Throne and Altar

Reparations for slavery

It can’t happen because the whole idea is that white should pay our debt.  But if we pay our debt–with some sufficiently big one-time check, even one big enough to reduce the white population to penury–then we will have paid our debt.  That would mean things would be square between whites and blacks.  Whites would no longer have anything to be ashamed of.  This, of course, can never be allowed.

The mystery of Harper Lee

From the Guardian:

In a move which has shocked Monroeville, Lee, who resides in an assisted-living facility in the town, is bringing a lawsuit against the local museum, accusing the small, not-for-profit institution of exploiting her fame and the prestige of her Pulitzer-winning book without offering compensation. The museum is fighting back, condemning Lee’s lawsuit as “false” and “meritless” and warning that the legal action could destroy an institution that honours the author’s legacy and provides an economic boost to the town.

Let me explain things to inhabitants of Monroeville who are “shocked”.  Anyone who has read To Kill a Mockingbird knows that Harper Lee hates you.  She hates all white Southerners.  Demonizing you has been her life’s work.  Of course she doesn’t mind delivering an economic hit to the town.

What does it mean to say that we are a “nation of immigrants”?

It means that our culture, and by extension we ourselves, have no real connection to this land.  Trace back anybody’s ancestors far enough, and one finds that they came from somewhere else, but that doesn’t make everybody an immigrant.

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Reading this

Since God is our Heavenly Father - we can consider how an earthly father might hope that his children should regard and address him – especially if that earthly father’s wish was for his sons and daughters to grow into unique and developed personalities who would at some point undergo a transition from child dependent to adult ‘friend’.

Taking this perspective, it seems clear to me that a good father would hope for love of course, and also respect and due deference – but not ‘worship’, submission, abasement, grovelling or anything of that sort – which would more appropriate to a tyrant than to a father.

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I’ve watched others do it.  I’ve seen the results.

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Read commenter Taco’s story of how the Catholic annulment machine helped steal his family and realize that this is what our Kasperized hierarchy would regard as a successful operation, the system working as desired.  Those of us that don’t like it must just be lacking in mercy.  Both Zippy and the pope think that half of Catholic marriages are invalid.  I disagree with both of them, but there’s a big difference between the two.  Zippy recognizes it as a pastoral catastrophe; the bishops see it as good news.  It means that half of married Catholics have a “get out of jail” card that can be given to them if and when convenient (for one of them).  Perhaps with more careful analysis, it could be found that all marriages are invalid.  Now that would really be ideal!  Yes, it would mean that we’re all fornicators and our children are all bastards, but the whole point of the Kasperite heresy is that it’s subjective experience rather than reality that matters.  You didn’t really want to bind yourself to another person; you just wanted to feel like you had.

It’s a very easy thing to do, arguing that at the time of a wedding, one of the spouse’s knowledge or will didn’t encompass the entirety of the sacrament’s meaning.  In fact, we know that this is always true!  Sacraments are, to use my prior terminology, supra-rational signs.  What they signify can’t be exhaustively encoded in explicit human statements.  If the signification could be thus captured, it wouldn’t be supernatural.  If we follow this reasoning, saying that some (actually all) marriages are invalid because of the least bit of vagueness in the participants’ understanding or motives, then it follows that all baptisms are invalid, all confessions are invalid, no one has ever properly received the Eucharist, and the Church is useless as a vehicle of grace.

I suppose it could still get by as a vehicle of warm feelings, though.

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Some clerics have taken to emphasizing that it’s not divorce per se that the Church condemns, but only divorce followed by remarriage during the life of the original spouse.  This is technically correct, in that it is the remarriage that constitutes adultery, an intrinsic evil.  However, to leave things at that is to deceive by leaving out much of the truth.  After all, what we promise in our marriage vows is a great deal more than sexual fidelity, and to repudiate any of these vows is gravely sinful.  Thus, even the separation of spouses, which the Church admits, is gravely sinful when pursued against the will of the other spouse except in the most exceptional circumstances.  And even in the case of a permanent separation, it is usually a grave wrong to file for a civil divorce.

In making that last statement, I know I am setting myself against the vast majority of Catholic priests in the West, who are known to advise separated spouses (if the party in question is the woman and the priest judges her to be the wronged party–and I’ve never known a priest not to judge the woman to be the wronged party, no matter who does the separating) to get a civil divorce in order to protect their assets (and usually milk the husbands of theirs).  It’s just a legal formality, right?  The Church herself says civil divorce doesn’t change anything, so signing that form doesn’t mean anything, right?  After all, a girl has got to protect herself, and divorce is just how asset-splitting is done in the West.

Well, getting divorced does make you a client of an evil system.  Now, this in itself isn’t always intrinsically evil.  It’s not sinful in itself to get a routine exam through Planned Parenthood or to work out a mutually beneficial exchange with Ursula the Sea Witch, but you should really ask yourself if that’s the sort of thing you want to associate with.  Maybe in dire circumstances, but the circumstances should be dire.

You should also ask yourself whether filling out those divorce papers doesn’t make you a liar.  After all, what our law and society mean by divorce is that a marriage is ended and the parties are free to contract another one; you know that this is false.  You can tell yourself that that’s not what you mean by signing the form, but what others think is not incidental.  The whole reason you’re signing it is to get the law and the ambient culture to act according to the false meaning.

Suppose every statement of divorce spelled out what is intrinsic in this claim that man can and may terminate what God has joined.  Among other things, it would state that Christianity is therefore false, that the man Jesus Christ was a fraud or a madman.  Do you still feel okay about signing the form?  After all, those words you’re putting your name to aren’t what you mean by this act.  For that matter, what’s the big deal about offering a pinch of incense to Caesar?  There’s nothing intrinsically wrong in doing something like that.  You don’t think the Emperor is a god, and you’re not responsible for how other people interpret your actions.  After all, a girl has got to protect herself.

It nevertheless may well be that many divorces encouraged by priests are morally licit given the alternatives and the understandings of the parties involved.  It is certain though that every divorce makes the culture of marriage weaker and the culture of divorce stronger.

Here’s another idea.  There are lots and lots of Catholic lawyers out there.  Instead of just reminding women to collect their cash and prizes, suppose we set our lawyers to working out ways to financially protect abandoned wives without corrupting ourselves with the “D” word.  When people say “Catholics don’t believe in divorce”, we do more harm than good by saying “No, no.  We just don’t believe in remarriage.”  The simpler “don’t believe in divorce” really does capture the heart of it.  We do not believe in what everybody today means when they say “divorce”.

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An exchange between Zippy and me:

Bonald

June 2, 2014 at 1:45 am

I actually felt embarrassed for the neoreactionaries reading that post at newinternationaloutlook.com. Some of the better-known neoreactionaries have identified their movement with “neo-cameralism” by which they mean reconceiving government along the model of a business corporation as you describe. That is, the problem with liberalism in their view is that it hasn’t taken the desacralization of sovereignty far enough, a position that hardly makes an old-school reactionary like me want to sign up for their movement.

As for Moldbug himself, I’ve read a lot of his verbiage. All your complaints about his writing style are true (and deliberately so, since he and his followers see themselves as passing on esoteric knowledge which they would not want to debase with excessive clarity), but I often enjoy it nonetheless. I am perplexed that such a large group of bloggers regard him as their main inspiration and theoretical guide. I just don’t see it as being profound or revolutionary on that level.

Part of it, I suppose, is a difference in what I think the major questions are. The Orthosphere focuses on ethics and political philosophy. Neo-reaction does this only incidentally. Its main focus is sociology: identifying elites and how they gain and maintain power. Hence, I once said that Moldbug reminds me of Pareto.

From time to time, the neoreactionaries start arguing about the essence of their movement, and I watch from the sidelines. I am a taxonomer of the Right, remember, so I have an academic interest in these things. They’re in the middle of another bout of introspection now, by the way. They very much like to talk about themselves. These discussions never come to a satisfactory conclusion, because they have nothing to compare themselves to except Leftism and libertarianism. They don’t realize that other schools of the Right have theoretical cores worth engaging, so they have no way of saying how they differ from us. When they try, it’s just to boast that they have an intellectual system while we unsophisticated normal reactionaries presumably don’t (not that they’ll ever bother to check).

Zippy

June 2, 2014 at 11:35 am

Bonald:

That is, the problem with liberalism in their view is that it hasn’t taken the desacralization of sovereignty far enough, a position that hardly makes an old-school reactionary like me want to sign up for their movement.

That tracks the mirror-of-Marxism idea too, when you think about it. The problem isn’t modernity, it is that we just haven’t tried the best things about modernity quite hard enough yet.

As for Moldbug himself … but I often enjoy it nonetheless.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s got some really funny zingers. I’ve just never actually made it through an entire post. And building an ‘intellectual movement’ around him seems like building an ‘intellectual movement’ around a comedian. The image I can’t escape comes from the ridiculous movie “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, where a future society is based entirely around the lyrics and music of a rock band started by a couple of stoners.

Unlike great rock star comedians like Brian Regan or John Pinette or Jerry Seinfeld, Moldbug just doesn’t know when to take a bow and exit. He just goes on, and on, and on, and ZZZZZZzzzzzz.

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Thanks, Bruce, for giving me something else to be gloomy about.

Not knowing much about biology, I’m used to thinking of natural selection as something that improves species (at least by the measure of ability to successfully reproduce), but BC points out that, because of the continual accumulation of deleterious mutations, one actually needs a continual culling of the herd just to keep a species “in place”.  As in, he thinks that before the Industrial Revolution of order 3/4 of humans died before successfully reproducing (most during childhood), with the more fit having a slight edge, and that this was necessary to avoid genetic decline.  With the end of infant mortality and the ability of just about anyone to successfully reproduce, mutations are now accumulating and genetic IQ declining precipitously, a process that will continue until civilization collapses and the death of most children re-establishes itself as the norm.  Industrial civilization is, thus, an intrinsically transient thing.

What to make of this?  Bruce won’t appreciate the comparison (although it is meant positively), but I think the situation here is analogous to global warming.  In both cases, the effect being described certainly exists to some degree.  Nobody doubts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas or that humanity is dumping huge amounts of it into the atmosphere, and now that I’ve had mutation load explained to me, I must admit that turning off selection must have the effect BC describes, at least at some nonzero rate.  What’s more, the mutation overload theory is impervious to many escapes.  One can’t say “well, maybe modern civilization can get by with a lower-IQ population”, because the process continues until the disaster comes.  One might actually hope that it takes a pretty high IQ to maintain industrial civilization, because although we hit “giga-death” sooner, we leave with more mental capacity intact.  Saying that the accumulation of mutations is slower than BC thinks doesn’t help either, because with no positive selection one must hit the disaster eventually.  One might imagine an aggressive eugenics program as a way to save civilization, but it would have to be more draconian than anything anyone today would stomach (although presumably not as bad as pre-industrial unguided eugenics, which measured fitness only by the loosely correlated economic status).  For both global warming and BC’s scenarios, there remains a great deal of doubt regarding both observations and models.  For example, I’m still not sold on the assumption that the relation between reaction time and intelligence is constant in time.  (Not that I disbelieve it; I just remain agnostic, and because I haven’t really studied it, my agnosticism doesn’t mean much for the claim itself.)  However, for both theories, just because there are uncertainties doesn’t give us any reason to assume that things must be less bleak than the models predict or observations indicate, that truth is always on the optimistic edge of all the error bars.

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