February 2016

Doing the Best Things So Conservatively

By in political philosophy No Comments

Aurelian Craiutu, “Of Love and Politics“:

True to his commitment to moderation, Oakeshott sought to put politics and political participation in their right place, neither too high nor too low. Our first business, he argued, is to live, the second is to understand life properly, and only after that comes changing the world, to the extent to which that might be possible. Often times, he believed, “It is the failure to think out & have clearly before us a view of life & a view of how such a life is to be achieved which stands in our way.” Hence the primary importance he ascribed to achieving self-knowledge.

…“If I wrote it to persuade others,” he admitted, “I should be guilty of self-contradiction: I write it to persuade myself, & because no man can be said to be master of himself until he has made himself clear to himself.” Oakeshott was not just an academic who reads only in order to write for a small audience. He read first and foremost to educate himself and to find the meaning of the good life. “It is not my ambition to dictate to the future the way of life it shall follow,” he wrote in September 1928, when he was 27 years old. “All I have wished is to think out for myself a way of life, to make it clear to myself, so that I must follow it.”

For anyone reading these notebooks it is evident that much of what Oakeshott read and took interest in had to do with his restless romantic temperament and represented an effort to discover himself. To discover oneself, he believed, is to find “true” freedom, and “until this discovery is made all freedom is frivolity.”

…In times of crisis, when societies are in danger of destruction, politics tends to become prominent, but then it is important to remember that its main task is not to endow life with splendor and greatness like literature, philosophy, and the arts, but more modestly, to provide the framework for the gradual readjustment of human relationships by fallible men. In normal times, it is literature, philosophy, and the arts rather than politics that should be the outlets of superior intellects called to create the values of their communities.

As Notebooks suggests, Oakeshott rejected the all-consuming obsession with productivity, and deemed shallow that conception of the good life that claims that there is nothing worth pursuing beyond the enjoyment of material goods. He admitted with sadness that almost all forms of politics today have become rationalist, or near-rationalist, and lamented that the rationalist disposition has pervaded our political thought and practice. At the heart of rationalism he identified the belief that all human activity should be guided by unhindered reason, taken to be a sovereign, authoritative, and infallible guide in political activity. Greatness, Oakeshott believed, cannot be derived from the philistinism, intellectual mediocrity, conformity, and complacency that characterize, in his opinion, the rationalist spirit.

This was a position that Oakeshott shared with others, who were equally opposed to the technocratic outlook imbued with the belief in the superiority of expert knowledge. And he viewed ideologies as radical expressions of the rationalism he criticized. The proponents of ideological politics think they possess an infallible measuring-rod, and tend to evaluate all proposals for social and political change “against a single, unambiguous, universally valid measure,” which is given the status of axiom. In so doing, they seek to emancipate politics from opinion and conjecture, conducting themselves as they do according to the “iron laws” of history.

These People Talk Too Much, Need to Shut ’em Up

By in free speech No Comments

Allum Bokhari:

This is another chapter in the left’s long-running war on comments sections, which we have previously covered at Breitbart Tech. Once upon a time, comments sections were welcomed by the left as the a huge leap forward for democracy and free speech.

…The left’s embrace of comments sections lasted only as long as commenters agreed with them. Once the masses started challenging the elites above the comment line, it was only a matter of time before the innate authoritarianism of the regressive left showed itself.

If your Internet persona was born yesterday, you, like Bokhari, might find this to be an occasion for smug self-back-patting. Lefty writers have indeed become boring, predictable, and particularly intolerant of dissent. I attribute this to the old maxim “power makes stupid”. Our political discourse these days is dominated by a left-wing obsession with intersectionality, and most prominent writers have committed themselves to circling the wagons and defending the party line. There is nothing surprising about this. People in control of a narrative have no interest in promoting free-thinking which might undermine it. Opponents who are seeking a way back into power can afford to be more heterodox. This is just a structural factor, you might say, not a partisan one.

Which brings us to our time machine, in which we travel back to the days of 2001-2006 when Republicans were in charge of the White House and Congress, and the Iraq war, rather than the taxonomy of gender, was the burning political topic on everyone’s mind. If you were in the blogosphere back then, you likely remember, as I do, that right-wing websites were notorious for censoring comments from dissenters, if they even allowed comments at all, which they frequently didn’t. Not only that, many prominent right-wing bloggers engaged in what we now know as doxxing, i.e. ferreting out and publishing personal information about hitherto anonymous people. Why, it’s almost like there’s nothing inherent in partisan identity that makes one side reliably more virtuous than the other. Power makes stupid, and self-serving rationalization is a tool we all reach for when our territory is threatened. Stick around, and you’ll surely see the whole charade reverse itself again and again.

Wanna See a Monkey and a Clown Do Semaphore

By in identity, the statusphere No Comments

I’ve recently read two very interesting pieces about signaling. First, Ryan Murphy:

Second — and it’s impossible for any brief excerpt to do it justice — David Chapman:

At the beginning of this page, I asked: “What is ‘Buddhist ethics’ for?” My answer has been that it’s a strategy for advertising yourself as a “good” person—good to work with, hang out with, or have children with. I’ve explained why this strategy worked. I say “worked,” because it no longer does. Various trends I described have progressively lowered Western Buddhism’s signaling value. “Buddhist ethics” isn’t fooling anyone anymore; everyone understands, implicitly, that there’s no such thing. Buddhism isn’t daring and sexy and hip anymore; it’s your batty aunt’s quaint, harmless, old-fashioned hobby. And it has gone from an upper middle class religion to a middle-middle one, and now probably a lower middle one.

Lower middle class people are not losers! There is nothing wrong with lower middle class Buddhism. In fact, the Aro gTér lineage, which I practice, was almost entirely working class in the 1980s, and is still mainly working and lower middle class. I myself am working class by some criteria, and lower middle by some others.

There is nothing wrong with comfortable, simplified, status-quo Buddhism, either! The Consensus impulse to create that was well-motivated and useful. I would like to see different Buddhisms available for all sorts of different people.

By “Buddhism is for losers” I mean that, at this point, saying you are a Buddhist is likely to signal that you are loser in the eyes of many people who, a couple decades ago, would have been impressed. For them, “Buddhist” now means “well-intentioned but ineffectual”; someone who can’t get their stuff together enough to do anything significant or interesting.

What’s dysfunctional is using Buddhism to signal high status if that doesn’t work. That is definitely a loser’s strategy. It was bad enough that Consensus Buddhism was mostly empty posturing. Empty posturing that doesn’t fool anyone is totally pointless.

The Chinaman Is Not the Issue Here

By in art, jests japes jokes jollies, ohferfucksake, the cult of multi No Comments

Also, Dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature…

I asked the Coens to respond to criticisms that there aren’t more minority characters in the film. In other words, why is #HailCaesarSoWhite?

“Why would there be?” countered Joel Coen. “I don’t understand the question. No—I understand that you’re asking the question, I don’t understand where the question comes from.

“Not why people want more diversity—why they would single out a particular movie and say, ‘Why aren’t there black or Chinese or Martians in this movie? What’s going on?’ That’s the question I don’t understand. The person who asks that question has to come in the room and explain it to me.”

As filmmakers, is it important or not important to consciously factor in concerns like diversity, I asked.

“Not in the least!” Ethan answered. “It’s important to tell the story you’re telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity—or it might not.”

“It’s an absolute, absurd misunderstanding of how things get made to single out any particular story and say, ‘Why aren’t there this, that, or the other thing?’” added Joel. “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how stories are written. So you have to start there and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

He continued: “You don’t sit down and write a story and say, ‘I’m going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog,’—right? That’s not how stories get written. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about how stories get written and you don’t realize that the question you’re asking is idiotic.”

I already loved the Coens’ films anyway. Hearing them tell the philistines in the Aesthetic Affirmative Action Brigade to go fuck themselves without consent is just a sweet, sweet bonus.

The Good That We Would, We Do Not

By in conspicuous crusading, race, the cult of multi No Comments

FdB:

My argument here, of course, is subject to the same critique: by indicting the people who so conspicuously acknowledge their white privilege, I’m setting myself on a higher plane than they are, and thus guilty of the same kind of jockeying for rank on the righteousness hierarchy I’m critiquing. But this merely serves to underscore the problem: anti-racism as mental hygiene is a road that has no ending. The question is whether our goal is to be good or to do good.

The question of what he would have us do about privilege and racism is answered a couple paragraphs earlier, and it’s as predictable as you might expect: more affirmative action, more cosmetic diversity in high-status areas. Conservatives, as well as liberals with integrity, have long observed that progressives only care about superficial diversity while demanding ideological conformity. The same people who can’t congratulate themselves enough for managing to enjoy the company of people who look different than them will break out into hives if the objects of their patronizing attention should have the unmitigated gall to hold different political opinions from them. If you need to see proof of this in action, just watch how progressives feel perfectly free to use outright racist language toward black conservatives.

Speaking of that endangered species, Shelby Steele has reiterated in several books his conviction that affirmative action is primarily a scheme for restoring white moral authority. By that, he means that such programs have never come close to accomplishing their ostensible goals, but, as always when policies are rooted in emotional need rather than practical results, the failure is ours, not theirs. We didn’t try hard enough, we didn’t clap loud enough, we need to do it again, this time with feeling. Steele’s insightful approach owes much more to psychology than political science — as he describes it, “Whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening moral responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism.” But, he adds, “White guilt wants no obligation to minority development. It needs only the display of social justice to win moral authority. It gets no credit when blacks independently develop themselves.”

In other words, white progressives are primarily concerned with being seen to make amends for the sins of their race in order to regain the authority they always enjoyed, whether they actually make anything better or not. Doing so keeps them in charge of proceedings. Again, note the way in which “diversity” among, say, Supreme Court justices is only a good thing as long as it can be taken for granted that the minority representatives will act in accordance with the political values of the white progressives who make such a false show of stepping aside and renouncing their control. Let someone like Clarence Thomas step into the gap, though, and see how they react. As Steele bitterly summarizes the mentality, “We’ll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you’ll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for ‘helping’ you. When they called you a nigger back in the days of segregation, at least they didn’t ask you to be grateful.” Blacks who refuse to agree that white progressives always know best are further humiliated by the indignity of having their opinions belittled, stripped from them, and credited to the racist white conservatives who have supposedly brainwashed them or bought them off. Clearly, if they didn’t come to the correct conclusions, they must not know how to think at all. If you’re not with us, you can only be an idiot or a whore.

How amusingly ironic, then, that by offering those same old ersatz solutions, Freddie thinks he’s escaping the spectacle of white progressives competing to see who can take more responsibility for black uplift. At least the conspicuous anti-racism he’s criticizing is safely contained in a social media playpen where its effects on the real world are limited.

Is Our Children Learning?

By in extraordinary popular delusions, non compos mentis, ohferfucksake, silent moving pictures No Comments

Sam Kriss:

In general, the hard left tends to be a slow learner; that’s why there are still thousands of people who think selling newspapers on university campuses is a productive revolutionary activity.

A return to nice postwar social democracy would be far harder to achieve than the total revolutionary reconstruction of the state. If we’re serious about making a better world, the last year should teach us to be not against austerity, but for communism.

In general, the hard left tends to be a slow learner…

If we’re serious about making a better world, the last year should teach us to be not against austerity, but for communism.

…the hard left tends to be a slow learner...

...for communism.

A return to nice postwar social democracy would be far harder to achieve than the total revolutionary reconstruction of the state. If we’re serious about making a better world, the last year should teach us to be not against austerity, but for communism.

Looking to the Left to See the Right

By in conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions, moralizing, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds, the statusphere No Comments

Cathy Young:

There is a word for ideologies, religious or secular, that seek to politicize and control every aspect of human life: totalitarian. Unlike most such ideologies, SocJus has no fixed doctrine or clear utopian vision. But in a way, its amorphousness makes it more tyrannical. While all revolutions are prone to devouring their children, the SocJus movement may be especially vulnerable to self-immolation: its creed of “intersectionality”—multiple overlapping oppressions—means that the oppressed are always one misstep away from becoming the oppressor. Your cool feminist T-shirt can become a racist atrocity in a mouse-click. And, since new “marginalized” identities can always emerge, no one can tell what currently acceptable words or ideas may be excommunicated tomorrow.

…The social justice movement has many well-meaning followers who want to make the world a better place. But most of its “activism” is little more than a self-centered quest for moral purity.

Irving Howe wrote a viral post identifying the key characteristics of the social justice movement. It was not based on a “politics of common action”, because that would require them to make common cause with “saints, sinners and ordinary folk”; rather, it was a “gesture of moral rectitude” designed to set them apart from this fallen world. But none of them actually believe in the possibility of Marxist-style revolution, Howe wrote, and combined with their unrealistic standards and demands, there’s nothing left for these would-be radicals to do but maintain “a distinct personal style”. Howe noted how strikingly often these fundamentalist preachers of privilege-checking were themselves the privileged offspring of the white middle-class, and fretted over their radical zeal to jettison everything valuable in their Western heritage in the process of striving for “a mode of personal differentiation” in which style becomes “the very substance of revolt”.

Now, alert readers, having clicked through the link already, will have noticed that I was funnin’ with them a bit. Irving Howe was actually an anti-Stalinist leftist critic, and his essay “New Styles in ‘Leftism'” was written in 1965. To go ahead and put a fine point on it, nothing significant has changed about these people in over fifty years. They’re still using the same counter-productive tactics that their parents (or even grandparents) were using, still trying to extract ore from the same exhausted vein of narcissistic identity politics. Envisioning themselves in the moral vanguard, they’re blind to the ways they’re bound by thoughtless tradition. Believing themselves too clever to learn from history, they’re oblivious to how their radicalism follows the cyclical whims of fashion. Desiring a world filled with culture wars of liberation, they find themselves within shrinking horizons, isolated and constrained by atavistic tribal enmity.

1 2