Back in May we had a problem with server-side caching at Bluehost. The symptom was that commenters would see the comment-box pre-populated with the name and email of whoever had commented last. Please let me know if you see this happening again now. (I will be sorely vexed with Bluehost if so.)
To clear the form you can force a refresh by pressing F5 before leaving your comment.
Worried that our culture is in decline? Relax.
In fact, the more you can relax, the less this will hurt.
Here’s the future of the automobile, from former GM, Ford, and BMW executive Bob Lutz.
I love driving. Glad I got the chance, I guess.
The key weakness of liberalism — which, to be fair, has at times done much to improve society — is that it must assume as “given” the existence, and the continuing existence, of the society it hopes to improve. But liberalism, by its very nature — its pacifism, its sentimentalism, its opposition to hierarchy, its prioritization of the subjective over the objective, its orientation toward the feminine principle — has no capacity for assuring and defending the survival of its host society in mortal struggles against external, more illiberal enemies.
This is why warriors are seldom liberals.
Liberalism knows that it is parasitic upon its warrior class for its survival. It knows also that this relation is not symmetrical. This is why liberals generally dislike the military: it reminds them of their weakness.
I enjoyed this very much: Mark Knopfler playing his guitars, and talking about playing guitar. (The clip is hosted at Laughing Squid, where it’s described as Mr. Knopfler giving a “wonderful guided tour of his guitar collection” — but that isn’t what it is at all, as older and wiser readers will understand.)
Here.
The transgendered have become holy objects because, unlike those of us who are frozen in a conventional relation between our sex and our gender, and are trapped in the matrix of objective and pre-existing natural categories, the transgendered demonstrate the supremacy, and so the apotheosis, of the subjective.
In a secular religion that denies the metaphysically transcendent, the subjectivity of the individual must become the Divine; the creativity of the individual must be radically enhanced to encompass the world-creating (and world-destroying) power formerly ascribed to God. Transgenderism shows that this is possible. It is therefore of tremendous ideological importance, and so becomes a holy blessing, a special gift.
A Muslim terrorist in a rented truck mowed down pedestrians in New York today, killing eight people. At a news conference, Governor Cuomo assured us that the killer was a “lone wolf”, and that there was no evidence of a “wider plot”.
Rubbish. The “wider plot” has been in effect for fourteen centuries. It continues unabated today, and this man was part of it — as the next one will be, and the next, and the next.
Meanwhile, the Mayor announced that we will go forward “stronger than ever”. Stronger than ever, that is, with more barricades, security checkpoints, travel restrictions, militarized police, and ubiquitous surveillance.
Bleed, rinse, repeat. This is the future we have chosen.
Once again, I will say the Obvious Thing:
Allowing mass Muslim immigration is the stupidest and most irreversibly self-destructive thing that any Western nation can do.
I’ve been reading James Burnham’s Suicide of the West. Published in 1964, it is an anti-liberal jeremiad, and a corking good one. It also anticipates a number of themes that have become central tenets of both traditional-conservative and neoreactionary criticism.
I’m still only about three-quarters of the way through, but I’ll offer some excerpts.
Burnham begins by noting as a simple fact — devoid of political spin — that the West is shrinking:
For the past two generations Western civilization has been shrinking; the amount of territory, and the number of persons relative to the world population, that the West rules have much and rapidly declined.
Is this “suicide”?
I know, again from direct experience of discussion, argument and conversation, that my use of the word “suicide’ to describe what is happening to the West is even more disturbing to many persons than the use of such words as “contraction.’ “Suicide,’ it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and “bad.’ Oddly enough, this objection is often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.
Abetting this diminution of the West is, to Burnham, central to liberalism:
I do not mean that liberalism is””or will have been””responsible for the contraction and possible disappearance of Western civilization, that liberalism is “the cause’ of the contraction. The whole problem of historical causation is in any case too complex for simple assertions. I mean, rather, in part, that liberalism has come to be the typical verbal systematization of the process of Western contraction and withdrawal; that liberalism motivates and justifies the contraction, and reconciles us to it.
Burnham identifies the self-coordinating liberal hegemon for which Mencius Moldbug coined the term “the Cathedral” (my emphasis):
In sum, then: liberalism rather broadly designated””ranging from somewhat dubious blends to the fine pure bonded 100 proof””is today, and from some time in the 1930’s has been, the prevailing American public doctrine, or ideology. The predominant assumptions, ideas and beliefs about politics, economics, and social questions are liberal. I do not mean that a large majority of the population is, by count, liberal. Perhaps a majority is liberal, but that is hard to determine accurately. What is certain is that a majority, and a substantial majority, of those who control or influence public opinion is liberal, that liberalism of one or another variety prevails among the opinion-makers, molders and transmitters: teachers in the leading universities””probably the most significant single category; book publishers; editors and writers of the most influential publications; school and college administrators; public relations experts; writers of both novels and non-fiction; radio-TV directors, writers and commentators; producers, directors and writers in movies and the theater; the Jewish and non-evangelical Protestant clergy and not a few Catholic priests and bishops; verbalists in all branches of government; the staffs of the great foundations that have acquired in our day such pervasive influence through their relation to research, education, scholarships and publishing.
I’ve spoken often (for example, here and here) about the futility of argument across the gulf that separates liberals from the rest of us. Rational discussion, at its best, is like making and testing theorems — but two people can never agree that a theorem is proven if they are starting from incommensurable axioms. If one is embedded in a purely homogeneous ideological environment, however, political and moral axioms can often go completely unexamined. Burnham writes:
In short, liberals differ, or may differ, among themselves on application, timing, method and other details, but these differences revolve within a common framework of more basic ideas, beliefs, principles, goals, feelings and values. This does not mean that every liberal is clearly aware of this common framework; on the contrary, most liberals will take it for granted as automatically as pulse or breathing. If brought to light, it is likely to seem as self-evident and unquestionable as Euclid’s set of axioms once seemed to mathematicians.
It is a common observation lately that political polarization has deepened in America, that the center is increasingly hollowed out. Burnham saw this happening, though, even in 1964:
The ideological spectrum between the leftmost wing of liberalism and the rightmost wing of conservatism is not an evenly graduated gray continuum. The L’s and the C’s are bunched; and we can usually tell the difference intuitively. A connoisseur, in fact, can tell the difference intuitively just from a momentary sample of rhetoric at a Parent-Teacher meeting or a cocktail party, even without a specific declaration or proposal to go by, much as a musical connoisseur can distinguish intuitively a single phrase of Mozart from a phrase of Brahms.
Burnham comments on the remarkable coordination of liberal opinion:
The judgments that liberals render on public issues, domestic and foreign, are as predictable as the salivation of Pavlovian dogs. Whether it’s a matter of independence for Pogoland or school integration for some Southern backwater; the latest loyalty oath or a nuclear test ban; the closed shop or the most recent inquiry of the Committee on Un-American Activities; foreign aid or poll taxes; the United Nations or Fair Employment; whether it’s X, Y or Z, you can know in advance, with the same comforting assurance with which you expect the sun to rise tomorrow, what the response of the liberal community, give or take an adverb or two, will be. The editorials in the Washington Post, New York Times, New Republic, or indeed Paris’ Le Monde or London’s Sunday Observer; the liberal columns, speeches and sermons; the deliberations of the faculties of any Ivy League university; the discussions of the Foreign Policy Association, League of Women Voters or American Association of University Professors””the small flourishes of special rhetoric in their commentaries are like the minor decorations permitted on a rigorously fixed style of painting, architecture or music.
This last observation preceded Neoreaction’s ur-text by 45 years. In 2009, Moldbug wrote:
Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.
There are two explanations for this synchronization. One, Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because they both arrive at the same truth. I am willing to concede this for, say, chemistry. When it comes to, say, African-American studies, I am not quite so sure. Are you? Surely it is arguable that the latter is a legitimate area of inquiry. But surely it is arguable that it is not. So how is it, exactly, that Harvard, Stanford, and everyone else gets the same answer?
I’m afraid the only logical alternative, however awful and unimaginable, is the conclusion that Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because both are remoras attached, in some unthinkable way, to some great, invisible predator of the deep – perhaps even Cthulhu himself.
Certainly, the synchronization is not coordinated by any human hierarchical authority. (Yes, there are accreditation agencies, but a Harvard or a Stanford could easily fight them.) The system may be Orwellian, but it has no Goebbels. It produces Gleichschaltung without a Gestapo. It has a Party line without a Party. A neat trick. We of the Sith would certainly like to understand it.
Burnham goes to great lengths in this book to identify the defining postulates of liberalism. (He settles, finally, on 19 of them; I will sum them up in a later post.) At the most general level, the idea is this:
Liberalism is confident that reason and rational science, without appeal to revelation, faith, custom or intuition, can both comprehend the world and solve its problems.
If reason and science can indeed solve the world’s problems, then what does the liberal worldview imagine stands in the way? The answer is: ignorance, and faulty institutions. Both of these the liberal imagines to be remediable, by carefully controlled education and enlightened government reforms.
There is, beneath this optimistic outlook, another axiom: that human nature is infinitely malleable.
Inside the liberal system of ideas … human nature is changing and plastic, with an indefinitely large potential for progressive development. Through reason, freed from superstition, authority, custom and tradition, human beings can discover the truth and the road toward the betterment of society. There is nothing inherent in human nature that prevents the attainment of peace, freedom, justice and well-being””of, that is, the good society. The obstacles are ignorance and faulty social institutions. Because both these obstacles are extrinsic and remediable, historical optimism is justified. Social problems can be solved; the good society can be achieved, or at any rate approximated.
… For liberalism, the direct purpose of education cannot be to produce a “good citizen,’ to lead toward holiness or salvation, to inculcate a nation’s, a creed’s or a race’s traditions, habits and ceremonies, or anything of that sort. Nor is there any need that it should be, for the logic of liberalism assures us that, given the right sort of education””that is, rational education””the pupil, in whose nature there is no innate and permanent defect or corruption, will necessarily become the good citizen; and, with the right sort of education universalized, the good citizens together will produce the good society.
… The child, for liberalism, approaches the altar of education””for the school is, in truth, liberalism’s church””in all his spiritual nakedness as a purely rational, or embryonically rational, being, shorn of color, creed, race, family and nationality: the Universal Student before the universal teacher, Reason.
Another essential quality of liberalism is the rejection of natural hierarchies and discriminations:
In liberalism’s relativist theory of truth and democratic political doctrine, as in its account of human nature, there is no room for qualitative distinctions among men.
Burnham addresses in detail the important role of guilt in the liberal worldview. He notes that statism provides a remedy (my emphasis):
Let us consider the situation of a member of our affluent society, and let us assume him to be from the more rather than less affluent half, who is no longer deeply committed in spirit to the interlocked Christian doctrines of Original Sin, the Incarnation and Redemption, which constitute the Christian solution. His guilt nevertheless exists; he is conscious of it, and feels the anxiety that it generates. What is he going to do about it, and think about it? Liberalism permits him to translate his guilt into the egalitarian, anti-discrimination, democratist, peace-seeking liberal principles, and to transform his guilty feeling into that “passion for reform’ of which Professor Schapiro speaks. If he is an activist, he can actually sign on as a slum clearer, Freedom Rider, Ban the Bomber or Peace Corpsman, or join a Dr. Schweitzer or Dr. Dooley in the jungle. But activists of that literal sort are always a minority. The more significant achievement of liberalism, by which it confirms its claim to being considered a major ideology, is its ability to handle the problem of guilt for large numbers of persons without costing them undue personal inconvenience. This it does by elevating the problem to representational, symbolic and institutional levels. It is not necessary for me to go in person to the slum, jungle, prison, Southern restaurant, state house or voting precinct and there take a direct hand in accomplishing the reform that will unblock the road to peace, justice and well-being. Thanks to the reassuring provisions of the liberal ideology, I can go about my ordinary business and meanwhile take sufficient account of my moral duties by affirming my loyalty to the correct egalitarian principles, voting for the correct candidates, praising the activists and contributing to their defense funds when they get into trouble, and joining promptly in the outcry against reactionaries who pop up now and then in a desperate effort to preserve power and privilege.
The need to assuage this guilt outweighs practical considerations:
The guilt of the liberal causes him to feel obligated to try to do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil. This feeling, too, is non-rational: the liberal must try to cure the evil even if he has no knowledge of the suitable medicine or, for that matter, of the nature of the disease; he must do something about the social problem even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem””when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it. “We cannot stand idly by while the world rushes to destruction . . . or women and children are starving . . . or able men walk the streets without jobs . . . or the air becomes polluted . . . or Negroes can’t vote in Zenith . . . or immigrants live in rat-infested slums . . . or youngsters don’t get a decent education . . .’ or whatever. The harassed liberal is relentlessly driven by his Eumenidean guilt. It does not permit him to “let well enough alone’ or “stick to his own cabbage patch’ or decide that the trouble is “none of his business’; or to reflect that, though the evil is undoubtedly there and he is sincerely sorry for its victims, he doesn’t understand damn-all about it and even if he did he hasn’t got the brains and resources to fix it up. He may not know much, generally speaking he does not know much, about economics, but that lack in no way inhibits him from demanding that industry and government do this, that or the other to cure unemployment; he may not have a single serious idea about strategy and international affairs, but he will nevertheless join his fellow liberals in calling for grandiose measures concerning arms, alliances, bases, and colonies; he may have no acquaintance with the actual problems of mass education, but he will nevertheless insist on the most far-reaching reforms of the school system… The real and motivating problem, for the liberals, is not to cure the poverty or injustice or what not in the objective world but to appease the guilt in their own breasts; and what that requires is some program, some solution, some activity, whether or not it is the correct program, solution and activity.
Burnham also offers this brilliantly incisive insight:
For Western civilization in the present condition of the world, the most important practical consequence of the guilt encysted in the liberal ideology and psyche is this: that the liberal, and the group, nation or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself.
“Morally disarmed”. Exactly right.
That’s enough for one post, I think. Back soon with more.
A few days ago I mentioned a manifesto called the Paris Declaration — signed by, among others, Roger Scruton — and gave it two-and-a-half cheers. I did allow that I had a “quibble or two”, but in general I thought — and I still do think — that it was an important step in the right (which, not coincidentally, is also the Right) direction.
Our occasional commenter Jacques has written a post at Rightly Considered (which, if you aren’t familiar with it, is an online publication for conservative philosophers) in which he gives a far more critical appraisal of the document. After reading his remarks I am compelled to agree with his principal objection — that the manifesto, however bracing it may seem in the current political climate, stops too far short of addressing Europe’s lethal problem.
The Declaration’s authors, despite their laudable defense of European culture and heritage, still cling to a universalist view of human nature, in which every human population is seen as identically and interchangeably governed by, and adaptable to, ideas and propositions as a sufficient foundation of culture and behavior. Not visible at all in the Declaration is what I believe to be an ineradicable fact, namely that cultures are the “extended phenotypes” of particular human groups, and that therefore populations, taken en masse, are not interchangeable in this way at all. The Declaration has much to recommend it — in particular, a ringing call for the restoration of traditional hierarchies, discriminations, and institutions, and for the recognition of Europe’s Christian foundations — but if it ignores the awkward, intractable truth of human diversity, as it appears to do, its program is doomed to failure.
You can read Jacques’ essay here.
From Campus Reform:
Prof: Algebra, geometry perpetuate white privilege
The story is about one Rochelle Gutierrez, a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois. We read:
“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,’ Gutierrez argued.
Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”
Wishing to understand the issue more clearly, we sent an interviewer to speak to Hypatia Shakur-Rodriguez, an associate professor of mathematics and critical intersectionality at a nearby community college.
Reporter : Thanks for your time, Professor. Let’s talk about mathematics. Now as we all know, mathematics is a method, a process. If you had to sum it up for the layman, though, what is the essence of that process? How would you describe the operation of mathematics?
Professor : Well, on many levels, mathematics operates as Whiteness.
R : Hmm, I hadn’t thought of it that way. I’d always thought of mathematics, first and foremost, as an abstract intellectual activity that deals with the relations and provable truths of the realm of quantities and sets and possible geometries.
P : Wow. Just listen to the terms you’re using here. “Intellectual activity”. “Provable truths.” “Quantities”. “Geometries”. This is precisely the sort of marginalizing language that we need to stop using, now.
R : OK, OK! Sorry…
P : As I’ve just told you, what we need to focus on when we study mathematics is Whiteness.
R : Right, then: Whiteness. That’s bad?
P : ¡Joder! What a question! Yes, Whiteness is bad. Very, very bad. Like, Worst. Thing. Ever. Did you even go to college?
R : Well, yes, but it was a while ago.
P : It must have been. We’ve come a long way since then.
R : I’m starting to get that impression, yes.
P : I certainly hope so.
R : …
P : Anyway, let’s get back to math here. You know how there are great unsolved problems in mathematics?
R : Yes, of course! The Riemann hypothesis, the Hodge conjecture…
P : [claps hands over ears, breathing with difficulty] STOP!!!
[slowly collecting herself] Jesus… Trigger me like that one more time, and I call Security.
R : So sorry. Please continue.
P : The great unsolved problem in mathematics — which you would know, if you weren’t blinded by false consciousness, white privilege, and toxic masculinity — is that curricula emphasizing terms like “Pythagorean theorem” and “pi” perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.
R : Wow — Pi! The Pythagorean Theorem! To be honest, given what you’ve told me so far, I’m surprised that many of your undergraduate students would even be dealing with such advanced material these days. But still — forgive me, I don’t know quite how else to put this — mathematics actually WAS “largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans”, no?
At this the Professor’s back stiffens, her eyes narrowing. She leans back and presses a button under her desk. Moments later, a diverse and polygendered platoon of teaching assistants enter the office, surround our reporter, and scream at him until he leaves.
Here is David Bowie, in a 1999 interview, predicting in considerable detail the transformative, revolutionary effect of the Internet on media and culture.
Here is former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy’s detailed summary of the reeking DOJ/Clinton/Rosatom affair. (The Hill has also been covering the story, for example here.)
Corruption and obfuscation at this level should be front-page news, every day. If it had happened under a Republican administration, it would be.
Here’s Twitter’s most interesting and unusual feed, @ThomasWictor, on Niger and Benghazi.
A group of concerned thinkers, including Roger Scruton, have written a rousing manifesto calling for the defense of Europe against its accelerating cultural suicide. The document is called The Paris Statement, and it is good strong stuff. (I learned about it from this article at Reaction, where you can find additional commentary.)
You can read the Statement here. With a document of this length I will naturally have a quibble or two, but something like this — a clear and ringing declaration of European identity and purpose, that names and denounces the mortiferous ideology that has brought this great civilization to the brink of death — is Europe’s only hope. If it becomes a rallying creed for a pan-European awakening, as our own Declaration did, it might have a miraculous effect.
I will excerpt a few brief passages (and have bolded some for emphasis):
From part 1:
Europe belongs to us, and we belong to Europe. These lands are our home; we have no other. The reasons we hold Europe dear exceed our ability to explain or justify our loyalty. It is a matter of shared histories, hopes and loves. It is a matter of accustomed ways, of moments of pathos and pain. It is a matter of inspiring experiences of reconciliation and the promise of a shared future. Ordinary landscapes and events are charged with special meaning””for us, but not for others.
From part 2:
Europe, in all its richness and greatness, is threatened by a false understanding of itself… the false Europe praises itself as the forerunner of a universal community that is neither universal nor a community.
From part 7:
The true Europe is a community of nations. We have our own languages, traditions and borders… This unity-in-diversity seems natural to us. Yet this is remarkable and precious, for it is neither natural nor inevitable.
From part 9:
The true Europe has been marked by Christianity… It is no accident that the decline of Christian faith in Europe has been accompanied by renewed efforts to establish political unity””an empire of money and regulations, covered with sentiments of pseudo-religious universalism, that is being constructed by the European Union.
From part 12:
Our shared life is an ongoing project, not an ossified inheritance. But the future of Europe rests in renewed loyalty to our best traditions, not a spurious universalism demanding forgetfulness and self-repudiation. Europe did not begin with the Enlightenment. Our beloved home will not be fulfilled with the European Union. The real Europe is, and always will be, a community of nations at once insular, sometimes fiercely so, and yet united by a spiritual legacy that, together, we debate, develop, share””and love.
Part 13:
The true Europe is in jeopardy. The achievements of popular sovereignty, resistance to empire, cosmopolitanism capable of civic love, the Christian legacy of humane and dignified life, a living engagement with our Classical inheritance””all this is slipping away. As the patrons of the false Europe construct their faux Christendom of universal human rights, we are losing our home.
From part 15:
Libertine hedonism often leads to boredom and a profound sense of purposelessness. The bond of marriage has weakened. In the roiling sea of sexual liberty, the deep desires of our young people to marry and form families are often frustrated. A liberty that frustrates our heart’s deepest longings becomes a curse. Our societies seem to be falling into individualism, isolation and aimlessness. Instead of freedom, we are condemned to the empty conformity of consumer- and media-driven culture. It is our duty to speak the truth: The Generation of ’68 destroyed but did not build. They created a vacuum now filled by social media, cheap tourism and pornography.
From part 17:
Europe’s multicultural enterprise, which denies the Christian roots of Europe, trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form. It requires from the European peoples a saintly degree of self-abnegation. We are to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory””a collective act of self-sacrifice for the sake of some new global community of peace and prosperity that is being born.
Part 20:
The hubris of the false Europe is now becoming evident, despite the best efforts of its partisans to shore up comfortable illusions. Above all, the false Europe is revealed to be weaker than anyone imagined. Popular entertainment and material consumption do not sustain civic life. Shorn of higher ideals and discouraged from expressing patriotic pride by multiculturalist ideology, our societies now have difficulty summoning the will to defend themselves. Moreover, civic trust and social cohesion are not renewed by inclusive rhetoric or an impersonal economic system dominated by gigantic international corporations. Again, we must be frank: European societies are fraying badly. If we but open our eyes, we see an ever-greater use of government power, social management and educational indoctrination. It is not just Islamic terror that brings heavily armed soldiers into our streets. Riot police are now necessary to quell violent anti-establishment protests and even to manage drunken crowds of football fans. The fanaticism of our football loyalties is a desperate sign of the deeply human need for solidarity, a need that otherwise goes unfulfilled in the false Europe.
There is much, much more: the second half of the document moves from diagnosis to prescription, and it is a prescription, for the most part, that any traditionalist should applaud. Go and read the whole thing.
Ah, Diversity. How its worship enriches us!
It doesn’t, of course. But it does, at least, make for some last-minute entertainment, here on the deck of the Titanic.
There are some areas of human activity that lie forever beyond the reach of heartfelt wishes and fond imaginings: places where reality is still there even after you stop believing in it. One of these, for example, is competitive sports — where a runner’s velocity is still, stubbornly and implacably, distance over time. Another is engineering — which is difficult, and which makes certain non-negotiable demands. To build a bridge, or send an aircraft aloft, requires skills, talents and aptitudes that, whether we like it or not, are no more evenly distributed among the sexes and races than upper-body strength or fleetness of foot. You can rail against this all you like — and I’m sure some of you will rail against me for pointing it out. But when you’re done, there it is, nonetheless.
This means that places that do a lot of engineering are going to be staffed, very disproportionately, by members of certain population groups, and by males. For the sort of work that requires truly elite mathematical and spatial skills, the effect is going to be very noticeable indeed. This is a matter — not entirely, perhaps, but nearly so — of cold, hard statistics having to do with distributions of cognitive and behavioral traits. (As we must always point out, none of this tells you anything about any individual person. Seven-foot-tall men are far more common than seven-foot-tall women, but that doesn’t mean that they tower over them. Brilliant engineers, likewise, can be of any sex or race.)
This variety of trait-distribution is a real problem for companies like Google and Apple, who would — believe me! — like nothing better than to be able to make splendidly and durably engineered products with a workforce consisting largely, and ostentatiously, of females, blacks, Hispanics, and others likewise crushed by arbitrary forces of vile oppression. Sadly, though, the stubborn realities of the actually existing world require them to make a choice — and their having chosen good engineering over optics means that their technical staff is overwhelmingly white or Asian, and male.
This is a terrible predicament, and so they do what they can. Reality isn’t going anywhere, though, which leaves them little else to work with but theater, and spin. And so we have this news item, in which Apple’s black female Diversity chief attempts to convince her audience that if you squinch up your eyes just right, you can see Diversity anywhere — even among, for example, twelve blue-eyed, fair-haired males. You can imagine how that went over.
Mind you, in a more orderly and homogeneous (but I repeat myself!) society, such a group might, in fact, seem quite diverse. One might be a Calvinist, another a Catholic. One might be trim and athletic, another fat and flabby. One might play the bassoon, while another is putting together a Cannibal Corpse tribute band. They might vary enormously in temperament, style, political opinions, levels of education and wealth, and a thousand affinities and aversions. After all, the only things held constant here are hair color, eye color, and sex.
Ha! None of that matters, not at all. There are boxes to be checked here, comrade. Needless to say, the gambit was a failure, and the unfortunate spokeswoman was made to apologize. The problem, however, isn’t going anywhere: companies that do engineering are still going to face the same stubborn realities, and the same impossible demands.
Pass the popcorn!
From Albion’s Seed, page 896:
There is a cultural equivalent of the iron law of oligarchy: small groups dominate every cultural system. They tend to do so by controlling institutions and processes, so that they tend to become the “governors” of a culture in both a political and a mechanical sense.
The “iron law of oligarchy“: yet another reason not to worship at the altar of democracy.
Recently I quoted Mencius Moldbug:
Just as pornography can stimulate the human sex drive without providing any actual sex, democracy can stimulate the human power drive without providing any actual power.
As the Durants reminded us: “in the end superior ability has its way.”
Everywhere you look, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea is out, and Indigenous Peoples are in. (Well, the indigenous peoples of Europe, not so much…)
Those of us who don’t get all our history from Howard Zinn, however, know that the Noble Savage was a good deal more savage than noble. Some details here.
Here’s an interesting Twitter thread, from Thomas Wictor: the world’s leading authority on WWI flamethrowers, and a most unusual fellow.
The volcanic island of La Palma (one of the Canary Islands) is in the news after an earthquake swarm.
Why “yikes”? See here.
I’ve finally been reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. (I’ve known for years that this book was essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural history of the United States, but late is better than never.)
The book is delightfully engaging. I just came across this, in a chapter on the “building ways” of the Scottish, Scots-Irish, and English border-county settlers who populated the Appalachian backcountry (page 656):
The historiography of the log cabin has centered mostly on the history of the log, but at least equally important is the history of the cabin.
What follows is a discussion of the cabin architecture of the violent border regions of northern England and lowland Scotland. This history of violence and uncertainty is key to understanding both the prickly backcountry temperament and the low time-preference that leads people to invest so little in their architecture. Fischer quotes a long-ago historian of Scotland, John Major, who wrote in 1521:
In Scotland, the houses of the country people are small, as it were, cottages, and the reason is this: they have no permanent holdings, but hired only, or in lease for four or five years, at the pleasure of the lord of the soil; therefore do they not dare to build good houses, though stone abound, neither do they plant trees or hedges for their orchards, nor do they dung their land; and this is no small loss and damage to the whole realm.
These folkways persisted in the transplanted settlers of the region. Prosperity that doesn’t come from reaving and conquest can only come from playing the “long game”, and to do so requires low time-preference. If your culture has been shaped by centuries or millennia of rootlessness and instability (at which point, arguably, your genome has been shaped as well), this will not come naturally. The backcountry territory settled by this cohort is still among the poorest areas of the nation.
After the Las Vegas shooting, I noted that when I was a boy guns were a common and unremarkable part of normal American life:
I grew up in a rural area of west-central New Jersey. When I was a boy, all the households around me had a gun or two. We boys used to stack up hay-bales and put targets on them (a charcoal briquette was a favorite choice) to shoot at with a .22. Schools and scout-troops often had rifle ranges; I myself got a marksmanship Merit Badge while at summer camp with the Boy Scouts. I don’t recall being aware of any gun laws at all; you could buy ammo at the general store. (Gun safety was a big deal, though, and kids were taught to handle firearms carefully and respectfully.)
This was the state of normal (non-urban, middle-class, predominantly white) American culture half a century ago. Guns were an unexceptional part of that bygone world, and were easily accessible to all of us (you could order pretty much any gun you liked through the mail, by sending cash in an envelope!). Somehow, though, we hardly ever murdered each other, and mass shootings were very, very rare.
Something, I said, had changed, and it clearly isn’t access to guns.
What is it, then? Why does the life of our society seem so degraded, and life itself so much emptier, even as our material conditions have improved? This question is better suited to a book than a blog-post, but a blog-post will serve, at least, as a place-holder for a survey of the problems and their symptoms, and pointers to further questions. In this and subsequent posts I want to look at, in no particular order, of some of the symptoms I’ve noticed in my sixty-one years. (I hope the reader will forgive me if I make liberal use of excerpts from earlier posts.)
1) One factor has been the secularization, and encryption, of religion. While a secularized crypto-religion can retain much of its form and function, the removal of the actually transcendent, and its replacement with worldly substitutes, places the apex of the cosmic hierarchy down among us, instead of above us. This not a difference in degree: it is a qualitative difference, and it leads to a disruptive change in the effect of religion on human societies.
From April of last year:
The religious impulse, the need for sacred objects, and the hunger for salvation will always find some form of social expression…
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.
The State! It is a low and shabby God, but it’s all that’s left. Needs must, when the Devil drives.
2) Among the casualties of the truncation of the transcendent hierarchy is a belief in any foundation for natural categories. If the human mind is not an emanation of divine order — if there is in fact nothing above us — then the world we find ourselves in is just a brute fact, a contingent jumble of phenomena. We yearn to make sense of it, but in doing so we now have nobody, and nothing, to consult but ourselves. If we begin to doubt, there is nothing beneath us but the abyss. If God is dead, then we must be God to ourselves — we must become our own Creators.
This is a terrifying and lonely responsibility, and it is understandable that many would seek to distract themselves from it with anything they can find. If you are trying to understand why culture seems shallower and shallower all the time, why our attention-spans are becoming shorter and shorter, and why so many lives dissolve into drugs, pornography, and the moment-to-moment flicker of little screens, this would be a good place to start digging.
3) The consequence of this need for constant distraction and stimulation is like the “tolerance” of habitual drug-users: we need more and more of it, faster and faster, just to maintain the same effect. This has a crushing effect on our sense of time: because memory cannot compete with the vividness of our artificial stimulation, the past vanishes, while our hunger for immediate distraction drives out any thought of the future. We find ourselves living more and more narrowly in the present — but unlike the attentive being-in-the-moment that is at the root of all esoteric disciplines, our new and pathological presentism is one in which we are not really “present” at all.
4) Amplifying the effect of our dwindling control of attention has been the sudden collapse of the effective size of the human world. Modern communication (in particular, social media) has brought each node of the global human network into direct and immediate contact with every other. Not only has the volume of the world-system shrunk effectively to zero, but it has flattened as well; every incoming datum, from a family member’s text-message to news of a catastrophe a continent away, is just another “ping”, another sensory twitch. (I have written about this at length, here.)
5) This disruptive discontinuity in the social habitat of the human species has happened in almost no time at all. Suddenly, the frame is completely changed. Throughout all of human history, humans have lived their lives in a limited and local social context of connections, obligations, and responsibilities. This embedding in family, extended family, and local community was the base of every society’s organic structure. All natural checks on human behavior arose in this local and personal context. Suddenly, in a single tick of history’s clock, all of that is gone: the local, and more importantly, the personal. is dwarfed, overwhelmed, by a rushing flood of impulses from every corner of the world. The web of personal obligations and responsibilities is swept away — and with it, the interlocking system of direct, proximate and permanent relations that are what, in a thousand ways, give shape and definition to our very selves. We become atoms in a fog of human particles, colliding and impinging and ricocheting off one another — but with the death of the local and persistent, we easily lose all distinction between foreground and background. We lose, perhaps above all, accountability.
That’s enough for tonight, I think. This partial list is, of course, just the beginning of this outline, but I want to take my time. I’ll pick it up again in the days and weeks ahead.
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s a long and detailed assessment of the claim that Donald Trump’s voter-base — middle- and working-class Americans — made an irrational choice that was contrary to their own interests. The author demonstrates that this view is unsupportable, and that those who make it are usually applying a standard of “interests” that they would not apply to themselves.
Bill adds his own meta-analysis, here.
Sorry for the lack of substantial content around here lately. From time to time I become so weary of the passing scene that I hardly know what to say about it. I’ll be back to normal soon, I expect.
Meanwhile: Diplomad is kissing California goodbye. Can’t say I blame him.
As the gun-ban furor continues, here are two more items you should read:
I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.
Just after the slaughter in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton (remember her?) took to Twitter to offer this tendentious and ignorant comment:
The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots.
Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.
In Ms. Clinton’s moated and wholly self-referential mind, a “silencer” — which, perhaps, she has seen in the movies — is a magical cylinder that turns the deafening report of a firearm into a barely audible puff. This is, simply put, false. (It is also the case that any “silencer” the Las Vegas shooter might have used would have melted to slag almost immediately.)
Want to learn the truth about what are correctly called “suppressors”? Then read this article by Larry Correia. (While you’re at it, see this item by David French in response to Jimmy Kimmel’s post-Vegas histrionics.)
I am 61 years old. I grew up in a rural area of west-central New Jersey. When I was a boy, all the households around me had a gun or two. We boys used to stack up hay-bales and put targets on them (a charcoal briquette was a favorite choice) to shoot at with a .22. Schools and scout-troops often had rifle ranges; I myself got a marksmanship Merit Badge while at summer camp with the Boy Scouts. I don’t recall being aware of any gun laws at all; you could buy ammo at the general store. (Gun safety was a big deal, though, and kids were taught to handle firearms carefully and respectfully.)
This was the state of normal (non-urban, middle-class, predominantly white) American culture half a century ago. Guns were an unexceptional part of that bygone world, and were easily accessible to all of us (you could order pretty much any gun you liked through the mail, by sending cash in an envelope!). Somehow, though, we hardly ever murdered each other, and mass shootings were very, very rare.
Something has changed, obviously. And it isn’t access to guns.
In the wake of the LV massacre we hear the usual outcry from gun-rights opponents. It’s just another instance of the great and widening chasm separating the two Americas, and as always the hue and cry will simply push the two sides farther apart.
In confronting this act of evil, the “progressive” mind leaps reflexively, and emotionally, to two conclusions: namely, that something must be done, and that government ought to do it. The details don’t even matter much; the most vociferous gun-rights restrictionists are generally those least well-informed about firearms.
Those of us on the other side of this divide see it very differently: that there is ineradicable evil in the world. No new law or government policy will change this. Indeed, no proposed law would have prevented this massacre; there are about 300 million guns in America, and a psychopath bent on slaughter will get his hands on what he wants, laws or no laws. The problem is too many guns in America, you say? Then explain why gun homicides have fallen by half in recent years, even as gun sales have skyrocketed.
I don’t want to drone on about gun control in this post; I’ve already done so, here and elsewhere. My point, rather, is that in this increasingly shrunken, pressurized, overheated and chaotic world, nothing is going to prevent these horrors. (I think mere shootings is just the beginning.) The abyss is real — and however much we may flatter ourselves that we can paper it over with ostentatious gestures, some of us are always going to fall through.
Sorrow is everywhere today: following on the sickening atrocity in Las Vegas is the news that Tom Petty — one of the greatest rockers and songwriters of my generation — has died.
I’m still waiting for the Muse to return from vacation. Meanwhile, here’s a fine post on disagreement by our friend Bill Vallicella.
Note the link in Bill’s post to the acerbic NRx blogger ‘Porter’. I’d earlier called Bill’s attention to Porter’s post on the NFL brouhaha, which you might enjoy also.
With a tip of the hat to our pal Bill Keezer, here’s a good item by Mark Steyn on the “progressive disease” I’ve called C.I.V. It’s all been said before, but it needs saying again and again.
Best line:
“When you demolish your own inheritance, the lot does not stay empty. Something arises in its place.”
Here’s an essay by William Voegeli on immigration, published at Claremont Review of Books back in August. It is outstandingly clear and comprehensive.
I’ll offer a brief excerpt, in which Voegli makes what I think is the most important point of all about immigration policy (I have bolded the relevant passage):
Given the stakes, the conservative instinct toward caution applies with extra force to immigration. Cautious governance entails constant awareness that an immigration policy that turns out to be excessively restrictive can easily be reversed, but revising an insufficiently restrictive one will be difficult and undoing its consequences even more so. Caution also means treating the successful assimilation of previous large waves of immigrants to America as a fact of history, not a law of nature. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as the brokerage firms’ ads say, particularly given that the biggest single source of immigration today is an adjacent nation, not ones separated from North America by thousands of miles and a difficult ocean passage. Nor did the Ellis Island immigrants come to a nation where the Americanization of newcomers was stymied by the fierce opposition of multiculturalists.
Conservatives are cautious not just about how to proceed but about how the world works. No matter how secure and admired a set of arrangements appears, it is always vulnerable to external antagonists and internal decay. America’s experiment in self-government needs to be conserved because it is reckless to assume it will simply sustain itself.
Exactly right. (See points 7-11, here.)
Perhaps my favorite passage of all was this:
Politics is hard, so it is not enough to settle any question by ascertaining how Vox.com thinks about it in order to endorse the opposite approach. In the majority of cases, however, this method will yield a very good beginning.
Mr. Voegeli’s article deserves your attention. Go and read it all, and pass it around.
Well, the lovely Nina and I are on our way back. We’re traveling a day later than we meant to: we’d flown from Boston to Vienna (and had left our car at Logan Airport), but while we were overseas the carrier, Air Berlin, having declared bankruptcy, canceled all flights to Boston forever. So now we are in Dusseldorf waiting five hours for a connecting flight to JFK, where we’ll spend the night in an airport hotel and get a shuttle to Boston tomorrow — after which it’s a mere two hours’ drive to get home to Wellfleet.
We had a fine time — Vienna was as gracious as ever, and Prague is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen (and, as predicted, still thoroughly and happily European) — but I’ll be glad to get home. Long, cramped flights are no fun for a beefy six-foot-tall hombre of my advancing years — and given my conservative disposition (Michael Oakeshott explains, here) I’m rather a homebody anyway.
It may be a while before I’m fit for purpose again, so here are three things to read.
First: you may have heard of a new book called Testosterone Rex, by Cordelia Fine, that argues that there are no innate differences between males and females. (This is of course obvious nonsense, but it is getting raves in all the right circles, of course, because it says all the right things.) Here’s a review by Greg Cochrane.
Second: An item by Patrick Buchanan that looks at the Trump presidency as a rebirth of Gaullism.
Third: former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy on the Mueller investigation.
Back soon.
Vienna, September 19th —
As it was last time we were here, Vienna — unlike so many other European cities — still manages to maintain its European character, at least in its more affluent districts (I should note that we have not moved around the city much this trip, and have only been inside the Ring and in our daughter’s neighborhood in a quiet section in the Third District, near the Hundertwasser House.) There is a growing sense of entropy, and more graffiti and little signs of decay each year, but it is still… well, still Vienna. Disorder has never been well-tolerated here, and it still isn’t. The place remains distinctly and proudly Austrian.
Tomorrow we are off to Prague for two nights. As with the other former Iron Curtain nations, Czechia is not going gently into that good night. We’ve never been to Prague before, so I can’t compare it to how it was, but I expect it, like Vienna, to be a distinct, and heartening, contrast to places like Paris, London, or Amsterdam.
One thing I can say: it’s been a blessing to be distracted from the news. I understand that the Norks keep launching missiles, that Mr. Trump made a speech at the U.N., that Hillary Clinton still won’t go away, and that there have been further eruptions of barbarism in St. Louis and elsewhere (oh, and this), but that’s really about all I know. I can’t really see how I’m any the worse off for my inattention.
File this under “Diversity and its Blessings”.
I’m off to Vienna and Prague tomorrow; I’ll let you know how things seem there.
Well, I’m back home in Wellfleet after a splendid three-day weekend on Star Island. (The high point of the weekend was a tribute performance we gave on Saturday night in honor of the late Walter Becker, consisting of a baker’s dozen of Steely Dan’s greatest hits. (It would have been impossible to get that together in such short order — Steely Dan is difficult music! — were it not for the presence of some really outstanding musical pros in our little circle of friends.)
I won’t be home for long — on Thursday the lovely Nina and I are off to Vienna for about ten days to visit with our daughter, her husband, and our little grandson Liam, now a toddler (as of about a week ago).
I’m afraid content may be sparse while we’re away. To be honest, it was so nice to get completely away from news and politics last weekend that I have little eagerness to dig back in. I did notice, however, that Bill Vallicella has again taken up the problem of consciousness — and, with the subject being an old hobby-horse of mine, and his comment-box being open, I joined the conversation. Bill and I have been on opposite sides of this for at least a decade now — I think that the physical brain probably, somehow, gives rise to consciousness, and he doesn’t — but I’m always glad to have another go at it. We’ll see.
I’ll be away this weekend (as I was last year at this time) for our annual musical retreat on Star Island. Back early next week.
The comment-box is open, if anyone would like to broach any topics for consideration.
Mencius Moldbug on fascist-hunting:
Unfortunately no central statistics are kept, but I wouldn’t be surprised if every day in America, more racists, fascists and sexists are detected, purged and destroyed, than all the screenwriters who had to prosper under pseudonyms in the ’50s. Indeed it’s not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of Americans, perhaps even a million, are employed in one arm or another of this ideological apparatus. Cleaning it up will require a genuine cultural revolution – or a cultural reaction, anyway. Hey, Americans, I’m ready whenever you are.
The logic of the witch hunter is simple. It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins‘ day. The first requirement is to invert the reality of power. ((On inversion, see also here.)) Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters. By this test alone, we can see that the conspiracy is imaginary (Brown Scare) rather than real (Red Scare).
Think about it. Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn’t waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They’re getting burned right and left, for Christ’s sake! Priorities! No, they’d turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.
Much more here.
Here’s the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, quoted in New York Magazine (my emphasis):
Q: …Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools?
A: What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development.
What’s telling about this isn’t Hizzoner’s antipathy to the central principle of America’s founding; anybody’s who’d been paying any attention at all already knew the guy was a communist. It’s that things have moved so far along that he no longer feels the slightest inclination to conceal it.
A happy item in the New York Times today: Power Station Studios, where I was a staff engineer from 1978 to 1987, has been bought by Berklee College of music and will be re-opening after a long-overdue renovation.
Power Station, Studio A: my alma mater.
This is the second time this magnificent facility, which in my opinion is the best place on Earth to make a record, has cheated death. In 1996 the original Power Station, in deep financial trouble, was rescued from imminent condo-hood in by Chieko and Kirk Imamura, who renamed it Avatar [note: this link might not work for long].
Now it seems that Berklee will be sprucing the place up and putting it back in business again as Power Station. This is very good news.
… Also in today’s Times, this gem:
“Every day that you’re working as a model, you’re objectified somehow.”
Well, duh.
I didn’t see this coming: Walter Becker is dead at 67. If you’re a musician of my generation, or a fan, that’s a heavy blow.
Many of you will have read Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-decorated book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It makes what has seemed to many (even to me, when I first read it) an overwhelmingly persuasive case that the persistent inequalities in power, influence, and prosperity among the world’s population groups — why, for example, did Europeans colonize the Third World, and not the other way round? — were due entirely to the constraints and accidents of geography, and of native fauna and flora. The book was a mighty affirmation of our era’s hegemonic human-universalist worldview, and along with its Pulitzer, received lavish praise from all quarters. It quickly became a central resource in the modern, Progressive (but I repeat myself) canon.
As time went by I came to understand that the argument put forward in GG&S, while certainly presenting important and clarifying insights and questions, is not quite the slam-dunk it seemed. Now Greg Cochran, co-author of The 10,000-Year Explosion has put up a series of blog-posts examining Diamond’s arguments.
You can read these posts here. And if you haven’t read Cochran’s book: drop everything, follow the link above, and do so at once.
Sorry it’s been so slow around here. It’s August, when I always take it easy a bit — but I’ll confess that I’m also getting a little spooked by the extent to which we are all (and I’m no exception) living more and more of our lives online.
Our attention, which is more precious than gold, and the one thing we must master if we are to have any hope at all of inner development, is increasingly spent in a virtual world created, manipulated, and harvested by a few increasingly powerful companies. (Note that we “pay” attention, a usage that captures quite precisely the crucial fact that attention is a finite and valuable resource.) Our words, our wishes, our habits, our movements, are noticed, tracked, sifted, and analyzed — and remembered. (If you have a Google account, try going to https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity on a logged-in browser.) Meanwhile the human world, once so vast and cool, has now been compressed into a tiny hot space in which everything is brought into immediate contact with everything else. As I wrote in the essay linked just above:
In short, the smaller and hotter the world is ”” in other words, the more likely it becomes that any two “particles’ will impinge on each other in a given time ”” the more volatile, reactive, unstable, and “twitchy’ it becomes. As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace ”” the legislative processes of large democracies, for example ”” to respond effectively to innovations and crises.
As we adjust to this accelerating impingement, our attention, constantly interrupted and diverted, becomes harder and harder for us to control, even as we become more and more deeply addicted to being peppered with (mostly useless) information. To lose one’s smart-phone — in other words, to lose a thing that never existed in all of human history until just over a decade ago — is now a crisis requiring immediate action. Imagine really cutting yourself off: no cell-phone, no Google, no Amazon, no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no email, no texting, no Google Maps, no Wikipedia. Just a land-line, the radio, basic TV, and books. (Just like it was until I was in my forties.) Could you do it?
Let’s put it this way: whether you think you can or not, I bet you won’t. I bet I won’t either.
Something very big is happening to us, and it’s happening very quickly. Some days I really don’t want to look at the computer at all. So that’s why it’s been quiet here.
OK! Having said all that, here are a few links:
First up, a new way of looking at what the brain does, using algebraic topology.
Speaking of brains, it appears that IQ may be on the decline in the West — fourteen points since Victorian times. (Why that might be, I leave as an exercise for the reader, for now at least.)
Meanwhile, here’s Heather Mac Donald on a spirited defense of ordinary virtues by a pair of academics, and the cataract of bile it has earned them.
Finally, a detailed look at the cooling oceans, and the lengthening rhythm of interglacial cycles (don’t forget that we are in a warm spell in the middle of an Ice Age). We used to get interglacials every 41,000 years; now they come much less frequently. Learn more here.
Victor Davis Hanson (my emphasis):
For the last decade, we were lectured that the arc of history always bends toward our own perceptions of moral justice. More likely, human advancement tends to be circular and should not to be confused with technological progress.
Just as often, history is ethically circular. No Roman province produced anyone quite like a modern Hitler; Attila’s body count could not match Stalin’s.
In the classical Athens of 420 B.C., a far greater percentage of the population could read than in Ottoman Athens of A.D. 1600. The average undergraduate of 1950 probably left college knowing a lot more than his 2017 counterpart does. The monopolies of Google, Facebook, and Amazon are far more insidious than that of Standard Oil, even if our masters of the universe seem more hip in their black turtlenecks than John D. Rockefeller did in his starched collars.
Our discussion of “white supremacy” continues, over at Bill Vallicella’s place.
I don’t like the tropics; they’re too profuse. Anything goes, completely unchecked.
Give me the North. Each winter Life’s follies, feints, and flourishes are weighed, measured and tested. The ones that make it back the following year need to show something serious: at best, ingenuity, but at the very least, genuine toughness.
Everything in the North means business.
For nearly all of us, a gravestone or other physical memorial is in any real sense as temporal, as evanescent, a thing as we ourselves are. For when such memorials no longer serve as a token, reminder, or feeble proxy for the deceased in the minds of those who knew them, they simply display a name — and a name, unattached to the memory of an actual person, is just a string of letters.
When the reference to memory is broken, at last, with the death of all who knew him, a person ceases, in any imaginably meaningful sense, to exist. It is a second, and final, death.
Here are two syllogisms about race.
The first:
(1) All human groups have identical statistical distributions of cognitive, behavioral and personality traits.
(2) Human groups, when considered as groups, have measurably different life-outcomes and levels of success in our societies.
(3) Given (1), these different outcomes can only be due to wholly exogenous factors, such as cultural obstacles and systemic racism.
The second:
(1) Various human groups, due to their particular histories of selection under widely varying environments, can be expected to have different statistical distributions of cognitive, behavioral and personality traits.
(2) Human groups, when considered as groups, have measurably different life-outcomes and levels of success in our societies.
(3) Given (1), these different outcomes may be due to innate factors, exogenous factors, or some combination of both.
If you accept syllogism #1, you are a good and decent person. You may express your views in public without fear of ostracism, public shaming, censorship or loss of employment.
If you accept syllogism #2, even provisionally, you are a loathsome bigot, and a purveyor of hate. You deserve ostracism and, wherever possible, persecution. In more enlightened nations than ours, you can expect to be prosecuted under the law.
Any questions?
It would be an awfully suspicious coincidence if Truth turned out to be exactly what we think it ought to be.
I had sad news today: my old friend and colleague Jason Corsaro died yesterday of cancer. I’m not sure of his age, but he must have been about my age, 61.
Jason and I came up together as assistant engineers at Power Station Studios (now Avatar); he was promoted to full engineer just before I was, around 1982 or so. He was flamboyantly talented, and before you knew it everyone wanted to work with him. His first major album was Madonna’s Like A Virgin (on which I also worked, as one of my last sessions as an assistant). It was a huge hit, but he was still honing his craft. Shortly afterwards he developed an arcane processing chain for drum ambience that resulted in a shockingly massive, aggressive sound (for you audio geeks out there, it involved, among other things, running the distant “room mikes” through heavy compression, a side-chain-triggered noisegate, and — this is where it got weird — a Publison DHM89 harmonizer, with the delay crosspoints reversed so that the sound came out backwards). If you’re familiar with the enormous sound of Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love, or the band Power Station’s version of Get It On (Bang A Gong) well, that’s the sound I’m talking about — and back then, during the Great Snare Wars of the middle 1980’s, this was roughly the equivalent of bringing an A-10 Warthog to the Battle of Crécy. Jason’s fame was assured, and he became a very busy man. A partial list of his credits, which includes, among other records, Soundgarden’s Superunknown and Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life, is here.
I hadn’t been in touch with Jason for a while, but we were close friends back in the trenches in those early years. He was a good man, and a truly great engineer — an artist and an innovator. His life is over far too soon.
Rest in peace, brother.
Last week a Google engineer expressed, in a perfectly reasonable memorandum about human diversity, the view that the company had become a left-wing monoculture in which dissenters actually might have to worry about being fired. For publishing this essay, he was fired.
Now Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has announced that the company is giving a million dollars to the execrable “hate”-hunting racket called the Southern Poverty Law Center.
If you’re like me (of course you are!), all this makes you want to have nothing more to do with either Google or Apple. Thinking about that, though, made me realize how hard it would be for most of us to do so.
For starters: if you have a modern cell-phone, it is almost certainly an iPhone (Apple), or some sort of Android device (Google).
Maybe you use iTunes (Apple) to play music, perhaps on your Mac (Apple again). Or maybe you use the Chrome browser (Google), and maybe you use it to do Internet searches (Google again, obviously). Perhaps you watch videos on YouTube (Google), or maybe you find your way around with Google Maps, or Google Earth. If you’re a blogger, you might well be on Blogger (Google again). There’s also a good chance you have a GMail account. (I have two.)
So: you’ve begun to realize that these very powerful companies are strongly aligned against proponents of traditional Western nations and cultures. But it’s probably also the case that you are a daily, and at this point deeply dependent, user of their products. (As I’m fond of saying, invention is the mother of necessity.) Are you prepared to give all that stuff up? I doubt it. I’m certainly not inclined to; in fact I wonder how I ever lived without it.
This is something of a problem, no?
