It was once thought -- as long as a decade ago, since Fukuyama's End of History is predicated on it -- that cultural evolution is universal, and that there are clearcut, unidirectional stages from primitive band to modern liberal democracy.
September 11, 2001 more or less applied the kibosh to this idea, or at least made it clear that certain cultures have a very long way to go if they are ever to break through the tribal barrier and join the ranks of the civilized.
I read The End of History when it came out, and found its thesis to be entirely persuasive. I mean, who in their right mind wouldn't prefer individualism to collectivism, liberty to authority, the rule of law to the rule of man, democracy to autocracy, civil rights to unlimited state power, free markets to command economies or crony capitalism?
The operative term is, of course, right mind. "Mind" is the most important variable, both individually and collectively, because it is obviously the case that many people prefer all of those social arrangements that we find anathema.
So Fukuyama can be correct in essence, or "archetypally," even if things are much messier on the ground. This should come as no surprise, because this is Just the Way the Cosmos Works.
For example, my racket, psychology, is implicitly predicated on the idea that health exists and that it is preferable to pathology. Any organism is internally directed toward its archetype, but that doesn't mean everyone is healthy.
To the contrary, pathology in any organic system is a measure of the distance between reality and ideal. We could say the same of cultural pathology, at least so long as we have an ideal. Modern liberalism, of course, has abandoned this in favor of a horizontal multiculturalism, in which all cultural comparisons are considered invidious and probably racist.
The result is that for the politically correct left, there is a ban on the exercise of judgment and discrimination, and therefore wisdom. One can certainly see this in the field of psychology. Like most every other profession, mine has been hijacked by left wing activists who substitute their collective ideology for individual discrimination.
In certain areas, one is not permitted to entertain thoughts that are counter to various reflexive leftist memes, especially as they pertain to race, sexual orientation, sexual differences, family structure, mothering, fatherhood, and cultural practices.
If in our view a person is enmeshed in a pathological culture, then it is our problem. As in the old Soviet Union, we need the psychologist. We need a dose of sensitivity training in order to overcome our bourgeois indoctrination.
Here one can appreciate one of the many contradictions at the heart of the left: that all cultures are equally precious except for traditional American culture, which is uniquely bad and oppressive. No leftist ever condemns, say, homosexual activists, for insensitivity to the Judeo-Christian norms of the majority.
You will have noticed how this mechanism operates in your personal life. I assume we all have crazy relatives.
The annoying thing about crazy relatives is that they always insist that you adapt to their craziness, and if you don't, you are considered crazy, or impolite, or inconsiderate.
This conceals the fact that the crazy person is crazy specifically because he has no insight into his craziness, nor can he adapt to the real world. Screwball comedies from Shakespeare to Seinfeld are based on this idea, but it's not funny when it's happening to you.
A friend of ours recently endured a three week visit from especially difficult in-laws, and was nearly insane by the last day. Here we see how mental pathology is exported into others in the psychic environment.
Conversely, the healthy person is more empathic and flexible. He can see that the crazy person is actually in pain, and he will try to minimize their pain by adapting to their nutty world. But often a line is crossed, whereby the crazy person becomes a tyrant because of our indulgence of them, i.e., our desire to spare them of pain.
When people accuse Petey of being unkind, this is usually what is going on. Since he has no one to please, he has no interest in making crazy people feel comfortable. He is not going to adapt to them. Rather, they must adapt to him. If they don't like it, they can find someone else to manipulate. It shouldn't be difficult. Don't you have family?
It is the work of a moment to see how this identical mechanism operates on the world stage. What is the UN but a bunch of crazy autocrats who expect the world to fall in line behind them? Look at their favorite mascot, the dreaded Palestinians. The UN has spent the last 50 years indulging their madness instead of pointing it out to them, which would obviously be the helpful and "therapeutic" thing to do. Indulging madness only results in more of it.
Now, back to cultural evolution. As we have discussed in the past, the word "evolution" in its original sense is completely at odds with any materialistic/relativistic/Darwinian framework, since evolution is by definition directional. So when we talk about cultural evolution, we are implicitly saying that there is an ideal way for man to "be."
And as soon as we say this, the psycho-spiritual left will accuse us of some nonsense such as "cultural imperialism" or "religious fascism." But this is no more fascistic or imperialistic than to say that some diets are better than others for cardiac health. Only if one begins with the assumption that clear arteries are no better than atherosclerosis can all diets be considered equal.
Fukuyama -- who is clearly not coming at this from a personally religious standpoint -- writes that "The only part of the world where tribalism was fully superseded by more voluntary and individualistic forms of social relationship was Europe, where Christianity played a decisive role in undermining kinship as a basis for social cohesion."
That's odd. It's almost as if Christianity, far from being at odds with evolution, is the key to it.
And when we say "Christianity," please do not make the multicultural error of substituting "religion." For example, "In India, kinship interacted with religion and mutated into the caste system, which up to the present day has proved much stronger than any state in defining the nature of Indian society" (ibid.). And let's not even talk about Islam.
However, this raises the immediate objection of why evolution didn't proceed apace in South America despite its conversion to Christianity, or in the Orthodox east, where church was generally subordinate to state.
We'll deal with that later, but it's a little like asking why one brother turns out to be a sterling chap, the other an assoul. This problem was recognized before the beginning. Look at Cain and Abel. Same family. Same God. What went wrong?
Indeed, what went wrong between Judaism and Islam? They're both tribal, strictly monotheistic, and conspicuously porciphobic. How come the former raced ahead of the pack, while the latter is stuck in the wayback machine?
Early day today. Gotta get to work. To be continued...
Friday, April 29, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Founders and Bounders, Panderers and Slanderers
Continuity? Yes, where were we?
It's tricky to simultaneously pick up a strand of thought while abandoning memory, desire, and understanding in order to plunge into the wild godhead of O and encounter a fresh cosmos each morning.
Any repetition is due to the currents and patterns of my own ocean of being, although we are always endeavoring to conform ourselves to the Real. Naturally some biography always slips into one's cosmography. If only science would acknowledge this.
But that's the thing about any cultural elites, who inevitably believe their point of view is "normative" and that opposing ones are deviations. Which is especially ironic in relativists who not only reject norms, but believe they are oppressive -- even biological norms such as male and female, which are transformed into bloodless and soulless "genders."
Thus, for example, the mainstream liberal media pretend there is "media" and "conservative media," but no liberal media. Likewise, irony-proof secular fundamentalists believe there is science and faith, but no faith in science. Put these two errors in the same person and you have the typically clueless Times reader or NPR listener whom the future laughs at even now.
Is it even remotely correct to maintain that primitive peoples practiced a pure form of communism, and that this is somehow normative for humans?
Beginning with the latter, the answer would have to be yes if you believe that our genetic endowment is normative -- that it is not only an "is" but an "ought."
It is analogous to nutritionists who believe we should all adhere to the "caveman diet" -- which at least makes sense in light of the fact that our physical form is presumably identical to what it was as long ago as 200,000 years.
But does this mean that we should in effect adhere to caveman psychology and group dynamics? Underneath it all, this is what romantics from Rousseau to our latter day tree-buggers are saying.
I might add that the the modern faith of AGW would have no psychic traction if it weren't rooted in this romantic fantasy of primitive harmony with nature.
There is a reason why properly religious people tend to be immune to the fantasy. We know there's no backward-looking return to Eden. In a temporally irreversible cosmos, that is a non-starter. There is paradise, to be sure, but it is up and ahead, not down and back.
So Marx and Engels "argued that an early stage of primitive communism existed prior to the rise of exploitative class relationships, an idealized state that communism sought to recover" (Fukuyama).
How's that working out? I mean in the real world, not in the fantasies of the tenured?
"[R]eal-world Communist regimes in the former USSR and China forced millions of unrelated peasants into collective farms. By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity" (ibid).
Amazingly, in the Soviet Union, the tiny four percent "of land that remained privately owned accounted for one-quarter of total agricultural output" (ibid.).
Does this settle the argument over private property? Hardly. Again, leftism is a religion. Its idol is equality, irrespective of how self-defeating it is. We see this in Obama's insanely wasteful spending spree and in his authoritarian appropriation of the healthcare system.
Again, leftism is not something one can be argued out of, only awakened from. Nothing short of that can disabuse them of the faith that smart people with good intentions can create paradise on earth by appropriating your liberty and deciding what is best for you, right in the brisket, Chicago style.
But this is somewhat beside the point, because primitive peoples were not communists and they certainly weren't environmentalists.
First of all, since they weren't even individuals as we understand the term, no one argued for, much less decided upon, "group sharing," any more than the various organs of one's body get together and decide to share the food.
This is man's default state, and he needs to be educated out of it, not plunged into it -- even though the latter may well be more "natural."
It is also natural for a man to defecate in the street or to rape the next attractive woman he sees. Only the supernatural saves us from nature. Nature certainly doesn't. Nature couldn't care less, so long as we reproduce. And even then it couldn't care less, because it doesn't care, full stop. Only humans care.
I might add that primitive peoples not only weren't environmentalists, but were the greatest despoilers of nature the planet has ever known. Only Malthusian population constraints prevented them from destroying the place.
Individual <--> Environment is a complementarity that only fully blossoms with modernity. Only when man is ousted from Eden does he know of its existence. Which is the whole point. Growing up is painful, and is always accompanied by loss.
Primitive peoples shared everything within the boundaries of what they considered "the one." For them, oneness was not instantiated in the individual but the group. Thus, they lived not in a dialectical space of "me <--> you" or "I <--> thou," but of group <--> stranger, or insider <--> outsider.
And just as an individual has psychic defense mechanisms to keep out the not-self, the group has defense mechanisms to protect its own integrity -- mechanisms such as human sacrifice, ancestor worship, and ritual warfare.
These primitive mechanisms come with the terrortory of "communism," so never ask why the left requires enemies to slander and defame. It needs them for the purposes of primitive group cohesion. Conservatives have no use for race, but the left couldn't do without its hyperbolic fantasies of racism (or misogyny, or homophobia, or Islamophobia, or class warfare, or Gaia rape).
Perhaps it is no surprise that of the Big Six Founders, the conservatives -- Hamilton and Adams -- were implacably opposed to slavery, and never owned any slaves.
But the founders of the Democratic party, Jefferson and Madison, each owned over 100. And the conservative Washington not only freed his upon his death, but even provided for them, while Jefferson's were sold (and families hideously broken up) to pay off the debts from his insanely extravagant and self-indulgent lifestyle.
You will note that to this day, the brilliant but erratic Jefferson is the favorite founder of the angry adolescent left. He said so many intemperate things, that he provides a goldmine of unwise cracks for the left to legitimize its anti-American ideology through one of America's founders.
It's tricky to simultaneously pick up a strand of thought while abandoning memory, desire, and understanding in order to plunge into the wild godhead of O and encounter a fresh cosmos each morning.
Any repetition is due to the currents and patterns of my own ocean of being, although we are always endeavoring to conform ourselves to the Real. Naturally some biography always slips into one's cosmography. If only science would acknowledge this.
But that's the thing about any cultural elites, who inevitably believe their point of view is "normative" and that opposing ones are deviations. Which is especially ironic in relativists who not only reject norms, but believe they are oppressive -- even biological norms such as male and female, which are transformed into bloodless and soulless "genders."
Thus, for example, the mainstream liberal media pretend there is "media" and "conservative media," but no liberal media. Likewise, irony-proof secular fundamentalists believe there is science and faith, but no faith in science. Put these two errors in the same person and you have the typically clueless Times reader or NPR listener whom the future laughs at even now.
Is it even remotely correct to maintain that primitive peoples practiced a pure form of communism, and that this is somehow normative for humans?
Beginning with the latter, the answer would have to be yes if you believe that our genetic endowment is normative -- that it is not only an "is" but an "ought."
It is analogous to nutritionists who believe we should all adhere to the "caveman diet" -- which at least makes sense in light of the fact that our physical form is presumably identical to what it was as long ago as 200,000 years.
But does this mean that we should in effect adhere to caveman psychology and group dynamics? Underneath it all, this is what romantics from Rousseau to our latter day tree-buggers are saying.
I might add that the the modern faith of AGW would have no psychic traction if it weren't rooted in this romantic fantasy of primitive harmony with nature.
There is a reason why properly religious people tend to be immune to the fantasy. We know there's no backward-looking return to Eden. In a temporally irreversible cosmos, that is a non-starter. There is paradise, to be sure, but it is up and ahead, not down and back.
So Marx and Engels "argued that an early stage of primitive communism existed prior to the rise of exploitative class relationships, an idealized state that communism sought to recover" (Fukuyama).
How's that working out? I mean in the real world, not in the fantasies of the tenured?
"[R]eal-world Communist regimes in the former USSR and China forced millions of unrelated peasants into collective farms. By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity" (ibid).
Amazingly, in the Soviet Union, the tiny four percent "of land that remained privately owned accounted for one-quarter of total agricultural output" (ibid.).
Does this settle the argument over private property? Hardly. Again, leftism is a religion. Its idol is equality, irrespective of how self-defeating it is. We see this in Obama's insanely wasteful spending spree and in his authoritarian appropriation of the healthcare system.
Again, leftism is not something one can be argued out of, only awakened from. Nothing short of that can disabuse them of the faith that smart people with good intentions can create paradise on earth by appropriating your liberty and deciding what is best for you, right in the brisket, Chicago style.
But this is somewhat beside the point, because primitive peoples were not communists and they certainly weren't environmentalists.
First of all, since they weren't even individuals as we understand the term, no one argued for, much less decided upon, "group sharing," any more than the various organs of one's body get together and decide to share the food.
This is man's default state, and he needs to be educated out of it, not plunged into it -- even though the latter may well be more "natural."
It is also natural for a man to defecate in the street or to rape the next attractive woman he sees. Only the supernatural saves us from nature. Nature certainly doesn't. Nature couldn't care less, so long as we reproduce. And even then it couldn't care less, because it doesn't care, full stop. Only humans care.
I might add that primitive peoples not only weren't environmentalists, but were the greatest despoilers of nature the planet has ever known. Only Malthusian population constraints prevented them from destroying the place.
Individual <--> Environment is a complementarity that only fully blossoms with modernity. Only when man is ousted from Eden does he know of its existence. Which is the whole point. Growing up is painful, and is always accompanied by loss.
Primitive peoples shared everything within the boundaries of what they considered "the one." For them, oneness was not instantiated in the individual but the group. Thus, they lived not in a dialectical space of "me <--> you" or "I <--> thou," but of group <--> stranger, or insider <--> outsider.
And just as an individual has psychic defense mechanisms to keep out the not-self, the group has defense mechanisms to protect its own integrity -- mechanisms such as human sacrifice, ancestor worship, and ritual warfare.
These primitive mechanisms come with the terrortory of "communism," so never ask why the left requires enemies to slander and defame. It needs them for the purposes of primitive group cohesion. Conservatives have no use for race, but the left couldn't do without its hyperbolic fantasies of racism (or misogyny, or homophobia, or Islamophobia, or class warfare, or Gaia rape).
Perhaps it is no surprise that of the Big Six Founders, the conservatives -- Hamilton and Adams -- were implacably opposed to slavery, and never owned any slaves.
But the founders of the Democratic party, Jefferson and Madison, each owned over 100. And the conservative Washington not only freed his upon his death, but even provided for them, while Jefferson's were sold (and families hideously broken up) to pay off the debts from his insanely extravagant and self-indulgent lifestyle.
You will note that to this day, the brilliant but erratic Jefferson is the favorite founder of the angry adolescent left. He said so many intemperate things, that he provides a goldmine of unwise cracks for the left to legitimize its anti-American ideology through one of America's founders.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Essential Idiocy and Absolute Power
When a boy reaches 13, all of his thoughts turn toward forming a band. Indeed, there is no real mystery as to why human bands formed, since they are just the exteriorization of our interior, which is intersubjective and trimorphic right down to the Ground.
In this regard, John Lennon's creation myth is as good as anyone else's: "I had a vision that a man came unto us on a flaming pie, and he said, 'You are Beatles with an A.' And so we were."
But how and why did humans leave intimate and independent bands for more anonymous corporate record labels? While one could argue (I wouldn't) that the formation of bands is fully explained by natural selection, this cannot account for the evolution to tribal societies, i.e, for something that only emerges much later.
Obviously, natural selection does not plan ahead. If it did, then mosquitos, or dysentery, or MSNBC would not exist.
Right away we meet that troublesome word "evolution," which means very different things to different primates. For if one is going to maintain an intellectually consistent Darwinism, one cannot distinguish between bands and tribes on the basis of "evolution."
From the Darwinian perspective, human beings are "complete" as of 200,000 years ago, so anything we happen to do afterwards with our genetic endowment is entirely beside the point. To put it another way, whatever "point" there was to the human genome, it was established way back in the archaic environment to which we are an adaptation even now.
In this regard, our recent troll was more or less correct (or at least consistent) in his explanation of human origins. For him, and for all materialists, we are just a transient adaptation to an environment (including the weather) which no longer exists.
Thus, we are truly orphaned in the biosphere, just as Genesis says we are. Everything was beautiful back in the archaic environment of Eden. But ever since then we've been wandering in the desert bewilderness, looking for home in all the wrong places. Any existential pain is really a kind of phantom limb pain resulting from being a bunch of saps amputated from the tree of life.
Speaking of tree-buggers, I think this is what the environmental fanatics are on to. Since they are generally pagans or atheists, for them there can be no Reality above or ahead; instead, reality for them is below (in nature) and in the past (our genes).
In this romantic creation myth, they would like us all to revert to living as our primitive furbears, which would reinstate peace and harmony and recreate heaven on earth. To them I do not say "earth first" but you first!
Now, either one is a relativist or one is an absolutist; there can be no in between, just as there can be nothing in between something and nothing. One cannot be a little bit pregnant with being. Either you is or you isn't. O or Ø.
A Raccoon is an unyielding absOlutist, and this is the ultimate source of virtually all of the disputes with our detractors. Whatever the issue, we can usually mark the difference down to this single question: what is your lexical Orientation -- O or Ø?
Is a tribe more developed than a band? We say yes, no question. Why? Because we believe in evolution. Is the tribe the end of evolution? Clearly, no. Evolution -- if it is to be called evolution and not just change -- has a point.
Thus, like anything with a point, we judge it not in terms of the past but the future; we look at it in terms of its archetype, which is to say, its truth, or essence.
Is a man more developed than an infant? Yes, because the essence of the infant is to develop toward its archetype, which is implicit in the present but actualized in the present-and-future.
Does this mean that the man is more valuable than the infant? Obviously and emphatically, NO! Rather, the infant is precious precisely because of what he is in essence: a human being. Existence has no value in the absence of essence.
Now, to say that a Raccoon is an absolutist is another way of saying that he is an essentialist. For us, essence is prior to existence; for the vast and powerful anti-Bob community, existence is prior to essence. Simple as. For our distinguished adversaries from nowhere, essentialist is a bad word.
For the Raccoon, the very purpose of existence is to disclose our essence, which is to say, achieve a deustiny that is ultimately union with our source and ground. Like any destination, it is again not down and back but up and ahead; in short, it is O, not Ø.
But for the relativist, there can be no purpose to existence. To the extent that the relativist insists that there is a purpose, you must continue vigorously applying the cluebat upside their head until this elementary truth sinks in. Either he is a nihilist or he is lying to himself, most likely the latter, for the consistent nihilist is rara avis cerebellus, or a true birdbrain.
I apollogaze for the preluminary refractions. But we do need to define our terms and establish our metacosmic position at the outset, for it will prevent any number of dis- and misunderstandings in what follows, and allow us to cut straight through to the nub of the gist of the essence. Armed with our mighty metaphysical bullshit detector, we may proceed anywhere in the cosmos without fear of getting lost or even tenured.
Fukuyama properly notes that "One of the biggest issues separating Right and Left since the French Revolution has been that of private property."
Rousseau, in one of his seminal tractpot rants, "traced the origins of injustice to the first man who fenced off land and declared it his own." Karl Marx took over from there, and you know the rest of the story, which continues to unfold.
For the Raccoon, the origin of injustice is -- obviously -- Justice. Justice is prior to injustice, certainly not anything bipedal apes could establish on earth. We can only know of an explicit injustice because of our tacit knowledge of justice. Obviously, natural selection does not know of, and cannot speak of, injustice. Is it just that the lion eats the lamb? That the Lakers defeat the Hornets? Of course not. It just is.
Marx is the quintessential example of an absolutist masquerading as a relativist. Please note that an insistent relativism always results in tyranny, for in the end it will devolve to the enforcement of one man's opinion, to which the rest of us must conform. Don't like Obamacare? Too bad. It's all about the power, baby.
Please note that absolute relativism is the very foundation and essence of fascism. Absolutism proper is its converse.
The American founders are the opposite of Marx, not just in the details, but again, in essence. For in essence they were absolutists.
For example, to say that human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, is an absolute statement beyond which one cannot go (and governments may not transgress). It is now and forever.
This is what we meant when we said that man (as such, not such-and-such a man) cannot be surpassed, because the Absolute cannot be surpassed. You are born free. Now deal with it. And I don't mean by diminishing my freedom, moron.
Fukuyama notes that Madison, in Federalist #10, asserts that one of the most important functions of governments is to protect private property rights. Thus, for the modern Marxist, this is the very codification of Cosmic Injustice. For example, recall Obama's indictment of the Founders, and his gnostrum for how to remedy their cosmic errors. The Supreme Court must address
"the issues of redistribution of wealth and the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent, as radical as, I think, people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical; it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.... You can craft theoretical justification for it legally, and any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts."
Right. It's easy. The way one does this is to find a nuanced, subtle position situated between what the Constitution says and what Obama would like for it to say. In short, one establishes a shadowy area between Truth and the lie, or between O or Ø. Then call it "settled law," which absolutizes the newly minted relativism.
But again, there is no place between O or Ø, unless it is understood to be a kind of shadow -- or better, prolongation -- of O. Indeed, "shadow" is a misleading term, as it may lead one to regard the world as maya, or illusion (which it must be under the constraints of any post-Kantian metaphysic).
But the fact of the matter -- and of matter! -- is that the world is precisely real, or "relatively absolute," because it is sponsored and nourished by the same O in which our intelligence is rooted. Ultimately -- or in essence -- intelligence and intelligibility are the same thing, complements to O.
To be continued....
In this regard, John Lennon's creation myth is as good as anyone else's: "I had a vision that a man came unto us on a flaming pie, and he said, 'You are Beatles with an A.' And so we were."
But how and why did humans leave intimate and independent bands for more anonymous corporate record labels? While one could argue (I wouldn't) that the formation of bands is fully explained by natural selection, this cannot account for the evolution to tribal societies, i.e, for something that only emerges much later.
Obviously, natural selection does not plan ahead. If it did, then mosquitos, or dysentery, or MSNBC would not exist.
Right away we meet that troublesome word "evolution," which means very different things to different primates. For if one is going to maintain an intellectually consistent Darwinism, one cannot distinguish between bands and tribes on the basis of "evolution."
From the Darwinian perspective, human beings are "complete" as of 200,000 years ago, so anything we happen to do afterwards with our genetic endowment is entirely beside the point. To put it another way, whatever "point" there was to the human genome, it was established way back in the archaic environment to which we are an adaptation even now.
In this regard, our recent troll was more or less correct (or at least consistent) in his explanation of human origins. For him, and for all materialists, we are just a transient adaptation to an environment (including the weather) which no longer exists.
Thus, we are truly orphaned in the biosphere, just as Genesis says we are. Everything was beautiful back in the archaic environment of Eden. But ever since then we've been wandering in the desert bewilderness, looking for home in all the wrong places. Any existential pain is really a kind of phantom limb pain resulting from being a bunch of saps amputated from the tree of life.
Speaking of tree-buggers, I think this is what the environmental fanatics are on to. Since they are generally pagans or atheists, for them there can be no Reality above or ahead; instead, reality for them is below (in nature) and in the past (our genes).
In this romantic creation myth, they would like us all to revert to living as our primitive furbears, which would reinstate peace and harmony and recreate heaven on earth. To them I do not say "earth first" but you first!
Now, either one is a relativist or one is an absolutist; there can be no in between, just as there can be nothing in between something and nothing. One cannot be a little bit pregnant with being. Either you is or you isn't. O or Ø.
A Raccoon is an unyielding absOlutist, and this is the ultimate source of virtually all of the disputes with our detractors. Whatever the issue, we can usually mark the difference down to this single question: what is your lexical Orientation -- O or Ø?
Is a tribe more developed than a band? We say yes, no question. Why? Because we believe in evolution. Is the tribe the end of evolution? Clearly, no. Evolution -- if it is to be called evolution and not just change -- has a point.
Thus, like anything with a point, we judge it not in terms of the past but the future; we look at it in terms of its archetype, which is to say, its truth, or essence.
Is a man more developed than an infant? Yes, because the essence of the infant is to develop toward its archetype, which is implicit in the present but actualized in the present-and-future.
Does this mean that the man is more valuable than the infant? Obviously and emphatically, NO! Rather, the infant is precious precisely because of what he is in essence: a human being. Existence has no value in the absence of essence.
Now, to say that a Raccoon is an absolutist is another way of saying that he is an essentialist. For us, essence is prior to existence; for the vast and powerful anti-Bob community, existence is prior to essence. Simple as. For our distinguished adversaries from nowhere, essentialist is a bad word.
For the Raccoon, the very purpose of existence is to disclose our essence, which is to say, achieve a deustiny that is ultimately union with our source and ground. Like any destination, it is again not down and back but up and ahead; in short, it is O, not Ø.
But for the relativist, there can be no purpose to existence. To the extent that the relativist insists that there is a purpose, you must continue vigorously applying the cluebat upside their head until this elementary truth sinks in. Either he is a nihilist or he is lying to himself, most likely the latter, for the consistent nihilist is rara avis cerebellus, or a true birdbrain.
I apollogaze for the preluminary refractions. But we do need to define our terms and establish our metacosmic position at the outset, for it will prevent any number of dis- and misunderstandings in what follows, and allow us to cut straight through to the nub of the gist of the essence. Armed with our mighty metaphysical bullshit detector, we may proceed anywhere in the cosmos without fear of getting lost or even tenured.
Fukuyama properly notes that "One of the biggest issues separating Right and Left since the French Revolution has been that of private property."
Rousseau, in one of his seminal tractpot rants, "traced the origins of injustice to the first man who fenced off land and declared it his own." Karl Marx took over from there, and you know the rest of the story, which continues to unfold.
For the Raccoon, the origin of injustice is -- obviously -- Justice. Justice is prior to injustice, certainly not anything bipedal apes could establish on earth. We can only know of an explicit injustice because of our tacit knowledge of justice. Obviously, natural selection does not know of, and cannot speak of, injustice. Is it just that the lion eats the lamb? That the Lakers defeat the Hornets? Of course not. It just is.
Marx is the quintessential example of an absolutist masquerading as a relativist. Please note that an insistent relativism always results in tyranny, for in the end it will devolve to the enforcement of one man's opinion, to which the rest of us must conform. Don't like Obamacare? Too bad. It's all about the power, baby.
Please note that absolute relativism is the very foundation and essence of fascism. Absolutism proper is its converse.
The American founders are the opposite of Marx, not just in the details, but again, in essence. For in essence they were absolutists.
For example, to say that human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, is an absolute statement beyond which one cannot go (and governments may not transgress). It is now and forever.
This is what we meant when we said that man (as such, not such-and-such a man) cannot be surpassed, because the Absolute cannot be surpassed. You are born free. Now deal with it. And I don't mean by diminishing my freedom, moron.
Fukuyama notes that Madison, in Federalist #10, asserts that one of the most important functions of governments is to protect private property rights. Thus, for the modern Marxist, this is the very codification of Cosmic Injustice. For example, recall Obama's indictment of the Founders, and his gnostrum for how to remedy their cosmic errors. The Supreme Court must address
"the issues of redistribution of wealth and the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent, as radical as, I think, people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical; it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.... You can craft theoretical justification for it legally, and any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts."
Right. It's easy. The way one does this is to find a nuanced, subtle position situated between what the Constitution says and what Obama would like for it to say. In short, one establishes a shadowy area between Truth and the lie, or between O or Ø. Then call it "settled law," which absolutizes the newly minted relativism.
But again, there is no place between O or Ø, unless it is understood to be a kind of shadow -- or better, prolongation -- of O. Indeed, "shadow" is a misleading term, as it may lead one to regard the world as maya, or illusion (which it must be under the constraints of any post-Kantian metaphysic).
But the fact of the matter -- and of matter! -- is that the world is precisely real, or "relatively absolute," because it is sponsored and nourished by the same O in which our intelligence is rooted. Ultimately -- or in essence -- intelligence and intelligibility are the same thing, complements to O.
To be continued....
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Leaving Eden for the Big City
We left off yesterday discussing the "tyranny of cousins" -- i.e., band-level societies -- and how they are held together not so much by blood as by what Melanie Klein called "constitutional," or innate, envy.
Speaking of bands, oddly enough, it reminds me of a lyric by Alice Cooper: What's keeping us apart isn't selfishness / What's holding us together isn't love.
As Fukuyama explains, these societies "are highly egalitarian." They are essentially horizontal, with primary distinctions falling along the lines of age and sex.
This is primitive communism in all its naked glory. But note that the result -- or basis -- is the same as its modern version, the effacement of individuality by a kind of coercion that is always operating under the surface.
What is the nature of this coercion? As Fukuyama describes it, it is a kind of passive-aggressiveness that keeps everyone in line. No one has to even explicitly tell anyone else what to do.
While some members with leadership abilities will naturally emerge -- as when boys play together -- they do not have any formal power, nor are there any explicit rules or laws. Fukuyama notes that there is "authority" but not power; or again, the power is implicit and spontaneous.
Here again, this reminds me of the implicit regime of political correctness, which is also always present, aggressively pushing people into little boxes of identity in order to enforce community standards. Political correctness is like the rule of law, only furtively established by totalitarians.
And one only becomes aware of the law by transgressing it. Then you understand that there is this alternate source of power and "justice" in the world. It is decentralized and dispersed, but comes together like a collective defense mechanism when needed to attack liberty and enforce ideological servitude.
Importantly, political correctness results in a false unity, since it is founded upon fear and hatred rather than love. It is rooted in thanatos, not eros (or a "false eros," i.e., (-L), as when the troll leaves us with a chirpy namaste, assoul!).
An image occurs to me. If I remember correctly, there is a kind of fungus that exists as individual cells, but which can come together in the form of an elongated tube, which can then "walk," so to speak, by falling forward.
Now, a fungus is neither plant nor animal, but one of those "in between" entities that escape our clear-cut boundaries, like viruses or Michael Jackson.
Like the Walking Fungus, tribal societies "can aggregate at a high level," but "are prone to immediate fissioning once the cause of their union (such as external threat) disappears" (Fukuyama).
Fukuyama mentions an old Arab wisecrock: "Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the stranger." This explains how the only real "unity" in the Arab-Muslim world is deeply rooted in the cosmic thanatos of Jew-hatred. This is the same unity as human sacrifice, which I believe Gil Bailie calls "unanimity minus one."
The Walking Fungus also reminds me of zombies who walk around but aren't really alive as we understand the term. Is it possible for Death to be "alive" and running around loose in the world? Or does this only happen in movies?
Oh no, it happens. More on which as we go along. (Click to embiggen.)
How did humans transition from band to tribe? It occurred only yesterday, about 10,000 years ago, and accompanies the development of agriculture. Correlation is not causation, so it is impossible to say which came first.
But on the psychic plane, this represents a profound shift, for it is the transition from a life of freedom and movement within bountiful nature -- one might even say Eden -- to one that is stationary and for the first time involves work that is actually toil instead of "adventure."
There is a big difference between getting together with the boys to go on a hunting trip vs. turning soil and picking weeds. Ask any man.
The need for constant mobility limited the size of bands, but agriculture brought with it great increases in population that required new modes of interaction. Now, for the first time, human beings had to deal with others outside the clan without simply killing them.
As a result, roles that were once concrete and implicit now must become abstract and explicit. For example, instead of "authority" incarnated in the form of "father," the authority must be pried away from the object and understood as role, not person.
Importantly, the authority will still be rooted in the unconscious archetype of Father, only projected into the Chieftain or Big Man.
This kind of arrangement is still halfway between tribalism and a fully developed society, the latter of which is (supposedly) fully conformed to abstract roles and laws. For example, for us moderns, the "president" is primarily an abstract office, not a concrete man.
But not really, for as we were saying yesterday, later stages always contain -- and are sometimes contained by! -- elements of earlier ones. This is true both on an individual and a collective basis. Indeed, Obama's fundamental problem is that the left's archetypal projections of the godman have gradually been withdrawn, thus revealing the emperor's empty suit.
Fukuyama doesn't get into it, but what are the implications for religion of these different stages of development? Joseph Campbell wrote a big-ass, expensive book -- which he considered his magnum opus -- on this subject (published separately as The Way of the Animal Powers: Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers and The Way of the Seeded Earth.
Wait. Fukuyama does get into religion, but not too deeply. In fact, he says that the reason band-level organization "took hold across human societies was due to religious belief, that is, the worship of ancestors."
The spirits of the dead require "continual maintenance on the part of their living relatives, who had to provide them with regular offerings of food and drink lest they become angry" -- like in-laws who never leave.
The bigshots who unified the society were subject to the same courtesy, only on a grand scale -- for example, as exemplified by the pyramids of ancient Egypt. When a pharoah died, it was considered good form to entomb him with a bunch of slaves to tend to his needs in the afterlife.
Likewise, in ancient China "the graves of high-status people were filled with... the bodies of horses, slaves, and concubines" -- not to mention plenty of food -- "intended to accompany the dead person into the afterlife."
Even so, the problem with a Chinese burial was that the spirits were still hungry an hour later.
On that note, I must stop. Time to earn some bread by the sweat of my brow.
Speaking of bands, oddly enough, it reminds me of a lyric by Alice Cooper: What's keeping us apart isn't selfishness / What's holding us together isn't love.
As Fukuyama explains, these societies "are highly egalitarian." They are essentially horizontal, with primary distinctions falling along the lines of age and sex.
This is primitive communism in all its naked glory. But note that the result -- or basis -- is the same as its modern version, the effacement of individuality by a kind of coercion that is always operating under the surface.
What is the nature of this coercion? As Fukuyama describes it, it is a kind of passive-aggressiveness that keeps everyone in line. No one has to even explicitly tell anyone else what to do.
While some members with leadership abilities will naturally emerge -- as when boys play together -- they do not have any formal power, nor are there any explicit rules or laws. Fukuyama notes that there is "authority" but not power; or again, the power is implicit and spontaneous.
Here again, this reminds me of the implicit regime of political correctness, which is also always present, aggressively pushing people into little boxes of identity in order to enforce community standards. Political correctness is like the rule of law, only furtively established by totalitarians.
And one only becomes aware of the law by transgressing it. Then you understand that there is this alternate source of power and "justice" in the world. It is decentralized and dispersed, but comes together like a collective defense mechanism when needed to attack liberty and enforce ideological servitude.
Importantly, political correctness results in a false unity, since it is founded upon fear and hatred rather than love. It is rooted in thanatos, not eros (or a "false eros," i.e., (-L), as when the troll leaves us with a chirpy namaste, assoul!).
An image occurs to me. If I remember correctly, there is a kind of fungus that exists as individual cells, but which can come together in the form of an elongated tube, which can then "walk," so to speak, by falling forward.
Now, a fungus is neither plant nor animal, but one of those "in between" entities that escape our clear-cut boundaries, like viruses or Michael Jackson.
Like the Walking Fungus, tribal societies "can aggregate at a high level," but "are prone to immediate fissioning once the cause of their union (such as external threat) disappears" (Fukuyama).
Fukuyama mentions an old Arab wisecrock: "Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the stranger." This explains how the only real "unity" in the Arab-Muslim world is deeply rooted in the cosmic thanatos of Jew-hatred. This is the same unity as human sacrifice, which I believe Gil Bailie calls "unanimity minus one."
The Walking Fungus also reminds me of zombies who walk around but aren't really alive as we understand the term. Is it possible for Death to be "alive" and running around loose in the world? Or does this only happen in movies?
How did humans transition from band to tribe? It occurred only yesterday, about 10,000 years ago, and accompanies the development of agriculture. Correlation is not causation, so it is impossible to say which came first.
But on the psychic plane, this represents a profound shift, for it is the transition from a life of freedom and movement within bountiful nature -- one might even say Eden -- to one that is stationary and for the first time involves work that is actually toil instead of "adventure."
There is a big difference between getting together with the boys to go on a hunting trip vs. turning soil and picking weeds. Ask any man.
The need for constant mobility limited the size of bands, but agriculture brought with it great increases in population that required new modes of interaction. Now, for the first time, human beings had to deal with others outside the clan without simply killing them.
As a result, roles that were once concrete and implicit now must become abstract and explicit. For example, instead of "authority" incarnated in the form of "father," the authority must be pried away from the object and understood as role, not person.
Importantly, the authority will still be rooted in the unconscious archetype of Father, only projected into the Chieftain or Big Man.
This kind of arrangement is still halfway between tribalism and a fully developed society, the latter of which is (supposedly) fully conformed to abstract roles and laws. For example, for us moderns, the "president" is primarily an abstract office, not a concrete man.
But not really, for as we were saying yesterday, later stages always contain -- and are sometimes contained by! -- elements of earlier ones. This is true both on an individual and a collective basis. Indeed, Obama's fundamental problem is that the left's archetypal projections of the godman have gradually been withdrawn, thus revealing the emperor's empty suit.
Fukuyama doesn't get into it, but what are the implications for religion of these different stages of development? Joseph Campbell wrote a big-ass, expensive book -- which he considered his magnum opus -- on this subject (published separately as The Way of the Animal Powers: Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers and The Way of the Seeded Earth.
Wait. Fukuyama does get into religion, but not too deeply. In fact, he says that the reason band-level organization "took hold across human societies was due to religious belief, that is, the worship of ancestors."
The spirits of the dead require "continual maintenance on the part of their living relatives, who had to provide them with regular offerings of food and drink lest they become angry" -- like in-laws who never leave.
The bigshots who unified the society were subject to the same courtesy, only on a grand scale -- for example, as exemplified by the pyramids of ancient Egypt. When a pharoah died, it was considered good form to entomb him with a bunch of slaves to tend to his needs in the afterlife.
Likewise, in ancient China "the graves of high-status people were filled with... the bodies of horses, slaves, and concubines" -- not to mention plenty of food -- "intended to accompany the dead person into the afterlife."
Even so, the problem with a Chinese burial was that the spirits were still hungry an hour later.
On that note, I must stop. Time to earn some bread by the sweat of my brow.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Envious Cravemen and Liberal Proglodytes
As we were saying in the previous post, the origins of everything are obscure. One of the reasons for this is that science has no difficulty tracking continuity. The trick is how to account for true discontinuity and still call it "science."
Inevitably, science deals with the problem by explaining the novel and unknown in terms of the past and the known. It superimposes what it knows on what it doesn't.
In so doing, it drags life into matter, pneuma into brain, and subject into object, and then just ignores both the remainder that defies such a simplistic reduction and the many irreducible paradoxes that result.
For the scientistic mindset, the emergence of a puzzling discontinuity such as humanness is not really a radically novel development, only a continuation of monkeys. Life is nothing special, just a statistically rare arrangement of matter. And even the cosmos itself is no big deal, just a random fluctuation in the quantum void.
Thus, when science tries to explain everything -- or when it tries to leap outside itself, toward ultimate explanations -- it necessarily explains nothing, for science can no more explain itself than the eye can see vision or the fingers can grasp the hand.
The purpose of science is not -- and cannot be -- to explain "everything." Science always requires an implicit frame of reference in order to make sense, and this frame of reference is always metaphysical and/or theological.
We would have no objection to this if they made their metaphysics explicit, but they never do this. Instead, they make the most outrageous claims while pretending that these claims are not rooted in a metaphysic that the science itself can in no way support, for the science is a posteriori to the metaphysic.
We must bear these caveats in mind as we search for the "origins of politics," for we will not actually discover them through the methods of science. Science will show us shadows and footprints, but never the thing itself. Irrespective of whether one calls oneself scientific or religious, rational or transrational, a leap of faith is required in order to "settle" the matter. A matter is settled when our mind is at peace, and no longer persecuted by the presence of the unKnown.
Take the example of those 3D magic eye pictures. In Bion's metapsychology, the random-appearing dashes of color are analogous to "thoughts without a thinker," or what he calls beta elements. These are the raw material, so to speak, of thinking.
It is the work of a moment to analogize this to the human condition, for we all find ourselves immersed in a giant 4D Magic Eye Motion Picture we call the Cosmos, and starring you in the lead. The odd thing is that you must simultaneously play your role while figuring out the plot.
The sudden emergence of the three-dimensional image out of the chaotic void is what Bion calls alpha function, but you are free to simply call it "thinking." A person who fruitfully thinks will constantly be engaging in alpha function, that is, continuously bringing together and synthesizing the raw stuff of life into novel syntheses. As we mature -- so long as we are rooted in, and guided by, the teleological attractor of Truth -- these syntheses are successively wider and therefore deeper.
Thus, our psychospiritual development is intrinsically non-linear and discontinuous, as we gather more existence into our being. And to say "depth" is immediately to leave science behind, for depth is a measure of soul -- in fact, the most adequate measure of soul, in any field.
Why is Shakespeare deeper than [fill in the blank]? For the same reason that Aretha is deeper than Celine Dion, or any artist or thinker is deeper than another. The deepest idea can be made shallow in the head of a shallow soul -- for example, the profound ideas of God, or Creation, or Evolution (or Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, respectively).
So let's keep this in mind as we search for the origins of politics, which are buried in the mythterious origins of humanness.
Fukuyama reminds us of that quintessential example of scientistic materialism gone nuts, Marxism: "they posited a theory of developmental stages -- primitive communism, feudalism, bourgeois society, and true communism -- all driven by an underlying conflict between social classes."
There is so much wrong with this formulation that we don't have time to fisk it to pieces -- besides, History has already done so.
But note that it begins with materialistic assumptions -- it is, after all, "dialectical materialism" -- so that its conclusions are foreordained. It is a perfect example of a theory that explains everything and therefore nothing. But do the tenured nevertheless put their faith in postmodern variants of it? Does a boor shoot hoops in the White House?
Fukuyama is correct that "the evolution of political complexity" is "not linear: a given stage of development often contain[s] characteristics of earlier ones, and there [are] multiple mechanisms moving society from one stage to another."
Now, once we even use the word "stage," we are talking about hierarchy, about evolution, and about superiority. In other words, we are outside the domain of science, and inside the qualitative and properly human domain of values.
But liberals are profoundly uncomfortable with the human world, so they deicided to abolish the hierarchy with their doctrines of cultural relativism and multiculturalism. In this weird variant of Marxist materialism, all modes of production are equal, except for capitalism, which is worse.
This is another example of the incoherence of any form of secular materialism. As we have said many times, it is not the Raccoon who denies evolution, but the metaphysical Darwinian. Just as the leftist stole the term "liberal" to conceal his essential illiberalism, the Darwinist has stolen the word "evolution" to conceal his necessarily horizontal worldview, in which nothing can be higher or lower than anything else.
Properly speaking, the metaphysical Darwinist believes in change, not evolution. This was exemplified by our recent troll, who explained to us that human beings are simply an adaptation to funky weather. Since no weather is objectively better or worse than any other weather, humans are no higher or lower than anything else in this 2D unmagic eye picture. Suffice it to say, this doesn't even explain our cosmic funkmanship, let alone less important capacities.
Thus, Fukuyama is again correct in noting that "cultural relativism is at odds with evolutionary theory, since the latter necessitates identifying different levels of social organization and the reasons why one level gets superseded by another."
I also want to return to Fukuyama's previous statement about later stages containing elements of earlier ones. This is indeed a key principle, for any transformation must work with the existing material. Thus, I am not surprised that the laws of physics explain certain things about me. But to pretend that I can be reduced to physics is just stupid. Indeed, it is the other way around: humans explain physics, not vice versa.
Likewise, to pretend that humanness can be reduced to genetics or environment is equally stupid. Nevertheless, we should not be surprised to find traces of apehood in man, elements of primitive communism in modern economies, and elements of tribalism in liberal democracies. This hardly means that the latter terms can be reduced to the former.
One of the principle ways -- perhaps the principle way -- tribalism endures in the modern world is via the left. In defining itself as "postmodern" and "progressive," the modern leftist ironically becomes an atavistic proglodyte, for extremists meet in this cosmos.
Fukuyama notes that in the world of early humans, there is "nothing resembling modern individualism," which reminds us of the forced anonymity of the leftist hive, which reduces us all to racial, or gender, or socioeconomic categories.
For example, in Obamaworld, a hard working person earning $250,000 a year, who has five children in private schools, a wife at home, a mortgage underwater, and no net worth, is a "millionaire." Any individuality is effaced by the ravenous demands of the state.
In both the premodern and postmodern worlds, we are bound by what the anthropologist Ernest Gellner called the "tyranny of cousins." This is obvious in the former, as everything we think and do is defined and constrained by our place in the clan: "That is, your social world was limited to the circles of relatives surrounding you, who determined what you did, whom you married, how you worshipped, and just about everything else in life."
And in our opinion, one of the key psychic mechanisms that held this system together was and is envy. Envy was evolved to solve a serious problem, i.e., group unity and harmony, for human beings cannot survive outside the group. All primitive groups are characterized by the "evil eye" of envy, which makes its target feel uncomfortable and persecuted by these envious projections. But in order to evolve out of tribalism toward universality, we had to first break through the envy barrier, hence the 10th Commandment of spiritual evolution: you shall not covet your neighbor's whatever. In short, envy is natural; transcendence of envy is supranatural.
Thus, the leftist hardly needs to invent envy. He must only provoke, legitimize and exploit it in order to gain power over the envious, and eventually over all of us. Like the cravemen they are, they just want to be fair, and spread the poverty around.
Inevitably, science deals with the problem by explaining the novel and unknown in terms of the past and the known. It superimposes what it knows on what it doesn't.
In so doing, it drags life into matter, pneuma into brain, and subject into object, and then just ignores both the remainder that defies such a simplistic reduction and the many irreducible paradoxes that result.
For the scientistic mindset, the emergence of a puzzling discontinuity such as humanness is not really a radically novel development, only a continuation of monkeys. Life is nothing special, just a statistically rare arrangement of matter. And even the cosmos itself is no big deal, just a random fluctuation in the quantum void.
Thus, when science tries to explain everything -- or when it tries to leap outside itself, toward ultimate explanations -- it necessarily explains nothing, for science can no more explain itself than the eye can see vision or the fingers can grasp the hand.
The purpose of science is not -- and cannot be -- to explain "everything." Science always requires an implicit frame of reference in order to make sense, and this frame of reference is always metaphysical and/or theological.
We would have no objection to this if they made their metaphysics explicit, but they never do this. Instead, they make the most outrageous claims while pretending that these claims are not rooted in a metaphysic that the science itself can in no way support, for the science is a posteriori to the metaphysic.
We must bear these caveats in mind as we search for the "origins of politics," for we will not actually discover them through the methods of science. Science will show us shadows and footprints, but never the thing itself. Irrespective of whether one calls oneself scientific or religious, rational or transrational, a leap of faith is required in order to "settle" the matter. A matter is settled when our mind is at peace, and no longer persecuted by the presence of the unKnown.
Take the example of those 3D magic eye pictures. In Bion's metapsychology, the random-appearing dashes of color are analogous to "thoughts without a thinker," or what he calls beta elements. These are the raw material, so to speak, of thinking.
It is the work of a moment to analogize this to the human condition, for we all find ourselves immersed in a giant 4D Magic Eye Motion Picture we call the Cosmos, and starring you in the lead. The odd thing is that you must simultaneously play your role while figuring out the plot.
The sudden emergence of the three-dimensional image out of the chaotic void is what Bion calls alpha function, but you are free to simply call it "thinking." A person who fruitfully thinks will constantly be engaging in alpha function, that is, continuously bringing together and synthesizing the raw stuff of life into novel syntheses. As we mature -- so long as we are rooted in, and guided by, the teleological attractor of Truth -- these syntheses are successively wider and therefore deeper.
Thus, our psychospiritual development is intrinsically non-linear and discontinuous, as we gather more existence into our being. And to say "depth" is immediately to leave science behind, for depth is a measure of soul -- in fact, the most adequate measure of soul, in any field.
Why is Shakespeare deeper than [fill in the blank]? For the same reason that Aretha is deeper than Celine Dion, or any artist or thinker is deeper than another. The deepest idea can be made shallow in the head of a shallow soul -- for example, the profound ideas of God, or Creation, or Evolution (or Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, respectively).
So let's keep this in mind as we search for the origins of politics, which are buried in the mythterious origins of humanness.
Fukuyama reminds us of that quintessential example of scientistic materialism gone nuts, Marxism: "they posited a theory of developmental stages -- primitive communism, feudalism, bourgeois society, and true communism -- all driven by an underlying conflict between social classes."
There is so much wrong with this formulation that we don't have time to fisk it to pieces -- besides, History has already done so.
But note that it begins with materialistic assumptions -- it is, after all, "dialectical materialism" -- so that its conclusions are foreordained. It is a perfect example of a theory that explains everything and therefore nothing. But do the tenured nevertheless put their faith in postmodern variants of it? Does a boor shoot hoops in the White House?
Fukuyama is correct that "the evolution of political complexity" is "not linear: a given stage of development often contain[s] characteristics of earlier ones, and there [are] multiple mechanisms moving society from one stage to another."
Now, once we even use the word "stage," we are talking about hierarchy, about evolution, and about superiority. In other words, we are outside the domain of science, and inside the qualitative and properly human domain of values.
But liberals are profoundly uncomfortable with the human world, so they deicided to abolish the hierarchy with their doctrines of cultural relativism and multiculturalism. In this weird variant of Marxist materialism, all modes of production are equal, except for capitalism, which is worse.
This is another example of the incoherence of any form of secular materialism. As we have said many times, it is not the Raccoon who denies evolution, but the metaphysical Darwinian. Just as the leftist stole the term "liberal" to conceal his essential illiberalism, the Darwinist has stolen the word "evolution" to conceal his necessarily horizontal worldview, in which nothing can be higher or lower than anything else.
Properly speaking, the metaphysical Darwinist believes in change, not evolution. This was exemplified by our recent troll, who explained to us that human beings are simply an adaptation to funky weather. Since no weather is objectively better or worse than any other weather, humans are no higher or lower than anything else in this 2D unmagic eye picture. Suffice it to say, this doesn't even explain our cosmic funkmanship, let alone less important capacities.
Thus, Fukuyama is again correct in noting that "cultural relativism is at odds with evolutionary theory, since the latter necessitates identifying different levels of social organization and the reasons why one level gets superseded by another."
I also want to return to Fukuyama's previous statement about later stages containing elements of earlier ones. This is indeed a key principle, for any transformation must work with the existing material. Thus, I am not surprised that the laws of physics explain certain things about me. But to pretend that I can be reduced to physics is just stupid. Indeed, it is the other way around: humans explain physics, not vice versa.
Likewise, to pretend that humanness can be reduced to genetics or environment is equally stupid. Nevertheless, we should not be surprised to find traces of apehood in man, elements of primitive communism in modern economies, and elements of tribalism in liberal democracies. This hardly means that the latter terms can be reduced to the former.
One of the principle ways -- perhaps the principle way -- tribalism endures in the modern world is via the left. In defining itself as "postmodern" and "progressive," the modern leftist ironically becomes an atavistic proglodyte, for extremists meet in this cosmos.
Fukuyama notes that in the world of early humans, there is "nothing resembling modern individualism," which reminds us of the forced anonymity of the leftist hive, which reduces us all to racial, or gender, or socioeconomic categories.
For example, in Obamaworld, a hard working person earning $250,000 a year, who has five children in private schools, a wife at home, a mortgage underwater, and no net worth, is a "millionaire." Any individuality is effaced by the ravenous demands of the state.
In both the premodern and postmodern worlds, we are bound by what the anthropologist Ernest Gellner called the "tyranny of cousins." This is obvious in the former, as everything we think and do is defined and constrained by our place in the clan: "That is, your social world was limited to the circles of relatives surrounding you, who determined what you did, whom you married, how you worshipped, and just about everything else in life."
And in our opinion, one of the key psychic mechanisms that held this system together was and is envy. Envy was evolved to solve a serious problem, i.e., group unity and harmony, for human beings cannot survive outside the group. All primitive groups are characterized by the "evil eye" of envy, which makes its target feel uncomfortable and persecuted by these envious projections. But in order to evolve out of tribalism toward universality, we had to first break through the envy barrier, hence the 10th Commandment of spiritual evolution: you shall not covet your neighbor's whatever. In short, envy is natural; transcendence of envy is supranatural.
Thus, the leftist hardly needs to invent envy. He must only provoke, legitimize and exploit it in order to gain power over the envious, and eventually over all of us. Like the cravemen they are, they just want to be fair, and spread the poverty around.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Theme Song
