Time Capsule

May 22, 2018 – 4:02 pm

I’ve been unexpectedly busy over the past few days, with little time for writing. I do have something substantial for you to read, though: an essay by the late Joseph Sobran on the nature of conservatism. It was written in 1985, and bears the title Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow.

I’ll quote the opening paragraphs, just to prime the pump:

MOST POLITICAL DISCUSSION nowadays moves in ruts the discussants don’t even seem to be aware of. They talk about rights, freedom, the Constitution, foreign policy, the budget, all sorts of disparate things they never seem to get in focus.

It may help if we step back from politics a bit.

The main political line of division in the United States is between people we call liberals and people we call conservatives. The debate between them has been described in various ways; I would like to offer one of my own, based not so much on theory as on personal introspection.

At certain moments I find myself enjoying life in a certain way. I may be alone, or with friends, or with my family, or even among strangers. Beautiful weather always helps; the more trees, the better. Early morning or evening is the best time. Maybe someone says something funny. And while everyone laughs, there is a sort of feeling that surges up under the laughter, like a wave rocking a rowboat, that tells you that this is the way life should be.

Moments like that don’t come every day, aren’t predictable, and can’t very well be charted. But the main response they inspire is something like gratitude: after all, one can’t exactly deserve them. One can only be prepared for them. But they do come.

This may seem a thousand miles from politics, and such moments rarely have anything to do with politics. But that is just the point. Samuel Johnson says:

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

But the same is true of all that human hearts enjoy. Laws and kings can’t produce our happiest hours, though in our time they do more to prevent them than formerly.

“To be happy at home,’ Johnson also remarks, “is the end of all human endeavor.’ That is a good starting-point for politics, just because it is outside politics. I often get the feeling that what is wrong with political discussion in general is that it is dominated by narrow malcontents who take their bearings not from images of health and happiness but from statistical suffering. They always seem to want to “eliminate’ something”“poverty, racism, war”“instead of settling for fostering other sorts of things it is beyond their power actually to produce.

Man doesn’t really create anything. We don’t sit godlike above the world, omniscient and omnipotent. We find ourselves created, placed somehow in the midst of things that we here before us, related to them in particular ways. If we can’t delight in our situation, we are off on the wrong foot.

More and more I find myself thinking that a conservative is someone who regards this world with a basic affection, and wants to appreciate it as it is before he goes on to the always necessary work of making some rearrangements. Richard Weaver says we have no right to reform the world unless we cherish some aspects of it; and that is the attitude of many of the best conservative thinkers. Burke says that a constitution ought to be the subject of enjoyment rather than altercation. (I wish the American Civil Liberties Union would take his words to heart.)

I find a certain music in conservative writing that I never find in that of liberals. Michael Oakeshott speaks of “affection,’ “attachment,’ “familiarity,’ “happiness’; and my point is not the inane one that these are very nice things, but that Oakeshott thinks of them as considerations pertinent to political thinking. He knows what normal life is, what normal activities are, and his first thought is that politics should not disturb them.

Chesterton (who hated the conservatism of his own day) has good remarks in this vein. “It is futile to discuss reform,’ he says, “without reference to form.’ He complains of “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal,’ and he criticizes socialism on the ground that “it is rather shocking that we have to treat a normal nation as something exceptional, like a house on fire or a shipwreck.’

“He who is unaware of his ignorance,’ writes Richard Whately, “will only be misled by his knowledge.’ And that is the trouble with the liberal, the socialist, the Communist, and a dozen other species of political cranks who have achieved respectability in our time: they disregard so much of what is constant and latent in life. They fail to notice; they fail to appreciate.

We can paraphrase Chesterton’s remark about reforming without reference to form by saying it is futile to criticize without first appreciating. The conservative is bewildered by the comprehensive dissatisfaction of people who are always headlong about “reform’ (as they conceive it) or are even eager to “build a new society.’ What, exactly, is wrong with society as it is already? This isn’t just a defiant rhetorical question; it needs an answer. We don’t have the power to change everything, and it may not be such a bright idea to try; there are plenty of things that deserve the effort (and it is an effort) of preserving, and the undistinguishing mania for “change’ doesn’t do them justice”“isn’t even concerned with doing them justice. What we really ought to ask the liberal, before we even begin addressing his agenda, is this: In what kind of society would he be a conservative?

For some reason, we have allowed the malcontent to assume moral prestige. We praise as “ideals’ what are nothing more than fantasies”“a world of perpetual peace, brotherhood, justice, or any other will-o’-the-wisp that has lured men toward the Gulag.

The malcontent can be spotted in his little habits of speech: He calls language and nationality “barriers’ when the conservative, more appreciatively, recognizes them as cohesives that make social life possible. He damns as “apathy’ an ordinary indifference to politics that may really be a healthy contentment. He praises as “compassion’ what the conservative earthily sees as a program of collectivization. He may even assert as “rights’ what tradition has regarded as wrongs.

There is much, much more, and the quality is consistent throughout. I will likely return to it all in future posts, but for now you must go and read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (1)

Container Vs. Content

May 17, 2018 – 9:05 pm

The brilliant but relentlessly optimistic Steven Pinker offered today a link to a brief article about a new cross-cultural study of human morals.

The article, which you can read here, lists seven moral rules that seem to be universal to all cultures. They are:

1) Love your family.
2) Help your group.
3) Return favors.
4) Be brave.
5) Defer to authority.
6) Be fair.
7) Respect others’ property.

It’s easy to see why these would be selected for (easy, that is, if you accept the still-controversial idea of group selection): groups whose individuals instantiate these moral axioms will form robust and cohesive societies that are able to compete effectively against other groups.

The author, Oliver Scott Curry (Director of the Oxford Morals Project), explains:

Converging lines of evidence ”“ from game theory, ethology, psychology, and anthropology ”“ suggest that morality is a collection of tools for promoting cooperation.

For 50 million years humans and their ancestors have lived in social groups. During this time natural selection equipped them with a range of adaptations for realizing the enormous benefits of cooperation that social life affords. More recently, humans have built on these benevolent biological foundations with cultural innovations ”“ norms, rules, institutions ”“ that further bolster cooperation. Together, these biological and cultural mechanisms provide the motivation for social, cooperative and altruistic behavior; and they provide the criteria by which we evaluate the behavior of others. And, according to the theory of ”˜morality as cooperation’, it is precisely this collection of cooperative traits that constitute human morality.

What’s more, the theory leads us to expect that, because there are many types of cooperation, there will be many types of morality. Kin selection explains why we feel a special duty of care for our families, and why we abhor incest. Mutualism explains why we form groups and coalitions (there is strength and safety in numbers), and hence why we value unity, solidarity, and loyalty. Social exchange explains why we trust others, reciprocate favors, feel guilt and gratitude, make amends, and forgive. And conflict resolution explains: why we engage in costly displays of prowess such as bravery and generosity; why we defer to our superiors; why we divide disputed resources fairly; and why we recognize prior possession.

And, as predicted by the theory, these seven moral rules ”“ love your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to authority, be fair, and respect others’ property ”“ appear to be universal across cultures. My colleagues and I analyzed ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies (comprising over 600,000 words from over 600 sources). We found that these seven cooperative behaviors were always considered morally good. We found examples of most of these morals in most societies. Crucially, there were no counter-examples ”“ no societies in which any of these behaviors were considered morally bad. And we observed these morals with equal frequency across continents; they were not the exclusive preserve of ”˜the West’ or any other region.

For example, among the Amhara, “flouting kinship obligation is regarded as a shameful deviation, indicating an evil character’. In Korea, there exists an “egalitarian community ethic [of] mutual assistance and cooperation among neighbors [and] strong in-group solidarity’. “Reciprocity is observed in every stage of Garo life [and] has a very high place in the Garo social structure of values’. Among the Maasai, “Those who cling to warrior virtues are still highly respected’, and “the uncompromising ideal of supreme warriorhood [involves] ascetic commitment to self-sacrifice”¦in the heat of battle, as a supreme display of courageous loyalty’. The Bemba exhibit “a deep sense of respect for elders’ authority’. The Kapauku “idea of justice’ is called “uta-uta, half-half”¦[the meaning of which] comes very close to what we call equity’. And among the Tarahumara, “respect for the property of others is the keystone of all interpersonal relations’.

All very good so far, and not really surprising at all. “Love your family.” “Help your group.” “Be brave.” If you were designing a set of rules to make groups more resilient in competition with other groups, and to ensure that there would be a stable framework for nurturing and providing for succeeding generations, you’d probably come up with these very ideas. And the pitiless meat-grinder of evolution has done exactly that, at horrifying cost.

But there is a trap here for the unwary: it is to confuse the universality of these moral frameworks with the universality of their scope.

Here is the last paragraph of the article, and it has an all-too-familiar ring:

And so there is a common core of universal moral principles. Morality is always and everywhere a cooperative phenomenon. And everyone agrees that cooperating, promoting the common good, is the right thing to do. Appreciating this fundamental fact about human nature could help promote mutual understanding between people of different cultures, and so help to make the world a better place.

There is a very dangerous equivocation here: “everyone agrees that cooperating, promoting the common good, is the right thing to do.” But does “the common good” mean the same thing to a Maasai warrior, or a Somali Muslim, as it does to Steven Pinker, or a researcher of morals at Oxford? Do the concepts of “your group” (rule 2), or “authority” (rule 5), have the same referents?

It seems clear enough that Messrs. Pinker and Curry, along with the rest of the clerisy that currently occupies the commanding heights of Western cultural and political power, quite obviously believe that they do — and that even if they don’t, they ought to.

Furthermore, “ought” implies “can”. And if your Universalist faith is strong enough, you will make the move from “ought’ to “can”, and go straight on to “shall”. Amen.

On this they have pinned their belief in our salvation, and are willing to stake our civilization’s future. What could go wrong?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion, HBD | Comments (13)

Gottfried On Goldberg

May 16, 2018 – 6:33 pm

It was only yesterday that I mentioned Jonah Goldberg’s latest book, Suicide of the West, and mentioned in passing Paul Gottfried’s critique of Mr. Goldberg’s earlier money-maker, Liberal Fascism.

Well, just today Professor Gottfried has published a review of Goldberg’s book over at VDare — and as you might imagine, it is not favorable. Read it here.

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

The Reliable Effectiveness of Disruptive Low-Status Coalitions

May 16, 2018 – 11:20 am

From Spandrell: here, here, and here are three posts outlining an idea — “Bioleninism” — that seeks to explain the steady movement leftward of political systems, and the shift, beginning in the 1960s or so, from economic to cultural Marxism as the vehicle for that movement.

The model seems coherent and plausible. It also has considerable overlap with the analysis of mass movements presented by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer (which I consider to be a point strongly in its favor).

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

The Poison Pill

May 15, 2018 – 5:27 pm

Jonah Goldberg has a new book out, called The Suicide of the West. (I don’t know why he felt he had to swipe the title of James Burnham’s monumental assault upon the modern liberal order, but it would’ve been nice if he hadn’t.)

I haven’t read the book, but I know Jonah Goldberg’s oeuvre well enough — I’ve read a great many of his columns, as well as his popular book Liberal Fascism, which sacrificed conceptual rigor regarding Fascism and Nazism for a tendentious jab at the Left. (If you are serious about understanding Fascism, which, pace Goldberg, was very much a movement of the Right, you ought to read Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: The Career of a Concept.) Mr. Goldberg is the Platonic Form of the genteel conservative in the modern era: trailing along a little way behind the advancing forces of the Left, tidying up the rubble. And like most others in his intellectual taxon, he is a loyal cheerleader for the Enlightenment as the fountainhead of all that is good about the modern world — and none of what is bad.

The Federalist‘s John Daniel Davidson, unlike me, has read the new book, and has offered a review. He takes a gratifyingly skeptical eye to Mr. Goldberg’s Enlightenment boosterism, and zeroes in on the point that Goldberg (along with others such as Steven Pinker) misses (I have bolded a key passage):

Goldberg calls the emergence of the liberal order “the Miracle,’ because we can’t exactly account for why it emerged about 300 years ago. Given the sweep of evolutionary history, he says, the material progress of the past three centuries is not natural: “The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death.’

But something happened to disrupt the natural state of mankind. “Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world,’ writes Goldberg. “It was as if the great parade of humanity had started walking through a portal to a different world.’

The problem now, he argues, is that we’ve lost perspective on how good things are, on how uniquely prosperous the liberal era has been in the long slog of human history. What’s more, the Miracle is fragile. It didn’t spring unbidden from human nature””it was chosen, and it can be unchosen. To preserve it, we must reject the rising tide of tribalism, populism, and nationalism, and rediscover a sense of gratitude for what we have. More than that, we have to pass the Miracle along to each successive generation, or it will vanish. Goldberg invokes Hannah Arendt’s aphorism that in every generation Western civilization is invaded by barbarians: “We call them children.’

No doubt Goldberg certainly wants to conserve many good things like capitalism, private property, free speech, and democracy. But he fails to offer a full account of why the liberal order is at risk in the first place and why so many Americans are not as grateful for it as they should be. Despite all this prosperity, despite things being better than they’ve ever been, it doesn’t feel like it. Why?

Perhaps it has something to do with the liberal order itself, and not just tribalism or nationalism gone awry. Perhaps the Miracle, wondrous as it is, needs more than just our gratitude to sustain it. Perhaps the only thing that can sustain it is an older order, one that predates liberal democratic capitalism and gave it its vitality in the first place. Maybe the only way forward is to go back and rediscover the things we left behind at the dawn of the Enlightenment.

Goldberg is not very interested in all of that. He does not ask whether there might be some contradictions at the heart of the liberal order, whether it might contain within it the seeds of its undoing.

This points very directly to the essence of the neoreactionary critique: that while modernity, with its sacralization of universalism and democracy, may have been enormously successful in transforming the economic life of the West (and thereby the rest of the world), it did so by gradually burning through the immense cultural and spiritual capital it inherited from its forefathers — and now the accounts are overdrawn, and a reckoning is overdue.

Mr. Davidson is just getting warmed up. The cardinal weakness in Goldberg-style “conservatism”, he argues, is that in diagnosing the ills of the modern world, it stops short of examining the fundamental characteristics of the Enlightenment itself: in particular, the gradual abandonment of transcendent metaphysics, the ascendancy of scientific materialism, and the adoption of a posture of radical skepsis that has, as I’ve argued elsewhere, become a universal acid that nothing can contain.

Mr. Davidson cites C.S. Lewis to argue that as we began to turn our attention away from the transcendent, we learned to bend Nature to our will — but in doing so we also gave up everything that could guide us in determining what our will ought to be:

Having debunked all tradition and morality through the wonders of applied science, having succeeded in reducing all of human life to mere biological functions that can be precisely manipulated, mankind will “be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be.’

But therein lies the problem, says Lewis. Without any standards by which to judge what man ought to be, this new species of mankind will be reduced to following the mere whims of pleasure and instinct: “When all that says ”˜it is good’ has been debunked, what says ”˜I want’ remains.’ In an entirely conditioned society, even those who do the conditioning will be slaves””ruled by nature, not reason.

In the unleashing of our animal desires and irrational impulses, nature will have its final victory over man at the very moment of our supposed triumph. “All Nature’s apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals,’ writes Lewis. “We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever.’

It’s easy to anticipate the objections to this argument. Indeed, we hear them constantly. What about science and medical progress? What about the eradication of disease? What about technological advances? Isn’t man’s conquest of nature a good thing? Hasn’t the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution and the invention of liberal democratic capitalism done more to alleviate poverty and create wealth than anything in human history? Shouldn’t we preserve this liberal order and pass it on to future generations? Shouldn’t we inculcate in our children a profound sense of gratitude for all this abundance and prosperity?

This is precisely Goldberg’s argument. Yes, he says, man’s conquest of nature is a good thing. It’s the same species of argument raised earlier this year in reaction to Patrick Deneen’s book, “Why Liberalism Failed,’ which calls into question the entire philosophical system that gave us the Miracle.

Reviewers, many right-of-center, dismissed Deneen’s critique by noting all the good things that have come from the Enlightenment, like women’s suffrage and the eradication of slavery. Does Deneen think those things were a mistake? Does he want to take it all back? Even Deneen’s modest proposal for a remedy””that like-minded families should form tight-knit communities where they can rediscover and practice older forms of virtue and morality””comes in for mild scorn. Where will such communities be founded? one reviewer wanted to know. In liberal societies, that’s where.

But such critiques of Deneen’s thesis, like those of Lewis’s, are too narrow, and they fail precisely because Deneen’s claims about liberalism are so capacious. He is not chiefly interested in the problems of the modern progressive era or the contemporary political Left. He isn’t alarmed merely by political tribalism and the fraying of the social order. Those things are symptoms, not the cause, of the illness he’s diagnosing. Even the social order at its liberal best””the Miracle itself””is part of the illness.

Deneen’s argument reaches back to the foundations of the liberal order in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries””prior to the appearance of the Miracle, in Goldberg’s telling””when a series of thinkers embarked on a fundamentally revisionist project “whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.’

The project worked, as Goldberg has chronicled at length, but only up to a point. Today, says Deneen, liberalism is a 500-year-old experiment that has run its course and now “generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-Aids and veils to cover them.’

Exactly on target. This is why, under the modern liberal caliphate, “Conservatism, Inc.” accomplishes precisely nothing, beyond providing a soft and comfortable lifestyle for telegenic and articulate dhimmi such as Jonah Goldberg. Why has it been able to “conserve” nothing at all? Because, as it is more and more plain to see, it understands nothing at all.

Read Mr. Davidson’s review here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

E Pluribus Pluribus

May 14, 2018 – 11:31 am

I’m driving all day, but for now here’s a brief item on the political consequences of shifting American demographics.

Rising diversity at national scale increases tribalism, destroys cohesion, diminishes liberty, and fosters divisive competition that throughout history always tends toward fission and violence. What fools we are.

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

Service Notice

May 12, 2018 – 11:46 pm

Houseguests this weekend. Back in a bit.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

May 10, 2018 – 2:13 pm

Next stop on the road to Utopia: if the NAACP has its way, you will have your thoughts examined on suspicion of “implicit bias”. (This is because you might, in the tenebrous recesses of your reptilian brain, harbor the monstrous notion that some things are generally different from others, in ways that occasionally matter.)

“The IAT test is unscientific rubbish,” you say?

We find your lack of faith disturbing.

Anyway, as it happens the Motus Mentis editorial position harmonizes nicely with the NAACP’s. Away with implicit bias, I say! I prefer to keep mine right out in the open, in the sunshine and fresh air — where it’s easy to keep an eye on, and to make occasional repairs when needed. You should try it.

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

Done Deal

May 9, 2018 – 2:19 pm

President Trump yesterday announced that the U.S. would no longer consider itself bound by the deal his predecessor had made with Iran. His critics, both here and abroad, are writhing and hissing like Gollum with the Elven-rope around his neck:

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, only someone with a heart of stone could witness their pain without laughing.

If they wanted a deal that would survive Mr. Obama’s grip on power, they ought to have made the thing in the light of day, not based it on Iranian lies and secret side-deals, not bribed the mullahs with pallet-loads of untraceable cash delivered by aircraft in the middle of the night*, made Iran commit to no-notice inspections, made them forswear their support of terror and destabilization of the region, made them actually sign the damn thing (which they never did), not have squashed ongoing investigations into Hezbollah drug and money-laundering for fear of irking Tehran, and — above all — sought the consent of the Senate, as the Framers intended.

The arrangement President Trump has now terminated was never an agreement by the United States, in accordance with the Contitution’s prescriptions for entering into such things, and so it was never binding upon the United States. It was nothing more than a smarmy little “understanding” between a man temporarily in control of a nation he does not love (egged on by his Iranian-born Wormtongue) and a ruthless enemy permanently committed to our destruction. That man and his cadre having been to our astonishingly good fortune ejected from power, his crooked little backroom deals and his eight-year legacy of cramping and maleficent executive orders may now be swept into the gutter. Thank you, Mr. Trump, for doing so.

 
*Where did that money come from, anyway?

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (18)

Incels, Redux

May 8, 2018 – 8:14 pm

I commented a few days back about “incels” having risen to virality (though not, of course, to virility, which would make the whole topic moot). A point I didn’t make, though, was that the collective shudder on the Left at the sight of these wretches, and the equally collective wish to make them go away, wants explaining.

“Really?” I hear you ask. “Why does disdain for gamma-level males need explaining?” (After all, it seems so … natural.)

Here’s why: because the affliction that makes the incel miserable is the same one that the Progressive culture-warrior normally makes the subject of endless crusades: the unequal distribution of social goods. (And if sex isn’t a social good, what is?)

Here’s a short explanation, then, and one that is obvious enough: when we talk about incels we are talking, generally, about heterosexual males.

‘Nuff said, right?

Well, perhaps not. For a far more comprehensive elaboration of the Incel Question, I refer you to this cask-strength post by the blogger known as Spandrell. (Caveat lector: don’t leave it open on your desktop at the office.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (4)

Cause And Effect

May 8, 2018 – 2:41 pm

From ‘Mencius Moldbug‘:

Since the reality of political history is that all polities of nontrivial size are controlled by organized minorities, all nontrivial democracies are pseudo-democracies. They are all different, however, since every organized minority is different. Every government flavored with democracy is irredeemably foul, but broadly the 20th-century pseudo-democratic regimes can be separated into two broad categories: oligarchical (communist, impersonal) and despotic (fascist, personal). Your preference depends on whether you prefer to be ruled by an omnipotent politician or a faceless machine. There is no difficulty in classifying the USG, or any other major modern government – they are all oligarchies.

So are we truly guilty? Perhaps this is an out – it is not us, but our rulers, who have committed these terrible collaborations. And by them conquered, of course, the world. Leading inexorably to our present national position of “global leadership,” not at all to be confused with “world domination.”

The question of whether the voting community is an active participant, or a passive part, in this machine, is an empirical one. It is of course much easier for the community to be an active participant in a fascist regime where individual politicians take actual power as a consequence of their personal support – although once they attain that power, they can build the usual apparatus to “manufacture consent.” Thus in a sense fascism is the more democratic form, but only in a sense.

In an oligarchical regime, public opinion is always an effect rather than a cause. It still matters, but only in the sense that some effects cannot be caused. But the power of the machine is always increasing. Few in the Reagan era could have imagined that in the lives of their grown children, most Americans would come to regard gay marriage as an essential civil right. Why did this happen? Because the ruling class is sovereign not just politically, but also intellectually. What it believes, everyone comes to believe – and is horrified that previous generations somehow failed to believe.

For those not familiar with Moldbug’s essays, a good index is here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (7)

Rules Of Engagement

May 6, 2018 – 9:23 pm

My friend Bill Vallicella, having read our recent post and comment-thread on Rod Dreher’s essay on Marx (see Bill’s recent post on the same article, here), noted my formulation of the consistent principle of our opponents in the current culture war:

Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always.

(The correct understanding of this principle, I’ve argued, renders pointless the accusations of hypocrisy and inconsistency that are always popping up in conservative critiques of the Left in public discourse.)

Bill wrote to ask me:

Are you advocating the “Defend your people, always, etc. ” principle, or are you merely stating that this is the principle that the hard Left lives by? One could do the latter without doing the former. But I think you do both.

This is a difficult question, and until he asked it I hadn’t tried to answer it for myself. My provisional response, which I will paraphrase here, was:

Certainly I think it’s the principle the hard Left lives by, just to get that out of the way. (It seems from Bill’s own post that he has come round to the same opinion.)

But do I advocate it? Well, I’d much rather not have to, of course; I’d prefer to work out our difficulties and differences in the arena of reason and dialogue, where the principle doesn’t apply.

But are there circumstances in which one should advocate it? In wartime this rises to the level of an existential question — and with Western civilization essentially at war now, it wants answering.

Off the top of my head, I suppose the question breaks down into at least these three subordinate questions:

1) Do my people deserve defending?

2) What are the stakes?

3) If the stakes are high, or (in the worst case) existential, what am I willing to sacrifice?

So: I’ll say yes to 1). (I think Bill would too.)

As for 2), I think the stakes are getting pretty close to existential. (Indeed, what I described as “the arena of reason and dialogue” is itself part of the territory that is under siege.)

So it all boils down to 3). Should we temporarily put aside reason and mercy and justice, if we must, to defeat those who would extinguish reason and mercy and justice? (The question seems related to Bill’s recent series of posts about tolerance of intolerance, and the interpretation of the Constitution.)

My answer: if that’s what it takes, then yes. We owe this to our children’s children, and to those who dedicated their lives (and gave their lives) to build and to safeguard the civilization of which we are now the stewards.

There is also another critically important question, one that I think is logically prior to the others:

4) What constitutes “my people”, and why?

Finally, the most important point of all: any group that can’t confidently answer questions 1) and 4), and that is thereby unable to cohere tightly enough to defend itself against external enemies who can, is doomed.

Or, to put it another way:

If you aren’t prepared to kill, you should be prepared to die.

Comments are welcome.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics, Reaction | Comments (14)

The Sixties: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

May 4, 2018 – 2:03 pm

The term of the moment is “incel”, which is short for “involuntarily celibate”. It rose to virality after a young man associating himself with the “incel” movement ran down a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto last month. The young-adult liberal website Vox explains the term here.

There is now a bit of a reaction underway on the Left to the existence of this wholly unwelcome phenomenon. Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, offered a tweet recently saying:

“CEOs of big tech companies: You almost certainly have incels as employees. What are you going to do about it?”

One wonders what she might have in mind.

The reactionary’s impression of all this is clear enough: by destroying the social norms and pressures that once tended to make sex available only in the context of marriage, and by replacing monogamy with consequence-free sexual libertinism, we have created an unstructured sexual marketplace in which a great many males — who might otherwise have found partners, as higher-status males were removed by the pool through marriage to high-status females — are now completely excluded from all sexual opportunities. This unintended consequence of the sexual “revolution” is only now attracting notice — understandably, perhaps, as there have been so many others. (The very same problem also affects polygamous societies, which goes a long way toward explaining the way in which recently arrived hordes of young and unrestrained Muslim men have enriched formerly tranquil places like Sweden.)

In 1934 the anthropologist J.D. Unwin published a meticulously researched book called Sex and Culture, in which he documented the robust correlation between sexual mores and the fate of civilizations.

Wikipedia sums up Unwin’s conclusions as follows (another brief synopsis is here):

In Sex and Culture (1934), Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 known civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. Aldous Huxley described Sex and Culture as “a work of the highest importance”.

According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous it becomes increasingly liberal with regard to sexual morality and as a result loses its cohesion, its impetus and its purpose. The effect, says the author, is irrevocable. Unwin also infers that legal equality, and only legal equality, between women and men is necessary to institute before absolute monogamy is instituted, otherwise the monogamy will erode in the name of emancipating women, as he shows has occurred numerous times and places throughout all of written history.

Successful civilizations do not simply fall from trees. They are complex and intricate living things, depending for their existence upon conditions and interrelationships that are beyond the comprehension of any person. The traditions and moral systems that such societies preserve may also preserve them, and to assume that such things are mere artifacts, or atavistic caprices, to be discarded without care is a species of arrogance, and of solipsistic foolishness, that can have mortiferous and irreversible effects.

It is also something we seem to pride ourselves upon these days. I suppose that’s because we’re so good at it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (10)

Rod Dreher On Marx And Neoreaction

May 2, 2018 – 2:44 pm

I’ve just read a response by Rod Dreher to a recent NYT op-ed, by Jason Barker, praising Karl Marx.

Mr. Dreher grants to Marx a correct understanding of the revolutionary power of capitalism:

Capitalism ”” for Marx, the merchant class (the “bourgeoisie’) were the carriers of capitalism ”” turns everything into a market. Capitalism is a revolutionary force that disrupts and desacralizes all things. All that talk in The Benedict Option about “liquid modernity’? That’s based in Marx, actually. Zygmunt Bauman, the late sociologist from whom I took the idea, was a Marxist.

Look, most of us conservatives in the West are to some degree supporters of the free market. What we missed for a very long time was that it is hard to support a fully free market while at the same time expecting our social institutions ”” the family, the church, and so forth ”” to remain stable. This is an insight of Marx’s that we conservatives ”” and even conservative Christians ”” ought to absorb. I write about this a lot, though not in specific Marxist terms.

The thing is, Christian Democratic parties throughout Western Europe have largely absorbed this truth. Catholic social teaching is based in these insights as well. They aren’t necessarily against the free market, but rather say that the market must be tempered for the common good.

That wasn’t Marx’s view, obviously. Marx thought the free market was itself wicked, and ought to be totally controlled by the state. We know where that all ended up: with a hundred million dead, and entire economies and societies destroyed.

Dreher adds that Barker’s piece openly acknowledges that an evolved Marxism is one of the roots of the modern Left’s “social-justice” crusades:

But we can agree that Marx was right to diagnose the revolutionary nature of capitalism, if catastrophically wrong about the cure for capitalism’s excesses. If that was as far as Jason Barker went, that would be fine. But he doesn’t ”” and this is the warning. Barker continues:

The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not “philosophy’ but “critique,’ or what he described in 1843 as “the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.’ “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,’ he wrote in 1845.

Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths’ of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.

We have become used to the go-getting mantra that to effect social change we first have to change ourselves. But enlightened or rational thinking is not enough, since the norms of thinking are already skewed by the structures of male privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use. Changing those norms entails changing the very foundations of society.

There it is, reader. There is the “cultural Marxism’ that you hear so much about, and that so many on the left deny. It is in the Marxist principle that there is no such thing as truth; there is only power.

Dreher draws the right conclusion from this:

This is why it is pointless for us conservatives and old-school liberals to stand around identifying contradictions and hypocrisies in how the progressives behave. They don’t care! They aren’t trying to apply universal standards of justice. They believe that “universal standards of justice’ is a cant phrase to disguise white heterosexist patriarchal supremacy. They believe that justice is achieving power for their group, and therefore disempowering other groups. This is why it’s not racist, in their view, to favor non-whites over whites in the distribution of power. This is why they don’t consider it unfair to discriminate against men, heterosexuals, and other out-groups.

They will use things like “dialogue’ as a tactic to serve the long-term strategy of acquiring total power. Resisting them on liberal grounds is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. The neoreactionaries have seen this clearly, while conservatives like me, who can’t quite let go of old-fashioned liberalism, have resisted it.

Yes, we neoreactionaries have seen this very clearly indeed. Why, just a few weeks ago, commenting on the media’s outrage at Facebook’s having provided user data to a firm associated with the Trump campaign, when they didn’t seem to mind that they did it for Obama just a few years earlier, I wrote this:

This has a lot of people over on the Republican side of the aisle blasting the mainstream media for hypocrisy. But if that’s the way you’re looking at this, you couldn’t be more wrong. What the MSM are showing here is, in fact, disciplined adherence to a timeless and consistent political principle:

Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always.

How I wish more people understood this!

It appears that Rod Dreher now understands it. He continues:

I hate to say it ”” seriously, I do ”” but I think that today’s conservatives (including me) are going to end up as neoreactionaries…

That’s what happened to me, too, Mr. Dreher. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind, either — but here I stand. I can do no other. Welcome aboard.

There’s more, and it’s all worth your time. Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (11)

Revolt Against The Modern World

May 1, 2018 – 2:54 pm

Here’s something worth reading: an interview with the anonymous traditionalist “Wrath of Gnon”. (For those of you not familiar with the neoreactionary term “Gnon”, you should imagine it as meaning something almost exactly congruent with Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings“: the enduring truths of Nature, or Nature’s God, that periodically render a pitiless judgment upon our imaginary Utopias and dream-castles.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (5)

A Religious Test For Islam?

April 30, 2018 – 9:03 pm

There’s been an interesting discussion over at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website about the Constitution’s prohibition, in Article VI, of a “religious test” for public office. The discussion, with an anonymous Canadian philosopher (although, as was said once of Newton, “we recognize the lion by his claw”), spans several posts.

In the first post in the series, Bill declares his opinion that the prohibition should not apply to religions that are also political ideologies whose tenets are in direct opposition to the political principles of the Constitution itself. (For example, a coherent interpretation of Islam favors the imposition of sharia law, which would be in direct controversion of the Establishment Clause.)

Bill writes:

It is important to realize that Islam is as much an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion. Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices.

Many assume that no restriction may be placed on admissible religions for the purposes of the implementation of Article VI. I deny it. A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the “no religious Test” provision. One could argue that on a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.

While I sympathize with Bill’s take on both Islam and his view of what the Constitution ought to be, I think it’s clear that this is hardly a mainstream interpretation, to put it mildly.

Enter the Canadian, to whom Bill responds in the second post. C. writes:

I’m almost convinced the correct response is that, unfortunately, if the Constitution is interpreted correctly then fundamentalist Muslims do indeed have the right to hold public office–given the most natural and reasonable interpretation of word meanings and even taking into account the likely intentions of the founding fathers, the history of legal interpretation, etc. It’s very hard to get around this.

Bill acknowledges that a plain reading of the Constitution would seem to bar a religious test for Muslims seeking office. But then he asks:

[T]he question I would put to my fellow citizens is: Are you comfortable with an interpretation of the Constitution that allows for its elimination and the values and principles it enshrines?

I am not.

There are those who will say: let anyone immigrate from anywhere and then let the people who have immigrated decide what they want. They call that democracy, and they are all for it. The people are the residents within certain geographical borders, and residency constitutes citizenship. If the residents want blasphemy laws, then we shall have blasphemy laws.

Well, right. That’s how popular government works! This sort of thing is a big part of why we neoreactionary lepers are so leery of multiculturalism, and indeed of democracy itself.

The Canadian rightly points out that there is little room for “interpretation” here while maintaining any sort of fidelity to the text:

You point out that Islam is not just a religion but also a political ideology. But does that really help? It still is a religion, and if the Constitution forbids any “religious test”, without ever saying anything about the scope of “religion”, the most natural interpretation is that even religions that double as political ideologies–most religions, really–are subject to the “no religious test” rule. You say that we could declare Islam an inadmissible religion, but then wouldn’t effectively mean that the Constitution is self-contradictory? On the one hand, there is to be freedom of religion and no religious test–the subject here being surely just religion in general. On the other hand, only some religions are protected by the “no religious test” rule, and for other religions there can be a religious test after all. That seems incoherent, no?

It seems incoherent indeed, if you ask me. But Bill replies:

There is no contradiction or incoherence such as you imagine. I take it you find no incoherence in what the logic books call exceptive propositions. For example, “All citizens of the United States are guaranteed freedom of religion except those whose religions are incompatible with the values and principles of the American founding.” The following propositions are logically consistent. (1) The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and disallows religious tests. (2) The Constitution guarantees these things subject to the proviso that the religion in question is compatible with the principles of the American founding.

Now the Constitution does not contain these formulations. But we will agree that the document is subject to interpretation. My claim is that it is most reasonable interpreted along the lines I have suggested.

I agree that this would be a salutary amendment, but it isn’t what the Constitution says. Bill’s response continues:

As for incoherence, I should think that your account is more justly charged with it. A constitution that allows for its own subversion is incoherent if not strictly self-contradictory in the logical sense. The provisions of such a constitution do not cohere with its own continued existence.

This may be so, but this is, in my opinion, a flaw in the Constitution itself, and not the sort of thing that is remediable by interpretation. The reason is that once we unmoor ourselves from the clear meaning of the text, then we are free-floating in a realm of competing goals and principles. In light of what, exactly, do we place limits on such interpretations? Who decides what’s a justifiable interpretation and what isn’t?

In the third post, the Canadian raises exactly this question:

What are the criteria for a reasonable interpretation? On the one hand, a reasonable interpretation might be one that results in a constitution that reasonable people could accept. Naturally, if this is the criterion, no reasonable interpretation can produce a constitution that, in practice, would create a society where that same constitution would be destroyed. On the other hand, it might simply be one that’s adequately supported by the textual evidence (and other evidence, e.g., reasonably hypotheses about the authors’ intentions).

In any case, I think that for your argument you need the first notion of reasonable interpretation. But then there’s a problem: Leftists, whose ideas about reasonable political principles are very different from ours, can now argue on a similar basis that we should just ignore the seemingly plain meaning of the Constitution in cases where it conflicts with their values. For instance, they can argue that since it’s just not reasonable to let citizens buy AR-15s, the 2nd Amendment must be interpreted in such a way that citizens don’t have that right. That seems worrisome. If there isn’t even a generally agreed meaning for the constitution, the only way to politically resolve such disagreements is by some kind of debate over ultimate aims or values; but I know you agree with me that that isn’t likely to happen either. So it seems wise to insist that the constitution’s meaning is the meaning of the text, not the meaning that we think it would have or should have in order to be most reasonable. But then we’re back to the problem that the text just doesn’t seem to exclude Islamic freedom of religion, or to allow for a “religious test” in that case–or even to exclude the possibility that the Constitution is just internally inconsistent in some respects…

Bill sticks to his guns:

It seems to me that the Constitution cannot be interpreted so as to allow the emergence of the following logical contradiction:

a) Under no circumstances shall (i) the freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice (or to refrain from the practice of any religion) be prohibited by the government, or (ii) the freedom to express one’s view publicly be abridged.

b) Under some circumstances (e.g., when enough Muslim fundamentalists gain power) the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech many be prohibited and abridged.

Note that the (a)-(b) dyad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot both be true. What we have here is a strict logical contradiction.

But to embrace a logical contradiction is the height of unreasonableness. I conclude that to interpret the Constitution in such a way that it allows for the emergence of the above contradiction is unreasonable.

Is this in fact a logical contradiction? Not if you consider that the Constitution itself contains a mechanism for its own modification. The process would be a simple one: 1) the demographics of the nation change; 2) Muslims are admitted in growing numbers to national office, thanks to the No Religious Test Clause; 3) once Islam has consolidated its power, the Constitution is amended to abolish the Establishment Clause (and perhaps also even the No Religious Test Clause itself).

There’s nothing incoherent about any of this; it is simply the way a democratic popular government evolves in response to demographic and cultural change. If you are going to vest sovereignty in the people, as the West seems to have a fetish for, then to change the people is to usurp the sovereign. In other words: this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It is inherent in the nature of democratic popular government that it is dangerously sensitive to the moods and passions of the people. The Founders were acutely aware of this liability, and so they did their best to safeguard against it. But to imagine, as the leaders of the modern West seem to, that you can swap out the people and somehow preserve the nation — based simply on abstract political principles held in common by the founding population, but not by their replacements — is a suicidal error. The problem, then, is not with the Constitution, which rightly contains provisions for its own modification, but with the inherent liabilities of democracy itself, and the unique peril that democratic nations face from multiculturalism and mass alien immigration.

The Canadian understands this:

We might be back to a recurring deeper disagreement here. I don’t think that any system of abstract principles and values is enough to provide a framework for a workable society. I think some kind of pre-rational or pre-conceptual horizon of meaning and practice and natural community is the basis; explicit principles and values have a role, but only when they’re understood by everyone to operate within that specific cultural world. The principles of “no religious test” or “freedom of religion” were just fine when they were only being applied to a fairly small range of fairly similar religions, practiced by relatively similar people. (And, sure, there were always some who were not so similar–Africans, Amerindians–but they were small in number and had no real influence.) Once every religion on earth was included in American society, that was bound to create insoluble problems. Of course, one option is to simply say that there will be freedom of religion for a specific list of religions, and only those ones. But that seems contrary to other traditional American principles. I suspect that the very idea of “religion” that we in the west tend to take for granted is really an artefact of our specific religious and cultural heritage. There is probably no useful general account of “religion” across all human cultures. So it would be unwise to propose any kind of freedom for that kind of thing.

Finally, Bill must know that there is simply no possibility of any actually existing Court interpreting the Constitution in the way he would like; it simply isn’t going to happen. A religious test that bans Muslims from political office? Not a chance.

The only rational answer to the problem Bill perceives is this: to understand, and act upon, what I have called the Obvious Thing:

Allowing mass Muslim immigration is the stupidest and most irreversibly self-destructive thing that any Western nation can do.

Go read the whole series. The four parts are here, here, here, and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Politics, Religion | Comments (4)

Warmism

April 28, 2018 – 6:02 pm

Here’s a good piece, of unspecified age, describing the cult of climate change. (The author chooses to call it a “cult” because the belief-system isn’t old enough to qualify as a “religion”.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (0)

Gohmert On Mueller

April 27, 2018 – 11:15 am

I’ll be driving all day today, but before I go I want to pass along this long report by Representative Louis Gohmert on the character and professional history of Robert Mueller. (A hat-tip to our e-pal Bill Keezer for this.)

Caveat lector: I haven’t had time to read it all myself yet, or to vet any of what it says, but I thought you all might find it interesting.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

A Bright Cold Day In April

April 26, 2018 – 12:37 pm

You’ve probably heard about the Alfie Evans affair in England, in which Her Majesty’s Government, having decided that a young boy in a persistent coma ought to be dead, has been trying to kill him, and has prevented his parents from taking him elsewhere for treatment. It’s a disgusting and horrifying story, and should remind all of us frogs that the temperature in the pot is rising.

Steve Deace, writing at Conservative Review, has posted a brief and rousing polemic about the case, here.

Alfie’s treatment has rightly provoked a good deal of outrage — so much, in fact, that it wants tamping down. To that end, the local police have informed the public:

We’ve issued the following statement following reports of social media posts being made in relation to Alder Hey Hospital and the ongoing situation with Alfie Evans:

Chief Inspector Chris Gibson said: “Merseyside Police has been made aware of a number of social media posts which have been made with reference to Alder Hey Hospital and the ongoing situation involving Alfie Evans.

“I would like to make people aware that these posts are being monitored and remind social media users that any offences including malicious communications and threatening behaviour will be investigated and where necessary will be acted upon.’

What year is it again? Oh, that’s right: 1983.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Foreign Affairs | Tagged | Comments (7)

The Naturalistic Fallacy

April 26, 2018 – 12:05 pm

Over the transom today:

It’s “ethically inappropriate’ for government and medical organizations to describe breastfeeding as “natural’ because the term enforces rigid notions about gender roles, claims a new study in Pediatrics.

“Coupling nature with motherhood”¦ can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family (for example, that women should be the primary caretaker,’ the study says.

This would be a fine occasion for a rant about the postmodernist insanity of the modern Leftist religion, and about its willingness simply to deny the existence of any reality beyond that which the faithful may construct in their hallucinations. After all: if breastfeeding isn’t natural, then what explains lactation? How did such a thing come to pass? Is milk now a “social construct”? Is the long history of mammalian evolution explicable only by some sort of backward causality involving lattes?

I’ll let that go, however; we’re all used to this sort of thing by now. What jumps out at me in this item is the suggestion that a “study” can determine what is “ethically inappropriate”.

Why is this noteworthy? Because for decades the corrosive action of the Left has been to subjectivize what is objective: to deny the reality of sex, race, and innate characteristics and distinctions of every kind. In this, though, we see the other edge of the sword: the objectivization of the subjective.

Read the article here. Read also this related item.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Science, Rubbish, Reaction | Comments (9)

Truth And Consequences

April 25, 2018 – 9:11 pm

I’ve been busy catching up with work, and have no time for writing just yet. But I do have something good for you to read: a substantial essay by Toby Young on heredity and heresy, and the scientific denialism of the progressive Left. It’s so good that I won’t excerpt it: you must go and read the whole thing.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, HBD | Comments (0)

Notes From Abroad

April 24, 2018 – 10:00 pm

Several readers have written to ask me to report on our visit to Austria last week. Mostly we were visiting with my daughter, her husband, and our little grandson, but we did get out and about a bit. Here are some thoughts and recollections.

First of all, Austria still retains, as far as I can see, its national character. There are signs of the flood of Mideastern and African migration that have so radically altered much of Europe, but they are few, and even Vienna, or at least the parts of it that we spent our time in, still seems distinctly, and quite homogeneously, Austrian.

Vienna is, as befits an ancient seat of European empire, a gracious and civilized place. It is orderly and unhurried. (See my remarks on this from an earlier visit, here.) In bustling New York it always seems as if everyone has twice as much to to as can possibly be done in a day; in Vienna it seems that everyone has exactly as much to do as can comfortably be done, and not a thing more. The people seem to understand the importance of balance, and of leisure. The shops are all closed on Sundays; to a visitor from New York this seems inconvenient at first, but I soon came to appreciate it (it was, after all, how things were even in the U.S. when I was a boy, in a forgotten age of the world).

We didn’t do much sightseeing this time around, but we did walk quite a bit, often going from our daughter’s home in the Third District (over east of the Ring) toward the old city center. In that central area are many of the well-known landmarks: the cathedral of Saint Stephen, the Hofburg, Maria Teresa Platz and the big museums, the Rathaus, the Opera, and so on. We’ve visited often since our daughter moved there, so it’s all becoming terra cognita at this point.

One highlight was dinner at the Grecian Biesl, which has been doing business since 1447. (I had the schnitzel, and good local beer.) We dined in a room in which visitors had written their names on the walls over the years; among the autographs were Beethoven, Mozart, and Mark Twain.

The lovely Nina and I drove off to Salzburg for a stay of two nights. (I hadn’t been there since 1972; Nina’s last visit there was in 1968.) We stayed in a cozy hotel in the Altstadt, a few yards from Mozart’s birthplace. Here we did do the usual touristy things. We climbed up to the Hohensalzburg fortress, with its commanding views of the city and of the towering mountains nearby; we walked through the gardens of the Mirabell Palace (as featured in the “Do Re Me” sequence in The Sound of Music), and we stopped by the vast St Augustin beer hall and garden for some refreshment (I must thank my Nina for her indulgence on that one, as she doesn’t even drink beer).

In the evening we went back to the Schloss Mirabell, which has a marble chamber-music hall in which Mozart himself used to perform; there we saw a small ensemble perform two Mozart sinfonias, and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, on period instruments.

The next day, rather than drive on the main highway back to Vienna, we detoured south through the Alps. Our course took us through Golling, a charming little town, and then on to Hallstatt, an impossibly scenic lakeside village completely surrounded by enormous mountains. (So renowned is its beauty that a life-sized replica of the town has apparently been built in China, which accounts for the number of Asian tourists we saw there.)

Our commenter Jason asked what the Austrians thought of their new chancellor. (His name is Sebastian Kurz, and he is what is called, these days, “far-right” — a category that now includes anyone more traditionally minded than Che Guevara.) I will confess that I made no effort whatsoever to find out. I feel awkward talking about politics in foreign countries; it seems gauche and pushy to do so, I think. (Also, this trip was for pleasure, not business.) Speaking for myself, I’ll say that I’m glad to see any signs in Europe of some residual will to live.

In short, then: a delightful trip. The weather was warm and sunny throughout, and our little grandson Liam was a joy.

Thank you all. We’ll be back to our normal coverage shortly.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (9)

We’re Back

April 23, 2018 – 10:38 am

Did I miss anything?

We had a splendid time overseas, but home is best. I have a busy couple of days ahead, picking up the threads of ordinary life. Things should get back to normal here shortly.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Service Notice

April 12, 2018 – 11:52 am

Things may be a little quiet here for a fortnight or so: the lovely Nina and I are off to Austria to visit our daughter, her husband, and our wee grandson Liam.

I’m disinclined to keep too close an eye on the news while we’re traveling; frankly I could use a break. I may post a thing or two before we get back.

Thanks as always, readers, and keep your powder dry! These are parlous times.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (12)

One Of These Days These Boots Are Gonna Walk All Over You

April 11, 2018 – 4:17 pm

Here are three takes on the Michael Cohen raid, and the Mueller probe generally: by DiploMad, Alan Dershowitz, and Dymphna.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Dead End

April 11, 2018 – 11:16 am

From Twitter today:

Cosmologists wonder about a thing called the “Great Filter“. It may be as simple as this.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (0)

Rod Dreher On The Failure Of An Ideal

April 10, 2018 – 3:48 pm

The scales have fallen from Rod Dreher’s eyes. Commenting on Harvard’s decision to suspend and defund a campus religious organization, he says that his belief in “compatibilism” — the idea that it is possible for orthodox religion to coexist peaceably with the modern liberal state — is over. Regarding the new liberal order, he notes that “it doesn’t matter whether or not we consider ourselves its enemy, but whether it regards us as its enemy.”

Mr. Dreher quotes Alasdair MacIntyre, who likens the predicament of the 21st-century religious traditionalist to what faced the civilized people of Rome during that empire’s decline:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead””often not recognising fully what they were doing””was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

It is what many of us in the reactionary Right have said: when the Flood is upon us, we must build an ark.

I have one point of disagreement with Mr. Dreher’s essay: he does not seem to understand that liberalism itself is now a religion, and is in fact the established religion of the West. He and his fellow orthodox Christians are not merely political dissenters. They are Cathars. He is clearly despondent, but he is not sufficiently afraid.

Read his article here.

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

Fools Rush In

April 10, 2018 – 3:10 pm

Here’s a disturbing pattern:

1) We lean toward a stand-down in Syria.

2) Spooks and hawks object.

3) A chemical-weapons attack is reported. It is blamed, on scant evidence, or no evidence at all, on Assad and the Russians.

4) Women and other tender-hearted types throughout the West weep over looping news footage of suffering children. (Spooks and hawks cackle, their eyes aglint.)

5) The cry echoes from on high: “Something must be done! This cannot stand!”

6) Presto! We attack!

It is happening again. I am dismayed. I wish more people were.

Here is some commentary from the strategic-security analyst John McCreary’s NightWatch bulletin over the past two days.

Yesterday:

Before rushing to judgment about this alleged Syrian attack, astute Readers will recall that the militant extremists have performed false flag chemical attacks in the past. Just after the US announced its intention to withdraw from Syria, it is in danger of being drawn back in. Nothing suggests the Syrians or Russians want that outcome. At this point, the judgments of Syrian culpability constitute evidence free analysis.

Chemical attack on 7 April. Syrian doctors and rescue workers said on 8 April that at least 40 people died from an apparent chemical attack on the night of 7 April in the city of Douma.

Comment: Pro-extremist press analysis judged that the attack appeared to force the start of a final withdrawal of hardline rebels from one of the last districts under opposition control in Douma. An agreement allowing them to pull out was announced by the Russian military command in Syria. They and their families are heading for Jarabulus in the Turkish zone.

The on-site reporting sources on chemical weapons attacks are biased beyond credibility. In the past, the Islamists posted images that purported to show youthful victims of a chemical attack in a hospital in Syria. However, an astute observer reported that the hospital was Egyptian, and he had been there and recognized the pale green tile. The images were photo-shopped.

Special comment: What is irreducible is that chemical attacks drag the US back into the conflict. One web site posted an analysis that showed a correlation between two past chemical attacks in Syria and US announcements of its intention to end its involvement in the Syrian civil war. A few days after a US withdrawal announcement, a chemical weapons attack occurred, according to this analysis. Of course, correlation is not causation, but it deserves attention when it starts to create a pattern.

A second point that also is irreducible is the Russians have no reason to want the US dragged back into the conflict. Last week, Foreign Minister Lavrov once again encouraged the US to leave, as it keeps promising to do, he said.

The Syrians have no interest in dragging the US back into the conflict and had won the battle for eastern Ghouta.

Russian aircraft technicians are essential to the operational capabilities of Syrian combat aircraft. As in past attacks, it is a simple process to determine whose aircraft, if any, were over Douma at the time of the attack. The Russians know the payloads.

The Russians stand with the Syrians. On 8 April, the Russian Foreign Ministry published a press release on its web site that the reports of a chemical attack by the Syrian forces on the town of Douma in eastern Ghouta were “planted”.

“Information continues to be planted about the use of chlorine or other toxic agents by the Syrian government forces. More of this fabricated information about a chemical attack that has supposedly taken place in Douma appeared yesterday”¦ The White Helmets, a volunteer rescue force that has reported a chemical attack, have been “repeatedly exposed over their links with terrorists”, the ministry added.

“We have warned of this kind of dangerous provocation more than once lately. The purpose of these mendacious conjectures, which are without any basis, is to shield the terrorists and the irreconcilable radical opposition, which rejects a political settlement, while at the same time trying to justify possible external use of force.’

“It is necessary once again to warn that military intervention under far-fetched and fabricated pretexts in Syria, where there are Russian service personnel at the request of the legitimate government, is absolutely unacceptable and can lead to the gravest of consequences,” the ministry said.

Comment: The Russians warned several times in the past two weeks, most recently on 6 April, that ultra-extreme Islamist groups were preparing chemicals to stage an attack in Douma.

Russian defense spokesman Major General Yevtushenko said, “The ringleaders of Jabhat al-Nusra (the al-Nusra Front) and the Free Syrian Army, which are acting together, are plotting explosions of makeshift chemical charges containing chlorine in a number of areas under their control, including Al Balad in Daraa,” he said.

As for the so-called White Hats independent journalists have confirmed they act as a mouthpiece for the extremists.

Today (I have emphasized some passages):

The Russians continue to defend Syria. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on 9 April that the Russian military in Syria have repeatedly warned of provocations aimed at blaming Damascus for the use of chemical weapons.

The Russian Centre for Reconciliation in Syria said Russian specialists inspected the site of the alleged chemical attack on the 9th and said there was no trace of chemical agents.

The Syrian Red Crescent also issued a statement on 9 April that its medical personnel in Douma had found no evidence that a chemical attack had taken place. The Red Crescent runs a hospital in Douma. It received no patients that were exposed to chemical agents over the weekend, despite claims by the White Helmets that hundreds were wounded from exposure to chemicals.

Comment: This is the first report that Russian specialists already visited the site. The Russian visit will change no minds. Many will doubt anything the Russians claim. But unlike the western powers, the Russians at least said they tried get evidence.

Western states have not even done that much.

If the site is accessible to the Russian specialists and to the Red Crescent, it ought to be accessible to western specialists. The Syrians intend to declare Douma a terror-free zone.

We repeat our warning that we judge the Russians are serious about the threat of “grave consequences’ if the US attacks Syrian forces. The Israeli attack has deprived the US of the benefit of whatever reluctance the Russians might have had.

In other words: we have no conclusive evidence, beyond the highly questionable authority of the “White Hats”, that a chemical attack even occurred, let alone that it was mounted by Assad and the Russians. (There was good reason to think that the last one wasn’t.) Against that allegation we must weigh the facts that (a) there was no tactical reason whatsoever, in war-fighting terms, to use chemical weapons, and (b) for Assad or Putin to do so would be an utterly incomprehensible strategic blunder.

What have we to gain by escalating against the Russians in Syria? (Keep in mind also that war with the Russians would quickly spill far beyond Syria’s frontiers.) What U.S. interest does it serve? Say we advance with real power, and topple Assad. What then? Have we learned nothing in our futile decades of nation-building in Mideastern snakepits?

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (7)

The Rake’s Progress

April 10, 2018 – 11:05 am

Google honors the Egyptian roué and occasional actor Omar Sharif with one of its worshipful “doodles” today (because “diversity” or something, I guess). Here’s a recap of his life.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Tagged | Comments (0)

Home And Away

April 9, 2018 – 10:07 pm

A habit of mine is to get outside to walk a few miles every day; it lifts the spirit, and clears the mind. Usually I am in one of Cape Cod’s remoter precincts, so I walk a favorite hilly trail in the pine-woods; but sometimes I am in New York, and I take my walk, as I did this afternoon, in Prospect Park.

The two experiences are very different, as you’d imagine. The woodland trail in the Outer Cape is a tiny track through the forest; although I know that others walk it, in the years I’ve been on it I’ve only ever encountered another person a handful of times. The knob-and-kettle terrain is carpeted with pine needles, and if there is no wind it can be eerily silent, save for the distant susurration of waves lapping at the western shore. The view opens from time to time to give a glimpse of the 25-mile expanse of Cape Cod Bay, and of the great arc of the Cape up to Provincetown. The sea-washed air is usually cool and wholesome — though in the winter, when the trail is covered in snow, and the northwest wind roars across the bay, it can be bitter.

This sort of solitude in the woods is, for those with a taste for it, food and drink for the soul; the connection with Nature’s immensities of time and space is direct, but all around you are the little here-and-nows of the living world in the present moment: wildflowers, miniature greenscapes of lichens and mosses, the birds wheeling overhead, and of course the trees themselves, both upright and fallen.

The walk in Prospect Park is a very different business. The Park itself is a beautiful creation: the crowning achievement of the great Frederick Law Olmstead. It is, too, in its statues, monuments, and architectural adornments, a book of history, both aesthetic and biographical. But unlike my trail in the Wellfleet woods, it is an artifact, a work of man. And there is no solitude here: Man, in all his variety, is everywhere.

This is, for someone like me, a healthy thing. Out here in the sequestered cogitorium of neoreaction, we meditate on the Long Now: the great tapestry of the civilizations men have wrought, and the patterns and principles we can wring from it. When we turn our eyes outward, it is to focus our instruments on the passing scene, to make the day’s observations, and to test their fit against our models. Solitude, such as I find in the piney forest, is good for such reflection and meditation. Ultimately, though, the object is human life: what we are, how we flourish, what we can know about ourselves, and what we should be living for. In Prospect Park these things are no longer the abstractions they can be in the stillness of the forest.

On this bright cold day in April, as I was nearing the end of my walk, I heard a rumbling sound behind me, and some youthful voices. I turned to look, and saw a trio of young men in baseball uniforms, rolling a bag of equipment, and heading for the ballfields.

What makes civilizations come into being, grow old, and die? What things can we know, and how can we know that we know them? How ought we to live? How ought people justly to be governed? Who laid the foundations of the world? What does it mean to be conscious? Have we souls? Do we continue?

All good questions. But today I was reminded that it is April in Brooklyn, and that it’s time, once again, to play ball.

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

Bloody Well Right

April 6, 2018 – 1:33 pm

This video is everywhere today, and I’ll do my part to make sure everyone sees it. The speaker’s name is Mark Robinson:

Robinson nails the essence of anarcho-tyranny in a brief and powerful sentence: speaking of the law-abiding citizens of America (and I’ll note that his remark applies to all the decent, diligent, and docile citizens of the modern West), he says:

“We are the first ones taxed, the last ones considered, and the first ones punished.”

Amen, sir. Churchill couldn’t have said it better.

Mr. Robinson, you have a rare gift. Run with it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Guns | Comments (2)

E Pluribus Multis

April 5, 2018 – 12:18 pm

Continuing the discussion of David Reich’s book on human genetics, here’s Steve Sailer with an essay on the populations of India and China. The gist: compared to India, which has maintained genetically distinct (and stratified) subgroups for millennia, China is highly homogeneous.

Mr. Sailer is a man of broad erudition, penetrating intelligence, and roving curiosity. Were the era less stifling, and more open to diversity of inquiry and opinion, he would be one of our foremost public intellectuals.

By Malcolm | Posted in HBD | Comments (0)

Riddle, Mystery, Enigma

April 4, 2018 – 10:09 pm

I have a question about the Skripal poisonings, allegedly ordered by Vladimir Putin:

Why aren’t the victims dead?

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

Nick Burchill’s Very Bad Day

April 4, 2018 – 3:03 pm

This is quite possibly the best thing I have ever read: the story of how a young man was banned from a hotel for 18 years. It involves a flock of seagulls and a suitcase full of pepperoni.

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (0)

Three Models Of Equality

April 2, 2018 – 10:10 pm

Last Saturday’s post was about the scuffle between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over the role of genetics in the varying distribution of cognitive, behavioral, and personality traits in distinct human populations (and over Mr. Harris’s association with Charles Murray, whom people like Klein accuse of peddling racism and “pseudoscience”). I linked to Andrew Sullivan, who had written an excellent article defending Harris and Murray, saying that if liberalism is to survive, it must be able to coexist with truth. (If you haven’t read it, you should.) Mr. Sullivan defends the “classical-liberal” position, which differs from modern, cryptoreligious “Progressivism” in its view of equality and justice.

For the social-justice crusaders of the present day, a pillar of the faith is that human variation in capacity and aptitude, to the extent that it exists at all, is entirely a result of cultural pressures and prejudices. This means that a society that tolerates wide inequities of life-outcomes is by definition unjust. If we’re all innately the same in every important quality, then social inequalities are incontrovertible evidence that the game is unfair — so we have a moral duty to attack the existing order, and to replace it with something better. The job will never be finished until results are equalized for all human groups, no matter how you slice them: sex, race, sexual orientation, and so on.

The “classical liberal” understands that this concept of equality goes too far. Clearly people are not all the same, and wishing that they were does not make it so. This means that when men are free their results will differ, and those with superior talents, aptitudes, and dispositions will come out ahead. The only way to prevent this is to rig the game against such people, with at least two adverse consequences:

First, advancement in science, commerce, art, literature, etc. — all the things that make high civilization pleasant and prosperous — is driven by the efforts of its most gifted and ambitious individuals. To hold such people back is to handicap the society as a whole.

Second, inequalities in outcome arising from the innate inequalites of individuals can only be prevented by restrictions or penalties imposed upon those who rise above the average. Those so hampered will not endure this gladly, so enforcement requires an inequality of power between those striving toward exceptional achievement and those seeking to ensure equalities of outcome. Who will win in the struggle to be at the top of this power-structure? As always, it will be those with superior ambition and ability — superior, that is, in the qualities that fit tyrants for their position.

Thus we see a sort of conservation principle at work: inequality, like energy, can never be eliminated. It merely takes different forms.

The classical-liberal model, then, accepts that there is an ineliminable tension between liberty and equality, and considers inequalities of outcomes preferable to the inequalities of power, and diminutions of liberty, that are necessary to ensure equal results for everyone. What matters, and must be defended, is equality of opportunity, and equality before the law.

Sullivan concludes:

When genetics are in a golden age, when neuroscience is maturing as a discipline, and when the truth about these things will emerge soon enough, it matters that we establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet. Liberalism has never promised equality of outcomes, merely equality of rights. It’s a procedural political philosophy rooted in means, not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends.

That liberalism is integral to our future as a free society — and it should not falsely be made contingent on something that can be empirically disproven. It must allow for the truth of genetics to be embraced, while drawing the firmest of lines against any moral or political abuse of it. When that classical liberalism is tarred as inherently racist because it cannot guarantee equality of outcomes, and when scientific research is under attack for revealing the fuller truth about our world, we are in deep trouble.

So far, then, we have two models. The first, which we can call Utopianism, assumes the absolute equality of all people in all things, with the implication that differences in life-outcomes are necessarily due to remediable social and cultural defects. Moreover, it asserts that human nature itself is malleable. The task before the Utopian, then, is constantly to re-engineer society, and the people themselves, until perfection is achieved. Because of these premises, inequality of outcome is in itself conclusive evidence of continuing social injustice, and proof that the job is not yet finished.

The second, “classical” Liberalism, limits its assumption of equality to rights and opportunities. If there is work to done toward a just society, it is only to ensure that all people are in fact treated fairly and alike by the law, and that nobody is arbitrarily or maliciously denied his inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. (After that, you’re on your own.)

Enter our reader Jacques, who, in the comment-thread to Saturday’s post, raised an important question. Here are his remarks:

But in reality the problem is worse than Sullivan thinks (or claims to think). Liberalism is supposed to be a “procedural” philosophy based on “civic and moral equality” as he says. But what exactly does that mean? How can there really be some set of fair and reasonable “procedures” or some notion of purely “moral” equality that isn’t ultimately dependent on assumptions about the capacities and dispositions of the people inhabiting a liberal order? For example, if there is some kind of procedural justice that liberalism requires, then at least all (normal or typical) citizens must share certain basic rational and moral capacities. Maybe they have to be capable of assessing evidence or applying moral standards without tribal prejudices or narrow self-interest. But then it’s always an empirical possibility that only some human groups tend to have these traits, or tend to have them to some degree sufficient for competently and justly operating these “procedures’” The same goes for “equality”. What is “moral” equality once we strip away any specific empirical basis involving psychological traits that science might reveal to be very unevenly distributed? It’s necessarily an article of faith at that point; but if liberalism depends on a faith that lots of reasonable people can reject, it’s no longer neutral and procedural; then it’s no longer just and reasonable under its own standards.

In the end liberals face a hopeless dilemma: (i) deny any empirical basis for their theory, in which case the theory has no clear meaning or implications for actual human life, and can only be given meaning if it’s grounded on some controversial transcendental belief system; or (ii) admit the empirical basis needed for the theory to be meaningful and useful, in which case no one knows whether its empirical basis is actually true and science might at any time demolish the whole thing.

Liberalism was never really neutral or purely procedural. It was always incoherent, oscillating between the tautological and the unverifiable. And that served a purpose, for a while — wielding power and imposing a substantive belief system, pretending to have no power and no beliefs. But that trick isn’t working so well anymore.

Jacques’ point, if I understand it correctly, is this: the functioning of a free society of laws and rights — a community in which order and social structure are almost entirely self-organizing — requires that people understand the limits and constraints upon their behavior that the laws, and the rights of others, impose. To understand these limits, and to be able to live within them, is a necessary precondition of individual liberty. Our laws acknowledge this: those who cannot understand such constraints, or who understand them but will not live within them, have their rights and liberties constrained. (Examples of such people are children, criminals, the profoundly retarded, and the insane.) Were society not to limit the rights and liberties of such people, the system would fall apart: the result would either be anarchy, or the imposition of an authoritarian, artificial order. Both of these are far from the “sweet spot”; both are curtailments of liberty.

A free and open society, then, depends on more than an abstract framework of principles, laws, and rights. Such a society necessarily consists of actually existing people, who must have both the capacity and the disposition to instantiate and internalize those abstracta as personal guidelines and constraints. There will always be, as noted above, classes of people who cannot (or will not) do this, and for them we have created elaborate public institutions: schools for the children, asylums for the insane and the feeble-minded, and prisons for the criminals. But these resources are finite, and are already stretched thin; for the whole system not to break down requires that there be at all times a large enough fraction of the population that does have the cognitive and behavioral capacity to be part of a free and largely self-constrained public order.

But what, asks Jacques, if the open, high-trust society we have created in the West is, as I have argued elsewhere, a manifestation of a distinctive population’s unique balance of traits and dispositions? What if the Western liberal system — a framework of individual liberty that relies on a citizen’s ability to assimilate and live by laws and rights and duties and other such abstractions — is part of the “extended phenotype” of, and depends for its existence upon, a distribution of heritable traits that, in general, only characterizes a broadly Western-European genome?

Whether this is true is not a matter of ideology, or of ethics, no matter how ardently we might like it to be. It is a purely empirical question about evolutionary contingency. The adaptability, in statistical terms, of distinct human populations to different sorts of societies may well be as contingent and empirical as the question of the suitedness of Inuits or Pygmies for careers in the NBA. To deny this possibility — to insist, beyond debate, that all populations are precisely equal in their adaptability to Western norms, and to full participation in Western civilization, with everything such participation requires — is simply a declaration of faith.

In addition, then, to the two models of equality we named above — the Utopian belief in the absolute equality of all people, in which Justice requires equal outcomes, and the classical-Liberal belief in a limited sort of equality that nevertheless assumes for all an equal capacity to participate in liberal society — we have a third, more “tragic” model that admits the possibility of innate inequality of adaptability to Western society at all.

This third model is not a new idea; it was the generally accepted view of human reality until the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, if this view is correct, it identifies a danger: if our society admits sufficient numbers of settlers without regard to their fitness for participation in Western-style liberty, or with their ability to internalize and be guided by the abstracta that are peculiar to Western liberal culture, that culture may soon be overwhelmed, and lose the ability to sustain itself.

Is the model correct? Well, we have a method in the West for settling empirical questions: we do an experiment. And as it happens, just such an experiment has been underway in Europe for several decades now.

Are we prepared to draw any conclusions?

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

Go Not Gently!

March 31, 2018 – 6:13 pm

Several people have sent me links to an article by Rod Dreher on the narrowing of acceptable public opinion, and the suffocating and isolating effect it has on speech and social interaction. When we have an opinion that might run afoul of Cathedral orthodoxy (and there are fewer and fewer opinions one might have nowadays that don’t), and we aren’t sure that we are in safe company (which is to say, you are speaking to anyone but trusted friends), we are increasingly afraid, for fear of serious consequences, to say anything at all.

This is nothing new in the world; indeed it is all too familiar. It is characteristic of two kinds of societies: totalitarian regimes that must suppress political dissent; and nations, fractured by ethnic, religious, or political tensions, that live under the threat of civil war. (Often it is these very tensions that lead to totalitarianism; again and again we have seen murderous intra-national antipathies tamped down only by ruthless tyranny.)

That is what’s happening now all over the West. Europe and Canada, who are aggressively criminalizing dissent, are farther down this road than we are; in the U.S. the penalties for heresy are still, for now, limited to boycotts, media hate-frenzies, loss of employment, and social expulsion. That it has come to this, however, is a clear and disturbing sign that we are moving either toward ever-deepening totalitarianism, or toward civil war.

Perhaps it isn’t too late, though, at least here in America, to avoid both tines of that fork.

In his article, Mr. Dreher gives us the terrifying example of David Hogg, the child-monster that our media and cultural overlords have inflated to grotesque proportions, and who wields, for the moment, intimidating power. Mr. Dreher likens him to Anthony Fremont, the godlike, telepathic mutant child in Jerome Bixby’s horror classic “It’s A Good Life” who terrorizes a helpless village with capricious and irresistible violence.

The comparison is apt: in both cases we have terrible power in the hands of a morally and intellectually undeveloped mind. But there’s a difference too, and a critically important one: unlike Anthony Fremont, neither David Hogg, nor his handlers, have any intrinsic power. It is still only our fear, for now, that gives it to them.

If we want to live free again, it may still be possible to win this war without bloodshed. We have immensely powerful weapons ready to hand, if we have the wisdom to use them. They are simple, available to all, and they can be utterly irresistible when deployed with courage and resolve.

What are they? One is Faith. Another is Laughter.

But the greatest of them all is Truth.

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

Eppur, Si Muove!

March 31, 2018 – 1:20 pm

The secularist writer and podcaster Sam Harris has got into a public scuffle with Ezra Klein, “editor-at-large” of the young-adult news website Vox, over Harris’s recent interview with Charles Murray, and the more general question of the role of genetics in the distribution of traits in distinct human populations.

The absolutist “blank-slate” view of human nature is an essential tenet of the universalist post-modernism currently dismantling Western civilization. It is the load-bearing member that holds up the entire structure: globalism, radical feminism, multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, subjectivism, postcolonialism, and all the rest of it. (It is the One Ring that keeps the Dark Tower standing, and so it must be defended at any cost: this is why social panopticons such as Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have become something akin to the Eye of Sauron.)

Into the fray rides Andrew Sullivan, a journalist I respect more than most. (I don’t always agree with him, but he thinks for himself, isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, and when he has something to say he says it well. That’s good enough for me.)

Mr. Sullivan has written an outstanding essay on the Harris-Klein fracas. The gist: he stands for truth. I will offer only a small excerpt, because you must go and read it yourself:

I know this is a touchy, fraught, difficult subject. I completely understand the reluctance to discuss it, and the hideous history of similar ideas in the past. But when people seeking the truth are immediately targeted for abuse and stigma, it matters. When genetics are in a golden age, when neuroscience is maturing as a discipline, and when the truth about these things will emerge soon enough, it matters that we establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet. Liberalism has never promised equality of outcomes, merely equality of rights. It’s a procedural political philosophy rooted in means, not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends.

That liberalism is integral to our future as a free society — and it should not falsely be made contingent on something that can be empirically disproven. It must allow for the truth of genetics to be embraced, while drawing the firmest of lines against any moral or political abuse of it. When that classical liberalism is tarred as inherently racist because it cannot guarantee equality of outcomes, and when scientific research is under attack for revealing the fuller truth about our world, we are in deep trouble. Because we are robbing liberalism of the knowledge and the moderation it will soon desperately need to defend itself.

Go and read the whole thing here.

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

Tiptoe… Through the Land-Mines

March 29, 2018 – 9:21 pm

Making a bit of a splash at the moment is a new book by the Harvard geneticist David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. (Any book that says anything truthful about heredity and human groups is going to attract attention these days, if only to burn it in the village square.)

Steve Sailer reviews it over at Taki’s. (Greg Cochran will be along with a review presently.)

The topic, of course, is fraught, and anyone writing about it who wishes not to be an all-but-unemployable pariah must make the same sort of obeisances and disclaimers that folks like Galileo once did. Here’s one from Professor Reich:

Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.

Mr. Sailer comments:

So you should just lie back and think of England, like the girls in Rotherham and Telford.

But thinking of what “mixture’ did to the inhabitants of England who were forced to embrace it 4,500 years ago is horrifying.

Before about 2500 BC, ancient Albion was inhabited largely by farmers tracing back to the Fertile Crescent. Suddenly, steppe barbarians, bearing the Bell Beaker culture, arrived, and almost immediately most of the old Britons died off.

Since then, 90 percent of subsequent skeletons in England reflect the DNA of the steppe invaders.

What happened to most of England’s earlier inhabitants? One of the less violent scenarios is that the steppe migrants introduced bubonic plague.

In general, “migration’ and “mixture’ tend in Reich’s book to serve as euphemisms for genocide of the native males and rape of the native females. Reich lists numerous examples from around the world where genetic data show that newcomers enslaved or murdered the local men and turned their women into concubines.

Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, HBD | Comments (2)

Omelette, Eggs

March 28, 2018 – 4:12 pm

According to this report, the Obama administration suspended the mechanism whereby employers are notified that the Social Security numbers used by their employees don’t match the employees’ names. This sensible cross-checking had been used to catch both fraud and clerical errors, and had prevented millions of citizens from losing Social Security benefits they were entitled to.

Why did they do this? Because they worried that it might discourage illegal aliens from registering for DACA if they had used fraudulent SSNs. They worried also, with good reason, that Americans might object to suspending this protocol. So they kept it quiet. For four years.

When I read stories like this, my mind wanders toward comforting images.

Torches. Pitchforks. Lamp-posts.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (5)

Service Notice

March 28, 2018 – 1:25 pm

It appears that my blog-posts are now appearing again in Google searches. I don’t know if this was due to a re-indexing after the blog’s title change (perhaps the blog’s title carries more weight in Google’s world than for other search providers), or whether it might even have been thanks to some behind-the-scenes assistance from my friend Bob Wyman (if so, thanks, Bob!).

In other news: I’m going to capitalize titles again. (Stop the presses!) It looks better that way. Adjust your plans accordingly.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Girl Talk

March 27, 2018 – 2:51 pm

With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter “Whitewall”, here’s a depressing item:

German Defense Minister Seeks ”˜Reconciliation’ with Taliban

It is difficult to read this without thinking that such a story simply cannot be true: that it is completely beyond all credibility that anyone not a child or an imbecile could possibly imagine that an organization dedicated to implacable jihad in the name of Islamic theocracy would actually bind themselves to a secular, or even “moderate”, Constitution; that any such concession they might make would be anything other than tactical taqiyya.

Yet here the story is. And here is another female European “leader” — a defense minister! — singing Kumbaya as her nation opens its veins.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (12)

Point taken!

March 27, 2018 – 2:14 pm

In the news today:

Al Sharpton’s half-brother charged in murder after marching against guns

I have to admire Rev. Glasgow for going the “extra mile” to demonstrate how dangerous guns are, but I do think he and his pal might have asked Breunia Jennings for her permission before drafting her to participate in such a lurid dramatization.

By Malcolm | Posted in Guns | Comments (0)

Izzat so?

March 26, 2018 – 3:45 pm

Here’s a response, by Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer [cue ad-hominem attack in comment thread in 3…2…1…], to Hillary Clinton’s insulting remarks the other day about winning the “dynamic” states, and losing the backward ones.

I will confess that I hesitated before mentioning That Woman’s name in print. As Richard Wagner is said to have advised: “Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Rubbish | Comments (2)

All The News That’s Fit To — Look, A Squirrel!

March 26, 2018 – 11:38 am

With a hat-tip to our e-pal Bill K., here’s Richard Fernandez on our psychotic media environment:

With misinformation as with miseducation the public sees, but not in due proportion. Its calculations are put all out of reckoning. The image of world is presented like a reflection in a fun house mirror, with certain aspects greatly enlarged while others are minimized almost to invisibility.

Perhaps never in human history has the average man been bombarded with so many stories. Yet paradoxically never has the public been in greater danger of strategic surprise. If it is caught at unawares the reason for its blindness won’t be lack of bandwidth but in all the things it imagined were important that weren’t.

Read the rest here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (2)

Protip

March 25, 2018 – 11:26 pm

A great way to prevent mass shootings is by avoiding civil war.

By Malcolm | Posted in Guns | Comments (1)

The Second Amendment, and the Third Law

March 25, 2018 – 1:19 pm

I’ve been unable to turn on the news over the past 24 hours without immediately hearing about yesterday’s protests against “gun violence”. The news agencies have clearly learned a trick or two from their show-biz colleagues who call themselves “illusionists”: if these protests were about “violence”, the marchers would surely have something to say about the people who commit such violence, how to deter them, how they ought to be dealt with, why they have taken to shooting up schools. But even though the protests are ostensibly a response to the Parkland massacre, nary a word have I heard from any of the marchers, or from any of the demagogues who took to the microphone to whip them up en masse, about Nikolas Cruz, Stephen Paddock, Omar Mateen, Nidal Hasan, et al.

Instead, from what I can gather, it was a fellow named “Wayne LaPierre” who barged into Stoneman Douglas High and opened fire, accompanied by a sizable mob of otherwise law-abiding American citizens, such as myself, whose crime is membership in the National Rifle Association. Meanwhile, Messrs. Cruz, Paddock, Mateen and the rest of them, lacking any agency whatsoever, are exempt from blame. Indeed, as far as I can make out, the guns themselves have more capacity for volition, and so for the commission of sin, than the people who wield them. (I keep hearing the phrase “high-capacity” from my betters in Congress and the media; perhaps that’s what it refers to.)

Nor have I seen any reflection, on the part of the mob, upon the broader context in which these things seem to be happening. I heard a grandmother explain to a reporter that she was marching because she wanted her grandchildren to be as safe in their schools as she was in hers. Sadly, the man with the microphone didn’t ask her what, exactly, she thought had changed, which of course is the first thing one should ask when trying to troubleshoot (so to speak) a problem of almost any kind. (“This thing used to work fine, and now it doesn’t. What happened? What’s different now?“) He might have pointed out that in her childhood, “military-grade” guns were easily available to all, with almost no restrictions, yet nobody seemed to shoot up any schools or concerts. But he didn’t, of course.

No, the media and our progressive overlords (but I repeat myself!) have palmed the card, and masterfully redirected our attention. This is no march against gun “violence”: it is a march against gun ownership, against the Second Amendment, against the pre-existing right that the Second Amendment does not confer, but guarantees, and, perhaps most ominously of all, against those scores of millions of American citizens for whom this fundamental right — the right that secures all the others — is not negotiable.

The organizers of these demonstrations seek to increase the pressure, and they’re doing a good job. What I think they do not realize is that they are only compressing a spring.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics, Guns, Reaction | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

Playback #1

March 24, 2018 – 11:13 pm

As occasional leavening for the steady diet of politics and reaction I’ve been posting up here for years now, I think I’ll begin revisiting my other life: decades spent recording and mixing music. (Because so many of the recordings I’ve worked on are now on YouTube, it’s easy posting.)

I’d say about three-quarters of the work I did was for albums and singles; the rest was divided between music for films, theater, and advertising. (There’s some overlap there: film and musical-theater work often finds its way onto albums as well.) The TV and “jingle” work is evanescent, but it was good work to have: the level of professionalism is extremely high, nobody’s wasting any time, the money’s great, and you almost always get home in time for supper. (This often made a welcome contrast to 30-hour sessions with drug-addled rockers.)

Of the album work I did, perhaps a majority was for various sorts of jazz artists. At Power Station Studios, where I “made my bones” as a staff engineer in the 70s and 80s, you had to cover whatever they threw at you, from R&B and hip-hop to large orchestral ensembles. Everyone, though, finds a niche, and although I worked on a lot of R&B and rock music, what I enjoyed most was capturing the sound of acoustic instruments — so I ended up doing a lot of jazz records, orchestral overdub sessions, and things like that. Some of these artists don’t have the household-name recognition that the big rock acts have, but in addition to the many rock and R&B records I was a part of, I was fortunate to work with some of the greatest jazz artists of my generation: people like Michael and Randy Brecker, John Scofield, Peter Erskine, Weather Report, Steve Khan, Joe Lovano, Tony Bennett, Anthony Jackson, the Count Basie Orchestra, Ron Carter, Dave Holland, Bib Mintzer, the Yellowjackets, Marcus Miller, David Sanborn, Jack DeJohnette, and many, many others.

So I think that now and then I’m going to put up a couple of recordings. I hope you enjoy them, and in particular I hope it may introduce you to music you might not have heard otherwise. I’ll probably lean toward the jazz stuff, but I’ll try to strike a balance, so you can get a sense of the variety of styles a professional engineer has to be comfortable with.

For tonight, two from 1998:

Up first: Quality Time, from the album of the same name, by the great tenor player, composer, arranger, and big-band leader Bob Mintzer — with Jay Anderson on bass, Phil Markowitz on piano, and Peter Erskine on drums. (“Quality Time” is more than just a catchy title: the “time” on display by this quartet — the rhythmic interplay and “pocket” — is of the highest quality.) Recorded and mixed by MP at Carriage House Studios, Stamford, CT.

Next: Power, a single by by Chaka Khan. Lead guitar by Mike Landau: one take, no punches. Overdubs and mixing by MP at O’Henry Studios, Los Angeles.

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

Empty calories

March 23, 2018 – 2:41 pm

“Continental breakfast” is to breakfast what Continental philosophy is to philosophy: something to chew on, but devoid of nourishment.

By Malcolm | Posted in Apophthegmata | Comments (2)

The Demotion Of The Supernatural

March 23, 2018 – 12:48 pm

In a comment to my previous post, reader Asher says that Leftism, rather than rejecting the supernatural, locates it in Man himself.

I think this is almost right. But it is subject to an important objection: if Darwinian Man is nothing more than a part and product of Nature, then locating the “supernatural” in Man is to say that Nature itself is supernatural, which is clearly a contradiction in terms. I prefer to say instead that the Leftist cryptoreligion locates the sacred in Nature, and in Man only as a product and integral part of Nature.

Two years ago I wrote this:

The religious impulse, the need for sacred objects, and the hunger for salvation will always find some form of social expression. (This is because what makes religion adaptive in the first place is its effect on group cohesion.)

Religion wants a “skyhook”: something above us upon which we can depend, and with which we can make a kind of contract. In return for our faith, and for a promise of effort and self-sacrifice in the required virtuous forms, we are given protection, or even salvation.

As children, we trust in the protection of our fathers and mothers, and we submit to their authority in return. But even as adults, the world around us is still chaotic and merciless, and to have so many things beyond our control is frightening and stressful. We know that as adults we must make our way somehow in the material world ”” but we are finite, and we know in our bones that the mysterium tremendum is not. Dwarfed by this infinitude, we seek to attach ourselves to something transcendent; salvation in God is our warrant against that great chaos.

When the supernatural basis for all of this is removed — when God dies — we’ve lost our skyhook; the warranty is void. But we are no less overborne by the chaos and mystery we face. We continue to seek the transcendent, but the sky is now empty, and the heavens have lowered. Having sliced off the apex of the sacred pyramid — the unifying presence of God — we are left with a truncated, frustrated hierarchy. God had been the Absolute from which both the natural world, and all human agency, emanated, but now the roots of both Nature and the soul of Man are exposed and disconnected.

We have not, however, lost our sense of awe, and of transcendent beauty and mystery, when we contemplate the natural world — and so in our new, sawed-off religion, we preserve Nature as a sacred object. (Indeed, with God now departed, many of us now promote Nature to fill his place.) And having lost God as the agent and guarantor of our protection and salvation, we must set our sights, and pin our hopes, upon the only thing we can still discern above us: the State.

Once we have put Nature in the place of God, then Darwinian Man, being at the same time a creation of Nature and a coequal part of Nature, becomes sacred as well — a devalued version of the notion of Man being the “image of God” (we should note as well that this can be seen as a stunted analogue of the Trinity). In this way, evolution becomes a spiritual involution: the towering ladder of Being, that once reached all the way to Heaven, is reduced to a single rung.

See also, for example, this. I have so many posts touching on all of this from various angles that I really should gather them all and distill them into a single essay. The gist, though, is this: When God is removed from the cosmic hierarchy, the sacred necessarily becomes earthly. (Where else can it go?)

Another point to keep in mind is that, because the lowering of Heaven to Earth is a flattening of a gradient that, historically, has always served as a mighty source of energy, the change can also be understood in terms of entropy:

It’s a mechanical, entropic process, like water finding every crack and fissure as it seeks the lowest level.

It is entropic precisely in the sense that it levels and flattens everything, as order yields to disorder. In particular, it levels the gradients that are necessary, in any thermodynamic system, for the possibility of useful work. Ultimately, everything will be undifferentiated from everything else. (Is that not the obvious endpoint of our secular religion’s pathological mission?) It is this flattening, correctly understood as a thermodynamic exhaustion, that is why Leftism always reduces societies to economic and cultural rubble.

Astrophysicists speak of the “heat death of the Universe’” This is perfectly analogous: it is the heat death of our civilization.

From the same post:

The action of the Left is always to reduce potential; it leaves everything it touches in a lower-energy state. It breaks mountains into scree; it dismantles cathedrals to build hovels.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (16)

A religion by any other name…

March 22, 2018 – 3:19 pm

Our friend Bill Vallicella has posted an interesting essay on the Left’s attempt to maintain a doctrine of transcendent egalitarianism while scraping away the transcendent. He describes the problem as follows (after noting that our academic institutions have become “Leftist seminaries”):

What explains the fervor and fanaticism with which the Left’s equality dogma is upheld? Could we explain it as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian belief that all men are created equal? Long before I read Carl Schmitt, I had this thought. But then I found this provocative assertion by Schmitt:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.
(Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. G. Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 36.)

The idea that all humans are equal in virtue of having been created by God in the image and likeness of God is a purely theological notion consistent with deep and wide empirical differences among humans. Its secularization, I suggest, involves several steps. (These are my ideas, not Schmitt’s.)

The first step is to transform the metaphysical concept of equality of persons into an empirical concept of equality of measurable attributes.

The second step is to explain away the manifest empirical inequality of human groups and individuals in terms of sexism or racism or ageism or some other ‘ism.’ This involves a turn toward social constructivism and a reality-denying turn away from the mind-independent reality of biological differences between the sexes and the races. Sex becomes ‘gender’ and the latter a social construct. Similarly with race. The absurdities that result are foolishly embraced rather than taken as so many reductiones ad absurdum of the original mistake of making sex and race social constructs. Thus one foolishly embraces the notion that one can change one’s race. For a calm and thorough critique of this notion as represented by a contemporary academic, see my Can One Change One’s Race?

The third step is to jettison the theological underpinning of the original equality conception.

In this way a true, non-empirical claim of Christian metaphysics about persons as rights-bearers is transformed into a false empirical claim about human animals. At the same time the ground of the non-empirical claim is denied.

It is easy to see how unstable this all is. Reject God, and you no longer have a basis for belief in equality of persons. Man reverts to being an animal among animals with all the empirical inequality that that brings with it.

So the Left has a problem. It is virulently anti-theistic and anti-religious and yet it wants to uphold a notion of equality that makes sense only within a theistic framework. The Left, blind to this inconsistency, is running on the fumes of an evaporating Christian worldview. Equality of persons and rights secularizes itself right out of existence once the theological support is kicked away.

Nietzsche understood this long ago. The death of God has consequences. One is that the brotherhood of man becomes a joke. If my tribe can enslave yours, then it has all the justification it needs and can have for doing so. Why should I treat you as my brother if I have the power to make you my servant and I have freed my mind of Christian fictions?

For those of us who oppose both the Left and the Alt-Right faction that is anti-Christian and Nietzschean, the only option seems to be a return to our Judeo-Christian heritage.

A year ago, I posted an item of my own in response to Bill’s disagreement with my opinion that modern “progressivism” — whose most sacred tenet is its radical egalitarianism — is a mutated form of Protestant Christianity that, having slyly stripped away its commitment to the supernatural, had become a “cryptoreligion” that was now the established church of the present-day liberal West. I laid out historical, taxonomic, and empirical reasons to believe that this hegemonic faith could fairly be called a “religion”. (Bill, in this latest post, seems to be moving asymptotically closer to acknowledging this, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for him to grasp the nettle.)

Bill is quite right to point out that, deprived of any metaphysical basis for such radical egalitarianism and for the denial of the plainly obvious differences between individuals, and between long-separated human populations, this new official faith has a serious problem, one that can only get worse over time.

It’s easy to see why this must be. A simple analogy will be clarifying:

In the field of structural engineering, if you were to ignore the varying qualities and properties of different materials, and to insist instead on their universal interchangeability, your buildings and bridges would fall down. To preserve the doctrine of interchangeability, you would have two options: you would have to blame these collapses, increasingly implausibly, on pernicious environmental factors, or you would have to lower your ambitions so as to build only those structures that any of the available materials, randomly chosen, could support.

The same considerations apply to social structures as well — and this is why, as Bill correctly observes, the secular Left finds itself under increasing pressure. It is easy to see that it is already, and has been for some time, applying both of the “solutions” listed above to protect and preserve the underlying doctrine.

What Bill doesn’t say (though I imagine he’d agree) is that the problem doesn’t go away simply by putting the supernatural metaphysics back in place. As I described in this post about the evolution of religion in America, the reduction of Christianity to a worldly cryptoreligion necessarily involved the flattening and immanentization of transcendent principles and hierarchies:

What happened in the Progressive era, however, was that the social mission completely overturned and usurped the traditional concept of salvation itself. Working toward God no longer meant work on oneself for the saving of one’s individual soul, which now was scorned as sinful self-interest; the only soteriological pathway now ran through the collective, right here on Earth… Here, we see Heaven itself shot down from the sky.

In this way, equality of all before God became, at first, equality only before the law — and finally, in the present day, equality on every Earthly measure, real or imagined, simply by proclamation (save of course, for those instances where sacralized “victims” are to be lifted above their oppressors). Perhaps a nationwide resurgence of traditional religion might also entail a reconsideration of what Bill calls “a false empirical claim about human animals” — but I’m inclined to doubt it. Water doesn’t flow uphill.

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