Would You Hire These People?

February 4, 2020 – 12:19 pm

The Democratic Caucuses in Iowa (or, as the ailing Rush Limbaugh calls them, the “Hawkeye Cauci”) are in embarrassing disarray, with a new report-resulting “app” (reportedly designed by Hillary Clinton campaign bigwig Robbie Mook) having apparently failed to work. Multiple candidates are claiming victory, but nobody knows. (Remember the rollout of the Obamacare website?)

Meanwhile, the party’s “impeachment” tantrum — the latest in a series of desperate and petulant attacks going back even to before the 2016 election — is about to be shut down in the Senate, a day after the unscathed Mr. Trump delivers, in what should be an entertaining spectacle, his annual State of the Union address.

With each passing day, the Democrats, by calling for the dismantling of every structural component of the traditional American nation — from the Bill of Rights, to the Electoral College, to the very idea of the nation itself, and of respect for its founding — alienate more and more of the dwindling number of “centrist” voters upon whom they must depend for any hope of victory in November. Their vision of America is a rootless, deracinated, atomized people, cut off from tradition, heritage, religion, and all reverence for the past; they seek to encourage this not only by reviling and denouncing America’s past in education and mass media, but also by flooding the country with uncountable millions of aliens who share none of America’s traditions, folklore, culture, byways, or mythos, thereby making any reliance upon such things for the preservation of social cohesion — and without such shared values and beliefs there can be no more social cohesion within a nation’s borders than there is in an airport lounge — an act of “bigotry”, “xenophobia”, and “exclusion”. The aim is to eliminate altogether the “civil society” and horizontal ligatures that have throughout all of human history bound people into organic and healthy communities, leaving behind a flattened and stifling two-level hierarchy: below, a solipsistic, radically individualized populace, stripped of everything but the appetites of the present moment, and severed from the extension in time, and thereby the deep sense of duty and connection to the dead and the unborn, that has been the hallmark of healthy societies always and everywhere; while above them squats a vast, tutelary, managerial bureaucracy.

Russell Kirk described the latter:

Trained at uniform state schools in the new orthodoxies of secular collectivism, arrogant with the presumption of those who rule without the restraining influences of tradition and reverence and family honor, such an elite must be no more than an administrative corps; they cannot become the guardians of culture, as were the old aristocracies.

This is the choice now on offer. It has been the choice on offer for several decades now, but sought always to conceal its real nature. What’s different in this election is that the mask has come off.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (11)

Bad News

February 3, 2020 – 5:03 pm

I was shocked and saddened just now to learn that Rush Limbaugh has been diagnosed with “advanced” lung cancer. Mr. Limbaugh, a brilliant analyst of the American political scene, has most importantly been, for decades now, a vital brake (to the extent that such a thing is possible) on the entropic forces of the American Left. There are scores of millions of voters across what he likes to call “the fruited plain” that might well have been seduced into complicity with the slow destruction of the traditional American nation were it not for his daily beacon of clarity, and call to resistance. The extent to which that resistance has succeeded is in large part due to him alone.

Lung cancer is a terrifying disease, with a five-year survival rate under 20%. All strength to Mr. Limbaugh in this mortal battle.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Charles Murray’s Latest

February 1, 2020 – 12:18 pm

Charles Murray has a new book out: Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.

From the blurb at Amazon:

The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas:

– Gender is a social construct.

– Race is a social construct.

– Class is a function of privilege.

The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in.

(I had to pause for a moment at “rich texture”. Some thought went into that, surely!)

Whether advances in genetics and neuroscience (and obvious common sense, and the evidence of all human experience) are actually “overthrowing” anything, or just battering themselves bloody against the ramparts of an invulnerable orthodoxy, remains to be seen, but it is brave of Mr. Murray to gird himself and take the field yet again. For his prior sins of truthfulness, he has been reviled and ostracized for decades, denounced while being interviewed by Congress, and was physically assaulted on a college campus just a couple of years ago.

No doubt the book will receive hostile reviews aplenty from that stifling keep within the ramparts, but here are two from the clearer air outside: one by Steve Sailer, and one by John Derbyshire.

By Malcolm | Posted in HBD | Comments (4)

Hmmm

January 31, 2020 – 9:36 pm

Here’s a research paper, from a team of scientists in India, about the now-pandemic coronavirus. They are puzzled by an “uncanny similarity” of portions of its molecular structure to other dangerous viruses, including HIV, and say that the insertion of these novel sequences is “unlikely to be fortuitous in nature”.

Perhaps we will be hearing more about this.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Curiosities | Comments (0)

Good Friday

January 31, 2020 – 9:21 pm

The Senate has voted to shut down the Democrats’ impeachment stunt, and the U.K. has officially left the E.U. It’s nice to see things work out now and then.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Racist Thing #111

January 31, 2020 – 1:12 pm

The Coronavirus Task Force.

By Malcolm | Posted in Racist Things | Comments (1)

Who IS this Guy?

January 29, 2020 – 8:03 pm

I haven’t commented on this impeachment show — in part because I have nothing original to say about it, but also because I don’t want to dignify it with serious commentary. Eventually it will come to an end; Mr. Trump will not be removed from office, and then we can all wait a few days for whatever desperate assault the Democrats come up with next.

I will say, though, having watched a little of the spectacle the other day, that there was one person who stood out: a member of the Trump team by the name of Patrick Philbin. He is almost superhumanly cool and efficient, marshals his arguments with exquisite precision, and speaks entirely without, as far as I can tell, any of the little pauses, false starts, and interjections that affect the speech of nearly everyone else I’ve ever seen. The man is really quite extraordinary.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

Service Notice

January 26, 2020 – 1:07 pm

I’ve been a little preoccupied this week with family matters and other offline distractions. Back soon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Ah, Democracy

January 22, 2020 – 10:55 pm

“Impatience and ignorance are characteristic of democratic ages; coarsely ambitious men generally are at the helm of state; dignity is wanting in the conduct of affairs, although arrogance is not lacking; the decay of the family, especially in America, to the status of a mere household, removes one of the ancient supports of social tranquillity; human opinions scatter like dust, unable to cohere, and it is hard to rally public opinion to any intelligent concerted action; literary tastes are superficial, reading is hasty; placidity is preferred to nobility; intellectual isolation plagues a community of mind; and, perhaps most dangerous of all, freedom of thought and discussion are badly hampered…

How far private property, individuality, and decency in government may survive under absolute democracy is not yet certain.”

— Russell Kirk

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

MLK Day

January 20, 2020 – 4:51 pm

Martin Luther King — or, at least, the man as publicly imagined — would be aghast if he saw how the politics of collectivist grievance-bloc identitarianism — ‘Bioleninism’, to give a nod to the subject of our previous post — has come to dominate American life in the decades since he died. People should be “judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin”? That’s nowhere in sight, and it hasn’t been for quite a while now. People are judged, and sorted into bins, simply by their base-level object-classes.

“But what of individual character?”, you might well ask. The answer is just another question:

“Character? How many divisions has it got?”

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

A Safe Space For Spandrell

January 20, 2020 – 3:05 pm

Spandrell’s blog, Bloody Shovel, has been moved from WordPress.com to its own domain. This was a wise move – Spandrell has been an influential writer on the reactionary Right for years now — see, for example, his important essays on ‘Bioleninism‘ — and a host like WordPress might have shut him down at any time.

The new site is here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (0)

Up And Down

January 18, 2020 – 12:32 pm

In a comment on our previous post, Professor J.M. Smith said:

Our society is shot through with an incredible amount of intelligence, but a great deal of it seems to work in service of things that are low and stupid. Think of someone snap-chatting selfies using a smartphone and the internet. The end of their act is low and stupid but the means are awe-inspiring. I think Thoreau called this “improved means to unimproved ends,” but must say that I think he was probably too generous about the ends. How about “improved means” to degraded ends”?

I’m not exempting myself here. Countless engineers have strained every fiber of their being to construct a world in which I can do low and stupid things almost effortlessly (but not, of course, without complaint).

Plato said that the lower should serve the higher, but our thinkers take the opposite view. The bruits were not placed on earth to serve men; men were placed on earth to serve the bruits. Lowly men do not owe honor and service to noble men; noble men owe honor and service to lowly men. A good deal of modern Christianity seems to be saying that God worships us.

Exactly right. I’ve thought for years that it is a sign of an ascending civilization that what is lower aspires to what is higher, while the reverse is true of a civilization in decline. In 2013 I wrote, in a letter to a friend:

I’m horrified by the reversal of cultural aspiration that has occurred over the past few decades. Not so long ago, low culture aspired toward high culture. On the cover of Time were authors, artists, intellectuals. For eros, pop culture gave us Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth dancing in evening dress. Now, in our accelerating decline, what is higher aspires to what is lower: the eyes of all are turned toward the underclass, masturbating on stage in its underwear.

You could add to that pre-tattered jeans on sale in boutiques for hundreds of dollars, and the study of hip-hop and comic books in our institutions of higher learning while the great canon of literature and philosophy is abandoned. We are flying nose downward, and the terrain is getting closer.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone

January 16, 2020 – 5:59 pm

Ross Douthat published a wistful column at the New York Times the other day, lamenting the death in academia of the Western canon of literature. At the heart of the problem — and the problem itself is, as Chiang Kai-shek once said in an analogous context, a “disease of the heart” — is the death of our civilization’s belief in objective truth and beauty, in God, and ultimately in its own value.

We read:

[I]f there’s any lesson that the decline of Christianity holds for the painful death of the English department, it’s that if you aspire to keep your faith alive even in a reduced, non-hegemonic form, you need more than attenuated belief and socially-useful applications.

A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation and recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.

This is the late, perhaps terminal, stage in the progression of the European Enlightenment. The radical skepticism introduced in that era has revealed itself to a universal acid that dissolves, sooner or later, anything that tries to contain it. Into that vessel first went Christian faith — but faith was followed in due course by truth, beauty, and at last the idea of any worthwhile distinctions and discriminations at all, or belief in an objectively existing reality.

It is the triumph of entropy: of rust, of decomposition, of the tireless disintegration that reduces mountains to rubble and great civilizations to roofless churches and forgotten graves. The West has built its great tower of modernity with the stones it has pulled from its foundations.

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

Palming The Card

January 14, 2020 – 11:47 pm

Over at Unz Review, Steve Sailer comments on Baltimore’s homicide statistics, in which 303 murders were committed with handguns, and only 9 with long guns (the stats lump together rifles and shotguns, so the number of rifles used was almost certainly fewer than 9). Blunt objects and knives each were used in more murders than long guns.

For some reason, though, all we ever hear about is those darn rifles.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Guns | Comments (4)

Gleichschaltung

January 13, 2020 – 4:51 pm

As they all said, in bone-chilling unison: this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Sir Roger Scruton, 1944-2020

January 12, 2020 – 1:50 pm

It was with terrible sadness that I learned today that Sir Roger Scruton has fallen from the ramparts at age 75. He was a man of incomparable culture, erudition, discrimination, and integrity. Not only has Western civilization lost one of its greatest defenders; it is also as if a magnificent library has just been burnt to the ground.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Less Is More

January 10, 2020 – 11:08 pm

Women and demographic minorities living in the modern West inhabit the least racist, least sexist society that has ever existed. They have greater liberty, and a broader scope of opportunity, than they have ever had anywhere on earth. Yet to listen to public discourse, or to look over any university’s curriculum, would give a newcomer the impression that bigotry and oppression have never been worse.

A new research paper from USC describes a phenomenon the authors call “prevalence-induced concept change”. Here’s the abstract:

Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.

That’s not all there is to our problem, of course; much of it is a game of power that the blogger Spandrell has called “Bioleninism” (for more on that important insight, read Spandrell’s series of posts beginning here.) But the idea the USC authors put forward certainly fits neatly with, for example, the appearance in recent years of the concept of “microaggressions”: as actual macroagressions became rarer and rarer the concept of “aggression” expanded to include things that people of my generation wouldn’t even have noticed happening. (One gets the feeling that any act of genuine old-school aggression against our thoroughly coddled and hypersensitized youngsters would probably be fatal; Lord help them when things start falling apart for real.)

This idea ties in nicely, too, with what I’ve been saying for years now: that grievance is fractal. The supply is inexhaustible, because we simply zoom in to smaller and smaller scales.

You can have a look at the USC paper here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

Master Yourself, Or Be Mastered

January 9, 2020 – 10:04 pm

“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

– Burke, letter to François-Louis-Thibaut de Menonville, 1791

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Inner Work | Comments (3)

Well, You Can Just Ask Directions, Right?

January 8, 2020 – 1:45 pm

In a recent poll, men were almost twice as likely as women to be able to locate Iran on an unlableled map.

The overall success rate was a dismal 28%. By sex: 38% of men got it right, and 20% of women.

By Malcolm | Posted in HBD | Comments (10)

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 9 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 9 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 Reason and Philosophy, Inner Work, Religion, Ruminations | 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)