The Theological Origins Of Modernity

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Luke Ford

Michael Allen Gillespie writes in this 2009 book:

Petrarch asserts unequivocally in The Solitary Life that public life is incompatible with virtue. At the heart of this claim is his conviction that social life is dominated by the opinions and values of the multitude, who are invariably slaves to their passions. Man in society is thus not a free being who seeks his own good but a slave who desires the praise and fears the blame of others and who consequently wants only what others want.

Those engaged in public affairs, are ruled by the power of another man’s nod and learn what they must do from another man’s look. Th ey claim nothing as their own. Their house, their sleep, their food, is not their own, and what is even more serious, their mind is not their own, their countenance not their own. They do not weep and laugh at the promptings of their own nature but discard their own emotions to put on those of another. In sum, they transact another man’s business, think another man’s thoughts, live by another man’s grace.

The multitude thus merely follow one another, which is to say, they are dominated by the lowest desires and turn the satisfaction of these desires into objects of praise. Under such circumstances, virtue is impossible and man necessarily becomes vicious, prey to envy and resentment. The busy man’s heart is wholly fi xed on treachery, and he becomes pernicious, unstable, faithless, inconstant, fierce, and bloody. The intellectual life also disappears in the public sphere, for public life is devoted to the cultivation of estates and not minds. In fact, minds are deadened under such circumstances by the mania for talk, noise, and disturbance. Petrarch admits that there are some saintly active men (such as Scipio), but he believes that they are very few and that they are not happy.
In his view a noble spirit will never find repose save in God or in himself and his private thoughts, or in some intellect united by a close sympathy with his own.

It is only in private life, only in what Petrarch calls solitude or retirement, that man can be true to himself and enjoy his own individuality.

Petrarch does not mean that everyone should simply follow his whims: “Each man must seriously take into account the disposition with which nature has endowed him and the best which by habit or training he has developed.” In the plan to reform our lives, we should be guided not by idle wishes but by our character and predisposition. It is thus necessary for man to be particularly honest and exacting in passing judgment on himself and to avoid temptations of eye and ear. This is only to say that each man should undergo the kind of self-examination undertaken in the My Secret. Once one has come to the bottom of oneself and grasped one’s peculiar nature, warts and all, he or she should follow the path that this nature demands. As Petrarch puts it, “Each person, whether saint, soldier, or philosopher, follows some irresistible call of his nature.” In his view, however, we generally do not do this because we are guided not by our own judgment but by the opinions of the crowd. This distortion of judgment is the great danger that makes the private life, or the life of solitude, necessary. Independence of mind is possible only in solitude, in private away from the crowd, away from politics. Only there is it possible “to live according to your pleasure, to go where you will, to stay where you will . . . to belong to yourself in all seasons and wherever you are to be ever with yourself, far from evil, far from examples of wickedness!”

…the immoderate desire for fame (the unresolved problem of the My Secret) can be satisfied only by withdrawal from active life and the proper use of leisure. Only in private will it be possible to win the war over our passions, “to expel vice from our borders, put our lusts to flight, restrain our illicit propensities, chastise our wantonness, and elevate our mind toward higher objects.” “Let some govern the populous city and others rule the army. Our city is that of our mind, our army that of our thoughts.” Humans in this way remain political but only because they become autarchic cities with laws and customs peculiarly their own.

…Petrarch seldom tells us anything that we don’t already know, and as a result he seems superfluous to us.

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Theses On Method

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Luke Ford

Professor Bruce Lincoln writes:

1. The conjunction “of” that joins the two nouns in the disciplinary ethnonym “History of Religions” is not neutral filler. Rather, it announces a proprietary claim and a relation of encompassment: History is the method and Religion the object of study.

2. The relation between the two nouns is also tense, as becomes clear if one takes the trouble to specify their meaning. Religion, I submit, is that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent with an authority equally transcendent and eternal. History, in the sharpest possible contrast, is that discourse which speaks of things temporal and terrestrial in a human and fallible voice, while staking its claim to authority on rigorous critical practice.

3. History of religions is thus a discourse that resists and reverses the orientation of that discourse with which it concerns itself. To practice history of religions in a fashion consistent with the discipline’s claim of title is to insist on discussing the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourses, practices, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual, and divine.

4. The same destabilizing and irreverent questions one might ask of any speech act ought be posed of religious discourse. The first of these is “Who speaks here?”, i.e., what person, group, or institution is responsible for a text, whatever its putative or apparent author. Beyond that, “To what audience? In what immediate and broader context? Through what system of mediations? With what interests?” And further, “Of what would the speaker(s) persuade the audience? What are the consequences if this project of persuasion should happen to succeed? Who wins what, and how much? Who, conversely, loses?”

5. Reverence is a religious, and not a scholarly virtue. When good manners and good conscience cannot be reconciled, the demands of the latter ought to prevail.

6. Many who would not think of insulating their own or their parents’ religion against critical inquiry still afford such protection to other people’s faiths, via a stance of cultural relativism. One can appreciate their good intentions, while recognizing a certain displaced defensiveness, as well as the guilty conscience of western imperialism.

7. Beyond the question of motives and intentions, cultural relativism is predicated on the dubious–not to say, fetishistic–construction of “cultures” as if they were stable and discrete groups of people defined by the stable and discrete values, symbols, and practices they share. Insofar as this model stresses the continuity and integration of timeless groups, whose internal tensions and conflicts, turbulence and incoherence, permeability and malleability are largely erased, it risks becoming a religious and not a historic narrative: the story of a transcendent ideal threatened by debasing forces of change.

8. Those who sustain this idealized image of culture do so, inter alia, by mistaking the dominant fraction (sex, age group, class, and/or caste) of a given group for the group or “culture” itself. At the same time, they mistake the ideological positions favoured and propagated by the dominant fraction for those of the group as a whole (e.g. when texts authored by Brahmins define “Hinduism”, or when the statements of male elders constitute “Nuer religion”). Scholarly misrecognitions of this sort replicate the misrecognitions and misrepresentations of those the scholars privilege as their informants.

9. Critical inquiry need assume neither cynicism nor dissimulation to justify probing beneath the surface, and ought probe scholarly discourse and practice as much as any other.

10. Understanding the system of ideology that operates in one’s own society is made difficult by two factors: (i) one’s consciousness is itself a product of that system, and (ii) the system’s very success renders its operations invisible, since one is so consistently immersed in and bombarded by its products that one comes to mistake them (and the apparatus through which they are produced and disseminated) for nothing other than “nature”.

11. The ideological products and operations of other societies afford invaluable opportunities to the would-be student of ideology. Being initially unfamiliar, they do not need to be denaturalized before they can be examined. Rather, they invite and reward critical study, yielding lessons one can put to good use at home.

12. Although critical inquiry has become commonplace in other disciplines, it still offends many students of religion, who denounce it as “reductionism”. This charge is meant to silence critique. The failure to treat religion “as religion”–that is, the refusal to ratify its claim of transcendent nature and sacrosanct status–may be regarded as heresy and sacrilege by those who construct themselves as religious, but it is the starting point for those who construct themselves as historians.

13. When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one’s interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between “truths”, “truth-claims”, and “regimes of truth”, one has ceased to function as historian or scholar. In that moment, a variety of roles are available: some perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collector, friend and advocate), and some less appealing (cheerleader, voyeur, retailer of import goods). None, however, should be confused with scholarship.

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Kamala Harris – The Affirmative Action Candidate

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Luke Ford

From comments at Steve Sailer:

* I don’t understand the logic here.

I would think Whitmer, Warren, Klobucher, etc. as VP would guarantee a Biden win at this point.

Black women aren’t going to vote Trump just because Biden chose a white VP. Whereas blue collar whites in swing states might be wary of Kamala.

* To the extent that Obama was ever accepted as authentically black by African Americans, it was because of his marriage to Michelle. And Barack looks kinda sorta like an American black. Kamala does not look African American and she’s married to a Jewish guy. Do African Americans identify with her?

BTW, when Obama ran against Bobby Rush, blacks told “Obama so white” jokes about him. One was, “Obama so white, when the riots start he run out and buy hisself a TV.” I also liked, “Obama so white he say the whole word,” and “Obama so white when he read Malcolm X, he say Malcolm the Tenth.”

* Sheesh. This reads like a cry for help or a secret message being sent out in Morse code from a POW.

Basically, the between-the-lines message is Biden and his family don’t like or trust Harris, realize that she doesn’t really bring that much to the ticket, and get that she’s eventually going to stab him in the back for her own self-interest again. But they’re basically stuck with her because blackety-black-black.

It’s a sad but almost too perfect microcosm of what the rest of us live with.

This really is the ticket of flaccid boomer cuckery. If Biden can be pushed around this easily now on race, how much worse will it be as he ages in office, he’s a self-admitted “transitional” caretaker figure to the woke tide represented by his Veep, and BLM has just come off of an election-year-long exercise in moral and literal extortion?

* Obama made an earnest and dedicated (if often rather ridiculous) effort to connect with African-American culture. In addition to the marriage to Michelle, there was the moving to Chicago to be a community organizer and the church with the wacky pastor. It may have been a largely unrequited love for the first 25 years of his career, but we can’t say it didn’t pay off eventually (albeit in a triple-bankshot way that saw him winning over white liberals before he did blacks). Our esteemed host on this blog wrote a book all about this journey.

Kamala never made that effort, and stuck with being a sort of unplaceable Amerimutt by way of California. She also definitely does not have Obama’s rare “blank screen” gift that allowed him to seem sunny, uplifting, and messianic while still letting the public project whatever they wanted to see onto him. As hard as they might be trying to coach her, the human costume doesn’t fit her well.

I’d be interested to see how black women versus black men react to her. I can’t pretend to any insider insights. But I could see black women wanting to see themselves in her: wildly successful in a government job, having using that WAP for all it’s worth from day one, married to a rich white guy and not stuck with some useless black bum, having another white man who might be titularly the most powerful man in the world next year as her bitch, not having to ever be stuck with any man’s kids, and, to top it all off, having the good hair without having to work for it.

Black men supposedly already are supportive of Trump somewhere in the 30% range (which isn’t to say they’ll vote that way, just that they poll with that kind of approval). And they might say to themselves “she wouldn’t marry one of us but she put plenty of us in jail.”

* One of the funniest parts of the “Rising Star” biography on Obama was his typically white reaction to the OJ Simpson verdict.

“Three days later, everyone’s attention turned to California when a Los Angeles jury astonishingly acquitted former football star O. J. Simpson of murdering his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, with many African Americans celebrating that verdict. Barack was crestfallen, later remarking that it “was pretty clear that O.J. was guilty, and I was ashamed for my own community to respond in that way.””

Also, he favored typical cocaine, not the crack-cocaine strongly favored by the brothas. If Obama had to choose between micro-brews and Old English Malt Liquor, you know what he’d choose. Red wine.

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Kamala Harris Slept Her Way To The Top

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* By fucking her way up the ladder of success, Harris is the mirror opposite of the meeeeee-too movement.

* So they coached her up for the big reboot today…

Go watch the video. It’s a lot of awkward hand motions and fake smiles. Both will just reinforce her reputation as phony.

Older people can’t learn new body language. She wants to squirm while speaking so the coaches gave her a few hand/arm motions to release the urge but it isn’t natural at all.

The plastic surgery makes her look less tired but RBF is a facial muscle thing triggered by anger inside the person. The surgery and the forced smiling don’t fix the hardness especially in the eyes. Her inner bitch can’t just hide away.

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Get Another Job

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Luke Ford

Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder:

As we saw with the Voltaire story, it is not possible to stamp out criticism; if it harms you, get out. It is easier to change jobs than control your reputation or public perception.
Some jobs and professions are fragile to reputational harm, something that in the age of the Internet cannot possibly be controlled—these jobs aren’t worth having. You do not want to “control” your reputation; you won’t be able to do it by controlling information flow. Instead, focus on altering your exposure, say, by putting yourself in a position impervious to reputational damage. Or even put yourself in a situation to benefit from the antifragility of information. In that sense, a writer is antifragile, but we will see later most modernistic professions are usually not.
I was in Milan trying to explain antifragility to Luca Formenton, my Italian publisher (with great aid from body language and hand gestures). I was there partly for the Moscato dessert wines, partly for a convention convention in which the other main speaker was a famous fragilista economist. So, suddenly remembering that I was an author, I presented Luca with the following thought experiment: if I beat up the economist publicly, what would happen to me (other than a publicized trial causing great interest in the new notions of fragilita and antifragilita )? You know, this economist had what is called a tête à baffe, a face that invites you to slap it, just like a cannoli invites you to bite into it. Luca thought for a second … well, it’s not like he would like me to do it, but, you know, it wouldn’t hurt book sales. Nothing I can do as an author that makes it to the front page of Corriere della Sera would be detrimental for my book. Almost no scandal would hurt an artist or writer. 6
Now let’s say I were a midlevel executive employee of some corporation listed on the London Stock Exchange, the sort who never take chances by dressing down, always wearing a suit and tie (even on the beach). What would happen to me if I attack the fragilista? My firing and arrest record would plague me forever. I would be the total victim of informational antifragility. But someone earning close to minimum wage, say, a construction worker or a taxi driver, does not overly depend on his reputation and is free to have his own opinions. He would be merely robust compared to the artist, who is antifragile. A midlevel bank employee with a mortgage would be fragile to the extreme. In fact he would be completely a prisoner of the value system that invites him to be corrupt to the core—because of his dependence on the annual vacation in Barbados. The same with a civil servant in Washington. Take this easy-to-use heuristic (which is, to repeat the definition, a simple compressed rule of thumb) to detect the independence and robustness of someone’s reputation. With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them.
Large corporations and governments do not seem to understand this rebound power of information and its ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a corporation or a debt-laden government trying to “reinstill confidence” you know they are fragile, hence doomed. Information is merciless: one press conference “to tranquilize” and the investors will run away, causing a death spiral or a run on the bank. Which explains why I have an obsessive stance against government indebtedness, as a staunch proponent of what is called fiscal conservatism. When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.
And we are blind to this antifragility of information in even more domains. If I physically beat up a rival in an ancestral environment, I injure him, weaken him, perhaps eliminate him forever—and get some exercise in the process. If I use the mob to put a contract on his head, he is gone. But if I stage a barrage of informational attacks on websites and in journals, I may be just helping him and hurting myself.

From Quillette:

I’m an attorney representing a professor at the University of Central Florida who is being subjected by the university to what can only be called an inquisition after expressing opinions on Twitter that led to widespread calls for his firing. UCF is a public institution—an instrument of the state—and is now bringing its full power to bear against a man who dared to question the prevailing orthodoxy that has quickly descended over so many of this country’s institutions. I cannot bear witness to what the university is doing to this man without speaking out against it. If we do not challenge this egregious abuse of power, things will only get worse.

Professor Charles Negy is a wonderfully eccentric man, someone who teaches extraordinarily controversial subjects—Cross-Cultural Psychology and Sexual Behavior—with bluntness and humor. He is exactly the kind of professor you want in college: someone who is passionate about his subject, who will challenge your deeply-held assumptions, and who encourages free and open discussion in the classroom. Negy’s bluntness has occasionally ruffled feathers over the years, but throughout his 22-year career at UCF he has received consistently superior performance reviews. For the past four years, for example, he has received an evaluation rating of “Outstanding” for his instruction and advising.

In June, however, things changed overnight for Negy after he posted a characteristically blunt tweet to his personal Twitter account…

Immediately, #UCFfirehim began trending on Twitter and people began to protest both on UCF’s campus and outside Negy’s home.

UCF president Alexander Cartwright understood, but was clearly disappointed, that the university could not fire Negy for his constitutionally protected tweets, telling the Orlando Sentinel: “The Constitution restricts our ability to fire him or any other University employee for expressing personal opinions about matters of public concern. This is the law.”

So Cartwright chose a different strategy: He publicly announced a witch hunt into Negy’s classroom speech.

From comments at Steve Sailer:

* I remember about 25 years or so ago I applied for an adjunct teaching position at a college with an overwhelmingly high percentage of minority students. The head of adjuncts and the department chair in that department were minorities themselves.

At one point in the interview I was asked my opinion about minority education. I went on a rant, saying minority education was a racist concept which implied minority students weren’t capable of learning. The head of adjuncts took me to the department chair and had me repeat my rant. I was hired.

Not only that, but when I caught some minority students cheating a few years later I was permitted to punish them. Not all colleges allowed that for certain ethnic groups.

So yes, even many of us liberals don’t want students coddled no matter what the ethnic background, and that includes liberal minorities as well.

Posted in Economics | Comments Off on Get Another Job