Several times recently, in posts on this blog discussing the vagaries of current American politics, I’ve had occasion to reference my own political philosophy by name. This has caused a certain amount of confusion and curiosity, because the moniker I mentioned—“moderate Burkean conservative”—falls nowhere on the narrow range of political opinions allowed into our collective discourse these days.
Now of course a good part of the confusion arises because the word “conservative” no longer means what it once meant—that is to say, a person who wants to conserve something. In today’s America, conservatives who actually want to conserve are as rare as liberals who actually want to liberate. The once-significant language of an earlier era has had the meaning sucked right out of it, the better to serve as camouflage for a kleptocratic feeding frenzy in which both establishment parties participate with equal abandon. Putting meaning back into the words can be a risky proposition, in turn, because so many Americans are used to waving them about as arbitrary noises linked to an assortment of vague emotions, the common currency of what passes for thought in so much of modern American life.
Nonetheless, I think the risk is worth taking, if only because a genuine conservatism—that is, a point of view oriented toward finding things worth conserving, and then doing something to conserve them—is one of the few options that offer any workable strategies for the future as the United States accelerates along the overfamiliar trajectory of a democracy in terminal crisis.
Let’s start with the least familiar of the terms I mentioned above, “Burkean.” The reference is to the Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797), generally considered the founder of the Anglo-American conservative tradition. This is all the more interesting in that Burke himself was none of the things that gets labeled “conservative” in today’s America. For example, while he was himself an Anglican Christian, he defended the rights of Catholics to freedom of worship at a time when this was a very unpopular stance—roughly on a par with defending the rights of Satanists in today’s America—and lent his own home to a group of Hindus traveling in Britain who had been refused any other place to celebrate one of their religious holidays.
He was also an outspoken supporter of the American colonists in their attempts to seek redress against the British government’s predatory and punitive trade policies, and maintained his support even when all peaceful options had been exhausted and the colonists rose in rebellion. Yet this was the man who, toward the end of his life, penned Reflections on the Revolution in France, which critiqued the French revolutionaries in incisive terms, and which has much the same place in the history of Anglo-American conservatism that The Communist Manifesto has in the history of the modern radical left.
This doesn’t mean, by the way, that Burkean conservatives quote Burke’s writings the way Marxists quote Marx or Objectivists quote Ayn Rand. Like other human beings, Burke was a blend of strengths and weaknesses, principles and pragmatism, and the political culture of his time and place accepted behavior that most people nowadays consider very dubious indeed. Those of my readers who want to hear what Burke had to say can find Reflections on the Revolution in France
online, or in any decent used book store; those who want to engage in ad hominem argument can find plenty of ammunition in any biography of Burke they care to consult. What I propose to do here is something a bit different—to take Burke’s core ideas and set them out in a frame many of my readers will recognize at once.
The foundation of Burkean conservatism is the recognition that human beings aren’t half as smart as they like to think they are. One implication of this recognition is that when human beings insist that the tangled realities of politics and history can be reduced to some set of abstract principles simple enough for the human mind to understand, they’re wrong. Another is that when human beings try to set up a system of government based on abstract principles, rather than allowing it to take shape organically out of historical experience, the results will pretty reliably be disastrous.
What these imply, in turn, is that social change is not necessarily a good thing. It’s always possible that a given change, however well-intentioned, will result in consequences that are worse than the problems that the change is supposed to fix. In fact, if social change is pursued in a sufficiently clueless fashion, the consequences can cascade out of control, plunging a nation into failed-state conditions, handing it over to a tyrant, or having some other equally unwanted result. What’s more, the more firmly the eyes of would-be reformers are fixed on appealing abstractions, and the less attention they pay to the lessons of history, the more catastrophic the outcome will generally be.
That, in Burke’s view, was what went wrong in the French Revolution. His thinking differed sharply from continental European conservatives, in that he saw no reason to object to the right of the French people to change a system of government that was as incompetent as it was despotic. It was, the way they went about it—tearing down the existing system of government root and branch, and replacing it with a shiny new system based on fashionable abstractions—that was problematic. What made that problematic, in turn, was that it simply didn’t work
Instead of establishing an ideal republic of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the wholesale reforms pushed through by the National Assembly plunged France into chaos, handed the nation over to a pack of homicidal fanatics, and then dropped it into the waiting hands of an egomaniacal warlord named Napoleon Bonaparte.
Two specific bad ideas founded in abstractions helped feed the collapse of revolutionary France into chaos, massacre, tyranny, and pan-European war. The first was the conviction, all but universal among the philosophes
whose ideas guided the revolution, that human nature is entirely a product of the social order. According to this belief, the only reason people don’t act like angels is that they live in an unjust society, and once that is replaced by a just society, why, everybody would behave the way the moral notions of the
philosophes insisted they should. Because they held this belief, in turn, the National Assembly did nothing to protect their shiny up-to-date system against such old-fashioned vices as lust for power and partisan hatred, with results that made the streets of Paris run with blood.
The second bad idea had the same effect as the first. This was the conviction, also all but universal among the philosophes, that history moved inevitably in the direction they wanted: from superstition to reason, from tyranny to liberty, from privilege to equality, and so on. According to this belief, all the revolution had to do to bring liberty, equality, and fraternity was to get rid of the old order, and voila—liberty, equality, and fraternity would pop up on cue. Once again, things didn’t work that way. Where the philosophes insisted that history moves ever upward toward a golden age in the future, and the European conservatives who opposed them argued that history slides ever downward from a golden age in the past, Burke’s thesis—and the evidence of history—implies that history has no direction at all.
The existing laws and institutions of a society, Burke proposed, grow organically out of that society’s history and experience, and embody a great deal of practical wisdom. They also have one feature that the abstraction-laden fantasies of world-reformers don’t have, which is that they have been proven to work. Any proposed change in laws and institutions thus needs to start by showing, first, that there’s a need for change; second, that the proposed change will solve the problem it claims to solve; and third, that the benefits of the change will outweigh its costs. Far more often than not, when these questions are asked, the best way to redress any problem with the existing order of things turns out to be the option that causes as little disruption as possible, so that what works can keep on working.
That is to say, Burkean conservatism can be summed up simply as the application of the precautionary principle to the political sphere.
The precautionary principle? That’s the common-sense rule that before you do anything, you need to figure out whether it’s going to do more good than harm. We don’t do things that way in the modern industrial world. We dump pesticides into the biosphere, carbon dioxide into the air, and inadequately tested drugs into our bodies, and then figure out from the results what kind of harm they’re going to cause. That’s a thoroughly stupid way of going about things, and the vast majority of the preventable catastrophes that are dragging modern industrial society down to ruin result directly from that custom.
Behind it, in turn, lies one of the bad ideas cited above—the notion that history moves inevitably in the direction we want. Yes, that’s the myth of progress, the bizarre but embarrassingly widespread notion that history is marching ever onward and upward, and so anything new is better just because it’s new, which keeps so many people from asking obvious questions about where our civilization is headed and whether any sane person would want to go there. I’ve discussed this in quite a few earlier posts here, as well as in my book After Progress; I mention it here to point out one of the ways that the political views I’m explaining just now interface with the other ideas I’ve discussed here and elsewhere.
The way that a moderate Burkean conservatism works in practice will be easiest to explain by way of a specific example. With this in mind, I’m going to go out of my way to offend everyone, by presenting a thoroughly conservative argument—in the original, Burkean sense of that word “conservative,” of course—in favor of the right to same-sex marriage.
We’ll have to pause first for a moment, though, to talk about that word “right.” This is necessary because by and large, when Americans hear the word “right,” their brains melt into a puddle of goo. The assumption these days seems to be that there’s some indefinite number of abstract rights hovering out there in notional space, and all of them are absolute and incontrovertible, so that all you have to say is “I have a right to [whatever]!” and everybody is supposed to give you whatever it is right away. Of course everybody doesn’t, and the next step is the kind of shrill shouting match that makes up so much of American political nonconversation these days, in which partisans of the right to X and partisans of the right to Y yell denunciations at each other for trying to deprive each other of their rights.
If you happen to be a religious person, and believe in a religion that teaches that God or the gods handed down a set of rules by which humans are supposed to live, then it probably does make sense to talk like this, because you believe that rights exist in the mind of the deity or deities in question. If you’re not a religious person, and claim to have a right that other people don’t recognize, you’ll have a very interesting time answering questions like these: in what way does this supposed right exist? How do you “have it”—and how do the rest of us tell the difference between this right you claim to have and, say, an overdeveloped sense of entitlement on your part?
All these confusions come from the attempt to claim that rights have some kind of abstract existence of their own. To the Burkean conservative, this is utter nonsense. A right, from the Burkean point of view, is an agreement among the members of a community to allow some sort of behavior. That’s what it is, and that’s all it is. The right to vote, say, exists because the people of a given nation, acting through political institutions, confers it on a certain class of persons—say, all adult citizens.
What if you don’t have a right, and believe that you should have it? That’s called “having an opinion.” There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion, but it doesn’t confer a right. If you want to have the right you think you should have, your job is to get your community to confer it on you. In a perfect world, there would no doubt be some instant, foolproof way to establish a right, but we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where the slow, awkward tools of representative democracy and judicial review, backed up by public debate, are the least easily abused options we’ve yet found to accomplish this task. (That doesn’t mean, please note, that they can’t be abused; it means that they’re not quite as prone to abuse as, say, the institutions of theocracy or military dictatorship.)
With that in mind, we can proceed to the right to same-sex marriage. The first question to ask is whether government has any business getting involved in the issue at all. That’s not a minor question. The notion that legislation is the solution to every problem has produced a vast number of avoidable disasters. In this case, though, what prevented same-sex couples from marrying was governmental regulations. Changing those regulations requires governmental action.
The second question to ask is whether government has any compelling interest in the existing state of affairs. History shows that letting government interfere in people’s private lives is a very risky thing to do, and while it can be necessary, there has to be a compelling interest to justify it—for example, in the case of laws prohibiting child abuse, the compelling interest of protecting children against violence. No such compelling interest justifies government interference in the marital decisions of legally competent, consenting adults; as noted further on, “Ewww, gross!” does not count as a compelling interest.
The third question to ask is whether the people who will be affected by the change actually want the change. That’s not a minor question, either; history is full of grand projects, supposedly meant to help some group of people, that were rejected by the people who were to be “helped,” and those inevitably turn out badly. In this case, though, there were plenty of same-sex couples who wanted to get married and couldn’t. Notice also that the proposed change was permissive rather than mandatory—that is, same-sex couples could get married, but they could also stay unmarried. As a general rule of thumb, permissive regulations don’t require the same level of suspicion as mandatory regulations.
The fourth question to ask is whether anyone would be harmed by the change. Here it’s important to keep in mind that “harmed” does not mean “offended;” nor, for that matter, are you harmed by being kept from forcing others to do what you want them to do. One of the eternal annoyances of liberty is that others inevitably use it in ways that you and I find offensive. We put up with the inconvenience because that’s the price of having liberty ourselves. Claims that this or that person is going to be harmed by a change thus need to evince specific, concrete, measurable harm. In this case, that standard was not met, as there are no Purple Hearts issued for being butthurt.
The fifth question is whether the proposed change is a wholly new right, a significant expansion of an existing right, or the extension of an existing right in its current form to a group of people who did not previously have it. Creating a wholly new right can be a risky endeavor, as it’s hard to figure out in advance how that will interact with existing rights and institutions. A significant expansion of an existing right is less hazardous, but it still needs to be approached with care. Extending an existing right in its current form to people who don’t previously have it, by contrast, tends to be the safest of changes, since it’s easy to figure out what the results will be—all you have to do is see what effect it has had in its more restricted application. In this case, an existing right was to be extended to same-sex couples, who would have the same rights and responsibilities as couples who married under existing law.
The sixth question, given that the right in question is being extended in its current form to a group of people who didn’t previously have it, is whether that right has been extended before. In this case, the answer is yes. Marriage between people of different races used to be illegal in many American states. When extending the right of marriage to mixed-race couples was being debated, the same arguments deployed against same-sex marriage got used, but all of them amounted in practice to someone being offended. Mixed-race marriages were legalized, a lot of mixed-race couples got married, none of the horrible consequences imagined by the opposition ever got around to happening, and that was that.
So, to sum up, we have a group of people who want a permissive regulation granting them a right already held by other people. No actual harm has been demonstrated by those opposed to granting that right, and no compelling interest prevents government from granting that right. The same right has been extended before with no negative consequences, and a very simple change in the wording of existing marriage laws will confer the right. Under these circumstances, there is vastly more justification for granting the right than for refusing it, and it should therefore be granted.
No doubt some people will take offense at so mealy-mouthed an adding up of pros and cons. Where are the ringing affirmations of justice, equality, and other grand abstract principles? That, of course, is exactly the point. In the real world, grand abstract principles count for little. In a society that values liberty—not, please note, as a grand abstract principle, but as a mutual agreement that people can do as they wish so long as that doesn’t infringe on the established rights of others—what matters when someone petitions for redress of a grievance is simply whether that petition can be granted without any such infringement. The questions asked above, and the institutions of representative democracy and judicial review, are there to see to it that this happens. Do they always succeed? Of course not; they just do a marginally better job than any other system. In the real world, that’s justification enough.
What about the religious communities that are opposed to that right? (This is where I’m going to shift gears from offending my readers on the rightward end of things to offending those on the other end of the political spectrum.) Conservative Christian groups are a religious minority in America today, and it’s a well-established rule in American law and custom that reasonable accommodation should be made to religious minorities when this can be done without violating the agreed-upon rights of others. That doesn’t give conservative Christians the right to force other people to follow conservative Christian teachings, any more than it would give Jews the right to forbid the sale of pork in America’s grocery stores. It does mean that conservative Christians should not be forced to participate in activities they consider sinful, any more than Jewish delicatessens should be forced to sell pork.
By and large, businesses that serve the general public are rightly required to serve the general public, rather than picking and choosing who they will or won’t serve, but there are valid exceptions, and religion is one of them. I’m told that in New York State, orthodox Jewish businesses are legally allowed to post signage stating that Jewish religious law applies on the premises, and this exempts them from certain laws governing other businesses; thus, for example, a woman who enters such a business with uncovered hair will not be served. It would be a reasonable accommodation for conservative Christian businesses that cater to weddings to be able to post signage noting that they only provide services to the kinds of weddings authorized by their own religious laws. That would let same-sex couples take their business elsewhere; it would also let people who support the right of same-sex marriage know which businesses to boycott, just as it would let conservative Christians support their co-religionists.
Again, any number of shiny abstractions could be brandished about to insist that conservative Christian businesses should not have that right, but here again, we’re not dealing with abstractions. We’re dealing with the need to find reasonable accommodation for differing beliefs in a society that, at least in theory, values liberty.
Claims that this or that person will be harmed by letting a religious minority practice its faith on privately owned business premises, again, have to evince specific, concrete, measurable harm. Being offended doesn’t count here, either, nor does whatever suffering comes your way from being denied the power to make other people do what you think they ought to do.
My readers may have noticed that, given the arrangements just outlined, nobody in the debate over same-sex marriages would get everything they want. That’s at least as offensive as anything else I’ve suggested in this post, but it’s the foundation of Burkean conservatism, and of democratic politics in general. In the messy, gritty world of actual politics, nobody can ever count on getting everything they want—even if they shout at the top of their lungs that they have a right to it—and the best that can be expected is that each side in any controversy will get the things they most need. That’s the kind of resolution that allows a society to function, instead of freezing up into permanent polarization the way America has done in recent years—and it’s the kind of resolution that might just possibly get some semblance of representative democracy intact through the era of crisis looming ahead of us just now.
*******
Two other things. First, I’m frankly astounded by the outpouring of congratulations—not to mention tip jar contributions—that came in response to last week’s post on the tenth anniversary of The Archdruid Report. On the off chance that anyone didn’t get thanked sufficiently, please know that the lapse wasn’t intentional! I’m more grateful than I can say for the support and encouragement I’ve received from the community of readers that’s emerged around this blog.
337 comments:
I'd be interested in your opinion of hetrosexual marraige. MY wife, daughter and I were discussing marraige and premarital sex recently and I think that the issue is more complex by far than the issue of gay marraige. The concept of forcing fertile couples to make a lifetime commitment before society allows sexual intercourse has obvious benefits to society. Yet the "right" to engage in potentially child-producing, disease spreading behavior is now almost universally accepted in industrial society.
Having been young and horny myself several decades ago I can understand the eagerness by which the young favor the exercise of this right but clearly a casual Burkean conservative glance at premarital sex would be cause to call out the well armed militia. Yet we see this right, and the right to easy divorce causing significant social damage. Is this damage more significant than the damage caused by people being held in bad marraiges?
5/11/16, 5:41 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
This is exactly why I take what appears to be the least popular position in Canadian politics these days when it comes to the senate: leave it as is, the risks of altering it aren't worth the dangers. If it's abolished, that's fine, but the committees it has can do excellent work. If it's made elected, how do you deal with disputes between the houses? Australia has a system, but I'm fond of pointing out it had a constitutional crisis over this, and it seems no one wants to put even the limited rules Australia has in place. If the method appointees are made to it is altered, again fine, but the current system works, the new one needs to prove it does too, and most changes seem likely to be abused.
It's also fun to watch people recoil in horror when you defend democracy, not because it's "perfect" and "moral", but despite the flaws. In fact, it was fun to watch people try to argue with me when I began by pointing out all democracies are always corrupt, and that there is nothing that can be done about it since people with power will want money and people with money will want power. However, since democracies tend to treat their citizens better than non-democracies, it is worth preserving it, despite the corruption.
Over all, these arguments get rather fun, as long as it's done in good spirit on my end. I can't control how other's react, but it's still interesting to watch.
5/11/16, 5:44 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832
5/11/16, 5:49 PM
Villager said...
John Gray's Straw Dogs is an interesting read - though a bit too oriented toward aphorism and popular appeal for my tastes.
Burke lived in a time when a well articulated belief counted for something. In today's Twitterverse that's an idea 140 characters or less in length.
I followed your suggestion and am reading Magic Mountain - wherein a chapter is as long as the typical generic romance. Interesting enough if one keeps front and center the thought that the sanatorium is Mann's depiction of a diseased society in miniature.
5/11/16, 5:58 PM
Leo Knight said...
5/11/16, 5:59 PM
Justin said...
5/11/16, 5:59 PM
Tom Schmidt said...
I assume you would extend this right to religious groups whose belief system indicates that members of other groups can be ignored or not served? If so, you've essentially repealed the Civil Rights laws. That would be consistent with Burkean conservatism, but you will now bring down the wrath of the leftish half of your readership upon you.
One wonders what the subsequent years would have been like had social pressure simply led to the repeal of the odious segregation laws at a state level without the Federal Civil Rights legislation.
5/11/16, 5:59 PM
John Michael Greer said...
History thus shows that the benefits to legal prohibition of sex outside of marriage are largely illusory and the costs are real and serious. That being the case, government does not have a compelling interest; the people who would be affected by the change you're proposing clearly don't want to be "helped" by it. Liberty, if it means anything, includes the right to make bad decisions, and therefore -- from the standpoint of moderate Burkean conservatism, as I understand it -- the gradual social changes that, over the course of the twentieth century, abolished prohibitions on nonmarital sex were justified.
WB Jorgenson, exactly! If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and if you're going to fix it, you need to be able to show that your solution will be better than the problem.
5/11/16, 6:03 PM
Unknown said...
To say it more simply: allowing Christian cake makers to refuse to make cakes for gay couples is giving any ethnic enclaves who want to institute the Sharia law the militia right wing claims to fear a hell of a legal foothold.
5/11/16, 6:06 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Villager, I've tended to have a similar reaction to Gray -- philosophy by aphorism can work (Nietzsche comes to mind), but it can also be glib and shallow. Berlin is quite another matter, and I share his take. As for Mann's novel, it's got many levels, but the social-satire aspect is to my eye always there.
Leo, exactly -- thus my jab at verbal noises linked with vague emotional states as the common currency of American nonthinking.
Justin, as I see it, the laws against homosexuality were religious in origin, and thus part of the hangover (in the head-pounding, gut-churning, kneeling at the porcelain altar and repatriating your last two meals sense) from the theocratic stage of European history. That is to say, they were certainly part of the general revulsion toward sexual pleasure that pervaded Christianity before the modern era, but I don't think the matter was anything like as utilitarian as you've suggested.
Tom, as far as I know, there are very few religious groups whose doctrines actually prohibit, say, doing business with people of a different ethnic background or skin color. There are a few -- the Christian Identity movement comes to mind -- but religion wasn't the source of the Jim Crow laws, and I've specified that accommodating the needs of religious minorities is something of a special case. (For example, the draft laws grant special exemptions to members of religious minorities that aren't granted to other categories of people.) Thus I don't see civil rights laws as necessarily invalid; a lot would depend, as it generally does, on a case by case analysis of costs and benefits.
5/11/16, 6:17 PM
fudoshindotcom said...
I am disappointed. Here I was looking forward to being offended and............not one offensive word ;) If that was a genuine attempt to offend me you really must try harder.
I would venture that in this age of expecting immediate gratification people are too narrowly focused on the present moment to allow the Precautionary principle to be employed usefully.
As for our intelligence, I think you'll agree that one clear-eyed look at how we've treated our life-support system, the biosphere, masterfully illustrates the monumental stupidity our species is capable of. Half as smart as we think we are? Not even close.
5/11/16, 6:21 PM
John Michael Greer said...
5/11/16, 6:21 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
I examined how well different ideas of conservatism and liberalism worked to explain what was going on in Food Fight! Thoughts on liberalism and conservatism inspired by the Preface to Food, Inc. The Burkean definition used by Jerry Pournelle proved utterly inadequate in identifying modern American conservative and liberal positions. In fact, the liberal solution to the example I was examining ended up fitting Burke's and Pournelle's idea of conservatism, while the conservative solution would have been identified by the same authors as being the liberal one! Instead, classifying political positions based attitudes about inequality worked better than tradition vs. rationality. Score one for Marx.
As for your solution regarding accommodation for minority religious views, it reminds me of Andrew Sullivan's call for magnanimity by the activists on behalf of same-sex marriage. He observes that they don't seem to have any, even in the face of stunning successes. Sullivan may be the most visible Burkean conservative in the U.S. It helps that he's originally from the U.K.
5/11/16, 6:22 PM
Tidlösa said...
It could be argued that same-sex couples shouldn´t have the right to adopt children, since children need both male and female parents/role models. This would be a compelling interest for the government to either stop same-sex marriage, or create a form of marriage sans children. Also, international adoption organizations (whether we like it or not) tend to avoid nations where children can be adopted by same-sex couples, making it impossible to adopt foreign children if same-sex marriage is passed into law. But yes, I´m trying to argue the case in a "Burkean" fashion here, following your example.
As for the French Revolution, I believe that the ancien regime was so rotten, that the revolution became inevitable once the nobility had rejected Necker´s reform proposals - "abstract ideas" or not! The "Burkean" argument makes sense only in a society that can still be reformed by some other means. If it can´t, we all have to ride the tiger (and go off and run like hell when the tiger stops, I suppose).
I also agree with some of the comments above, that democracy is preferable because it is (in the words of Churchill) "the worst possible form of government...except for all the others". C S Lewis said something similar: he supported democracy precisely because humans *aren´t* perfect. Even Plato (sic) had a similar opinion, stating (or letting one of his dialogue characters state) that democracy was incapable of great glory, but precisely for that reason, also incapable of great crimes...
Does this make me a Burkean? Hmmm...I always thought of that guy as some kind of super-toxic arch-reactionary!
5/11/16, 6:28 PM
Justin said...
Although I suspect more pressing issues will rear their heads in a couple years, I am not sure what to make of the issue of cake makers being forced to comply with cakes for gay weddings. I don't have much sympathy for homophobes, after all, unlike racists, homophobes can have gay children and I've seen the consequences of that. On the other hand, wedding cakes are hardly a human right, and even in more conservative places I'm sure the average gay couple can find a baker who'll help.
5/11/16, 6:29 PM
Lynnet said...
5/11/16, 6:36 PM
blue sun said...
Have you ever heard, or used, the term "paleoconservative"? I've applied that to myself at times for lack of a better term. In fact, just the other day I discovered you can take a quiz to determine if you are one:
http://www.gotoquiz.com/are_you_a_paleoconservative_or_a_neoconservat_1
Then there is the term "Crunchy Con" (for crunchy conservative), coined by the writer Rod Dreher in his 2006 book 'Crunchy Cons.' I've used that one too.
Dreher used to write for the Front Porch Republic and now writes for The American Conservative, as far as I know. In the years when your blog first started, I also used to read the Front Porch Republic blog nearly as often, although that site has degraded considerably since most of the founding authors have left.
As a thinking person in America today, it's very difficult to define one's self with any of the commonly used labels!
5/11/16, 6:38 PM
Thelma said...
5/11/16, 6:47 PM
John Roth said...
5/11/16, 6:48 PM
S.Treimel said...
5/11/16, 6:53 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
It is nice that you defined a conservative as: "a person who wants to conserve something". It would be nice to meet people like that. ;-)!
In an astonishing coincidence this morning, I was listening to the radio when a lady representing the Australian Conservation Foundation was being interviewed on a rather important topic. I thought that the interview may be interesting and I was particularly curious to hear what that group was trying to conserve.
You see the problem is that Cape Grimm which is in the north western corner of the island state of Tasmania - a stunning, wild and very remote corner of the planet - has a scientific station measuring some of the world's cleanest air, which they believe will very soon be able to measure 400ppm (that's parts per million) of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere at that location. This is an unprecedented recording / measurement from such a remote corner of the world. The very thoughtful interviewers asked the very hard and outstanding question: “Whatever happened to the 350 organisation?” BAM – as I’ve heard said!
What surprised me the most is that after delivering a concise and very well spoken summary of the problem, the representative then went onto claim that their group was demanding that the government apparently do something about the problem, because without government action... No doubt they are correct in that assertion, but they also failed to mention other more immediate courses of action which may possibly have put them out of a job. The interesting thing was that the representative had an ever so slight moment of hesitation before communicating that particular meme and I wonder if there was a guilty conscience underneath those words - or even a true sense of the sheer scale of the problem. My gut feeling was that the words were intended to provide a soothing effect, but I could well be wrong?
Out of sheer curiosity, do you see that meme being thrown around? The reason I ask is because I wonder how well that meme will last when the climate extremes, become even more extreme? My gut feeling is that at some stage in the future, people may switch to the even more dubious claims such as: Well, action could be taken if it weren't for . Dunno.
Of course: "A right, from the Burkean point of view, is an agreement among the members of a community to allow some sort of behavior ."
It is my gut feeling that community is often avoided / feared - or only fostered with likeminded people - for the very reason that people are indulging their "overdeveloped sense of entitlement on your part?" as you put it.
Putting up with the many interesting characters who have very different desires and objectives in a real community is a very different experience as I know only too well.
PS: I second your opinion of "Into the Ruins" - which I received in the mail this morning - and urge everyone to go out and subscribe to this excellent and very well priced publication. And most importantly, it appears to be completely advertisement free!
PPS: Did you just provide a basic lesson on the processes of logic, deduction and reasoning? Well done, you! :-)!
Cheers
Chris
5/11/16, 6:56 PM
Dennis Mitchell said...
In reality, I'm desperate to find a sane political voice to vote for. Then again I greatly admired, Bill Cosby and Lance Armstrong. At least T Rump can't do anything to disillusion me.
5/11/16, 7:01 PM
Robert Dudek said...
I for one find it offensive that women should be completely covered up due to the demands of their religion ( even on the hottest days of the year).
5/11/16, 7:01 PM
Repent said...
I found a recent live interview online that you gave to the youtube channel 'Live leak', in addition to your fabulous writing skills you are also very skilled at giving great interviews, the interview was great !
https://youtu.be/POiN-jptBbg
What really fascinated me was that you dove headfirst into your knowledge and pursuit of the occult. I personally, though my experiences with Ayahuasca, took up a dedicated and daily practice of meditation. I've found that quieting my mind and going deep inside takes me even further into other realms than I experienced using the sacred medicine. I was also fascinated in regards to your statement of feeling the thoughts of the bird on your patio. This is obviously much further down the rabbit hole of experience than anything that I've experienced myself yet. (It also shows how much more that there is to discover)
Do you think you can do a post regarding your personal meditative practices and implications of your insight into the cosmos at large?
5/11/16, 7:01 PM
Clarence said...
clarence
5/11/16, 7:05 PM
S.Treimel said...
5/11/16, 7:05 PM
Shane W said...
setting the record straight, black travelers could find no shortage of black-owned black accommodations in the South in the pre Civil Rights era, the region with the highest percentage of black people was more than able to support a wealth of black businesses. Traveling through the lily white North and West is where things got hairy, I once read that there were no accommodations open to black travelers in the entire state of New Hampshire pre-Civil Rights. People must remember that although segregation was REQUIRED by law in the South, it was PERMITTED by the ABSENCE of Civil Rights laws in the rest of the nation, and most white people outside the South took advantage of this by judiciously forbidding blacks to patronize their establishments. Allowing "coloreds" in that day and age, outside the South, was a surefire way to kill business, and most businesses weren't willing to open their doors to black people.
5/11/16, 7:22 PM
pygmycory said...
5/11/16, 7:26 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
On an only slightly different matter, one thing I was thinking about recently is JFK's classic quote about how "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." It's a favorite amongst Lefties like me, yet it flies completely in the face of how we actually act. A huge part of the left-wing agenda right now is to try to make sure people that we've labeled "bigots" don't get anything they want, at all costs. Somehow, keeping a significant portion of the country disenfranchised doesn't strike me as a recipe for political stability.
5/11/16, 7:32 PM
Graeme Bushell said...
Do you know, I don't think I ever asked that question of myself before, "in what sense can a right be said to exist?". It's a good question. In the Burkean sense, the arguably more fundamental rights listed in the UN declaration exist because the authorised signatories to that declaration said that they do (although perhaps they don't exist in the sense of being universal - that would be an opinion). The same goes for the rights outlined in the US constitution.
The interesting questions arise when these rights get constrained by a shrinking natural resource base: mostly those listed in article 25 of the declaration.
Cheers,
Graeme
5/11/16, 7:33 PM
William Polensky said...
I remember reading a Meiji-era explanation of the basis for Japanese family/marriage law that went something like this: The family being the basic unit of social organization, strong families are an essential requirement for a strong state. Because the State has a compelling interest in the stability of families, and the production and rearing of children, the State therefore grants certain privileges to married couples and their households.
If you start with the premise that the legal institution of marriage is a policy designed to promote stable, reproductive households, then there is no "right" to marriage that could be extended. Here in Japan (my long-time abode), the consensus of opinion seems to be that same-sex couples can do whatever they want, but there is no point in them getting "married" per se (especially since there exist legal loopholes by which they can acquire some of the privileges of marriage).
5/11/16, 7:37 PM
Max St said...
Once again, I am startled by the quality of your arguments; really, I feel like I'm listening to myself.
I remember being vilified in dear old Bellingham when I used the exact phrase "If it aint broke, don't fix it" to a group of uber-liberals; I don't even recall the exact topic. And yet the jeers and catcalls; I was asked if I'd done the awful thing of voting Republican. My response --that I'd stopped voting entirely-- provoked the standard cliched response: if you don't vote, you can't complain. Really, whether one votes or not is independent of one's "right" to complain, which, as you've pointed out, isn't a right at all. One can attempt debate; it is either accepted or denied. In my case, among card-carrying liberals, it was denied, and it was really just a case of this:
"...nobody can ever count on getting everything they want."
It's difficult to bear, though, when the other party insists on getting their way at all costs. What does one do then? Are we obligated to act civilly towards barbarians? Your thought on this, as always, would be very welcome.
5/11/16, 7:42 PM
Vesta said...
5/11/16, 7:42 PM
Duke Williams said...
Admittedly we are embarrassingly often out smarted by our dogs. We can't seem to out think non-thinking viruses. Maybe the bar which allows us our hubris is very low. Or maybe we are simply not clever enough to recognize the bar and our defiencies.
5/11/16, 7:56 PM
Ray Wharton said...
It is useful, regardless of the current political context, and applies differently in different contexts. Not so much about ideals, as about relations. A culture that is hot for Democracy has opportunities and dangers than one which isn't accustomed to that political system.
There is no correct ideal, instead each situation is open to benefiting from certain possible adaptations, but unable to gain from adaptations that work in other contexts. This is evolutionary. A nice thing about evolution is its creativity, finding many many different solutions to a given circumstance.
History is the guide, the process of experience hoping to become manifest.
5/11/16, 8:05 PM
John the Peregrine said...
Let's say you're the Supreme Leader of France in 1789 (or for that matter, Russia in 1917). The monarchy has been toppled, and France is in a state of shock and anticipation for what's to come. As a Burkean, what specific changes do you make to improve society? Do you still abolish feudal privileges? What argument can you make for it, when they've been "proven to work" for 1,000 years? Do you overthrow the monarchy completely, or reduce its power to that of a constitutional monarchy, or something else?
5/11/16, 8:10 PM
thenoteswhichdonotfit said...
5/11/16, 8:16 PM
avalterra said...
I've often thought that, although many good decisions were made by the founding fathers, that one of the best boons to our own revolution was a wide open western frontier. That the reason a violent over throw of our government never occurred was the release valve of the frontier. If you didn't like what D.C. was doing - head west.
Of course, eventually this closed off but by then we had begun to tap the huge energy potential of crude oil and began to establish our empire.
Regarding marriage, though, wouldn't it be easier to remove the government from the problem entirely. If marriage is just a legal contract between whoever then the issue is taken out of the hand of legislators and voters and is kept a private affair. And there in lies the problem I see. Laws tend to build up like layers of paint on an old house. Inevitably one ends up with a bureaucratic empire that sees nothing beyond its reach but everything beyond its grasp.
AV
5/11/16, 8:21 PM
Leo Knight said...
5/11/16, 8:33 PM
NC Jim said...
5/11/16, 8:34 PM
Compound F said...
5/11/16, 8:41 PM
A Post-Millennial said...
"Article IV - Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law."
What this suggests to me is that there are in fact certain "grand principles" which you value, like liberty and perhaps also justice and equality. They are crucial in guiding you in determining what facets of our society are worth preserving and, perhaps, provide direction if you feel some aspect of society needs changing. Correct me if I'm off base here.
If all the above is essentially on target, that suggests your major issue with the French Revolution is not ideological but rather methodological. That sounds reasonable; nobody (save a few bloodthirsty communists) wants to defend the Reign of Terror. I fear, however, that your analysis of how social change happens is unhelpful. Here you are on rights, and how people acquire them:
"A right, from the Burkean point of view, is an agreement among the members of a community to allow some sort of behavior. That’s what it is, and that’s all it is. The right to vote, say, exists because the people of a given nation, acting through political institutions, confers it on a certain class of persons—say, all adult citizens."
Really? The people gave themselves the right to vote by "acting through political institutions?" In every historical example I can think of, people organized themselves and put pressure on the state in non-traditional ways, using methods firmly outside of the existing political institutions, methods which often included violence. American land-owners won the right to govern their own affairs through victory in their independence war, a model that many other colonized people would be forced to follow. The French bourgeoisie rejected the institutions of the Monarchy when they swore the tennis court oath and affirmed their willingness to pursue and defend their aims with noble blood.
I know the French Revolution horrifies you as much as it did Burke. And that's fine, no conservative should be a partisan to that movement. My contention is that the conservative ideology you propose has no mechanism to evolve unless society is already shaped in a certain way, already possesses the "awkward tools of representative democracy and judicial review" won in a historical transformation which almost certainly was not conservative in nature. I fail to see how a Burkean conservative, situated in the American south in the 1950s, could be anything other than a proponent of "state's rights" to uphold Jim Crow.
Given that your underlying project seems to be to identify the elements of the present society, technical and ideological, which are worth preserving in the face of imminent collapse, I can understand the allure of a political ideology which claims to make preservation its primary aim. However, such an ideology is much less alluring if situated in a society whose organization starkly contrasts with the abstract principles we hold dear, places like the French Old Regime or Old Dixie. For me, Burkean Conservatism as you have described it, needs to be paired with a positive project, perhaps some sort of ecological democracy, for it to make any sort of sense.
5/11/16, 8:43 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Total aside... Interesting you chose the marriage example at this time, as I have just been chatting with a friend of mine who was finally able to get married last year. His partner of 20 years is Canadian and, having no legal status to their relationship, the partner has been living as an undocumented shadow in the US for two decades. Now, thanks to a marriage license and a good immigration lawyer, he has a SS## and a green card, and can participate fully in the economy and society AND pay taxes. Lots of positives there, nary a negative to be found.
5/11/16, 8:44 PM
Stacy said...
I can understand your example of the bakery being allowed to refuse service to same-sex couples in a Burkean context, but I am scratching my head over the Hobby Lobby case, in which a private company wanted to disallow the insurance coverage of hormonal birth control for its female employees based upon the religious beliefs of its owners. Is this a different animal or the same type of example as the bakery?
5/11/16, 8:52 PM
Tom Schmidt said...
Could a Kosher Deli forbid a lactating woman from entering, for fear of mixing milk with meat? I once tried too rider a cappuccino at the Second Avenue Deli. Unclear on the concept!
5/11/16, 8:57 PM
Nathan Donaldson said...
Of course there are sterile things in nature, like Mules, that are surely living things. But I would say that although they are alive they are defective.
I do not think it is coincidental that same-sex marriage has become an issue at a time of universal below replacement reproduction rate in Western countries. I am not claiming that homosexuality is a major cause of the current sterility (at least not yet - I don't pretend to know what exactly drives the behavior but I think you would agree that from the historical record of the ancient world it appears that it may be somewhat socially elastic) but the sterility of modern life makes it appear to be a good idea. We no longer save seed, raise chicken or breed goats - and wish our grass would behave like the asphalt. To an Amish farmer the idea of two men getting married is as absurd as it would be to our great-great grandfathers.
You wrote about Catch 22s a week or so back but here is the ultimate one as I see it: The population of advance countries is depleting natural resources fast. Infertility would seem to be the best way to reduce the population and save resources. But as the population gets older how do you pay for promises of a long retirement with fewer young workers? At certain point those promises will obviously not be able to be paid, so why should younger people keep at it and support the system? A tipping point will be reached and a vicious cycle starts. (As in Obamacare now: healthy people dropping out of insurance, causing insurance premiums to go even higher, causing more healthy people to drop out) I believe that even if ecological disaster doesn't destroy our economy first then the socialized Welfare/Warfare/Financial state will still find a way to collapse under it's own weight instead.
The problem of modern life might be even greater then the Earth's stinginess. I see the end of a civilization as an inevitable battle between the forces Arrogance and Apathy. Honestly, what do you think Spengler would have to say about gay marriage, the long-term negative birthrate, long-term negative interest rates (for crying out loud!), and the huge migration of Muslims into Europe? I haven't read Burke, but I read the Decline years ago and it colors all my thinking about the social change I've witnessed in my lifetime.
A note: I never bought into the myth of progress, ever... I was pessimistic even as a child. I picked up Spengler's book at the library in my early twenties because the title was appealling. To be a conservative, spiritually conservative that is, is to imagine deep down in one's heart a lifetime lived in the past far more worthwhile then the one being lived in the present time, or in the foreseeable future. I am sure I am a conservative.
5/11/16, 9:02 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
5/11/16, 9:05 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Pinku-sensei, oh, granted -- the language of political discourse is so thoroughly corrupt in today's America that any abstract scheme ("tradition vs. rationality," for example) inevitably fails to make sense of the whole picture.
Tidlösa, by the logic you're proposing, single parents should have their children taken away from them, since they can't provide role models of both genders! Same-sex couples have been raising children in the US for a while now; I know of no evidence that the children are in any way disadvantaged or harmed by this. It's also been quite common, especially after major wars, for large numbers of children to be raised in households consisting only of women, as the men in question were no longer alive to take part, and those children also came out fine. Thus your proposal can't be justified.
Justin, oh, I get that. Most "utilitarian" claims are pretty irrational, when you give them a hard look. As for access to wedding cakes, I'm not a great fan of homophobia either, but again, the nature of liberty is that some people are going to use it in ways that you and I dislike.
Lynnet, no, now you're comparing apples to grapefruit. There are specific religious prohibitions against same-sex relationships in the Bible. There are no such prohibitions preventing Christians from doing business with non-Christians, and so appealing to religious law as a basis for such an exclusion would be impermissible. As for slippery slopes, every issue is a slippery slope heading somewhere -- meaning, of course, that if you take any statement and extrapolate it far enough, you can get something unacceptable. That's why every determination of rights is a tradeoff in which nobody gets everything and everybody gets something.
Blue Sun, yes, I've heard "paleoconservative," and considered it for a while, but there's more than one flavor of conservatism included in that word. (Though I did come up way over on the paleoconservative side of things on the quiz you linked to.) That's why I settled on "moderate Burkean conservative" as a self-description -- it differentiates me, for example, from religious conservatives, monarchists, Traditionalists, and the like.
Thelma, the deadline's passed, but I haven't yet had time to begin assembling the anthology; if you've got a story, or can get one together fairly soon, you might want to surf on over to The Meriga Project website and post a link. In the meantime, though, there's a new Space Bats contest on.
John, in an arbitration process, where both sides have agreed not to use the mechanisms of civil law, relying on the Talmud or any other traditional law code would pass the "sniff test" -- since the regulation permitting this is permissive rather than mandatory, and both sides have to agree to it, no one's liberties are being infringed on.
S. Treimel, I really was doing my best to be offensive! ;-)
5/11/16, 9:06 PM
Compound F said...
5/11/16, 9:23 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Dennis, thank you!
Robert, there are some towns in the US where public nudity is not illegal, there are also a vast number of nudist camps across the country, and somehow the social fabric hasn't utterly unraveled there. I personally see laws banning nudity as another of those hangovers from the stark shivering terror of sexuality that we inherited from the theocratic era of European history.
Repent, that's really a topic for the other blog.
Clarence, oh, I expect some spit-slinging denunciations -- some from the left, some from the right. It should be entertaining to watch.
S. Treimel, hmm! That's a very good point. I don't know that it would count as a compelling public interest all by itself, but it certainly strengthens the case for the right to same-sex marriage.
Pygmycory, most restaurants have a sign saying "No shoes, no shirt, no service," and that impacts my freedom to go shirtless and shoeless. We all put up with limits to our freedoms; that's part of the bargain of living in a diverse society. Permitting members of a handful of minority religions to follow the dictates of their conscience on private business premises, when the vast majority of businesses don't follow those same rules, isn't much of a limit.
James, exactly! The insistence -- on both sides of the political spectrum, by and large -- that the only acceptable outcome is the total defeat of the other side is one of the main factors pushing the United States toward a really miserable future.
Graeme, no argument there. It's very easy to say "everyone has a right to food," but what do you do when there isn't enough food to go around?
William, and that's another feature of Burkean conservatism: it takes cultural differences into account. The consensus reached by one society concerning rights will not necessarily be the consensus of another society, and that's as it should be, because rights aren't abstractions -- they simply define what behaviors a given society collectively chooses to allow.
5/11/16, 9:24 PM
Jay Moses said...
it is this latter point that makes your marriage argument interesting. as you apply these burkean principles to the issue you actually come out exactly where the libertarian would land, i.e. that government needs to keep its nose out of this issue altogether. indeed, i suspect most libertarians would argue that marriage is a contract freely entered into by two (or more) competent, consenting adults and that government should not be in the business of regulating marriages at all. and libertarians would surely agree with your conclusion that private businesses should have the unfettered right to choose with whom they trade.
as well reasoned as your argument may be, i must confess i have difficulty in squaring it with burke's often quoted point that "true religion is the foundation of society". have a care good druid, you may be morphing into a libertarian. not that there is anything wrong with being a libertarian. some of my best friends etc. etc.
5/11/16, 9:33 PM
Candace said...
Trying to parse out where the rights extend.
5/11/16, 9:41 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Vesta, excellent! Yes, I was planning on getting to that. Burkean conservatism is also evolutionary ecology applied to the sphere of human politics...
Duke, a lot of it is the peculiar but very popular belief that humans are somehow uniquely outside of nature. Thus we go out of our way to avoid noticing that we can often be outsmarted by an ordinarily resourceful duck.
Ray, exactly. Exactly! Politics is an art or, better still, a craft rather than a science. There is never only one right answer, and there are no answers that are entirely right.
John, trusting such decisions to a Supreme Leader is generally a very bad idea. If I were alive and politically active in France in 1789, I'd advocate for a written constitution, an elected legislature that met regularly, and specific reforms that limited the arbitrary power of the monarchy and abolished the special rights the aristocracy had over the Third Estate. Assuming that the Paris mob and a majority in the National Assembly backed me, the result would be a parliamentary constitutional monarchy on the English model, but with a written constitution subject to amendment by established procedures -- and that would be well positioned to extend further liberties to the French people over the course of the next century or so.
Notes, that seems entirely sensible to me. Heaven knows almost anything would work better than the Unaffordable Care Act, but expanding Medicare into a single payer system has all the advantages you've listed, and would very likely be the best option we've got.
Avalterra, yes, a case could also be made for taking marriage out of the purview of government. That would be a considerably larger change than simply changing the requirements for marriage, though, and you'd need to be able to show that there was enough benefit to be gained by that step to make it worth doing.
NC Jim, of course it's a slippery slope. Every decision that weighs the rights of one person against the rights of another is a slippery slope. That's why it's so important to recognize that rights are not grand abstract universals but simply the agreements made by a society about permissible behavior, so that we can debate and then settle where between wedding cakes and insulin the relevant line should be drawn.
Compound F. okay, that gets tonight's gold star. I haven't read up on prefrontal neurons since my college biology classes, but clearly I need to review that!
5/11/16, 10:20 PM
Claire said...
This is exactly the kind of clear thinking that has made this blog so immensely popular. This is why I've been a faithful follower for many years. Your blog is a breath of fresh air after the suffocating murk that passes for normal political discourse.
I'd like to see how that moderate Burkean conservative thought process works through the proposed mandatory vaccination laws. I can see that 'mandatory' is much more serious than 'permissive'. I can also see that proving harm is very subjective. I grew up at a time when getting measles and chicken pox was just a normal part of childhood. I find the current hysteria that surrounds this topic very strange.
I also see labelling ('anti-vaxxers') and lumping them together with creationist and climate change deniers as an example of using emotionally loaded 'snarl' words to stifle debate and de-legitimize the contrary view. Its almost impossible to have any kind of conversation about this very serious issue.
5/11/16, 10:21 PM
John Michael Greer said...
That said, you're being somewhat unfair to Burkean conservatism in insisting that it offers no options for establishing entirely new rights and freedoms. Not so; do you recall my mentioning in the post that Burke supported the American Revolution? There are times -- they don't happen often, but they do happen -- when a wrong is so deeply entrenched that ordinary methods can't uproot it, and that's when you turn to other options. That's a very, very risky thing to do, but sometimes it's the only option. Thus I consider the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement both entirely justified in the context of their times and places. Now of course I'm a moderate Burkean conservative, and thus tend to set the bar for justifying change lower than some others might, but there it is.
Bill, exactly. The habit of all-or-nothing thinking is very deeply rooted and very damaging in today's America. Congrats to your friend on his marriage!
Stacy, to my mind that's a different animal. It's only an issue because in the US, for a variety of bad reasons, your health care coverage is partly paid for by your employer, and that produces all kinds of conflicts when (as in this case) the employer's religious convictions and the employee's freedom of choice come into conflict. It's not surprising that a conflict of that kind produced a split decision at the Supreme Court! There are many other reasons, of course, why the current US way of handling health care costs needs changing, but the inescapability of conflicts along these lines is one of them.
Tom, you'd have to ask an Orthodox rabbi about that.
Nathan, I see the widespread acceptance of same-sex relationships in Western countries, rather, as a predictable outcome of the social changes that have turned Christianity into a minority religion in the West. Plenty of societies outside the Abrahamic religious sphere have zero trouble with same-sex relationships; a great many of them tend to differentiate between marriage, which is a contract between families for the purpose of producing children, and love -- but even that's not a universal. The decline in population -- that's normal, as I think Spengler points out somewhere, when a Culture becomes a Civilization; certainly it happened in a big way in the Roman world, and in other examples as well. As for the transformation of some European nations to Muslim-majority societies, that's yet another matter, which will get a post of its own in due time.
Bill, I ain't arguing. I see it as an attempt by the totalitarian end of the Left to demand universal obedience to their dictates, and thus just as out of line as the equivalent demands made by the totalitarian end of the Right.
Compound F, I hadn't heard of that. Since we aren't lizards, I'm not sure how relevant it is!
5/11/16, 10:25 PM
Rob Rhodes said...
Perhaps the most odious misuse of the word has been property rights, used over the centuries to justify everything from ownership of other humans to abuse of a piece of the Earth to which one happens to hold a current deed.
I will read some Burke, too much of what I know was written about him rather than by him and you certainly given an appetite for the original!
By the way, what would a radical Burkean conservative look like :-)
5/11/16, 10:27 PM
Yucca Glauca said...
5/11/16, 10:36 PM
Mister Roboto said...
5/11/16, 10:37 PM
kuanyin said...
Wonderful explanation of Burkean conservatism! I have a question for you, though. It's been on my mind for a few weeks, so I hope you don't mind if it harkens back to old posts. Also, I'm afraid it might seem a bit cheeky, but I really don't mean it in that way. I've been a faithful reader for years, though an infrequent commenter, and I am asking because I have great respect for your judgment, and really want to know what you think. So here it is: how do you square your Burkean awareness that the new will not necessarily be better (and can be a lot worse) than the old, even when the old sucks, with your conviction (expressed in last week's comments I believe) that Trump is preferable to Hillary, even though we don't what he will do, because it seems likely that it will at least differ from the current set of disastrous policies?
I'd like to offer a couple caveats here. I don't like Hillary and do think the status quo is a mess. Also, I am not scared of (or disgusted by or inclined to laugh at) Trump supporters in general. I appreciated your recent series of posts because they've given me support in my campaign to get acquaintances to stop referring to Trump supporters as "mouth-breathing, backward racists" and acknowledge that they are for the most part regular folks legitimately frustrated by being screwed over for the past 50 years. However, the idea of Trump himself as president DOES scare me a lot. It's the combination of uncontrolled ego, complete inability to tolerate criticism or mockery, bullying instincts, and authoritarian principles.
Also I think the racism thing is a bit more complicated than you made it out a couple weeks ago. I'm not sure it's just a question of does Trump hold prejudiced views. Personally, I'm not sure if he holds any views other than those related to his own greatness. I am sure if it would help him get elected he'd be more than happy to love on Hispanics and Muslims. The point is the opposite is true, so he is doing the opposite. He is USING racism as a tool to rev up people and, at least to some degree, to distract them from the real sources of their distress. What's to stop him from doing the same once he is in office? When, for instance, his people realize he is not going to help them as he promised, and he needs a convenient distraction. (I really am very doubtful that he will help the wage-earners who have suffered most from the neoliberal consensus. Free trade has made him rich! He made his true colors clear in the first debate when he said that U.S. wages were too high if we wanted to compete with China). I am an ESL teacher, so I work with a lot of recent immigrants, many of whom are Hispanic and Muslim, and who are frankly terrified of a Trump presidency. I have to say, I trust their judgment too. Many of them have seen this movie before, in their countries of origin.
So anyway, while Hillary is the obvious representative of the dysfunctional, corrupt status quo, couldn't things get a lot worse quickly? Personally, I can so easily picture them doing so under a Trump presidency that I am willing to hold my nose and pull the lever for her. What makes you more sanguine about our prospects under him, or at least willing to take that risk?
5/11/16, 10:39 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Russell Kirk had a massive influence on the development of my thinking, and his book The Conservative Mind ought to be read by anyone who wants to get a sense of what that much-vexed word "conservative" used to mean; for the benefit of my readers on the left, I'll mention that this lifelong conservative denounced the Iraq war and ripped into the Neoconservatives in no uncertain terms. That doesn't mean I share all his ideas, of course. As for Burke's comment about true religion, well, sure, and if we had any way to know which one of the world's many religions was true, that might actually mean something. As it is, liberty allows us each to choose the religion (or lack of same) that seems best to us, and so we muddle along as best we can.
As far as libertarianism, though, you've misunderstood me. I don't support the unilateral right of businesses to choose with whom they trade; rather, I support the American custom of allowing certain exemptions from ordinary public-accommodations laws in the case of religious minorities, when that can be done without significant infringement on the rights of others. To my mind, the libertarian movement is a classic example of the opposite of one bad idea being another bad idea -- but that's a discussion for another time.
Candace, the rights extend as far as law and custom extend them. Remember, rights aren't abstractions; they're agreements. Negotiating the point at which one person's rights end and another's begin is one of the things that the political process is there to do.
Claire, I know. My own point of view -- which is that mandatory vaccination is justified for serious infectious diseases, and not justified in other cases -- is by and large one that neither side wants to consider.
5/11/16, 10:41 PM
Unknown said...
One of the stations on the way to the Supreme Court's finding a right to same sex marriage in the Constitution was a decision by the California Supreme Court striking down, IIRC, an initiative passed by a majority of voters a few years previously which permanently outlawed same sex marriage.
The majority opinion accompanying the verdict was clearly written in plain English, easy to follow, but very long. I looked it up online and got through about the first half. The Court observed, correctly, that California already had a law that afforded same sex couples exactly the same legal rights, privileges and responsibilities as statutory marriage, but under a different label, civil union.
The author observed briefly that the proponents of marriage equality might have pursued it by trying to extend civil union to heterosexual couples (who were not eligible) while at the same time removing marriage from the state law codes altogether. "But that is not the case before us."
That was a road not taken, which IMHO would have accorded better with Burkean conservatism than the victory that was won. The First Amendment forbids an establishment of religion. Logically that means to me that "marriage is between a man and a woman", "marriage is between a man and up to four women", and "marriage is between two consenting adults who are not more closely related than first cousins" are personal opinions, and whether they originate in particular religions is something to which the civil law ought to be indifferent.
(continued in part 2)
5/11/16, 11:01 PM
Unknown said...
Burkean marriage law, part 2
The marriage laws in the Gold Rush era California Constitution were secular by the standards of the day; for example, all children born to a married woman are legitimate regardless of who the father might be. At the time the gay rights movement was gathering steam, cohabitation and adultery were legal in CA, spouses were not obligated to live together, and all divorce was no fault. This is a very different institution of marriage than the Christian sacrament. The groups that had pushed the successful initiative to ban same sex marriage made no serious effort to overturn the civil union law (equally scandalous to their convictions) because it had been on the books for awhile and most of the public accepted it.
My read on public sentiment at that tine was that if the gay rights activists in California had gone for getting marriage out of the state law code altogether and substituting universal civil union, they would have had a good chance of getting that passed by the legislature, and it would have made the proposition moot, because "marriage" would no longer have had any legal meaning.
From a Burkean POV, this would have been a better solution. It would simultaneously have granted equal rights to all adults regardless of sexual orientation, extended societal support for the family unit, and reduced the number of things that people with different moral and religious views can fight over in the courts. People would be obligated to recognize each other's civil unions; recognizing each other's marriages (or not) would be a private matter. The Christian confectioners would be left in peace.
I understand why the activists chose not to do this. As a practical matter, it's easier as JMG says to extend existing rights to another group than to rewrite the entire state law code, even if in this era a computer can be programmed to do a global search and replace on the term "marriage". Getting rid of legal marriage would have made coordination with all the marriage laws in other states and in Federal law much more difficult. But the main reason, I think, was the one that the majority opinion in the case I'm discussing cited as the basis for its ruling. That is that in our culture, the word "marriage" has a status and dignity that "civil union" does not. Some (not all) gay people wanted that dignity. Some heterosexual (or passing as heterosexual) people wanted to deny it to them. The gay people and their supporters won outright in the end.
5/11/16, 11:05 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Yucca, exactly! One of the central points of Burkean conservatism is that disagreement is okay. Having different opinions is okay. Arguing like anything to defend your point of view, even when other people disagree with it, is okay -- and it's okay for them to disagree with you, too. Thus it isn't popular among those whose personal insecurities are so extreme that they can't bear the thought that someone, somewhere, might hold a belief they don't like.
Mister R, no argument there -- as long as you don't go around trying to make everyone else ostracise everyone who goes around trying to make everyone else do something... ;-)
Kuanyin, the policies that Trump supports aren't coming out of the blue. Backing away from the global economy, reducing US military commitments overseas, enforcing immigration laws, eliminating tax loopholes on corporate income -- all these were standard policy not that long ago, and they produced better outcomes than the neoconservative consensus that Clinton has pursued throughout her political career. I think we can discount her current campaign rhetoric, as that's no more relevant to what she would actually do in office than Obama's cynical sound bites about "hope" and "change," or for that matter George Bush Sr.'s equally cynical rhetoric about a "kinder, gentler America;" the policies she's supported in her career are all but indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush.
As noted in my post, one of the tasks of a conservative is deciding what is worth conserving, and the specific policies Clinton supports -- giveaways for the rich, punitive austerity for the poor, irresponsible military interventionism overseas, and the like -- are disastrous mistakes for which most Americans are already paying a bitter price. Thus rejecting the continuation of those mistakes in favor of a return to policies that worked better for most Americans is, I would argue, a thoroughly conservative thing to do.
As for the rest of your argument, you're projecting the same fantasies on him that Obama had projected on him by the frothing end of the Right, and that the Dems loved to project on George W. Bush in his time. Clinton's behavior does not lead me to think that she has any respect for the rule of law, any capacity to tolerate criticism, or any particular willingness to abide by the limits of the Constitution, so I could use exactly the kind of scare-language you've used here in talking about where a Hillary Clinton presidency could go, you know.
Deborah, granted -- there were always other options. Myself, I think that getting government entirely out of the marriage business is probably something to move toward over the long term, but it's a drastic step, and a simple extension of the right to marry to a population that requested that right was arguably the simpler and less disruptive choice.
5/11/16, 11:16 PM
Compound F said...
I am ashamed of our species.
5/11/16, 11:33 PM
Unknown said...
I wasn't raised Orthodox, but AFAIK, a lactating woman can keep a kosher household, so there is no reason she could not shop at a kosher butcher. Judaism is an eminently practical religion.
5/11/16, 11:37 PM
Unknown said...
JMG, you wrote, "As for the rest of your argument, you're projecting the same fantasies on [Trump] that Obama had projected on him by the frothing end of the Right, and that the Dems loved to project on George W. Bush in his time."
In this one particular instance, I think that the fact that you never watch TV may be causing you to assess Mr. Trump's character very differently than people who have watched his demeanor at his rallies and during the GOP debates. I think he is a clever man, but he is not right in the head.
5/12/16, 12:08 AM
Emmanuel Goldstein said...
As NC Jim mentioned, there was a flap a few years ago about whether Pharmacists could be guided by their consciences when dispensing prescriptions. The two areas of contention were 'Birth Control' and 'Euthanasia' medicines. States came up with different approaches to this problem.
In Illinois, then-Governor Blagojevitch (sp?) mandated that all pharmacists must dispense all legal medications regardless of their consciences or beliefs, or have their license to practice revoked. Several pharmacists lost their licenses over this, thus never again providing prescriptions of any type to anyone.
Tennessee took a Burkean approach, in that private pharmacies were allowed to refuse to dispense one or another med based on conscience, but they had to post their restriction publicly (in the front window and/or at the counter), and were expected to refer a birth-control-pill-seeker to the nearest pharmacy that would provide services, if asked.
Walgreens and CVS, who currently control 99.4% of all prescription dispensing in the United States, require conscience-burdened pharmacists to declare their beliefs to management before any incident occurs. I worked for each of them for years, but never knew anyone who tried this route. Not sure if that means 99.4% of US Pharmacists have no beliefs on this, or if those that tried it mysteriously vanished from employment soon after..
Bottom line, Burkean Conservatism still makes an appearance every now and then, but certainly not as often as should be the case.
5/12/16, 12:23 AM
Albatross said...
Many, many thanks for putting in the effort of ten years to clarify the mysteries of living. I've been hanging around here since 2012 and I feel like mentally refreshed every Thursday morning when your essay arrives just in time for my early breakfast (5 am., timezone Stockholm). I was too preoccupied last week to find the moment to reflect on the gratitude I feel for being able to partake of the deep thinking you provide in both of your blogs. It's all so sensible. What you conclude from your analyses hits right on the mark for me. Thanks.
As is I ain't got a penny to my name, so there's nothing for me to put in yer tip jar. All I could do was to at least share your essay on Facebook.
Juri Aidas (Albatross, Long Distance Navigator)
5/12/16, 1:36 AM
Mikep said...
Perhaps it's time to give name to the opposite to the "Burkean" mindset. I would like to suggest "Yeswecanism" to which the reply will always be "yes we can, but should we?"
Yeswecanism is also the world view of Jack Russell terriers and other small yappy dogs.
5/12/16, 1:43 AM
lordyburd said...
Yet another worthwhile proposition is best written by Burke himself. "You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of all power". I have and continue to see this contempt in my own country, Pakistan, in the proclamations of the upper middle class folks. They too, proclaim the virtues of truly representative democracy as long as the lower classes vote for their (middle class's) candidates. The poor are condemned for idiotically selling their vote to corrupt politicians. Apparantly, "true" democratic nations don't do this. I would love to visit such a land of milk and honey ;)
5/12/16, 1:49 AM
Mean Mr Mustard said...
"..conservatives who actually want to conserve are as rare as liberals who actually want to liberate"
And here in the UK, Labour doesn't work! ;-)
cheers
Mustard
5/12/16, 2:13 AM
Karim said...
I am going to take a risk now concerning gay marriage.
I have no anti gay feelings nor am I offended by same sex marriage.
When the French Government came up with the "Pact Social" some years ago that allowed gay couples to inherit from each other and so provide State protection to the remaining spouse, I thought it was a good idea.
My concern is about adoption of children. Although it is correct that up till now same sex or single sex parents have done as well or as badly as others, does it follow that we should let same sex marriage adopt kids?
JMG's argument that given nothing untoward has befallen these kids, thus we can let same sex marriage adopt kids is reminiscent of conducting social experiments on kids, in other words a violation of the precautionary principle.
Furthermore, although war, divorce create single parent families, these situations have not been created on purpose, they are the resultant of the messy nature of life on this planet.
Adoption by same sex marriages is creating a similar situation artificially and on purpose.
It is also saying that a father + a mother is the same thing as 2 mothers which is the same thing as having 2 fathers. A non - demonstrable proposition, unless we accept to conduct social experiments.
In view of the above, I favour the "Pacte social" without adoption. It is a fair deal, that would upset very few people. Exactly in line with the precautionary principle.
By the way, if same sex marriage is acceptable, what about polygamy or polyandry?
In view of the above I see no reason to limit marriage to a monogamous relationship (how monotonous!)
Why not multiple partner marriages, let us say 2 women 3 men, or 5 women 2 men?
The permutations really are multiple! We can even have temporary marriages, limited in time (automatic divorce after a mutually agreed period).
Now, please be nice to me in your reactions!
Thank you!
5/12/16, 3:39 AM
Daniel Najib said...
More to the topic of this weeks post: I normally read each weeks post a couple of times to digest it, but I feel like I need to read this through a bit more than twice. You make a convincing argument for Burkean conservatism, and I find myself drifting towards the same mentality over the last few years. Yet, I still find it hard to cast away entirely the Trostkyist, liberal ideals I held so strongly in my youth. Call it nostalgia, I suppose. I don;t know much about Burke, but Reflections on the Revolution in France is now next up on my reading list.
5/12/16, 3:46 AM
Phil Knight said...
http://www.juancole.com/2016/05/majorities-separation-religion.html
5/12/16, 3:56 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
The people who get hung up about religious businesses not participating in their wedding remind me a bit of the people of color who get upset about getting barred from joining a country club. Sure, in a perfect world such things would not happen, though neither would golf courses outside of Scotland I guess. So why do they want to involve themselves with people who don't like them?
5/12/16, 4:04 AM
YCS said...
I realised long ago that the triumphant assumption of western liberal values being universally correct are a standard way of thinking amongst the intelligensia. If you hear a bunch of university students, regardless of political view, most are absolutely sure that their worldview is some sort of divinely mandated rational humanist god's dictate.
The fact that rights are a social agreement that is actively negotiated amongst members of society, or that there isn't any objective view on rights that obviously conforms to THEIR exact worldview never passes their mind. The idea that many societies interpreted what they thought was the will of a god of nature and decided to form a society that worked towards those goals, rather than expounding a self-defeating load of tripe on how the universe was rational and so is everything inside it, is anathema.
In short, it's like Arthur and Dennis the Constitutional Peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Two different groups existing separately in time and space speaking different languages. What happens though when these 'rational humanist' principles, which by the way exist in a world that is neither rational or humanist, face reality?
It shall be entertaining.
YCS
5/12/16, 4:14 AM
nati said...
Those people of the french revolution at least were honest regarding their ideology and their goals, their budies in the present time are feeding us with all kind of aparently inocent small demands that are not supposed to have catastrophic consequenses while their real goal is a revolution, exactly the same kind of revolution you wrote against, one that wishes to invent a new human being and a new sociaty based in theoretical models that ignore reality.
5/12/16, 5:08 AM
David said...
I haven't caught up on all the comments yet, so others may have already mentioned him, but I personally have always thought that John Stuart Mill's "no harm" principle made for a good guideline. I don't know enough about the history of social/political philosophy to know where he fits in with Burke's thought overall, but there seems to be some similarity. Common sense would suggest to me that the best way to have a stable society would be to respect each other's differences rather than to push for conformity.
5/12/16, 5:24 AM
Professor Diabolical said...
http://web.archive.org/web/20050406215537/http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html
Her conclusion comes to, unlike the Archdruid, that minor, innocuous, well-meaning, and even self-evident changes to marriage since 1900 have instead created a great deal of social upheaval and open hardship. If one agrees that making sex-outside-marriage and divorce-for-bad-marriages easier has caused the destruction of marriage overall, and further that the decay of the family has made life harder on everyone, then you might follow by being even more leery of altering marriage further--or even reversing the former permissiveness. And note, opening up divorce to people who were being abused within an inch of their lives, or denying support to single mothers who were the most need-worthy people in society, was a VERY small, VERY obviously good change. (Caveat: this was primarily a social change, not a legal/governmental one)
This would set the Burkean standard of Conservative proof and humility far higher. ...Unfortunately for us, who have to figure out what to do, when even the most obvious good backfires.
5/12/16, 5:27 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Hmmm, I'd be very interested to read your thoughts on the limits of tolerance. They do exist and it would be a fascinating topic to explore and whilst I'm a reasonably peaceable bloke, I do have limits as some people find out in the real world. As does everyone really.
Out of sheer curiosity - and you do know that I'm reasonably pragmatic and am thinking much further ahead than you have explored here today - but how does one take rights away from people in a way that is consistent with Burkean Conservatism? That would be a fascinating topic. I understand how it can happen in the rough and tumble approach involving horesman.
Cheers
Chris
5/12/16, 5:32 AM
fudoshindotcom said...
The definition given of a Spiritual Conservative being someone who imagines a life lived in an earlier time to be more worthwhile caught my attention. I don't identify as such, but am curious, as the difficulties we face become increasingly pandemic wouldn't a Spiritual Conservative find even more meaningful pursuits available today and the effort more worthwhile than in the past?
Thanks as always for a thought provoking post and comments.
5/12/16, 5:43 AM
Ahavah said...
My business, on the other hand, is also essentially a contract between consenting adults for me to untangle their bookkeeping and help them analyze their financial position, or keep track of their donors or customers or whatever, and help manage grants or events or programs or what have you. I don't see why govt should be able to force me to do this for organizations or businesses that are actively working against my interests, such as groups promoting racism, misogyny, intolerance, inequality, etc. I therefore very reasonably expect other business owners to have the same right. It is supposed to be a free market. If they can find enough racist, woman hating, prosperity gospel proponents of their own faith to support their business, great. But I doubt it.
I say this knowing full well there plenty of people out there who would refuse to do business with me because of my gender, religion, and social-political philisophy. I would rather know up front than be stabbed in the back. Forcing people to serve me won't make them accept me and I seriously question the quality of their work for me knowing they hate me. As someone said, why would you want someone who hates you to make you a cake in the first place?
Regarding health care, that is an area where I simply do not believe we should have a free market in the first place. We need a basic human right to healthcare (not health "insurance") which should include a non-profit single player system and govt provided clinics and hospitals accessible to everyone. As the insulin argument above shows, some things should not be left private business and IMO profiteering off the sick and letting people who can't afford treatment of medicine die is a violation of our constitutional right to life. And where you work should have nothing whatsoever to do with what healthcare you can receive. Medicine is a special case for many reasons. Other nations have recognized that. The US is throttled by monied political interests that won't give up their ability to profiteer without a fight. Maybe a literal fight.
There's no such basic human right to get a cake from whatever bakery you want. And a local Baker who refuses customers will soon find a competitor who will be happy to take their money. That is how a relocalized economy will work - no more Hobby Lobbys or other giant chains imposing edicts from on high. Just local businesses who either deal with their community or go under.
The sad fact is that going to legislate some things just doesn't work. It only driver them underground where you can't see what they're doing at first glance. SJWs were astonished by this political season and the issues coming out of the woodwork, and that racism and misogyny still exist, because they thought they had legislated them away. They they began using that fact to try and impose more legislation, which will only make the backlash worse. Things will only change when we as individuals stop feeding the beast with our time and money. Why does anyone still shop at Hobby Lobby? Either because they agree with their positions or they don't care enough to be inconvenienced by going somewhere else. Same for climate change... If we're not willing to put our time and money into doing things differently...well, you get it.
5/12/16, 5:46 AM
Scotlyn said...
However, your Burkean conservatism strikes me as making you a neighbour that would not be hard to live beside, and on with whom much common ground could be found.
I note the word "community" that you used in your definition of rights has not received too much response, though I think it deserves it. Of course making community is itself a job of work...
5/12/16, 5:55 AM
GermanDom said...
Where I disagree is in your understanding of marriage as "something which is allowed." Nowadays it is understood as a contract between two people. This is neither the historical sense (rather it is thought of as a contract between two families and two members/status carriers of a tightly knit community) nor does it have to do with the consequences of marriage:
When one marries, she can combine her tax rate with that of her spouse and (partially) her children. This is a RIGHT (privelege) which is given the married couple.
The topic is erroneously categorized in the current discussion as a matter of sex. For that (and to have a common household or to change names, etc..) one hardly needs to get married.
Dominic
5/12/16, 5:57 AM
Scotlyn said...
5/12/16, 5:58 AM
Chris Travers said...
I wanted to wade into the Burke/SSM question a little because I think there is one key aspect to this which I didn't see in your write-up (if I missed it, I apologize) but that is the fact that an issue like this doesn't occur in the abstract. Rather it occurs in a context of already shaped and forms traditions and other aspects of a social order. So please take this as an expansion on your points.
From this perspective, things become a lot more nuanced. One can certainly see same-sex marriage in the West as effecting a certain incremental change as the interaction of families and the greater society interact. As Burke noted, we cannot really speak of universal rights in part because governance is an inexact science. But we can talk about things in a context.
I would argue that same-sex marriage is an issue that arises from the separation of marriage not only from reproduction but also (and more importantly) from economic production. This change has been happening (with frankly disastrous effects) for the last century or so. Now there is a lot to dislike about the separation of marriage from economic production -- this has head, for example, to a real hegemony by corporations over every area of the economy in the US and most other "developed" countries.
So I think a real fear a Burkean might have on the issue of SSM in the US is that it makes this very consumerist, industrial economy harder to dismantle and further entrenches these shiny ideas of rights. But on the other hand, things have been moved so far in this direction that it is hard to argue that the harms in recognizing same-sex marriage in the US are greater than the harms of not recognizing it. The harms of recognition are now largely abstract and the harms of not recognizing are very tangible for some people.
On the other hand, what of a different cultural context? What about the economic order where people still retire with their children, where family businesses hold strong against corporations, where hand-made crafts are still seen as status symbols, etc.? Where gender makes a useful way of dividing family responsibilities over the generations? In such a social context I think the question of harm goes very much the other way.
One of the problems of course with pointing this out is that people on both sides of the issue tend to designate the independent thinker as the enemy.
5/12/16, 6:01 AM
Dan Mollo said...
When words can only draw upon the realm of abstraction, and not from agreed upon norms of conduct and cultural tradition, they can mean absolutely anything. I think a powerful example is how Americans have come to perceive the constitution as an unchangeable, monolithic document, when it was always meant to be a fluid document that would change with the changing social norms and practices as well as the changing self image of society in general. When abstractions are heaped upon a document with clear wording and meaning, anything goes. You don't even have to read it! Amendments be damned!
5/12/16, 6:07 AM
blue sun said...
Labeling becomes more interesting as the political drifts over to the religious. As for myself, it would be convenient to label myself as a "Conservative Christian" (cue the tomatoes headed at my face, yikes!) but that carries so much baggage in our culture today that it is incomplete as a descriptor, airborne rotten tomatoes notwithstanding.
In one sense, you have an advantage labeling yourself as a Druid, if only because there are fewer humans in recent memory carrying that banner. You certainly don't have the likes of the infamous Creflo Dollar or Benny Hinn up on stage waving the banner and screaming, "Look at me! I represent the movement!" (Or if you do, not as many.)
Then there is the curious double standard we see in our national discourse. You raise a very good point by using Orthodox Jews as an example. When an Orthodox Jewish baker, say, refuses to cater a non-Kosher banquet, there's not a peep from the media. Yet a Conservative Christian baker makes a similar convictions-based refusal, and it ignites a firestorm, prompting media denouncings, mocking skits on Saturday Night Live, and accusations such as "wacko" (apparently even from some of your readers).
Obviously there is a difference in that same-sex marriage is a hot topic at the moment, but I believe it goes beyond that. There seems to be this myth abroad (apologies, I mean 'myth' in the sense of a story that is not true) that the United States used to be a Conservative Christian nation.
As someone who's studied the Christian scriptures and read a bit of history, however, I'm not sure it ever was. I could understand why today's Conservative Christians would find the myth that the US was once a Christian nation convenient, and tend to use it.
What I find fascinating, though, is that the media also buys into this myth. Lock, stock, and barrel. Sure, it serves as an excuse to maintain Conservative Christians in their place as the media's favorite whipping boy, but I wonder if it doesn't also serve as a convenient explanation for our current national problems? I'm not sure I can explain how we ended up with this myth so firmly cemented in place.
Once again, the answer is probably Capital-P Progress. What's old must die. We must shed ourselves of our old (and therefore mistaken) notions. And thus, we ALL must have at one time in the past held said mistaken notions.
5/12/16, 6:20 AM
Don Plummer said...
So much of our political discourse is also tied up in binary thinking, something you have discussed before: employing of false dichotomies and false analogies. But issues, people, and their viewpoints are far more complex than can be fit neatly into any ideological box. I probably myself have both a conservative and a liberal streak in me. Which streak would prevail in a given situation would most likely depend on the topic under discussion.
It's quite clear that most self-identified conservatives in the USA are hardly conservative at all. Thank you for making that point clear. It's difficult, though, to get people to understand why this is so.
I find it interesting that you would use same-sex marriage as the example of how Burkean conservatism works. Have you read Wendell Berry's essay "Caught in the Middle," published in his recent book Our Only World? Berry here discusses sexual politics, specifically abortion and same-sex marriage. He arrives at the same conclusion you do on "gay marriage," but his argumentation is different. Most relevant to your column this week is the way that Berry, simply and straightforwardly, deals with what you here call the “Ewww, gross!” factor: "One may find the sexual practices of homosexuals to be unattractive or displeasing and therefore unnatural. But anything that can be done in that line by homosexuals can be done, and is done, by heterosexuals. Do we need a political remedy for that?" (p 91).
5/12/16, 6:21 AM
Chris Travers said...
I think one thing JMG has said that I would agree with is that it is fairly disastrous for the government to micromanage the sex lives of members of the community. I would add also that this sort of micromanagement doesn't actually happen in conservative societies. For purposes of this I will say that the simplest test of what sort of society is conservative is that conservative societies usually expect people to retire with their children (and naturally this has implications for things like same-sex marriage). I want to talk more about the implications this has on premarital sex because I think it puts the issue in a different (and more complex) context than we see it in the West.
When parents retire with their children end up with a real interest in who their children marry. Consequently publicly snubbing one's parents' interests in this regard will get one nowhere, and parents will find ways to enforce their interests. On the other hand, you have the fact that if you don't have a counterbalance to the power parents have, children end up at their mercy. That counterbalance is usually family honor, and the prohibition of premarital sex plays into this. In other words, nobody wants their family to be known as the one where pregnancy preceded marriage, and so when this happens the parents will quickly make sure any objections they have to a given match are left at the door. Almost every culture where parents have a lot of influence have these safety valves for the children to essentially override a parental veto. Premarital sex is one of them and the condemnation is part of what makes it an effective override (because the threat of contageous shame is enough to get them to support the marriage).
Interestingly enough there is also a lot of evidence that bridal kidnappings in Greece and Rome also had a similar role with the brides often conspiring to be kidnapped, and even the brides parents being in on it if it meant saving face about a lack of dowry or the like.
Sometimes the condemnation is more functional than the prohibition.
5/12/16, 6:42 AM
Chris Travers said...
Not only was Kirk one of the giants of traditionalist conservatism in the US, but in 1942 he voted against FDR because he believed that FDR was leading the US into the role of empire. Did h vote for the Republican? No.
Russel Kirk, the great Conservative, voted for Norman Thomas, the candidate of the Socialist Party.
5/12/16, 6:56 AM
Eric S. said...
5/12/16, 6:57 AM
Unknown said...
- RTR (The Unknown who mentioned the Green Book)
5/12/16, 7:01 AM
redoak said...
5/12/16, 7:05 AM
Johnny said...
I didn't write last week but I did want to congratulate you on 10 years of your blog and to thank you again for all your work.
I wrote you a couple weeks ago mentioning William James' Pragmatism lectures. Reading your post today I can see that Burke must have had a profound impact on James as the process you describe matches almost exactly what James proposes, except that James is applying the same thinking to the individual. James is also interesting, to me, in that he sees pragmatism as a tool to using ideas to make sense of the world, but also as a tool that you can use to judge the ideas you apply, so working inwardly and outwardly (hopefully that is making sense).
When reading James it occurred to me that his ideas seemed to be very much rooted in Darwinian thinking, but since Burke was writing a century earlier, do you think Darwin was possibly influenced by Burke? Or am I just imagining a relationship between these concepts?
5/12/16, 7:05 AM
ed boyle said...
I think that Burkean conservatism may be good for boring times but difficult in radical times. The industial revolution has forced everyone since 200 years into ever more radical solutions to accomodate. China after Mao or even Mao himself. Russian revolution. German and Japanese industrialization. Only Amish are truly Burkean.
Even under natural conditions there are certainly times when Burkean principles would be maladaptive.Climate change, ice melt 12000 years ago. Earthquake prone Japan. Invasion prone Eurasia. Only England is so safe and isolated as to almost never have disasters or invasions. Burke is typical British therefore.
Of course the idea makes sense. 7 generations. Give back to your grandkids what you borrow from nature. This is hardly Eurasian history. North American indians had perhaps similar isolation to Britain. So the concept was similar. Chinese were quite practical and inparticular Egypt had such a multimilennial stabilty based on isolation. Culture generally is a fixed point based on nature, genetics, language in all regions. Violate this in extremis by upending culture, peoples, customs and you will violate Burke. Thailand, India, ghana, what have yu remain as they are. Experiments come and go. Industrialism, mass immigration, gay marriage are in this deeper sense Burkean nonsense. Traditional lifestyles have their deeper reasons.
5/12/16, 7:07 AM
wagelaborer said...
I hang with the radicals, but I get aggravated when they announce that health care, or education, or water, is ''a right''.
No, they are services that society provides to our citizens. Or, should provide, in my opinion.
Also, I have friends that don't believe in participating in the political process, announcing instead that ''we need to take the streets and smash the state and have a revolution''.
Disregarding the obvious fact that ''taking to the streets'' doesn't lead to ''revolution'', I feel that using the existing structures, with the existing procedures, (even though they are very biased against third parties, such as the Green Party), is the best way to go about trying to change things for the better.
Yes, it is frustrating to deal with unequal ballot access laws, ignoring by the media, and lack of access to public debates, but the framework is already set up, so why not use it the best we can? So, there I am, out on the streets, asking for petition signatures. No one else seems to want to ''take the streets'' in such a boring and depressing way, but, so it goes.
5/12/16, 7:20 AM
Don Plummer said...
I don't even think Bernie Sanders would curtail the military overreach that America has been involved with over the past several decades. Our last real effort to dismantle the "national security state" (as writer Andrew Bacevich describes it), was, not surprisingly, during the Carter years.
5/12/16, 7:29 AM
Chris Smith said...
Excellent post and a fascinating analysis of how to think about apportioning and defining rights in a society. I'll be thinking about it for awhile. I disagree, however with your argument about bakers being allowed to discriminate based on religious belief.
I think the baker making a cake for a gay wedding is a bad example. I think pharmacists are a better example, at least in part that the refusal to fill a prescription can have far more serious consequences than refusing to bake a cake. A lot of states (Illinois comes to mind) allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions based on the their conscience. These laws were mostly enacted with a mind towards allowing conservative Christian pharmacists from being forced to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. But consider the following. The Church of Scientology does not recognize mental illness and disavows the use of psych drugs. What happens when a Scientologist pharmacist in Illinois refuses to fill a prescription for antipsychotics based on his or her religious convictions?
I think my response to the issue would be as follows. As a society, we have decided that businesses open to the public have to be open to everyone equally. We've been doing this since the 1960s with respect to race and sex, so it is not a new idea. If you have an objection to filling prescriptions or baking cakes for some group or groups then you always have the option of not going into those professions in order to assuage your conscience.
5/12/16, 7:31 AM
Vesta said...
5/12/16, 7:33 AM
Nastarana said...
a voice in the desert, crying out
Andrew Sullivan, who was outed by the late and much lamented Media Whores Online for a gay username which can't be repeated here, a "Burkean conservative"? Really? I have always thought of him as a carpetbagger opportunist.
ShaneW, I once read a lovely reminiscence about a mid 20thC group of white lady conventioneers, League of Women Voters or some such, who checked out of a Boise,ID hotel en masse because of the hotel refusing to accommodate a Black family.
Dear thenotesthatdonotfit, I suppose you are aware that there are significant parts of the coalition of interest groups which make up the Democratic Party which do not want medicare for all ever to happen. All those nice jobs in insurance offices and HMOs, including bilingual jobs, would go away, or such is the fear. Back in 2008, Mme. Clinton's faltering campaign was revived, temporarily, over precisely that issue. Insurance companies were blamed for lack of "public option" in the eventual bill, which they did oppose but so did other factions as well.
5/12/16, 7:47 AM
barrymelius said...
5/12/16, 7:56 AM
Nastarana said...
Three companies have been publicly targeted over their insurance policies: Hobby Lobby, Home Depot and Eden Foods. Is it just me, or is there not a pattern here which has nothing to do with sex or birth control?
5/12/16, 7:56 AM
Violet Cabra said...
JMG, belated happy decade posting (was overwhelmed last week)!! I found this blog 2 and a half years ago and it has changed my life profoundly. It hasn't provided a path (truth is a pathless land) but it has provided light to help me pick my way through the woods. Many thanks from the bottom of my heart.
Re Burkean conservatism: as I've mentioned before, this is essentially the political outlook I have (yes even as a trans person, eccentric etc) and I feel that it is heavily informed by my decade of gardening. I remember once while I was visiting a squat in New Orleans I would later live at, my friends were excited about gardening. There was an enormous lemon balm plant in the garden, which for some reason they wanted to take up to plant something else in its space. The beautiful melissa was dug up and then the main gardener of the house returned. She saw the melissa and got angry "why did you dig it all up??" she cried. They said they wanted to divide it, to plant some chives where it had been. It was promptly replanted and it promptly died.
Governments are similar to plants. They grow from specific seeds on specific soil. If they are resilient and strong they perrenialize and keep the "weeds" at bay (competing narrow interests of society). Spengler even talks about how politics arises from the plantwise nature of man. If the institutions of governance are violently uprooted then what's gonna grow? Crabgrass? Rocks? It appears historically that after violently uprooting political institutions out come the weeds which fight violently and then the old plant tentatively sends up a shoot from the deep roots that are still lodged in the soil. There is a lot of crying and gnashing of teeth. The garden is in disarray. A lot of people die in utterly idiotic ways. In the end nothing really changes, except there's a few more mass graves, more poverty and maybe the country is now under foreign dominion.
Also, as a trans person I feel that it is only decent that people who believe that my identity violates their religion have a right to keep me out of their religious spaces/institutions. I believe it would be indecent for me to, say, try to use the ladies room in a fundamentalist Christian Church. Part of the reason I choose to move back to New England from the South is that my trans is less of an issue here for the most part. When leftist queer people to try to push their values down someone else's throat it absolutely disgusts me. Sure, I believe we deserve to have our genders to be legally recognized, and with minimal hassle (my papers are in order and it was a year and a half of crying on the phone with government bureaucrats). But that doesn't negate a certain degree of sensitivity to other people's needs and principals. If I don't want people to destroy my identity what right do I have to try to destroy theirs?! Also more pragmatically I fear that by being insensitive to people's values around sexuality and gender we may be setting the stage for more explosive violence some years down the line. It frustrates me that many people with less vulnerable identities use trans issues as a way of politicking, I've talked with friends with other vulnerable identities (poor people, people of color, etc) and have found that my sentiment is shared by many. I'm interested, and reservedly hopeful, about the shifts in political life that are afoot. My sense is that a lot of allegiances are changing very, very rapidly.
5/12/16, 7:59 AM
wagelaborer said...
The government contract of marriage is designed so that when the two people decide they'd rather be dead than remain married, have the option of divorce, and it gives guidance to how they divide up their property, their house, their kids, their pets, etc.
It also grants certain benefits, like health insurance, Social Security, etc. This is why civil unions in certain states are not enough.
My friend has been in a relationship with his partner for over 40 years. About 10 years ago, his partner became seriously ill. His partner did not work and was not on my friend's insurance, because...not married. So they mortgaged their house, (which had been paid off) in order to keep him alive. And last year, my friend lost his job.
Life in America. I think that we can do better.
Obama used the ''why invent something new'' when pushing for his mandatory insurance company tithing bill, because, of course, we already had a lot of people who had such insurance through their employers. Of course, we also lready had Medicare, and wouldn't it have been much easier to take out two words "over 65'', then to pass a 1,600 page insurance company written bill? Or, expand community health clinics, which are public and usually free, and which we already have.
The mandatory vaccination thing is an attack on religious and individual rights, using scare propaganda. We already have well over 95% of children covered for dangerous communicable diseases under existing laws. The religious communities that refuse have their occasional outbreaks of diphtheria and whooping cough, but pose no danger to the vaccinated. Hepatitis B and HPV are not a danger to the Disneyland attending public. The flu vaccine, widely pushed, is usually said by the CDC, the next year, to have been disappointingly ineffective. Yes, we should be able to pick and choose, with religious exemptions for those who think that God wants them to have measles.
5/12/16, 8:06 AM
Lynnet said...
I'm not objecting to the Burkean principles _on principle_. I ask in the interest of finding out where the boundaries are (not to be a smartaleck). The easy questions are, well, easy. It's the hard questions that we need to work on.
5/12/16, 8:11 AM
RPC said...
The difference between a Burkean approach and the existing one would be that after the issue had been discussed and a solution reached, those differing would have some confidence that they could live with the solution.
5/12/16, 8:19 AM
David said...
You comment re acceptable disagreement brings to mind a conversation I had at work some weeks ago. Our chief accountant, who resides in one of the offices next to mine, is a big HRC support (went to a rally in Green Bay, got to shake her hand, etc.) whereas I am one of those Sanders supporters who will be expressly not voting Democratic this year (likely for Jill Stein and the Green party). During the (very polite) conversation, she mentioned that one reason she couldn't support Bernie was that she couldn't see giving nuclear launch codes to someone who didn't believe in Jesus. I pointed out that the Constitution expressly forbids religious qualifications for public office (in Article VI). She replied that the Constitution also allows her to vote for whom she wishes, so long as they otherwise qualify. I had to concede the point.
5/12/16, 8:21 AM
James M. Jensen II said...
I flirted for quite a while with the latter camp after I ran across the work of Roderick T. Long. The last straw was when I realized that there is simply no good case for the Lockean theory of acquiring property. Locke, of course, argued that we acquire property through mixing our labor with unowned resources. Libertarians love this theory but the obvious counterargument is: why? Why isn't the labor simply expended?
The best case for it I've seen was by Roderick T. Long, a philosopher I admire quite a bit (he made me take Aristotle seriously). He argued that the Lockean theory explains why we own our bodies: since in eating we mix the materials of the food with our bodies. Analogously, when we mix our labor with resources, they become, in a sense, part of us.
That always struck me as silly: first, it suggests that eating something someone else owns is analogous to cannibalism. Second, and more damningly, it's completely superfluous: the much simpler, more obvious reason I have a right to use my body is that it's part of what constitutes me. In which case, self-ownership (if you want to call it that) doesn't help explain why you can own anything else.
This is, of course, the problem with all forms of rationalism: eventually you have to either make unjustified assumptions of the kind you claim to be avoiding, or you have to make really bad arguments for those assumptions.
5/12/16, 8:23 AM
over the hill and down the other side said...
The mother wrote that her toddler was very attached to his pacifier. A woman relative, seeing this, was outraged. No child should be allowed to suck on a pacifier!
The child, seeing her upset, took the pacifier out of his mouth, and, holding it up, asked her, "Hurt you?"
Many things that appear to hurt us only hurt our favorite opinions!
5/12/16, 8:29 AM
MigrantWorker said...
I reckon Burke would fit right in in Lakeland Republic!
Speaking of which - can we expect new instalments of Retrotopia at some point?
MigrantWorker
5/12/16, 8:42 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
I must say, I find this approach to the political process very appealing. Thanks for sharing it and laying it out in such concise terms. Though it seems to me that what reliably happens once "Being offended doesn't count" is established, the offendable immediately begin summoning superhuman creativity to explain why That Which Offends is really detrimental to society as a whole, and as such officialdom must take action to prevent people from engaging in it. Often the myth of progress is invoked to insist that history is inevitably moving in the direction of a society in which That Which Offends no longer takes place. How does one best counter this without getting caught up in the quagmire of rhetorical handwaving that results?
I've been contemplating politics in light of your "Cimmerian Hypothesis", and I've come to think that these dysfunctions set in when people secretly believe that the political process is about creating an artificial environment whose purpose is to affirm the validity of its inmates' ideas by removing those parts of the human experience that aren't in accordance with them. With such a foundation, even though words like "liberty" and "diversity" is waved around by the self-righteous, a diverse population exercising actual liberties will be perceived as fundamentally threatening to those with any ideological agenda you'd care to name.
5/12/16, 8:45 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Around here, most gas station/convenience stores do not display a "Shirt & Shoes" sign. If a store does put one up, I simply take my business elsewhere. I have options, and I know it was the owner's choice to post the sign, even if he chooses to lie and try to hide behind misquoted "state health codes." And I avoid these businesses even when it is far too cold to actually go barechested.
I also will not use the local package shipping store because they display a lot of right wing militia paraphernalia. In that case it can present a hardship because there is not a competing similar business nearby, but they have their rights.
We have two print shops in town. One publishes the local paper than is full of overtly christian content on the front page (e.g. "He Is Risen!"). The other does not. Guess which one I use when I need photocopies?
This is what freedom looks like.
They can express their ppreferences, and so can I.
Of course, the pressure from the left to ban discrimination is resulting in a backlash from the right attempting to codify and institutionalize discrimination.
5/12/16, 8:55 AM
jeffinwa said...
To paraphrase the Stones "you can't always get what you want, but you just might find, you get what you need".
5/12/16, 9:12 AM
James M. Jensen II said...
First, is this an area where the government is already involved? Well, the government does set some regulations on public restrooms for health purposes etc. but these are regulations on the proprietor, not on the public's use. While there are things you aren't allowed to do in a public restroom, I can't think of any that aren't also forbidden in all other public spaces. So this does seem to be an extension of government into a new area. Not a good sign.
Second, this is a restriction, not a permission. The bar just got ten feet... err, I mean, a good bit higher.
Third, what benefits might accrue from the measure? The argument tend to center around the possibility of men pretending to be transgender women in order to perform various forms of sexual misconduct in the women's room, and women's fear of the same. The latter is a poor argument (on the level with being offended) unless the former is in fact a significant risk... which no one seems to have any evidence to suggest it is.
Finally, existing laws already penalize the various forms of sexual misconduct that might be engaged in.
All this strongly suggests that laws regulating who can use which restroom are inappropriate at this time. It's driven by the fear that people are suddenly going to start using a right they have always had to do something that is already illegal, and the only way to combat a sudden epidemic of criminal misconduct is to take that right away. That's... not reasonable.
5/12/16, 9:28 AM
ladyimbrium said...
5/12/16, 9:33 AM
ladyimbrium said...
5/12/16, 9:39 AM
zach bender said...
You say, "By and large, businesses that serve the general public are rightly required to serve the general public, rather than picking and choosing who they will or won't serve, but there are valid exceptions, and religion is one of them."
Even a Burkean conservative might question the validity of this exception. Why "should" the community allow or encourage people who enter the public marketplace to refuse goods or services on the basis of prejudices they can attribute to "religious" belief?
I was surprised to see the suggestion -- which you attribute to hearsay -- that New York allows businesses owned or operated by (for example) orthodox Jews to refuse service (for example) to women who do not cover their hair, and I have been unable to find anything to this effect in a brief survey of state law and local ordinances. Quite the contrary, actually.
As other commenters have pointed out, it is often not as simple as choosing not to patronize such a business, if (for example) it is the only game in a small town. The bigots can team up and effectively deny targeted groups reasonable access to goods and services.
Would also note anti-miscegenation laws were often grounded in ostensible religious belief about the mixing of races.
5/12/16, 10:00 AM
Glenn said...
I would prefer the system they have in Canada, which is, IIRC, based on post-revolutionary French civil law. Civil unions _for all_, and you may have a church wedding and marriage as well in any church which is willing to do so. I agree with Deborah, that the current argument in the U.S. is precisely because of the loaded word "marriage" and the cultural status it confers. The fundamentalist religious right does not want "those people" to have that status, and whichever "those people" (formerly mixed race, now homosexuals or trans) of any particular time do want it. My proposal would likely result in the complaint from christian evangelicals that government was "stripping the right to marriage" from good christians. Future iterations involving more than two consenting adults might involve quite a large discussion and go on for a _long_ time.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
5/12/16, 10:02 AM
MIckGspot said...
5/12/16, 10:08 AM
Joel Caris said...
Thank you twice over--for such a thoughtful and illuminating essay, and for your mentioning and linking to Into the Ruins.
It seems almost embarrassing to admit, but the concept of evaluating social changes in a very straightforward, pro and con sort of way is almost revolutionary (no pun intended!). Having grown up as a liberal and still considering myself one--though I'd say a combination of farming, being involved in local food systems work, and your incisive writing have all helped to instill quite a streak of Burkean conservatism into me--I have quite often fallen into the mode of grand statements about how things ought to be, rather than simply taking a hard look at the practical outcomes of policy. (Not that I always lost sight of those realities, but it certainly wasn't the basis of my rhetoric.)
I also really enjoy your explication of classic liberalism, as I have a very strong belief in that constant attempt to live up to ones ideals--both at a personal level and at a societal level. I deal with this struggle internally all the time, as I have some pretty high ideals for myself and, conversely, I am a man who very much enjoys comforts, many of which stem out of contradictions of my ideals.
We are a messy lot, humans. I think again of my favorite quote from Overshoot: "Using the ecological paradigm to think about human history, we can see instead that the end of exuberance was the summary result of all our separate and innocent decisions to have a baby, to trade a horse for a tractor, to avoid illness by getting vaccinated, to move from a farm to a city, to live in a heated home, to buy a family automobile and not depend on public transit, to specialize, exchange, and thereby prosper." It really, for me, perfectly summarizes the trap we've fallen into. We humans really never were designed to have access to so much and to so easily be able to make choices of comfort that lead to destruction. I don't think we're wired to make that choice right, most of the time.
Yet, that doesn't excuse us from the need to constantly attempt to make that choice right and to do it more often than not. That's the struggle I have within myself; I am very forgiving of human frailty, my own included, but I also don't think it's an excuse not to act right by the world. So in that way, I suppose I am a liberal. But I also firmly believe that limits are the only way to ultimately bring us into a better balance, and so I suspect that belief puts me in the conservative camp.
Still, I come back to this notion of social change in the context of pros and cons, and I can't help but love it. It's fascinating to see people take your cake baker example and extrapolate it to other situations that seem similar at first glance. But by taking a measured, pro and con approach and actually considering each case rather than wrapping it in soaring rhetoric of one side or another, you can actually burrow down into considered, imperfect solutions that may function in the real world.
Good gods, if I lived in that political reality!
I hope that as our political ecosystem continues to crumble around us, we can find the strength to reorient ourselves to a way of conducting our political lives more in that tradition. In the mean time, I have a lot to think about, and perhaps that process will help me to contribute to a new kind of political functioning in this country.
5/12/16, 10:28 AM
Steve Thomas said...
I tried to push this on the other blog, but at the risk of being annoying I'm going to try again here--
I wonder if you might do a post on thinking.
As I recall there have been a few nods in that direction over the years. You've explained the concept of "snarl words" and you regularly point out the ways in which people don't actually think. But I wonder if you might do a post, or at least a comment, which would describe the basic way you approach an argument.
I've found, observing myself, that I react to contrary opinions this way:
1. Emotional response -- "What this person is saying makes me feel uncomfortable."
2. Immediate leap to defense. Get angry at other person, lose track of what point I was actually trying to make.
3. Other person responds in kind; cycle repeats.
I think this is the standard pattern. I really do try not to do this. When it comes to analyzing a piece at leisure, I'm a little better. I can do a close-reading of an essay and figure out what the writer's argument is and whether it actually works. But you are able to do the same thing in real time, with comments that aren't neatly laid out in essay format, without leaping to an emotional reaction or losing the thread of your own thoughts. Maybe it's something that can't be taught, but if you have any pointers, well, I'd find it helpful and I imagine others would as well.
5/12/16, 10:34 AM
Jeff Kennedy said...
I really appreciate hearing your thoughts on this. Can't thank you enough for the time and thought you put into this blog.
5/12/16, 10:55 AM
FLwolverine said...
The law firms I have worked for represented real estate developers of various sizes and types, so I asked one of my former law partners if he thought our experience with developers had anything to tell us about Mr. Trump. Or (I asked) is he so sui generis that we cannot generalize? The response I received was: "Oh, Trump is definitely a developer. As such, he lies easily, is totally self-absorbed, and will not pay the final bill."
I thought this was both apt and amusing, and everyone I've told this story to agrees (admittedly, I've been selective in my audience). The problem (she says ruefully) is that the same thing can be said about politicians in general these days.
5/12/16, 10:58 AM
nephilimsd said...
I've been reading your blog for a few years now, and while I haven't posted before, I've thought about it a few times. I admire your eloquence and clarity in untangling complex issues and putting words to vague ideas that are difficult to explain clearly.
In this particular case, I have a difficult time with the concept that religion should be able to be used as a foundation for any difference in treatment under the eyes of the law. By this logic, it should seem reasonable that any particular discrimination should be tolerable, so long as the discriminator cites a religious edict for doing so. Part of the problem I have with this is the definition of religion. If I were a card-carrying Satanist for example, should I be allowed to exclude anyone who seems overtly Christian (or any church-going religion for that matter) from my business?
To clarify, I'm not advocating that businesses should not be able refuse service to anyone, just that religion should not be made as a special-case for such exclusion. It seems like the law should either permit excluding customers on any basis they choose or they should not be able to do that. A pragmatic argument for the merits and costs of such a policy should be evaluated, and the consequences either way should be tolerated by all.
5/12/16, 11:12 AM
America Reforged said...
5/12/16, 11:30 AM
Tomuru said...
5/12/16, 11:53 AM
ed boyle said...
Religions, social theories, science, philosophies come and go as these are peripheral concepts. An individual remains as is since birth. Each persn has a standard mood, capabilities which remain same. One is happier, another more sad, another more serious, etc. We can develop ourselves through training or ameliorate highs and lows through techniques like yoga, alcohol, social contacts, aerobics, etc. We adapt our potential to our environment. Animals do same. If you had pets you notice as with kids different moods as standard personality traits.
Being a wage earner, always running, more mute than communicative makesme more in tune with my animal, burkean self. Sitting all the time alone at a school desk, dorm room desk or office computer effected my social capabilities negatively. Not talking, just observing develops intuition.French and German or Chinese philosophers and social theoreticians were perhaps eggheads of sorts. Thatcher called EU treaty on single currency cloud cucko land. She is turning out to be right. The Fed and QE, NIRP is all crazy. Like Byzantium we will have to fall back to a simpler more common sense model based on real human behaviour. Trump and Bernie Sanders are tapping into common sense just like Le Pen and 5 star and Podemos. The more reality separates from theory the greater the backlash in politics, science, religion. Industrialism for example is based on theory. We can have it all. No price to pay. You can't have a free lunch. Brain cancer from mobile phones, skin cancer from sunny vacations, lung cancer from cigs, microwave ovens denaturating food. Ozone destruction by CFCs. Bees dying off due to pesticides. Antibiotics running out of effectiveness. Run off from agriculture.
Animal instinct plus human intellect drives shortsighted behaviour. If we want something, we go get it, like predators. Overeating, sex, addictions. Human intellect alows us to rationalize away our behaviour. Religion, politics make us to gods or servants of god. We are allowed as inspired by god or intellect to take everything, do anything.
5/12/16, 11:58 AM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
5/12/16, 12:04 PM
Oregoncharles said...
The principle deserves a more precise formulation than that. It is, that if there is a possible hazard, uncertainty dictates caution - that is, not taking the contemplated step. It is expressed precisely by the solid yellow line in the middle of the highway: there is a known hazard, oncoming traffic; and because you cannot see whether that hazard is oncoming, you must not cross into its path. (In general, traffic laws and practices express very practical wisdom, because the consequences of mistakes are so dramatic and immediate.)
You're right that Burkean conservatism, as described here, is equivalent. "Look before you leap," as the maxim says - and don't leap if you can't see what's there. There is also the first law of tinkering: save all the pieces.
I've long noted that conservationists are the only real conservatives these days. In fact, the "left" has been very conservative, notably in its opposition to "free trade." What we're really doing is trying to conserve the regulatory and welfare systems that make capitalism bearable. There is probably a better way, but "laissez faire" (an old term for "free trade") isn't it.
The bigger picture is that "liberal" and "conservative" have become grab-bags of proposed policies. There are overarching themes to each; the Green Party tries to make those explicit with its 4 Pillars and, in the US, 10 Key Values. But in practice the grab-bags are pretty arbitrary. This is the interesting thing about Trump: insofar as he expresses policies, he lands solidly on both sides of the usual line. Apparently the resulting blend is surprisingly popular, especially in such a defiant package, but Republican "conservatives" hate it.
5/12/16, 12:20 PM
pygmycory said...
As for the shirt and shoes, point taken. Trouble is, you could extend this argument to say that demanding niquab, burqua (or for that matter full plate armor or a clown costume) for service is just fine, and the logical structure would be identical. And that is getting to be a pretty hefty burden to place on part of your population when it is not asked of the other part. Armor is heavy, expensive, and a good way to get heatstroke in the summer, after all.
I suppose the above paragraph would fall in the 'slipperly slope category'. I guess I'm a bit leery because the niquab, burqua, hijab are actually required in various places around the world, and I don't want to wear them and don't think I should have to. I don't have to now, and I'd like it to stay that way.
5/12/16, 12:24 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
5/12/16, 12:41 PM
Oregoncharles said...
I've long regarded the "Christian" fish on a business as a sign that they don't want my dirty money. Why this doesn't apply to wedding businesses is beyond me.
I agree that government should not be in the "marriage" business. Oddly enough, that actually happened in Benton County, Oregon, where I live (a very liberal place, in the current loose meaning of the term.) The commissioners saw the ban on same-sex marriage as a moral dilemma for them, so they ordered the county clerk to stop issuing marriage licenses. Bingo: everybody is getting a "civil union" - although unfortunately, I don't think that law exists in Oregon. After a while, the state ordered them to cut out the nonsense, ending that particular reform. But it's coming.
5/12/16, 12:47 PM
Nastarana said...
For one thing, the ongoing email investigation is beginning to resemble the Watergate affair the summer before President Nixon was elected. For another, many American women won't tolerate a third wife living in the WH, and that's not even getting into the details of just who Mrs. T #3 is and how, exactly, did she go about making a living pre marriage. Certain factions in the army, through certain generals, have let it be known they won't take orders from Trump--a rather circumspect statement about "duty to refuse unlawful orders" but one gets the picture.
Jill Stein of the Green Party has already approached Sen. Sanders about getting together to discuss issues and concerns we have in common. In other words, a third party Green Party maybe also including the Working Families Party (of which I am a member) coalition is being contemplated for the fall election. One Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska has promised to walk out of the Republican Convention; it remains to be seen how many he can take with him. Sasse is known to have Presidential ambitions himself. I consider it highly likely that there will be at least two major, believable third party challenges this fall, and that the election might well be decided in the House of Representatives. To that end, the Democratic Party is doing everything it can to stack the House with pro-Hillary conservadems, many of whom are former Republicans. A site called Down With Tyranny has the gory details.
Someone has now let it be known that Biden--by all accounts the backup choice if, or when, Mme. Clinton is indicted--would like progressive heroine Sen Warren for his VP choice. He would no doubt also like her out of the Senate during his (hypothical at this point) presidency.
5/12/16, 12:50 PM
Mike said...
5/12/16, 1:36 PM
M Smith said...
Is anyone surprised that he also thought the leash laws in our intown neighborhood and picking up after his two leashless dogs were for everyone but him?
5/12/16, 2:05 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
You are a paleoconservative. You value a small government with little spending, strong immigration restrictions, decentralization of the economy and society, destruction of multicultural programs, and a nationalist and isolationist view on foreign policy. You uphold the traditional values of conservatism.
Of course, the quiz simply confirmed that which I have already known for a long time. This is not at all surprising when you consider that I count thinkers like Oswald Spengler, Glubb Pasha, Russell Kirk, Patrick Buchanan and William Lind as major intellectual influences.
5/12/16, 2:09 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
"The law firms I have worked for represented real estate developers of various sizes and types, so I asked one of my former law partners if he thought our experience with developers had anything to tell us about Mr. Trump. Or (I asked) is he so sui generis that we cannot generalize? The response I received was: "Oh, Trump is definitely a developer. As such, he lies easily, is totally self-absorbed, and will not pay the final bill.""
And how is this any different than the behavior of Bill and Hillary Clinton? Based on everything we know about their long and sordid history when it comes to politics and business, your former law partner's description of Trump fits the Clinton's pretty well...
5/12/16, 3:23 PM
NJGuy73 said...
5/12/16, 3:32 PM
Adam D. Schneider said...
Work to what end and for whom, is the question. For the starving peasants of France the Ancien Regime could hardly be said to "work".
5/12/16, 3:37 PM
Zachary Braverman said...
5/12/16, 3:45 PM
buzzy said...
5/12/16, 4:11 PM
rapier said...
There used to be mentions of Burke quite often in the heady early days of Reagan and 'movement conservatism' but that passed long ago. I will hardly be the first person to point out that capitalism, especially today's version of money manager capitalism is anathema to older fashioned conservatism and the headlong rush into technology, fueled by endless well springs of credit too make a mockery of older versions of conservatism.
Anyway points well taken on Burkean conservatism and perhaps one day that older version of conservatism will rise again. However it borders on the impossible that any such conservatism will take root by the choice of the people or the elites.
I'm not sure I made a real point here. Just rambling.
5/12/16, 4:14 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I think that question sums up everything wrong with politics today, although I hadn't realized it at the time. I think I may have made them forget their disagreements if I had...
5/12/16, 4:50 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
My frustration is that I don't have religious charisma and so can't found such an order myself. If I could, I would gather up a few hundred people, and plan a self-contained economy in a particular spot where land is cheap yet fertile, and where the government does not interfere much with how people choose to live. It would be about conserving nature, conserving creativity and freedom in work, conserving reason, and conserving small interdependent communities. And it would have the religious belief that though we are not that smart, we are not children either, and have the capability to plan for ourselves on a small scale, without the sticks and carrots of big Government, God, the Market, or other abstract, omnipotent and invisible entities.
5/12/16, 5:11 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
I am reminded of that old Arab proverb: my brother and I against my cousin, but my brother, my cousin and I against the outsider. I think we are already seeing the return of nationalism and tribal politics in the West, thanks in part to the racial and gender politics of the Left, as well as the rise of Caesarism. Let the wars begin and may the most worthy be victorious!
5/12/16, 5:33 PM
whomever said...
The place where religion gets political is, bluntly, Judaism (and I hope no-one accuses me of anti-semitism here). The ultra-orthodox can, honestly, be pains in the neck. What's interesting is the people I see who are the most anti-Satmar are other Jews. My old boss is Jewish and he once went on a rant abut them that from a gentile would be seriously unacceptable (and I've heard they are even more hated in Israel because they are exempt from military service). But the conflicts are at a relatively low level of heat, because, lets be clear, who can imagine NY without Jews? (bye by bagels, pastrami and so much else). No one seriously thinks that anyone is going to cart them off, anti-semitism is pretty socially unacceptable (at least among most classes). But you've seen conflicts over things like bike lanes (which they object in their neighborhood due to "indecently dressed" women), the last Brooklyn DA was primaried out due to credibly evidence he'd covered up sexual abuse in their community, theirs the occasional scandal around one of their "neigborhood watches" beating up people, etc etc. I've got multiple woman friends who've bought things at their stores and rolled their eyes at some of the things (they usually have a less-orthodox jew on staff to talk to women). But it all sort of works out and people are mostly pretty level headed. So it gives me hope that it's possible.
The other big difference is of course the power dynamic: They don't have enough power that they will seriously ever challenge anyone. Whereas there are parts of the country where it really does seem like there is a minority that wants to turn them into a christian version of Saudi Arabia.
5/12/16, 5:41 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown Deborah, or a good actor. We'll see.
Emmanuel, and to my mind all three of those were valid approaches. It depends entirely on where a given community chooses to draw the line.
Albatross, you're welcome and thank you.
Mikep, I don't know that anybody's yet done a poll to determine the political affiliations of small yappy dogs, but I tend to think you're right. ;-)
Lordyburd, we get to see the same "democratists" all the time among the American left, who wax rhapsodic about the poor and underprivileged while abusing store clerks and restaurant waitstaff, and if the poor and underprivileged don't vote for the people that elite liberals want them to vote for -- oh, then you get to hear a very different tune. That is to say, nothing has changed since Burke's time.
Mustard, funny.
Karim, the "experiments," if you want to label them as such, have been happening for many decades -- and no, it doesn't matter that some single-gender families get that way involuntarily; the results still apply. Since you've failed to offer any actual reasons to think that harm accrues to children adopted by same-sex couples, I would argue that you don't have a case for barring same-sex couples from adopting. "But what if something bad happens?" is a pretty weak argument!
As for polygamy, I see no reason why that should be outlawed, either. It's not something I would engage in, but again, if legally competent consenting adults want to manage their marital affairs that way, is it anyone else's business? I fail to see why it should be.
Daniel, it fascinates me to hear how utterly committed to the status quo so many young people are -- especially in college. It used to be the case that college students liked to ask hard questions about where their society was headed, but I gather that this has gone out of fashion.
5/12/16, 6:00 PM
Justin said...
It does seem to me that there is a natural impulse to allow a minority to impose rules upon others in a limited way and a competing impulse to restrict the ability of majorities to impose rules on minorities. I think that a school of thought that relieves these tensions would be quite an achievement.
5/12/16, 6:16 PM
Clay Dennis said...
5/12/16, 6:19 PM
pygmycory said...
Just a single data point, but illustrative, never the less. Sexual orientation doesn't determine parenting ability.
5/12/16, 6:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Greg, with regard to the country clubs, keep in mind that it's hard to play golf without a golf course, and if nearly all the golf courses in your state are the property of segregated country clubs, you've got a problem. Since the people owning the country clubs weren't religious minorities, for whom special accommodations have traditionally been made in America, it wasn't unreasonable for people of color who wanted to play golf to press for access to the country clubs.
YCS, it shall indeed. You've made an important point, though -- the stunningly parochial thinking of those affluent liberals who can't imagine that anyone might have a valid reason to disagree with them.
Nati, the changes in marriage didn't happen because of changes in government policy. The government policies changed, bit by bit, because millions of Americans were dissatisfied with older notions of marriage, and altered their own marriages accordingly. I'm part of that process; my wife and I have been married for 32 years, and it's been a happy marriage precisely because we negotiated (and renegotiated) the terms of the relationship rather than accepting the frankly dysfunctional models of marriage our culture and our families presented us. If you want to see that as a revolution, by all means -- but remember that Burke supported the American Revolution...
David, John Stuart Mill is one of the great names of classic liberalism, and yes, he put a lot of effort into coming up with an ideal that would be generally accepted and could thus be used to guide public policy. As I noted to A Post-Millennial earlier, that sort of thing is the natural complement of Burkean conservatism, and if you find classic liberalism more to your taste, by all means.
Professor D., that only follows if you ignore the immense harm that was being caused by the Victorian approach to marriage, fixate solely on the harm that's been caused by the current version, and redefine the replacement of the older form of marriage by the current form amounts to the "destruction" of marriage. None of those seem valid to me. I can't speak for your circle of friends and acquaintances, but I know plenty of people who are more or less happily married, so it's a bit much to claim that marriage has been "destroyed" -- I'd say, rather, that it's changed, and the problems that have followed the change are inevitably different from those that preceded it.
Cherokee, how do you take rights away? By the same process that brings them into being. If a community, acting through its institutions, says, "This right no longer exists," then that right no longer exists. We do this all the time; when a judge sends a criminal to jail, the judge is saying in effect, "The community has decided to deprive you of most of your rights, in response to the crime you've committed." Bang! The rights are gone. Since a right is simply an agreement on the part of a community to permit some behavior, that's all it takes.
Fudoshin, oh, granted, the Traditionalist approach becomes very appealing as a society runs into increasingly serious trouble, and I expect to see a lot of that sort of thing as industrial civilization winds down. Sometimes it's a good idea, as when hearkening back to older traditions allows for the preservation of worthwhile things that would otherwise be lost. Too often, though, what you get is a sort of roleplaying game at gunpoint, where everyone is required to pretend that they live in some supposed golden age of the past. More on this in an upcoming post.
5/12/16, 6:27 PM
zaphod42 said...
Enjoyed your estimable ramblings today. Especially where you commented that
“...when human beings insist that the tangled realities of politics and history can be reduced to some set of abstract principles simple enough for the human mind to understand, they’re wrong. Another is that when human beings try to set up a system of government based on abstract principles, rather than allowing it to take shape organically out of historical experience, the results will pretty reliably be disastrous.”
I agree with your premises, and would remark that, at this time men become dogmatic. Their “principles” become immutable, inflexible and “holy.” When this happens, unless it be undone, it is over for that particular society, which can only end in collapse.
Later your reiteration of your oft stated belief about the wrongheadedness of many ‘technocrats,’ describing
“…the myth of progress, the bizarre but embarrassingly widespread notion that history is marching ever onward and upward, and so anything new is better just because it’s new,…”
And, isn’t it the case that there is, as stated in the Bible, “…nothing new under the Sun.”? And that, even were that not true, there is nothing inherently better about newer than about older. So that folks who hold that position (like my first-born and namesake) are doubly mistaken. And, make no mistake, it is next to impossible to dislodge them from their fantasies. I promise that I have made every effort to dissuade CW from virtual fantasies, to no avail.
And finally, your discussion of “rights” was wonderful. Should I ever be arguing an appeal involving related or congruent topics, may I infringe on your copyrights?
Wonderful posting, Enjoyed immensely.
Craig
5/12/16, 6:31 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Scotlyn, I'd agree that there are both private goods and public goods worth, shall we say, conserving! One of the pleasant features of Burkean conservatism is that it does tend to make for good neighbors, as negotiation, compromise, and a lack of interest in rigid ideological positions comes with the package.
Germandom, er, whatever; you seem to have some very narrow definition of the word "stance," which is not the one I'm using.
Scotlyn, delighted to hear it. Are you getting the occasional bursts of absurd good luck yet?
Chris, I fail to see how same-sex marriage has any connection to the abandonment of the household economy; I know same-sex couples, one member of which is a stay-at-home housewhichever, and in at least one of those cases he makes a pretty fair contribution via the household economy. I've spoken before of the massive benefits of restoring the household economy to its former importance, and where that's concerned, it seems to me, any family -- however constituted by gender -- could make that choice.
Dan, exactly. The US Constitution is a set of agreements about how the states and the people will manage their political destiny together. It's been amended many times, and quite a few of those amendments were for the better; it could quite frankly use some more amendments right now.
Blue Sun, oh, we have them in Druidry; they just don't get as much publicity. As for the mythology, of course -- affluent liberals are deeply into the myth of progress, affluent pseudoconservatives are deeply into the myth of decline from a golden age, and both have cooperated in spreading the fantasy that the US used to be a conservative Christian nation, in the teeth of the evidence. How many people remember that John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, was a Swedenborgian missionary, and that Thomas Jefferson wrote up a version of the Gospels from which, as he put it, every statement that would not be accepted as evidence before a modern jury had been deleted? This has been a country of religious radicals, eccentric beliefs, freethinkers, occultists, and bona fide nutjobs since about fifteen seconds after the Mayflower sighted land, and I wish people would stop pretending otherwise.
Don, no, I haven't read that Berry essay, and clearly I'll have to remedy that. Of course he's quite correct; technically speaking, the one difference between gay sex and straight sex is that straight couples have one additional option, which can sometimes result in pregnancy.
Chris, and those cultures will have their own decisions to make about what counts for appropriate behavior, of course. Thanks for the anecdote about Kirk!
Eric, and that's exactly the sort of debate that's involved in settling where the line is going to be drawn. That you'd draw it further to one side than I would is simply one of the things that has to be hashed out via public debate and, eventually, legislative and judicial action.
5/12/16, 7:11 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Redoak, hmm. I tend to shy away from anybody recommended by neoconservatives, and I know that Strauss is one of their favorite philosophers, but it's quite possible that this isn't his fault. Sure, I'd be happy to have a look at it.
Johnny, it's entirely possible that Darwin was influenced by Burke; a lot of people in 19th century Britain read and discussed Burke, so direct and indirect influence are both possible. As for Dewey, he's one of the philosophers I've been meaning to get to for a while now; as I think I mentioned a while back, I tend to study philosophers one at a time, and fairly intensively, but his turn is coming.
Ed, granted, there are times when things become so chaotic that conserving much of anything becomes all but impossible. That said, the effort's often worth making.
Wagelaborer, the people who insist that they're going to "take to the streets, smash the state, and have a revolution" -- do they ever actually do anything about that shopworn fantasy? Or do they just sit around with their hands in their shorts daydreaming about the subject? The soi-disant revolutionaries I've met have all belonged to the latter category. Of all the classes and categories of people in today's America, they pose the least threat to the status quo.
Don, Trump has also talked at length about normalizing relations with Russia, getting our allies to do more for their own defense, and focusing on rebuilding here at home instead of overthrowing governments overseas. I think there's some chance that, if he's elected, he would be less likely to get us into yet another round of useless wars. Clinton? Based on her record, a vote for her might as well be a vote for George W. Bush. I'm not a Trump fan; I find some of his policies and a good deal of his posturing very unwelcome; but if it comes to a choice between him and Clinton (and I hope it doesn't come to that; I still think Sanders has a chance) I really do think he's the lesser evil.
Chris, okay, let's take a look at what you're doing. You're shifting the discussion from wedding cakes to pharmacies, and why? In order to find a general principle that you can apply to all such cases. (That's what I get from your discussion of both as "examples." Examples of what?) This is exactly the sort of thinking I reject. It's been said that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but it might be said with even more truth that consistency is the mother of bad laws. Rather than finding some grand abstract principle that will inevitably yield injustices on one or the other end of its application, the Burkean approach is to treat each case on its own merits: i.e., since nobody ever died from not getting a professionally baked wedding cake, wedding cakes involve different issues and different constellations of rights and responsibilities than pharmacies do, and reasonable accommodation can quite readily apply to one but not the other.
Vesta, nicely phrased. Accurate, too.
5/12/16, 7:35 PM
FLwolverine said...
I believe I (ruefully) acknowledged that the description applies to politicians in general these days. Sorry if that was too subtle.
Personally, what I'm concerned about with Trump is that nothing will get done if he's elected because neither Republicans or Democrats in Congress will support him, yet he will veto legislation that he doesn't like or agree with. Result: more stalemate. I can see the same thing happening with Hillary Clinton if there is a Republican House and/or Senate, and I think it unlikely Democrats will win both houses.
Although I suspect the Donald will cause a lot more turmoil and upheaval if he doesn't get his way than Hillary would cause if she doesn't get hers.
5/12/16, 7:48 PM
Golocyte Golo said...
But of course this means that government can't grant all petitions, redress all grievances, or set the shape of society. Society under such a government must have its discontents, and even some left behind completely, and the people in charge will have to be able to tell them "too bad; sometimes we can't just change things."
Is anyone really ready to accept that?
I'm fatalistic about it. A basically steady-state government structure seems out of reach now. Cultures are larger than governments, as they say, and as a culture we're tumbling. Society always has divergent views, but we seem to be in a place where views have moved past the disagreement stage and gone straight to the stage where people can't communicate with each other, even enough to disagree.
Imagine three people sit down, in all sincerity, to discuss government policy: a 60-something church-going religious conservative who barely used the Internet except email at work and exchanging the occasional picture of his granddaughter, an old school McDworkinite anti-porn down-with-the-Patriarchy radical feminist, and a non-religious libertarian electrician who owns his own truck and has two younger employees with whom he is always frustrated and complains that they don't show up on time (likely due to drug problems).
These people would not disagree on policy issues. They wouldn't even be able to discuss policy issues. The conservative and the libertarian would agree on lower taxes, but that would sound like code for racism and privilege to the feminist. The feminist and the libertarian would agree on certain social issues, but that would sound like Satanic destruction of society to the conservative. The conservative would favor the privileging of heterosexual marriage, which would sound like female slavery and white-male oppression to the feminist, and like moral authoritarianism to the libertarian.
Where do we go with Burkean conservatism when society is atomized and divergent to the point where we can no longer talk? Where reigning systems are intolerable to so many, and the proposed changes are odious to so many more?
5/12/16, 8:49 PM
nuku said...
re dress codes and other restrictions on “freedom“:
there’s a UK case now of a woman hired as a temp office worker who was fired on the first day because she refused to wear high (2” or higher) heels for her receptionist position. She’s suing the company on the grounds she should have right to wear “comfortable” flat shoes. If she wins her case, should this right be extended to all those poor white collar guys forced to wear suits and ties to work on hot days. Why can’t they be allowed to work in more comfortable shorts and flip flops? Is this the beginning of the slippery slope?
Just an example that the line is always hard to draw and depends on the circumstances.
I can understand and sympathize with your aversion to wearing a black tent with eye slits, but you are ok with some women having the right to do this in your neck of the woods (even if its not really their personal choice but something they are forced to by their culture)?
On the other hand, if you found yourself in a country with Sharia law, Islam as the state religion, and a traditional patriarchal culture, your right to appear in public in shorts and low cut top might not exist, or if it did, it would only be applied to “crazy Western tourists who bring us lots of hard cash and only flaunt themselves around the fenced-in swimming pools of expensive hotels“.
I think there is a tendency in most of us to want clear-cut simple solutions to all the problems of society. The difficulty is that LIFE IS inherently WET AND MESSY (and that’s why there will always be slippery slopes). We all know where the quest for the FINAL SOLUTION ends up don’t we?
The moderate Burkean Conservatism outlined by JMG appeals to me precisely because it recognizes that final solutions don’t work and aren’t final and that life is an on-going process of making temporary accommodations to changing circumstances. This can be hard work and there’s always that old limbic brain flight or flight response lurking in the background: either run away or clobber the problem into submission.
5/12/16, 9:16 PM
kuanyin said...
5/12/16, 9:32 PM
Unknown said...
Greg and JMG, the reason why people pay exorbitant dues and initiation fees to join country clubs is not for access to the athletic facilities. It is for social access to the other members. It's to gain the opportunity to make up a foursome with wealthy and powerful individuals and make business deals while playing a round of golf.
When Jews, nonwhites or women are excluded from membership in the elite country club of the area, it impedes their careers and puts them at an economic disadvantage compared with the people who are allowed to join the club.
5/12/16, 9:37 PM
Karim said...
As I said, there is no evidence that same sex or single parent families do any better or worse at parenting, that is at present a given.
Note that however I said that adoption by same sex parents is effectively saying to the kid that 2 fathers is the same as 2 mothers which is the same as mother and father.
This is a fiction. Most of us know, by direct experience, that a father is not the same as a mother. From direct and common experience a mother is worth much more than a father to a kid.
The question is, are we, as a society, ready and willing to deprive a kid intentionally and permanently of a mother by allowing 2 men from adopting a kid just because the empirical evidence is neutral?
If I were a legislator, I would be extremely reluctant in doing that. It very much sounds like children rights are not being fully respected at this point.
Laws need to rest on fundamental principles, not on empirical evidence. In my understanding of human nature, the supreme need and thus right of a child is to have, at a minimum, a caring mother and thus it follows that any argument that circumvents that need and right is spurious.
Having said that, it follows that adoption by 2 women would be acceptable. I think so, at this point in time.
In my understanding, adoption by same sex marriages rests on shaky and slippery grounds from a perspective of children rights principles.
Now, note that none of the above is meant to prevent single parent families of either sex from raising their own biological kids.
All of the above is said with the greatest of respect to druids, gay people, married or unmarried, single parent families and so on. It is not my intent to show contempt to any of my fellow human beings.
Peace be upon you all.
5/12/16, 9:45 PM
The Court Jester said...
Just a quick thought to share: You know the quote: "A country gets the government that it deserves". Put another way: A government cannot exceed the quality of its people. So if a country wants a better government, the people must up is game. The fact that world politics is dysfunctional, this is merely a reflection that the people are dysfunctional. South Africa, my home country, is a prime example of this.
With kindest regards.
5/12/16, 9:57 PM
aiastelamonides said...
JMG,
Commenter Yucca took the words out of my mouth, but I'll add a couple more things on the theme of (moderate Burkean) conservatism as a method, not a doctrine:
1) The obvious analogy is to science and the scientific method. The kinship is more than analogical, in fact: the conservative method, as you might call it, should draw on the results of the social sciences as well as history (though the various social scientific doctrines have to be evaluated by their performance in the real world – as should the conservative method itself). The sciences have many virtues: besides being better than other methods of investigating the world, they encourage people to ask the right questions and to tolerate doubt and disagreement. Science can become haughtily dogmatic, especially when it contradicts common sense. Behaviorism is the first example that springs to mind. But behaviorism was defeated much more easily than the ideologically-rooted pseudoscience of, say, the Nazis and Soviets. Science – and presumably imaginative Burkean conservatism – is as capable of producing bad ideas as anything else, but it is usually better at destroying them.
2) One of the big problems for the social sciences is how to categorize things. That is what adjusting for confounders is all about, but that only works if you have a large enough sample size. To the extent that conservatism draws on history, it will often have to choose between adjusting for confounders and having a reasonable sample size. Furthermore, although there are conventional confounders to control for in studies of individuals, it isn't clear what confounders there are for societies. Often it will be unclear on which side of a binary (or where on a spectrum) a country should go. In the case of Latin American immigration, for example, reasoning from all the historical cases of mass immigration will produce an unhelpful mess. They are too dissimilar. You could narrow it down by working with cases of immigration into democracies, or cases of immigration into declining great powers, or cases of immigration in which the immigrants were relatively culturally united (e.g. not 19th century mass immigration to the Americas), or cases of immigration into the US Southwest (e.g. the Chinese, the Dustbowl refugees, the Sunbelt migration). If we had more historical cases than we do, we could treat all of this scientifically, and get results of the same (doubtful) quality as those of the social sciences. As it is, we don't have much to go on as to which of these measures is best. The USA has been pretty good at assimilating immigrants, but falling civilizations have been pretty bad at it. Working from economic data will provide an equally uncertain position. At this point, the method falters. Recourse to something beyond it is necessary in order to make a decision. I think the usual conservative answer would be to do what is less risky, but this does not seem to be required by the method.
5/12/16, 10:37 PM
aiastelamonides said...
3) Obviously, it's good for a belief system to be fluid. Any account of the world, especially one simple enough to work as a political platform, will generalize about the world in ways that correspond well enough to reality at one time, but become increasingly detached from it as time goes on (this account included?), so it is important to continually overcome old dogmas. And it is good to encourage disagreement. Without it, whichever dogma has a momentary advantage will solidify its position and stop requiring rigorous arguments of itself. The lower the standard of argument, the longer until it becomes clear that the old system has stopped working. It is necessary, however, for a political movement to actually have political positions. The tension between these two goods seems to have collapsed in favor of the second, creating the modern conservative movement. A better solution might have been to acknowledge that any particular conservative movement's endorsed positions may be wrong, but also that it is necessary to take a position in politics and defend it against people whose methods are theoretical and ideological. This is a rather weak hand politically, unfortunately.
4) It seems that all political thinkers could and should be conservatives of this kind (just as all physicists should be scientists), including political radicals. Violent revolutionaries couldn't be conservative, but someone trying to create a fundamentally different social order could go about in a consensual, reversible manner. I know that some radical circles stress building alternative institutions now, within the old system, with the hope that they will be able to function better than their official counterparts, and thus attract enough of the population that the eventual transfer of power would be relatively easy and the new government relatively stable. This seems to me like a reasonable conservative course of action. This is sort of what happened in the American Revolution, or so it seems to me. It's not clear that it could work in a non-colonial situation, though federalism seems to allow for it in a smaller way (as in the history of women's suffrage).
Vaguely on topic, since you mentioned the religion of Progress and I have mentioned failures of science: a friend tells me that satellite designers have realized that much of their work could be done with sophisticated hot air balloons orders of magnitude more cheaply. I don't know enough to speculate about the implications for deindustrial technology.
5/12/16, 10:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Barrymelius, by the same logic, you might want to wait another million years or so before suggesting that history does have a direction. To my mind, any claim that history is going somewhere in particular is mythology -- and all things considered, if I want to read mythology, I'll pick up the Mabinogion or a volume of Ovid.
Violet, congrats on finding a new place to live! Thank you, and kudos as well, for a clearly expressed statement of one of the least common virtues these days -- the recognition that even people who don't like you have rights, too.
Wagelaborer, exactly -- there are crucial differences between marriage in civil law and marriage as it's interpreted by many of our American religious traditions. If two people want to have a religious interpretation apply to their marriage, great -- here again, the marital choices of legally competent consenting adults are nobody's business but their own -- but the state has no business forcing some particular religious interpretation on everyone.
Lynnet, it's specifically in the Talmud, which is the core body of Jewish religious law. You'd have to discuss the matter with an Orthodox rabbi if you want to know more, though. But you're right, of course: it's a matter of figuring out where to draw the boundaries. The point where something is specifically prohibited in religious law is one workable choice, when larger issues aren't involved.
RPC, to my mind, you'd have to justify the claim that society's interest in demanding a particular kind of childrearing environment supersedes the right of individuals to manage their own private affairs, including the raising of children. I'd be very slow to accept the claim that government can be trusted with the right to decide how children are to be raised, outside of very basic health and safety issues; consider how badly the Federal government has messed up education in this country by zealously pursuing a set of fashionable theories!
David, exactly. I really do have to do a post here on the separate-spheres doctrine at the heart of the political philosophy of liberty, don't I? Your co-worker has the right to let her religious beliefs shape her political opinions, because the one place that the religious and political spheres can be allowed to overlap in a free society is in the individual conscience. More on this later on.
James, excellent! Yes, utopianism and rationalism tend to run together -- it's so tempting to think that you can rationally play out a society and have it come out perfect. The mere fact that this has been tried countless times, with reliably disastrous results, never dissuades the true believer. There are, as I see it, two flies in the ointment; the first is the issue you've raised here -- the hard fact that no logical system can prove its own first principles, and so you've always got some degree of Garbage In, Garbage Out rising from the foundations. The second is that the universe is not a rational phenomenon -- or, put another way, what we call "reason" is simply the set of habitual ways of data processing that turned out to be that little bit more successful in keeping our ancestors fed, mated, and out of the jaws of cave bears than the alternatives. Reason is not the truth about the world, and trying to make the world follow rational patterns always ends in disaster.
5/12/16, 10:40 PM
John Michael Greer said...
MigrantWorker, yep -- I'm planning on a new Retrotopia installment next week.
Sven, the only thing I know of that can protect society against the superhuman creativity of the butthurt is what Druid teacher Philip Carr-Gomm calls the three special senses of Druidry: common sense, a sense of proportion, and a sense of humor. As for the link between these points and the Cimmerian hypothesis, hmm! I hadn't thought of that, but you're right -- it's the mental equivalent of a wholly built-up environment in which nobody has to worry about nature intruding.
Bill, exactly. I don't patronize stores with the Jesus fish on the signs or the advertising, either.
Jeffinwa, you're welcome and thank you.
James, no argument there. I thought it was very telling that the moment the pseudoconservative right lost the fight against same sex marriage, they basically ran out and found something else to get offended about -- it's as though they've become addicted to a state of moral panic. When they lose this one, maybe we can get them to fly off the handle about naked dogs in public -- after all, innocent children might be traumatized by seeing a dog's bare genitalia. Oh, the horror!
In addition to the points you've made, I'd point out, first, that transsexual people have been using bathrooms corresponding to their nongenetic sex for as long as there have been transsexual people, without causing any of the consequences the pseudoconservative right is shrieking about these days; and second, that if we want to pass regulations to keep people from perpetrating sexual acts in bathrooms, we should logically start with those most likely to do so. Congressmen have been caught far more often engaging in sex acts in public bathrooms than transsexuals have -- thus, if the actual point of the exercise is to decrease the likelihood that children are exposed to sex acts in public bathrooms, passing laws banning Congressmen from using public bathrooms would seem to be a much higher priority. I expect to see the defenders of America' precious bodily fluids proposing such legislation at once.
5/12/16, 11:11 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Zach, oh, good -- I was hoping that somebody would fall into that trap. Why should American law and custom allow reasonable accommodation for the beliefs of religious minorities? Is there some grand abstract principle that justifies that? Nope. It so happens that most Americans have tended to agree that this is a good idea, and from the standpoint of Burkean conservatism, that's all the justification it needs.
Glenn, and that's also an option, though I don't know that it's the best one -- again, all we have to do to make same sex marriage work in the US is to change a few words in a few places in the laws governing marriage, and there you go.
MickGspot, I'm not at all surprised. Since the supply of labor so vastly exceeds the demand at this point, all kinds of silly things will be popping up to decrease the number of job applications that human resources departments have to process, and that's one of them.
Joel, you're welcome and thank you. The thing is, we live in a society in which the political institutions were designed with that kind of back and forth in mind, and they could still be used for that purpose. What's needed is a relearning process by which a significant number of Americans start thinking of politics, not as a place to park extremist fantasies, but as the process by which people of many different opinions figure out how to live together in peace. I think that's possible; if I didn't, I wouldn't have posted this essay.
Steve, hmm. It wouldn't be a single post; it might have to be an entire sequence -- but I'll think about it. (So to speak.)
Jeff, the drastic and extremely unwise innovation by which corporations have been given legal personhood needs to be reversed; one of the amendments to the US constitution I'd support soonest is one that restricts the rights of personhood to natural persons, i.e., actual human beings. That's my response to your first question. As to the second, I've already addressed that. As I noted in my post, the rule of thumb I'm invoking here is that "reasonable accommodation should be made to religious minorities when this can be done without violating the agreed-upon rights of others." The Jim Crow laws were not reasonable accommodation to a religious minority, and they did violate the agreed-upon rights of others, so they were rightly thrown out.
FLWolverine, that last comment of yours, to my mind, sums things up pretty neatly -- because I'm quite sure we can expect that sort of behavior no matter who becomes President next January.
Nephilimsd, that sort of demand for consistency is very common; the problem is that any rule applied consistently ends up producing injustice at one or another end of its application. It's customary in American law to provide reasonable accommodation should be made to religious minorities when this can be done without violating the agreed-upon rights of others. Is that inconsistent? So long as it helps people of different beliefs live together in relative peace, I don't see that consistency matters at all.
5/12/16, 11:29 PM
Chris Travers said...
Without income and corporate employment, both corporate pensions (and similar plans like 401k's) and public pensions (like social security) become out of reach for most people. So the alternative means of support is to retire and live with one's children and help them raise one's grandchildren. Family businesses thus achieve the same sort of immortality that corporations currently enjoy in the current social order in the West.
So those are two huge differences. This then leads to the points I made about premarital sex and family honor. Having a *functional* condemnation of premarital sex only works when you have functional family honor because this allows pregnancy to have political power in the family politics of marriage.
What these things then mean is that marriage ends up being an institution which is largely framed in terms of one's social duties to one's parents rather than one's own quest for personal fulfillment. And one has a duty to one's parents to get married and have children of one's own if one is able to.
Another thing is that in these cases you have some other problems to deal with that you don't have in a corporate economy. How do you spread around the means of production to the next generation? In my wife's culture, men inherit the business and women inherit the family responsibilities. Hence men marry into family and women marry into business.
This is not to say one could not imagine a family household business economy where same-sex marriage was recognized. But when you start looking at actual such economies today, one tends to see a lot of things that would have to change to make same-sex marriage actually attainable and that means you have some real harm arguments which don't apply in the West. After all, it is one thing to argue for SSM if nothing else needs to change. It is different to argue that everything else can change to accommodate such a purported right. So on one hand, that's something which ties SSM as an issue to reduction in birth rates (because having children is no longer conducive to retiring in a good lifestyle), and so also the harm issue across this divide.
BTW and as an aside this gets to what I think a lot of Americans don't understand about Third World countries. The term of course comes from the idea that these countries were non-aligned in the cold war but people in the US, because they see a force of history going in one direction, think they are in the process of becoming like the US, but in fact developing nations have many different critiques of Western social and economic order and don't want to follow us. They see a culture of isolation and loneliness.
5/12/16, 11:43 PM
Chris Travers said...
5/12/16, 11:45 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Tomuru, I haven't the least idea. How much of human behavior is genetic is an exceptionally complex question, and to my mind it's not really relevant to the issue of whether consenting adults should have the right to engage in private acts without interference from government.
Ed, The Eagles sang it a long time ago:
"We satisfy our endless needs
And justify our bloody deeds
In the name of destiny,
And in the name of God."
WB Jorgenson, of course. The religion of progress is based on the idea that innovation is always good, so anything that stands in the way of innovation is sinful, and should be shouted down by thoughtstoppers like that one. I'll talk in a future post about the blindness to the middle ground that pervades contemporary American culture.
Oregoncharles, of course! I could easily spend a whole post on the precautionary principle. You're quite right, by the way, that a good half of Trump's appeal is his refusal to accept the various prepackaged sets of political ideas -- most Americans are sick to death of being told that they have to accept ten bad policies in order to get three good ones, which is basically what both mainstream parties have been saying for years now.
Pygmycory, if you don't want to wear plate armor, then it's up to you and people who agree with you to organize politically in order to establish and maintain that right. That's true in any case; Burkean conservatism simply makes explicit what talk about rights as abstract universals tends to hide.
James, so far, nothing from the right; several pieces of trolling from the left, but even those were kind of vague. I think most of the professionally butthurt on both sides of the line simply had their brains dribble out their ears on reading a conservative argument for same sex marriage, and crept away whimpering. ;-)
Oregoncharles, as I mentioned to Bill further up, I do the same thing with businesses that have the Jesus fish on the signage. Since their faith tells them they can't serve God and Mammon at the same time, I figure it's an act of kindness to keep my money away from them, so they won't be tempted to worship it!
Mike, I'm not at all familiar with Sullivan. I mostly read things written by dead people these days.
M Smith, been there, seen that. The confusion between rights and a sense of entitlement is pretty widespread these days.
5/12/16, 11:47 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Zachary, part of the problem is that word "shouldn't." It's astonishing how few people these days grasp the difference between a statement of fact and a value judgment. More on this in a future post!
Buzzy, thanks for the info!
Rapier, yes, your comment was what kicked this off, for which thank you. I use the term "pseudoconservative" deliberately for the post-Reagan movement; the current right wing in the US is as starry-eyed a bunch of utopian fantasists as you can find anywhere -- they've just taken their abstractions from Ayn Rand and an assortment of cherrypicked Bible passages rather than from Karl Marx. Will that last? I suspect it won't -- but we'll see.
WB Jorgenson, when people ask me that, I tend to say, "Neither. Why do you insist that there can only be two sides?" Then their brains melt and dribble out their ears...
Iuval, a hint: nobody "has" religious charisma. You get it from a deity, and you get it not for the purpose of doing what you want, but so that you can do something the deity wants. Don't think of it as an instrument; when it appears, you are the instrument.
Submarine, I'm in a similar situation. I'd much rather see Sanders get the nomination, as I could vote for him with a fairly clear conscience -- I disagree sharply with some of his positions, but not that many. If it's Trump vs. Clinton, though, I'll have to vote for Trump.
Whomever, an overdeveloped sense of entitlement is by no means restricted to affluent white goyim, sad to say!
Clay, au contraire. In times of extreme crisis, it's all the more important to fall back on what people are familiar with, because there's no time to innovate a new social structure in the midst of chaos. That's one of the reasons I consider it so important to get the tools of democratic process into as many hands as possible, so that as crunch time hits, people have an effective and familiar way to organize collective action as needed.
Pygmycory, I'd agree with that, having seen plenty of similar cases.
5/13/16, 12:05 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Golocyte, fortunately, most people in today's America aren't religious conservatives, radical feminists, or libertarians. My hope is to start a conversation among those who aren't committed to dogmatic extremes of any kind, and eventually the three people in your dialogue will notice that something different is going on and, if they want to get in on it, they need to learn how to communicate courteously with those who disagree with their ideologies.
Kuanyin, you're quite right that Trump is astonishingly good at attracting projections -- better even than Obama was, and the latter was no slouch. Half of Clinton's problem in getting the nomination is that she only seems to have that skill with affluent white women of liberal leanings; for everyone else, it's a matter of hold your nose and turn the lever on the voting machine. But we'll see how it all turns out.
Unknown Deborah, that's also an issue -- but I happen to know some Japanese-Americans whose interest in getting into a country club, when it finally dropped the color bar, was the opportunity to play golf on a really nice course!
Karim, when you say "laws need to rest on fundamental principles," you're claiming something that I've specifically rejected. Whose principles? Yours? Mine? Someone else's? The whole point of this post is that trying to base laws on fundamental principles, instead of simply paying attention to what works and doing that, is a bad idea. With all due respect, your opinions about who should and shouldn't be able to adopt are thus beside the point.
Court Jester, that's a very important point, of course. Radicals on both sides of the political landscape are constantly trying to use government to make people more virtuous, and it never works.
Aias, excellent! Yes, yes, and yes. I'm glad that somebody's thinking about balloons again; as the satellite belts head toward an inevitable Kessler syndrome, a fallback position like that is good to have.
Chris, I should have specified -- in contemporary America. I've already noted that each society is going to come up with its own way of sorting out conflicts between various rights; furthermore, I've said here repeatedly that I don't offer any particular guidance to people in other countries -- the last thing they need is one more clueless American telling them how to run their lives. In today's America, given the specific set of social conditions we have today and will face in the predictable future, the revival of the household economy can be done just as effectively by same sex couples as by cross-sex couples, and so the history and prospects of the household economy are irrelevant to the current discussion.
5/13/16, 12:24 AM
Scotlyn said...
This rinds me that I once recommended the Barbara Kingsolver novel "Prodigal Summer" to someone as "dripping with sex"... and so it is... there is reference to some human jiggy, though not much by way of play-by-play, but the whole novel (three storylines) drips with awareness of what I might call "sexual attentveness" throughout nature... animals, plants, humans... it struck me as one of the most amazing clean & living turn-ons...
5/13/16, 12:26 AM
Chris Travers said...
It is worth starting from a point of understanding what corporate personhood used to mean, and where it is going now. The doctrine starts in a case involving Dartmouth College where it basically means that a corporation is an artificial entity and therefore only has certain rights, and the job of the court is to determine which rights it has and which rights it does not have. John Marshall's opinion in that case was that the state could not just dissolve the college because they didn't like the board of trustees. In essence corporate personhood started out as a way of restraining corporate rights, because the corporation did not have all the rights of the owners.
When we look at Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, it is fairly clear that the court is moving away from that view and seeing corporations instead as just a collection of individuals, so the individuals' rights must be respected and the corporation doesn't get different rights just because it is incorporated. Citizens United is based on the premise that you cannot regulate speech by regulating money, and you cannot threaten to throw corporate officers in prison for their role in speech. Hobby Lobby is based on the idea that corporate owners don't lose their rights to live a religious life merely because they incorporate a business. In many ways these cases are a step away from corporate personhood. In other words, the corporation as a person no longer matters, only the natural persons involved.
So the question is what replaces corporate personhood. Do we say as a society that the federal government can regulate anything by regulating corporations (because incorporation signs away individual rights, and because that is the entry price to running a business)? Do we destroy the balance of power by saying only natural persons have rights and that such natural persons' rights include without question the full rights of the owners, directors, and officers of the corporation (in which case Hobby Lobby and Citizens United look rather minor in comparison to what we will get)? To my mind that is a cure worse than the disease. Or do we try to go back to what worked in the past, where economic power was far more decentralized, where small businesses were favored over large businesses (by very high marginal taxes on corporations etc)?
Those are uncomfortable questions in our current economic order. And I think careful application of a precautionary principle is very important in looking at how we restore justice to our economy.
5/13/16, 12:44 AM
James M. Jensen II said...
This is a marked contrast from the authoritarian, religion-hostile socialism one sees in Asia, or the religious but authoritarian socialism in countries where Simon Bolivar is the main hero.
5/13/16, 1:37 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
Unknown Deborah, yes. Again, I find that kind of thing a big turn off. Perhaps it comes from my dad. He grew up working class, but worked his way up into a job where it would have been beneficial to join club. But he never did because he had the same distaste for what he perceived as snootiness. But to each their own.
Anyway, sorry for the digression. Really enjoying this discussion of Burkean conservatism. I find myself getting more irked with some of my friends on the left lately and this helps me understand why a bit more.
5/13/16, 3:39 AM
Chris Travers said...
What I am *not* saying is that same-sex couples are excluded from a household business economy or that restoring one necessarily means changing the direction the US is going on this issue. One of the points I usually make (that I had assumed was more implicit in this conversation but I guess not) is that we don't *know* what the impact will be on SSM regarding reasserting a household business economy. We cannot say necessarily how society will evolve to support this and how it will affect same-sex couples. But we cannot rule out the US as re-establishing such an economy in a way that is inclusive of such households. In the end, I am sure, we will see less government intervention in marriage and more community intervention and that may not all cut in the same direction across the entire country even.
But again, my point is that the whole shape of modern marriage in the US is shaped by the corporate economy. This also includes gender roles to a large extent and one can see feminism as a reaction to women being stripped of power by industrialism (domestic power is work a whole lot more when most economic production takes place in and around the home). In a culture where one has not had that history of corporate economics it is hard to find parallels to same-sex marriage as it exists in the US.
I think our disagreement is less than our agreement, and I think we both agree that social and economic orders are products of their own history. That history is not the same in Utah as it is in West Virginia. It is not the same in Malaysia as it is in Indonesia. It is not the same in Sweden as it is in Germany.
As corporate collapse eventually happens in the US, SSM will be apart of the legacy of social structures that comes into play. It makes it harder to look to the past purely for models that accommodate everyone at such a point. But at the same time communities will make organic decisions about the shape of family as needed for their own survival. As I am sure you would agree, not every community will likely come up with the same answers.
So how we got here is part of the question. How it affects where we go is another one and that is murkier.
5/13/16, 3:39 AM
Ursachi Alexandru said...
5/13/16, 3:40 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Yes, no doubt the objections would be audible from the moon! ;-)! That is funny.
Thank you for the answer in relation to the removal of rights. I must confess that I was hoping that it would be otherwise. But of course, opportunity often knocks, but sometimes it is dressed in overalls and looks an awful lot like hard work.
You may be aware of the inflating housing bubble here. The bubble is inflating to absurd heights.
One of the politicians, I believe it may have been the opposition leader (but please someone correct me if I'm wrong), was reported to be touring a suburb today in Sydney where the median house price is - I believe - AU$1.5m (that's US$1.09m) and it wasn't a high end suburb. What was absurd was that the politician was spruiking policies for the forthcoming Federal election and promising to address housing affordability, whilst also promising to pursue policies that grow house prices.
Such claims are absurd because it is patently obvious to everyone (including Blind Freddy) that pursuing contradictory outcomes is simply not possible. It cannot be achieved. I mean you can't make houses both cheaper and more expensive at the same time. It is a ludicrous claim. But no one seems to have called him out on that.
Unfortunately, from my perspective so many people want to pile onto the gravy train of ever increasing house prices that I'm seriously unsure whether there is the will within our society to actually address this problem. My gut feeling is that I'm seeing an expression of greed on a massive scale, and I worry about that because it is primarily the young that are excluded and if a person only owns one house then it also becomes a meaningless gain (unless that person is increasing their debt as a result of house price inflation). It ain't good and it worries me.
I am patently unsuitable for an entry into politics as they stand today. I am much more predisposed to personal relationships with agreed to costs, benefits and obligations. And such things seem to be brushed aside nowadays in politics and that circus would drive me bananas and there would be the ever present temptation to brush the imbeciles aside.
Cheers
Chris
5/13/16, 4:13 AM
Karim said...
Greetings all!
I'd like to modify what I said a little bit as I have been thinking about the whole affair over the morning.
As I see it, fundamental principles are spin offs of a very careful examination of what tends to promote peace, justice and harmony within a society (the assumption being that we value these things, I agree that what one society considers to be peaceful, just and harmonious might not be universal but let us assume that we all more or less agree on those things).
So for example the enforcement of fundamental principles of democracy, free speech and the rule of law have the tendency (at least where I live) to promote societies that are fairer and nicer than otherwise.
Similarly the evidence that kids place mother (female figure) above father (male figure) systematically (but not always) does indicate to me that mummy is much more important than daddy (that might be a constraint of biology, but I am not sure).
Hence I would say that a family ought to be centred on a mother/female figure, hence it becomes a fundamental principle of family life.
So it follows that adoption ought to be centred on a female figure (+ another spouse as it becomes so much easier to raise kids that way, if I may say so).
So to correct what I said earlier, fundamental principles evolve out of a careful evaluation of what tends to promote peace, justice and harmony, assuming that that society values these things.
Of course, in a democracy if the majority so decides that a mummy is the same as a daddy and acts upon it, so be it, irrespective of what I say or do.
Once more, nothing in the above should be construed as an attack on single parenthood.
PS: I don't want to appear aggressive, obnoxious or otherwise. So I promise not to reply a 3rd time on the same issues.
5/13/16, 4:22 AM
fudoshindotcom said...
I will look forward to your take on a supposed "golden age".
What I meant to express was my thought that a Spiritual Conservatist would find more meaningful work now, rather than in an earlier era, as conservation becomes ever more important to our survival. Or did I misunderstand why they imagined living in an earlier time more worthwhile? Not trying to beat a dead horse here (or anywhere for that matter) but now that we're on the shadow side of the peak I would think the efforts of Conservationists become increasingly valuable.
"There are two types of people, those with guns and those who shovel.You shovel"
5/13/16, 4:36 AM
latheChuck said...
You write as if the care-givers of orphan children have the opportunity to choose between adoption into a family with
1. one male and one female parent, or
2. two same-sex parents.
In many cases, the choice is between
1. institutional care (a succession of more-or-less well-meaning but transient care-givers) up to age 18 (and then what?!), or
2. a stable home environment (with one or two full-time, permanent parents, of arbitrary gender). Only in the case of healthy white infants is there enough scarcity to make fine distinctions: age, siblings, race, wealth, location, gender, etc, and why would gender be a deal-breaker?
5/13/16, 4:54 AM
nuku said...
A friend told me she divides people into EOs=easily offended, NEOs=not easily offended. I usually try to avoid spending much time with the former.
5/13/16, 4:57 AM
Nathan Donaldson said...
5/13/16, 6:49 AM
donalfagan said...
I'm glad to see a specific discussion of the Burkean position, because I'm so tired of the incredibly elastic positions of self-described conservatives and libertarians.
5/13/16, 6:56 AM
Mark Homer said...
You seem to have slid over the issue of: when does an issue to be decided by Congress become a compelling right to be granted by the Bill of Rights? Or when does a minority have a right to be protected from the legislative majority by the courts?
At what point does the majority have the right to say, "Hey, not so fast, you Harvard/Yale Law School elitists." We want to still decide this by legislative means? Even if one agrees with the Supreme Court, their taking over the right to decide an issue is not necessarily one to be accepted without comment.
As William James suggested in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," when some people find their lives work better if they believe in an old man in the sky telling everyone what to do, that is a religious truth for them, and, usually, a legal right to be protected by the First Amendment. Notwithstanding a frequent state of war between the groups, it seems to work for them. The fact that it may short-circuit thought may even be a plus, if it allows them simply to get on with their lives. "Who asked you to butt in?" may be a legitimate constitutional argument.
5/13/16, 7:05 AM
Eric S. said...
Ok good, so it’s in the ballpark, just drawing the line in a different place (and of course, the idealists would have to deal with the fact that the place where I drew the line protects the rights –to draw in disputes discussed in the other blog- of all those pesky heterocentric Gardnerians, gender absolutist Dianics, and Folkish Heathens to have their rights to draw their boundaries where they please, so long as they aren’t providing public accommodation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Up above, I saw you mentioning that you’re going to be exploring the nature and limits of the virtue of tolerance at some point in this series. I ran across this article a few days ago that relates really strongly to the themes that have been unfolding in this blog lately, exploring the various parallel cultures in the American political landscape, the failures of the American Left, and the various code words used to denigrate the working class, and it also explores the virtues of tolerance and self-criticism, and the lines on which prejudices in the American landscape are unfolding so it seems right up there with something worth discussing on this blog (It’s also one that needs to be read through to the end to get the real impact of what it’s saying). But if you’re exploring the virtue of tolerance, it might be worth a peak:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
5/13/16, 7:16 AM
Phil Harris said...
I have not read enough Burke though I am sure you are right that he is useful in understanding 'conservatives'. I understand your dismissal of 'Ayn Rand fantasists' who stand opposed to pragmatic older traditions of history-based political conservatives. Some of the fantasists seem to have hijacked the views of our own conservatives here in Britain.
When you are talking about the value of the 'moral fabric' of collective action I could not agree more. I wonder in this context what you think about the future specifically of the Republic, and how it can secure a moral fabric within its present Constitution?
Burke of course had attached caveats to 'Democracy' while at the same time retaining ‘Monarchy’. I wonder therefore whether his support for the American Colonists was more designed to keep them within a 'reformed' monarchy? An incompetent incumbent monarch apparently could be seen as a glitch rather than as a reason to destroy and attempt to replace the monarch and associated historical collective moral fabric with 'rational written principles'.
The Republic as it turned out was to be a modern restoration of a very old idea - there were not too many republics around yet in Burke's day. I suppose arguably the Constitution has kept the continuity of moral fabric in what became the USA. Burke though had a curious notion of future Empire. Was he speaking as a voice in the English Parliament for the Colonists, as an active politician or a philosopher for his vision of a new power in the world with his own take on creating a transcendent English destiny?
One can see Burke’s appeal to Churchill the British conservative aristocrat (ref. Rapier comment this post) with an American mother. Churchill was romantic about the British Empire and the USA, and history.
Burke as you say is a model for arguing rationally the treatment and respect due to minorities and of Catholics at that time within Britain. (I suggest however that Burke as protagonist for a Catholic settlement within British Law was not a singular endeavour: it was ‘in the air’ for sometime I think? I think perhaps for example of William Cobbett the journalist politician who also stood as a conservative critic at the doorway of modern political economy and at the same time retained something more than nostalgia for the pre-Reformation and the lost mediaeval institutions and the background of rural household economy.)
best
Phil H
5/13/16, 7:59 AM
RPC said...
5/13/16, 8:52 AM
Roger said...
There's also the absurd distortion of meaning, for example of the term phobia - homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia - in mis-characterizing views with the aim of diminishing and mocking and inciting the fury of those being mocked. It's not mere distaste or disapproval, no, it's PHOBIA.
Or, for that matter, of the term "war" as in "war on women" or "war on the poor" or "war on immigrants". This "phobia" and "war" nonsense is a tool used especially by the left but no side has any monopoly on the coarsening of public discourse.
No matter which side it comes from it's all to ramp up the rage-o-meter. Say certain words and the banners unfurl and tribal drums start beating. It's to the barricades.
And while we're preoccupied on the barricades the kleptocrats feed undisturbed.
5/13/16, 9:45 AM
Karim said...
I am quite aware that care-givers have a very difficult time finding stable homes for orphans as in my line of work (optometry) I come across lots of kids and some from orphanages or from very difficult familial backgrounds.
At this point we are only having a discussion about same sex marriages and adoption from a conceptual perspective, i.e trying to find out what could be best for orphans in view of what we believe is fair and good.
My understanding is that kids need a female figure much more than a male figure.
In that sense the choice ought to be between a male/female couple or a female/female couple.
I would be extremely wary/ reluctant of sending off kids to a male/male couple due to the absence of a female/ mummy figure. In my understanding that would be an infringement of children's rights.
Now I am NOT saying that I am right and that everybody else is wrong or that my logic is unassailable, it is simply the way I feel and think about the issue.
The contingencies of actual real life certainly works in favour of same sex marriage and adoption, as after all it is better for kids to be in a stable male/male family and cared for adequately than to be into institutions. No doubt about that. But should this type of arguments be used to justify adoption by same sex couples. I don't think so.
Anyway, I'd like to thank you for your civility, lathechuck! and that of JMG too!
As I said earlier, I was very apprehensive of expressing my views on the matter on an open forum as it is clear that the tide in favour of adoption by same sex couples is unstoppable in the western world and even in Mauritius which is a fairly religious and traditionally minded country, the tide is turning among the younger generation.
For instance, my kids think that it is curious and incomprehensible that I oppose same sex marriages and adoption for instance. They think I am no longer with it! Basically a goner!
Peace to all!
5/13/16, 10:09 AM
pygmycory said...
5/13/16, 10:42 AM
over the hill and down the other side said...
I have been a Michael student for many years. Also a fan of Manly Palmer Hall and Tom Campbell (MyBigToe.com).
Basically, the approach is that Consciousness creates the world. Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the material world. The world is a "learning lab" in which we are able to experience cause and effect. (Campbell states this in geek language as "virtual reality").
Having been raised in a household with a Confederate patriot mother and a father proud of his descent from Mormon pioneers, I always thought of history as a collection of stories told to support a cause and a cast of "heroes".
Maybe this dismal view led me to embrace the Michael teachings because it offered a cosmic vision of life as a grand learning experience in which all experience--"good" or "bad"--leads to development as successive waves of humanity/creatures "go through school."
The notion of "Progress" that you so legitimately seek to demolish, seems like a degraded materialist version of this. Egalite, Fraternite, Liberte (the values of Love) seen as equal access to more and more stuff.
5/13/16, 10:42 AM
Alex Blaidd said...
What's happened of course is that neoliberalism has taken over both sides of the political spectrum.
Here's a question I have. What if the change in question is actually about returning to a state that has a long tradition? So instead of necessarily proposing something new it's about proposing to go back to the way things 'always were'? In my mind that would be seen as Burkean conservatism. For example, Corbyn's Labour want to re-nationalise our country's utilities and rail (well those in his party who don't want to put him out to dry that is). As they have been under national control for the vast majority of their existence, could that be considered conservative? Does this also mean that the idea of being exclusively either a liberal or conservative party has been abandoned by the political mainstream?
This question interests me also with regards to agriculture. If I am to explain to a farmer the benefits of a traditional grazing system, as opposed to the current practice, and I suspect that farmer to be conservative, as is usually the case, then I would be better appealing to his reverence for tradition than say in the latest published data about why traditional systems are more effective (and thus an evolution, as I might put it if I were talking to someone who was more liberally minded).
Finally may I ask if you took the systematic points of your argument with regards to equal marriage rights from a particular book?
5/13/16, 10:49 AM
David said...
Your presentation of an empiricist approach to social governance as opposed to an idealist (abstractionist?) one is fascinating. I have a definite attraction to abstract, first-principles thinking, but I am (slowly) learning that it is simply a construct rather than reality. This discussion has opened some more mental doors for me (not an unusual by-product of reading your posts, by the way). Thank you.
5/13/16, 11:03 AM
Golocyte Golo said...
It just seems like, in the circles I travel in (University circles; admittedly not representative) people are becoming more ideological, not less, and moderate voices are feeling more social pressure (and sometimes professional pressure) to take a side or keep quiet. Discourse in the media, too: I couldn't think of a leftist NYTimes commentator who doesn't explain Republican success with working class voters by saying the Repubs appeal to voters' racism in order to stay in power, where they can serve their rich masters. Similar demeaning, dismissive assertions come from the right. Views like this, which seem both common and firmly held, preclude meaningful dialogue.
I sincerely hope rational attempts at dialogue, such as appears here, can succeed. I hope you are right and I am wrong.
5/13/16, 11:10 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Chris, I think you're drawing the matter too broadly. The issue under dispute is not whether corporations have a distinct legal identity, separate from that of their CEOs, stockholders, etc; the issue is whether constitutional rights assigned to persons may be applied wholesale to corporate "persons." Those are two different issues, and it's the latter that I'm discussing.
James, a good point!
Greg, well, I'm not a fan of golfing either, and I've also had the interesting experience of being involved in Freemasonry, which used to be as nose-in-the-air and exclusive as your average country club, but has had to deal with coming down in the world over the last five decades or so!
Chris, fair enough.
Ursachi, no need to borrow the label! The only reason I use it is that it makes it easier to clarify, in this kind of public forum, what I do (and don't) believe in.
Cherokee, oh man. That's a classic. I suppose the candidate is also a firm proponent of vegetarian carnivores and celibate prostitutes, and promises to paint every house in town with light-colored black paint right after the election.
Karim, that is to say, you have an opinion. So noted.
Fudoshindotcom, thanks for the clarification. Yes, that makes sense -- though it's a recurring pattern in history that those who try to turn to the past often end up innovating the most! More on this in a future post.
Nuku, that sounds like a very good strategy!
Nathan, definitely a Juvenal attitude! Funny. But of course it's not a matter of going with the flow; the work of the conservative is to pump the brake pedal and slow things down, so the liberal whose lead foot is shoving down the gas pedal doesn't run the car into the ditch.
Donalfagan, you and me both.
5/13/16, 11:21 AM
ed boyle said...
john, this link worked with great visuals. I like your quote and the last line 'you call some place paradise
kiss it goodbye'
I was thinking about sexuality as a mental construct. Like butch, queens, jocks, etc. British heterosexual males could seem 'queer' to a latino. Cultural attitudes affect our programming of how we give and take aggession andaffection. Take snow leopards. Mild mannered indeed.star sign in same culture has similar effects which makes it so exciting. My Leo wife is so dominant and butch and I as youngest son and pisces am passive-aggressive clown.
And in straight or gay relationships, regardless, of course the personality roles take over and gay straight takes the
backseat
5/13/16, 11:37 AM
Ien in the Kootenays said...
5/13/16, 1:00 PM
Art Deco said...
This comment is actually related to last weeks post, where you asked your readers how we found you, and what effects your posts have had. But since there were already over 250 comments on the post when I found it, and this one is heading the same way, I figured you could use a break from the "Happy Anniversary" type posts ,and this certainly could wait.
I don't know what led me to this blog exactly, but it was probably a mention of the long emergency or the catabolic colapse that turned up via a google search on cheery topics like "the decline of the United States" or "the fall of cililizations", since I had just read "Collapse" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jerad Diamond. And although I recommend both books, I thought they were a bit light weight. I never really followed the peak oil or the global warming scenes on the net, because, after all, "They will think of something". An error that your blog has pointed out rather sharply.
I am sure that it wasn't a comment that led me here, because until I read your blog , I never read comments - like a true elitist , I had trained myself to not even look at comments, under the assumption that they were all worthless. A second error underlined by the quality of the discussions here.
Fifteen years ago, I bought a standard all electric fixer-upper house (with a well) in an old suburban neighborhood within walking distance of the university. The surrounding area is all agrcultural, and has a lot of Amish and Anabaptist farms so horses and buggys, farmer's markets, and craft beers are common here. We have decided to stay here come what may.
Since I started reading your blog about five years ago, I've insulated and air sealed the entire house, added a woodstove that heats it well (and a woodpile that ate about 500 sq ft of my back yard), a small vegetable garden that took another 500 sq ft of backyard, and a rainwater catchement system that feeds a lilly pond and waters the garden. I have had the existing apple and pear trees pruned and fertilized in hopes of making hard cider in the fall, and added solar panels on the roof. My electric bill is now tiny, and my diet is much improved.
These are all positive effects of your writing, but you have made it clear that they will not be nearly enough - without fossil fuels for the chainsaw and jeep I'd never be able to process enough wood for the winter, and the garden would need to be at least four times it's current size to provide a basic diet for a couple. So be it - I'm certainly ahead of where I was (and where my friends and neighbors are) as regards our physical resilience. I thank you for that.
On psychological/spiritual resilience, I am no Druid, but I have been studying my ancestor's old stories and lore about the Celtic civilizations that existed before the Romans took over Europe a few thousand years ago, and I believe the preindustrial iron age could have actually provided a pretty good life for most people, so I have less/little fear for my decendants at the end of the current empire. Perhaps the end of the Kübler-Ross denial and anger phases; but I don't think so - I am still mad as hell at my generation(Boomers), but I'm working on getting over it. I thank you for that too.
Finally on this weeks post, I don't imagine that wedding cakes for same sex marriages is really a big issue for most of your readers - it is a non issue for me as both my grown children are in long term committed relationships (complete with mortgage and children) but are not married. Next time you feel like offending a lot of readers consider abortions or gun control here in the US - both, after all involve killing humans and will certainly stir up trolls.
ArtDeco at artdecohq.wordpress.com
5/13/16, 1:19 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
As noted before, I am a paleoconservative and my views tend to be pretty far to the right. But I like Sanders and I think he is by far the best of the candidates for the Presidency this time around. Many of the people I know are Sanders supporters, including a few of my conservative friends. The local Democratic Party caucuses in area where I live drew a huge and enthusiastic turnout of Sanders supporters, especially among the young. But thanks to the way the Democratic Party establishment has rigged the game, Hillary walked away with most of the delegates from my state. So much for democracy in the Democratic Party, hehehe...
My former boss, who is a lifelong New Deal Democrat and is now retired, is a diehard Sanders supporter and regularly gets grief from his fellow salary class white liberals, who are mostly backing Hillary. He wears his status as the resident heretic and class traitor as a badge of honor.
Like you, if Sanders can manage to pull an upset victory, I will vote for him, but there is no way on Mam Gaia's green Earth I will vote for Hillary. In that case, I will vote for Trump but will do so with serious misgivings. I can see why Russell Kirk voted for the Socialist candidate in the 1944 elections as a matter of principle.
5/13/16, 1:31 PM
Jon from Virginia said...
After rejecting a number of brittle and mean responses, I believe I would accept the order, and since baking is about joy, I would donate a door prize--a smaller cake that says Celebrate Open Carry -with a logo of the Huey P Newton gun club in icing.
5/13/16, 1:32 PM
Don Plummer said...
We all know how that turned out. So please pardon me if I'm more than a little skeptical of Trump's comments that fall along a similar line of thinking.
5/13/16, 1:41 PM
zach bender said...
Burkean conservatism may suggest a longstanding consensus is sufficient to justify this, but it does not foreclose a conversation about whether allowing a business which offers goods and services to the public can refuse the custom of homosexuals or transgendered or whatever by attributing its bigotry to a "religious" belief.
Assuming there is (or was) in fact a consensus, the Burkean can ask whether allowing the practice to continue inflicts a harm that "should" be ameliorated, and if changing the rules might foreseeably lead to a greater harm.
One might also consider whether allowing businesses to refuse to serve various classes of people based on these purported beliefs helps to perpetuate a culture in which blacks, women, homosexuals, etc. are relegated to a second class of citizenship.
Or does the Burkean argue that a consensus that treats these individuals as somehow less than full members of the community is a consensus that should be respected?
5/13/16, 2:02 PM
Scotlyn said...
5/13/16, 2:29 PM
Candace said...
@ Chris Travers "feminism" really is just the idea that women are people. The notion that women have some special claim to power in a domestic economy is not true. They only had power if their partner recognized that a woman had more knowledge about what was going on I that sphere. They were accorded respect the same way the master of the manor respects his butler or housekeeper.
5/13/16, 3:04 PM
Unknown said...
The Court Jester, you wrote, "You know the quote: "A country gets the government that it deserves". Put another way: A government cannot exceed the quality of its people. So if a country wants a better government, the people must up is game. The fact that world politics is dysfunctional, this is merely a reflection that the people are dysfunctional."
I think this only applies to countries which are able to exercise some freedom of choice. IMO Lebanon does not have the government it deserves; it has the government that Syria and other powers in the area allow it to have. Israel, I'm sorry to say, has the government it deserves. Iran got its current government on the rebound from shaking off the government imposed upon it by the CIA and Great Britain. If that government is still in place in twenty years, perhaps the Iranians will deserve it.
The same analysis applies to the Western Hemisphere. Canadians and Argentinians have the governments they deserve. Honduras and Guatemala, not so much.
5/13/16, 3:15 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
http://snafu-solomon.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-current-administration-has-just.html
http://snafu-solomon.blogspot.com/2016/05/and-societal-decay-speeds-upft-worth.html
The gent who runs the blog is an African-American conservative from the Deep South. There are a lot of people out there who are fed up with the antics of the SJW's and the rest of the activist Left and not all of them are wage class whites. More and more, I am seeing a deep undercurrent of anger and rage building, which Donald Trump and the alt right are tapping into.
I think that if things continue the way they have, we will eventually see open warfare and blood in the streets. So far, I think the right has exercised quite a lot of restraint because most conservatives still believe in playing by the rules. But continuing to play by the rules doesn't make much sense when you are dealing with people who not only use intimidation and bullying tactics as a matter of routine, but get the government to do a lot of their bullying for them. We also know that the activist Left has effectively seized control of institutions like the courts, the mainstream media, the public school system and academia. So again, why should those on the right continue to play by the rules when it's a rigged game run by people who hate them and everything they stand for?
I think we will see a major insurgency within a decade or two, if not a full blown civil war, in part because the activist Left just keeps pushing and pushing and insists on demonizing and marginalizing those who don't agree 100 percent with the SJW agenda. Push people too far and they will rebel, especially if they feel they have nothing to left to lose.
Sooner or later, people are going to realize that if you keep giving into bullying tactics, you only encouraging the bullies to push even harder, just like Hitler did in the 1930's until he miscalculated in 1939 and found himself in a war with the British and French. One of the reasons why I think Trump's candidacy and the alt right movement are so significant is because it shows people are starting to fight back against the radical Left.
William Lind believes we are headed for another American civil war and even wrote a novel on the subject. The first half of Victoria is available free online over at Traditional Right. The prospect scares the hell out of me, but at this point, if we continue going down the road we have been going as a society, I think its probably inevitable. As someone said earlier in the comments section, those who make peaceful protest impossible make violent revolution inevitable and that is exactly what the SJW's and the rest of the political correctness crowd are doing.
5/13/16, 3:24 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
5/13/16, 4:48 PM
Caryn said...
Just have to say I am flabbergasted you use the term 'butt-hurt'. I must be older than you to think of this as a naughty word!
It's nice to be back online and Thank You for the (for me) introduction of Burkean Conservatism. I will have to look into it further. One thing that keeps popping up in my mind about your explanation of it, particularly as illustrated with the example of the same sex marriage and Christian bakery - and the comparison of the wedding cake to life saving pharmaceuticals is that this common sense Burkean approach works best and perhaps can only work in a much smaller country. (?) What keeps popping up in my head is that the USA is simply too big to manage in any one-size-fits-all structure. You inevitably end up with laws trying to cover all bases with silly consequences or a labyrinth of a gazillion laws trying to distinguish- and cover all bases. In a country of 300 million peeps, too many bases!
I think the argument of comparing the wedding cake to life-saving pharmaceuticals is valid under the premise that in establishing a law of forced-commerce safeguards the unpopular minority needing the life-saving drugs. It's an umbrella law, safeguarding the accessibility of commerce; so while absurd when talking about a wedding cake, it is rational when it must (because of scale) include talking about all commercial products, (because that will include necessary, even life saving ones).
To apply this Burkean common sense approach - to distinguish between fripperies like wedding cakes, possible necessities like the one grocery store in a food-desert-locale and absolutely necessary ones like the life-saving drugs, I think many more laws or more intricately written laws would be necessary. e.g.: definition of minority status, or number of followers in % to the whole region of minority religious followers, level of necessity of the goods in question, etc. In a massive population and geography like the USA, I just don't see how it can work very well. It becomes far too cumbersome. Well, I think that's what the USA has got now and it doesn't work very well at all.
I have often thought the natural 'evolution' of the USA, not to mention some other huge countries, is disintegration back into smaller separate nations which can be more cohesively governed and where these distinctions can be managed because the scale is smaller, (fewer bases to cover.) I don't feel pro or con for this, I just think it is what will, perhaps must happen. Do you think this is true?
@Karim: I understand and respect your concern. I was going to point out to you 2 things re: same sex couples and adoption. One was what lathe chuck said. ('Nuff said.) The other was just a gentle reminder that human gender identity and traits are not binary, they're on a spectrum. There are definitely some men, whether gay or straight who are by nature more nurturing, unconditionally loving, 'mothering' and possessing of what we would consider feminine sensibilities, especially towards children; some females, both gay and straight, who possess traits we would more traditionally associate with masculinity. I see this crossing of lines a lot amongst the male and female teachers at my place of work / primary school. In my 54 years of wanderings on this earth, I gather the suspicion that we silly humans cross those lines far more often than is generally thought, and far more often than NOT! We just don't talk about it.
The other thought that keeps popping up for me is that we silly humans are like herding cats. We seem bent on defying any cohesive political or societal structure or even gosh darnit - gender behavior!
5/13/16, 5:50 PM
nuku said...
If The Myth Of Progress is
“a degraded materialist version of..a cosmic vision of life as a grand learning experience in which all experience--"good" or "bad"--leads to development as successive waves of humanity/creatures "go through school"
are you saying that the degraded version is to be rightly demolished, but the cosmic version of Progress (development, getting better and better, etc) is not a myth? Could you contemplate subjecting this idea of “cosmic” Progress to the same kind of critique that JMG has applied to the limited “material” version? And if you did that, might it turn out that Progress is a myth on any level?
It seems to me that Progress is not a universal aspect of reality, but always subject to a limited/defined context. If my goal is to get from A to B, then progress is simply defined as “getting closer to/arriving at B“. If I’m just wandering around the countryside more or less at random, getting closer to B isn’t progress.
5/13/16, 6:07 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Eric, exactly. The place at which the right of free association gives way to the right of equality in public accommodation is something that has to be negotiated by political means, and will inevitably be a compromise that leaves extremists on all sides unsatisfied. Many thanks for the link!
Phil, the destiny of constitutional government in the United States is a huge question, and one that's probably going to need a series of posts all on its own. At the moment, the bipartisan kleptocracy is blatantly ignoring the constitution, and the radicals on both sides are just as happy to tear it down; unless that can be reversed, I don't see much hope of anything other than a straightforward descent into Caesarism. Can it be reversed? We'll talk about that further on.
RPC, that's a very helpful criterion!
Roger, oh, granted. The left is yelling about the war on women and the right is yelling about the war on Christianity, and meanwhile what's left of the rule of law and the politics of compromise and civility goes gurgling down the drain. One virtue of the Burkean conservative approach is that it offers a way to step back from the barricades.
Over the Hill, good. Philosophy shows us that the collection of appearances we call "matter" are an epiphenomenon of consciousness, not vice versa -- you can get that from Schopenhauer or Berkeley just as well as from the Upanishads or the Michael Teachings -- and from that standpoint, the study of history is a way of seeking to understand the transformations of consciousness over time. The heroic-cause school of history suffers from what Blake called "single vision," the flattening out of experience into a one-dimensional movement; the same is true, equally, of the myth of progress, or for that matter Marxism and its equivalents. History is so much richer than that!
Alex, I consider Jeremy Corbin to be one of the few actual conservatives in British political life, and Bernard Sanders to be a close equivalent on this side of the pond. Both of them want to scrap some policies that have failed, and go back to earlier policies that worked -- and in both cases, that strikes me as an excellent idea. More generally, you're quite correct -- saying "why don't we go back to what worked" is an eminently conservative idea, as well as an eminently sensible one, and the fact that the Tories on your side of the pond and the pseudoconservatives on ours simply want to go charging ahead in a course of radical change that has consistently failed to bring about the results they claimed it would -- well, that right there shows that they're not conservative in any meaningful sense. We have too many free-market Jacobins in conservative clothing these days!
David, you're most welcome!
5/13/16, 6:10 PM
Shane W said...
perhaps Violet can explain better, but gender is definitely not binary, nor arbitrarily biological. It's a spectrum, from gay guys like me who are androgynous, with a definitely feminine mind in the way I flirt, or even dominate, sexually, yet am more than happy with my male parts, my red body hair, etc., to someone like Violet, who's way more on the feminine side. The gender spectrum exists in all sexualities, but, IMHO, is more pronounced in the LGBT community. I say this, because there are lots of maternal gay men out there, fulfilling a maternal role to their children. Just because there are two men does not mean that there is not necessarily a maternal figure(s) or maternal role(s) in the household. Now one may discuss gender "confusion", but anthropology and human history is rich w/people outside the gender norms of their culture. Atypical gender is found in a minority of people in almost all cultures.
There's also been a lot of discussion about the South. Perhaps Bill can shed more light on this, but the South is the nation's most conservative region, in the true Burkean sense of the word. We regard change with suspicion, give great deference to the existing order of things, and make change much more slowly than other parts of the country, particularly the Northeast and West Coast. Many people confuse our conservatism with being reactionary, which most of us are not. Regarding the collapse of Christianity and the acceptance of same sex marriage, it is happening here as well, albeit more slowly and cautiously, in true Southern conservative fashion. Counties and cities that for years voted dry every time a wet/dry election came up are voting wet. Even hard liquor is sold and bars are open on Sundays in places where that never was the case before. Church attendance is declining here as elsewhere. Now, we are still the Bible Belt, which means that compared to, say, NYC, we're a very religiously Christian kind of place. But that is an apples to oranges comparison. Compared to our past, we are less religious, and the Baptists and other evangelical denominations have much less sway over our politics and our people than they once did. Young evangelicals, particularly college educated ones, are very tolerant of same sex marriage, and have assured me that it's all a matter of time of waiting for the old opponents to die off/step down before changes are made regarding LGBT issues in evangelical churches.
Now, this doesn't set well with certain "progressives", who should proclaim victory and move on to other issues. A discussion with an older lesbian a few months ago reminded me of what JMG said in a recent post about white privilege dying, and how certain people will be flailing at ghosts of dead -isms, if I may paraphrase, as the world changes. This lesbian was railing all against the evils of the Christians as if it were still 1985, fighting the good fight of yesteryear. Personally, I think she needs to get out more and meet more people of different ages and beliefs than herself, and then she'd find out how much younger evangelicals have changed.
5/13/16, 6:19 PM
Shane W said...
Regarding marriage, I think the biggest mistake was eliminating common law marriage. In this day and age, it would be a great benefit recognizing in law cohabitating couples. I read where it was eliminated starting in the late 19th-early 20th century as a form of social engineering to push people into legal marriage. I think reviving common law marriage makes a lot of sense--Canada, for example, never eliminated it. Does anyone know more about the history of the push to eliminate common law marriage?
Regarding country clubs, we belonged to one growing up, and I can say that there are different classes of country clubs, some more exclusive/elite than others. For example, the most elite one in Lexington was Idle Hour, then Lexington Country Club, then on down from there. Small town country clubs tend to be less elite, less extravagant, and more congenial. There was an urban legend about Idle Hour that one of the black staff fell in the pool once, upon which the pool was emptied and scrubbed to a t. I also heard that it was anti-Semitic, as well, perhaps Ahavah can shed more light on that...
Regarding traditional cultures and homosexuality, many traditional cultures have found homosexuality beneficial. Having adults who don't procreate around to help with childrearing and other tasks can be useful, and many traditional cultures had specific roles for their queer folk. It wasn't until colonialism and the spread of Christianity, Islam, and industrialism that many cultures became homophobic. Even in our modern, Western culture, gay people are known for adopting the most at-risk, least "desirable" children. If that's not a social benefit, then I don't know what is.
5/13/16, 6:20 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ed, oh, granted! One of the good things about the recent loosening of gender roles is that it gives more room for the people involved in any given marriage to adjust the terms of their relationship to better suit their own needs. It used to be scandalous for the husband to stay at home and the wife to work -- my wife's great-aunt and great-uncle did that, and took oceans of flack for it -- but there are plenty of couples where that's far and away the most sensible arrangement. Other examples could be cited by the ream.
Ien, yes, it's been discussed at great length already. I'd be fine with having a group of Pagans win the right to celebrate Beltane with an outdoor orgy -- for that matter, I'm told that some already do so. Whether you're tired of giving reasonable accommodation to religious minorities or not, it's a well-established custom in American public life, and one I support.
Art Deco, thank you! It's exactly because wedding cakes for same sex couples is such a petty issue that it makes a great touchstone here; we can watch the self-righteous indignation boil up, compare it with what's actually under discussion, and chuckle.
Submarine, glad to hear it. There's a real chance that the next decade or so will see a complete repolarization of American politics, in which what now passes for the bipartisan conventional wisdom inside the DC beltway becomes recognized as one of several options, and a party supporting those policies has to contend with another party whose views embrace the middle ground between Trump and Sanders. I for one would look forward to that.
Jon, funny! The interesting thing is that I know people in gun clubs who would be glad to take it.
Don, oh, I know. There's always the possibility that he'll do the same kind of bait and switch that Obama did, and adopt all the policies he claimed he was going to reject. The point is that with Clinton, we know exactly what we're getting.
Zach, excellent -- you're digging yourself in deeper. Each of your questions is an attempt, in increasingly heated language, to try to extract a grand abstract principle from the pragmatic agreement among most Americans that religious minorities should be given reasonable accommodation where this does not impose undue burdens on the rights of others. That sort of reflexive principle-seeking, and the heated language as well, is of course absolutely standard these days, and it leads to exactly the sort of intractable political stalemate we've got today: each side is insisting, "If you support this policy, you must therefore support this grand abstract principle," and out come the straw men, to be battered to bits in the usual fashion. What I'm suggesting, of course, is that the approach in which you're engaged is a bad idea, and an approach based on pragmatic agreements negotiated on a case by case basis is a much better way to enable people of widely differing opinions to live together in relative peace.
5/13/16, 6:29 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Submarine, there I think you're mistaken. I think it's very likely that we'll see a domestic insurgency or an open civil war here in the US in the next decade, but it won't be because of the antics of a few pampered, affluent would-be radicals -- the "social justice warriors" you mention. It'll be because of the increasing impoverishment and immiseration of most Americans, carried out by the current bipartisan consensus, for the benefit of the affluent 20% or so. Both sides in the recent "culture wars" have done their share of bullying, of course, and it does not impress me that both sides are so ready to condone their own bullying and whine incessantly when they get some of their own medicine fed to them! The current social-justice scene, though, is well into circular firing squad territory, and between that and the impending collapse of the American university system, I don't think there'll be much left of that scene by the time the bullets start flying.
Robert, elegant! Thank you.
5/13/16, 6:40 PM
onething said...
But I'm surprised you say that the prior sexual morality didn't make much difference to the frequency of extramarital and premarital sex. I'm pretty sure that back in the day virginity was the general rule for most young women before marriage. Extramarital affairs may be a different matter.
I'm also pretty sure that the reason that most societies the world over had exactly the same expectations of their young women was that they could not afford a lot of unwed motherhood, which puts the burden on the family of origin, such as the girl's father. A family that allows much of this will lose out in the Darwinian sense because human children are so unbelievably labor intensive to raise that you need the commitment of two main adults do accomplish it. Before the industrial revolution, people just could not afford it.
5/13/16, 6:54 PM
Shane W said...
5/13/16, 6:57 PM
onething said...
When oh when have they ever, ever done so? Jews and their businesses, Muslims and their businesses have for centuries upon centuries lived near one another and never turned away business! Christians also, when not too isolated have not turned away customers.
5/13/16, 7:01 PM
Justin said...
Changes to human biology aside (JMG, have you read Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy?) it seems to me like the healthiest way of assigning children to men is to have the male relatives of the mother, rather than the biological father being the male caretakers. However, societies based on the nuclear/extended family, where most men end up reproducing have obviously been very successful. One thing I haven't been able to find out about the matrilineal model is the rate at which men who live to puberty successfully reproduce.
There is some evidence that historically, across cultures, a much greater proportion of women who make it to adulthood reproduce compared to men meeting the same criteria. It does seem to me like it matters how reproductive success is distributed among men especially, because there is reason to suggest that women's reproductive success is far more equal due to biological limitations.
I'd like to beat the horse I buried earlier. I think that sexuality is more fluid than we like to pretend it is. In situations where the opposite sex is not readily available, I suspect that a reasonable percentage of people would go for it if there were few consequences. I would argue that in societies where most men do not reproduce, but the energy and perhaps anger of those men is necessary for the society, prohibitions on homosexuality serve a 'utilitarian' purpose in preventing defection.
I try and pay attention to sociological trends, even ones I don't identify with, and the expulsion of gay men from the professionally oppressed has been quite a surprise. I also read that something like 50% of gay men in France voted for Front Nationale. It's pretty clear that the social-justice scene has no clothes.
5/13/16, 7:38 PM
LewisLucanBooks said...
PS: Ruth Goodman ("How to be a Victorian", numerous YouTube videos on daily life in various historic eras, etc. etc.) has a new book out. "How to be a Tudor: A Dawn to Dusk Guide to Tudor Life." I always pick up a bit of craft or lore from her books or films that make my life a little more "green" and simpler. Lew
5/13/16, 8:22 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
As a bisexual druid I have to say I'd really rather live in a society in which I have the right to engage in rituals which make people uncomfortable (which appears to be all of them for some reason) regardless of how it makes other people feel than one where I can get a wedding cake from someone who thinks it immoral to serve me if I end up marrying another male. If the cost of religious tolerance is letting people refuse to make wedding cakes for people marrying others of the same gender, then that's fine with me. Besides, it's probably better to get the cake from somewhere else anyway, I wouldn't trust the person to make it at full quality (whether concious of that or not).
The funny thing about dealing with people and societies is there are often no right answers, however I think trying to force everyone to be tolerant just will not work, and quite likely will backfire. So where possible without causing undue harm (and that likely will have to be decided on a case by case basis, I can't think of any way to codify this into a rule I'd be comfortable with in all cases) I think religious tolerance is a good idea, even if it causes issues.
5/13/16, 8:47 PM
Nastarana said...
5/13/16, 10:14 PM
HalFiore said...
First, though I found myself in almost total agreement with every position you took in your SSM example, and I especially appreciate the way you developed the argument as a series of highly, well, rational cumulative steps, I was left with an uneasy feeling at the end. In short, it seemed to me that at every step, the decisions were somewhat arbitrary. E.g., Does the government have a compelling interest? You give an example which you believe constitutes a legitimate compelling interest, and then basically assert that, no, there is no such comparable need. As much as I agree on the matter, I don't see how that's anything but an opinion that you and I share.
Now, maybe you are saying that if enough people agree, from a Burkean position, a right has been established, as long as the agreement exists. Fair enough, but I don't see how this can be used as an argument, in the court of public opinion, to establish the right in the first place.
The second is the same as a comment I made, also too late to get an answer, in the post before your recent sabbatical:
"I find it ironic that, as a self described Burkean conservative, you seem to be favoring the two revolutionaries in the running [for the current election], while roundly dismissing the more institutional candidates." [I then gave some personal opinions that are not so relevant to the current post.]
And then:
"I am persuaded in my old age that revolutions are almost never a good thing. That is, that they always cause a lot of collateral damage and more often than not produce a worse situation than they overthrew. I think Burke would agree." [Though you give the counter-example in this post of his support of the American Revolution, would you so equate the conditions of the colonies under British colonial rule to the current discomforts of average Americans today? Or is this another case of if enough of us think we have a right?
To that end, I might as well throw in one more comment from that post:
"I don't want to minimize the fear and pain that a lot of people are going through these days, but I am especially flummoxed by the people commenting here that equate Sanders and Trump as more or less interchangeable agents of bringing down the status quo, as if they are suffering intolerable hardship and are willing to do anything to just mess things up. I suspect a lot of these people are actually pretty comfortable in their own lives, at least on the scale of worldwide comfort or how bad things can be in this country, also." [Well, I might have put that better, but it seems to me that there is a pretty high burden placed on anyone wanting to advocate revolution from a Burkean position.
So, how would you present a Burkean argument for Sanders or Trump? I just don't see it.
Oh, and since I was in travel mode last week, I also wanted to give a hearty congratulation and big thank-you for the service you've been providing for the last 10 years in this blog. I am especially thankful that the writing of this blog has resulted in a respectable number of very fine books, some of which sit on my bookshelves, and some of which have been passed on to others I thought were ready for your message. While we have not always had the warmest of interactions, I take a lot away from what you have to say, even when it has been aimed pretty sharply in my direction.
5/13/16, 11:16 PM
Mark Mikituk said...
I am most certainly in the classic liberal category you mentioned, though I would probably just call myself someone with idealist tendencies, and yourself someone with pragmatist tendencies. What struck me most is something I think you said in the comments; that classic conservatives and liberals make good contrary powers (paraphrase, sorry if that sounds off).
Within my own mind, I cultivate the tendency to always doubt as a counter to my idealism or hope. I could imagine a moderate Burkean like yourself cultivating a contrary tendency to consider hoping for something better at times. In terms of imagery one might see the classic liberal as the eternal youth, and the classic conservative as the wise old man.
Regards,
MM
5/13/16, 11:17 PM
MG said...
One quick question, that occurred to me when reading these wise sentences: "The existing laws and institutions of a society, Burke proposed, grow organically out of that society’s history and experience, and embody a great deal of practical wisdom. They also have one feature that the abstraction-laden fantasies of world-reformers don’t have, which is that they have been proven to work. Any proposed change in laws and institutions thus needs to start by showing, first, that there’s a need for change; second, that the proposed change will solve the problem it claims to solve; and third, that the benefits of the change will outweigh its costs. Far more often than not, when these questions are asked, the best way to redress any problem with the existing order of things turns out to be the option that causes as little disruption as possible, so that what works can keep on working."
I profoundly agree with these principles, but I'm also aware that Tainter's work urges us to prevent our societies from becoming more and more complex (or even to decrease their level of complexity, if we think we've been on an overshoot). As I understand it, on the one hand we sometimes have no choice but to add new layers of complexity (when we face new problems too big to be ignored), so that on the other hand we should desperately try to find out what "old" layers of complexity could be removed without causing too much harm, and how to remove them gently.
That is to say, I think that simplifying our institutions meets the "need for change" criterion just quoted. I guess it fits the "benefits outweigh the costs" criterion too, but I'm not sure (one could argue that trying to buy time before collapse is pointless). What I'm sure of, is that it would inevitably cause more disruption that reformists are usually willing to accept, and that it will involve discarding things that worked, at least in some sense.
After all, even the most bureaucratic systems grew "organically out of history and experience"!
Hence the question: what happens when Burke meets Tainter?
(By the way, I would be very happy to hear from Mr. Carr soon!)
5/14/16, 1:00 AM
Alex Blaidd said...
Interestingly, I think the only chance Corbyn has of getting into power is if we vote to leave the EU, which could potentially see the capitulation of the Tories. Whilst I'd rather we 'bremain' it would make some very interesting watching to see what happens if we did leave. It would be a time to get the popcorn out for sure. (the 'brexit' camp are using the appeal to novelty fallacy. Most people don't love the EU, but then the alternative could be so much worse when our country could be turned into a massive neo-liberal tax haven with Murdoch pulling even more of the strings)
Whilst Corbyn won't stave off the decline of the West, I think 5 or 10 years of him could at least mean that the UK would maintain and keep its ailing infrastructure and public services - which will come very handy in the decades to come - that reason alone should mean everyone votes Labour (and I've never actually voted Labour before myself). 5 or 10 more years of the Tories, which terrifyingly is very possible, at least for 5 more years, and I don't think we'll have a rail system anyone can afford, an NHS, nor a steel industry and we'll probably be stocked to the brim with nuclear power plants and fracking (though perhaps when the fracking bubble bursts it would put an end to that, I hope), though doubt it. Corbyn would oppose all that and with a bit of PQE - we're printing money anyway, so may as well get something useful out of it, we could see our basic infrastructure and industries in decent shape for the decline.
But I don't think he'll get in. The Tories will lay on the fear of terrorism and the Middle East, and of immigration and when it comes to those topics, Corbyn is seen unfavourably by most people, and his comments don't help the issue. In a way his issue is that he needs to play a bit more politics, but then, it's his unwillingness to compromise on his principles that have led to his recent popularity.
I know you don't like to comment on the politics outside of the US much, but I'm wondering whether you might write a post about the fate of America's allies when the US empire finally collapses? That might be enough of a reason for you to write it ; )
5/14/16, 1:03 AM
Mikep said...
5/14/16, 1:59 AM
Tripp said...
I love the boycott. I'm a boycott master. I haven't darkened the door of a BP since the Deepwater Horizon spill, but more importantly, I'm slowly winding down my participation in the automobile culture in general. Not fast enough to be sure, but man, that's a tough one, especially for rural folks where the social geography of the deindustrial future has barely begun to make in-roads into the current asinine layout.
Just ordered my subscription to Into the Ruins! Really looking forward to it. I've enjoyed getting to know a few of the promised authors in this first edition a little better around here over the years.
@LewisLucanBooks: thanks for the shout out last week! We have haunted more than one comments section together now for quite some time, haven't we? Been fun. Wish you could see my potato patch this spring. Best ever.
5/14/16, 2:24 AM
latheChuck said...
What people really seem to want, though, is to personally occupy the "exclusive" neighborhoods that they currently can't afford. "Make THOSE houses more affordable for ME, but not for my obnoxious neighbors." When we hear the phrase "affordable housing" around here (Washington DC area), it's heard as "places to live for people who you don't want to live with". Affordable housing is a fine thing, as long as it's Not In My Back Yard. (By the way, I'm not representing my own attitude here, but the attitudes I see reflected in news reports when housing projects are proposed.)
With both housing and higher education, making it "affordable" now depends on making government-backed loans available to the consumer. I heard last night that about 30% of cars on our highways are now leased, not purchased, because people can't afford to buy the cars they want. Will people ever learn that if they can't afford to buy that car, they really can't afford to lease it, either?
5/14/16, 4:19 AM
Karim said...
@ Candace, Caryn, Shane W and lathechuck
I am pleasantly surprised by the gentleness and civility with which you have responded to my concerns. It is deeply appreciated. I thank you very much for that.
I accept that my position about sex and gender identity and maternal roles was somehow outmoded and in need of revision in view of the complexity of human nature.
As usual, I meant no offense to anyone on these delicate issues that go to the very core of our humanity.
Salaam, Peace be upon you all....
Karim
5/14/16, 5:18 AM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
Another great post. Keep 'em coming!
I was not at all acquainted with Burkean conservative thought, let alone the moderate version thereof, prior to you bringing it up in previous comments on other blog posts. You piqued my interest, and so I did a bit of research on Burke and how contemporaries frame him in defense of their ideological perspective. I was not impressed, but on the other hand, your commentary of Burkean principles and application to a contemporary social "challenge" achieved a nice "middle ground" that a majority of people from various ideological hues can understand, if not more than partially accept.
At first, I was quite intrigued that Burke defended the American Revolution and not the French Revolution, but can now understand why. A bit of a diversion here, but my own studies have led me to the view that the American Revolution was nothing more than a proxy war between continental European monarchs and financial interests versus the British Crown's imperial adventures in the New World. The mythologies built up around freedom and "fighting the man" are quaint, although one should not miss the irony in the suppression of both Shay's and the Whiskey Rebellions. Also, one must only analyze the interests and actions of more than a minority of founding fathers on the topic of land and property to see that the notions of greed and class warfare were just alive and well back then as they are today. (cf. Hutchinson, "Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence, 1776)
Be that is it may (or may not!), Burkean's support of the American Revolution makes him seem less conservative, counterintuitively, to the esteemed Baruch Spinoza and his thoughts on revolution. I don't know much about the Neo-pagan scene or Druidry, but would be surprised if the core of Spinozan thought--the unity of Nature--doesn't strike a chord.
I would be interested in your views on the myths of American Revolution, revolution in general, and Spinoza, if time and space permits.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts :-)
5/14/16, 6:44 AM
PRiZM said...
My apologies for a belated congratulations on 10 years of The Archdruid Report, and a belated thank you! I've kept coming back to this blog week after week for nearly 8 years despite the many huge changes in my life because what you've written has influenced my thinking and perception on matters in a way that challenges my thinking. I honestly can't thank you enough, and I'm glad that I have been able to drop a tip in the jar over these years and when the opportunity arises in the future I will do so again.
With that said, this weeks post was another great, insightful, eye-opening post. A part that really stood at to me was as follows:
The precautionary principle? That’s the common-sense rule that before you do anything, you need to figure out whether it’s going to do more good than harm.
I can't help but think how in our society today, both domestically in the USA, and globally, the way we are being educated has eradicated a lot of our ability to reason using common sense. Further, that our education and experiences have not helped many of us, myself included, to develop the ability to see the consequences of many of our actions besides what the immediate result may be.
With that in mind, is perhaps next weeks post going to be delving into the much needed discussion of education problems and reform?
5/14/16, 7:03 AM
cris said...
Long time reader, first time commenter.
Thank you for writing the ADR. For what it's worth, I think it's very valuable stuff, though one should expect as much from a combination of a sense of what's important, wide perspective, extensive knowledge, deep understanding, clear thinking, good argumentation, eloquence and (hard?) work :)
This week's post is particularly valuable because, although it treats an important subject (that concerns all of us) at a quite elementary level, it manages to teach most of us quite a bit.
Can I suggest that you please consider doing something similar with the subject of practical ethics? It is a related subject and from your take on practical politics I surmise you favor some kind of consequentialism but there are many blanks to fill in. I suggest that though difficult, the subject of practical ethics is very relevant to your blog, since its theme is "...how should we then live?".
5/14/16, 7:23 AM
David said...
5/14/16, 7:25 AM
Roger said...
Can't remember who said this but the US system smells a lot like the British system, each of the American institutions being re-workings of their British predecessors with the President an elected king.
Maybe specific issues currently generating the greatest heat and fury are those that came not out of organic growth but abstract principles. Imagine the Obama administration resisting the urge to do a superiority dance on the "problem" of trans-gender school washrooms and change-room facilities.
Is there anything that generates more anger than abortion rights? Can you argue that the US Supreme Court stopped the process of organic growth on the issue of abortion? Or is it the other way around, that the Supreme Court decision was the culmination of the process? But imagine the Supreme Court never hearing or deciding Roe v Wade.
On this side of the border our Supreme Court overturned legislation on abortion long ago. The court's intent was for legislatures to revamp those laws. But there's been nothing of the sort and, since that time, women, doctors and hospitals have been left to their own devices with no politician willing to pick up what is seen as a white-hot, no-win issue. I wish I could say that it's been a form of Burkean wisdom at work here.
What about organic growth on the issue of slavery? No doubt, slavery is a stain on the national honour (and, before Canuck commenters start doing our own little superiority dance, we have to remember our own calamities). But there are those that claim that slavery in the Unites States in the mid 1800s wasn't long for this world anyway (ie with the advent of mechanization) and maybe the civil war that came out of the dispute was the worst way forward. Imagine an alternative history where abolitionists were told to curb their enthusiasm because slavery is doomed as a business model and that in any case individual states each have to find their own way forward. So imagine as a consequence slavery going away on its own as a product of technological and economic change. And no secession and no war. Imagine present day politics without the legacy of that conflict. I suppose the main question is would economic and social circumstances of Black people have been better as a result? Or worse?
5/14/16, 7:51 AM
Barry McMullin said...
Nice to see the hat tip to Edmund Burke; I can't resist commenting, as I pass him by most days of the week, on College Green in front of Trinity College Dublin: http://tinyurl.com/zm9jhc2
(The statue is still here, though the top hats are no longer compulsory. ;-))
Picking up on a comment from Iuval, I too would commend the somewhat more recent work of Karl Popper on "piecemeal social engineering" (first in his short booklet, "The Poverty of Historicism", and then at length in "The Open Society and its Enemies"):
http://www.iep.utm.edu/popp-pol/
On Popper's part this view of political philosophy was directly connected to his radical view of knowledge: that all knowledge (and he did mean "all") is preliminary, tentative, and fallible - but useful, and improvable, nonetheless. It follows, of course, that Popper's own views must be held open to criticism, so here's a nice critique or elaboration of his piecemeal social engineering, to defend "piecemeal utopian political reform":
http://www.reasonpapers.com/pdf/26/rp_26_3.pdf
Which arguably is a fair description of Samuel Alexander's most recent analysis and response to our impending global collision with limits:
https://t.co/U1bRMg8YNW
This is nicely encapsulated in what I've just decided to dub "Alexander's Paradox" (though maybe our Archdruid might reasonably claim priority?):
"So where does that leave us? In the paradoxical position, I would argue, of knowing that a planned transition to a post-growth economy is both necessary and seemingly impossible."
Speaking of which, I'm looking forward to the return of Retrotopia!
Regards from sunny Ireland - Barry.
5/14/16, 8:02 AM
Peter said...
What interested me during my reflections was the parallels this philosophy evoked in virtue ethics in the polytheist context (thanks for your intro to this via A World Full of Gods, by the way) and the scientific method. Both of these sort of teach you how to think rather than teaching you what to think. You could say that values are built into these systems, such that the results they produce have tendencies or patterns, but leave flexibility for context and the vagaries of reality and experience. (The scientific method, of course, also tends to value consistency, even when it can't have it.)
Whether or not these parallels hold true or not, this aspect has been what I appreciate the most about your tutelage over the years: teaching me how to think for myself with limits. As a 26 year old who spent some time in various radical movements, which necessarily require straightjackets on thinking, and left only to fall into nihilism, your writings have been a breath of fresh air, clearing away a lot of mental cobwebs while giving me useful constructs. If your writings continue to reach a larger audience, rest assured that they are not creating an army of clones, but rather moral agents able to act freely and competently in the world. Many thanks!
5/14/16, 8:07 AM
onething said...
In the end it boils down to semantics. I don't like calling something the same which is not the same. I suspect that as time goes on new words will be invented so as to differentiate the different types of marriage. I liked Deborah Bender's thoughtful and informed post very much. In the end getting govt out of the marriage business might be the way to go. But I think we do have to realize that this is a slippery slope that may lead to polygamy. Polyandry, of course, seems eminently practical and I'm in favor of it.
*********
On another note, while I'm something of an antivaxxer, I too have thought that much of my own objections are that they have become excessive in number, (which becomes a nonprecautionary practice), and that it was better left to the serious diseases. The problem is that there is hype about all the diseases including flu so that there are shrill cries and fear tactics being used to make all of them serious.
********
I have to agree with Ahavah about medicine being nonprofit. Even though I will not go so far as to call medical treatment a right, I think that as a society we should recognize that it is not just or healthy to have those human needs up for profiteering. That includes pharmaceutical companies - nonprofit. This does not mean that people cannot have lucrative careers as surgeons, pharmacists and researchers by the way. The highest salary allowed by nonprofit is one dollar shy of one million.
5/14/16, 8:22 AM
shrama said...
Just confused about how you are concluding that Christianity is a minority religion in the West. At least in the US, according to the Wikipedia page on "Religion in the United States," Christian denominations including Catholic, Protestant and others make up nearly 70% of the population. Are you only counting Catholics here for minority status since they make up only 20% of the population, or are you implying that many Christians are merely "Christians in name only" ?
5/14/16, 9:02 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
5/14/16, 9:19 AM
onething said...
5/14/16, 9:31 AM
zach bender said...
But I am still having trouble understanding how the "pragmatic agreement" is not itself an abstract principle. The word "should" is in there, and the word "reasonable" is of course subject to being read as an inkblot.
As applied in a particular case -- my straw protagonist, who presents as transgendered, walks in the door of a shop and the proprietor refuses on the stated ground of religious belief to provide goods and services otherwise available to the consuming public -- is that acceptable? to whom? or what pragmatic agreements might we as a community negotiate?
Apparently the community has already agreed -- provisionally, subject to the unfolding of additional pragmatic concerns in the future -- that the religious belief of the shop owner "should" be accommodated, "within reason." That agreement was of course negotiated at a time when transgendered people were largely excluded from the conversation.
Excluded how, the Socratic questioner (also straw) asks.
Well, it was not so long ago that the community denied transgender existed at all, except as a disease or a perversion. So okay, there were transgendered people out there, but they had as a practical matter no voice in framing these pragmatic agreements. Speak up and your position in the economy would be destroyed. And in most cases you would internalize the dominant narrative and view yourself as sick or perverted.
Which at one level is of course your own problem, gotta clear your own thinking, etc. But as you know from your own experience this is a long and difficult path.
One might say we have come a long way in changing the dominant narrative to accommodate (if you will) the perceived needs of the transgendered minority. Not all of it has been accomplished on a Burkean path, obviously, and it is partly because of this that we see the pushback. But I think the case can be made that grassroots efforts have also been instrumental here.
But -- and here I speak as something of an outsider to the specific problem, as I am fortunate to be able to present as a cis gendered heterosexual white male -- the actual, daily lived experience of the transgendered person is still fraught. People stare, people make comments, people refuse your custom on the purported (that word again: heated?) ground of religious belief. Sometimes they beat you up or kill you.
Well, but this is where you find yourself, kid. Transgendered in a community that is not ready for you. Deal with it. Burke is not saying it is acceptable to beat you up or kill you. Let's put away the straw men. The question is whether the shopkeeper should be compelled somehow to provide goods or services in exchange for your money. And apparently Burke says this is something for the community to work out through pragmatic agreements.
I guess my point is that if the pragmatic agreement as it presently exists allows the shopkeeper to refuse your custom, then the pragmatic agreement participates in a systematic oppression which tends to silence those whom it excludes. A positive feedback loop, if you will.
If the transgendered person is disabled as a practical matter from participating in negotiating the pragmatic agreement, maybe we need at least occasionally to employ other, more coercive tools.
5/14/16, 9:40 AM
Crow Hill said...
The Sacred Band of Thebes (Ancient Greek: Ἱερὸς Λόχος, Hieròs Lókhos) was a troop of picked soldiers, consisting of 150 pairs of male lovers which formed the elite force of the Theban army in the 4th century BC. Its predominance began with its crucial role in the Battle of Leuctra in 371BC. It was annihilated by Philip II of Macedon in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. (Wikipedia)
5/14/16, 9:42 AM
BoysMom said...
Religious tolerance being a rather marginal habit of prosperity, I expect we'll see less and less of it as time goes by. Now, in places like the USA, where it's fairly well engrained, we're already seeing less tolerance of religions that don't wear Christian trappings (no one seems to much mind the UU, the LDS, and the JW), then, say, we saw in the '90s and '00s. In areas where religious tolerance is less of a part of cultural identity, I expect religious discrimination will increase much faster and with much less resistance from the population.
I started referring to myself as a localist, as a political identifier, a while back. I expect that, as travel through the USA, was a dicey prospect before the interstate highway system (my parents pre-date it, and my mother's family in fact, were regular travelers, very unusual in the era) it will become a dicey prospect again, at least in the areas not serviced by passenger trains. It takes an awfully short time for roads to become impassible by auto. Travel is hardly an inalienable right, though Americans tend to think it is!
The best bet for most of us who are outliers in some way, is to be "Yes, they're XXX, but they're OUR XXX," whether it's gay, straight, mixed race, religion, or whatever. Most Americans seem to have a certain amount of ability to hold two contradictory ideas in their heads at once, where "All XXX are Evil, but those are OUR XXX and they're okay." I'm seeing this here locally right now in a couple very specific instances, in both cases OUR XXX have been part of the community for twenty years or more.
5/14/16, 9:59 AM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I've seen the same thing. Those who appear to lack ideology are being attacked for it. I've been the target of it: I have a goal (a stable, society with as much fairness as possible), but apparently being pragmatic about it is unacceptable, people on both sides of the political aisle find the idea of pragmatism overriding ideology terrible.
It's funny, but apparently lots of people think perfection is not just possible, but easy if only their opponents quit blocking it. This of course means anyone who tries to argue against them is their enemy.
5/14/16, 10:18 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
This is the best explanation of Burkean conservatism I've ever read. Does it count as ironic that the biggest lesson of history we seem to constantly forget, is that we can learn from history?
Also here's the very rough draft of my essay on the circles of privilege. Any feed back would be appreciated.
http://bonesofourempire.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-new-circles-of-privilege.html
Regards,
Varun
5/14/16, 10:40 AM
Hawkcreek said...
When you wrote that we have no "rights", were you deliberately avoiding any discussion of the "absolute rights" that some jurists believe we have? I know that may be a totally different discussion, and may not fit in this topic.
Blackstone said, “The rights of all mankind... may be reduced to three
principal or primary articles; the right of personal
security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of
private property.”
I happen to agree with you that all the other "rights" are social constructs, but I do think we have some rights that are not given to us by society. In fact, I believe that these rights produce obligation in some cases, like that of personal security (We must protect ourselves and our family, for example).
5/14/16, 12:22 PM
John Roth said...
This is the first time I've heard of the Dartmouth College case. The usual cases quoted on corporate personhood derive from the 14th amendment's (1868) guarantee of rights to "persons," and hence the question of whether a corporation is a "person" in the sense of the 14th amendment. The Wikipedia article, as currently written, appears to ignore the critical case: County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad. (1886) In this case the court reporter wrote that the 14th amendment applied to the case, even though this does not appear anywhere in the published opinions.
Without knowing about this case and the 14th amendment connection, the rest of your comment makes no sense.
@Nuku
As a long-time student of the Michael Teachings, I'm going to weigh in to answer your question. That's going to take some background. I'm also going to simplify the terminology significantly to avoid having to go into unnecessary details.
One of the key factors in the MT is that the soul, over the progression of incarnations, accumulates experience that shows up as a progressive widening of horizons in lots of different directions. This is a linear progression: souls do not lose experience, although additional experience may cause major reevaluations.
Societies have facets that cater to the needs of souls in all different stages of their growth, just as they have facets that cater to people in all different stages of physical growth from infancy to old age.
If the spread of experience levels was a steady state, then history would indeed not have a direction; it would simply be a mosaic of Consciousness trying out different things to gain experience in how they worked.
However. Also according to the MT, there are a fixed number of souls (we call them Essences) in this particular branch of Consciousness, so the average amount of experience goes up over long spans of time, and the balance of factors needed in a society to support gaining the needed experience will change over long spans of time.
I look at this as a mosaic with pieces made up of several pictures. When pieces of one picture are replaced by pieces of another, the perception of what "the picture" actually is can change. There was such a change about 5000 years ago with the growth of villages and cities, and another about 2500 years ago with what some historians call the Axial Age. Are we due for another in the near future? Maybe. If so, it's not going to be anybody's idea of a "golden age."
5/14/16, 1:16 PM
Bruce E said...
Wasn't this claim, this non-conversation, about rights there from the founding of the country? "We hold these truths to be self-evident" is a clever rhetorical trick, but also an admission that what followed concerning rights was a series of assumptions that we refuse to hold up to scrutiny. The moral-geometry problem thus set up, everything follows from there. No chance of an actual conversation, lest we slip our ideological moorings and find ourselves in the middle of a non-Euclidean world where things still fit together but don't make sense like they used to. How can both be true at the same time?
I wonder what a nation founded on Burkean-defined rights might look like. Short of redefining the "Creator" as "community" or "consensus" or some Jungian "Collective Unconscious," it seems like we would need to start with a non-hatred of mankind, a kind of optimism about how people act when not under some external compulsion. I guess the anarchists may have that sort of optimism, but I must confess I lack it, although I would love to purchase some if it is for sale...
5/14/16, 1:24 PM
Scotlyn said...
much at sexual freedom as at sexual positivity and play, that is to say at the shift in religious sensibility the archdruid has written about from a biophobic orientation to a biophilic one (implying a higher level of comfort around both sex and death as integral aspects of biological "earhtly" life).
Re "free sex" in absence of birth control (not that I think birth control has ever been *entirely* absent among humans & some other animals...) the male habit of devoting time and energy towards sister's children rather than sexual partner's children in some cultures is ample testimony to how many ways there are to skin a cat.
I find David Graeber's suggestion that the Abrahamic sensibility setting such a high premium on female virginity and family honour may have arisen as a rebellion of desert peoples towards the severe consequences of being unable to pay debts to city money lenders (Sumerian times)... having to sell your daughters into sexual slavery. Ie a family whose daughters were virgins upon marriage was a family who had successfully stayed free of debt & retained its honour.
5/14/16, 3:01 PM
nuku said...
In the days of Vietnam and the “universal” military draft when I was canon fodder age, one could get an exemption from military service on “conscientious objector” grounds. But that only applied to men who were bona fide members of a religion, like the Quakers, who had a strong tradition of nonparticipation in military duty.
The above is an example of socially agreed upon specific exemptions to laws that normally applied to all (men of draft age). Religious belief was grounds for exemption, but the onus of proving that the exemption applied was on you.
As a footnote, in my case I made application for objector status, even though I knew I wouldn’t qualify, simply as a delaying tactic; the application and associated appeal process took more than a year during which time I found a sympathetic shrink who was willing to write a letter stating that I was mentally unfit for military duty and, since that was also an exemption, I was excused from military service on those grounds. This is an example of gaming the system and having the resources to do so. Was it fair, I guess not, but I’ve got no regrets. I had a very deep objection to fighting in an unjust unnecessary war, but that wasn’t a socially acceptable exemption. I recognize that some poor and probably poorly educated kid went in my place and maybe ended up dead or scared for life, but equally, some Quaker kid didn’t have to compromise his deeply held religious convictions. Life ain’t perfect.
5/14/16, 3:48 PM
Jason B said...
5/14/16, 3:50 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
Pat.
P.S. @Joel et. al - just finished "Into the Ruins" Issue 1. My only complaint is that it's too short.
5/14/16, 4:27 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
Of course, what those rights and liberties included depended on who you asked - the Tidewater aristocrats had one view, the back-country riflemen another, neither of which would pass muster today (as many a post-modern talking head has noted at great and outraged length.) And so on. And if said talking heads re such believers in Progress, how can they not forgive our ancestors their un-Progressed sins? Don't ask me! This isn't my native period either.
Pat
5/14/16, 4:38 PM
pygmycory said...
It was an amalgam of the former Progressive Party and the Conservative Party. Since then it has combined with the Reform Party and somewhere along the way the result of this became the Conservative Party again. Somewhere in the middle for about a week it was allegedly called the Conservative Reform Alliance Party, but then someone noticed what the initials spelled, and scrapped the name.
5/14/16, 5:39 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/14/16, 9:18 PM
Mark Rice said...
A Russian at a medieval re-enactment festival takes down a drone with a spear!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/12/watch-this-russian-man-use-a-prehistoric-weapon-to-wreck-a-drone/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_innov
5/14/16, 9:47 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/14/16, 10:19 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/14/16, 10:22 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/14/16, 10:34 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/14/16, 10:42 PM
nuku said...
Thank you for taking the time to reply regarding the MT and the myth of progress. I’ve heard of the teachings and may even have browsed one of the books long ago, but don’t have any memory of the details.
From what you say, I gather that the sum total of experience of each of a fixed number of “souls” grows over long time spans. Ok, but does having more experiences automatically lead to these souls “progressing“ in something other than simply having a greater amount of experiences? Something like wisdom, moral purity, being a better soul, etc.
I would venture to say that this is the implicit assumption in MT: more experience=wisdom/better soul. In other words some sort of ethical, moral, spiritual growth/progress. That’s of course a possible opinion and an appealing one. I’m thinking, with a smile here, of the movie “Groundhog Day” yes? However I can also imagine a person/soul having lived a huge amount of experiences who doesn’t get any “better” whatever that means. Maybe some of the experiences change the soul in positive ways (however you define that), and maybe this is balanced by other experiences which change the soul in negative ways, so that in the end the soul just stays the same, in essence no progress just more experience. I don’t know, just exploring...
5/14/16, 11:38 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
It is a classic isn't it! Those sorts of news reports provide no end of entertainment. I mean how do you even begin to pursue contradictory objectives? To my mind it is some sort of absurdist art form and I often recall your mention of the Pravda joke, which started off as a joke, but somehow became less funny as time progressed.
Our Prime Minister who has called an election appears to have been mentioned in the Panama papers. It is not a good look, regardless of the circumstances.
Hey, I thought I might mention a strange coincidence too. A few weeks back I mentioned the show that was way out there on the zeitgeist - which is the only one I watch nowadays as there are too many other things to do in "the real world" (as they say). I mentioned to you that it would be nice if they remembered to tell a story in that show - and they ended the short season by doing just that. Literally having one of the characters tell a short story as part of some Moth program. Incidentally, it was a better story than I could have written too! I know when I'm outclassed. Fiction is a tough business.
It has been a warm autumn down here, which is really not a good thing, and I need many more uninterrupted years of activities, but that may not eventuate. Oh well, beggars can't be choosers as they say.
How is your spring going? Has your quince tree shown any sign of flowering? I’m poaching them in the wood oven and they provide so many useful products. Yum!
Cheers
Chris
Hi lathechuck,
How are you going? My mind always sees your handle as "lathe" and "chuck", but perhaps my mind is focused on woodworking machinery? Out of sheer curiosity, was that your intention?
Anyway, of course it is not logically impossible because, well, it appears that someone has made those exact claims. As to whether they'll work in the real world, well, that depends on whether you believe that two plus two equals five - some people may believe that (a friend was fond of telling me that joke and adding in the side line: A guide to creative accounting).
As far as I can tell, and I may be wrong, the US is currently strengthening its buying power relative to other currencies. Certainly, we here have dropped in value relative to the US dollar. You may not notice such matters.
Status is not an objective that interests me, sorry.
I reckon the 30% number is on the low side from what I see here. It never used to be that way and I wonder about that particular issue too. For your interest too, we describe "leasing" to mean "rental", but in your sense of that word we describe it as a "higher purchase". A nice phrasing!
Cheers
Chris
5/15/16, 3:12 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I am always left feeling a bit dumbfounded and uncomfortable by the whole "birth control" argument that gets thrown around here in the comments section from time to time. It just seems like a sort of weird argument to me where the people involved are arguing about other concepts but using those particular words.
The reason I say that is because from an ecological perspective it is impossible for any population of any species to exponentially grow on a finite planet. It just can't happen. It is simply not possible. Nature provides negative feedback loops which limit the human population for free, without any real concern for individual wants, needs, or wishes. As individuals and also as a culture we have to be able to accommodate ourselves to those limits because they are real, and that is termed: "maturity".
What I reckon you lot are actually discussing with a great deal of unnecessary heat is accommodation of your own wants, needs, and desires without any particular reference to that of the greater ecological realities.
And I'm very uncomfortable that there are a whole lot of people living in glass houses and throwing a whole lot of rocks around. It is not a good look.
Anyway, don't waste those rocks on silly missions as they're very precious you know! I have passed peak rocks here, I know this lack only too well! ;-)!
Cheers
Chris
5/15/16, 3:55 AM
Shane W said...
you mention the possibility of Trump doing a bait & switch a la Obama. If that happens, what chances do you put on it causing an insurgency among his supporters for being sold out? Considering the anger among his wage class constituency, I just don't see them whimpering and rationalizing the way Obama's supporters did. I'd be interested in your take on the consequences of a Trump bait & switch.
5/15/16, 5:13 AM
latheChuck said...
Looking back somewhat farther, the former pastor of my church (something of a medieval scholar) once explained to me that premarital sex was common in medieval times because no couple could afford to be infertile. Once pregnancy was achieved, marriage could follow. If a relationship didn't result in pregnancy, there was no contract between families to break in order to try a new relationship.
As I've heard it said as old folk wisdom, "second pregnancies always take 9 months, but first pregnancies can be much quicker."
5/15/16, 5:51 AM
Unknown said...
Perhaps this will help. http://www.tasmaniantimes.com.au/index.php/article/conflict-of-interest-the-cancer-within-our-public-life
You cannot belong to a political party and honestly and faithfully represent your constituents. Please note, you do not have to agree with them to represent them. In a democracy, the role is representative, and then deliberative where the greatest common good is sought out and pursued.
Political parties are machines and as such they tend to be driven by people who are using them to get something done. From long observation what is sought to be done is most often not what those inside the machine think they are working for.
Cheers.
Once again, my thanks to JMG for his wonderful blog and particular thanks to his partner for her care and support of his generous and excellent efforts.
eagle eye.
5/15/16, 5:57 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
So this means that the South does change, about as fast as the rest of the country, but just with a lag. A lot is made of the few counties that openly and agressively resisted the Supreme Court on same sex marriage. Little is said about the hundreds and hundreds of other county clerks who announced within a week of the ruling that they had adjusted their paperwork and were ready to be in full compliance.
And alas southerners are just as glued to their smart phones as everyone else, with the same negative consequences on traffic flow and highway safety...
5/15/16, 6:16 AM
latheChuck said...
In case any of you are exposed to that bit of nonsense, it's easy to review the official figures from the monthly report by the Energy Information Agency: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/mer.pdf. You don't have to read all 235 pages to see that the US imports TWICE AS MUCH energy as it exports. Yes, production is up (due to fracking), and consumption is down (due to the export of energy-intensive manufacturing and materials processing), but we have a long way to go to be self-sufficient.
Maybe the journalist assumed that we would only export energy if we had a surplus, but that's not how it works.
Our Department of Energy/Energy Information Agency seems to have a firm grasp of the history of energy (one chart spans 1645 through 1945). Planning a sustainable future is a different story.
5/15/16, 6:24 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
...I do miss the olden days when our hot-button topics here were things like neoprimitivism, permaculture, the true sustainability of alternative energy, etc. rather than Donald Trump, SJWs, and gay marriage...
5/15/16, 7:15 AM
Shane W said...
the Civil War was basically about the industrial North subjugating and dominating the agrarian South. It was basically the North that had changed through the industrial revolution, while the agrarian South remained the same. Of course, New England slave ships had basically dumped a lot of slaves on the South and flooded the market before the slave trade was outlawed. The tentative truce and balance of power between South & North that brought the Union into being had basically been ripped up by the time of the outbreak of the Civil War. No sane person could imagine the Confederacy continuing human slavery into the 20th century. Every country in the world had emancipated its slaves by the end of the 19th century, and there is no reason to think the Confederacy any different. Even thoughtful Southerners were contemplating the end of the "peculiar institution", but the thing about the South is, when some self-righteous, hypocritical Yankee demands we do something, we reflexively dig in our heels and fight to the end for it. The worst case scenario of the Confederacy regarding slavery is that is becomes some kind of pariah state like South Africa and apartheid, and international pressure and embargoes finally force the Confederacy's hand, and they have to give up slavery to maintain their economy. The sad thing about the Confederacy is that its military generals, like Lee, were "honorable" men, who felt fighting a guerrilla war below them, so did not fight the North in the way that they could win. If the Confederacy had fought the North like North Vietnam & Afghanistan and engaged in guerrilla tactics, they would have won.
Regarding the conservative nature of the American Revolution, one of the first things the new states did was codify English Common Law as the law of the land, thereby providing continuity of legal systems and rule of law.
5/15/16, 8:01 AM
tokyo damage said...
Second, last month you were going hard on the 'salaried class' vs. 'wage class'. But when you apply that framework (class conflict) to a place like Hobby Lobby or Anti-Gay Wedding Cakes Inc, you're faced with a conundrum: at most shops, the 'wage class' employees do not share the particular religious beliefs of the owners. So what about the religious freedoms of the clerks? Does burkean conservatism care about that? Or just the owners' religious freedoms?
Of course, allowing minimum wage workers to sue the government because their working conditions go against their religious beliefs would open up a huge can of worms. For instance, what if my interpretation of the Bible is that minimum wage should be $30/hr, can I say MY boss is oppressing my religion? My fanciful example shows just how silly these RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) laws are, because what the bosses are demanding of their employees (and GETTING in many cases) is just as wacky.
5/15/16, 8:56 AM
Mark Rice said...
Trump-Sanders Phenomenon Signals an Oligarchy on the Brink of a Civilization-Threatening Collapse
This writer seems to be channelling the Archdruid. Cycles of history with a crisis every 80 to 90 years.
"Internal pressures and the sense of betrayal grow as desperation and despair multiply everywhere except at the top, but effective reform seems impossible because the system seems thoroughly rigged. In the final stages, a raft of upstart leaders emerge, some honest and some fascistic, all seeking to channel pent-up frustration towards their chosen ends. If we are lucky, the public will mobilize behind honest leaders and effective reforms. If we are unlucky, either the establishment will continue to “respond ineffectively” until our economy collapses, or a fascist will take over and create conditions too horrific to contemplate."
5/15/16, 9:23 AM
Shane W said...
5/15/16, 9:55 AM
Shane W said...
I noticed your attitude towards Bernie seems to have changed since left-leaning posters were first hailing him last summer the way they hailed Bill Clinton & Obama when they were running. What, if anything, has changed your mind, if it has changed, regarding Bernie's ability to change the neoliberal consensus if he gets elected?
5/15/16, 10:32 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Onething, the idea that most young women were virgins at marriage before the modern era is one of those "good old days" fantasies that social conservatives cling to. Teen pregnancies in the US peaked in 1960 and have declined ever since; go back a little further, and premarital virginity was pretty much exclusively an upper- and middle-class obsession, as it increased the marketability of young women in the largely commercial transaction of marriage. Outside the upper reaches of society -- and of course the middle classes were much smaller then -- the usual habit was that young people played around, and when a young woman got pregnant, she got married as promptly as possible, usually but not always to the father. A remarkable number of first pregnancies resulted in a healthy birth in a lot less than nine months...
Shane, I'll be satisfied if he enforces the immigration laws, chucks a few trade treaties, and walks away from the new Cold War with Russia. The policies of the recent past have been so disastrous that the bar for improvement is very, very low just now.
Justin, not yet. I mostly read books by dead people these days, though Atwood's trilogy is on the get-to list.
Lewis, I'll certainly pass that on.
HalFiore, you seem to think that a conservative would say, "We've made an awful mistake, and therefore we must keep making it!" There's nothing revolutionary about either Trump or Sanders -- neither one is suggesting anything that would have been surprising in the least before the Reagan revolution sent the US and its inner circle of allies into the current, and disastrously misguided, bipartisan consensus. We've got two candidates who want to go back to what worked, and one candidate who wants to keep on pursuing a failed set of innovations until it runs this country into the ground; that being the case, calling the latter the conservative choice is, if I may be frank, absurd.
As for your second question, a right is the legal expression of a value held by most people in a society. If I say, "I think legally competent consenting adults ought to be able to make marital choices without government interference," that's an opinion expressing a value. I can present various arguments in favor of that opinion, of course. If enough people end up sharing that opinion, then the institutions of government establish the right. You don't begin by establishing a right; you begin with a debate over values, and the establishment of the right is the final step in the process.
Mark, very much so. Classic liberalism and Burkean conservatism are complementary, and yes, there's a balance of idealism and pragmatism between them, with occasional strayings from either side. As for occasionally lapsing into idealism, why, yes -- my Retrotopia series (which will be picking up again next week) is, after all, an expression of my ideas about what a much better society would be like.
5/15/16, 3:30 PM
latheChuck said...
I've never heard the phrase "higher purchase". When I say "leasing", I mean a plan by which one will make monthly payments over a small number of years, and after you've spent thousands of dollars, you're left with nothing (but the obligation to return the car). I suspect, though, that the manufacturer considers the car "sold" when the dealer takes delivery, regardless of whether the vehicle is bought or leased from the dealer.
5/15/16, 3:41 PM
Nancy Sutton said...
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36035-thomas-frank-bill-clinton-s-five-major-achievements-were-longstanding-gop-objectives
5/15/16, 4:17 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
I belong to the Silent Generation, and my 'teen years were the '50s. I had several good older adult friends, who were not part of our extended family or in our immediate neighborhood, with whom I would have long talks about all sorts of things that a 'teen really would rather not talk about with his (or her) parents. I would visit with them after school. I don't remember that my own parents ever so much as met met any of them. And this was not unusual for my generation. My age-mates had such friends also, different from mine, whom I hardly ever met. (And we didn't "run in packs" as much as young people seem to do now, but spent a lot of our time outside of any "pack" of our agemates.)
All this was rather decisively tossed out the window during the "Never Trust Anyone Over 30" years, tossed out voluntarily by most young people of the Boomer generation and the generations that followed that one. And eventually, during the several "moral panics" that surfaced in the later '80s and the '90s, it ceased to be a voluntary thing, and started to be enforced by the culture and its institutions. It also became risky, even legally dangerous at times, for older people to enter into such friendships with the young.
By the time I retired from my university (in 2005), I had occasionally heard undergraduates quite seriously discussing whether there could ever be a genuine friendship between a senior and a freshman: they were, the argument went, at such different stages in their lives as to have little common ground for friendship. And now some of the young parents in our immediate neighborhood seem to feel it is inherently wrong to leave their own children in the care of people who are not their own older relatives, even for a few hours. This appears almost to be a moral issue in their culture.
5/15/16, 4:38 PM
Justin said...
It appears we've entered bizzaro-world: Senator Feinstein did something I wholeheartedly agree with.
http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/air-space/strike/2016/04/14/feinstein-lrso-nuclear-cruise-missile-alcm-replacement/83003490/
Of all the feckless stupidity the current elites in Washington have brought us during my time on the planet, developing a relatively stealthy longish-range delivery system for nuclear weapons might take the cake. At least during the ICBM era, it could be understood that one side would launch their missiles, and the other would launch their missiles in the 20 minute or so window between detection of the enemy launch and destruction of their own launch facilities and that would be that. A few near misses aside, this was a good system. Nuclear cruise missiles... well... there's really no way to detect them on time.
5/15/16, 5:23 PM
nuku said...
“higher purchase,” was that meant as some sort of irony or was “hire purchase” what you meant to write? If the former, it kinda tickled my fancy.
5/15/16, 5:35 PM
steve pearson said...
5/15/16, 6:29 PM
John Roth said...
Yes, in the Michael Teaching, more "experience" does lead to significant changes in perspective. To avoid some jargon that might lead to more heat than light, I'm going to say that the learning focus of each of the five stages is: survival, security, achievement, relationships and being oneself. For people looking for an "occult philosophy" hook, yes, there are two more stages, but they don't appear on the physical plane. When one of them does show up, you can assume that the situation is about to go to you know where, and an intervention is needed. People like Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed and a very small number of others are the emergency rescue crew.
The actual sequence is seven levels in each of the five phases, and moving from one level to the next has specific requirements that have to be met. It's possible to gain more experience without learning anything, but sooner or later gaining more and more of the same kind of experience gets rather old. It's not possible to backtrack, although it is possible for a lifetime to go horribly wrong and need several lifetimes to balance.
The current mean in the planetary population is toward the end of the achievement phase, which is why present-day societies, like those for the last couple of thousand years, have been set up to give lots of rewards to achievement, in terms of hierarchy, power, money, access to high quality mates and so forth. In the last century or so, there have been a lot of social facets coming in that support a relationship perspective. At present, there are roughly equal numbers of souls in an achievement and relationship perspective, but many of the ones with a relationship perspective still haven't shaken off the achievement imprinting.
To bring this toward this week's topic, this week's essay has to do with the fourth level of the relationship phase: right relationships within a specific society. The fifth level has to do with right relationships between the sexes/genders, the sixth has to do with right relationships among societies and the seventh has to do with right relationships with all the other species with which we share the planet.
One of the overall lessons is that you are not going to teach a soul a lesson for a level that it isn't ready for, than you're going to teach an 8-year old boy why his 16-year old brother is acting irrationally toward a giiiirl. That doesn't mean that someone in the security phase can't be taught that "the way" is to use Robert's Rules of Order and chuck people who won't follow procedure out the door; it just means that they won't understand why it works, any more than that 8-year old boy can understand *why* his 16-year-old brother is acting irrationally.
The "myth of progress" is specific to the achievement phase: progress represents an achievement.
5/15/16, 6:57 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Alex, I talked a little about the fate of US allies in a post-American world in an earlier post here. US geopolitical strategy focused on building up a ring of subservient allies on the periphery of Eurasia -- Britain, Japan, and the small nations of the Persian Gulf are the major surviving examples -- and using those to play containment games against potential Eurasian rivals. When the US goes down, it's going to be payback time. Japan's getting ready for that with a military buildup; Britain seems completely clueless -- as far as I can tell, all three major parties are tacitly assuming that the protective umbrella of US power will keep Britain safe forever -- and so the payback is likely to be correspondingly worse. As for Corbyn, agreed -- the Tories are using the same playbook as both US parties, which focuses on reducing the lower 80% to Third World conditions so that the upper 20% can maintain their current comforts. Corbyn might well replace that with less shortsighted policies.
Mikep, that may just be the best explanation for the current social-justice frenzy I've heard yet.
Tripp, you'll get no argument from me. I have never darkened the door of a Mall*Wart and I have never shopped at Amazon, in both cases because I won't put up with the way their policies affect others.
Gottfried, any war's a complex thing, and simple explanations rarely stretch far. For France, sure, the American Revolution was an opportunity to stick it to the British Empire; for Britain, it was all about hanging onto a place to stick the business end of the imperial wealth pump; for the colonists, it was partly about detaching said wealth pump, partly about overturning a whole series of punitive and predatory legislation, and partly about overthrowing British treaties with Native American nations that restricted white settlement to the Atlantic coast. It was the predatory and punitive legislation that roused Burke's ire, as far as I know. Of course it wasn't about freedom in the abstract -- again, grand abstract principles count for very little in the real world, except as raw material for rhetoric; it was a matter of specific freedoms and specific burdens, as it always is.
Prizm, not next week's -- that's going to be the next episode of Retrotopia -- but shortly afterwards, yes, it's time for that. I recently fielded a news story on that subject that's far too delectable a handle to let pass.
Cris, hmm! That's an interesting idea, and one that I'll certainly consider.
David, depends on the party. If the party's corrupt enough, it's usually a waste of time; that said, without a party organization, a single individual has a hard time making much of an impact -- well, unless he or she happens to be a charismatic demagogue.
5/15/16, 7:07 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
Having read recently some of the alt-right's opinions on social change, I'm wondering how Burkean conservatism tends to view social change in general (as opposed to purely political changes like marriage legislation). Something that I've found disagreement with in both the alt-right's ideas and much of traditional conservatism is the idea that social change in western cultures away from traditional western forms is inherently bad, and equates it with being taken over or conquered by a different culture. It seems to me that the distinction between two very different scenarios is often lost, the two scenarios looking something like
A) Cultural change that emerges within a society, coming from experiments with ideas imported from other cultures and homegrown new ideas.
B) Cultural change imposed of a society by outside forces, being dominated by another culture.
I personally see these as two totally different circumstances, scenario B is clearly not a good position to be in, but I can't see scenario A as being bad, especially at the present time when the course we're on is so disastrous. More people experimenting with different ways of living means there's more of a chance some of them will be adaptive to the changing times. If everything was going well, I could understand the appeal of a more hardline conservative position, but I can't see our present circumstances as a good time to be rigid on these things.
On the other hand, the left in America, by and large, seems so attached to the myth of progress and the idea of American supremacy (even if they don't think it's a good thing) that they can't imagine being subject to scenario B as ever being possible, and thus have a blind spot to the dangers of mass immigration and the like. So once again I don't find myself agreeing with any of the typical posttions of this. I'm wondering what the Burkean position would look like.
I wonder if you're planning on doing any posts on the whole issues of isolationism vs multiculturalism and the like, as it seems to be an issue that's soon to explode into the forefront and I don't have a firm position on it all at this point. If I look at the big view, it seems like similarly to biological evolution, diversity and isolation of cultures must both have their benefits and drawbacks in different places and different times. In the evolution of species, diversity within a species is good for resilience, but isolation is also important in the evolution of new species. I'd think cultural evolution is similar, but I don't really know how that applies to our current situation.
5/15/16, 7:18 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Barry, I'm quite a fan of Karl Popper, and would certainly agree with your description of his theory of the Open Society as drawing on Burke to some extent. Alexander -- that's a more complex matter. For example, I don't agree with his paradox; to my mind, it's not a paradox but a non sequitur. Given that an orderly collective transition is no longer possible, and we have limited time and resources, throwing more of both after the fantasy of an orderly collective transition is a waste we can't afford. At this point, it's up to individuals, families, local organizations, and communities to collapse now and avoid the rush -- and they'll need all the resources and time they have to spare.
Peter, you're welcome and thank you! In point of fact, the parallels have been much on my mind, too. Virtue ethics, like Burkean politics, starts from the assumption that there's no one right answer and that any decision has to be a compromise between contending interests -- in the case of virtue ethics, contending virtues, none of which can be wholly satisfied without rejecting the claims of others with equal merit.
Shrama, if you'll go back to my post, you'll find I didn't say that. I said that conservative Christianity is a minority religion in the West. That little adjective "conservative" really does matter! Not all Christians reject same sex marriage, you know -- in fact, many denominations have already accepted it, and many people who belong to denominations that haven't accepted it differ from the official viewpoint of their own churches. The subset of Christians who do reject same sex marriage is a minority in Western countries.
Cathy, agreed -- if you're going to claim a religious exemption, you can't pick and choose, any more than someone who's applying for a conscientious-objector exemption from the draft is allowed to say, "Well, I'm against this war, but not that one." As for the rest, of course; the whole point in saying "reasonable accommodation where that does not unduly infringe on the rights of others" is that it calls for case by case decisions about what's reasonable and what infringements are undue.
Onething, a refreshingly pragmatic point of view! Thank you.
5/15/16, 7:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Crow Hill, excellent! A useful reminder that current stereotypes about same sex couples may not be valid outside of narrow historical and cultural boundaries. (For that matter, I used to live not that many blocks from the J&L Saloon, a gay leather bar in Seattle, and some of those guys could probably have stunned a rhino with a punch.)
BoysMom, I tend to see things a little differently -- obviously! Religious tolerance comes in when societies become sufficiently complex and cosmopolitan that choosing one's religion is an option, and it stays in place as long as that condition applies. In China, for example, the idea of religious tolerance came in with the T'ang and remained in place right up to the 1949 revolution, because China never thereafter lost the urban centers and social complexity needed to support that level of flexibility. When industrial civilization goes away, those parts of the world that retain cities and long distance trade -- even if both are vastly smaller and simpler than they are now -- are likely to retain religious tolerance, while those that contract to subsistence farming and the like will return to the sort of system where your religion is the one you grow up with, because that's the only option there is. More on this in an upcoming post.
Varun, it's an immense irony, no question! Thanks for the link; I'll have a look as time permits.
Hawkcreek, but I didn't say that we have no rights. I said that rights don't exist in some kind of abstract sense, separate from the fabric of social agreements that create and constitute them. Those "absolute rights" don't exist at all in a failed state, for example -- certainly not in any sense that means anything; anyone with a gun, presuming that you don't have one or are out of bullets, can deprive you of all three at any moment. Even in a settled society, you can be deprived of those rights by legal means: you can, after all, be arrested by the police for the commission of a crime, and deprived of your property, your liberty, or your life by a court -- so in what possible sense are those rights "absolute"? That is to say, I see that kind of abstract theorizing as of limited value when it comes to making sense of how rights function in the real world.
5/15/16, 7:46 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I'm quite likely one of the youngest people here (I'm 20), and I find it fascinating to see my instincts are right: age segregation really is a very recent phenomenon. However, it's progressed to the point where it's really quite absurd, at least in my mind. I have a few friends who are four or five years older than me, and this raises eyebrows for a lot of people, likewise the fact I have a few friends who are a couple years younger raises eyebrows as well.
The part that baffles me the most though was in high school where I was on both ends of "wide" age-gap friendships (in each case grade 9 and grade 12), the amount of offence people took at the thought was astounding. People weren't just surprised, but offended by the fact we were friends. And these weren't even necessarily people who knew us. I'm still in touch with most of them, but it's still fascinating to watch people react.
5/15/16, 7:51 PM
zach bender said...
So I guess the problem I am trying to work through is, when the balance has decidedly shifted, what does the Burkean do about the rearguard. Which is one way of viewing the present situation on these social issues. What I think I am hearing is that the Burkean lets the rearguard die off naturally.
But of course one thing we supposedly have agreed on is that the state has the ability to enforce rules some people do not agree with.
Anyway, I think I have a somewhat clearer idea of your argument than I did.
5/15/16, 8:26 PM
nuku said...
Bill, I understand your frustration with how the discussion sometimes seems to revolve around current “hot button” topics that don’t seem to have clear relevance to the main thrust of this blog, but,
(please correct me if I’m mistaken JGM),
I think JGM’s choice of these current topics is a)not random and b)in support of his pedagogic aims in each post.
In other words, this post for example is about Burkean Conservatism, and a central part of that is the issue of Rights, what they are, where they come from, can they change, if so how, etc? Having stated the Burkean position, that rights are created by a consensus of the members of a society in a particular place and time, are thus subject to change, and in an “ideal“ Burkean republic consensus comes about in part, by mature, respectful, meaningful discussion of issues (some of which are “hot button” ones at the time), JMG then introduces an issue or two as examples which he explores from the Burkean viewpoint.
What then happens of course is that various commentators who have a personal interest in the hot button issue express their opinions and a discussion actually starts around those issues; which of course nicely illustrates JMG’s thesis about how consensus discussions can happen. Since the tone of this blog is set by our thoughtful and mature moderator, and since the blog is to some extent self-selecting of mature thoughtful people, the discussion doesn’t descend into snarl words and pettiness.
Not all commentators are drawn to commenting on the specific hot button examples chosen by JMG to illustrate his main point. Some make comments on the main point itself either through logical argument and analysis, or through introducing their own experiences that bear on the theme of the post.
So, while I too have certain topics that are dear to my heart and which aren’t at times featured, I also find much of interest and enlightenment in following along both JMG’s themes and in seeing how all of you other commentators “run with the ball“.
Its a great pleasure to be part of this, dare I say it, community. Thank you JMG for creating this place.
5/15/16, 8:32 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/15/16, 8:46 PM
Unknown said...
5/15/16, 8:56 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/15/16, 8:57 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/15/16, 9:32 PM
jessi thompson said...
5/15/16, 9:51 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Nuku, understood. You do what you have to do.
Jason, let's try repeating this again to see if it sinks in: "reasonable accommodation where this does not unduly infringe on the rights of others." It fascinates me that people seem to be unable to process those words "reasonable" and "unduly," and insist that any accommodation or infringement must be pushed to the furthest possible extreme. As for whether somebody's right and somebody else's wrong, that's as irrelevant as it's objectively undecidable: what we know is that there's a difference between strongly held opinions, and a need to work out some kind of compromise that allows people to live together in relative peace.
Pygmycory, oh, I wish they'd kept the name and the acronym! As for Progressive Conservatives, yes, I remember that from my first stint in college -- that was in Bellingham, WA, not that far south of the border. There was much discussion as to whether "Progressive Conservative" was an oxymoron or one of the ordinary, unoxygenated kind... ;-)
Mark, I saw that. Let's hear it for Retrotopian military technology!
Cherokee, glad to hear that the power of narrative is beginning to get a look in. The quince has flowered this year, and we have high hopes! We've had lots of rain, though I'll be glad for that when the dry part of the summer comes.
Shane, that kind of thing's impossible to predict. It might turn into an insurgency, it might give rise to a genuine third party, it might simply crumple. Too many variables in play to be able to tell in advance.
LatheChuck, I really do think that the drivel about America as energy exporter is a sign that a very large number of our fellow citizens have snipped the last thread of connection linking them to reality and gone drifting away on the tides to La-La Land. That being the case, I expect such idiocy to be shouted more and more loudly as the jaws of the unwelcome destiny we've manufactured for ourselves clamp tighter and tighter on this godforsaken nation.
Bill, understood. The thing is, I said everything I had to say about neoprimitivism, permaculture, and alternative energy, and I don't like the sound of my own voice quite well enough to keep repeating the same things over and over again. The alternatives were to shut down the blog and to head into new topics, and the latter seemed like a more sensible idea.
5/15/16, 11:36 PM
Candace said...
Since you were able to get past the label "Archdruid". (Which no one in my family is willing to do.). Maybe you can get past the labels "post-modern" and "conservative" and just consider the ideas without labels. The label mostly denotes who is most famous for articulating the idea. It doesn't really tell you whether it's a good idea or not. Pierce originally developed the philosophy of "Pragmatism", his focus was actually on science and mathematics. James and other expanded and changed the ideas, to the point the Pierce wanted to rename his work.
You might want to consider that the same thing can happen to a variety of labels. Adam Smith's "Free Trade" is not the the same thing as the "free trade" being proposed in the most current set of treaties.
5/16/16, 12:00 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Mark, one of the things I've noticed since about three years into this writing this blog is that what I say out here in the fringes sooner or later gets picked up closer in to the mainstream. It's fascinating to contemplate, and leads me to wonder if people really are desperate enough for something other than the same old nonanswers that they'll even listen to the ravings of archdruids!
Shane, Sanders has moved considerably over toward a populist stance since his campaign started, and his ability to attract a broad spectrum of voters is impressive as well. I didn't think he'd do half so well against the all-out opposition of the Dem establishment as he has -- and the extent to which he's been ready, willing, and able to buck the system has also influenced my view of him.
Nancy, thank you! More broadly, that resonates with my analysis of the post-Reagan Democratic party: basically, Republicans who don't have the courage to admit it.
Robert, that's a fascinating point. One of the things I've valued most about my involvement in fraternal orders is the chance to establish friendships with men many years older and younger than I am. It's quite something to sit at a table eating pizza and talking with a guy who's just had both legs amputated as a long term result of frostbite he suffered in the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge, when the guy sitting next to me wasn't born yet when George Bush Sr. launched the first Iraq war. I wonder what can be done to make such connections accessible to others?
Justin, no argument about the nuclear business. A sane US government, assuming we could get such a thing, would push for a nuclear treaty that would ratchet everyone down to 250 warheads, and take plenty of other steps to renormalize relations and stop manufacturing tensions. It'd be a slam dunk for the Nobel Peace Prize and would save everyone billions a year, but it wouldn't feed the fantasies of omnipotence that wash through too many heads inside the beltway!
Ozark, to my mind, a Burkean approach to social change would start by noting that every society is always balanced between pressures for change, in a galaxy of directions, and pressures to remain stable. In the case of each proposed change, a society needs to decide, by way of its political and cultural institutions, whether the change is a good idea or not. Thus lumping "social change" together as a single thing is unproductive; what matters is each specific change and its effects, so far as those can be determined, compared with the effects of leaving things alone. Yes, that means rejecting any of the typical positions on the subject!
Zach, the Burkean approach doesn't assume that a group of people with a view that happens to be unpopular at the moment is a "rearguard," since history isn't going in any particular direction. They're simply a minority, and in our society, it's customary to provide reasonable accommodation to the beliefs of religious minorities. Of course the state has the power to use coercion to enforce codes of behavior -- one of the goals of a society that values liberty, though, is to see to it that this power is used as little as possible, and then only to maintain the essential liberties and rights the nation has established.
5/16/16, 12:03 AM
John Michael Greer said...
5/16/16, 12:05 AM
Unknown said...
jessi thompson, you wrote, "Pagan Rome's suppression of all monotheism"
I wonder where you got that idea. It's wrong.
For most of its history, Pagan Rome was in contact with only one monotheistic religion, the Jewish one.
The Romans had a great respect for ancient religions and old customs of other peoples as long as those beliefs and practices were not seen as threats to public morals or the power of the state. They thought Jewish practices were somewhat exotic but not immoral.
During the Republic and the early years of the empire, Jews lived all over Roman territory, engaged in many occupations, and were permitted to proselytize. The Jews were pretty effective missionaries; they acquired converts and many Romans who weren't willing to adopt the full yoke of the Law (which included exacting standards of purity and circumcision for males) admired the teachings of Judaism to the extent of becoming "God fearers" which is to say, unaffiliated monotheists. A comparable phenomenon today would be Americans who decorate their yards with Tibetan prayer flags, meditate and believe in reincarnation, but don't formally convert to Buddhism. The Temple in Jerusalem was a tourist attraction to Romans like the Taj Mahal today.
The Roman rulers of Judea gave the Jews a privilege no other provincial nation received: Jews were excused from making offerings to the genius of the Emperor. For Pagans in the Roman Empire, this offering was the equivalent of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and it was mandatory.
The High Priest and his family were confirmed in their authority by the Roman government and the Jewish royal family accommodated themselves to Roman rule to hold on to their position. Some rabbis supported nationalist revolts. The third Judean revolt against Roman rule caused the army so much trouble that the Emperor lost patience, ordered the Temple sacked and leveled, and exiled all the Jews from their homeland. That wasn't because they were monotheists and the Romans were polytheists. It was over who controlled the wealth of Judea. Following this there was a serious government-sponsored persecution of Jews throughout the Empire, with Torah scrolls being burnt and rabbis being executed. However, once the armed resistance had been thoroughly suppressed, the Roman authorities relented and teaching of the Torah resumed. Soon after this, the Talmud was written in Jerusalem and Babylonia while those places were under pagan Roman rule.
Christianity, once it split off from Judaism to become a separate cult, was a different kettle of fish. The Romans were suspicious of new religions.
5/16/16, 1:14 AM
Bruno B. L. said...
As the time left for the American Empire expires, I expect the American government to have less resources available to impose its will, abroad and inside its borders. Thus there will be plenty of accommodations being made with minority groups simply because the manpower needed to subdue all of them will not be available anymore.
5/16/16, 1:33 AM
latheChuck said...
You also run into misleading statements such as "we import almost no oil from the middle east". That's true; we get most of our imported oil from Canada and Mexico, but middle east oil supplies Asia and Europe, and if it didn't, Asia and Europe would be buying Canadian and Mexican oil, too.
5/16/16, 3:46 AM
redoak said...
5/16/16, 6:28 AM
Robert Mathiesen said...
For one thing, a revival of some of the old fraternal orders would help, or the creation of new ones around current myths and symbols. Who now even knows the Biblical story of how King Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem well enough for the fine details to fire his imagination? It was that particular imaginal fire that gave the old Freemasonic rituals their power. Do we share even one such imaginal hearth now?
One of the things that used to be said about Freemasonry -- perhaps it is still being said -- is that it included the art and craft of "making good men better." That is important. I think that, by and large, only older men can pass this art on to younger men in ways that really stick. They share the same inner hormonal life.
In my 'teen years I was a member of the Order of DeMolay, as my father had been before me. (His was a Masonic family, but he had not gone on into the Craft himself.) I kept no friendships from my local chapter after I went to college, but I still regard the Order's rituals and meetings as a major formative influence in my life -- so much so that I later managed to find and buy on eBay copies of Demolay ritual books used in my day, the 7th editions of the secret _Ritual Degrees and Ceremonials_ and the even more secret _Book of Secret Work_. (The not-at-all-secret _Monitor of Ceremonies_ hadn't been published yet, but some of the texts in it were used in typewritten form.)
The Demolay meetings were also where I learned how _Robert's Rules of Order_ worked in practice. Later, when I became an academic, I found that hardly any of my colleagues understood anything of how to conduct a meeting under those Rules of Order.
There is a very interesting and perceptive African working the New Age circuits, named Malidoma Somé. His first, shortest book is (IMHO) by far his best: _Ritual: Power, Healing and Community_ (1993). In it he states that the great illness of modern Western society is its lack of profound common ritual activity, particularly the lack of initiations into the communities of adult (male or female) life for young men by older men and (differently) for young women by older women. He comes back to this favorite theme of his again and again in his later books and articles. From my own experience, I think he has put his finger onto something of the highest importance here.
But again, I do not see how this can be done effectively in the sort of fragmented society we have made for ourselves over the last century or so.
5/16/16, 7:40 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
The first is about the man who snatched the hijab from a woman and read her a lecture on "This is America..." To me, that's a straightforward case of assault and should be treated as such. Especially in today's Topsy-turvy world where a schoolyard fight can bring felony charges and so can defending oneself against a bully. Or for that matter, a baby waving its rattle at a cop is considered Battery because "he was brandishing a weapon."
The second is the barber who told a customer that he doesn't cut black hair - and then pulled a gun on the customer. The first was his right. The second was way out of bounds. What's interesting was the barber's rationale: "He argued with me! (questioned his terminology. I read the story.) And then he *approached* me!" Which is apparently seen as a dangerous and life-threatening move!
Shakes head. Someone has put paranoia pills in the water supply.
5/16/16, 8:19 AM
James M. Jensen II said...
"not only am I not a postmodernist, I'll be taking apart some of the standard delusions and deceptions of postmodernism in an upcoming series of posts."
Oooh, oooh! Is this where we get to talk about Paul Feyerabend? Pretty please?
To my mind, he was the best of the postmodernists. He said what he meant, in plain English, and never took anything back just because other people didn't like it. And when he finally realized he had simply made the opposite mistake of the rationalists, he spent the last years of his life criticizing himself and reformulating his views to avoid the problems.
He titled his views "epistemological anarchism" but it was also epistemological populism -- what it really was was epistemological dissensus. We are better off if everybody thinks what and how they want to and has as much freedom to act on those beliefs as we can afford. Then we can see what ideas work and which don't.
A very similar philosopher was Richard Rorty, who started in the same way as Feyerabend -- a rationalist and eliminative materialist who broke ranks in favor of a flavor of postmodernism. By the end, their views are quite hard to tell apart, except that Feyerabend had a flair for the dramatic (he titled a book Farewell to Reason and I'm told the original edition of Against Method at one point compared science to prostitution) while Rorty preferred a quieter style.
All that said, I think I have an idea of the sort of "standard delusions and deceptions" you're going to talk about. Many of the more standard postmodernists managed to convince themselves that they were simply the cutting-edge, perhaps even final phase, of Progress and that Nature didn't really exist since everything was a social construct and we could pretty much decide what reality was for us.
5/16/16, 8:23 AM
Johnny said...
I'll be looking forward to hearing how you view post modernism, one thing I had wondered reading about pragmatism, where they step back from notions of absolute truth (or at least absolute truth that we have access to), was how this differed from post modernism (something honestly I do not have a great grasp on).
I will look into Dewey also, I have not read any of his work.
5/16/16, 8:25 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
About the concern for looming insurgency or war, yeah, I know there are alarming noises and deep tensions... but I remember the Civil Rights era in the South. I remember our Lieutenant Governor with his axe handle to keep the n*****s out of his restaurant. When MLK was assassinated I sat in the same second grade classroom as his youngest son in an Atlanta public school that had been unwillingly desegregated just a few years before. If forced desegregation and voting rights did not cause the entrenched upper class white power base to break away from the Union, what will? There was plenty of violent oppressive action, and of course abundant acts of lethal terrorism, but a full-fledged insurgency never came about, nor was there any second seccession. It did push the white racists out of the Democratic Party (their traditional home since Jefferson) and into the waiting arms of the Republicans, but that is the sort of political realignment has generally happened a few times in each Century.
The one Civil War we have had was about an institution that was at the foundation of the economy supporting the entire Southern power structure. The schisms we have now are of a different nature. And the economic forces that are driving the empire down are global and impersonal.
Of course forecasting "future history" is one of the most questionable things we bobtailed monkeys engage in, so only the coming decades will really tell.
5/16/16, 8:49 AM
Jay Moses said...
the utilitarian would presumably say that the existing situation assures the greatest good for the greatest number and, therefore, should continue. traditional social contract reasoning presumably results in the same outcome since the existing social contract includes the torture of children as an element. the burkean conservatives with their go slow and respect existing institutions approach would, i suspect, reject the notion of a sudden switch in the existing order. how then can any social system react in extreme circumstances?
this is not a problem confined to speculative fiction. history is replete with examples such the genocide of native americans, the enslavement of africans, lynching, forcible sterilization etc. in which hideous treatment of the outsider can be justified by such bromides as "majority rule", "three generations of imbeciles is enough" and "the greater good". absent some rights that are irreducible how can any society prevent such behavior?
5/16/16, 9:30 AM
Jason B said...
5/16/16, 10:59 AM
Matt and Jess said...
5/16/16, 11:38 AM
Jeff said...
I think that the only thing that prevents me from more fully embracing a true "conservative" political point of view is the thorny issue of the commons. If there is one natural right that should be obvious, it should be the right to share and have access to unpolluted air, water and earth, after all that is the right that is granted to all living things by virtue of the Earth that is our home. I know that's a little different from the definition of "right" as you defined it, but when this fundamental right is taken away a society will collapse either through internal violence, depletion of resources or both. So maybe that's not a right per se, but when individuals act unilaterally based on self interest, it doesn't normally result it good outcomes. It certainly hasn't in this particular iteration of human history.
This, of course, calls into question the "right" to own private property in the first place and the implied threat (or real use) of violence to enforce it, which is ultimately the bedrock on which all conservative thought is founded, at least in my understanding of it. Granted, maybe I'm not fully understanding it.
On the other hand, I don't dispute that there are men and women of great talent and genius that leave behind enormously valuable legacies of tradition that do work, so to speak, and it's certainly in the best interest of our species to let those individuals have access to resources and for their legacies to be preserved in the various human institutions. And I also agree that it does appear that attempts to fix a broken system almost inevitably makes things worse. I think that many of us who have had a previous life as social activists come around to that hard reality sooner or later.
I haven't really come to any real conclusion on this. Maybe Stiner was correct in that as a species we'll have to slowly evolve toward a more workable synthesis, but that would require faith in the direction of history... so... I dunno. Maybe things just fall apart and that's okay.
Anyway, thanks for another great post, lots to chew on!
Jeff
5/16/16, 11:41 AM
Hubertus Hauger said...
- We not being as smart ... gives me the insight, that when so, I may exagerate only to shout down the minority-complex I am disturbed by.
- Simplyfying the complex entagled reality makes it easier to handle, but also more misleading.
- Last, but not least there is less benefit to rush. Just watch the steps I go. I can always do what I do. Reform it a little (or a lot, or not at all) as I see, what works. Rushing is a sign of emergency or panic ahead. In our case it often is smelling panic-driven to me.
5/16/16, 12:49 PM
team10tim said...
I want to relay a useful notion for discussing rights (herein referred to as freedoms) that helps cut through some of the knee jerk reactions that this topic normally induces. Positive and negative freedoms. The concept of positive freedoms and negative freedoms has nothing to do with any moral foundation or value system, only what can be added and what can be taken away, hence the name.
Negative freedoms are things that can be taken away from a person. So a person living on a deserted island has every conceivable negative freedom. That person can run around naked and screaming, smashing everything in sight with a big stick because there is no one around to prevent them from doing so.
Positive rights can only be added through cooperation. Broadly speaking, they are freedoms that can not be achieved without the help of others. For example going to the moon. It is beyond the scope of a single person to build a Saturn V rocket on their own in the course of a single lifetime.
Of course, these examples are extremes, almost everything lies somewhere in the middle. Libraries are a good example. A person gains access to books that that person doesn't own (a gain of a positive freedom) but that person is required to be quiet in the library (a loss of a negative freedom) in order to do so. In the broadest possible terms a limit of negative freedoms allows for the expansion of positive freedoms.
Where these lines should be drawn is the heart of the matter and that requires a value system. Different value systems will naturally draw the lines in different places. This framework isn't really helpful for deciding where the lines should be, but it is useful for discussing freedoms and rights with someone from a different value system.
Thanks,
Tim
PS Sorry for posting this so late. I've been busy.
5/16/16, 1:33 PM
onething said...
I can't decide if this is a joke or not.
5/16/16, 3:21 PM
Joel Caris said...
Tripp, thank you, as well! Keep your eye out--your first issue should be arriving on Wednesday, I believe. Hope you enjoy it!
5/16/16, 4:44 PM
dltrammel said...
Although I suspect the Donald will cause a lot more turmoil and upheaval if he doesn't get his way than Hillary would cause if she doesn't get hers."
---
I was speaking with some friends over the weekend, a group I see about twice a year (we work together at some sci-fi conventions) and we were discussing the amazing changes a mere 6 months had done.
One thing one of them said mirrors your sentiment. He was planning to vote Trump because he felt that any damage Trump did to the Nation (laws passed or unpleasantness he got us into), would be more easily fixed come the next Presidency, as opposed to Clinton who he felt would leave a legacy not easily corrected.
Either way we are in for some deep doo-do, I fear.
5/16/16, 4:58 PM
Shane W said...
5/16/16, 6:59 PM
Peter VE said...
Now I have to add Edmund Burke to Spengler (next) and Karl Polyani (half way through). Reading your work and your commenters brings me in mind of the circle of students around Plato or Aristotle.
5/16/16, 7:06 PM
nuku said...
Here are 2 websites for modern initiation rituals for young men and young women here in New Zealand. Australia has similar programs:
http://www.tracks.net.nz/
http://www.tracks.net.nz/tides/
I was associated with Tracks for 5 years when my girlfriend’s 2 boys were in their teens (13-18). The program grew out of the experience of several years of 5-day “men’s work” events. After listening to man after man talk about his messed up life, we began to see that many adult problems stemed from a lack of proper initiation of young boys by older mature men into “what it means to be a good man”. Its not easy, but for some boys it really worked.
I agree the lack of formal initiations/rites-of-passage is a serious failing of modern society.
5/16/16, 11:53 PM
Shane W said...
RE: Great Britain & Brexit. From what I've read, Brexit guarantees the breakup of the UK. The last Scottish independence vote was close, but they're saying that if Britain votes to leave the EU, Scotland will vote to leave the UK and stay in the EU. Being a "clueless American", I'd love to get the take of British readers on Brexit's effect on Scottish independence.
5/17/16, 3:02 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Yes, narrative does have a lot of power. ;-)! I am looking forward to your next installment of the Retrotopia story too, I almost thought that you may have chosen to convert your words into a book form instead.
Great to read that you are enjoying solid rain in your part of the world. Those are the years that the much abused aquifers enjoy a tidy drink. Although, I'm unsure whether they are a big thing in your part of the world? Dunno. Be careful what you wish for with the rain, as the reports are starting to roll in that there is a reasonable probability that an La Nina event may form later this year. Although, again, that may not impact your corner of the continent?
Quince trees put on a good show too. I do hope that you enjoy some fruit this year.
Cheers
Chris
5/17/16, 3:05 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thanks for the story. Respect. Yes, the ability to take raw materials and make something useful is a great skill.
Hi nuku and Steve,
Thanks for the correction and you are both 100% correct. Maybe I should have written: "higher puropose"? :-)!
Cheers
Chris
5/17/16, 3:08 AM
onething said...
He also mentions that it's a mathematical certainty that if these practices are not busted back, this problem alone is enough to bring down the economy. Which, oddly enough Obama actually said in 2008.
This has become my litmus test for politicians. Trump comes closest to addressing it. Perhaps not close enough. Bernie comes in second, but has said a few things. The CAUSE of the high prices are a nontopic in the media. It's generally spoken of as if it were some weird storm (act of God) we were experiencing. Just as some of the bankers needed to go to jail, so do some hospital CEOs and pharma CEOs need to go to jail.
5/17/16, 7:13 AM
redoak said...
5/17/16, 7:15 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Q: Why do bikers wear leather?
A: Because chiffon wrinkles so!
5/17/16, 8:15 AM
Wiborg13 said...
I know that you have asked an answer from Archdruid Greer, but I’ll make a few comments if you don’t mind.
English is my third language, so I’m sorry if for some reason some things don’t make sense. If that happens, please tell me what are those things are and I’ll try to explain me better.
First let me comment about the stories. Let’s examine them from a pragmatic lens (call it burkean if you want).
1 – The Lottery.
It is an almost perfect portrait of our society.
Yes, the sacrifice of Mrs. Hutchinson is horrible, but she had no problem with it until it was her time to be sacrificed. The price wasn’t too high as long as it was someone else to pay the price. When Mrs Delacroix says : "Be a good sport, Tessie" one has to consider how many times did Mrs Hutchinson said the same or similar words.
And if you read that story again the most vocal advocate of the lottery is the man that has been reaping it’s benefits for the longer time, Old Man Warner, that has been present to seventy seven lotteries. When someone tells him that some places are considering to ditch the lottery he says : “Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves”.
The burkean conservatives in the story are the progressives, the ones that live in the places where they have given up the lottery. The change, even if it implied eating chickweed and acorn stew implied less sacrifice than selecting a member of the village to die each year. And in true burkean style, if things really got to be too horrific it would always possible to return to the lottery next year.
2 – Those that walk away from Omelas.
It is also a parable about today’s society. The right to be happy, the entitlement to live a blessed life. It is the absolute right of the people in Omelas to be happy. And someone else pays the price. And I wish that Omelas was real, because reality is so much worse. In real life it isn’t a child that is trapped in a room, suffering until it dies. It’s millions of children that become blind working in sweat shops under insufficient artificial light 14 to 18 hours a day, every day, with a single meal, it is the tens of thousands that work and die in the mines of Congo to harvest the coltan to our cell phones. The child in Omelas is sister/brother to the little girls and boys in Thailand that earn a living by sexually pleasing tourists. Need I say more ? Being a real conservative would mean to make choices (and apply them) that would reduce the number of children that suffer a living hell. And I am personally peeved by this story. There are those that walk away from Omelas… I call them cowards. They walk away to clean their conscience but do nothing to prevent or reduce the suffering of the child. Not even a kind word. N-o-t e-v-e-n a k-i-n-d w-o-r-d.
TO HELL WITH THEM !!!
Sorry for this outburst. Usually I am not this passionate.
Now ... Regarding the real life examples that you gave … The genocide of native americans, the enslavement of africans, lynching, forcible sterilization etc.
Those were only possible because of irreducible rights. Let’s be honest , as George Orwell has written so eloquently, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
For some to have all the rights, others have none. I am not saying that this is a good thing.It isn't. No amount of rhetoric will ever change that. But I beg you to consider that the process that gave rights to people that had none was a burkean process. If MLK or Ghandi had been born 60 years before and tried to do what they did, the result would have been much different. It took time, it took a lot of effort and above all it took a lot of people to fight for it, And when you combine all of those elements you have change.
5/17/16, 12:49 PM
Wiborg13 said...
Returning to the example of the Gay wedding cake… One has to consider the opposite situation. To be able to provide products and services to people that others consider to have no right to those products or services. Two examples come to mind. The pastors that were arrested and fined for giving food to homeless people (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/90-year-old-man-2-pastors-charged-with-feeding-homeless-in-florida/) and Hugh Heffner (Yes the Hugh Heffner that owns Playboy). Most people nowadays ignore that Hugh Heffner closed several clubs in the South of the USA because he had resoundingly rejected segregation in his clubs. When the law tried to impose it he chose to close the clubs. Either he would provide a service to everybody or he wouldn’t provide it. It doesn’t mater if we don’t like the man. That was a good example.
5/17/16, 12:51 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
I am writing because I found the theme of the last few posts somehow off-center. Not that they are wrong nor about unimportant themes; they are important and your insights are very good. Rather I think they miss the bigger picture.
I very much agree with your analysis that the current elite are out of touch, and more than willing to throw more and more of us under the bus to support their privilege. In fact I strongly suspect that many of them would be willing to toss their own parents and children to the wolves if it saved them. The question I wonder about is whether this is all that different than other human societies in the last 10K years.
With few exceptions, most large societies in recorded history (and I suspect even earlier) had elites. And those societies had developed dogma, laws and other social structures to hold their social orders in place and continue their wealth pump from the many to the elite. Whether monarchy, castes or whatever there were always some elite with a hierarchy (big or small) directly under them who wielded more power and had more wealth than the "common folk".
What you have been showing us, in very precise detail, is what the social and political symptoms of a breakdown of that wealth pump looks like, and how the elites usually deal with it (or not). While interesting and timely, I can't help but wonder if we should not be spending time on the bigger picture and how to avoid this pattern for the future.
Perhaps there just has not been enough examples of these transitions to assess how and where previous societies went wrong when they allowed themselves to fall into the same setup yet again. Or perhaps it is just my "sense of entitlement" that makes me want to think that there is a solution to this problem. I do accept that there no more needs to be a solution to this than there NEEDS to be new energy source which will let me continue driving and jetting all over the world (not that I do).
Still I can't help but wonder if it is just the "natural order" of things that humans seem to fall into this organization every time. Or if there is some fatal flaw in how we do things which promotes this solution.
5/17/16, 5:40 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
Let me give two examples of what I have in mind when I say this.
#1. A good friend, the wife of an academic colleague of mine, was born and raised in Sweden in an elite family that included ministers to the Crown, ambassadors, and other kinds of high-level government service. Her father was a Mason in the Swedish Rite of Freemasonry, which is a rather different thing from English and Aemrican Freemasonry, with far more esoteric teaching. In strict accord with his oaths, he never said anything to his family about what happened in lodge -- except for one night, when he came home late and shaken to his very core. By accident, my friend was up late that night also, and saw her father come home in such a state. Naturally she asked what had happened to him. His answer, as he shook and trembled, was along the lines of, "I died, and I heard the entire funeral service read over me, and I was buried, and I was completely forgotten by my brothers as the years rolled by over my grave." He never would explain further, even that night, and he regretted the next day that he had said as much as he did. -- And that was just one degree ritual, one night, out of a substantial number of degrees that he took as a Swedish Mason.
My friend's father was a man in the prime of his life, tough and strong and very well seasoned in the unpleasant real world of professional diplomacy, when this happened to him. He came through the experience (whatever it was) OK in the end. But I can easily imagine that a ritual in which one vividly experienced these particular things in one's own body might completely undo a more fragile man, and render him unable to function as an independent adult afterwards.
#2. As Malidoma Somé tells it, his tribal initiation took a number of weeks. He and the other young men were completely removed from village life for those weeks, and camped in the bush with several older men as initiators. During these weeks the young men had a number of demanding and challenging experiences. Some of thee experiences, by our scientific, materialistic standards of judgement, were physically impossible and could not have happened, except as hallucinatory experiences. But the point I want to stress here is not about those weird experiences, but that at least three of Malidoma's age-mates died while having some of these impossible experiences, and their deaths were real deaths. Despite their deaths, the initiation continued to its end without any interruption. The survivors were welcomed back as adult men. The young men who died were mourned, and then forgotten. To judge by what Malidoma said, some of the young men always, or almost always, die during their weeks in the initiation camp.
These are examples of the sort of physical or psycological risks that initiation has always entailed in other cultures and in past centuries. Our modern society would not allow any sort of initiation to be practiced that was so risky.
(to be continued)
5/17/16, 6:03 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
I can't speak for young women, of course, but as a young man, one of the most powerful initiatory things that ever happened to me happened when I was alone. I had misjudged a risk climbing a cliff by myself and without ropes. I had climbed myself into a place I could not climb out of, under an overhang. I hung there on the cliff face for a long while, waiting to fall and die on the jagged boulders below me. But as it happened, I didn't die. Hanging there, waiting to fall to my death whenever I tired and my grip loosened, all of a sudden my senses sharpened enormously and my strength became far greater than usual. It was a sudden thing, like a light-bulb switched on without warning. Then I could see and feel finger-nail cracks in the rock, and use them to drag myself upward and outward over the lip of the overhang that had me trapped, and save myself. I would never have known that a human body had such resources in extremis, had I not stupidly put myself in such a lethal situation. -- Decades later, I read how John Muir, climbing alone in the High Sierras on Mount Ritter, made a similar mistake while climbing and had exactly the same kind of experience, which saved his life, too. -- For me, it was a transformative experience.
5/17/16, 6:03 PM
Urban Harvester said...
I want to offer you a belated congratulations for your tin anniversary! I'd have commented last week but I was laid off from my job a few weeks ago and with all of the turmoil it took me until yesterday to catch up with the last three posts and all of their comments! Such good stuff. Your comments to anthropocentrism laid the groundwork nicely for the beginning of your series on Burkean conservatism! Your "not half as smart" comment reminded me of something Richard Tarnas said in a lecture I attended on C.G. Jung: "Half of what I am going to tell you today is wrong, I just don't know which half" - it stuck with me!
I also commend you on the ADR as a remarkable example of disciplined discursive, meditative, practice. You are inspiring, and it motivates me to develop consistency in my own practice. I think I was made aware of your blog when the Long Descent came out. I was hitting the permaculture textbook hard and its recommended reading at the time and I'm afraid that the same review in Permaculture Activist which someone else mentioned last week left me with the misguided notion that I could wait to read it. When I finally got to it however in 2012 with the Druidry Handbook, and then with Decline and Fall, it was a breakthrough. I started reading your blog then regularly but it was your dark age america series that got me hooked, reading all of the comments and finding the wonderful community that has gathered around your work. One of the most memorable posts in my mind was The Last Refuge of the Incompetent, where you said "The struggle to delegitimize the existing order has to be fought on cultural, intellectual, and ideological battlefields, not physical ones, and its targets are not people or institutions but the aura of legitimacy and inevitability that surrounds any established political and economic order." You are doing a fine job of that as well as of "subject[ing] the... [powers that be] to sustained and precise attack from constantly shifting positions, engaging in savage mockery one day and earnest pleas for reform the next". This latest post is just another excellent example, but it is one that I have been eagerly anticipating as how to bring a political philosophy to guide the work of challenging the anthropocentric privilege, prejudice, and acts of injustice that our culture accepts as normal.
(cont.)
5/17/16, 7:27 PM
Urban Harvester said...
I commented a while back that your comments here and there on your political philosophy spurred me to do some research, and have helped me to make peace with my late grandfather. He was a geologist, a surveyor, the captain of an artillery unit in WWII and gods forbid a CONSERVATIVE. Being raised in a liberal (albeit Mormon) household I never could understand why he affiliated himself with the "conservatives". My Grandmother on the other hand was always a staunch democrat, but the two of them together wrought some serious conservationist magic along the marshlands and riverways of the Utah Lake watershed, and accomplished some significant victories. I was working for him when he died at 97, helping him sort through all of his files, rock collections and WWII pictures and I asked him once why he would be in favor of G. W. Bush et al and he, typical of a man of VERY few words, simply said that he wasn't: those who were running the party were very different from the what conservatives used to stand for... I now sorely wish I could have talked to him more about his thoughts instead of having been trapped, tongue tied, in a state of typical and fashionable binary cognitive dissonance. So hat's off to you for expressing this very unfashionable and wonderfully pragmatic and logic laden approach to managing rights within a considerate and cosmopolitan society. It has helped me to see how many of old Keith O'hAodha's quirks were in fact virtues (in the Nicomachean sense).
There are so many things your work has introduced me to, from a classical approach to rhetoric and learning, to C.S. Lewis the neoplatonist (as opposed to the apologist), to Druidry, and so much more... (I have also leaned to use Grandpa Keith's slide rule!) My world is much richer and wilder, so thank you! A toast for working towards the re-enchantment of the world - may its future be blessed with a Precautionary Party (or some such grassroots political organization or other working to delegitimize the existing order and preserve something of what can still be preserved from this enchanting wer-eold). Many thanks and good health to you and Sara!
5/17/16, 7:28 PM
Matt said...
Yes, a brilliant paragraph. As a relatively recent refugee from a worldview of abstract principles, this really hits home for me.
Matt
5/18/16, 8:50 AM
Jason B said...
5/20/16, 7:26 PM
Unknown said...
5/24/16, 12:15 PM