After reading Mary Jackson's latest article for PajamasMedia, I started thinking about the way that men are often treated today viz-a-vis children. It lends support to my deeply conservative believe that social morality is a wheel that keeps turning, creating the illusion of progress while never truly taking us anywhere we ought to be going. Two generations ago, the wheel had turned to a point where it was socially acceptable to create moral panics about the sexual and criminal proclivities of blacks and hispanics, and now it is toward all men, irrespective of race. Society has not, in any sense, morally improved, but rather has merely seen its collective sins mutate.
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun, and the heart of man is as corrupt and deceitful as it ever was. Our naive, childish belief in the notion of progress has hindered us from having any shot at moral improvement because we are so blind to what should be obvious.
At work here is something deeper than male bashing. Society is rotting away from the inside out. Common sense ain't so common anymore, and people justify the stupidest beliefs and actions based on policy, what the media is saying and other cockamamy excuses that are so brittle that they shatter explosively when subjected to even the level of reason that the good Lord gave a chimpanzee. Mary quoted Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, and he made a great point about how society is collapsing from within:
It is insane, and the problem is the general collapse of trust. Almost every human relationship that was sensibly regulated by trust is now governed by law, with cripplingly expensive consequences.
The inability of more and more people to establish trust without the government, and create spontaneous social order is the most terrifying trend that traditionalists and defenders of liberty face today. Quite simply, many people are simply increasingly unfit to govern their own affairs, let alone those of others. This exists in a vicious feedback cycle with the ability of many to engage in critical thinking. It's also the closest thing we have ever seen to a sociological cancer in that it is a memetic disease that is spreading rapidly and undermining to all of the organs of society.
I don't know that we can fix this sort of thing. It probably has to work itself out.
"that was sensibly regulated by trust is now governed by law"
To include marriage, an institution that is far from a contract yet is governed by a sick sort of contract law.
I'm currently perusing Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. And the things he has to say makes a lot of things click together.
Example: one of the things endemic to a fascist state that there is nothing outside of it. All relationships are governed by, well, government. This hell we find ourselves in, where people do not regulate their own behavior, form relationships outside of formal contracts, and can't seem to handle things among themselves without going to the Nanny State, is intentional and by design.
I also think cultural diversity--not just ethnic, although the two go hand-in-glove--has a lot to do with it. Humans being tribal creatures like we are, our nature is to only trust blood kin or those who look like ourselves. Mixing many disparate cultures together while also rejecting the Enlightenment ideals of reason and law is a sure-fired recipe for a Hobbesian stew that may only be contained by an omnipresent muscular state.
I think for us to have trust again, we need to have a conscious re-commitment to reason and law as the binding force, and not tribalism. It's the great experiment, really, to see if humanity can ally themselves to a concept like, say the Constitution, and not the similiar-to-me bias. So far, I think we're failing, and societies predicated on this experiment are breaking down and reorganizing into the tyranny that is required to effectively govern a polyglot culture.
One of the things that got us to this point was the Enlightenment view that man is a rational animal. As Vox put it, man is not so much a rational animal as a rationalizing animal. In fact, this point is one of the fundamental problems with libertarianism, as it is the foundation for libertarian views on economy and personal liberty. Since most libertarians do not take a conservative view toward limiting the right to vote, they have nothing substantially practical and rational to offer here.
"As Vox put it, man is not so much a rational animal as a rationalizing animal"
I think I remember this post. I agreed with it too. One of the truisms I took away from it was that people by and large came to a position on an issue in accordance with their biases, then used rationalization to back it up.
The Enlightenment dream of reason and rational behavior I fear is just that.
I am glad that that be the case. The Enlightenment got us into the troubles that began in the mid-19th century and ended with where we are today. The sort of reason that the Enlightenment taught was a purely, unconditionally naturalistic one in which all metaphysical knowledge was summarily dismissed as irrationality. This is no small part of the reason why philosophy has been crippled as a respectable field of inquiry, and why we face many problems today with seemingly insanely stupid behavior (we can't automatically assume even "common sense" anymore since according to Enlightenment-style thinking, we have to make a case for even common sense).
A great blog for topics like this is What's Wrong With the World. Some of the posts there have come to influence my thinking even more than Vox's blog has in the past. "Maximos" is a particularly thoughtful contributor there.
"The sort of reason that the Enlightenment taught was a purely, unconditionally naturalistic one in which all metaphysical knowledge was summarily dismissed as irrationality."
Unfortunately, I think that you are correct in this. Many of the Enlightenment exponents deified Reason and pushed God to the sidelines, even vilified Him. Yet we both have seen how Reason is almost always a slave to the Passions, not the other way around. The liberals today are heirs to this same trend of elevating humanism to the status of a religion.
Yet I hesitate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think there is a place for a political process divorced from religion, yet accepts, makes room for, even welcomes, the civilizing influence of religion. The secular state cannot exist without a religion to educate, inform, and unify its citizens.
The Enlightenment's focus on atomistic individualism, leads to breakdown and disorder. There is no concern with the good of the society, the family, any entity beyond that of the individual person. Yet humans have only progressed this far because of their bonds with another, forming families, tribes, communities, nations.
Perhaps we need an Enlightenment II (a term I borrow from Vox).
Thanks for the link. I'll have to peruse.
The goal of the Enlightenment was to dethrone God, not instill a genuinely rational worldview. Reason and the rule of law were always a part of the Western tradition, aside from a brief period of time before the Renaissance in some parts of Europe. Those traditions can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans.
The problem, or a contributing factor. is the dumbing down of society. Children are not taught to question things, nor to think too much for themselves. This allows the 'state', or some other 'authoratative' entity, to TELL them what to think. This also has the added effect of discouraging many from searching for the truth themselves. This way, you can marginalize those who do question and investigate as 'fringe' elements, and not to be taken seriously. Just look at those demonized for disagreement with Climate Change or Gay marriage.
I experienced some of that in my classes in high school. One day we were given a diagram that showed the political spectrum, and the teacher had managed to put the Nazis and libertarians on the same side of the spectrum (the right). I asked the teacher, in front of the class, to explain this. I said, "how can two groups which agree on so little be right next to one another on the spectrum?" She didn't really say much, so I asked her how the Nazis could even be considered on the right, and she replied smugly, "oh, I'm sure that once you study them, you'll see that they're really right wing." I then pointed out to her that I had the text book for AP Comparative Politics which I was studying for in order to take the exam (our school didn't offer it) and said that that's really interesting, since my AP Comparative Politics book described in great detail all of the ways that the Nazis collectivized and controlled the economy, among other left-wing actions.
Needless to say, I was the only student in her class who got marked down for having the wrong opinions. It frosted her, though, that I literally scored the highest on one of her exams, and I had paid so little attention to her previous rants^H^H^H^H^Hlectures that I didn't even know we were going to have an exam.
Needless to say, I was the only student in her class who got marked down for having the wrong opinions.
Or maybe you just embarrassed her. Teachers are petty creatures who will punish you for making them look the idiots that they are.
"Reason and the rule of law were always a part of the Western tradition..."
Perhaps I've assimilated too much propaganda Mike, 'cuz I'm under the impression that while reason and law were part of the western tradition, they were not as prominent as was priestcraft. It was priestcraft's abuses that led not only to the Reformation but created the climate where things stunk so bad that the Enlightenment happened as a response.
Thus I see the Enlightenment as a rejection of Religion, not necessarily a rejection of God. Granted there were a quite a few God-hatin thinkers, but they were on the fringe methinks. And they were fairly well suppressed by a Church that was the State and brooked no heresy.
Rejection of God wholesale came later as the masses started to like the idea of putting man's ego at the center of the universe.
A lot of that is true about the Roman Catholic Church, but let's not forget that the Roman Catholic Church also had a vibrant intellectual tradition in its monastic orders, and was certainly not as hostile to science as is often suggested. For example, the persecution of Galileo was your average political one because the fool basically spat in the face of the pope who invited him to Rome, and the pope responded by ordering him to recant in order to make him look like a fool.
Also, in the Orthodox world, the secular government was often supreme over the church. This was especially true in the Byzantine Empire, where the emperor was in charge of the Greek Orthodox Church much like the King of England is the supreme head of the Anglican Church. Additionally, the more powerful Catholic monarchs like the kings of France often just paid lip service to the church's political demands. In fact, toward the second half of the 15th century, the King of Spain was actually in a position to tell the pope what to do, which is how the Spanish Inquisition was created and placed under secular, not ecclesiastical, authority.