Collapse: The Blog

The Perverse Consistency of Modern Thought

I recently praised the remarkable consistency of reactionary thought. In truth, though, we don't have a monopoly on coherence. There is a perverse consistency to modern thought, too.

Let's begin with my presupposition that modernity is simply the product of a critical mass of people who are utterly insensible to the sacred. The sacred permeates the entire order of being and thus impacts the way it is experienced for religious people; the inability to experience it as sacred thus should entail a pretty comprehensive deformation of life experience.

Reactionary thought binds everything together: ontology, epistemology, theology, ethics, and politics. Can modern thought accomplish this same binding act, taking as its starting point the inability to experience anything as sacred?

Sure.

Let's start with theology. If nothing is sacred it can only be because there is no source of the sacred, i.e., no God. So spiritual autism leads to atheism.

If there is no God then it must be the case that there is nothing transcendent. To transcend, after all, is to point upwards, and we supposedly live in a purely horizontal world. So the appearance of that which is transcendent, such as ideas or universals, must be illusory. In other words, everything must be reducible to the lowest level of being: matter. Thus, the unofficial modern ontology: materialism.

Of course, if matter is all there is, then the study of matter is all that produces knowledge. Thus, modern epistemology: scientism.

And if everything is reducible to matter, then it follows that even ideas like "good" and "evil" are reducible to matter. Indeed, in a materialist ontological paradigm, they are reducible to pleasure and pain (sensate reactions to material stimuli). "Good" and "evil" may be said, at best, to arise out of some kind of arbitrary psychological abstraction of these two concepts. This gives us modern ethics: utilitarianism (the reduction of "good" and "evil" to mere pleasure and pain/harm).

If the order of being is not sacred, then there is no reason to respect the duties it appears to impose on us. So status, which arises from the fixed nature of the order of being, gives way to contract, a state of fluidity. Thus, modern politics: democracy (a state of permanent, sanctioned revolution).

Out of these things arise several other pathologies. Democracy gives us technocratic managerialism, the rise and rule of experts. Atheism and materialism combine to give us the aggressive sacrilege of the modern age. Materialism and utilitarianism have conspired to butcher a few tens of millions of unborn children. Scientism and materialism fuel one another. This dark unity explains all the characteristic impulses of the typical modern: the parousiasm of his politics (e.g., the hysteria surrounding President Obama's 2008 campaign), the reductionism of his rhetoric, his general anger ("f***ing fascist homophobe!"), and so on.

In fact, just as surely as the reactionary equivalents of these things are all simply different expressions of the sense that the order of being is sacred, so too is modern thought comprised of modularized expressions of the sense that life itself is meaningless and unjust and that God is dead. The withered and toxic fruits of a spiritually poisoned tree.

How Systems of Thought Run Aground

Rooting through the recent archives at Jim Kalb's Turnabout, I came across this:

Scientific knowledge is knowledge of mechanism that enables prediction and control. If you treat that kind of knowledge as adequate to all reality, which scientism has to do to be workable, then human agency disappears.

Human agency is nonetheless with us. We know ourselves as agents, we recognize others as such (if we are not psychopaths), and intelligent activities like science seem to require it.

The solution people adopt is to accept human agency as a reality but a very strange sort of reality about which nothing can be said. To say something about it would be to assert knowledge regarding it and therefore to attempt to subject it to a regime of mechanism, prediction, and control. That’s why it’s horribly wrong (in the current view) to classify people or to attribute significant qualities to them. Any attempt to do so is an attempt to enslave them.

Instead, each of us becomes equally an unknowable being transcending all reality about whom nothing can be said and whose will has a validity to which no limits can be assigned. But then science stops being the supreme standard. PC becomes the supreme standard. Each of us becomes a god, absolute and unknowable. If that conflicts with science, so much the worse for science, and that is where we are today.

The moral: science is a wonderful thing, but it’s a specialized part of more general human practices of knowledge, and when it tries to be the whole you get big problems.

When you subscribe to any kind of metaphysical system based on error (i.e., the self-refutingly unscientific belief that science is the only way to know things), that's what you get: "big problems."

A system of thought can run aground in two respects. First, it can be simply self-contradicting, which is to say that it can't possibly true because it refutes itself. Scientism, I've argued before, is one example of this, but so too is what I've previously identified as deontological libertarianism -- in a nutshell, the belief that consent is morally prior to all other arrangements (whether or not you consent to the binding character of your consent). I'm sure you can think of other systems of thought that truck-bomb themselves right out of the gate (e.g., "all truths are relative"). If you can gather up all the loose ends, you might be able to tie them together into a single act of circular reasoning ("the right to property derives from the fact of self-ownership; the fact of self-ownership is legitimated by the right to own things"), but that doesn't resolve the problem of internal consistency.

The other respect is that it can contradict intuitively-apprehended first principles. As I wrote yesterday morning on Catholic Complementarian (which I recently discovered and now enjoy immensely) with respect to liberal hysteria over pedophilia:

. . . liberalism is at best highly inconsistent re: its attitude toward sex and more often than not treats it like it does everything else, within a paradigm of materialist reductionism: it’s “just sex.” Innately meaningless, valueless, a totally physical recreation with at best conventional (and thus arbitrary) significance attached to it. Yes, sex is regarded as an expression of the self, but so is everything: piercings, tattoos, desecrating the Eucharist, etc. And it regards it as no more innately valuable or meaningful than any of those things.

So to answer your last question, “Why the liberal hysteria over pedophilia?” you have to bear this in mind… that if sex is meaningless, than sexual crimes must also be meaningless. In other words, reflexive hysteria and the Voegelinian prohibition of questioning is their way of confronting the fact that a world filled with pedophiles is exactly what a world run consistently on their principles would look like.

(It's a credit, actually, to the basic decency of people that modernity has taken so long to get to where it is. The shucking of long-held moral convictions, even in the face of inability to articulate rational defenses of them, is difficult. One has to convince oneself. It's a testimony to what Christians have been saying all along -- that man has an intuitive and innate yearning for the good -- that modernity can only function because it's riven with unprincipled exceptions from its own logical conclusions. Yeah, the modern objection to pedophilia is basically irrational within the framework of its own principles; yeah, they can't explain why instinctive revulsion is OK with respect to pedophilia but not OK with respect to homosexuality [bearing in mind that "because they can't consent!" hasn't ever stopped us from making them eat vegetables, brush their teeth, or do their homework, or that people don't respond with horror to violations of legal technicalities]. But moderns are basically decent enough [for now] that they don't let their irrational dogma get in the way of the intuitive apprehension that buggering children is wrong, and not just because they're technically, legally incapable of consenting until they reach an arbitrarily-designated age.)

So unsound systems of thought produce big problems. But the system of thought characteristic of modernity -- basically ontological reductionism, the war against the order of being -- is a big thing, and it relates to the world in big ways. Its fingers extend not merely through the way we think about being but also the way we think about man, the universe, society, knowledge, and ethics. So the problems it produces aren't just big problems -- they're BIG big problems. As Kalb relates in his talk "PC: The Cultural Antichrist":

. . . political correctness is an odd tendency. It's a bit uncanny. It doesn't fit in with how we normally think about things. That's why we don't know what to make of it. People try to laugh it off, but it doesn't laugh off.

It seems too stupid to be real but it trumps everything all the same. If a thieving employee shoots and murders his co-workers the big question is whether any of them were racists. When an affirmative action army officer does the same, because he wants to do jihad, what top brass worry about is whether it will make diversity look bad.

Something that trumps normal considerations so completely must have transcendent importance. It's clear that PC relates to something big.

(Here he's referring, respectively, to the atrocious headlining of a news story relating to a black employee's murder of eight white coworkers in a shooting spree, and Army Chief of Staff General George Casey's cautioning that the murderous rampage of an affirmative action hire at Fort Hood, Texas, shouldn't lead the Army to deprioritize ethnic diversity).

Ordinarily, egregious errors are self-correcting, if nothing else because their proponents follow them through quickly to obscene and heinous conclusions. What, then, has kept the modern train of errors running? Personal dishonesty and intentionally affected ignorance internally, intentional suppression (libeling, intimidation, and murder) of people who presume to point out the errors as errors externally. I think this latter point has historically been more important in fueling the compounding errors of modernity, precisely because it fuels the former; the ends seem to justify the means beforehand, but absolutely have to once the fires have started and the graveyards begin to fill.

On the Desecration of Flags

I remember briefly obsessing about flag-burning once during my college years; I seem to recall a flag-burning Constitutional amendment came within a vote or two in the Senate of being sent to the states. I also remember vacillating wildly about the issue. I haven't given it much thought since then, mainly because no one else has, but now I see it's back in the news. What are we reactionaries to make of it? (Note that by flag desecration I mean any act directed toward a flag which is aimed at sullying it, such as burning it in protest, cutting or tearing it, trampling it, or smearing it with foul substances; the burning of a flag in accordance with protocols for its proper retirement are not of interest here).

First, let's orient the discussion toward its proper object. There is no sense complaining that such a ban would run afoul of anyone's rights. There is no natural right to do it that I can discern, and whether or not there ought to be a civil right to that effect is precisely what's at issue here. At best, one could make a case that banning flag desecration would run afoul of other people's natural rights. But that only gets us so far: justice itself entails the restriction of rights when the crime is of sufficient gravity to justify it. Thus the murderer loses his freedom of movement when he is imprisoned, while lesser crimes are punished with proportional restrictions or impositions; in other words, it doesn't go beyond "the means must be suited to the ends"; it says nothing about the character of the end. So the proper question ought to be, "Is the desecration of the flag a grave enough matter to justify legal enforcement of its prohibition?"

Probably so, although there's certainly room for debate about the extent or form of the prohibition. A flag is an existential representation of a group of people, an expression of their self-consciousness as a people and not merely a mass of alienated persons. In a sense, then, to desecrate the flag is to consciously attack the deliberate self-expression of a united people. Insofar as social unity is a good thing, and thus a thing to which people have a right, they also have a right to demand that the symbols through which this unity is expressed be protected, and thus a right to forbid the desecration of those symbols. There is a reason, after all, that it's called flag desecration -- that is, de-sacralization, or the removal of a thing's sacred character -- and not merely flag destruction.

To the modern, people's objection to the desecration of the national flag is incomprehensible: it's just a variegated bit of fabric, after all. But in registering this objection, he betrays nothing but the autistic insensibility of his soul to the importance of representations in organizing man's social life; he also exposes himself as a materialist (and, consequently, exposes the vacuity of the idea of "values" in a materialist ontology, despite his objection that it need not lead to nihilism). He may acknowledge the fact that flag-burners themselves don't feel as if they're just burning a colorful strip of cloth, but in doing so he will probably say that the flag is nothing more than a receptacle for the projections of collective consciousness. But in saying this, he has given the game away. The flag is an expression of the people's self-consciousness, and this is what endows it with value; that it would still serve this purpose even if the flag had a different shape, color, or content changes nothing. It's true that any given flag is an arbitrary design; but it's true only in the sense that any given man has made an arbitrary choice of wife -- it is not then follow that his wife doesn't matter or that he has no duties toward her. Haecceity matters.

Conversely, another commonly-heard objection is that the flag is, indeed, a symbol -- but a symbol of freedom. Thus, the logic goes, prohibiting the kind of freedom of expression that allows a flag to be burned would be an insult to the flag, not a protection of it. (This is the logic hinted at in Michael Douglas' final speech in The American President). But this is very little more than propositional nationalism, that is, the idea of America not as a nation but as some sort of nebulous ideal; we might also call it universalized nationalism. As such, it is runs afoul of the same absurdities as propositional nationalism does: it means that "American" corresponds not to national citizenship but to adherence to some ideal. We know this is false, though, or at least that no one takes it seriously, because there are plenty of Americans who don't believe in that ideal and plenty of non-Americans who do. Clearly, "American" is not an ideology but a nationality: it relates to identity, concrete, particular, and historical. To be American is not (necessarily or exclusively) to be a democrat or a libertarian or a capitalist but to be a citizen of the United States, subject to the authority of its government and sharing in a common culture, heritage, and network of traditions as those who also share this identity. A second response to this conflation of the flag-as-freedom is that it's obviously self-contradicting: if the flag is a symbol of freedom, why do protestors burn it and not some other symbol? Because they hate freedom? Why, then, do they insist on the freedom to burn the flag? Protestors themselves never think they're burning the flag as an expression of hatred for freedom but as an expression of hatred for the political expression of the people, that is, of this or that government (usually because of this or that action they disapprove of). In short, the modern can oppose a prohibition on flag desecration only by emptying both the flag and the act of burning it of symbolic content -- in other words, stripping both the object and the protest of meaning. (I suppose that is basically modernity in a nutshell: the intentional destruction of meaning for the sake of enthroning a subsequently meaningless freedom).

A final objection is that prohibiting flag desecration is unnecessary, either because it won't stop people from desecrating them or because it rarely ever happens. The latter is probably the best possible objection: that there are simply more pressing issues at hand. This may be true, but note that it is an argument related to the circumstances of the present time. It says nothing about whether or not such a law would be good in principle. As for the former objection, it is not necessary at all that the law actually suceed in stopping anyone from burning the flag: it is enough for it to serve as an expression of the common will, that this particular symbol has meaning and value and will be protected.

So the flag is a concrete symbol of a concrete people, an expression of themselves as a common people; and insofar as communal self-expression is a good, it follows that destruction of communal self-expression is an evil, and thus that the people are within their rights to demand that it not be permitted.

What form, then, should the prohibition take? Should flag desecration be a misdemeanor or a felony? Should it be punished with a fine (if so, how much?), imprisonment (if so, for how long?), or both? Should police seek to actively prevent, even with physical violence if necessary, the desecration of the flag, or should it only be punished after the fact? These are valid questions and require a good deal of reflection (especially on ethical first principles); they are certainly beyond the scope of this post, which is only intended to establish the validity in principle of the right of a people to insist that their national symbols be protected. I will say that the importance of protecting those symbols increases as national unity weakens, so that in times of crisis, it may well be more important to protect the flag in times of peace.

Bear in mind I say this as someone who has only a very generalized affection for his country -- there are a few nations in the world today quite as deserving of punishment and reprimand as this one.

The Fragmentation of Philosophy

"Keep your morality out of politics" is an historically aberrant and deviant mode of thought, and for the simple reason that ethics and politics are not really distinct fields; rather they are distinct expressions of the same thing, fields of inquiry which lead, ultimately, to the same object.

In fact, pretty much all the fields of philosophical inquiry are now conducted as if they were quite distinct from each other, so that ethics is totally unrelated to politics which is totally unrelated to epistemology and so on. Hence Rawls sought a theory of justice which was "political, not metaphysical." What a strange thought; its historical inauthenticity is one datum for the falseness of the endeavor even to find (that is, invent) such a theory.

For premodern man, ontology was the glue which held the philosophical endeavor together. Just as surely as talk of truth, beauty, and virtue are simply discussions about the good under different aspects, so too are talk about right action, right knowledge, the good life, the best government, and so on simply different expressions of the question of what it means for something to be. How can you ask what the "best government" is until you know what "government" is? What "best" is? What "is" is? Ontology made an organic and harmonious unity out of a philosophical enterprise that is now not even so much specialized or modularized as it is simply fragmented. The abandonment of organized ontology has loosed on the world a flood of errors.

What we have today are shards of philosophy: a vast number of schools of thought about different fields, the necessary connections between which have been severed, which may be mixed and matched arbitrarily to produce a functionally infinite number of combinations, with no real reason to pick any one of them or even a method for doing so. Had a revolution? Close your eyes, reach into the bag, grab seven metaphysical systems at random and see what social orders you can build on the resulting mix. Philosophy has reduced the social order to a generations-spanning game of Scrabble. A dress-up Barbie doll philosophy for a Barbie doll society.

One of the things that impresses me most about reactionary thought is its remarkable coherence: everything fits together; more importantly, everything points upward. Every so often, a thought strikes me (I need to get better about writing them down so I can blog them later), a necessary connection suddenly realized, another piece in the puzzle fit into place. It is not even that one arbitrary arrangement has been proved to me to be optimal; it is that the idea that there could ever be any other arrangement has been proved to me to be irrational.

All this convinces me that if the world is ever to be saved, a revitalization and revalorization of ontology will have some part to play in it.

More on Scientistic Question-Begging

See Alan Roebuck's "No Evidence for God?" in Intellectual Conservative for a useful treatment of the tendency of atheists to beg the question against theism by simply assuming, without basis, something like naturalism, materialism, or positivism to be true -- in other words, assuming the natural/material/empirically observable world is all there is.

While you're at it, check out one atheist's near-perfect instantiation of this tendency when he challenges theists to debate him... on a few conditions:

* By "knowledge and facts" I mean factual, scientific proof. No personal opinions, appeals to revelation, quoting the bible, no arguments purely from quoting an authority without actual evidence, personal/second-hand stories that cannot be confirmed, and no "philosophical bullshit.” **

** By "philosophical bullshit" I am referring to the fact that philosophy is not the most reliable method of getting at the truth. The sciences and empiricism are the most reliable methods of getting at the truth, not simple thought experiments, or philosophizing.

Of course, whether or not science is the fullest description of reality is precisely what is at issue here; taking it off the table simply begs the question against theism. And the claim that science alone is the basis of all knowledge is at once a philosophical assertion and a nonscientific one (as all epistemological claims necessarily are) -- and thus is simply self-refuting. The only way to get around this irreconcilable contradiction is to indulge in what Voegelin called the prohibition of questioning, a better example of which I couldn't have asked for.

Modernity and Spiritual Autism: A Question of Chickens and Eggs

I have previously diagnosed modernity as the ascendence of rebellion against the order of being. And this, I have argued, arises from spiritual autism, the inability to experience the order of being as sacred. The predictable result is the demand for ever-more freedom: first political freedom, then freedom from want or need, then freedom from social conventions, from morality, and finally (I hope, anyway) from biology itself. (Taxpayer-subsidized elective sex changes for all!)

I have, in other words, regarded insensibility to the sacred as having causal priority over rebellion agaisnt the order of being. I wonder now if that is the correct ordering of things. Is it possible that man's atheism is instrumental -- that he denies God because he yearns to be free of the order of being, not vice-versa. It is the distinction, in other words, between spiritual autism as akin to literal autism (a simple pathological defect of understanding, will, and spirit) and as the intentional affectation of ignorance so as to rationalize the unfettering of one's will from basic rational and ethical considerations.

Discuss!

The Normative and the Universal

One of the ways spiritual autism seems to manifest is a failure to grasp distinctions (perhaps explaining the relentless reductionism of the modern mind). One of the greatest such failures concerns the distinction between the normative and the universal.

The normative simply describes general norms, pertaining to the forms or essences in which people participate. A norm is universal only in a loose sense: it describes the universal form or essence. It doesn't require that any particular person fall under the purview of that norm.

A good example: men are taller than women is a normative statement, because they are. There are to my knowledge no societies in which men are shorter than women, and we would all rightly regard such a society as an aberration and question what has produced it. It doesn't matter that there are individual men who are quite short and individual women who are quite tall -- these are deviations from the norm. Very short men and very tall women are exceptional.

(Does the exception void the rule? If it did, it would not be an exception. If it wasn't an exception, it could not void the rule.)

In a loose sense, the norm is a statistical average; but it's not precisely the same thing. The statistical average is the mathematical expression of the norm. It is evidence that the norm exists without being the same thing.

Or consider "the reproductive system is ordered toward reproduction." Hardly a leap. That's what it's there for, that's why we have one. Common sense, as they say. A normative statement. Everything we know about it lends credence to that claim: the nature of the act, the nature of the desire for the act, the physical structure of the organs involved, etc.

Yet somehow the fact that the reproductive system doesn't always lead to reproduction (whether due to chronic or periodic infertility, withdrawal, the fact that the system can be used in some other manner such as with masturbation, etc.) is evidence that there is no norm, to the modern mind. Because he interprets it universally.

In other words, the modern mind will accept a statement only if it is true everywhere and always, when r = 1. But r = 1 only in the case of tautologies, so nothing but tautologies are true; so, functionally, nothing is true.

But just because r does not = 1 does not mean that r = 0.

There are, in fact, an infinite range of values between 0 and 1.

How better to express the modern condition than as totally insensibility to the infinite?

On Spiritual Autism

I've referred to spiritual autism before, but what is it, really?

One commenter here, Peter S., referred to it as a "more or less persistent and thoroughgoing numbness or insensibility with regard to the sacred." That's about as a sound a definition as one could hope for. Spiritual autism is a pervasive insensibility to the sacred.

A consequence of this insensibility is that reality and the order of being are improperly experienced. For reality itself is radically unfree: man's species, sex, race, nationality, time and circumstances of birth, and the authorities to which he is subject, to name just a few, are all determined for him without his consent or even his notice. In him, determinism reigns. With a strong sense of the sacred, this lack of freedom becomes understandable and rationalizable: through his participation in the sacred (for instance, by religious ritualism), man understands himself to be part of a rational order oriented toward the good. In other words, the sacred allows man to experience the authority of the order of being as legitimate. Without a sense of the sacred, reality becomes meaningless, senseless, and incomprehensible; the human condition becomes one not of citizenship and duty but of imprisonment and injustice. Rebellion against that order results, with predictable consequences.

Where does spiritual autism come from? In part, from simple ignorance (what Musil called "honest stupidity," that is, man's natural inability to comprehend the sacred in its fullness, compounded by general societal ignorance and a lack of religious tradition). In part, from sin, which deadens the conscience and weakens man's spiritual faculties. And in part from an intentionally disordered will: from a will to disbelieve. This will to disbelieve leads man to folly, especially when confronted with flatly incontrovertible rational arguments for, say, the instance of God: it leads him to believe that the universe is disorderly, that anything can come from nothing anywhere and at any time, that reality itself is socially constructed, that there is no necessary connection between effect and cause, that one man is not necessarily any more like another man than a starfish is to a skyscraper, and so on. It is a temptation, as old and as evil as the serpent that inspired it.

The will to disbelieve may well be the most important aspect of spiritual autism, and it corresponds to earlier thinkers' and societies' tendency to diagnose it as simple folly (the Israelite nabala, the ancient Greek amathia, the Scholastic stultitia, and Robert Musil's "higher stupidity"). The will to disbelieve is what turns mere incompetence to apprehend the sacred into an actual sin, born of pride and committed with the full assent of the will. It is what makes it a damnable, instead of a merely regrettable, thing.

We must not make the mistake of thinking that spiritual autism is exclusively a feature of atheists (though I have yet to meet an atheist that didn't exhibit the intentional affectation of ignorance or the rank hubris of the pneumopath). Nearly all modern theists exhibit it, as well, especially among the creedal Protestants, who have collapsed almost completely into modern liberalism. (Jim Kalb's description of the Episcopalian Church in Pennsylvania where the Stations of the Cross had been replaced with stations of the UN Millennium Development Goals at the start of his talk "PC: The Cultural Antichrist" really drove this home for me). In the Catholic Church, where a culture of widespread dissent has crystallized that is urged on by the feckless and timid response of the hierarchy to open heretics among the clergy, virtually nobody knows about, cares about, or understands anything the Church teaches, especially with respect to moral theology. It is simply seen as unimportant, faith itself as an adornment to an otherwise wholly worldly life, to be ignored or discarded when inconvenient.

I call this phenomenon "spiritual autism" not because it is a naturally-occurring defect (being a defect of the will and spirit, it obviously isn't) but because this defect produces the kind of insensibility to complex phenomena commonly seen among people with Asperger's. Reductionism is one common feature, whether the epistemological reductionism of modern scientists, individualist reductionism of modern political thinkers, the religious reductionism of pseudo-Christians, and so on. The kind of bland and blinking misapprehension, embarrassingly persisted in even when pointed out, is another. Edward Feser's kerfluffle with Stephen Law over the latter's absurd "Evil God Challenge" to classical theism is a pretty good example of this. At one point in the ensuing discussion in the comments section, Feser points out that the challenge is inapplicable to classical theism because an "evil God" is an ontological non sequitur, a metaphysical impossibility, whereupon Law replies that this is no reason to suppose his argument is invalid! Deeply confused, irrational, disordered thinking about matters metaphysical prevails among the spiritual autists, and this confusion penetrates literally everything to which they turn their attention. Eric Voegelin's terming it pneumopathology -- spiritual insanity -- may be more apt.

I think spiritual autism is largely unrepentable, although miracles are, hypothetically, always possible. The man who has genuinely convinced himself that the universe is a chaos and being a prison has a long, long way to go before his soul may be saved. He is mired in darkness, squalor, and ignorance. Perhaps nothing short of a truly heroic exertion of grace may be able to turn him away from his follies.

Well, Darn

I've been trying to catch up on philosophy lately and was surprised to discover that my diagnosis of the modern condition as a case of spiritual autism is already heavily represented in the works of Eric Voegelin (e.g., The New Science of Politics), who regarded modernity as a resurgence of Gnosticism and who saw the modern mind's pathologies as arising from a characteristic alienation from society and a belief in the inherent disorder of the universe. He even has a better word for my cumbersome "spiritual autism" formulation: "pneumopathology" (literally, spiritual sickness or deformation).

Darn!

More on this later, when (if) I finish reading.

Complexity and Collapse

Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies is a classic for collapse scholars, and one I think I've mentioned here only once or twice before (probably because I read it my first year of college and barely remember much of it). The gist of Tainter's argument is that societies work to solve particular problems, that more complex societies are capable of marshalling more resources (which I'll call "social capital") and thereby solving more complex problems, but that this arrangement poses problems of its own in that complex societies are more difficult to sustain and thus more fragile in the long-term.

Complex societies are prone to what we might call capital waste: the more complex a society becomes, the more social capital it consumes in addressing problems, leaving less such capital available to address the problems themselves. When the spread between available capital and existing social problems becomes too narrow, the society becomes vulnerable to major external threats, so that, for instance, anything which causes a sharp and sudden diminishing in available social capital (e.g., a plague, the loss of a large amount of territory to war or rebellion, terrible famines, etc.) can cause the complex society to become "upside down": suddenly it is consuming more social capital than is available to finance it. The result is a large-scale shedding of social complexity which is generally recognized as social collapse.

There are two assumptions at work in this theory. The first assumption is that there is something like a law of social capital equilibrium, so that a society will generally seek out a stable point in terms of the relation of social capital to social problems, so that it will not address any more problems than it has the capital to (and if it does, it will be punished violently by the gods of sociology). The second is that this is in itself a problem which societies are reluctant or perhaps even unable to address. An ideal society is one that is in a state of dynamic disequilibrium, which is able to adapt fluidly and quickly to changes in its deposit of social capital -- if necessary, permitting some of its citizens to starve or die of plague than waste social capital it can't afford failing to address a problem it can't solve. But most societies are not in such a state; most are quite brittle, and any shock to their systems causes them to shatter.

There's an analogy here which I think is useful to John Maynard Keynes' diagnosis of the cause of depressions. As demand falls in an economy, prices must fall, including the price for labor (i.e., wages); but wages, unlike prices for material goods, are "sticky," that is, resistant to downward movement. The result is that labor prices itself out of the labor market by demanding higher wages than the failing economy can afford; because he refuses to allow his income to fall alongside demand, he winds up unemployed, causing demand to fall further and turning what should have been a modest correction into a full-blown implosion. (Whether or not this is an accurate representation of reality, I leave to others to decide).

Likewise, social complexity in an ideal society would rise and fall to match the total volume of social capital, yet clearly this is not the case: societies almost always grow in complexity until it reaches its maximum in terms of available resources; any catastrophic event that causes a massive and unexpected hemorrhage in the availability of social capital also forces a sudden reduction in social complexity; the violent loss of social complexity has a knock-on effect that further reduces the availability of social capital and thus a further loss of social complexity. This continues until equilibrium is reached, whereupon the victim-society looks probably substantially different than it did prior to the catastrophe. You can see this in microcosm in the collapse of Argentina's economy a decade ago, and which the Argentine survival blogger Ferfal recounts in detail here.

Democratic societies are probably especially prone to such collapses because the masses of men are short-sighted and ignorant, and because democracy itself deals with reality only in tiny, two-year chunks. But the problems that kill society don't boil up in the span of two years. They fester for generations with symptoms only the wisest of men can notice, and then they metastasize, killing the host with astonishing rapidity. It takes a strong man to force the changes that societies need in order to adapt to the social reality. This is why monarchical societies endure for centuries, if not millennia, where youngling America is already burning out and the rest of the degenerate West is on the brink of population collapse and demographic conquest by hostile foreigners.

Really, think of it as a kind of historical regression to the mean. Over time, societies will tend toward stabler and less complex forms of organization: toward monarchy and tribalism and away from democratic bureaucracy; toward smaller-scale economic arrangements and away from large, top-heavy corporations and distribution systems; and toward localized social governance and away from centralised federalism. It must, as a matter of social necessity arising from the variable and unpredictable availability of social resources and the comparatively static and unchanging nature of social organization.

The hilarious thing is that nothing but a monarchical figure can halt this trend, and the trend (if not halted) leads us back to monarchy, anyway.