Human nature and political left vs. right
Commenter “Snow on Pine” makes the following excellent observation about the differences between left and right:
The fork in the road occurs at the crossroad named Human Nature.
Believe that humans are innately good and that it is just their circumstances that make them misbehave—do bad things, and you travel down one of the two forks—everything thereafter—your view of the world, your value system, your view of the purpose and role of government, and the solutions to those “circumstances” you propose—are all based on that fundamental assumption about human nature.
That road terminates at Socialism and dictatorship, in less and less Freedom—as you try (or claim to try)—in vain—to arrange “circumstances” to create a perfected man.
Believe that human beings are fallible, and tend to get into trouble if left to their own devices—are what they are and are not “perfectible”—and you travel down the other fork—and everything thereafter—your view of the world, your value system, your view of the purpose and role of government, and the solutions to that “misbehavior” you propose—are all based on that fundamental understanding of human nature, how to take it into account, and to plan government and public policy around it.
That road leads to more Freedom and, among other destinations, to Capitalism.
Starting at that fundamental divide, each road diverges more and more from the other, getting further and further apart, until the people traveling each road can no longer even see or easily communicate with each other.
I agree wholeheartedly with that last paragraph of Snow’s. And I believe that Snow’s general analysis has some basic truth, particularly regarding the more idealistic sort of leftist (and they absolutely do exist) and the smaller-federal-government type of conservative. But there’s also a way in which the situation sometimes gets flipped/reversed/twisted.
I’ve known leftists who don’t seem to believe in the basic goodness of humankind. They just happen to believe that they themselves know best and therefore should have power and control over flawed humanity, that they themselves can put the correct restrictions on other people so that they themselves can get the results they deem “good.” If people are innately selfish, for example, they must be forced to share. If they are innately racist, they must be forced to check their privilege. Don’t let re-education camps fool you; the instruction is not necessarily meant to gently persuade. Sometimes the goal is to tell the attendees what is the expected behavior for them, and what is the penalty for non-compliance.
On the other side, there are some people on the right (not very many, but some) who seem to be quite sanguine about human nature, or at least about the larger social systems in which humans are involved. They veer towards thinking that total laissez-faire capitalism would work just fine, for example. Likewise, they believe that by lowering taxes very dramatically and eliminating entitlements, people would give so much to charity that social ills would be adequately addressed.
I also think that the divergent roads along which people disposed to be on the left and those disposed to be on the right travel are not entirely ideological roads (although there’s certainly that). They are also informational roads and group-identity roads. I believe this tends to be more true for left than right, but that it can be true for either.
For example, people on the left don’t tend to expose themselves to any media outlets on the right, whereas people on the right are exposed (voluntarily or not) to the left far more often. That’s the informational road I’m talking about, and the left travel one that’s more homogeneous. For me, one of the main drivers of my political change was being exposed to new sources of information available over the internet in the early years of the 21st Century—and I’m not talking about fringe sites on the right, I’m talking about hoary periodicals such as Commentary or National Review which I’d vaguely heard of before but never actually seen until I started getting most of my news via internet around 2000. The internet made it easy, and I was far more simpatico with what the right was saying than I had previously thought I would be before I had that exposure.
But the group identity road is an important one, too. A lot of people grow up as members of groups (for example: religious, racial, urban-vs.-rural) in which they rarely meet someone who thinks differently, or if they do they’re not aware of it. If a person grows up with that sort of political identity forged by group identity—what Zell Miller called the “birthmark”—it is particularly difficult for that person to change a political affiliation and outlook. It’s felt as a very jarring experience. You can hear a lot of these stories on the WalkAway videos at YouTube, and it’s clear that many of these people have gone through a lot of emotional anguish as they sort it out.
In the context of this discussion, I recommend reading what I believe to be a very undervalued book by the late Israeli Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jacob L. Talmon, an “anti-Marxist” scholar whose book I’ve recommended here before.
The title of Talmon’s 1952 work is, “The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,” and it analyzes leftist ideology, and what Talmon termed “totalitarian democracy” and “political Messianism” as they originated and played out in the French Revolution.
How those on the Left believed that given the lofty nature of their goal–their march toward Utopia, and the salvation of all mankind–that nothing and no one should be allowed to stand in their way–and, in fact, that any person who blocked their march, who stood in their way should, as a last (or perhaps as a first ) resort be eliminated, be killed.
See the Introduction to Talmon’s 1952 book here at https://www.panarchy.org/talmon/totalitariandemocracy.html
Thus, all those who, as these leftists saw it, were too stupid to “understand where their true interests lay,” who suffered, as Marxist ideology has it, from “false consciousness,” should be “forced to be Free,” as those on the Left defined that Freedom.”
Isn’t people being “forced to be Free” by those on the Left, what we are seeing happen all around us, in the age of political correctness, and Identity politics?
Yes, I think that whereas the traditional progressive was Rousseauian in outlook, as Snow on Pine describes, and thus backed-in to their totalitarianism, the old fashioned kind are increasingly replaced by a type of “liberal” which can no longer deny that humans have certain more or less fixed dispositions or preferences, and that these preferences, some of them of life and death import, may collide in ways that cannot be resolved through education and dialog.
Which is why in more recent decades liberals have been casting traditionalists as not merely benighted, but as “Neanderthals”; i.e., irredeemable moral and intellectual dregs of the species, properly slated for actual extinction or replacement, with themselves as the soaring, imaginative vanguard which has a duty to the future to politically cull and reshape the herd through various managerial techniques. One even sees this admission developing, although it is made more or less in passing, in as early a work as Rawls’, “A Theory of Justice”.
Speaking of political nature and human left vs right:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/06/oberlin-college-hit-with-maximum-punitive-damages-capped-at-22-million-by-law-in-gibsons-bakery-case/
A: no college administrator should retain employment who does not know the difference in usage between “less” and “fewer”; I extend that to their attorneys.
B: the entire purpose of leftist activism is to “impact people who had nothing to do with the protest” — examples too numerous to link, but three guesses about how many people at Oberlin support reparations for US slavery.
Some relevant commentary:
ttps://hotair.com/archives/2019/06/13/oberlins-lament-dont-let-malicious-social-justice-defamation-put-us-business/
Cue Orwell: “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” Inside the Whale (1940)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Orwell
Forward Covington Catholic!
I’ve been seeing that quote by Orwell for years, and decided to look up the context.
Turns out it’s also relevant to the divergence of ideologues.
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/whale/english/e_itw
“the salvation of all mankind–[required] that any person who blocked their march, who stood in their way should… be eliminated, be killed.” – Snow
Sort of like that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” justification that the old anti-war protestors used to complain about?
A: no college administrator should retain employment who does not know the difference in usage between “less” and “fewer”;
Can someone for making a grammatical error? Pretty frivolous.
The real reason to fire people in this circumstances is for manufacturing this controversy (Raimondo), taking it to trial (Varner), and not putting a stop to the GC when she wanted to take it to trial (Ambar).
Two roads, travelled by different classes —
https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/12/why-are-the-western-middle-classes-so-angry/
Why Are the Western Middle Classes So Angry?
By Victor Davis Hanson| June 12th, 2019
Two roads also implies, eventually, two end points.
I have written here before about the dangers of the attitudes discussed in your guote above.
About historically illiterate, inexperienced, often idealistic and politically naive people—more often than not the young—who have had no actual, on the ground experience with the inevitable end state of Socialism/Democratic Socialism i.e. Communism in thin disguise.
(I include Nazi Germany here as one of my examples because, although a lot of people want to forget or disguise it, the acronym NAZI does, in fact, stand for the “National German Socialist Workers’ Party”).
About how, lacking any real experience of Socialism/Communism—with the lack any real Freedom, things like political violence ending in torture and murder—see Cambodia, the old U.S.S.R., China, North Korea, and Nazi Germany, the all enveloping surveillance and control mechanisms of actual dictatorship—see China, the U.S.S. R., North Korea, and Nazi Germany, with Party members as the elite and superior to all others—see the old U.S.S.R., North Korea, China, and Nazi Germany, hours spent in line to get often absent basic necessities, economic collapse and inflation/deflation—see the old U.S.S.R., and Venezuela, re-education, public humiliation and forced confessions—see China’s Great Proletarian Revolution and its Red Guards, and the old U.S.S.R., drab, crowded, run down Socialist housing—see the former East Germany, work/death camps—see the old (and perhaps today’s) U.S.S.R., North Korea, Cambodia, and Nazi Germany, etc. etc., can invent a benign, fantasy “Socialism” in their heads—say, like the glowing propaganda picture that is painted of the Socialism at work in Scandinavia—which can lead them to make disastrous decisions with bad, even deadly consequences.
They are the people who very likely believe Bernie when, as he did yesterday, he tells them that “Democratic Socialism “ is the high-minded path of ”Compassion,” “Justice,” and “Love.”
But, in reality, as a recent saying goes, “you can vote yourself into Socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.”
We’re really talking here about human nature as presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — whose ideas led directly to Robespierre and onward to Pol Pot. Nature vs Nurture. If you postulate that it is society that corrupts the innocent, sinless child then you may end up believing that if such influences are removed…. the natural Goodness of the child will prevail.
The contrary view may be found in “Lord of the Flies” and the Marquis de Sade, etc, and is much less pretty to contemplate.
“…until the people traveling each road can no longer even see or easily communicate with each other.”
True, but that’s why we have artillery.
“…but that’s why we have artillery”
Sad but excellent point.
As to your statement on charity, I have heard a number of people take the Scrooge position that the gov’t has taken over responsibility for the poor (using taxes), so in effect they have already “given”. Most charities in the past were via religious institutions (either formally or informally). Such institutions seem to be under fire from the gov’t AND the popular culture. The advantage to the old system was that it was targeted toward those really in need. The disadvantage was that local prejudice could exclude some.
Once the gov’t takes something over, it is really difficult to revert.
Starting at that fundamental divide, each road diverges more and more from the other, getting further and further apart, until the people traveling each road can no longer even see or easily communicate with each other.
neo: I responded to Snow on Pine:
Is this so? From what I can tell, it’s more that people become less interested in communication. It is more trouble to communicate with people outside one’s worldview, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
I don’t think the problem is communication but motivation. At one time I wasn’t equipped to understand American conservatives or abstract expressionist painters for that matter. I wouldn’t say my understanding of either is complete, but I’m not in the dark and don’t consider them malevolent others.
Oh, and I can now communicate, after a fashion, with American conservatives and abstract expressionists, though the latter are hard to find these days.
They still seem kind of strange and I’m not sure I trust them.
To quote Churchill, “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
When confronted with the dreadful, the murderous result–the butcher’s bill–paid by the people whose misfortune happened to be that they came under Communist rule–the proponents of Socialism/Communism always have a facile answer.
Thus, they say, well, “the implementation was not complete, or it was botched.”
But this time–this time–the Socialism/Communism we are proposing to become the law of the land will not be botched, it will be done right, and boy, will it be great.
It is truly amazing to me that anyone could be so naive, that they would accept this excuse and rosy prediction–after an estimated death toll of a hundred million plus people killed–due to the half dozen times when true Socialism i.e. Communism was tried to be implemented.
Haven’t enough people died already, their misery and deaths proving that true Socialism i.e. Communism is a wrong and murderous, a disastrous path down which to travel?
When you are making the ultimate omelet, you don’t care how many eggs you break. It seems that it’s always the ultimate omelet being made.
Snow on Pine: A Churchill tidbit:
Winston Churchill repeated a grade during elementary school and, when he entered Harrow, was placed in the lowest division of the lowest class. Later, he twice failed the entrance exam to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He was defeated in his first effort to serve in Parliament. He became Prime Minister at the age of 62. He later wrote, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up.”
https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/OnFailingG.html
Edison said inventing the electric bulb took on the order of a thousand attempts. Why should socialists give up after a dozen or so failures?
Do you really believe you can’t communicate with socialists? Or they can’t communicate with you?
They don’t give up because cost (in other people’s lives and treasure) is no object.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
If there ever was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” it’s Bernie Sanders, and the others who are advocating for “Socialism.”
No offense to Snow on Pine, but, Neo, I think your distinction is much more relevant and common. I hear and read many who state circumstances as SoP did, but I don’t think that way and I don’t believe most others do either.
I don’t believe AOC thinks people are perfectable, certainly not folks on the right. She thinks they (those on the right) are selfish and greedy and heartless or clueless or both. But if we make her our Boss she’ll sort us and reward the good and punish the bad. Many on the left hate their fellow man and what legions of us gone. Out of their way.
It is as you write, Neo.
“…want legions of us gone…”
Not, “what.”
DNW’s first comment describes fascist leftists I encounter.
They are our betters, The Elites.
And, as Hillary stated, we are irreedeemable.
To use the omelette analogy. We are not the eggs broken to make the omelette. We are the bits of shell that must be removed and discarded before whisking the eggs.
“What we have here is failure to communicate.”
Seems to me, there is a great deal of preaching to the choir by those assuming the choir needs to be educated. Let a hundred of artfldgrs blossom. But perhaps we rubes are a bit more up to date than some of our more long winded betters may imagine.
Advise from an old farm boy, if your comment is longer than the post, you might think about engaging in some brevity. BTW, this comment is too long. 😉
SoP, I agree about Bernie, AOC, Ilhan Omar… They would all smile as we are marched to the reeducation camps.
parker,
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.” – Louise Brooks
“The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.” – George Burns
Why should socialists give up after a dozen or so failures?
Do you really believe you can’t communicate with socialists? Or they can’t communicate with you?
This is fun. Reminds me of when I planted myself in the blind spot of progressives.
Rufus T.
Chuckled at the Pascal quote. Thanks.
huxley in the blind spot of progressives, is that like playing dodge ball with the Europeans when separated by a lot of salty water?
My mind tells me I can sleep deep below the raging bastard of tinnitus. May all find peaceful sleep and blue skies in the morning.
I tend to fall in line with Snow on Pine on this. I once had the opportunity to engage in an excellent debate with a bright young college student on the death penalty. As with every good debate, we peeled away all of the peripheral layers to expose the core differences in our points of view. In this case, we arrived at exactly the difference that S on P described. She thought all humans were food and that their lives were valuable. I know from sad experience that humans exist who do not posess sufficient empathy to ever coexist within a social matrix. These are dangerous and uncivilized beasts that can never be permitted to exist among us. In fact their very existence diminishes our race. Our very racial survival demands that we cull such miscreants from the gene pool.
However, there is another fundamental premise about human nature that must be included in this discussion: “All humans men (humans) are created equal.” Now, I know what Thomas Jefferson really had in mind when he wrote that. He grew up in an aristocracy. That was a statement that directly challenged the status quo. But, I don’t think he ever intended that statement to be taken literally. Clearly, we are not all equal. Some are stronger, some are faster, some are smarter, and some are more beautiful. In fact, he meant that all men should be equal in the eyes of the law. However, the concept of egalitarianism took hold in Western Culture as an ideal despite the obvious evidence to the contrary of the proposition.
I just finished binge-reading nearly all of Legal Insurrection’s posts on the Gibson vs Oberlin trial.
At one point, either McGraw, Jacobson, or a commenter pointed out that the two parties were on two very divergent roads, and would never agree on the points they were disputing.
Which is true.
Gibson’s tried several times to just get the college to put out a statement saying they did not have a history of racism, as claimed on the flyer & student organization letter (and never backed up with any evidence), and clear their reputation; while the college demanded that the store owners call the college first, rather than the police, in any further crimes involving students — essentially giving them a free pass — and then they would deign to transact business with the store again.
Evidence on the first couple of days showed that the charges of racism were totally false; later, information surfaced that the college got a lot of communications from the community to that effect and ignored them.
As Professor Jacobson himself said, after reading the trial reports, I am SMH over the obtuseness, and arrogance, of the college’s administration, and the incompetence, and arrogance, of their attorneys.
There were some pretty good zingers from the witness stand, and the Gibsons’s lawyers were brilliant.
Continuing my comment above. Sorry, I pushed the button by accident…
If we start with the assumption that all people are equal, then in a fair society, all of the outcomes would be equal. For such a person, the evidence of unequal outcomes is proof that the society is unfair. It also justifies the resentment of underperformers for those who overperform the average. In turn, that resentment makes a very large percentage of the population vulnerable to populist politicians.
So, for me, the roots of most of the political divisions and evils of the western world are the twin fallacies that all people are inherently good and that they are all equal.
om on June 13, 2019 at 10:19 pm said:
They don’t give up because cost (in other people’s lives and treasure) is no object.
* * *
And Oberlin pushed the Gibsons into a defamation trial because they are spending other people’s money — lawyer and expert witness fees easily hit several hundred thousand dollars, and now they will have appeals and eventually paying the judgment against them — since the costs won’t come out of their own pockets.
Although, if Oberlin’s trustees are at all sane, they will sack the lot of them.
AesopFan,
” (and never backed up with any evidence) ”
Tawana Brawley, Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, MO, the University of Missouri, Andrew Breitbart’s $100,000 challenge to John Lewis …
And Stacy Abrams is the Governor of Georgia, Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin, Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist…
As Ronald Reagan said, “They know so much that isn’t true.”
I’m wondering where the stupid idea that people are inherently good got started. Until fairly (in historical terms) recently, everyone understood that the basic rule of human conduct was, as Thucydides put it, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” Was it Rosseau? Marx? And why would anyone believe humans were inherently good when all of human history shows the opposite?
The commentary here should be shown in every high school civics class (oops, I forgot that civics is no longer taught in high school).
Thank you Snow on Pine, AesopFan and others.
My simple mantra: “Beware of those who promise to make Heaven on Earth, for they will stop at nothing to eliminate anything or anybody whom they perceive as standing in their way.”
In line with the road to the Left and it’s world-view there is this:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/time-to-leave-western-civ-behind-looking-for-a-place-to-emigrate/
huxley on June 13, 2019 at 9:32 pm
I did not know that about Churchill. The other thing I did not know about him was that as a younger man, he was the architect of the battle of Gallipoli fiasco. After WWI, the elites in the U.K. considered his career to be finished.
Never, never give up. I’ll say.
I apologize if this has been presented by Neo already, or extensively commented on before. If it were, I probably commented on it myself, but simply don’t recall. LOL
But in rereading it – and it is nearly topical, postdating the election of Trump – I was struck by its continuing relevance to the matter at hand.
That matter, is the relationship between the granting of the concept of a human nature or at least of “natural kinds” and real categories, and human sanity. A granting which brings with it the possibility of logic, and practical reason, and at least some potential for constructive order and freedom.
The denial of real categories (radical nominalism) whatever the originating impulse, seems to eventually express itself socially in raving chaotic nihilism, and the impossibility of communication as definitions are dissolved, and terms corrupted into meaningless, emotive, rhetorical gibbering at the service of a fulminating mental instability and rage.
Is there a relation between a disordered psyche and emotional instability and hard core nominalism?
From February of last year.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269251/my-sister-kate-destructive-feminist-legacy-kate-mark-tapson
Read the article at the link that DNW has just put up above, it’s quite something.
I’ve nearly finished Thomas Sowell’s “The Quest for Cosmic Justice.”
In the last chapter he quotes at some length from a speech by Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in 1838.
Lincoln worries about “threats [to our gov.] from within” by “men of ambition” whose
A few sentences later, Sowell states the following, probably from a perspective from within an elite university.
(Italics mine. Is that one too cynical, or just accurate?)
To oversimplify, it can be very fashionable to scorn all traditions, and exhilarating to wreck them in pursuit of a grand new vision. Even for the followers that have not helped to build the vision, once they have gone past the emotional phase of resentment and victimhood, they don’t see any downside.
Did Lincoln think emancipating the slaves was rash in 1838, or do I misunderstand? And Sowell quotes it nonetheless.
Roy said ” She thought all humans were food and that their lives were valuable.”
Well, she’s right, you don’t want to waste food.
Richard Saunders–People want to believe that people are “inherently good” because, that view of human nature is so much more flattering than what the actual facts on the ground demonstrate about the real general essence of human nature.
Its sort of like the disappointment and shock that all of those primatologists/anthropologists must have felt, when the news broke that observations actually showed that Chimpanzees–our closest living relatives, out of whose biological imperatives and social structures human beings evolved— deliberately stalked, killed, and ate their fellow Chimpanzees.
I think these coupled passages, TommyJay, may better be understood to point toward Woodrow Wilson than to be aimed in any measure at slavery as an historical object as such. Of course Lincoln can only indicate Wilson (i.e., someone like him) prospectively, whereas Sowell can see him in old film and history books.
As I have mentioned here I am not formally religious, nor am I a churchgoer, but examining my world-view, values, and ideas, it is obvious that the Christian teachings I pretty unconsciously absorbed as a child–however rudimentary and devoid of higher theology or “hell and brimstone” teaching they were—created that world-view and values that I hold.
As the saying goes, ”as the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined,” and, in my case, this is true. That essentially Christian viewpoint is the lens through which I view the world, how I make sense of it; the program I consult to see what the game is, and who the players are.
As I later learned, Christian theology sees each one of us as a “fallen creature’” as a fallible being prone to bad behavior—in Christian terms a ‘sinner”—and in need of God’s grace.
As I see it, this mindset performs the vital function of helping to keep our human fallibility front and center in our minds, and helps to keep our hubristic, Promethean tendencies in check.
We do need boundaries, and as uncomfortable, stuffy, confining, faulty, and even sometimes as unfair as they might have been, they were there for a reason, they served a specific function.
They were protective walls, designed to keep out the uncontrolled anarchy and violence that awaited outside their perimeter.
But today we live in a society in which the formerly ubiquitous Christian teachings that were all around us and embedded in our society and culture—taught explicitly in church on Sunday, but also present—explicitly and implicitly—in our schools, in our literature, and entertainment, in public discourse, in virtually every aspect of our society and culture, and in our lives—which created a framework for our society and culture, informing, directing, and setting the boundaries and expectations for how we lived those lives, has increasingly—and very deliberately—been pushed out of the public square, and is vanishing from our lives, more and more quickly and fully receding toward the horizon like the tide; a sign—if we are smart enough to recognize it—of the Tsunami that is very likely to follow.
The former boundaries have eroded and, in some cases, seem to have just about vanished.
As I see it, then, in the West’s increasingly unbridled, Post-Christian societies, our tendencies toward hubris and towards seeing ourselves as Promethean in nature—“modern,” “scientific,” without bounds, and no longer subject to any “superstitions,” to any archaic rules or moral codes—have increasingly become more voiced, and more common—are on their way to very likely becoming dominant.
Emblematic of this Promethean attitude—it seems to me—is the news that, in China, a scientist/surgeon and his team are getting ready to perform the first head transplant, things like genetically manipulated “designer babies” are on the horizon, harmful narcotic and psychoactive/hallucinogenic drugs are increasingly seen as relatively benign and are being “de-criminalized,” and the clamor for totally without limits abortion—including infanticide— grows.
“… or simply a posture of daring in the role of a verbal dandy.”
That was the part I meant to emphasize. Should have used bold face.
sdferr: The part about slavery was in some sense completely extraneous to the main point. But I was curious about it and the context in which Lincoln made it.
______
The Mallory Millett interview linked by DNW is amazing. Worth reading the whole thing.
Thus saith the progressive: ‘Because nature (as in the world apart from man) is not “fair”, We will make the life of mankind fair. Because God does not exist, We must become our own God.
A little problem that arises however when men deny they have a “nature” as in a telos, or objective end. This leaves them forced to ask, “What entity, exactly, are “we” acting in aid of?’, since there is no essential, objectively discoverable, “there” there to man: no essence, no purpose, not even any moral coherence to the would-be God.
What then is this contingent thing, which would legislate and become God, yet which on its own analysis has no essential nature, no objective purpose, no independent being, and not even a coherent identity?
Can “it” even be defined, rather than simply described as a transient locus of pointless impulses; an evanescent closed loop accident manifesting in aid of nothing?
If you take progressive metaphysics seriously – or at least the propositions which taken together imply a metaphysics – when you look at the progressive model of man, there IS NO coherent there, there.
So what is it then, that would ascend to the Throne, and decree the Law?
There is a reason that Kipling’s “God of the Copybook Endings” is not taught in every school in the land.
See it here http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm
For my “Buddhist” acquaintance, Huxley.
https://thejournalofbusiness.org/index.php/site/article/download/448/352
Now two things before you bother to click, if you do bother:
– this is written by an Indian and so you will have to mentally correct for some of the awkward language yourself.
– this does not specifically explore what methodological practices might be derived for the phenomenological “epoche’ ” from out of Zen meditation, but does implicitly note a kind of parallel.
It should also be mentioned that neither Phenomenology so far as I am aware, nor I, as I am certain, have any interest in these practices as a means of escaping ‘suffering”; which seems to be the goal of Buddhism in general, if not necessarily abstract westernized Suzuki style Zen in particular.
We have a situation then, wherein the analysis of consciousness in Buddhism seems to exist primarily in aid of that goal: and where the direct engagement with a more or less unmediated reality develops as a kind of happy side-effect or discovery, which only after the fact reveals itself as a kind of worthwhile goal.
As the author points out, Phenomenology to the contrary, is focused on knowing; whereas Buddhism is focused on … well, who the hell knows what it is focused on ultimately … on “Nothing” I guess (however you construe that, and its benefits)
Rufus T. Firefly on June 14, 2019 at 8:02 am said:
..
As Ronald Reagan said, “They know so much that isn’t true.”
* * *
Simply put, the news has always been fake.
Snow on Pine on June 14, 2019 at 3:06 pm said:
-People want to believe that people are “inherently good” …
* * *
…because then so am I — and no changes to my character or behavior are needed.
See your comment below on the suppression of the Christian “background radiation” of society.
Once it’s gone..things will not end well.
Snow on Pine on June 14, 2019 at 1:30 pm said:
In line with the road to the Left and it’s world-view there is this:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/time-to-leave-western-civ-behind-looking-for-a-place-to-emigrate/
* * *
What’s really sad is that they had to put a specific tag at the bottom of the post.
Three guesses what that was, and the first two don’t count.
The roads are diverging at approximately the speed at which the universe is expanding.
Or faster.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/pinterest-blacklists-pj-media-other-conservative-sites-and-this-is-just-the-tip-of-the-censorship-iceberg/
Source posts for the PJM article on Pinterest.
— and the “bottom line” from there, which I meant to include above:
https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/11/tech-insider-blows-whistle-on-how-pinterest-listed-top-pro-life-site-as-porn-bible-verses-censored/
They incude an example of what happens when you type “bible vers” — none of them even make sense: “bible versus tattoos” — really?
The insider has either been fired or placed on administrative leave.
I wonder how Pinterest found out so fast who lratted them out — the DOJ doesn’t seem to be able to discover any of the government’s leakers.
https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/11/pinterest-insider-fired-part-2-coming-soon/
“Project Veritas has learned that the brave insider at Pinterest who exposed their methods of censoring conservative and religious content has been fired. This morning, Project Veritas published documents and an interview with the insider showing how Pinterest banned Live Action, suppresses Christian terms, and censors other pro-life content.”
“Is there a relation between a disordered psyche and emotional instability and hard core nominalism?” – DNW
That article on Millett was nearly unbelievable.
We talk about leftism being a mental illness, but I always thought it was just kind of a joke.
Not any more.
This is kind of a companion piece to the Millett article:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273985/leftism-makes-people-meaner-dennis-prager
FWIW, commenters at FPM did not shy away from calling her evil.
Now go read Mallory’s first article at PJM — the feminists destroyed the world on purpose, by design, and really are just as evil as we have finally begun to realize.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/240037/marxist-feminisms-ruined-lives-mallory-millett
Ray,
Funny…
No more edit function.
I hope that wasn’t the only takeaway from my comment.