Intellect & feeling

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, 11 April 2006 12:12.

I have enjoyed John Ray’s recent posts about his cultural outings in Brissie with his lady friend.

What interested me most, though, was something he wrote in the comments section of one of these posts. In response to GW he said of the religious impulse that,

Yes. It is an instinctive thing. Either you have it or not. I of course feel much richer for having it. I am slightly surprised that you do not as there is a modest positive correlation between ethnic sentiment and religious sentiment. I think my ethnic sentiments are similar to yours but I no more let that dictate my conclusions than I allow my religious instincts to make me a believer. So I do FEEL similarly about the two areas. Not to be impulse-driven is of course a marker of both civilization and modernity. But I at least still enjoy feeling as I do.

So John feels personally enriched by a positive sense of ethnic identity and by a sympathy for his own religious tradition. However, intellectually he cannot accept the validity of either.

John is not alone in taking this stance. For most of the last 50 years Australia has been governed by prime mininsters who at a “sentimental” level were proudly Anglo-Australian, but at a formal political level acted against their own traditional identity.

What we have here, perhaps, is one of the weaknesses of the Western tradition, namely a tendency to set intellect and feeling against each other.

We have been through strongly rationalist periods in which only that which could be proved in terms of abstract reason was considered valid, followed by anti-intellectual counter-movements emphasising feeling, instinct, imagination and impulse.

I don’t believe that intellect and feeling should be set apart in this way: in forming our principles both are necessary.

What do we consider to be important and worthy of defending? Do we determine the answer to this in a purely abstract intellectual way? The answer is clearly no.

Consider this example. Should men act protectively toward women? The answer most men give to this question won’t result from abstract intellectual arguments. The answer will have more to do with how men have experienced the womanhood of women. If you experience something lovely in the physical fragility and vulnerability of feminine women, and if you experience in response a heightened sense of masculine love and protectiveness, which is felt to be something worthy in your own make up, then you will probably accept as a positive principle the idea that men should act protectively toward women.

In other words, our knowledge of what is best in the nature of things will often come from the strength of our own experience, and not from abstracted systems of belief (which will always have arbitrarily asserted starting points).

This does not mean that the intellect has no place in determining principles. Humans are a mass of often contradictory impulses and instincts. And we will often experience things differently according to our psychological condition. So our highest intellegence is needed to order these experiences, and to obtain a consistency of principle.

But the highest intelligence is useless in a denatured man. It does not have the necessary material to work on. That’s why I most admire men who have retained the greatest sense of connectedness to first things. Who have a strong sense of ancestry, of ethnic pride, of responsiveness to nature and to the high arts, of masculinity, of virtue, and of love for women.

The intelligence will naturally draw on such experiences in forming principles - in formalising our sense of what is important and worth defending.

Therefore, impulse or instinct is not to be immediately relegated to a status of mere personal sentiment. They exist as part of the human experience, and it is through the quality of experience, ordered intellectually, that principle is formed.

Tags: Political Philosophy

Comments:

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:03 | #

Interesting thoughts Mark, however, it appears you are opposed by evolutionary forces.

Charles Darwin:

As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures.

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except towards their pets. How little the old Romans knew of it is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas.

This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.

The anomally appears to be, if men act sympathetically to women, other members of their tribe and eventually their nation, it enhances survival of that characteristic, that humanity as Darwin describes it, one of the most noble of virtues, is reinforced by natural selection and public opinion. As those sympathies become more tender and widely diffused what is to stop them spreading to others. Thus you find this disconnectedness with your ethny in higher civilizations. The ‘my race is the human race’ meme evolves from the very sympathies you and Darwin, describe as noble.

On the face of it, it appears counterintuitive, counter-evolutionary, for it seems to portend extinction. Yet evolution, apparently, selects for enhancing survival. How can it be that the evolutionary outcome for a highly evolved civilization is the road to extinction?

Posted by Mark Richardson on Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:18 | #

Desmond, I don’t see any problem with having sympathy toward men of other races as my fellow-creatures. Darwin was wrong if he supposed that this by itself destroyed the natural allegiances we have to our own families, towns, regions, nations and races.

There has been a decades long campaign to repress the expression by rank and file Westerners of their natural allegiances. It did not disappear by itself as an aspect of Darwinian evolution.

The question is why the Western political class would do this. As part of answering this we have to ask why it is that some “conservative” types have recognised the importance to themselves personally of these allegiances, but have nonetheless acted against these allegiances on the grounds that they are only valid as personal sentiment, and not as a principle to be defended as part of public policy.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:35 | #

Darwin’s not talking about equal rights. He’s talking about sympathy and the instinctive desire to help all feeling and perceptive beings. It is evolved because it does not appear in savage tribes. It’s a noble virtue when extended to your tribe or nation. However, it appears, to become, if not ignoble, then deleterious when extended to other nations or races. Or does it?

Sir Arthur Bryant’s description of Alfred the Great’s display of outgroup sympathy to the invading pagan Danes; converted to Christianity and then allowed to live among the Saxons and Celts as equals, enhanced the survival of the English tribes. Of course the Danes were not as genetically remote as the new invaders. However, they may have been as equally despised.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:52 | #

Mark, Darwin, AFAICT, does not say that outgroup sympathy destroys natural allegiances. He simply says that outgroup sympathy will extend to other races and nations.

For example, Edmund Burke to Mary Palmer 19 January 1786, in defence of India,

I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your Lilies and Roses in their face; but who are the images of the Great Pattern as well as you and I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not.

Once a notion like Burke’s is reinforced then it naturally comes into conflict with your position. Now Burke’s radical position has essentially become, as Darwin predicted, mainstream.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Tue, 11 Apr 2006 23:02 | #

But what, Desmond, is the basis for your acceptance that the preservation of tribe or nation is virtuous? Did you sit down one day and make a logical calculation? In other words, was the origin of this acceptance an act of pure reason? Or did you accept the worth of an instinct you felt, perhaps because you recognised immediately the value of this instinct to your own identity and to the connection you felt to your own society and your own tradition?

If it was the latter, can instinct be the basis of political principle?

I believe it can be, because I think it can represent an objectively existing good, but I wonder if John Ray agrees.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Tue, 11 Apr 2006 23:08 | #

Desmond, having just read the last comment you posted, I’m not sure we understand each other’s arguments.

If outgroup sympathy does not destroy natural allegiances (which is certainly true in the case of Burke) then what is the problem?

Posted by Andy on Tue, 11 Apr 2006 23:35 | #

Then why are equal rights for animals a non-starter? Clearly the line between man and animal is obvious and eradicating it in practically no one’s interests and so it remains.

Or so one would think. You’d be stunned at the amount of pretentious blathering I am forced to read and listen to regarding the evil practice of “speciesism”. Some of the nuttier egalitarians actually want us to treat the grizzly bear as if he were a man.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 12 Apr 2006 20:55 | #

It’s true, in Burke’s case, outgroup sympathy did not destroy a natural allegiance. However, in Burke’s time 3 million Indians (or whatever) did not live in England. Outgroup sympathy, the Burkean notion that we are all God’s children, allows acceptance of a vast number of immigrants, colonizers, race-replacers, to be accepted among us, with little or no uproar. The red man in North America was destroyed by outgroup migration. However, not having a highly evolved, (at least compared to Europe) civilization, he had no sympathy for his replacers. He fought to the very end to preserve his ethny and way of life. The problem is that this does not happen in European societies because, if Darwin is right, of outgroup sympathy. And if most here are correct, the presence of a growing outgroup in your society is destructive. Darwin makes that case as well.

He writes,

Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race. Various checks are always in action, serving to keep down the numbers of each savage tribe,- such as periodical famines, nomadic habits and the consequent deaths of infants, prolonged suckling, wars, accidents, sickness, licentiousness, the stealing of women, infanticide, and especially lessened fertility.

If any one of these checks increases in power, even slightly, the
tribe thus affected tends to decrease; and when of two adjoining
tribes one becomes less numerous and less powerful than the other, the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and absorption. Even when a weaker tribe is not thus abruptly swept away, if it once begins to decrease, it generally goes on decreasing until it becomes extinct.*

Outgroup sympathy allows massive levels of migration and as Darwin said, “and when of two adjoining tribes one becomes less numerous and less powerful than the other, the contest is soon settled…”

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:04 | #

...mankind is only WEAKLY tribal.

John, If you believe in evolution, a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage, the above statement cannot be true. Northern Europeans and their new world descendants are weakly tribal, however, not all of mankind. Therein lies the problem.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:31 | #

It is not through natural selection but through liberalism that the weak tribalism, aka decadent individualism, of Western Man has come to pass.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:49 | #

Desmond, Darwin was not the only nineteenth century intellectual to perceive a trend toward internationalism. Marx thought that capitalism was responsible; Disraeli saw it more in terms of a looming political conflict.

As for the “weakly tribal” comment, all I can say is that the Australian working class was very strongly tribal right up to the 1940s. It’s true that the political class eventually acted against such tribalism, but I don’t see, given working-class attitudes, how this can be ascribed to genetics.

Posted by Desmond jones on Thu, 13 Apr 2006 06:09 | #

KMac asserts that,

Europeans have been less subjected to between-group natural selection than Jews and other Middle Eastern populations. This was originally proposed by Fritz Lenz, who suggested that, because of the harsh environment of the Ice Age, the Nordic peoples evolved in small groups and have a tendency toward social isolation.37 Such a perspective would not imply that Northern Europeans lack collectivist mechanisms for group competition, but only that these mechanisms are relatively less elaborated and/or require a higher level of group conflict to trigger their expression.

This perspective is consistent with ecological theory. Under ecologically adverse circumstances, adaptations are directed more at coping with the adverse physical environment than at competing with other groups, and in such an environment, there would be less pressure for selection for extended kinship networks and highly collectivist groups.38 Evolutionary conceptualizations of ethnocentrism emphasize the utility of ethnocentrism in-group competition. Ethnocentrism would thus be of no importance at all in combating the physical environment, and such an environment would not support large groups.

Considering the environmental evolutionary forces, natural selection would reinforce individualism because those most capable of surviving in that environment would have a larger number of surviving offspring. Thus Nordic people would have an evolved tendency toward individualism and all of its implications: individual rights against the state, representative government, moral universalism, and science. Arguably, it was this very tendency that was the reason for the explosion of European influence across the globe.

However, this tendency toward individualism, which in colonial Pennsylvania produced a society, guided by faith and self-constaint, that did not need government. It also means that such a group is vulnerable when confronted by powerful collective forces. The Quakers discovered this fact, when confrinted by a savage powerful collective force, the Delawares.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 13 Apr 2006 08:59 | #

You are both right and wrong, Desmond, if somewhat devoid of sunlight and hope in both respects. You extrapolate a base tendency for individualism into the step-changed of post-WW2 group suicidalism that burdens us today. That we are less individual than Sub-Saharan Africans but more individual than East Asians, Jews and many others is true. But the real measure of us is that degree of individualism which we displayed up to 1945. Thereafter, our liberal democratic political culture was attacked from without, as well as from within by infected members of our own ethny. Those members - mostly of our generation - are now established as our political, academic, legal and media elites.

Ideologically speaking, the attack by which they took the citadel was parasitic in nature - the parasite being economic Marxism which evolved rapidly in the 1980’s into its more successful cultural variety, with all its equality and rights-based machinery.

The great issue before us now is not that we are bound to disappear as an ethny because of our tribalist shortcoming - we are not. The issue is how do we throw away our infected liberal zeitgeist and cloth ourselves again in a parasite-proof, properly Conservative one.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 13 Apr 2006 19:59 | #

I’ll accept your assertion that I’m a pessimist, GW, however, I’m not alone. Professor MacDonald, a much more learned man than I, also displays some grave resrvations.

Whether Western individualistic societies are able to defend the legitimate interests of the European-derived peoples remains questionable. The present tendencies lead one to predict that unless individualism is abandoned the end result will be a substantial diminution of the genetic, political, and cultural influence of European peoples. It would be an unprecedented unilateral abdication of such power and certainly an evolutionist would expect no such abdication without at least a phase of resistance by a significant segment of the population—presumably the more ethnocentric among us.

The most frightening thing is the notion that it is unprecedented. At least a passing ‘phase of resistance’? There has not been even a *phase* of resistance; buildings destroyed, undergrounds and trains bomb, and still no resistance of any measure. It is becoming, as KMac suggests ‘a unilateral abdication of power’. In fact it’s more than an abdication, whites are actively aiding and abetting there own destruction.

Regardless, despite my displays of irrasciblity, the rays of light that you do shed upon my dark world are appreciated.

Posted by JB on Fri, 14 Apr 2006 17:27 | #

Guessedworker:

That we are less individual than Sub-Saharan Africans…

less individualistic than blacks ?

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 14 Apr 2006 21:24 | #

JB,

In this passage I am not refering to that stripe of individualism which one might think of in respect to a Falstaff figure - someone like Samuel Johnson, say. I mean that socibiological scale which travels the gamut of individualist>cooperative, not the personality one which runs individualist>conformist (though it happens that conformism is also a sociobiological quality selected by East Asians to maximise in-group cooperativeness).

Africans are very lacking in this natural cooperative capacity, and it is in that sense that they are more individualistic than Europeans.