*
The way in which the media can put news 'down the memory hole' simply by refraining from mentioning it is an important insight into the nature of modern discourse.
It indicates the modern 'reality' is only that which is in the media now; and that the price paid for so much media content, so much time spent by the addicted citizenry on acquiring 'news' - is that each fresh day the slate is being wiped-clean.
So, the media control what is in people's minds past, present and (speculations about) the future.
*
There is nothing too big to be buried.
In the UK, the Fuel Crisis of 2000 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_protests_in_the_United_Kingdom - was without doubt the most extraordinary political event of my lifetime; yet it was almost immediately buried. People never think about it, never talk about it, and - so far as I can see - it made no long term difference.
Even major terror atrocities can be disposed of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_International_Airport_attack
*
What enables this is something in which we are almost-all of us complicit; the flood of news/ opinion/ analysis/ gossip on a daily basis.
To keep-up means that we must according news priority over history; the new dissolves the old, the old can only survive by being continually re-made as new.
This process is critical to modernity, because the process is intrinsically devaluing of the past - of people, opinions and facts.
*
This is indeed the key to the inversions of political correctness.
The casual, routine, un-argued assumption of the correctness and superiority of the current, is critical to the ability of the PC elites to retain their avant garde status (and their claim to expertise) by their ability continually to re-make morality, truth and aesthetics - to make sin into virtue, virtue into sin, propaganda into truth, truth into propaganda, beauty into kitsch and ugliness celebrated as beauty.
*
Because when the old is kept alive, this happens only on the media's own terms; so that the old is seen through the lens of the modern.
In such circumstances it is facile to misrepresent the past in any convenient fashion. Of course the media often invents falsehoods (I have experienced this personally - being 'quoted' - in quotation marks - in the mainstream international media supposedly-saying things which I never said and which do not believe); but invention is not necessary.
Since nobody and nothing is perfect, enemies can be rubbished by remembering bad things (maybe even just bad rumours or speculations); and since nobody and nothing is utterly bad then friends can readily be rehabilitated.
There is no requirement to prove the new better than the old, and no attempt is made to prove this; the new simply displaces the old on the assumption that those in the past were worse than us.
*
(To follow-up yesterday's example of Evidence Based Medicine - EBM; when this was introduced as superior to past ways of conducting clinical practice, there was no attempt to prove its superiority as a system, nor was this required of EBM. Instead, EBM simply displaced traditional methods of doing medicine in official discourse, and is now taught at medical schools as fact, as morally superior (doctors are taught to submit to EBM, i.e. to submit to management) as the only rational (because systematic) conduct. A 'systematic review' (i.e. a review conducted according to pre-specified and explicit criteria, and done by biostatisticians) is stated to be intrinsically superior to the knowledge and experience of expert clinicians. Past medicine (i.e. pre 1994), past doctors - those who made all of the discoveries from which we now benefit - are talked about and taught almost universally as being wicked, incompetent, selfish, corrupt.)
*
The future can be controlled likewise. The future is what people today say it will be.
I never cease to be amazed by the way that people around the world came to believe in the predictions of global warming.
One would imagine that to be regarded as a prophet, the minimumn requirement would be to make prophecies which came true.
Otherwise, how would you know someone was a prophet?
There never has been even the slightest shred of evidence that anybody can predict the earths climate, yet because the media is full of people doing exactly this, on a daily basis, 'everybody' (for a while) began to believe it was possible; believed, indeed, that our knowledge of the earth's future climate was the most certain and important knowledge possesed by humanity, the item of knoelwedge around which all policies must be organized.
Yet of course humans cannot predict future climate! Not even slightly.
*
How could so many people be so stupid as to imagine that we can?
Simple - because it fills the media, we are addicted to media, we believe what is in the media; and we believe what is in the media simply because it fills our minds, and it fills our minds because we have an intrinsic assumption that the current wipes clean the past.
And we believe that the current wipes clean the past because in a thoroughly secular society - and a society which regards truth, beauty and virtue as merely subjective delusions - at a deep spiritual level, we have to believe that the current wipes clean the past.
*
It is the insight first articulated by the Romantics: Since modern life has no purpose or meaning, life is lived in the present moment; therefore life is (nothing more than) a series of present moments (each complete unto itself - the world in a grain of sand). The validity of life is the validity of the present moment. The past is dead, except insofar as it is remembered by humans - which means the past is merely subjective. Knowledge is simply a matter of: "What have you done for me lately?"
*
At the root of all this is the absolute need for diversion as a primary spiritual mechanism in secular modernity.
In a world regarded as being ultimately without meaning or purpose; the most effective response is to fill the mind, and given the phenomenon of habituation (where animals stop responding to repeated identical stimuli) the most effective way of filling the mind is with a stream of novelty.
But the whole thing can only continue so long as the mass media remains large, attention grabbing, accessible, and prestigious.
If at any point, for any reason, this media dominance stopped; and of course this will happen sooner or later (probably sooner, due to the corruptions of bureaucracy) - then the PC edifice will immediately crumble.
*
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
What is the justification for the leadership of the PC technocracy?
*
Until about a decade ago, I was fairly heavily involved in critique-ing 'Evidence Based Medicine' (EBM) and the broader movement to bring clinical practice under political and managerial control:
http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/91/5/371.full.pdf
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/journalism/ebm.html
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/cargocult.html
This was a matter of which I had some 'insider knowledge' from working as a public health physician and lecturer in epidemiology; including knowing/ working with the most recent UK Chief Medical Officers and engaging in discourse (certainly not 'debate' because it was one-sided) with leading advocates of EBM.
*
These experiences provided me with what seem-like insights into the way that the politically correct technocratic elite strive to justify their position of authority.
The way that it works is arranged hierarchically - and defeat on a superficial technological level leads to immediate retreat to the level below which is moral.
So despite the most apparent and obvious 'techno-' element of technocracy, this is somewhat misleading - it is, in fact, merely a kind of propaganda, designed to fool the inexpert and uninterested.
Underlying this is the unyielding base of non-empirical and politically correct idealism.
*
First line justification: Techno-procedural
The PC elite claim expertise in the techniques and procedures which they say are necessary to governance.
It would be difficult for the advocates of EBM to come straight-out and claim that they are morally entitled to rule (even though this is what they believe) - it is rhetorically much easier to claim that they are merely 'implementing' the results of impartial and intrinsically-valid techniques.
In EBM the basic technical method is to use large amounts of data (the quality of which is irrelevant) and subject it to statistical summary and analysis which is complex-enough to be boring or incomprehensible to the intended audience.
This applies more generally in PC governance: the techniques used are usually statistical - on the basis that most people regard large masses of numbers as intrinsically valid, cannot be bothered to analyze data critically and have zero knowledge of statistics.
Claims backed by large amounts of data are self-evidently validated; whereas critical analysis of the quality and applicability of data is merely abstruse technical quibbling...
Statistics becomes the real reality - humanly-experienced reality becomes 'anecdote' - hence nothing at all.
*
Second-line justification - progressive ethical
If the validity of the data or the statistical techniques are challenged successfully, then the technocracy move back to politically correct ethics as the justification of their right to rule.
PC ethics are progressive, continually changing over time. Therefore understanding and expertise in ethics is continually becoming obsolete, continually needing to be updated, continually inverting (bad becoming good and vice versa) and thereby maintaining a rarity value for those who are competent in this discourse.
In a nutshell, the PC elite claim that only they are competent rulers, because only the PC elite understand how morality changes, only the PC elite have kept-up with these changes.
To have non-PC persons in positions of ruler-ship is therefore immoral.
(As always with PC, the morality is defined negatively. The primarily immoral is identified (racism, sexism, whatever) - and virtue is defined in terms of opposition to this. )
*
So, my repeated experience in arguing with the advocates of EBM was that they would first defend their right to dictate medical decision making on the basis of their (supposed) expertise in accessing and analyzing data; then when this was exposed as illusory and irrelevant they would revert to moral arguments of a negative type.
I found that, at root, the negative moral arguments were based on visceral anti-doctor emotions (especially among doctors).
these were justified in many ways: an aversion to the 'arrogance' (which might mean mrely autonomy - or might mean resistance to political correctness) of some doctors, or of the medical profession; or to a one-sided hatred of the abuses of medicine (focusing on doctors who were lazy or incompetent, doctors who uncritically adopted new ineffective treatments, or failed to adopt new effective treatments, or who continued to use old ineffective treatments).
It was a negative ethic because it was focused on preventing abuses, rather than stimulating good practice.
Good practice was taken for granted as something that naturally happens; so the main job of policy was forcibly to coerce doctors so that none will be able to be lazy, or do things deemed incompetent or obsolete, and all will be made to do things deemed effective or necessary.
*
What counts as desirable or undesirable in terms of behavior and practice derives from techno-procedural justifications.
But at this level of discourse, the techno-procedural aspects are not defended in terms of being correct (indeed, they have usually already been proven incorrect by this point in the discussion); but are defended in terms that they are anti-abuse.
The rhetorical move is that if you are truly against abuses (if you hate them as much as the EBM advocates do - and they are merciless in their flagellation of imperfection) then you must be in favor of bureaucratic systems of preventing abuses; if you are against bad doctors, then you must be in favor of bureaucracy.
*
It is not claimed that the bureacrats are necessarily good as individuals - rather the implicit claim is that bureaucrats do not matter as individuals - because systems are better than individuals.
The idea is to replace doctors - whose personal qualities do matter, hence doctors can damage things by their selfishness and corruption - with bureaucrats who are mere functionaries following rules, and whose personal qualities therefore do not matter because virtue is located in the system, not in the person.
*
But in the end, EBM was able to emerge and grow for no better reason than that it served an agenda of power: it combined surface plausibility with a rationale for expanding power.
EBM survived not be being able to win arguments, but by being able to ignore arguments.
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2009/08/zombie-science-of-evidence-based.html
Merely by being part of the general trend of PC bureaucratization, moral inversion, progressivism - EBM had instant and unstoppable inertia.
*
Until about a decade ago, I was fairly heavily involved in critique-ing 'Evidence Based Medicine' (EBM) and the broader movement to bring clinical practice under political and managerial control:
http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/91/5/371.full.pdf
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/journalism/ebm.html
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/cargocult.html
This was a matter of which I had some 'insider knowledge' from working as a public health physician and lecturer in epidemiology; including knowing/ working with the most recent UK Chief Medical Officers and engaging in discourse (certainly not 'debate' because it was one-sided) with leading advocates of EBM.
*
These experiences provided me with what seem-like insights into the way that the politically correct technocratic elite strive to justify their position of authority.
The way that it works is arranged hierarchically - and defeat on a superficial technological level leads to immediate retreat to the level below which is moral.
So despite the most apparent and obvious 'techno-' element of technocracy, this is somewhat misleading - it is, in fact, merely a kind of propaganda, designed to fool the inexpert and uninterested.
Underlying this is the unyielding base of non-empirical and politically correct idealism.
*
First line justification: Techno-procedural
The PC elite claim expertise in the techniques and procedures which they say are necessary to governance.
It would be difficult for the advocates of EBM to come straight-out and claim that they are morally entitled to rule (even though this is what they believe) - it is rhetorically much easier to claim that they are merely 'implementing' the results of impartial and intrinsically-valid techniques.
In EBM the basic technical method is to use large amounts of data (the quality of which is irrelevant) and subject it to statistical summary and analysis which is complex-enough to be boring or incomprehensible to the intended audience.
This applies more generally in PC governance: the techniques used are usually statistical - on the basis that most people regard large masses of numbers as intrinsically valid, cannot be bothered to analyze data critically and have zero knowledge of statistics.
Claims backed by large amounts of data are self-evidently validated; whereas critical analysis of the quality and applicability of data is merely abstruse technical quibbling...
Statistics becomes the real reality - humanly-experienced reality becomes 'anecdote' - hence nothing at all.
*
Second-line justification - progressive ethical
If the validity of the data or the statistical techniques are challenged successfully, then the technocracy move back to politically correct ethics as the justification of their right to rule.
PC ethics are progressive, continually changing over time. Therefore understanding and expertise in ethics is continually becoming obsolete, continually needing to be updated, continually inverting (bad becoming good and vice versa) and thereby maintaining a rarity value for those who are competent in this discourse.
In a nutshell, the PC elite claim that only they are competent rulers, because only the PC elite understand how morality changes, only the PC elite have kept-up with these changes.
To have non-PC persons in positions of ruler-ship is therefore immoral.
(As always with PC, the morality is defined negatively. The primarily immoral is identified (racism, sexism, whatever) - and virtue is defined in terms of opposition to this. )
*
So, my repeated experience in arguing with the advocates of EBM was that they would first defend their right to dictate medical decision making on the basis of their (supposed) expertise in accessing and analyzing data; then when this was exposed as illusory and irrelevant they would revert to moral arguments of a negative type.
I found that, at root, the negative moral arguments were based on visceral anti-doctor emotions (especially among doctors).
these were justified in many ways: an aversion to the 'arrogance' (which might mean mrely autonomy - or might mean resistance to political correctness) of some doctors, or of the medical profession; or to a one-sided hatred of the abuses of medicine (focusing on doctors who were lazy or incompetent, doctors who uncritically adopted new ineffective treatments, or failed to adopt new effective treatments, or who continued to use old ineffective treatments).
It was a negative ethic because it was focused on preventing abuses, rather than stimulating good practice.
Good practice was taken for granted as something that naturally happens; so the main job of policy was forcibly to coerce doctors so that none will be able to be lazy, or do things deemed incompetent or obsolete, and all will be made to do things deemed effective or necessary.
*
What counts as desirable or undesirable in terms of behavior and practice derives from techno-procedural justifications.
But at this level of discourse, the techno-procedural aspects are not defended in terms of being correct (indeed, they have usually already been proven incorrect by this point in the discussion); but are defended in terms that they are anti-abuse.
The rhetorical move is that if you are truly against abuses (if you hate them as much as the EBM advocates do - and they are merciless in their flagellation of imperfection) then you must be in favor of bureaucratic systems of preventing abuses; if you are against bad doctors, then you must be in favor of bureaucracy.
*
It is not claimed that the bureacrats are necessarily good as individuals - rather the implicit claim is that bureaucrats do not matter as individuals - because systems are better than individuals.
The idea is to replace doctors - whose personal qualities do matter, hence doctors can damage things by their selfishness and corruption - with bureaucrats who are mere functionaries following rules, and whose personal qualities therefore do not matter because virtue is located in the system, not in the person.
*
But in the end, EBM was able to emerge and grow for no better reason than that it served an agenda of power: it combined surface plausibility with a rationale for expanding power.
EBM survived not be being able to win arguments, but by being able to ignore arguments.
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2009/08/zombie-science-of-evidence-based.html
Merely by being part of the general trend of PC bureaucratization, moral inversion, progressivism - EBM had instant and unstoppable inertia.
*
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Why must political correctness inevitably fail?
*
Political correctness has absolutely no chance of success, it must inevitably fail.
*
There are many reasons for this - some contingent but highly probable: such that the means will corrupt the end - so the endemic lying, dependence-creation and bribery of practical populist leftist politics will surely corrupt the ideals of PC.
And the fact of the failure of PC is blazingly obvious. As England has become more politically correct it has become more pervasively corrupt.
British political discourse is now barefaced lying, science is not even trying to be honest, law is not even trying to be just, art is ugly and disdains beauty, morals are inverted.
Even the crudest cheating, bribery and embezzlement are massively increased, tolerated, soon forgotten - and even if punished, punished only mildly.
*
The equation for modernizing societies is simple: increasing official bureaucracy/ objectivity/ impersonality = increasing actual corruption/ favoritism/ inefficiency.
The actuality is exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen in theory; yet this actuality does not stop it happening.
The rationale for ever-more bureaucracy is unaffected by the actuality of bureaucracy.
This means bureaucracy is operating at a level of pure ideals.
*
But there is a fundamental and very obvious reason why PC must fail; which is as follows:
If humanity is fundamentally corrupt and selfish such that human agency must be subordinated to impartial abstract system; then selfish and corrupt human agency can neither design nor implement impartial abstract systems.
So the actual systems of PC (being designed and imposed by selfish corrupt humans) will never be abstract and impartial but will on the contrary always bear exactly those marks of selfishness and corruption which they are supposed to suppress.
If you cannot trust humans to make their own choices, you cannot trust humans to make choices for other people.
*
This point is neither complex nor difficult to grasp - yet in order for PC to gain traction and currency it must blind itself to precisely this simple and obviously fatal flaw.
*
Political correctness merely substitutes one vast centralized selfish-corruption for the multitude of individual selfishnesses and corruptions of past societies.
Apparently it is easier for intellectuals to believe one big lie than many small ones - at any rate, the intrinsic flaws of bureaucracy are invisible to PC intellectuals.
*
It is not that PC intellectuals believe that abstract bureaucracies are perfect, rather that they will not believe in their intrinsic and gross imperfection. It is this blind spot which constitutes the big lie of PC.
And it is this blind spot which prevents PC from evaluating and comparing their proposed panacea of large totalitarian bureaucracies with the alternative of individual human agency.
*
All this is very obvious - but really, how do PC intellectuals fail to see it?
The answers are many: among them are micro-specialization, dishonesty and a short attention span.
*
Micro-specialization means that questions are framed so narrowly that they can only yield a narrow range of pre-defined answers (and never decisive and destructive refutations); dishonesty means that questions do not need to be answered at all but can be dismissed by ignoring, by crushing, or with ad hominem attacks; and a short attention span means that two step logic is beyond the capability of modern systems - PC can see one step ahead, to perceive that abstract bureaucratic system would prevent individual corruption; but cannot concentrate long enough to project two steps ahead, and to perceive that bureaucracies are not abstract but that their systems are merely a variant of individual corruption.
*
So the link between the increase in scope and strength of political correctness, and the increase in scope and strength of corruption is intrinsic and inevitable.
We need not therefore fear (because we will not get) an inhumanly efficient bureaucracy run by passionless impartial idealists; but we should fear and are getting a Brezhnev bureaucracy of seedy covert bribery and embezzlement among the intellectual elite - shielded by escalating propaganda of soaring Utopian idealism.
*
(The reality is that humans are indeed selfish and corrupt, and this is inescapable within the human condition on earth; but that our standards of behaviour are not human but divine and our reference should be heavenly not earthly. Read Pascal's Pensees for further elucidation...)
*
Political correctness has absolutely no chance of success, it must inevitably fail.
*
There are many reasons for this - some contingent but highly probable: such that the means will corrupt the end - so the endemic lying, dependence-creation and bribery of practical populist leftist politics will surely corrupt the ideals of PC.
And the fact of the failure of PC is blazingly obvious. As England has become more politically correct it has become more pervasively corrupt.
British political discourse is now barefaced lying, science is not even trying to be honest, law is not even trying to be just, art is ugly and disdains beauty, morals are inverted.
Even the crudest cheating, bribery and embezzlement are massively increased, tolerated, soon forgotten - and even if punished, punished only mildly.
*
The equation for modernizing societies is simple: increasing official bureaucracy/ objectivity/ impersonality = increasing actual corruption/ favoritism/ inefficiency.
The actuality is exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen in theory; yet this actuality does not stop it happening.
The rationale for ever-more bureaucracy is unaffected by the actuality of bureaucracy.
This means bureaucracy is operating at a level of pure ideals.
*
But there is a fundamental and very obvious reason why PC must fail; which is as follows:
If humanity is fundamentally corrupt and selfish such that human agency must be subordinated to impartial abstract system; then selfish and corrupt human agency can neither design nor implement impartial abstract systems.
So the actual systems of PC (being designed and imposed by selfish corrupt humans) will never be abstract and impartial but will on the contrary always bear exactly those marks of selfishness and corruption which they are supposed to suppress.
If you cannot trust humans to make their own choices, you cannot trust humans to make choices for other people.
*
This point is neither complex nor difficult to grasp - yet in order for PC to gain traction and currency it must blind itself to precisely this simple and obviously fatal flaw.
*
Political correctness merely substitutes one vast centralized selfish-corruption for the multitude of individual selfishnesses and corruptions of past societies.
Apparently it is easier for intellectuals to believe one big lie than many small ones - at any rate, the intrinsic flaws of bureaucracy are invisible to PC intellectuals.
*
It is not that PC intellectuals believe that abstract bureaucracies are perfect, rather that they will not believe in their intrinsic and gross imperfection. It is this blind spot which constitutes the big lie of PC.
And it is this blind spot which prevents PC from evaluating and comparing their proposed panacea of large totalitarian bureaucracies with the alternative of individual human agency.
*
All this is very obvious - but really, how do PC intellectuals fail to see it?
The answers are many: among them are micro-specialization, dishonesty and a short attention span.
*
Micro-specialization means that questions are framed so narrowly that they can only yield a narrow range of pre-defined answers (and never decisive and destructive refutations); dishonesty means that questions do not need to be answered at all but can be dismissed by ignoring, by crushing, or with ad hominem attacks; and a short attention span means that two step logic is beyond the capability of modern systems - PC can see one step ahead, to perceive that abstract bureaucratic system would prevent individual corruption; but cannot concentrate long enough to project two steps ahead, and to perceive that bureaucracies are not abstract but that their systems are merely a variant of individual corruption.
*
So the link between the increase in scope and strength of political correctness, and the increase in scope and strength of corruption is intrinsic and inevitable.
We need not therefore fear (because we will not get) an inhumanly efficient bureaucracy run by passionless impartial idealists; but we should fear and are getting a Brezhnev bureaucracy of seedy covert bribery and embezzlement among the intellectual elite - shielded by escalating propaganda of soaring Utopian idealism.
*
(The reality is that humans are indeed selfish and corrupt, and this is inescapable within the human condition on earth; but that our standards of behaviour are not human but divine and our reference should be heavenly not earthly. Read Pascal's Pensees for further elucidation...)
*
Monday, 13 December 2010
On Google Books - Wayfarers in Arcady by Charles Vince
*
One of the most beautiful, and saddest, books of essays I have seen has appeared on Google Books.
(I have been reading it at intervals for more than a decade, but it is so rare that I never bother to mention it. My thanks to Google Books for making most of it available.)
Go to: http://books.google.co.uk/books and search for 'Wayfarers in Arcady'.
For me, this encapsulates the effect that the 1914-18 war had upon an upper class, literary, intelligent, sensitive, somewhat neo-pagan soul.
It is extraordinarily well-written - and utterly desolate.
England has never recovered.
*
Then listen to Banks of Green Willow composed in 1913 by George Butterworth (1885-1916) - a gifted young English composer of the same general class as Charles Vince; but killed in WWI while serving in the Durham Light Infantry, as an effective and brave Lieutenant.
Written at the end of the Edwardian idyll, B of GW seems strangely prescient of the overwhelming sadness to come:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Q9dz1kse8
*
One of the most beautiful, and saddest, books of essays I have seen has appeared on Google Books.
(I have been reading it at intervals for more than a decade, but it is so rare that I never bother to mention it. My thanks to Google Books for making most of it available.)
Go to: http://books.google.co.uk/books and search for 'Wayfarers in Arcady'.
For me, this encapsulates the effect that the 1914-18 war had upon an upper class, literary, intelligent, sensitive, somewhat neo-pagan soul.
It is extraordinarily well-written - and utterly desolate.
England has never recovered.
*
Then listen to Banks of Green Willow composed in 1913 by George Butterworth (1885-1916) - a gifted young English composer of the same general class as Charles Vince; but killed in WWI while serving in the Durham Light Infantry, as an effective and brave Lieutenant.
Written at the end of the Edwardian idyll, B of GW seems strangely prescient of the overwhelming sadness to come:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Q9dz1kse8
*
Authority under divine monarchy - versus modern democracy
*
Under divine monarchy (the Byzantine model) the monarch believes himself subject to God, and the people believe themselves subject to God - hence to the monarch (if he be a genuine monarch, properly devout).
All authority comes down from God and via the monarch. And that authority is divine.
*
Under modern democracy, authority comes from man - but not from a particular man, but from a mass of men - from the system used to determine the will of a mass of men.
At one level authority, therefore, comes from force, from the decision of the biggest group.
But not really.
Perhaps, then, the most powerful group?
Closer.
*
But the group - in a modern democracy - is itself merely a kind of contingent mathematical average of a large number of individual opinions.
There is no group mind.
*
The democratic view is atomic - there is a democratic view (which derives from a particular system of discovering the democratic view) and it applies only to a specific 'issue' - or even more precisely to the way in which a particular issue is framed: the choices offered: the question to which is asked 'yes or no'.
Is there a mystical authority of democracy possible? Yes, probably, in a devout society of people each of who is praying for divine guidance, and whose deliberations are informed by such prayers.
The early 'ecumenical councils' of the Christian Church would be of this type, and probably the town meetings of early New England would be another instance.
*
Probably - at a lower level - the college meetings of the Fellows of an Oxford or Cambridge college up to the early 19th century - in so far as most of them have internalized the spiritual values of the college, and most of the fellows individually and sincerely wished to maintain these values.
(Of course many such colleges became corrupted by individual careerism and idleness. I am talking of those which did not.)
However, I believe that for such a system of democracy to be maintained also requires a sincere and cohesive religious underpinning - once this was removed from college governance, a process of change began which was first and briefly meritocratic (short term benefit) but soon and irreversibly degenerative (long term harm).
(And it is noteworthy that the original method of college governance was autocratic: the Master/ Warden/ Principal dictated policy and the Fellows/ Regents were merely temporary, fixed-contract employees.)
*
But to articulate a vision of democratic authority is to recognize its utter and complete lack in modern societies.
We 'believe' in democracy as the crudest form of magic: somehow democratic voting processes have the (literally) incredible property that they will (although themselves lacking any specific rationale or validity, and being widely varied, and prone to manipulation and cheating) magically lead not just to good choices and policies, but will (somehow) transmute the base metal of individual, short-term selfishness into wise, long-term public spiritedness.
*
Do we actually believe this?
No. Which is why there is no authority.
But - lacking any allowed alternative - we are not allowed to deny it.
Which is why the situation is desparate and irremediable.
*
Under divine monarchy (the Byzantine model) the monarch believes himself subject to God, and the people believe themselves subject to God - hence to the monarch (if he be a genuine monarch, properly devout).
All authority comes down from God and via the monarch. And that authority is divine.
*
Under modern democracy, authority comes from man - but not from a particular man, but from a mass of men - from the system used to determine the will of a mass of men.
At one level authority, therefore, comes from force, from the decision of the biggest group.
But not really.
Perhaps, then, the most powerful group?
Closer.
*
But the group - in a modern democracy - is itself merely a kind of contingent mathematical average of a large number of individual opinions.
There is no group mind.
*
The democratic view is atomic - there is a democratic view (which derives from a particular system of discovering the democratic view) and it applies only to a specific 'issue' - or even more precisely to the way in which a particular issue is framed: the choices offered: the question to which is asked 'yes or no'.
Is there a mystical authority of democracy possible? Yes, probably, in a devout society of people each of who is praying for divine guidance, and whose deliberations are informed by such prayers.
The early 'ecumenical councils' of the Christian Church would be of this type, and probably the town meetings of early New England would be another instance.
*
Probably - at a lower level - the college meetings of the Fellows of an Oxford or Cambridge college up to the early 19th century - in so far as most of them have internalized the spiritual values of the college, and most of the fellows individually and sincerely wished to maintain these values.
(Of course many such colleges became corrupted by individual careerism and idleness. I am talking of those which did not.)
However, I believe that for such a system of democracy to be maintained also requires a sincere and cohesive religious underpinning - once this was removed from college governance, a process of change began which was first and briefly meritocratic (short term benefit) but soon and irreversibly degenerative (long term harm).
(And it is noteworthy that the original method of college governance was autocratic: the Master/ Warden/ Principal dictated policy and the Fellows/ Regents were merely temporary, fixed-contract employees.)
*
But to articulate a vision of democratic authority is to recognize its utter and complete lack in modern societies.
We 'believe' in democracy as the crudest form of magic: somehow democratic voting processes have the (literally) incredible property that they will (although themselves lacking any specific rationale or validity, and being widely varied, and prone to manipulation and cheating) magically lead not just to good choices and policies, but will (somehow) transmute the base metal of individual, short-term selfishness into wise, long-term public spiritedness.
*
Do we actually believe this?
No. Which is why there is no authority.
But - lacking any allowed alternative - we are not allowed to deny it.
Which is why the situation is desparate and irremediable.
*
Sunday, 12 December 2010
Peter Kreeft on the war against PC (i.e. the culture war)
*
“ The theme of spiritual warfare is never absent in scripture, and never absent in the life and writings of a single saint. But it is never present in the religious education of any of my “Catholic” students at Boston College.
"Whenever I speak of it, they are stunned and silent, as if they have suddenly entered another world. They have. They have gone past the warm fuzzies, the fur coats of psychology-disguised-as-religion, into a world where they meet Christ the King, not Christ the Kitten.
"Welcome back from the moon, kids.
"Where is the culture of death coming from? Here. America is the center of the culture of death. America is the world’s one and only cultural superpower.
"If I haven’t shocked you yet, I will now. Do you know what Muslims call us? They call us “The Great Satan.” And do you know what I call them? I call them right.
"But America has the most just, and moral, and wise, and biblical historical and constitutional foundation in all the world. America is one of the most religious countries in the world. The Church is big and rich and free in America.
"Yes. Just like ancient Israel. And if God still loves his Church in America, he will soon make it small and poor and persecuted, as he did to ancient Israel, so that he can keep it alive.
"If he loves us, he will prune us, and we will bleed, and the blood of the martyrs will be the seed of the Church again, and a second spring will come—but not without blood. It never happens without blood, sacrifice, and suffering. The continuation of Christ’s work—if it is really Christ’s work and not a comfortable counterfeit—can never happen without the Cross.
"I don’t mean merely that Western civilization will die. That’s a piece of trivia. I mean eternal souls will die. Billions of Ramons and Vladamirs and Janes and Tiffanies will go to Hell.
"That’s what’s at stake in this war: not just whether America will become a banana republic, or whether we’ll forget Shakespeare, or even whether some nuclear terrorist will incinerate half of humanity, but whether our children and our children’s children will see God forever.
"That’s what’s at stake in “Hollywood versus America.” That’s why we must wake up and smell the rotting souls.
"Knowing we are at war is the first requirement for winning it."
*
Peter Kreeft. How to win the culture war.
http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/how-to-win.htm
*
Friday, 10 December 2010
More basso profundo choral music - and the virility of Orthodoxy
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neiJ0xgblFo&feature=related
This music and this performance has a physical effect on me: I find myself frozen, holding my breath - and if I had any hair, it would be standing on-end, and bristling.
So be careful when you listen to this - and avoid if you are driving or operating dangerous machinery.
*
In passing, this is a (rather extreme, perhaps) demonstration of what I consider to be the virility of Orthodoxy compared with other denominations of Christianity; all of which have a certain... epicene quality about them to my mind. Not fatal, forgivable, preferable to the alternatives - yes... but for me it is a factor which I admit to finding off-putting. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Orthodox priests are usually married patriarchs, while the monks tend to be heroically ascetic.
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neiJ0xgblFo&feature=related
This music and this performance has a physical effect on me: I find myself frozen, holding my breath - and if I had any hair, it would be standing on-end, and bristling.
So be careful when you listen to this - and avoid if you are driving or operating dangerous machinery.
*
In passing, this is a (rather extreme, perhaps) demonstration of what I consider to be the virility of Orthodoxy compared with other denominations of Christianity; all of which have a certain... epicene quality about them to my mind. Not fatal, forgivable, preferable to the alternatives - yes... but for me it is a factor which I admit to finding off-putting. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Orthodox priests are usually married patriarchs, while the monks tend to be heroically ascetic.
*
Thursday, 9 December 2010
JRR Tolkien and the 'good German' - The Lost Road fragment
*
Christopher Tolkien, from The Lost Road:
*
"From Elendil's words at the end of The Lost Road there emerges a sinister picture: the withdrawal of the besotted and aging king from the public view, the unexplained disappearance of people unpopular with the 'government', informers, prisons, torture, secrecy, fear of the night; propaganda in the form of the 'rewriting of history' (...); the multiplication of weapons of war, the purpose of which is concealed but guessed at; and behind all the dreadful figure of Sauron, the real power, surveying the whole land from the Mountain of Numenor.
"The teaching of Sauron has led to the invention of ships of metal that traverse the seas without sails, but which are hideous in the eyes of those who have not abandoned or forgotten Tol-Eressea; to the building of grim fortresses and unlovely towers; and to missiles that pass with a noise like thunder to strike their targets many miles away.
"Moreover, Numenor is seen by the young as overpopulous, boring, 'over-known': "every tree and grass-blade is counted", in Herendil's words; and this cause of discontent is used, it seems, by Sauron to further the policy of "imperial" expansion and ambition that he presses on the king.
"When at this time my father reached back to the world of the first man to bear the name "Elf- friend" he found there an image of what he most condemned and feared in his own."
The History of Middle Earth volume 5 - edited by Christopher Tolkien - The Lost Road. 1987. Paperback edition - page 77.
*
The Lost Road is a story (precursor of the Notion Club Papers) which Tolkien began in about 1936 but never got near to completing (although he submitted some of it to his publishers - who were gently discouraging).
JRRT's son, Christopher, has said that in decribing Numenor, Tolkien was thinking of the Nazis in Germany - who took over in 1933.
As a philologist of Germanic languages, Germany was the centre of Tolkien's intellectual world; and he was appalled by the change in this beloved culture under National Socialism.
In The Lost Road, he reflects on the moral conflicts of a person caught up in such political processes - where a beloved country becomes evil; and the dreadful dilemma between the short term and immediate duty to family, and the ultimate duty to 'God'.
Much of this shortish fragment (about 35 continuous pages, with a few dozen other pages of fragments) of an unfinished novel consists of an agonized discussion between Elendil - leader of the 'good Numenoreans' - and his son Herendil who has been partially corrupted by the majority of evil Numenoreans (led, from behind the throne, by the evil demon (fallen angel) Sauron (who at that time was man-like, exceedingly beautiful, intelligent and eloquent, and of greater than human stature).
Herendil urges his father to adopt a quietist attitude, withdrawing from public life, refraining from criticism of the regime. To be a 'good German' in the Middle Earth equivalent of a National Socialist tyranny. Elendil cannot bring himself to do this. Herendil fears the secret spies, the torture chambers, and being killed as a human sacrifice to the devilish Morgoth.
And there the fragment stops.
*
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
This blog is nat dood - only resting (while I write the PC book/let)
Our Bog is Dood
Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,
They lisped in accents mild,
But when I asked them to explain
They grew a little wild.
How do you know your Bog is dood
My darling little child?
We know because we wish it so
That is enough, they cried,
And straight within each infant eye
Stood up the flame of pride,
And if you do not think it so
You shall be crucified.
Then tell me, darling little ones,
What's dood, suppose Bog is?
Just what we think, the answer came,
Just what we think it is.
They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours
And we are wholly his.
But when they raised them up again
They had forgotten me
Each one upon each other glared
In pride and misery
For what was dood, and what their Bog
They never could agree.
Oh sweet it was to leave them then,
And sweeter not to see,
And sweetest of all to walk alone
Beside the encroaching sea,
The sea that soon should drown them all,
That never yet drowned me.
Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
*
Monday, 6 December 2010
Christian martyrs versus PC martyrs
*
It is my contention that political correctness is (more or less) communism plus 'original sin'.
The 'original sin' element for PC is humanity's innate selfishness.
PC responds by embracing abstract systematic bureaucracy to replace individual decision-making in all important areas.
*
For the Pure Altruist, altruism is not a moral choice but an objective act of allocation.
The ultimate act of altruism is therefore for the altruistic individual to remove all elements of personal choice, credit and virtue out of altruism, so that altruism does not depend on contingent human factors.
PC strives to promote and embrace an abstract system of altruism which forces everybody to be altruistic including himself; which forces him to suffer and perhaps die for objective altruism.
For PC altruism ought not to be a choice; altruism ought to be explicitly and impartially imposed by rules, regulations and laws.
The only moral choice in PC is whether to submit willingly to abstract altruistic systems, or whether (selfishly) to resist them.
*
The ideal for PC (as for most idealistic secular people) is 'pure altruism': that is, altruism untainted by an personal benefit whatsoever.
*
A Christian martyr dies as a witness for his faith; he dies in order that others might attain salvation.
Yet the martyr also is rewarded richly for his witness, by a place in heaven.
(The reward for witnessing to heaven is a place in heaven).
(Indeed, many Saints are Saints precisely because they are martyrs - http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/stschurch.htm )
*
To the politically correct, Christian martyrs are selfish (not altruistic) and they are deluded.
To the PC, Christian martyrs are selfish because they are acting for their own reward, and they are deluded because the reward does not exist.
*
A PC martyrs dies as a witness to his faith; he dies in order that others may be happier or may suffer less.
The PC martyr has no reward, because death is oblivion.
(The reward for witnessing to PC is annihilation.)
And the oblivion is real and absolute, because PC is this-worldly, and because PC is engaged in national altruism up to and beyond the point of cultural annihilation.
So for the PC there will not even be a possibility that the martyr will be remembered and revered, because he has chosen not merely personal annihilation but embraced cultural annihilation - specifically the destruction of the culture that supports PC.
*
This is what I mean my PC being motivated by Pure Altruism.
Pure Altruism is the altruism of an atheist who chooses death and embraces cultural destruction, rather than sell-out or abandon his PC principles.
PC idealism is altruism at any cost; and the greater the cost, the greater the evidence of sincerity.
*
To its adherents political correctness therefore feels like a higher ideal than Christianity, because PC is Purely Altruistic, and altruism (helping others at cost to oneself) is the highest conceivable value in the secular world.
Christian martyr's are (assumed to be) rewarded with a place in heaven; while PC martyr's are consigned to oblivion.
PC martyr's therefore do not benefit at all from what they do, they suffer purely for the sake of others.
*
More exactly, PC martyr's suffer purely for the sake of what they themselves conceive to be the happiness of others (although the others might not agree).
But what a futile act is PC martyrdom! To die for what you believe to be the happiness of others? - for the freedom to choose gratifying lifestyles!
So PC martyrdom really is Pure Altruism: pure to the point of utter absurdity.
*
For political correctness, to be moral is to be absurd, to be self-sacrificing, to sacrifice anything and everything which has made you what you are.
*
For PC, the ideal aspiration is to climb a ladder to a higher level of abstraction where one constructs and imposes a system of Pure Altruistic morality, then to kick away the ladder
(so that nobody else may ever ascend the ladder to tamper with the perfect system)
- and in kicking away the ladder, to fall to one's doom, to fall into a furnace of personal and cultural annihilation.
That's what I call martyrdom.
*
It is my contention that political correctness is (more or less) communism plus 'original sin'.
The 'original sin' element for PC is humanity's innate selfishness.
PC responds by embracing abstract systematic bureaucracy to replace individual decision-making in all important areas.
*
For the Pure Altruist, altruism is not a moral choice but an objective act of allocation.
The ultimate act of altruism is therefore for the altruistic individual to remove all elements of personal choice, credit and virtue out of altruism, so that altruism does not depend on contingent human factors.
PC strives to promote and embrace an abstract system of altruism which forces everybody to be altruistic including himself; which forces him to suffer and perhaps die for objective altruism.
For PC altruism ought not to be a choice; altruism ought to be explicitly and impartially imposed by rules, regulations and laws.
The only moral choice in PC is whether to submit willingly to abstract altruistic systems, or whether (selfishly) to resist them.
*
The ideal for PC (as for most idealistic secular people) is 'pure altruism': that is, altruism untainted by an personal benefit whatsoever.
*
A Christian martyr dies as a witness for his faith; he dies in order that others might attain salvation.
Yet the martyr also is rewarded richly for his witness, by a place in heaven.
(The reward for witnessing to heaven is a place in heaven).
(Indeed, many Saints are Saints precisely because they are martyrs - http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/stschurch.htm )
*
To the politically correct, Christian martyrs are selfish (not altruistic) and they are deluded.
To the PC, Christian martyrs are selfish because they are acting for their own reward, and they are deluded because the reward does not exist.
*
A PC martyrs dies as a witness to his faith; he dies in order that others may be happier or may suffer less.
The PC martyr has no reward, because death is oblivion.
(The reward for witnessing to PC is annihilation.)
And the oblivion is real and absolute, because PC is this-worldly, and because PC is engaged in national altruism up to and beyond the point of cultural annihilation.
So for the PC there will not even be a possibility that the martyr will be remembered and revered, because he has chosen not merely personal annihilation but embraced cultural annihilation - specifically the destruction of the culture that supports PC.
*
This is what I mean my PC being motivated by Pure Altruism.
Pure Altruism is the altruism of an atheist who chooses death and embraces cultural destruction, rather than sell-out or abandon his PC principles.
PC idealism is altruism at any cost; and the greater the cost, the greater the evidence of sincerity.
*
To its adherents political correctness therefore feels like a higher ideal than Christianity, because PC is Purely Altruistic, and altruism (helping others at cost to oneself) is the highest conceivable value in the secular world.
Christian martyr's are (assumed to be) rewarded with a place in heaven; while PC martyr's are consigned to oblivion.
PC martyr's therefore do not benefit at all from what they do, they suffer purely for the sake of others.
*
More exactly, PC martyr's suffer purely for the sake of what they themselves conceive to be the happiness of others (although the others might not agree).
But what a futile act is PC martyrdom! To die for what you believe to be the happiness of others? - for the freedom to choose gratifying lifestyles!
So PC martyrdom really is Pure Altruism: pure to the point of utter absurdity.
*
For political correctness, to be moral is to be absurd, to be self-sacrificing, to sacrifice anything and everything which has made you what you are.
*
For PC, the ideal aspiration is to climb a ladder to a higher level of abstraction where one constructs and imposes a system of Pure Altruistic morality, then to kick away the ladder
(so that nobody else may ever ascend the ladder to tamper with the perfect system)
- and in kicking away the ladder, to fall to one's doom, to fall into a furnace of personal and cultural annihilation.
That's what I call martyrdom.
*
What's the use of social statistics? Data or anecdotes?
*
As I will be embarking on the attempt to pull-together my thoughts on political correctness, I will be confronted by the necessity to frame the argument.
Do I use statistics? Do I provide heavy referencing for my statements?
'No' and 'no' is going to be the answer.
Instead I will try to present a rational argument.
*
I have just bee reading Mencius Moldbug's comments on a thread at Mangan's - http://mangans.blogspot.com/2010/12/ron-unz-apologist-for-mexican-invasion.html - and MM is very insightful on this, from a historian's perspective. I reached similar conclusions from the angle of medical science.
*
The way that large scale data sets and statistics are actually used is to control the discourse, maintain uncertainty, to exclude refutation.
A single data set that (no matter how wrong) appears to support PC is spread across the media of the world in a few hours; but no amount of data in refutation of PC is ever enough: and what there is is subject to hyper-critical and incompetent dissection.
The Bell Curve 'controversy' is a clear example of this phenomenon. The data were as straightforward and clear as any such data realistically ever can be, and yet...
And big data collection is very expensive, so that it is always under primary control of big social systems (and reanalysis of the data, while possible, never compensates for the lack of primary control - fresh data is always spun to favour PC).
*
The main role of 'statistics' is merely to summarize unwieldy amounts of data. The prime statistic is the average.
Before proceeding further the first step is to decide whether averaging makes any sense - in medicine usually it does not - averaging merely creates artifacts of the 'an average of apples and oranges' variety.
What is the 'average' effect of a drug that leaves 3 people dead, 10 people unaffected and 7 people cured? Answer: there isn't an average effect : the minimum valuable statistical summary is 3, 10, 7.
Any attempt to condense the data further than this is an error. Yet this error is mainstream, standard in reporting of clinical trials.
*
The same kind of error is going on all the time in social statistics.
But the use of social statistics for propaganda is now much simpler and more obvious than this.
The UK was the best documented country in the world - with reliable statistics going back many hundreds of years: back to the Domesday Book of 1086.
Not any more. In the first place the national statistics are dishonest, in the second place they are incompetent (schoolboy errors abound), and in the third place they are grossly incomplete.
*
If the UK government really wants to take a problem off the map, they simply do not collect statistics on it, then attack any critics on the basis that their evidence is anecdotal.
One example I exposed was related to the 'quality' of university teaching, as supposedly-measured by the QAA (quality assurance agency) for higher education:
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/journalism/lecturesizes.html
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2008/05/class-sizes-in-uk-universities.html
Yep the QAA did not collect data on university class sizes: still don't.
It could be done in a day, at the cost of the salary of about 250 man hours for a junior administrator.
But they don't do it.
*
Also they do not collect data on teaching contact hours.
The only available data (not from the government) suggest that in the UK teaching contact hours are the lowest in the civilized world
http://www.hepi.ac.uk/466-1275/The-Academic-Experience-of-Students-in-English-Universities-%282006-report%29.html
*
So if the government does not want something discussed, they simply don't collect data on it.
And if there is no data, the bureaucracy have created a 'climate' in which it would be 'scientifically' irresponsible to discuss matters.
*
Immigration is probably the biggest matter. Sustained, mass immigration at an unprecedented level is a very obvious feature in the UK, much of it 'illegal' or due to people claiming 'asylum' from poorer and more violent societies, or just people arriving undocumented and unable to speak and staying anyway...
How much?
Who knows? Nobody knows.
Data are not being collected.
Hence there is zero discussion in the 'responsible' media.
*
Evidence?
What people experience in their lives.
But this is just anecdote.
And to raise an anecdote is personal, it means taking personal responsibility for evidence. It means being exposed to personal criticism for one's reported anecdotal experience.
*
But then governments use anecdote.
They use single instances to support argument - as when Gordon Brown used a failed Oxford applicant called Laura Spence to argue that the UK university system was biased against working class people, or state schools, or northerners, or something...:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Spence_Affair
This anecdote was false, mistaken, bizarrely ill informed, an incompetent mess - but it didn't make any difference.
The government got their way - university admissions was brought under state control, and now a PC system of allocating UK places according to social class quotas is in place. (It doesn't work - but it is in place).
So anecdote is forbidden: except when it supports PC projects.
*
In sum, the modern use of data is anti-truthful, the intellectual elite have proven themselves to be utterly corrupt.
Don't look for intellectual consistency here: there is none.
The PC elite are indifferent to honesty and promote lies (see above), indifferent to beauty - indeed promote ugliness (see modern art and architecture), indifferent to virtue - indeed promote the opposite of what used to be regarded as virtue (see the rest of this blog).
This is done by mass consensus among the intellectual elite.
And they do not respond rationally to critique - not at all - but moralistically.
moral: that is the root of their concern.
Not virtue, morality.
And that morality is political correctness.
*
The refusal to collect statistics on universities and immigration/ asylum seekers is because these are PC/ multicultural/ inclusive projects - and data might get in the way of the goals. Therefore: no data.
The modern elite will sacrifice anything to political correctness - even the education and prosperity of their own children.
This political correctness is serious stuff!
*
NOTE:
If data could defeat political correctness, then PC would already have been defeated by Charles Murray - by himself and unaided. Or by Thomas Sowell. Or Steve Sailer.
That, on the contrary, PC has grown and thriven and spread and tightened its vice-like grip should be sufficient evidence that PC is not threatened by data: PC has data under control.
*
PC will not be defeated by rational debate: no it won't. Nor by evidence.
PC will be defeated by itself, of course, if it lasts long enough; or else it will be defeated before this by the strongest/ most determined/ most relentless remaining group that is not PC.
Political correctness will not, will never, be converted by reason and evidence. In all probability PC personnel will be replaced, not converted.
*
For PC (as for most humans) morality trumps any amount of reason and evidence.
PC could only be converted by a higher morality i.e. a religion, which seems, at the moment, in the West... very unlikely.
*
As I will be embarking on the attempt to pull-together my thoughts on political correctness, I will be confronted by the necessity to frame the argument.
Do I use statistics? Do I provide heavy referencing for my statements?
'No' and 'no' is going to be the answer.
Instead I will try to present a rational argument.
*
I have just bee reading Mencius Moldbug's comments on a thread at Mangan's - http://mangans.blogspot.com/2010/12/ron-unz-apologist-for-mexican-invasion.html - and MM is very insightful on this, from a historian's perspective. I reached similar conclusions from the angle of medical science.
*
The way that large scale data sets and statistics are actually used is to control the discourse, maintain uncertainty, to exclude refutation.
A single data set that (no matter how wrong) appears to support PC is spread across the media of the world in a few hours; but no amount of data in refutation of PC is ever enough: and what there is is subject to hyper-critical and incompetent dissection.
The Bell Curve 'controversy' is a clear example of this phenomenon. The data were as straightforward and clear as any such data realistically ever can be, and yet...
And big data collection is very expensive, so that it is always under primary control of big social systems (and reanalysis of the data, while possible, never compensates for the lack of primary control - fresh data is always spun to favour PC).
*
The main role of 'statistics' is merely to summarize unwieldy amounts of data. The prime statistic is the average.
Before proceeding further the first step is to decide whether averaging makes any sense - in medicine usually it does not - averaging merely creates artifacts of the 'an average of apples and oranges' variety.
What is the 'average' effect of a drug that leaves 3 people dead, 10 people unaffected and 7 people cured? Answer: there isn't an average effect : the minimum valuable statistical summary is 3, 10, 7.
Any attempt to condense the data further than this is an error. Yet this error is mainstream, standard in reporting of clinical trials.
*
The same kind of error is going on all the time in social statistics.
But the use of social statistics for propaganda is now much simpler and more obvious than this.
The UK was the best documented country in the world - with reliable statistics going back many hundreds of years: back to the Domesday Book of 1086.
Not any more. In the first place the national statistics are dishonest, in the second place they are incompetent (schoolboy errors abound), and in the third place they are grossly incomplete.
*
If the UK government really wants to take a problem off the map, they simply do not collect statistics on it, then attack any critics on the basis that their evidence is anecdotal.
One example I exposed was related to the 'quality' of university teaching, as supposedly-measured by the QAA (quality assurance agency) for higher education:
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/journalism/lecturesizes.html
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2008/05/class-sizes-in-uk-universities.html
Yep the QAA did not collect data on university class sizes: still don't.
It could be done in a day, at the cost of the salary of about 250 man hours for a junior administrator.
But they don't do it.
*
Also they do not collect data on teaching contact hours.
The only available data (not from the government) suggest that in the UK teaching contact hours are the lowest in the civilized world
http://www.hepi.ac.uk/466-1275/The-Academic-Experience-of-Students-in-English-Universities-%282006-report%29.html
*
So if the government does not want something discussed, they simply don't collect data on it.
And if there is no data, the bureaucracy have created a 'climate' in which it would be 'scientifically' irresponsible to discuss matters.
*
Immigration is probably the biggest matter. Sustained, mass immigration at an unprecedented level is a very obvious feature in the UK, much of it 'illegal' or due to people claiming 'asylum' from poorer and more violent societies, or just people arriving undocumented and unable to speak and staying anyway...
How much?
Who knows? Nobody knows.
Data are not being collected.
Hence there is zero discussion in the 'responsible' media.
*
Evidence?
What people experience in their lives.
But this is just anecdote.
And to raise an anecdote is personal, it means taking personal responsibility for evidence. It means being exposed to personal criticism for one's reported anecdotal experience.
*
But then governments use anecdote.
They use single instances to support argument - as when Gordon Brown used a failed Oxford applicant called Laura Spence to argue that the UK university system was biased against working class people, or state schools, or northerners, or something...:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Spence_Affair
This anecdote was false, mistaken, bizarrely ill informed, an incompetent mess - but it didn't make any difference.
The government got their way - university admissions was brought under state control, and now a PC system of allocating UK places according to social class quotas is in place. (It doesn't work - but it is in place).
So anecdote is forbidden: except when it supports PC projects.
*
In sum, the modern use of data is anti-truthful, the intellectual elite have proven themselves to be utterly corrupt.
Don't look for intellectual consistency here: there is none.
The PC elite are indifferent to honesty and promote lies (see above), indifferent to beauty - indeed promote ugliness (see modern art and architecture), indifferent to virtue - indeed promote the opposite of what used to be regarded as virtue (see the rest of this blog).
This is done by mass consensus among the intellectual elite.
And they do not respond rationally to critique - not at all - but moralistically.
moral: that is the root of their concern.
Not virtue, morality.
And that morality is political correctness.
*
The refusal to collect statistics on universities and immigration/ asylum seekers is because these are PC/ multicultural/ inclusive projects - and data might get in the way of the goals. Therefore: no data.
The modern elite will sacrifice anything to political correctness - even the education and prosperity of their own children.
This political correctness is serious stuff!
*
NOTE:
If data could defeat political correctness, then PC would already have been defeated by Charles Murray - by himself and unaided. Or by Thomas Sowell. Or Steve Sailer.
That, on the contrary, PC has grown and thriven and spread and tightened its vice-like grip should be sufficient evidence that PC is not threatened by data: PC has data under control.
*
PC will not be defeated by rational debate: no it won't. Nor by evidence.
PC will be defeated by itself, of course, if it lasts long enough; or else it will be defeated before this by the strongest/ most determined/ most relentless remaining group that is not PC.
Political correctness will not, will never, be converted by reason and evidence. In all probability PC personnel will be replaced, not converted.
*
For PC (as for most humans) morality trumps any amount of reason and evidence.
PC could only be converted by a higher morality i.e. a religion, which seems, at the moment, in the West... very unlikely.
*
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Political correctness defined - its tendency revealed
*
My out-pourings on the topic of political correctness have now, more or less, stopped; and I am starting to pull things together.
*
Karl Popper commented (in his autobiography Unended Quest) that definitions are of limited value; and can indeed serve to close off enquiry.
Definitions come after enquiry, and serve merely as a convenient summary.
*
My understanding of the nature of PC has developed as my ideas have clarified. I would now consider PC to be an evolutionary development of socialism/ communism - it is what the New Left of the sixties became.
In particular, PC is post-communist in its anti-utopianism - and its principled anti-humanism.
*
In its early ideal form communism was intended to liberate human individuals - after humans had been remade/ or had their false programming removed, then the state apparatus was supposed to wither away.
Of course, when this showed no signs of happening then communism became hypocritical, careerist and corrupt - but PC has arrived at the corruption, careerism and cynicism of late communism.
Yet there is much more to PC than this: PC is underpinned with an extraordinary anti-human kind of idealism, a state-ism, in which humans are regarded as the root of all evil and the abstract state embodies virtue (through its abstract processes, its procedures, laws, regulations, bureaucracies etc.)
So ultimately the idealistic PC intellectual is something like the idealistic communist commissar who was working to make his own job unnecessary; the idealistic PC bureaucrat is acting to make human judgment and power not merely unnecessary but impossible: all important human decisions are to be transferred to abstract system.
Individual agency is replaced by the state.
*
Thus PC is, in its aspiration, the only wholly and permanently totalitarian ideology to have gained any currency and traction in the history of the world.
That is why political correctness is evil; and why PC must be denied and opposed by each individual human person, without regard to the possibilities or probabilities of effective resistance.
Even if resistance seems doomed certainly to fail in this world, PC must be resisted.
Because resistance to PC is not 'futile' - quite the opposite - life has meaning and purpose in the act of resistance.
It is embracing of PC anti-human abstraction and the annihilation of human agency which is 'futile': indeed, its futility is guaranteed.
(Hence the tidal self-loathing unto despair, avolia and socio-personal suicide of the PC elites.)
*
PC is not, therefore, merely a political matter: it is existential, it is ultimate.
*
My out-pourings on the topic of political correctness have now, more or less, stopped; and I am starting to pull things together.
*
Karl Popper commented (in his autobiography Unended Quest) that definitions are of limited value; and can indeed serve to close off enquiry.
Definitions come after enquiry, and serve merely as a convenient summary.
*
My understanding of the nature of PC has developed as my ideas have clarified. I would now consider PC to be an evolutionary development of socialism/ communism - it is what the New Left of the sixties became.
In particular, PC is post-communist in its anti-utopianism - and its principled anti-humanism.
*
In its early ideal form communism was intended to liberate human individuals - after humans had been remade/ or had their false programming removed, then the state apparatus was supposed to wither away.
Of course, when this showed no signs of happening then communism became hypocritical, careerist and corrupt - but PC has arrived at the corruption, careerism and cynicism of late communism.
Yet there is much more to PC than this: PC is underpinned with an extraordinary anti-human kind of idealism, a state-ism, in which humans are regarded as the root of all evil and the abstract state embodies virtue (through its abstract processes, its procedures, laws, regulations, bureaucracies etc.)
So ultimately the idealistic PC intellectual is something like the idealistic communist commissar who was working to make his own job unnecessary; the idealistic PC bureaucrat is acting to make human judgment and power not merely unnecessary but impossible: all important human decisions are to be transferred to abstract system.
Individual agency is replaced by the state.
*
Thus PC is, in its aspiration, the only wholly and permanently totalitarian ideology to have gained any currency and traction in the history of the world.
That is why political correctness is evil; and why PC must be denied and opposed by each individual human person, without regard to the possibilities or probabilities of effective resistance.
Even if resistance seems doomed certainly to fail in this world, PC must be resisted.
Because resistance to PC is not 'futile' - quite the opposite - life has meaning and purpose in the act of resistance.
It is embracing of PC anti-human abstraction and the annihilation of human agency which is 'futile': indeed, its futility is guaranteed.
(Hence the tidal self-loathing unto despair, avolia and socio-personal suicide of the PC elites.)
*
PC is not, therefore, merely a political matter: it is existential, it is ultimate.
*
Friday, 3 December 2010
The stigmata of political correctness: pacifism
*
There is honest pacifism - which asserts that war must be avoided on principle at any cost; there is dishonest pacifism - which allows war but only as a 'last resort' (hence de facto never); and there is the mainstream 'pacifism' of careerist and manipulative 'international communism' and PC - which is the doctrine that the West must passively submit to its enemies.
*
All pacifists are politically correct; although all politically correct are not necessarily pacifist.
(It is their pacifism which marks many libertarians as politically correct.)
Those who believe the opposite of pacifism to be war-mongering are all politically correct.
PC is mostly pacifist at present, in the sense that PC imposes a pacifist agenda on its Western host societies while ignoring or indulging other societies.
However PC is not pacifist with respect to its favoured (client) groups: from them violence is tolerated, and war is reframed as resistance.
*
Pacifism is a product of defective morality; which denies transcendent goals, denies the primacy of salvation, denies - indeed - that anything is worth dying-for.
Pacifism is therefore materialist, this-worldly, soul-denying: an abstract exaltation and excuse for the primacy of life-preservation, comfort and sensation-seeking.
(Pacifism is also, and very obviously, short-termist and self-destroying; hence pragmatically untenable. However, that is another matter than being considered here.)
Of course, as individuals we are weak, we cling to life, are addicted to comfort, crave the indulgence of sensation - and war is destructive of almost everything that we most value.
We fear war.
*
Nonetheless, to be a pacifist (that novel doctrine of modernity) entails the extraordinary arrogance of rejecting the wisdom of all our ancestors, including the wisest and holiest.
Pacifism entails that all previous generations until recently were so stupid as uniformly to have misunderstood the massive reality of war and/or so wicked as grossly to have misinterpreted objective morality.
We fear war. But to be moral, we must fear other things even more than we fear war.
*
Note: There is neither recklessness nor prejudice in labelling so many people to be PC as is implied by the stigma of pacifism: nowadays, in the West, everyone must be assumed politically correct until proven otherwise.
*
There is honest pacifism - which asserts that war must be avoided on principle at any cost; there is dishonest pacifism - which allows war but only as a 'last resort' (hence de facto never); and there is the mainstream 'pacifism' of careerist and manipulative 'international communism' and PC - which is the doctrine that the West must passively submit to its enemies.
*
All pacifists are politically correct; although all politically correct are not necessarily pacifist.
(It is their pacifism which marks many libertarians as politically correct.)
Those who believe the opposite of pacifism to be war-mongering are all politically correct.
PC is mostly pacifist at present, in the sense that PC imposes a pacifist agenda on its Western host societies while ignoring or indulging other societies.
However PC is not pacifist with respect to its favoured (client) groups: from them violence is tolerated, and war is reframed as resistance.
*
Pacifism is a product of defective morality; which denies transcendent goals, denies the primacy of salvation, denies - indeed - that anything is worth dying-for.
Pacifism is therefore materialist, this-worldly, soul-denying: an abstract exaltation and excuse for the primacy of life-preservation, comfort and sensation-seeking.
(Pacifism is also, and very obviously, short-termist and self-destroying; hence pragmatically untenable. However, that is another matter than being considered here.)
Of course, as individuals we are weak, we cling to life, are addicted to comfort, crave the indulgence of sensation - and war is destructive of almost everything that we most value.
We fear war.
*
Nonetheless, to be a pacifist (that novel doctrine of modernity) entails the extraordinary arrogance of rejecting the wisdom of all our ancestors, including the wisest and holiest.
Pacifism entails that all previous generations until recently were so stupid as uniformly to have misunderstood the massive reality of war and/or so wicked as grossly to have misinterpreted objective morality.
We fear war. But to be moral, we must fear other things even more than we fear war.
*
Note: There is neither recklessness nor prejudice in labelling so many people to be PC as is implied by the stigma of pacifism: nowadays, in the West, everyone must be assumed politically correct until proven otherwise.
*
Can political correctness be stopped? If not, then what's the point?
*
So, can political correctness be stopped?
The answer is no: not likely, not by any ordinary means.
Not by power, organization, democracy, coup, revolution or anything like that.
*
The reason is that all mainstream politics is semi-PC.
So modern politics-as-usual is a war between extreme PC on the left and semi-PC on the right.
Politics is nothing more than a squabble among the PC elite.
*
All of the secular right is semi-PC; and it is only among the religious right that a PC-free zone can ever be found, and even the merest possibility of effective opposition to PC.
Democracy cannot lead to an effective non-PC movement.
Among the non-PC religious right, the non-PC Christian right is a relatively small, weak, mostly-declining minority.
*
Therefore any plausible, likely, mass, 'democratic', powerful, influential 'opposition' to PC will itself be PC.
But you can't fight an inferno with a candle: you can't fight full-on PC with half-hearted PC.
*
If political correctness probably cannot be stopped by human agency, then what is the point of all this stuff?
All this analysis?
What is the point? - when I am saying that I believe it is very unlikely that PC can be beaten by any group that I would want to beat it, and that democratic opposition to PC is doomed to fail?
*
My reason is religious: political correctness is evil and therefore must be opposed whatever the chances: whatever the odds and probabilities of success.
PC must be opposed despite the near impossibility that virtuous human effort alone can win: this simply means that success could only come from virtuous human effort with outside help, with the aid of divine providence.
It really is as simple as that.
*
So, can political correctness be stopped?
The answer is no: not likely, not by any ordinary means.
Not by power, organization, democracy, coup, revolution or anything like that.
*
The reason is that all mainstream politics is semi-PC.
So modern politics-as-usual is a war between extreme PC on the left and semi-PC on the right.
Politics is nothing more than a squabble among the PC elite.
*
All of the secular right is semi-PC; and it is only among the religious right that a PC-free zone can ever be found, and even the merest possibility of effective opposition to PC.
Democracy cannot lead to an effective non-PC movement.
Among the non-PC religious right, the non-PC Christian right is a relatively small, weak, mostly-declining minority.
*
Therefore any plausible, likely, mass, 'democratic', powerful, influential 'opposition' to PC will itself be PC.
But you can't fight an inferno with a candle: you can't fight full-on PC with half-hearted PC.
*
If political correctness probably cannot be stopped by human agency, then what is the point of all this stuff?
All this analysis?
What is the point? - when I am saying that I believe it is very unlikely that PC can be beaten by any group that I would want to beat it, and that democratic opposition to PC is doomed to fail?
*
My reason is religious: political correctness is evil and therefore must be opposed whatever the chances: whatever the odds and probabilities of success.
PC must be opposed despite the near impossibility that virtuous human effort alone can win: this simply means that success could only come from virtuous human effort with outside help, with the aid of divine providence.
It really is as simple as that.
*
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Russian male choir with basso profundo - solution to the blend problem
*
As a companion piece to the Greek Orthodox choral music below, here is the Russian Orthodox tradition - with a delightful snowy winter video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBOMVLd7wYg
This is another solution to the problem of getting a homogeneous blend of voices in a four voice choir.
Essentially, you drop everything half an octave and use male tenor-altino voice (i.e. high tenors who blend across the break in the voice up into alto falsetto) for the top line (instead of sopranos or trebles); and use the basso profundo voice for the bottom line (instead of 'normal' basses).
Unfortunately, this is apparently only an option in Russia - since nowhere else seems to produce bassi profundi...
However the result - I think you will agree - is both hair-raising and spine-tingling.
*
As a companion piece to the Greek Orthodox choral music below, here is the Russian Orthodox tradition - with a delightful snowy winter video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBOMVLd7wYg
This is another solution to the problem of getting a homogeneous blend of voices in a four voice choir.
Essentially, you drop everything half an octave and use male tenor-altino voice (i.e. high tenors who blend across the break in the voice up into alto falsetto) for the top line (instead of sopranos or trebles); and use the basso profundo voice for the bottom line (instead of 'normal' basses).
Unfortunately, this is apparently only an option in Russia - since nowhere else seems to produce bassi profundi...
However the result - I think you will agree - is both hair-raising and spine-tingling.
*
Byzantine Orthodox church music
*
This is a wonderful video
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98eek_yyyyyyyy-yy-kabarnos_music
I like to imagine I am an Anglo-Saxon visitor to Constantinople, and hearing something rather like this in Hagia Sophia.
Ah! - Civilization. Mystery. Beauty. Truth.
*
This is a wonderful video
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98eek_yyyyyyyy-yy-kabarnos_music
I like to imagine I am an Anglo-Saxon visitor to Constantinople, and hearing something rather like this in Hagia Sophia.
Ah! - Civilization. Mystery. Beauty. Truth.
*
Political correctness is anarchistic, not socialistic
*
The difference between socialism and anarchism is that for socialists economics is primary while for anarchists power is primary.
By this definition, political correctness is essentially an anarchist ideology, while communism (from which it evolved) was essentially a socialistic ideology.
*
The primary aim of communism is/ was to redistribute money (wealth, income, whatever).
The primary aim of anarchism, and of PC, is to redistribute power.
Political correctness redistributes power in various ways - some of these are indeed economic, since wealth leads to power: economic power is a form of power.
So PC allocates salaries, subsidies, taxes, tax-exemptions, selectively enforces economic rules, and so on.
But PC also redistributes power in other forms: it allocates privileges (legal and administrative) and positions, assigns duties, generates images (positive and negative), regulates propaganda and advertising, gerrymanders voting (ie. shapes constituencies to benefit PC-favoured groups), regulates media depictions in terms of relative and absolute frequency and whether positive and negative. And so on.
*
In practice, PC (because it is an ideology of the ruling elite) in the first place takes power from the middling people and allocates it to bottom people - from the moderately-powerful to the least powerful; subtracts power from PC-disfavoured groups (whites, men, economically-productive people, the native-born, tax and rates-payers etc.) and adds power to favoured groups.
Political correctness perceives this process as being a just re-allocation from selfish, undeserving exploiters to miserable, vulnerable victims.
Since this process is a matter of raising-up the lowest using the money of the middle, it is a matter of being 'generous' using other-people's-money; and is therefore - at the first level of analysis - an extreme form of hypocrisy and moral grand-standing.
And, for the most part, that is precisely what PC is: the appropriation of moral approbation by elite bureaucrats who coercively extract resources from their enemies and reward their supporters.
*
But at the highest level of politically correct aspiration and devoutness, the elite among the PC sincerely intend to take this process through to completion. They sincerely intend to destroy their own class, as well as the middle class.
Naturally, this intention is kept under wraps; not broadcast to the mass of PC careerists; but it is surely there.
The elite within PC intend to redistribute their own power.
*
In the short term the PC elite need to take all power to themselves, partly in order to begin the process of redistribution of power, but most importantly so that they can convert their personal power into impersonal power.
Those who sincerely want an egalitarian distribution of power cannot simply replace themselves with another class of redistributors, because humans are intrinsically selfish and corruptible.
This would soon lead to a recapitulation of power inequalities, as always happened under communism. The Marxist idea of replacing the bourgeoisie with the proletariat only replaced the personnel in charge of the state, only inverted the power structure - but it did not create an equal distribution of power.
The PC elite therefore intend to disempower themselves, intend to redistribute their power permanently.
This means not installing people or classes into power. Instead the PC elite intend to replace themselves with abstract systems of redistribution.
*
The PC elite intend to replace their own personal and inevitably selfish power with abstract power, in a nutshell to replace people with committees, to replace individual discretion with algorithmic regulations and votes, irreversibly to install redistributive procedural bureaucracy as the permanent form of ruling power.
*
Once procedural bureaucracy is irreversibly installed, thenceforth society will experience a continual redistribution and equalization of power imposed by an all-seeing, all-measuring, all-powerful system.
And the system will not depend on its personnel; indeed the ideal ruling system would be immune to influence by its administering personnel, unaffected by change in personnel, the system would use the personnel - not vice versa.
It would perhaps be something like rule by a computer - or maybe rule by 'The Borg' from Star Trek: the Next Generation: that is to say, rule by a group mind - an entity in which the individual is immersed, and which selfishness is therefore impossible.
From this perspective the ubiquity of voting (as the only method for generating authority) is merely a primitive step on the road to decision by the group mind.
*
So political correctness is the evolutionary child of anarchism, the product of a New Left focus on the distribution of power replacing the Old Left perception of economics as the primary social reality.
And - interestingly enough, ironically enough; PC is of course a totalitarian ideology which aspires to annihilate individual agency.
A totalitarian and anti-human bureaucracy was not-at-all what early anarchists were hoping-for.
Nonetheless, it is what they are getting...
So, anarchism has evolved from extreme libertarian individualism to the dissolution of the individual in the group mind...
*
Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.
*
The difference between socialism and anarchism is that for socialists economics is primary while for anarchists power is primary.
By this definition, political correctness is essentially an anarchist ideology, while communism (from which it evolved) was essentially a socialistic ideology.
*
The primary aim of communism is/ was to redistribute money (wealth, income, whatever).
The primary aim of anarchism, and of PC, is to redistribute power.
Political correctness redistributes power in various ways - some of these are indeed economic, since wealth leads to power: economic power is a form of power.
So PC allocates salaries, subsidies, taxes, tax-exemptions, selectively enforces economic rules, and so on.
But PC also redistributes power in other forms: it allocates privileges (legal and administrative) and positions, assigns duties, generates images (positive and negative), regulates propaganda and advertising, gerrymanders voting (ie. shapes constituencies to benefit PC-favoured groups), regulates media depictions in terms of relative and absolute frequency and whether positive and negative. And so on.
*
In practice, PC (because it is an ideology of the ruling elite) in the first place takes power from the middling people and allocates it to bottom people - from the moderately-powerful to the least powerful; subtracts power from PC-disfavoured groups (whites, men, economically-productive people, the native-born, tax and rates-payers etc.) and adds power to favoured groups.
Political correctness perceives this process as being a just re-allocation from selfish, undeserving exploiters to miserable, vulnerable victims.
Since this process is a matter of raising-up the lowest using the money of the middle, it is a matter of being 'generous' using other-people's-money; and is therefore - at the first level of analysis - an extreme form of hypocrisy and moral grand-standing.
And, for the most part, that is precisely what PC is: the appropriation of moral approbation by elite bureaucrats who coercively extract resources from their enemies and reward their supporters.
*
But at the highest level of politically correct aspiration and devoutness, the elite among the PC sincerely intend to take this process through to completion. They sincerely intend to destroy their own class, as well as the middle class.
Naturally, this intention is kept under wraps; not broadcast to the mass of PC careerists; but it is surely there.
The elite within PC intend to redistribute their own power.
*
In the short term the PC elite need to take all power to themselves, partly in order to begin the process of redistribution of power, but most importantly so that they can convert their personal power into impersonal power.
Those who sincerely want an egalitarian distribution of power cannot simply replace themselves with another class of redistributors, because humans are intrinsically selfish and corruptible.
This would soon lead to a recapitulation of power inequalities, as always happened under communism. The Marxist idea of replacing the bourgeoisie with the proletariat only replaced the personnel in charge of the state, only inverted the power structure - but it did not create an equal distribution of power.
The PC elite therefore intend to disempower themselves, intend to redistribute their power permanently.
This means not installing people or classes into power. Instead the PC elite intend to replace themselves with abstract systems of redistribution.
*
The PC elite intend to replace their own personal and inevitably selfish power with abstract power, in a nutshell to replace people with committees, to replace individual discretion with algorithmic regulations and votes, irreversibly to install redistributive procedural bureaucracy as the permanent form of ruling power.
*
Once procedural bureaucracy is irreversibly installed, thenceforth society will experience a continual redistribution and equalization of power imposed by an all-seeing, all-measuring, all-powerful system.
And the system will not depend on its personnel; indeed the ideal ruling system would be immune to influence by its administering personnel, unaffected by change in personnel, the system would use the personnel - not vice versa.
It would perhaps be something like rule by a computer - or maybe rule by 'The Borg' from Star Trek: the Next Generation: that is to say, rule by a group mind - an entity in which the individual is immersed, and which selfishness is therefore impossible.
From this perspective the ubiquity of voting (as the only method for generating authority) is merely a primitive step on the road to decision by the group mind.
*
So political correctness is the evolutionary child of anarchism, the product of a New Left focus on the distribution of power replacing the Old Left perception of economics as the primary social reality.
And - interestingly enough, ironically enough; PC is of course a totalitarian ideology which aspires to annihilate individual agency.
A totalitarian and anti-human bureaucracy was not-at-all what early anarchists were hoping-for.
Nonetheless, it is what they are getting...
So, anarchism has evolved from extreme libertarian individualism to the dissolution of the individual in the group mind...
*
Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.
*
Moving things 'in the right direction' - the rationale of PC policy
*
Political correctness is, in its purest form, an extreme type of idealism: since a life in which all human 'goods' are allocated by impersonal mechanisms and without any individual influence is either utopian (for the PC elite) or dystopian (for normal human beings).
But PC does not operate at this level of clarity and abstraction - rather it operates in a pragmatic way.
Policies are chosen on the basis of 'moving things in the right direction' and without taking account of exactly where these policies are going: what is the state being aimed-at.
And therein lies the danger.
Since the state being aimed-at is never articulated, it is never evaluated, which means that things may end-up some place nobody wanted them to go.
*
As a teenager I began with a very pure form of egalitarianism - economic equality.
I got this from the great writer George Bernard Shaw (who was also an early socialist and a founder of the Fabian Society). Shaw envisaged absolute equality of income - more exactly, income equality to the point that differences made no practical difference of status.
But after a while I realized that nobody else seemed to want this, indeed the most powerful British 'socialists' of that era - the Trades Unions - seemed to be obsessed by maintaining wage 'differentials' (or inequalities).
So I fairly rapidly gravitated to the idea that we needed to move in the direction of equality.
This negative doctrine seemed to encapsulate the behaviour of socialists, who did not seem to want actual equality, not even to have any clear idea of how much inequality was acceptable - but instead had essentially three ideas, with which I (at that time) agreed:
1. Inequality is important
2. There is, now, too much inequality.
3. We should move towards having less inequality.
*
I think that this negative way of framing politics is, in fact, dominant - especially with political correctness.
The basis for policy is indignation at a current state of affairs. Something which is happening is pointed at, and it is proclaimed to be intolerable.
The current state of affairs need not be referenced to any actual state of affairs (past or present, real or imaginary) - but the point is that the state of affairs is obviously unjust, obviously intolerable, therefore obviously something must be done to ameliorate it.
*
(To disagree with the above analysis is taken to be approval of the injustice.
(To advocate tolerating the intolerable is - obviously - evil.
(Of course the intolerable may prove ineradicable - in principle, or merely in practice [e.g. prejudice - pre-judging] - but it must still be pronounced intolerable.)
*
For example, thousands of papers have been written about 'inequalities in health', demonstrating and measuring differentials in health on the basis of social status, education, income, wealth, race, ethnicity and so on.
The measured inequalities are implicitly (or explicitly) regarded as intolerable.
But without any author of these papers ever troubling themselves in any way about what degree of inequality would be tolerable.
Indeed, a frequent tactic of such papers is to do international comparisons which show that - say - health inequalities are smallest in Japan and Sweden, largest in the USA, and middling in the UK. Then the recommendation that the UK and the USA should move in the direction of Japan or Sweden.
But it is never ever stated that Swedish and Japanese inequalities are acceptable, just, and fair; and therefore that the Japanese/ Swedish degree of health inequality is what we in the UK/ US are aiming-for; and that therefore (assuming policies are successful) when we have reached Japanese/ Swedish levels of inequality then the inequalities-in-health pressure-group will disband themselves as now obsolete...
*
So, what superficially appears to be a reasonable, non-fanatical pragmatism - instead of insisting upon absolute equality, we merely ask that things be moved 'in the right direction' - actually makes the demand for 'more equality' insatiable.
As long as any degree of inequality can be found in any situation, then the demand to move things in the direction of 'more equality' can be sustained.
As long as the measurable situation is not absolutely perfect with respect to ideal hopes, then there is an absolute necessity for external intervention to change that situation.
And all this without ever having to define aims, defend demands, compare rival courses of action, or make tough compromises about the best attainable results.
*
Political correctness therefore uses pragmatic methods to generate utopian demands - ensuring that it will never succeed, and that success will never threaten its own survival.
*
Political correctness is, in its purest form, an extreme type of idealism: since a life in which all human 'goods' are allocated by impersonal mechanisms and without any individual influence is either utopian (for the PC elite) or dystopian (for normal human beings).
But PC does not operate at this level of clarity and abstraction - rather it operates in a pragmatic way.
Policies are chosen on the basis of 'moving things in the right direction' and without taking account of exactly where these policies are going: what is the state being aimed-at.
And therein lies the danger.
Since the state being aimed-at is never articulated, it is never evaluated, which means that things may end-up some place nobody wanted them to go.
*
As a teenager I began with a very pure form of egalitarianism - economic equality.
I got this from the great writer George Bernard Shaw (who was also an early socialist and a founder of the Fabian Society). Shaw envisaged absolute equality of income - more exactly, income equality to the point that differences made no practical difference of status.
But after a while I realized that nobody else seemed to want this, indeed the most powerful British 'socialists' of that era - the Trades Unions - seemed to be obsessed by maintaining wage 'differentials' (or inequalities).
So I fairly rapidly gravitated to the idea that we needed to move in the direction of equality.
This negative doctrine seemed to encapsulate the behaviour of socialists, who did not seem to want actual equality, not even to have any clear idea of how much inequality was acceptable - but instead had essentially three ideas, with which I (at that time) agreed:
1. Inequality is important
2. There is, now, too much inequality.
3. We should move towards having less inequality.
*
I think that this negative way of framing politics is, in fact, dominant - especially with political correctness.
The basis for policy is indignation at a current state of affairs. Something which is happening is pointed at, and it is proclaimed to be intolerable.
The current state of affairs need not be referenced to any actual state of affairs (past or present, real or imaginary) - but the point is that the state of affairs is obviously unjust, obviously intolerable, therefore obviously something must be done to ameliorate it.
*
(To disagree with the above analysis is taken to be approval of the injustice.
(To advocate tolerating the intolerable is - obviously - evil.
(Of course the intolerable may prove ineradicable - in principle, or merely in practice [e.g. prejudice - pre-judging] - but it must still be pronounced intolerable.)
*
For example, thousands of papers have been written about 'inequalities in health', demonstrating and measuring differentials in health on the basis of social status, education, income, wealth, race, ethnicity and so on.
The measured inequalities are implicitly (or explicitly) regarded as intolerable.
But without any author of these papers ever troubling themselves in any way about what degree of inequality would be tolerable.
Indeed, a frequent tactic of such papers is to do international comparisons which show that - say - health inequalities are smallest in Japan and Sweden, largest in the USA, and middling in the UK. Then the recommendation that the UK and the USA should move in the direction of Japan or Sweden.
But it is never ever stated that Swedish and Japanese inequalities are acceptable, just, and fair; and therefore that the Japanese/ Swedish degree of health inequality is what we in the UK/ US are aiming-for; and that therefore (assuming policies are successful) when we have reached Japanese/ Swedish levels of inequality then the inequalities-in-health pressure-group will disband themselves as now obsolete...
*
So, what superficially appears to be a reasonable, non-fanatical pragmatism - instead of insisting upon absolute equality, we merely ask that things be moved 'in the right direction' - actually makes the demand for 'more equality' insatiable.
As long as any degree of inequality can be found in any situation, then the demand to move things in the direction of 'more equality' can be sustained.
As long as the measurable situation is not absolutely perfect with respect to ideal hopes, then there is an absolute necessity for external intervention to change that situation.
And all this without ever having to define aims, defend demands, compare rival courses of action, or make tough compromises about the best attainable results.
*
Political correctness therefore uses pragmatic methods to generate utopian demands - ensuring that it will never succeed, and that success will never threaten its own survival.
*
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
Charles Williams - inept, plus wilful obscurity
*
I have been (again) reading Charles Williams (1886-1945) - indeed, I have been reading "C.W" off-and-on since about 1987 (stimulated by Humphrey Carpenter's biography The Inklings).
A major factor in my returning again and again to reading C.W was my failure to understand him and the conviction that I must be missing something important.
I now feel that I understand Williams better than before.
And I am prepared to share this hard-won understanding with my blog readership...
(smiles, looks quizzical, and continues...)
*
This essay by Barbara Newman of Northwestern University entitled "Charles Williams and the Companions of the Co-inherence" was extremely valuable - I just found it last week:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/spiritus/v009/9.1.newman.html
'Read the whole thing' as they say, but one interesting argument was that C.W's decade of intensive training in ritual magic may have been the key factor which enabled him, on the one hand, to attain the concentrated effort that allowed him to accomplish such a lot of writing in the face of many other duties and distractions; and on the other hand to generate a spiritual outlook, stillness and mental focus which amplified his already considerable 'charisma' to a remarkable extent.
*
C.W produced poetry, plays, literary criticism & reviews, novels, and theology.
At the end of the day I would regard only the novels and theology as being of interest.
*
The poems are bad: indeed very bad.
They are bad because they are inept - so much is seen from the early poetry. And the late poems are very bad because they try to disguise their ineptitude with pretentious technique and vocabulary.
This much may be inferred on internal evidence, but is confirmed by learning how he discussed the writing of poetry with his confidante: his main concern was a striving for originality, which is clearly not the way that a poet talks of such matters.
That people such as C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot highly-valued Williams poetry is evidence of 1. Tin ears and 2. C.W's immense charisma.
*
Williams poetic plays are impossible - beyond bad. They must have been utter torture for the audience.
*
The reviews and criticism are OK.
*
The novels are very interesting; but they are inept, and at a very basic level: it is very difficult to follow what is going-on, who is speaking, what is happening and even what has happened.
Indeed, among novels that I have actually finished and re-read, I would say that Williams are by far the worst written: less competent than the worst pulp fiction.
*
The theology is also very badly written.
At first I thought this was because C.W was dealing with profound matters, but this can't be right, since much more spiritually-advanced people (who are much less famous than Williams as writers) are considerably more lucid.
Fr Seraphim Rose for instance, or many other Orthodox Christian spiritual writers such as the anonymous author of Way of a Pilgrim, or St John of Kronstadt; or Roman Catholics such as Pascal, or Aquinas...
But, really, almost anyone is easier to understand than C.W.
The reason is is simple and twofold: firstly, Williams was an inept writer and secondly - on top of that - he was deliberately obscure.
C.W certainly has some interesting things to say, theologically. Interesting, but surely wrong!
Once you have reached the bottom, his main ideas seem not just wrong, but obviously - almost absurdly - wrong.
*
C.W is supposedly a Christian theologian (and is regarded as a great one by many including the present Archbishop of Canturbury - although the present +Cantaur seems so brilliant as to be able to read anything into anything...) .
Yet Williams has many bizarre ideas that are (surely?) at odds with Christianity. Sometimes C.W seems not to believe in the divinity of Jesus - which makes him non-Christian.
Apparently he did not believe in the desirability of resurrection, but would prefer death to be an end and a sleep - which means he denies Christian hope.
He believes that all time is literally simultaneous, which denies any direction to history and any meaning to human agency.
(For instance, a modern person can - in Williams' world - accept and thereby reduce the sufferings of people in the past. Including (yes, really) alleviating the sufferings of Christ on the Cross.)
I accept that C.W was much more intelligent and well-informed than I - but this is just nonsense.
And C.W writes frequently and at length of a Way of Affirmation which is supposed to be an equally valid alternative spiritual path to holiness as the ascetic Way of Negation as practiced by the Saints.
Yet Williams' prime exhibit, his only strong and successful instance of a Way of Affirmation is the fictional world depicted by Dante's poetry of love - and Williams provides not a single real life example of a single person ever attaining sanctity by the Way of Affirmation.
Very strange.
*
Williams' vast productivity becomes easier to understand - as a writer he had very low standards.
I am no literary genius (as readers of this blog would willingly testify!) but I would have been ashamed to release such badly-written stuff as Williams poured-out.
With Williams it is not just haste, but I can only presume he had no ability objectively to evaluate his own writing and recognize whether it 'worked' or not.
Or maybe he could see that it did not work, and strove to disguise this obvious fact with deliberate obscurity.
If so, he succeeded with many people, including this writer: it took me a long time to be sure that something like this was going-on.
*
What is indeed remarkable about Charles Williams is now how he managed to write so much but how he managed to publish so much!
A second minor miracle is that so much of his ouvre remains in print: indeed that any of it remains in print is fairly remarkable.
At any rate - and despite my many and serious reservations about Williams writing ability and motivations - I am pleased that so much of what he wrote (and was written about him) is still available.
*
I remain fascinated by Williams as a personality, his effect on other people.
In particular, C.W exemplified in a strong and pure form the horror so many people feel at the shallowness, the banality of mundane worldly existence and the countervailing craving so many people feel for a life in contact with a higher and more real order of things.
Williams' novels depict this in a way which is exciting, inspiring and appealing .
And this was how C.W made other people feel - his friends like Lewis and Tolkien, and his circle of disciples and devotees.
From Williams people got a sense of being in touch with occult reality, a deeper or higher reality; and a stronger sense of being alive and aware.
It seems to me that this was much more a matter of the power of magic than the holiness and love of Christianity - still, for many people and up to a point (beyond which point it became demonic and exploitative), Williams' spiritual charisma could be a step in the right direction: away from materialist nihilism and towards meaning and purpose.
*
I have been (again) reading Charles Williams (1886-1945) - indeed, I have been reading "C.W" off-and-on since about 1987 (stimulated by Humphrey Carpenter's biography The Inklings).
A major factor in my returning again and again to reading C.W was my failure to understand him and the conviction that I must be missing something important.
I now feel that I understand Williams better than before.
And I am prepared to share this hard-won understanding with my blog readership...
(smiles, looks quizzical, and continues...)
*
This essay by Barbara Newman of Northwestern University entitled "Charles Williams and the Companions of the Co-inherence" was extremely valuable - I just found it last week:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/spiritus/v009/9.1.newman.html
'Read the whole thing' as they say, but one interesting argument was that C.W's decade of intensive training in ritual magic may have been the key factor which enabled him, on the one hand, to attain the concentrated effort that allowed him to accomplish such a lot of writing in the face of many other duties and distractions; and on the other hand to generate a spiritual outlook, stillness and mental focus which amplified his already considerable 'charisma' to a remarkable extent.
*
C.W produced poetry, plays, literary criticism & reviews, novels, and theology.
At the end of the day I would regard only the novels and theology as being of interest.
*
The poems are bad: indeed very bad.
They are bad because they are inept - so much is seen from the early poetry. And the late poems are very bad because they try to disguise their ineptitude with pretentious technique and vocabulary.
This much may be inferred on internal evidence, but is confirmed by learning how he discussed the writing of poetry with his confidante: his main concern was a striving for originality, which is clearly not the way that a poet talks of such matters.
That people such as C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot highly-valued Williams poetry is evidence of 1. Tin ears and 2. C.W's immense charisma.
*
Williams poetic plays are impossible - beyond bad. They must have been utter torture for the audience.
*
The reviews and criticism are OK.
*
The novels are very interesting; but they are inept, and at a very basic level: it is very difficult to follow what is going-on, who is speaking, what is happening and even what has happened.
Indeed, among novels that I have actually finished and re-read, I would say that Williams are by far the worst written: less competent than the worst pulp fiction.
*
The theology is also very badly written.
At first I thought this was because C.W was dealing with profound matters, but this can't be right, since much more spiritually-advanced people (who are much less famous than Williams as writers) are considerably more lucid.
Fr Seraphim Rose for instance, or many other Orthodox Christian spiritual writers such as the anonymous author of Way of a Pilgrim, or St John of Kronstadt; or Roman Catholics such as Pascal, or Aquinas...
But, really, almost anyone is easier to understand than C.W.
The reason is is simple and twofold: firstly, Williams was an inept writer and secondly - on top of that - he was deliberately obscure.
C.W certainly has some interesting things to say, theologically. Interesting, but surely wrong!
Once you have reached the bottom, his main ideas seem not just wrong, but obviously - almost absurdly - wrong.
*
C.W is supposedly a Christian theologian (and is regarded as a great one by many including the present Archbishop of Canturbury - although the present +Cantaur seems so brilliant as to be able to read anything into anything...) .
Yet Williams has many bizarre ideas that are (surely?) at odds with Christianity. Sometimes C.W seems not to believe in the divinity of Jesus - which makes him non-Christian.
Apparently he did not believe in the desirability of resurrection, but would prefer death to be an end and a sleep - which means he denies Christian hope.
He believes that all time is literally simultaneous, which denies any direction to history and any meaning to human agency.
(For instance, a modern person can - in Williams' world - accept and thereby reduce the sufferings of people in the past. Including (yes, really) alleviating the sufferings of Christ on the Cross.)
I accept that C.W was much more intelligent and well-informed than I - but this is just nonsense.
And C.W writes frequently and at length of a Way of Affirmation which is supposed to be an equally valid alternative spiritual path to holiness as the ascetic Way of Negation as practiced by the Saints.
Yet Williams' prime exhibit, his only strong and successful instance of a Way of Affirmation is the fictional world depicted by Dante's poetry of love - and Williams provides not a single real life example of a single person ever attaining sanctity by the Way of Affirmation.
Very strange.
*
Williams' vast productivity becomes easier to understand - as a writer he had very low standards.
I am no literary genius (as readers of this blog would willingly testify!) but I would have been ashamed to release such badly-written stuff as Williams poured-out.
With Williams it is not just haste, but I can only presume he had no ability objectively to evaluate his own writing and recognize whether it 'worked' or not.
Or maybe he could see that it did not work, and strove to disguise this obvious fact with deliberate obscurity.
If so, he succeeded with many people, including this writer: it took me a long time to be sure that something like this was going-on.
*
What is indeed remarkable about Charles Williams is now how he managed to write so much but how he managed to publish so much!
A second minor miracle is that so much of his ouvre remains in print: indeed that any of it remains in print is fairly remarkable.
At any rate - and despite my many and serious reservations about Williams writing ability and motivations - I am pleased that so much of what he wrote (and was written about him) is still available.
*
I remain fascinated by Williams as a personality, his effect on other people.
In particular, C.W exemplified in a strong and pure form the horror so many people feel at the shallowness, the banality of mundane worldly existence and the countervailing craving so many people feel for a life in contact with a higher and more real order of things.
Williams' novels depict this in a way which is exciting, inspiring and appealing .
And this was how C.W made other people feel - his friends like Lewis and Tolkien, and his circle of disciples and devotees.
From Williams people got a sense of being in touch with occult reality, a deeper or higher reality; and a stronger sense of being alive and aware.
It seems to me that this was much more a matter of the power of magic than the holiness and love of Christianity - still, for many people and up to a point (beyond which point it became demonic and exploitative), Williams' spiritual charisma could be a step in the right direction: away from materialist nihilism and towards meaning and purpose.
*
Political correctness cannot be explained by selfishness among the elite
*
While it is fun to point out the selfishness and hypocrisy of the PC elite, it would be an error to imagine that political correctness is explained by this: that PC is merely an indirect way in which the elite can pursue its own self interest, or that PC is merely a technology in a power struggle between sectors of the ruling class.
PC is indeed all of these, but there are an infinite number of such ideologies, and the interesting question is why PC has been adopted universally throughout the West and why it has spread through all the institutions of the West despite PC being very obviously self-destroying: despite PC being suicidal.
What is interesting is why and how a suicidal ideology can thrive and be so resilient in the face of... well, in the face of reality.
Or, more exactly, in the face of reality as spontaneously perceived by common sense.
*
What is interesting and novel about PC is its reality-denying aspects.
Or, more exactly - since all religions deny reality in the sense of positing a higher reality than the everyday - how PC is reality denying in the absence of any concept of a higher reality.
Political correctness denies common sense reality, but lacks any method of perceiving another reality higher than common sense, and denies any such possibility.
So that it is not merely rhetorical to term PC nihilist: nihilist is simply a term describing of a belief system which denies reality.
*
There are, of course, degrees of nihilism.
A lot of people believe that there is a reality, but have reservations concerning how much individuals may know of reality.
But PC is a very extreme form of nihilism, in the sense that it denies knowledge of reality and also denies any possibility of knowing about reality.
Of course, at an operational and everyday level, PC pretends to care about and know about reality - but that is not what it does: implicitly PC believes that reality is socially-constructed; and that there are no constraints to the social construction.
Very radical, too, is the implicit belief of PC that reason is not valid; that reason is, indeed, socially constructed, hence contingent, hence without objective validity.
*
But I do not see nihilism as being linked to an active wish to destroy (maybe it is, but I cannot perceive this link) - and the deep nihilistic 'beliefs' of PC clearly do not prevent its having motivations.
*
The root of the problem is that as progressive, radical, atheistic, this-worldly, leftism evolved - it did so by challenging basic beliefs and convictions with which humans are born.
In all human societies until recently in the West, humans came-into the world with built-in assumptions - and human society used these inborn beliefs (or, most of them) to develop ideologies.
So, all ancient ideologies incorporated a kind of trust: trust in the reality of the world (various combinations of the visible and the higher world), validity of reason, reality of the soul etc.
*
But the radical tendency developed a method of wholesale but piecemeal doubt of these assumptions, one at a time.
(The ancient cynics and skeptics had tried out radical systematic doubt, but this was immediately and obviously self-refuting; whereas piecemeal doubt could masquerade as common sense.)
Some assumptions were accepted (for the moment) and were used to challenge other assumptions; in a kind of rotational process - until doubt had been cast upon each and every assumption with which humans were born.
*
So the culture of atheistic, leftism - which is now PC - stripped away the basic toolkit of assumptions with which humans were born into the world. So the culture of radicalism rapidly made humans helpless in the face of reality; took pre-designed people - created for this world - and made them into (psychologically) formless blobs.
The hope behind this was that formless blobs would be amenable to re-programming - and indeed they are (many of them). But, in an unreal world, what to reprogram them with?
The formless blob humans created by PC deprogramming are being filled with the highest thing known to PC; which is impersonal abstract altruism; they are being filled with the idea that the highest goal a human can aim-at is to impose upon human behaviours an abstractly virtuous system which does not depend on individual humans, does not require moral humans, does not need human choice - human agency.
*
At a deep level, PC has become a program to destroy humanity (destroy not the physical form of humans, but destroy their agency, freedom, choice etc) - and this is not seen as a bad thing to do, since humans are intrinsically selfish animals, and therefore the highest imaginable thing in the PC world is an abstract system which shares-out 'goods' despite what humans might feel about it.
Of course PC cannot justify that imposing a system of altruism is objectively a valid endeavor. Because no endeavors are valid. There is no valid positive goal for PC - it is negative and reactive against our spontaneous perception of selfishness/ injustice/ corruptibility.
PC is therefore always working-towards - and if it ever actually arrives and achieves its goal, then it will collapse from its internal contradictions.
That collapse might still leave humans enslaved to abstract systems of altruism, but the humans so enslaved would no longer be politically correct.
(Something of this sort seems to have happened in the USSR by 1989.)
*
My point here is that PC has evolved logically from a set of skeptical moves, from an attitude of radical doubt, which actually originated in the West around the time of Abelard in the medieval Catholic universities.
Is it really plausible that something so abstract, so philosophical/ ideological, so hifalutin, so far removed from the everyday and the practical could be the cause of Western suicide?
Well, yes. Only something of that sort could have the capability of getting humans to behave so anti-biologically as does PC.
*
While it is fun to point out the selfishness and hypocrisy of the PC elite, it would be an error to imagine that political correctness is explained by this: that PC is merely an indirect way in which the elite can pursue its own self interest, or that PC is merely a technology in a power struggle between sectors of the ruling class.
PC is indeed all of these, but there are an infinite number of such ideologies, and the interesting question is why PC has been adopted universally throughout the West and why it has spread through all the institutions of the West despite PC being very obviously self-destroying: despite PC being suicidal.
What is interesting is why and how a suicidal ideology can thrive and be so resilient in the face of... well, in the face of reality.
Or, more exactly, in the face of reality as spontaneously perceived by common sense.
*
What is interesting and novel about PC is its reality-denying aspects.
Or, more exactly - since all religions deny reality in the sense of positing a higher reality than the everyday - how PC is reality denying in the absence of any concept of a higher reality.
Political correctness denies common sense reality, but lacks any method of perceiving another reality higher than common sense, and denies any such possibility.
So that it is not merely rhetorical to term PC nihilist: nihilist is simply a term describing of a belief system which denies reality.
*
There are, of course, degrees of nihilism.
A lot of people believe that there is a reality, but have reservations concerning how much individuals may know of reality.
But PC is a very extreme form of nihilism, in the sense that it denies knowledge of reality and also denies any possibility of knowing about reality.
Of course, at an operational and everyday level, PC pretends to care about and know about reality - but that is not what it does: implicitly PC believes that reality is socially-constructed; and that there are no constraints to the social construction.
Very radical, too, is the implicit belief of PC that reason is not valid; that reason is, indeed, socially constructed, hence contingent, hence without objective validity.
*
But I do not see nihilism as being linked to an active wish to destroy (maybe it is, but I cannot perceive this link) - and the deep nihilistic 'beliefs' of PC clearly do not prevent its having motivations.
*
The root of the problem is that as progressive, radical, atheistic, this-worldly, leftism evolved - it did so by challenging basic beliefs and convictions with which humans are born.
In all human societies until recently in the West, humans came-into the world with built-in assumptions - and human society used these inborn beliefs (or, most of them) to develop ideologies.
So, all ancient ideologies incorporated a kind of trust: trust in the reality of the world (various combinations of the visible and the higher world), validity of reason, reality of the soul etc.
*
But the radical tendency developed a method of wholesale but piecemeal doubt of these assumptions, one at a time.
(The ancient cynics and skeptics had tried out radical systematic doubt, but this was immediately and obviously self-refuting; whereas piecemeal doubt could masquerade as common sense.)
Some assumptions were accepted (for the moment) and were used to challenge other assumptions; in a kind of rotational process - until doubt had been cast upon each and every assumption with which humans were born.
*
So the culture of atheistic, leftism - which is now PC - stripped away the basic toolkit of assumptions with which humans were born into the world. So the culture of radicalism rapidly made humans helpless in the face of reality; took pre-designed people - created for this world - and made them into (psychologically) formless blobs.
The hope behind this was that formless blobs would be amenable to re-programming - and indeed they are (many of them). But, in an unreal world, what to reprogram them with?
The formless blob humans created by PC deprogramming are being filled with the highest thing known to PC; which is impersonal abstract altruism; they are being filled with the idea that the highest goal a human can aim-at is to impose upon human behaviours an abstractly virtuous system which does not depend on individual humans, does not require moral humans, does not need human choice - human agency.
*
At a deep level, PC has become a program to destroy humanity (destroy not the physical form of humans, but destroy their agency, freedom, choice etc) - and this is not seen as a bad thing to do, since humans are intrinsically selfish animals, and therefore the highest imaginable thing in the PC world is an abstract system which shares-out 'goods' despite what humans might feel about it.
Of course PC cannot justify that imposing a system of altruism is objectively a valid endeavor. Because no endeavors are valid. There is no valid positive goal for PC - it is negative and reactive against our spontaneous perception of selfishness/ injustice/ corruptibility.
PC is therefore always working-towards - and if it ever actually arrives and achieves its goal, then it will collapse from its internal contradictions.
That collapse might still leave humans enslaved to abstract systems of altruism, but the humans so enslaved would no longer be politically correct.
(Something of this sort seems to have happened in the USSR by 1989.)
*
My point here is that PC has evolved logically from a set of skeptical moves, from an attitude of radical doubt, which actually originated in the West around the time of Abelard in the medieval Catholic universities.
Is it really plausible that something so abstract, so philosophical/ ideological, so hifalutin, so far removed from the everyday and the practical could be the cause of Western suicide?
Well, yes. Only something of that sort could have the capability of getting humans to behave so anti-biologically as does PC.
*
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
Misunderstanding the Post-Christianity in PC
*
Secular right commentators are always banging-on about the Christian nature and roots of PC.
This is correct, but - being secular - they completely misunderstand, indeed invert, the meaning of being Post-Christian.
The secular right emphasizes the Christian elements in PC - residual from Christianity.
But this is entirely to misunderstand.
The proper emphasis is on the Post, not on the Christian.
It is the fact that PC has rejected Christianity which is of significance; not that PC retains some scattered aspects of Christian ethics.
Specifically, it is the rejection of the pre-requisites of Christianity which cause the problem of PC.
In particular, there is underlying PC a nihilistic rejection of reality; this was caused when Christianity was rejected.
(In order to get rid of Christianity) what was rejected was a whole way of orientating humanity in reality: most of it pagan, some of it monotheistic, a relatively small amount of it being specifically Christian.
So, PC Post-Christianity is not just Post-Christian, but also Post-Monotheist and Post-Pagan. None of these traditional religious perspectives make any kind of sense to PC.
So PC Post-Christians reject the soul, life after death, reality, the possibility of knowledge of reality, the possibility of God, the possibility of revelation, miracles, prophecy...and so on and on.
It is being 'Post' all-this-stuff that is the problem about PC - and it really has nothing to do with the Christian elements residual in PC.
*
Secular right commentators are always banging-on about the Christian nature and roots of PC.
This is correct, but - being secular - they completely misunderstand, indeed invert, the meaning of being Post-Christian.
The secular right emphasizes the Christian elements in PC - residual from Christianity.
But this is entirely to misunderstand.
The proper emphasis is on the Post, not on the Christian.
It is the fact that PC has rejected Christianity which is of significance; not that PC retains some scattered aspects of Christian ethics.
Specifically, it is the rejection of the pre-requisites of Christianity which cause the problem of PC.
In particular, there is underlying PC a nihilistic rejection of reality; this was caused when Christianity was rejected.
(In order to get rid of Christianity) what was rejected was a whole way of orientating humanity in reality: most of it pagan, some of it monotheistic, a relatively small amount of it being specifically Christian.
So, PC Post-Christianity is not just Post-Christian, but also Post-Monotheist and Post-Pagan. None of these traditional religious perspectives make any kind of sense to PC.
So PC Post-Christians reject the soul, life after death, reality, the possibility of knowledge of reality, the possibility of God, the possibility of revelation, miracles, prophecy...and so on and on.
It is being 'Post' all-this-stuff that is the problem about PC - and it really has nothing to do with the Christian elements residual in PC.
*
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