47 Minutes of Barbarous Tradition

Drawing together the loose threads of yesterday's wooly offering, what I'm trying to say is that our civilization has been so transformed as a result of 2,000 years of conditioning by Christian values, that we may no longer recognize the strangeness of the original message. 

Rather, we take our extremely unusual values for granted, and no longer recognize the messenger. The transformation has been so thorough that many have become deaf to the words of the founder. 

"Imagining our values universal, we can't see just how rare" they are, says Landes. It's why idiots everywhere call for a "two state solution" to the problems of the Middle East, failing to recognize the premodern mentality and value system that undergirds and motivates a civilization untouched by Judeo-Christian values. They are not like us, sorry to say. They are very much in need of the message our own elites have forgotten.

Which is ironic, because it is the diversity crowd that insists the barbarians "want the same things we want," when they actually want the opposite. I'm the one who believes in diversity (which is not the same as endorsing it). It's easy: all you have to do is listen to what they actually say. You can also watch what they do, but then it's too late, as Israel found out on October 7.

A related point is that premodern and postmodern mentalities converge, because both are un- or anti-Christian. And be careful what you wish for -- especially progressive Jews who are finding out the hard way what their secular -- and anti-Jewish -- ideologies have wrought, as in, My God, what have I done?

It's ironic too that the left pretends to believe in the science of evolution, only from the neck down. Multiculturalism teaches that no people or culture are more evolved than any other, except for MAGA voters, who are at the bottom.

Me too vote Republican! -- although I despise them only slightly less than Democrats.

In the spirit of diversity, let's investigate the premodern mindset. That's the subject of chapter five of Landes' Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad. 

By the way, the short answer to the question posed in the title is Yup. A shorter answer is Ha! -- the hollow and bitter kind. 

The whole chapter is flooding me with memories of another chapter in my own life -- this being the early '90s -- when I was a self-styled psychohistorian. 

Come to think of it, I've never fully reconciled that life chapter with the present one, so perhaps this is the opportunity to do so. Back then I was a Man of the Left, and would have -- like any progressive -- placed my retrograde beliefs at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy. Ha! -- the more-than-slightly embarrassed kind.

I was even on the editorial board of the Journal of Psychohistory, and for all I know, may still be. The founder of the journal was a nice man named Lloyd deMause. Sorry to hear that he has passed, but 88 years is a good run. 

Let's learn something. I don't know if it's still something, but in the words of Jordan Peterson, it's certainly not nothing. 

In the 1970s, DeMause began conceiving of psychohistory, a field of study of the psychological motivations of historical events, and their associated patterns of behavior. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations -- past and present -- by analyzing events in childhood and the family, especially child abuse.

His approach didn't make anyone happy, neither proper historians nor neo-Marxist ideologues, since it applied theories of psychological development to cultures, meaning that some cultures are objectively more evolved than others, and We Can't Have That.

The question is, where does the Arab-Muslim Middle East fall on this spectrum? With the help of Landes, we're about to find out, good and hard. 

For deMause, everything comes down to humane parenting, which is certainly part of the puzzle, but this turns out to be too reductionistic if we exclude other critical factors such as genetics. For example, I myself could scarcely be a more humane parent, but my 18 year old son is more than a tad neurotic. Just born that way, I guess. Like his father, come to think of it.

Psychohistorians "suggest that social behavior such as crime and war may be a self-destructive re-enactment of earlier abuse and neglect; that unconscious flashbacks to early fears and destructive parenting could dominate individual and social behavior," and they're not wrong. But nowadays I would again say that this can only be a piece of the puzzle. Cultures are complex, multifactorial, and overdetermined. 

Nevertheless, Golda Meir was certainly not wrong to say that peace will come to the Middle East when Palestinians love their children as much as they hate the Jews -- you know, instead of using their children as suicide bombers and human shields. 

It's a small thing to ask, but of course, we've been conditioned by those three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, rather than 1,413 years of (fill in the blank) tradition, from Mohammad to Hamas. Say what you want about the latter tradition, but it's different from ours, and we ought to respect the difference.

Psychohistorians accuse most anthropologists and ethnologists of being apologists for incest, infanticide, cannibalism, and child sacrifice.... Some of the practices which mainstream anthropologists apologize for (e.g., sacrificial rituals) may result from psychosis, dissociation, and magical thinking.

Are they wrong?!

I haven't seen the 47 minute video of grotesque Hamasities, but I don't have to. The Palestinians give infanticide, child sacrifice, psychosis, dissociation, and magical thinking a bad name.

But let's get back to Landes. To repeat what was said at the end of yesterday's post, "Perhaps the most difficult thing for Westerners, raised in a positive-sum culture" to appreciate "are the dynamics of cultures that embrace zero-sum values" (Landes).

Conversely, we Christians are all about positive-sum values. Jews are commanded to love the stranger, but Jesus sees and raises the ante, asking us to go so far as to love our enemies, and how absurd is that? 

Nevertheless, that's a prime directive, and we see its entailments everywhere in our culture, from tolerance of different points of view, to respect for victims, to the innate dignity of the poor and marginalized.

Conversely, a zero-sum world is divided into "us and a hostile them." I see that Landes in fact cites an old school psychohistorian, Eli Sagan, whose book I once reviewed, and with whom I even carried on a correspondence. Sagan referred to the "paranoid imperative," which is rule or be ruled, and not in a nice way. "In a zero-sum world, one cannot win without the other losing" (Landes). 

Say, I wonder if I kept any of those old letters from Sagan? Yup. Here's one from 1994, which I haven't looked at since:

I am in total agreement with you that an adequate theory of psycho-social evolution has yet to be constructed. The very first consideration, I feel, is to see that the development of society is more complicated than the development of the psyche, simply because society is more complicated than the psyche. 

Although I still believe that psychic development is the energy and the "engine of history," it is a mistake to feel that society is reducible to psychic dimensions, the attempt at which is psychic reductionism. 

Is he wrong?

An adequate theory of psycho-social evolution. We're still working on it, and will resume the work tomorrow.