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The Red Riding Trilogy: the utility of redemption, Part 2 The period covered by Red Riding - 1974 to 1983 - came as the classical Marxist cycle, with its prostitution of trade union activism for class-warfare, lost all traction and before the “cultural” cycle, with its bourgeois values of hyper-individualism, radical egalitarianism and anti-discrimination, gained any. We plainly see that working-class life has completely lost its motor. A strong sense of moral hiatus is present. We are invited to supply meanings, and that is what I am doing in these essays. I’ll pick up where we left off with Part 1 and get straight to the point. That’s my point, of course. Whatever the point that Tony Grisoni and, before him, David Peace intended to make – and they are wellnigh certain to be left-leaning so it wasn’t mine, I’m sure - the one that comes barrelling out of the TV screen and knocks you sideways is the power and meaning of a general and secular redemption. In the world of Red Riding, in which innocence is so finally and absolutely betrayed, the redeeming agent is simple fidelity to that innocence. Thus the corrupt but guilt-tortured Maurice Jobson finds redemption in confessing to the child-like Michael Myshkin (David Mays), a Stefan Kiszko figure whom he had framed eight years earlier for the abduction, rape and murder of three young girls . The gluttonous and seedy John Piggott, the very model of the failed male, finds his redemption in the defining moment of the whole six hours of Red Riding … the moment when he recovers the missing child Hazel Atkins alive from some old underground workings. These workings connect to a pigeon loft owned by the now very late Martin Laws. The wordless, slow-motion emergence of Piggott, with Innocence in his arms, from darkness into a space whitened with rising pigeon feathers and shot through with sunlight is beyond poetic. It has all the luminancy of archetype. I think it deserves a closer look. From any perspective, the scene in the pigeon loft functions as archetype only if the child is our child, and John Piggott’s fidelity to her is ours, and the redemption he receives from it is ours also. In other words, we are talking here about a fidelity to the collective essential self, and we are talking about a life lived in a way that redeems us as products of a flawed age … redeems us as men living unserious lives filled with petty freedoms and petty pleasures. What that would mean, I think, is a masculine reality - an old one, probably - which neither considers itself nor demands the consideration of others, but looks to be just and true. You think I’m interpolating, perhaps, rather than interpreting? Well, consider what power would be left to the scene if Piggott was bearing an Asian or black child towards the light, and if ”diversity” has been parachuted into this Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties for the cast to “embrace” and “celebrate”. The archetypal excludes such thoughts. They are meretricious and insignificant. If the director of Red Riding 1983, the Indian-German Anand Tucker, saw fit to follow this white man’s script, then I can interpret it as such as well. I’ve seen it claimed on CiF threads that Red Riding’s primary subject matter is the futurelessness of seventies life in West Yorkshire mining communities and even the Thatcherite destruction of working class community in the decade that followed – always a favourite with Guardianistas. Perhaps that was what Peace and Grisoni intended, I don’t know. What I do know is that their end product works in the manner I have described, and a liberalistic reading reduces the storyline and takes away its mythic power. It doesn’t parse the intrinsics, which in this case are (a) gross societal decay in which (b) progenerative evil from a source of trust, a priest, brutalises (c) innocence which, finally, is delivered to the light by (d) one who has found it in himself to stand up, and will lie down no more. Moreover, his actions bring (e) a redemption to, we must believe, more than him alone. Now, anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with our myths will recognise in this the outlines of a very old story which appears at all times and in all places. Its root, in my ungodly opinion, is the duality of male purpose. This is all rather obvious. But what I mean by it is that the male of the species is evolved to look beyond his narrow reproductive interests to the collective interest of protection and resource acquisition. This affords the female the luxury of concentrating on her narrow reproductive interests - a division of labour which clearly offers substantial fitness gains. Male mate-fitness, therefore, involves proofs of fidelity – the reason women are fixated on being loved - and proofs of strength – the reason they select for status. To be male, then, includes a striving to become something greater than one is … to pursue the life of glory and the will to power. And since men’s ideas make the world, our myths and philosophies - for example, palingenetic nationalism, Christianity, liberalism – reflect that. However, the teleological model of thought takes us unerringly away from familial bonds, kinship bonds, ethnic bonds and all that belongs to the life that is ... the beautiful life, the life of the real, and the only life we have. It might not have entirely set out to do so. Palingenetic nationalism is intended to advance racial interests, religions to prefer adaptive behaviour, liberalism to free the many from the power of the few – all of them arguably existential purposes. But there is always some convoluted abstraction at the end of it, some rumour of a more masterful or sinless or fully human condition. It might be the salvation of Christianity, or the unfettered will of classical liberalism, or the New Soviet Man of Marxism-Leninism ... It makes no difference which. As a matter of course, the teleological impulse will weigh the life of the real and find it wanting. It will turn away and follow the upland path to a hyper-reality, and it will do it as singularly as its nature dictates. By way of illustration … I read a book on the Stoics all of thirty-five years ago. I can’t recall the title now, or the author. But for some reason I never forgot a reference to a single passage from The Iliad: the leave-taking of Hector from Andromache and their infant son, Astyanax. Here is that passage:-
Seeking to identify the formative strands of Stoic thought, my forgotten book author took this picture of a princely father joyously dandling his son in the moment of his departure for war as the very essence of Stoicism – not a vision of something dry and ascetic as we are apt to see it, but of a fortitude ascendant over and, in some critical way, expanded by familial life and love. As a mere ascetic, you see, the Stoic would have surmounted little, and his journey to sagehood and moral and intellectual perfection would be one of less value. To himself. Whether there were ever morally and intellectually perfect sages, supermen, New Men or saved dead people it seems unkind to enquire. But we may surely ask whether, under any of the teleological models, our ethnic interests have been advanced and our adaptive behaviours preferred. They plainly aren’t today under the “freedom train” of neoliberalism + Marxism. Wasn’t the summit of freedom in the West in 1861? It seems to me to have been downhill ever since. As for the masculine life of glory, the authoritarian individualism which appeals so strongly to certain New Right thinkers … From the Little Iliad:-
Part 3, the final part, will follow shortly. Comments:2
Posted by Friedrich Braun on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:22 | # April 06, 2009 By Patrick J. Buchanan On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler’s panzers smashed into Poland. Two days later, an anguished Neville Chamberlain declared war, the most awful war in all of history. Was the war inevitable? No. No war is inevitable until it has begun. Was it a necessary war? Hearken to Churchill: “One day, President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world ... .” But if the war need not have happened, what caused it? Let us go back to Munich. On Sept. 30, 1938, at Munich, Chamberlain signed away the Sudetenland rather than fight to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule imposed upon them at the Paris peace conference in violation of Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Why did Britain not fight? Because Britain had no alliance with Prague and Chamberlain did not “give two hoots” who ruled the Sudetenland. Also, Britain had no draft, no divisions to send to France, no Spitfires, no support from America or her dominions, no ally save France, who had been told that, if war came, the United States would not deliver the planes France had purchased. U.S. neutrality laws forbade it. In his meetings with Chamberlain, Hitler had warned that Poland and Hungary would also be entering claims for ancestral lands ceded to the Czechs at Paris in 1919. Thus, after Munich, Warsaw had seized coal-rich Teschen, which held tens of thousands of Poles. Hungary, in the “Vienna Award” of Nov. 2, 1938, got back lands in Slovakia and Ruthenia where Hungarians were the majority and Budapest had ruled before 1919. Neither Britain nor France resisted these border revisions. Came then March 1939, when Czechoslovakia began to crumble. On March 10, to crush a Slovakian push for independence, Czech President Emil Hacha ousted Slovak Prime Minister Father Tiso, occupied Bratislava and installed a pro-Prague regime. On March 11, Tiso fled to Vienna and appealed to Berlin. On March 13, Tiso met Hitler, who told him that if he did not declare independence immediately, Germany would not interfere with Hungary’s re-annexation of Slovakia. Budapest was moving troops to the border. On March 14, Slovakia declared independence. Ruthenia followed, dissolving what was left of Czechoslovakia. Adm. Horthy, told by Hitler he could re-annex Ruthenia but must keep his hands off Slovakia, occupied Ruthenia. Hacha now asked to meet with Hitler to get the same guarantee of independence Slovakia had gotten. But Hitler bullied Hacha into making the Czech remnant a protectorate of Germany. Thus, six months after Munich, the Germans of Czechoslovakia were where they wished to be, under German rule. The Poles were under Polish rule. The Hungarians were under Hungarian rule. And the Slovaks were under Slovak rule in their new nation. But 500,000 Ruthenians were back under Budapest, and 7 million Czechs were back under German rule—this time Berlin, not Vienna. Ethnonationalism had torn Czechoslovakia apart as it had the parent Hapsburg Empire. Yet, no vital British interest was imperiled. And though Hitler had used brutal Bismarckian diplomacy, not force, Chamberlain was humiliated. The altarpiece of his career, the Munich accord, was now an object of mockery. Made a fool of by Hitler, baited by his backbenchers, goaded by Lord Halifax, facing a vote of no confidence, on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain made the greatest blunder in British diplomatic history. He handed an unsolicited war guarantee to the Polish colonels who had just bitten off a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Lunacy, raged Lloyd George, who was echoed by British leaders and almost every historian since. With the British Empire behind it, Warsaw now refused even to discuss a return of Danzig, the Baltic town, 95 percent German, which even Chamberlain thought should be returned. Hitler did not want a war with Poland. Had he wanted war, he would have demanded the return of the entire Polish Corridor taken from Germany in 1919. He wanted Danzig back and Poland as an ally in his anti-Comintern Pact. Nor did he want war with a Britain he admired and always saw as a natural ally. Nor did he want war with France, or he would have demanded the return of Alsace. But Hitler was out on a limb with Danzig and could not crawl back. Repeatedly, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. Repeatedly, the Poles rebuffed him. Seeing the Allies courting Josef Stalin, Hitler decided to cut his own deal with the detested Bolsheviks and settle the Polish issue by force. Though Britain had no plans to aid Poland, no intention of aiding Poland and would do nothing to aid Poland—Churchill would cede half that nation to Stalin and the other half to Stalin’s stooges—Britain declared war for Poland. The most awful war in all of history followed, which would bankrupt Britain, bring down her empire and bring Stalin’s Red Army into Prague, Berlin and Vienna. But Hitler was dead and Germany in ashes. Cost: 50 million lives. “But ‘twas a famous victory.” COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts. 3
Posted by Friedrich Braun on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:30 | #
Buchanan keeps saying that again and again even though Hacha’s daughter is quoted as saying that her father was at all times well treated and no undue pressure was put on him when he met Hitler. The artificial state of Czechoslovakia collapsed because Czechs and Slovaks didn’t get along. Period. See David Leslie Hoggan, author of The Forced War and other works, was born in Portland, Oregon, on March 23, 1923. After study at Reed College in Portland, he went to Harvard University, where in 1948 he earned a Ph.D. in history for his dissertation on German-Polish relations in 1938-1939. http://www.revisionists.com/revisionists/hoggan.html http://www.torrentreactor.net/torrents/2657074/Hoggan-Forced-War(revisionist-origins-of-WW2)(1989) 4
Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:56 | # The teleological model implies that the being which survives shall preserve its personal identity and be connected by conscious memory with the previous life. Unless the individual’s identity is preserved, a future existence is, relatively, of little interest. With the possible exception of Judaism, it appears to be a universal tenet. 5
Posted by SOCIAL UNREST RISING-RACIAL TENSIONS FLARING on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:06 | # Good report on how the current economic crisis is causing racial tensions to flare up; quote: 6
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:38 | # Desmond, The teleological model does not deliver the butterfly, so there is no backward glance at the caterpillar. Man doesn’t happen to be a caterpillar anyway, and cannot become a butterfly. Teleology effortlessly escapes its natural bounds, very like altruism and for substantially the same reason. I am toying with the idea that the religious impulse may have evolved among Out of Africa peoples as a strategy to resolve this conflict between being and becoming. As far as I am aware, nobody else is working on that. But you are apparently in possession of a hard drive-full of literature that can dispute any statement. Do you have any thoughts on that idea? 7
Posted by exPF on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:18 | # GW, I’m trying to grasp your division of life and philosophy into ontology and teleology; its a fascinating framework.
Do you include all human striving in the “teleological model of thought”? Some of our impulses, such as - to leave home after adolescence, to want social status (hence, careerism), to want to be like someone great (i.e. role models) - seem to be deeply ingrained and to exist almost prior to philosophical thought. Almost, I say, because I can’t be sure. It seems you think someone being focused on ‘accomplishment’ would almost necessarily betray or stray from that which he is in essence, his kinship network, etc.? I feel that the survival of the kinship network is definitely dependent on the young man acquiring these skills that come from “teleology” - if I have understood your use of that word properly. So a young man “striving” to become something better, in the end undoubtedly produces a better man (well, assuming he has a good model of reality, which I will get into later on in the comment). Returning to the quote again…
If “striving” and the attempt to attain the perfection of manly character through trials and rites of passage, is seen to be included under the teleological model of thought - then it appears to me that the teleological model offers a culmination of man’s individual existence. Becoming a man - which is impossible without the bare bones “teleology” I describe above - multiplies life’s richness for the person and for society by fostering a strong human being where before was a child and thus, in some sense a dependent person. How do you divide this from teleology? Or square it with the fact that a desire for teleology is probably, (and I think definitely) part of our ontology i.e. our being? Here is my theory: Dawkin’s describes many examples of evolutionary arms races. Marxism, liberalism, and theistic religions all posit a model of reality (any ism or philosophy would probably inevitably posit a model of reality). According to this model, some things are good, some bad. Humans engage in cultural or memetic “arms races” whenever a socially accepted model of reality posits an absolute good somewhere - that is to say, men strive to find the “pot of gold at the end of the philosopher’s rainbow”, which may or may not even be there. You said it very elegantly this way:
This cultural arms race - fought for status and because men genuinely believe in what memes are promulgated and believed in by others - has different results depending on what system uses it. You mentioned the priest and nun, pursuing salvation and thus given an elevated social status (in olden times) as a result of their dedication to Jesus Christ’s “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”. There are surely analog examples in Marxism, liberalism (running a fashionable salon out of London and discussing the necessity of intervention in Bosnia would be an example of the liberalist “pot of gold” - an example taken from Jonathan Bowden’s Apocalypse TV, which I shall shortly write a review of for this website). There is even an analog in Nazism and some interpretations of Nietzscheism - the coldly loyal fearless martial superman, which Ernst Jünger apparently tried to live, as many others no doubt also did. I think that heroism and valor can also be used to make “pots of gold”- the two-edgedness of this way of thinking, sometimes tending to hypochrisy and a noble lie, is mentioned in Horace: “sweet and seemly it is to die for one’s country.” As somebody once said about that: no its definitely not! (especially when one’s “country” is a massive empire waging wars of conquest - in this case group survival could barely be said to hinge on military victory - so the later roman legions couldn’t claim the same heroism as for example today’s Iraqi militants can - they are at least fighting for the freedom and existence of their peoples;). I think the continued refinement of the model of the world behind the “-isms” - through science, as always - is bringing about a situation where the teleology inherent in these systems of thought tends to not place “pots of gold at the end of rainbows” which are not there. In other words, the “goods” these systems posit are adaptive and worth striving for - they do not end in a false oasis of perfectibility. Just to talk for a sec about the origins of philosophies and their roots in individual’s experience of reality - no less than two of the philosphies we discussed we’re sprung from the imaginations of individual jews, essentially “rebelling against the world through mentation” as much as they could be said to be living in it. Giving talks, eating dinner and discussing things - or Marx feverishly writing and sending letters in the name of his cause: one cannot claim that these guys grabbed life by the roots and lived it wildly and to the fullest. Its my contention that they lived the same life that most pure intellectuals live: a squeemish, anemic life on the run from risk and challenges that demand something deeper than neocortex thinking. The strains of thought we hold dear are sprung from a different spring - scientists making statements about the organization of animal life which then at some point reach our “clade” by imputation first, then observation. And, as a second component, the efforts of nationalists to defend, describe and uphold an organic European society which, for all its failings, definitely did and does exist. This keeps us more firmly grounded in the real than Marx with his “material forces of production” or the divine revelations, or liberals whose arguments tend to be based on their own squeemish sensibilities. I think you being an advocate of this ideology in some way confirms the assertion also. You knew ‘real life’ before you knew the grandeur of philosophical theories (if I understand the bio correctly). Well, how much of philosophy is driven by alienated precocious youth, tirelessly mentating from the position of exile it faces as a result of high intelligence, doggedly determined to find the “center of the world” and have their “social status deficit” at once cleared by pointing the way to the true “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”? We know to what extent words and theories can seduce, especially those whose experience of reality has been weak. 8
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:52 | # GW: “The teleological model does not deliver the butterfly,” That depends on how high one sets the bar, what the pinnacle is defined as, how far one is prepared to carry one’s skepticism, and to what degree one is willing to contrain means employed. “...so there is no backward glance at the caterpillar.” Sure there is. One would be hard pressed to deny oneself the pleasure of savoring the contrast between our evolutionary precedessors and our more ‘primitive’ human ‘others’. Pathos of distance. “Man doesn’t happen to be a caterpillar anyway, and cannot become a butterfly.” Yet Man has no static being. Any ontological conception of Man, that seeks to ground him in the permanance of his being, and therefore coax out of him appreciation for his being, on the grounds of its permanence, is a noble lie. The universe may not give a damn about what Man may flatter himself to think is a purposeful process of ever improvement, but at least a teleological noble lie, that vests meaning in becoming, and Man as but one link in the chain of that ennobling becoming, takes into account becoming - which is the true state of matter as it progresses through time. “Teleology effortlessly escapes its natural bounds, very like altruism and for substantially the same reason.” What natural bounds? The natural bounds that being places on it? Yet there is no being, only becoming. And if one strives to preserve being isn’t one following a teleology that affirms the value of preserving being, i.e., striving for something of higher value? “...the religious impulse may have evolved among Out of Africa peoples as a strategy to resolve this conflict between being and becoming.” faith gene = slot to insert memes that enhance the meaningfullness of being, i.e., enables the belief of the noble lie of being, as opposed to becoming (the truth) 9
Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:59 | # A disputatious hard drive; that would be cool. Possibly you might start with Sir Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture.
It appears consistent with, for example, the definition of the “soul” in Norse paganism.
Of course then you’re left with the origin of dreams, “the God of the Gaps”.
Which is? 10
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:39 | # I’ll attempt to crack this most hardy of walnuts: Our perception of being has to do with the evolved acuity, or lack thereof, of our senses. The more mundane senses (e.g., sight) perceive movement of ‘objects’, yet what is actually being perceived is the agglomeration of molecules, and the disbanding molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles, and the energy that forms these sub-atomic particles. So the ‘object’, as we perceive it with our more mundane senses, is an illusion of sorts. It is only our neo-cortex, a powerful tool that essentially upgrades our mundane senses, that allows us to look beyond, to see behind, to unmask ‘objects’, and indeed ‘see’ beyond the scope of our own lives and the life of our species. The more primitive emotional responses, from which we derive meaning, how can these emotions be again attached to a ‘being’ for which they evolved to give meaning, when the later neo-cortical intellect gives the lie to that ‘being’? What is to be done when the will to truth defeats the will to be? Lobotomy or faith gene: take your pick. 11
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:57 | # PF,
It isn’t striving per se. But one can build one’s house or travel the yellow-brick road. The road is always an intellectual abstraction. The striving of the male for status, on the other hand, is natural. I’m interested in the bifurcation of male reproductive fitness only because I see it as the place where the abstractions are ultimately sourced. Male reproductive fitness itself is patently an existential issue. Does Dawkins say that “Marxism, liberalism, and theistic religions all posit a model of reality”. That depends upon a rather loose and intellectually undisciplined interpretation of what “reality” is, and how and by what it is modelled. Homo sapiens models reality (never “knows” it, of course) from impressions, or data, gained from the inner and outer workings of his mental systems, chief among which are the muscular control systems, the emotional system and the mental system. The languages used by these three are sensation, feeling and associative thought. Reality is modelled, or approximated, out of these. All teleological abstractions, including Marxism, liberalism, and theistic religions, posit a version of human purpose, and nothing else. In my far distant life as a third-rate copywriter and first-rate petrol-head, I went to Wandsworth library one day and borrowed Das Kapital, just to see what all the fuss was about. I discovered in no time that the entire, very boorish tome was an attempt to twist the world to fit a political programme. The old bastard hadn’t “modelled reality”. He hadn’t built a philosophical model from the ground - the “real” ground - up. Have a look at the theory of commodity fetishism. You’ll see what I mean. One thing I learned from JWH is that first principles are deeper in the foundations than we think, and it is extremely difficult to construct philosophy on them. None of the teleologies can be extrapolated from EGI, which he himself acknowledges.
The problem is not just that teleological systems send us after abstractions, but we are not the men the abstractionists suppose. Their model of Man is flawed, most particularly with regard to the nature of consciousness and thinking about the self, about “I”. Obviously, this is much less of a problem for nationalist thought than for those who place all emphasis on the unfettering of the will. But it still has to be taken into account. One still has to work from as accurate a model as possible.
Obviously, some teleological systems offer more half-baked rewards at journey’s end than others. But “rebirth” is already off with the millenarian birds, and that’s well before the adlerian adjective is appended. 12
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:30 | # CC, Re: caterpillars and butterflies, I meant that radical transformation - for example the making of Homo sovieticus or the saved Christian - doesn’t exist. I didn’t mean that changes in people’s lives are impossible.
Alas, the true state of matter as it progresses through time is entropy. Everything falls apart all the time. Of course, some things fall apart quicker than others. I had a Mercedes E320 once. It rusted, and I was told that it was one of thousands produced in Mercedes’ South African factory that had gone the same way! Entropy loves Africa, though I don’t believe Mercedes feel the same way. Seriously though, it is important to distinguish existential issues from dreams and fantasies. Language has a way of intoxicating, and all this talk of ennobling might tend in that direction. Every writer needs to be on guard for it. To that same end, I will have to set strict conditions for “redemption” in the third of the Red Riding posts.
The natural bounds of striving, as I explained to PF, are at the point where human purpose ceases to be related to the stuff of existence. Obviously, people strive in life for existential reasons.
Philosophically, these are the wrong way around, CC. Analytic <> Idealist; being <> becoming; experience <> thought; truth <> beauty, and so on.
These are sympatico, if not the same thing. 13
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:40 | # Desmond, I haven’t got into the idea in any depth yet. What attracted me to it was the problem of matching the vast edifice of religious feeling one encounters Out of Africa to the smallish raisons d’etre provided for it by evolutionists (who plainly do not include Sir Edward Burnett Tylor).
The allure of personality inflation. 14
Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:27 | # GW,
Not sure what you mean, however, my guess was the tendency to universalism. If I may, I must disagree with your lumping together of ‘Marxism, liberalism, and theistic religions’. Marxism and liberalism (or more appropriately neoliberalism) are ethnic strategies designed to conduct political warfare. IMO religion is less a desire for purpose, than a means to combat fear, at least in its very primitive sense. Good luck with your project. 15
Posted by Wandrin on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:45 | #
Made me think. For most early human tribes religion was either ancestor worship or a morph from that to polytheism - supernatural protection from your supernatural extended family - a means to combat fear. Then there’s the one God - creator not ancestor - all powerful and greater than all the other Gods of all the other tribes. For a superstitious ethnic group that could provide a pretty potent aid in the conduct of actual warfare. 16
Posted by exPF on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:48 | # First off, who is JWH? GW wrote:
Bifurcation into what? Striving to be better than one is .. I get that. Whats the other pathway? You’ve called liberalism a teleological model of thought. You’ve said that male striving is somehow teleological, or representative of the teleological drive. Here is a pertinent quote:
As an aside, the literary shorthand you are allowing yourself here is definitely preventing me from understanding you. There are multiple instances in the last few comments by yourself and CaptainChaos where the use of metaphorical or literary shorthand makes unclear what you guys precisely mean. “butterflies and caterpillars” - one more thing where I have to guess what you guys mean. Maybe we could concretize the debate by using examples. Is it ‘natural’ for a man to want to go to college, to secure a career for himself? That would fit under the rubric of ‘striving’. If, when at college, a heterodox professor takes a risque stance in his department, and this student (now a grad student) stands up as a supporter of liberalist dogma - is that not natural? What if similar considerations (status, group membership, careerism, notions of right and wrong) drive him to make both decisions (i.e. both to enter college and defend liberalism)? Where is the dividing line between ‘natural teleology’ or ‘natural becoming’ and ‘theoretical teleology’ i.e. liberalism, Marxism, etc. etc.? In this case, you and I GW may have a semantic different of opinion on how to articulate this. My version depends on conflicting models of reality and the goods and bads they posit.
I think that any assertion about life is a model of reality. It could be completely wrong, totally and completely the inverse of the truth - it would still be a model. It could be undertaken in bad faith, open to the self-serving fallacies of it’s creators, yet it would still be a model.
Yes, but how do humans build a model of reality on a historical time scale? Or how do humans build a model of reality encompassing thousands or millions of unknown persons? Most of our basic reality models - our thinking about how to walk, how to eat food, how to drive cars, how to go to work in the morning - are not open to debate, being long established. Most of our more advanced models - dealing with the progression of historical epoches, trends in society, the interactions of thousands and now billions of people - these models are extremely putative and experimental. Notice that each of the systems we discuss (Marxism, liberalism, Christian theology) attempts an understanding of historical, and in the case of Xtianity, cosmological time, while encompassing the lives of millions and eventually hundreds of millions and trillions of human perspectives. We haven’t evolved to utilize these models as part of our survival mechanism, so evolution hasn’t refined our ability to create or evaluate them, and one is at the mercy of the right trail of the bell curve, who can easily have distorted perspectives, or be self-serving and unserious (Marx in my opinion was all of these).
We’re in semantic disagreement here. It seems to me that they posit a model of reality, including a vision of good and bad. What they denote as bad, their followers avoid; what they denote as good, their followers strive toward. Purpose seems to be the result of this model of reality. For example, once you accept the model of reality that an all-knowing God reigns over us all, its only natural to obey His will. Notice how each of these posit and frame good and bad ends which refer to human experience: they each have a eutopia and a distopia. Christianity has demons of hell, and the beauty of heaven. Marxism has capitalist oppression and socialist triumph. Liberalism has the hell of conflict, resurgent naziism and “the new dark ages” (represented for them by people like us), and the one-world Lennonist vision of universal love and consumer capitalism. Insofar as one accepts their utopia and fears their distopia, one could said to have accepted their model as plausible. It is only then - after some considerable philosophical conversion has taken place - that the teleological ends come into consideration, i.e. become “purpose” for the lemmings and followers and those who emerge pre-programmed by the hive mind. But I think that the same psychological factors (status, careerism, self-protection) are driving both positive male becoming (what CaptainChaos seems eager to defend) and the striving towards a fallacious abstraction (Homo sovieticus, liberal ‘kosherness’, Christian salvation). If the motivation to pursue both of these things springs from the same psychology, isn’t it easier to say that the flawed model of reality is responsible for misplacing the goal of human striving?
Right. I see the same tendency in Freud - they seem to lack the spirit of science. His philosophical model was still a model, just like Freud’s psychoanalytical theories were still psychological theories.
Good point, I agree wholeheartedly.
“Rebirth” is a metaphor for a man/person/thing having undergone such significant change that one could be said to be “born again”. I think that the differences between the practical results of liberalist thinking and that of palingenetic nationalism, can produce such vastly different results in people - raise one child under Pomo-liberal principles, another under strict nationalist principles - the differences can in fact be quite extreme. For this reason I see the use of the term “rebirth” or “renaissance” to be applicable after times of moral/spiritual renewal. 17
Posted by Svigor on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:41 | #
Just read a bit of this as I’ve been holding off reading these RR threads and others until I have time to do them justice, but I wonder if you have anything to say about Blade Runner? Magnificent film IMHO. Never seen a film that quite transports me the way BR does. 18
Posted by Svigor on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:01 | #
I agree. While religion may have sprung from dreams, visions, etc., the gods sprang from the sun, the weather, the dark, the seasons, birth, death, etc. 19
Posted by exPF on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:48 | # Reply to his troll-crushing Majesty, the fearless Captain Chaos!
I disagree with this opposition of being and becoming. Becoming is predicated in being (that means, absent the fancy language, that “being” is a thing which already includes “becoming”). When you have properly described or apprehended the “the essence” of something, you will understand the ways in which it can undergo change; these ways constitute qualities or characteristics of its being. As an illustration of this, you mentioned molecules composing objects and sub-atomic particles The same is true for man, his ‘being’ sets concrete limits on his ‘becoming’: being defines becoming.
Disagree. You are still reading this, Captain Chaos, right? Then you still are the same man you were when posting your comment, at least in terms of human time frames and pattern recognition upon which our lives are based - i.e. within our relative framework. Presumably you are the same man you were two years ago, with some changes to your body’s molecular composition and neural pathways. When I say the “same man” it doesn’t mean every molecule in your body is identical to the ones you ‘were’ at that time. It means that, in our terms of pattern recognition, you are fundamentally the same assemblage of molecules, even if turnover has changed 25% of these molecules in the last two years. You have genetic structures which have built biological structures - these biological structures continue to assemble and re-assemble and repair the same structures in your body again and again - each time with different molecules from the food you eat and air you breathe. You are constantly rebuilding yourself with food, like all of us. This means you have a slow molecular rate of change during your lifetime - after your lifetime your rate of molecular change will speed up dramatically, i.e. after decomposition. But as an organism whose existence on Earth is a fact of life - and hopefully will remain so for much, much longer - your life is, in terms of human observation, static. This term is never used in an absolute sense and the absence of that absolute usage can’t be cited as evidence of the fact that we are in perpetual flux - because the essence of our “sameness” (i.e. what we perceive as static being) is based on a certain, imperceptibly small rate of change which characterizes human organisms during their lifespan. As long as that change does not cross a certain threshold, our pattern recognition mechanisms register the object as “same”- as long as you don’t morph into Harvy Weinstein, or an 80’s drag queen, you are still CaptainChaos even if your collagen molecules have been refreshed with amino acids from the asparagus and eggs you ate yesterday - as long as the same genetic structures are commanding the assemblage of molecules into new biological structures, you remain the same “person” in our human terms. So you are static and will be for many decades hence.
Permanence of human being? I don’t get it. An ontological conception of man wouldn’t, to my mind, need to seek to coax out of man an “appreciation for his being on the ground of its permanence”. It would simply need to state in true terms what he is and is not, and man is then free to live with the understanding of what he truly is. As an example of this, my “What is always with us?” post was an attempt to assert that human beings are, viewed across evolutionary time, “always” in the presence of family - the conclusion from this is that it is in our nature to exist in the presence of family. Family is thus a part of human ontology - subtract it, and the results are always (to my mind), sub-par. I wrote that post as a unique philosophical observation because it appeared to me that philosophical literature didn’t recognize the importance of the family in human endeavors - so it strikes me as important that our philosophy compensate for this complacency of pre-MR philosophy.
“Becoming is the true state of matter as it progresses through time” - There is no true or false state of matter as it progresses through time. What is important is the aspect matter displays to us (the pattern recognizers) in the time-frame of our lives. A human is but a “chemical reaction” which the germline precedes and follows - but so is a planet and a galaxy (without the germline). What one recognizes as a thing, and where one sets the boundaries of change and transition between things (thus, where one defines “being” and where one defines “becoming”) are dependent on the time-scale of the viewer/pattern-recognizer. A pattern recognizer with a time-scale based in geological time or cosmological time might not even perceive the existence of human beings as a “thing”, but rather as the transition between the RNA molecule of RNA World and the artificial intelligence robots who may arise out of our invention and take over the planet for themselves. (far-fetched, I know). To the eye of this cosmological pattern recognizer, he might need science (the study of cause and effect) to even perceive the existence of human beings within that chain of causation, so quickly would it happen for him. So our entire species’ “being” was for him a facet of RNA molecules and A.I.robots’ “becoming” because that is where he sets those boundaries. The boundaries of being vs. becoming are arbitarily set by the perspective of the viewer.
The object isn’t an illusion but a pattern we recognize. If we can ascertain through science the existence of more, deeper layers beneath the patterns we observe, comprising them, and thus discover an ever deeper and deeper-reaching rabbit hole of “layers of being” - that doesn’t invalidate the fact of the pattern itself, it merely invalidates the essentialist interpretation of that pattern, i.e. the presumption that we had fully described all essential features of that pattern in the description of its outermost face, i.e. that it was only what we said it was. In fact, it was more complex. The oxygen cloud contained quarks, bosons and god knows what else. So the horizon of perfect knowledge is pushed back by new layers of complexity being discovered- it doesn’t invalidate the recognition of previous layers.
Sorry man, but I can’t agree with any of this. We don’t derive ‘meaning’ from primitive emotional responses - thats an overstatement. We may derive ‘deep motivation’ from them, but “meaning” constitutes a lot more than just deep motivation, it would even include the context in which our motivations spring up- thus our map of the world, which isn’t based on emotions as much as other systems of thought. Emotions didn’t evolve to ‘give meaning’. They evolved as motivational triggers which aid in survival. Almost every structure in the nervous system could be said to contribute to our construction of “meaning”. That is too all-inclusive a term to be attributed to certain nervous system functions exclusively. The neo-cortical intellect also doesn’t give the lie to ‘being’. Our entire neurophysiology and neuroanatomy are part of our ontology - i.e. that which we are, i.e. our being. So for one part of our brain to “refute or prove false” our very ontology is somewhat contradictory. Different parts of the brain may have conflicting mental modules, or conflicting drives, or conflicting purposes, or whatever. There is a good deal of conflict that can happen within the same human nervous system - but none of it is, to my mind, a conflict with the brain’s own ontology.
That offends my sensibility, lol. So you’ve reached some back-of-the-napkin 20
Posted by Lurker on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:50 | # exPF - JWH is/was ‘JW Holliday’, AKA ‘Michael Rienzi’, used to post and comment here. Has commented since but under other names, I think some people play ‘spot the JWH comments’. Not active recently. Set up own blog Western Biopolitics but thats no longer readable - at least not by the likes of me. 21
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:28 | # Desmond,
A better answer, along the lines of my somewhat flip previous reply, would be “intellectual vanity”, I guess. However, to be serious (it was late and I wasn’t in a very serious frame of mind last night!), there is some internal consistency between teleology and altruism. Highly intelligent people who do not distinguish between real and unreal goals are not much different from highly intelligent people who do not distinguish between the in- and out-group. The common factor is that thought is distant from the object, and that tends the thinker to abstraction. This is a structural problem of thought itself, and it has been recognised in various ways since the dawn of Western philosophy. But, of course, there’s also that personality issue. These people take pleasure in their abstractions.
Yes, the Jewish roots of both Marxisms and some strands in continental liberalism are what they are. I do think it’s a bit drastic, though, to claim the entire liberal ouevre for Jewry. Leave us something to cover the last three hundred and fifty years of philosophical adumbrations. I will add one other thing. The decay of occidental thought, art and religion from the second half of the 19th century onward opened the way for the war-products of the fertile and aggressive Jewish intellect. The takeover of liberalism and, with it, so many of our points of reference in life generally, is very near complete now. It seems to me that a fight-back predicated on “the masculine life of glory” simply cannot gain traction in the scientific age. A fictive nationalist goal will not replace a fictive liberal one. The revolution requires that reality be placed opposite fiction. This is a strategic necessity. It remains to be intellectualised into a strategic possibility. 22
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:04 | # Wandrin, As religious antecedents, fear, revenge, explanations for real-world phenomena, and so on are all very well, but they are for stupid people and, possibly, peoples. There are two more compelling explanations for “why God”. One is advancement of adaptive behaviours and the other is the, from an evolutionary perspective, interestingly free-floating and rather subtle idea of experiencing the real by dying to an unreal self in an unreal world. The latter we can dismiss in the West because Christianity has virtually nothing but fragments of texts relating to it, and only a few secluded monks and other profound people find their way to it. For the rest it’s adaptive behaviours all the way - or was once. However, I can’t quite balance the overwhelming significance of religion to its believers with the making of adaptive choices. I think there may be more to be said about its genesis, and my idea that faith may be an evolutionary response to the harmful disjuncture of “being” and “becoming” is just a shot in the dark. I’ll probably look at it properly some time. 23
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:24 | # Svi, Bladerunner, Eyes Wide Shut and, for what it says about art, the dated and forgotten 1948 British ballet classic, The Red Shoes, have all tempted me to do a piece for MR (Chinatown is the only one I’ve written about thusfar). Maybe I’ll do some film stuff sometime if I run out of other things to get me thinking. ‘Course, you could always ... 24
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:03 | # PF to CC:-
Genetically, becoming is predicated in being, yes. But philosophically, becoming is a transubstantive state brought into being itself at the expense of that which went before. One dies to the old to be reborn into the new. Such a movement requires a negative reading of what we truly are, for peoples are not catterpillars soon to become butterflies. It’s all a cruel hoax. Thus I wrote that “the teleological model of thought takes us unerringly away from familial bonds, kinship bonds, ethnic bonds and all that belongs to the life that is ... the beautiful life, the life of the real, and the only life we have.”
Yes, good. But I hold this to be a redemptive understanding, and a return, well within “the natural bounds of striving”. The object isn’t an illusion but a pattern we recognize. Correct, the “thing that is” is not illusory. But we cannot know it in its fullness. This is a “design weakness” in the modelling method of Homo sapiens, not in the physical world. But there is also a second issue, which is the quality of waking consciousness. I’ve tried to draw attention to this many times, and I’ll see if I can fit it into the final RR posting. 25
Posted by Wandrin on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:04 | # GW
My point was a much simpler one, sparked by Desmond’s comment:
I wasn’t really commenting on whether religion was spawned by fear or not. I don’t have a clear view on that. It just occurred to me when reading Desmond’s comment that mono-theistic belief in a sea of poly-theists could give an advantage in war. if you persuade your tribe that there is one God who is stronger than the Gods of all the surrounding poly-theist tribes and then you further persuade them that your tribe is the chosen tribe of that God then the psychological effect would be similar to that given by elite military units. Belief in eliteness makes people fight harder. So it’s possible to see judaism specifically, if not religion as a whole, as “an ethnic strategy designed to conduct political warfare”. Looking at it that way then you could make a case for both islam and Nazism being mirrored reactions to judaism. jewish ethno-nationalism, underpinned by religion, has an advantage in emotional strength. If you want to build an ethno-nationalism that can compete with the jewish version then giving it a mystical underpinning helps to even things out. The problem with this is if a tribe or nation copies the mystical ethno-nationalism of jews then they end up being as big a threat to everyone else as jews are. This may be obvious to people who have thought about these things longer but it only struck me while reading. An offshoot of this way of thinking could be seeing Jesus as a liberal rebel against iron age jewish Nazis - though that’s not very helpful from a nationalist point of view.
I have no clear view of this but I recall real life situations where terror was kept under control by praying and terror is very unhelpful in life-threatening situations. So a terrified ancient human hunting some gigantic beast might have been helped by their belief in an ancestral spirit watching over them. It may just be a psychological trick but it’s not stupid if it keeps you alive. 26
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:28 | # exPF: “There is a good deal of conflict that can happen within the same human nervous system - but none of it is, to my mind, a conflict with the brain’s own ontology.” Proposition: The emotional system of the brain, which gives meaning to life, evolved in such a way that it attaches the most satisfactory meaning to a certain conception of life, man, the universe and his place in it. What conception of life? A conception of man that posits him as created as he currently is, and promises that he always will be as such, at least in spirit, in an afterlife. Now, the neo-cortex allows us to investigate this matter, was man always as he is now? No, he was not. So, what if that realization denies to us the most satisfactory meaning of life, or most satisfactory interpretation of life’s meaning, our emotional system is evolved to have which, is dependent upon the above described conception of man as eternal? What if man’s will to be, or at least go on as he is, as long as he can, is diminished with the realization that he has no eternal being? If that be the case, then the will to truth does confound the will to be. I do not claim it is true, but I think it plausible. 27
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:34 | # PF,
The European male is not evolved simply to strive, strive, strive. He doesn’t only present his chosen female with “the blood-stained spoils of him whom he has laid low”. He doesn’t only protect the transmission of his genes through the collective defeat of the neighbouring tribe. The European female’s demand for monogamous committment is predicated on the high costs of childcare in the European EEA. European men are evolved to answer this demand. European morality is evolved to support them him in that. In us all lives a father as well as a warrior. But in woman lives only a mother.
I lack the focus of a trained mind, PF. I tend to fall back on painting pictures rather than fashioning precise definitions. Let me know if I roam too far afield.
Earlier I wrote, “All teleological abstractions, including Marxism, liberalism, and theistic religions, posit a version of human purpose, and nothing else.” For me, it is about conflicting models of Man, not reality. That’s what I write about. That what I understand to be the lifeblood of all philosophy. Of course, I accept that all these teleological systems attempt “an understanding of [the] historical”. I think that is a consequence of not building from the ground up ... from the essential, from “being”. And let’s not forget that anti-essentialism IS the essence of egalitarian thinking in general and postmodernism in particular. Why do you think the intellectual left prostitutes the truth that nothing can be known? Why do they specialise so heavily in sociology and linguistics? Why, because they have to defend a false model of Man “in the air”, so to speak ... they can’t go to the ground to work because that would bring everything crashing down. And give us nationalism!
I’m not sure about how we absorb the subtle promptings of the philosophical zeitgeist. There is the culture industry, of course, and our Jewish masters of the popular taste and morality. But that’s all so crude. I really think it has to be to do with the plasticity of Man and the formation of personality. But I haven’t much to say about it.
Well, the full term is “heroic rebirth”, which takes the issue beyond semantics. A people being reborn as heroes, probably cleaving to a mythic vision of knightly virtue, scores so high on the irony meter, no self-respecting Englishman could walk by without a quiet smile and shake of the head. I remain an instinctual English conservative. Change is a curse, change is the problem. We need respite from change. Given the appalling costs of the last sixty years to us, we need to be redeemed, not changed - though I accept that I am using the word here in a specific sense that you did not mean. 28
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:54 | # CC, You are constructing furiously, and I am loathe to stop you. But, surely, your example can be fitted to the Oxford Debate and the famous victory of the Darwinists over the Creationists. In Darwinism truth and being are at peace, are they not? Truth is at war with falsehood. In actual fact, “the most satisfactory meaning” in life issues from the love of one’s child, not from taking giant intellectual steps across the vault of the heavens. Parental love is perfect. There is no egoism in it. The next “most satisfactory meaning” is love of woman. The next is that curious moment of self-awareness which descends unannounced from time to time, and reminds one that “I am”. And so on. There are many beautifully existential meanings, and I can’t think of one in conflict with truth. 29
Posted by Captainchaos on Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:14 | # GW, I take it for granted that European Man is more pliable under dint of the constructed, of memes, than other peoples. If one were to suggest to, say, the Chinese, that they do not exist, and therefore lose nothing by ceasing to exist, they would laugh. So, if European Man is more pliable, that tells me his will to be is more finicky, if not more delicate. But therein lies the importance of giving him ideas that are adaptive, a project I’m unaware takes place anywhere but here. “There are many beautifully existential meanings, and I can’t think of one in conflict with truth.” European Man also seems to need to dream, to project his earthly delights onto the sky. Post a comment:
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Posted by Wandrin on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 01:30 | #
I can imagine a left-leaning writer wanting to write the scene with a non-white child but being torn by the drama feeling more powerful with a white child and in the end surrendering to that feeling. As drama is at its most powerful when it draws on deep instinctive roots it makes sense.