Collapse: The Blog

More on the Social Consequences of Unemployment

A while back, I blogged about the deleterious social effects of unemployment, which many economists regard as relatively normal and healthy (or at least as neutral).

Today, over at Traditional Christianity, Alte links to a study finding that unemployment also harms family formation and induces couples to live in sin rather than get married. This is just yet more reason that legitimate conservatives ought to oppose the continued destruction of the American quality of life through "free trade" and mass immigration. Better a no-growth economy in which everyone's employed and happy than one which destroys families and livelihoods in exchange for a 2% annual rise in GDP.

A Thomist Response to the Euthyphro Dilemma

A common atheistic objection to Christianity is that, even if it were true that God exists, He would not be worthy of worship because He is clearly a monster. Here His command to Abraham to slaughter his son Isaac, or His ordering the Israelite genocide of the Canaanites, is typically cited. Since natural law tells us that murder is immoral, and since God has occasionally commanded things that are contrary to natural law, then God is necessarily not universally good -- and therefore is not God. Since a thing cannot be supposed to exist which refutes itself, the atheist concludes, it's safe to assume that God must not exist.

But is natural law absolute? Perhaps in a world without God, it would be: there would be nothing beyond nature, so of course natural law would be inviolate. Which rather makes the atheists' objection circular: God doesn't exist because He commands immoral things, and those things must be immoral because God doesn't exist.

But natural law is "natural" precisely because it arises from nature; and nature is necessarily subordinate to God, since He created it and is all that sustains it in being. Thus, even the highest of natural goods is subordinate to the lowest of supernatural goods.

And natural goods are not even inviolate relative to one another. A woman may not, for instance, sterilize herself for contraceptive reasons by having her uterus removed; to do so would be to act in such a a manner as to intentionally frustrate the procreative telos of her sexual faculty. But she may have uterus removed if it is diseased, because the sexual faculty is subordinate to the health of the body of which it is only one part. This is simply the principle of double effect; thus, natural law lends itself to a rational weighing of goods.

Take another example. Most of us can agree that the death penalty, at least in principle, is legitimate (see this relatively straightforward defense of capital punishment from Edward Feser over at Public Discourse). Under these circumstances, execution as punishment for a crime is not murder: it serves a proper end (the just punishment of the guilty and the protection of society), and is ordered by a legitimate authority, where murder is necessarily unjust and an illicit usurpation of authority over life and death. But what authority is higher than God's, who creates and sustains all life and whose merest whim could terminate it in an instant? If God commands one to kill, it cannot be murder: it must always be legitimate.

This isn't voluntarism, though, nor some kind of divine command theory. It is simply a statement that man's nature necessarily includes his being subject to the will of God: it is good for man to obey God. And the goodness of his obedience to God is higher than any earthly good. Thus, natural law positively requires and endows with goodness certain actions committed by man, acting on God's orders, which would be illicit if committed by man acting solely according to his own will.

Note that I said, though, only "certain" goods. I said earlier that natural goods are subordinate to supernatural goods; there, supernatural goods are in fact inviolable, and we can rest assured that God (being goodness) would never act contrary to them. To do so would be a logical contradiction. Thus God cannot, for instance, command man to hate Him, any more than he can create a circular square. And this is where this position veers away from nominalism and voluntarism, as Ockham famously held that God's command for man to hate Him would endow that command with goodness, since man has no objective, universal nature from which goods can arise.

Christianity, Time, and Modernity

It's often said that the premoderns had, at best, a conflicted view of the nature of time and history. Many hewed to what we might call a cyclical, circular, epic, mythic, or fatalistic view of time. That certainly seems to have been the case with the Stoics, who saw time as an orderly march toward the universe's reabsorption by the primal fire and its rebirth, but the idea of this kind of eternal return seems to have been common among premodern cultures, especially toward the east.

Christianity, by contrast, seems to have been the first major intellectual movement predicated firmly on what we might call a linear or eschatological view of time, according to which time had a definite beginning and is proceeding toward a definite (and final, hence eschatological) end. Just an idle thought, but it seems to me that such a conception of time and history is a necessary prerequisite to modernity. For one thing, the modern obsession with "progress" (whether scientific, economic, social, psychological, whatever) is really incoherent without such a conception of time; after all, to progress is to move forward, which implies that forward movement is possible. For another, an eschatological view of time seems to imbue human agency with a good deal more importance than would a cyclical view. If time is cyclical, then there is a degree of determinacy necessarily involved, but also a degree of futility. This is why the Stoics and their Roman imitators tended to be downers. A good example of this attitude of futility can be found in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations:

The rational soul wanders round the whole world and through the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that our posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors  saw nothing greater than we have seen.

The ancients' obsession with fame as a means of achieving immortality has thus always come off as tragically futile, at least to me; why bother, after all? By contrast, eschatological time attaches meaning to man's actions, because it endows truth to the old canard that "you only get one life." In this way, Christianity can assert that man is the Imago Dei -- the image of God, possessing, like Him, the faculties of reason and free will -- and not sound absurd. This assessment of the meaningfulness of human activity naturally lent itself to its (improper, irrational, and immoral) elevation after the nominalist revolution, leading, by way of the humanists, the Enlightenment thinkers, and finally nihilistic atheists, to the modern ideal of the supremely-willing Ubermensch.

I'm sure someone smarter than me has thought of this before, though.

The Yawnslaught Continues

Of all the extreme things I've posted on this blog, who would've thought it was my equivocation about the supposed evils of bullying sexual deviants that would have... errm, engendered continuing backlash from a veritable army of lefty douchebags? (If anything, I'd have thought it would have been my declaration that AIDS research constitutes "the most colossal misappropriation of limited scientific resources ever seen" that got the leftenstaffel in revolt.)

Yawn. Douchers. No one here cares about you or your feelings or your weird friends, no one's impressed by your gaudy demonstrations of moral sophistication, and no one's intimidated by your poorly spelled threats. Especially since, if experience is any gauge, you're probably a gangly, hollow-chested neckbeard with ironic large-framed glasses or a beturtlenecked trustafarian grad student in sociology with a clinical aversion to gun ownership. Pfeh.

Democracy Sucks

Even the political class is starting to catch on:

Speaking to a Cary Rotary Club today, N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue suggested suspending Congressional elections for two years so that Congress can focus on economic recovery and not the next election.

"I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that," Perdue said. "You want people who don't worry about the next election."

The comment -- which came during a discussion of the economy -- perked more than a few ears. It's unclear whether Perdue, a Democrat, is serious -- but her tone was level and she asked others to support her on the idea.

Oh wait, there's more -- from Peter Orszag, former director of the Office of Budget and Management:

During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country’s political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. If you need confirmation of this, look no further than the recent debt-limit debacle, which clearly showed that we are becoming two nations governed by a single Congress—and that paralyzing gridlock is the result.

So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

Perdue now claims she was joking, and Ezra Klein is hurriedly insisting that Orszag actually believes we don't have enough democracy, but this strikes me as the sort of whisper campaign that always precedes the major initiative, in which some nobody bureaucrats with zero futures to have to worry about squandering advance some idea that's given a few months or years to germinate on the periphery of people's subconscious. Then some high-profile individual (perhaps a Congressman, perhaps a well-known journalist) begins to seriously advocate it. His credibility and perhaps career are destroyed in the process, but by then the avalanche has already begun. A decade or two later, it's gay men sodomizing each other in public streets and state Supreme Courts declaring an inalienable right to gay "marriage."

This would be a refreshing trend if only it weren't leftists advocating it. Democracy does suck, after all; its basis is a gross misconception of the nature of man (and reality itself), and it is invariably conducive to rank utilitarianism. But the left's proposed alternative -- government by an ever-multiplying number of technocratic committees (in the case of Orszag) or government by one massive unelected committee (apparently Perdue's) is worse: it amplifies all the worst aspects of democracy while removing the one that has the potential to mitigate its abuses.

 What's amusing to me is that people can complain seriously about gridlock and nothing getting done and the business of the American people being left unfinished and blah blah blah, yet it never occurs to them that these problems are essential to democracy and not merely incidental to it. A democracy incapable of gridlock isn't democratic at all, it's merely government by a committee of elected tyrants. Nobody even seems to be aware that this talk is wholly antithetical to the rationale for which democracy was instituted in America in the first place, which was to create a government that could not at all legislate in the absence of broad consensus. In our utterances, we have already all become anti-democratic. It's as if we're living in a slow-motion anti-revolution in which the outward forms of a society are preserved while its interior rationale and institutions are gutted and destroyed. But then modernity is nothing if not dishonest: it requires us all to believe things we intuitively know are absurd, obscene, false, and even evil.

Karl Denninger (a libertarian) wants Perdue deposed by the people, but even he knows it won't happen and that he's wasting his breath saying it. The American people do not care about democracy anymore: they don't have the energy, the patience, the intellect, or the will for it. Their hearts are elsewhere. They will swoon into the arms of the first strong man to come along and thank him for relieving them of the burden of governance, for which they are clearly unsuited.

It's time we all just admit it: the American experiment is over. It has failed. The Founders foresaw its eventual doom and now that doom is here. Its name is Collapse, and the price of its visitation will be death and privation on an appalling scale.   Some romantic cowboy-poet types will no doubt pen odes to its lost beauty, and future generations will study our collapse and learn all the wrong lessons from it (if, indeed, we're lucky to have future generations capable of study). Meanwhile, the rest of the world will get its head out of its ass and write off the whole democracy thing as the philosophical and moral junk it's always been, its inadequacies now at long last exposed to the light of day.

EDIT: The audio of Perdue's speech sounds conspicuously serious, contrary to her claims.

Is Science Necessarily Modern?

We on the right tend to see scientific progress as a modern innovation, a tendency confirmed by the Enlightenment narrative of clear-headed scientists upsetting and overthrowing the irrational Christian order of the Middle Ages. Bonald, who is right to note that science has on the whole been a boon for mankind, calls science "modernity's one definite worthwhile endeavor" and is proud to be a part of it. But is it necessarily the case that science is an explicitly modern endeavor?

First, let's refute a key component of that Enlightenment narrative according to which God was the sword used by the Middle Ages to cut all the mystical Gordian knots of creation that they couldn't untangle with their bare hands. Science was not slow to progress in the Middle Ages because they were ignorant, stupid, and foolish but because their philosophical and social priorities were ordered elsewhere. The premoderns didn't look to nature with an eye toward conquering it because they didn't care about conquering nature; they reflected on nature as a means of coming to know, understand, and love God.

In part because of this pervasive narrative, we tend to forget that the scientific method was itself born from theological movements. Michael Allen Gillespie, in The Theological Origins of Modernity, suggests that science was a necessary byproduct of the nominalist revolution that had laid waste to medieval scholasticism, because it was necessary for the nominalists to assert a clear and coherent vision of the world to contrast that of their opponents.

(But curiously enough, science itself is still dependent on a realist conception of universals. There is no sense talking, for instance, about psychopathology or birth defects without presuming that there is such a thing as a norm from which they deviate. Even evolution can be said to possess a teleology of survival, hence why some evolutionary traits can be meaningfully said to be "maladaptive." That science proceeded from nominalism is really only indicative of the fact that most people don't fully grasp the logical implications of their beliefs and therefore don't act on them consistently.)

I think we also tend to associate science with modernity because of positivism, a foolish and self-refuting bit of nonsense that is alien to science itself. Positivism is simply a modern perversion of science; science itself does not make the claims that positivists make, nor could it.

In light of all this, is it possible that a society successfully governed by an antimodern philosophical movement would embrace science? I think it would, but I also think that science would occupy a diminished place in it. Government funding for research programs and tuition-subsidized bloating of academic departments would naturally give way to the social priorities of the antimodern zeitgeist, probably being redirected toward communities and churches. Scientists wouldn't be persecuted or anything of the sort, but they would be expected to accept their reduced social status and to adjust their budgets and plans accordingly.

Collapse and the Culture of Death

Let us taken as a given, for the moment, that something like a large-scale economic collapse is on the immediate horizon -- perhaps no more than 12 months away, as the rat-faced predator Alessio Rastani predicts with barely-concealed glee. And let us take as a given, furthermore, that this collapse will instantly erase at least the last thirty years of economic progress (or, more appropriately, expose all that "progress" as fraudulent), resulting in a catastrophic decline in standards of living vastly in excess of the Great Depression. Finally, let us assume that this is severe enough to result in largescale death from a combination of starvation, exposure to the elements, disease, and civil disorder, especially among the elderly, the disabled, and children.

How will our culture of death handle such a collapse? I foresee a few different possible outcomes:

1. Suicide. One of the advantages to having as our enemy a culture that fetishizes death is that you don't have to fight them for long. Under a "cultural suicide" scenario, the moderns that don't die largely kill themselves in the ensuing years of privation and misery, deprived at long last of the hedonistic distractions that made life bearable for them. David P. Goldman ("Spengler") suggests Islam is in the midst of an ongoing cultural suicide, an "act of existential despair," borne of their inability to reconcile themselves to modernity. Note that this need not be a literal suicide but a kind of political suicide, a withdrawal from participation in the polity and community into a shell of perpetual masturbatory navel-gazing that renders modernity just as good as dead. I would also classify as a "suicide" scenario one in which the collapse results in the thorough intellectual bankruptcy of the moderns, to such an extent that the true right or a reasonable facsimile thereof is able to seize control and put things aright.
   
   
2. Metastasis. The total converse of a cultural suicide event, under a "metastasis" scenario, the collapse is so hard and felt so keenly by so many that the culture of death booms, capturing the hearts and minds of nearly everyone who comes into contact with it and rendering marginalized and impotent everyone who already opposed it. This is a Nazi Germany/World War II outcome.
   
   
3. Metamorphosis. This seems the least likely outcome to me, but suppose the collapse precipitates a dramatic metamorphosis of the modern project -- that it compels it along the next step of its logical evolution.
   
   
4. Retrogression. This also strikes me as unlikely, but I suppose I can't discount the possibility of it. A "retrogression" event is characterized by the culture of death's shucking of those aspects of its gestalt that are clearly dysfunctional, and its return to a comparatively primitive but perhaps more humane and stable form, such as classical liberalism or Christian humanism.

To keep things simple, I'm excluding here the possibility of fragmentation, according to which society fractures along different lines with the fragments going their separate ways (one could easily see southern secessionism producing a half-society that has retrogressed to the social conditions of the mid-19th century, while Left Coast types hurl themselves off of skyscrapers). Are there more possibilities I'm missing? If so, by all means, please correct me.

But suppose the next stop on the road of the future is only this four-way intersection. What should we on the far-right regard as most likely? And what should we regard as most desirable?

In terms of likelihood, I see either a metasis or a metamorphosis as most likely, and more likely a metastasis. For one thing, it's clear that the moderns are firmly in the saddle; we on the right are simply being dragged along for the ride, so we are already mostly powerless to alter the zeitgeist in a positive direction. For another, metamorphosis strikes me as impossible precisely because I think the culture of death is the logical conclusion of the modern philosophical project; having already embraced heresy, unreason, madness, and evil, it has nowhere to go but Hell. I suppose it's possible that, by some Herculean intellectual effort, some well-meaning modernists might be able to salvage a few worthwhile elements from the wreckage and transform it into a functional creed, although even in that case I could not foresee it lasting more than a few centuries (the track record of social stability since the collapse of the spiritual society of the Middle Ages has been one of a tightening spiral of social collapse and rebirth) before we hit yet another existential, society-destroying crisis.

But in terms of desirability, it seems to me that cultural suicide or retrogression would be preferable, and I lean slightly toward suicide. Retrogression might be more humane in the short term, but it would produce a society predicated just as much on falsehoods as the present one is and there's no guarantee it wouldn't follow through to the same grim conclusions it did last time. The suicide of the moderns, on the other hand, whether literal or figurative, would at last rid the world of a deleterious and frankly Satanic influence on society and the men who comprise it, or at least serve to mitigate its power, while placing either the far-right or an approximation of it in charge. The meek would inherit the earth while the strong overdose on Xanax and drown themselves in their bathtubs.

Damned Inflation

I was feeling groggy this morning so I stopped by a gas station on my way to work to caffeinate. A simple 20-ounce bottle of Dr. Pepper cost $1.49 -- in Texas. Five or six years ago, the same bottle in Maryland, where the cost of living is approximately 40-50% higher, would have cost me about $1.05. (3-litre bottles of generic-brand soda were $0.99).

Infuriating.

America's State Religion

From Fox News (so take with a grain of salt):

An honors student in Fort Worth, Texas, was sent to the principal’s office and punished for telling a classmate that he believes homosexuality is wrong. ...

Dakota was in a German class at the high school when the conversation shifted to religion and homosexuality in Germany. At some point during the conversation, he turned to a friend and said that he was a Christian and “being a homosexual is wrong.”

“It wasn’t directed to anyone except my friend who was sitting behind me,” Dakota told Fox. “I guess [the teacher] heard me. He started yelling. He told me he was going to write me an infraction and send me to the office.”

Dakota was sentenced to one day in-school suspension – and two days of full suspension. His mother was flabbergasted, noting that her son had a spotless record, was an honor student, volunteered at his church and played on the school football team. ...

[Liberty Counsel attorney Matt] Krause called the incident “mind blowing” and said the teacher had frequently brought homosexuality into ninth grade classroom discussions.

“There has been a history with this teacher in the class regarding homosexual topics,” Krause said. “The teacher had posted a picture of two men kissing on a wall that offended some of the students.”

Krause said the picture was posted on the teacher’s “world wall.”

“He told the students this is happening all over the world and you need to accept the fact that homosexuality is just part of our culture now,” Krause said.

The school district would not comment on why a teacher was discussing homosexuality in a ninth grade German class.

Utilitarianism: it's no longer optional!

EDIT: Here's the relevant press release from the Liberty Counsel. And a curiously phrased statement from the Fort Worth Independent School District.

Lefticography and Spiritual Autism

I swear I could devote an entire spin-off blog devoted to analyzing how leftists write. I mean, some days I catch myself trolling the most intolerable left-wing sites just looking for stuff to scrutinize. This is entirely different than the weird leftist proclivity for getting themselves offended; it's a deep and abiding intellectual fascination with the language used by leftist minds.

I've always had the sense that there was a vast and unbridgeable chasm between the left and right, probably going back to the days when I first read Fred Kerlinger's Liberalism and Conservatism in college. There's much to hate about that book, including Kerlinger's questionable statistical methods and reductive treatment of conservatism as merely modern Burkean pseudo-libertarianism, but his criterial referents theory (according to which political attitudes can be measured according to the criteriality attached to certain ideological referents, e.g., "gun control," "abortion," "divorce," etc. -- which was a relatively novel idea at the time) was nevertheless an interesting one because it exposed the inadequacy of the traditional polar conception of politics. Instead, he found that liberals and conservatives didn't just stake out opposite positions on the same referents: they were fundamentally different in terms of the referents they valued. The liberalism and conservatism subscales of his social attitudes scale correlated at a mere -.30 or so, meaning that variance in liberalism subscores could explain, at best, around 9% of the variance in conservatism subscores. That's not nothing, but it's certainly not a lot, and considerably less than the 100% suggested by the typical formulation according to which L = -C.

Ever since then, the realization dawned on me that the left-right split isn't merely just a difference in values (autonomy/equality for the left, tradition/authortiy/duty for the right). The world looks fundamentally different to leftists than it does to rightists. I can't conceive how they see it -- any more than I can, say, conceive of how a person with synesthesia experiences the world -- but I know the difference is there, and I feel like the way that leftists write offers some glimpse into their worldview.

It seems to me that liberalism is characterized in part by (and may well spring largely from) what I like to call spiritual autism. Autism spectrum disorders tend to be characterized by a few neurodevelopmental deficiencies, particularly in the areas of communication, social interaction, and sometimes impulse control. The ordinary liberal's spiritual deficiencies mirror these.

First, I've documented before the extent to which the rise of liberalism in the West has coincided with the corruption of language. Leftists just don't grasp the language with which spiritual matters might be discussed. Consider, for instance, the pathetic delusion that Christian love is nothing more than drippy affection and brainless tolerance, rather than an act of will. In this vein, I've noticed a tendency among liberals to write in a manner that is painfully literal, bereft of even the slightest concession to metaphorical ornamentation. I used to think that when liberals describe, for instance, God as a genocidal tyrant-in-the-sky, they were merely being superficial, sacrilegious assholes. Now, though, I think they describe Him that way because they genuinely think religious people see Him that way -- because they cannot grasp that it is proper for God to ordain the deaths of men (even the deaths of whole races of men, such as the child-sacrificing, demon-worshipping Canaanites) and proper for man to obey the will of God, Who creates and sustains him.

I think this communicative deficiency produces profound frustration in those liberals who make an effort to engage religion (and the vast majority don't). This is why liberals and atheists alway seem so damn angry, not to mention deliberately impious. Since liberals cannot grasp religion on its own terms, those who can't reduce it to mere universalized liberalism (God as tolerance) reduce it instead to a collection of superstitions which people need to be shocked out of by means of grossly socially inappropriate displays of desecration. Impiety and sacrilege are to the liberal as aggressiveness and destructive tantrums are to the autist: both spring from an inability to mentally acquire and adhere to proper spiritual or social roles.

If this is true, liberals are in quite a sorry state. The world to them must seem irrational and intimidating; it can hardly seem otherwise. They ought to remain in our prayers, even as we continue to fight them and the false and evil creed their deficiencies lead them to defend.