No, Paleoconservatives Are Not Helping the Left

Paul Gottfried writes May 8, 2021:

Michael Anton raises several good points in his brief against Brion McClanahan’s assault on the 1776 Commission and that commission’s yoking of universal equality with the American founding. Anton is perfectly correct that state declarations of the rights of citizens drafted during or after the American Revolution incorporate the natural right phraseology of the Declaration of Independence. Thus, the attempt by members of the Old Right, including Willmoore Kendall (whom I usually follow in these matters), to downplay natural rights language in the American Founding is open to question.

Anton is also right that at least several of America’s founders opposed slavery in principle, even if such a theoretical opponent as Thomas Jefferson only freed a small number of his slaves. It is of course also true that Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) wished to send the emancipated slaves out of his state because of what he thought were intractable differences between the races. Like the signers of the Declaration who went along with what the Claremont Institute understands as the authoritative passage in that document (and not all members of the Continental Congress approved of that wording), we are supposed to assume that all human beings have inalienable rights to life and liberty.

But that did not mean that for the founders “all men” were equally entitled to citizenship or that all human beings were equally fit to exercise that right. Certainly, Jefferson, even as a critic of slavery, did not believe that blacks were able to do so in the foreseeable future; and I doubt that many members of the Continental Congress were ready to extend the vote to women. The reason is not that the founders were not as enlightened as Michael Anton and the 1776 Commission. They simply understood the right to life and liberty as stopping with that right and not requiring the full panoply of civil and other rights that our modern political and educational leaders attach to the notion of equality.

In Novus Ordo Seclorum, Forrest McDonald offers a detailed analysis of what educated 18th-century Americans understood by equality. Looking at five general usages of that term, several of which were derived from the politics and epistemology of John Locke, McDonald concludes that equality for most of the founders “did not necessarily imply a conflict with the institution of slavery.” According to McDonald, few people of that generation went as far as Alexander Hamilton, who assumed the “blacks would prove to be intellectually and socially equal to whites,” given the proper conditions and a long enough apprenticeship. Although Jefferson “trembled” with fear of divine retribution when he contemplated the evil of slavery in 1776, “few of his countrymen trembled with him.”

What may be argued, however, is that certain convictions held by the founders, e.g., belief in a shared moral sense and the equal dignity of all human beings before a Divine master, would have led them over time into a stronger anti-slavery stance. But this is different from ascribing to these figures an anguished preoccupation with the injustice of slavery. Please note that Lincoln before the Civil War opposed slavery but did not wish to grant full rights of citizenship to freed blacks. Like other members of the American Colonization Society, Lincoln was hoping that the emancipated blacks could be resettled somewhere other than in the United States. The restricted concept of equality that most early American leaders accepted was not as expansive as the one that Harry Jaffa or Michal Anton would like us to accept. It was far more limited in scope.

COMMENTS SECTION:

* The imaging that there was a founding based on two sentences in a document (the Declaration), a fall from grace, and a redemption under Lincoln is a religion.

The Declaration was not intended to be a founding document. It was a plea for help from other nations. Jefferson tells us what the Declaration was in his 1825 letter to Henry Lee. The Declaration is not what Jaffa and his students imagine it to be.

There was no founding. America grew organically from the mainly English settlements.

* The problem with ‘all men are created equal’ is how to cash out that value without destroying every community standard or even normalcy itself.

‘All men are created equal’ means in practice that any individual can imagine an ‘inequality’ and demand it’s correction.

This is why ‘conservatives’ cannot say ‘No’ to any aspect of the equalitarian Left and make it stick.

Now conservatives are pro-transsexualism because ‘equality’ now includes the equal right o decide one’s sex and to demand the necessary medical interventions to remove the ‘chains’ of ‘natural sex’.

* All men are created equal means we share a common humanity, shared general characteristics that impose upon all of us – within the limits of our particular endowments – similar obligations to think and support ourselves. From this equality comes an equality of the individual rights we require to sustain our lives within a functioning society. There is absolutely nothing in this concept that requires treating any inequality as an injustice requiring correction and thus ample opportunity to say no to the left, at least by those who actually understand the principles properly.

* The natural rights of every individual, following Locke, exists in a state of nature prior to government and the so-called civil rights that government brings to those within its jurisdiction. Of these natural rights, property rights, is the right which distinguishes us from the political left.

The “civil rights” legislation of the 1960s violated property rights just as Jim Crow did. Some opponents of Jim Crow, as you remember, opposed the new Civil Rights laws precisely on those grounds.

When I read an essay by a conservative that doesn’t revolve around the concept of property rights, I wonder what good are conservative intellectuals and how are they going to help us revive our founding principles.

Posted in Michael Anton, Paul Gottfried | Comments Off on No, Paleoconservatives Are Not Helping the Left

Josh Hawley vs The Age of Pelagius

00:00 The best looking Cabinet secretary is 61!
04:00 Grievance, rebellion and burnt bridges: Tracing Josh Hawley’s path to the insurrection, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/11/senator-josh-hawley/
06:00 The Age of Pelagius, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139261
11:00 Jesse Watters: The true origin of COVID, https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/jesse-watters-the-true-origin-of-covid
19:00 Are breathing techniques good for your health?, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jul/12/are-breathing-techniques-good-for-your-health
21:00 Improve oxygen uptake in the blood – Patrick McKeown, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hga_6I7u0_A
22:00 My commentary on breathing techniques, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139252
25:40 BMJ study on the Alexander Technique, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXmimtk381U
37:30 The Alexander Technique: First Lesson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgplXmILzoQ
48:00 Rob Henderson watches The Shield, https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1391521499513823233
49:00 All hail The Shield – the scuzzy forgotten classic of TV’s golden age, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/apr/30/all-hail-the-shield-the-scuzzy-forgotten-classic-of-tvs-golden-age
52:30 Saagar Enjeti: New Details REVEAL Fauci, Media Coverup Of Lab Leak Hypothesis, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pk0wLN5uuU
59:45 Richard Spencer on Conservative Anti-Capitalism, https://youtu.be/USe_yL64uPw?t=825
1:02:00 Affordable Family Formation, https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2008/11/06/affordable_fami/
1:09:00 Rand Paul vs Anthony Fauci
1:11:40 Rick Wiles Says ‘The American People Are Being Oppressed by Jewish Tyrants’, https://vimeo.com/546506402
1:22:20 The Pelagian Controversy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8-NBgDQ1_Q
1:25:50 Jim Goad: Does whiteness exist? https://www.bitchute.com/video/GjifQib48j3l/
1:27:30 Tribalism for everyone or for no one
1:30:00 Abysspilled Norman Finkelstein destroys your hopes and dreams
1:32:00 Kenneth Brown on nationalism, https://youtu.be/MY-3ekOEOs8
2:09:40 How and Why Did Judaism Survive? An Answer to Mark Twain, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9364pNlpQLg
2:37:00 Origins of Covid-19
2:42:00 Drag queen says keep kids away from drag shows
2:47:40 FAUCI ADMITS FUNDING PLA BIOWARFARE RESEARCH LAB IN WUHAN, https://www.bitchute.com/video/7SoIJ5qJ83q0/
3:00:20 Violence erupts between Israelis and Palestinians
3:03:15 E. Michael Jones says Israel wants to rebuild the Temple, https://www.bitchute.com/video/2FoXyBabNVO5/
3:05:30 JF Gariepy on Palestinians vs Israel, https://odysee.com/@JFGTonight:0/jfgt196:4
3:10:45 Tucker Carlson on Joe Biden’s economy
How Much Do American Jews Care About Israel?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139235
3:18:10 Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE&t=2949s
3:19:00 Sheldon Solomon on culturally constructed belief systems
3:21:30 Barricade Gage says there’s no gas shortage

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The Hottest Cabinet Secretary Is 61!

Bud: Luke didn’t you say you had big issue w women having loose —–. past 40, and ‘kal v’chomer’ 60. Looking good and sex are two completely different things. That’s why all the ‘JLo hot at 50’ or Martha Stewart sexy at 80 is f—n gross, to any man that knows the score. You’ll end up admiring 60 year old nice skin as you have to finish yourself in the bathroom, god forbid.

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Grievance, rebellion and burnt bridges: Tracing Josh Hawley’s path to the insurrection

The Washington Post reports:

Hawley made a striking declaration about his view of Americans in a June 2019 article in Christianity Today, titled “The Age of Pelagius.” He said Pelagius, a Greek scholar born about the year 350, had said individuals had freedom to be whatever they chose. “It’s the Pelagian vision,” he wrote. “Liberty is the right to choose your own meaning.”

Hawley found such liberty abhorrent.

He said it meant that an individual could “emancipate yourself not just from God but from society, family, and tradition.” He said those seeking this liberty became elitists.

This was too much for his onetime hero, George Will, who viewed individual liberty as an essential American trait. Will had been helpful during the Senate campaign. He had been urged to write about Hawley by Danforth, his longtime friend and the godfather of Will’s daughter. Will came to Missouri, rode with Hawley on a campaign bus and wrote a column praising the candidate as “an actual, not a pretend, conservative.”

But Will gradually concluded that his assessment had been wrong. He wrote a column in January 2020 ridiculing Hawley’s attack on individualism. As the two feuded, the senator fired off a Trump-like tweet at the man he once revered: “I’m told NeverTrumper and ex-Republican George Will attacking me again today for talking about working people. Oh George. Don’t you have a country club to go to?”

Will said in an interview that he found the tweet “surpassingly dumb.” He later condemned Hawley’s effort to reject the presidential election results and create a “synthetic drama” on Jan. 6, writing that the senator from Missouri, along with Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), must be “forevermore shunned. … Each will wear a scarlet ’S’ as a seditionist.”

My father was not a fan of Pelagius. I guess I’m ambivalent. I don’t care about the mechanics of salvation and I don’t believe that humans are perfectible and rational (they have a limited capacity for rationality) but I do believe in the ability of people to improve (I don’t want to go through life without believing in free will but I recognize there are good arguments against it). Pelagius seems like he would have fit in well with the Enlightenment and its belief in the inherent goodness of human nature (which I do not share).

Judaism is more optimistic than Christianity about human potential.

Paul Johnson wrote in his History of the English People:

Since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, the official religion of the Empire had been Christianity. Though the administrative centre of the Empire had been transferred to Byzantium, the state religion was still centrally conducted from Rome. Already indeed its chain of command, and its contacts with outlying regions such as Britain, were maintained in a more regular fashion than the political and military functions of the Empire. Christianity still had a working international infrastructure. This religion, by its very nature, was centralised, universalist, authoritarian and anti-regional. It was run by a disciplined priestly caste, commanded by bishops based on the imperial urban centres, under the ultimate authority of the Bishop of Rome himself, the spiritual voice of the western Empire. Its doctrines were absolutist, preaching unthinking submission to divine authority: the Emperor and his high priest, the Bishop of Rome, in this world, and a unitary god, who appointed the Emperor, in the next. Man was born in sin, and must accept tribulation as inevitable; he could indeed be redeemed, but only by an authority external to him – God in the next world, the Emperor in this. Salvation, now and for ever, lay solely with the Christian Empire. These attitudes and doctrines underlay the political posture of the pro-imperial party in Britain.

They had, however, come under increasing challenge from a theologian who took an altogether less pessimistic view of the human condition, and of the divine dispensation for man. Significantly, this theologian was British. Pelagius was born in Britain, of native stock, about AD 350, and was about thirty when he first travelled to Rome. He had had a good education, in the legal traditions of the Empire, but his outlook had been shaped by the local environment – physical, political and economic – of a distant province, which had never been more than semi-Romanised, and which was a very peripheral factor in imperial policy. Pelagius attacked the prevailing orthodoxy of Roman Christianity. When Adam sinned, he argued, he injured himself only:
it was nonsense to pretend his fault was transmitted to every human being, to be effaced only by divine grace; a child was baptised to be united with Christ, not to be purged of original sin. Man was a rational, perfectible creature: he could live without sin if he chose; grace was desirable, but not essential. Man was a free being, with the power to choose between good and evil. He could become the master of his destiny: the most important thing about him was his freedom of will. If he fell, that was his own fault; but by his actions he could rise too.

Pelagianism was the spiritual formula for nationalism, for the independence movements breaking out from a crumbling empire. In
the year 410 Pelagius was still in Rome, leaving it just before the city was sacked by the Goths. His work was by no means complete, and had not yet been anathematised by a Church which saw it as a threat to its universalist authority. But his views were already widely known and arousing fierce controversy. They were hotly repudiated by the orthodox political and religious element who saw the re-establishment of the Empire, in all its plenitude, as the only hope of salvation from the barbarian. But they were eagerly accepted by those who thought that the Empire was already dead, and that individual communities must look to their own defences. Man could save himself by his exertions, and others by his example: in this world as well as in the next. The Empire could not, by a miraculous infusion of grace, turn back the savages from the gates: only organised local resistance could do that. Possibly even the barbarians themselves could be brought within the pale of civilisation, and unite with local citizens in building viable societies to their mutual profit. Pelagius had pointed out that free will existed even among the barbarians; they too were perfectible, could choose freedom and profit from it.

These arguments had a particular appeal in Britain, which had always felt itself a neglected, despised and expendable outpost of the Continental imperial system. There is no evidence Pelagius ever re- turned to Britain. But he was not the only British member of his school; one of the most energetic and vehement of his companions was also a Briton, and there may have been others. At any rate his beliefs were widely held in Britain by 410 : there was a strong Pelagian party among the British propertied class. There, orthodox Christianity was no more than a powerful, officially endorsed sect; perhaps not even the predominant one. Not all the leading Britons were convinced that Christianity was the only religion. In the late fourth century there had been a pagan revival in Britain, which has left traces in the splendid shrine of Nodens, in the west country, built possibly as late as AD 400. Among the British Pelagians, at least, there was an ambivalent attitude to other religions, a refusal to recognise Christianity as the exclusive route to salvation, a willingness to do business with the unconverted. This could be expressed in political and military, as well as religious, terms.

Tolerance may have been dictated by common sense. Nearly 150 years later, the monk Gildas, writing from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity, blames the destruction of an independent Britain by barbarous invaders on the moral failings of the British, their lack of resolution in their faith. Echoing him, Bede says that the British were submerged because they made no attempt to convert the heathen to Christianity. But Gildas’s account is avowedly didactic, not historical; he was a partisan, among other things an anti-Pelagian. His reconstruction of events after 410 distorts what actually happened, for he made himself the mouthpiece of the pro-imperial party. To negotiate with the barbarians, on the basis of a mutual tolerance of race and religion, was an obvious course for the British nationalists, who were also Pelagians. Saxons had been established, as military settlers federated to the provincial authorities, on parts of the East Coast for many decades. They were part of Britain’s defensive system, such as it was. It was sensible to encourage others, of Jutish and Frisian and Prankish origin, moving across the narrow seas, to settle themselves in Kent in organised, law-abiding communities, working in co-operation with the British authorities for the defence of all the island’s peoples. These settlers had been touched by civilisation; they were not outer barbarians but military tribes who could be used against them. The story of the British Vortigern, or High King, and Hengist and Horsa, reflects an arrangement which made good political and military sense at the time. It ended in tragedy, according to the subsequent gloss of both British and English Dark Age historians. But it may, in fact, have successfully ensured a limited period of peace in which newly independent Britain could organise itself. And the collapse of the British State, which endured in some form for nearly 150 years, seems to have been brought about by civil war rather than external attack; moreover, our only account of what happened comes from Gildas, who was a leading member of one of the British factions.

At any rate, in 410 the Pelagian nationalist party in Britain took control, though its authority, and policy, were qualified. We know roughly what happened from the historian Zosimus. He says that in 410 an enormous army of barbarians crossed the Rhine, without effective resistance from the imperial authorities. The British revolted from Roman rule, and established a national state. They took up arms, freed their cities from the barbarian invaders, expelled the remaining members of the imperial administration and set up their own system of government.

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Improve oxygen uptake in the blood – Patrick McKeown

I have some disagreements.

* It is not a good idea to deliberately take a breath. It should be involuntary. The more you manipulate your breathing, the more interfering tension habits you’ll develop that will reduce the quality of your breath. When you gasp for breath or deliberately try to inhale as much air as possible, you simultaneously tense up your body, you inculcate tension patterns, and you reduce your breath capacity.

People prefer to learn by adding on new habits rather than reducing bad habits.

* When this guy speaks, he tends to tip his head back, tightening and compressing his neck and back muscles, reducing his breath capacity.

The Guardian reports:

Patrick McKeown, a Galway-based Buteyko practitioner who advocates mouth-taping during sleep, travels widely to speak at conferences. Prior to Covid-19 he was booked up 18 months in advance. “Five years ago, it was sleep,” he says. “Right now, breathing is hot.” McKeown believes a range of conditions including asthma are caused or exacerbated by modern human tendencies to mouth breath and over-breathe. Buteyko Method teachings have traditionally emphasised the idea that mouth breathing lowers carbon dioxide levels in the blood, which, in turn, causes asthma symptoms. McKeown distances himself from this, saying that while low CO2 plays a role, so too do the cooling and drying of the airways caused by, he says, mouth breathing, and that the resulting wheezing, coughing and breathlessness in some people can be eased by switching to nose and lighter breathing.

While Prof Thomas acknowledges that more nose-breathing might help some asthma patients, he says the Buteyko method’s emphasis on increased oxygen intake and low carbon dioxide levels in the blood is simplistic. “People with asthma don’t overbreathe, and we’ve measured CO2 levels in asthmatics before and after retraining and found no relationship whatsoever between severity of asthma and CO2 levels,” he says. “The claim that asthma is caused by hyperventilation and low carbon dioxide are scientifically untenable.”

Prof Thomas acknowledges that more nose-breathing might help some asthma patients, but rejects the emphasis on either increased oxygen intake or low carbon dioxide levels in the blood as simplistic. “People with asthma don’t over breathe, and we’ve measured CO2 levels in asthmatics before and after retraining and found no relationship whatsoever between severity of asthma and CO2 levels,” he says. “The claim that asthma is caused by hyperventilation and low carbon dioxide are scientifically untenable.”

…Extraordinary claims that breathing techniques can treat serious diseases and improve performance in various ways are based on preliminary findings, small studies and research that shows only associations. The claims on Wim Hof’s website, for example, that his method “is linked to reducing symptoms of” diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease are unsupported by high-quality research. Dolan’s website quotes a US doctor as stating: “Possibly one of the best therapies ever discovered for HIV, other infectious diseases, and most degenerative, or chronic illnesses (including cancer) is oxygen therapy.”

Many people undoubtedly benefit from breathing exercises. However, overblown claims about these powers are frustrating for scientists who believe they do have potential for more widespread use, but that this should be supported by good-quality research and trials. “It is likely there will be uses for breathing techniques in a variety of medical settings,” says Thomas. “However, it’s not a magic bullet. “There are a lot of people peddling snake oil. What one has to do is look at these claims with a sceptical eye, and do proper scientific studies to show whether or not it works. If you are just generally worried about your health, it won’t do you any harm. Just don’t expect it to turn your life around.”

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