From jk Wed Oct 1 05:23:01 1997 Subject: Re: Multicultural vegetables To: j Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 05:23:01 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1382 Status: RO > historical trend: widening the area of free-trade results in > increased pressure for bigger government. To the extent that this > pressure is not successfully resisted, free-trade libertarians become > the unwilling servants (or, to use a Commie term, the objective > allies) of an expanded regulatory state. Bigger in the sense of geography, not necessarily in the sense of regulatory burden. At least additional argument is needed to show that a large free-trade area will end up more extensively regulated than a small one. Free traders would intend for the international regulatory scheme to supplant local ones altogether, so that compliance with the former would mean that the goods can be sold anywhere. To me it seems more like a national sovereignty issue and a rule by distant irresponsible elites issue than a quantity of regulation issue. Countries where there has been little regulation would get more, but the reverse would also be true. I suppose to the extent libertarians are radicals who hope to change things they might have an easier time of it if what they have to change isn't a unitary global structure impervious to influences from outside the bureaucracy. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Wed Oct 1 08:52:55 1997 Subject: Re: NY visit To: t Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 08:52:55 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2185 Status: RO Our talk was interesting. You want it seems to modify the welfare state to allow for more particularism and local community. You accept the generally secular ethos that has arisen in England and the West but want to modify it to make room for an understanding of the good life that has more depth than getting whatever it is you happen to want as easily and quickly as possible, maybe something out of A. Maslow. I doubt that any of that will be possible. If the morally neutral state - morally neutral because it won't be the expression of any particular community - is ultimately responsible for seeing that each of us has a materially decent life then our connections to others become as a practical matter optional. What you do and I do is really in the end our own separate business. That way lies radical individualism - community after all depends on bonds that are part of self-definition. Body is not so separate from soul that we can make ourselves materially independent of each other without affecting less tangible things. That way also lies the servile state since the state that takes care of us will necessarily demand a quid pro quo. Since there won't be any very persuasive moral relationship to the morally neutral state the quid pro quo will be exacted by force. I'm also doubtful of the secular state. People need to understand good and evil as connected essentially to the way the world is rather than something projected by human desires and fears onto a morally neutral world. A truly non-religious morality will not I think work. Also, for self-rule to be possible the state must tie into fundamental understandings of right and wrong. If the order of the state is not somehow based on that of the cosmos it will I think exist only by force. Such at any rate are my concerns. Absolute agreement is not however necessary, certainly not as things are now. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Thu Oct 2 13:57:11 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id NAA06510; Thu, 2 Oct 1997 13:57:11 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim KalbMessage-Id: <199710021757.NAA06510@panix.com> Subject: Re: Character: the Human Nature Question To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 13:57:11 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <01BCCE76.38784480@shentel.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Oct 1, 97 02:27:37 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Andy: > Jim goes on to express reservations about the adequacy of that ideal, > reservations that seem to reflect that lack of faith, of which Miki > spoke, in human nature with nothing "imposed" upon it. One issue it seems to me is whether man is a social animal, whether we are complete in ourselves individually or whether we become ourselves only by being part of something greater that exists in accordance with principles that don't reduce to our individual feelings, impulses, aspirations, etc. In the former case individual inclinations may be a sufficient guide but not otherwise. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Fri Oct 3 07:06:20 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id HAA14470; Fri, 3 Oct 1997 07:06:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710031106.HAA14470@panix.com> Subject: Character: Social Animal To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Fri, 3 Oct 1997 07:06:19 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Andy writes: > Therefore, we must presume that human nature developed in such a way > that not only was it geared toward survival, but more specifically > geared toward a strategy of survival through social life. It would > seem then that our "individual feelings" etc. should be naturally > intertwined with the requirements of a larger group. But there is a limit to the intertwining. Man naturally has language, culture, the ability to accumulate social experience through tradition and symbolize understandings of good, evil and the cosmos through mythology, etc. None of these things can be educed from a single individual. Each of us must get them from his society to become human. That was also true in the paleolithic. Even then there were different cultures maintaining different ways of life under different circumstances. Any large group must exist through the identification of the members with the group, so the way it satisfies its requirements must somehow on the whole be consistent with individual feelings, etc. Not in all cases, though. The way of life of an Eskimo was quite different from that of a Bushman, so presumably some things implicit in human nature had to be suppressed and some exaggerated to become one or the other. Also, even after childhood training the need for social control always remains. There may not have been formal government but there were Eskimo shaming rituals and no doubt something with a similar function among the Bushmen and no doubt the Cro-Magnons. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Oct 3 08:08:35 EDT 1997 Article: 10339 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Immigration, multiculturalism and idealism Date: 3 Oct 1997 07:59:10 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 32 Message-ID: <612mme$irq@panix.com> References: <199709231641012250526@deepblue22.salamander.com> <60aoss$jgr@panix.com> <19970929094204699239@deepblue15.salamander.com> <60pmih$4js@panix.com> <199710012041333170025@deepblue16.salamander.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <199710012041333170025@deepblue16.salamander.com> wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes: >That would indicate that there is a level or scope of planning which >does not lead to corruption. Or is it entirely contextual? If I let >the task be the master, will my efforts somehow be properly directed, >at least to the extent that I will not serve what I oppose, or become >the enemy? Pascal said that tyranny is the attempt to get in one way what can only be had in another. Everything must advance consistently with its own principles. So if your idea of the good society is (e.g.) one in which people rule themselves in accordance with understandings of the good developed through tradition you're not going to be able to bring it about by seizing control of the state and having the newly-formed Ministry of Traditional Understandings of the Good straighten everyone out. It would make sense instead to develop and propagate your notion of what the good society is, to try with others to live by it, and to try to weaken or limit the effect of things that prevent its realization, for example the centralized state bureaucracy, the universal all-penetrating market, liberal ideology, what have you. It seems to me less a matter of making the task the master than being guided by an understanding of what is good that can be shared with others and coordinate independent efforts, and that also helps you live well here and now so that pragmatic success of some grand scheme does not become a _sine qua non_. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Oct 3 08:08:36 EDT 1997 Article: 10340 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Immigration, multiculturalism and idealism Date: 3 Oct 1997 08:01:49 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 10 Message-ID: <612mrd$j4j@panix.com> References: <199709231641012250526@deepblue22.salamander.com> <60aoss$jgr@panix.com> <19970929094204699239@deepblue15.salamander.com> <60pmih$4js@panix.com> <199710012041333170025@deepblue16.salamander.com> <611mgv$jvk@examiner.concentric.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <611mgv$jvk@examiner.concentric.net> drotov@concentric.net (dimitri rotov) writes: >The crisis of American conservatism is Petainism (minor strain) and >Lavalism (major, monumental strain). Would you repeat for us what P'ism and L'ism are? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Oct 4 09:55:20 EDT 1997 Article: 10343 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Immigration, multiculturalism and idealism Date: 3 Oct 1997 18:15:16 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 10 Message-ID: <613qpk$asa@panix.com> References: <199709231641012250526@deepblue22.salamander.com> <60aoss$jgr@panix.com> <19970929094204699239@deepblue15.salamander.com> <60pmih$4js@panix.com> <199710012041333170025@deepblue16.salamander.com> <611mgv$jvk@examiner.concentric.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <611mgv$jvk@examiner.concentric.net> drotov@concentric.net (dimitri rotov) writes: >Some of the issues of conservatives implementing change are >highlighted in Paul's career and I don't think he makes any mistakes. A very interesting comment. Do you want to expand? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Oct 4 09:55:21 EDT 1997 Article: 10345 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Immigration, multiculturalism and idealism Date: 4 Oct 1997 09:49:59 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 52 Message-ID: <615hi7$crn@panix.com> References: <199709231641012250526@deepblue22.salamander.com> <60aoss$jgr@panix.com> <19970929094204699239@deepblue15.salamander.com> <60pmih$4js@panix.com> <199710012041333170025@deepblue16.salamander.com> <612mme$irq@panix.com> <19971003101531977671@deepblue4.salamander.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes: >But there is still the matter of the scope of action. We have schemes >in our personal conduct, and even if we eschew grand schemes we have to >have some idea of how far we can go, how much planning and organization >is necessary and desireable. In the end it comes down to judgment based on experience and personal style (tradition and culture, to bring in the social dimension). >Resistance doesn't make me a stormtrooper, does it? I don't think so, but then I'm not a pacifist. The usual view is that a decision to use force is not a matter of ordinary prudence, a judgment of how things will most likely turn out. It's a more demanding standard based on social experience that gives rise to concepts of justifiable and unjustifiable uses of force, not something we excogitate for ourselves. >Is the difference between liberals and CRs (of the proper sort) simply >that the former are neutral regarding individual aims and purposes >(tacitly encouraging Kalbian hedonism) while the latter want some >specific conception of the good to orient individual aims? Something like that makes sense. If we are to avoid having a comprehensive centralized administrative system in charge of all significant social affairs we need generally accepted coordinating concepts. Classical liberals - libertarians - use property as a coordinating concept. Men make their choices but they accept the rules of property and those rules coordinate their actions to bring about the general good. If you don't think the market is quite enough to bring about the good life you'll want other coordinating concepts, for example sexual morality to support family life or an accepted religious orthodoxy to establish a connection between the order of society and that of the cosmos. Still, the more complex the system of coordinating concepts the more likely at some point you're going to need personal loyalties and authority to keep things running, exceptions to the rules that are never clearly articulated, etc. >Similarly, a CR regime could employ principles usually considered >liberal attributes: "rules of universal application" and "authority >constrained by general principles". Those principles just wouldn't have the clarity and universality to which a liberal regime aspires. A CR regime is not managed but it doesn't run itself the way an ideal liberal regime would. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Sat Oct 4 09:46:37 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Sat, 4 Oct 1997 09:46:37 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 6289 Status: RO Thanks for your note, these are interesting issues. > The laws against prostitution in the US were a result of that same > liberal/progressive trend, specifically feminism, that you decry so > much. Not unless feminism goes quite a ways back. Laws against fornication, which would cover prostitution, go back to the earliest times in America and were brought over from England. The New England Puritans didn't invent them. Were there ever licensed brothels in England? I've seen 18th c. English references to women being punished as "common prostitutes," so antifornication laws weren't a dead letter there at least as applied to those who were in it as a business. > Traditional morality held the man less bound by the constraints of > marriage than the woman. True enough, but that didn't mean whatever a man did was OK, especially not formally. > It was feminism that was responsible for much of the laws restricting > sexual behaviour. Feminism saw these laws as a means of attacking > traditional sexual structures, and ultimately on masculinity itself. It's true that laws against prostitution strengthen women's position. Ditto monogamy. Still, strengthening women's position is not the same as feminism since it need not include abolition of gender as a principle of social order. It is the attempt to abolish gender that is the ultimate attack on masculinity. Laws restricting sexual conduct seem to me consistent on the whole with a view that recognizes sex and gender as basic to the social order. Such a view would be antifeminist. > Statutory rape laws were likewise intended for the disruption of > these relations. The intent was to remove the threat that men would take > up relations with young women, thereby strenghtening the power of the > woman who was likely to be a member of feminist movements, at the > expense of men. They also keep young women in the custody of their fathers, and preserve them as future wives. Making a variety of sexual outlets available to men (here you're going beyond prostitution as an accommodation to human nature) weakens the family. Weakening the family does make women worse off but it also makes children worse off, and it makes men's actions less part of a continuing system of things based on something other than will and appetite, and so is antitraditional. > Those who supported these laws tended to also support lenient divorce > laws Is that so? I can't believe it's been uniformly the case. Official Christian sexual morality has always been no divorce and no sex outside marriage. Some people have taken that seriously, and it's affected practice and social attitudes at least somewhat. > which represented the forces unleashed like a disease against the > world by means of the American and French revolutions, and which had > their root in the Protestant reformation, which is why I cannot see a > true traditionalist conservative embracing the ideals of America or > even non-Anglican forms of Protestantism ; these concepts are bound > with the idea of the perfectability of mankind Catholicism of course views fornication as a sin. There are Catholic countries that have accepted prostitution, mistresses etc. as inevitable, certainly more so than the northern European countries. Is that religion though or an old cultural difference? Ireland is a Catholic country, and attitudes toward sex have been strict there. As you point out, acceptance of prostitution etc. goes with a lower status for women, and women had an unusually high status in Germanic society. It seems true that "American ideals" and Protestantism are on the whole antitraditionalist. It seems possible to me though to interpret them in a sense tolerably consistent with traditionalism. Restrict American ideals to formal politics and keep the scope of formal politics limited; place American ideals in a larger religious setting so that the nation is understood to be under God. As to Protestantism, it could be understood as specific reforms rather than a continuous process of deconcretizing. > But anyway : on sexual matters, I am opposed to prostitution and > statutory rape laws( child molesting laws are sufficient, which > prohibit sexual contact with under 14s - that's good enough) A difficulty regarding prostitution is that in an egalitarian democratic society if something is legal that means it's as legitimate as anything else. On statutory rape I disagree. I oppose open season on young girls. > To make a long story short, the glorification of weakness and > pervasiveness of liberalism in the US culture is why I am not able to > sympathize with foes of immigration who adopt a patriotic American > standpoint - is such a culture really worth saving ? I can understand > and sympathize with Europeans who correctly see third world > immigration as a threat to their culture. They have something to > lose, that would really leave the world the worse if it disappeared. > But American culture being rotten to the core, is the America vs. 3rd > world a choice between two evils? I don't think the Europeans are much better off. It's enough to make you cry. The issue though isn't whether U.S. culture or German culture as they are now are better than Turkish, Chinese or Mexican culture but how we can all climb out of the wreckage and build something better. Continuous ethnic mixing is a bad thing because it makes it harder for principles of social order other than amoral state bureaucracies and markets to grow up and become authoritative. That's true I think regardless of how far downhill things have gone -- multiculturalism will make them even worse. > Are there any resources in general geared to reclaiming the > Mediterranean heritage ? Interesting question. I don't know of anything. One possible reason is that since the Mediterranean has always had ethnic and religious cross-currents there's less of a connection between public and private life so it's easier for Mediterranean people to carry on a tolerable private life in a cosmopolitan environment. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Sat Oct 4 09:54:51 1997 Subject: Re: Sexual Morality FAQ To: b Date: Sat, 4 Oct 1997 09:54:51 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 780 Status: RO > What would you say to those who would argue that much of "traditional > sexual morality" is, in effect, part of a genocidal campaign to stop > the reproduction of Third World people? Don't see it. Strong and stable family life and well-defined sex roles usually means large families of well-brought-up children -- not particularly genocidal. Family planning involves a technological attitude toward sex rather at odds with TSM. In the West the decline of TSM has gone with a decline in birth rates. In contrast, TSM is quite strong among most Third World people in the Third World. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Sat Oct 4 21:19:18 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Sat, 4 Oct 1997 21:19:18 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 5084 Status: RO >The level of net discourse is quite low, only slightly higher than that >of North American society as a whole and bound to become lower as more >people get access (a familiar story with the spread of any new >technology). The newsgroups have gotten decidedly worse over the 5 yrs. or so I've been a user. The worthwhile discussions are mostly on mailing lists. >serious efforts to end prostitution in the US were part of the rise of >feminism during the 19th century Don't doubt it, but more-fully-developed feminism tends to support women who become sex workers. Their choice after all. Besides, feminism mistrusts heterosexual relations, and the advantage of prostitution is that the money gets paid and there's the end of it. Above all, modern feminists want to maintain the principle that sex is not a principle of social order. Making sex an ordinary item of commerce gives powerful support to that principle. Think dialectically! The issue is what legalizing prostitution would mean today. At one time legal prostitution might have contributed to a generally orderly system of sexual relations because it kept men from debauching respectable women. I don't think it would have that effect today. It would just drive home the principle that sex has no public moral implications. We don't need to give that principle additional support. >For example, on the matter of statutory rape laws, I would think in a >society that paid the slightest allegiance to traditional values they >would not be needed. Because of informal sanctions, including retaliatory violence from Dad and Older Brother. "Slightest allegiance" is wrong, though. Laws can support social standards that are generally but not universally accepted, especially when people think they have a right to do whatever is legal. What would the effect be today of eliminating statutory rape laws? >Explain how strengthening the position of women is different than >feminism. Feminism in the catastrophic modern sense is the abolition of gender as a principle of social order. It's wrong for there to be different social standards and expectations regarding men and women, or so we're told. Adjusting rights and obligations of men and women within a system that accepts that there are important distinctions between the sexes is a different and normally more benign matter. An example: strict standards for the sexual conduct of women strengthens the position of women just as general refusal to make private cut-rate contracts with employers strengthens the position of working men. Strict standards for female sexual conduct are not however feminist in the current sense. >Certainly Ireland and other northern Catholic nations are not places >where the woman is restricted and the man is relatively free. I think of it as part of a package. The Mediterranean countries are between Northwest Europe and the Levant both geographically and culturally. The NW is ethnically rather unmixed and so tends not to distinguish the domestic order from the order of the larger society. The household and the nation run into each other. As a result rule is for the public good, there is political freedom, and women have a strong position. The system can't survive cosmopolitan multiculturalism though. Therefore both Nordic racism and Scandanavian decadence. In the Levant, governments tend to be despotic, the men run things, women have no influence and are kept under cover, and the order of private life is not affected by the presence of diverse cultures in the same political society. Italy is in between, the North more like NW Europe and the South more like the Levant. >I have considered formally converting to Catholicism Religion precedes culture, so conversion for cultural purposes does not work. The religion has to come first. >American ideals were based on the destruction of monarchy, and total >opposition to king and pope ; it is impossible to reconcile >traditionalism with them. I think you underestimate the flexibility of traditionalism. It's possible to have a traditionalist society without king or pope. Consider Israel before Saul and the Jews after the destruction of the Temple. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Sun Oct 5 18:36:35 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Sun, 5 Oct 1997 18:36:35 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 7373 Status: RO >I guess my point was that Mediterranean societies seem to be better at >handling cosmopolitanism, and thus seem to be based on a sturdier >footing than the Nordic structures of not only Germanic Europe , but >also the USA being as white America is far more based on northern >Europe than southern Europe. My own view is that we're heading into a hypercosmopolitan era, and the social structure that works will therefore be an extreme form of the southern European form, more extreme even than those traditional in the Middle East. Basically we're headed ultimately and after a lot of problems for a conglomeration of inward-turning ethno-religious communities ruled by an irresponsible despotism. Think of a society composed of Hasidic Jews, Amish, Gypsies, etc., etc., etc. ruled by the Mamelukes. Too bad from my point of view, because I like the NW European form of society, but better than the NWO as planned. >> Don't doubt it, but more-fully-developed feminism tends to support >> women who become sex workers. > >Some feminism, but a decided minority strain despite much publicity There's always a problem talking about feminism because they're so irrational and self-contradictory, not to say dishonest. Nonetheless, I think feminists today are uniformly against social standards that tell women what to do sexually. For me the key is that feminism is nothing without liberalism, and liberalism denies that the body has any intrinsic meaning. The point of life is getting whatever it is you happen to want, and the whole world, including your body, has importance only as a resource for that end. Morality for liberals consists in establishing a universal rational scheme that helps people equally get whatever they happen to want. Sexual morality has no place in such a system because it says some sexual impulses are better than others. From a liberal standpoint that's pure bigotry. The form of feminism that is going to get anyplace is going to have to agree with that. >I know the prohibition of legal prostitution in the mediterranean >countries was due to a combination of feminism's rise and US >influence. My point is that legal prostitution had one function in traditional Mediterranean societies, the preservation of a system of gender roles, while its legalization in America in 1997 would have quite a different function. It would contribute to the abolition of gender roles by denying that sex and the body have specific moral implications. >America basically means liberalism - I don't know how - except for the >south - it is even possible to support traditionalist or even semi- >traditionalist ideas and express support for the USA and its ideals - >they are totally at odds But the South is perfectly happy with no kings and no Pope. So traditionalism does not need those things and can live with specific rejection of them. King and Pope do help make the public order traditionalist, and so they have been important in Western Europe where as discussed the public order is continuous with the domestic and private order in which people actually live. Even in the West though the absence of King and Hierarchy has been consistent with tradition where the public order has been somewhat anarchic or libertarian, as in the American South and in Medieval Iceland. That's why American conservatives have correctly identified constitutional limited government as essential to their cause. More generally -- no society can exist at all except through whatever health there is in its moral tradition. America has existed because its claimed ideals have not been understood in as categorical or comprehensive way as People for the American Way would prefer. "All men are created equal" did not originally mean that the state should abolish the family. What's wrong with understanding American tradition consistently with what has been best in American life? Why not do for American tradition from one point of view what revisionist theologians have done for Christian tradition from an opposed point of view? Life must always go on -- the point is to live it as well as possible with what is available. >This is exactly what I was referring to. I would think that this would >be sufficient, and a father who is not capable of such Again, a law good in some circumstances is bad in others. NW Europeans tend to do things more by law than by vendetta, and have more basic respect for the autonomy of others. So laws that support the natural reactions of a father with public sanctions can be beneficial. >When would you say the era of transition really would have been >defined as ? Things are always in transition. I think it made a difference when men left the farm and especially when most men became employees with no definite demonstrable skill and so became much more dependent on the favor of other men. >Still there is less mixing ethnically speaking in the northwest, which >has created a sort of hothouse society, that cannot survive >cosmopolitanism. An aside -- East Asia will be an interesting case. The Chinese have always been able to survive some degree of cosmopolitanism because of their extended family system and their system of authoritarian government through Confucian (that is to say Chinese traditionalist) scholar/officials. Even so the government from time to time has found it necessary to restrict contact with the outer barbarians. The Japanese are different. They have a culture based on scarcity and common ethnicity. They can't deal with minorities. In coming decades I expect to see big problems there since instant broadband universal communications etc. are plopping them into a global society in which *they* are a minority. >Conversion for cultural purposes has a long and hallowed tradition. It >was a factor in the construction of beautiful churches, especially >during the twilight years of the Roman Empire People didn't convert to build nice churches. Augustine didn't convert because the Church was where the high culture was - that was all pagan. >For me, standing inside the Palermo Cathedral was an epiphany, >unleashing a rather unexplicable inner mechanism. The beauty and >majesty of the church have always attracted converts. They grab your attention and make you think there might be something there. The cathedrals of England are amazing. They join heaven, earth, man, nature, God, thought, feeling, and devotion in a single cosmos. To admire them though only raises the issue of Christianity. To convert is something else. It is to be owned by God in Christ, not to be your own any more. It is equivalent to the acceptance of death. No one goes through that for the sake of an intellectual or aesthetic experience. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Mon Oct 6 22:00:30 EDT 1997 Article: 10351 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Christians Need Promise Keepers Date: 6 Oct 1997 21:59:10 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 14 Message-ID: <61c51e$eb8@panix.com> References: <3437CEA2.3055@worldnet.att.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <3437CEA2.3055@worldnet.att.net> Claire Day writes: >I admire and Respect Promise Keepers >I reject the leader,2Submit to the suthority of your churchs.2 Church >leaders are servants of Jesus, leaders of His people, not bosses. Isn't this similar to the usual objection to PK, that definite roles mean male authority, and authority simply means domination and subservience? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Mon Oct 28 18:43:30 1996 Subject: Re: masters cont. To: a Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 18:43:30 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1825 Status: RO > And I would suggest if you are interested on this theme you get > yourself a copy of the Red Queen. I intend to look at the RQ. I find the issue extraordinarily interesting. What after all does lifetime monogamy mean? It includes extraordinary respect for individuality and for our ability voluntarily to incur obligations that remain binding no matter what subsequent changes or inconveniences may arise. It demands subjection of aggression and overreaching in matters that touch us extremely forcefully and closely to a publicly-shared principle that is equal for all. It is, or was, a remarkable institution. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Palindrome of the week: Was raw tap ale not a reviver at one lap at Warsaw? From jk Sat Nov 2 13:33:58 1996 Subject: Re: The New World Order To: s Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1996 13:33:58 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1691 Status: RO > I agree, broadly speaking, with your concerns with the New Wrold > Order as you percieve it. Would you not agree, though, that the > problems you identify are also those of the current world order and > have at their root the problem that they are founded on economic and > materialistic rather than spiritual principles? Sure -- the NWO is simply the extension and perfection of what we have already. That's why all respectable opinion favors it. > Would it not, therfore, make sense for us all to be actively engaged > in shaping that world order upon spiritual lines? If we religionists > don't do that and just take a luddite approach, fearing change rather > than welcoming it, then who is going to infuse the world order with > the breathings of the Holy Spirit? The economists??? The > politicians??? The media??? If "that world order" means "the way things will be in the future" then I agree. If it means accepting the principle of construction and centralized administration of a rational world order in accordance with some overall plan I disagree. We don't know enough and can't possibly know enough to do that even if "we" (meaning some elite) had the power. At length the principle that a centrally planned and administered economy doesn't work is coming into general acceptance. There are many other aspects of social and political life that are equally or even more resistent to rationalization. Things grow up that we didn't plan or choose -- the NWO concept is a denial of that fundamental feature of our lives in society. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Palindrome of the week: Was raw tap ale not a reviver at one lap at Warsaw? From jk Wed Jan 1 10:29:42 1997 Subject: Re: Flags In Churches To: E Date: Wed, 1 Jan 1997 10:29:42 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 793 Status: RO > but, of course, as RBork inadvertently demonstrated in the famous FT > symposium, it is devilishly hard to demonstrate exactly how those > guys are wrong as a technical matter, while applying standards which > one could cheerfully apply to one's own intended position. It's a problem. The obvious technical resources are original intent, the history of the development of the law and the concept of law as such. The first would be revolutionary on a grand scale, not the intended role of the courts. The second puts us exactly where we are now. The third would presumably draw its content from academic legal culture. Therefore the appeal to the majority as trumps. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Palindrome of the week: Lived on decaf, faced no devil. From jk Fri Feb 7 17:31:43 1997 Subject: Re: BEYOND THE FRINGE: 32-10 To: j Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 17:31:43 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1923 Status: RO > Well, if the dream is dead, the last few generations of royal blood > has to take a great deal of responsibility for that. I suppose. Still, I know too little about monarchists and royal families to say. Do the Count of Paris or the Scandinavian royal families misbehave? I assume not, since you don't hear about them. Or how about Benelux royalty? The King of Belgium is a serious Catholic as such things go -- as I recall he dekinged himself for a day or two when the Belgians were going to loosen up their abortion law. > After reading 3 or 4 books by Strauss, I decided that for all his > acuteness in discussing the ills of the modernity, he really didn't > have much to offer in the way of a philosophical approach toward > living in the present. I certainly found it difficult to view him as > a conservative. He's not a philosophical conservative but he's critical of modernity and so is on the same side of the barricades. Also, the Straussians take the classics very seriously and talk about interesting issues. I intend to read more of him. > SOon after I found a copy of Voegelin's "New Science of Politics," > bought it and discovered he was now at least intelligible to me. I've read several things by him and need to read more. I was fascinated by his _Order and History_ but at this point couldn't give a good account of what it says, which shows I think that I should reread it. > Are you familar with Alasdair MacIntyre's work? I've read his _After Virtue_ and liked it. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Palindrome of the week: Plan no damn Madonna LP. From jk Tue Oct 7 06:59:59 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 06:59:59 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 3558 Status: RO > I would think that legal prostitution in America today would be a key > element in re-establishing " family values " of some kind. Can't see it -- it would just add another item to the menu. It wouldn't isolate irregular sexual relations, it would bring them fully into the commercial mainstream. > The collapse of the USSR shows that states based on ideals are > hothouse states by nature. No state is really based on ideals. Nor is any state without ideals. There's always a mixture. The advantage of the US over the USSR of course was that the ideals were less comprehensive and categorical and intended to affect social life less directly. > The whole idea of America was freedom from traditionalism Not really. It was self-government of a people, mostly outside governmental structures. Self-government outside govermental structures is compatible with traditionalism. In fact, it requires a lot of it. Why speak of "the whole idea" of America anyway? Lincoln and other politicians may have spoken of America as a "nation dedicated to a proposition" but it's not obligatory to believe them. There have been hundreds of millions of people here doing trillions of things. All that doesn't belong to the tyrants, blowhards, and writers of propaganda for schoolchildren. People who speak of "American ideals" also speak of our grievous failure to live up to them. Why not rehabilitate the legitimacy of the failure and say it's a good thing? Democratic ideals have been an element in American life but far from the sole element. Tradition is not so fragile that a little bit of this or that poisons it. > But what is best in American life ? Purely financial and > materialistic aspects, and even those are somewhat in question. Don't understand. The *only* things that have *ever* happened in America have been financial and materialistic events? I just got up this morning, and already that's been false as to my day. Think of the logic of what you're saying. You are saying, for example, either that the life of every family in America has always been based solely on financial and materialistic aspects, or that the financial and materialistic aspects have uniformly been better than any other aspects. > Europe has its problems, some quite severe, but the USA is much worse > ( except for unemployment ) . America has more experience in dealing with the modern mess. I think we'll do better than the Europeans. The current situation is too much at odds with the conditions under which the Europeans have flourished. Having farther to fall isn't necessarily an advantage. > However, once the church was in a monopoly so as to speak, its beauty > and magnificence certainly worked wonders on attracting converts. Was > this not the aim - I'm skipping a few centuries here - of the Counter > Revolution and its Baroque style ? The lack of the Baroque is an aspect > that makes America especially but even northern Europe less palatable. The Baroque had to do with a struggle within Christianity, in my mind more a matter of adherence to a party than conversion. Splendor of course attracts adherents to a party. > PS. The south is undoubtably healthier than the USA as a whole,but > how would you say that its level of the disease of modernity compares > with that of the UK ? Dunno. The descent of the UK has been meteoric. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Wed Oct 8 18:53:04 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Wed, 8 Oct 1997 18:53:04 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 5696 Status: RO >Americans have never really accepted extramarital relations as >unavoidable to the extent that the rest of western civ. has, which is >one reason for the high divorce rate in the US. The two are related to the idealization of marriage, and to an egalitarian notion that makes everything follow a single system. Still, if prostitution were legalized the "single system" would be that all consensual sexual relations are legitimate and a matter of individual choice and taste, and the tendency would be reinforced to make marriage an optional ideal, and thus a subjective matter, rather than the fundamental social institution. >I don't know - isn't the whole purpose of self-government, no king, no >pope, and in the north it was also no aristocracy ? As a practical matter, self-government on anything larger than village scale requires some sort of aristocracy and reliance on tradition. Massachusetts for example had its own aristocracy. >America has alwaysa been a nation guided by ideals and ideas more than >anything else. It was in these cases the ideal of racial purity that >led to the destruction of an organic tradition with pre-European roots >as existed to the north and south of US borders. Don't see how failure to marry Indians destroyed tradition. >Unfortunately, outside the south there has been little principled >conservatism of the sort that one sees on the other side of the pond, >just lunkhead moronic populism at its ugliest extremes whether from >left or right. The conservatism has generally been silent. The whole system has lasted as long as it has because the role of government and therefore of declared political ideals has been limited, and because Americans tend to avoid thought. Now we need explicit principled conservatism, because government has grown and because there are large bureaucracies which enforce abstract "thought" in the form of ideology, which means that we have to discern and emphasize the nonliberal and antiliberal strains in American life that have silently made social order possible here. >What I mean by that is that to me, the only good things about America >for myself, who is basically middle class, is the opportunity to leave >it, and sheer materialistic things You wouldn't even be alive without the love and self-sacrifice of those who came before you. Social order can't exist at all without those things, and if there were no social order whatever in America the population here would be about 318, probably not including you. Almost any mother has probably done and felt something better in her life than ownership of a car. Even in America there are military cemeteries, and not all of those buried there were shot in the back running from battle. It is a finer and more admirable thing for a man to be willing to die for his country than for a man to own a car. The list could be continued. So it seems that there have been a very large number of things in America better than sheer materialistic things. The fact that public representations of "the American dream" or whatever don't emphasize those better things is irrelevant. All that shows is that such representations falsify the basis of all social life, and therefore (in particular) of our social life. Better representations are needed. >> America has more experience in dealing with the modern mess. > >Do you really believe this ? Sure. It's the first modern country. >Britain is the most far gone country in the old world, only slightly >better than the USA.Holland and even Germany ... Direction is everything. Have you looked at trends in European crime rates, illegitimacy rates, welfare costs? In European religious life and high culture? I see no reason to suppose the Europeans will keep much of the things that have made them such a great and noble civilization. >Australia will probably wind up handling these problems better than the >US or Europe. They seem to have incorporated all the good aspects of >the USA with the bad ones minimized. Going down the tubes, fast. PC and multiculturalism reign supreme in the smaller English-speaking countries. The Pauline Hanson situation illuminates the nature of the Australian governing elites and ideology. >Europe would be a better place for raising children than the US. It's odd then that the Europeans aren't taking advantage of the opportunity. >On legal prostitution, I thought of something - what about it being >part of a compromise in order to make divorce more difficult, which I >am strongly in favour of ? People don't think about things that way. >they saw Italian men as being too apt to cheat and mess around in >general, in essence too masculine - whereas they saw a WASPized Jew and >an actual WASP respectively as being properly tamed and neutered. For my own part I'm sympathetic to the tradition that that views the Latin as less manly than the Northerner, that sees the theatrical male as less a man. >if we're headed for a sort of extreme form of the Mediterranean society >as an alternative to the NWO-approved future, I fail to see how a >northern European rooted society would be able to cope ? ) Right. Analysis tells me we're headed ultimately toward a super- Levantine society, but I greatly prefer societies of the northern European type. So in practical politics I support measures that make it more likely that my preferred society could function. My pessimistic analysis might after all be wrong. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Thu Oct 9 04:26:43 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 04:26:43 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2101 Status: RO > but this is true in all countries. i was talking more about things > specifically American. That's OK if you're in some sort of anteroom before conception looking at a catalog to figure out which country you're going to be born in. Once you're born and you grow up you have a country and a family and it's not that easy to do anything about it. They are most of what has made you what you are. You want to move to a country with more tradition but if you do what will make it *your* country? They are not after all your traditions. In thinking about your country and family it doesn't make sense to focus your attention on how another country and family have more of some good quality or other. The question is what the qualities are that have made possible whatever good your own forebears have had and been. Those qualities necessarily include things like love and sacrifice because life can't go forward any length of time without them. The story of those qualities is the true story of your country and family. The fact that others might have a similar story that's better in some ways doesn't mean the story is not yours. It just means that we all belong to the same human race. > As I said before, Europe has some severe problems. But I see the > whole process of decay as more advanced in the US than anywhere else. As I said, the US is the first modern country. What will keep decay from going to completion in Europe? The principles of European civilization, monarchy, aristocracy, church, region and nation, class, are all gone. > He is very much into the Vince Lombardi school of Americanism with > the PC tone that is part and parcel of " Americanism " today ; USA is > #1 because we give breaks to minorities and go out of our way to > prevent white privelege. What does Vince Lombardi have to do with PC? (I should say I'm not a sports fan and so know very little about him.) -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Fri Oct 10 06:55:42 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 06:55:42 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1462 Status: RO > Actually monarchy, although it has lost its power, still remains as a > figurehead, and will probably make a comeback in some countries even > as the nations grow closer together in the EU. What can a monarch be though under modern circumstances, with the emphasis on amusement and sensation and without an aristocracy or established church? In any case, monarchy is a lot less important as a unifying and ordering principle in the Mediterranean countries than in the North and West of Europe. It is important in societies in which there is not a clear line between family life and public life, and depends on the general health of such societies. > An anti-modern reaction could occur more easily in Europe than in the > US. I'm dubious. An anti-modern reaction would I think take the form of a religious revolution which seems more likely here. In Europe people are too much in the hands of the ruling classes. That's more true of the North of course. > To say that European regionalism is gone is mighty premature. It's difficult to have regional differences that matter much with cars, superhighways, and a population that spends several hours a day watching TV. I just don't think it's going to be an important part of social and cultural organization. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Fri Oct 10 17:52:11 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 17:52:11 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1863 Status: RO > And people in the US are less in the hands of the ruling classes ? I > don't know. I think there's more of a gap here. That's why we don't trust government. > In Europe it would take the form of an anti-immigration, > anti-foreigner Fortress Europe type mentality. I just don't think that's enough to live on. > Have you seen any of the news about the Front National recently? Nothing illuminating. Thanks for the translation, I don't read Spanish. > I do not see how an anti modern backlash in the USA would be anything > but faithful to the belief in the perfectability of man and merely > loyal to an earlier stage of progress oriented modernity like a > hundred years ago. The failure of the American experiment will affect the way people look at things a great deal I think. Already new break points are appearing between John Locke and conservative Christianity, which up to now have of course been allied here. Walt Disney Enterprises is making people think that maybe the free market and diversity and doing things technologically and on a large scale is not such a reliable ally of goodness. When multiculturalism and feminism go bust liberalism will go bust too, and no liberalism means no American experiment. Most likely radical familism and congregationally-oriented religious separatism will play a large role. Ditto walled communities, which are already a growing trend. Ditto ethnic fragmentation. The reason a true counterrevolution is hard to imagine here is that liberalism is part of the essence of "America." True enough, but what that really means is that when liberalism stops working what we end up with here won't be "America." -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Sat Oct 11 04:53:36 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 04:53:36 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1854 Status: RO > Compared to Spaniards and Italians, Americans trust government > incredibly. True enough, I was thinking of the North. > Anyway. even the French distrust government more than Americans do. They nonetheless think they have the right to rely on the state. When the foreign correspondents for the _New York Times_ wax thoughtful they go on and on about how the French are proud of the post-war welfare state and that shows how important they think solidarity is. A strange concept - solidarity as a matter of cash payments mediated through a state bureaucracy. There will be no antimodern revolution as long as people base their lives and understanding of community on the modern state. The marriage of the French to the authorities might not be altogether happy but it's a marriage. > > > In Europe it would take the form of an anti-immigration, > > > anti-foreigner Fortress Europe type mentality. > > > > I just don't think that's enough to live on. > It would also take the form of getting back in touch with traditions. But traditions are sustaining not so much in themselves as by their spiritual content. > Walled communities are part of what is perpetuating PC and > ultraliberalism. Not sure why that should be. There aren't many of them where I am but those that there are mostly want to tend to their own affairs. From other parts of the country I've heard different things - from some that the only thing they're about is property values and it's an oppressive bore to live in them and from others accounts of walled communities where the people mostly go to the same evangelical church and that's what determines the nature of the life. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Sat Oct 11 07:31:51 1997 Subject: Re: Thanks for information To: M Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 07:31:51 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2442 Status: RO > Nietzsche (who despite his flaws is still overall is my favorite > philosopher). Nietzsche writes beautifully, and he makes the reader feel very intelligent and much superior to everybody else. So far as I can tell though Pascal deals much more sanely with problems of meaning (e.g., do all concepts fall apart on analysis?) and perspectivism. One problem Nietzsche has is that noble aristocrats don't scream, rant, and engage in personal abuse of those they want to position as their inferiors. A noble aristocrat is what he is, and that's what on Nietzsche's own view he is not and can't be. Also, his denial of transcendence makes him hopelessly stuck mind and spirit through and through in a world he hates. That's why he's incoherent. He wants to be God but all he can manage is his own crucifixion and without appeal to transcendence he can't even explain why it's a crucifixion. So he complains and yells at people. In other words, he hides in trivia from what he wants to present as his own situation. > a hatred of modernity, egalitarianism and mass society. I seem to > part company of the issues of race and sexual morality and > Christianity. If there are no ethnic loyalties and no standards of sexual morality rather like the traditional ones I don't see how egalitarianism and mass society or something equally mindless and brutal are to be avoided. Healthy culture requires healthy tradition, and that requires particular ties among men that precede the choices they happen to make. The basis of such ties is the family, and ethnicity is family writ large enough to support tradition and culture. > I am also suspicious of capitalism, regarding it as a socially > destructive force (which is where the Frankford School/New Left hit > the mark on their critique of mass culture). The issue of course is what the alternative is under present circumstances. The centralized administrative state is worse. > I also agree with Aristotle as well as Murray Bookchin and Kropotkin > that the only viable society with any meaningful sense of community > is the small scale ones. The difficulty is that people want to find some way of having the bureaucratic welfare state administer small scale communities. Can't be done. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Oct 12 13:48:30 EDT 1997 Article: 10352 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Immigration, multiculturalism and idealism Date: 7 Oct 1997 06:05:16 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 22 Message-ID: <61d1gs$5s2@panix.com> References: <199709231641012250526@deepblue22.salamander.com> <60aoss$jgr@panix.com> <19970929094204699239@deepblue15.salamander.com> <60pmih$4js@panix.com> <199710012041333170025@deepblue16.salamander.com> <612mme$irq@panix.com> <19971003101531977671@deepblue4.salamander.com> <615hi7$crn@panix.com> <199710061516591033288@deepblue3.salamander.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <199710061516591033288@deepblue3.salamander.com> wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes: >people exploring CR approaches sometimes fear that if they step away >from liberal structures they will fall off the map into naziism or >some other horror. The basic problem I think is deep-down acceptance of moral subjectivism, the view that there aren't any objective goods we can recognize in common that can order our common life. There's only what I want, and what you want, and who gets his way. On that understanding, the only possible alternative to liberalism (rational scheme for giving our own way equally to each of us as much as possible) is A dominating B and making B subservient to A's desires. That arrangement could take the form of naked worship of force (Naziism), or the relation of dominance and subservience could be masked by manipulative rhetorical appeals to "traditional values" or whatever (PK). -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Oct 12 13:48:31 EDT 1997 Article: 10360 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Immigration, multiculturalism and idealism Date: 12 Oct 1997 13:47:02 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 21 Message-ID: <61r2em$r3m@panix.com> References: <199709231641012250526@deepblue22.salamander.com> <60aoss$jgr@panix.com> <19970929094204699239@deepblue15.salamander.com> <60pmih$4js@panix.com> <199710012041333170025@deepblue16.salamander.com> <612mme$irq@panix.com> <19971003101531977671@deepblue4.salamander.com> <615hi7$crn@panix.com> <199710061516591033288@deepblue3.salamander.com> <61d1gs$5s2@panix.com> <61quol$nrj$1@gte2.gte.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <61quol$nrj$1@gte2.gte.net> "T.O. Minnix" writes: >> That arrangement could take the form of naked worship of force >> (Naziism), or the relation of dominance and subservience could be >> masked by manipulative rhetorical appeals to "traditional values" or >> whatever (PK). >This surprises me - I would have thought CRs would have identified PK >with a new Great Awakening. The "on that [moral subjectivist] understanding" at the beginning of the paragraph was intended to carry over to the sentence quoted. I didn't intend to state my own view. Actually, I haven't been paying close attention to PK although I've seen lots of liberal criticisms. Anybody have an opinion on the movement itself? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Tue Oct 14 20:18:45 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id UAA06397; Tue, 14 Oct 1997 20:18:45 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 20:18:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710150018.UAA06397@panix.com> To: jk@panix.com Subject: The ECUSA and the nature of politics Status: RO >Those who are currently involved in the ECUSA's power structure have, >for many reasons, let their politics form their theology. Some theorizing of my own, to do with whatever anyone wants: The problem goes deeper than ECUSA and even formal religion, it's the overall trend toward basing all thought in all aspects of life on experience. If you keep at it long enough, and it's been going on for centuries, and you squeeze out everything that can't be reduced to experience, then "truth" eventually becomes whatever symbolic articulation of your sensations, feelings and desires you find most empowering, "righteousness" becomes action that as a practical matter advances "truth," and "God" is a way of saying that "truth" and "righteousness" are the ultimate standards. Anything other than that will appeal to something that isn't in your experience. Oddly, the description I just gave applies equally to progressivism and Naziism. Both views are fully modern, and both are based on practical denial of the transcendent and consequent deification of man as he concretely is. (As they say, "We are Church, and in the Eucharist we become Christ.") The reason for the importance of Naziism in progressive thought is that there is so much common ground between the views -- for progressives the Holocaust is always just inches away, and any deviation from progressive correctness could lead there rather quickly. For progressives, then, the ultimate ethical standard is the triumph of the particular actual will, which now has the role once played by the Will of God. However, instead of taking as their goal the triumph of the will of a particular people, identified with the will of the particular man who leads that people, progressives aim at an overall system that gives a practical guarantee of the equal triumph of all wills. It follows that support of radically egalitarian social transformation -- opposition to oppression, understood as the subordination of one human will to another -- becomes the essence of the faith. All other things -- creeds, sacraments, scriptures, you name it -- are symbols, observances and pious legends, OK but only to the extent they support what is essential. From jk Mon Nov 4 14:57:48 1996 Subject: Re: PO To: m Date: Mon, 4 Nov 1996 14:57:48 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1294 Status: RO > Who is Flora Lewis which frequntly writes in International Herald > Tribune? She used to be a columnist for the _New York Times_ on foreign affairs and so speaks for establishment liberal opinion. > Friday 1/11 she writes how to fight the "extreme right" in Europe and > USA, in which she includes Le Pen as "proto-fascist" and Joerg Haider > as almost nazi. Not mensioning Buchanan she writes that the militias > has got into the republican party and turned it from "mainstream". On > the other hand she writes that Le Pen and Haider is turning the > european mainstream to the right. That is the establishment liberal view here. In the prestige press such views are treated as fact rather than opinion. So far as I can tell, any European who thinks immigration causes problems that can't simply be attributed to the bigotry of Europeans is an "extreme rightist." In the United States, the forces of "extremism" include everyone to the right of Bob Dole, everyone who (as a recent discussion in the _New York Times_ put it) is concerned about immigration, abortion or moral chaos. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) Palindrome of the week: Was raw tap ale not a reviver at one lap at Warsaw? From jk Sun Oct 12 07:06:44 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 07:06:44 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1104 Status: RO > Quite personally, I can't understand the German revulsion towards > Turks in particular or southerners in general If people from a place where there's a lot of public cynicism move into a place where there's a lot of public trust there are going to be problems. Actually, it seems clear that ethnic outsiders will always cause problems in a place where there's a lot of public trust. > Somehow this never seems to have caught on to anywhere near the same > extent among Americans who distruct government, a sign that even with > the growing distrust of government it is still regarded higher than > in much of Europe It could also show greater self-respect and respect for others. Unwillingness to live by fraud is not such a bad quality. > The people who live within them tend to be the movers and shakers of > the society The more walled and gated communities there are the less that will be the case. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Sun Oct 12 18:28:57 1997 Subject: Re: Comments on sexual morality and America To: s Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 18:28:57 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1265 Status: RO > > Actually, it seems clear that ethnic outsiders will always cause > > problems in a place where there's a lot of public trust. > It's human nature for those who look different to be shut out in some > way. What I had in mind was something different, that public trust depends on cultural cohesion, and that ethnic difference means culture difference and so difficulty maintaining that cohesion. The type of society that grew up in Northern and Western Europe, in which public life tended to be free and open and also to have a moral content, was able to do so because there were no invasions from outside after the 900s. Its development was aided by the continued absence of outsiders. By 1500 for example there were no Jews in any of the European countries on the Atlantic seaboard. > > The more walled and gated communities there are the less that will be > > the case. > So they'll give up their walled and gated communities once they're more > common? No, I meant that as more people live in them they won't remain the particular hangout of limousine liberals. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Wed Oct 15 12:23:40 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id MAA29223; Wed, 15 Oct 1997 12:23:40 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 12:23:40 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710151623.MAA29223@panix.com> To: jk@panix.com Subject: Re: Re: Re: The ECUSA and the nature of politics Status: RO I continue to spin out theory, for comment and I hope with the indulgence of readers: >They exalt their own human reason and experience above that which has >been revealed by God ... They have cut themselves off from the things >which can guide them and keep them from error. As a result, God becomes >projections of their own experiences and wills. It's important how broad and deep this tendency is, and not only in the church. Our system of public morality is constructed as a projection of our own experiences and wills. It takes the view that what life is about is getting one's own way, and what morality and politics are about is finding principles for accommodating conflicting purposes. Our schools inculcate the same understanding, and our legal system makes the intrusion of other viewpoints in public life unconstitutional. Our scholarship construes the world in terms of human feelings, sensations and purposes using modern natural science as a model. To the extent modern theology aspires to mainstream intellectual respectability it follows the same path. The revolution of the 60s was the triumph of this system of thought throughout society. In that period our public life became formally self-sufficient and man-centered (that was the point of the school prayer decisions). The next step was for the resulting moral understanding to become all-penetrating -- as people began to say, "the personal is the political." Today we are achieving political correctness, in the church and in society at large, which is to say that language suggesting objective moral norms other than those of liberalism is being abolished, because if there were such norms some lifestyles would be better than others, contrary to equality. The goal is to make it impossible to express dissent from the established order. The effect of all this is that the people in the pew who still from habit consider themselves "mainstream" are in fact nothing of the kind. If they have any doubts they should watch TV, read their children's textbooks or pick up a random selection of magazines from the local newstand. From the standpoint of all authoritative American institutions they are cranks, if they take what they say they believe at all seriously, and the function of respectable organized religion is to keep them harmless. So in attempting to take back mainline denominations from trimmers and revisionists traditionalists are going against the whole grain of American life today. From jk@panix.com Thu Oct 16 09:20:53 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id JAA07121; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 09:20:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710161320.JAA07121@panix.com> Subject: Character: It's for your own good ... To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 09:20:52 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Some comments on comments: >I tend to think of children as coming into this world as people who >have the potential to form themselves. I think part of what's at work here is the idea is that a man is too glorious a thing to be an artifact so it's wrong to think we can decide what we want a child to become and make him into that thing. That seems all very true. Another alternative though to the "child forming himself" theory is that we elders could recognize the best possibility for the child and help him become that through education and discipline. We might be wrong about what's best for him, but so might anyone including the child. A necessary part of the process would be for the child to come to a better understanding of his own good, and in time his understanding would count for more and more, but there'd be nothing *uniquely* valid about the child's views. Especially in the earlier stages his parents and teachers would normally understand the matter better than he does. In many respects "the best possibility" would be similar for all children -- for example, it would include physical health and ordinary virtues like honesty. In some respects it would reflect the child's particular qualities or the situation he is born into. It wouldn't be quite the same for example for a musical and unmusical child or for a child born into a hunter-gatherer family and one born into an American professional family. What is best for a child depends to some degree after all on what possibilities his life will offer. Often of course a parent's judgment of his child's good would reflect the parent's own idiosyncrasies. That's just how things are - it doesn't mean though that the situation has to be understood as the parent devising an agenda and forcing it on the child as a foreign imposition. To me that seems a natural view. We want what's best for our children and exercise our authority as parents to try to promote it, and we don't think "what's best" is at all the same as "what I happen to want" or "what my child happens to want." People tend to reject the view though because they don't think any of us has a "good" that others can recognize and is largely independent of what we happen to want. The tendency is to want to reduce good to preferences and to think that the _summum bonum_ is giving people what they want. Or maybe the _summum bonum_ is creating oneself though an act of pure choice, if that's a different concept. (I think the two are the same, except the former sounds tawdry and the latter heroic.) It seems to me these tendencies make it impossible to think coherently about family life and education since children are not and can not be independent even to the extent we adults are, and the whole question in bringing them up is what they will be led to become - in particular, how their "values," their settled long-term preferences, will be formed. So unlike economics and politics, in childrearing saying "give 'em what they want" gets the discussion precisely nowhere. And as a practical matter I'm not sure "let the child create himself" can be distinguished from "give him what he wants." >Yet the real task is sometimes to trust that the form is already in a >sense there or to be created from within. The child may look like he >is going to become a gangster, but one needs to see that is not what is >really there. Fine. Is there anything uniquely authoritative about the child's insight into the matter? >Yes, but it is ultimately the child's choice as to the values he/she >wishes to take on in forming him/herself. The notion of choosing values is an odd one since it is a condition of rational choice already to have values. >I think of the difference as the distinction between keeping the yard >clean and planning and developing a French garden. I do not chose the >plants, but some sense of order is needed, and I pick up broken >bottles. Man is a social animal though. It is *natural* for man to live in society and become human through participation in culture, the particular way of life of a particular society. We do not as individuals create ourselves. To treat children as if they should is to deny their nature and truly to force an agenda on them. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Thu Oct 16 20:35:34 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id UAA04116; Thu, 16 Oct 1997 20:35:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710170035.UAA04116@panix.com> Subject: Character: Responding to Andy To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 20:35:33 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Andy writes: >The title you gave your message, Jim --"It's for your own good..." -- >has some pretty heavy-duty overtones that you may not be aware of ... >the title of a devastating book ... contibuted over the generations to >the inhumanity expressed eventually in Nazism and the holocaust. I knew of course that the phrase is sometimes considered a particularly creepy mask for domination, and used it partly as a minor provocation and partly because I think it should be rehabilitated. We *necessarily* do things to our children for their own good, and might as well grow up and deal with it. I wasn't aware of the book you mention. I consider it natural though for people to justify bad things by appeals to good things, to "the will of God," "the good of the children," "social justice," what have you. What else would anyone use as a justification? Naziism may be something of an inkblot. Every one who looks at it sees the other guy. My own theory is that it's a logical implementation of social constructivism and denial of goods that don't reduce to preferences. The good (or so a philosophical Nazi might say) is what a particular society constructs as its good, in other words its will as made concrete in the will of its leader. A people's good (that is, its will) becomes universally valid and therefore as close to absolute good as we're going to get when it overcomes the wills of all other peoples. That overcoming is most fully and undeniably realized through a successful war of universal conquest, torture and extermination. So the way to the universal triumph of the true good turns out on this view to lie through the horrors you mention. The point of the foregoing is that although some people tie Naziism to imposition of an idea of the good on others I'm more inclined to tie it to a denial of objective good valid for all regardless of preferences. If "good" is not at bottom distinct from "what I feel like doing" then it seems to me you arrive at some very odd results. Hitler didn't think there was some objective common good that the Jews shared with Aryans. He didn't want to force them to become vegetarians, he wanted to create a new world from which they were absent. It was triumph of the will and not triumph of ethical cognition that mattered for him. >"How are we to tell the difference between the imposition that >constitutes a form of abuse and the imposition that is actually in the >service of the good (the child's own, or some larger)?" This is the question of how we can tell what is good. My answer is that it's a skill a man or society develops through experience by working at it. In the case of society as a whole the word "tradition" is used instead of "experience." You do your best and eventually you get better. There are no perfect masters of the skill, at least I don't know any, but we can't act rationally without relying on whatever degree of it we have. If we can't tell at all what is good then we can't act rationally even in our own affair, so if there's a fundamental problem with saying such a skill exists then saying "don't impose your idea of the good on someone else" doesn't solve it. >But what confuses me is: if the infant's desires to be breast-fed >should be heeded as right and good, but if --as I believe-- a goodly >number of the subsequent desires of the growing child should not be >trusted to point toward the good, just how and why is the line to be >drawn between what is naturally trustworthy and what is not in our >inborn natures? There's no mechanical way of doing it. You come to be able to draw the line well by participating in a good way of life. Presumably there's more good than bad in all actual ways of life -- otherwise they would fall apart and their adherents would murder each other -- but none is perfect. That's life. You do the best you can. Even if your Mom put you on a feeding schedule and that was bad she was probably a better mother than she would have been if she hadn't tried to do what seemed best instead of simply doing what she felt like doing or simply what you seemed to want (and if "what one feels like doing" is the standard why would she have done the latter instead of the former anyway?) -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Oct 18 06:37:01 EDT 1997 Article: 10366 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: What to do about "the culture" Date: 13 Oct 1997 11:19:30 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 43 Message-ID: <61te62$g9@panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO The following proposed questions for discussion at a meeting of a traditionalist conservative discussion group. I wondered whether it would provoke comments on a.r.c. The topic is "Can the Culture be Redeemed?" For present purposes, "the culture" means the complex of attitudes, ideals, goals and ways of life publicly presented as valid and proper. It includes the things understood to bind the members of a society together morally, and those taught to children by public institutions. In America today the culture is mostly determined by the mass media and governmental or quasi-governmental institutions, although popular acceptance or at least acquiescence is also necessary. So things that pass without much comment and with authoritative support on TV or in the public schools are part of the culture; things that are viewed with suspicion and always have to explain themselves are not. It seems that in America the culture (as so defined) is hedonistic, individualistic and relativistic. Its principle of order is to balance impulse with careerism, self-seeking with egalitarianism, and hoggishness with a cult of connoisseurship. It recognizes money and power far more easily than other forms of authority. In recent decades it has become explicitly opposed to any religion except the religion of self. It could hardly care less about tradition except as something to destroy in the interests of liberty and equality as it understands those things. As described, "the culture" seems unredeemable. Is the description accurate or only a caricature? Do the problems reflect fundamental problems with the way Americans live or only problems with our elites? If the latter, how can the points of soundness in American life be built upon? If the former, what should be done? Should traditionalist conservatives put their efforts into trying to reform the culture, or into building a counterculture or countercultures with only defensive participation in public life? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Oct 18 06:37:02 EDT 1997 Article: 10425 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: What to do about "the culture" Date: 18 Oct 1997 06:31:26 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 41 Message-ID: <62a35u$ql3@panix.com> References: <61te62$g9@panix.com> <344271FA.5941@nospam.com> <627aaj$rf1$1@cfs2.kis.keele.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <627aaj$rf1$1@cfs2.kis.keele.ac.uk> cla04@cc.keele.ac.uk (Andy Fear) writes: >I think it would be wrong to see high culture as solely belonging to >Western Europeans, there are plenty of other noble cultural >traditions. So far as I can tell multiculturalists don't study Sanscrit or read Ibn Khaldun or _The Tale of Genji_. Freeing oneself from high and noble culture is more the purpose, affirmation of the self whatever the self happens concretely to be. On that score the Confucian _Analects_ aren't much help. >One is to withdraw from society, as advocated by Plato, the other >would be to enforce moral norms on society. Alas the first would not >be tolerated by liberals - we have already seen what happens to >communities who try to drop out of the liberal world order. It's a mixed situation. Strictly orthodox Jews and the Amish seem to be doing just fine. Liberal theoreticians think their kids should be taken from their parents and given the current version of liberal education but so far there doesn't seem much appetite to do that. Laziness, corruption and sentimentality hold out a lot of hope and the liberal world order generates those in plenty. It's not going to be a perfectly implemented system run by efficient and dedicated officials. Think more of something presided over by the United Nations bureaucracy or the New York City Department of Education. Keep your head down and do what you want and you might become a target but most likely you'll get away with it. It's too much trouble to stop or even notice you and besides there are more interesting things for the higher-ups to attend to like interagency politics and finagling unauthorized perks. >The second requires an effort of will which I see no sign of existing. As will and order disintegrate in society at large people will have to organize their own locally. It's not as if there's going to be anything else for them to rely on. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Oct 18 14:15:31 EDT 1997 Article: 10431 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: What to do about "the culture" Date: 18 Oct 1997 14:01:11 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 46 Message-ID: <62ath7$6t3@panix.com> References: <61te62$g9@panix.com> <344271FA.5941@nospam.com> <627aaj$rf1$1@cfs2.kis.keele.ac.uk> <3448E41C.7388@nospam.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <3448E41C.7388@nospam.com> FELIX writes: >> One is to withdraw from society, >In this country, the only successful examples of this are those >communities with strong centuries old religious traditions. My inclination is to think this is the only solution that will work, though. Unless you're part of an inward-turning community modern communications mean you can easily establish instant connection with anyone, anything, and any pursuit in the world. It's as easy to connect with someone in Tokyo as your next-door neighbor. In a very few years everyone will be a couple of button clicks away from a drug-enhanced virtual reality rendition of _120 Days of Sodom_. Even if most people don't feel like going all the way with the Divine Marquis, that and every other imaginable possibility and some not so imaginable, and everything in between, will be immediately available and so be impossible to exclude >from what defines our world. That means our world won't be defined in any way that's even slightly comprehensible. Unless you happen to be a god or at least a saint coherence of life is impossible if you don't live in a coherent social setting. Incoherence eventually means death, so in the end people will come to live by whatever is necessary for coherence of culture. So far as I can tell, that will mean dropping out, which means a discipline and way of life fine-grained enough to keep out the all-penetrating world order, which probably means a religious way of life with lots of rules for family life. The sort of thing the strict Orthodox and the Amish have, in fact. >As long as white people keep getting their (gradually diminished) >paycheck they do not appear to be ready to take up the gun to rid >themselves of their oppressors. The fundamental problem though isn't oppression in any ordinary sense. If a man's loosing his marbles very likely it will be possible to take advantage of him in various ways but his basic problem is not that he's being taken advantage of. Even if every oppressor in the world moved to Antarctica to fast and do penance for his sins the situation described above would still be with us. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Oct 18 14:15:32 EDT 1997 Article: 10432 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: What to do about "the culture" Date: 18 Oct 1997 14:13:42 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 16 Message-ID: <62au8m$8bj@panix.com> References: <61te62$g9@panix.com> <344271FA.5941@nospam.com> <627aaj$rf1$1@cfs2.kis.keele.ac.uk> <62a35u$ql3@panix.com> <3448EAD8.31DB@nospam.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <3448EAD8.31DB@nospam.com> FELIX writes: >I am constantly suprised that the counter-revolutionaries in this >group are not more explicitly Christian in their posts. Then it becomes a different conversation. If you're talking about politics and social issues and aren't presuming Christianity then you can't bring it in as an answer because it doesn't follow from what's been said to that point together with assumptions that can be taken for granted. That of course may show that conversations of this kind are of limited use, like a conversation about public health among people not all of whom can be presumed to accept the germ theory of disease. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Sun Oct 19 06:17:40 1997 Subject: Re: On Nietzsche and Other Matters To: M Date: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 06:17:40 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 5013 Status: RO >[Nietzsche's] value lies elsewhere: in the questions he raises, and in >the manner in which he examines ideas and problems in new ways. He's a provocative writer it's true. Read him and it frees you from having to read a lot of other things. >Ad hominem attacks and psychologizing are not really productive when >examining particular philosophical systems. As you observe, he's not a systematic philosopher. He's a man in a situation partly of his own making and partly forced on him and must be considered as such. It's true one can break off particular observations or arguments and consider them in abstraction from his overall effort, and that can be valuable, but it's not the only productive way to deal with his writings. >Nietzches' philosphy is a philosophy of transcendence, albeit of a non- >theistic kind (this is not as strange as might appear at first glance. It's a philosophy of the necessity and non-existence of transcendence. As such in the end it has nothing to say. All he can really do is scream and strike poses. Still, the situation he's stuck in -- partly by choice -- is one worth understanding and he illuminates it better than almost anyone. >His aphoristic style may stike some readers as trivial, but a careful >reading does not bear this out. Actually, I like his style very much. >Your references to his "cruxifiction" are I suppose, to his psychotic >break at the end of his career. That wasn't what I had in mind. Crucifixion is the death by torture of the transcendent at the hands of the non-transcendent. He needed transcendence but couldn't allow it partly because of the cultural situation and partly because he didn't want anything other than himself to be God. Therefore he was stuck hopelessly in the non-transcendent and it tortured him so he screamed and wriggled around like a bug on a pin. >Without giving over to the "hyper-cosmopolitanism" of multicuturalism, >I think we can strike a balance between tradition and tolerence. I for >one do not want to live in a world where it is acceptable for a racist >skinhead to beat me and my Cuban wife to death. In America in 1997 anyone who thinks it's OK for ethnic distinctions to play a significant role in social life is considered the same as somebody who thinks it acceptable for a racist skinhead to beat you and your wife to death. After all, racism is racism. What function does it serve to define the issue that way? >It is my belief that the corrosive effects of post-modern capitalism >are so corrosive and insideous, that talking about conserving anything >will be a moot point within the next 20 to 30 years. We will be forced >to act at some point in the future, hence such a response will no >longer be conservative as such but radical. It will be an effort at >retrieving what was valuable in the past and building traditions that >are sustainable. The difficulty is what to do about it. Capitalism makes everything a matter of choice, on the theory that each of us is an utterly independent chooser, and then gives tons of money to whoever can manipulate us most successfully, which is possible because we are social beings as well as choosers. The usual proposed remedy, the modern state, only makes things worse. It is also based ostensibly on the theory of man as an independent chooser (that's basic liberal theory) but actually on manipulation, and it adds to the power available to the capitalist the power of brute physical force. >This is not the same as claiming that a universal sexual morality >exists, which can be determined and imposed. Still, the geni is out of >the bottle. I don't even begin to speculate on how to put it back. I don't think sexual morality is different from other kinds of morality. If people feel it as valuable a variety of arrangements grow up that have the effect of enforcing it. One possibility is that people will notice that sloppy sexual conduct goes with a cruddy life. That's already true of course. Perhaps family ties will become more necessary as a practical matter because of welfare cuts, degradation of public education, etc., and things like traditional sexual morality that support family life will come to have a clearer relation to living well. Another possibility is that the continuing evacuation of public life of moral content will eventually mean that most people will carry on their lives as adherents of some sectarian religion, and sectarian religions that last always have strict sexual morality because otherwise it becomes impossible to maintain boundaries between the sect and everyone else and to pass on beliefs etc. to the next generation. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Tue Oct 21 09:00:09 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id JAA20517; Tue, 21 Oct 1997 09:00:09 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710211300.JAA20517@panix.com> Subject: Character: co-creation, consent, etc. To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 09:00:09 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO >From the discussion between the Schmooklers: >I would, for example, prefer, "If you keep interrupting, I will have to >put you in your room," to "This is not the kind of person I want you to >be, one who interrupts." What's wrong with "People who are considerate don't interrupt, we should all be considerate, and it's my duty to see that you learn that"? It seems to me most parents actually think about things that way, that it would wrong the child and the world not to teach elementary manners. Also, why should your child think you're justified in imprisoning him unless your action has to do with with a moral system that is binding before you or he choose anything? Otherwise it seems it's simply a matter of your greater physical strength enabling you to have things your way. >I do believe we do create ourselves, co-creatively with God, through >our choices. To empower children to do the same doesn't seem to be to >impose an agenda. Co-creatively with God is an interesting notion. It may be quite useful. Does it mean we can make choices that thwart or violate God's co-creative activity, and such choices are illegitimate? For example if I drank myself to death it seems I would be doing something of the sort. Someone might say as he left the graveside "God made him for something better." It also seems that it would be possible for someone, a parent say, sometimes to judge God's co-creative purpose well enough to enforce it without imposing an agenda, for example by intervening to prevent his young son from developing a crack habit. There must be less extreme examples as well. Also -- is it only God who is co-creator with us? Why not our family, our society, our times and environment? It seems to me those things contribute to making us what we are at least as much as the conscious choices we make. If my parents for example had a co-creative role in making me what I am then it seems that playing that role to the best of their ability would be different from either imposing an agenda or letting me develop in accordance with a strictly internal principle. >Though we are social and are impacted by that, that doesn't mean that >we are created by it. Co-created? It seems to me I'm probably a different sort of guy in very profound ways than I would have been if I had been raised as the eldest son of Assurbanipal's favorite concubine. The differences may well go deeper than most differences I could create by conscious individual choice. What sense then does it make to say that I am created by my conscious individual choices but only impacted by not being the eldest son of A's favorite concubine? >no one can be influenced except if the influencee in some way decides >to go along. My parents influenced me to speak English rather than Sanskrit because that's what they spoke around the house. In some sense no doubt I decided to go along with the influence but how illuminating is it to put it that way? The example isn't trivial. Moral judgments and so on are encoded in customary vocabulary and turns of phrase. If A grows up in an environment in which people are always analyzing conduct in terms of "dharma" and B grows up in one in which they talk about what's "cool" instead chances are they'll be influenced to have a different understanding of what life is about. How could they go about declining the influence? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Oct 21 09:54:47 EDT 1997 Article: 10436 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: What to do about "the culture" Date: 18 Oct 1997 18:21:55 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 29 Message-ID: <62bcq3$31u@panix.com> References: <61te62$g9@panix.com> <344271FA.5941@nospam.com> <627aaj$rf1$1@cfs2.kis.keele.ac.uk> <62a35u$ql3@panix.com> <62a64d$av4$1@cfs2.kis.keele.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <62a64d$av4$1@cfs2.kis.keele.ac.uk> cla04@cc.keele.ac.uk (Andy Fear) writes: >Officials in the Anglo-Saxon world in particular tend to be zealous >and there is the question of the pleasure of power even if exercised >in a petty way. Who cares about the Anglo-Saxon world in the age of multiculturalism? Think East of Suez, where there ain't no 10 Commandments. Oriental despots may thoroughly enjoy the pleasures of power, but minute regulation of daily life is too much trouble. Why should islands off the coast of Europe be any different? The English will rise above their puritan heritage of zeal yet. I think it was Robert Walpole who said there's a lot of ruin in a country. He may have meant that people who predict national ruin are wrong, but I think it means things can degrade a whole lot more. So have faith in incoherence, incompetence, and if it comes to that corruption on a grand and petty scale. The new liberal order isn't going to promote the contrary. >I fear that in the main they won't bother, but will simply sit and >take it. The ones who do that will tend to die out. Wait a few generations and see who's thriving. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Tue Oct 21 09:54:48 EDT 1997 Article: 10445 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: How stable is liberalism? Date: 21 Oct 1997 09:53:32 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 68 Message-ID: <62ic4s$slg@panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO Another issue statement for a traditionalist discussion group, proposed here for comment: The topic is "How stable is a liberal social order?" Our current social order is mixed, but more and more exclusively oriented toward the goal of liberalism, equal freedom. In the long run, freedom and equality can not be can be achieved simultaneously, and each is self-destructive if pursued single-mindedly. On the other hand, liberalism views all other principles of social order as evil, and so is unable to moderate its pursuit of its goods. Our current liberal social order is therefore unstable. To make that more definite: 1. The evolution of liberalism at some point creates conflicts (for example, between freedom and equality or between either and their own conditions) that would make it unworkable. 2. Most libertarian and neoconservative thought is an attempt to save liberalism by restoring it to an earlier stage in its development. Libertarians like to define liberal goals classically, in formal rather than substantive terms, while neoconservatives generally approve of the concrete liberal state as it stood at some earlier time. 3. Neither attempt can be successful because each in some way denies the fundamental principle of liberalism, maximizing the equal freedom of each to do whatever he wants while preserving the equal freedom of others to do similarly. The evolution of liberalism has been the unfolding of that principle, and to halt or reverse the evolution is to give up on it and prefer some other principle. 4. Therefore, liberalism will not be saved, but rather will lead to a crisis resulting in major and discontinuous changes. With a change in guiding ideals, our system will no longer be recognizably liberal. So far liberals have won their arguments with prophets of doom. The American and other liberal systems have displayed a startling ability to meet and overcome challenges while becoming ever more liberal. Throughout much of the world, including all its developed parts, monarchical rule and feudal remnants have long been swept away. Fascism and communism have all but disappeared. Liberal ideals, such as individual freedom and equality, and liberal forms, such as representative government, universal suffrage and an independent judiciary, are all but universally accepted, as is the principle of combining market economics with ultimate state responsibility for individual well-being. State activism against non-liberal principles of social order such as religion, ethnic culture and family (sex roles, heterosexism, parental authority) is generally understood to be a fundamental requirement of morality. However, triumph doesn't last forever. As the logic of liberalism works itself out, the liberal interpretation of freedom and equality, and the practical requirements for putting that interpretation into effect, become more and more far-reaching. One result is an increased role for state and world market, the only institutions universal and neutral enough to satisfy liberal principles. Another is the weakening of all institutions, since the functioning of institutions depends on inequality and restrictions on freedom. Eventually state and market themselves weaken fatally since they cannot exist in a vacuum but presume popular moral discipline and other preconditions that they cannot themselves generate. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Tue Oct 21 08:12:55 1997 Subject: Re: Your misogyny web site To: P Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 08:12:55 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2992 Status: RO > First, I have heard reports of some small societies (Melanesian, I > think), which were formally matriarchal; and Andrea Dworkin, in one > of her essays, also refers to one of such "feminist paradise" in > which most of the men were castrated. I don't think such societies exist. I mostly rely on Steven Goldberg (see Sheaffer's Domain of Patriarchy page) and on my confidence that if they did exist they would be as famous as Harriet Tubman. As to Dworkin, she has a far better mind and prose style than most feminists but she's insane. I wouldn't take any assertion of hers seriously. > First is what we can call the "Lysistrata factor", or the fact that > most men, incredibly vain creatures that we are, will do just about > anything to avoid appearing unattractive to women. I would include that under "masculine cowardice." > A Christian man is of course afraid for all the usual reasons to > speak against feminism, but he also (at least in the more > intellectual forms of Christianity -- Bible thumpers anachronize that > book and interpret it more literally) cannot justify his position -- > and therefore he is silent. Don't agree. Christianity is full of conflicting tendencies, and to give any of them free reign so that it destroys its contrary is to destroy Christianity. The technical term is "heresy." So feminism is, among other things, a Christian heresy. St. Paul does say in almost so many words that in Christ there is no race, class or gender. He also preaches submission of slave to master and wife to husband, and the whole New Testament presumes the legitimacy and permanence of distinctions among nations. To claim that taking the latter tendency seriously is an anachronistic reading of the Bible is pure prejudice. Christian antinomianism has always been based on the former tendency, but it has never been orthodox. The fact we are all in some sense equal in relation to God does not mean at all that social distinctions are wrong. To claim otherwise is to make the Kingdom of God something to be created immediately by an act of our own wills. What's happened today is that secular thought has become antinomian, so the Christians who count as intellectual from the standpoint of modern secular thought tend to be antinomian heretics. I assume you read Plato. If so, there is a description of what is going on today, not only feminism but antiracism, the sexual revolution, the cult of youth, and even animal rights, in _Republic_ 562d ff. That situation is a consequence of the disappearance of the transcendent characterizing the series of regimes described in books viii and ix. The current situation in what is understood as intellectual Christianity has the same origin -- it's "God is dead" Christianity, whether called by that name or not. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Wed Oct 22 09:20:45 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id JAA20656; Wed, 22 Oct 1997 09:20:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710221320.JAA20656@panix.com> Subject: Character: Jim to Ed To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 09:20:45 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Ed writes: >>>I would, for example, prefer, [A]"If you keep interrupting, I will >>>have to put you in your room," to [B]"This is not the kind of person >>>I want you to be, one who interrupts." >> >>What's wrong with [C]"People who are considerate don't interrupt, we >>should all be considerate, and it's my duty to see that you learn >>that"? > >I consider this a shaming remark. It tells the child not that there >is a problem with its behavior but with its nature. That is the >essence of shaming. A is what I would actually say, but if the kid demanded an explanation of what I mean by "have to" C is the one I would give. I wouldn't say B, because my mere desire isn't a justification for ordering the kid to do something. On that point I agree with Andy's counterculture. To my mind the issue is whether in addition to personal desires there are goods we all share and can recognize that provide a basis for human society including the family. I suppose C could be changed to "Interruption is inconsiderate, we should all act considerately, and it's my duty to see you learn that." But that wouldn't change the point of parental intervention, which is not only to prevent particular acts, but also to habituate the child to certain kinds of conduct and so encourage him to become a person with qualities he does not at present possess. In this particular case one could say "Mr. Soandso has a right not to be interrupted and I'm protecting that right" but you can't always appeal so readily to the interests of third parties. "Eat your brussels sprouts and then finish your homework" doesn't protect others and the *particular* acts, eating those 4 brussels sprouts or whatever, don't much matter. It's the kid's habits we're worried about, and those on account of our concern for his well-being. Speaking as if discipline of children were simply a matter of protecting other people distorts the situation, which can't be a good thing. Your comment on shaming is interesting. It seems to me there's a difference between intentionally shaming someone to get your own way and recognizing that it is right sometimes to feel shame, that shamelessness is no virtue. But if it is right sometimes to feel shame then saying "that remark will cause someone to feel shame" does not necessarily show there's something wrong with the remark. >I do not think it is superior to imprison someone for moral reasons >than for the child not following what I have told him. Would you say "I do not think it is superior to imprison someone for reasons I believe justified on general grounds all can accept than simply in order to get my own way"? >>Co-creatively with God is an interesting notion. It may be quite >>useful. Does it mean we can make choices that thwart or violate >>God's co-creative activity, and such choices are illegitimate? > >I do not feel qualified to answer this question, as it relates to the >will of God for which I cannot speak. If we can never make judgements as to God's intentions or actions I'm not sure what sense there is in speaking of God. >I'd like to stop a kid from developing a crack habit if I could, >because I'd prefer it out of love for him. "[O]ut of love for him" sounds to me very much like "for his own good." >people decline influence all the time. Sure. But to decline influence it seems we have to know what we think is good and bad. That understanding isn't something we simply create for ourselves, even with God's help. It depends on what we think the world is like, what distinctions we draw between different sorts of conduct, what we think the various kinds of conduct are associated with or lead to, what we expect of things and people, what the people we care about care about themselves. All those things we get in the first instance from our early surroundings. To say that a child's early surroundings "influence" him seems to understate their role in his becoming a human being. Even after we become adults it's terribly difficult to maintain such independence of others that it would be true to say that our relations to others only influence us rather than to some degree constitute us. I'm not sure it's good to try to be that independent. >We create who we are through our choices. But I also have the >experience that God creates me. Jim, you and I can impact each other, >but we are not each others' Creators. Perhaps God creates us by working through our choices, if we accept his activity. Could he also create us by working through our parents if they are conscientious or through the social standards we grow up with if those standards have arisen among people who to at least some degree trust in God and accept him? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Oct 22 16:46:09 EDT 1997 Article: 10455 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: How stable is liberalism? Date: 22 Oct 1997 12:05:19 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 55 Message-ID: <62l87v$kii@panix.com> References: <62ic4s$slg@panix.com> <1997102110452226909@deepblue4.salamander.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Status: RO In <1997102110452226909@deepblue4.salamander.com> wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes: >Every individual must be treated as moral end in his own right, not >simply as a means so someone else's end. Economic redistribution >breaks this goal. Some are workhorses used as means, others are the >deserving recipients. The theoretical answer is that production is a function of the economy as a whole, of all the participants and the conditions and understandings governing their collective action, so determining how much production should be attributed to a particular participant is like determining how much of the watery quality of a glass of water should be attributed to a particular hydrogen atom. Social contract theory gets us past any remaining difficulties. The workhorses should really be understood to have agreed to redistribution from behind the veil of ignorance. You're right of course that it rankles when people who have their acts together find they have to pay the freight for people who don't but plainly could. Hence all the propaganda about middle-class intolerance, judgementalism, racism, etc. People have to be trained to feel it shouldn't rankle and to feel guilty when it does. You're right that it's a strain. >2. Conscience. "Free will" and "freedom of conscience" are not the >same thing, and when liberals uphold the latter they make trouble for >themselves. It's a matter of strategy. "Freedom of conscience" is useful breaking down established nonliberal social institutions. Once the institutions are suppressed and liberalism is firmly in the saddle it becomes antisocial, a form of bigotry and hate. >You can already see this: "I want X" is an acceptable statement, but >"I was raised to believe X" is not. Just so. It's a sign of the progress of liberalism. >Liberals currently hold that homo may NOT be converted to hetero. But >what if some individual wanted to make that transition? It would seem >that liberals are bound to honor his choice and ought to fight hard >for enabling methods and technologies. Again it's strategy. "Homosexuality is innate" helps break down heterosexuality as an established norm. Once that's been done then the concept of innate homosexuality will be seen as tyrannical. >Choice vs multiculturalism. Isn't all choice judgemental? In a liberal state choice aspires to become mindless impulse. Only so does it become morally acceptable. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Wed Oct 22 16:42:45 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id QAA12227; Wed, 22 Oct 1997 16:42:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710222042.QAA12227@panix.com> Subject: Character: Goods and rights To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 16:42:44 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Andy writes: >Your point, as I understand it, is that there IS such a good, and that >it is characteristic of the liberal side of many of our cultural >discussions to deny that, with a great variety of consequences. That's right. >In other words, although Ed is far from relativistic about whether >there is such a thing as the good, he opposes some traditional ways of >trying to achieve the good because of strong feelings and beliefs about >how people are to deal with each other. My concern is that his views seem to deprive the good of any function. Ed may accept that the good exists, but he seems reluctant to say that anyone can recognize it (see his comment regarding the will of God) let alone legitimately act on it in opposition to someone else's desires. In order to matter or even be worth talking about it seems to me the good must be something publicly recognizable, such that I can recognize your good, possibly better than you do. If that is the case then non- contractual authority can be justified as something better than the sheer domination of A by B for B's private purposes. Otherwise I don't see how it can. And if it can't the relation of parent and child is necessarily a sort of slavery. >What I'm hearing is a sensitivity (which, from my point of view, is too >extreme) about one person imposing upon any other his concept of the >good, even (or perhaps especially?) between parent and child. But if my concept of the good never justifies me in doing anything in regard to other people, how much of a role can "the good" play in ethics? P.S. -- Miki just signed off, which means I should delete her address, but instead I deleted her message. Which address should I delete? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Wed Oct 22 16:37:51 1997 Subject: Re: Misogyny To: P Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 16:37:51 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 3600 Status: RO >But if you truly believe that you are equal to a woman, then it seems >to me that you are agreeing with the feminists, and not refuting them. Equal as to what? A captain and a major are equal in ways that are more important than those in which they differ. They are equally bound by military law and by the informal standards of honor required of officers and gentlemen. They are referred to as "brother officers." When they took their oaths as officers they became something other than what they were; nothing nearly so important happens when they get promoted. For that matter they're both human beings, and what they have in common as such is more fundamental than their points of difference. Nonetheless, the distinction between the two is important, especially if one is the commanding officer of the other. Is it splitting hairs or counting dancing angels to say the distinctions matter even though they are not everything? >When I said that taking race/gender/class distinction seriously was an >anachronistic reading of the Bible, I merely meant it as a social >observation, not as a slur, if that is what you mean by "prejudice". I took it as a statement regarding how the Bible should be read by someone today with a serious and intelligent interest in it. My response was "Not so, it's how it should be read by someone who has already decided for other reasons that r/g/c distinctions should be abolished." That previous decision is what I referred to as "prejudice." >But you are correct in surmising that I don't think much of >Christianity, regarding it as a very toxic Jew-originated >superstition. But Christianity made Europe. >But just to call it cowardice, and leave it at that, doesn't capture >the cupidity and vanity that I meant to point out to you. A fair comment, and I will consider my wording. >It is not clear to me, for example, how secular thought could be >antinomian, since, as I understand it, this adjective describes the >difference between salvation through grace and Mosaic Law. I used it to refer to the belief that secular salvation -- tolerance, inclusiveness and multiculturalism, liberation, what have you -- involves rejection of traditional moral distinctions and institutions. Doing whatever you are moved to do in the right spirit is what leads to heaven or the equivalent. >And it is also not clear to me how one could possibly have a "God is >dead" form of Christianity. It's easy. You just say that taking literally all the stuff about a personal being transcending the world of our experience but interfering with it is just fundamentalism. To speak of "God" is to speak of what we take most seriously, to say God is personal is to say our most serious concerns are found in our relations with other men, to say God is mighty and exercises his providence among men is to say that serious engagement in our relations with others leads to social progress, etc., etc., etc. Just treat "God" and so on as a way of speaking of this- worldly (and probably political) concerns viewed as matters of ultimate importance. >But thanks for taking the time to reply. Always nice to find someone >willing to speak with intelligence on any subject. Actually my motives are mostly selfish -- people ask questions and raise issues from various angles and responding helps me understand and develop my own views. So thanks for your comments. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Thu Oct 23 05:45:23 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id FAA29455; Thu, 23 Oct 1997 05:45:23 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710230945.FAA29455@panix.com> Subject: Character: Shame and consideration To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 05:45:23 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO > If the object is to teach the child to be considerate, I do not > believe that this can be done well by being inconsiderate to the > child. Making the child feel bad about him/herself does not seem > like good modeling. To my mind it depends on what sort of "making the child feel bad" we're talking about. It can be a manipulative device used to get one's way or it can be a consequence of the child understanding the true state of affairs. Truth is sometimes unkind and should be softpedalled but not always. Feeling bad about oneself can be many other things as well. Suppose X, a parent, habitually gets his way by shaming the unfortunate members of his family and other such devices. He does not of course admit the nature of his conduct. Then he notices other families in which people are much happier and have better relations than in his own. He has the uneasy feeling that the difference may have something to do with his own conduct and starts feeling bad about himself. Eventually he decides to see a psychologist. After several sessions with Dr. X the situation becomes altogether clear to him, and he feels *really* bad about himself. Is there something wrong with this story? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Thu Oct 23 08:37:56 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id IAA14921; Thu, 23 Oct 1997 08:37:56 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710231237.IAA14921@panix.com> Subject: Character: Jim on Ed on Andy on Ed To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 08:37:56 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Some more stuff for Ed and anyone else who's interested: >Similarly, if I approach a child with the idea that I shall mold him or >her into the object that I wish them to be, then I can inadvertently or >perhaps semi-deliberately rob them of the sense of the freedom of their >being by conveying to them through my language that their being and >nature is in my hands and not in theirs. It seems to me possible to approach a child with the idea that what it would be best for the child to develop into is neither in your hands nor his, but something to be discerned and worked toward. Since you're a lot older and more experienced your views on the subject might be on the whole more reliable, to an extent that justifies the compulsion parents inevitably exercise upon their children. To say that it is just a matter of trying to make the child what you wish seems false to me. >They are accepted as people, regardless of what they do. Then I can >distinguish nicely between what they are and what they do. Unconditional acceptance also means we accept our children regardless of their habits, attitudes, personal qualities, etc. One loves one's son even if he is what is ordinarily called a bully. So from that point of view education for character, which implies that the child should develop personal qualities that at present he lacks, seems no less consistent with unconditional acceptance than forbidding the child to do particular harmful things. In both cases the fact we don't approve of something about the child doesn't mean we don't accept him. >I prefer instead to let a child chose which consequences he/she wants >to experience and let him/her base a choice of behavior on that. This >supports both the sense of agency and the sense of self-value while >instilling acceptable behavior. On the face of it this sounds like saying to the kid, "decide what you want, and whatever it is, go for it." Somehow though I expect that if the kid routinely came up with the wrong answers you'd put a lot of time and effort into discussing with him just what's good and bad about the consequences he's experiencing. ("It may *seem* like pushing your sister away from the Nintendo so you can play with it gives you just the Super Mario experience you want, but remember that ... and does it really ... " etc.) So all the morality would be packed into the discussion of consequences. It might often be good to approach things that way but I'm not sure it is always a uniquely good approach to teaching the kid how to act. Sometimes I think it would just seem artificial. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Thu Oct 23 09:11:13 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id JAA19183; Thu, 23 Oct 1997 09:11:13 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710231311.JAA19183@panix.com> Subject: Character: Conclusion, perhaps To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 09:11:12 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO My exchange with Ed may be winding down: >It is my belief that if one treats one's children with utmost respect >and behaves with integrity manifesting what one believes, that is the >most powerful way of allowing a child to see what is ideal in a human >and provides the greatest chance that they will do so themselves, in >their own way. Agreed, at least in general. My only issue is whether that does the whole job, whether as parents we are sometimes forced to use compulsion, and if so how we can best make sense of that and the other things we actually do. >I'm not sure I wish to continue a point-by-point rebuttal to your >rebuttal. We seem to be neither converging nor elucidating together. >Communication does not seem to be moving forward. It feels more like a >scraping of ideas against each other, with no profit in sight for >either of us. I've gained from it, although it may not be apparent. So I should thank you for sharing your views without reward. Our styles differ greatly. It is always useful to imagine how the world looks to another, why it looks that way, and to formulate the concerns that lead one to consider another view more adequate. I find point-by-point exchanges helpful in such things. That's why I go to the trouble of engaging in them. Others of course find they distort the consideration of issues. Certainly they accentuate disagreements. >Shame that is healthy is about behavior. Toxic shame is about one's >being. "You are a bad person." is toxic. "You hurt that kid, and you >should not behave that way" can be healthy. One issue I have regards shame over habits, how a man who habitually lies in certain settings or becomes conscious of a streak of cruelty in himself should feel. It seems illusory to view such things as a series of independent actions. You can see that I've continued the point-by-point. Whether that's a good habit or a bad one others can judge. Thanks again, though. You have helped me. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk Thu Oct 23 08:32:24 1997 Subject: Re: misogyny To: P Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 08:32:24 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 4633 Status: RO >to say that souls are equal without regard to race/gender/class >distinction does not mean "equal in the eyes of God only", or equal in >some other Jesuitical sense. I don't see how saying we are all equal in the most fundamental respects makes it particularly difficult or Jesuitical to recognize other distinctions that have important social implications. Thought can't be carried on without making distinctions and limiting the application of principles to proper domains. Maybe your point is that thinking is hard and it's easier to shout slogans. True, but I can't help that. The important thing about modern egalitarianism, one that I tried to bring out in my anti-feminist page, is that it is such an *extremist* outlook. On any view that takes into account the complexity of social life and human nature it makes no sense at all to try to organize a society that puts us all in the same position across the board. It's plain fanaticism. Whatever else people disagree on, they can agree to reject feminism. That's a point to insist on. >Feminists and other secular humanists who use this approach mean it >literally and do not therefore allow of any distinctions -- indeed, >they cannot. Just so. Therefore saying we are the same in fundamentals does not lead to feminism any more than observing the obvious, that there are some women who are taller or better mathematicians than the great majority of men. >Somewhat ironically, I think that this idea of the equivalence of souls >is ultimately Pythagorean/Platonic in origin. It's a tendency of rational thought, that attempts to find common principles equally applicable everywhere. >But as I said, I believe the key to prevailing in this argument is to >jetison the baggage of Christianity entirely. Don't agree. To get rid of transcendental religion is to make man the creator of his own world and human rationality the measure of all things. Human rationality tends toward egalitarianism because it looks for common principles equally applicable everywhere. In addition, if man is the measure it is hard to justify social arrangements to those subject to them on any basis but equality. You should remember how recent a development Christian feminism is. It's not a result of Christianity becoming more Christian, but of its abandonment (in its respectable forms) of the transcendent and betrayal of its own nature. >Eventually, it will be shown that the notable absence of women (and >Negroes, for that matter) from the intellectual history of mankind is >no mere artifact of culture, but that it is due to very clear >neurological differences between men and women -- I'm as convinced of >this as I am of anything. What makes you think it will be permitted to be shown or that society will be run scientifically? The main noticeable consequence of the publication of _The Bell Curve_ is construction of the new social defenses for egalitarian dogma now found needed. >The historian Gibbon blames Christianity for the fall of Rome, and the >ensuing 10 centuries of intellectual darkness and religious >obscurantism. Rome had its own problems -- high taxes, bureaucracy, growing despotism, intellectual stagnation, economic decline. Christianity won because it provided a new principle of social order that was needed because the old ones were dying. And you should learn more about the cultural, intellectual and even scientific and technological history of the next 10 centuries. They weren't dead. >With regard to your last point about "God is dead" Christianity, I will >only say that I have never known Christianity to be presented as just >another philosophical system. You spoke of Christian feminism and instanced R. W. Emerson, J. S. Mill and so on. Christianity becomes feminist when it turns into a philosophical system indistinguishable from secular left/liberalism with traditional terminology layered on. How do you think mainline churches and religious thinkers manage to remain respectable today? Not by adhering to views fundamentally at odds with the regime. Their function is to bridge the gap between those in the pews, who are attached to the traditional outlook but aren't great thinkers, and the demands of the New World Order. They do it by retaining the old forms and language but reinterpreting them to make their substance identical with the requirements of those in power. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Oct 24 12:30:09 EDT 1997 Article: 10459 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: How stable is liberalism? Date: 23 Oct 1997 15:12:39 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 29 Message-ID: <62o7j7$mb9@panix.com> References: <62ic4s$slg@panix.com> <1997102110452226909@deepblue4.salamander.com> <62l87v$kii@panix.com> <19971023063028353509@deepblue5.salamander.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com In <19971023063028353509@deepblue5.salamander.com> wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes: >> In a liberal state choice aspires to become mindless impulse. Only >> so does it become morally acceptable. >What are the implications for market economies? If my choice is >supreme, how can I be held responsible for contracts I made in the >past, or for any fiduciary responsibility? Contract disappears, a tendency visible as the tendency of judges to enforce their own view of the relation between the parties that makes sense rather than the contract as written. To some extent the tendency is cushioned by the greater readiness of judges to pay attention to what's in black and white when neither party is a natural person but only to an extent. I don't know what the tendency of the law is on fiduciary responsibilities. I would expect that their distinctive features would be disapppearing since they had a particular source, "the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive," [Cardozo] that was rooted in an understanding of human life that no longer exists. On the other hand fiduciaries are often big institutions like banks and if there's a lawsuit they're a deep pocket so in many practical situations the result (liability for minor or constructive shortcomings) would be similar. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Sat Oct 25 04:34:26 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id EAA00180; Sat, 25 Oct 1997 04:34:26 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710250834.EAA00180@panix.com> Subject: Re: Character: Jim on Ed on Andy on Ed To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 04:34:25 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Ed writes: "This conversation began with my objecting to the idea of molding a child into an image we have of him/her." I agree with the objection. I think of argument as a somewhat specialized activity, like the stress-testing _Consumer Reports_ puts consumer products through or dissecting a biological specimen. It tells you a lot about the thing you're examining, but it's not a normal way of acting and can look more like vandalism than anything else. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Sat Oct 25 05:03:22 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id FAA03804; Sat, 25 Oct 1997 05:03:22 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710250903.FAA03804@panix.com> Subject: Character: from Ed to Jim re "Conclusion, perhaps" To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 05:03:21 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Ed writes: > I'd be interested in your saying what you got out of our exchange, if > you are so minded. To see what ideas mean to someone is to draw on his stock of thought and experience. Ideas about childrearing touch on sensitive and painful issues and also on feelings of responsibility. They relate to how we came to be human beings and so go very deep. As a therapist who sees the consequences of childrearing disasters ideas about such things take on special meaning. By seeing what that meaning is I learned something. Also, how people deal with ideas is always of interest. They have a logical side that appears in formal argument but are also stand-ins for a complex of feelings and experiences that varies for each of us although there's usually enough in common to make communication possible. Otherwise there'd be no point using words, people would just yelp or moan. As a therapist you seem to emphasize the latter tendency. So you present one side of a range of possibilities, which helps understand the possibilities. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Sat Oct 25 08:53:44 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id IAA17981; Sat, 25 Oct 1997 08:53:44 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710251253.IAA17981@panix.com> Subject: Character: Addendum To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 08:53:43 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO I wrote to Ed that ideas "have a logical side that appears in formal argument but are also stand-ins for a complex of feelings and experiences that varies for each of us although there's usually enough in common to make communication possible. Otherwise there'd be no point using words, people would just yelp or moan. As a therapist you seem to emphasize the latter tendency." One of the wonderful things about computerized editing is that it's easy to move sentences around. One of the bad things is that references can get lost. The "latter tendency" I thought Ed seemed to emphasize was not yelping and moaning, but treating ideas as stand-ins for feelings and experiences rather than as logical counters. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Sat Oct 25 10:25:15 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id KAA26247; Sat, 25 Oct 1997 10:25:15 -0400 (EDT) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710251425.KAA26247@panix.com> Subject: Character: Goods, rights and what not To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 10:25:15 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO More with Ed: > I do attempt in my own life, and I support others attempting in > theirs to discern what is right and good. It seems to me that part of what we do as parents is to encourage our children to attempt to do so. Since learning goes from the concrete to the general it seems that the process would start with teaching our children to see as good particular things that we understand as good and to act on that perception. If so, it seems that in raising our children we are necessarily guided by a character ideal we have for them -- attempting to discern what is right and good and to live by it is a character trait, conscientiousness, and the particular good things we teach our children, honesty and consideration for example, correspond to other character traits. > I object intrinsically to the concept of recognizing someone's good > better than they do. I think it is arrogant, except when it comes to > people who are really incompetent to discriminate, such as the > severely developmentally disabled. It seems to me we can't help but take that approach with our children. In later life I agree it would be arrogant to claim the kind of discretionary personal authority over another that a parent has over his children. It is not clear to me though that it is arrogant to participate in other arrangements that in effect presume that a person is not always the best judge of his own good and that there is a social wisdom that sometimes should be preferred to private choice. For example I see nothing arrogant about accepting the validity for others as well as oneself of moral standards that tell us habitual drunkenness is a vice, or supporting licensing requirements that make liquor less easily obtainable than it would be in an absolutely free market. The requirements might be a good or bad idea for any number of reasons, and one can easily become too much involved in worrying about the moral lapses of others, but the basic principle remains I think that since we are social beings what the people we live with are like *does* matter to us. I think that an important principle, not because I want to oppose any concrete concern you have expressed, but because at present many people tend to make its denial into an absolute, which I think is a mistake. > I just don't think one has to decide for others what is right and > good, unless, of course, one is a legislator. To make a moral judgement is to legislate. Also, in a democracy we are all legislators. Legislation of course demands prudence and it is imprudent in all sorts of ways to put the reform of other people at the top of our "to do" list. Nonetheless, I think it is right to have some concern for the well-being of others, and well-being is more than physical. I apologize to our beloved and respected leader and everyone else if I have wandered too far off the topic of character. One reason the topic is interesting is that it is so closely related to other social and moral issues. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Oct 26 06:31:20 EST 1997 Article: 10463 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Which America? Date: 24 Oct 1997 12:45:51 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 57 Message-ID: <62qjbv$gi7@panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Yet another issue statement for a discussion group, this one from a year and a half ago. Comments? The topic is "Which America, or, Can This Country be Saved?" In my view, these are the basic issues raised by the Buchanan campaign. Patrick Buchanan says his movement is inclusive, while _The New York Times_ says it is not. Both have a point. Buchanan is reaching out to groups, such as conservative Christians and NRA members, whose members have been ridiculed, demonized and excluded from public debate. He isn't particularly interested in reaching out to Queer Nation. The NYT does the same thing but with the opposite groups. It seems that two Americas are being proposed, each of which would be glad to include people who sign on to its principles, customs, and interpretation of our national life and history. Buchanan likes the America of traditional American patriotism, a particular complex of peoples and ways of life that limit the scope and application of ideals such as freedom and equality, while the NYT likes the America of People for the American Way, which is basically a set of abstract principles intended to promote equality and individual autonomy and the institutions implementing those principles and which requires the destruction of the America of traditional American patriotism. Many ordinary people still prefer the first America, while all national institutions prefer the second (for one thing, it increases their power and authority). The grand political issues thus include the following: 1. To which America do most people actually give their loyalty and why? TV, the way the educational system has developed and lots of other things have undermined the first America and promoted the second. How effective have they been? Can the trends be reversed? 2. More specifically, how can the first America be saved from the imperialism of national institutions? How can that be done? People get most of their information from national institutions (the media) and that's where most political discussion is carried on. People look to them for security in old age, poverty and (more and more) sickness. They are presented as embodying "America", our highest earthly loyalty. How could suggestions that they be cut back possibly be successful? Has Buchanan's relative success been based on abandonment of the notion of cutting back? 3. Is there something conceptually hopeless in the whole effort because the first America was fatally infected from the beginning with the second America? Was multiculturalism implicit in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" all along? If so, now that the implications of our founding principles have become explicit can those implications be denied without rejecting the American polity as such? All respectable opinion holds that Buchanan has done so. Is respectable opinion right? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Oct 26 06:31:21 EST 1997 Article: 10469 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: What to do about "the culture" Date: 26 Oct 1997 06:28:34 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 51 Message-ID: <62v9h2$t08@panix.com> References: <61te62$g9@panix.com> <62uqdp$jt5$1@gte1.gte.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com In <62uqdp$jt5$1@gte1.gte.net> "T.O. Minnix" writes: >> "the culture" means the complex of attitudes, ideals, goals and ways >> of life publicly presented as valid and proper. It includes the >> things understood to bind the members of a society together morally, >> and those taught to children by public institutions. >Are we trying to redeem "the culture" or trying to redeem the people >living under and influenced by the same? The former seems absurd - >the definiton of culture you give seems to involve only ideas or at >most behaviors, not people. Ideas cannot be 'redeemed' - they are >either right or wrong. As to the latter, people can be 'redeemed' by >changing their beliefs toward more wholesome ideas. A system of ideas, practices etc. can be redeemed if a small number of changes understood as removing specific evils and abuses but leaving most of it as it is can turn it in a decisively better direction. It can't if it's bad in its basic principles. The distinction is the one often seen on the Left, between reformers and revolutionaries. Can America be guided toward the goals of the Left by reinterpretation and development of principles it already accepts, for example by construing "liberty" and "equality" as People for the American Way do to require steady weakening of traditional standards and corresponding strengthening of the state bureaucracy, or is something more dramatic like abolition of private property required? On the neoconish right the issue came up in the _First Things_ symposium I think last November in which some of the participants made noises suggesting they no longer accepted the moral legitimacy of the actual American regime as a given. The result was a big to-do, resignations from the board, denunciations of incipient terrorism and bomb-throwing from _Commentary_ types, etc. The question you raise is a good one, whether there's any real difference between "up with America" and "down with America" when what you want is something that can be defined independently of "America." It does seem to me though that it matters what attitude you adopt toward grand abstractions like "the American way," "the Constitution," etc. Those are things after all that for better or worse motivate people and they aren't completely free of content. Is it better to think about what one is doing and present it to others as basically continuous or decisively opposed to the existing state of affairs? Is the basic presumption to be that the TV networks, the official mythology taught in the schools, pop music, mainline religion, what have you is OK or not OK? Do you accept Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, M. L. King as heroes? These questions are not meaningless. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Mon Oct 27 09:03:58 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id JAA06430; Mon, 27 Oct 1997 09:03:58 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710271403.JAA06430@panix.com> Subject: Character: to Ed on moral training, demon rum, and so on To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 09:03:58 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Ed writes: >I do not object to telling a child my values. But I do not expect them >to adopt them as their own. It is to me, as it was also to my father, >to some extent, most important that my children be endowed with the >capacity to decide for themselves. Is the Autonomous Agent a particular moral ideal? It seems to me it is. After all, one can't be that way without possessing certain virtues, at least what are understood as virtues from one moral perspective, for example the habit of looking within rather than to authoritative others for guidance. So it is hard for me to distinguish helping one's child become endowed with the capacity to decide for himself from training him in particular virtues. Anyone who tries to do the former will look to me like he's doing the latter. >I objected, in a way somewhat ancient between him and me, to the >concept of producing a product. But if we talk instead about >supporting the development of a subject, of a person, not as an object >who matches or fails to match a moral ideal, but rather as a person who >can navigate life's space successfully -- including, but not limited >to, how moral and in what way they wish to be -- then I agree. To develop a person able to navigate life's space successfully seems to require a conception of successful navigation and what life's moral space is like. I'm not sure it's possible to try to help the development without deciding a lot of moral points. "Successful navigation" might mean maximizing one's own present pleasurable sensations or it might mean applying the precepts of the Bible as John Calvin would have applied them. Depending on the nature of the world either definition might be the appropriate one. Children start life knowing very little, and what they learn from us goes very deep. In effect, it creates the world for them, especially the moral world. It is only after that they recognize the basic features of their moral world that they become able to make moral decisions at all. For example, are values something we create, important to the extent we make them so by our own decision or agreement with others, or do they become important to the extent they correspond to objective goods that are valid whether we or anyone else choose them or not? It makes no sense to say we choose for ourselves between these alternatives, because they are so fundamental as to define the moral world within which rational choice takes place. >>attempting to discern what is right and good and to live by it is a >>character trait, conscientiousness, and the particular good things we >>teach our children, honesty and consideration for example, correspond >>to other character traits. > >I am happy to see these qualities emerge in my children. But I also >tolerate their opposite, as parts of a whole person. In a sense one has to tolerate it if his child is dishonest, inconsiderate, morally frivolous and lacking in integrity, or for that matter Jeffrey Dahmer, because you can't stop him from being your child or wanting what is best for him. It seems wrong though to think that what is most important is that he feel empowered to choose among those things. He *is* empowered to choose among those things; what seems to me important is that he recognize the nature of the moral world that makes some choices good and others bad, and that he develop the habits etc. that enable him to follow the good and turn from the bad. >But I consider ideal parenting to be that which gradually relinquishes >that position to the child and all along allows children to chose for >themselves when appropriate and to state their needs. I really do >believe that much harm has been done children by parents knowing for >them what was right when it really wasn't. I agree, on the whole. All I would add is that great responsibilities like that of being a parent have dangers in all directions. >>For example I see nothing arrogant about accepting the validity for >>others as well as oneself of moral standards that tell us habitual >>drunkenness is a vice, >> >It is interesting that you should chose this ground to present the >rightness of moralizing about other people. It seemed an example likely to bring out issues. >Most people who work with alcoholism have long since abandoned the >concept of alcoholism as a vice and see it instead as a disease. Even >those who reject the disease concept do not go back to the 18th century >concept of alcoholism as a vice. I'm not sure what is involved in saying alcoholism should not be viewed as a vice, or that there is something specifically 18th century about such a view. Is it something special about heavy drinking, or is there something wrong with the concept of "vice" in general? To me, "vice" simply means habitual behavior that is destructive or otherwise wrong but is in general subject to conscious control. It doesn't mean something one has consciously chosen or could simply decide to give up and count on the decision sticking. Most of us know what such things are like from our own experience, and we've suffered from them in others. Habitual lateness is a vice. So are greediness, habitual overeating, nastiness to others, lack of charity, and lots of other things. It's quite unpleasant to become conscious of such things in oneself because simply saying "well that's a bad thing so I'll stop" doesn't work. On the other hand, saying "that's just the way I am" or "it's a disease so there's not much to do unless someone else cures me" doesn't seem to be a step forward. "Most people who work with alcoholism" sounds like it means most people who are professionally involved with problem drinking rather than most people in general who come in contact with it. The former I would expect to prefer a disease view since after all in America in 1997 the activities of professionals tend to be organized on technological lines -- one defines a problem, analyzes causes of the sort professionals can control, and devises a solution based on affecting those causes. It seems to me though that most people who come to see themselves as drinking too heavily cut back without professional involvement because they think it's a bad thing to do and they see themselves as responsible for their own lives. A big part of the way they come to see things that way is the popular view that heavy drinking is a bad thing and that people can control what they do even with regard to alcohol -- in other words, that habitual drunkenness is a vice. That's also part of how people avoid developing drinking problems in the first place. It may be of course that some people have a compulsion to drink that makes the popular view misleading, just as some people have violent compulsions that make the popular view that rape, murder and mayhem are evil acts misleading. It may also be that "well you would just stop if you had an ounce of decency in you, you swine" may not always be the most helpful thing to say. The question you seem to raise though is whether the view that habitual drunkenness is a vice has a legitimate role at all. I don't understand the view that it does not. [Aside to Seth: forgot to mention -- the first word in the subject line should always be "Character."] -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Tue Oct 28 08:52:44 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id IAA08409; Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:52:44 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710281352.IAA08409@panix.com> Subject: Character: are we plants or social animals? To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:52:44 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Also sprach Andy: >I do believe, Jim, that you and I perhaps differ most on this point-- >the extent to which what is inborn in the human being must figure in >the understanding of that person's good. Our good is no doubt inborn in us. If it weren't, and it were imported altogether from outside, it's not clear why it would be *our* good. The matter is not simple, though. First, we are social animals, and what's good for us depends on what society is like and our relation to it. It's as if the good of a water molecule depended on its relation to the Atlantic Ocean. If you were smart enough you could figure out everything about the Atlantic Ocean by looking at a water molecule but it's not a practical procedure. So to figure out what's good for the molecule you also have to look at the ocean even though God wouldn't have to. Secondly, we are complex and subtle beings, with potentialities that are hard to see before they become actual, so what is important about us and for us isn't immediately obvious on inspection. Luckily, what we have in common is more important than what distinguishes us from each other. It follows that the best source of knowledge about what is most important for and about me would be vast accumulated experience of human beings in all aspects of their lives, to the extent such a thing exists somewhere. The best source for that I know is experience accumulated in society, in other words tradition. Thirdly, to the extent you appeal to biological nature, evolution, etc., you should take into account that the impulses and desires that arise in us did not become part of our natural constitution in a setting that gave them free reign. Man evolved as a social animal, and the setting for which he is fitted by nature is a *cultured* one. It's as if a plant evolved in gardens. Cultivation, pruning, weeding, what have you would be natural to it. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From jk@panix.com Tue Oct 28 08:54:45 1997 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id IAA08655; Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:54:45 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Kalb Message-Id: <199710281354.IAA08655@panix.com> Subject: Character: what's special about "morality?" To: CharacterForum@panix.com Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:54:44 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Ed says: >You tend, at least in this conversation to see all good from a moral >viewpoint, and also all ill. The reverse, I think. I see morality -- questions of how one ought to act -- from the standpoint of all good and all ill. You seem to think there's a special kind of good that has to do with morality and some other kind of good that doesn't. I don't understand that. It seems to me the goal is an overall view of how to act that takes into account all the goods and evils we can do something about. >I see raising children as navigating space in which moral good is only >one element, and helping children chose between things is not just a >matter of helping them to be good but of preserving and developing >parts of themselves that are important outside of a moral viewpoint, >even immoral sometimes. If preserving and developing those important parts is a good thing to do, why not view it as part of morality? If not, why do it? Maybe the problem is the word "morality." Would "ethics" or "acting well" or some other expression be better? The substantive question is how best to act and think about our actions. >Perhaps this would be a good point to agree that we just see things >differently. No discussion lasts forever, it's true. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Tue Oct 28 08:58:45 1997 Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.5/8.7.1/PanixM1.0) with ESMTP id IAA24609 for ; Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:58:43 -0500 (EST) Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id IAA41128; Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:57:37 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 2447796 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:57:36 -0500 Received: from panix.com (oibfxL7//U5ddB8FXNtPpa7ZsrcYgQi0@panix.com [198.7.0.2]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id IAA20380 for ; Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:57:35 -0500 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id IAA09102 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:57:33 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <199710281357.IAA09102@panix.com> Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 08:57:32 -0500 Reply-To: newman Discussion List Sender: newman Discussion List From: Jim Kalb Subject: Re: Two new books To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19971027203114.007ce100@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Oct 27, 97 08:31:14 pm Status: RO Bah, optimism. He's intelligent, though. >With the collapse of communism, the last competitor with any moral or >intellectual credibility, there is now no challenge to the liberal >definition of what is politically right. There continue to be numerous >political challengers to the liberal conception of politics, but their >naked exercise of power cannot stand before the glare of public >scrutiny. Lacking an ideology, power invariably reveals its instability >and is succeeded by equally precarious claimants to its exercise. >Liberal politics has emerged as the undisputed touchstone of the good >in politics. Well said. There is now no challenge to the view that legitimate power rests on consent of the governed, in other words that in the long run there is no such thing as legitimate power. The genius of liberalism is therefore to live in the short run. The liberal state functions because of its non-liberal elements while drawing its moral authority from its attack on them in the name of reform. It uses prerational social discipline to attack the sources of that discipline. Hence liberal guilt -- liberals know their actual policies and social arrangements they can't do without can't be justified on their own principles. As Professor Walsh suggests, the eventual consequence as the situation clarifies itself and the ruling group is no longer able to obtain the consent required for legitimacy through payoffs and obfuscation is instabilility. Groups seize power on some thin excuse or none and hold it until the spoils of office make them overly self-indulgent and they lose cohesiveness and are replaced by another group. For extended discussion and analysis of such situations see Ibn Khaldun's _Muqaddimah_ and Tacitus' _Annals of Imperial Rome_. >The mystery is that liberal politics works at all given, in the view of >so many commentators, either its superficiality or its bankruptcy. It lives by eating its presuppositions. As the man says, it's a process and not a theory. >At every stage the source of the moral appeal remains the promotion of >self-determination as the route to the growth of the person. Which becomes indistinguishable except rhetorically from "do what you feel like doing" as the _summum bonum_. >In this sense, the liberal tradition is not a self-contained persuasion >but is in continuity with the discovery of the soul through philosophy >and its transcendent fulfillment through revelation. The revelation though increasingly loses a determinable objective content. Any impulse whatever becomes justifiable as the work of the Spirit. >The secret of the tradition's success is that the elaboration of the >process alone contains enough of the intimations of its direction to >evoke a responsive unfolding. The current state of the process retains enough of the intimations of its original direction to delay collapse for a long time. Nothing is forever, though. The proof of the pudding, as Professor Walsh suggests, is in the eating. He's quite right that liberalism has become our only conceivable public morality. In that sense it is a success. He seems to believe it is also a success in the sense of promoting the soul's transcendent fulfillment. That is less obvious. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Wed Oct 29 09:52:07 1997 Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.5/8.7.1/PanixM1.0) with ESMTP id JAA19723 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:52:06 -0500 (EST) Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id JAA19058; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:50:47 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 2479990 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:50:47 -0500 Received: from panix.com (W5RvEZpGqLFjSWA6408NCyYOl45LjQzV@panix.com [198.7.0.2]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id JAA50022 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:50:45 -0500 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id JAA27557 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:50:40 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <199710291450.JAA27557@panix.com> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:50:40 -0500 Reply-To: newman Discussion List Sender: newman Discussion List From: Jim Kalb Subject: Re: Two new books To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19971027203114.007ce100@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Oct 27, 97 08:31:14 pm Status: RO More on Walsh: > What they fail to recognize is that there would be no political order > at all, liberal or any other, unless it were experienced by those who > support and sustain it as legitimate and worthy of their > participation. No variation on the theme of self-interest can > explain what it is that compels human beings to support an order that > depends on such support precisely when it is in conflict with the > satisfaction of interest. An excellent point. The key I think is that liberalism is not an order but a process that manages for a time to combine social order with subjectivism as to the good. Habits of deference and self-sacrifice that remain from ages in which the good was thought to be objective and valid for all are one source of order. In liberal ages those habits are no longer supportable theoretically, however. The other necessary source of order is therefore the promise of a future of ever-increasing freedom, equality and material prosperity. Liberalism never lives in the present, but always in some combination of the past and future -- that's what it means to say it is a process. The absolute conflict between the two in fundamental principle is negotiated by liberal pragmatism -- its orientation toward particular issues and reforms and the obfuscations and payoffs typical of democratic politics. The difficulty today is that liberal principle has triumphed too thoroughly. The end of history means liberalism is becoming a system instead of a process, and it can't exist as such. Key events include the formal declaration of the godlessness and therefore self-sufficiency of the American political order in the school prayer decisions and the appearance not long afterwards of Rawls' _Theory of Justice_ setting forth liberalism as a system. As always the flight of the owl of Minerva demonstrated the approach of dusk. > The liberal articulation can be a means of preserving the > philosophic-Christian consensus within a context in which its actual > explication is no longer possible. Its stabilizes things by slowing down the process whereby radical subjectivism as to value destroys the transcendent. It pushes the radicalism into the future and so permits life today to go on as it had. The transcendent is therefore preserved for a time even though in theory it doesn't exist and is inexpressible. So actually I agree with this sentence. > The revolutionary direction always carries a high index of > improbability and destruction. Much more likely to effect improvement > is an appeal that builds on the remaining residue of moral authority, > working to expand its foothold into a full-fledged recognition of its > obligatory force in individual and political existence. This is a > task not primarily for Sounds like he wants to reverse the process of turning away from the transcendent -- "God," in plain English -- while accepting the moral world of liberalism that is defined by that process. > Nietzsche's depiction of liberal democracy as the offspring of > philosophy and Christianity was indeed correct. Make Christianity a human system ("philosophy") and liberal democracy is one of the things you can get. Seems plausible enough. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Wed Oct 29 09:52:45 1997 Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.5/8.7.1/PanixM1.0) with ESMTP id JAA26982 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:52:44 -0500 (EST) Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id JAA17350; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:51:24 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 2480000 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:51:23 -0500 Received: from panix.com (P0OlocQIUORGIMzVH8YgkY4bqPS4gcC5@panix.com [198.7.0.2]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id JAA37048 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:51:22 -0500 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id JAA27669 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:51:21 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <199710291451.JAA27669@panix.com> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 09:51:20 -0500 Reply-To: newman Discussion List Sender: newman Discussion List From: Jim Kalb Subject: Re: Two new books To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Oct 28, 97 09:41:52 pm Status: RO > I wonder how much of it is normal digestible political philosophy and > how much is sheer Voegelinianism? He's got to pull the rabbit out of the hat somehow. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Wed Oct 29 10:08:01 EST 1997 Article: 10486 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Which America? Date: 29 Oct 1997 08:52:32 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 76 Message-ID: <637f30$hfe@panix.com> References: <62qjbv$gi7@panix.com> <3456A071.CC506BB3@net66.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com X-Newsposter: trn 4.0-test55 (26 Feb 97) John Hilty writes: >The first America of the town craftsman and the family farmer was >destroyed by the agricultural, industrial, and telecommunication >revolutions, which require the existence of large organizations in the >form of big business, and a form of big government that either caters >to its interests or regulates it in the interest of the general public. It's not obvious to me that those technological changes require predominance of big business. The agricultural revolution means there will be fewer farmers but not that the family farm won't be predominant. The industrial revolution does mean there will be some activities, like manufacturing automobiles, that are best carried on by very large enterprises, but most can still be carried on in a variety of ways. The situation seems different in different countries and depends on the local way of doing things -- the Japanese like big business, the Chinese like family enterprises for example. In any case the overall economic importance of activities like car manufacturing seems to be declining. Telecommunications made economic enterprise on a national scale possible but I don't see why it makes it necessary. In recent years it seems to have made it easier for smaller enterprises to compete. As to government, the things it does that cost the most money or have a big effect on social relations and how people live -- social security, public education, civil rights enforcement, other social programs and protections -- don't appear to be required by technology. They no doubt reflect a technological approach to the world, the belief that through organization and application of resources we can manufacture the society that's wanted, but that seems a different matter. I would say that most government regulation, OSHA, EEOC or whatever, is facilitated rather than required by large size of economic enterprise. No doubt medical technology makes government involvement in funding medical care more likely but that seems to me a somewhat isolated although important case. >Yes, multiculturalism was always implied in the "pursuit of life, >liberty, and happiness," however it was denied, explicitly or >implicitly, to women, blacks, the poor, and members of other minority >groups. The founding fathers were a bunch of wealthy WASPS who failed >to extend the benefits of democratic government and capitalistic >enterprises to everyone else, although this has slowly eroded with the >passage of time, no doubt due in part to the characteristics of >democracy itself. You seem to treat the benefits of society as something produced by a process to which race, class and gender have no natural connection. On that view justice becomes a matter of dividing the benefits up equally or at least in accordance with criteria to which r., c. and g. are irrelevant. Such a view seems to follow from taking the equal right of each individual to pursue happiness as the basis of social order. If that is the goal the founding fathers of course only made a start toward achieving it. In assessing something like the Buchanan campaign an important question is whether such an order is desirable or even possible, or whether America has been able to exist and in some respects prosper only because of residual illiberal aspects (e.g., residual loyalty to family and to particularistic ethnic, religious and local communities and standards). Is a society run on fully universalistic principles possible, or are ethnicity, class and gender necessary principles of social organization? It seems to me the latter is the case, which calls in question the political and moral judgments implied by your language. >I would take his so-called commitment to free enterprise and civil >liberties with a grain of salt -- that's not the part of the first >America that really interests him. If his commitment were absolute he would of course be a liberal. My impression (I don't know that much about the man) is that he thinks they are good things in a world in which there are many good things but aren't the sole legitimate basis of social order. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Wed Oct 29 16:53:34 1997 Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.5/8.7.1/PanixM1.0) with ESMTP id QAA05649 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 16:53:28 -0500 (EST) Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA31774; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 16:51:28 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 2492127 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 16:51:27 -0500 Received: from panix.com (cbVINIELOSOvfF6YZBEZ7IFSyqnUVCH9@panix.com [198.7.0.2]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA31758 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 16:51:25 -0500 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id QAA19075 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 16:51:23 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <199710292151.QAA19075@panix.com> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 16:51:22 -0500 Reply-To: newman Discussion List Sender: newman Discussion List From: Jim Kalb Subject: Re: Orthodoxy To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU In-Reply-To: from "Mark Cameron" at Oct 29, 97 10:35:17 am Status: RO Mark Cameron writes: > The practical argument that moved me was that Catholicism is the one > force that represents a direct challenge to the premises of secular > modernity. Orthodoxy perhaps offers an alternative, an escape, as do > the Amish or Hassidism, but Catholicism is an affront to everything > that this dark age stands for. I can't help but wonder whether perhaps for historical reasons Orthodoxy is better set up to survive very bad times, domination by the Turks, Golden Horde, Bolsheviks, whatever. What will be most useful in the years to come? Catholicism has of course been engaged with the secular world for a very long time, far more than the pre-Constantinian church was, and more assertively than Orthodoxy has been. The problem is that you tend to become what you're engaged with. Evil communications corrupt good manners as someone once said. That seems to have happened in Seth's local Catholic diocese. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Wed Oct 29 17:06:05 1997 Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by mail1.panix.com (8.8.5/8.7.1/PanixM1.0) with ESMTP id RAA06830 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 17:06:05 -0500 (EST) Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id RAA39842; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 17:04:39 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 2492687 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 17:04:39 -0500 Received: from panix.com (E/zWePt11h58a480npiYJjWZQVqvpcna@panix.com [198.7.0.2]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id RAA46736 for ; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 17:04:37 -0500 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id RAA20922 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Wed, 29 Oct 1997 17:04:34 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <199710292204.RAA20922@panix.com> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 17:04:34 -0500 Reply-To: newman Discussion List Sender: newman Discussion List From: Jim Kalb Subject: Re: Orthodoxy To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy" at Oct 29, 97 07:39:12 pm Status: RO Ita dixit Francesca: > The point is that people are going to go on and on and on asking > questions. One has either to say 'all questioning is forbidden' or > to think of a way of answering. The Catholic church has taken the > latter path - it is a living intellectual force. Another question of course is what the important issues are and which are dead ends or somehow aside the point. Paul didn't become a living intellectual force in Athens by taking part in the discussions that were already under way in the Areopagus, he raised new issues that he thought were the ones people should be thinking about. He tied them to existing discussions to the extent he could but that was a matter of presentation rather than substance. He didn't try to reform the Athens city government or try to develop a position that could become part of the discussions at the Academy and maybe affect the development of the curriculum there somewhat, he founded entirely new communities. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Oct 30 07:58:02 EST 1997 Article: 10497 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: Which America? Date: 30 Oct 1997 07:41:13 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 42 Message-ID: <639v99$ca0@panix.com> References: <62qjbv$gi7@panix.com> <62ut0a$ndn$1@gte1.gte.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com "T.O. Minnix" writes: >if the founding principles of the American nation did imply that >equality and liberty are supreme social ideals (or as commentators such >as Robert Bork have surmised, if the seeds of our current political >crises were planted in the thought behind the American Revolution) then >how can the society defended by Buchanan be any more stable than that >produced by 20th Century Liberalism, since both are largely based upon >and expressions of these ideals? The American polity has been constituted by its explicit public ideals (equality and liberty) and by its actual way of life. Both have been necessary to it even though they are somewhat at odds with each other. The problem we have today that the former have eaten up the latter and it isn't possible to base a social order solely on equality and liberty. The goal of Buchanan's conservative Americanism, I think, is to stabilize the American polity by reducing the power of centralized national institutions that make it their business to force the actual American way of life into full compliance with American public ideals, and to modify American public ideals to make room for things like family values, religion and acceptance of ethnic and other parochial loyalties. Both are quite difficult to do but the effort I think is worth making. >with what ideals conservatives (really counter-revolutionaries or >right-radicals at this point, since the American conservatism intends >to conserve precisely the ideals in the Declaration of Independence) >intend to replace these fallen idols of political philosophy (life, >liberty, and the pursuit of happiness)? Most of them want to retain the D. of I. ideals but as elements within a public moral order that includes other things and so limits them. There is no real break with American conservatism. Get rid of big government and stated national public ideals suddenly become much less important in the overall scheme of things. Tom Fleming for example seems to favor a sort of neo-Scottish Highlands/hillbilly way of life in which freedom is the highest public value but ties to kin are of enormous practical and therefore moral importance because those are what you have to rely on. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Fri Oct 31 05:51:14 1997 Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by mail2.panix.com (8.8.5/8.7.1/PanixM1.0) with ESMTP id FAA27486 for ; Fri, 31 Oct 1997 05:51:13 -0500 (EST) Received: from listserv.vt.edu (listserv.vt.edu [128.173.4.9]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id FAA57004; Fri, 31 Oct 1997 05:49:33 -0500 Received: from LISTSERV.VT.EDU by LISTSERV.VT.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 2530213 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Fri, 31 Oct 1997 05:49:32 -0500 Received: from panix.com (cNVw+XCJq6qKFvuKulv+xpRGybRCAbEa@panix.com [198.7.0.2]) by listserv.vt.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id FAA03744 for ; Fri, 31 Oct 1997 05:49:31 -0500 Received: (from jk@localhost) by panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id FAA28829 for NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU; Fri, 31 Oct 1997 05:49:31 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <199710311049.FAA28829@panix.com> Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 05:49:30 -0500 Reply-To: newman Discussion List Sender: newman Discussion List From: Jim Kalb Subject: Re: Two new books To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19971031021851.007e9c30@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Oct 31, 97 02:18:51 am Status: O Thus Seth: > what a gloomy bunch paleos are generally speaking. For sure. I am reminded only in reverse of the old classmate of Dr. Johnson's who said he had tried to be a philosopher in his time, but cheerfulness kept breaking through. It does seem there's an ethical principle somewhere that what's good ought to be more important to us than what's bad and more the basis of what we do and think. So maybe we should all get collectively bummed out about how gloomy paleos are. > You are the first person to mention Ibn Khaldun's name since my > course in economic history with David Friedman two decades ago at the > Center for Public Choice at Virginia Tech. An amazing figure, given > his (Khaldun's) time and place. Actually, I think it was his time and place that enabled him to develop such a good theory of posthistorical multicultural society. Interesting Friedman is a fan though. He (Friedman) has also written about medieval Iceland, another of my interests. > But apparently he thinks it has some unsuspected sources of renewal > and/or resilience, though I'm not far enough along in the book to > know what they are. Doesn't he say that section of his book is going to be incomprehensible? Maybe he's just constitutionally cheerful, like Emerson, and when you try to figure out the exact grounds for his cheerfulness you end up in this world where the more you look at things the less they scan and eventually you start doubting his sanity. > >>In this sense, the liberal tradition is not a self-contained > >>persuasion but is in continuity with the discovery of the soul > >>through philosophy and its transcendent fulfillment through > >>revelation. > This is the first time I've encountered a claim like this from > anybody who might be identified with the orthodox Roman Catholic > Right. Which is one reason why the book really interests me. The quoted language is literally correct. The issue is whether the continuity of which he speaks although necessary to the existence of actual liberal societies is something that gets progressively purified out so the societies eventually come to an end. > Film at 11 when I finish the book. Do let us know. Give us a slo-mo replay on the videotape. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Oct 31 13:26:04 EST 1997 Article: 10503 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: The web of tradition Date: 30 Oct 1997 19:12:34 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 39 Message-ID: <63b7pi$rqf@panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Yet another issue statement for a discussion group meeting. The topic is "Traditionalism and Electronic Communications." Traditions are strongest where community is closest. However, modern communications tend to break down the particular ties that create close communities, because they make it as easy to talk to 100 New Zealanders chosen at random as to your sister around the corner. Also, traditions are transmitted more by personal contact and word of mouth than by images or writings broadcast to everyone. Because modern communications make everyone equally easy to reach, they put a premium on universal comprehensibility. Thus, modern communications mean that the things communicated tend to be things that can be separated from particular human relationships and cultural backgrounds and so are divorced from all particular traditions. So what happens to tradition in the age of 500 cable channels and the Internet? Does it disappear in favor of forms of life based purely on market principles, as many net libertarians seem to expect? Or if we need traditions and traditional institutions that don't simply facilitate individual choice and exchange (e.g., family and religious traditions), how will they preserve themselves and develop? Some religious groups solve the problem by radical restriction of their participation in the universal electronic web. Something similar but more limited has been suggested as a solution for the problem of pornography on the net. Is that the wave of the future? Will the universal interconnecting web simply be a transitional phase that enables people to sort themselves into seccessionist communities that will then cut most of their outside ties to enable them to construct a livable social world on their own principles? Or is there some other solution to the problem, if there is a problem? -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Oct 31 14:12:20 EST 1997 Article: 10509 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: The web of tradition Date: 31 Oct 1997 14:12:10 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 23 Message-ID: <63daia$hdh@panix.com> References: <63b7pi$rqf@panix.com> <19971031071611384168@deepblue3.salamander.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com X-Newsposter: trn 4.0-test55 (26 Feb 97) wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes: >People may form new distributed communities, but it hard to know if >physical proximity can be entirely optional I don't think physical proximity can be optional. Electronics doesn't touch us as closely or in as many ways as face-to-face dealings. Also, community isn't community unless it's part of what makes the man. It's hard for electronic connections to be part of what makes us what we are because switching is too easy. The communities that have been somewhat distributed (Jews, Gypsies, various religious sects) have in fact emphasized local physical proximity and physical separation from others. The Jews traditionally had a variety of rules (dietary, domestic, minyan requirements) that required them to live with other Jews and made it difficult for them to mix readily with others. Ditto Gypsies (rules of ritual purity) and the more cohesive sects (separation from the world, emphasis on local congregations). -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Nov 1 05:14:06 EST 1997 Article: 10510 of alt.revolution.counter Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Re: The web of tradition Date: 31 Oct 1997 14:14:32 -0500 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 41 Message-ID: <63damo$i1c@panix.com> References: <63b7pi$rqf@panix.com> <3459f7d7.37184@news.xs4all.nl> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com X-Newsposter: trn 4.0-test55 (26 Feb 97) vtnetSPAM@xs4all.nl (Martin) writes: >Even traditions can probably be regarded as based upon the free market >principles in a extended sense, since the primary function of >tradition is to sustain communities which in turn bring a comparative >advantage to its members. They're both forms of self-organization so there are naturally points of similarity. >What no doubt will remain is the comparative advantage of community >and so with it the principles underlying community. Some moral and >behavioral codes that are respected by all members (even in disregard >of short term personal interests) will remain Community requires us to do more than disregard our short-term personal interests, though. The good of the community has to become part of our own good, so that we become willing to disregard even what would otherwise be considered long-term personal interests. We have to be willing to sacrifice. >Where counter revolutionaries are wrong is in their believe that the >comparative advantage that communities offers, is best restored by >restricting information to foster common values. In today's world >communications (and with it competition) is so intense and issues so >complex, that the advantage of withholding information to foster >community, will almost always be overshadowed by the loss of the >comparative edge for individuals and so for the community that >comprises these individuals. The information that gives comparative advantage is mostly technical information and in any case not everyone has to have all of it. So I'm not sure the conflict is so fundamental. In any event I can't think of that many social issues regarding which information of a sort that gives comparative advantage plays a key role. I don't think it's usually things that would normally be called "information" that are the issue. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson
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