Anglobraining

 English men are still slaves of empiricism. Which means they get an allergic reaction reaction you ask them to generalize about something. This is the legacy of William of Ockham*, where there are no universals in nature. Englishmen by nature do not believe in universals.

"So you end up with these trivialities - they're good at trivialities. The best example would be logical positivism, the end of philosophy, which is the direct heir of William of Ockham as well."

E. Michael Jones in his Degenerate Moderns Brazilian Edition interview

*Link is to the best & most succinct explanation of Ockham's denunciation of universals.

One of the most annoying and constant features of philosophizing in English is the constant pushback against coming to any general conclusions or universals; there is always the desire to find some exception, or to dream up some absurd hypothetical that uncharitably bypasses normal interpretations of the opposition's arguments. Everything has to be couched in such perfect language because there is no longer any principle of charity, nor any desire to actually attack the content of the argument head-on. 

Let us refer to the act of seeking out edge cases & absurd hypotheticals to bypass universals and normal lines of argument as Anglobraining. It is the effort to turn everything into a discussion about trivialities and exceptions, making either universals or grander logical arguments irrelevant, and the desire to shrimp out of any such arguments, seeing them as impossible or improperly setup. 

One of the First & Most Important Anglibrainers: William of Ockham; note the massive Angloschnoz.

Everything is premised on the world being dominated by a materialistic unreality. By unreality, we mean something that fails to be constant or measurable because the second we put our finger down on it it begins to vanish before our eyes. Everything is reduced to nihil because the anglobrainer will literally drag you into quantum mechanics before he is willing to concede that universals or rationality can provide us with enough to have an actual discussion.

Perhaps a terrific example of this is how any discussion about gender esssentialism has to be completely derailed by the existence of intersex peoples. By intersex, of course, we mean an actual definition of people whose chromosomal sex is inconsistent with their phenotype, which occurs in 0.018% of the population (PubMed).

Of course it is not the case that intersex people are completely irrelevant to a discussion on gender essentialism. They are certainly a category which must be accounted for in an essentialist's position, but most people tend to believe that if something is applicable to 99.9% of people, it is quite insightful of a measure for humans in general. The exception to the rule does not break the rule, it affirms the rule. The rule points out the anomalous, which makes it a good rule, and that which fails to conform to this rule is something that has to be addressed in light of the rule. 

If a species no longer fits into the same genus, the structure of the family is not broken; the system simply refined. But the Anglobrain would have you believe that the very idea of taxonomic rank must be done away with. 

Some people are born blind. We do not let that change our ideas about how eyes should function because, maybe, it is unfair to people born blind to say that they should function at all. Likewise, people who are born with irregularities in their manifestation of sexual characteristics are not viewed as something that should throw an entire wrench into how we should view sexual functionality in humans. 

But the Anglobrain thinks that all talk of essentialism must be called off if there is any sort of complaint to be made against a model based on universals. 

Gender isn't real because we can't empirically conclude that sex is even necessarily real since intersex people exist. 

The same can be applied to discussions about morality. 

A man cannot say we shouldn't change the names of historic buildings in response to a story about General Lee's name being removed from something because he would certainly support changing the name of a campus building named after the historically relatively insignificant pedophile who that donated to have it built, as in the case of Sir Ron Bierley and Wellington College.

Moreover, we are supposed to be forever hung up on the problem of thou shalt not kill  and thou shalt not steal because of arguments about self-defense and Robin Hood. Conversation is never allowed to advance into a rich discussion of ethics because we cannot get over the fact that the language has not been meticulously assembled with nano-optical tweezers & microscopes.

The anglobrain wants every inch of every argument to be painstakingly defined because he has one move: insert the edge case; attack the universal. 

But it is ultimately not the duty of the writer to turn every broadly philosophical work into a narrow, analytical philosophical paper. It is the job of the reader to understand the core of the argument, and then to make a case corresponding to the argument, pointing out any potential common ground, and pointing out important differences. 

This does not suit some people, though, because they dislike the idea of philosophy being between competing systems for understanding the world that try to navigate a common reality. 

Their version of philosophy does not include usable universals, thus is not a common reality to be navigated. It's a battlefield of atomized individuals which do not contribute to any whole, but only live out a solitary existence in a world of fog. 

Anglobraining is derailing everything with postmodernity and races toward antinomianism.

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.  

Chauvin's Defense Relying on Handwritten Notes? Third World Stuff

 One of the more important characteristics of any country that I would consider to be developed would be its ability for the professionals and experts to simply report the truth transparently without any fear of reprisal or blowback. 

Every country, of course, has sacred cows which it tries to protect. This is not really an issue. But when it comes to reporting the facts clearly & concisely of a crime or some other incident that does not need to be inherently political, there can be no effort to make a cover up. 

But take a look at what Chauvin's defense team is relying on:

Handwritten notes of a law enforcement interview with Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, say Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system. 

"If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3," Baker told investigators.

Kare11

The documents that should clearly convey this information are too opaque to clearly communicate this information. This, alone, would be just potentially be an error of how the documents themselves are organized, but combined with the fact that one can expect "expert" witnesses and the coroners themselves to firmly put themselves into the pocket of the prosecutor's, the defense is absolutely forced to rely on documents like these. 

You are no longer living in a truly developed country when it is the case that people are too shy to speak the facts in a court case because political interest groups are so invested in their narratives that they seek to win political points through dishonesty. 

Any society which cannot examine individual events objectively has no hope of having a functioning democracy.

27% of People in 1937 Didn't Have Religious Membership

 An interesting paragraph jumped out at me while looking through an article on religiosity: 

The polling giant has been measuring church membership since 1937 when nearly three-quarters of the population (73%) reported membership in a house of worship. For much of that time, membership remained at about 70% but began to decline after 1999. By the late 2000s, membership had dropped to about 62% and has continued to fall.

KTLA 

Many people would focus on the fact that this article talks about membership in houses of worship dropping dramatically, but the fact of the matter is that it is pretty surprising that nearly a third of Americans historically did not see themselves as members of a particular religious tradition. 

This reminds me of polls from the 19th century which showed that a third or more of scientists were atheists, and polls of Parisians from the same time which showed similarly that only 80% of them identified as Christians. Neither the Jewish or Muslim populations of the city would scarcely make up the rest of the 20% to 100, so sizable religionless populations did exist in those times. 

It may very well be the case that a third of Americans have always been somewhat religionless. I am not saying outright atheist, though certainly it would not be too difficult to believe that maybe 1 in 10 Americans were historically atheist as Rodney Stark has implied, but I can imagine that a very large amount of Americans had extremely mild views about God and spirituality. 

The early 20th century was a time when the occult flourished, after all, and the 1950s onwards were full of New Age movements, fixations on things like hypnotism and Freudian psychology. 

Americans tend to be so obsessed with this idea that grandma & grandpa (and great-grandma & great-grandpa) were pious pillars of their community, along with absolutely everyone else in the community, that they forget that there were porn theaters, prostitutes, alcoholics, atheists, literal Communists and Anarchists, practitioners of the occult, etc., thriving in urban areas, and no doubt having presences in towns and villages. 

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.

Moderate to Avoid Being Negligent

 A very insightful quotation from St. Gregory of Sinai:

In my opinion, those who do not psalmodize much act rightly, for it means that they esteem moderation - and according to the sages moderation is best in all things. In this way they do not expend all the energy of their soul in ascetic labor, thus making the intellect negligent and slack where prayer is concerned. On the contrary, by devoting but little time to psalmodizing, they can give most of their time to prayer. On the other hand, when the intellect is exhausted by continuous noetic invocation and intense concentration, it can be given some rest by releasing it from the straightness of silent prayer and allowing it to relax in the amplitude of psalmody. This is an excellent rule, taught by the wisest men.

The Philokalia, Vol. IV

 As the monks take time to chant the psalms, so, too, must regular people take breaks in their life in order to not slack when it comes to prayer. 

We become intellectually negligent if we do not achieve adequate rest, and so it should always be our goal to achieve a proper balance so we can be at our best.

The trick is to figure out how to balance it perfectly. This is something that will be a daily struggle for most of us. 

Premoderns Understood Doubt & Skepticism

One of the unfair stereotypes that people have about our forebears is that they were hopelessly ignorant folks to whom religion came easily.

They sucked down the information without question, and gullibly believed everything that was told to them. They were the sort of people that saw lightning and heard thunder, and totally believed that God is angry! or some other oversimplification.

But St. Gregory of Sinai, who spent much of his life in a monastery, tells us that this is simply not the case. 

Mature believers everywhere, and in every circumstance, struggle with doubt:

As the great teacher St John Chrysostom states, we should be in a position to say that we need no help from the Scriptures, no assistance from other people, but are instructed by God; for 'all will be taught by God' (Isa. 54:13; John 6:45), in such a way that we learn from Him and through Him what we ought to know. And this applies not only to those of us who are monks but to each and every one of the faithful: we are all of us called to carry the law of the Spirit written on the tablets of our hearts (cf. 2 Cor. 3:3), and to attain like the Cherubim the supreme privilege of conversing through pure prayer in the heart directly with Jesus. But because we are infants at the time of our renewal through baptism we do not understand the grace and the new life conferred upon us. Unaware of the surpassing grandeur of the honor and glory in which we share, we fail to realize that we ought to grow in soul and spirit through the keeping of the commandments and so perceive noetically what we have received. On account of this most of us fall through indifference and servitude to the passions into a state of benighted obduracy. We do not know whether God exists, or who we are, or what we have become, although through baptism we have been made sons of God, sons of light, and children and members of Christ. If we are baptized when grown up, we feel that we have been baptized only in water and not by the Spirit. And even though we have been renewed in the Spirit, we believe only in a formal, lifeless and ineffectual sense, and we say we are full of doubts. 

Hence because we are in fact non-spiritual we live and behave in a non-spiritual manner. Should we repent, we understand and practice the commandments only in a bodily way and not spiritually. And if after many labors a revelation of grace is in God's compassion granted to us, we take it for a delusion. Or if we hear from others how grace acts, we are persuaded by our envy to regard that also as a delusion. Thus we remain corpses until death, failing to live in Christ and to be inspired by Him. According to Scripture, even that which we possess will be taken away from us at the time of our death or our judgment because of our lack of faith and our despair (cf. Matt. 25:29). We do not understand that the children must be like the father, that is to say, we are to be made gods by God and spiritual by the Holy Spirit; for 'that which is born of the Spirit is spirit' (John 3:6). But we are unregenerate, even though we have become members of the faith and heavenly, and so the Spirit of God does not dwell within us (cf Gen. 6:3). Because of this the Lord has handed us over to strange afflictions and captivity, and slaughter flourishes, perhaps because He wishes to correct evil, or cut it off, or heal it by more powerful remedies.

St. Gregory of Sinai, in the Philokalia, Vol. IV