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An Archon of Right Liberalism Takes the Turn to Orthogony

John C. Wright has long been one of the most intelligent and effective writers at the Right end of the political spectrum. He has been a great defender of the Constitution, the Enlightenment, the private sector as against the state, of traditional customs, mores and values, and so forth; and, in particular, of Christianity. He is one of the more competent, clever and entertaining Christian apologists now writing online.

He’s prolix, even compared to such as I. But his writing is always sprightly, and fun to read … so long as one has a half hour or so to spare for it each day. He’s a lawyer, so his comments on current affairs are well grounded in the tradition of English Common Law, in its down to earth common sense. And he’s also a competent and successful writer of science fiction novels, so he is able, ready and indeed eager to explore novel notions, and consider imaginatively how they might work out in practice.

A formidable guy, altogether. And what is more rare in these latter days of cultural antagony and deliquescence, sweet tempered and irenic withal. He is valuable and discerning wit.

Having grown jaundiced upon it myself circa 2009, it had bugged me for some years that despite all that, he had been so far still convinced of the Enlightenment as a natural and just evolution of Christian culture, rather than a divagation therefrom.

Well, I am pleased to report that he has recently suffered – nay, enjoyed – a paradigm shift of an orthogonal sort.

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Were AGI to Exist, We Would Never Allow It: The Alignment Problem for the Woke

Meta

In Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, he worries that “systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole – and appear to assess black and white defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes.” Christian is probably right to worry about fully automating such things when people’s lives are at stake, but not about the issue of bias. How one reacts to this concern will be partly governed by one’s political affiliations and preferences. It is intended that one’s hair catch fire and one’s eyeballs bug out upon hearing this. Anyone who has read someone like Thomas Sowell is more likely to ask, “So?” The training data for machine learning will consist of past results, including such things as the performance of men and women for various jobs, and the recidivism rates for blacks and whites. Should we call those “hate facts” or “inconvenient truths?” Whether those considerations should be removed depends on whether they contribute to better or worse performance on the part of the machines. Reality and leftist ideology with its utopian, really dystopian fantasies, are usually at loggerheads. When it suits progressives, they will say sex and race must be ignored à la Title VII, while continuing in practice to absolutely fixate on sex and race in every arena of life in order to positively discriminate against white men, in particular. Blind auditions for orchestral positions were introduced at one point (performers played behind a screen). Those have now been abandoned because it has been decided that impartial, unbiased, meritocratic selection methods disadvantage people of color. Our ears are racist!

On the other hand, there is good reason for being suspicious of machine learning and AI because we know that programmers and companies like Google are in fact introducing intentional biases into their AI that promote their Woke agenda. Google’s “Gemini” AI picture generator was programmed to only produce non-white people, including the depiction of historical figures, with an Indian female, and black male, pope, and the like. When asked to generate German troops, they were depicted as black men and Asian women, which is a kind of slander on both groups of people and historically inaccurate. Google withdrew the program saying that a “mistake” had been made. It was no mistake. It was simply an amusing consequence of programming its AI to discriminate against whites in favor of people of color. Meta’s Imagine AI image generator does the same thing. A prompt for Professional American football players produces female players only. One for a group of people in American colonial times consisted entirely of Asians, mostly female. One can guess, with 100% confidence, that Brian Christian will not now write a new book worrying about this kind of bias in AI. Continue reading →

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Sunday in Texas, One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago

“On the whole it must be admitted that the tone of morality in Texas is not particularly high.”

James Macdonald, Food from the Far West (1878)

James Macdonald travelled through Texas in 1877, primarily to look at the cattle, but tangentially to look at the Texans.  He found the former very numerous, but scrawny, the latter very exiguous, but ornery.  Although languid as a rule, Macdonald said a Texan would spring to life if circumstances afforded him an opportunity to hang cattle rustlers by their necks, or teach some slack-jawed rascal manners with his gun.

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An Introduction to the Thought of Owen Barfield

BarfieldOwen Barfield was a member of the Inklings, the famous literary group that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Barfield wrote the first “fey” novel that influenced the two other writers to pen their own works of fantasy. He also was instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity after many years of the “Great Debate” engaged in on long walks. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy mentions him by name and many of the speaking engagements Barfield had in the U.S. were from Lewis fans, thanks to Lewis’ endorsements. He had more of a popular audience than an academic one, just as was the case for Lewis’ Christian apologetics.

Barfield’s parents were secular, but made sure their children were exposed to music and literature; playing the piano to them and reading classic literature out loud. He also received a classical education at Highgate high school where a friend, Cecil Harwood, contributed to his love of language and introduced him to the writings of Rudolf Steiner who he felt had managed to disentangle himself from the materialist philosophy that predominated then and now.

Plato had written that a beautiful thing participates in the Form of Beauty; a just act participates in the Form of Justice, and a true statement in the Form of Truth. The Forms have the quality of mind and the logos emanating from the Form of the Good (Spirit). For Barfield, the world of nature is what it is because it is “participated by” consciousness. Consciousness, on this view, is the inside of nature, not just of human beings and other sentient creatures. Barfield appeals to Aristotle’s concept of the three kinds of soul. The nutritive, belonging to plants. Plants “inwardize” the principles of generation and propagation. Made from dust, they nonetheless resist environmental forces and attempt to maintain their integrity. The sensitive soul is possessed by animals, and the rational soul by humans. The human interior is a microcosm of the macrocosm, since it includes the nutritive, and sensitive souls, but also extends to the upper reaches of reality. Aldous Huxley thought of individual minds as filtering and drawing on mind at large, selecting and excluding elements of it. Similarly, for Barfield, life itself draws from life at large existing as cosmic potential. “Humanity individualized the cosmic logos, the nous, the intellectus, from out of its transcendent potentiality.” Human intelligence individualizes cosmic intelligence.

Continue reading at Voegelinview. Write comments here at the Orthosphere.

An Introduction to the Thought of Owen Barfield

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There is “High Ground” and High Ground

“At this point I have no lingering interest at all in the ‘high ground’. This is war, and we should do what we can to win, rather than do only what we may, and lose.” 

Malcolm Pollack, Comment at  Maverick Philosopher.com  (Feb. 28, 2024)*

“Every exertion of physical force if made upwards is more difficult than if it is made in the contrary direction.” 

Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832)**

There is in war ‘high ground’ and high ground, the former most useful as a source of consolation after defeat, the later most useful as a means to clobber the enemy with fire and steel.  “High ground” is occupied by what Sam Francis called “beautiful losers,” high ground by scruffy roughnecks who are not too good to win.  Francis said American conservatives lost, albeit beautifully, because they had thought to win political battles with their erudition and eloquence, and so, through a long string of defeats, had assumed “that it was only a matter of time before their own beliefs would creep up on the Left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an intellectual and cultural coup d’état, after which truth would reign.”***

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The Company We Keep

Everyone with an eye for beauty knows that there are colors that clash and colors that, placed side by side, enhance each other’s beauty.  Promiscuous mixing of colors almost always results in a horror.  Everyone with a sensitive pallet likewise knows that flavors must be intelligently combined.  Very seldom does anything good comes from a pot into which ingredients are thrown at random.  These cautionary lessons should, but do not, impress today’s artists and cooks of culture, and this is why our societies  resemble a mess of slumgullion or a man who got dressed in the dark.

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God’s First and Primitive Law

“I know of no instance, not one, excepting man, of parasites who consume the provisions hoarded by a worker of the same species.”

J. Henri Fabre, The Mason Bees (1918)*

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground . . .”

Genesis 3:19

The word parasite originally denoted a member of the retinue of a great man.  It registered the fact that such hangers-on sat at the great man’s table and subsisted on the great man’s bread.  Etymologically, the word parasite means to eat bread (sitos) alongside (para), and for ages it has been implicitly understood that the munching parasite gives his benefactor little or nothing in return.

We remember the word’s origin in the one-sided banqueting of ancient parasites when we say that a parasite lives at the expense of its host.

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The Basic Error of Modernity versus the Basic Truth of Tradition

I’ve just finished one of the 20 or 30 best books I’ve ever read. Theophany: The NeoPlatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite, by Eric Perl, is only 138 pages long (counting end notes, but not index or bibliography), but it took me months to read, because it is so packed with insight. I could read only a page or so in a given session, before I had to set the book aside to process what I had learned. Perl opens Neo-Platonism and sets it forth plainly and coherently. Before I read it, Neo-Platonism seemed to me a foggy confusing mess. Having read it, I feel that I understand Neo-Platonism as it were from the inside; so much so that I am able to see that it has informed my own thought from the beginning. Indeed, I daresay I may just have discovered that I have been a Neo-Platonist all along!

Highly recommended, for those who are interested in metaphysics generally, or in ancient Greek philosophy. Or, for that matter, in thinking clearly.

I write about the book now because in his conclusion, Perl nails the divergence – or as I would characterize it, the divagation – in intellectual history that gave rise to the whole of modernism: to liberalism, nominalism, Kantianism, the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, to relativism, and so forth; in the limit, to nihilism, to nonsense, to insanity, and so to cultural deliquescence. Beginning on page 111, he writes:

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Impractical Christianity

“The advantage God has is that we were created (by Him, in fact!) to be loved and to love. The devil just can’t do anything with that but lose.” 

The Continental Op, “Comment on ‘Fighting in Ways Sauron Does not Know,'” FrancisBerger.Com (Feb. 25, 2024)

“My friends were full of interesting stories about criminals they had tamed, subdued and reformed by kindness; among whom, I remember, figured one notorious ruffian, Jacky-Jacky, who had almost homicidal mania.  Him they made their gardener; and Mrs. Maconochie spoke of a certain creeping of the flesh when one day she stood alone with Jacky-Jacky by the fruit trees in the compound—he armed with a bill-hook, and she defenseless.”

Elizabeth Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, (1885)*

Love is a wonderful thing, and one reason it is wonderful is because it is rare.  Under the right circumstances, love also has the transformative powers with which The Continental Op and the friends of Christopher Kirkland credit it, but these circumstances are perhaps rarer than love itself.  We have it on the highest scriptural authority that some humans are wolves, indeed such dastardly wolves that they deceive mooncalf Christians with sheep’s clothing.

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“Pascal’s Wager, 21st Century Edition”

(HT Patriactionary.)

Someone calling himself Bleppstein von Sama says

Pascal’s Wager for the 21st century:

God may or may not be real, but the other side is so passionate, so committed to worshiping Satan, evil, homosexuality and corrupting children that even if god wasn’t real, believing in him to fend these demons off is preferable.

Yep. The other way doesn’t work. So the Christian way is, at minimum, preferable.

This is evidence for God rather than a full proof, but it’s strong evidence for the truth. Sooner or later, you must commit yourself to that to which the evidence leads.

This is an argument presuppositional in spirit. But you can just call it not being a dumba**.