Colonizing the New Psychic World

As promised, nine more takeaways from How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity. Imagine that: the most important story ever -- at least horizontally speaking -- neglected!

However, "neglected" might not be the most accurate adjective. How about "abused." Or maybe "deconstructed." Or "tragic." Or "imperialistic." Neglect is far too passive a term. At best, the glorious story of our triumph has been abandoned. At the other end is frank condemnation. That's what you call academic diversity!

Note also the equation of "west" and "modernity" in the title. One could equally say: How Modernity Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of the West.

Another irony about the left is that they want their modernity -- at least parts of it -- but don't want to know about or have anything to do with the specific conditions that brought it about.

But there is a parallel stupidity on the "right" -- or whatever you want to call these folks -- in which they appropriately cherish the conditions that brought modernity about, while rejecting much of its dynamism and content (and not just the bad stuff). It is a battle of stupidities with which the Raccoon wants nothing to do, and up with which he will not put.

This cultural heteroparadox is discussed in an unintentionally related book called The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. To extend the equation above, to say "west" is to say "modernity," which is to say prosperity and abundance. And you would think that to say the latter would be to say Happy Happy Joy Joy. But the majority of people do not say, let alone feel, this. Or so it seems.

So, what went -- and is going -- wrong? It is a genuine conundrum, because the majority of people in the modern west are living lives that were the literal dreams of past generations.

In fact, if not for those restless dreamers, the dream would never have come to pass. But the fulfillment of the dream hasn't made people happy. However, I disagree with the notion that the dream is actually a nightmare that makes people unhappy (i.e., "alienation," "false consciousness," and all those other diseases of the tenured).

Rather, the enslackened conditions of modernity simply allow people the time and space to indulge their misery, their conflict, their envy, their emptiness, whatever. For most of history, this was quite literally impossible, since it was a struggle just to obtain food to live another day. To the extent that neurosis existed, it was a luxury of the affluent 1% or less.

Because western history entered a quite novel space after World War II, people living through it have been unable to see it -- the fish being the last to know about water. Perhaps it will be more obvious to future generations, but it's really not that hard to see with your activated Coonvision.

As Lindsey writes, "In the years after World War II, America crossed a great historical threshold. In all prior civilizations and social orders, the vast bulk of humanity had been preoccupied with responding to basic material needs.... Concern with physical survival and security was now banished to the periphery of social life."

This "liberation from material necessity marks a fundamental change in the human condition, one that leaves no aspect of social existence unaffected."

In my opinion, this is the One Big Thing that ties together a diverse range of cultural, spiritual, political, and artistic phenomena, both good and bad. The fact is, we are in "uncharted territory," and every modern movement, from scientism to fundamentalism, is an attempt to deal with it.

When we say "uncharted territory," what do we mean? We mean first and foremost that a space has opened up as a result of freedom from necessity, and that mankind simply isn't accustomed to this space. As a result, all sorts of mischief and mayhem ensue from trying to fill the space with ideology, paranoia, acting out, sex, drugs, rock & roll, video games, vulgar politics, whatever.

Most people now have the opportunity to ask questions such as: who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is the meaning of existence? Such questions are pointless when mere survival cannot be taken for granted, and one must toil all day just to subsist.

This space began opening up with the industrial revolution, but it didn't reach a critical mass until the mid 20th century. Consider: from the reign of Augustus to 1500 or so, "world output per head was essentially unchanged." To the extent that economic growth occurred, it was canceled out by increased population.

And although conditions were dramatically improving by the 19th century, you will be forgiven for failing to notice. "A typical farmhouse in early 19th century America was a cold and dark affair," providing "basic shelter from the elements" but little more. There was an intimate relationship between work and food: if you shirked the former, you missed out on the latter.

But don't despair. It was all over soon. "From 1800 to 1900, life expectancy for males registered almost no gain, inching upward from 45.5 to 46.3." Medical care? In 1900, just a little over a hundred years ago, Americans "spent nearly twice as much on funerals as on medicine." If Obama were around then, he's be campaigning for socialized mortuaries to bend down the cost-curve of death: Embalmacare.

By 1890, only 24% of American homes had running water. Who are you? Who are you? Easy. You're that guy or gal who lugs 9,000 gallons of water to the house, year in, year out. Now, stop asking stupid questions and get to it, so you can think about more important things such as gathering the wood.

Here is an example of a reality that people seemingly fail to appreciate: the first commercial radio broadcast was in 1920. Less than a century later, here we are instantaneously communicating with each other all over the world. It's difficult to even say this without sounding painfully clichéd, but there is something quite cosmically revolutionary beneath the cliché. I hope.

More telling stats: in 1900, "2 percent of Americans took vacations." In 1890, 3.5% of 17 year-olds were high school graduates. By 1950 that number was up to 57.4%.

The upshot is that the sorts of existential questions that were pointless in the past now confront everyone. And I'm not sure that big-box religion has fully kept up with the challenge of dealing with this new space and with these urgent questions. (There are also religious movements that do gear themselves to the new mentality, e.g., the New Age, but they go badly off the rails.)

It's not the content that has to change, but I think one must be able to address people where they're coming from. Whether we like it or not, dogmatic and predigested answers will not satisfy, at least at first. Rather, I think such a person needs to... how to put it... experientially understand the truth of dogma within his own psychic space, and see how these time-tested answers comport to the deepest questions within. Or something like that. It's difficult to say without sounding painfully clichéd, at least this morning for some reason.

However, on a good day, it is one of the things we try to do here at One Cosmos. You know, teach an old dogma with some new tricks.

Adjust Your Calendar, or Ten Takeaways from How the West Was Won

This is a Bonus Post, considering the fact that it's a holiday and all. And I suppose the subject matter isn't inappropriate, since the West wasn't won by a bunch of guilt-ridden tenured pussies who think we prevailed only because everyone else was so peaceful, tolerant, and enlightened.

Rather, we won because of a combination of correct religion and metaphysics, freedom to pursue knowledge and truth, and superior technology in the application of righteous violence, in that order. (Not to mention little things like private property, monogamy, and decentralized power, but these can be seen as entailments of more fundamental truths.)

Just as most people maintain a rough calendar of future activities and commitments, we should be equally concerned about past activities and commitments, not necessarily ours per se, but mankind's.

After all, you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been, and this applies both individually and collectively. Stark's How the West Was Won helps us revise our cosmic calendars, for some people more dramatically than others.

To cite the most obvious example, if you fail to understand and appreciate how Christianity was absolutely central to the rise of science, then your old calendar is hopelessly corrupt. In fact, Stark makes a compelling case for the thesis that there was no scientific revolution, and certainly no sudden rejection of religion at its origin. Rather, the idea of a revolution was a retrospective invention of self-glorifying enlightenment literary figures who were not scientists and played no part in its development, e.g., Voltaire.

Interestingly, Stark demonstrates this not just with logic and history, but with empirical evidence. Specifically, he examines the lives of the most important scientists of the so-called revolution, relying on independent sources to come up with the list, and essentially dividing them between the intensely religious, the conventionally religious, and the skeptical.

As to how one can determine whether a person is intensely religious, it isn't all that difficult, really. For example, Isaac Newton would qualify, since he "wrote far more on theology than he did on physics," as would Kepler, who "was deeply interested in mysticism and in biblical questions," devoting "great effort to working out the date of the Creation..."

Long story short, among 52 scientific luminaries, 31 are judged to be devout, 20 conventional, and only one a rank skeptic. That latter would be Edmond Halley, who was "rejected for a professorship at Oxford on grounds of 'atheism.'"

Of course, it is difficult to know what was really in the hearts of the "conventional," since they may have simply been going with the program to avoid attention and controversy. Even so, a solid majority were nevertheless intensely devout, so it is unlikely that the rest would be at the other extreme end of the continuum.

And in any event, this highlights the obvious fact that there is and can be no conflict between science and Christianity, because science came to be in only one time and in one place: in the Christian west.

Frankly, this should not come as a shock or surprise to anyone. Nevertheless, it is something the academic left will never acknowledge, which is itself an intriguing scientific question. That is, how and why does this perverse ideology begin and end in the rejection of reality? More on this later.

Suffice it to say that honorary Raccoon emeritus Alfred North Whitehead made this point almost a century ago, that science developed in the west because of the implicit "faith in the possibility of science" (emphasis mine). It was transparently derived "from medieval theology," which revolved around "insistence on the rationality of God," so that "the search into nature could only result in the vindication of faith in rationality" (quoted in Stark).

Conversely, just as "Christian theology was essential for the rise of science," "non-Christian theologies had stifled the scientific enterprise everywhere else."

We are excluding Judaism only because it had no major impact on the scientific enterprise until the 19th century liberation of the Jews in Europe, at which point they raced to the top. That too is a fascinating historical nugget, because it means that a whole people with the correct view of reality had been actively suppressed from exploring its implications to the benefit of all!

Nor is it any coincidence that so many anti-scientific progressive campus groups lead the charge of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions on Israel. Hey, if you hate reality, might as well go straight to the source.

Well, this is not a day of slack for me, since I have grubby remunerative work to do. We'll pick up this thread at a later date, since I guess we have ten more aways to take from the book.

Freedom is in Our DNA. Or Not.

So? Why not? Many traits are now known to be heritable, including intelligence, aggression, extroversion, agreeableness, and openness.

This does not mean these traits are absolutely determined by genes. If I understand the concept rightly, heritability is a measure of the observed differences -- the variation -- in a population that can be attributed to genes. Yeah, I could just look it up, but why would I want to yield to an expert?

Okay, "heritability of a trait is the square of the coefficient of G in a linear approximation to the surface GxE to trait." Thanks for the tip!

It's a somewhat slippery concept, since it measures "relative contributions of genetic and non-genetic differences to the total phenotypic [observable] variation in a population," but "is not the same as saying that this fraction of an individual phenotype is caused by genetics." Thus, as Wade points out, "genes don't determine human behavior; they merely create a propensity to behave in a certain way."

So much for homosexuality being caused by genes. Oh well. There's always nurture, i.e., environmental deprivation or trauma.

It brings to mind what one of the early fathers said about astrology: the stars incline, but do not compel.

As to the genes that influence aggression, Wade mentions that -- come a little closer, I'm gonna have to whisper this -- "African Americans are more likely to carry the violence-linked allele of MAO-A promoters than are Caucasians," but this does not -- {gulp} -- imply "that one race is genetically more prone to violence than any other." For one thing, there are no doubt yet-to-be discovered gene sequences that muddy the issue and account for the intrinsic racism of white Europeans.

Besides, as any liberal knows, "people who live in conditions of poverty and unemployment may have more inducements to violence than those who are better off."

O.o

Which is no doubt why white collar crime doesn't exist, and why the wealthy 1% are the Best People in the World.

At any rate, since genes don't determine any human behavior, this implies that we are always free. If we are always free, this implies that we transcend our genetic programming. Thus, to suggest that "freedom is in our DNA" is slightly oxymoronic, for it would be like saying that "freedom is determined." But to the extent that freedom exists, it can only be permitted, not compelled.

Wait, I'm confused. Animals don't have free will. So, how does freedom get into -- or escape from -- the genome? Or, what happened to the genome that permitted freedom to manifest?

Maybe I'm not asking or conceptualizing this in the right way, because it strikes me as Very Weird. Take an ant, for example. Would we not say that roughly 100% of any (minimal) variation we see between two ants is attributable to genes? Or in other words, there is no freedom.

But even the most heritable human trait still leaves us with a margin of freedom. Where did this margin come from?

Well, it comes from God, of course, since we are talking about a vertical margin. I don't see any other way to account for it, especially because this is not a blank or "empty" freedom, but rather, a "structured" freedom. Yes, our freedom is under constraint, but it is not genetic constraint but moral constraint.

These constraints are, on the one hand, given by God (e.g., the Ten Commandments), but on the other, discoverable by our natural reason.

However, it very much appears to me that our natural reason has improved over the millennia, so there was clearly a time that we needed those Ten Commandments handed down from on high, because most men could not discover them with their natural reason.

This is something I've been thinking about while reading Stark's How the West Won. In particular, the sadistic violence of past humans is just so over the top that they might as well be a different species (which implies that our contemporary Islamist sadists are swimming in their own private idahole).

Examples are far too numerous and too gross to chronicle, but just consider how much the Romans loved their inconceivably violent spectacles, as if they had absolutely no capacity for empathy. "Besides being fed to wild animals, people were executed in the arenas in a variety of sadistic ways -- flogging, burning, skinning, impaling, dismemberment, and even crucifixion."

In other words, crucifixion was entertainment, whereas today liberals wet their pants at the thought of some worthless convicted sadist suffering for even a moment. How do we get from the one to the other, and why do liberals, like the Romans, empathize with the sadist and not the victim?

The larger point is that in the not-too-distant past, human beings did not have to struggle with their conscience over, say, torturing animals for fun. There are still people who are like this, but it is one of the hallmarks of sociopathy, of an antisocial personality disorder (which in turn seems to be under heavy genetic influence).

Does this mean that most people in the past had what we now call antisocial personality disorder? Yes and no, since they lived in an environment that normalized such things. In that environment, someone who opposed torture on principle would stand out.

Indeed, Stark says that there is no recorded evidence of any ancient civilization uttering a peep about slavery being problematic. To me, this again implies an absence of empathy. Slaveholders might concede the humanness of the slave, but only in an abstract way. It is as if they could not put themselves in the position of the other and thereby say to themselves, "this is intrinsically wrong."

Oh, by the way. There are still some 30 million slaves in the world, the vast majority in Muslim countries, central Africa, and the Democratic Party. Not that there's anything wrong with it, because Diversity.

To be continued...

How Transcendent Truth Conditions Natural Selection

When we review a book, it is not for the usual purposes of evaluating its merits or ridiculing its author.

Rather, it is to help expand our cosmic horizons (either vertically or horizontally, intensively or extensively) so as to lend support to certain otherwise *speculative* ideas, and to assist us in assimilating its message -- at least the important, world-stretching bits.

I don't really see any point in reading if it doesn't further these ends. I don't read for "pleasure" except for the pleasure of time-dilation, slack retrieval, and pneuma-cosmic expansion.

So it is in this spirit that I am reviewing A Troublesome Inheritance. Sometimes -- if not most of the time -- evolutionary psychology begins and ends by narrowing our cosmic horizon, for which reason religious people rightly recoil from it.

But any science that renders man less than human is for me a non-starter. Personhood cannot be reduced to something less than it is without doing grave and unforgivable damage to humans. Science must always be subordinate to the "humanities," in the sense that it mustn't be used as a pretext to dehumanize man.

This does not mean that we need to limit scientific exploration, only that we need to keep it in perspective and to situate it in a wider context. Science alone cannot provide its own context, only content. It is up to us to place the its content in a wider anthropo-cosmic context. If we don't, then we will end up placing ourselves in a wholly scientistic, which is to say, infrahuman, context.

So, as I said: not only should we not resist any genuine scientific finding, but we should be its most enthusiastic supporters. Natural selection? Bring it on! But reduce man to a random configuration of genetic mutations? Get real. Nothing is that simple and shallow, let alone the most complex, profound, and mysterious subject-object in all of creation.

If such a dank subterrestrial hole of reduction is sufficient to satisfy your own meager curiosity, then gopher it. But just don't imagine the rest of us will dig your tunnel vision, or that such a cramped pneumopathology is normative. If it were, then man would never have embarked upon the scientific adventure to begin with -- this latter being a subset of the grand Adventure of Consciousness.

This adventure is progressive, not just horizontal or lateral, let alone static. Stark discusses this in his thus far enjoyable How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity. Short answer: it was won by progressing.

Ah, but what is the source of progress, or the key that unlocks its activation? Favorable geography? Guns and steel? Greed? Technology? Genes? Racial quotas? Homosexual marriage? Transcendent truth, AKA God and metaphysics?

Ultimately it must be the latter, because if your fundamental picture of reality is wrong, then it is difficult if not impossible to progress further. Stark demonstrates exactly how this works -- or fails to work -- in practice. I don't know if I want to get into details, as this is something we have discussed the past, and you can read all about it in the book.

For example, if you believe that appearances are fundamentally deceptive and that truth is found only in a transcendent world of a priori ideas, then there is no reason to explore the world.

Likewise, if you believe that every event is directly caused by the will of Allah or by Martin Luther's God of predestination (which amount to the same thing), then you will have no interest in the material and efficient causes -- let alone felicitous accidents -- that bring things about. If you believe that time is cyclical or degenerative, then progress itself will be a non-concept, an impossibility. Etc.

Is science -- scientism rather -- bringing about conditions that impede its own progress? Absolutely, and that is one of the purposes of Wade's book: to help science escape from its own self-imposed political agenda. It is not religion that is holding evolutionary science back, but rather, the left. If God works through evolution, who are we to argue?

But so long as time and eternity are distinct, then evolution must be the law of the cosmos, so we are condemned to eternal progress (that is, if we choose to accept God's offer and participate in it -- you can't force a man to be free).

It is clear to me -- although I've never heard anyone put it exactly this way -- that truth directly conditions the genome, somewhat like transcendent yeast in the genetic dough. How? In a number of ways. For example, the acquisition of speech gave man access to a whole new nonlocal realm of truth (and other transcendentals) that in turn fed back into evolution.

Indeed, this is one of the open secrets of Jewish progress and success, in that "as late as 1500, only 10% of the population of most European countries was literate, whereas almost all Jews were" -- including, most importantly, women, who serve as the initial membrane between reality and the neurologically incomplete infant: more literate and intelligent mothers = more abstract and interiorizing children, the hinge of human evolution.

Going back even further, universal male literacy among Pharisees was attained between 200 and 600 AD, and there was an element of sexual selection here, as Jewish fathers were "advised on no account to let their daughters marry the untutored sons" of the rude country folk who devalued education. Smart guys got the babes, and you know the rest.

So in this way, evolution becomes explicitly teleological, with the mind converging on a nonlocal truth that in turn feeds back into the genome via worldly and reproductive success. As man's thinking in general became more literate, more intelligent, and more abstract,

"the social and genetic variance of society was greatly increased," and "a person with social skills and intelligence had a reasonable chance of getting richer, something that was seldom possible in a hunter-gatherer society where there were no disparities and no wealth to speak of" (Wade).

In this way, we can see that the great evil of income inequality is related to cognitive inequality.

In fact, this is precisely Murray's argument in Coming Apart. More than at any previous time in history (or prehistory, so 200,000 years!), our modern economy is ruthlessly sorting people by intelligence, and intelligent people tend to marry each other, making for more intelligent children and so on. This wasn't such an issue in an agricultural or industrial economy, but it certainly is in a knowledge/information economy.

Which is why leftists must practice racial and ethnic discrimination in order to shut Asians and Jews out of higher education. In other words, the anti-science left directly disrupts that which furthers progress. It helps no one to consign some future Neils Bohr, Jonas Salk, or Paul Desmond to some third rate cow college because we need to make space for more mediocrities and dullards, irrespective of their race or gender or ethnicity.

UC Berkeley could be all Asian or Jew for all I care, so long as a few of them are working on a cure for diabetes or on new antibiotics and none of them are wasting their time and our money on gender studies or queer theory or black history.

Then, if you still wanted left wing diversity in your indoctrination, you could always attend a state or junior college, where you would be exposed to every kind of florid idiot instead of allowing elite universities to hog them all. Problem solved.

To be continued...

Remumbling Our Individual and Collective Prehistory

If you don't know human history, then you're like a man with amnesia, right? Or worse, like Obama, which proves that leaders who don't know our history condemn us to relive the bad parts.

But what if you don't know your prehistory? Actually, we all implicitly know our prehistory, since we are evidently -- if evolutionary psychologists are correct -- doomed (or privileged, depending) to repeat it. We know it by way of our "instinctive" actions, inclinations, preferences, institutions, etc.

As alluded to yesterday, it is possible that we are all related to a single tribe of common ancestors that split from Africa 50,000 years ago. And who knows, maybe that tribe included a couple of elders we know of as Adam and Eve.

Whatever the case, their descendants have been wandering in the bewilderness ever since, adapting to novel environments quite different from what they would have encountered in Africa.

A group of hunter-gatherers can only sustain about 100-150 people before it generates another spinoff sitcom: "Those migrating eastward faced new environments" and "would have had to relearn how to survive in each new habitat" (Wade).

The first wave of migration was into more friendly and familiar latitudes, but humans eventually pressed northward into Europe, where "the problems of keeping warm and finding sustenance during the winter months were severe." Note that was before the present period of comfy global warming that began some 10,000 years ago, so environmental pressures would have been exceptionally harsh: like natural selection, only worse.

Interestingly, there was also the matter of confronting the protohumans of a previous wave of migration, e.g., Neanderthals, Home erecti, and other almost-but-not-quite humans. (This brings to mind a comment by Bertie Wooster about a man whose face looked like nature had begun fashioning a human but given up halfway.)

I did not know this, but these primitive subgeniuses were apparently the residue of a group that had split from Africa some 500,000 years before, meaning that they had been evolving independently from the African humans all that while. (I had been under the assumption that Homo erectus was a direct precursor of Homo sapiens sapiens, when they are different lines out of an earlier common ancestor.)

Now that I think about it, it's almost like a premature birth, isn't it? Their timing was just a little bit off -- okay, half a billion years off -- so they weren't quite ready to leave the womb of Mother Africa, not yet fully half-baked humans.

Could the story of Cain and Abel be an archetypal recollection of our genocide of these distant cousins? Whatever the case, the world wasn't big enough for two kinds of humans, so these squatters "disappeared about the time that modern humans entered their territories."

Suspicious, no? Next time some leftist clown blames whites for what happened to the Indians or some other victim group, remind him of what primitive humans did to the Neanderthals. End the occupation! Of the world.

In any event, once these different human groups were situated in their unique environments, "each little population started to accumulate its own set of mutations in addition to those inherited from the common ancestral population."

So, as I wrote in a comment yesterday, it is as if there is that common genetic clay that is further tweaked by unique circumstances. If the human clay didn't have this shape-shifting potential, then we'd all still be in Africa. Anyone who attempted to leave would have simply died out like a palm tree trying to live in Alaska, or like a professor trying to survive outside the artificial hothouse environment of academia.

Which leads to the question: how much of the human genome is shared, how much unique to particular groups/races? That is difficult to assess, but Ward suggests that perhaps 14% of the genome would have been subject to recent selective pressures and local adaptations. He also mentions that an analysis of the genomes of 2,000 African Americans "found that 22% of their DNA came from European ancestors and the rest from African groups..."

This sounds about right, assuming a baseline of 200,000 years ago, 150,000 years of which are shared by all. A very big leap also occurs with the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent settlements around 15,000 years ago. This required a major rewiring, not so much for exterior circumstances as interior, i.e., psychic, ones.

Living in much more population-dense communities obviously required vastly more subtle and wide-ranging interpersonal skills, diminished aggression, delayed gratification, and a hierarchical instead of purely horizontal group organization. Are we to believe that such dramatic phenotypic changes influenced, and were under the influence of, no genotypic changes?

Indeed, fossil records show that there is a gradual thinning of our bones at this time, implying that we didn't require such heavy skeletal underarmor for the constant head-bashing: "humans shed bone mass because extreme aggressivity no longer carried the same survival advantages."

Those New Guineans mentioned in yesterday's post didn't have to remember their prehistory, because they were still living in prehistory, "using Stone Age technology and embroiled in endemic warfare." If those are the new Guineans, imagine the old ones.

It would be an interesting experiment to adopt one of those New Guinean babies and see how he does in modern society. Would he be under no genetic constraints whatsoever? That would be a rather extreme position, but if true, then Wade's ideas would pretty much be out the window.

In the Coonifesto there is a wise crack by Norbert Elias to the effect that

"It seems as if grown-up people, in thinking about their origins, involuntarily lose sight of the fact that they themselves and all adults came into the world as little children. Over and over again, in the scientific myths of origin no less than religious ones, they feel impelled to imagine: In the beginning was a single human being, who was an adult" (emphasis mine).

Well, Wade has another headslapper by Elias, that "Many people seem to have the unspoken opinion that 'What happened in the twelfth, fifteenth or eighteenth centuries is past -- what has it to do with me?' In reality, though, the contemporary problems of a group are crucially influenced by earlier fortunes, by their beginningless development."

So, it is as if there is a personal prehistory in the form of a preverbal infancy etched into our neurology, and a collective one etched into our genome.

To be continued...

Doing the Australian Crawl in the Far End of the Gene Pool

First off, it's interesting that we've had a string of outwardly unrelated books that seem to be commenting on one another: in the past few weeks we've learned How Monogamy Made Us Human, How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Ruining Everything, and now how our genes are implicated in Race, Human History, and left wing denial of all the above; well, not just denial, but active promotion of their antitheses.

Come to think of it, our reading streak may also go back to the trinity of Narrative, Freedom, and the oldenpneumagain Genesis. Put them all together and what do we get? Among other things, we get genetically conditioned heterosexuality, monogamy, and intelligence, but how could these not be conditioned by our genes? As far as nature is concerned, there are pretty much only two issues, 1) get those genes into the next generation, and 2) don't be a fucking idiot, AKA don't win yourself a Darwin Award.

A good portion of Wade's book (similar to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism) is spent in full apology mode, assuring the reader that he is not a racist and that it is not racist to consider what he is about to toss out there. File under IT'S COME TO THIS. Yes, in the unlikely event that the book is ever permitted on a university campus, it should come with a warning label. The book is not appropriate for an adultolescent left wing audience hypersensitive to micro-aggressions, mini-traumas, or other delusions of persecution.

Wade commits two thoughtcrimes right out of the gate, first, noticing that some human groups are superior to others, and second, speculating that there may be a genetic explanation for this. (Not a total explanation, mind you; rather, just some contribution from the genes.)

If the leftist could articulate the principles Wade is violating rather than simply calling for his blood, they would be 1) that no culture is better than any other except for the culture that believes this crap; and 2) that humans are not genetically determined but infinitely malleable -- a Blank Slate.

This last principle is necessary to legitimize the overlord state that will mold us into the desired form via entitlements and special rights on the one one hand, and taxes and regulations on the other. With the combination of reward and punishment, the state can make a human being into pretty much anything.

To put it another way, in order for leftism to work, the state must be more powerful and influential than our genes -- or just say human nature. If human nature exists, then surely it is under genetic constraints, no? That's right: NO, YOU PRIVILEGED HETERONORMATIVE PIGDOG!

In The Bʘʘk, I believe I mentioned something to the effect that it is as if mankind set out of Africa 50,000 years ago, eventually spreading out into the various experiments-in-living we call Culture.

Beginning just a few hundred years ago, but especially now, with instantaneous global communication and all, it is as if these humans can finally reunite and compare notes. Indochina, what did you come up with? Africa? Europe? New Guinea?

No, really? Rocks and sticks? That's it?

What the hell happened to New Guinea? And whatever it is, don't imply that genes had anything to do with it! Rather, geography, or global warming, or something. Better yet, just say they're superior to us because Carbon, and leave it at that. Or say they're more evolved than us because Dreamtime or something.

Our little human adventure, "with at least five versions running parallel for much of the time, had a complex outcome. What is clear is that from the same human clay, a wide variety of societies can be molded."

Wade most certainly doesn't intend the reference, but God too works with a kind of clay to fashion human beings. It would make more sense if it were a genetic clay rather than just, you know, dirt. But I'll leave that to the theologians.

Whatever the case, the original human clay -- the clay to make a Homo sapiens sapiens -- appears no earlier than than 200,000 years ago, and we all had the identical genetic clay as recently as 50,000 years ago, when the human group split in half.

Look at it this way: three people walk into a bar, a Chinaman, an African, and a Caucasian. Trace their lineages, and they will be distinct for quite awhile, but the European and Asian reunite at 30,000 years ago, while the (p)resulting Euro-Asian meets up with the African at that 50,000 year mark.

Thus, we can hypothetically use aboriginal Australians as a genetic baseline, because they arrived there soon after leaving Africa, and then managed another 46,000 years with no outside contact or genetic influences until the 17th century; by then

"their way of life had changed little. Australian aborigines still lived in tribal societies without towns or cities. Their technology differed little from that of the Paleolithic hunters who reached Europe at the same time their ancestors arrived in Australia. During the 46,000 years of their isolation, they had invented neither the wheel nor the bow and arrow. They lived in a state of perpetual warfare between neighboring tribes."

It seems that these human beings were perfectly adapted to their environment, nor was there any genetic influence from elsewhom, so there was no evolutionary pressure to change. They "were never forced into the intense process of state formation and empire building that shaped other civilizations."

To back up a bit, it's not that Wade's opponents believe genes are irrelevant. Rather, they just insist that the human genome has been fixed for the last 50,000 years (or whatever the figure) and is no longer subject to evolutionary changes -- in other words, that evolution has made a special exemption for human beings, and stopped.

But it turns out, according to Wade, that human evolution has been "recent, copious, and regional," and that it is "beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has [not only] proceeded vigorously within the past 30,000 years," but has continued into the historical period.

Ashkenazi Jews might be the most dramatic example, since their average IQ is one standard deviation above average (around 115 as opposed to 100). How can one group be so far ahead of the pack?

Wade has a chapter devoted to the freakish disproportion of Jewish excellence. We've discussed this in the past, and it's pretty stunning; for example, Jews constitute less than two-tenths of a percent of the world's population, and yet, "as of 2007, had won an amazing 32% of Nobel Prizes awarded in the 21st century" -- this despite being the most hassled people in history.

First stupid question: could there possibly be a connection between Jewish intelligence and Jewish success? Second stupid question: is it possible that intelligence is partly genetic?

More slack the rest of the week. To be continued...

Evolution as if Evolution Mattered

Not only is there no conflict between science and religion, there can by definition be no possible conflict, because truth does not contradict truth.

Nor should we merely affirm that science and religion may coexist in peace, as in Stephen Gould's claim that they represent non-overlapping magisteria, which is to say, are irrelevant to one another, like football and baseball, or feminist studies and reality.

The reason why Gould's scheme fails is that science does not ultimately sit beside God, but must be -- like everything else, Gould included -- within God. We cannot visualize the relation as two separate circles, nor can we picture a venn diagram with an area of mutual interpenetration.

Rather, science must be understood as a fractal or microcosm or echo of the primordial reality: a part of the whole. If science seems to contradict the Primordial Religion, or universal metaphysics, then that is probably a good sign that it is on the wrong track.

For example, we can know materialism is false because it fails this test. Materialism isn't a scientific fact or theory anyway, but rather, a faux religion. Same with metaphysical Darwinism, or Marxism, or most any other modern-ism to which people devote themselves.

So, not only are science and religion compatible, but the relations between them are extensive, robust, and mutually illuminating. You can't have one without the other for the same reason you can't have the many without the One (and vice versa). Science is always in the Many but presupposes the One (or on the outside looking in), which is why it is a kind of perpetual reduction of multiplicity to a (tentative and transitional) unity.

It is in this freewheeling Raccoon spirit that I approach Nicholas Wade's latest book, which is irritating the usual irritants, i.e., the anti-scientific left. I don't have to read them to know that most of those one-star reviews are from angry proglodytes (but I repeat myself) who love evolution so long as it can be used as a rude club with which to belt Bible literalists, not as science per se (similar to how wealthy liberals love AGW so long as they don't have to give up their private jets).

Well, let's read a couple anyway. "This book will either make you gag, or make you more racist. However, some of the racism is thought provoking. But it is still racist, and do you really want to mull over the merits of being racist? If so, then this book is for you."

"People who speculate on race without scientific credentials are just racists. He will sell a few books because racism is always popular. Bud [sic] do you want to read a racist book?"

"I can't believe people believe this crap. Embarrassing. Very, very bad. Maybe Hitler will give this book five stars? Hmmmmmmmmm."

Yes, the book is speculative, for the same reason that natural selection is by definition speculative -- or at least has an irreducible element of speculation.

In particular, no one has any idea how genes affect the psyche, and yet, we do have brains, and brains differ. And just like every other part of our bodies, brains have been subject to evolutionary pressures. It would be an odd and arbitrary position indeed to insist that everything about human beings has been subject to natural selection except the one organ that counts.

To spell out my view, I would say that natural selection is one of the necessary conditions for man, but by no means a sufficient condition. The sufficient condition of man cannot be found in nature, or in the horizontal world. Rather, it is in the vertical world, so no amount of random mutations could ever result in the human person. Persons so clearly transcend nature that it is absurd to argue to the contrary.

I've just started reading Roger Scruton's The Soul of the World, where he makes this same unassailable point. As he puts it, "functional explanations of the evolutionary kind have no bearing on the content of our religious beliefs and emotions" (emphasis mine).

I believe this may be concisely expressed via the principle that even the most complete genetic explanation of man would be unable to account for how man may know the truth of this explanation. Or, to know its truth is to be outside and beyond the horizon of its explanation, precisely.

So I don't worry about natural selection taking away my truth, my beauty, my love, or my slack, because these are vertical realities that transcend its strictly limited scope. Again, it can provide clues about necessary conditions for the emergence of man -- after all, it's hard to exist as a human being without a body -- but not sufficient ones.

Or as Scruton puts it, evolutionary explanations "cannot take note of the internal order of our states of mind. Evolution explains the connection between our thoughts and the world, and between our desires and their fulfillment in [only] pragmatic terms."

However, our mental states are not about the same thing natural selection is about. For example, this post is not secretly "about" reproductive strategy. Rather, it is about what it is about, which is to say, the pursuit of truth.

The same is true, by the way, of evolutionary psychology. It would be self-refuting to say it is really all about getting chicks. No, it too is about truth, which proves with ironclad logic that it is insufficient to account for its own truth-value, such as it is.

Continuing this line of thought, Scruton wonders how it is that "our thinking 'latches on' to a realm of necessary truth," and how human beings somehow broke through to this higher reality that has no direct relevance to reproductive success. A human being who lived solely in the natural world wouldn't be a human being, as we live in a space of time, truth, freedom, possibility, language, mathematics, and other modalities that transcend physics and biology.

You might say that orthodox biology looks at genes to see what they are "about." Yes, they can be "about" man, just as they can be about an amoeba, an ant, or an ape. But what is man about? Darwin cannot answer this question except to say that he is about leaving his genes behind. Is that it? Yes, in part, so anything else that man is about is about something transcending nature.

Since you brought it up, Bob, what is man about? Well, for starters, he is surely about everything Darwin says he's about, for again, we do not deny science. If not for the fact of biological reproduction, I know I wouldn't be here. So my parents getting together is without question a necessary if distasteful condition for my existence.

But is it a sufficient condition? C'mon. Would such a meager explanation satisfy anyone?

I guess this has all been preluminary and foundational. To be continued tomorrow...

Imagine There's No Gender

It's easy if you try / No men among us / Unless they're gay or bi...

That's what they want, right? Gender equality, by which they mean gender equivalence, which equates to compulsory hermaphroditism.

I guess I just don't understand this liberal compulsion to auto-castrate. Where does it come from? What drives it? Is it the transformation of a more primary drive -- something from nature -- or is it wholly learned?

If so, what is the lesson? How do we end up in a world of parasitic Julias and puerile Pajama Boys? Who failed in their duty to teach these boys to properly despise their lack of manliness? Who neglected to transmit the male logos?

As an aside -- maybe not -- my job as a parent is to forge a man out of the raw material of my boy. I mean, right? The other day, I mentioned that I help coach his little league team. First playoff game was yesterday. Yes, we prevailed with a walk-off hit in the bottom of the last inning.

A moment of great Parental Pride occurred in the 4th, when Tristan was struck by a pitch and did exactly what I've advised him to do: don't rub, maybe give the pitcher an exasperated look, toss the bat aside with great disdain, and take your base. Show a little contempt at this feeble attempt at domination. Pathetic. {spit}

Or, if you really want to freak out the pitcher, just shake your head and chuckle to yourself.

Oh, and I gave him one more little piece of advice: if you get hit, return the favor by stealing second and third on the next two pitches. Mission accomplished.

By way of context, no other kid does this, and most of them dissolve into tears even when it can't possibly hurt that much. (Like on the butt cheek of a plump kid? Please.) Coaches rush forward and surround the player like a bunch of nervous hens. I'm not bragging, I just don't understand how the culture changed so dramatically in one generation.

Anyway, it's not as if I had to drill it into him. Rather, I mentioned it just once -- I think after a big leaguer got hit -- and the Principle resonated.

"Right. Don't even give the pitcher the pleasure of thinking he hurt you."

And as Mrs. G said to the other parents, don't bother asking him where he got hit, because he won't tell you.

But now we celebrate the exact opposite reaction. We can't call it a virtue, so what is it? For example, liberals fall over themselves to determine who can be more sensitized to "micro-aggressions."

Micro-aggressions? MICRO-AGGRESSIONS?! You're actually teaching children to scour the social environment for reasons to to feel victimized? That in itself is a MACRO aggression, dickhead!

For example, I read the other day how it is supposed to be offensive to ask a Spanish-speaking individual where's he's from, because it implies that he's not from Here. It's deeply anglonormative and privileged or something, or maybe like asking a fat lady when the baby is due.

If the inquirer were actually being aggressive and obnoxious, wouldn't the appropriate response involve something along the lines of simple Fuck You? But what kind of nut says FUCK YOU! in response to a friendly and innocuous inquiry? If it's a micro-aggression, why not just be microscopically offended, or in other words, ignore it?

There seems to be a kind of perverse privilege that goes along with being absurdly sensitive to these imaginary slights. It's a little like the art world, where the only way to prove your distinction is to claim to appreciate things that would repel an ordinary person, such as this genius who creates her masterpieces by dropping paint-filled eggs from her nethermost ladybitz.

Lady? That's aggressive too. Dennis Prager mentioned the other day that at some elite university, the gay-bi-lesbian-cross dressing crowd wants to ban use of the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" as Deeply Offensive. In the microscopic sense.

Anyway, the egg-chucking artist is an exception to the Giuliani Rule of "If I Can Do It, It Isn't Art," because I can't do that and it's still not art.

Hey, wait a minute.... Shouldn't I be offended that I am being excluded from this vaginormative art form?

That is all. I admit it. I got nothing. Go Cards. If you really want to win this thing, you have to be ready to give up the body:

Monogamy and Monosophy, Counterculture and Counter-Cosmic

Now that I think about it, I guess I've spent my whole (numerically) adult life being part of the so-called counterculture.

That is, just as the left was transitioning from a supposedly freewheeling counterculture to today's dreary, repressive, intolerant, and conformist dictatorship of virtue, I personally transitioned from the ambient bonehead illiberal leftism of my protracted adultolescence to the bohemian classical liberal neo-traditional orthodox hoodooism of our Founders.

Which means that I have never known what it is like to have folks like me in charge. Wait, I take that back. Jerry Brown, who was our governor from 1975 to 1983, is also our current governor. Thus, I suppose he once mirrored my own insanity. I was a moonbat under Moonbeam.

In fact, right now, the biggest issue confronting our failed state is whether Brown will sign a bill mandating that on birth certificates, men can be listed as mothers and women as fathers.

In other words, the question is whether the state can supersede biology and determine for itself who is a mother and who is a father. I don't see why not, since this is simply a corollary of the premise that sex has nothing to do with marriage. To paraphrase Dennis Prager, if sex is irrelevant to marriage, then it is surely irrelevant, period. Everyone is whatever sex they wish to be, which means that our only order is disorder.

It also means that the will has triumphed over reality, or power over truth.

Please note that disorder is not the same as chaos, which would disclose itself as outward or apparent randomness. Rather, this is the imposition of a disordered order, which is something else entirely, for if a woman can be a father, it means that you and I are no longer fathers or mothers (since the new definition vacates the plain meaning of father- and motherhood).

Remember, with rights come responsibilities -- or rather, vice versa, since rights flow from intrinsic cosmic responsibilities. Freedom without responsibility equates to unalloyed nihilism, just as responsibility without freedom equates to the purest tyranny.

But in the upside down and inverted world of the left, parents (or at least those with wombs) have rights with no responsibilities, whereas infants have responsibilities with no rights. What are the infant's responsibilities? Well, first of all, to not be conceived if it should inconvenience the one who has the right to bear it.

Failing this, the child has the duty -- both cosmic and constitutional -- to die for the sake of his mother's sacred right to convenience. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for the comfort and ease of one's indisposed and/or irresponsible parent.

Likewise, the infant no longer has the right to a mother and father, even if such things existed. But the adult, perversely, has the right to be a mother or father, even if this is clearly an impossibility, any more than my aunt can be a trolley car. You might say that with the left's abiding hostility to language -- or aggravated logophobia -- all things are possible.

The human race is and has always been a race between those who believe in the Absolute and those who want to be the Absolute. At the moment the latter have taken a commanding lead, but I wonder if this hasn't always been the case? If the good guys have ever been ahead, it wasn't for long.

In the Bible, according to Ratzinger, "the cosmos and man are not two clearly separable quantities, with the cosmos forming the fortuitous scene of human existence, which in itself could be parted from the cosmos and allowed to accomplish itself without a world."

Rather, cosmos and man are one (or not two), in that they share an underlying order. This is obvious in the case of science -- e.g., physics, math, and logic -- but it is equally true of ethics, which is grounded in the order of natural law.

Conversely, if our rights are grounded in man, then we have no rights, because what is man in the absence of the Absolute? That's right: nothing. Or, nothing but Obama, i.e., the arbitrary and lawless rule of man.

Thanks to the tenured boobs of multiculturalism, we now have multiple histories -- feminist history, black history, queer history, Chicano history, etc. But even supposing such inanities exist, they can only be understood in light of a universal History. In the absence of an Arc of Salvation -- i.e., cosmic progressivism -- such silly pseudo-histories can have no meaning whatsoever. Which is why the neo-Marxian statism of an Obama is just upside down Christian millennialism.

We say: one mankind, one morality, one truth, one history, and one cosmos because One Cosmos. Or, in an eccentric formulation that occurred to me the other day, monosophy and monogamy -- one wisdom and one woman -- are intimately related, and it might even be that in the absence of monogamy, the cosmos -- discovery of the one transcendent order -- would be impossible.

Bob, why would you say such a strange thing? Well, for starters, in order for there to be a cosmos, there must be human beings. Animals know nothing of any extra-terrestrial, transnatural cosmic order. So, what are the conditions necessary to discover this deep unity?

It seems to me that this cannot be an exterior, outward, or simple monism. This is a lower oneness for which we have no use. If reality were this simple, it would be too simple to account for us.

Rather, this reality must be -- how to say it? -- the simultaneous discovery and co-creation of a dynamic and living unity woven from the diverse -- at once complementary and/or polar -- threads of multiplicity. How is this possible?

Let us suppose that male and female are the (or an) instantiation of one-as-two. This is -- or was -- the assumption of our western his & heritage, i.e., male-and-female He created them. In short, the "unit" of mankind appears as two-knit, or as two becoming one flesh via the living third. To notice that homosexual (or any other form of) non-marriage cannot achieve such higher unity is to be cognizant of the vast realm of Beyond Obvious.

There is much more to say about this, but I'm backed up in my work, and besides, Tucker says it well enough.

(And RS, if you're out there slacking off at work again, don't worry, your book will soon be on the way. I'm just a little behind in my correspondence and everything else.)

Six Years with a Rotten Unicorn? Cheer Up, the Worst is Yet to Come!

Let's discretely change the subject and get back to what this blog does so well, which is what now?

In these latter days of totalitarian triumphalism, it's easy not to be our usual optimystic selves. And I mean this literally. Dennis Prager talks about how unhappiness is the cheap and easy path. It is the way of the Weak Man. Happiness, however, is a Serious Problem, and if nothing else, Raccoons are dead serious about their utter frivolousness.

Prager makes the excellent point that happiness is a moral imperative. Why? Because being around miserable people makes one miserable. Therefore, it is your cosmic duty to be happy, or at least confine your unhappiness behind closed doors, because seriously, you're bumming everyone out.

As they say in China, a fish rots from the head down. But as Iowahawk says, a unicorn rots from the horn down. Thus, it is an extra challenge to be happy with this rotten unicorn in office.

Why should this unicorn be so grim? After all, his wife has everything a man could possibly want: broad shoulders, muscled arms, a strong jaw, a 34 inch waist...

Not unlike Ronald Reagan. Now, there was a happy man, and his infectious happiness seemed to flow to the rest of the citizenry -- trickle down euthymia.

But it had the opposite effect on the permanently aggrieved, AKA the flightless wing of the left. They weren't happy under Reagan, and they are just as unhappy under his pneumagraphic negative. I detect a pattern, or at least an independent variable. One senses that the left won't be happy until everyone is as miserable as they are.

In contrast to President Buzzkill, Reagan didn't mope around like some misunderstood adolescent. But then, Obama's only qualification for office was having written a juvenile autobiography revolving around the psychic hole where his alcoholic and polygamous father should be. I guess that makes him our first alienated teen president.

Does anyone else find it ironic that an enthusiastic pothead should be such a morbid buzzkill? Maybe he just got high in order to flee from his depressed self. I would too. No, that's not true. I'd drink more.

Depressed characters can also be drawn to depressing ideologies and people, because it normalizes their depression. Or in other words, if you're married to Michelle Obama, you have a ready explanation for your depression. And an ideology like morbid neo-Marxism is both a cause and consequence of depression. Like Hitler, Marx was anything but a happy kampfer.

One thing I often tell patients is that a clinical depression is very much like a viral illness. Once it takes hold of the psyche, it's analogous to the virus that infiltrates the nucleus of the cell and starts making copies of itself.

In the case of depression, it starts producing depressed, morbid, and worrisome thoughts and feelings. At a certain point you have to tell the patient -- or yourself -- "Knock it off already! That is your depression speaking. It is no longer you speaking."

This is especially true in cases where medication is indicated, because then it really is an absurcular psycho-biological phenomenon. Such individuals pour out a steady stream of negativistic thoughts and feelings that easily affect the people around them.

Politics got you down? Feeling a little like this lately?:

Well, get used to it. This is how it's going to be for the rest of your life. These demon possessed political vampires are not going to go away, and they will never give up until everyone is as miserable as they are. You're just going to have to learn to be happy in spite of them, and in fact, just to spite them. If you are unhappy, then you've allowed these psychic terrorists to win.

I was looking for a quote by Ratzinger to the effect that Christianity will shrink to something analogous to what it was during its first three centuries. He is the temporal pessimyst to Pope John Paul's eternal optimyst. I didn't find the exact passage, but this is even more to the point. He sounds like a new testavus for the restavus prophet:

"The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.... As the number of her adherents diminishes... she will lose many of her social privileges... As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members....

"It will be hard-going for the Church.... The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution -- when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain....

"Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

"And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death."

Just don't count on it. That way you won't be disappointed. The Wee Church of Perpetual Slack is for the few. If it starts attracting the rabble, then we're doing something wrong. Just thank God reality is never what it is, but is always pointing above and beyond itself to our true home, which this world can't be. If it is, then the rancid unicorn has a point.

Unnatural is the New Natural

I'd like to write about something else, but it's difficult to think pleasant thoughts when the left is provoking so many unpleasant ones.

In fact, the left isn't satisfied with compelling disordered thought, but must also punish ordered thought -- such as the spontaneous reaction of that Miami Dolphins player to the KISS. That poor heterophile is in a World of Pain for his mundane normalcy, and re-education camp is only the beginning. He could cheat his way through college, beat his wife, have eight children out of wedlock, or try to injure other players, but be uncomfortable with two men kissing in public? The Ludovico medical facility for you!

"Choice! The boy has not a real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. The insincerity was clear to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice."

They want us to believe that Michael Sam is Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez rolled into one big victim. No doubt we'll soon be treated to heartrending scenes of him being led into the locker room by NFL officials (calling all photoshoppers):

This represents the complete inversion of reality by the left, since racism is wholly unnatural, while heterosexuality -- AKA sexuality -- is the most natural possible thing in all of nature.

Of course, science cannot pronounce on "norms" per se, but all of biology is oriented around the Prime Directive to reproduce. It is as close as science comes to admitting that the world is incoherent in the absence of teleology.

Thus, sex does not explain reproduction; rather, reproduction -- the end -- explains sex. Take away reproduction, and sex obviously makes no sense. It would be like ears in the absence of sound or eyes in the absence of light.

The difference between racism and so-called homophobia is that the former must be learned. Children are not born racist. Rather, they have to be taught to be racist, either by parents or by the culture.

My son, for example, has friends of all races, and if it weren't for the grown-ups talking about it, he would scarcely notice. He just doesn't care. He judges others purely by the content of their play, not the color of their toys.

Which, for the left, won't do. Rather, he will have to be indoctrinated to believe that he is secretly racist, that he is the beneficiary of "white privilege," and that everyone who doesn't look like him is his victim. As Obama would say, his greed rules a world in need.

Conversely, so-called "homophobia" is not learned, but rather, spontaneous. No normal parent wants their child to be exposed to the image of two men kissing on the lips, but if mine were, he would regard it as weird or creepy or maybe a puzzling attempt at humor, with no one ever having to tell him so. In any case, I wouldn't confuse him by trying to convince him that his natural reaction is immoral and that he must learn to deny his own feelings. Rather, I would downplay it and say something like, "yeah, it's weird, but some people are like that."

Please note that there is nothing whatsoever here that smacks of violence or aggression (let alone justifies it). Indeed, violence toward homosexuals, like racism, must also be learned. On those few occasions (that I know of) that gay men have come onto me, I was either a little discoonbobulated or maybe even flattered, but nowhere in me was there an impulse to physically lash out.

I have no idea where such an impulse would come from, but I suppose it might well be rooted in something that could legitimately be called homophobia, i.e., insecurity with one's own sexual identity, or unconscious homosexual urges that must be projected and violently punished.

Thinking back on my own boyhood, everyone was "homophobic" in the nonviolent sense. In fact, it never really occurred to me that something called a homosexual actually existed, only that masculine virtues were honored and enforced by the group. If someone were called a fag or a homo, it had nothing whatsoever to do with actual homosexuals, but rather, just enforcing the Code.

Now those words are forbidden, but you can't eliminate the underlying reality, so you see the same thing at play when someone is called a wimp or a wuss. The purpose is not to insult homosexuals, but rather, to encourage the guy to Man the hell Up.

Since I help coach little league baseball, I frequently must deal with failure to Man Up, but not only are there no permissible words to describe it, there is also pressure to deny that it is even occurring. So there are courageous players and wimpy players, but no vocabulary with which to talk about it.

Seriously, you can't even joke that there is No Crying in Baseball. My son knows that, but at least half the players don't, which is not just unseemly but frankly self-indulgent and narcissistic. I mean, if sport can't at least teach you to cope with adversity and failure like a man, what good is it?

On a couple of occasions I have mumbled that someone was throwing like a girl, but that was a pretty rash and reckless thing to do. It was as if they had never heard the expression before, or I had said something like FEEL FREE TO GROW SOME TESTICLES, BITCH!

Most of the kids -- even those with fathers -- have already been so indoctrinated with political correctness that you can't even point out that some guy on the other team is a bad player. And not in an insulting or mocking way, just as a neutral fact. If there are good players, then it stands to reason that there are bad ones. It doesn't mean they're bad people or that this permits you to ridicule them.

For example, it is an ancient adage in baseball that you don't throw a change-up to a bad hitter. A bad hitter won't be able to catch up with your fastball, so if you throw him an off speed pitch, you're doing him a favor.

Well, one of our kids was experimenting with a change-up. I told him, "just make sure you don't throw it to a bad hitter," and he was momentary nonplussed. He understood the principle, but reframed it as not throwing a change to a player who is "er, not a, er, really great hitter," or something like that. Political correctness forbids one to call things what they are, to feel one's feelings, and to see what is before one's eyes.

CreekOfConsciousness

Once again I have little time for a post. So, why bother? Just a habit, I suppose. I've been doing this for almost ten years now, and old school Raccoons will recall that it used to be every day. I used to occasionally mix in the odd repost, which I haven't done lately. Why not? I don't know. I have the idea of a ceasefire at the ten year mark in order to finally look down there, see what we have, and maybe try to organize it into book form. Of course, it would have to be multiple books. Should I do it by year? By subject? Or -- my preference -- to somehow intuit the nonlocal organizing principle behind the whole thing and then put it together around that? However, suppose we find the center. Then what? Is it a spatial center? A temporal one? Must be both. In fact, we have to begin with the principle that the cosmic center is God, or O. Or better, the metacosmic -- or macrocosmic -- center is God, while the intracosmic -- or microcosmic -- center is man. Which reminds me. One of the most foolish cliches of the left is that modernity somehow displaced man from the center of things. You know the drill: first heliocentrism. OH NO! Then geology: the HORROR! Then Darwin: MAKE IT STOP! But do you know anyone who is freaked out by these things? Yes, the sun doesn't revolve around the world, earth isn't 6,000 years old, and animals are subject to natural selection. This is a purely quantitative view of reality, so it presupposes what it would attempt to prove, which is the usual cosmic nothingbuttery, as in, existence, history, and man are NOTHING BUT whatever. However, religion, if it is about anything, is about qualities, and no amount of quantity adds up to a single quanlity, not even "lots," because that adjective would require the comparison of one quantity to another. So, what is the nature of this presumptuous speck of tenure who pronounces on the nature of ultimate reality? Isn't the statement I AM NOT THE CENTER a little like the statement ALL CRETANS ARE LIARS? In other words, in order to characterize the nature of reality, one must haver a commanding view of everything, and such a view is only possible from the center out and top down. Otherwise, one is just looking at things from the terminal point of a two-dimensional line, or from the end back. To rise above that line is to be at the center of a new perspective. Animals cannot do this. Imagine a frog at the bottom of a well. He will assure us that reality is a little bright disc surrounded by darkness which alternatively appears and disappears. If man is nothing but a contingent animal produced by accidental forces and pressures, then he is no more able than a frog to characterize the nature of reality. God is the name we give to ultimate reality, and not even the smartest frog knows anything about God, so take that, Descartes.

You Ought to be Ashamed!

If man evolved and/or is created to be monogamous, then wha' happen? For 99% of our existence we practiced monogamy, so we should have gotten pretty good at it. But then something changed.

Note that during that very long period of time, things were pretty "equal" for everybody, gender-specific specialities notwithstanding.

That is to say, everyone was equally poor, although no one knew it, because it turns out that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was characterized by a surplus of slack, working "short hours" and exploiting "abundant food resources" (Tucker). You might be astoneaged to learn that early humans lived "relatively relaxed lives" and that it was possible to get by "on two to four hours of subsistence effort per day."

One more way that I am a dyed-in-the-wool caveman.

I wonder if this is the blessedly enslackened situation Genesis describes, prior to the Temptation and Fall? That is, it seems there is plenty of low-hanging food of which we may "freely eat"; a girl for every boy; and the nuclear family ("a man shall leave his father and mother...") It's all good. Like the 1950s, but without the beatniks.

But then something unexpected happens. The text is frustratingly vague as to exactly what it is, but it is possible that it is conflating or reversing cause and effect.

That is, it may simply be describing an effect -- our all too obvious exile from paradise or the 1950s -- and then reading a cause back into time. Since what happened is "bad," then perhaps we must have done something bad to deserve it.

I've always been partial to Joyce's approach (in Finnegans Wake), which acknowledges the Fall -- the effect -- without trying to be too precise about what we did to cause it.

Look at it this way: we all have guilt and we all have shame -- Harry Reid being the exception that proves the rule -- but why?

Interestingly, the Bible acknowledges the existence of shame even in our prelapsarian state -- in fact, it is the Last Word ("ashamed") prior to Genesis 3, The Temptation and Fall of Man.

It also seems to implicitly acknowledge a capacity for guilt, in that there is an injunction -- don't eat of that tree -- and a potential punishment -- you shall die. There would be no point in communicating such a cause-and-effect formula to a creature incapable of freedom and responsibility, and therefore, guilt.

As we've discussed in the past, shame and guilt are quite distinct, the former having to do with ontology, the latter with existence. That is, shame has to do with being, whereas guilt has more to do with actions.

Shame also has to do with the other, with being seen (or busted). Thus, a truly shameless person -- Miley Cyrus, say, or Bill Clinton -- is so deeply disordered that it goes well beyond what any psychologist can deal with.

To put it inversely, to not feel shame is to not be human, and only humans can benefit from psychotherapy.

Sociopaths do not feel shame, nor do they feel guilt. In both cases, they are detached from the human family, in that they cannot empathize with the other, or see the other's point of view. Therefore, they can treat human beings as objects without being persecuted by a guilty conscience.

How would you feel if you had not only destroyed a young woman's life, but pretended she was the guilty party? A normal person would be deeply troubled for the rest of his life, but a normal person would also try to make amends (so long as the crime didn't involve murder, in which case no earthly reconciliation is possible).

So man, if he is man, must have a capacity for guilt and for shame. Modern man doesn't like this idea, so what does he do about it? Note that one cannot actually rid oneself of these (and remain human), any more than one can eliminate other quintessentially human characteristics.

Yes, but there is still a way: all one has to do is make the wrong right and the right wrong, and voila! The restoration of wholly unholy innocence! To be in-nocent means to be free of knowledge, and people who don't know any better -- children and animals -- are indeed innocent.

Furthermore, any person who would hold innocent children and animals to a higher standard would be an assoul. Therefore, you are an assoul for expecting humane, decent, and virtuous behavior of liberals!

There is another ontological perversion that infiltrates the liberal mind, and it is the equation of resentment and victimhood, accompanied by the equation of victimhood and innocence.

Therefore, instead of feeling shame about, say, being so envious and resentful, one not only feels innocent, but is proud about it (pride being another occasion for a normal person to feel humbled if not a little guilty).

I can summarize the lesson of this post in two words: Gay. Pride.

Which is a good thing, because I don't have time for one more word.

The War on Women is a Cat Fight

Time only for a short but I'd like to think important post.

I suppose to even suggest that females have a nature is to declare war on them.

Well, we are at war. But only against the women who deny their own nature -- and Nature in general (the one entails the other).

Democrats know this: they know that one of their most reliable clients is this large and growing pool of humanoid misfits. They are the polar opposite of whatever it is Pajama Boy represents.

Normally there is a sexual polarity that results from the complementarity of male and female. But who or what is the complement of Pajama Boy? A domineering mother, I suppose.

Likewise, what could be the complement to those pathetic "Julias" of the liberal imagination? The only thing I can think of is the State, so this is one of those rare occasions that I agree with liberals.

If marriage were still the norm, we'd have a permanent conservative majority. Consider: in 2012, married people favored Romney by a margin of 14 percentage points. Single women, however, supported Obama by a whopping 68 to 30 (cited in Tucker).

Who are those 30%, anyway? Right. The attractive ones. Or at least the ones who aren't repellant.

No woman is an island, which is why the State simply displaces the role of husband. As they say, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. However, she needs the government like a woman needs a man.

And the feeling is mutual, since the state needs single mothers like a man needs a wife. It's just patriarchy by another name.

In the past I have written of how the premature, neurologically incomplete, and helpless baby is the hinge of evolution. After all, if the babies don't survive and thrive, then the game is over.

However, in reality, like their Creator, humans are irreducibly intersubjective and tri-complementary. Therefore, you can't change one member of the subcelestial trinity without changing all the rest.

Thus, for example, when women no longer need men, we end up with Pajama Boy on the one hand and Hoodie Boy (e.g., Trayvon Martin) on the other: with wimps and barbarians.

So it is fair to say that each of the three is a hinge of evolution and of civilization: Man, Woman, and Baby. Each has certain responsibilities and certain entitlements.

But not just in terms of their biological categories. That means nothing. Here again, we're not talking about nature, but about NATURE, and a merely natural man sinks beneath himself into infrahuman Rousseauian hell.

Because we need to placate the angry and/or hysterical sub-female mob -- the ovary tower -- we are not permitted to talk about female responsibilities, only female "rights," such as the right to a dead baby and free birth control from Daddy.

Not so with boys, who are made aware of their responsibilities from the get-go, mainly to curb their aggression, impulsivity, competitiveness, enthusiasm, spirit, and life force. In short, they are to imitate female nature, even though there's no such thing.

And what is the primary cosmic responsibility of females? Interestingly, it is to help civilize male nature, but not in the way of the tenured or with the heavy hand of the state, as in the paragraph above.

Rather, Tucker discusses the centrality of female virtue, which is as critical to civilizational advance as are infantile helplessness and male strength and aggressiveness. You don't even need to look at it from a moralistic angle. Rather, just consider the results.

Tucker traces the roots of monogamy back to the spirited virtuous woman who refuses the seductions of powerful high-status males in favor of genuine passionate love.

This is a pattern we see "time and again in Western history -- high status aristocrats trying to make concubines and morganatic wives out of lower-status women, and the women, often peasant girls, standing up to them and refusing to comply. If there is one individual who is the lynchpin of a monogamous society, it is the Virtuous Woman." (Monica Lewinskys of the world, take note.)

Just consider the cascade of consequences that occurs when the woman fails in her duty to consecrate the booty. Ultimately we're talking about the failure of monogamy, and when that happens, all hell breaks loose for everybody, men, women, and children:

"[N]ormative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.... By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity...." (Tucker).

So yeah, there is a war on woman. Primarily by other women. Cat fight!

Nature is Supernatural

Men and women are faced with different Temptations. One difference is that men typically use power to obtain sex (e.g., Bill), while women use sex to obtain power (e.g., Hillary, riding the coattails of a powerful man). This truism is apparently rooted in different evolutionary strategies, but if this is the case, it doesn't negate free will. Rather, it's more like astrology: the stars incline but do not compel.

For the vast majority of human existence we have been hunter-gatherers -- 99% of that existence, according to Tucker. Therefore, if we want to know something about the ground floor of the psyche -- why man is the way he is -- it might be worthwhile to take a look at the ways and whys of our most venerable furbears.

More generally, if the evolutionary psychologists are correct, then we are definitely in the Wrong Place -- this is not my beautiful cave! -- and there's not much we can do about it. We have made our procrustean bed and now we have to live a lie in it. It is very much as if we have a nature designed for certain specific conditions, but those conditions are nowhere to be found -- like the old zoos that simply tossed the animals in cages without trying to replicate their environment.

But our environment is changing all the time, and since we adapt to it so quickly, it might lead one to believe that man has no nature. This is discussed in the excellent Making Gay Okay, which, based on the reviews, is making gays insane.

What is interesting is that traditionalists believe in an enduring human nature, and that this belief is in conformity with evolutionary science. So it is ironic in the extreme for leftists to call anyone else "anti-science," being that these scientifically correct mythtics are the worst offenders. They don't just deny the science, but try to block the scientific paths. One is not permitted to even think in certain directions, for fear of stumbling upon a Forbidden Truth.

Leftists believe in nature but not in NATURE, the latter of which transcends nature. NATURE is what the Founders were referring to with the crack about our rights being rooted in "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." They surely didn't mean lowercase nature -- as if our natural rights are founded upon physics or biology or natural selection. If they were, then politics would be founded on the principle of kill or be killed, which is what nature teaches us.

By NATURE, the founders mean "in the nature of things," or just the way things ARE and reality IS. No rational person says "realities are," which is one more reason why leftists are intrinsically irrational, for to say that there are realities is to deny Reality, precisely.

Our "point of departure," writes Reilly, "must be that Nature is what is, regardless of what anyone desires or abhors." Thus, this places reality outside the domains of will and desire. As we've Schuonsplained on many occasions, the human being is composed of intellect, sentiment, and will, and if the latter two are detached from the former, we are soon enough in leftist Hell, where there is lots of hysteria and bullying but no truth.

Speaking of modern science, one thing we know conclusively about man is that Aristotle was correct: man is the political animal, which does not refer to vulgar politics, but rather, to the fact that man's nature is to be involved with others in order to create a society in which it is possible to pursue the Good.

We cannot do this if we are fundamentally atomistic monads, in which case community would just interfere with our nature. It would mean that any community is a kind of falsehood, and astonishingly, this is precisely what the uber-leftist Rousseau argued:

"The Rousseauian anthropology claims that man is not a rational, political animal and that society in any form is fundamentally alien, and alienating to individuals. In his origins, man was isolated and essentially complete on his own and in himself" (Reilly).

We can see how this primordial craziness is present in both leftism and libertarianism. In fact, it is the reason why leftism is confused with liberalism, because it posits a kind of radical freedom that is equivalent to nihilism.

But in reality, there can be no such thing as radical or pure freedom. Rather, as with all ultimate ontological categories, freedom only exists in a complementary relationship, in this case, to responsibility. And although the two necessarily coarise, responsibility must be ontologically prior, otherwise it would have no explanation. In other words, you cannot get from freedom to responsibility, whereas responsibility automatically implies freedom.

Also, freedom is purely abstract, with no positive meaning, whereas responsibility is concrete. It's like a woman's so-called "freedom to choose." Choose what? Anything? No, of course not. That kind of purely abstract freedom refers to nothing.

Rather, let's be honest: it is the freedom to kill her baby. Such freedom is of course completely divorced from responsibility, but also cannot possibly be rooted in nature. If it is in nature, then it is obviously present in female babies, so only male babies could be aborted in "good" conscience.

Thus, this so-called freedom can only be a positive freedom, but is there such a thing? I don't see how, without freedom becoming something it is not.

That is, natural freedom does not impinge on anyone else's freedom, and everyone is equally free (and responsible). But the positive right to abortion obviously impinges on the rights of others, including the father, the baby, and society in general.

Now, among other things, nature is objective, for which reason we are "subject" to it. It took a very long time for man to recognize this, apparently not until the ancient Greeks: "Before this discovery, ancient man was immersed in mythological portrayals of the world, the gods, and himself" (Tucker).

To put it another way, nature had been subject to man, not in reality -- as if rain dances or human sacrifice were successful in influencing nature -- but in the imagination, where man lived. Like Marx, man tried to change nature before understanding nature. But only by bowing to nature's laws are we able to use them as the boundary conditions for further exploration and evolution.

Once man "discovered" the objective world, it permitted us to inquire into its rational structure. Thus, interestingly, the discovery of objective reality proved that NATURE is supernatural, i.e., infused with a transcendent truth intelligible to man's intelligence. As such, you might say that the world became objective on one level, but subjective on a higher level, i.e., the divine plane (in that it had to be grounded in a deeper, wider, and higher intelligence, ultimately a Person).

Oh my. Way out of time. Why didn't someone tell me? As always, to be continued...

TOTAL CLARITY and PERFECT NONSENSE

Yesterday I had insufficient time to express what I was trying to say with TOTAL CLARITY. For me, the achievement of TOTAL CLARITY means that no honest, intellectually adequate, and sincere person could possibly disagree with me.

I am always trying to paint the reader -- beginning with myself -- into an airtight corner from which there is no escape but inscape. Or there is no way out but up. This we call UPWORLD MOBILITY.

There is a lucid mechanical determinism that inspires futility and an organic entelechial deiterminism that nourishes HOPE.

Or in other words, one must know what IS in order to know what CAN BE. It is how ultimate reality can be always THE SAME and yet EVER NEW, instead of an ABSURCULAR repetitititititititition populated by a bunch of UNCLE AUTOMOTONS.

Revelation is both CLOSED and OPEN, or an open and shut case, because it is composed of TRUTH and FREEDOM, so it is dyna-static or olden pneumagain. This is the cosmic edge where all the RAZORACTION occurs.

I am always aiming for TOTAL CLARITY except for when TOTAL CLARITY only obscures the issue, for example, in defining God. To achieve TOTAL CLARITY in that arena would result in a total lack of clarity, i.e., absurdity. Any discussion of God requires the judicious use of orthoparadox, which cannot attain TOTAL CLARITY, but rather, transclarity, or PERFECT NONSENSE.

This is how and why O can be "incomprehensible and yet the meaning of everything," and why knowledge of it "does no more than render the mystery immediate and inescapable" (Ware).

This does not mean we should get an apophathead or veer off into irrationalism. Rather, there is an irreducible and endless play of apophatic and cataphatic, or knowledge and mystery, (n) and O.

This yeoman's work -- or play rather -- is NEVER DONE. The best we can do is to never stop aiming at that which transcends and defines us, the goal we can perceive but never see. Or we see through things toward that to which they point or converge upon.

And how do we perceive it? Two ways. We can look back and see its unmistakable fruit tracks, or turn forward and feel its attraction and its nourishment: it simultaneously PULLS on our emptiness and GIVES of its riches.

This dynamic force "attracts creation into the eschatological condition," which means that history is the interval or gap during which progress towards its own fillfullment occurs. For the AWAKE or even ALERT, time itself is the KNOWA's ARK of salvation.

"To the extent that one ascends in the knowledge of God, he ascends at the same time in the understanding of the mystery of God as that which is not to be understood. 'This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness'" (Staniloae). We are always rising above meanings toward MEANING itself via the DARKLIGHT of faith.

God is like any other name. Just because I know your name, or have a name for you, it does not mean that I fully know you, much less contain you.

You could say that being born again from above is the EIGHTH DAY of creation, i.e., VERTICAL LIFTOFF. Since the liftoff never ends, we could symbolize it [8∞] GUFFAW-HA! If it ever ends, it will mean that time has become eternal, or finally caught up with itsoph. History will have healed the wounds it inflicted, and hopefully JUDGMENT will wound the heels history inflicted upon the restavus.

So there will be a final endless COMM-UNION of orthoparadoxes such as flesh and spirit. Or not, because the other direction ends "in isolation within one's own emptiness" (ibid). In between is the exodus in the bewilderness of time, Israel on one side, Egypt on the other, Life or Death. Endless novelty or endless monotony.

Once upon a time we spoke of A influences and B influences, as described by Mouravieff. You could say that these are horizontal and vertical -- or terrestrial and celestial -- influences, respectively. No real happiness can result from A influences only. These bring transient pleasures, to be sure, but no quantity of horizontal pleasure adds up to one qualitative vertical bealtitude.

In order to be happy, man must have a goal "that transcends the domain of 'A' influences," or is "beyond the mental horizon" of mere horizontaloids. In the world of pure A, "nothing lasts, everything breaks, and everything tires." So you end up OLD, BORED, and JADED, or full to the brim with emptiness.

Will you knock it off with the capitalizing already?

Besides, what was it you were unclear about yesterday?

Well, it had to do with that penultimate crack to the effect that "homosexuality is rooted in the concrete pseudo-principle of selfish pleasure, which is then converted into the abstractions of freedom and equality."

Reilly expresses it more clearly, writing of how nature "is teleologically ordered to ends that inhere in their essence and make them what they are." In short, there is a truth and a reality that we do not invent and to which we graciously defer.

Conversely, the first principle of the homosexual activists is that "things are nothing in themselves, but are only what we make them to be according to our wills and desires" (emphasis mine). Here we see how one man's metaphysical trash is another man's libidinous pleasure, the pleasure of dominating reality with the will to POWER.

Marriage Equality and World Destruction

Barely no time today, and so much to fill it with. Maybe you should just read the book, because there are important ideas on every page.

And when I say important, I only mean like "world saving" (or world-shattering, depending on where you stand). Dennis Prager is the only other person I know of -- although I'm sure there are others -- who realizes that the attack on marriage is an attack on the very foundation of our humanness and therefore of civilization itself.

But when you affirm this, you of course sound crazy. It reminds me of the left's thus far successful attempt to controversialize Benghazi.

That is, the first step in turning the world upside down is to make right side-up "controversial," as if there is some legitimate doubt about it.

It's amazing how rapidly the left has been able to accomplish this with regard to the redefinition of marriage. The Obama who assumed the presidency in 2009 would now be unqualified due to his then hateful support of traditional marriage. He would have to be mozilla'ed.

It's not just marriage and homosexuality. Consider all the other things the left has successfully controversialized: the military, school prayer, sexual identity, motherhood, fatherhood, bastardy, the english language, illegal voting, illegal immigration, free speech, the Constitution...

Just the fact that we have to argue over these things makes us a little crazy too, because it's crazy to argue with a crazy person. Normally I would have no interest in doing so, but in this case we have no choice, because these crazys want to control our lives.

The very idea that the left, of all things, suddenly cares about monogamy and sexual commitment is absurd on its face. On what basis? In other words, on what principle of leftism is marriage founded?

Whatever it is, it is not the same as ours, so we're necessarily talking about apples and oranges -- or rather, the compulsory belief, backed by state violence, that apples and oranges are identical.

To believe otherwise is a thoughtcrime. It is to place oneself outside the margins of civilized society, which is again ironic in the extreme, since monogamous marriage and civilization are two sides of the same coin, as compellingly demonstrated by Tucker.

Thus, anyone who cares about civilization should be on our side, but these fools and tools have no earthly idea what is at stake. For upon what principle do they found their deviant notion of marriage? As far as I can tell, it is either "equality" or "freedom," as in "marriage equality" or "the freedom to love who we want."

Now, to be sure, equality and freedom are genuine principles. However each refers to the other; not only do they oppose one another, but each has its own irreducible complement. The complement of freedom is responsibility, while the complement of equality is hierarchy.

Freedom can have absolutely no meaning in the absence of responsibility, while equality in the absence of hierarchy is just nihilism. (I might add that in these complementarities, responsibility is prior to freedom, just as hierarchy must be posterior to equality.)

And bringing about the monstrous equality of the left always requires great violence and coercion, while its version of freedom simply equates to irresponsibility. Or rather, there is no personal responsibility, only collective responsibility.

Thus, individuals are incentivized to be more personally irresponsible, which results in the need for a larger and more intrusive state to be responsible for all these irresponsible losers.

But beneath the left's misunderstanding freedom and equality is an even deeper principle: pleasure. To put it inversely, real marriage is not based upon pleasure. Rather, it is based upon reality, specifically, the reality of sexual polarity and the recognition that monogamous marriage channels this in prosocial ways, in the direction of civilization.

As Tucker emphasizes, there is nothing wholly "natural" about monogamy. Rather, although rooted in nature -- the nature of things -- it is an institution that transcends nature.

But homosexuality is rooted in the concrete pseudo-principle of selfish pleasure, which is then converted into the abstractions of freedom and equality. Conversely, marriage is rooted in the abstract cosmic principle of sexual polarity, which is concretized in the form of marriage.

But I'm out of time. To be contined....