By Duggan's Dew of Kirkintilloch
Negative comments on this Ryerson Journalism Review article running nine to two in favour of 416 hipsters catching a clue. The election is over. We won. You lost. And a hard rain is gonna fall.
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By Dalwhinnie
David Frum said it best. Hitchens was a man who moved away from the moral certainty of Marxism to embrace a broader possibility of doubt and actual inquiry into the nature of the world, which requires that one reject “the smelly little orthodoxies” that Orwell described. I regret that he did not end up a Christian, but, like Orwell, he stands as a permanent reproach to the political Left because he did not embrace the transcendent. Had he become a believer they could have dismissed him from further thought. But because he shared so many of their assumptions about the good life, his continuing attacks from that point of view could not be dismissed. He confined the targets of his attacks to those things that ought to motivate the political Left, such as Islamofascism, but which do not, as we all observe.
He offended all the right people, and delighted in all the right things: literature, whiskey, smoking, conversation, inquiry and generally carrying on. If the political Left offered more Hitchens and fewer Noam Chomskys, I might be better able to take it seriously. Fortunately it does not.
I am persuaded that Hitchens has already encountered a huge surprise since dying, but I cannot know that with any part of my brain that can speak or write. I can only believe that. Let us hope that it is so, but in either case, I salute you, Christopher.
By Dalwhinnie
From time to time I enjoy reading blogs of guys who make me look like the tolerant liberal that I am. After all, a lot of what passes for conservatism is not really conservative in a deep sense; rather it is the cry for a return to common sense, and in doing so, we must reject the cultural Bolshevism and nihilism of the past 60 years. So that makes Barrelstrengthians look like dyed in the wool conservatives, because we oppose submission to Islam, affirmative action, or anthropogenic global warming, whereas what we really are is sensible people who favour free trade, religious freedom, including especially the right to avow one’s faith in God and the Christian faith in a public place, individual responsibilty, lawful behaviour, and well-brought up children. The rest is discussable.
For these reasons we are considered conservative when what we really oppose is authoritarian leftism, based on group rights, a movement which has appropriated the word “liberal” in the United States and Canada, and is nothing of the sort.
For others of a particular religious or political clarity, such as David Warren, Barrelstrengthians would be found wanting in doctrinal rigor, and quite likely fatally infected with Enlightenment ideas, such as rationalism, progressivism, or deism. (I don’t think so but we stand on guard)
To our brethren of schools even more extreme conservative than us, we say: peace. We have no quarrel with you, though you, by rights, may find us wanting in faith, clarity, or political rigor. There remains so much aggressive anti-Christian, anti-male, anti-white political thought and agitation out there that I have no time for intra-mural vilification. Even within the Blogging Tories list, it is very difficult to have a frank argument about race, say, when one side of that debate (namely that it is real, politically and statistically significant, and that genetics matters) is declared by the ideological gatekeeper as cause for expulsion.
So if you would like to venture into the deeper realms of rejection of modernity, there are a few blogs by men whose rejection starts at the Reformation, or the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and they are not kidding.
Here are some examples of blogs taken to be conservative which are, in my view, simply dealing with matters from a liberal (meaning concerned with individual rights) commonsensical position. I am not intending to insult them for this reason. I agree with that perspective in many respects, and am not certain where I would disagree with it, or their authors.
In other words, you do not have to be a throne and altar conservative to oppose islamization or unsustainable public finances. You can simply say, as we do, that a great deal of what needs doing in modern North American society is to stop trying to engineer equality of outcomes, and to support reasonable limits on the power of the state to transform us in the name of silly nineteenth century ideas.
I would be interested in comments on the validity of this division among conservative blogs and in additions to the list of really out-there (but sane) conservative blogs. Which are your guilty pleasures?
By Dalwhinnie
I can think of no book in recent times that has informed me more than Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary.
McGilchrist is a British physician, scientist and philosopher. The Master and his Emissary is, first, an explanation in terms of scientific research of how the two hemispheres of the human brain know the world, and second, a discussion of the unique characteristics of the Western world in terms of increasing left-hemisphere dominance.
This is not one of those trivial left-brain right-brain books that stimulates party-time conversation; it is a far-reaching, humane, and profound exploration of some issues that are swept under the rug in most contemporary discourse.
McGilchrist is at pains to educate the reader as to the latest scientific findings on how the two hemispheres differ in their appreciation of the world, and how they collaborate to allow us to be fully human.
Our basic problem is appreciating the right hemisphere’s role is that the left hemisphere controls the narrative. It is the talker, the story teller, the glib confident salesman making the pitch. In essence, McGilchrist shows (because the research shows) that the left hemisphere does not know what it is talking about, that the intuitive, accepting, permitting, imitative, comprehending part of the brain is the right hemisphere, which comprehends things totally but which does not control the flow of talk.
McGilchrist is carrying the offensive to the neuroscientists who have denigrated the functions of the right hemisphere, which they have likened to the zombie. Not so, says McGilchrist, it is the left hemnisphere which acts like a zombie when detached from the intuitive wisdom of the right. Zombies are the personification of those whose right hemisphere functions have been shut down, and he says it is no accident that the idea of the zombie, the Frankenstein, emerges with the Enlightenment, with its singular emphasis on left-brained ways of knowing the world.
Today all the sources on intuitive life – cultural tradition, the natural world, the body, religion and art- have been so conceptualized, devitalized and “deconstructed” (ironized) by the world of words, mechanistic systems and theories constituted by the left hemisphere that there powers to help us see beyond the hermetic world that it has set up have been largely drained from them.
Notions of excessive left-hemisphere dominance have received popular expression in movies like The Matrix. The resonance of this movie was generated by the feeling that the world is not as it appears to be – to the right hemisphere says McGilchrist. The irruption of the right hemisphere into left-hemispheric consciousness is expressed by metaphors – such as by taking the blue pill. That is the only way to get around the censorship of the left hemisphere.
Other cultures, including our own in previous times, enjoyed a more relaxed relationship of the two hemispheres, so that symbolic communication between the hemispheres was not felt to threaten the analytic world view of the left.
I shall give you a flavour of the book’s power by the casual savaging McGilchrist gives to Richard Dawkins of the selfish meme fame.
A meme is said to be the replicator of cultural information that one mind transmits to another mind….ultimately and inevitably, including hte idea of God – the Dawkins delusion.This is a perfect example, incidentally, of the left hemisphere’s way of constructing its own history, not least in its way of breaking a culture into atomistic fragments devoid of context, as though snippets of behaviour, feeling or thinking – of experience in other words – stuck together in large enough numbers, constitute the world in which we live.”
Another merit of the book is his relatively brief, insightful treatment of Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), one of the most fascinating books I have read. Jaynes said that the voices of the gods or God heard by all the characters of Homer and the earlier parts of the Bible, as well as the sacred literatures of other ancient faiths, were actually heard by them; they were not metaphors but communications between the brain’s hemispheres.
“His insight that there was a connection between the voices of the gods and changes in the mental world of those who heard them, that this might have something to do with the brain, and indeed that it concerned relations between the hemispheres, remains, in my view, fundamentally correct. However, I believe he got one aspect of the story back to front. His contention that the phenomena he decribes came about because of the breakdown of the bicameral mind – so that the two hemispheres previously separate, now merged – is the precise inverse of what happened. The phenomena came about because of a relative separation of the two chambers, the two hemispheres. Phenomna that wrere previously uncomplicatedly experienced as a part of a relatively unified consciousness now became alien.”
What is the take-away from McGilchrist’s book? The import of the book is that the western world is in a mental crisis caused by the over-dependence on left-hemisphere ways of knowing the world, and the delegitimization of religion, culture, intuitions, and other ways in which the silent right-hemisphere tries to rein in the left hemisphere and inform it of who it is really working for.
Do you recall the first Tron movie? The plot concerned “programs” inside computers fighting against the usurper who claimed that there are no users who dwelt outside the apparently self-sufficient world of the computer, that the programs worked only for the Master Program. You can interpret this tale as a metaphor that God exists outside the world, and that we programs are working for him. But McGilchrist invites you to consider that Tron can just as well be considered to be an intuition that the usurper is the left brain asserting that there is no right hemisphere.
Tron, the Matrix, and the Master and his Emissary: they are all on the same theme. McGilchrist expounds the neuroscience and philosophy which justify the insights of popular culture.
By Dalwhinnie
Admirers of Blade Runner, Total Recall, Johnny Mnemonic will find this article on Philip K. Dick of great interest. It appears that Dick had a full-fledged mystical experience in 1974.This experience is the subject of his last writing, gathered in the Exegisis of Philip K. Dick.
A review of the book on the amazon.co.uk site by Paracelsus says:
“Anyone who has read VALIS will know that Dick speaks about a very vague purpose hidden far beyond the words of his stories. It is that ‘vague purpose’ which is here laid bare, in its fullest and richest brilliance, in the author’s most personal and undiluted expression. Do not expect to read an average ‘journal’, scraps of notes, or even ’science fiction’ — be prepared for a deep and exacting examination of Logos and Mind, Christ and Sophia; the philosophies of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Iamblichus; the Gnosticism of Thomas and Valentinus, and much more besides that will threaten or inspire you, if you can even begin to understand it. “
Andrew McKie, writing in the Spectator Arts Blog, says Dick:
“maintained that, in 1974, he had received a message from God telling him the modern world was a fraud, a simulacrum laid over a reality that had not changed since the first century AD. He understood, or came to understand as he wrote about his experience, that this might be a delusion, and that it might be understood as a metaphor – but, uncomfortably for modern sensibilities, only in the way that St Paul or St John the Divine might have been regarded as deluded, or that the Gospels should be read only metaphorically.
“Dick’s theology, though not quite orthodox, is not noticeably more odd or problematic than that of Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena or St John of the Cross. He came, in his last years, to worship as an Episcopalian, and I imagine he’d have been happiest as a liberal Anglo-Catholic in the C of E.”
By Dalwhinnie
Anders Breivik, the killer of those young 70-odd young socialists, was found insane by Norwegian psychiatrists. Nonsense. He was a fully committed political warrior who slaughtered people with the firm conviction he was doing God’s work, same as any fanatic. Every Waffen SS soldier did the same. Every NKVD trooper who rounded up and shot Russian farmers, “spies”, “saboteurs” and other enemies of the Soviet regime was, by the same standard, a “paranoid schizophrenic”. Millions of soldier fanatics for the emperor of their choice murdered as many people as Breivik – perhaps thousands more – and were given medals. The man is not mad; he is sane, but evil.
Secular humanists have trouble with evil in a different sense than Christians have trouble with evil. For the secularist God-abolishers, evil is not supposed to exist, and talking in those terms is suspect, like talking in terms of “humours” or other medieval claptrap. Evil is something which the progress of science is supposed to have abolished.
The Guardian has an interesting article from a Norwegian on the subject of Breivik which glimpses the truth and then retreats from it. The author sees the hatred which motivated Breivik as political in origin, but fails to draw the necessary conclusion that Breivik was sane. Locking him up, on whatever pretext, is the only answer. People so much agree on the necessity of putting him away that they close their minds to the possibility the man was entirely clear about his principles, willing to act on them, and knew the quality of his actions. Nazis were not insane. Breivik is not insane. Evil, but not insane.
The Guardian article writer says:
“As most Norwegians, I do not have the medical skills to support or overrule the verdict of a psychiatric commission. Either way, the paranoia and the crimes of Anders Breivik are his own, but his hatred does not come from a delusional mind. We recognise it as the white man’s hatred that we have known for a century. His acts of terror mirror the views and expressions of a multitude of rightwing extremists. He is not alone in his madness.”
First point: when Muslims kill for religion they are treated as having no relation to Islam, but when right wingers kill to preserve white culture, they are taken to be the expression of a multitude.
Second point: when I visited Norway in my twenties it was 100% white. I recall reading recently that Oslo is now 28% non-white. From the perspective of 35 years later, one should ask: who among the Norwegians voted for this? Does this justify Breivik? No, but that is not the point. Who in Norway consciously voted to turn their city in the space of 35 years years from Lutheran to nearly one-third African or Muslim?
Third point: if Breivik’s hatred “does not come from a delusional mind”, as the Norwegian author admits, then wherein lies the insanity? Hatred is not insane. You may hate your boss, your enemy, your siblings, your parent, your job, but that does not make you insane. On the contrary, hatred may be the result of your rational and correct perception that someone or some group is fucking you over.
If there is ever a European civil war over Islam, Anders Breivik may be the John Brown of that struggle, the revolutionary abolitionist whose death (martyrdom?) helped to plunge the United States into the Civil War. Time will tell.
By Dalwhinnie
The recent suit at one of the too many human rights commissions by a Turkish-Canadian woman complained that, as a racialized ethical vegan, she was the victim of discrimination, and that she was part of a racialized minority. What pray tell, is a “racialized” person?
You will hear more about racialized persons, because the word acts like a dumptruck, transporting a host of grievance-mongering from one site of public discourse to another, without the bother of thought. Sort of like the German High Command sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, to get the bacillus out of Geneva and into the prostrate body of Tsarist Russia, where it could really do some damage. (I digress)
Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Put simply, a group of people is seen as a “race”, when it was not before.
This led me to the fascinating entry by the University of Guelph on the subject, Understanding Racialization:
In the past, race was defined as a natural or biological division of the human species based on physical distinctions including skin colour and other bodily features. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white. It was used to establish a classification of peoples. Some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been associated with notions of racial superiority.
There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centered on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.
While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.
I would say that these three paragraphs contain the essence of the leftist falsehoods that dominate public discourse.
Read the following and inform yourselves:
1. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white.
False. All people at all times have been conscious of racial differences, and “race” did not emerge in post-16th century Europeas an intellectual construct any more than height or weight did. Race, ethnicity, tribehood: each and all have been observed facts of life since before conscious thought, just as rabbits differ from hares, or both from deer. The intellectuals of Enlightenent Europe may have systematized the classifications, but they systematized classifications of everything: taxonomy and species collecting was the fashion of the time, viz. Linnaeus and the modern biological classification system.
The 4,000 year old pictographs of ancient Egypt show Africans and caucasians as recognizable races. The Romans pondered the origin of races as they looked upon the red-haired Scythians and the Negroid Nubians, and considered the origin of races as related to available sunlight in their native lands.
2. There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification.
False. Humans have evolved. (Darwin is apparently a new idea in some quarters). They are evolving still, at an accelerating rate. Races emerged as Africans left the African continent and colonized the rest of the world in a process starting about 50,000 years ago, settling areas where neanderthals had been before them.
Racial differences are real, genetic, unfolding in time, and evidenced by both organic processes and statistically-validated behavioral differences. I noted that the list of books above range in political acceptability from The Journey of Man, which has a PBS television series attached to it, to Philippe Rushton’s, which you can only get from non-Amazon booksellers. But they all say the same thing in different ways.
All humans who left Africa in ancient times are the products of adaptation to new environments, and various genetic compromizes have occurred over time to allow us to live in Asia, Polynesia, Europe, and the Americas.
3. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them.
False. Stephen Jay Gould’s Marxist beliefs led him to to emphasize the commonlaity of our species-hood over the fuzzy distinctions of race. He has been debunked elsewhere. See readings above, but more particularly, see Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, for the more general attack on Gould’s bioogical ideas.
4. While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society
“The social construction of race”. Of all the untruths taught in universities, perhaps none is more pernicious for the long-term than the denial of the biological. It has the effect of placing racial tolerance on the false premise that there are no races. Since there are no races, in this view, race is a social construct. Hence “racialized ethical vegans” can become a race – a category of people able to suffer “racialization.” You do not have to be a race to suffer discrimination. People will and do discriminate about anything, frequently for the benefit of human society. (e.g. the fridge is filthy- clean it. Pick up your mess. Get a job. Change the oil in your car) Trillions of discriminations keep civilization working.
Understand this: tolerance has no meaning or moral worth if there are not real differences to be tolerated. Toleration is a political bargain to make society livable without the need for an established religion.
By Dalwhinnie
It has been proven – study shows – that the brains of conservatives are more resistant to change and novelty than those of liberals, or so says Chris Mooney.
“There’s a reason Winston Churchill was a better wartime leader than Neville Chamberlain. There’s a reason why the Tea Party got itself elected in under two years, while Occupy Wall Street is kinda all over the place. There’s a reason why we have scores of environmental groups that often can’t see eye to eye. There’s a reason, as George Lakoff and others have noted, why Democrats (and scientists!) focus too much on policy facts and details rather than winning over people’s hearts (and winning elections).
“But when it comes to determining what’s true about complex, technical subjects—issues full of ambiguity and uncertainty, where you can’t just jump to conclusions and have to stay open-minded and tentative in your beliefs—I’ll take the scientific-liberal approach any day. And after reading the book, I think so will you.”
The “scientific-liberal” approach? Methinks something huge is being assumed here, that the scientific method is fully consistent with liberal political values, in the American sense of the word “liberal”.
As Geoffrey Miller wrote in his book Spent (worth a read), people have been found to differ along six different axes. These results are robust, and represent what psychological testing has been able to show in its century-long development.
One of the axes of difference is openness. It is generally true that people who identify with conservative positions will be less open to novelty than people who identify with left-wing positions. Likewise, conservatives will generally be found to be more sociable, or agreeable, than liberals (in the American sense of that term). Thus conservative people generally place a higher value of manners, and less on autheticity, than the expressive individualist.
The full range of differences is given by the mnemonic gocase:
Each of this characteristics is fully independent of the other. A person can be thoroughly open, say, and highly disagreeable; highly conscientious, but psychologically unstable. For example, I am rather more open than closed to new ideas and hence should be a liberal, but score lower on the agreeability scale, so I don’t particularly want to keep quiet at the dinner party regarding say, the usefulness of Canada’s gun registration. So I can come across as an argumentative conservative while passing the joint, so to speak.
And you have your own balance of quirks that makes you who you are. It may well be that people who are conservative react more emotionally than people who call themselves liberals, and “liberals” (a most misleading term) may have greater capacity for dealing with ambiguous information. This is the thrust of one of Mooney’s guest columnists, Andrea Kuszewski.
“So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.”
Here is where the conflation of openness with scientific method comes in.
The conservative is the one being accused of emotional attachment to wrong ideas, in the case of resistance to man-caused global warming.
Yet the case for or against man’s role in global warming is patently not about facts at all. It is a religious narrative. Conservatives can smell religion at a hundred yards. Liberals, to make as silly a case as Mooney’s, are less aware that they are gripped by a gnostic religious narrative.
Man is bad. He is destroying the planet. Something should be done. And we have the knowledge, intelligence and commitment to save the planet from those nasty people who are enjoying themselves as Gaia expires.
One of the most impressive features of any discussion with a warmist is their passionate belief that those who oppose them must be evil. They have perfect knowledge – it is undisputable. Hence those who oppose them must be either ignorant, and needing education, or knowledgable, and therefore consciously bad.
So don’t talk to me of liberals’ greater capacity for handling ambiguity and lessened emotional reaction to policy. If that is so, I have not met one in a long life in politics. They are passionately anti-factual on any issue of concern to them, because their (largely unconscious) religious narrative determines what is factual.
By Dalwhinnie
Sex fascinates me, as an observer, as a practitioner, and as a parent and grandparent. As I am sure it fascinates you. How can something so amazing as sex have anything to do with reproduction?
There was once a comedy skit of two guys talking about women and sex, with shopping carts loaded with diapers in the aisles of Costco, with floor to ceiling boxes of diapers surrounding them. It slowly dawns on us that sexual activity leads to something quite different from the ecstatic communion of sexual bliss. It leads to little copies of yourself who strangely differ from you and your mate, wondering about the world, demanding lunch and entertainment. It also frequently leads to marriage, and eventually, depending on your choice of mate, divorce and custody arrangements.
As to the amazing and by no means obvious relationship of sex to reproduction I am not alone in wondering.
Sex at Dawn joins the growing ranks of books on human nature, as seen through an evolutionary perspective. It is subtitled “How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships”. It covers some of the same ground as Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn and Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind, albeit from different perspectives.
Anthropologists and biologists are asking how it is that man has come to dominate the planet, and what critical differences distinguish man from the other four great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons.
We have gone in the space of a several hundred thousand years from chipping rocks on the African plains to colonizing every available part of the planet. How this has occurred is, in effect, the Question. What mechanisms, what processes, could have caused to domesticate and transform ourselves in such a brief timespan as 150,000 years?
Apparently it has to do with sex. Our sex lives are essential to our rapid evolution. Many people are repelled by that answer, but according to Darwin, there are only two ways of doing it: natural selection and sexual selection.
As Geoffrey Miller puts, only sexual selection is directed, rapid and intelligent enough to have produced us, because natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, is too slow and random to have moved us up the food chain from dimwitted rock shapers of 400,000 years ago to people able to play Bach and appreciate it. That means women have selected men to be as they are: capable of violence but good around the kids, able to bring home the bacon, and faithful enough to be tolerated. And women have been selected by men to be as they are: good with kids, able to forage for themselves and the family, handy, beautiful (no facial hair please), and smart enough to appreciate our jokes.
This is a depressing conclusion for those who imagine the perfectibility of man is only held up by the existence of bad social structures (economic and religious arrangements). It is of no consequence to those who believe that man – in whatever condition he then was – received revelation as to how he should behave.
Sex includes better brains, which offer more entertainment value, bigger dicks and more beautiful chicks, and cleverer, more emotionally engaged men and women loving one another. I could have written that differently, but that is the main conclusion of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. We have conquered the planet by being smarter, which has entailed and caused us to be more sexy, to be more rapidly reproductive, and to share the burdens of reproduction better as between men and women.
We are each the result of sexual selection. Men have been selected by women, and women by men, and what you experienced in your mate selection days is what everyone has gone through. And, by and large, despite the fact that less than one percent of our sexual activity is aimed at reproduction, we have populated the planet with ourselves quite effectively.
This brings us to the controversy dealt with in Sex at Dawn. How much were we ever intended to be sexually faithful?
This issue bedevils our understanding of ourselves. The time before agriculture spreads backwards from 10,000 years ago into the mists of time. It is in this time that anatomically modern humans emerged, probably about 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This long period is a sort of blank slate onto which writers project their theories of how we got be so smart and well adapted.
Did the family unit mean that much then? Did we pair-bond for longer than a few years, in order to raise children? Was the family the engine of human survival? Was evolution accelerated by sexual exclusivity, however short term, which is implied in the idea of family?
Or, to the contrary, did people just boink and move on? Did the hunter-gatherer pack or tribe enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity in the days before we had more property than we could carry on our backs? Did men choose sexual exclusivity for some relevant period of time as they supported their mates in breeding? In the absence of accumulation of property, did we have something to defend that made patrilineal relationships a sensible social institution? Did we grow up as a species knowing who our fathers were, and did they and their brothers teach us how to hunt? Or was dad just one of the guys who fucked mother on occasion, and also taught us how to catch fish and shape a spearpoint?
This is the context in which books like Sex at Dawn are written.
Sex at Dawn is engaging in an argument about the family and the pair-bond which lies at the core of it. Essentially it is stating that the human being was not meant for sexual fidelity and it is time we recognized that fact.
The argument goes like this.
1) The behavior of the human species since the invention of agriculture is of no relevance. Since we began to accumulate property (beyond what we could carry on our backs and pack-animals) only with the advent of settled existence, and that only with agriculture, the history of the last 10,000 years reveals nothing of our true nature. It is a distortion caused by property. Property enforces the need to assure ourselves of the fatherhood of our children, and therefore the sexual exclusivity of our pair-bonds.
2) If you want to know about how we behaved sexually before agriculture, compare the human body to those of the other 4 great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons. The evidence, in the form of penis size and shape, external testicles, female ovulation – whether hidden or evident, shows that we are designed to be sexually promiscuous. The existence in humans of “sperm competition” means that we were and are promiscuous, and that males have fucked women in group situations forever. Sexual exclusivity is a fantasy, a lie we keep telling ourselves.
3) As we pass out of the agricultural epoch, sexual arrangements are starting to leave behind the mould imposed by the property-obsessed homo economicus of the previous era.
As the authors state, “despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted…we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations” (p.310)
That, in essence is the book. I have rendered it as logically as I could, and spared you the ranting tone and the irrelevant asides on the religious suppression of human sexuality.
To which I respond:
1) The whole thing is an argument against the concept of marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime, fair enough. But who is arguing for marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime? The anthropologists argue merely that the human pair-bond was an engine of our reproductive success, in the raising of children and the transmission of culture to them. So it is pointless to argue about the pair-bond with people who are not saying it was ever wholly exclusive or meant for life.
2) That leaves institutional religion. The Christian Church and Islam have both praised the institution of faithful marriage and repressed sexuality in the interests of family stability. If you had responsibility for the human species in your hands, over the course of centuries, would you argue for anything less? Would your religion make explicit allowance for group sex and seasonal orgies? Point me the way to one such and I might join. But I doubt it would last for centuries, as the sexually repressive ones have.
3) As to improvising new familial configurations, what do you think has been going on for the last fifty years? As soon as we could escape the bonds of one man or woman for life, we have done so. Though the results are not entirely in yet, there is little ground for total confidence that sexual liberation is possible where children are involved. I am not ready to join David Warren in wholly condemning the modern era, but the importance of the family to the welfare of children is a non-negotiable truth, and free-form boinking will always take second place to the requirements of child-rearing. Child-rearing is the twenty to twenty five year mortgage. And if marriage fails, it is always a tragedy, even if leads to better outcomes eventually for the couple engaged in it. How it affects the children is the crucial test, and we do not yet have confidence to say it carries no cost to them. It is a price they pay for their parents’ inability to love one another for a lifetime.
4) Societies are in competition. The improvising of familial configurations in which we have been engaged for fifty years is a novelty. There is no reason to believe the society which engages in it will always prevail against those which suppress sexuality in favour of everyone doing their duty, and out-breeding the pleasure-seeking improvisers of family configurations.
So the advocates of the pair-bond may, with Baronness Thatcher, say that the facts of life are conservative, even if humans were, are and remain a randy bunch of adulterers, group-sex devotees, and polymorphously perverse libertines.
By Dalwhinnie
This is the question put by a New York Times Magazine article. It explained that Twitter and other elements of post-literate civilization were to blame for the death of Big Ideas.
Rubbish!
Well, here’s a big Idea.
The US is rapidly going bankrupt. The Pacific Fleet will be rusting in San Francisco harbor in 30 years if they fail to get a grip on it.
And in turn:
The US is lowering its general IQ with massive Hispanic and third world immigration.
The US is losing its middle class. The social cohesion of the US is fraying and we ought to be concerned about it. The US is becoming a stratified Confederacy, and policy will emerge in thirty years to handle the social conflicts generated by stratified population whose bottom quarter is cognitively unfit for 21st century levels of production and behavior. Dark prognosis? You bet.
And if those are not ideas but mere observations, let me try this one on you.
The 20th century saw a long war 1914-1990 about the form of the state, fought between national socialism (eliminated in 1945) international socialism, eliminated in 1990, and parliamentary democracy, which was left ascendant.
The 21st century will see –is actually seeing – a fight between Shari’a and parliamentary democracy. Later maybe there will be a fight with China but I doubt that China’s assertions are any more than normal great power politics. Ugly and we don’t like them, but not world shaking because China does not intend to convert the world to its way of doing things. It wants a general bow in its direction, as Emperors of old used to require.
I would say that the Harper government’s inner circles are probably aware of these issues, and are generating the public mind-space to deal with them effectively.
Twitter, social media? Background noise.
Big ideas? The author of the NYT piece cites:
Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, as examples of Big Idea thinkers.
Here is my view:
Einstein – vastly important physicist, likely to be supplanted in the next 200 years as Isaac Newton has been, but only by something as world-changing as Newton and Einstein were themselves.
Compared to Einstein, the rest of the list are barely worth a mention in the American portion of the history of the 20th century.
Reinhold Niebuhr – big in the 1930-40s – led American liberals to a more realistic view of Communism. No significant influence beyond his lifetime.Useful work
Daniel Bell – big in the 70s- foresaw post-industrial society – useful work.
Betty Friedan – big in the 70s – drivelous nonsense, momentarily important, declining to zero influence before her death.
Carl Sagan – a twit, a shallow twit (“Billions and billions” “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – meaning that anything that disagreed with his materialist views required evidence sufficient to satisfy one carl sagan, who together with Gould (below) set up SciCop, a supposed Inquisition for scientific ideas and conjectures of which he did not approve.
Stephen Jay Gould – a proven fraud and a Marxist phlogisticator, and major thought-controller in his own right.
Both Sagan and Gould had a negative influence on the ambit of free thought, and Gould in particular slandered the authors of IQ testing and twin-studies on purely Marxist premises. He is strongly disputed by other Darwinists.
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People have to fill magazines with Deep Thought. The challenges are evidently before us, and powerful forces exist to prevent them from being challenged. My guess is that, once the public debt issue is faced, a great deal of what currently passes for thought will be wrung out of the universities and commentariat. Less of it will be subsidized.
Thank you for your fleeting attention to this morning’s rant.
By Dalwhinnie
Historian David Starkey pulled a major no-no on BBC television Friday night when he said
“the recent riots happened because too many young white people had ‘now become black’.
“The broadcaster was branded a racist yesterday after an appearance on Friday night’s Newsnight programme, when he blamed the riots on a ‘violent, destructive and nihilistic’ gang culture, which he said was being embraced by many white and black people.”
He said: ‘A substantial section of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.
‘Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois, that’s been intruded in England and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.’
UPDATE:
See the David Starkey interview via BBC iPlayer.
By Dalwhinnie
I want all the Christians to take a metaphorical break and allow my inner beast to rage in explicitly pagan terms against the political Left for failing to enforce social norms. For what I have to say will not be pretty or compromizing. Indeed, I shall have to go into a dissociated state and get in touch with my inner Timberwolf: matchless, iron-willed, upholder of eternal truths of mammalian behaviour.
<Pause for entry into the left hemisphere, my “ka“>
You oath-breakers have offended the gods! You have permitted wholesale dereliction from accepted social norms. Your doom awaits! And I shall bring it to you, Timberwolf, implacable enemy of the lawless, avenger and vindicator of the gods’ laws.
You know that social cooperation rests in the belief that every little bit of non-cooperation hurts. You know that cheaters must never be allowed to prosper. You know that killing must be avenged! That rape must be avenged! That insolence, bad manners, cutting into line, welfare cheating, bad etiquette, driving selfishly, failing to signal a turn, atheism, Critical Legal Theory, pants hanging so low as to show the butt crack: it all must be reproved, admonished, avenged, or suppressed, as the case requires.
Yet you do not do this. You say everything is an arbitrary social construct, and that we must understand – which is to say tolerate – declining standards of civility, trust, good manners, a due sense of proportion: all this is merely “white” culture that itself is racialist, imperialist, sexist, and God knows what.
Wrong! This is blasphemy to the gods. They will be avenged. They cannot long tolerate the deliberate lessening of civility, coarsening of manners, and falsification of truth.
Social cooperation is the basis of all human achievement: commerce, law, invention, progress, wealth creation, sharing with the poor, understanding of the other’s views, parliamentary government, and treating women as equals. Social cooperation is the essence of all higher achievements, yet you cut the roots of it, all the time. You abuse the trusting, you abhor the honest, you defile the temples of the gods, you proclaim all is merely an arbitrary construct, that it could be different, and should be different. And that you know how it can be different.
Wrong! This way we are on – whose proof is our rising prosperity – has been painfully achieved by hundreds of thousands of years of men taking the law into their own hands, long before there were courts, bailliffs, sheriffs, policemen, and jailers. When there was no agricultural surplus to distribute, a man took revenge on cattle-rustlers, rapists, thieves, and murderers. Society expelled the vicious, kept track of habitual liars and child abusers, and killed psycopathic manipulators.
Lack of social conscience must not be allowed to prosper, yet you constantly extoll the conscienceless and the social outsider. Why do you not praise the obedient, the cooperative, the honest? If free-riders are not admonished, the basis of all that you profess to hold true is defeated: honesty, integrity, social cooperation, trust, love, equality.
Not merely must cheaters be punished, but those who will not punish cheating must be exposed and themselves punished. That is the Law of Nature. Failure to be clear about this is the first step on the downward path.
And you know the most effective way to enforce this is to make people believe a superintending deity is watching. Why are you so against the notion of a superintending deity?
Why do you so relentlessly attack the enforcement of standards? Why do you punish the man who defends his home with firearms? Why do you believe that the state should vindicate what the individual most affected by law-breaking should not?
Why then do you so relentlessly attack standards themselves?
Because you are weak! Because you fear to vindicate the rights of the abused woman if her oppressor is large, black or Muslim. Because you think that society can hold together even as you eat into its foundations. You do not insist on civility from barbarians. You assault those who call barbarism “barbarism” as the maintenance of old-fashioned, parochial standards. You confuse the higher attainments of civilization with barbarism itself, so that murder goes unavenged, the rapist is immune, the thug walks free, the sociopathic babble of the Left is proclaimed as wisdom, and the honest, the cooperative, and the humane are considered patsies.
The gods will be avenged, the just shall be vindicated. And the longer your reign of anarchy and antinomianism lasts, the worse the reckoning will be.
Yours truly,
Timberwolf,
vindicator of the laws of the gods
<end of transmission from the thymic system>.
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The difference between me and Anders Breivik is that I know that the necessary correctives to this state of being – and they are necessary – do not begin in murder. The cycle of revenge will not be stopped, even in civilized, democratic, white Norway. There will be a debt to be collected, somewhere, by this act of political slaughter, which will set back the cause of anti-Islamic reaction and equally the defence of Enlightenment civilization. You did not calculate this, Mr. Breivik. Like Hitler, you set back the cause for which you thought you were fighting. Civilized behaviour is not upheld by slaughtering the children of your political enemies. Though it seem obvious, its truth appears to have escaped Anders Breivik.
By Dalwhinnie
The Toronto Distrcit School Board’s “Teaching resource for dealing with Controversial or Sensitive Issues” is a must read for all those who are concerned that left wing bias is at the core of our teaching approach.
1. Validation of the homosexualist agenda:
Teachers must ask themselves:
Do I display a variety of visual images and models that represent and validate all families in a contemporary and non-stereotypical manner? Would all students feel included?
and
Lead a discussion with students about how different families have different groups of family members, for example, single parents, grandparents, and grandchildren, two moms, two dads, aunts with nieces and nephews, no parents, divorced parents, foster parents, and people with no children.
2. Ecological Activism
It is essential that students obtain a negative attitude toward chemicals in the environment. To this end, teachers are instructed to cause students to:
Research and present legislation and regulations regarding the production and disposal of toxic waste materials. Is the legislation sufficient? Does it create problems? For whom?
■ Debate whether herbicides and insecticides should be used in urban lawn care or gardens, or on municipal property.
Research and analyze historic environmental disasters involving pollution by toxic chemicals/toxic waste (e.g., Love Canal, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, or another student-chosen example).
3. Expose White racism
This is the discussion of “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
“First, Mockingbird is written by a White author, it features a White hero, and is narrated from the viewpoint of a naïve, young white girl. Even though the author’s intent is to expose racism, the book provides a very limited perspective on African Americans (“Negroes” in the language of the book).
“Knowledge of the African-American man the hero defends is largely related by the narrator. Rarely too are the opinions and concerns of African Americans voiced in the novel. While their subservience is shown, the ways in which they exercised resistance to racism are under-represented. It is unlikely that the author would have been privy to this information, given African Americans’ need to protect themselves in a white supremacist society.
“Second, just as authors write from differing perspectives, individuals read and respond to texts from differing perspectives, based on their complex social locations (e.g., race, gender, economic status) and experiences. When people have similar reading experiences and interpretations, it is often because they are from the same “reading community” (Fish, 1980). A white middle class reader can identify with Scout and Atticus, and dissociate from the white racist (and underclass) characters in the novel. As a white reader, it is also possible to finish the novel with one’s racial identity relatively intact. At the novel’s conclusion, Atticus has fought injustice, Jem is saved, Bob Ewell dispatched, and the loose ends are all neatly tucked away for the novel’s “sympathetic” White characters. But for an African American, identification with the African-American characters in the novel might be more demoralizing. They are largely seen through white eyes, and at the novel’s end, Tom is dead, and the voices of pain and rage in the African- American community are not heard.
So go to a black-centred novel for comparison. Also, do this, says the Toronto disctrict School Board:
“Before or after reading the novel, students might read and discuss excerpts from Peggy MacIntosh’s essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (http://www.nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf) in order to see the many ways in which whiteness grants social mobility.
While the “Teaching resource” is still dealing with “To Kill a Mockingbird”, observe this insert into the text
“Anticipated student responses to To Kill a Mockingbird may include the following:
■ hurt that African Americans might be presented in so negative a manner
■ anger that this novel was chosen for study
■ incredulity that the descriptions and opinions of people of African ancestry that are encountered in the novel can still be found today
■ rationalization that the white people in the story behaved as they did out of ignorance
Students should be given opportunities to address in discussion and writing any of these issues, including the question of whether the novel should be taught at all.”
Can you imagine any piece of literature not composed explicitly to satisfy the leftist agenda surviving this test? The Iliad is anti-Trojan and shows the characters as driven by the gods; the Odyssey overemphasizes the hero’s cunning and Penelope’s dependence upon males; the Bible is out in its entirety for racism, sexism, genocide, incest and pro-Judaic tendencies. Nothing whatever of value would survive this intellectual Stalinism.
As David Mamet wrote in the National Post about a class of students he was attempting to teach playwriting to, the entire thought process of the young people he tried to teach was characterized by their profound sense of entitlement to indict all literature with racism, sexism and homophobia. They had nothing more to say, they had no capacity to think further, deeper or otherwise. Discussion would be stopped by the first bully to reach for the unanswerable racism card.
“But here was my question: On leaving the university, what would these young Stalinists do? Who would pay them for the ability to bravely proclaim, “That’s not funny?” In what society could they live?
“They were and are the children of privilege -in some, the privilege is inherited, and the cost of college meaningless, in some the cost is huge, and families suffer; but in all cases the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a “liberal arts education” is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend or complete -to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition.”
Do you wonder why?
By Dalwhinnie
The times, the morals! When I contemplate the frivolous idiocy of the following items, and when I contemplate them together, I realize there is more folly in the world than I will ever have time to correct, and Steven Harper cannot correct either. Vast forces of idiocy and malice keep the conservative blogosphere at work incessantly.
On the other hand, truth may be winning against that outrageous mountebank, David Suzuki. Lord knows what happens when evidence based science confronts the Suzuki foundation. Vivian Krause, who is doing great work investigating the links between leftist US foundations and west-coast politics, scores against the Suzuki Foundation’s claims that farmed salmon spread sea lice to wild ones.
Mrs. Seeker After Truth indeed!
By Dalwhinnie
Jodi Foster’s The Beaver is a profound and funny film, which deals with depression: how it runs in families, how things do not always turn out for the best, and which manages to be extremely funny thanks to the artistry of Mel Gibson, who, as his character, is bleakly hopelessly depressed, and who, through his alter ego, the beaver puppet, manages to come alive again.
If you have ever known anyone afflicted with depression, including perhaps the person whose face you see in the mirror, you cannot miss this film. For the rest of us who are blessed with happiness, this movie is a hugely entertaining enlightenment.
