I see that Boris Johnson is the new Prime Minister. He’s certainly a smart and energetic person. Regarding Brexit (regarding which, to the extent that I care at all, I am of course on the Leave side), I’m interested to see what happens with the Irish border.
The media are shouting that a new scientific paper claiming that previous warming periods were merely local “drives a stake through the heart” of global-warming skeptics. I’ve just checked my own ticker, however, and saw no signs of woody impalement. Here are some of the reasons why.
There may be other stories worth a mention, but for now I can’t be bothered. I’ll get back in the saddle in a few weeks. Thanks for your patience, readers, and I hope you are all having a lovely summer.
In response to a recent shooting spree, New Zealand decided it would disarm its citizens. The citizens, however, like their fellow Antipodeans in Australia following a similar attempt at confiscation some years ago, have generally refused to comply. Good for them.
Good for them. All that such policies accomplish is to make criminals of decent citizens, put them at a defensive disadvantage against violent offenders, remove an essential bulwark against government tyranny, and to incentivize a new black market.
Thomas Jefferson, in his Commonplace Book, quoted the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria on laws restricting the carrying of arms:
They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
Learn more about the stiff-necked Kiwis here.
I’ve paid little attention to the news over the past few days, but two related stories have percolated through. The first is the decision by the city of Charlottesville, VA, to put an end to its annual celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.
Older readers, who received their education prior to the Ministry of Truth having taken over our nation’s schools, will recognize Thomas Jefferson’s name. Among other things, he was the fledgling American nation’s third president, and was also the author of a relatively important historical document known to racists, fascists, xenophobes, and bigots across the fruited plain as the “Declaration of Independence”. Charlottesville, meanwhile, is the home of the University of Virginia, and of Jefferson’s estate, Monticello.
The second item was the decision by Nike, Inc., a company that uses foreign slaves to manufacture sportswear popular with American youngsters and celebrity athletes, to cancel a line of shoes featuring the nation’s first flag. That flag, which featured thirteen stars and thirteen stripes representing the original American colonies, was designed in 1776 (the same year, as it happens, that the scoundrel Jefferson produced his “Declaration of Independence”) by a woman named Betsy Ross. She presented it to another notorious racist and blackguard by the name of George Washington, who was himself a ringleader of the criminal cadre responsible for the creation of the great stain on history that we call “The United States of America”.
Astonishingly, rather than having been consigned to the dustbin of oblivion — as it surely soon will be, if there is any justice in this world — the name “Washington” lives on in various place-names across the continental expanse of Native American land currently under illegal occupation by the government headquartered in “Washington, District of Columbia.”. (Adding insult to injury — and please, don’t even get me started on “Columbia”… )
Okay, snark aside: things are moving faster by the day, and this latest advance — the attainder of our most potent symbol, the natal American Flag — is a direct and audacious attack on the very tap-root of American unity and identity. If we are willing to let these people dissolve our attachment to both the Founders and the flag — indeed, to despoil, desecrate, and diabolize all of our nation’s early history — there truly will be nothing of America left that anyone could properly call a nation.
Please listen to John Batchelor’s most recent conversation with historian Michael Vlahos on this most recent acceleration of our cold (for now) civil war. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.
This morning’s assortment of email alerts included a fine short essay by Anthony Esolen, writing at American Greatness on the subject of “toxic masculinity”. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a longish excerpt:
We’ve all been hearing plenty about “toxic masculinity’ these days, and never from people who trouble to tell us what strong, virtuous, and noble masculinity might look like. That should not surprise us. If someone should use the phrase “toxic Judaism,’ we would not expect from him a wistful description of gentle, intelligent rabbis studying for many years each phrase of the Scriptures and all the centuries of commentary thereupon, or a call for Jews to return to their heritage. We would expect rather a sense that all Judaism is more or less toxic, and the less of it a Jew might have, so much the better. In other words, we would expect sheer bigotry.
And yet I can see a paradoxical use for that phrase, “toxic masculinity.’ Many drugs, we know, are medicinal in small doses but toxic in large doses. The reverse applies here. Masculinity is the drug that is dynamic, creative, and protective in large doses, but querulous, selfish, irresponsible, and dangerous in small doses. And we find it to be so in some rather strange places.
Let me explain. I recall many years ago a study which showed that prison inmates with lower levels of testosterone tended to get into fights more often; and feminists, not known for thinking past a single move on the chessboard, concluded that it therefore proved that testosterone had nothing to do with aggressiveness. Of course it proved no such thing. Every boy knows that the bully is never the strongest kid in the class. The bully is the one who feels his weakness or inadequacy and takes it out on boys who are smaller than he is. The more manly you are, the more you will command simply by your presence. No announcement is needed.
A man’s man does not raise his hand in anger against a woman. He despises men who do that: he considers them to be less than the mud on the sole of his shoe. Women, for their part, are attracted to strong and virile men for the protection they will afford them, because women are vulnerable””smaller and weaker than teenage boys, even when they are not bearing a child or taking care of an infant or of small children. To use the old poetic image, she is the fruitful and “marriageable vine’ that clings to the tall and strong but otherwise barren elm.
We may find “toxic masculinity,’ then, wherever there is toxic aggression but without manliness, without the sense that power is to be used sparingly and always for protection of the weaker, without the strict accountability that the man demands of himself, blaming himself first for things that go wrong, while giving credit to others when things go right. The more masculine you are, the more confident you are that you need not prove your manhood by swagger, by picking on the weak, by pumping yourself, and by stiffing those who have assisted you.
There’s a reason why “virile” and “virtuous” have the same etymological root, and it’s up to us men to keep that ancient and honorable virtue alive. (Indeed, it’s our duty — and the mephitic cultural ascendance of dessicated feminists and epicene soy-boys should remind us that our civilization depends on it.)
In his book Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, Forrest McDonald had this to say (my emphasis):
Public virtue entailed firmness, courage, endurance, industry, frugal living, strength, and above all, unremitting devotion to the weal of the public’s corporate self, the community of virtuous men. It was at once individualistic and communal: individualistic in that no member could be dependent upon another and still be reckoned a member of the public; communal in that every man gave himself totally to the good of the public as a whole. If public virtue declined, the republic declined, and if it declined too far, the republic died. Philosophical historians had worked out a regular life cycle, or more properly death cycle, of republics. Manhood gave way to effeminacy, republican liberty to licentiousness. Licentiousness, in turn, degenerated into anarchy, and anarchy inevitably led to tyranny.
So, brothers, as we prepare to enjoy and honor our nation’s birthday, remember: the stakes are high. Man up.
From Richard Fernandez: what happened in Portland this weekend — an unholy merger of self-imagined virtue with willingness to inflict terror — is nothing new. (Just ask Robespierre.)
Things might be a little slow around here for a bit; we have our children and grandchildren visiting, and the strife-torn world seems far away. Which is nice.
In last night’s post, I wrote that, based on what I’d just seen, I believed that Donald Trump will be re-elected in 2020. The impression, however, that the ten people on stage last night had made on me was so strong — the craziness so palpable — that I had, in the moment, forgotten to keep in mind the one person from the previous night’s debate who might actually stand a chance against Mr. Trump: Tulsi Gabbard, a Samoan-American Hindu now serving as a Congresswoman from Hawaii. (I think Michelle Obama might have a shot as well, should she enter the race, but so far she’s on the sidelines.)
Ms. Gabbard is intelligent, attractive, and articulate, with a beautiful speaking voice. She is a (non-combat) military veteran, and a committed skeptic of military adventurism. At the Wednesday debate, she seemed an adult among children. She appeared briefly on Tucker Carlson’s show last night to explain her anti-interventionist position; you can see the video here.
Ms. Gabbard easily won Drudge’s pick-the-winner poll, and was the most-searched name on Google, after her performance in Miami; clearly she made a strong impression on a lot of viewers. There can be little doubt, though that she is going to face terrific headwinds from both her own party and the media (but I repeat myself) as she tries to knock people like Harris and Warren off the top of the pile (Biden’s already a dead man walking, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the fix is in again for Bernie).
Here is a brief and insightful assessment from the Z-man.
Just watched the first hour or so of the second round of the Democrats’ debates.
Donald Trump will be re-elected in 2020.
The New York Times has published an article, with lovely graphics, explaining that the GOP is now an extreme right-wing party, while the Democrats — whose presidential candidates were on stage tonight calling for, among other things, abolishing private healthcare, stripping and redistributing legally earned wealth that they believe to be “in the wrong hands”, removing all legal penalties for entering the country illegally, crushing right-to-life dissenters with Federal law, and requiring Federal funding for pregnant men to abort their babies — are pretty much middle-of-the-road. Here’s the lede:
The Republican Party leans much farther right than most traditional conservative parties in Western Europe and Canada, according to an analysis of their election manifestos. It is more extreme than Britain’s Independence Party and France’s National Rally (formerly the National Front), which some consider far-right populist parties. The Democratic Party, in contrast, is positioned closer to mainstream liberal parties.
So: the Democrat platform, apparently, sits in about the same place as the median of the “manifestos” of European parties. (Why that is a good thing, given the history and current state of Europe, or why it should matter at all to Americans, is not made clear.) The article continues:
According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany ”” mainstream right-leaning parties…
To call Britain’s Conservative Party “right-leaning”, as it waddles steadily leftward, should tell you all you need to know (or already knew) about the viewpoint from which this article originated. But then there’s this:
[T]he United States’ political center of gravity is to the right of other countries’, partly because of the lack of a serious left-wing party. Between 2000 and 2012, the Democratic manifestos were to the right of the median party platform. The party has moved left but is still much closer to the center than the Republicans.
The Paper Of Record then astonished even me by offering this illustration in support of their claim:
We see that the GOP has moved hardly at all, while the Democrats (and, to a lesser extent the U.K. Conservatives) have blasted off leftward like a rocket-sled to Hell.
In other words, the Republicans — who, let’s face it, have been nothing for any real conservative to get excited about for a very long time — have become a “far-right” party through mere constancy. (And isn’t this rather what we should expect from people who call themselves “conservative”? It’s as if the Times is startled to learn that anyone over here actually meant it.)
Meanwhile, what’s all this based on? How have we located this “center” that marks the rightmost frontier of acceptable opinion? There’s an illustration for that, too:
The thing speaks for itself. (Included in the scoring, too, are other dangerous “right-wing” ideas like “Constitutionalism”, “national way of life”, “free enterprise”, and “traditional morality”.)
The thrust of the article is unambiguous: pile up enough of those items in the top half of the diagram, and soon you are way, way out of line. (And the line keeps moving, so you’d better keep up.)
We can take all of this cum grano salis, of course. We haven’t learned anything about the Times that we didn’t already know. But: as even their own diagram illustrates, the GOP looks “far-right” to the Democrats of 2019 for the same reason that someone standing on the edge of a cliff looks “far-up” to someone who has just fallen off.
Jefferson: Final cause
Madison: Formal cause
Washington: Efficient cause
America’s British colonists: Material cause
Yesterday’s post, in which I attempted a taxonomy of civil war, brought out a long and sorrowful reply from a reader by the name of Casey. I began to respond in the comment-thread, but the concern Casey expressed seems to me so prevalent in traditionalist and conservative circles lately that I thought that I should promote my reply to a post of its own.
You can read Casey’s comment in full at the original post, but this excerpt should give you the gist:
I’m in my thirties and reasonably conservative (especially, agreement with your take on race, informed and scientific as it may be, makes me deplorable and anathema in my society), and my assumption is that, unless my views change, I’m destined to live out my days, especially from my 50s on, more or less censoring what I believe and adjusting however I must to exist in the new political order. My own workplace isn’t likely to become politically charged or fraught, and in any case in a decade I hope to be self-sufficient through rental income, and eventually via inheritance, making exposure to liberal pressures exerted in the workplace irrelevant. What concerns me most is future pressure to positively declare oneself an ally, failure to do so resulting in stigmatization. This is one reason I hope to opt out of public life.
In the future, I’ll read blogs like yours and Dr. Vallicella’s (long may you all endure), and whatever other stimulating dissenters to the new order emerge, but it’ll be for fraternal feeling and sane observation, not with an eye to political action. I predict conservatives will become more like chroniclers of society’s shift toward the left, attempting to understand, among themselves, what about human nature led it down this road, perhaps inevitably, continuing to speculate about the future, as we currently do, and practicing conservative values how we may. We might gather at a hotel for a conference of an intellectual nature, maybe hear about Michael Oakeshott or a panel on the evolution of healthcare coverage and why care is so bad, if it is, compared to yesteryear. Certainly we’ll bemoan education. Some of us will wax nostalgic about Trump the way people did about Reagan until recently. In this future, unless I see hard results that force me to change my tune on liberal policies, something intellectual honesty compels me to remain open to, I’ll look back with regret over the turn things took, remembering at least the diluted conservatism I saw eking out victories in my youth, even hope that butting against reality will force a course correction, at least temper how far leftward things tilt.
But I’m not sure I see myself becoming part of anything more reactionary than that. Some of us must fade into history. Sometimes there just are losers ”” pagan philosophers escaping into Syria from Justinian’s crackdown, Native Americans constrained to reservations, true-believing senior Nazis fleeing Deutschland, segregationists in the South, many of whom dot our nursing homes and have, one way or another, accepted the demise of the society they strove for in their heyday. These groups lost and had to cope with that in their own way, whatever verdict is passed on their place in history, whether in hindsight we judge them piteous or shameful. Long as I live, I will never be able to erase that I was one of those people who pulled the lever for Trump, hopefully twice, sure as a group to be cast as villains, sure, in my mind, to dwindle in influence and standing (such as we now have) as time passes.
Here is my reply:
Casey,
Please! Do not allow yourself to slip into such darkness. Nobody knows what the future will bring. Remember that the Left is ultimately waging war not only against us, but against reality itself, and against human nature — and so, ultimately, we have the stronger foundation.
Remember also that societies are living organisms, and that when a pathogen poses a serious enough threat, the organism mounts an immune response. The election of Donald Trump in 2016, despite all of his flaws, was the beginning of such a response. It may well continue, with growing strength and confidence. As for our opponents, be assured that in their arrogance, ignorance, and misguided moral certitude, they will overreach. (Perhaps they will, for example, seriously attempt nationwide gun consfication.) And the reaction, once they do, will be overwhelming.
Note also that the Left, which because of its tendency to define itself negatively, in relation to what it seeks to oppose and destroy, is necessarily a rag-tag assortment of sullen and resentful factions, between and among which are many fatal contradictions. It is in the nature of such coalitions to turn against themselves as they begin to gain power. Because the fundamental philosophy of the modern Left is to see everything as a zero-sum game, and because their axiomatic externalization of all responsibility means that they define their very selfhood upon victimization and “resistance”, they must always have someone else to blame and hate. In this way the cohesion of their coalition, and its possibility of victory, are self-limiting: the more they marginalize the rest of us, the more they must turn upon each other.
In the post on which you commented, I used a metaphor from the physics of black holes. In a post from a few years ago I used another — in which the Left, as it approaches its own singularity, is torn apart by tidal forces:
The leftmost edge of the Left has accelerated sharply leftward in recent years. This has exerted tidal stresses on what was never a monolithic cultural bloc to begin with, and the laminae are starting to pull apart ”” with the result that many old-fashioned and relatively moderate liberals are beginning to see for themselves the unmistakable features of a fundamentalist and authoritarian religion beneath the contours of what they had previously imagined to be nothing more than a compassionate and humanistic political attitude. Given that many of these sorts pride themselves on their atheism, to see that they have been associated with a religion is immediately to declare apostasy.
Finally, remember this: if there must be war, we will win. Not only do we have truth, American tradition, and natural law on our side — we also have the guns.
Let not your heart be troubled! Live well. Prosper. Marry. Take care of your body and your spirit. Read. Learn. Study history. Lift. Learn to fight. Identify and struggle against your vices and weaknesses. Teach your children. Be a good friend, a good husband and father, and a good member of your community. Love your family and your friends. Seek the truth, always.
Be the best you can be — and be prepared, should it come, for the worst.
There may be darkness ahead, but dawn will follow. We will prevail.
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.
Like animals and plants, humans, too, create complex organic ecosystems that vary according to population, evolutionary history, and environment. Ours are social, cultural, and political.
How sensitive we are to tampering with the ecoystems of animals and plants! How careless with our own!
My friend Bill Vallicella has posted another interesting item on the idea of America as a “proposition nation”. Bill, who is quite rightly trying to find a middle way between open-borders multiculturalism and blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, begins by citing with approval a quote from Patrick Buchanan:
But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.
Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?
Bill responds:
There is none. Most people with a bit of life experience know that one can get along and interact productively with only some people. There has to be a broad base of shared agreement on all sorts of things. For example, there ought to be only one language in the U. S. for all public purposes, English. It was a huge mistake when voting forms were allowed to be published in foreign languages. Only legal immigrants should be allowed in, and assimilation must be demanded of them.
No comity without commonality as one of my aphorisms has it.
Quite right. Bill and I generally agree very closely about all of this. But I must ask: how much commonality is required, and of what sort? Commonality has infinite forms: people may have in common language, race, religion, folklore, history, tradition, food, ritual, music, humor, and a thousand other things. A recently arrived Somali jihadist and an evangelical Christian with a MAGA hat might both enjoy gardening, but such commonality hardly seems sufficient for robust social cohesion.
Given, then, that commonality is necessary, what degree of commonality is sufficient?
Bill ventures an answer:
But I must add, contra certain of the Alt Right, that “one people” should not be understood racially or ethnically. An enlightened nationalism is not a white nationalism. America is of course ‘a proposition nation.’ You will find the propositions in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence.
I don’t give a flying enchilada whether you are Hispanic or Asian. If you immigrated legally, accept the propositions, drop the hyphens, and identify as an American, then I say you are one of us. I’ll even celebrate the culinary diversity you contribute.
He immediately qualifies this, though:
That being understood, it is also true that whites discovered these America-constitutive propositions and are well-equipped to appreciate and uphold them, and better equipped than some other groups. That is a fact that a sane immigration policy must reflect.
That complicates things a bit. If, as I have argued, variations in the distribution of cognitive and behavioral traits among human groups means that (on average at least) populations vary to a meaningful extent with regard to what sorts of cultures and political systems suit them most naturally, then merely verbal assent to our founding abstracta, given in exchange for settlement, might turn out in practice to be insufficient for robust assimilation and cohesion. In a post last month on this topic (also in response to an item at Bill’s place), I quoted Thomas G. West on the question of whether propositions alone were enough:
In that post I wrote:
In The Political Theory of the American Founding (see more about this book in the series of posts beginning here) Thomas G. West argues, following Aristotle, that the newly founded nation depended for its existence on both its form and matter. The form, he writes, was “its principles: the laws of nature and of nature’s God.’ He continues:
The matter that existed in 1776 was a brute fact, which included the universal features of human nature. But it also included the particular geography, laws, racial stock, popular sentiments, moral habits, and religion of colonial America. The form, the natural rights theory ”¦ determined, more than anything else, which traditions would continue and which would be discarded as the new regime took shape under the ruling guidance of natural rights.
The critical point is that both form and matter are essential, and both limit and determine what sort of nation they can make in combination. The American Founding could not have happened elsewhere: swap out the colonial population of 1776 with a random assortment of people from everywhere on Earth and it would quickly have failed. The particularities of the “matter’ upon which the American propositions were to act were every bit as determining as the “form’ ”” the propositions ”” themselves.
Form alone, then, is not enough: we must pay continuing attention to the matter. (And we are not, to put it mildly, doing a very good job of this just now, even on the mainstream Right.)
Moreover, there is always the question of tribalism and faction. In the latest edition of the Claremont Review Of Books, Thomas Klingenstein wrote:
The more tribes in a given society, the more conflict. Conversely, the fewer the tribes (other things being equal), the closer the friendships among citizens and thereby the greater the opportunity to pursue happiness (the purpose of society). This is because friends themselves contribute to happiness, and because friends are more trustworthy than non-friends: friends are more inclined to sacrifice for each other and a community of friends requires fewer social and political restraints than a community of non-friends. Who can be friends is open to debate, but there should be no debate that not everyone can be a friend. In other words, there is a limit to “diversity.’
Good common sense.
Bill assesses his position:
My view is eminently reasonable and balanced. It navigates between the Scylla of destructive leftist globalist internationalism and the Charybdis of racist identity-political particularism.
I too think there is, somewhere, a narrow way between Scylla and Charybdis, and I’ve been squinting into the fog myself, trying to find it. But as we navigate we must keep in mind at least two things. The first is that the cultural and biological diversity of human groups (which, as noted above, I believe to have some relation to each other), may equip them differently to internalize, and live according to, the philosophical abstractions that constitute our nation’s founding principles. The second is the extent to which they will be drawn away from commonality, and into factional rivalry, by tribalism. Though there may be some variety in the disposition of different human populations to tribalism (“hbd chick” is the scholar to consult on this) it remains a natural and universal impulse — and faction, as Klingenstein notes above, will naturally increase as diversity deepens.
So, as we steer our ship through these treacherous waters, with our children born and yet-unborn on board, we must remember that the survival of our vessel is our highest duty. Should we steer closer to Scylla, or Charybdis? Which of these presents the greatest existential danger? Are the survival of our nation and culture (and, of course, the very propositions we seek to cherish and preserve, which will sink right along with the passengers if the ship goes down) more at risk from an excess of caution regarding indiscriminate immigration, or from globalism, multiculturalism, and open borders?
For my own answer to this question, I refer readers to this post, from 2013. And my questions for Bill are: what does constitute a “sane immigration policy”? How can we know that lip service to our founding propositions, given as a condition for admission at a port of entry, is enough? How close to Charybdis are you willing to sail?
Here’s a scathing summary, by the indispensable Kimberly Strassel, of the government’s abuse of power in what has come to be known as Spygate.
Please watch. It would be all too easy for an increasingly childlike and easily distracted polis to let all of this slip out of mind.
(I’ve started the embedded video about five minutes in, where the substance of the presentation begins.)
Do you still read the papers? Do you send a letter to the editor now and then, or leave a comment at the online version?
Enjoy it while it lasts, warns John Derbyshire. Here.
In Monday’s post about Angela Saini’s race-denialist polemic, I should have added a few words about the deep moral and philosophical errors that lead so many people to fear, and to seek to suppress, the stubborn realities of human biodiversity. (“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”)
For Americans the starting point, both philosophically and historically, is the natural-rights theory of the Founding, which takes as axiomatic that every adult has an equal and inalienable right to life, liberty, and property, and shall stand as the equal of every other before the law, and that no person is by nature subject or sovereign to any other.
Moreover, the realities of human biodiversity are only statistical. Humans vary within populations on every trait-axis, and so differences in the average distribution of heritable traits within population groups tell us nothing in advance whatsoever about any individual. Our default position with regard to any person of any race should, prior to direct, personal experience, be one of civility, decency, and respect.
Finally, to deny the realities of statistical between-group differences makes all of the above hostage to empirical truth, and implies that if such differences turn out to be real, then all of our fundamental notions of natural rights, equal justice, and human dignity are somehow made invalid, and our worst impulses given license. Whatever the answer to the empirical question may turn out to be, it is foolish to put ourselves in a position that requires us to fear the discovery of natural truths, and then to allow that fear to suppress rational inquiry.
As Arthur Jensen said in 1972:
We must clearly distinguish between research on racial differences and racism. Racism implies hate or aversion and aims at denying equal rights and opportunities to persons because of their racial origin”¦ But to fear research on genetic differences in abilities is, in a sense, to grant the racist’s assumption: that if it should be established beyond reasonable doubt that there are biologically or genetically conditioned differences in mental abilities among individuals or groups, then we are justified in oppressing or exploiting those who are most limited in genetic endowment.
Ernst Mayr, 1963:
Equality in spite of evident non-identity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to “conditioning’ or other non-genetic factors”¦ An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost.
These quotes are taken from an excellent paper, by Noah Carl, titled How Stifling Debate Around Race, Genes and IQ Can Do Harm. You can read it here. It will be well worth your time.
Attracting considerable attention is Superior: The Return of Race Science, a new book about race by Angela Saini. It makes the usual case: that beyond mere superficialities, race is a meaningless concept, a “social construct”.
In the face of mounting evidence, this is a claim that is becoming more and more difficult to defend; indeed it would be more plausible to say that societies are racial constructs. Nevertheless, the book’s position is that the persistence of scientific support for the reality of meaningful variation in the distribution of traits in human populations is “insidious and destructive”.
Here are three critical reviews, by James Thompson, Steve Sailer, and Bo Winegard and Noah Carl. (You won’t have any trouble finding favorable ones, so I’ll leave that to you.) Reading them should give you some idea of where the actual science stands, and how far our new secular religion will go to deny it.
I note with real sorrow the death of Mac Rebennack, AKA “Dr. John”, who died yesterday of a heart attack. He was 77. In my opinion he was a national treasure — a first-tier master of an indigenous hybrid American musical style.
I worked with Mac on a couple of projects a long time ago. It was an honor. In person he was gracious, friendly, and engaging, with a million stories to tell. He was also a consummate professional in the recording studio; I can’t recall ever having to re-do, or even fix, anything he ever played.
Thank you, sir, for a lifetime of wonderful music.