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The politics of authenticity: Part 3 This essay is the third instalment in the on-going authenticity series but the second of my reflections on technology and its totalistic, artificialising co-option of the life which we in the West know today and lead, and can lead; and as things stand will know much more co-optively tomorrow. This is not an especially ideological essay, or a “nationalist” essay. Its intent is to further shape our consideration of technology’s synergy with Man, the technological animal. To that end, a distinction will be made between the effects and meanings of the four ages in this, a history almost as ancient as the first hominid. The essay will be followed by a final offering in this triptych titled Opening and Presence, which will ask what, as the only viable conclusion to be drawn from Martin Heidegger’s valedictory advice on technology, the thought and speech of a naturally emergent life would actually look and sound like in practise - which is also, as it happens, where we begin here! 2. INTO HEIDEGGER WORLD OR INTO THE HYPER-WORLD
Here is a radical thought. What shared future, within reasonable material parameters, would our people desire and choose for our progeny? Let’s pitch that future not too far ahead: say, that of the adult lives of our grandchildren. What if that question - admittedly, a question which, in its fullness is not easily framed - could be answered definitively enough to then adduce a majority opinion? What if that opinion could be employed as a filter for politics such that everything incompatible with it, everything restrictive or exploitative of it, is itself restricted or excluded completely? Other things being equal, what if by careful discrimination and curation, government could create the conditions in which the desire of the nationalist heart can become the reality of our people’s life? Only eight years (we are told) short of the age of Technocracy, you may be thinking that this is a somewhat naïve and idealistic bet on politicians’ respect for our ethnic person, as well as for the liberty and democracy they affect to hold sacred. But, actually, it is a bet on the timelessness of human authenticity and its agency in a world in which Power is intent on bringing forth no less human artifice, diminishment, and subjection than ever did Philip K Dick with his Tyrell Corps replicants. As Heidegger himself said in his long essay Discourse on Thinking, published in 1966, with material written eleven years earlier:
That said, what if the present-day Tyrell Corps were, in fact, operating from a sounder psychological and sociobiological basis than we nationalists? What if authenticity resided deeply enough in, and synergised enough with, technology itself that it - authenticity - transported us not to Heidegger World but to Technocracy? It is a terrifying thought that we may belong too much to modernity and the technological paradigm to escape even the negatives of its grip upon us ... that its diminishments are also a part of us. But this is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Heidegger’s appeal to his goddess of truth. Let us examine it. The ages of the god of the forge We can clear the way a little by finding a meaning - not necessarily only Heidegger’s - for “what makes up what is most modern technology’s own.” To that end, we shall not be examining technologies as such, or how men have thought technologically of Nature (the outer meaning of “standing reserve”). Rather, we shall trace the eras of technology’s making of Man in pursuit of Heidegger’s “construct”. We will find throughout that development, from its beginning to the present day, technology’s innermost power of human transformation of his body, his personhood, and his mind’s ordering of reality. First, though, let’s trace the history of Man and his technology and, too, their seeming future. Technology as such pre-dates the genus Homo sapiens. Driven by life’s will to survival and continuity, our hominid ancestors increased the possibility of life in their environments by whatever means their creativity allowed. “Found” clubs and projectiles for hunting and fighting and stones as hand-tools were the beginning of technology. Although there is a 700,000 year break between the date - four million years ago - assigned to the development of bipedalism and the archaeological evidence for simple “found” tools (from the age of Australopithecus or “Lucy”), it is bipedalism which is usually associated with the evolution of tool-use and tool-making. Certainly, bipedalism freed the hands for additional tasks, particularly during movement, and there is no better candidate for the absolute point of origin of all our technology today. There is another 700,000 year break to the Olduwan Industry period of some 2.6 million years ago, to which the oldest knapped stone tools have been dated. Subsequently, hand actions such as throwing, cupping, and gripping have shaped technology and been shaped by it. Within the whole organism of the hominid body, including the brain, it was the hand which most directly testified to that wild synergy, and the hand that, by its dexterity and versatility, extended the crude striking of stone against stone and stone against animal flesh to the working of wood, and of skins, clay and natural fibres, and the control of fire. With each advance the world opened up as an ever more negotiable and manageable evolutionary space. Our ancient predecessors made themselves as they made the world about them. For example, they acquired control over fire perhaps 400,000 years ago, setting in motion the rich history of fuel. So, when Homo sapiens arose between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago, they were essentially pre-technologised, and technology itself was inseparable from human being because both were entered synergetically into the natural, daily processes of life. This first, organic phase of technologisation, the phase of physical synergy, lasted as the only phase through the pre-Neolithic, when animal husbandry, a true symbiotic form, first developed. It took another 5,000 years until the Neolithic Revolution of 10,000-11,000 years ago for the cutting and dressing of stone to produce permanent structures (as, for example, at Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia, dating from around 9,000-10,000 years ago, or nearby Karahan Tepe, a ritual site which may be two thousand years older). Within a millenium or two, crop farming came to (what we know today as) the Fertile Crescent. The farmer and the stone tool-maker together made possible the urban settlement; and, thereby, civilisation itself. The metal-worker - Hephaestus at his forge - joined them 3,000 years later. The potter’s wheel took another 3,000 years to arrive. Permanent, mud brick-built settlements such as Catalhoyuk and Jericho harboured a population of two, three, even four thousand souls. But these were protective settlements (in the case of Jericho, famously walled). More varied bloodlines apart, they were still closer to tribal villages than socially complex urban spaces. There was an absence of monumental building to testify to a wider aristocratic or religious hierarchy, a formal civil and political structure, and economic power, or any of the other characteristics of a true city. At Catalhoyuk that development never took place. Its inhabitants remained hunter-gatherers throughout the two millenia of its occupation and appear never to have developed social hierarchy. Jericho, it should be said, is still occupied and houses 18,500 people. Archeologists have identified twenty levels of occupation through time. At their outset, both settlements were on the cusp of post-tribal urbanisation, but only on the cusp. They were still - just - of that first vivifying, organic phase of technologisation. From the Heideggerian perspective human personhood was not yet artificialising in response to the proliferating artifice of the urban environment. Authenticity was not yet technology’s casualty. When Catalhoyuk and Jericho were first settled, the true city - a technological instrument in itself - still lay four thousand years in the future.
When it did fully arrive in the Near East the urban was but the scene-setter. Severed from the land’s complete and organic shaping of Man himself, and freed by the crop farmer and the livestock farmer from a personal life of bare subsistence, men responded with a grand, generational act of world-making. We can, of course, interpret that act as technology’s historical force, seeking Nature’s mastery and domiciliation. But Man and his technology are forever synergised. So, sociobiologically speaking, Urban Man lived not only in a new technological landscape raised in mud and stone but in a blank environmental canvas for the unchanging human instinct to engineer a novel and comprehensible order within which the bargains of mate competition must proceed. Accordingly, new power heirarchies, social hierarchies, and specialised economic roles, including artistry and artisanship, came into being. These were each instruments of the totality of the city as replacement for the natural environment. There were relational losses to that replacement. The made-world of the city, with its non-tribal population, imposed a different relation upon humans than that of the kinship and belonging which had adhered over the long age of physical synergy. Whereas under the old synergy a man’s place in the world was determined by who his tribe was and who he was within his tribe, in the new age of instrumental synergy the measure was what he did and the relation of that to what others did. The individual - certainly the male individual, in whom tribalism most resides - was already atomising. His were ineluctably the relations of power and commerce, and of accident, and they instrumentalised everything. Not just tools themselves, nor the fire and charcoal that made the metal ones possible, but those who made them and those who used them, and those who commanded their use became instruments of the new totality. There is a work by Canaletto which illustrates this to some effect. It is titled The Stonemason’s Yard, and it dates from the mid- to late-1720s, on the cusp of the next great technological age:
The work captures not the enchanted bridges and churches and palaces of Venice but the life and labour of the common people. Interestingly, we see woman as mother, woman as spinner of thread and worker of cloth, woman as keeper of the house ... woman, essentially, as a creature of her own biology and a being of unchanging Nature. She is Hestia. She is in the city but not fully of the city. But the men are much different. Their reproductive nature is buried beneath the masculine conventions of the city, whose revenues secure their status, which is fitting enough, since woman, in her natural beauty, seeks status in man. So, in Canaletto’s Venice the men are, during their day at least, re-created as economic beings undertaking often alien, mechanical tasks for the getting of coin - another alien, mechanical thing. The figure of the stonemason himself, an Hesphaestus of sorts at the middle of the foreground, connects their lives of instrumentality to the world for which the polished classical orders and columns and capitals constitute a definitive and exclusive language of taste and refinement, power, wealth and authority. There are just the artifacts of the yard and some creations in stone above the roofline to bear witness to that language. All of the buildings immediately surrounding the yard are humble and in poor repair. Their compositional language speaks just as forcefully, but of the insignificant value of physical labour. The maker of fine things doesn’t get to enjoy them himself. Through its architecture and its economy the city arrays and orders the social meanings of men’s instrumentality, by which they may be known. One might turn for illustrational purposes to a second Canaletto. It portrays the other side of the stonemasonry’s linguistic bargain. Painted by the artist when he was in London a quarter of a century later, it records some of the most refined “speaking” of that language to be found in the pre-industrial period. The title is The interior of Henry VII chapel in Westminster Abbey:
The chapel itself was dedicated to The Blessed Virgin Mary in 1503 and erected over the next sixteen years in English Perpendicular style. It was at the technological frontier of stonework in its day, being the first construction anywhere of a fan vault ceiling with pendants. It is the burial place of several monarchs and of many high nobles, and that ceiling is as close to a conversation between a king and his god as early-sixteeth century stonemasonry could cut and shape, smooth and polish into being; and as good a physical example of European Man’s instrumentalisation of the raw earth as one will find. Indeed, the whole process of producing the stonework ... the conceiving and planning of it, the causing of its making, the making itself, the fitting of it, the paying for it, and the using of it ... made instruments of everyone involved at every stage. Further, the reading of it, the experiencing of its physicality and language, was likewise instrumentalising, for a time delivering the observer to a designed conclusion of religious awe such that, gazing upward, the observer might be falling backward, obeisant and receptive to the will of the God of heaven. Without the deed of observation the whole design could never be instrumentally complete. It would be something uncommunicated, potentialised but held in reserve; one day, no doubt, to be forgotten altogether. In mitigation of the coming of the city in pre-modern Europe, men’s instrumentalisation was strictly channelled within its economy. Save life itself, nothing material, not even religious art, could be brought into being without economics. Men had a refuge in the general simplicity and solidity of the rest of their lives. But no degree of instrumentality is ever appropriate, ever sufficient for humans beings, regardless of their station in life or the heights of civilisation they and their fellows may scale. In so much as it visited economics and utility upon human being, instrumentality reduced it; and in so much as it imparted to urban personhood a certain attenuation and mannered contrivance, it reduced that too. For, as a general and inalterable rule, out of artifice comes only greater artifice. But if artifice is (at least in part) also the evolutionary environment of adaptiveness then trait selection will reflect that. In this sense, every environment is evolutionary, including the city. What traits might be privileged therein is a nice question. It isn’t as though we could look at the human thumb! But they would have to reflect the economic, social, and cultural actualities. One might, then, expect a greater incidence of sociobiological specialisms in response to a world of disinterested strangers thrown together. The self-interested individual and also the altruist may be privileged. Likewise the religious believer, the analytic thinker, the abstract thinker, female vanity and materialism ... With the beginning of industrialisation four decades or so after Canaletto painted the chapel, European Man was thrown headlong into the age of frenetic technological change, and change to his own human sum, which we know as modernity. One should note that this development was his alone. Many ethnic groups had created cities and economies and, too, great religious art; and experienced the instrumentalisation of human being to that end. But the coming of the next age radically advanced the artificialisation of European Man’s evolutionary environment (since environment, however it constitutes, is always the ground of selection for fitness, and fitness is always a product of that ground). The spirit of this new age was replacement, and its means was the machine. It set its face absolutely against the ancient principle of the land and rootedness, and of the organic - the suppliers of true human value. In their place it championed the transitory, the unsecured, the novel. Thus it emptied the rural spaces and filled the cities, ripping up people from their rooted lives and setting them down in a concrete artifice. It transformed everything technological that had preceded it, and technologised eveything that had not. It created materialism, the corporation, and the economics of human commodification. It industrialised the working life. It industrialised war. It massified consumption and disposability. It consumerised entertainment and sex, and even contraception. And all this it did under the politics of massification in pursuit of selfhood. At the end of modernity, technology’s gift of human artifice can no longer be measured via the narrow function and status of Canaletto’s stone mason, a man instrumentalised by the technology of his time, yes, but still with one foot in the natural world. Seminal to modernity though the millenia of urbanisation and socio-economics obviously were, the mechanised process has since become so general and intrinsic to human existence, so omnipresent, that much the greater part of the waking life consists in acts at one level or another of technological derivation. Even in his dreams modern man perceives in the terms of technology’s enframing of him, to use Heidegger’s term (or the highly adjacent construct, as he refers to it in his Der Spiegel interview). So final, so unbroken and wholly encompassing, so sufficient unto itself is this estate that, being-in it calls forth a corresponding mind-world of implicit and reflexive, inter-connecting object-identities, associations, and senses, all of them particular to it. These inform the brain’s rendering of reality itself. Technology’s totality is right there, in the very reality which the autonomic brain constructs from light, and there again in the truths and meanings our cognitive systems abstract from the construction. If we put away sociological thinking to reflect on that totality we can, finally, reveal technology’s ordering power, and the place to which that ordering consigns our being, to which Heidegger refers as enframing as standing reserve, and which we will examine in the next sub-section. One final thought on modernity. Inevitably, it’s macro-scale product, it’s worldhood, is our very environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. For, nothing else stands. Such an estranging and artificialising happenstance must have had profound genetic implications. It must have worked itself out in trait selection ... in what kind of men and women we are today compared to our forefathers even from Canaletto’s time. I, for one, do not have an answer as to the exact difference. But it is difficult to believe that, just on the basis that artifice leads to artifice, shallowness to shallowness, substantial losses of ancient fitness traits have not been incurred by way of the modern sexual bargain. That must be so even if we confine our terms to endogamous pairings. The rates of exogamy, of course, offer a definitively evidential proof of loss. In any case, there can be no doubt that modernity has generated a step-change to a total technological world, finalising European Man’s promethean project of bringing Nature under his hand. But now we are once again in a period of transformation, ushered in by the launch of the internet in 1992. If the machine age re-made Man as a subject of its essential character, artificialising his person and commodifying the artifice, the imminent, much vaunted Fourth Industrial Revolution will, if successful, finalise human being itself and replace it with something it is not. For, ahead lies the Hyper-World of Davos and Meta, the city pod-scape, and the manifold, unwanted fruits of quantum computing, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, brain interface technology, genetic engineering and synthetic biology, and government by algorithm. Their collective progeny will be Digital Man, a radically public being re-purposed and re-engineered as someone else’s idea of him, and an object in someone else’s Dickian universe of the mind. The destiny of a man whose designed life-purpose is to be predated upon is not much different to that of any farm animal. He will be supplied with the essentials as per the interests of the Kratos, and in the case of this technocratic Kratos that provision extends to his own too too addictive, stupifying world of entertainment: a barren virtual environment of evolutionary adaptiveness in which man and woman never actually meet, never fall in love, never know parenthood, and never experience real human meaning. The hardly hidden intention, then, is to induct those who survive to this point, who may not number very many, into an anti-human anti-life, in which standards for “happiness”, aka compliance, will be centrally prescribed, and the non-compliant will be switched off with algorithmic indifference at his or her central bank digitial currency account. We are back to what Leo Strauss said many years ago, “The future will be a world of entertainment without the possibility of political struggle”. Doubtless, other factors beside technology and an Actonite corruption and criminality of the powerful are responsible for this psychotic scheme, and it is not part of my purpose here to explore those, or how political Establishments not just in the West but across the world, actually, have fallen in with it (as is the case in London) or found it useful in some strategic sense (as is the case in Beijing). My first purpose is to get closer to Heidegger’s enquiry as to “what makes up what is most modern technology’s own.” But I would also like, eventually, to arrive at some answer to the question posed earlier, namely: what if technology is simply too much of the European Mind and the European genome to be open to a meaningful corrective? After all, we are not the men of the pre-modern era. What, then, does authenticity involve in the modern, technologised environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, which our brains brilliantly and unquestioningly render for us as we go. That question needs to be kept in mind. To that end, we might reprise the four phases of technological synergy proposed in this article. In the age of Kratos Nationalists are very familiar with the idea that modernity brought damage with it, and that this was especially associated with the trespass of capital and mercantilism against the cthonic principle of rootedness and belonging. The nationalist interpretation of the American Civil War, for example, is built thereupon, as is the coming of the railroad and commerce to the American west a few years later. The usual solution is the re-discovery of identity and tradition. Meanwhile, environmentalists critique the modern age not as an abrogation of autochthony but of Nature and “the planet”. Their movement was captured by anti-capitalists after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and to them Heidegger’s notion of standing reserve would speak of an exploitative, deathly-cold assessment by moneyed interests, by which all Nature is reduced to a ready store of realisable value. These people’s solution is, first, to de-technologise society to eliminate fossil fuel consumption and, second, to re-distribute wealth. Finding our nationalism anathema and environmentalism instrumental the Davos corporations and the foundations fund both, as they fund the race industry and alphabet activism and everything else that stands against the life and free of the peoples of our race. While all political and socio-economic meanings for standing reserve have some surface truths in them, they overlook technology’s deep-historical impact upon the human mind and body and, therefore, the all too human source of the effects they disparage. Heidegger’s most profound use of the term is only proximally relevant to anti-modernism and anti-capitalism alike. It is at once a much more subtle conduit for damage, going in and coming out. At this level, standing reserve is an ontological condition that must be addressed in our being, and not merely politically or socio-economically. To digress for a moment, his idiosyncratic path to uncovering the essence of technology (most notably in TQCT) goes via several more or less serial, more or less novel ontological concepts. This path is precisely the way, in his view, that technology re-orders European Man’s natural sense of reality to an artificial sense of it, which he terms standing-reserve. Not only enframing and standing-reserve have their places here but also , granting, destining essencing, challenging, setting-upon, ordering, presencing, revealing or unconcealing, and threatening. Sometimes he qualifies one by the other, as in “this setting-upon that challenges”. Sometimes he welds two terms together, as in “challenging ordering”. This being Heidegger, with his fundamentally experimental and poetic rather than didactic method, his precise meanings and relations are rarely more than gestured towards. Educated guesses as to the great man’s thought-flow have to be made, and likely assumptions interpolated. It is a dangerous business. One suspects that not a few Heidegger scholars would press on with their cogitations, expectant for truth, even if here and there concepts in the text were quietly switched like cards in a cheater’s poker hand. With not much modification, Alan Sokal’s postmodern generator could be re-purposed and gainfully employed. For me, personally, there are always elements I have to give up on or take on trust, certainly at first reading. “Needing” as a characteristic of a blind process is one. For the same reason “granting”, which seems to be explicable only religiously but cannot be such, is another. But see for yourself. By the way, no original concepts were harmed in any way ... or switched ... during the cutting and pasting of this perfectly typical passage from TQCT:
Heidegger’s beginning and end, problem and solution are stated here. The “destining of revealing” that is “from out of a granting” gestures towards the classic Mind-Body problem. It is the means by which Heidegger characterises the brain’s autogenetic rendering of reality as something finished within Man from something raw without. I do believe that, in this context, the phrase “man is given to belong to the coming-to-pass of truth” recognises what I have endeavoured to characterise by the term “certainty”. We know that, for Heidegger, enframing is technology’s trespass upon the rendering process, purloining it, changing not the raw data, which includes the meta-data of the technological, but the ordering or contextualising of it so that the natural rendering process is “challenged” and changed by the alien difference. Objects in the world shift from the solid exigencies that our brains must real-ise to that artificial “inclusive rubric” which is standing reserve. In other words, some part of truth is lost. Even our fellow man renders as part of the artifice, so that we can no longer obtain a clear sight of human being. Here is Heidegger from The Question Concerning Technology, first published in 1954:
That is the ontology of Man in modernity. Although the concepts of enframing and standing reserve constitute Heidegger’s principal contribution to technology theory, their mechanics are curiously assumed. His first cause is “granting”, apparently quite a promiscuous process. It does not discriminate, but enables technology’s power to shape reality just as readily as it enabled Nature’s. It worries me because there is nothing to grant nor anything from which granting may take place. The first simple cell which responded to light, and in so doing transmitted its genetic material to the morrow more effectively than those which did not, was wholly in the way of organic life’s unceasing struggle to continue its anomalous existence in the universal, cold state of mechanics. It was neither an act of granting nor of taking but of that accident which is organic life itself and its will to ever-refining continuity which is the creative essence of evolution. One might, then, prefer to characterise the guiding cause of “every destining of revealing” accordingly, as the creativity of evolution. From which, let it be said, we need not shrink because evolution is a scientistic concept. Yes, the science of the being is categorically different to the ontology of the being’s Being. But truth is the same in either case, and cannot be in disagreement. It is simply a truth that our brains have evolved to render the light ... to sense what abides in it and to discriminate at each moment for life, and not for death. The introduction of evolution as first cause does not disqualify the philosophical character of what must follow merely because it is a scientific theory. On the contrary, truth always opens the right path; and in this case it is the path from essence to reality, and back gain. Now, we may reprise the three past ages of human technology as the whole context for the digital age on which we are embarking:
From the very beginning, technology has exercised a synergising capacity. As Man’s own creation and helpmeet taken up to aid his suffering belief in the necessity of his existence, it entered the evolutionary process and, via that, his very brain process, in effect re-creating him and his reality in its utilitarian image. As he advanced it, so it advanced the radicality of its effects upon him, social and genetic. Man’s technological ancestors, the users of, first, found tools and then made tools, receded with Time and the coming of the urban environment. Where he had stood, the Man of Tools arose, and men exchanged their affinity with the soil for the restiveness and artifice of urban life, perhaps to become instrumentalised as, say, a stone mason in the city economy. The mason’s mallet and chisel, the wealthy merchant’s trading house, the ruler’s language of power - all were tools. The city itself was a tool, instrumentalising all the lives within (one consequence of which was to multiple technological innovation). Of course, instrumentality was not a complete phenomenon. It pre-supposed a (more) natural being as its ground, and that ground necessarily persisted, only shifting at evolutionary speed with generational selection, mutation, drift, and flow. We are born as what is Nature in us in our own time. Instrumentality, therefore, did not signify total artifice in Man but only the synergising in the urban life of that which comes from its artifice and that which comes from Nature. This synergising of differences made possible the full synthesis of the selection and transmission of traits for fitness, thumbs an’ all. The next epoch broke like a tidal wave on an eternal beach, its force over-reaching the retreating other. The advancing tide of the machine substantially stripped European Man of his artisanship and re-purposed him as minder, operator, driver, engineer, storeman, manufacturer, shipper, distributor, retailer, consumer, user, and so on - essentially, a machine part himself, in use or waiting to be in use to the economics of the mechanical. Heidegger in TQCT again:
Now we Europeans, and many others besides, stand (in political reserve, certainly; in a permanent, genetically-dictated reserve, possibly) at the very end of the modern epoch. The Derridian claim of postmodernity was void of proofs. But the digital or post-human age, the age of the Hyper-World of the powerful, will have manifold and disturbing proofs. Heidegger saw it nearly seventy years ago. His commendation to us to save the human essence must become the grand cause of our nationalism. Of that there can be no doubt, though doubt there may be about our surviving capacity, particular among the more genetically varied white populations. What will technology mean for all of us in the coming age? It is a second Fall now. It will be finalising then. No nation. No kind-ness. No freedom. No human beauty. Nothing of the human heart which, today, we routinely know and love and serve. Technology’s ownmost, as the final determinant for the reduction of Nature’s capricious power yesterday, and the reserving of the natural Man as commodity today, will turn out tomorrow to be anti-Nature and the old fear, sickeningly justified, of self-destruction by the compulsions of absolute power and the existential blindness of endless progress. Comments:2
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 06 Jul 2022 18:06 | # Cheers James, yes, Heidegger’s argot is not infrequently a pain in the proverbial; and I did find this essay quite difficult to write because of the unfamiliarity of his technological terms. Also, it was more difficult to write given the relative absence of a definite ideological standpoint which would otherwise makes things hum along. Give a nationalist writer a bit of modernity to go at, or liberalism, and the writing drives itself onward to its conclusion. But Heidegger went beyond those familiarities, as was his wont, to the fundamental of what I describe at the end as a second Fall, which abides within us and undergirds history’s drift to where we are today. When he did talk in TQCT about the whole history of human technology he also restricted matters to the modern age, on the basis that the real harm is/was being done then. However, in so doing he missed the deep antecedents of “enframing” as a selection medium (ie, a “coloured” reality), and thus the gene issue. That latter has to be parsed by us if we are to approach the question concerning technology comprehensively; and that’s the reason I have brought it into focus. I rather thought it might open up a less philosophically propositional line of enquiry which could be used to connect to your own thought. And here you are! Sorry I can’t get back to the pre-Cambrian, but there we are. Of course technocracy represents pretty much the ultimate fantasy of the parasite, whereby the body of the host can be kept in suspension (ie, in Meta) indefinitely while his entire world ... the rest of the planet, basically ... is taken for the parasite. It solves the tiresome problem of transmission. In a sense, though, while there is a lot to say about futurism and its trespasses, the real issue for us is not the future, deathless oligarch-supermen or the technological, off-world marvels their AI drones can generate for them. The issue is us, and that old question, “What is to be done”. 3
Posted by Thorn on Wed, 06 Jul 2022 23:29 | # Do you think Heidegger could’ve answered the question as to why contemporary whites don’t place a premium on their future existence? (Crucial question, BTW.) (‘Place a premium on’ - meaning: To value (something) highly.) Has WN thinkers come close to formulating a sales pitch that’ll sell their message outside their own bubble / echo chamber? How’s that Heideggerian philosophy product doin’ on the sales floor? ... Is it selling like hotcakes? If not, why? 4
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 07 Jul 2022 00:00 | # Here are the alternatives, Thorn, in no particular order: 1. You could blame Islam. Any of them sound likely to cut through? 5
Posted by Thorn on Thu, 07 Jul 2022 00:15 | # I blame whites for not placing a premium on their future existence. I’m sure you can understand that. 6
Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 07 Jul 2022 00:18 | # I couldn’t find the prior MR post I did where I described in more detail the concept I was trying to get across by my “See also”‘s that bears on “What is to be done?” So let me put it this way: We have previously discussed the possibility of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in the context of educational systems to cultivate what might be thought of as an authentic orientation toward technology: e.g. kids banging rocks together (maybe to make rhythms) -> rock scrapers -> rock blades -> spear -> cordage -> atlatl -> bow and arrow -> firestarting -> etc… Music making devices are in there somewhere as you have pointed out before. But the key thing to get about all this is that these “memes” are _vertically_ transmitted in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness: Parent to child. That’s why I included the “Emergence of Parasity…” link: To call out the importance of Parental education of children as vivifying transmission of symbionts such as memes as well as the microbiome of the family if not the tribe. Somewhere along there we come to dogs as the initial living tool aka symbiont that is also vertically transmitted from parent to child. The importance of vertical transmission is central to all manner of coadaptation and avoidance of virulence. When it comes to “futurism” one must distinguish between technology development that results from vertical transmission and that which results from unbridled directions of transnsmission. That was part of my intent with the last two “See also”‘s. 7
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 09 Jul 2022 10:11 | # It seems to me, James, that vertically transmitted technology is what, at point, I have described in the OP as synergic. Perhaps the analogy with transmission does break down somewhat if we think about the creative process itself which, at least at the cutting edge, happens a priori outside the existent method and both with its prior form and contra its imperfections. I am quite interested in the take up (ie, transmission of the detail and use) of specific technologies within the population. When you think that there are millions upon millions of smart phones in Sub-Saharan Africa, among populations which are not remotely party to their creation yet are perfectly able to extract as much benefit from them as any other, the “educating parent” in this scenario is quite difficult to pin down. If one also seeks a symbiont here, would one be looking at the corporation rather than phone technology as such? I would welcome some clarification and development of these questions? Also, I think that, to be a useful guide, “unbridled directions of transmission” needs more definition. Obviously, there is a sense in which technology freely advances humanity in some evolutionary sense or whether it advances the interests of Power, or can be used to either end. But, to return to the Heideggerian view, the deeper issue is perhaps not that, but whether or not human being is reduced by it in some way, ie, inauthentised by its transformational power. There is, I think, always this potential with technology for inauthenticisation. If it does not proceed in evolutionary time it must distend human being in some temporal sense. One might argue that this is an inevitable and natural result of the introduction of a technology (perhaps a new tech rather than a development of something existing) before mind and body have internalised it within their own evolution. There is a lot to tease out how. 8
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 09 Jul 2022 10:28 | # Thorn: I blame whites for not placing a premium on their future existence. Blame is inappropriate. Human beings are not free of the age into which they are born, and must be understood within that context. “... for they know not what they do.” 9
Posted by Thorn on Sat, 09 Jul 2022 12:02 | # “Human beings are not free of the age into which they are born, and must be understood within that context.” Big G, the movie ‘Soylent Green’ was set in the year 2022. Just givin’ ya a friendly heads-up. Cheers! 10
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 09 Jul 2022 12:31 | # GW writes: “Perhaps the analogy with transmission does break down somewhat if we think about the creative process itself which, at least at the cutting edge, happens a priori outside the existent method and both with its prior form and contra its imperfections.” I don’t think so. Again, going to the cultural evolution analogy, the symbiont (ie: technology, whether living or constructed, which is transmitted parent to child) mutates just as the genes transmitted parent to child mutates. Does the mutation introduce an “inauthentic mode of Being”? Well, that depends, doesn’t it? Sexual reproduction introduces higher levels of novelty during the meiotic lottery forming gametes which, when combined in a zygote, is a never-before-seen combination of genes. The key, however, is, again, vertical transmission not just parent to child but deme to child where “deme” is used in its zoological sense as an environment with sufficient genetic isolation to result in speciation. Is a new species “inauthentic”? Well, again, that depends, doesn’t it? A good deal of the globalist apology for all this is that we’re nowhere near realizing the potential benefits of expanding the “deme” within which we live through novelty in genetic and technological recombinations. Sounds good to a kid with his new chemistry set under the Christmas tree, whereupon he takes all the various chemicals and a test tube and puts them all in there to see just WTF happens—which is about the depth of thought behind such globalist apology as we see with collapsing total fertility rates selecting from the next generations the characteristics most demanded by “The Global Economy” in this generation. As for the cell phones in sub-Saharan African (or, indeed, in our) hands, this is clearly not vertically transmitted, except as a creature of the unfriendly AGI called “The Global Economy” which incorporates human beings as Mechanical Turks with decreasing necessity as it absorbs, via machine learning, to mimic the intelligence according to its own utility function. This is “unbridled directions of transmission” in the large. It is exceedingly dangerous. It is sold to us by the unfriendly AGI as “progress” and our addictive propensities agree. But the fundamental dynamic behind all this is the evolution of virulence which sees borders as evil because those borders might not only prevent virulent pathogens (whether microbes, humans, ideas/technologies) from seeking out new food to denude, but prevent escape from ecologies it has denuded therein to be trapped and die along with the denuded ecology. Think Jewish virulence and The Global Economy as a typical example. Pointing once again to the Cambrian Explosion of species and its relation to sex: When sex reached the stage of individual male intrasexual selection over resources, concomitant with predation, it discovered a way of limiting gene flow, providing a much greater number of demes. Prior to that, “sex” had functioned primarily as a quasi-mutation, but masculinity transmuted the unbridled directions of transmission to focus much more heavily on vertical transmission within the deme—hence much greater speciation. 11
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 11 Jul 2022 18:52 | # James, let’s try to pull all this together. Tech as symbiont, having touched genomic ground, can hardly be inauthentic. That is actually quite a frightening aspect of all this. What we are cannot be otherwise, however that came to be. But can you accept that there is a horizontal or cultural transmission at work here in addition to vertical? I mean, there is this negotiable space ... tech as environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (deme?) ... which Heidegger gestures towards with his concern for tech’s influence in the rendering of reality. So, this is tech as a creative or framing medium, not least in our brain’s rendering of reality itself, which framing represents Man as commodity in modernity but as raw material in the digital future. He is claiming that intervention in some form in that process can abort this tendency and bring us to model instead Man in his essential nature. On that basis, we are seeking the conditions in which a certain lodestar, (perhaps a sensing or tasting of the authentic, or naturally authentic, from deep human instinct), might bring European Man to the necessary salvation. It might function as a “horizontal” injection into the framing process so that our rendering of our EEA is “real”, if not naturalised entirely, ie, real enough to discriminate against damaging excess. For Heidegger, this is indeed a religiously-scaled endeavour, though not, of course, religious in itself. On that secular basis can we synthesise something here? 12
Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 11 Jul 2022 21:41 | # GW asks: “But can you accept that there is a horizontal or cultural transmission at work here in addition to vertical?” Cultural transmission may be either horizontal or vertical or, indeed, “oblique” as described as early as 1981 in Cavalli-Sfornza, L. and M. Feldman. 1981. Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach, meaning, for example, in loco parentis rule of public schools. Need I remind you of how dangerous even “oblique” transmission is given the accelerating public education horrors of at least the last 50 years? Key to containment of said horrors is masculinity’s “moral territory” which you view with, shall we say, skepticism evidenced by the connotation of your use of the phrase “honor culture”. The phrase “death before dishonor” may ring a bell here. Let me put it another way: The first time in evolutionary history one male said to another male, “You don’t look like you’re from around here,” was at the dawn of the Cambrian Explosion. Explosion of what? Species. What does it take for a species to evolve? A deme. What does it take to form a deme? Limited gene flow across borders. What does this have to do with Man? Transmission of morals from fathers to children where “morals” may be substituted for “culture” if you like. OK, so let me offer a somewhat less difficult phrase for you to accept: “cultural territory”—which is to say the territory within which a species is cultured has very strict controls on “oblique transmission” of culture (and genes and microbes and…). Who imposes those controls? Men. 13
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 12 Jul 2022 09:20 | #
If, for present purposes, we take vertical as parental and oblique as non-parental authority, we are left with horizontal as the free entry point for the new. Once entry is made, the two other forms of transmission would or could eventually become live channels, confirming the arrival of the new as the endemic force. But, initially, anyone seeking radical change surely has to focus on the horizontal avenue. The policing of authority’s dictates and trespasses by masculine intervention, honour-based or not, is a bit of a side-issue, and would only be reactionary in the absence of a horizontally-transmitted creative force. Within its own terms reaction functions perfectly correctly, but it has nothing to say creatively. Even as an appeal to a better but past age it relies on “something” to stir from its deep slumber and burst into the people’s life to re-impose itself; and in this respect reaction reveals itself to be, at its heart, quite feminine and submissive, assuming, and receptive. All of which is the inevitable wages of assigning the creative principle elsewhere. To my mind, masculinity must first reside in taking ownership of the creative process. Accordingly, it doesn’t care in the immediate term about existing personal or societal values and qualities, struggles, and travails. It does not analyse these things because analysis is not its method. Origination is its method, at considerable remove from morality and honour and the rest of the ready answers. It stands, therefore, in the existential moment where unconcealing truth directs the gaze. Its domain is the fierce crucible of the intellect, where a fully relational Idea may emerge out of that linear truth, and be made into the means to make the world. Anything else is entirely superfluous until the act of creation itself is done. Our Cambrian explosion occurs then, in the taking of the Idea out into the world. But, of course, we are here only feeling around the outside of this. We need to take a step inside. 14
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 12 Jul 2022 18:32 | # GW writes: “But, of course, we are here only feeling around the outside of this. We need to take a step inside.” When you demanded this of our dialogue in the past, I was pretty much at a lost as to what the acceptable boundaries had become. To what are we to refer if not “things” that are, at the very least, shared intersubjectively? How are we to distinguish those “things” from those that are shared “objectively”. It basically terminated dialogue. 15
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 12 Jul 2022 18:55 | # Rather than attempt, as I had unsuccessfully done in the past here, to tip-toe around in order to avoid the appearance of brute break-in while GW picks the locks, I’ll just forge ahead in my transgressive manner in hopes that I’ll stumble upon some terms that are acceptable: I would certainly hope it acceptable to assert that technology assisted in expanding the ecological range of hominins. Quoting from an old source:
There is nothing here that refers directly to technology—at least not yet:
Now, you may wish to argue with the idea of “moral imprinting” of youths as a biologically evolved “meta-instinct” enabling the expansion of the ecological range of man as “moral animal”, but I would certainly hope such argument would be over little more than the meaning of words and that you will do me the courtesy of “stepping inside” to divine my intent, albeit expressed a foreign language to your ontology project, and then do me the additional courtesy of attempting to provide me with translation into acceptable terminology. This would aid in my language acquisition. All this is by way of addressing your primary concern where you stated: “To my mind, masculinity must first reside in taking ownership of the creative process.” If we can identify with (step inside?) a male expelled from a hominin group’s polygyny, to try to eke out an existence at the margins of the ecological range, we can imagine him under a good deal of stress. Resources for survival (let alone attracting a mate and raising children) are scarce. Might we finally lay to rest that quote attributed to Socrates that “our Invention” is, necessarily “social” while admitting that “necessity” motivates invention whether social or asocial? In those situations where a lone male is separated from society at the edges of the habitat to which he is adapted and trained, is it too much to expect that he might occasionally not simply die, but be of an endowment that enabled him to adapt through creativity? Might such a male occasionally not simply survive but mate? Might occasionally the issue of such a mating not simply end up either dying or not mating, due to failure to repeat his sire’s creativity but to, instead, be taught how to repeat the invention by his sire? Certainly we might accuse the tribe from which his sire was expelled of being reactionary in its dogmatic adherence to “morality” to the point that it excludes the creative individual. All well and good. But isn’t it reasonable to assume that the sire might have inherited and passed on the “reactionary” tendencies of his tribe—being “morally imprintable” during youth? Must we assume that said imprint is so “reactionary” as to prevent all such young men from being sufficiently transgressive during survival challenges as to, actually, survive in the expanded ecological range? After all, his sire could simply fall back into the mode of passing morals on to his son, modified by his creation of a new “moral”, with the naturally vivifying intensity of having faced death were it not for the new “mutation” to the culture? This would vertically transmit to his son the same creation that enabled his sire to mate and raise his son to sufficient biological development that the son would have a nervous system capable of receiving said creation! Finally, must we regard this creative act as “horizontal”? Certainly it is novel, but why burden this kind of novelty with association with the novelty introduced by the arrival of a Jew who shows up in a nation, offers gold to the local elite for protection, and then proceeds to train the youths to abjure their parental teachings and preach against their “reactionary” proclivities? 16
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 28 Jul 2022 09:43 | # Apropos our earlier discussion about the limitations of scientistic thinking, the general terms for a reformulation of technology must be philosophical. Accordingly, our philosophical frame is not technology itself but technology’s enframing of Man as “standing reserve” in Heidegger’s ontology; or instrument, then commodity and then, in the all too forseeable future, post-humanity, these three comprising the historical dynamic of the above essay. We are indeed seeking to establish whether technology can be rendered consonant with what we are at this point in evolutionary time. Therefore, in broad terms we must establish (a) in what consonance consists and (b) how the lived life must reform not just to accommodate technology but to generate it as a consonant dynamic. All my efforts to think philosophically, not only in respect to technology’s reductive effects ... our “Second Fall” ... but to all our existential circumstances, really, answer to (b). So I’m looking for the politics of reform to flow from the philosophy. It is true that a sufficiently authoritarian system could conceivably achieve some success without any philosophy at all, merely by imposing a moral filter for the most harmful elements of tech. This, after all, is how our glorious elites are operating with their climate programme (for the purpose of gifting a totalitarian power to them, obviously). But our preference must be for a political solution that arises out of the living consciousness, which would be Heidegger’s revolutionary solution. His quest was to bring Man to, or towards, what we might call self-affirmation and appropriation so that a permanent inherency guides the path of his life (not only in respect to technology, of course). Now, you may be ahead of me with this, but ... Your thoughts tend to the “how” of Man’s technological history. Perhaps we should structure the conversation for a clearer and more critical address of the actual moment of technological creation itself, as distinct from the onset of synergy, to try to find the point of separateness, where technology does not yet attach to Man, and some ground principles pertaining thereto. That way we might find a distinction between a fit consonance and “unbridled directions of transmission”, so that we might still save consonance from the onset of reduction. In the essay, my principal point, really, is that in any given period Man’s physiological and sociobiological nature and Man’s technologies exist in every moment both as separate emerging yet, once emerged, synergising phenomena. Obviously, the synergy is for no other reason than the fact that technology addresses the survivability of the physical environment (including, as you say, marginal environments), and environment is necessarily also the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. As he enters and reshapes it, so it enters and reshapes him in whatever ways fitness may consist in that changed environment. We must ask, therefore, in what reduction truly consists. Who is to judge what is reductive if the only true judge is fitness? Well, we are sighted creatures. Evolution is not, of course, sighted or purposive. Sightedness, which is a substantially moral exercise, is also a product of selection for fitness. We are not bound to be blind as to how technology changes both Nature and Man - albeit that Nature in its vastness and resilience, probably has a power to reclaim its “self” in a manner that Man, as a self-separating entity, does not. What we are become is what we are. Our question, then, is how to handle the question of the will of what we are now so that we remain such, and are not mechanically subjected to the involution that is reduction. There is a lot here to unpack and connect. I think it is inevitable that our active point of contact with it has to be at the point of technological creation, before practise is commonalised and further synergises. There is a danger that one could become reactionary, merely seeking to “select out” negatives. Heidegger warns us against such calculative thinking, and commends us to think essentially ... holistically ... as an act of creation in itself. This is the challenge. 17
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 30 Jul 2022 22:55 | # Is it reductionistic to, as I have done, valorize father-creator to son transmission of morals, ie: a meta-morality distinguishing creation that is consonant with holistic essence from “calculative thinking”? Did I transgress a philosophical boundary by referring to this in terms of evolutionary medicine wherein “calculative thinking” leads us to consider vertical transmission of genes and technologies as tending to evolve symbiosis hence holistic essence? How does philosophy differ from “calculative thinking” about what contributes wisdom (so loved by the philosopher) vs what detracts therefrom?
18
Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 31 Jul 2022 02:53 | #
Camp 38 excerpted from Chapter 4 and start of 5. 19
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 31 Jul 2022 11:32 | #
This question comes too early. It seems to me that your “sighted” paternal morality, as described here, is a proposed solution. But we are only just at the stage of setting out some basic principles, one possible contender for which I’ll suggest below. Realistically, at this point in Man’s history the father is also a creature of the technological age, because he is inevitably biologised within a technologically transformed EEA. There is nowhere for him to look to. The feedback-loop which is synergy, as it runs from tech-to-environment then environment-to-Man, offers him no point in time to stand to one side from his own biologisation (and that of his sons). Once he is biologised, it is too late. Which is why I am suggesting that we look for “time”, as well as for base principles, in the creative technological act, up to the moment of transformation of the EEA. We can’t run later because, post-transformation of the EEA, Man becomes the passive, responsive, feminine principle to environment’s masculine creativity. He has no agency here. He is in the realm of natural law here, beyond the reach of mere thought, scientistic or philosophical. By way of example, one such base principle may be very like EGI. Manifestly, familial humanity prefers for self and kind. It isn’t a static model, exactly, because it is subject to selection for fitness as well, of course, as the other two natural modes of genetic variation - mutation and drift - each operating within their own evolutionary time but, also, within-group. In any case, it is the the tribe or ethnic group which is the repository of traits for fitness. The question then hinges around whether fitness is always analogous to the constantly amending selection pressures of the technologised environment, however reductive those pressures might actually be. Does technology, in, say, its address of the environmentally marginal, (sometimes) introduce pressures for maladaptive selection? Is this what we are looking for to get a handle on the situation?
Technology, as a product of calculative thinking, isn’t necessary a bad thing. But essential thinking is a different phenomenon, and it is state-related. When you are next in a medieval-style church consider its architect’s treatment of space, particularly height (the Henry VII chapel is an exceptional example); also light, its colour and separation, and also the character of sound/silence. Not only the medieval cathedral-builders but every builder of an ancient church sought to generate in worshippers an existential state in which the clamour of the world within and without would fall away, the Word of God could be heard, and thinking thereon would necessarily be an holistic experience. No doubt, the stone and timber circles of the ancient European past performed the same service.
Well, that is a helluva question. I would say that wisdom is knowledge not just that liberation is detachment from all the world has made in us and the appearing of that which was always close, but how, quite scientifically, this estate can be brought under our hand. I’ve often mentioned the two esoteric religious goals of Union with God and self-perfectionment. Mentioning them is one thing, knowing them such that another might know them also is quite another. We, of course, are concerned here in the crass practise of racial politics. It is only the existential nature each of esoteric religious practise and of ethnic nationalism that gives us cause to speak of these things at all. 20
Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 31 Jul 2022 14:17 | # GW write:
An addict also has no agency. So what we are really talking about is a kind of “addiction” to the “technological age” which has mechanized his agency. But I don’t get what you mean by our search for “time” as well as base principles and how finding these things will reach the biologized technological man who is “beyond the reach of mere thought” since “base principles”, at least, if not “time” whatever that means, are, at present, “mere thought”. Let me continue with “addiction” as a metaphor (hence “mere thought”) for the alienation of the biologized technological man, and thereby continue with a “halfway house” to treat said “addiction” as a way of not getting ahead of our selves if “not getting ahead of ourselves” means avoiding establishing objectives while we suffer from our lack of authenticity hence our lack of agency—except for the objective of gradually reducing our dependence on that which has mechanized our agency:
Further quoting from “Camp 38” which is largely about a bunch of addicts trying to help each other build a halfway house—being careful to exclude those addicts who are so bereft of agency they don’t even recognize their state of self-alienation. If even this level of modest aspiration is verboten as “getting ahead of ourselves” then how is it we are to regain sufficient agency to even have an authentic conversation about authenticity? 21
Posted by Hi on Sun, 31 Jul 2022 15:56 | # Off topic question. Searching for an old post by Graham Lister titled “Las Vegas as Shining Beacon of Nihilism”. Can’t find it. Has it been removed? Is there a way to recover it or access it in some way? Thanks. 22
Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 31 Jul 2022 17:28 | # Hi, it isn’t entirely “off topic” as my post “Iowa As a Shining Beacon of Nihlism” was perhaps motivated by Lister’s appropriation of Simon Critchley’s phrase “Las Vegas is shining beacon of nihlism” and Lister then proceeded to attack the publisher of “Camp 38” by referring to that resource of “the culture of critique” known as “RationalWiki” whose toxicity is not exceeded by even that cesspool of biohazardous bias, Wikipedia. 23
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 11:17 | # A good deal of Graham’s excellent material has been deleted, which I assume is something he did himself. I don’t know that for sure. But Graham had quit the fight somewhat, having found a public sector post with which his political statements were not at all compatible. Steve E did something similar a few years earlier, and I had to conduct a scorched earth policy for him on his comments too. Graham’s comments remain, I am happy to say. 24
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 07 Aug 2022 10:00 | # James, Obviously, as users we are profoundly addicted to technology. Everything in our life is changed by technology, and we can no longer envisage - or survive - life without it. But I would say that this is an input problem. To the extent that our brains render a reality from the existent raw data that is also technologically informed there is also an output which is inhering, like the changes to the brain chemistry which recreational drugs and alcohol effect. Input and output occur in the same place, which is also changing and which is technology’s principal focus, and that’s our EEA. To find an entry point to the problem one has, imo, to find the moment between a new technologisation and the resultant remaking of Man. There is the still free moment ... the “time” of my last comment about this ... in which Man the Creator stands as he is and not as he will be. So my thinking is that we might be able to work in that moment to theoretically understand the whole process and maybe even find a means to interdict it the evolutionary feedback. We would necessarily be working on the basis that all prior genetic change is permanent ... is us, in fact. It may, one day, be possible to engineer benficial genetic change, but that is another matter entirely, for another, much more informed and consequential age. On the subject of ready answers, the idea that certain changes to the genome necessarily must flow from technologisation is unfamiliar to most of us. We seem more used to thinking about modernity as bringing (a) a cultural decline (which thought is then written off by devotees of the radically modern, and by people who are just temperamentally addicted to novelty, as Golden Age Fallacy) or (b) an end to the evolutionary process entirely. The latter need not detain us. But cultural and civilisational decline, like moral decline, the decline in spiritual thinking, are realities. For present purposes, however, they lead back to instant diagnoses and ready solutions or, failing that, Spenglerian pessimism. As I see it, we should not be seeking an outcome of mere traditionalism or social conservatism or Christian community. We should not be Aldous Huxley’s reactionary Simple Lifers, which I think may describe that Camp 38 community. We should not be describable at all or includable in some or other group; not social at all, not concerned to make political statements, to dissent, to join in with - or against - the world. All of that will inevitably come too soon, and waste itself. First, the new intellectual ground has to be broken, to which end we must focus wholly on the parts, processes, and principles of the techno-EEA feedback loop in that moment before it is completed and Man changes again. If we can fill out a roster of those three copy headings, and in that logical order, we will have made a fair start. On alienation, it is quite tricky to determine it in respect to technology because, obviously, technology’s role in biologisation, whilst it takes Man away forever from his, let us say, primordial reality, has the finality of gene expression. We don’t know how, exactly, citification and, then, modernity have changed us genetically. But I made the point in the essay that they must have done so, and that:
Any change to the genome is as factic as any other. So one is entitled to ask from what, in this singular respect, the modern man is alienated (in the sense that it may be restored to him). The answer, it seems to me, is self-ownership and agency. We do not currently own technology. It is mechanistic in its action. What ownership might mean is itself a big subject. But that, too, must be investigated and brought out into the open, or what is any of this about. Clearly, Man cannot truly be himself if he is just an unconscious, passing presence in techno-evolutionary time. Agency ... will ... requires some form of permanence, not in the sense of frozen genetic ground but in the sense of that stature which stands behind all significant decision. So when he comes down from the mountain, this Man-Moses, the essential thinker, must strike the earth with his staff and put an end to the carnival of unconsciousness in the encampment below. That is our end game here, and if the opposite of alienation is central to that, and it probably is, then it has its place in the order of things. But first, parts, processes, and principles. 25
Posted by Thorn on Tue, 09 Aug 2022 21:59 | # “So when he comes down from the mountain, this Man-Moses, the essential thinker, must strike the earth with his staff and put an end to the carnival of unconsciousness in the encampment below.” Conditions are changing fast and for the worse, hence, all the effort you’ve been may have not been in vain. The social landscape is becoming ripe for your ideas to take effect. I really believe that to be true, GW 26
Posted by Thorn on Tue, 09 Aug 2022 22:04 | # all the effort you’ve been engaging yourself in may have not been in vain. 27
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 10 Aug 2022 00:12 | # Cheers, Thorn. I agree that things are speeding up. The understanding that something programmatic is working itself out and if it is still hidden it will not remain so indefinitely ... a moment of revealing is approaching, and it will be shocking and distressing for a lot of people ... that understanding is percolating through more and more non-nationalists. The Dutch seem to be radicalising. Italy is going to get itself a properly right-wing government under Georgia Meloni in a few weeks. A genuine revolutionary movement with an intellectual grounding may not be in the offing anywhere yet, but eventually one will materialise. It’s not going to take anything from the work that has taken place here - I don’t really feel that I’ve got anything sufficiently completed. But maybe some input further down the line might be possible, even if it is indirect. In any case, one can only speak one’s truth and keep going. 28
Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 10 Aug 2022 15:12 | # GW writes: We should not be Aldous Huxley’s reactionary Simple Lifers, which I think may describe that Camp 38 community…. we must focus wholly on the parts, processes, and principles of the techno-EEA feedback loop in that moment before it is completed and Man changes again. If we can fill out a roster of those three copy headings, and in that logical order, we will have made a fair start. “Simple Lifers” is little more than an epithet as “described” in “Brave New World”. Indeed, there is no such description in that book. There is no need for such a description just as “everyone knows” what the sarcastic epithet “Bad Old Days” means. “Nuff said.” It is used by the virulent among us to denigrate all those who see even some aspects of “the way things are” as inferior to “the way things were”. It is similar to the way Marxists use the word “reactionary” as an epithet. The point is to “accept” not just “the way things are” but the evolutionary direction—the culture as process—it entails. So please be more careful about using such a blunt “descriptive” when I’ve proffered something of inestimable value that has a much deeper philosophical foundation than you currently comprehend, or you may find yourself without the “process” and “principles” you seek. Camp 38’s “process” derives in part from its “principles” and its “principles”, when adopted, permit one to perceive “the problem”. Don’t throw out the entire “process” just because you see it partially reacting to the problem. The “parts” of its culture are partially domesticated humans, and the world into which they are “thrown”. Understanding what “domestication” entails is a big part of the problem of technology—because it isn’t “technology” per se that is the proper focus of Man’s dilemma. Technology is an extended phenotype, like a beaver’s dam. One might say that the difference is in the fact that Man must learn to build his extended phenotypes whereas the beaver does so instinctively, however even beavers have some intelligence and learn some things as part of their ability to adapt to their environment. The process of learning occurs not just at the neuronal level but, if continued over many generations, it is hard coded in the genetic level. You can’t get away from this—no animal with a nervous system constructed by genes and environment can. So let’s get down to discussing “the problem” in terms of “parts”, “process” and “principles”. Define those words as best as you can from your perspective. 29
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 13 Aug 2022 11:53 | # OK, James, but I am not going to go straight to “parts, processes and principles”. I’‘d rather work our way in discursively. So ... Dam-wise we would be seeking to interdict dawning technology’s power to re-engineer us by re-engineering our EEA. That is the precise objective. Such an interdiction would mean acquiring a new human facility generalised to our race if not to all humanity, not reactive in use but predictive. Operationally, it would, at a minimum, require the following novel psychological attributes: a) a hitherto almost unimaginable degree of self-awareness of the collective being that is the race or group, ... on top of which it would require there to be the relatively straightforward political means to interdict the development and deployment of offending technology. Although in application the (let us say) supra-technological mechanism would be 100% in service to the existing biology, in its realisation and in application such a facility would, at first, be 100% cultural - and perhaps religious, one can’t rule that out. Indeed, Heidegger’s valedictory appeal to the divine and the exigencies of mass experience could be read as a commendation of that. Generating a religion involves another, dense layer of difficulty, particularly in this secular age. Religion aside, it ... the facility ... could not be limited to creating reactive movements and ideals for the reasons already given in the article and on the thread, namely that having passed into biological fact, prior effects of technology cannot be undone. It does not matter if Camp 38 is/was filled to the brim with wise and saintly people. We do not seek to react to technology per se or to create a utopia even reasonably free of the modern, technological culture. We want to interdict it on a selective basis. The interdiction would start from “now”. It would not look back in any way. It would be surgery with a scalpel, not butchery with a bludgeon. One other point on that matter. The “simple life” parallels the several forms of traditionalism and conservatism which, to the chagrin of many nationalists, never arrive at a revolutionary nationalist position. Instead they hold out a false promise of change and so act as a safety valve instead of / as well as a feeder to the nationalist view. As we are attempting the impossible in setting out a means to and form for a supra-technological age, we should draw strong lines. So ... without breaking things down too much at this stage and without yet considering the possibility of the desired interdiction, we could perhaps formulate technology’s re-engineering process hitherto as pure mechanism thus: E-t differentiates H+v for survival and reproduction Where: E is the primordial or pre-technological environment of evolutionary adaptiveness The variation itself is not, or may not be, qualitatively neutral. By rendering marginal habitats survivable, the technological paradigm reduces competitive pressure such that a higher incidence of transmission of “classically” weaker traits occurs - a point you have made in multiple ways, and I made, for example, in my comments in the essay about the city and negative trait selection. After all, the companion of technology is human artifice, and “just on the basis that artifice leads to artifice, shallowness to shallowness”, the strict lineaments of fitness are rather easily obscured. Perhaps the above formula could be made more comprehensive and useful for our purpose if such reduction could be factored in. For example, it might be possible to enter into it reduction which is specific to the grand ambitions of technocratic elitism. It is recurrent in history that, initially, technology liberates men. But eventually the powerful are able to appropriate it and exploit it against the rest. Under the technocracy, however, natural selection is forcibly passing into the designing of post-humanity, something far beyond even the artificial selection/selective breeding which might have accompanied the Perpetual Age of the older elitism. One would hope that post-humanity is a clear line in the sand for anyone of the mass of humanity, including the mass of Jews: https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-cyborg-revolution-is-here-is-it-good-for-the-jews/ 30
Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 14 Aug 2022 16:23 | # You still misunderstand “Camp 38” in a most fundamental way. It is actually all about the problem of bringing in people who are not born into its way of life and it goes to some lengths to describe its origin in precisely the way you describe a solution to our “addiction” must be addressed: Starting from where we are. The difference is that the unsettled American frontier provided an enforced-by-Dasein “cold turkey” for some people who were “thrown” into feral conditions. If you think the difficulty of this is glossed over in Camp 38, you obviously are still laboring under the same prejudice that I have already warned you against holding. It is quite understandable as prejudices go since both you and Huxley (with his notion of “simple life” people) are from the parent culture that had not been so “thrown” for millennia.
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Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 14 Aug 2022 16:49 | # A word about Camp 38’s valorization of hybridization is in order since this is obviously one of the main forms genocide is taking in the present circumstances: There are two basic views of our current genetics: 1) We’ve already been so “domesticated” that we no longer possess the genetic correlation structures that took eons to evolve in the EEA. 2) Our precious genetic correlation structures that took eons to evolve in the EEA have been undergoing attack for 10,000 years but are not yet totally lost to us and every effort must be made to identify them and sequester them during the passing storm called “technological civilization”. I’ll call #1 the “Hybrid Supremacists” camp and #2 the “Purity Preservationists” camp. Hybrid Supremacists are typically identified with “The Way Things Are” and only occasionally resort to half-hearted defense against genocide by hybridization when their particular genetic correlation structures (the ones they still identify with) are under obvious attack. Good examples of these guys are Jews, southern European “Imperium” types and some of the more successful northern Europeans (Curt Doolittle comes to mind as someone who is all about “domestication” having run its course and who wants to be a “good shepherd” via monarchism). I’m squarely in the Purity Preservationist camp but I sympathize with the folks who identify with the Camp 38 approach for the same reason that I went about culturing a new breed of chicken that was semi-feral by mixing a variety of heritage breeds and subjecting them to progressive neglect until they required from me no food, water or shelter and were on the verge of being ready for intensive inbreeding to fix the traits in new pure breed (when my resources ran out and the 4H clubs couldn’t be bothered to take over). See, this is the kind of attitude that comes from actually doing animal husbandry and not having one’s head up one’s urbane ass. 32
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 14 Aug 2022 21:36 | # I appreciate the clarification on Hartman’s dedication to separation sans preservation. It puts him into the culture camp, determinedly defending ideals, values, structures without any greater end, which is the way of modern man. You will have to explain to me what is different in Hartman and the subsequent operation of Camp 38 to the line of German anti-modernism that leads from Lebensreform in the 1870s to the Nature Boys in 1940s Cal on the one hand and the Volkisch movement on the other. If it’s just the treatment of addiction, well, I have, I think, done enough to acknowledge the re-wiring of our brains by technology. Is there any more meat on the philosophical bone? If so, tell me what it is and I will try to work it through. The reason I’m suspicious about all prior forms of anti-modernism, and tend to lump them together as flawed from the outset, is that no amount of naturalistic and existential accounts, projections and polemics will expunge all life’s learned dicta and value-orders, including those coming down to us from deep in our intellectual history and from our religious past. They are just too all-encompassing and formative, and men are too much the product of these things to change. But there is also the possibility that all the narrativising is too much of the calculative, too fragmental, and invites like fragmental thinking ... sums and products ... in return. There is the possibility that ideology, as entrenched thought and feeling, functions in a faux-holistic way, answering to its own confines. It is immune to localised attack by dint of the fact that everything is cellular, and blitzing one cell does not destroy all the surrounding cells. Always something survives to maintain ideological stasis. This is why no anti-modern movement survives or becomes critical in its mass. What always survives is the liberal individual. Something more is required to kill him off, and that something is what we ought to be looking for. 33
Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 15 Aug 2022 13:53 | # When the sperm fuses with the egg to form a zygote, is it just another aspect of the inauthentic anti-modern fallacy into which we are all doomed absent the Ontology Project? If not, then at what point in the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” progression do we owe it to you to admit we are so-doomed? Here’s another point that may illustrate: A ranch just outside town here is being run by some apostate Amish who make a good living by breaking horses that are shipped from all over the United States including cowboy country like Montana and Wyoming. Let’s forget about the Amish as a reservoir of authentic “simple life” ok? Let’s talk about a mated pair of broken horses that escape from the ranch in the wake of a collapse of civilization. When their sperm and egg fuse and the zygote repeatedly doubles into specialized tissues, is it “broken”? When the foal drops, is it “broken”? When it is weaned, is it “broken”? When it reaches sexual maturity and runs free to find a mate, is it “broken”? When it mates and produces the next generation of horses, is that generation “broken”? Now, one might object that the horses aren’t “technological” creatures—that, for example, the mare’s milk being produced by specialized tissues is not “technology”. What _is_ it then? How does it differ in terms of “authenticity” from, say, a robot shaped like a horse with an internal chemical plant that synthesizes lactose, etc. and feeds it to the foal? Is it because the robot is “unnatural”? Or is it because the robot is dependent on another species for its “authorship”? Are the cowboys in Montana and Wyoming who must resort to some apostate Amish for the expertise in breaking horses inauthentic cowboys because they are dependent on another culture for a service in which they were once self-sufficient? Doesn’t this get into the question of “self” that you’re trying to get at with the ontology project’s radical notion of national identity? If so, then what is the relationship between national self-sufficiency and the ontology project’s notion of “authenticity”? 34
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 16 Aug 2022 00:58 | # Ultimately, James, we are trying to solve a problem as old as, and probably older than, the Fall. The required quality of liberation, of change, goes beyond what people do with their lives in Montana or Wyoming or in Todtnauberg or here in Sussex. It is immaterial what beliefs they hold, however nobly they struggle, or ignobly, however moral they may be, or immoral, however needy or blessed. All that is equal in our sight. The most inspiring leader, the cleverest thinker, the most generous of benefactors, the most dedicated to his god is not more free in our terms than any man from the gutter. Why, because everything that is of the given life, whatever it may be, is broken. Brokenness fills out the brief writ we have to live on this earth. Time and the world itself is only really, finally real for us when we have, usually through some momentary act of the attention, slipped that broken life’s “surly bonds”, to quote John Gillespie Magee. The problem of technology is not wholly different to the problem of modernity, in that some act of detachment is necessary with each. What I am trying to get you to do is to put your mind, which I hold in such regard, to resolving the “impossible” conundrum of a form for a supra-technological age of strategic detachment, as per 29 above. Your heart’s desire, though, seems to be closer to charity for the afflicted. I have to ask you to give up on them long enough to make some progress. 35
Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 17 Aug 2022 01:12 | # GW , here’s a doubly rare find , viz., A Christian website interviewing a female , race realist academic , one Dr. Clare Ellis : https://www.thepostil.com/the-fate-of-europe-a-conversation-with-clare-ellis/ 36
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 17 Aug 2022 16:50 | # What a girl! I had heard of her, but not read her. She has a very well researched and sound reading of political internationalism and elitism, which might be 30-40% of the whole. I wonder what else she’s got nailed down! Thank you, Al. 37
Posted by Thorn on Wed, 17 Aug 2022 18:42 | # Observations on a Trip to Poland
https://www.thinkinghousewife.com/2022/08/observations-on-a-trip-to-poland/ 38
Posted by Al Ross on Thu, 18 Aug 2022 02:45 | # Observations on Christian non - support for Whites : https://time.com/6206585/jesuits-reparations-descendants-slavery/ It was formerly accepted by many that the Jesuits were the intellectual shock troops of Christianity but it turns out that , like their tomb Houdini’s namesake, Third of a Jewish Deity , they have had their Opus Dei in the sun.
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Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:01 | # GW asserts: “Ultimately, James, we are trying to solve a problem as old as, and probably older than, the Fall. The required quality of liberation, of change, goes beyond what people do with their lives in Montana or Wyoming or in Todtnauberg or here in Sussex. It is immaterial what beliefs they hold, however nobly they struggle, or ignobly, however moral they may be, or immoral, however needy or blessed. All that is equal in our sight.” Really? There are no gradients, no compass, no star by which to guide our journey home? It must be “all or nothing all at once” after blindly groping at random? If so, we must have Fallen off a shear cliff like Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius who, in hubris looks down to realize there is nothing and, having flailed our limbs against the air in our vain attempt to get back to Terra Firma, with the Road Runner looking on aloof from mid air like a rock doesn’t we find our natural if “inauthentic” level, far below. 40
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 23 Aug 2022 16:25 | # In our time revolutionary liberations seem to be everywhere. But the only one that is not sectional, and is not dependent on an external oppressor, is also the one that is difficult-to-impossible to communicate. It is that one liberation which does not materialise from any supposed improvement to life, but from our attention to consciousness out of unconsciousness, so to speak. Put another way, the life which gives us the greater part of what we routinely and mechanically assume to be our person can never deliver us from itself. It is precisely that engrained habituality which constitutes the fallen human condition, within which one may struggle for simple change for all one is worth, but there will be no escaping its bounds. A true escape would be precisely an uplift from that condition of engrained habituality and its resulting inner declension into absence and estrangement. Only in the turn, and I emphasise, the turn, to presence and authentic dwelling may men gain the facility to dispose from conscious decision, as the masters of history rather than as mere reactors. The singularity of this liberation is key to understanding the conjunction of creativity and change. There is no other human movement equal to it. At the same time, it is only and uniquely applicable in questions of existence, and thus the particular, personal sense of the real, be it of the world or of our self and relation. This is what unites the religious and secular, and elevates the coarse matter of political philosophy to the standing of human truth. 41
Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 25 Aug 2022 20:32 | # Over the last few days, I’ve been pondering something that I believe I might have mentioned before here: My question to Margaret Mead when she visited our local small town college and I was permitted to escape from high school to report on her nibs. My question was one I had often asked myself as a consequence of noticing that when I had some intuition possessing what I suspect you would call “human truth” I noticed that almost immediately there was a temptation to objectify this “accomplishment”... taking “pride” in it I suppose one could say… and in that precise moment, I felt the muse depart. This deeply troubled me for years and when I confronted her nibs with all the adulation directed toward her it was the first time I had encountered a person so celebrated. I thought it must be absolute torture for her—to have her muse depart as a result of all that adulation—without some way of dealing with this. So I asked her how she kept her head about her in the face of all the adulation. I don’t really recall the answer because it didn’t strike me as—well—authentic. My report was rather lackluster because I couldn’t really get excited about her on the basis of all the other people in that little rural Iowa town so desperate to live down the hick reputation Jews relentlessly assaulted Iowans with from their bully pulpits of media, academia and business, despite having among the nation’s highest scholastic aptitudes*. So, yes, if this trick I was seeking to retain the blessings of my muse is what you call the “turn” and we can avoid profaning it to “turn a trick” thereby having the muse flee from the would-be pimping game, then I have an intuition of your project. *The SAT scores (that WERE second only to North Dakota when adjusted for participation rates) have declined over the decades here as the best and brightest of the young women were “turned” out in the urban gene shredders thanks in large measure to the aforementioned Jewish evolutionary strategy. 42
Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 28 Aug 2022 17:36 | #
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Posted by Timothy Murray on Fri, 28 Oct 2022 20:56 | # Thank you for this. I have only skimmed it, but I will be fitting it into my timeline work as I set out to create a mental image of History with Murray’s 400 year units as a starting point. (I am sure there are better organizations, but indulge an autodidact as he sets out..) and as I do so, seek to understand your viewpoint . Again, only a scan, but a gripping read. I gabbed about it
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Posted by Timothy Murray on Thu, 03 Nov 2022 20:56 | # CTL-F “time” yielded 16 results. None of them were for Daylight Savings Time. Do you folks in Europe have this? In America, twice a year, we “fall back one hour” or “leap ahead one hour” every.damn.year. Instead of humanity adjusting its measurment of time to man, man is adjusted to time. That! is as inauthentic as it gets. cordially. 45
Posted by Al Ross on Sun, 13 Nov 2022 02:10 | # You may have a point , Timothy. After all , given your expectation of “Eternal Life” vis - a - vis most people’s time - limited actuality , you have the divine - endowed luxury of limitless Celestial leisure . At least you will not be permitted to die of boredom. Saved again. On a style note : “Spring Forward , Fall Back ” is less clunky. 46
Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 18 Nov 2022 15:42 | # “How the ctmu completes Heidegger’s mission.” 47
Posted by Al Ross on Mon, 21 Nov 2022 03:30 | # Whenever I hear the word ” Spirit” , I reach for my pistol ( apologies to Herr Goering ). The reason is that “Spirit ” is just a new age weasel word for Religion, nothing more. 48
Posted by Richard Yorke on Tue, 22 Nov 2022 21:15 | #
I do find his claim of telekinesis valid, in a video months ago. Would be the logical implication of teleology? Also to me, the CTMU is correct from what I’ve read. I’m not really familiar with mathematical notation as I should be, still somewhat wary of it, like opening the Ark of the Covenant Shittim wood(Acacia Tree). There’s an appropriation of proprium(“Merit”, Shittim Wood, Ephraim, Nicolaitanes…) that from my view does not belong to them, in that I agree with the 18th Century Theologian Swedenborg. I think of it more as a question of priority, rather than reciprocity. Then with Chris’s support of “Adaptive Morality”, why not go Nuclear? Drawing first blood.
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Posted by Al Ross on Thu, 24 Nov 2022 04:47 | # Why not go Nuclear ? RY I believe you Americans already did that . So what happened . A Japan that was already defeated militarily had to have its civilian population immolated just to confirm Atomic tests and to prevent ” house - to - house -” fighting on mainland Honshu , a district which contained no domestic gun owners ? Why are Americans so dim ? Post a comment:
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Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 06 Jul 2022 14:37 | #
Hesitantly posting a response not knowing what land-mines I’ll trigger by being inadequately familiar with Heidegger’s argot, “the problem” arises from Man treating Man as “standing-reserve”. The urban slang insult of “tool” as in “You’re such a tool!” is appropriate to this discourse. I find it interestingly predictable that the “urban dictionary” has more controversy over this definition than most other urban slang:
* Predictable because any essential concept that has crept into the popular culture is dangerous to the essence-draining “modern epoch” and hence must be obfuscated in response.
* Interesting in that it points to social control structures that should be further investigated for potential neutralization.
This is, essentially, the manifestation of the process of parasitic castration leading Man to eusociality.
See also:
The Emergence of Parasity From Heterosity Demonstrated
Civilization Takedown: Obsoleting the Campsite
Superman As Heliocentric Individual