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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2023-156
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
European disunity:
Aukus:
Iran:
Non-disclosure:
Miscellaneous:
Use as open (not Ukraine related) thread…
Cross-posted from The Z-Blog
There is a bourgeoning discussion below concerning the trope “Diversity is Our Strength,” which begins with the statement that those who utter the phrase can never explain why this is so. There follows a retinue of impassioned but predictable comments which assume that the utterers are either disingenuous, or pecuniarily interested, or mindlessly parroting the elite prescriptions which they do not fully understand but adhere to for psychological security. Unfortunately, none of this is true. Were any of that the case, then support for the concept would have waxed and waned with the private trajectories of the principals. What we see, however, is a strong, persistent, almost fatalistic adherence to the idea over many decades which is held “come what may,” despite diversity’s manifest difficulties. There is a reason for this, but it is not to be sought in anyone’s material advantage. Rather, it lies deep in the founding mythology of the Modern West.
If you have ever wondered why the Leftists continue to win victory after victory while the Traditional Right cannot find its footing and the Establishment Right inevitably capitulates, the answer is that the Left has the good conscience at its back. The Left feels very much that it is on “the right side of history” and that any advances it makes in its progressive agenda are justified and irrevocable. The Establishment Right eventually capitulates because its conservatism is linked to its social advantages; it “conserves” whatever garners it a place at the table, thus its principles follow in the train of popular fads, which at the moment happen to be Leftism. (This does not contradict what was said earlier about Leftism not being a mercenary interest, for the committed Leftists themselves have quite other motivations.) Finally, the Traditional Right, despite its high principles informed by the purest historical and philosophical scholarship, is able only by the most heroic efforts even to preserve itself a patch of unpolluted ground, let alone make any gains against the Leftist juggernaut. Traditionalists get no love or respect, without which it is impossible to do much in the field of politics. While we often criticize the Left for believing in “narratives” rather than “reality,” this misses the fact that perception largely is reality in human affairs, or at least the two overlap to a very high degree, hence the strength of narratives. You can overthrow a king simply by persuading enough people that he is illegitimate and not to be recognized, by “de-platforming” him. Then the helpless king, whose orders now fall dead from his lips, can be easily thrown into the dungeon, where the gaslighting can begin. “Of course, you were never really king. That is a figment of your imagination and a symptom of your oppressive will to dominate others. You must repent of all that and do penance.” That is exactly the situation of the Traditional Right today.
This suffices to explain the motivational spectrum and the relative strength of the three groups, but we still must answer the question why does the Left have such a good conscience about its work. Why does it get the love and respect necessary for hard political slogging? Why is it so confident of its aims, so sure of its permanent position, so insistent upon the obedience of others? In short, why is the Left vested with authority in the first place? It is because, as I have answered before, alone among the three groups, it is the Progressive Left which, in a Ship of Theseus sense, is numerically continuous with Western Civilization, and not the Traditionalists.
The Modern West was conceived in the passion of revolution against the first two estates, the nobility and the clergy, and this spirit has imbued it ever since. Like Antaeus the Giant, it has infinite strength so long as it stands on the revolutionary soil of its birth. No claim against priest or king, no matter how extravagant, is ever met with any real, heartfelt resistance. Quite the contrary, the full underlying program of Whig History—the unsullied good of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the freedom of man to everywhere do what he pleases and believe what he pleases—is sweepingly accepted as the revealed will of God and the moral arc of history.
With this mighty theme at his back, no Leftist ever need fear pressing his case too far. Every new demand can be easily slid into the Whig Historical framework like a hand into a glove, from whence it reenacts the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation in microcosm. “Who is to say that male crossdressers can’t use the women’s bathroom? Those priests with their silly rules? Those kings with their made-up titles? Off with their heads!” To take, for example, the “Diversity is Our Strength” trope, it follows immediately from the ideals built right into the Constitution itself. Freedom of Speech is presumed to be a good and desirable thing. Why? Not for the benefit of the speaker himself, you see, but for the benefit of everyone else, for the benefit of “the truth.” Because no one can claim to have the truth himself without becoming the dreaded king, the truth must be reduced to an impersonal process. Every idea must be allowed to shine, and once we’ve added some dither in the form of “diverse” opinion, the giant analog computer known as society will deliver us the truth of its own. In this cast of mind, delimiting diversity is a great impiety and may even impede the eschaton.
It need only be stated to be seen at once that every social conflict of modern times, including the Civil Rights and Great Society legislation that primarily affects the nation today, has been fought out precisely in this Whig Historical pantomime. The bad guys are the stodgy old priests and nobles, the good guys are the young freedom fighters, and the revolution is the dialectical realization of the one true good. The ethic of the West is permanent revolution. The melodrama is intuitively obvious to everyone inwardly born as a citizen of the modern West, but not really to anyone else.
Therefore, Leftism will continue as long as the West does, and its end is the end of the West. This is why Occidentalism is such a hindrance to dissidents today. It is necessary to be inwardly detached from the West in order to defeat it. The dialecticalism, Marxism, Darwinism, and postmodernism that define the West today was all present in germ in the Rights of Man and the 95 Theses. The antidote begins with the Council of Trent and the Summa Theologica.
Also, this is why the recent Supreme Court ruling against Affirmative Action is a very big deal, for it actually countermands the whole spirit of modernity. Many here pooh-poohed it as ineffectual, as not being dramatic enough to bring about real change. However, in this day and age, these are the only kind of victories we will see—hidden in plain sight. The rebellious spirit has not relented nor will it, but the eternal truth, the real truth has announced itself and marches towards us with a steady, firm step. Our duty is to make straight its paths.
Posted by: Intelligent Dasein | Jul 3 2023 17:41 utc | 130
@ juliania | Jul 3 2023 5:23 utc | 94
It’s been nagging at me ever since I posted, to expand on that comment of mine. I didn’t mean to suggest that it was Buddhist in origin or that it even referred to the Buddha.
That line again:
If you sit by the river long enough, the body of your enemy will float by
I think of this as a proverb, a bit of human wisdom – perhaps Chinese in origin, but it doesn’t really matter so much as the principle being stated.
I said it was nothing but a meditation instruction, but actually it extends into far more realms than that, easily into the material as well as the immaterial world.
~~
As to the material: I have found in life often that when I have a task that I can’t quite manage for some reason, and blame myself for procrastination, sometimes within a few days the specs for the task will change, and it turns out it was a good thing I didn’t jump up and do it, because that would have been wasted.
And whether intended or not, there was some sitting by the river here. And the dead task floated by.
But this saying applies mostly to the mind, I think, and it refers to our reaching out and grasping at anger or love or whatever passionate entanglement with a projection or a perception. And it says to abide without grasping, and you’ll see that the object around which you wrapped your passion dissolves and disappears, as the fabricated illusion it always was, which we always made it to be, purely from our attachment.
So it’s a warning not to launch oneself outward on one’s passions, but to stay inward and perceive instead the grasping tendrils from the mind, rather than be caught up in them. And the illusion will fade – and it WAS an illusion, always. This is the message, although I’m not saying it very well.
And when I call it a meditation instruction, this doesn’t refer to actual meditation practice so much as it does to how we hold ourselves in every moment of the day and night – on the practice cushion or off the cushion, in daily life.
~~
It’s a thing, in other words, that we do, this leaping ahead of ourselves or of the facts of an object, to perceive it in a preconceived way, and the proverb reminds us not to be so hasty. It reminds us that the enemy was always the fabrication that we made in our mind, and as its power fades and it loses its hold over us, we see that this holding was itself the enemy – we are our own worst enemy in this sense.
If we sit by the river long enough, the grasping distortion we place on reality will die, and that enemy will float on.
And this is a general thing that sentient beings do, and the Buddha was such a great teacher that were were privileged to learn how he did this very thing, and finally dissolved the very last trace of it in himself. This is why they call him the Conqueror.
The universe is so superbly fractal that we find the same pattern ranging from the tiniest movement of mind to the larger passage of events. The proverb is referring to a pattern, to be seen wherever one sees it.
Posted by: Grieved | Jul 3 2023 19:05 utc | 137
The question of how Heidegger’s relevance is the thread that connects multiple threads in which I engaged. Since it is not immediate MoA stuff, let me recap my view of how it came about.
It started with some remarks on Sartre’s conduct during the german occupation of Paris one day late in a Ukraine thread concerned with bridgelayers, to which I responded that there are other problems with Sartre, namely those that relate to his bridgelaying for Heideggerian thought into french philosophy – somewhat culminating in Derrida, which is damning. Even more damning, at least for me, is the fact that Heidegger outplayed Husserl, to end up being world-famous in our time, while actually reversing an incredible breakthrough of Husserl, who is a fringe figure today.
I hinted at personal reasons for the betrayal (most likely on the terrain of clinical psychiatry), as well as politically unsound (the Nazi angle). My original aim at this point was not about getting myself a stage to start waxing about philosophically, but rather because Husserl’s ideas are incredibly consequential, which few are aware of, even among those who read or even studied him. – One example I gave here was in a response to our eternal poster “young” in which I analyzed the veracity of precognition, now possible to unsderstand in a completely coherent manner, as I do claim. But the more pressing topic on this forum is obviously ethics, and especially political ethics at that: what can may come after the age of empire?
A discussion about law (and my wish to have a beer with Don Firineach in the Lebenswelt as he offered) had continued the topic when I found a few quotes that very much supported my previous view I gave on Heidegger. And then this article appeared that was discussed here upthread. I had read it even before it was mentioned here, and at this point I felt that we are all in on the topic now.
So I connected the isolated dots I had layed out before and began to give an answer on the ethical question. This argument rests historically on Husserl, and not Heidegger, but the connection is mine. It is more readily evidenced by the quantum findings, which are in my view nothing but a proof that Husserl’s subtle (and very hard to grasp) twist is actually very basic; not even a theory, but merely a realization that the notion of an eternal substance that makes up the world, with or without a creator god, is plainly illogical. Hence “Schrödinger’s tree”, aptly given its name by Tom here. I realize it might not be most accesible example one can come up with, but then, have you ever wondered why Schrödinger kills a cat in his thought experiment, instead of just using a Geiger counter?
Once we realize that sentience is all around us, we can build a body of ethics that is rested on pure presence of other. It would be positively grounded, rest on empathy, be attainable to a code law that doesn’t have the anarchist’s problems, is essentially multipolar, and does include nature. Moreover, the IMHO proper Begriff of otherness here is Aristotle’s nous, which according to the cited work is misunderstood today for historical reasons.
This angle allows for a revision of history that explains how we ended up in this age of plunder in the first place!
When you stomach that, you will gain a positive understanding of actual human nature. The manicheans had it right, which made them to peaceful for their various kings and leaders, which probably triggered their extinction. It was a common test for a forcibly converted manichean to crush an ant, as the true believers wouldn’t do it.
Today I’d state the place where we are now as one where abject human traits are subject of psychiatry first, and ethics second – the “original sin” according to the manichean view is to fail at the realization that everything is sentient, and to act accordingly.
If we managed that, we could learn to coexist with our planet, and it would come as a natural insight, as opposed to something we need to fight for (or against).
I’d not be surprised if at this point the aliens showed up to finally talk to us . . .
The bizarre failure of Abendland-style ethics to recognize the presence of others was first addressed, unsurpringly, by a woman: Edith Stein, Husserl’s assistant in Freiburg. Like him she was a converted jew, though a catholic, who went lost in Auschwitz, and later canonized by pope John Paul II.
Edith Stein is great mystic. She lived in a monastery in my hometown Speyer for a while, and I would like to quote her here:
Nur in geistigen Sphären kann der Mensch frei sein, nicht aber in der Natur.
Only in spirit can man [mankind] ever be free, but never in nature.
Why not in nature? Because nature is acting unintentionally, sometimes against us sentient beings (think disease and gamma bursts).
Is this a philosophy now? You judge. – Of course it was the esteemed Karlof1 who hurt me so much, because he rashly did away with the notion last time. I blamed malenkov because I thought Karl would know he’s implicated, and also because I knew that I was rash in my replies myself. It didn’t help that I drank this day.
So much from me on this episode at MoA.
I’m not butthurt enough to kark it forever, but as far as my original intent goes, the argument itself was stated sufficiently.
I’ll be taking replies, and I shall challenge malenkov to give Adorno’s argument here, so can we can sort this out.
Thanks for the attention, MoA.
– Niko
Posted by: persiflo | Jul 3 2023 22:42 utc | 156
Having spent only an hour or two reading the Introductory part of the Introduction to Metaphysics by Heidegger, I offer this little snippet as a possible taste of some of what he was on about. At the risk of over-simplifying and misrepresenting, it seems to me that he was wrestling with much of what the non-materialist movement has been addressing, (much too) slowly following many of the startling discoveries by the quantum crowd but of late picking up steam. It coincides with the increasing cross fertilization of Oriental traditions grounded in meditation practices which provide a rapid experiential exposure to issues involving Being, Awareness and ontological perspectives or definitions. But I might be missing much of what he is saying, especially given how little have penetrated into his extensive material.
Against these multiple misinterpretations of the spirit, we determine the essence of the spirit briefly in this way (I choose the formulation from my Rectoral Address, because there everything is succinctly brought together in accordance with the occasion): “Spirit is neither empty acuity, nor the noncommittal play of wit, nor the understanding’s boundless pursuit of analysis, nor even world reason, but rather spirit is originally attuned, knowing resolution to the essence of Being” (Rectoral Address, p. 13). 37 Spirit is the empowering of the powers of beings as such and as a whole. Where spirit rules, beings as such always and in each case come more into being . Asking about beings as such and as a whole, asking the question of Being, is then one of the essential fundamental conditions for awakening the spirit, and thus for an originary world of historical Dasein, and thus for subduing the danger of the darkening of the world, and thus for taking over the historical mission of our people, the people of the center of the West. Only in these broad strokes can we make plain here to what extent the asking of the question of Being is in itself historical through and through, and that accordingly our question, whether Being is to remain a mere vapor for us or whether it is to become the fate of the West, is anything but an exaggeration and a figure of speech.
He talks of Germany being the center and between the twin pincers of Russia and the US who, it strikes me, he is describing as essentially soulless because materialist. He goes through four ways in which spirit is misinterpreted and all four are materialist in thrust, namely:
1. Regarding spirit as intelligence or cleverness (a form of spiritual materialism etc., i.e what can we do with it).
2. “Spirit, thus falsified as intelligence, is thereby reduced to the role of a tool in the service of something else, a tool whose handling can be taught and learned.”
3. “As soon as this instrumental misinterpretation of the spirit sets in, the powers of spiritual happening—poetry and fine arts, state-creation and religion—shift to a sphere where they can be consciously cultivated and planned.” (In other words, they can be formulaically conceptualized and categorized and, thus abstracted, stripped of presence, of living Dasein/life, like butterflies on an entymologist’s display of corpse insects.)
4. Summing up the three: “The last misinterpretation of the spirit rests on the formerly mentioned falsifications that represent the spirit as intelligence, this intelligence as a tool serviceable for goals, and this tool, together with what can be produced, as the realm of culture. The spirit as intelligence in the service of goals and the spirit as culture finally become showpieces and spectacles that one takes into account along with many others, that one publicly trots out and exhibits as proof that one does not want to deny culture in favor of barbarism. Russian communism, after an initially
purely negative attitude, went directly over to such propagandistic tactics.”
Instead of living, breathing presence wherein its being and the creation in which they dwell are not two we have abstractions bereft of authentic life which in turn lead to an inevitable ‘darkening’ of our civilizations, seemingly one of his main concerns – at least in this chapter.
These things we are clearly wrestling with today, though I find his vocabulary a little harder to grok than Iain McGilchrist’s for example. (And of course, they may not be in accord.)
It seems like Dugin’s view of the challenges ahead for Russia in developing herself once again into a bona fide, vibrant and healthy civilization accords quite a bit with Heidegger’s emphasis on Dasein / Being-Here-ness and Spirit. It’s a vision of the world that is essentially alive, making divisions between form and space, mind and body, animate and inanimate unnecessary, even fundamentally harmful, or ‘darkening.’ And that of course is anathema to modern scientific materialists whose view permeates most modern cultures these days, East and West.
Posted by: Scorpion | Jul 4 2023 1:27 utc | 163
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Jul 4 2023 4:39 utc | 180
Just because you raise a question, doesn’t mean that anyone has to answer it! (Like that tree, nobody hears, eh?!)
Actually, I DID sorta-kinda answer it in the sense that it prompted me to take two hours to actually read some Heidegger (not a review or critique but the man himself, albeit in English unfortunately).
In terms of how it affects my life? Well, not Heidegger specifically since I haven’t studied him, but philosophers in general? When I was eighteen and studying to take the Oxbridge Entrance exams at the Cambridge Polytechnic (having left public/high school early due to altercations with the authorities!), I spent a few weeks going through Bertrand Russell’s overview of Western philosophy where I got enraptured with Kant, after which I don’t recall finishing the book. But Kant got me going. During this Kantian period, I stumbled onto Transcendental Meditation – the rishi was lecturing in Cambridge and I saw the poster and learned the technique and then did it privately for a couple of years after that, pretty much every day, though have no idea why. And then gradually got into Buddhadharma, becoming a close student of a famous Tibetan lama, which practiced intensely for 20+ years including months in mountain huts and giving teachings in NYC and Europe and so on. (Now I’m an old fart who likes to irritate people on obscure web forums penetrating the depths of emptiness and fullness being not two!)
So I can say that Kant changed my life. Not Heidegger, though, since I never read any twentieth century stuff. I plan to remedy that as I work through Iain McGilchrist’s 1000+ page tome sitting on my desk for over a month now, beckoning….
This stuff can change how you view fundamental reality, albeit it only ‘gets’ you that way as an experiential, not abstract intellectual, experience. To which end I suspect that at least 50% of that effect is supplied by the reader who is primed to be so triggered.
I don’t recommend it. I think I would have had a much happier and easier life as a university professor or playwright or some such. Instead, I ended up living forever in no-mans-land. I also think the Dalai Lama is right when he recommends that most Westerners stick to Christianity if they want to lead spiritual lives. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic…
What I objected to – if I remember aright which possibly do not! – is the condescending tone in yours, Ed’s and Constantine’s posts, the bloated judgmentalism. I hate it! Call it a personal foible, if you like. But I despise the way so many in the West, and also in the modern world generally since the West’s materialism in many ways has gone global, dismiss people in the past, many of them great people who dedicated their lives to making this world a better place, but are now deemed unworthy by those of us who have spent most of our lives brainwashed and really don’t understand very much at all about how people even one hundred years ago experienced their lives, their cultures, their ‘reality.’ We don’t know, and yet we opine. (And most of us haven’t taken the time to explore how we experience our own sense of reality, we just go from one experience to the next, following the nose of habitual instinct, like dogs.)
And I am as guilty as any in this, though I do try not to dole out scorn with my opinions to the degree that so many others nowadays do. (I have occasionally done so in a deliberate but also foolish attempt to act as a mirror, but regret it every time.) I think voicing such scorn is a sign of insecurity, that actually one knows one doesn’t really have the complete picture but one is going to bully one’s opinion across anyway. It’s also a defense: something may have called one’s pet view into question but rather than reflect on it and maybe have to change, easier to deflect by using insult as an effective repellent. Call it a tried-and-true Nazi approach, if you will… We can all do better. I apologize for any ill temper yesterday. I have German family members and am overly sensitive in a way that most actual Germans have learned not to be. Another personal foible.
Posted by: Scorpion | Jul 4 2023 15:07 utc | 197
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