AOTC said
2013/05/09 at 21:21 e

“The modern-liberal, and politically progressive elites, quit “arguing” on the basis of demonstrable principles long ago.”

basically, they do what they want. boldly.

i doubt any reasoning is going to stop them .

i suspect it will take something like an existential “punch in the throat” to thwart their ends. i suppose that can come by the natural eventual outcome of living their worldview, or…. some brave good people will have do it. whether we like it or not.”

When I wrote, “It just shows how behind the curve the conservatives are.”, I should probably have said, “It just shows how behind the curve the conservatives have been”

They increasingly come to your conclusion as more and more (probably younger) conservatives come to grips with what the left really intends, and find the courage to confront the fact that the mental furnishings and assumptions of the left-liberal mind are in fact radically different from, and ultimately socially incompatible with their own (as modern liberals will be and have been the first to say),

Conservatives have broadly become ideological, not just reactionary, during the last 30 years.

You can observe this amazing phenomenon yourself in many ordinary news comment boxes having to do with the latest political outrages.

Rather than just fulminating outrage, the conservative comments often show a sophisticated grasp of “ideas” and the processes driving the liberal dysfunction,

Conservatives see that they are dealing with people who really do mock the entire idea of objective truth and meaning. And, with the last two Democrat administrations, they have seen in very practical terms what this disaster means for their own lives and futures.

basically, they do what they want. boldly.

i doubt any reasoning is going to stop them .

i suspect it will take something like an existential “punch in the throat” to thwart their ends. i suppose that can come by the natural eventual outcome of living their worldview, or…. some brave good people will have do it. whether we like it or not.

But the author does make the broader point when he notes through other examples, that the stupid and morally bereft people running Memphis are not quite so stupid as to be incapable of foreseeing the consequences of being forced to rely on their own devices and skill sets.

Lacking an ability to charm cooperation out of others voluntarily, they would soon be dead, and that would end their ability to experience whatever tawdry joy it is that floods their particular neural connections with dopamine and makes their lives felt to be worth living.

They are seriously dependent as a result of their own moral defect, and they know it.

This existential phenomenon of dependency represents in fact the informing structure which underlies and conditions the political trajectory of modern liberalism itself. Liberalism proceeds from the notion, or the hypothesis, of a mysterious and never thoroughly explicated moral entitlement of the obnoxious, to be obnoxious, and still be affiliated.

Christianity saw the obnoxious as fallen, probably only more slightly more fallen than average, members of an objectively like kind – a genuine family of man relating to one another through an objective Third Party.

This in fact was the basis until recently for all claims, like King’s – to racial justice. Held to exist was a real mankind – a natural kind – and a real God to whom all men owed real duties; and through those duties to God, to other men.

Darwinian evolution, for reasons that are not completely clear to me, is often viewed as invalidating the formal logic of this implication through re-conceptualizing the emergence of the (human) “kind” from a case of special creation, to one of naturalistic evolutionary development.

The ironist movement then comes along and says that there are not any really existing natural kinds under any interpretation. Kinds, are seen as mere names we socially agree to put to things.

Now, I suppose that in a purely naturalistic reality, one radically contingent in Rorty’s sense (you are the accidental product of mere chance: having no nature just conditioning), while uncontingent in Dawkin’s sense (the universe is self-existent), one can see how the “God question” would be put aside.

But the notion of natural kinds is not thereby really done away with. For if you wish to argue that the existence of various human groupings through evolutionary chance demonstrates that there is not one humankind or nature, you have not demonstrated thereby that there are no natural human kinds. You have merely argued that they are not intended as results by a creator, or that they are not coextensive with some common uses of the term “man”

In hypothetically showing that all the entities we commonly label as men are not of one kind in any philosophically indubitable sense, you have not demonstrated that none of the entities we commonly call men, are not in some philosophically defensible sense, of a kind. Some, might be.

And this is the big dilemma, for pure “naturalists” – empiricist naturalists exemplified by say Richard Dawkins – which needs sidestepping in ethical discussions.

It is precisely this logical problem however, which was inconveniently not to say impolitely noted by Noam Chomsky in his comments regarding empiricism and racism. As Chomsky points out, an honest and thoroughly consistent empiricism, might logically lead to racist conclusions. [Whereas Chomsky, (although I take it is an atheist) believes that on the contrary there is good reason to assume on the (even empirical) evidence that humankind is one.]

Nonetheless, most leftists of the kind we are dealing with, are not Chomskyean essentialists.

This is where Rorty’s and Obama’s “narrative” strategy, i.e., the myth-establishing strategy and project of the modern left, comes into obvious political play.

Our values they say, are not to be understood as expressed axioms of our properly functioning intrinsic natures, but rather it is our accidental values which make us, specially us … Or so their appeal goes.

They cannot consistent with their own nominalistic and world-interpreting principles, argue that all men have the same character potential, or that men share fundamental tastes or natures common to all. Nor, because of the fact/value dichotomy they accept, can they deduce rights, interpersonal imperatives, or duties, nor extrapolate on the basis of such, even if they did posit them. How then, as a practical matter, are modern-liberals to structure their social exhortations to interpersonal forbearance and sacrifice?

At least until such time as under their control the state achieves enough power over everyone and everything to make what they see as self-interested (non-collectivist) behavior literally impossible, how is the modern-liberal to “argue”?

Eschewing appeals to objective universals or obligation entailing fact situations, they have only two non-overtly violent methods left to deploy. The first is blatant emotional appeals and social pressure: PC proclamations and marginalization of the dissenting for example. The other is the uninhibited use of whatever political power is available to them now, in order to leverage the most boundless claims system possible in the future.

As we see these are commonly employed in tandem.

Thus, the steady encroachment over time of the political upon every aspect of associative life. Puzzled, we witness a mysterious seeming impulsion toward the consolidation of all associative systems and institutions, and the centralization of of every aspect of life. But that is merely the completely NATURAL consequence of the modern liberal’s attempt reach the goal they seek through social management means, while lacking any rationally consistent or intellectually defensible justification for doing so.

The modern-liberal has simply decided that it will use politics to “evolve” man in the direction which they prefer. End of that discussion. The rest is just about implementation.

And, since reason itself is for them a mere mental instrument in the service of subjectively self-justified sensations, they lose all interest in trying to justify what they want on the basis of rational and public argument anyway.

Disappointed types, like Kingjester, the author of the essay Foxfier linked to, are futilely appealing to the illuminating power of – to use one of CS Lewis’ tropes – a now “discarded image”: man the common moral animal.

Many of the people to whom Kingjester is hopefully appealing, certainly any liberal intellectuals chancing upon it, are no longer interested in playing that particular game.

The modern-liberal, and politically progressive elites, quit “arguing” on the basis of demonstrable principles long ago.

That strategy once served their purposes such as they then were: the political recognition of formal fairness. Appealing to one of “their own’s” past rhetorical employment of now abandoned motifs, when even their aims have changed from formal legal parity, to substantive appropriation, refashioning, redistribution, and boundryless inclusion, will get conservative moralists nowhere.

It just shows how behind the curve the conservatives are.

[Note 5/11/13. I reread the rambling and dissatisfying comment above this afternoon. Instead of deleting it, I've decided to try and correct a few misplaced commas, and in some cases to substitute what I hoped would be more precise language into a framing I have already laid out many times before, both here and elsewhere. I'll leave what remains up as an object lesson to myself: If you are going launch off on an essay, do it on purpose. It's likely to be more coherent that way. I pretty much left the comments dealing with what I personally see as the logical, or epistemological if you prefer, problem of leveraging universal negatives (regarding the real existence of classes) out of nominalist presuppositions, unchanged.]

Wonder what happened to the rest of it,though….

that same vein of irony exists in the leftist prescription for ‘doing good”

i have always puzzled at liberal “do-goodery”. in modern liberalism, ’causes’ are really never about an individual, except where an individual can be trotted out for a public appearance to further the political gain of liberalism. the left’s claim to care about others, seems, merely ‘the claim’. before i even knew there was such things as politics, i understood about caring for people because of my dad. he, countless times, aided people in need. he never once crowed about it. he never once expected anything in return. he sacrificed for others one person or family at a time. he knew their names. his charity was never a ‘program’ it was how he lived.

i really enjoy cs lewis. his writings are astonishingly revealing politically. while not actually political. he also captures the wonder, the possibilities, and the longing that is what is being human.

” … i really enjoy ravi. i can understand what he says because his delivery paints a picture i can see in my head. i like cs lewis for similar reasons. … i am struck by the inherent similarity of themes the christian apologists and then buckly and minogue use to explain what seems the same foe.”

Good video.

If you are familiar with CS Lewis, then you probably see some parallels between the relationships among the devils portrayed in “The Screwtape Letters” and a large swath of those now labeling themselves as liberals. They are ostensibly all about alleviating “suffering”; but their means inevitably become totalitarian, and their system a rigged game of centralized privilege dispensation.

“Yield to us”, they demand.

“In aid of exactly what?” we ask. They have after all, and on their own interpretation deconstructed the person into a loose congerie of impulses – not even an existentially coherent being. So what is it they expect “the other” they are always whining about, to recognize or respect in them, and why?

Their answer of course is “just because” – reasoning about or to intrinsic ends having been abandoned by them long ago.

Remember that angry little librarian clown from New Zealand? Remember how he once became indignant at what he apparently felt was the indifference being expressed by conservatives toward the fate of the liberal kind; and how when his buddy Perry was asked why such hypothetical indifference might a problem, he stood in and took up the cudgel instead, and began ranting that not caring about the fate of liberals and their pets was wrong, or bad or something, because “people matter”.

I then asked Perry if all people mattered, and if so, if all people mattered equally. His unwary answer was “No”.

End of that line of inquiry and discussion, then. What on those terms is left to discuss? Who should be considered to matter less by whom, and why?

I then asked the librarian why people mattered.

Silence.

Ultimately, the only response you get from a modern-liberal is the noise they make while gnawing on the bones of their victims.

If there is no hell, liberals will be forced to invent one. It’s the only place they can really be happy.

for me, a very eye opening political description of what is now called liberalism is the following series.. i am struck by the inherent similarity of themes the christian apologists and then buckly and minogue use to explain what seems the same foe. i see a connection but cannot explain it. in fact your paragraph sums up the essence of the thing i see.

“”"” However, ensuring their ease in a world where labor is still required to draw wealth from the earth, entails guaranteeing that they have access more or less at will to those who actually do the wealth producing. Which is why mere tolerance is no good to them: they require your affirmation and participation and involvement and risk sharing and open ended commitment to a “shared fate” (Rawls) lest you ignore them and go about your own projects”"‘.

it’s essentially evil. evil being a parasite and not the original thing. (cs lewis)

AOTC said
2013/05/01 at 16:46 e

ha! i forgot about that thread till now.

wow, that was pretty awesome.

so, is “perry, in my view” still out there somewhere irritating all whom come in contact with him?

geez, what a tool.

I really was not and still am not largely familiar with this Ravi fellow, but I took a look at the relevant YouTube series and I’d say that it is in the second part where he presents an avowedly sketchy overview of the road to postmodernism. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlmqXiqargw&feature=player_detailpage#t=63s

Rorty in his book basically admits that the academic class in the United States and the Western world in general, has adopted a thoroughgoing values nihilism of which the general public is still largely unaware and would baffle it.

When thinking about it at all, those disapproving of the smell, understandably refer to it as “relativism”, when it is in fact a very much deeper skepticism about all of reality and human existence.

Yet, ordinary people do also gradually adopt the stance, even without necessarily having been trained in the particular philosophical outlook which shaped the original values nihilism claim structure. They just cease to care about meaning as they become preoccupied with ensuring their ease.

However, ensuring their ease in a world where labor is still required to draw wealth from the earth, entails guaranteeing that they have access more or less at will to those who actually do the wealth producing. Which is why mere tolerance is no good to them: they require your affirmation and participation and involvement and risk sharing and open ended commitment to a “shared fate” (Rawls) lest you ignore them and go about your own projects.

Totalitarianism (call it for now the soft variety if you want) is then the natural outgrowth of a hedonic armchair nihilism which plots to savor its pleasures for longer than its private resources or its ability to attract contributions voluntarily, would normally allow.

What else can they do in order to get what they want, but turn all society into a redistribution machine run for the sake of their ultimately purposeless purposes?

What strikes me as remarkable is how they incoherently “justify” it on the basis of a mere “taste”; which is, as they describe it, one of expressing solidarity with supposed “fellow sufferers”.

The undercutting effect on this proposition of their own nominalism aside, (a nominalism which if taken seriously makes identifications based on universally applied identities impossible in principle) the additional question of how they balance sufferings is wildly funny.

How for example do they determine just who is suffering, and then calculate relative deservingness while balancing, say, the “suffering” of an unappreciated thespian desirous of government funding, with that of a libertarian who’s suffocating beneath the demands piled up by the trembling and unappreciated sufferers of the left?

That’s the kind of “problem” which would make their absurd ironist-solidarity buffoonery merely comical, if these no-limits cretins were not in fact so deadly in earnest, so uninhibitedly grasping, and therefore, dangerous.

wow, that was pretty awesome.

so, is “perry, in my view” still out there somewhere irritating all whom come in contact with him?

geez, what a tool.

“my broad understanding is that they have all gone mad, full on crazy, actually.”

They certainly have cut loose from any of what we would think of as traditional moorings.

I also notice that John referenced this issue back in June of 2011, with a link to a YouTube video by a famous Evangelical who was, as far as I can tell, characterizing postmodernism rather than citing “canonical” texts. .

What I should probably do is revisit the entire series and look for names being named.

I see that you and I, (AOTC and I) had a couple of previous exchanges on this matter, and I specifically referenced not only Rorty, but also Old Perry’s attitude toward “truth” and standards as something of a paradigm case and everyday level exemplar.

“Full on Crazy” or morally mad, might not be a bad description.

http://truthbeforedishonor.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/postmodernism-sucks/

I paid 5 bucks at a used book shop for an unused copy. I’ll also work up a series of direct quotes with page numbers so that you can further determine if you’re interested.

In my opinion having a copy of this text is like having a copy of Michael Bellesiles fraud filled book “Arming America”: useful as a reference point when the hand flappers begin hyperventilating that you have overstated the case when describing the left, its mindset and its aims.

Not to say that Rorty was engaging in the same kind of conscious duplicity Bellesiles was judged as having been guilty of. But what Rorty did do was to draw together the main impulses, themes, and theories of the anti-essentailist movement, and encapsulate them in a way that clearly and unambiguously outlined their program, or method, for social (and therefore human *, on their view) restructuring.

* If you think as they do that “socialization goes all the way down”, and you re-describe what the terms of social life have been and shall be, and hector and finagle until you successfully reset the social terms of what is considered “privileged” and what is thought brutishly outre, you will on your own theory be remaking man … whether it is actually true or not.

And even if it is not true quite as imagined, one could expect a certain herd culling effect if only certain types of individualism, say, sexual as opposed to economic, were legally allowed. In other words, the cost of reproduction for the disfavored economic libertarian, would become quite high, as their life energies were redirected though law and coercive takings away from their own private interests to “alleviating marginalization and cruelty”.

Now though, if you are a radical nominalist and if you don’t believe that there is an objective human nature, it seems to me a bit less than obvious what the word “cruelty” itself might mean in any “objective sense”.

But I guess if you are a postmodernist, concerns like that don’t really have much force. “Cruelty” is what a postmodernist is determined and persistent enough to describe it as; be it deliberately starving children, or refusing to fund and applaud an “artistic” absurdity which some annoying neurotic has fixated upon.

my broad understanding is that they have all gone mad, full on crazy, actually.

actually looking at my music collection i dont see an obvious pattern. ive been known to listen to the old jim reeves “welcome to my world” right after listening to black sabbath or blue oyster cult. then pivot to elton john, the bee gees, chicago, the carpenters, collective soul, the eagles, goo goo dolls, tammy wynett, george strait, ..

i like this song…,my brother sent this link to me. i usually hate ‘christian’ rock music , this is awesome though. give it a listen:

be a liberal must mean you adopt a ‘life of a caricature’

i am almost afraid of the content of what lies under that facade.

To be a liberal means, in general nowadays (since being a liberal is becoming synonymous with being an a-theist “ironist”), that you “create” yourself.

What not particularly intelligent persons of that type create is an anxious mess.

Whether anything moves in, or there is anything to move in, to take up residence in the web of physical impulses to which they conceptually and willfully reduce themselves, is anyone’s guess.