Isegoria

Jim takes a neoreactionary look at fixing Christianity:

Either we go with Darwin alone, or we go with a Christianity reconciled with Darwin.  Anything else is the death of European civilization.  And very few people can handle Darwin alone.  Most of those who claim that they can, are lying, and are in fact preaching progressivism, a form of Christianity rendered observably false by being transliterated from the next world to this world.

The doctrine of the fall contains important truths about the nature of man. The doctrine of evolution also contains similar important truths about the nature of man. Our state religion is going to have to deploy both doctrines simultaneously.

And the doctrine of evolution is that we are risen killer apes who rose upon a thousand genocides. So, death did not literally come into this world with the loss of innocence. Rather, it is a spiritual truth about the black pill, about spiritual death.

A lot of it is a matter of explicating what predecessors said and did reverentially but not uncritically. If the process of explication uncovers errors and defects, it has to be pointed out and fixed accordingly. This is how you make old books live again and recover and reactivate traditions.

If you don’t integrate Darwin and Christ, the clever sillies, claiming falsely to know the truth from Darwin, whom they do not read and do not understand, will take down Chesterton’s fence, and you will start agreeing with them that Chesterton’s fence is really stupid and come up with some clever reasoning that it is not really part of Christianity. And I see this happening right now, and it has been happening ever since Darwin

Christianity is a church, adoptive kin, it is necessarily a tribe, and thus, being a tribe, necessarily something rather like a state. Merely individual Christianity, a personal and individual relationship with god, is not Christianity. Faced with a hostile belief system, Christians are retreating before it, and yielding the collective and tribal functions of the Church to the educators, to the progressives. And inventing a merely individual Christianity that is concerned with merely individual salvation. In so doing, they are hoping to save Christianity by abandoning it.

The clever sillies invoke Darwin merely as a creation myth, to discredit the bible and to discredit the moral, psychological, and spiritual truths of the fall. The correct response is to retreat from young earth literalism, while pointing out that Darwinism confirms the psychological and spiritual truths of the fall. Christianity’s response has been to retreat from young earth creationism as literal truth and also to retreat from the moral, psychological, and spiritual truths of the fall

Religion needs to be a true statement about this world, as well as an unfalsifiable statement about the next. Christianity needs to be fixed so that it once again makes the true statements about this world that it used to make. Speaking truth about this world is a vital and important task of religion, which task it has fled from fearing condemnation by the state religion of progressivism Instead of speaking the truth, they torture the texts, Jewish style, to make them say the opposite of what they say. They turn Saint Paul into a feminist, and turn Deuteronomy and Proverbs into twenty first century anti family and anti marriage law.

Megan McArdle suggests that we listen to the “bad” feminists:

How has the most empowered generation of women in all of human history come to feel less control over their bodies than their grandmothers did?

Let me propose a possible answer to this, suggested by a very smart social scientist of my acquaintance: They feel this way because we no longer have any moral language for talking about sex except consent. So when men do things that they feel are wrong — such as aggressively pursuing casual sex without caring about the feelings of their female target — we’re left flailing for some way to describe this as non-consensual, even when she agreed to the sex.

Under the old code, of course, we had ample condemnatory terms for men who slept with women carelessly, without much regard for their feelings: cads and rakes, bounders and boors. Those words have now decayed into archaism. Yet it seems to me that these are just the words that young women are reaching for, when instead they label things like mutually drunken encounters and horrible one-night stands as an abuse of power, a violation of consent — which is to say, as a crime, or something close to it. To which a lot of other people incredulously respond: now being a bad lover is a crime?

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If you cast an eye back over history you’ll see that what most societies have actually come up with is the social equivalent of a cartel: if you want the sex, you’re going to first have to invest in some sort of relationship, because it’s not (readily) available any other way. Those regimes, of course, were often quite punishing to women, but then, that’s how cartels often work; when a cartel member cheats by selling below the fixed price, it is the member, not their customer, who suffers retaliation from the rest of the cartel.

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Tragically, any suggestion that women have the power to change the dynamic is labeled “victim blaming” — as if we lived in an ideal world where being the person most likely or able to change something was always neatly synonymous with being the person who caused the problem in the first place.

It is easy to imagine that politics would inevitably decay into legal battles, Anomaly UK notes, but, at least in established long-standing democracies, this rarely happens:

Outside of the developed West, this is quite a common occurrence. The last few years have seen disputes over whether candidates acted lawfully in Ukraine, Venezuela, Honduras, just off the top of my head.

As a general approach, those norms can’t be a solution to the problem: if there is a strong norm against prosecuting opponents, that would surely tempt politicians further into legally questionable territory in order to take advantage of it, approaching the point where there is a significant danger of prosecution.

One solution that would work is for the grey area to be shrunk down: if the real rules (which might not be the same as the formal rules) are very clear and very easily interpreted, then nobody will make a fatal mistake, either of stepping over the line so that his opponents have to take legal action against him, or of taking a situation to the legal arena which the other party has reasonably assumed to be safe.

That could be the case, but really doesn’t appear to be.

Another solution would be if politicians feared the punishments for malpractice much more than they wanted to win, so that they would never take even small risks of getting caught. Again, that does not appear to be the case.

Another solution in a democracy would be if any malpractice is looked on so severely by the electorate that it would be counterproductive. That surely is not the case. It might be that that has been the case until recently. There is a whole narrative, quite logical, that the populations of the Western democracies used to be so attached to democratic values that any breach of those principles would outrage them to the point of unelectability, and that a recent increase in partisanship has fatally damaged that equilibrium.

There are two problems I can see with that narrative: first, that there is no history of notably clean politics in the democracies: lies, bribes, and gerrymandering being commonplace throughout history. Second, that it doesn’t make sense for voters to be so moralistic about their own side cheating. The current situation, where supporters of a candidate see accusations of cheating as either signs of the viciousness of the enemy propaganda, or as indications of his own heroic strength, or both, seems far more natural than such high-minded fairness.

My own view is that the thing that has made democracy work, in those rare cases where it has worked, is that the apparently opposing parties are really part of the same ruling class. The issues that stand between the parties are low-stakes issues, which are resolved by the parties staying within the rules. The reason they stay within the rules is because they are united on the high-stakes issue, of the existing ruling class holding on to its position, and aren’t prepared to jeopardise that by fighting no-holds-barred over side questions.

For instance, take the quote from Jeremy Paxman’s book The Political Animal that I picked up in 2011: “In April 1925, for example, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, announced that Britain was to return to the Gold Standard, whereby the value of sterling was guaranteed by allowing pounds to be exchanged for gold. This momentous (if ultimately unsuccessful) decision had been two months in preparation, involving heartfelt arguments on both sides of the debate. Yet not a word of it appeared in the newspapers. Indeed, it was hardly heard outside the confines of the Treasury.”

Or, as I put it another way in 2008 : ” They only situation in which a government can genuinely act in the interest of a class wider than just politicians is when there is a larger class of relatively powerless people – slaves or peasants – who would be a threat to a divided ruling class. That is the characteristic of democracies before the twentieth century.”

If both sides politically are actually united on maintaining the system that favours them, that doesn’t mean that their disagreements are fake. It just means that they aren’t important enough to risk the system over. However, from the point of view of an outsider to whom the disagreement is most important, that is almost the same thing.

We may be living in the 21st century, Razib Khan says, but we’re still living by Iron Age ethics:

Something happened in the centuries around 500 BCE all around the world. Great religions and philosophies arose. The Indian religious traditions, the Chinese philosophical-political ones, and the roots of what we can recognize as Judaism. In Greece, the precursors of many modern philosophical streams emerged formally, along with a variety of political systems.

The next few centuries saw some more innovation. Rabbinical Judaism transformed a ritualistic tribal religion into an ethical one, and Christianity universalized Jewish religious thought, as well as infusing it with Greek systematic concepts. Meanwhile, Indian and Chinese thought continued to evolve, often due to interactions each other (it is hard to imagine certain later developments in Confucianism without the Buddhist stimulus). Finally, in the 7th century, Islam emerges as the last great world religion.

It has long puzzled me why all the great institutional faiths arose in about 1,000 years. And then not much since then (numerically Sikhs are marginal, while the fracturing of Christianity in the 16th still left the daughter sects recognizable and possibly reconcilable).

I think here perhaps an analogy to our technological conundrum applies. One reason we don’t have jetpacks and flying cars is that the limitations of physics make it difficult. Some things may be physically possible, but the engineering costs are prohibitive. The several waves of life-transforming technological revolutions between 1750 and 1950 slowly started to ebb in the past generations. Why? It turns out that going from horse and human power, to fossil fuels, and nuclear power, were huge transitions in terms of gains in power. There may not be much to do at this point (fusion is perhaps the major exception).

Similarly, the reason that modern people can get a lot out of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Confucius’ Analects, and the Bible, is that the ethical low-hanging fruit was picked. Recently there have been advances in domains such as the abolition of slavery, so it isn’t as if no progress has been made. But if you read about the Bronze Age world, you see one where human sacrifice is still routinely practiced, as opposed to being an aberration. The distance between 0 AD and 1000 BC is arguably greater ethically than between 0 AD and 2000 AD.

Living in large complex societies with social stratification posed challenges. A religion such as Christianity was not a coincidence, something of its broad outlines may have been inevitable. Universal, portable, ethical, and infused with transcendence and coherency. Similarly, god-kings seem to have universally transformed themselves into the human who binds heaven to earth in some fashion.

The second wave of social-ethical transformation occurred in the early modern period, starting in Europe. My own opinion is that economic growth triggered by innovation and gains in productivity unleashed constraints which had dampened further transformations in the domain of ethics. But the new developments ultimately were simply extensions and modifications on the earlier “source code” (e.g., whereas for nearly two thousand years Christianity had had to make peace with the existence of slavery, in the 19th century anti-slavery activists began marshaling Christian language against the institution).

Arnold Kling has a few reasons for being less than fully bought into Jordan Peterson:

He is a spellbinding speaker but his first book, Maps of Meaning, was turgid. There is something disconcerting about the fact that his ideas seem to come across better in a format that allows for less editorial polishing. I noted this in December of 2016, when the Peterson tsunami was just forming.

Some of his ideas are mystical and sound really strange.

He gains some of his stature by attacking post-modernists who are intellectual weak, at least in the way that he presents them. For me, it is more impressive to take on stronger opponents than weaker ones.

He may now be over-rated by his fans on the right. But he is badly, badly, under-rated by smug leftists whose ability to understand opposing viewpoints pales in comparison with his.

Using the three-axes model, I put Peterson firmly in the conservative camp. He sees civilization as fragile and precious, and he is animated by the civilization vs. barbarism axis.

Jordan Peterson came back on Joe Rogan’s show (Joe Rogan Experience #1070), and I recommend watching (or simply listening):

Jordan Peterson spoke with Quillette about his newly influential ideas:

Classical liberalism is not an ideology because its reflective of something that is deep and that is real. The books that I have written, both Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules for Life are an amalgam of a Jungian psychoanalytic approach to narrative and evolutionary biology. And so they are also an amalgam, in some sense of theology and evolutionary biology. But that’s sort of via the psychoanalytic interpretation of literature.

The reason for that in part is that I think that our religious preconceptions evolved. They are deeper than rationality, by a large margin. They reflect a reality that’s deeper than that which we have been able to apprehend rationally so far.

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I think the one advantage that I have is that the material I have on YouTube is being watched and is being understood. And it’s not easy material, so the people who are supporting me that have put the time in, actually understand with reasonable depth what it is I am trying to do and why.

That’s makes [the fan group] more solid than it might be. I think I have evidence for that and the evidence is that I have had my reputation attacked, probably as brutally as it can be attacked short of actual physical violence over the last year and a half. And what’s stopped that from having a lasting effect is the fact that four hundred hours of what I have said have already been online and that people know it very deeply.

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Part of the humility that’s necessary to make this sort of thing work is the proper terror of making a mistake. I have been far more terrified of making a fatal error in the last eighteen months than I have been thrilled about my newfound notoriety. I have been walking a very thin tightrope. I only have to say one thing, in all the things that I have said since September, and I have come close!

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Outside of my immediate family, I have a circle of advisers who are not the sort of people who are swayed by fame. Not because they don’t understand its utility, not because they are contemptuous of it, none of that. But because some of them have had their fame, and some of them have had the kind of power in the world that is sufficient so they are no longer star-struck by that sort of thing and they can see the dangers. I talk to them and I say, “OK, here is what I said, what did I do wrong? Where did I go overboard? Where wasn’t I clear? Where did I wander into egotism?” And they are brutal, they tell me, “Here is what you did wrong, don’t do this again”. There are five of them. And plus I pay attention to the social media comments. Not obsessively, but if I have made a video that doesn’t get fifty-to-one likes to dislikes I have made a mistake. Because that seems to be about the [right] ratio.

This isn’t a moral virtue on my part. This is desperate instinct for self-preservation. It’s like if you’re in a piranha tank you don’t want to get a speck of something delicious on you, how would that be?

After 45 years, Matthew Parris returned to the country that he knew as Nyasaland. It’s now Malawi. There he concluded that Africa needs God — even though he’s an atheist:

In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding — as you can — the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing. First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world — a directness in their dealings with others — that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

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Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers — in some ways less so — but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. ”Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service. It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work were unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man’s place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There’s long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours. I don’t follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety — fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things — strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

He tries to explain the philosophical difference between Christian Africans and non-Christians with Sir Edmund Hillary’s famous answer to why he climbed Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.”

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It’s… well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary’s further explanation — that nobody else had climbed it — would stand as a second reason for passivity. Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and insubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosophical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted. And I’m afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

By the way, it wasn’t Hillary who said that after he successfully summited Everest; it was George Mallory who said it after he’d failed and before his last attempt — where he failed.

(Hat tip to commenter Charles W. Abbott.)

“Who’s afraid of Jordan Peterson?” Peggy Noonan asks:

This flashed through my mind when I saw the interview this week between British television journalist Cathy Newman and clinical psychologist and social philosopher Jordan Peterson. It burned through the internet, in part because she was remarkably hostile and badgering: “What gives you the right to say that?” “You’re making vast generalizations.” He seemed mildly taken aback, then rallied and wouldn’t be pushed around. It was also interesting because she, the fiery, flame-haired aggressor, was so boring — her thinking reflected all the predictable, force-fed assumptions — while he, saying nothing revolutionary or even particularly fiery, was so interesting. When it was over, you wanted to hear more from him and less from her.

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He is of the tough school: Know life’s limits, see and analyze your own, build on what you’ve got and can create.

And be brave. Everything else is boring and won’t work.

Deeper in, you understand the reasons he might be targeted for annihilation. First, he is an intellectual who shows a warm, scholarly respect for the stories and insights into human behavior — into the meaning of things — in the Old and New Testaments. (He’d like more attention paid to the Old.) Their stories exist for a reason, he says, and have lasted for a reason: They are powerful indicators of reality, and their great figures point to pathways. He respects the great thinkers of the West and the Christian tradition.

More undermining of the modernist project, Mr. Peterson states clearly more than once that grasping at political ideology is not the answer when your life goes wrong. There’s no refuge there, it’s a way of avoiding the real problem: “Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”

That is a dangerous thing to say in an ideological age.

What should we do instead? Admit life ain’t for sissies. You will die and on the way to death you will suffer; throughout you will be harassed by evil, both in the world and in your heart: “Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer — we’re tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world.”

The only appropriate stance: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” and “accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.” Literally: “Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind.” Competitors and predators will start to assume you’re competent and able. Moreover, it will “encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.”

“Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.” Respect yourself, take part, keep “the machinery of the world running.”

Don’t be arrogant. “Become aware of your own insufficiency…. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. And above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the death of millions of people.”

He’s suggesting here the personal is political, but not in the way that phrase is usually meant.

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When people, especially those in a position of authority, like broadcasters, try so hard to shut a writer up, that writer must have something to say.

When cultural arbiters try to silence a thinker, you have to assume he is saying something valuable.

So I bought and read the book. A small thing, but it improved my morale.

I briefly mentioned this long-form interview Jordan Peterson had with Geen Stijl, but, if you have the time, do listen to the whole thing:

It’s the polar opposite of his interview with Channel 4.

David Brooks calls this the Jordan Peterson moment. Dr. Peterson has a new book out, 12 Rules for Living, and his YouTube videos have accumulated 40 million views.

But Brooks isn’t exactly a fan:

At some level Peterson is offering assertiveness training to men whom society is trying to turn into emasculated snowflakes.

Peterson gives them a chance to be strong. He inspires their idealism by telling them that life is hard. His worldview begins with the belief that life is essentially a series of ruthless dominance competitions. The strong get the spoils and the weak become meek, defeated, unknown and unloved.

I immediately spotted something wrong there, and Peterson himself called it out on Twitter:

Not dominance competitions. Competence competitions. Not the same thing at all….

I can almost hear him saying “Bucko” at the end there.

“Much of Peterson’s advice sounds,” to Brooks, “like vague exhortatory banality,” but Brooks did enjoy Peterson’s dissection of Channel 4′s Cathy Newman:

Instead of actually listening to Peterson, she just distorted, simplified and restated his views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish.

Peterson calmly and comprehensibly corrected and rebutted her. It is the most devastatingly one-sided media confrontation you will ever see. He reminded me of a young William F. Buckley.

The Peterson way is a harsh way, but it is an idealistic way — and for millions of young men, it turns out to be the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which they are raised.