Marcotte & Salon Misleading on CRT

 What a dishonest article from Amanda Marcotte over at Salon:

Yet with so many white people across the country in a total freak out over "critical race theory," it appears few, if any, of them could even explain what it actually is. That's because, despite what Fox News is telling them, critical race theory — the actual academic framework that was developed in law schools to understand the historical reasons our legal system perpetuates racial inequalities — is not, in fact, being taught to 3rd graders or even 11th graders. Claims otherwise are a complete lie, ginned up by right-wing propagandists who are desperate to keep the GOP base whipped into a racist frenzy.

Firstly, CRT is generally understood by people. Of course, it would never be difficult finding a collection of people who have difficulty articulating it, as broad concepts become difficult to put into words when a proverbial microphone is shoved in front of one's face, but people know exactly what it is, and what it ties back into: cultural Marxism. 

CRT can be understood by the narrow definition presented above - as purely legal theory that is certainly not being taught to third graders, or it can be understood with a broader definition as they are oft presented by the academics involved themselves:

"Critical race theory is a practice. It's an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it," said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor who teaches at UCLA and Columbia University. (CNN)

Thus, what is meant by teaching CRT in schools? That the approach to history is of one that deals with white supremacy, and insists that it is an on-going fundamental reality in the US. 

It would essentially be re-enforcing ideas like

Critical race theorists believe that racism is an everyday experience for most people of color, and that a large part of society has no interest in doing away with it because it benefits White elites. (CNN)

So, we can ask ourselves: 

Is there a movement to bring these into schools? Yes.

Is there a movement for American history to be taught this way? Of course. 

Now, why is it linked to Marxism? Because many of the players are Marxists - some of the founders of BLM are self-described Marxists. 

CRT is also relatable to what can be more broadly understood as [i]Critical theory.[/i]

Max Horkheimer first defined critical theory (German: Kritische Theorie) in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy, Horkheimer critiqued both the model of science put forward by logical positivism, and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. He described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[6] Critical theory involves a normative dimension, either by criticizing society in terms of some general theory of values or norms (oughts), or by criticizing society in terms of its own espoused values (i.e. immanent critique).[7] (Wikipedia)

And one cannot really understand critical theory as something that is apart from Marxism, even when Marx is being used in a relatively normal sense. 

... and... What does Wikipedia say about Critical race theory?

Both critical race theory and critical legal studies are rooted in critical theory, which argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors.[5] (Wikipedia)

Marcotte continues:

 It is important to note that the fabricated fury over "critical race theory" is a cleverly constructed right-wing troll. Liberals who want to respond with a quick, easily digested rebuttal are instead boxed into a frustrating corner. Because pointing out that critical race theory is not being taught in public schools is a trap, as it could be construed to imply that there's something wrong with critical race theory. And any straightforward defense of critical race theory implies that schoolchildren are somehow expected to understand graduate school-level academic theories. But in fact, the real issue at hand is that conservatives don't want white kids to learn even the most basic truths about American history. 

Marcotte essentially denies that CRT can exist beyond the very narrow definition and thus goes against academics that have brought it into more broad terms that are easily communicable to children, and, more interestingly, presents us with a false dichotomy: we're trapped because if we explain all this so-difficult, professional academic tier theory to the conservatives, we'll be inadvertently saying that schoolkids are able to understand this! 

I also do not understand the final sentence: the real issue at hand is that conservatives don't want white kids to learn even the most basic truths about American history, as if we are now willing to accept that curricula are being changed to  get in line with the current academic trends... excuse me, LEGAL academic trends. 

 Instead, as Sean Illing at Vox explains, "conservatives have appropriated critical race theory as a convenient catchall to describe basically any serious attempt to teach the history of race and racism." 

This is completely dishonest as there were not conservative movements that existed to whitewash history in the 1990s and 2000s - none that are remotely similar to the backlash against CRT today. Yet, anyone who went to school in the US in the 90s & 2000s (and before) would be able to tell you that they were taught up & down the history of race and racism in the US, and even abroad. 

So much so that it is patently absurd for Sean Illing to pretend that this is not the case.

The article eventually stumbles into incoherence: 

And that's the crux of it: Schoolchildren aren't really being taught critical race theory, but critical race theory — the actual framework, not the right-wing scare term — is a legitimate academic pursuit that has turned up important facts that white supremacists of yore have covered up. And it's those facts — things like the practice of redlining, the truth about what the Confederacy stood for, what Martin Luther King Jr. really believed, and the history of lynching and events like the Tulsa race massacre — that conservatives want to silence.

Does anyone actually believe that debates about the values and stances of the Confederacy, MLK's beliefs, lynching, the Tulsa massacre, etc., are subjects that were not being understood or explored without this academic school? 

These words can only be written by someone who is an academic, or who suckles upon their teets. Regular people are constantly digging into history, studying our past, and are interested in the philosophies of MLK and the Confederacy. Academics are welcome to join them, too, and are even welcome to create their own particular schools & circles that focus on it, regardless of how erroneous and far from the mark they come... 

But crediting themselves with as the true & honest shapers of all korrect opinion about actualité is really a bit much to stomach.  

Feel free to skip the rest of Marcotte's article - I did. 

Anekantavada: the Many-Sidedness of Perception

 The Jain concept of Anekantavada is certainly very interesting, and I do not think that it is without parallel in Chrsitainity...

For a brief definition:

Anekāntavāda (Hindi: अनेकान्तवाद, "many-sidedness") is the Jain doctrine about metaphysical truths that emerged in ancient India.[1] It states that the ultimate truth and reality is complex and has multiple aspects.[2] Anekantavada has also been interpreted to mean non-absolutism, "intellectual Ahimsa",[3] religious pluralism,[4] as well as a rejection of fanaticism that leads to terror attacks and mass violence.[5]...

According to Jainism, no single, specific statement can describe the nature of existence and the absolute truth. This knowledge (Kevala Jnana), it adds, is comprehended only by the Arihants. Other beings and their statements about absolute truth are incomplete, and at best a partial truth.[8] All knowledge claims, according to the anekāntavāda doctrine must be qualified in many ways, including being affirmed and denied.[9] Anekāntavāda is a fundamental doctrine of Jainism.

The origins of anekāntavāda can be traced back to the teachings of Mahāvīra (599–527 BCE), the 24th Jain Tīrthankara.[10] The dialectical concepts of syādvāda "conditioned viewpoints" and nayavāda "partial viewpoints" arose from anekāntavāda in the medieval era, providing Jainism with more detailed logical structure and expression. 

Wikipedia

A medieval depiction of the many-sidedness of perception and man's inability to actually understand it in its completeness, but here enlightened beings are theoretically properly observing all of it. 

While Christianity undoubtedly rejects Jain cosmology and the extremity of Jain ethics, I found the above aspect of Jainism to be rather inspiring, and it also reminded me of St. Gregory Palamas, who wrote:

80. The inspired and universal tongue of the divine theologians, St John of Damaskos, says in the second of his theological chapters: 'A man who would speak or hear anything about God should know with all clarity that in what concerns theology and the divine economy not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. ' We know that those divine realities of which we desire to speak transcend speech, since such realities exist according to a principle that is transcendent. They are not outside the realm of speech by reason of some deficiency, but are beyond the conceptual power innate within us and to which we give utterance when speaking to others. For neither can our speech explain these realities by interpretation, nor does our innate conceptual power have the capacity to attain them of its own accord through investigation. Thus we should not permit ourselves to say anything concerning God, but rather we should have recourse to those who in the Spirit speak of the things of the Spirit, and this is the case even when our adversaries require some statement from us.

 St. Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science and on the Moral and Ascetic Life: One Hundred and Fifty Texts, in the Philokalia Vol. IV, 

Further remembering that God encompasses everything, and understanding that significant parts of reality are actually not describable, we can conclude that there is, on some level, fundamental truths and knowledge that are not actually accessible. Naturally, we can observe events and we can come to conclusions about the obvious and the mundane, but no Christian can actually claim to be fully initiated into knowledge of the truth of reality. 

This also reminds me of a story of another Saint (it may actually have been St. Gregory Palamas) who asked God to show him his true self as God sees him, and then he had to pray for him to make it stop because it was so excruciating seeing the depths of his own imperfections and sins. 

Thus, if we understand that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23), we can essentially view all forms of human reasoning and perception as being flawed to some degree. This directly supports the concept of Anekantavada and encourages us towards always looking for some sort of middle ground and divestment from our own selfish interests that we know to actually be corrupt in the root.

Christianity should embrace the imperfect many-sided perceptions that we all have, but also emphasize that God alone can judge, and can perceive all that is happening in a way that is objective. But let me emphasize before we go that objectivity itself is a human concept and does not come close to the omniscient perception that God has, and how He would relate things back to the summum bonum, Truth, and Reality.

Yarvin on the Three Forms of Government

 Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, recently summarized power in the following way: 

There are three political forces: monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Every regime is based on one and suppresses the other two.

Democracy is the strongest but least stable force; truly democratic regimes are rare. Oligarchy is the most stable force; it is especially good at suppressing democracy, because it is especially good at pretending to be democracy. The only threats to an oligarchy are either a foreign oligarchy, or a union of democracy and monarchy—in which democratic energy installs a monarch.

It is very easy to show that, when democratic energy is weak, monarchy is the only possible successor of oligarchy. In general and with only clearly limited exceptions, the first job of any new regime is to dismantle and replace the institutions of the old. Like any other serious task, only unity of command can solve this problem.

Gray Mirror

Yarvin basically understands that most democracy is illegitimate, a fact which Plato recognized in the era before Christ, and something that the American founding fathers more or less knew. 

Yarvin understands that Oligarchs manufacture consent via democratic institutions, which gives us an illusion of a mandate from heaven.

Mandates from heaven actually used to be honest: they were said to come from God! Of course, whether or not they did is up for debate, and we would probably insist that it's impossible that all these different mandates did come from God, but what is perhaps the key to this is the mandate of heaven vis a vis understanding that the heaven being referenced is the metaphysics that govern the cosmos. 

That way, we can abstract the principle enough to make it more universally palatable to different religions, and people who are atheists but recognize the power of immutable principles which govern human nature can likewise feel a certain loyalty to these regimes. 

Monarchy is the third form of government being referenced here. I think that we must interpret this as monarchy in the literal appeal to the mandate of heaven in an undemocratic fashion. In this sense, literal monarchy or more republicanized and fashed out forms of it can be scene as being in the same vein. 

Yarvin says another thing that is very interesting:

Therefore, “democratic energy installs a monarch” is a description of all revolutions—at least, all internal revolutions.

The nature of democratic energy is unstable. It is going to throw into power a Lenin or a Washington, and then it will generally begin to dissipate as the regime consolidates itself. 

The revolution dissipates, but the principles endure.  

Rorty & Linguistical Cynicism

While discussing philosophy with a Rorty fan, I came across this very interesting excerpt: 

In Rorty's view, both Dewey's pragmatism and Darwinism encourage us to see vocabularies as tools, to be assessed in terms of the particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rorty suggests, "have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout or the bowerbird's skill at weaving." (TP 48)

Pragmatic evaluation of various linguistically infused practices requires a degree of specificity. From Rorty's perspective, to suggest that we might evaluate vocabularies with respect to their ability to uncover the truth, would be like claiming to evaluate tools for their ability to help us get what we want—full stop. Is the hammer or the saw or the scissors better—in general? Questions about usefulness can only be answered, Rorty points out, once we give substance to our purposes.

Rorty's pragmatist appropriation of Darwin also defuses the significance of reduction. He rejects as representationalist the sort of naturalism that implies a program of nomological or conceptual reduction to terms at home in a basic science. Rorty's naturalism echoes Nietzsche's perspectivism; a descriptive vocabulary is useful insofar as the patterns it highlights are usefully attended to by creatures with needs and interests like ours. Darwinian naturalism, for Rorty, implies that there is no one privileged vocabulary whose purpose it is to serve as a critical touchstone for our various descriptive practices.

For Rorty, then, any vocabulary, even that of evolutionary explanation, is a tool for a purpose, and therefore subject to teleological assessment. Typically, Rorty justifies his own commitment to Darwinian naturalism by suggesting that this vocabulary is suited to further the secularization and democratization of society that Rorty thinks we should aim for. 

Stanford Encyclopedia's article on Rorty.

Rorty. Relaxin'.

Rorty understands language in a very cynical way -- which is not a bad way at all of understanding language. 

I believe it is actually the case that people have always understood the potential for language to be abused. What is a lie, after all, if not an abuse of language? But Rorty's cynicism is deeper than this. It views all language as pragmatic in essence, and thus never actually is entirely honest. 

Perhaps I am being too hard on him, and my interpretation is not entirely correct, but that is not something to be bogged down in when this idea alone is quite interesting.

If the language we use to discuss ideas is ultimately for specific purposes, and not meant to be precise presentations of our real perception of how the world is and what our ideas are, we have to treat the way that anyone talks to us skeptically. We become a part of anyone's agenda when we assent to the way that they are using language. 

Rorty is not wrong in viewing language as behaving this way. 

I think that, especially in modernity, language has begun to mean this. Our justifications for the Iraq war can be seen as a large ruse to profit off of the highly lucrative oil trade and to serve other geopolitical interests. 

When we see the way that all political groups can shift back and forth on things like free speech and property rights when it suits them, we see that hypocrisy can seem almost unconscious and natural. Thus all of the words & ideals previously presented seem like a bunch of hot air, and to have originally only been uttered to serve a single purpose, and to not really be about the ideas in themselves. 

But I think that people tend to believe what they are saying, even if they renege on these words later, and that there are many people who are incredibly sincere in their beliefs and do not yield. The religious, in particular, have an inclination to uphold their precise descriptions of reality, and all that the Saints wrote and martyrs confessed. 

I think that Rorty's assessment is particularly poignant due to the circumstances in which we 20th & 21st century people live: our governments are "democracies" that consist of oligarchs manufacturing consent via the media, who are always engaged in employing ideas and symbolism to manipulate people. Many of these people are not even necessarily very political or philosophical by nature, but are told that it is their duty to be as such. 

Because the populace is not particularly invested in their own narratives, the elites who rule via the manufacturing of consent are blessed by their fickleness.

You can also see the elites benefiting from the cynical use of language in the marketplace. Advertisements are themselves a form of propagandizing in practice. You can see it also cynically employed in law as well, where great efforts are gone to to follow the 'letter of the law' and the very meaning of language becomes distorted. 

Western liberal democracies have cynical views of language because they are ruled by merchants & lawyers who view language as pragmatic tools. Rorty was undoubtedly able to make this conclusion, and it affected the very way that he views language. 

But I think that, in a society more grounded in tradition & language, we would not be having cynical views about language, but rather cynical views about humans, and we would be talking about hypocrisy and not gutting human communications.

Interpersonal Subjectivity

 There is an objective reality to the universe. 

Objectivity exists in two ways; First, there is an exclusive, single set of facts about what actually happened. We may not know it, but we know that only one reality unfolded. Were the north and south kingdoms of Egypt united through war, or through some diplomatic or otherwise peaceful means? We do not know, but we know that they were eventually united, and that some series of events precipitated their unity. 

Second, there is the truth of God, which functions as objectivity over topics that we would normally consider subjective. If God says that murder is wrong, it does not matter what twisted logic the murderer presents. It is as good as objectively true because the architect of all has declared it as such. 

This ultimately leads us to Interpersonal Subjectivity, which is the reality that most of us life in. 

We cannot force any sort of agreement about value-systems, morality, abstract principles which have to be followed.We have to have the same faith or principles in order to achieve this as there is no way to demonstrate this end. 

Perhaps even more poignantly, humans often cannot even agree on the facts. There are always conspiracies about whether data was covered up, manipulated, or not fully disclosed. There is also always the potential that the correlation of the events does not mean that there is necessarily the same cause behind them. 

All discussion in the world ends up actually functioning as interpersonally subjective even if objectively true things or moral things are being said. 

This functions as a sort of curse over human interaction. But it is also a blessing in the sense that it can also be the basis for liberty. 

Without the Esoteric, the West Reaches a Dead End

Western countries and religion feel dead and trite, at worse, and contentious and personal, at best. People on both the left and right try to recast their societies in new ways, seeking to find meaning in a story that nobody can really follow anymore. We are seeing people even expand the scope of their political and social theories, blowing them up to the point where they now take the place of religion itself. 

But still, it's in religion -- religion which convincingly makes contact with the mystical -- that we will find what can actually be the driving force for something that is not just adequate for the lives of individuals, the society, and a generation, but which can be the basis of multiple civilizations and countless humans over millennia. 

Cue Dugin & Dzhemal.

In the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR, Iran was one of Russia’s few remaining partners in the Middle East, and both Dzhemal and Dugin provide spiritual legitimacy for this strategic partnership. For Dugin, Orthodox Christianity is close to Shia Islam since both managed to preserve their esoteric nature, while Western Churches and Sunni Islam degenerated and became “purely social” religions (Dugin 1995, sections 3 and 4).

 Between Salafism & Eurasianism: Geidar Dzhemal and the Global islamic Revolution in Russia

Aleksandr Dugin

They are talking about religion as a fundamental organ for the anatomy of civilization. Other religions have become purely social, but these two are in touch with the spiritual world above. 

When I first read this, I tried to understand this as Orthodox (and Shi'a, but I can't actually comment on Shi'a well) having just a fundamentally different philosophical & sociopolitical approach because they are still esoteric, and not "social." But it was falling short in my head. I think the conclusion is more radical... Bear with me.

The Orthodox have an impenetrable and inscrutable monastic tradition that lends itself to mysticism & is very esoteric. It cannot be digested by anything secular, and stands above conventional politics, and even the scandals of the Church. 

It's vital that this is inaccessible (unlike the Vatican). If you ain't on Athos, you ain't nothin. Nobody cares what any joinalist says about this. What matters is what Br. Nektarios said after his trip to the Holy Mountain. It could be a strange prophecy of a war between Turkey & Russia, or just a talk about how everyone should hang a cross on their door. It is also thought that there are endless mysteries happening on the Mountain that we will never have access to, and these are completely real. 

St. Poprhyrios wrote that, during evening prayers, there are spiritual earthquakes happening all over Mt. Athos; you can feel it. The whole mountain opens up. You can find beliefs about the mysterious nature and spiritual power that extend to other monastic communities in Orthodoxy, and pay attention to other great events, like the Holy Fire in the Holy Sepulchre. 

Because of this, there is a link between the laypeople struggling in the modern world and the Divine, and this comes purely from the ascetics, and is unfiltered by media or modernity. Mysticism is strong, and legends grow around it.  The ultimate reality about God is accessible, and the mundane is being constantly overshadowed by this. 

I would insist that this is also happening in Catholicism and in Protestantism, but that these are the exceptions to the religious body, and not the rule. More importantly, it's spotty. Unlike Orthodoxy, the whole (or close to the whole) of the Church is not animated by this relationship, and it only exists on the fringes and actually can be embarrassing to the more mainstream. What Protestants do you know that are proud of speaking in tongues and handling snakes? What Catholics do you know that talk extensively about spiritual warfare with the demonic and the meaning of Marian apparitions? 

The meaning seems to likely be that Orthodoxy (and presumbaly Shi'a Islam) maintain the spiritual élan vital, which ultimately can give us a political & civilization force that is above any contemporary Western (or Sunni) model. 

Because the Orthodox community has access to the mystical and truly believes in a spiritual world that is strong, it's capable of a different kind of civilization. Its structure is not limited to secular power and culture, its not defined solely by history, literature, and a political state. It is able to be united through the chalice across time & space; it is bound together by God. Its ultimate authority are found in the mystical and the esoteric, a force that is greater than the Bishops of the church and their stuffy letters, and is surely far greater than the concept of the political state or some cultural icon of a writer or painter. 

Orthodoxy has within it access to the divine. Even if you do not accept that, like presumably Dzhemal himself does not, you can acknowledge that what is happening within Orthodox communities is greater than what can happen in the countries whose religions have been downgraded to mere social statuses: it is esoteric, mystical, uncontrollable, lived in addition to learned. 

Because it occupies a higher and greater space, it is capable of taking up a greater place in the life of the people and the nation. Orthodoxy is not just able to be some common social reference point, it is capable of being the truth and foundation of a civilization. 

While moderns try to find meaning, and try to blow up these narratives about discrimination, policing, and ethnic diversity into a common faith to unite the people, there exists that which can actually do it, but due to the pride of people, who wish to only look to themselves as the criterion for everything, it is out of their reach. Because they view humans as the ultimate measure and ultimate end, they are damned to their humanism, and trapped by their narrative. 

But above and beyond them exists a universe to which they are blind, and this is ultimately why their ways of thinking and their systems will not last into the future. They can only build that which is limited to this time. 

Without the esoteric, an organ in the anatomy of civilization is missing. 

Arcs, Not Systems, for Chronologically Grand Thinkers

Many people into alternative political philosophies will find themselves struggling to get specific in reference to what their long-term vision. It may sound counterintuitive, but this is because their vision of politics is chronologically grand, as opposed to chronologically shallow. It is actually people with shallow vision that may feel comfortable latching onto a particular -ism that fits the time exactly, but it has been my experience that with maturity and bigger picture thought, one becomes more inclined to a broader range of possibilities (especially during times of uncertainty), and one also finds themselves falling out of the side of every political dialog, completely incapable of being limited to the small ring of thought that has become the fleeting focal point for the short-term.

The chronologically grand thinkers imagine politics in the context of history, and see the future as having deep roots. They do their best to think beyond the epoch and the <current year>. The chronologically shallow throw themselves into the political flavors of the day, and bring everything back to a series of simple questions and answers about the real and the immediate. Their frame of reference is small, and it is hard to even seriously consider them in a grand context because their views are not serious enough to be thought of as immutable. They are the definition of ephemeral. We can imagine them getting on another bandwagon before the end of the decade.

The chronologically grand thinkers cannot name a specific system or ideology with precision if they still have doubts. This is a weakness, but also a strength, because it allows them to be open to potentialities. While being specific and calling your short is admirable, one of the more impressive political books I read, Dugin's Fourth Political Theory, is joyfully open to the future, and many of the other thinkers of the New Right have also been greatly open to the future. 

Moreover, it's also a humble gesture, viewing the future as something that they do not get to forge themselves, but as something that is still in the process of being born. 

Thus the chronologically grand dissident thinkers (1a) are just plain open to the future, and we tend to look at the rising head of a powerful movement which is reflective of our views as (1b) providential. Whether it is the restoration of a monarch, a military coup, a democratic victory, or an outright revolution, we can see ourselves adjusting our tastes to the zeitgeist, instead of making the times and reality be adjusted to our views. The spirit of the times, of course, should not necessarily be understood as the end of history or even a temporary end goal for a generation... It might not even be correct at all. But because it might be correct, at least for this time, we have to throw our muscles into it in order to try to create any kind of alternative. For the fact of the matter is that any movement which opens the door to change is more dynamic than the status quo which is by its very nature closed to change. 

Eye of Providence, by Anastasia Voynovska (available here)

Our individual preferences must be ready to change when anything that is remotely reflective of our alternative view comes along, and, moreover, those of us who believe in God may believe that the first major opportunity for change that we see is something that has been ordained by God. Of course, all things are ordained by God, the question is whether we are to benefit from it in terms of achieving a better reality through its success, or being punished by the bad idea, and achieving a better spiritual reality as a result of its failure. 

The chronologically grand thinker has to have the humility to accept that a great myriad of systems have been practiced, many of them with good results (at least for a time), and that the future can hold for a return of one of these systems, or a fusion of two or more of them. 

(2) Another major reason that we dislike labels is because everything that is dissident that becomes systemized seems unnecessary, potentially contentious, pretentious, and cringe. People without any political power or influence coming up with detailed visions are ultimately contributing only to their own sadness, and they come off as people who are not in touch with reality. Nobody wants to be led by someone who sounds far away from his goal, and nobody wants to follow someone that comes off only as a dreamer. 

Thus, it is actually be better to conceive of dissident political philosophies as having an 'Arc,' not necessarily a particular system. They have goals, and visions, and some may be surprisingly particular, butt even when they are, they should be open to change. 

This practice could even be a useful explanation for people trying to negatively characterize their opposition. E.g., 

• the Social Democrat has Marxist arc
• the Republican has a Fascist arc
• the Libertarian has an Anarchist arc 

Explaining your opponent's arc in negative terms and accusing them of secretly aiming for the marginalization or destruction of something that most people generally value is already one of the most common forms of political critique.It is also one of the most dangerous forms, because it dislodges people from their own frame of reference and imposes upon them a set of accusations that they now have to defend against. 

In the case of the dissident right, the accusations are predominant and so toxic that there's really no way to escape it other than denial, which has you chasing your tail like a dog, or through fully accepting the narrative with as little spin as possible, which basically just has you looking insane for you have accepted a conclusion that the rest o the country views as absurd. 

In conclusion, it is best to think of any set of political philosophies or values as potentially just a large arc toward a distant goal. Maybe not even an arc, but rather it functions just as an explanatory arc, in which there is no goal, but simply an observation about reality that you believe repeats or holds steady.

The arcs allow us to relate back to contemporary realities while maintaining contact with the bigger vision. For instance, if we say that we have an 'authoritarian right' arc, it could easily indicate that the local political party or candidate X will tend to get our vote, but the overall vision can be far more long-term and aimed at greater ends. We can participate and talk about chronologically soon politics in a way that makes sense to others without abandoning the grander vision that we may have. 

It also helps us understand how politicians actually compare standing next to each other, and how they may even have very exceedingly different arcs in spite of their short-term similarities. And it is also through this system that we can also have the benefit of being detached from overly rigid systems which would honestly only harm us -- being hyperfocused on a future that might not happen, and missing all of the potential benefits of the real future that is truly providential. 

Unnecessary Dichotomies & Narrative Thinking

We are sometimes taught to think in the direction of opposites, and that "sadness" is the opposite of "happiness," but isn't it also the case that anger or nausea is just as distant from happiness as sadness? You could say that this is an unnecessary dichotomy -- I think 'false dichotomy' would be too strong since it is not deceptive to make a comparison between the two...It's just not the fact that we have to conceive of sadness as the opposite of happiness.

I think there's actually a lot of unnecessary dichotomies like this -- for instance, Capitalism and Communism are opposing economic visions, but if we were to look at a partially planned economy from the premodern period, we could scarcely say that it is a "mixed economy," nor could we say that it either validates a Capitalist or Communist world view. Thus, while Communist & Capitalist are opposites in a sense, it does not mean that, by necessity, an economy which has property rights/ownership that would be considered "mixed" by somoene from a capitalist/communist perspective is necessarily mixed. 

Just as such, we cannot say "There are atheists who do not believe in heaven or hell, and Muslims that believe in layered heavens and hells, and Buddhists as well who acknowledge near infinite heavens & hells, so a Christian is a moderate, perhaps even closer to an atheist!, since he believes in one heaven, one hell." 

By thinking too much "logically" in a linear, graph-paper sense of the word, we come to unnecessary dichotomies. The sort of thing that school teachers would drum out of us -- the attempt to map everything out and categorize things has actually resulted in all of these unnecessary dichotomies that clutter the mind. 

We can see this as well with the "racist" and "anti-racist" dichotomy. Yes, in a sense, the opposite of someone who believes in the superiority of their race and dislikes other racists is an anti-racist, but this is not a scale that actually has to be applied to everything. It's not useful in every circumstance.  In fact, it may even be the case that it is very much not useful in most circumstances. 

Unnecessary dichotomies is one of the things that hampers any form of debate because it draws people into the practice of trying to define their enemy in unflattering ways -- ways that does not actually amount to how they define themselves. It breeds a sort of dishonesty in discussion that rarely anyone moves beyond. 

 

And this is the stuff of narrative thinking: everything that exists in the world is reuploaded into the context that the partisan thinker wants. So, for instance, gender roles in a Sri Lankan fishing village or 19th century art becomes something that is then looked at through the lens of a 21st century feminist, and the whole world rewards her as an intellectual for translating it all into the biases that she has. 

People think they are doing something objective when they literally take a foreign, independent cluster of references, meanings, and ideas, and then reconstruct them within their own framework of bias in a way that is usually unflattering. 

This isn't philosophy. It's thought terrorism. 

There Is No Moral Progress

Introduction

The far social left, which have come to dominate a lot of public discourse and who we often refer to as "SJWs" and "wokescolds" and enjoy reaching for the word "bigot" and "Nazi" when anyone disagrees with them, often come off as the primary opponents of the Dissident Right, just like how the scientifically illiterate fundamentalist Christians and heartless robber baron capitalists and their corrupt political sprog are the primary opponents of the far left. But it's actually a bad habit for us to spend so much time with them. While some of the material we have of them is useful for trying to push people who straddle the center further right & galvanize our movement, the actual ideas we always have to deal with come from the progressive left humanists like Steven Pinker who are nuanced and can actually have a very tight argument. They aren't bad, either, and the arguments are perfectly reasonable, intelligently written, and have slick appeal.  

One of the issues with them, however, is that in a godless universe sans metaphysics, everything comes down to utilitarianism, which Fr. Seraphim Rose refers to as being ultimately nihilistic. Nihilistic in the literal sense that there is no acknowledgment of a greater moral authority, and everything hinges around forming some public consensus of how to give the greatest good to the greatest number. Because no good can be pointed to beyond what is the most obvious, and the second we begin talking about what the good is everyone begins to disagree because our visions are so radically different, the arguments generally focus on reducing the bad, which is usually more obvious. 

After all, many things feel good which are not good, and many people debate how good things really are, whether we are talking about a strict work life-to-work balance or eggs, but we can all agree that someone throwing acid in the face of a stranger is bad -- an example I remember Sam Harris using when questioned by a sharp philosophy student in the UK. Atheist ethical systems are ultimately constructed from what is most obviously evil, and hopes to branch off of this until we can come up with some public concept of good. 

Sam Harris is famous for making really basic arguments to large audiences. It's a mystery how he has become a spokesperson for secular humanism. 

So, all of morality is reduced to avoidance of what is agreed upon as bad, and moral progress is the trend in history of the world to generally improve. 

Their vision of moral progress generally all comes down to the following:

Moral progress is the reduction of pain and suffering. 

• There is less pain and suffering because of progressive policies which focus on reducing this.
• Premodern governments were ignorant (at best) and morally reprehensible (at worst) were illiberal and based on superstitions.
• We must have progressive secular humanist governments that focus on reducing pain and suffering, thus are decidedly intersectional, secular, and socialist.

In addition to these arguments, there is also one smuggled in assumption that never gets talked about: the universal moral equality of all individuals, and the general disregard for groups. Individuals have rights, and groups are artificial constructs. 

There's a lot of shying away of what this could ever mean for groups. Even the primal human inclination is to look out for one's family first and foremost, then one's tribe and broader community, we have to take away this kind of thinking because the bottom immediately falls out from this concept of the moral. When we can question where it is important to primarily reduce pain and suffering and become specific, we start taking the globalist-humanist basis of this out of the framework it has to be understood in & open up a different box of questions and ideas. The whole plot is lost because we all are now thinking in terms of our own benefit and our own group before others, and we begin to see the world as a competition of groups with differing systems to acquire the means to reduce suffering, and we think in terms of hierarchy and competition. This idea could be expanded upon, but that would be another essay. 

Is Moral Progress Really Just Less Pain & Suffering

The statement is rational in the sense that no person is going to say that I do not believe that the reduction of pain and suffering is moral.

However, this is simply not the right way to measure morality, because:

i. some virtue is acquired through elements of pain and suffering. To learn discipline, we sacrifice leisure and laxity.
ii. some pain and suffering is deserved. Men who commit murders that now feel the pain of isolation in jail are receiving a just desert.
iii. some pain and suffering is caused entirely by amoral agents and has no moral quality to it. Thus, some questions of pain and suffering are no longer in the scope of a discussion on morality.
iv. morality just generally transcends pleasure. The right thing is not measured ever by what feels good, but by what is in concordance with what is beneficial to the growth of people and provides the greatest cosmic outcome. Pleasure may be the just reward for moral action, but the joy from self-satisfaction at having done the right thing is a stark contrast with the hedonist's pleasure.
v. some reductions in pain and suffering flies in the face of moral progress. Indeed, there are papers that argue that even things like child smut can reduce the instances of actual victimization of children (Science Daily).

Less Pain & Suffering Is a General Improvement

The reduction of pain and suffering is not always even a moral concern, and sometimes the reduction of pain and suffering can come at the cost of morality, such as the example of smut potentially reducing sexual violence and assault. Surely, nobody would argue that increased consumption of that stuff is a moral good, at best it would be morally neutral (like everything should theoretically be treated in the atheist universe), but it would be hard to argue that a man who logs onto the internet to view women doing degrading things is involved in a moral act.

Less pain and suffering is nearly always desirable, and thus can be conceptualized as a general improvement. For instance, better technology and warnings that results in people being safer from hurricanes is a great improvement, but it does not really have that much in the way of "moral progress" in the sense that nobody killed by a hurricane is being killed by an evil agent. It is tragedy and pain in the same way that any other untimely death is that cannot be blamed on some agent acting nefariously.

I would hesitate to even refer to any of this as progress. Progress always implies a path toward something, and while many things can be imagined to have a desired end like less pain and suffering, morality is not something that we progress to because it is something which is not worked toward or progressively understood, but timeless and beyond man.

Morality Has No Dimension of Progress

What is right is always right. Obviously, different times produce different circumstances, and the good may not align exactly with the terms of those circumstances. For instance, the concepts of "serf," "slave," "sharecropper," "nobi," "Brahmin," "warrior," are not universal, nor do they necessarily extend across time. Yet, when the terms are even accounted for and we think about the principles of right and wrong, we can apply the general virtues to specific situations and come to conclusions.

Because we are not God, there will always be disagreements on the priorities of the virtues and sometimes even what these virtues are. However, it still remains generally agreeable that we can condemn a cruel slave master in the 1st century BC because their cruelty is universally abhorred. We can also condemn a kind slave master for maintaining someone as a slave, and yet, we can also see some people perhaps venture forth with the argument that a master who keeps his slave living in good conditions -- conditions relatively better to the majority of free citizens -- is even doing well by the same universal measure of what is good.

The good is not relative to us -- we are simply relative to the good. Moreover, our inability to precisely articulate or even know the good is not proof of its non-existence, just as how the inability of the Egyptians in the year 2,000 BC to construct airplanes is not evidence against airplanes. If man were to have been wiped out by an asteroid before we ever invented airplanes, it would not mean that heavier-than-air flying machines were ever impossible just because sentient life never developed them. It would merely mean that it remained unknown by man. The good is real whether or not we know it, and whether or not it is knowable. 

There's Less Pain & Suffering Because of Technology

People mistakenly believe that things like the liberation of women, of serfs, of slaves, etc., were all accomplished by men becoming moral giants and realizing some profound truth.

It's completely the opposite.

Man develops the technology to transition out of a previous organization of labor, and then he declares that the old organization of labor was bad, and he forgets the reason such an organization of labor existed in the first place but pretends it existed due to prejudice or hatred. In reality, these forms of labor existed like this because it was the most efficient division of labor, and just as the people then thought of themselves as the end point of history and could not imagine much beyond them, some of them took up the pen and wrote about how this may be the best that it can get.

Because we live in an era that looks like this, we have decided that we created the best institutions, and not that the technology created the institutions that are normal to us. We think our authorship over the current era to be greater than what it actually is.

The general improvement to all man's lots is the result of

- modern medicine
- electricity
- mass production
- mass surveillance resulting in greater accountability
- greater rates of education. 

Through these developments, we have reached a heightened state of material improvement that has reorganized a labor and daily life to be free of the deprivation and lack of surveillance that used to fill life with a lot of suffering we do not know now. Our morality has now matched these expectations. Less desperate people means less crime. Less extreme master/slave relationships make it so less sociopaths are able to have vast amounts of people at their whim. It also means that more sociopaths are observed, and more sociopaths are choosing rich fantasy lives over actual crimes or other various means to scratch their devilish itch because the chances of being caught are exponentially greater with modern technology. 

Because everything has been restructured to match where technology is, our sensitivity to certain things has changed. Because the state can be a father to a bastard, we no longer think particularly ill of the unwed mothers. Because of the anonymity of urban centers and how even rural people no longer really know their neighbors, the personal vices of man are not just things that we tolerate, but they are things that we are encouraged to completely and totally ignore. 

These things appear to be an advancement of morality because they match the living conditions which correlate with less pain and suffering to us. However, people who believe in God or virtue recognize that this is an incomplete view of morality. There is no moral progress for all of society because morality happens at a fundamentally individual level where our intentions are being measured. 

The closest thing to universal moral progress would be nothing more than providing a greater basis for education which happens to result in a greater amount of individuals attaining a higher moral state. However, one could say that the education of previous generations, which occurred in far more impoverished conditions, actually had another layer to them because of the poverty. If poverty and the threat of starvation, if close communities and large families, tend to produce greater sensitivity to the needs of others and, through humility and selflessness, make humans more inclined to prosocial moral behavior, it could even be the case that those who have access to all of the benefits of modern education but none of the above may actually morally regress. 

Still, we should ultimately never think of things in the framework of moral progress because morality is about the will and intention of individuals, and the second that we remove morality from this context it no longer makes as much sense. Thus, it is safe to say, moral progress does not exist, and the ingredients for moral progress might even be significantly different from what we would normally expect. 

Narrative Thinking

While listening to the Reformed Christian thinker James Whites (somewhere in the second half of this) he mentioned that there are two ways that people interact with ideas...

The first he called narrative thinking, which is characterized by people who just see an event happening -- such as the Coronavirus -- and now all of their thoughts on both things immediately connected to it and more abstract ideas are understood through this lens.

James White

The second he actually just called slow thinking (a blunder but he was perhaps coming up with this off the top of his head), but it really should just be understood as philosophy. We can simply call it philosophy because it focuses on finding the truth independent of the events that are happening and with the big picture in mind.

Narrative thinking is basically a mistake. It's playing with a deck that doesn't have enough cards because it is basically not considering the problem in its totality, but only as it stands in the present. A good example of this that many Westerners learn is the Treaty of Versailles, being regarded as far too damning and punishing to the Germans and thus immediately setting the grounds for another war.

Many politicians also think in terms of narratives -- everything is about the immediate problems that constituents face, and it is never good enough to have a long timeline for success in most circles. Few people want to wait months or years for a benefit, let alone decades, and so people look to the most immediate way to create change, even though these chances may fit poorly into metahistory. 

This is why, in one sense, a crisis is the very worst time for people to begin thinking about what has to be done. They are no longer thinking soberly, but thinking of this specific narrative and nothing else. In a sense, it is not unlike making a decision in a state of duress.

Anyone who thinks about politics or important events through the lens of what is immediately happening, not through the broader picture of what will happen in 100 years and what happened 100 years prior, is a menace to public discourse.