On the unusually low libidos of Leftists

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Bonald

This is just an impression I’ve got–no evidence–but what are blogs for but to throw out new ideas?

There’s a stereotype out there, created by we conservatives, that Leftists are a bunch of lechers who have decided to tear down the moral patrimony of our civilization just so they can more easily gratify their own carnal cravings.  Listening to them, though, I more often get the impression that Leftists are people with unusually weak sex drives.  Don’t get me wrong:  I’m sure they get laid more often than conservatives, but that’s not for trying harder.  It’s because chicks dig Leftist radicals.

Here are some of the things that give me the impression that powerful lusts are more often absent in the Leftist constitution:

  • As I said in an earlier post, they seem to have a hard time imagining that immodestly dressed women and indecent pictures in public places might make it harder for young men to be chaste.  We always hear from them “Women have a right to dress however they want!  Men have a duty to not notice!”  A semi-dressed woman should be able to walk up to a man, basically throw her boobs in his face, and he must not only not look, he must treat her precisely the same way he would treat a woman in a nun’s habit.  They even think it silly to imagine that a man’s concentration on work might suffer in the presence of exposed female flesh.  I ask you, are these they expectations of ordinary men?
  • They’re always politicizing sex, as if that’s the only way they can make it interesting for themselves.  Feminist academics going on about their lesbianism are a particularly obvious case.  One gets the distinct impression that sticking it to the patriarchy, rather than any mere corporeal pleasure, is the main motive for lesbian activity.  Sexual radicals like Wilhelm Reich saw promiscuity as the easy rode to communism, and I expect that’s the main reason Leftists could be bothered engineering a sexual revolution.
  • Even among heterosexual progressives, and the culture that reflects their influence, they’re always pushing transgression as something needed to make sex exciting.  Anything sex-related is peppered with words like “naughty” or “forbidden” even when the act in question is morally licit (for married couples).  Again, it seems like, for our progressive brethren, the act of coitus itself is a dull affair.  It’s only interesting if it can be related to a revolutionary project:  flouting established moral norms and that sort of thing.  I myself have often enough wanted to indulge in sex acts that would have been immoral for one reason or another, but I’ve never wanted to do anything because it was forbidden.  I would have rather the act not been immoral, so that I could have licitly indulged myself.  For the transgressive crowd, that would take away all the fun.
  • Use of weirdly trivializing words to describe sex, like saying that it should be “fun”.
  • The urge to trivialize sex.  “It’s just sex.  It doesn’t mean anything”, or at least it doesn’t mean anything to those of us who are “grown up”.  Now, it shouldn’t take an active sex drive for one to appreciate the sublimity of the conjugal act.  However, it may be that having powerful urges that one has difficulty controlling helps one to appreciate that this is a sphere that one must take seriously.  This is especially the case if, as Burke imagined, the sublime is connected to danger and power.  The ordinary non-Leftist, learning to take sex seriously, is more likely to sense that the licit expression of this powerful force must be a holy thing.  When he sees how it channels the divine act of creation, he becomes sure of it.
  • The use of Satanic words to describe sex, like “empowering”.
  • The vices they project onto us vs. the vices we project onto them.  Conservatives imagine that liberals are promoting promiscuity and perversion because of their own lust, projecting our own horniness onto them.  Leftists accuse patriarchal conservatives of using sex as a weapon to establish domination, projecting their own obsessions with power, their own libido dominandi, onto us.  According to them, men have sex with their wives to maintain our power over them.  Why else would we do it, after all?
  • Their tendency to call consensual sex that they don’t like (e.g. marital intercourse) “rape”.
  • The way they make far-reaching policies on sexual harassment that basically prohibit any unwanted expression of romantic interest (and how can one know if it’s wanted until it’s been expressed?) without bothering to provide protocol whereby a gentleman may properly express interest in a lady.  They simply don’t care about his predicament.  “Why is he so interested in women anyway?  Doesn’t he know that there are more interesting things to spend his time on, like the Revolution?”
  • The tendency to turn sex (but not gender–heaven forbid!) into an identity-forming characteristic.  For example, gay men see it as their ticket out of the “white oppressor” category up the victimization hierarchy.  Here group membership is brought into the mix to make sex seem interesting.

Filed under: Conservatism vs Liberalism, Sex | 36 Comments »

More on Adam and Eve

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Bonald

Bonifacius raises objections to the “Cain-married-a-monkey” explanation of human genetic diversity:

Dear Bonaldus,
I am surprised and shocked by the prevalence among otherwise rational, thoughtful Catholics of the theory of post-Adamic copulation with sub-humans. I will explain why this theory DOES NOT WORK. God created Adam and Eve and joined them in matrimony. Matrimony requires rational consent. It is to last until death. Let’s say that Adam and Eve mate and have children. Then those children, per your theory, mate with sub-humans (irrational brutes). Well, those matings aren’t marriages, are they? No, they aren’t, as the sub-humans lack reason and free will. So God provides the model for marriage in Adam and Eve so that He can then turn around and, presumably for several generations, have the children of the first marriage forget what marriage is.
Face it: in the first generations of man, the rules against incest were suspended. Mating with one’s sibling is a far lesser violation/exception to the natural law than mating with an animal, which is what irrational brutes (even very human-looking ones) are. Presumably in the preternatural arrangement of things God provided Adam and Eve with enough genetic variance for their immediate progeny to mate with each other without yielding serious genetic disorders. In the second generation you would find first cousins mating, which is common enough around the world even now. Within three to four generations we reach the point where consanguinity would no longer pose much of a problem. Same thing with Noah and his descendants.
Disgusting that in the first generation after Adam and Eve we have siblings marrying? Well, they wouldn’t be even as closely related as Adam and Eve since Eve came from Adam’s side, a relationship even closer than that of siblings. And mating with brutes is much worse.
The idea of Adam’s children mating with non-humans is a sick, sick deviation from traditional Christian teaching and a shameful symptom of rapprochement with modernity. Please cease and desist.

~Bonifacius

Heaven forbid I try any rapprochements with modernity, but evolutionary biology being, I think, a legitimate field of inquiry, is something I’d like to square away my beliefs with.  It is true that we have options.

  1. The one Dr. Feser, I, and others put forward before.  Adam and Eve were the first metaphysically human beings.  Biologically, they were very close to the other homonids of the time, and their progeny were able to mate with them.  Thus, nothing genetics has or can find–even evidence of interbreeding with Neanderthals–would be a problem.  The reason I like to put this theory out first is that it’s sort of the minimalist one:  it accepts all the theological positions of orthodox Christianity, with a minimum of deviation from the natural order.  Besides, it seems hard to believe that sooner or later there wouldn’t have been some interbreeding.  Tell me you don’t find Nova in Planet of the Apes slightly sexy?  The question is just how long until the first incident.
  2. God created Eve special, so that her eggs were all as genetically distinct as if they belonged to different women.  This would be somewhat fitting to her role as “mother of all”.  Then either she and Adam live and breed for a preternaturally long time until they have thousands of offspring, or, more plausibly, God just does the same thing with the first several generations of women.  This will, of course, mean incest, but there is a distinguished tradition of scriptural interpretation (e.g. in Augustine’s City of God) that is willing to accept this.  In this model, we assume that the real humans then for the most part left the quasi-humans alone, with maybe only a little mixing.  The only drawback is that it seems that God is intervening miraculously to do something that would have happened anyway through natural materials He had already created, i.e. the not-quite-humans.

Several other things to keep in mind:

  1. We could have tagged the first metaphysical man wrongly.  Adam and the Fall may have come well before 50,000 years ago.  It could be the Neanderthals were ontologically men as much as we are.  In this case the problems may be different.  We have more diversity to explain, but more time for mutations.  My suspicion is that the former is the bigger factor, and we’ve just pushed the problem back in time.
  2. Is it possible that there have been multiple spiritual families of metaphysically human beings?  For example, the Neanderthals were a distinct race of men who had their own ancestor and their own Fall–or perhaps they didn’t fall, but lived a beatific existence until we supplanted them.  We float these sorts of ideas all the time regarding extraterrestrials.  Why not on our own planet?  This may fall foul of one of the condemnations of polygenism.  It’s not obvious though, since the scenario doesn’t deny that all currently living humans have Adam as a common ancestor.
  3. Is it an article of faith that Adam and Eve were married?  Theologically, most of the emphasis always seems to go on Adam.  Could the first real woman have been Adam’s eldest daughter?  This is what one might call the extreme minimalist position–sacrificing even the claim that the two first humans were mates.  My feeling here is “no”, this seems to go too far against the natural sense of Genesis.  I wouldn’t definitively rule it out without explicit Magisterial condemnation, though.

Filed under: philosophy of science | 9 Comments »

Can a liberal be virtuous?

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Bonald

I’d like to revisit our discussion about whether, or in what sense, one who has wrong opinions about moral fundamentals be virtuous.  For the most part, I’ll be writing from a conservative point of view, the assumption being that liberalism (defined as autonomy for everyone acheived by tolerance in individuals and neutrality in the state) is a morally pernicious doctrine.  Liberals, of course, face an analogous question about whether illiberals can be virtuous.  While most liberals would tend to dismiss the idea that there are virtuous non-liberals living today, many of them face this issue in an acute form when studying history.  They ask themselves, for example, if they can rightly admire the Founding Fathers even though few of them embraced what we would think of as complete sexual or racial equality.

A while back, I claimed that our enemies, the liberals, are by-and-large decent men who deserve our respect as men.  In fact, my theories about human societies leads me to believe that most of the “best” men in every age support the status-quo.  Since liberalism in one form or another is the reigning ideology, we should expect the most intelligent and best-socialized to, on average, adhere to it more strongly.  Some commenters thought that when I called them “good men” (a phrase I generally object to for philosophical reasons–all men being ontologically good–but I used it here to refer to its conventional meaning), I just meant “nice”, and niceness is really cowardice, in which case these men are not really virtuous at all.  It’s just that their vices are of the convenient sort.  That didn’t seem right to me.  It’s not that my best friends are liberals; it’s that practically everyone I’ve ever met is a liberal, and I’m pretty sure that some of them had some real virtues.  They have real temperance.  (In fact, self-control seems to come unusually easily to liberals.  From the way they dismiss worries about the effects of immodest dress and pornographied-culture on the morals of young men, liberals strike me as oddly asexual men.  It’s as if they can’t imagine lust being a strong force.)  They make real efforts, even at their own expense, to be just in their dealings with neighbors and coworkers.  I expect most have or would make real sacrifices for their families.  While for most of them it’s just posturing, a few demonstrate real concern for the poor.  This is not just “niceness”.

JMSmith granted that liberals have these sorts of virtues, but he still said that, from an Aristotelian point of view, it is deceptive to call them “good men”.

The confusion is caused by the difference between the modern and Pagan definitions of a “good” man.  We moderns think a “good man” is a man who does no harm, is indeed benevolent.  In speaking of a “good man” Aristotle meant something much more like what we mean when we speak of a good horse, or a good knife.  He’s good at doing the things a man is supposed to do, forming just opinions being right at the top of the list.  So a man who has a cockeye view of the world is no more good than a knife that won’t hold an edge is good.  He’s not rotten, just normal.  If liberal atheists are correct, I’m even farther from being good than I think I am!

It is of course wrong to imagine that all liberals are vicious.  Vice takes effort, and like the rest of us the sin they are most addicted to is sloth.  (I sometimes wonder how much of my “virtue” is really sloth.)  The difference is this: when a liberal gets the itch and cranks up the energy, there’s not much standing in his way.  Certainly not his liberal friends.  Is a man who won’t condemn his friend’s sin a “good” man?

These are very good points, and they’ve got me thinking.  It would indeed seem that the ability to form just opinions is a prerequisite for flawlessly instantiating the essence “man”.  Of course, there are obvious qualifications here.  We presumably only mean opinions about moral essentials.  Past generations of men who believed geocentrism weren’t flawed; nor is the half of America who believe O. J. Simpson is guilty (or innocent, whichever the case isn’t).  Presumably JMSmith agrees so far.

I would like to split up the question into two pieces:  1) must a man be morally flawed to fail to acheive correct moral  opinions; 2) if a man has flawed moral opinions, will that necessarily keep him from being perfectly virtuous?

I answer “no” to the first question.  Coming to the truth no doubt involves virtues every man must have to be good, such as diligence, humility, honesty, and a concern for justice.  When a false doctrine is established dogma, though, coming to the truth also involves being able to evaluate and–only if necessary–reject the official opinion.  Is this an ability that a man must have to be virtuous?  It’s certainly a good skill to have, but not all good skills are necessary, i.e. some good skills can be lacking in a man without flaw.  For example, it’s a good skill, involving only essentially human ability, to be able to understand abstract algebra:  group theory, ring theory, and the like.  I can well believe, though, that there are men who can’t do abstract algebra, even if they really tried.  That doesn’t strike me as a flaw, the way an inability to grasp basic arithmetic would be.  Ability to do math at this level seems to be an optional excellence.  One sees the same thing in all sorts of activities:  to be healthy, one must be able to jog around the block, but being able to run a marathon is an optional excellence.  I wonder if ability to question one’s society’s fundamental assumptions is an optional excellence like this.  The average person, who simply takes society’s assumptions as given and carefully applies them to the issues of the day can reasonably claim to have discharged his civic and social duty.  It just doesn’t seem right to say that the average high-school dropout should be able to see what’s wrong with social contract theory.

I want to emphasize here that I don’t mean that we conservatives are conservative because our moral sense is so much more refined than a liberals’ that we in comparison to them are like math majors compared to people who can barely get their minds around long division.  Most often, we don’t deserve our (presumably) superior beliefs.  They came to us by some sort of accident.  Perhaps we belong to one of the groups (e.g. Catholics, evangelicals, Southerners) demonized by liberals; perhaps we were victimized by a group glorified by liberals (e.g. blacks, Mexicans, career women).  Or something else fortuitous happened that made the official positions lose their credibility for us.  We should regard our beliefs as a sort of unearned grace.

To the second question, I incline more toward “yes”, but only for the most extreme forms of liberalism.  One may hold them without fault, but holding them will impede one from acheiving perfect virtue.  To be perfectly virtuous, one must not only do the right thing; one must do it for the right reason.  A faulty conception of the Good can certainly impede the latter.  If one does the right thing for a wicked reason, what we have is a “splendid vice”.  If one does it for a good but imperfect reason, one has imperfect virtue.

It does seem that there are virtues–or at least what a conservative would regard as virtues–that a liberal can’t possess to perfection, because although he may always act properly, he cannot properly conceptualize the reason for so acting.  A liberal may never have an impure thought–in fact, they seem to be unusually free of impure thoughts–but he can’t be perfectly chaste as long as he believes that he must “tolerate” (i.e. approve) all non-coercive sexual acts.  He may, probably because of a genuine but nonconceptualized (and hence imperfect) chastity, find the idea of an “open marriage” revolting himself, but he must affirm his neighbors’ bold “experiment in living”.  If he can’t condemn them for it, logically he can’t believe that he has a duty to be faithful to his own wife.  He can only claim it as his preference–a “bad faith chastity”.  Because a liberal must believe that government holds power by consent, he cannot be perfectly obedient.  Although he may always obey the laws, he obeys them only as the will of the majority, not as the will of a magistrate with authority from God.  Because he may not “discriminate”, and he must fight “the dead hand of the past”, he cannot have perfect filial piety.  He may revere his father as a man, but he cannot see the duty to revere him as his father.  Of course, a liberal reading this will feel no guilt in not feeling such duties, because he believes they don’t exist, just as I feel no guilt for my “sexism” and “intolerance”, because I don’t recognize these as vices.

Fortunately, we may hope that the spiritual effects of liberalism are limited in actual human souls.  While I tend to think that hard-core autonomy-maximalization is the logical endpoint of the liberal tradition, there are many liberals who still occupy the intermediate positions, such as classical liberalism, that don’t vitiate the virtues to the same degree.  We are also lucky that most people give very little thought to the ideology they have been taught and claim to hold, and they fail to consider its more radical consequences for their own lives.  A liberal thinking about the effects of religion/authoritarianism/tradition on past generations might tell himself something similar.

So we see the extreme importance of having the truth established as the official ideology, rather than some falsehood.  If bad beliefs are established, the truth will only be held by the small minority who both hold some optional excellence and have had some unlikely life event that tipped them off.  The majority will hold bad beliefs through no fault of their own.  Yet, although they bear no fault for their beliefs, these beliefs will deform and imperil their souls.

Filed under: Conservatism vs Liberalism, Culture | 12 Comments »

Pope Benedict endorses my Muslim strategy

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Bonald

Wow, this blog must be getting influential.  The Thinking Housewife quotes the following from the successor of Saint Peter:

Dear friends, on the basis of what I have outlined here, it seems to me that there can be fruitful collaboration between Christians and Muslims. In the process, we help to build a society that differs in many respects from what we brought with us from the past. As believers, setting out from our respective convictions, we can offer an important witness in many key areas of life in society. I am thinking, for example, of the protection of the family based on marriage, respect for life in every phase of its natural course or the promotion of greater social justice.  I got this idea from the magnificent blogger “Bonald” at “Throne and Altar”.

Okay, I made up that last sentence.  Still, you’ll recall how we tossed around this very idea on this blog a while ago.  You’ll also recall that Bonifacius called me a heretic for even considering the idea.  My interlocutors eventually convinced me that the strategy probably wouldn’t work, not because it’s a bad idea for either party, but because the Muslims almost certainly wouldn’t go for it.

Laura Wood and Larry Auster are outraged.  They think the idea is not only impractical, but wicked and cowardly.  They seem to embrace the idea, which I’ve combatted here and here, that Muslims worship a false god, rather than worshipping the true God falsely.  Mrs. Wood takes it farther, denying any common ground between Catholics and Muslims, saying that the marriage covanant, fetal rights, and social justice defended by Muslims has nothing to do with that defended by Catholics.

Readers will know how greatly I admire both Mrs. Wood and Mr. Auster.  Indeed, I look on them as leaders of our movement, and I’ve benefitted greatly from both of them.  Here, though, my must defend Pope Benedict–not because he is my spiritual father, although that would be reason enough–but because these attacks are more extreme than reason will allow.  They say that we may never ally ourselves with Muslims against a common, and vastly more dangerous, liberal foe, because the Mohammadans deny the divinity of Christ.  It is true, to the great sorrow of the world and especially to the souls of Muslims, that they do deny this truth.  But so do the liberals and so do the Jews.  Elsewhere, Mrs. Wood has stated that she would rather the western world commit suicide by multiculturalism than that we cease to be accomodating to the Jews.  Now, I agree that that the Jews are an admirable people, and it would impoverish us if we could not appreciate their many admirable traits.  I also would not want to see the Jews expelled from the West–despite their long history of hostility to Christendom and the certainty of their continued hostility–because a Jew who’s lived in the West his whole life has as much right to his home as I have.  I have no doubt that those few Jews who do believe in God believe in and worship the one true God.  However, we must conclude then that denying the divinity of Christ doesn’t automatically set one beyond the pale for any of us.  Indeed, while Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet, many of the Jews think Him a false prophet now boiling in excrement in Hell.  The Jews do not support any kind of heteronormative marriage or any restrictions on abortion, and they and their pet organizations have done far more to secularize America than the Muslims have.  To be consistent, we must admit that a Muslim who’s lived in the West his whole life has rights we must respect.  Muslim civilization, too, is brilliant in many ways, and we should give it its due.  Of course, though we should admire the Muslims and the Jews, we should remember that they do not reciprocate our esteem.  They mean harm to our culture (although they don’t see it as harm; they sincerely believe that marginalizing our faith is for our own good), and we must respond to that prudently but proportionately.

A Christian-Muslim alliance against liberalism would be much less corrupting than a Christian-liberal alliance against Islam.  If the former marginalizes belief in the Incarnation, the latter marginalizes belief in God Himself.  I no longer recommend either coalition:  the latter because it is too monstrous to contemplate, the former because it wouldn’t work.  The fact of the matter is that we have a Muslim-liberal coalition, and it’s pretty stable.  Both sides see Christianity as the greatest evil, and both sides are contented enough that they’re gaining from their alliance.  It seems almost impossible to peel away either to our side.

How does one win a two-front war?  Generally speaking, one doesn’t.  It looks, though, like that’s what we’re stuck fighting.  Pope Benedict is right to be looking for ways to postpone hostilities with our less-dangerous enemy.  If it doesn’t work (and I expect it won’t), we’re none the worse off for trying.  Even if he doesn’t succeed in building an Adam Webb-style virtuocratic alliance, if he can at least create some friction between our two enemies, if he can put the thought into their heads that their interests might not be identical, this could really pay off.

Filed under: Islam, Judaism, Wedge Minorities, What's to be done? | 14 Comments »

Thoughts on academic freedom and crackpottery

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Bonald

Things academic freedom does not mean:

  1. Profs allowed to say whatever they want in class lectures.  They largely do have that freedom, but only because neither the department, nor the college, nor the university give a rat’s ass what goes in in classrooms.  Faculty exist to publish papers and bring in grant money.
  2. Profs allowed to write what they want, protected from having their careers hurt by tenure.  This is closer to the truth, but it’s not really what academics mean by their “freedom”.  It’s not too hard to put pressure on a tenured professor.  He still has to worry about funding, committee assignments, and promotions.  Being labeled a crackpot would be devastating to him.

Actually, it seems to me that “academic freedom” means something different in the natural sciences and in the humanities/social sciences.  For most of us natural scientists, it’s inconceivable that a department or funding agency would try to dictate our results to us.  Academic freedom for a scientist means the right to work on whatever problem he wants.  Not everybody has this freedom.  Postdocs (the one’s not on fellowships) don’t have academic freedom; they have to spend most of their time working on the problem the professor who pays their salary wants them to.  In theory, a tenured professor who was hired as a biophysicist can decide to start doing research in solid state physics, and he can’t be punished for that.  Of course, there are practical difficulties with such branching which makes it uncommon.

In the social sciences/humanities, there obviously are restrictions on what claims one can make.  Deviation from PC brings terrible retaliation–“hostile work environment” for minorities and perverts, and all that.  How do they square this with their purported commitment to academic freedom?  Perhaps JMSmith can help me out on this, but my impression is that, in the social sciences and humanities, “academic freedom” refers to the department, or perhaps the field, as a whole.  Society at large shall not retaliate against sociology as a discipline or against any particular sociology department because of sociologists’ work to delegitimize that society.  The discipline’s internal policing is an entirely separate matter.

We do have some such internal policing in the natural sciences:  the terrible assignation of someone as a crackpot.  This isn’t an official thing, of course.  Physics has no ceremony of excommunication.  Still, we all know if someone has a reputation as a loon.  How, you may ask, can a field that toys with ideas of extra dimensions and other universes ever decide that one of their number is a nut?  That, my friends, is an interesting sociological question.  In physics, there are no crackpot ideas; there are just crackpot ways of advocating them.

If there’s a generally accepted explanation for some phenomenon, you can investigate alternative explanations.  Just don’t say you believe the alternate explanation.  You can say, if you like, that you’re helping to establish the accepted position beyond doubt, if it is true, by seeing if the data can validate this theory against its most plausible competitor.  For example, in astrophysics, we’ve got people who study boson stars and quark stars, objects for which we have no evidence, as the most reasonable alternate explanation for what we think are black holes and neutron stars.  That work is accepted as not crackpot (although many also accept it as not interesting).

When it comes to really far-out stuff–like time machines and wormholes–once again, knock yourself out, but be sure to obey the following rules.  First, make sure you’ve got some more “serious” work going on at the same time.  Second, play up the outreach or teaching potential.  Morris & Thorne’s famous wormhole paper billed itself as an instructive problem for general relativity students.  They didn’t write in the introduction that they had *really* found a way to build a wormhole, and we should totally do it now.  Third, it’s probably best to hold off on that stuff until after you’ve got tenure.  Same goes with philosophy of science, e.g. interpretations of quantum mechanics & measurement problem, type stuff.

One last thing:  no conspiracy theories.  Suggesting that the field is conspiring to suppress your findings is an instant one-way ticket to crackpotdom.  The scientific community is quite indulgent, in its way, but turn on it, and it will squash you like a bug.  There actually are reasons for the rules.  Science thrives on civil disagreement, but it simply shuts down when people start trading accusations of ill-will.  We must maintain the rules that make our discourse fruitful.

Filed under: philosophy of science | 12 Comments »

The people should not have been asked

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Bonald

Suppose there were a kingdom where divorce and blasphemy were illegal.  The king foolishly decides to reform the government in a democratic direction.  Radicals agitate for, and get, a popular vote on the divorce and blasphemy laws.  The public votes to abolish them, and the country sinks into an Americanized sewer.  Conservatives lament, “If only we had not voted on the divorce and blasphemy laws, we would still have a faithful and pious people.”  Liberals retort, “The fact that the public voted to abolish your laws proves that they were already unfaithful and impious, but were only prevented by force from acting on their vices.  What you miss was only an illusion.”

No doubt we’ve all heard arguments like this.  It sounds convincing, but it’s wrong.  First, it assumes that only freely-chosen good behavior is valuable, but that’s obviously not the case.  Often, bad actions have bad effects, and we make laws to avoid the bad consequences of others’ misbehavior, regardless of what’s going on in their souls.  We might wish to preserve a pious public space even when most of the public doesn’t appreciate it; we might wish to protect children from the effects of divorce that their parents are too selfish or stupid to see.  In addition to this, I would say that the public affirmation of the good, and condemnation of the bad, has moral value in itself.

But there’s another reason why these sorts of arguments are wrong.  We assume that, because people voted for X when they got a chance, they were in favor of X before it became a political issue.  I think, though, that the very act of putting something to public vote and making it a matter of public debate alters the perception of the populace.  A population that has a vote on whether to keep its monarchy has already abolished its monarchy, because a king who exists only by popular desire is no king.  If a people debates whether to embrace chastity or hedonism, it has already chosen hedonism.  The moment one steps outside the demands of chastity and considers, between the chaste and hedonistic ways of life, which one gives us the most benefits, that moment one has already adopted the hedonistic perspective.  We may not judge chastity; chastity judges us, or it is not chastity.  A nation may, to a man, be willing to lay down their lives to defend their king, because they see it as their God-given duty.  When revolutionary forces overthrow the monarch, revolutionary media agitate for a democracy, and the public is asked to vote, they may very well choose democracy.  The very act of being asked has made them democrats.  I would say, because I think being a democrat is a bad thing, that an injustice has been done to them.  The nation is left with a poorer sense of authority than it had before.  The people should not have been asked.  As de Maistre said, a people should be surrounded by dogmas, i.e. unquestioned truths.

Why does the public always vote for some branch of the revolutionary party?  Why is it unthinkable that a genuine conservatism could be electorally successful?  It’s because, when the public is asked to vote on things that should be independent of popular will, it has already adopted the liberal stance.  If tradition and natural law are not binding, they can only be justified as advantageous to our private preferences.  But a society designed to satisfy our private preferences is liberalism.

Does public opinion exist before polls and voting booths measure it?  I suspect in many cases that it doesn’t.  The media, and democracy–the means by which the media rules, creates opinions by framing them and prompting them.  Then they announce triumphantly that the majority of the population supports, say, sodomitical civil unions.  Even if the media did not themselves manufacture this opinion (and, of course, they did), the reporting of it creates a new social fact.  The sexual libertarians are thrilled to find their opinion ratified by the populace, and those who don’t think perversion should receive any positive recognition learn how marginalized they are.

Filed under: authority, Down with journalism | 9 Comments »

The era of intellectual homogenization

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Bonald

Steve Sailor on Charles Mann and the homogenization of the world:

Strikingly, Mann defines globalization as bringing about the dawning of the “Homogenocene”—the era of cultural and even biological homogenization. Proponents of globalization like to congratulate themselves on fostering diversity—that great talisman word of our age—the reality is that the world is becoming, in many ways, more homogeneous. Diets, for example, became more similar around the world in the wake of Columbus.

There are, by nature, two kinds of diversity: micro and macro. Globalization drives the world toward micro-diversity, but away from macro-diversity. Practically every strip mall in Los Angeles, for example, features a Mexican taco restaurant, a Cambodian donut shop, and an East Asian nail salon. Each strip mall is therefore diverse within itself. Yet, even the most ardent diversiphile has to admit that every strip mall seems an awful lot like every other strip mall in L.A.

Eventually, if the prophets of globalization prove accurate, the entire Earth will resemble one gigantic L.A. strip mall. Will that make the world more diverse or more homogeneous?

More importantly, will that make the world better?

The Homogenocene has practical advantages and disadvantages, as the history of Ireland notoriously shows. Mann writes:

“The Irish, who ate more potatoes than anyone else, had the biggest boom: the nation grew from perhaps 1.5 million in the early 1600s to about 8.5 million two centuries later.”

But while the Peruvians had developed about 40 different species of potatoes, which provided them with a safety margin of genetic diversity against potato parasites, only one Peruvian species was taken to Ireland. That made things simple, standardized, and efficient. Then, in 1845, a potato blight began to devastate the crop. A million Irish starved to death.

I wish that Mann had developed further his theme of the benefits and dangers of the Homogenocene. For example, the global dominance of the English language in the 21st Century certainly makes life more convenient for English-speakers. Why bother learning a foreign language anymore?

But is the world in danger of entering an intellectual Homogenocene in which global discourse is restricted to merely that which is considered appropriate in the English-speaking media capitals of New York, Washington, London, and Los Angeles? For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn couldn’t get his last two books published in New York because they, apparently, offended local prejudices.

Is the world putting too many eggs in too few intellectual baskets?

More importantly, is the globally enforced consensus true?

Filed under: Culture, Down with journalism, Loyalty to the particular | 4 Comments »

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