Are we bound by social contracts with our ancestors?

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, 29 August 2009 22:01.

by PF

My grandfather will one day be dead. In as far as I am typing this here, he lives on genetically. But is there any sense in which I am bound to him and his memory beyond merely carrying his last name, blue eyes, and penchant for seriousness?

What if blue eyes aren’t enough - what if I love this man so much that I want part of his vision inflicted on the world, even if that vision is simply that the world he lived in and was a part of should not completely perish? Technological currents have destroyed most cultural traces of those times, but biological continuity is the last common denominator with meaning. He wouldn’t recognize most aspects of modern Britain as anything understandable to him; in fact, in his daily comings and goings he is beset by difficulties which are similar to the experience of people living in foreign countries, so difficult is the translation between old Britain and new - is it too much to ask that he at least be able to recognize the people living there?

Did we enter any agreements, when he was spending time with me? Did you enter agreements when you were spending time with your families? Agreements that you would wish to see enforced, whether or not the people themselves are here to speak up on the topic? Do you speak for yourself, or for those who came before you as well? Are you their emissary, or simply a purveyor of your own world vision you thought up yourself?

Furthermore, are any of us bound even to prior ancestors whom we may not be acquainted with? That seems a more subjective question. Considering the massive work behind our inheritance, I think we are. That boggles the average mind, however - and if understood can only be understood as ancestor worship in a religious or mythical context.

When we honor our family, we do what they would want us to do. Especially in respects pertaining to them. We have a desire to see their dream of the world become reality. These social contracts lock us into nurturing relationships with those who are close to us.

Its hard to decipher whether our grandparents and ancestors would have opinions about what beverages we drink, what color clothes we wear, or what type of techno we listen to. On many matters of our life, we have to interpret our ancestors voices as an anachronistic ambivalence towards our present state. There is no way to extrapolate them back to the present for everyday matters. Only for great matters, considered timeless, is this possible.

I know that they would feel strongly that England is the ancestral right of the English. ‘Strongly’ is a euphemism and understatement in this case, perhaps ‘vehemently’, ‘zealously’ are more fitting.

When they perished from this earth, did they lose all claim to see their will work in the world? Am I not here as in certain, very few respects, as an emissary of them and their will, their heritage? Isn’t that in one sense what they expect of me, as a just return on all that they gave me? Even if it was only life and a home?

Or do we just all make everything up fresh with each generation? If so, why even bother writing this. My grandson will be an MTV muppet and forget I ever existed. People don’t build things if that’s how it works. People wouldn’t. You’d get a world like the present, except absent all the technology and culture that is the only glory in a moral void.

We who’ve seen London, and know our ancestors and grandparents, know the shame and disgrace that sits with us. Its bitter. Whatever can be said about agency and responsibility, this happened to some extent on our watch. Well, its open to question where the blame is attributed, that’s not what I’m after here.

The decision to import millions of foreigners was the decision to break the social contracts which tens of millions of Britons had with their parents, grandparents and ancestors.

We might have not agreed to avoid David Bowie concerts, and never read Oscar Wilde, and never read Beat poetry (all of these probably against their tastes, excesses of the liberal Zeitgeist) - but keeping what they gave us to re-gift it later was a prerequisite placed on the inheritance. They wouldn’t have given it so strongly and cleanly as they did, if they knew we would destroy it.

There is a song that goes like this:

It’s a time when our old people / cannot walk the streets alone / fought for this nation / is this all they get back?

Who doesn’t feel the knife turn in them a bit as they hear this line, and contemplate the supreme injustice of what we have allowed to let happen?

Risked their lives for Britain / now Britain belongs to aliens.

We have betrayed myriad millions of English ghosts with this act. And that lies with us - only the cognizant, only the aware - only those who are developed enough morally to understand the obligation to their grandparents and great-grandparents, even to people they may have never seen, but who built this world in blood and stone, words and content. Jewish, perhaps even Scottish people can scoff at this. Ghosts, you say? haha, it’s all just my silly nutters dream. I must not be getting enough cash and good sex!

They aren’t beholden to that past, it doesn’t even exist for them. No conflict there. Opportunism and crafty words is their loadstar there, whereas ours is obligation, because we actually belong and we actually were meant to receive all this cornucopia of beauty, culture and affluence, and didn’t get here by usurpation.

Still, it bodes badly for them to have the wishes of so many million dead against them - even if the power to act on it exists only in the hand of grandchildren who have remembered, and who are few and far between. Who struggles for this dream, puts forth his hand in a well-hallowed cause.

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Comments:

Posted by Odin's Raven on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:20 | #

Wasn’t it Burke who remarked that the dead are more numerous than the living, and should have a voice in their decisions? The current inhabitants of Britain, those who are not actually aliens, have mostly lost contact with their history and ancestry. Anything that would in the not so distant past have been regarded as common decency is now derided. The dead disown them. They shall not long survive, and the land falls under the sway of strangers.

Posted by queequeg on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 02:35 | #

I’m not sure many of our ancestors would want us to do what would presently be necessary to regain our homelands. They might, if we could imagine ourselves in their company, prove to be not much different from the masses today—the women less wanton, the men graver, but at bottom too domestic to condone counter-displacement or anything else that might upset the oppressive silence of the dinner table at eventide. Very few of our ancestors were heroes; fewer yet, revolutionaries. No, ancestors are not the answer; it is more romanticism, not a philosophy.

Posted by Frank on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:01 | #

PF,

Beautiful article - I wish I’d written it. The living are but stewards of their ancient nation.

Posted by PF on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:56 | #

I’m not sure many of our ancestors would want us to do what would presently be necessary to regain our homelands. They might, if we could imagine ourselves in their company, prove to be not much different from the masses today—the women less wanton, the men graver, but at bottom too domestic to condone counter-displacement or anything else that might upset the oppressive silence of the dinner table at eventide. Very few of our ancestors were heroes; fewer yet, revolutionaries. No, ancestors are not the answer; it is more romanticism, not a philosophy.

I don’t imagine ancestors to be heroes. I don’t see them in glorified stature, but rather in their everydayness which, built up day by day, stone upon stone, generation upon generation, leads up to glory (or shall we say, civilizational progress and manifestation of spirit).

How they would interact with the whole matrix of thoughts, beliefs, strategies and philosophies necessary to conduct a modern political action… that line of thinking isn’t how I interface with them.
I interface with them through the extrapolation of visceral attitudes which I believe we shared in common, irrespective of memes, manners and the whole apparatus of thought.

Territoriality is one such instinct. It is only in these gut instincts that I believe overlap can be presumed, and I believe next to nothing is so visceral an instinct as to defend your homeland against invasion.

When I have an ancient instinct, i.e. when something stirs in me that is deeper than my thinking, I know it belongs to the past. Because I didn’t read about it on a website or think some new idea.
Whats in my head is totally new but whats in my belly is ages old - and they must have felt that too.

Posted by the Narrator... on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 08:51 | #

You’ve articulated something here that I think could be a critical point of defense for The West.
The current immigration policy in Western nations as an infringement upon (or an obstruction to) the social contract which we have with our ancestors.

G.K. Chesterton wrote,

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.”

Everyone knows the expression, “you can’t take it with you”. But that expression is a twisted notion. Our ancestors didn’t leave. They are still present in the blood that flows through our veins. Their eternal presence is reflected in the very thought processes that goes on in modern Western Man. Our personality, moods, temperament, intellectual reflexes and so on are not ours alone, but are part of a much larger community in the form of our forebearers. No one really leaves this world. We are here forever, bound to the soil, the sky, the rocks, the trees and, most strongly, to our progeny.

Our ancestors never tried to “take it with them”......cause they never left! What they fought and struggled to build, they kept. It is only now being stolen from them.

Their voices should still be heard as their actions and deeds still ring clearly across time.
This may be why the left works so hard to separate us from them. They fear what those ancestors thoughts, deeds and words might have to say about the present.

It may be why our adversaries work with such fervor to silence our ancestors by attempting to erase their memory in the minds of their descendants.

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This is a good one PF. It’s definitely an angle that could be both politically and socially applicable. It could work as both a personal (one-on-one) appeal to the common man as well as a part of a political platform.

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Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:58 | #

There is the question of what we think the social contract of our ancestors is. For a clue to that we must each ask ourselves: “Would I sign such an agreement today were the government removed from this land?”

If there is no such contract to which all would consent, then assortative migration is the only option to force. Isolated enclaves of individuals defecting from the surrounding social contract is ecological defection.

Once ecological boundaries are set according to consistency of the social contract—thereby creating what might more accurately be called ecological title, there is, in Common Law the notion of covenant running with the land. There is also the allodial concept that freehold title to land may not be lawfully alienated from familial inheritance.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:56 | #

James: “Would I sign such an agreement today were the government removed from this land?”

Do I want to bequeath “all my earthly goods” to my child or to the child of a Nigerian, Turk or Tamil? Only someone with a sickness in the mind would find this question difficult to answer. Yet the certainty somehow disappears when it is phrased: Do we want to pass our forefather’s land down to our own descendents or the descendents of Africans and Asians?

Then, the answer has a way of coming back: “Well, I’m not going to get into that. I’m not going to be around to know anything about it, am I? So what does it matter to me? Anyway, things have a way of always working out, don’t they? And I’ve got Indian mates at work, and they’re great.”

This lack of gravity and seriousness afflicts a substantial swathe of (especially young) people. It brings us back to PF’s pomo unbearableness. We’ve lost something critical to the collective mental health. The loss must be temporary - human nature does not change in a matter of a decade or two. It was caused by cultural manipulation and it can be corrected, over time, by cultural manipulation. But meanwhile we perhaps need to find a better way to deal with it than we have to hand at present.

Don’t ask me what that might be, though!

Posted by Marwinsing on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:39 | #

Do I want to bequeath “all my earthly goods” to my child or to the child of a Nigerian, Turk or Tamil? (GW)

Madonna and Angelina Jolie come to mind. And Jolie just happens to be a CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) member. Hmm…

Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:36 | #

Keep in mind that we’ve just been through an unprecedented period in the history of human fertility when a variety of socioeconomic and technological conditions converged on the largest and most educated demography in human history to render the best of them largely genetically childless and proud of it. This is _not_ something we are adapted to and it results in the evolutionary equivalent of “bequeathing all my earthly possessions to my precious little boy Scruffy whose unconditional love sustained my spirit through my final years”.

Posted by Mark IJsseldijk on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:03 | #

Keep in mind that we’ve just been through an unprecedented period in the history of human fertility when a variety of socioeconomic and technological conditions converged on the largest and most educated demography in human history to render the best of them largely genetically childless and proud of it.

But at the beginning of the Cornucopian Revolution the system did benefit us; in early industrial Germany it was not uncommon to see families of scientists with 8 children, for example. It is not by choice that we have rendered our best infertile. The Judeo-Plutocrats world victory after WWII and their subsequent subversion of our knowledge and technology for their pernicious and transient ends did that. Now, isn’t it just a matter of yanking it back from their greedy hands? Hence microcommunities, citizens dividends, etc (speaking of which those two ideas are hardly mutually exclusive).

Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:22 | #

MI writes: Hence microcommunities, citizens dividends, etc (speaking of which those two ideas are hardly mutually exclusive).

Indeed citizens dividends and resilient communities are synergystic as I’ve attempted to explain to GT repeatedly, with little but hostility in return.

My 1992 proposal for a citizens dividend was largely inspired by Control Data Corporation’s work during the late 1970s when William Norris, the founder and mentor of Seymour Cray, promoted decentralizing technologies with profound hostility from Wall Street

In this regard a piece of history worth researching is William Norris, cofounder, with Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation, who bet his company on creating a more decentralized structure for society via a combination of energy, agricultural and mercantile self-sufficiency.

I was working at CDC during this time as a system programmer on the PLATO system—and the word around there was that the military intelligence background of Norris led he and Cray to take seriously the need to decentralize society for national security purposes. (My part in this was working toward a very early mass market deployment of consumer networking with an eye toward supporting disintermediation of food supply chains originating at small “smart farms”.) The thing Norris didn’t count on was how extremely hostile Wall Street would be. I guess when you consider how concentrated power is among the Wall Street elite, you can see how a serious effort to reverse the urbanization of society by a Nebraska farm boy with lots of pull might be rather threatening.

They might be a little more open to suggestions now that the WTC has been hit—but who can say?

Posted by: James Bowery | Friday, 21 April 2006 at 07:41 PM

Posted by GenoType on Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:22 | #

The decision to import millions of foreigners was the decision to break the social contracts which tens of millions of Britons had with their parents, grandparents and ancestors.

The “inviolability of contracts” is one of the silly things impressed upon me during my teens and young adulthood. Oh, I “knew” better. I “knew” the Golden Rule was for idiots and that the man with the gold wrote, interpreted and bought the enforcement of rules, but this “knowledge” was superficial. I hadn’t internalized it. If I had internalized it I would have recognized, from the onset, the uselessness of litigation against the stronger party. And I would have recognized mediation for what it is - a salve or pain killer for the ego of the weaker party, upon realizing that litigation wasn’t worth the cost to him and that, perhaps, a little bit of something gained from the dispute was better than nothing (assuming the mediation worked). I could have spared myself the loss of much time, effort, money and “face,” as Orientals put it.

Contracts 101

Westerners have convinced themselves that a contract breech can be mitigated through negotiation. This ignores the fact that contracts are the result of negotiation and that contractual protections may only be enforced by the application of money, lawyers, courts, and time. The stronger signatory to the contract has the advantage in these areas, one that is overwhelming if he is a government or corporation. He can ignore his contractual obligations while stringently enforcing the obligations of the weaker party. For the stronger party a contract remains an important coercive tool. For the weaker party contracts offer little or no protection unless the time and costs associated with sending the dispute through the courts can be endured.

Contracts are decided in favor of money. Laws are decided in favor of naked force. The rights of the little man are tentative, at best. It could be that the wronging of the little man is a permanent feature of the human landscape. Despite the pretentious crap, every one of us here are little men. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. So, perhaps I haven’t internalized the lesson. Still I rebel. Still I look for ways to circumvent the circumvention of contracts by the stronger party. And still I look for ways to kill him.

Posted by Mark IJsseldijk on Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:50 | #

Congrats to GT for a civil and intelligent post.

Posted by GenoType on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:57 | #

The stronger party has circumvented the original contract. The weaker party cannot circumvent the circumvention. It’s a done deal. So, what should the weak do?

Negotiate? “Force” the stronger party to give us what we want at the ballot box? These are emotional salves at worst and a stall for time at best. Buy out the stronger party? The stronger party is not interested in reversing positions. Bribe members of the weaker party with a Citizen’s Dividend? Bribes are a tool of the stronger party.

Digression: Conservatism is the weaker party. It may be compared to labor unions which collaborate with management. Collaborating unions are weak, but their leadership are wealthy.

Leaders know that a sailor at sea can’t have his home and security. The best way for the weaker party to “revise” a circumvented contract is to dispense with it altogether and write a new, better one. This presupposes alternatives, preparation, work, confrontation, and risk.

Posted by GenoType on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:20 | #

Hate unions? Good for you! But be advised…

Employers “circumvent labor laws by using subcontractors to recruit the workers and by hiring ‘permanent temporary’ workers — who receive consecutive short term contracts for their labor — to ensure that they are not entitled to protections that ordinarily come with full-time work, including the right to organize.”

Love unions? Good for you! But be advised…

Employers circumvent the labor contract by dominating the union. According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) the employer dominates a union when “the impetus behind formation” of the union “emanates from the employer and the organization has no effective existence independent of the employer’s active involvement…” Well, so says the NLRB. Evidence of employer domination may include, under certain circumstances, union membership as a condition of employment or the (surprise!) inclusion of one or more company labor relations representatives in addition to full managerial representation at a low-level grievance hearing without a word of protest from the union. More specifically, I would look for vague terminology in the contract, one example of which is the term “operational needs.” Do you suspect non-white favoritism in hiring, transfers, promotions, and lay-offs? You would simply be amazed at how the retroactive implementation of certain managerial prerogatives – a hiring/transfer freeze justified through company “operational needs,” for example – can be used to neutralize what is clearly a case of racial favoritism.

The stronger signatory controls the contract. What are you, the weaker signatory, to do? Appeal to his better nature? Apply a little intellectual or media jiu-jitsu? Outsmart his legions of advisers? Pray for day when “complexity” brings down his house ‘cause, after all, “he’s only human and prone to mistakes?” Bribe or persuade others in the weaker party that you’re right and its present leadership wrong? Try it. Together with the leadership of the weaker party, the stronger party will cancel your ass. Your only choice is to minimize the contract’s influence in your life. Liberate your mind. Pursue alternatives. Become a free agent, if possible. Advocate these things. Lead where it counts – on the ground.