Auster vs. Sailer
With apologies, because this is a favorite theme of mine, here's the latest in the Auster vs. Sailer series.
Kicking off (I understand that's a sports metaphor) is Lawrence Auster. He responds to a reader's question about Sailer's idea that whites use minorities in a struggle to achieve status, and that "Obama is the culmination of a 40 year white status struggle". Auster:
Your questions inadvertently reveal how inadequate is Sailer's theory that status competition is at the root of white civilizational suicide. Since concern for status exists in all cultures, and since the Japanese--who obviously have far more concern for status and hierarchical relationships than do Americans--are not committing national suicide, status is not the explanation.At first glance, good answer. At second, not so much. That the Japanese really have "far more concern for status and hierarchical relationships" is not so obvious; they have a concern for the status quo, a concern for social consensus, but not necessarily a concern to vault themselves ahead of and above their fellow Japanese in the social hierarchy. Even assuming that I'm wrong here and that they do have "far more concern" for status in the same sense as the WhiterPeople, the point is moot if a belief in the superiority and/or victimhood of minority races is missing. Since one characteristic of the Japanese is that they believe in themselves, and have few or none of the qualms that liberal whites have about their group's history; and since the fraction of non-Japanese ethnics in Japan is very low; I think we can say that the example of Japan proves nothing about whether or not white status competition fuels the American obsession with the promotion of minorities and demotion of whites.
I think that we can grant that the comparison to the Japanese that Auster makes is at least doubtful. But not to Auster, apparently: he is offended:
I find it intellectually insulting to reduce something as vast and fateful as the suicide of the white West to something as trivial and common as status competition. But that's the material reductionist mind for you.Well, that's the all-or-nothing mindset for you. I don't believe that Sailer, or anyone else for that matter, has reduced the suicide of the white West to status competition, or anything else. To say that whites are status-conscious doesn't deny that other elements are in play here. That should be obvious. But Auster has such an animus against Sailer that he essentially calls him a dumb-ass ("intellectually insulting") for even suggesting the idea.
What reductionists like Sailer are incapable of grasping, and indeed have no interest in, is that human beings by their very nature are oriented toward truth.Now, humans may or may not be "oriented toward truth" - and Nietzsche could be brought in here as one who thought that they were not- but what Auster and many others deride as "reductionism" is merely a version of the scientific method. Elements in a system must be identified and isolated if we are to try to make sense of the system and to understand it. It's not "reductionism" to say that status competition may be an element in the broad scheme of American politics and society, just as it's not reductionism to say that human bodies are full of chemicals undergoing reactions.
Auster believes the notion of status competition to be incompatible with determining the truth of an ideology:
For example, if status competition to achieve wealth and desirable mates and thus to pass on one's genes is the cause of liberalism, then what can be done to arrest and reverse the liberalism? Nothing. No arguments can be used against it, and no one could ever cease being a liberal by any process of understanding or thought, since the behavior that constitutes liberalism is determined by the laws of evolutionary biology. The idea that liberalism is false, and that a person can come to see that it is false, is thoroughly excluded from the evolutionary materialist paradigm. So why does Sailer bother writing about liberalism? According to him, why should any article of his persuade anyone that liberalism is not true, since people, according to him, are liberals not because of what they believe is true and good, but because deterministic material forces make them pursue liberalism.This seems to me wholly mistaken. Evolutionary theorists think that religion, for example, functions in part as social cement; this idea does not preclude the notion that one or more of them may be true. For example, E. O. Wilson "argues that the belief in God and rituals of religion are products of evolution.[10] He argues that they should not be rejected or dismissed, but further investigated by science to better understand their significance to human nature."
Auster can't finish without one last personal attack:
Whence, then, comes the belief in these simplified materialist-reductionist theories which sound impressive yet are so bogus? Perhaps from the desire to have one, neat explanation for everything, the possession of which makes the possessor feel superior to other people who lack that all-purpose explanation. Talk about status competition.It's clear that Auster has something against Sailer, and I won't speculate as to what that is. But it's also clear, at least to me, that Auster is almost never content to attack mere ideas - the bearer of those ideas must also be attacked.
Last year, Auster wrote a short post, Do blog rolls serve any purpose?
Many blogs have a list of the blog author's or authors' favorite blogs. This is considered almost required courtesy, a form of mutual appreciation and acknowledgement, by which blogs help promote each other. But do blog rolls really accomplish anything, other than the expressive purpose of displaying the blog author's own preferences? [...]Besides courtesy and mutual appreciation, one important purpose of blog rolls is the building of alliances. But this, as we've seen in the attack on Sailer above, is something Auster does not seem to appreciate.
Update 11/15/08: Lawrence Auster has linked to this post from his website, and his sending of his large readership over here to read some rather pointed criticisms of himself does him credit.
Labels: Auster vs. Sailer
posted by Dennis Mangan @ 7:10 AM
115 comments
115 Comments:
Auster doesn't like Sailer's stance on Israel. This is also the reason he doesn't like Patrick Buchanan.
For Auster, the dividing line between which conservatives are acceptable or not is what they think about the Israel situation. Thus, Auster is completely okay with David Frum, who isn't very conservative or very good on the immigration question.
Also, Auster doesn't like or believe in Darwinism.
Dennis,
It seems as though Auster is willfully misunderstanding and caricaturing Sailer's observation. To me there is zero conflict between the WhiterPeople status competition and Auster's view that liberalism is a poison slowly killing our civilization. If you accept that people, in general, strive for status [which Auster seems to, given that he brings up the Japanese] then they still have to measure this status somehow. Money and power were the traditional crude metrics. In certain times and places they were supplanted or at least supplemented by things like integrity, prudence, and wisdom. My guess is that Auster would like a society that valued the latter set.
Tragically, liberalism has birthed a wholly different set of criteria which perhaps could be labelled as "ultra-tuned, comically self-conscious and hypocritical sensitivity". And so we have WhiterPeople who have adopted this set of measures and are acting accordingly. To fight the situation one can try to persuade people that the reigning set of principles is wrong, no?
I like a lot of what Auster writes. For example, his concept of "unprincipled exceptions" as practiced by the liberal regime is brilliant in its incisiveness. But his writing always reads like a high-pitched scream which gets wearisome. He also posesses a virtually negative sense of humor which is deeply unattractive. These seem like stylistic failings which unnecessarily detract from the essential truths that he courageously communicates.
As for his specific animus against Sailer - I think both you and I know exactly its fundamental source.
Auster: "For example, if status competition to achieve wealth and desirable mates and thus to pass on one's genes is the cause of liberalism, then what can be done to arrest and reverse the liberalism? Nothing."
This is incorrect. Human beings are status seeking, but the symbols of high status are subject to change and can be changed.
The political opinions of those with high status can be changed. We have to show that the politicals opinions of our current elite are wrong and harmful.
It is almost an axiom that people on the far right have prickly personalities. They take to constant bickering and putting down of people whose viewpoints differ from their own in minor details. I sometimes think that the far right will *never* grasp political power because it always fractures over personality splits.
"Besides courtesy and mutual appreciation, one important purpose of blog rolls is the building of alliances. But this, as we've seen in the attack on Sailer above, is something Auster does not seem to appreciate."
And it should be noted that, despite Auster's many attacks on Sailer, Auster's site continues to be listed on Steve's blogroll.
Dennis,
I don't mind your criticisms of me over the status discussion, but my last paragraph did have an element of humor about it which I think you missed.
I do have a hostility to reductionism, it is terribly destructive to human understanding, and it does bother me in particular that the reductionist thought of Sailer and others has become influential among some conservatives. I don't think that's personal. When I do have problems with Sailer as a person, e.g., regarding his statements on Israel and his article on Eric Breindel, I'm up front about it. So you don't have to read that into what I'm saying when I'm writing about another topic.
And of course I regularly mention Sailer in a positive way. If I were driven by personal hostility, as as been suggested is the case, I would not do that.
Apparently some commenters here feel that I was in the wrong for condemning Sailer for, e.g., saying that the prospect of the nuclear destruction of Israel by Iran would be no more significant to him than a baseball game. Apparently my condemning him over that makes me a sinister figure, driven by dark motives. Apparently the need to maintain friendships with other conservatives trumps all other considerations. Thus the paleocons, refusing as a matter of principle to criticize their own, are as much of a mindless phalanx as the neocons.
I'll be talking about the status issue tonight or tomorrow when I get a chance.
Consider this. When Sailer wrote that the nuclear destruction of Israel by Iran would be no more significant than a baseball game, that was not considered objectionable or divisive in the paleocon circles; no one except me ever criticized Sailer for saying that. But because I criticize Sailer, well, THAT is unacceptable, THAT is violating the rules of comity, THAT is going over the line!
Thus the real hierarchy of moral values in the paleocon circles reveals itself.
While I disagree with some of what Steve Sailer writes, I am in 100% agreement with the way he puts the Islamic threat in perspective. He is one of the relatively few voices of reason in the blogosphere, who is not convinced that Islam is a mighty unstoppable force destined to Conquer the World. He coined the memorable phrase "Middle Eastern powder thimble" as a humorous way of illustrating Islam's military feebleness.
Steve Sailer is a much-welcomed antidote to the panty piddling paranoia that has run rampant in America for more than seven years.
Auster: "When Sailer wrote that the nuclear destruction of Israel by Iran would be no more significant than a baseball game"
Completely unbelievable. I've kept up with Sailer's blog for the last four years. He has never said any such a thing.
And you just toss of this scurrilous sentence without so much as a link to whatever you're referring to. And by the way, that reveals a lot about your moral values.
Dennis, please call Auster out on this.
What I'm guessing is that Sailer said something like, the Israel/Palestine conflict is like a passionate baseball rivalry between two cities you don't live in.
But I have no idea what Auster is referring to since he doesn't link to it.
And this is the problem with Auster. When he dislikes someone, he just makes stuff up or interprets what they say in worst way possible, just as he has with Sailer's white status competetion theory.
Auster: "no one except me ever criticized Sailer for saying that."
Um, that was because Sailer never said what you've imputed to him.
"panty piddling paranoia" by palookas, I presume?
Steve Sailer wrote several posts about a possible war with Iran, but this appears to contain the statement in question: "Why baseball fans are more rational than foreign policy mavens: In these days during the apparent run-up to a war with Iran, foreign policy commentary appears to be largely the obsession of men with the irrational team-loving emotional instincts of baseball fans. So, why aren't they spending their time thinking about baseball rather than promoting war? It appears they are just too innumerate to be baseball fans." My interpretation is that, if it's given that Iran's military capabilities are minuscule, then Israel has little to fear. Those arguing for a war with Iran are as little rational, according to this line of thought, as those who believe the NY Yankees threatened by the KC Royals. Having said that, I do see Mr. Auster's interpretation to the effect that rooting for Israel has no more rational basis than rooting for the Red Sox.
I notice that someone says that my not linking the Sailer item shows my low moral standards. Hmm, maybe it simply indicated that I neglected to link the item?
Here are two VFR entries about Sailer's nihilistic comments on Israel and Iran. The first, from August 2006, was when I discussed the issue the first time. However, in that entry, I did not directly quote the objectionable Sailer passage. In the second entry, from August 2008, in response to a reader who criticized me for my criticisms of Sailer, I quoted the Sailer passage and discussed it in full so that no one could deny its true import.
Sailer compares Iranian nuclear attack on Israel to baseball, or, The enemy of my enemy doesn't exist
The bad demographic news—and an unrelated discussion of Steve Sailer
It's one thing to say that the U.S. is too close to Israel, or that we should mind our own business, but to compare the whole complex, dangerous situation between Iran and Israel to a baseball game was just stupid, and Auster was right to criticize Sailer about it, and I'll bet that Sailer regrets writing that sentence now, as he should. Sure, Auster is thin-skinned, abrasive, and tends to alienate supporters, but he was right on this issue, as on a lot of others. Sailer is a fine analyst with a lot of courage, but there are days when he thinks that he's Dave Barry, and he makes stupid statements that I guess are supposed to be funny, but aren't. But both Auster and Sailer are smart, brave, and fine writers. The conservative movement needs them both.
LA: "Apparently some commenters here feel that I was in the wrong for condemning Sailer for, e.g., saying that the prospect of the nuclear destruction of Israel by Iran would be no more significant to him than a baseball game."
Sailer didn't say that. From the first paragraph to the last, he makes clear that he is talking about media arguments favoring an attack on Iran. Auster infers that Sailer believes that an Iranian attack on Israel is no more consequential than a baseball game. I think this inferrence is unfounded. It's rather like going to your doctor for a diagnosis, your doctor resorting to a sports analogy to explain your condition, and you replying, "Doctor, we're talking about my life here. This is more serious than a baseball game!"
Sailer used a sports analogy to explain his version of the media coverage arguing for an attack against Iran. Obvously, Sailer's analysis may or may not be flawed, but to describe it, as Auster does, using words like "pathological" and "sociopathic" again seems to me to be over the top.
In Auster's defense, one of his posts did link to Sailer's original piece, which is here:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/08/why-baseball-fans-are-more-rational.html
Auster does at times seem a prickly, thin-skinned, and intellectually combative personality. These qualities, in part, make him a writer whose work is worth attending to. A nicer guy might not be nearly so honest, and he is honest on topics that nice guys generally avoid entirely.
I think Auster is rejecting ideas for reasons that have little to do with their truth. He simply finds them aesthetically unpleasing. In some respect he's similar to po-mo academics. A clear example is his remark on absurdity.
A book from E.O Wilson that I would recommend instead is Consilience. It's not about a specific topic so much as how we come to understand the world.
I agree with Dennis' interpretation of Sailer's baseball post and I highly doubt that Sailer regrets writing it.
Dennis,
You're a brave man for intervening in this spat!
Status competition amongst whites has been around with us for centuries - the Renaissance Italians invented the noun 'campanalismo' to describe one particular form that became prevalent in their societies, the rush to build the biggest and most spectacular bell towers. In that sense, one might say that the phenomenon is not unique to whites; look at Easter Island. Those guys destroyed themselves in the frantic act of status competition involved in building more and more cartoon figurines.
However, where I think Steve goes wrong is in failing to either qualify or quantify the phenomenon sufficiently. Although it is a feature of white societies, it is usually a function of white society either gone bad, going bad ot just defective to start with. Was individual status competition involved in the creation of the American republic? Or the British empire? I don't think so.
When Steve uses the word 'white' while discussing status competition, he seems to mean a specific kind of modern white liberal American. The pity, perhaps even the tragedy, of Steve's analysis is that he doesn't seem to come close to diagnosing that the kind of behaviour he describes is itself a symptom of cultural decline. If Toynbee is right, and I think he was, then all civilisations die through suicide - doesn't matter where they are, they all go for the same reasons. That one of them, the advancement of self at the expense of reproduction, should play such a prominent role in liberal thought perhaps shows that we've hit our own Easter Island moment. The elements required to make a civilisation decline are not specifically 'white'.
Another element which exists in all declined civilisations is a shift in perspective from consideration of the common good to sole interest in the personal. It appears that some elements in American, and most certainly in British, society have become so internally focussed that the whole concept of politics, the mere act of going along and getting along with other people whether you like them or not, is now redundant. That's a pity, becuse that's what made British and American society so great. It's as if we've spawned a million Medici princes instead; and look how long they lasted, and how good they were at creating a unified Italy.
Lawrence Auster's typically shrill reaction to the most gentle criticism is really quite sad, because it demeans a creative and original mind. He makes interesting critiques, then cuts his feet off with gratuitous personal attacks.
I wrote a post recently called 'Why Conservatives Lose'; it was about the reaction of Steve's readers to the online version of 'America's Half Blood Prince'. Instead of focussing on the content, applying themselves to the message, all they could do was pick out typos. It was a classic example of why movement conservatism has failed. Conservatives have become lazy in failing to apply their mind to new ideas, and are now as superficial as liberals in preferring discussion of style to discussion of content. The paleoconservatives whom Mr. Auster wrongly seems to think are one big family are a particular case in point. This time in history should be paleoconservatism's moment, when much of what its thinkers have predicted has come true - instead, they're still obsessing about Gettysburg, and it's forever Fort Sumter in the summer of 1861.
I don't know whether Sailer regrets using the baseball analogy with regard to Israel and Iran, but he should. While I don't believe that it was as bad as Auster thinks it was, it was a pretty lame statement, even if one agrees with the basic premise behind it. Sailer trivialized an important issue, regardless of one's take on it. After all, not everything can or should be reduced to a sports analogy.
Tschafer
Mangan: Hi, Auster.
Auster: Hi Mangan.
Martin: There's that Lawrence Auster with another typically shrill response to the gentlest criticism!
Larry,
Sad as it is to say - thanks for proving my point.
I'm glad to see that there are some comments appearing in the thread saying that there was something objectionable about what Sailer said about Israel, even if the commenters don't agree with me completely. To me, such acknowledgement is a big step forward.
Martin, Jared Diamond was wrong about Easter Island. It was not the people that destroyed all the trees but rats.
Also, we are not in a period of decline but improvement. See the series at GNXP previous generations were more depraved and Stephen Pinker's history of violence presentations.
How would one make the argument, by analogy, that as far as the USA should be concerned, the difference between her ally Israel's, and Iran's legitimate armed forced (including nukes) is so different as to render thoughts of America invading Iran on Israel's behalf unworthy of serious thought --without suggesting a trivialization of America's concern for Israel? Should we anthropomorphize it: our worrying about Israel getting wiped out by Iran is like worrying that our 5'10" eleventh grade varsity football playing son will lose a fight to a 4'1" third grade girl flute player? Any analogy is going to argue that America need not worry because the proportions of power between Israel and Iran are so out of line as to be fantastic. Being an analogy, it will be logically flawed and attackable. It's more intellectually honest (and fun if you ask me), to attack analogies by counter-analogy rather than crying foul. Crying foul strikes me really as just an objection to the point of the analogy, here, of course, the arguably too easy dismissal of Iran's threats to our ally Israel. To attack Sailer's analogy on it's own terms, then, one could say, "yes, well, if the SF Giants are starting to win their division because they are bludgening --literally, their opponents with baseball bats, then, yes, maybe the Yankees should trade some heavy hitters out to the coast for the sake of the game." As a native New Yorker, I am now fantasizing that the Montreal Canadiens should have lent the Rangers a few guys in 1973...
The point being that, while the IDF may have an overwhelming advantage in weaponry, training, tactics, moral high ground, etc. etc., the fact remains Israel herself remains under attack and threat by non- or quasi- or surreptitious- state-aligned militias, terrorists, what have you, which I understand are in part supported by Iran. Would that the Iranian mullahs were but fair-playing co-sportsmen whom we need only meet in rare inter-league play. And isn't destroying a bad analogy like that better than bitching and moaning about it? More fun, more enlightening?!
".......that as far as the USA should be concerned, the difference between her ally Israel's,...."
I am not aware of any formal arrangement making Israel our ally. Is there any military treaty in force between us? Do we have any military bases on their territory? No, and no.
After WWII and the Nazi genocide, jews understandably wanted a nation of their own, as only a state and its government could reliably serve as a champion of the jewish people.
However, they made a really, really bad choice in real estate, surrounded as they are by inveterately hostile nations. There should be no expectation that the United States would intervene militarily to defend Israel. That is not our job, and it would only commit us to an open-ended war between civilizations that, to me - frankly, seems unwinnable.
Peter wrote about Sailer:
"He is one of the relatively few voices of reason in the blogosphere, who is not convinced that Islam is a mighty unstoppable force destined to Conquer the World. He coined the memorable phrase "Middle Eastern powder thimble" as a humorous way of illustrating Islam's military feebleness."
The problem with this position is not that it may not be accurate to characterize the Muslim world's military capabilities as relatively feeble. The problem is that it tends to minimize the para-military dangers and destructiveness which innumerable Muslims can wreak over time in times and places we cannot, most of the time, predict for years, decades, generations to come.
While it may be true that Muslims will not be able to conquer the West (much less the whole world), that simplistic truism has the tendency to obfuscate the very real problem of what Muslims will be able to do through their mere fanatical will to try to conquer the West and the world: kill untold numbers of us in terrorist attacks of various types, and damage infrastructure.
We should err on the side of caution -- not a caution directed against ourselves for fear that we might react too aggressively, but a caution directed against Islam and all Muslims, in the very realistic fear that horrific attacks against us are being assiduously planned as we speak, attacks which take years of careful planning and which require deep infiltration into our social fabric, infiltration enabled by foolish politically correct attitudes in the West that see little or no danger from Muslim immigration and presence of Muslim citizens within the West.
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/
I haven't read enough of Auster to definitively analyze what he's doing, but provisionally I would say that he has been trying to grapple with the odd and paradoxical -- and relatively recent, historically -- phenomenon (and spectacle) of conservatives manifesting symptoms of various forms of Leftism.
I too have noticed this phenomenon, but I prefer to frame it in terms of a massive sea change in Western consciousness that has occurred in the past 50 years (approximately) -- a sea change by which politically correct multi-culturalism (PC MC) has become dominant and mainstream throughout the West.
This process of PC MC becoming dominant and mainstream could not have occurred had not a majority of conservatives undergone a change in heart and mind, becoming, in effect, true believers in the PC MC paradigm & worldview.
Concomitantly and logically, this change in heart and mind in turn could not have occurred were not the PC MC paradigm a considerably diluted version of the Leftism whence it originated: I.e., PC MC is a "Leftism Lite" -- sufficiently "lite" that the majority of conservatives have not felt they have betrayed conservatism by adopting it.
Where Auster goes wrong, in my view, is that his analysis goes into strange taffy-like contortions and permutations trying to explain the phenomenon of the "false conservative". The crux of these intellectual contortions in Auster is that he bases his analysis on the conviction that conservatives have willfully betrayed conservatism, whereas I think it is more helpful, more elegant, and more accurate to see the overarching phenomenon as one of people of intelligence, good will and good faith actually undergoing (and/or participating in) a sea change in consciousness that itself has many good aspects to it.
That is, in essence, the complexity of the phenomenon in question: PC MC has many good aspects bound up tightly with harmful aspects, and the good and the bad cannot be easily disentangled. But Auster tends toward a relatively simplistic demonization of the people and thoughts he considers bad and this tendency, combined with his otherwise perspicacious intellect, produces the odd result of his analytical contortions.
Auster is intellectually serious and combative. He doesn't back down, especially to liberals / liberalism. We need more like him, not fewer.
Sailer is amiable. If the left wins he will get steamrollered, and he'll make intellectual cracks about it. Auster will get steamrollered, but he'll go down fighting.
Sailer is all head. Auster has a good head, but he has the fight in his heart.
Hesperado writes:
"Where Auster goes wrong, in my view, is that his analysis goes into strange taffy-like contortions and permutations trying to explain the phenomenon of the "false conservative". The crux of these intellectual contortions in Auster is that he bases his analysis on the conviction that conservatives have willfully betrayed conservatism, whereas I think it is more helpful, more elegant, and more accurate to see the overarching phenomenon as one of people of intelligence, good will and good faith actually undergoing (and/or participating in) a sea change in consciousness that itself has many good aspects to it."
Hesperado admits he hasn't read enough of me to understand me well, but this doesn't stop him from saying that I commit "strange, taffy like contortions" in my criticisms of leftward moving conservatives—contortions of which he doesn't offer a single example. May I suggest to Hesperado that if you're going to make such a criticism, you ought to back it up.
The starting point of my critique of today's conservatives is that they always end up giving up the positions they claim to hold. For example, the people who made opposition to race preferences the highest principle of American politics went stone cold silent at the time of the Grutter decision, the greatest single advance of race preference, instead of denouncing it. The people who said fighting the culture war was the great challenge of our lifetime, accommodated themselves to the cultural left. The people who stood for assimilation and the American common culture and opposed multiculturalism stopped talking about America's common culture, went along with the idea of that America is essentially diverse, and supported presidential candidates and presidents whose professed goal was to Hispanicize America. The people who say that the expansion of Islam is a mortal threat to our society don't speak a single syllable about reducing or stopping Muslim immigration.
It's easy for Hesperado—a professed non-conservative who says that he supports political correctness and multiculturalism and applauds conservatives' surrender to these things—to criticize a principled conservative who holds conservatives to their professed ideals and shows why they always end up surrendering them.
Finally, he gets me spectacularly wrong when he says that my main criticism of liberal conservatives is that they have "willfully betrayed" conservatism. What an ignorant trivialization of my position. To the contrary, my central point is that the dominant belief system of modern society is liberalism, and that almost all people today, including most conservatives, are basically liberals whether they realize it or not, and that unless people understand and hold to consciously non-liberal principles, they will, whatever their professed ideals, inevitably end up drifting with the liberal tide. But of course, Hesperado admitted at the start that he hasn't read enough of me to understand me.
"Thus, Auster is completely okay with David Frum, who isn't very conservative or very good on the immigration question."
Erm, Frum is very good on the immigration question, compared to other big-name conservative voices. He has been consistent and clear on the issue: Immigration is bad for America and bad for conservatism.
"instead, they're still obsessing about Gettysburg, and it's forever Fort Sumter in the summer of 1861."
An even better example: After gaining traction on being prescient on immigration, Pat Buchanan decides to write a book aimed at... rehabilitating the America First movement. That's some great strategic thinking there Pat!
Frum isn’t good on the immigration question. Frum is a liar on the immigration question. Read Frum’s 1994 book, Dead Right and in it Frum treats opposition to mass immigration as weird.
In a 2000 speech to the Manhattan Insitute on his book about the 1970s, Frum told the audience that limiting immigration would be a mistake.
Now Frum claims that he was always against mass immigration, which is a lie. Even Auster knows that Frum is lying and even Auster has pointed that out. The link to Auster doing so is below. Here is an excerpt from Auster’s take on Frum’s dishonesty (but note that Auster himself said that he had no desire to attack Frum, a dishonest Neocon Zionist, a hesitancy Auster doesn’t have when it comes to dishonest attacks on Sailer).
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/008090.html
However, reading over Frum's chronology of what he sees as his tremendous role in immigration reform, I realize that he has omitted from it an article he wrote in July 1991 in the American Spectator which blasted immigration restrictionists, particularly Patrick Buchanan, as ethnic and racial bigots. (Disclosure: I bear some measure of responsibility for Frum's attack on Buchanan as a nativist, since the first time Buchanan criticized immigration for its ethnocultural impact on America was in his column about my booklet, The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, which he wrote in spring 1991.) It is remarkable that Frum, in listing his contributions to the immigration control movement over the years, left out what was probably his first big article on the subject, in which he sought to ban any discussion about immigration that had to do with the ethnocultural effects of immigration on America.
There is a reason that Joe Sobran defined “anti-Semitism” as “insubordination.” It would appear that in his constant attacks on Sailer, Auster is venting his displeasure with the fact that Sailer doesn’t place Israel upon a pedestal, as does Auster.
Let us all recall that Auster supported the current Iraq war with a fanatical furry that would make some Neocons look reasonable. Even now, Auster says that the USA (or Israel, with support from the USA) MUST attack Iran. In other words, Auster is saying, “Lets you and him fight.” Sailer says, “Thanks, but no thanks” to yet another Neocon war for Israel. For that Auster attacks Sailer constantly, calling him a bigot and anti-Semite (i.e., a racist). Besides the pot and kettle aspect to Auster calling any person except himself a “racist”, it should be clear that Auster hasn’t exactly carried his argument that opposing another preemptive war (the one against Iran) makes one an anti-Semite.
Isn’t there some inconsistency when Auster whines that his motives are being attacked (e.g., that Auster’s extreme support and personal identification with Israel is motivating his attacks on Sailer and others) and then for Auster to turn around and either claim or imply that the ONLY reason Sailer or Buchanan have for opposing a war with Iran (or Iraq) is that they “hate” Israel or have an irrational bigotry against Jews etc.
I mean, isn’t Auster claiming that his own personal (and possibly bigoted and irrational) motivations are off limits while those of his critics (including those who are just defending themselves or others from Auster’s attacks) are fair game?
Auster wrote:
"Hesperado admits he hasn't read enough of me to understand me well, but this doesn't stop him from saying that I commit "strange, taffy like contortions" in my criticisms of leftward moving conservatives—contortions..."
I couched my observations in terms like "provisionally I would say" and "in my view". Even though it was I myself who admitted my relative lack of complete knowledge of Auster's writings, that doesn't mean I in fact lack sufficient knowledge of Auster's writings to at least form an impression of them with regard to the issue in question, nor that this impression is to be summarily dismissed.
"of which he doesn't offer a single example."
True, I didn't. Perhaps I will at a later date, but that would involve considerable time and tedium, since Auster's statements that, in my view, reflect this contortion are sprinkled throughout a vast corpus and not, as far as I know, conveniently located in one essay.
"The starting point of my critique of today's conservatives is that they always end up giving up the positions they claim to hold."
At least in the area of multiculturalism and Muslims (since that's the primary area of my interest and focus), I would agree. But the question is: Why do conservatives do this? What has changed? Conservatives 60 years ago wouldn't have done this. Now the vast majority of them bend over backwards to "respect" Islam and Muslims. What happened? Perhaps Auster has already written about these questions. It just seems that whenever I read him on issues that get close to these questions, I never see any sense or indication that he has ever asked them and come up with a reasonable explanation. All I see are various different permutations of labels that try to capture that animal the "false conservative", who seem to be sprouting up all over the place, often in highly unlikely places to boot, which makes the puzzle all the more puzzling, one would think. One alternative explanation that might be implicitly lurking in Auster's paradigm is that of the "ecclesiola" -- i.e., the "pure remnant" who alone know the truth, while the vast majority have gone astray. This would be an impermissible explanation, unless one were -- either willfully or unwittingly -- succumbing to the Gnostic temptation to damn the Western cosmion. I tend to think Auster is not doing this, but I'd like to see more tangible and copious indications to make sure.
"For example, the people who made opposition to race preferences the highest principle of American politics went stone cold silent at the time of the Grutter decision, the greatest single advance of race preference, instead of denouncing it. The people who said fighting the culture war was the great challenge of our lifetime, accommodated themselves to the cultural left. The people who stood for assimilation and the American common culture and opposed multiculturalism stopped talking about America's common culture, went along with the idea of that America is essentially diverse, and supported presidential candidates and presidents whose professed goal was to Hispanicize America. The people who say that the expansion of Islam is a mortal threat to our society don't speak a single syllable about reducing or stopping Muslim immigration."
I'm painfully aware of such tendencies among conservatives, but the level at which I'm focusing here is the broader etiology of this. It's a matter of principle for me to avoid etiologies that would condemn too much, that would cut too deeply, for then we sacrifice the West itself in the name of some Gnostic wisdom only a small minority of special individuals have. So if we avoid a radical etiology, then how do we explain this phenomenon? The only alternative, it seems to me, would have to acknowledge the good of liberal progress -- that liberal progress is part of a larger process that contains malignancies as well. Like a body with cancer, we don't want to cut out too much and kill the patient, or mistake a healthy organic system in the body for the cancer that is attacking it. Indeed, even the conception of "cancer attacking the body" may be to botch the reality of the phenomenon, over-simplifying it as an exogenous process (where Leftism and/or "liberalism" -- and then the majority of false conservatives -- are seen as inimical outsiders to the ecclesiola), rather than an endogenous process intimately bound up with healthy growth and healthy state.
"It's easy for Hesperado—a professed non-conservative who says that he supports political correctness and multiculturalism"
Actually, I have written about 100 essays condemning PC MC (politically correct multi-culturalism) on my blog -- mainly within the nebula of how it relates to the irrational elevation of non-white non-Westerners and the irrational denigration of the white West, and this furthermore precisioned to a focus on the problem of Islam, my main concern.
"and applauds conservatives' surrender to these things"
And as part of my some 100 essays condemning PC MC, I have integrated lots of criticism of conservatives for having succumbed to PC MC. If Auster didn't admit, as I did, that he hasn't familiarized himself sufficiently with his interlocutor's writings to form a sufficiently complete appraisal of them, that hasn't seemed to have stopped him from completely mischaracterizing my position on PC MC. At least I know that he and I can tango...:)
"Finally, he gets me spectacularly wrong when he says that my main criticism of liberal conservatives is that they have "willfully betrayed" conservatism. What an ignorant trivialization of my position. To the contrary, my central point is that the dominant belief system of modern society is liberalism, and that almost all people today, including most conservatives, are basically liberals whether they realize it or not..."
Then that would properly expand the problem beyond "willful", which is good. However, once again, why has this occurred? And what will the explanation of the "why" imply about the vast majority who have succumbed? To me, if one continues to believe in the West, one cannot assume that the vast majority are not good, decent and intelligent. If the vast majority of the West are not good, decent and intelligent, then we might as well jump ship now, hunker down in a militia compound and stockpile weapons for the Counter-Revolution.
So if we don't assume that the vast majority are not good, decent and intelligent, then how do we explain this strange phenomenon of the sea change in consciousness that has occurred in the past 50-odd years, this major paradigm shift? And how do we characterize it? As a simplex malum, or as a complex, interpenetrating paradox of both bonum and malum?
MORE PROOF THAT FRUM ISN’T GOOD ON IMMIGRATION AND THAT AUSTER KNOWS THAT FRUM ISN’T GOOD ON IMMIGRATION. THIS IS FROM 2004.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002325.html
CIS PANEL ON IMMIGRATION AND JEWS
Here is the transcript of the recent Center for Immigration Studies panel on Jews and immigration, featuring Stephen Steinlight, David Frum and Joseph Puder. Steinlight, a professional Jewish activist who became an immigration reformer because he perceived immigration as a threat to American Jewry, seems to have expanded his sympathies and analysis somewhat and now notes that immigration is a threat to America and Western civilization as well as to the Jews.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 28, 2004 12:47 PM | Comment | Send
I must say that I am quite shocked at responses of Mr. Frum. To be blunt, he ignored the main points of Steinlight's opening arguement. Frum's response was simply to say that it isn't as bad as it seems, and then to speak on illegal immigration. David Frum is a smart fellow. Obviously, he knows that legal immigrants are a much bigger political force than illegal ones.
The Frum's position later on is simply confused. He seems to beleieve that we can set up an immigration proceedure to allow in Coptic Christians, Maronites, Kurds (as if Sunni Kurds cannot be Islamist?), and non-practicing Muslims. Is he that out of tune with political realities?
It is a shame that there was not a liberal Jew in the panel. I would have liked to see one of those reduced to incoherence as Frum was.
Posted by: RonL on May 30, 2004 2:51 AM
To Ron L,
I also was amazed at Frum's comments on the panel. He seemed to have nothing to say in relation to the topic under discussion. What was he doing there?
This raises some interesting thoughts about different kinds of Jews. Steinlight, a highly ethnocentric Jew who is intensely suspicious of white gentile Americans, nevertheless, _because_ of his very ethnocentrism, sees the Moslem threat which is a threat both to the Jews and to America as a whole. But Frum--a Jewish neocon who is not ethnocentric (at least in the Steinlight sense) but who believes in universal democracy based on the assumption that all people in the world are really the same--cannot get his mind around the palpable disaster represented by the mass presence of radical Moslems in this country. So he maunders on, saying nothing. Given his ideological commitments, he simply lacks the orientation toward reality to see what's happening.
To expect a neocon to grasp that immigration is really a problem, would be like expecting a liberal to grasp that sexual liberation is really a problem.
Posted by: Lawrence Auster on May 30, 2004 9:43 AM
The simple answer as to why "Auster has something against Sailer" is that Auster finds Sailer's theories reduce humans to marketable objects, subjects or mere products of evolution which he finds "intellectually insulting" as you note.
A constant theme of Austers is that of "the transcendent":
"Transcendence is the matrix of basic allegiances that cannot always be justified in rationalistic terms because the true value of any thing can be known only through participation in that thing, not through mere external observation or manipulation of it." What is transcendence, and why does it matter?
I don't imagine that Sailer would touch such a subject with a barge pole. What's more Dawkins, Hitchens and all the other Latter Day Atheists would have us believe that religion and concepts such as transcendence are evolutionary misfires and consign the whole subject to the scrapheap. Which is, in fact, monumentally ignorant, more so given the supposed intellectual genius status these people have been afforded.
As Stove puts it:
...to heirs of the Enightenment such as myself, the reasons for the very existence of religion have remained an absolute mystery. Nor is this a minor matter: not to understand religion is, quite simply, not to understand nine-tenths of human history. There is no mystery about why there is farming or industry, why there is instruction of the young, why there is architecture, medicine or law. But the most salient fact of all human history is this: that all those things, and many others, have almost always been suffused through-and-through with religion, and subordinated to it. All right; but why does religion exist?
This is the question of questions concerning Homo sapiens. (David Stove, The Oracles and their Cessation.)
So, leaving aside Auster's predilection for what seems at times hysteria, he is right to be intellectually offended. As am I and any other thinking person regardless of creed or lack thereof.
That's an interesting link to E. O. Wilson and his idea of Consilience. What status does Mr Wilson have in the Evolutionary Theorist community? How common are these ideas in that community? Are there others expounding upon the subject? I find the subject fascinating and would like to know more.
I applaud Hesperado's subtle, comprehensive and elegantly stated analysis of Auster vis a vis PC and conservatism.
Pat: In earlier days I seem to recall Sailer referring to himself as a Catholic, but I haven't read that in ages. In any case, a book you may find interesting in light of your comment is Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon", which is an exploration of evolutionary ideas concerning religion. I found it excellent, but do be warned that Dennett is often mentioned in the same breath as Dawkins, Harris, et.al.
And I think your comment went a long way toward delineating exactly what it is that differentiates the worldviews of Auster and Sailer.
Not having read David Frum's 'Dead Right', the opinions on immigration expressed in his 'How We Got Here' - a book I laid down the moment the author made the intellectual demand on his readers that they believe that he knew what travelling by public transport is like - certainly acknowledged the pernicious impact of the Immigration Act 1965.
The best comment on Frum that I have ever read came from Peter Brimelow, a friend turned opponent -
"I have to make a confession: I once helped David get a job at Forbes Magazine. The knock on him there was that he was an ideologue and not a good reporter. I don’t really believe this – it is the standard media bureaucrat criticism of any conservatives in the newsroom – but he may well be primarily a scholar. His work is always a polished, even brilliant, edifice, but when you get up close you can see the factual gaps, glossed over by ingenious theorizing."
http://www.vdare.com/pb/frumpurge.htm
Frum, an hereditary mediacrat, hasn't been on British TV for a while, which is good - I never liked watching him, because he always had to have the last word and shouted over his opponents in a manner similar to the late Mick
McGahey, the Communist leader of the Scottish coalminers in the 1983 strike.
I guess all leftists debate the same way.
Hesperado evaluates my writings not on the basis of what I actually say, but on the basis of his own private theory that I am a gnostic thinker! It's clear what has happened with Hesperado. Being a student of Eric Voegelin, who is the main critic of modern gnosticism, and not liking my criticisms of liberalism and conservatism, Hesperado picks up this handy conceptual tool from Voegelin and declares that I'm a gnostic. It's a high-fallutin' way of putting me down and dismissing my work, without having to engage in a fair evaluation of what I actually say. It is, in short, the intellectual version of a smear.
My criticisms of modern conservatives are not based on some hidden gnostic truth that only I and small coterie possess and that can only be known through some secret method; they are based on the conservatives' own stated ideals and positions that, as I've observed, they fail to live up to and steadily surrender. The reason the conservatives do this is that modern liberalism with its principle of non-discrimination has indeed completely dominated the modern world, and, therefore, unless one has a principle that is the opposite of liberal non-discrimination, one will inevitably move in the liberal direction.
Now, the fact that I'm standing against the accepted idea of the modern world may seem to a superficial and glib intellect to make me "gnostic," since an aspect of gnosticism is the idea that the entire society or cosmos is under a false idea and that only oneself has the "real truth," which is accessible only to those who join the gnostic brotherhood. In fact, unlike a gnostic, I do not say that the world is under some illusion or cosmic conspiracy and that only I have the "real truth." To the contrary, and UNLIKE many mainstream conservatives who think liberals are acting in bad faith, I always insist that liberals have good-faith and sincere reasons for believing the things that they believe, and that the only way traditionalists can win is to persuade liberals that liberalism is false and destructive and leading to the extinction of our civilization. The gnostic, by contrast, does not grant the rationality and good faith of other people and seek to persuade them; the gnostic says that others are toiling under the false consciousness of a cosmic conspiracy, and that the gnostic alone is in possession of the secret truth which cannot be known by ordinary people.
By Hesperado's logic, anyone who argues that the prevailing beliefs of his society are mistaken and destructive is a gnostic! Which would make any intellectual dissent to prevailing beliefs "gnostic" and thus illegitimate and suspect. It's a rotten game that Hesperado is up to. Instead of dealing with my ideas as I actually state them, he sticks a cheap negative label on them that has no other aim than to discredit my entire work.
That is not the way to go. For example, I've strongly criticized Steve Sailer's thought (see my 2005 article "Biocentric Yuppiedom versus the West"). But I do not just stick a label on him; I evaluate his biocentric approach and show why I think it's both mistaken in itself and bad for conservatism and the West, even as I underscore Sailer' value in certain areas.
If liberalism truly is the dominant social perspective, and looking at the current form of liberalism as the natural outgrowth of Cultural Marxism, then ever more self-destructive acts of liberalism would naturally lend itself to status seeking ritual. The dominant social group in the West has fully embraced anti-gentile Cultural Marxism as its Weltansicht, thus naturally, subordinate groups in society will internalize these values as well, to their peril.
Status seeking, a powerful force in every society, will cause liberals to take ever more absurd and self-abnegating positions as they prove to others their embrace of the current summum bonum. Liberals are seeking the transcendant as well, although their path leads them into a trap. Status seeking is a biological imperative, like lust or fear, Mr. Auster trivializes it to his his peril.
Dan
One of the commenters who call themselves Anonymous (there seem to be more than one) writes at 11/15/2008 06:20 PM:
"Let us all recall that Auster supported the current Iraq war with a fanatical fury that would make some Neocons look reasonable. Even now, Auster says that the USA (or Israel, with support from the USA) MUST attack Iran. In other words, Auster is saying, 'Lets you and him fight.' Sailer says, 'Thanks, but no thanks' to yet another Neocon war for Israel. For that Auster attacks Sailer constantly, calling him a bigot and anti-Semite (i.e., a racist). Besides the pot and kettle aspect to Auster calling any person except himself a 'racist', it should be clear that Auster hasn’t exactly carried his argument that opposing another preemptive war (the one against Iran) makes one an anti-Semite."
This commenter is the kind of liar and smearer that one runs into constantly in online discussion forums and who are a main reason not to participate in such forums. But I've gotten involved in this discussion, and the practical question is, do I ignore him, and perhaps let others believe that what he is saying is true, or do I reply? In this case I'll reply.
He writes:
"Let us all recall that Auster supported the current Iraq war with a fanatical fury that would make some Neocons look reasonable."
Truth: I consistently supported the invasion of Iraq because of the WMDs/terror nexus, an argument that—given what everybody including the most fanatical war critics thought at the time was true about WMDs—was persuasive to me, and, though I looked and looked, I never saw a good argument against it. I consistently opposed any war or intrusion abroad for the purpose of spreading democracy or changing the social structure of the Muslim world. I'm one of the most outspoken opponents of the Bush/neocon doctrine of pacifying Muslim extremism by getting Muslim countries to accept democracy. Second, I've been saying over and over since Fall 2003 that we have no strategy for victory in Iraq and that the neocons' constant predictions of "success," based on an election or two, were a sign of people living in an ideological fantasy world. To say that I'm not only like the neocons vis à vis Iraq but even more fanatical than they, is a statement of such idiocy that you wonder how the commenter manages to tie his shoes in the morning. Yet this is the kind of idiocy freely thrown around in unmoderated (or, as in this instance, insufficiently moderated) Web discussions, making them generally an unsuitable format for intelligent discussion.
The commenter continues:
"Even now, Auster says that the USA (or Israel, with support from the USA) MUST attack Iran."
This is true, and it's the only true statement the commenter makes.
The commenter continues:
"'Lets you and him fight.' Sailer says, 'Thanks, but no thanks' to yet another Neocon war for Israel. For that Auster attacks Sailer constantly, calling him a bigot and anti-Semite (i.e., a racist)."
This is a vile lie. I have never called anyone a bigot simply for opposing U.S. military action against Iran. And when I have used the word "bigoted" for Sailer, on perhaps one occasion, I defined it, I didn't just toss it around and use it like a smear. In my article about Sailer's attack on Eric Breindel I wrote:
"What is bigotry? An attitude of portraying a disliked group or any member of that group in the most negative terms possible, to make them as hateful as possible. What is a bigot? A person who displays a fixed bigotry. Steve Sailer has a fixed bigotry against the Jewish state, and against the Jewish neocons.
"My intention in saying this is not to get other people to exclude Sailer but to get them to criticize him and dissociate themselves from those aspects of his writings that are nasty and bigoted. Then maybe he will change. He's sure not going to change so long as the automatic reaction of people on the right to defend and excuse him."
[end of quote]
In claiming that I called Sailer an anti-Semite for opposing military action against Iran, the commenter is using the standard type of argument constantly used by Israel-haters and anti-Semites. They say, for example, that they're being called anti-Semites for merely "criticising" Israel, when in fact they're called anti-Semites for expressing hatred of Israel, for denying it right to exist, and for siding with those seeking to destroy it. These people never take responsibility for the fact that they are enemies of Isreal, and Instead keep saying that people are called anti-Israel merely for criticizing Israel, or for opposing some policy that defenders of Israel's existence support.
Also, as I discuss here, I have never called Sailer an anti-Semite. Also, I've never called him a racist in any context, let alone in the context of Israel and Jews.
The commenter continues:
"Besides the pot and kettle aspect to Auster calling any person except himself a 'racist', it should be clear that Auster hasn’t exactly carried his argument that opposing another preemptive war (the one against Iran) makes one an anti-Semite."
Truth: I rarely use the word "racist" and always define it carefully when I do. The notion that I go around calling people racists is an off-the-wall lie.
Then the commenter repeats his lie that I've called people anti-Semites simply for opposing military force against Iran.
I repeat: It's the presence of commenters like this that make one hesitant to participate in Web forums. Even if there is a discussion of a legitimate topic, the low-lifes and anti-Semites will show up and ruin it.
Dan writes:
"Status seeking is a biological imperative, like lust or fear, Mr. Auster trivializes it to his peril."
Dan reverses what I said. I have not trivialized or denied the role of status seeking as a force in society. I've said that since all societies involve status seeking, to say that status seeking is the cause of white guilt and Western suicide tells us precisely nothing about the specific causes of white guilt and Western suicide.
The question is WHY is white guilt (or rather the attribution of guilt to other whites) a key to status is our society. And to answer that, we have to look at the beliefs that people have, their notion of what is good and bad, of true and false. Sailer's reductionism ignores or eliminates such considerations and thus eliminates the possibility of understanding or correcting our current suicidal course. You can't reduce human beings to machines driven by biological imperatives, and then talk about what men and society ought to do. If humans are determined, then they have no choice in what they do. Reductionists and Darwinians who claim otherwise are just grabbing at an unprincipled exception to their own world view.
Regarding Mr. Auster's statement about the Iraq war, first of all, I agree that given what was known at the time about WMDs and so on, it seemed as if war was going to be the only way to deal with it. In retrospect, a better argument against the war comes from the notion of the fog of war, i.e. things can get out of hand quickly. That's an argument about the invasion; about the current campaign to democratize Iraq, very little can be said in its favor.
Just as in the current financial rout, lots of people now say that they saw it coming, but few acted on it.
"Victory has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan."
Regarding Mr. Auster's strictures on participating in forums (such as this one), I feel obligated to give wide latitude to comments - and in fact on this post every one has made it through. My view is that, so long as reasons and arguments are given, and absent wild accusations or profanity or gratuitous personal attacks, anyone can say what they like here.
Lawrence Auster requested via email that I correct one of his comments, but Blogger won't allow me to do that. (All I can do is delete them entirely.) So I'll post it here. The last sentence of his last comment should read:
"Reductionists and Darwinians who claim otherwise are just grabbing at an unprincipled exception to their own materialism."
E. O. Wilson is one of the most respected scientists in his field, and he sparked the "sociobiology" controversy with his book of that name. He and David Sloan Wilson are at odds with the majority Dawkins-faction of that camp when it comes to group selection.
I don't think Dawkins and Harris have a very good understanding of the phenomenon of religion. Razib of Gene Expression has some pretty good critiques of them and other posts explaining why religion is so universal and robust.
Mr. Auster is correct that status seeking itself does not provide a why, but it does provide a how. It shows how the latest (perhaps endstage) form of liberalism is working itself out. Having embraced its premise, liberals will seek to one up each other to show how fully they embody the new definition of goodness. This will lead to more and more destructive actions on the parts of liberals, because this form of liberalism was designed to destroy them.
The question is: WHY did our elites embrace the philosphy of Cultural Marxism that was created in order to destroy Western Civilization?
Dan
Re: David Frum, he's one of those apparently anti-Islam analysts who turned out to be really an asymptotic analyst (my term for those analysts who avoid criticizing Islam itself, and closely related to this, avoid criticizing the vast majority of Muslims, whittling the problem down to the more manageable -- and artificial -- size of a more or less "tiny minority of extremists" who are trying to "hijack" an otherwise benign "religion" called Islam).
See Robert Spencer on this:
http://jihadwatch.org/archives/019505.php
And Bat Ye'or:
http://jihadwatch.org/archives/019514.php
Among the positive aspects of Sailer's contribution, I should have mentioned one issue on which he is both passionate and on the right side: immigration.
Auster wrote:
“Hesperado evaluates my writings not on the basis of what I actually say, but on the basis of his own private theory that I am a gnostic thinker!”
I never said I have a theory that Auster is a Gnostic thinker. What I wrote was:
“One alternative explanation that might be implicitly lurking in Auster's paradigm is that of the "ecclesiola" -- i.e., the "pure remnant" who alone know the truth, while the vast majority have gone astray. This would be an impermissible explanation, unless one were -- either willfully or unwittingly -- succumbing to the Gnostic temptation to damn the Western cosmion. I tend to think Auster is not doing this, but I'd like to see more tangible and copious indications to make sure.”
Note my first sentence there: "...that MIGHT be lurking implicitly in Auster's paradigm..." and note my last sentence there: “I tend to think Auster is NOT doing this...” [emphasis added for those whose reading glasses need a new prescription]
“It's clear what has happened with Hesperado. Being a student of Eric Voegelin, who is the main critic of modern gnosticism, and not liking my criticisms of liberalism and conservatism, Hesperado picks up this handy conceptual tool from Voegelin and declares that I'm a gnostic.”
Again, I never “declared” that Auster is a gnostic. Auster often makes a big deal about how other people aren’t reading him carefully and end up criticizing a straw man rather than what he actually writes (and Auster in fact is complaining here about me doing this to me)--and yet he turns around and perpetrates the exact same thing he is accusing me of!
“It's a high-fallutin' way of putting me down and dismissing my work, without having to engage in a fair evaluation of what I actually say. It is, in short, the intellectual version of a smear.”
It certainly would be that, if what he claims I was doing were actually verifiable from my own writings. But it's not, as anyone with a lick of sense can plainly see by reading my previous comment Auster is complaining about.
”My criticisms of modern conservatives are not based on some hidden gnostic truth that only I and small coterie possess and that can only be known through some secret method; they are based on the conservatives' own stated ideals and positions that, as I've observed, they fail to live up to and steadily surrender.”
This just reiterates the assertion, but that’s a tangential problem anyway. As I said before, I tend to think Auster is NOT indulging in this kind of Gnosticism. Indeed, that's why I think his analysis on this issue tends to go into taffy-like contortions, precisely because he might be avoiding the easy out of the Gnostic explanation; but there is another vector pulling at his analysis, I think, one that needn't be there, in my view, which has its source, in my estimation (jeez louise, I find myself having to write like a frigging defense attorney whenever I'm engaging in a discussion with either Auster or Robert Spencer, for fear of setting off their hypersensitivity!), in a failure to reasonably account for why so many -- indeed, a majority if not a vast majority -- conservatives have had a sea change in hearts & minds. I mean, the reality is paradoxical and complex enough, without having to twist it further into pretzels. (Speaking of Spencer, he sort of evinces the opposite problem: instead of going into contortions in response to the paradox, he just avoids it, then pops in now and again with broad statements of the phenomenon that reveal a rather simplistic and naive grasp of one of the most important obstacles in our time to dealing rationally with the danger of Islam -- which one would think would occupy Spencer's interest a little more.)
At any rate, I’m more interested in Auster’s next sentence, which broaches on the etiological problem I mentioned in my previous comment:
“The reason the conservatives do this is that modern liberalism with its principle of non-discrimination has indeed completely dominated the modern world, and, therefore, unless one has a principle that is the opposite of liberal non-discrimination, one will inevitably move in the liberal direction.”
This sentence, of course, does not actually answer the etiological question, and only makes that question more pressing, and underscores the baffling nature of the reality in question. He begins the sentence with an apparent promise of some kind of answer:
“The reason the conservatives do this is that..."
But then we find he is just restating the problem that needs explaining. The question remains, and now becomes: Why have the vast majority of conservatives -- for it certainly is a vast majority when it comes to the problem of Islam -- Why have the vast majority of conservatives accepted this domination of liberalism? Surely, conservatives aren’t that mealy-mouthed and passive that a majority of them would just bend over for a domination of modern liberalism? Why would so many of them do that? This doesn’t say much for conservatism, that it inculcates a culture so ready to succumb.
Auster goes on to write:
“...In fact, unlike a gnostic, I do not say that the world is under some illusion or cosmic conspiracy and that only I have the "real truth." To the contrary, and UNLIKE many mainstream conservatives who think liberals are acting in bad faith, I always insist that liberals have good-faith and sincere reasons for believing the things that they believe, and that the only way traditionalists can win is to persuade liberals that liberalism is false and destructive and leading to the extinction of our civilization.”
This again completely avoids the gigantic and baffling phenomenon of the vast majority of conservatives becoming liberalized, so to speak. I can understand liberals being liberalized; what needs explaining is so many, perhaps a vast majority, of conservatives succumbing so easily to a paradigm shift that apparently goes against most of their core beliefs.
“By Hesperado's logic, anyone who argues that the prevailing beliefs of his society are mistaken and destructive is a gnostic!”
I never said this. I only framed the particular arguments of Auster as possibly implying the gnostic pathos as one possible explanation for an etiology that would make sense, given the nature of the phenomenon, coupled with the apparent etiological lacunae in Auster's writings. And it's not the possibility of a Gnostic motivation in Auster that interests me -- indeed, it was parenthetical in my previous comment, and ended up being tentatively dismissed by me ("I tend NOT to think Auster is doing this") -- it's the more interesting possibility that what I notice as apparent contortions in the generation of multiple species of the "false conservative" in his analysis with regard to this issue might have its source in his failure to think about and offer a reasonable explanation for such a monumentally odd phenomenon.
“Which would make any intellectual dissent to prevailing beliefs "gnostic" and thus illegitimate and suspect.”
And I never said this either. In fact, I have been engaging in intellectual dissent against the prevailing PC MC of our time, which I describe as “dominant and mainstream” regularly on my blog for over two years. I wouldn’t do that if I thought my inttellectual dissent was illegitimate and suspect.
“It's a rotten game that Hesperado is up to. Instead of dealing with my ideas as I actually state them, he sticks a cheap negative label on them that has no other aim than to discredit my entire work.”
It’s a curiously emotional reaction from Auster, when I didn’t label his ideas as anything, I only raised sincere questions about what they might imply and/or what might motivate them, given the apparent absence of an etiological explanation in his writings for what is otherwise a major concern of his, the phenomenon of the false conservative. And it's a queerly paradoxical reaction from Auster, since he's doing to me exactly what he's complaining about me doing to him (i.e., blatantly mischaracterizing his content and motives without evidence from what I have actually written -- indeed, in ostensible contradiction to what I have written only a few centimeters above him)!
Note from Hesperado: my last post probably came out as written by "Erich" -- I had forgotten to attach "Hesperado" to it.
I don't understand on what basis Auster thinks that the "prospect of the nuclear destruction of Israel by Iran would be no more significant to him [=Sailer] than a baseball game". Sailer does not seem to have mentioned the prospect of Israel's destruction anywhere, and we cannot really know what he thinks about it. From reading Sailer it is obvious that he thinks that the military threat, nuclear or otherwise, that Muslims pose is not serious. He doesn't believe that the Iranian government is so irrational as to risk its own annihilation by starting a war with Israel or America.
Correction to my last long post:
"(and Auster in fact is complaining here about me doing this to me)"
should read:
"(and Auster in fact is complaining here about me doing this to HIM)"
Auster states that he has never called Sailer an “anti-Semite” only a “bigot” against Jews and Israel.
But is this really a valid distinction? In a climate of opinion where Walt and Mearsheimer are smeared as anti-Semites for their book on the Israel lobby, to refer to anyone as a bigot against Israel and Jews is to effectively call them an anti-Semite.
Bill Buckley off course said that his essay and book on Buchanan and Sobran didn’t claim that they were anti-Semites. But if you write a book with the title “In Search of Anti-Semitism”, the subjects of the inquisition are likely going to be viewed as anti-Semites, especially in a society obsessed with “anti-Semitism.”
And if you accuse someone of being a bigot against Jews and Israel, how can you not expect most people to view that as a charge of anti-Semitism?
Yet another "Anonymous" writes (and by the way how many of these brave right-wingers are there at Mangan's who don't even use pen names?):
"[I]f you accuse someone of being a bigot against Jews and Israel, how can you not expect most people to view that as a charge of anti-Semitism?
I ask the nameless one to look against at what I wrote. I did not say that Sailer is a bigot against Jews. I said that he is a bigot against Israel and Jewish neocons.
Now, many people today consider someone who is a bigot against Israel to be an anti-Semite by definition. I've argued at length why I think that's incorrect. Namely, anti-Semitism is such a damning word that I don't think a person should be called that unless he has specifically expressed bigotry toward the Jewish people as the Jewish people. For example, though I've condemned Patrick Buchanan for his bigotry against Israel. I've never called him an anti-Semite, for the simple reason that in my view he has never attacked Jews as Jews. Now I think it's entirely possible that in his inner thoughts Buchanan really is driven by an animus against Jews as Jews. But the fact is that he has never expressed such an animus outwardly. He has never attacked Jews as Jews. Never. And I insist that when it comes to such a damning word as anti-Semitism, there must be an actual expression, not a merely likelihood about what a person may be thinking.
Jews have often criticized me and sometimes harshly condemned me for refusing to call Buchanan an anti-Semite. But my reply is that there are so many cases of clear anti-Semites in the world, ranging over the centuries from the M-man himself (Muhammad) to David Duke and various right-wing bloggers today, that we should reserve the word for people who are unambiguously anti-Semitic.
That's my position. Yet because I carefully and for stated reasons refrain from calling Sailer an anti-Semite, the commenter accuses me of sneakily calling Sailer an anti-Semite.
green mamba, I appreciate your compliment, thanks.
- Erich (aka Hesperado)
The question is: WHY did our elites embrace the philosphy of Cultural Marxism that was created in order to destroy Western Civilization?
I suggest you read Michael Lind's The Next American Nation, especially chapter 4. To summarize, he contends the white liberal elites are using cultural Marxism to destroy middle class and lower class whites. The alliance is (white elite + non-white underclass) vs (white middle class and underclass).
Lawrence Auster wrote: "Sailer's reductionism ignores or eliminates such considerations and thus eliminates the possibility of understanding or correcting our current suicidal course. You can't reduce human beings to machines driven by biological imperatives, and then talk about what men and society ought to do. If humans are determined, then they have no choice in what they do. Reductionists and Darwinians who claim otherwise are just grabbing at an unprincipled exception to their own materialism."
The conclusion there is true if we grant the premise, namely that a "biological imperative" just is something that determines human behavior. But surely it isn't. Whether the drive is for sex, food, or status, the drive is manifested in different ways and furthermore, at least the first two have been the subjects of social and religious regulation since the dawn of man. We can imagine someone arguing with a priest, for example, saying, "Well, sex is a biological drive. How can you hope to tell people what they ought to do?
I hope I'm not being too simplistic in saying that identifying the idea of a "white status struggle" is no different in principal from the idea of a biological sex drive. In both cases it's still possible to state how they should be carried out.
Dan wrote: "The question is: WHY did our elites embrace the philosophy of Cultural Marxism that was created in order to destroy Western Civilization?" I think Lawrence Auster's answer to this, namely that they did it because they think it good, is partly correct. But to see it differently, think for example of Che Guevara t-shirts, or even of President (-Elect) Obama: these things are considered cool, hip, fashionable. And then we're back to status, because to be fashionable is to have an edge over or to be more advanced than your fellows.
I just noticed now that Auster on his blog characterizes my comments about him as "an attack on me by Hesperado, a.k.a. Erich" and elaborates thusly:
"He argues that my account of a ubiquitous liberalism dominating the West is so strange, paradoxical, and pretzel-like in its intellectual contortions that the only possible explanation he can find for my odd behavior is that I am a gnostic thinker who is damning our entire civilization in favor of a hidden truth."
Up above, I already refuted this mischaracterization of my position with regard to my critique of Auster, and before that, there is another lengthy comment by me that clearly shows that Auster is mischaracterizing my position.
Auster's post on his blog is stamped at 7:38 pm, while his latest post above me here is 3:03 pm, and my post which should clear up the mischaracterization is stamped before that, at 1:32 pm. Auster has thus had plenty of time to see my refutation. Instead of actually addressing my refutation of his first mischaracterization of my position with regard to my critique of him, and offering a counter-refutation point by point, he has compounded his misunderstanding by formally reiterating and reinforcing it on his blog, hours after I already provided my refutation, which he completely ignores.
That's for the record. People of elementary intelligence and reason playing the home game and following along by actually reading what I wrote here (instead of relying upon Auster's characterization, as "Gintas" does on Auster's site) will see what's what.
Auster's hypersensitive personalizing of intellectual disagreements by others does make the debate fun, I admit; but also irritating as hell.
I think the issue here is that Sailer is discussing not the origins of white guilt, but why white guilt is so widespread and effective.
Auster asks on his own blog:
Isn't it evident that Pippa Bacca, the 33 year old Italian airhead who hitchhiked alone through Turkey wearing a wedding dress to send a message of peace and tolerance and got murdered, was not doing it as part of some Saileresque status competition, but because she believed in peace and tolerance?
But it isn't the Pippa Baccas or other true believers that Sailer is referring to here. He is talking about the "whiter" person who complain about institutional racism and about how guilty he feels over slavery, and then sends his kid to the expensive private school (or moves to a "good neighborhood" that has a lot of "good people" living in it) because the inner city schools just don't seem to have a good enough educational program for some reason.
Actually, Pippi Bianca is a great example of a person who is engaged in signalling (note that costly signals are more effective). She didn't merely ignore any characteristics of drivers when she happened to be hitch-hiking, she put on a wedding dress and traveled around different countries because she wanted attention. She likely thought that she was doing a good thing by teaching the world about yadayadakumbaya, but she was doing it for attention nevertheless.
"The question is: WHY did our elites embrace the philosophy of Cultural Marxism that was created in order to destroy Western Civilization?" I think Lawrence Auster's answer to this, namely that they did it because they think it good, is partly correct. But to see it differently, think for example of Che Guevara t-shirts, or even of President (-Elect) Obama: these things are considered cool, hip, fashionable. And then we're back to status, because to be fashionable is to have an edge over or to be more advanced than your fellows.
That doesn't answer the question at all! In fact, it is just a different way of asking the same question. Why do Che shirts impart coolness and high status? There is no intrinsic reason they should do so, and simply saying that they do tells us nothing. If, however, you can answer why Che and Obama shirts are fashionable, then you will have answered why the elites have embraced cultural Marxism.
"Why do Che shirts impart coolness and high status? There is no intrinsic reason they should do so, and simply saying that they do tells us nothing."
Why do sideburns or bell-bottoms convey coolness and status at one time but not another? I don't think that there's any other answer than that some people adopt these and others imitate. I'm not saying that it's entirely the same with "cultural Marxism", because historical reasons enter into it, like the fact of a black minority in this country, or a history of colonialism in Europe. Note that Russians or Eastern Europeans don't seem to suffer from white guilt; though Russia at least certainly has plenty to feel guilty about vis-a-vis non-white peoples.
TGGP writes:
"Actually, Pippi Bianca is a great example of a person who is engaged in signalling (note that costly signals are more effective). She didn't merely ignore any characteristics of drivers when she happened to be hitch-hiking, she put on a wedding dress and traveled around different countries because she wanted attention. She likely thought that she was doing a good thing by teaching the world about yadayadakumbaya, but she was doing it for attention nevertheless."
But this is an empty statement, since everything that human beings do, we could say that they're doing it for attention. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet—he was doing it for attention. Beethoven wrote his Fifth Symphony—he was doing it for attention. Ronald Reagan gave a speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964—he was doing it for attention. William Ayers set off a bomb in the Pentagon—he was doing it for attention. Al Gore has traveled around the country the last few years telling people that environmental apocalypse is about to occur—he's done it for attention. Alec Baldwin wrote a book about how his ex-wife made it impossible for him to see his daughter—he was doing it for attention. I'm writing this comment to Mangan's blog—I'm doing it for attention.
Since literally everything of note and not of note that human beings do in society has the element of drawing attention to themselves, to say that someone did something for attention doesn't tell us anything about the meaning and motivation of the act.
And the same applies to the argument that status competition is the reason for white guilt mongering. It's an empty argument, which has the appearance of saying something, but in reality is saying nothing,
Are we expected to believe that the destruction of Western civilization (by liberals who have embraced Cultural Marxism) is, among other considerations, a fashionable objective? That it's considered a "cool" or "hip" thing to do?
I find it easier to believe that liberal barbarians are indulging in a sentimental daydream.
I acquit Auster of charges of crypto-gnosticism.
There are a few ways in which he does remind me a little of a political gnostic:
A. He does often use evil and intentional destructiveness to account for the actions of his ideological enemies. This is not sufficient proof of gnosticism; there is at least a little evil on the left; Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihin showed that when he proved the connection between de Sade and the left.
B. His ideas about ideological purity do prevent compromise. But he makes a good case for why compromise must be avoided.
C. He does see the enemy as being located in all directions. Leftism really is everywhere in the West. Auster avoids saying most people lack the ability to see beyond untruth - which would be the mark of a political gnostic - he just thinks most people DON'T.
Ways he is not a gnostic:
A. He emphasizes common sense and historical awareness, rather than secret knowledge, as a guide to our actions. (This is grounds for acquittal on its own.) He is also guided by religion, but it is hardly a secret religion.
B. He seeks no revolution to wipe away the political cosmos and let our lights shine through. He seeks a steadfast reassertion of traditional values - quite the opposite of revolution.
C. Since he advocates no revolution, he has no need to justify the violence it would require.
I surmise that Auster's view of a good society is one in which neighbors don't bother each other, except when they ring the alarm bell for mutual defense. He has good reasons to ring that bell as loudly as persistently as he is. This is hardly gnostic.
I acquit Sailer of charges of reductionism.
Some of the things he writes can be interpreted that way, but I think this is due to sloppiness or over-focus on his part. When he says PC is "just" status competition on the part of leftist white, I believe he means PC contains little truth, and is no more substantive than status competition. Fashion is, after all, both complex and superficial; people can believe shallow nonsense at a fairly deep level.
I agree with the original post that Sailer probably did not mean to discount other possibilities; Sailer likes to talk about status, probably for the same reason he likes to talk about sports. People with other focuses will likely see other explanations.
In reply to Hesperado's a.k.a. Erich's comment of 11/16 at 1:32 p.m.:
I missed the phrase in his earlier comment where, after saying that he is drawn to the explanation that I'm a gnostic who "damns the Western cosmion," he added the qualifier, "I tend to think Auster is not doing this." The reason I missed it was that the whole drift of Hesperado's argument was to present his reasons for believing that I am a gnostic. If, in reality, he tends not to believe I'm a gnostic, why did he write an entire comment setting forth his reasons why I am?
He even has the audacity to write, in response to my criticizing him for calling me a gnostic:
"It’s a curiously emotional reaction from Auster, when I didn’t label his ideas as anything,"
Such is Hesperado's technique. He says something loud and clear, then claims he hasn't said it ("I didn’t label his ideas as anything"), and then claims there's something strange about me (a "curiously emotional reaction"), for thinking that he had, ahem, said what he had actually said.
Here's another example of the same technique. Initially Hesperado clearly expressed his approval for multiculturalism:
"I think it is more helpful, more elegant, and more accurate to see the overarching phenomenon [of conservatives buying into multiculturalism and politically correctness] as one of people of intelligence, good will and good faith actually undergoing (and/or participating in) a sea change in consciousness that itself has many good aspects to it."
So, Hesperado says that the spreading dominance of our society by political correctness and multiculturalism "has many good aspects to it."
But then, when I, in responding to his approving comments about PC and multiculturalism, described him as "a professed non-conservative who says that he supports political correctness and multiculturalism," he comes back and says, "Actually, I have written about 100 essays condemning PC MC... And as part of my some 100 essays condemning PC MC, I have integrated lots of criticism of conservatives for having succumbed to PC MC."
So he really wants it both ways, doesn't he?
And here's yet another example where he denies saying what he plainly said. He stated that he had an "explanation" for my strange, "twisted like a pretzel" ideas, and the explanation is that I am a gnostic. But when I, simply characterizing what he had said, wrote that he has a "theory" that I am a gnostic, he retorts, "I never said I have a theory that Auster is a Gnostic thinker."
Oh, I see. He didn't say that he had a "theory" that I am a gnostic he said that he had an "explanation" that I am a gnostic! I stand corrected.
In the same way, he writes at length about his explanation that I'm a gnostic, and when I replied that he had "declared" that I'm a gnostic, he complains that the word "declare" was wrong, because of all his famous qualifications (see above). Ok, so Hesperado is finally right about something in this discussion. I'll concede that I should not have said that he "declared" that I am gnostic. I should have said that he argued at length his reasons for thinking that my being a gnostic is the only explanation he can think of for my weird, twisted in a pretzel, paradoxical, intellectual gyrations.
Thus he writes:
"But the question is: Why do conservatives do this? What has changed? Conservatives 60 years ago wouldn't have done this. Now the vast majority of them bend over backwards to 'respect' Islam and Muslims. What happened? Perhaps Auster has already written about these questions. It just seems that whenever I read him on issues that get close to these questions, I never see any sense or indication that he has ever asked them and come up with a reasonable explanation. All I see are various different permutations of labels that try to capture that animal the 'false conservative', who seem to be sprouting up all over the place, often in highly unlikely places to boot, which makes the puzzle all the more puzzling, one would think."
As a writer, I have endeavored to show, as clearly as I can, the ruling liberal idea of our time, how it has been accepted at all levels of our society, and how this makes our society incapable of defending itself. And what has Hesperado gleaned from this? That my work adds up to nothing but tossing around various permutations of labels!
Then, finally, he asks a reasonable question:
"However, once again, why has this occurred? And what will the explanation of the 'why' imply about the vast majority who have succumbed [to liberalism]? To me, if one continues to believe in the West, one cannot assume that the vast majority are not good, decent and intelligent. If the vast majority of the West are not good, decent and intelligent, then we might as well jump ship now, hunker down in a militia compound and stockpile weapons for the Counter-Revolution."
This type of question has regularly been asked of me by readers: Why do I criticize almost all conservatives? Is everyone wrong? And my answer is that, given the profound, systemic crisis of our society, it's not surprising, that everyone is wrong. The West's suicide process could not have happened as a result of just one "bad" element in our society, say, the liberal elites. No, all the leading elements of our society, all the significant factions of the West, including elements normally thought of as very conservative, such as the Catholic Church and evangelicals, have signed on to an idea, the belief in non-discrimination, that spells the doom of the West, since it leads people to support, or to refuse to oppose, policies leading to the Third-Worldization and Islamization of the West. There is nothing gnostic about this insight. I'm not saying that the West is under the spell of false consciousness. People sincerely believe that discrimination is the most immoral thing and must be avoided at all costs; and further, that same idea is now embodied in attitudes, custom, and law, so that there are severe penalties for openly challenging it.
There is nothing mysterious or obscure about my argument. It is simple and straightforward. It is, however, very hard for most people to understand it, because understanding it would require them to abandon the most sacred belief in our society, an act that would make them immoral in their own eyes and pariahs in the eyes of society.
Which, by the way, may explain Hesperado's attacks on my straightforward position as "twisted" like a pretzel, as "queerly paradoxical," as characterized by "taffy-like contortions" (he even has an entry at his blog called ("The taffy-like contortions of Lawrence Auster"), and "gnostic," as well as his description of my responses to him in this discussion as "curiously emotional" and "odd." The reality is that my central idea—that the ruling liberal belief in non-discrimination is leading to the suicide of our society—is irrefutable, AND that my idea is deeply threatening and disturbing, not least because agreeing with it would require people to reject the dominant moral belief of our society. So, since my disturbing position cannot be refuted, it must be discredited by other means, among which is to try to portray me as irrational, weird, bent, or nuts, something that my attackers, including Robert Spencer and many less prominent people, have done over and over.
One final point. Regarding Hesperado's presentation of himself in this discussion as an opponent of the left, he has written at his blog:
"It is time to scrap the terms Left and Right altogether—and with them 'conservative' and 'liberal.'"
Does Christianity fall into the "gnostic" genre? Paul talked about how "the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers" and how Christ is "the mystery of the ages revealed."
If someone were a Christian, taking this seriously, he would, to an outsider, sound gnostic. Especially if this Christian suggested that the left / liberal Enlightement project is basically an anti-Christianity-in-the-West project.
I don't know Voegelin well, but didn't he say the political gnosticism he was describing was a Christian heresy? In other words, Christianity itself is not gnostic, and looking at politics through a Christian lens is not gnostic, either.
Auster wrote:
"Consider this. When Sailer wrote that the nuclear destruction of Israel by Iran would be no more significant than a baseball game, that was not considered objectionable or divisive in the paleocon circles; no one except me ever criticized Sailer for saying that. But because I criticize Sailer, well, THAT is unacceptable, THAT is violating the rules of comity, THAT is going over the line!"
"Thus the real hierarchy of moral values in the paleocon circles reveals itself."
When I read Sailer's referenced words in context I deem it unlikely that Auster seriously believes that Sailer's intent was as Auster has caricatured it.
He not only misrepresents another's position, but then proceeds on to castigate the owner of the now made-up position as morally reprehensible.
This is merely a smokescreen, for Auster believes he is always in the right to criticize, yet never rightfully subject to honest criticism that he declares amount to merely an attack upon him.
Auster later states:
"I'm glad to see that there are some comments appearing in the thread saying that there was something objectionable about what Sailer said about Israel, even if the commenters don't agree with me completely. To me, such acknowledgement is a big step forward."
Auster seems to revel in the fact that tacit support for his misrepresentation of Sailer's words seems to validate his false claim on Sailer's character.
Later when Auster is challenged on his position on Iraq:
"To say that I'm not only like the neocons vis à vis Iraq but even more fanatical than they, is a statement of such idiocy that you wonder how the commenter manages to tie his shoes in the morning. Yet this is the kind of idiocy freely thrown around in unmoderated (or, as in this instance, insufficiently moderated) Web discussions, making them generally an unsuitable format for intelligent discussion."
Auster is merely following his protocol on public forums in which he does not exercise total control. Open comments are good when they agree with Auster, but entirely valueless when they are not. Notice that Auster dabbles in name-calling and ad-hominem more than those who are critical of his positions, though he would have you believe otherwise.
Erich, when defending his criticism of Auster noticed and wrote:
"I just noticed now that Auster on his blog characterizes my comments about him as "an attack on me by Hesperado, a.k.a. Erich"...."
And followed with:
"Up above, I already refuted this mischaracterization of my position with regard to my critique of Auster, and before that, there is another lengthy comment by me that clearly shows that Auster is mischaracterizing my position."
Also:
"Auster has thus had plenty of time to see my refutation. Instead of actually addressing my refutation of his first mischaracterization of my position with regard to my critique of him, and offering a counter-refutation point by point, he has compounded his misunderstanding by formally reiterating and reinforcing it on his blog, hours after I already provided my refutation, which he completely ignores."
This is the end result of intelligent debate with Lawrence Auster. He inevitably retreats to his blog to continue with the one-sided discussion in the context he feels is fair and accurate, demonizing his critics as smear artists.
Auster's complaints against Erich here, and formerly against Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Baron Boddissey over at Gates of Vienna are always the same. He engages in disingenuous criticism by misrepresenting people's positions and then gets angry when he is called out for it.
It is no different than his moral condemnation here regarding the made up position by Sailer regarding "Israel, Iran and a baseball game".
This type of question has regularly been asked of me by readers: Why do I criticize almost all conservatives? Is everyone wrong? And my answer is that, given the profound, systemic crisis of our society, it's not surprising, that everyone is wrong. The West's suicide process could not have happened as a result of just one "bad" element in our society, say, the liberal elites. No, all the leading elements of our society, all the significant factions of the West, including elements normally thought of as very conservative, such as the Catholic Church and evangelicals, have signed on to an idea, the belief in non-discrimination, that spells the doom of the West, since it leads people to support, or to refuse to oppose, policies leading to the Third-Worldization and Islamization of the West.
May I ask mr. Auster whether he has any thoughts as to how this situation came about in the first place? Why is it that in Western societies today, "all the leading elements of our society [...] have signed on to an idea, the belief in non-discrimination, that spells the doom of the West"? Why have people been convinced to embrace such an idea?
Mr. Auster is often accused by others on the Right of quibbling too extensively, and thus destructively, with his purported ideological allies. He has repeatedly addressed this criticism by explaining his view that modern conservatives, despite their various "conservative" positions on the issues, are not truly conservatives because of their acceptance of the ultimately destructive liberal principle of non-discrimination. If Mr. Auster is right (as I believe him to be) that absent a clear and forceful rejection of this principle, conservative beliefs on the checklist of issues do not matter, because the liberal, non-dscriminatory principle will swamp all, then he is also right to attack the very thing in the modern conservative mind that completely disarms the modern conservative opposition to liberalism.
In other words, the tactical assaults on Mr. Auster as a "traitor to his own side" miss the boat. His critics must engage him on the issue that he is actually discussing -- the ultimate uselessness at any level, tactical or otherwise, of a so-called "conservative" opposition that accepts and helps to advance the underlying liberal principle of non-discrimination. Is Mr. Auster wrong that (1) almost all modern conservatives accept the non-discriminatory principle and (2) liberalism cannot be halted, much less defeated, until our society clearly rejects that principle? I have seen nothing from his critics that takes on either point.
On the issue of status and "coolness" as a motivation for various liberal beliefs, that too misses the point. Undoubtedly there are millions of liberals who buy into liberalism largely for such thoughtless, herd-like reasons. But liberal dominance of our society and all its institutions is what creates a context for liberal beliefs to enjoy the pull of status. So the relevant question is how society got to that point. In answering that question, we must accept the sincerity of liberal ideas and deal with them as such, as Mr. Auster recommends. Blithely dismissing a bunch of college kids' liberalism as status-driven is one thing, but blithely dismissing our society's dominant liberal beliefs (that created the context for college kids to view liberalism as a status symbol) as such is quite another, and is quite beside the point.
Wade Coriell has written the best explanation of my position, and the best defense of my position against my critics, that I've ever seen. I am profoundly grateful to him.
On his last point that "we must accept the sincerity of liberal ideas and deal with them as such," I would further ask this: Why do conservatives not want to do this? Why do conservative prefer to say that liberals are motivated by such factors as cynicism, or "ridiculous" political correctness, or competition for status? Because if status competition, rather than the liberal belief in the non-discriminatory principle, is what motivates liberals, then conservatives don't have to confront and oppose the liberal belief in the non-discriminatory principle—which, as we know, they don't want to do, because they believe in it themselves.
How we got to this point? I'd suggest what Nietzsche and Burnham have suggested: God is dead in the heart of Western man. Isn't that what the Enlightement project was all about? "Ye shall be as God!" is the second-oldest religion on earth.
The specific mechanism of this is something that we technocratic Americans would like to figure out. Perhaps if we discovered this mechanism we could use that knowledge to restore a non-liberal order? Anyone for some conservative social engineering? I think not!
In case it matters, I am a regular contributor at "View From the Right."
In this discussion, Lawrence Auster has identified his main insight and his main mission, and I agree with them: His insight is that liberalism (i.e., the comprehensive worldview of the left, based on religious agnosticism and the demand for unlimited tolerance) is in near total control of Western Civilization. And his main mission is to arouse in others the awareness of this condition and of the mortal danger it poses to the West. I have written about this myself; for example, Google my name and "Liberalism 101."
In this discussion, Auster has been opposed for, among other things, asserting that many conservatives are basically liberal, only disagreeing with liberalism on certain discrete issues but not with the foundational beliefs of liberalism. I observe that this is unquestionably true about prominent conservatives, because they need to appeal to the masses, and John Q. Public has been taught to hate those who dare to question the sacred imperative to nondiscrimination.
I would assert that most conservatives are basically liberal. If this seems strange, consider: Conservatives by their nature want to support the existing order. But if that order is liberal (and in America it is), then the conservative’s instincts will ultimately lead him to support liberalism, even if he disagrees with some of its excesses. Furthermore, since liberalism rules, the de facto definition of “conservative” is “opposing any part of the liberal agenda.” With this definition, anyone who opposes even a small part of liberalism is liable to be branded a conservative, even if he is in most respects a liberal.
Auster objects to this phrase of mine:
"a sea change in consciousness that itself has many good aspects to it"
-- and mischaracterizes it as an expression of support for PC MC.
First, the adjective "many" is by nature imprecise and to some extent subjective. I.e., if there are 100 features of an entity, and 20 of those features are good, it is not necessarily inaccurate nor misleading for a person to say
"That entity has many good aspects to it"
-- since one person could reasonably think that 20 out of 100 can be, under certain circumstances, described as "many".
The adjective "many" does not necessarily mean "most".
The reason I used "many" in my sentence Auster quoted is that I wanted a term that precisely has a degree of ambiguity in it:
The sea change in consciousness to which I refer has a certain number of good things about it. Now, I don't want to tendentiously stack the deck and say, or imply, that the number of good things about it is so low it is negligible and has zero effect on the overall complexion of that sea change, such that one can simplistically condemn that sea change as utterly bad.
I also didn't want to say, or imply, that the sea change has been a wonderful thing for Mankind.
What I did want to capture was the complex paradox of the sea change containing a sufficient number of good features, almost inextricably from the bad, such that it becomes a difficult problem whereby
1) the good and the bad are not easily disentangled
and
2) a reasonable explanation (that avoids Gnostic flavors) for the vast majority of conservatives succumbing to it makes sense.
Again, I have written on my blog over 100 essays profoundly criticizing and condemning and lamenting PC MC. Any implication that I "clearly expressed...approval for multiculturalism", as Auster claims, must therefore be chalked up to either
1) my own sloppiness and not communicating my ideas clearly
or
2) Auster's obtuse comprehension skills.
There is no third alternative. Re-reading my remark about the "sea change", I do not see anything sufficiently sloppy to warrant the interpretation Auster wrests from it, and in my little discursion into the adjective "many" above, I have already articulated at least one reason why.
PS to my last comment:
Now, if Auster feels that my language about the "sea change" contains, lurking implicitly within it, too much support for PC MC for his comfort, and if he then even saw fit to try to intellectually defend this perception of his, I wouldn't mind that at all. But to just come out baldly and claim that I support PC MC (in terms of an all or nothing sense) -- that I do mind, since it's not defensible from what I wrote. Or, if Auster thinks it's defensible, let him present an argument going point-by-point through everything I've written here related to that particular point. A simplex assertion absent such an argument is not sufficient.
I'd be interested in what Hesperado thinks are the good features of PC MC.
Jaz, I wondered the same thing. He answers that question in a recent blog post (see II under Analysis).
"So the relevant question is how society got to that point."
The principle of non-discrimination, which shouldn't be confused with tolerance, wasn't broadly accepted by elite liberals in the 1920s. This had changed by 1945 when the United Nations was founded. In the 1920s, only the far left communist fringe in the United States consistently opposed racial discrimination.
"In answering that question, we must accept the sincerity of liberal ideas and deal with them as such, as Mr. Auster recommends."
"Sincerity" is not an explanation. Of course contemporary liberals believe that non-discrimination is true and good. The same is true now of gay marriage, but that wasn't always the case. Why did they change their minds?
"Blithely dismissing a bunch of college kids' liberalism as status-driven is one thing, but blithely dismissing our society's dominant liberal beliefs (that created the context for college kids to view liberalism as a status symbol) as such is quite another, and is quite beside the point."
Status competition amongst elite liberals explains (in large part) why fringe causes eventually enter mainstream American political discourse.
Blode032222, thanks for the link, I was hoping someone who already knew would chip in.
That blog post had embedded in it in Section II, as part of the good things:
and true progress is made
I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself, but I guffawed. Not just progress, but true progress! Towards what is not quite clear, but I'm sure any other Whig could tell us.
Its easy enough to explain how all of this came to be--mostly the clap trap pop culture of the last fifty years--masquerading as mainstream media. Beyond that, there was the deliberate take over of our educational system as well as the various churches--that began in the sixties.
Barak Obama himself is a direct recipient of this brain washing. For decades now white men have either been portrayed as wicked and evil pseudo Nazis in the business world as well as politics or else fat, dumb and lazy. Always and always in these movies, its either a woman or a minority male that shows up to save the day with a wisdom only they can possess.
In fact, every movie Denzel Washington has ever made is in fact a remake of another movie where the role he plays was played by a white man. Now, if you do not think Hollywood did this deliberately, think about the movie "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner"--where the star roles of the two whites was played by a pair of socialists. Watch commercials and tell me of you do not see this played out even in ads for toilet paper and dish soap--even car repairs.
The left in the West took a lesson from Herr Goebbels, a mastermind of propaganda and the use of mainstream media to implement it.
RobertB
Here is an opportunity for Auster to expound his theory/ies on the revitalisation of the West and instead we have a mud slinging to and fro between himself and Hesperado.
If only he could see how maddening to his loyal reader and how destructive to his cause his untempered petulance is.
Auster has made a concise and coherant rebuttal of Sailer's reductionism concluding, "Sailer's reductionism makes him incapable of grasping civilizational issues."
Well, quite so. Sailer says at page 40 of his Half Blood Prince "By personality, I‘m a
reductionist, constantly trying to state complex truths as bluntly as
possible." He doesn't seem to make any greater claim than that. Nowhere, as far as I have read (and I am new to Sailer's work), does he make any grand claims to grasp civilisational issues.
What Sailer does do is cut out the mellifluous ramblings of what passes for mainstream debate and explain what is happening not necessarily the why in toto. Personally I find this limited but of use. This is where Auster is of great assistance.
However, it is self defeating to then beat Sailer about the head for failing to grasp and explicate what I am still yet to read in completion from Auster - i.e. a definitive statement of his plan to revitalise the West.
How would Auster sell "transcendance" to a Post Christian elite?
Auster's grandly titled The most important point for traditionalists concludes with a hopey-changey we are the people we've been waiting for statement of Obamesque proportions: "That inward refusal, that inward, spiritual independence of our environment, shared among enough like-minded people, can become the basis of a new community. And then other things, more active and external things, may become possible as well."
This is as useful as Sailer's Status Seeking Whites explanation which Auster so vehemently criticises.
How does Auster propose to unscramble the omellete? The civilisational West lost it's raison d'etre with the collpase of Christianity among the elites and new cultish forms among the masses. What we have left is the shell without the ethos.
Auster is right to point out that civilisation is glued by those things which bind us being ideals transcendant of ourselves. We find ourselves in communion as a culture when there is a common unwritten bond of understanding. But how does Auster propose to remake what has been lost?
Petroleum asks:
"May I ask Mr. Auster whether he has any thoughts as to how this situation came about in the first place? Why is it that in Western societies today, 'all the leading elements of our society [...] have signed on to an idea, the belief in non-discrimination, that spells the doom of the West'? Why have people been convinced to embrace such an idea?"
There are many explanations, and nothing I say here will be a satisfactory answer, but it should you started.
First, here is an entry at VFR from 2007, "Why are people attracted to liberalism?", in which a commenter asked pretty much the same question you've asked:
"I simply want to know why, if liberalism is/has been so flawed, people have chosen to live under it.... Why are people attracted to liberalism? What has it and does it offer them?" I answered his question by considering the three historic stages of liberalism, and showing how the good liberalism of the past makes it difficult for people to question the much more radical liberalism of the present.
One of my main themes is that a new kind of liberalism emerged out of World War II. Here are a few brief excerpts from different entries on that theme:
From 2005:
As Otto Frank put it at the end of the World War II (in which his entire family had been murdered), what was wrong with Nazism was its "intolerance." But, as I've written previously, if mere "intolerance," rather than dehumanizing murderous brutality, is what defines the ultimate evil at the core of Nazism, then "intolerance" is a terrible threat to humanity and must be eliminated everywhere. Intolerance, unlike Nazism, exists in all countries. Wherever there is a distinct national identity, for example, there is implicitly a lack of tolerance for other national identities in the same territory. Therefore America, which has a strong national identity, is as threatening to the human good as German national identity, and therefore the American nation has to be eliminated along with the German one.
[end of quote]
from 2007:
my recent discussion of the origins of modern liberalism out of an overreaction to Nazism, in which liberals defined the evil of Nazism as intolerance. Since anything short of liberal notions of tolerance is Nazism, i.e., the worst evil, and since the continued existence of any Western society is incompatible with tolerance [since the existence of one country implies borders and exclusions between it and other countries], the preservation of any historic Western nation or culture is the worst evil. Liberalism thus tells people that if they want to exist and preserve their societies, then they are evil in the worst way.
[end of quote]
And here from 2007 is a discussion of Theodore Dalrymples's essential liberalism. I recommend the whole entry as Dalrymple is a good example of how someone universally thought of as a tough-minded, grim conservative is at his core liberal, i.e., his highest principle is the need not to discriminate, because to discriminate is the ultimate evil.
I wrote:
The essence of liberalism is the belief in freedom and equality as the guiding principles of society. The essence of modern liberalism (post WWII liberalism) is the belief in tolerance and non-discrimination as the guiding principles of society. And therefore a true conservative would not make equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination the guiding principle of society. (Not that a conservative is against tolerance, but he doesn't make it the ruling idea.)
Also, by tolerance I don't mean the old idea of suffering that which you don't approve. I mean the modern liberal idea of nonjudgmentally accepting and being open to whatever comes down the road.
In today's Britain, as I realized to my shock after the July 2005 bombing, tolerance--unconditioned tolerance--is the guiding principle of society, the touchstone that is constantly appealed to on every issue. It was tolerance that led the British to allow millions of Third-World people including Muslims into Britain, and it was tolerance that has led the Brits to allow the Muslims including terror supporters free rein of their Island, and it's tolerance that keeps the British from reacting against the enemies in their midst. The main reason for the surrender of Britain to Islamization is tolerance.
[end of quote]
Auster writes:
One final point. Regarding Hesperado's presentation of himself in this discussion as an opponent of the left, he has written at his blog:
[then he quotes me:]
"It is time to scrap the terms Left and Right altogether—and with them 'conservative' and 'liberal.'"
Auster needs to do two things to persuade a reasonable human being of his claim that this plucked-out quote actually substantiates his claim that I am not, in fact, an opponent of the Left:
1) Read the entire essay of mine from which he has plucked this one quote;
2) present an actual argument based upon that entire essay that details, point by point from that entire essay, how I am not an opponent of the Left.
Otherwise, he is just blowing smoke.
"And therefore a true conservative would not make equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination the guiding principle of society. (Not that a conservative is against tolerance, but he doesn't make it the ruling idea.)"
The terms "equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination" are vague in and of themselves.
Who would be against equality - unless you mean equality of outcome?
Who would be against tolerance - unless you mean tolerance of things that are the antithesis
of the prevailing culture?
Who would be against non-discrimination - unless you mean afirmative action programmes that are in fact discriminatory? Surely the conservative is in favour of a meritocracy founded on non-discrimination?
These ideas are part of the formulating idea of our culture. It is their mutation under Liberalism that enables all sorts of social disasters.
To oppose them per se would be an unmitigated disaster for conservatism. However, a conservative can re-articulate how such terms have been applied to good use and should still be applied. When we hear these terms from a liberal we know they mean the exact opposite of the accepted meaning. That is the problem with Liberalism. They come as wolves in sheep's clothing. It is the conservative's duty to unmask the liberals true intent not by denying those things we all cherish but by reinforcing what is meant by them, the traditional understanding of the terms.
Pat Hannegan writes:
"Here is an opportunity for Auster to expound his theory/ies on the revitalisation of the West and instead we have a mud slinging to and fro between himself and Hesperado."
First, apparently Mr. Hannegan didn't notice that the topic of this thread was not my theories on the revitalization of the West, but whether status competition is the source of white guilt.
Second, what's passed between Hesperado and me is not mudslinging, but an argument. Hesperado launched an attack on my work that I needed to reply to. I love it when people who have not been attacked, blame the person who has been attacked an is defending himself for "slinging mud."
Third, this thread, including my own contribution here, is hardly limited to charges and counter-charges between Hesperado and myself. There's a lot of real substances being said here.
Mr. Hannegan writes:
"However, it is self defeating to then beat Sailer about the head for failing to grasp and explicate what I am still yet to read in completion from Auster—i.e. a definitive statement of his plan to revitalise the West."
I didn't criticize Sailer for not explicating a definite plan to revitalize the West. I criticized him for his reductionist theory of white guilt, and I explained why such reductive theories are wrong and not helpful.
Also, to repeat, I didn't realize that the topic of this thread was, "Auster announces definitive statement of his plan to revitalise the West." When and if I do announce such a plan, it won't be as commenter in a blog, even that of the estimable Mr. Mangan.
On another point, Mr. Hannegan quotes Sailer:
"By personality, I‘m a reductionist, constantly trying to state complex truths as bluntly as possible."
But stating complex truths as bluntly as possible is NOT the definition of reductionism. Reductionism is not a mood, a tone, or an attitude. Reductionism is a particular way of explaining reality. Specifically, it means reducing something is to one part of the whole of that something. When Marx said that all of human history has been the history of class conflict, that was reductionism. When Marx said that man's consciousness is wholly the function of his material conditions, that was reductionism. When Freud explained all of human personality in terms of the sex drive, that was reductionism; and when he defined the sex drive itself as the need to reduce sexual tension, that was reductionism. When B.F. Skinner said that all of human behavior can be explained in terms of stimulus/response, that was reductionism. When the Darwinists say that everything about living beings came into existence by random genetic mutations plus natural selection, that is reductionism. And when Sailer says, "White Guilt is just another ploy in the Great American White Status Struggle," that is reductionism.
Reductionism is exemplified not by bluntness, but the idea that a house consists of nothing but its basement. One could make such an argument in a suave, sophisticated way, and it would still be reductionist. There are Darwinists who are suave sophisticated writers, but they are still reductionists. There are traditionalists who are blunt, and who are even described (very unfairly!) as thin-skinned, bullying tyrants, but they are not reductionists.
Larry Auster deserves more respect than he's getting here. He could have just as easily referenced quotes from his 1990 book Path to National Suicide on one of his posts above. Where were the rest of us back in 1990? Still Liberals? Totally unaware of or not caring about the changes happening in America then? Where were the big boys like Charles Johnson then? He was still writing software programs and playing jazz on his trumpet!
I have noticed that many people here offer speculative answers as to why "liberalism" (I prefer the terms Leftism and PC MC) has become sociopolitically dominant throughout the West, but none of the speculations even touch on the most curious, and most significant, aspect of this phenomenon (which I mentioned more than once way up above):
the conversion of the majority (if not, indeed, the vast majority) of conservatives to liberalism.
Sure, it's "easy" to understand why liberals have become more "radical". And it's easy to understand why those dastardly "elites" might become liberalized or why they might exploit liberalism. But it is exceedingly odd, and exceedingly in need of explanation, why conservatives have so changed.
Closely related to this I implied in my sarcastic reference to that Macchiavellian cabal of "elites": the key is to explain how the vast majority of ordinary people have changed in this regard.
Without the conversion of the majority of conservatives and, concomitantly, ordinary people, the socioopolitical change we are talking about, the mainstream dominance of PC MC, would never have happened.
Nota bene for obtuse sophomores reading: when I use the word "conversion" I don't mean it literally.
Also, Pat Hannegan wrote:
"Auster's grandly titled The most important point for traditionalists concludes with a hopey-changey we are the people we've been waiting for statement of Obamesque proportions: 'That inward refusal, that inward, spiritual independence of our environment, shared among enough like-minded people, can become the basis of a new community. And then other things, more active and external things, may become possible as well.'
"This is as useful as Sailer's Status Seeking Whites explanation which Auster so vehemently criticises."
The entry that Mr. Hannegan quotes was not a plan for the revitalization of the West, nor did it present itself as one. It was a statement of the bare minimum needed for spiritual survival and integrity in the midst of a liberal-dominated society. I was obviously not suggesting that such inward refusal was the sufficient basis for producing a new community. I was saying that without that inward refusal, nothing of a traditionalist nature is possible, because a person will inevitably drift with the liberal side. But with that refusal, spiritual survival is possible, and, with it, more positive goals, such as, say, the creation of a new community, would also become possible.
Mr. Hannegan says the entry is grandly titled but empty. I respectfully disagree. I think that my statement he quotes is indeed the most important point for traditionalists, because, whether we launch a plan to build a new community and win back the West, or whether we merely go on living under the present liberal belief system and anti-culture that we as yet have no power to change, that inward rejection, that inward refusal to surrender to the liberal lies that surround us, is the indispensable condition of a life in truth, and of life as a Western man.
What Hesperado is dreaming of is Sam Francis' "Middle American Revolution." It started materializing--even to the point of getting Murray Rothbard to jump on the bandwagon--but then Newt Gingrich and other neo-cons got in front of the parade and headed it off and they all marched merrily down Liberal Way.
On a general note, I want to thank the owner of this blog, Dennis Mangan, for being so gracious and allowing so many of us (myself included) to go off on perpendicular tangents away from the main topic of this thread. Mangan is the kind of blog host I like, one who doesn't exert excessive control over the comments, and who doesn't unnecessarily filter them at the gate before they even get there. That's my philosophy at my blog too: I have had people posting comments that have often been rather rude and condemned me in various unhinged ways, but I have never censored or deleted a comment yet (except, of course, at the request of a commenter).
Auster, my point about signalling is not empty. Listen to the Robin Hanson podcast I linked to or read some of the signaling posts on his blog. If you want something more in depth, he has written some academic papers on signalling.
If you do something and nobody knows you did it (like donating anonymously to charity) you don't send a signal. If you put more effort into signaling than into what you claim is really your goal, then signaling is probably more important to you. Pippi Bianca could rationalize the effort she put into signaling by saying that sending the signal was an important component of her altruistic plan, but the signaling story fits more than most of your other dead Eloi stories (for that you should look to Richard Wrangham).
Here's my signalling theory about why women especially are drawn to liberalism: conservatives like to claim the mantle of toughness (even if they never served in the military and their liberal opponent did) while liberals like to appear more empathetic and caring (even if conservatives donate more money, time and blood). Women are supposed to be caretakers and if one started acting like Ayn Rand men would suspect that she wouldn't make a good wife or mother. Note that most of the "gender gap" in voting goes away when women get married. One could make a self-interest argument about single women being more dependent on the state, but Bryan Caplan has amassed pretty good evidence that the self-interested voter hypothesis is false.
Good Lord, your most recent post begins "Hesperado, aka Erich, launched a dishonest, sneakily meanspirited, and contorted attack on me..." yet this isn't mud slinging? You've effectively called him a sneaky, lowdown, liar setting a trap for you. This is not argument Lawrence it is smear.
This thread started with Dennis noting your "animus" towards Sailer, your reductionist like "all-or-nothing mindset", your "personal attack" on Sailer and your inability to "appreciate" the importance of "building... alliances." That is not all of the original post but a substantial part of it.
You can skirt around it and make the most convoluted distortions in avoiding that subject all you like, but I am on topic.
The "real substances" that have ensued in the thread have come about by posters attempting to state a cause for western cultural decline and ways to mitigate it and even to recover it. In that vein I asked you to define your argument. Is that too much to ask?
It comes from a genuine admiration of your erudition and comprehensive analytical skills.
So why don't you join in the conversation without linking to prior posts of yours and state why you think society has gone the way it has?
Hesperado, that's easy talk considering hardly anyone posts comments at your blog.
The last 10 posts at Hesperado's main blog have generated the following comment numbers:
2, 0, 7, 0, 10, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0.
Mr. Mangan's has more, but it only occasionally goes over 10.
If you look at Mr. Auster's blog, he has a post up there about this thread, and that has to be why this one thread here is elephantine by comparison. Mr. Auster himself, and probably any number of people who read his blog, are over here making for an interesting discussion on an otherwise sleepy, gentle backwater. I'll bet Mr. Mangan is positively blushing at all the attention he's getting.
Not that there's anything wrong with a sleepy backwater. I visit a number of them, and enjoy the quiet life. I might even take a look at Mr. Mangan's blog from time to time.
I don't mean to say that if you don't have many commenters what you write isn't interesting or worth discussing. But it might mean that. Wink wink nudge nudge.
Frustrating! There are so many good points being made by smart people here, some I know well and some I don't know at all, and I'll bet $ to donuts that 90% of them are being lost due to the irritation.
First, Jaz, I wasn't really "feeling" Hesperado's "true progress" phrasing either. Sounds pretty squishy and lefty. On second glance, though, it sounds like what he's talking about is the thoroughly noble and common-sensical goal of cutting through one's own biases and seeing the world clearly. Extreme prejudice gets in the way of "true progress", because, like the phrase or not, when we improve our mindset we are getting better as people. Hesperado can speak for himself, I just don't want your guffaw to be the last thing you think about him (I think it's a him).
Second, and pardon my shouting, Don't reductionist and non-reductionist worldviews complement each other? When my chemistry teachers used to say, "Biology is explained here!" and my bio teachers used to say "Biology is a discipline on its own, with the power to see great truths in the world", I felt that was a healthy debate - healthy as a footrace - rather than a fight. But I think the reductionist right and the traditionalist right are really in a fight here, and stand to lose an appreciation of each other.
Every time I read a smart righty, I find something that immediately makes me take pause. Ten years ago, I would have closed the book or the browser window and gone off and told my pals about some crank I read. (Ten years ago, I would have thought Dalrymple is an imbecile for suggesting that heroin is less addictive than barbiturates.) I urge everyone not to do this! If you find someone who seems like a crank, read them more, not less. People have good reasons for believing strange things, unless they are complete morons, which may be rarer than you think.
It takes guts to be a righty in this day and age. We're all a little weary of being called names, but beyond that, we're all a little too quick to dismiss each other. I'm not asking for acceptance of bad ideas, I'm just asking for righties to be patient with themselves while they get a chance to absorb someone's point of view. Righty points of view are typically MUCH more nuanced and difficult to explain than the "power to the people" pablum we hear every day. Keep that in mind.
Ayers is actually not such a good example of signaling. As he was underground and engaged in criminal activities, he couldn't be too open about what he was doing. Otherwise the FBI would have had evidence obtained legally to use against him in court. He may have been showing off to his smaller circle of associates, but that's a more tenuous argument than with other examples. An anonymous blog comment would also not be about signaling (doing so pseudonymously is a step above).
Regarding reductionism, Eliezer Yudkowsky has a large number of posts on the topic that explain it better than I could. "Consilience" might be more digestible writing though. My view is that all of our advancement in knowledge has come through reductionism. "Greedy reductionism" may lead you astray, but you will not get anywhere through non-reductionism, just a more correct reductionist analysis.
Sailer has argued that white guilt is not really about feeling guilty yourself, but demanding that other whites feel guilty. People whose ancestors killed indians or owned slaves are among the least prone to white guilt.
Why has liberalism been so successful? This is what Eliezer Yudkwosky refers to as "moral progress", as a non-cognitivist, don't believe in any such thing. Common narratives from liberals on how this came about include Peter Singer's Expanding Circle and Robin Wright's Moral Animal. Ed Glaeser (who I believe is a moderate neoconservative on domestic policy) has some similar reasoning on why the American cities industrialized earliest and had more immigration are more liberal in Myths and Realities of American Political Geography.
My impression of Auster is that he seems to be something like a pre-60s liberal (he likes both FDR and Lincoln, whom most righties I know absolutely despise). I think it's rather funny for him to define traditionalist conservatism as devotion to the truth when he rejects certain ideas (see my comment on absurdity above) without giving reason to think that they are false rather than merely unpleasant.
Blode032222 says:
First, Jaz, I wasn't really "feeling" Hesperado's "true progress" phrasing either. Sounds pretty squishy and lefty. On second glance, though, it sounds like what he's talking about is the thoroughly noble and common-sensical goal of cutting through one's own biases and seeing the world clearly. Extreme prejudice gets in the way of "true progress", because, like the phrase or not, when we improve our mindset we are getting better as people....
In Thomas Fleming's The Morality of Everyday Life, he devotes a number of pages (pp 143-148) specifically to Adam Smith and his Theory of Moral Sentiments. I can't do justice to what Fleming says, but he summarizes Smith: "Since Smith is one of the founding fathers not only of classical economics but also of classical liberal ethics, it is worth taking the time to see where this brilliant man went wrong."
He describes Smith's "Impartial Spectator" and it is the same thing you thought Hesperado was aiming for. If you keep cutting through your own biases, in the end, you won't even take your own side in an argument.
Perhaps another way to come at Liberalism is not to say that it is like a religion but that it is a religion.
I'm not the first to note that Leftism takes on the manner of a religious fervour. Many jokes have been made about it. But what is not explored is that Liberalism/Leftism is in point of fact, a religion, albeit a nascent one unbeknownst to itself.
Mainstream evolutionists have discounted religion as an aberration that the Enlightenment has overcome. And certainly we have witnessed the collapse of Christianity amongst our elites that would seem to support the notion.
But as stated earlier, 9/10ths of human history is made up of religion and that every aspect of society/ies has/have been "suffused through-and-through with religion".
Just because Christianity has lost its sway in the West doesn't mean that religion has ceased to be. It means that a vacuum has been formed into which a new religion is making its way. And that religion is the Universal Church of Liberalism and its inverted logic of non-discrimination, tolerance and equality.
Obviously there are atheists out there who don't feel the religious impulse but if they were any sort of empiricist they would have to acknowledge that for the great swathe of humanity that impulse exists. As Romain Rolland defined it to Freud : "By religious feeling, what I mean—altogether independently of any dogma, any Credo, any organization of the Church, any Holy Scripture, any hope for personal salvation, etc.—the simple and direct fact of a feeling of 'the eternal' (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and as if oceanic). This feeling is in truth subjective in nature. It is a contact."
Liberalism doesn't answer what is the meaning of life but how should I live my life (to paraphrase Joseph Campbell).
Liberalism could be approached from the definition of the phenomena of what constitutes typical religions: Beliefs, Sacred Stories, Rituals, Sacred Texts, Religious Experiences, Religious Ethics, Social Structures and Sacred Symbols.
Certainly Obama seems to have become the embodiment of the last phenomena. He is the embodiment of the Liberal dream.
In any case I will take up Dennis' suggestion and order a copy of Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" as well as Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"
That Liberalism is a religion seems as plain to me as the nose on my face. This also explains why so called conservatives are slowly bending to the new group's will.
Mr. Mangan, I hope you didn't think I was belittling your site for the low comment traffic. That was not my intent at all.
My intent was to poke a little fun at Hesperado for so bravely allowing the occasional comment. I have fought in the old USENET wars, and can see what total lack of moderation could do.
A civil group really does make for a good discussion.
Jaz, re: the relative dearth of commenters on my blog: if I had more, I would still allow them in the spirit of my conviction that allowing comments free reign is better than restricting them. Comments fields on every blog I have seen are visually separate from the main article, so it's not like a lot of comments are going to somehow flood over the main article and prevent people from reading it. There is thus no good reason for interdicting and/or censoring comments -- but in fact good reasons for allowing them.
On a related note, the merits of ideas and writings have nothing to do with popularity. Your insinuation that they do has an affinity to the "progress" you otherwise deride.
Jaz and blode, re: my phrase "true progress", I of course meant it in a banal and pragmatic sense, not in any portentously utopian sense. Anyone who reads more of my blog would know that. I am well aware of the erudite suspicions of "Progress", having cut my teeth long ago on (among other related writings) Voegelin's analysis of Condorcet in the broader and deeper context of Joachim of Fiore's "three ages" idea.
Jaz said: "I'll bet Mr. Mangan is positively blushing at all the attention he's getting."
Not blushing; basking.
"Mr. Mangan, I hope you didn't think I was belittling your site for the low comment traffic. That was not my intent at all."
Not to worry. I'm long past the point of thinking that the masses appreciate quality.
Even though the rest of this thread has (happily) moved beyond the Auster-Hesperado stand-off, Mr. Hannegan is still hung up on what he sees as the dread "mud-slinging" aspect of the situation.
So, to explain: I responded at length to Hesperado's posts and demonstrated in detail everything about his attack on me that I summed up briefly at my blog in the words Mr. Hannegan considers a smear. A smear is throwing false, baseless charges at someone with no facts. Writing a 1,200 word response to an attack on oneself and then accurately summarizing what one has demonstrated about that attack is not a smear.
As for getting into a discussion of the causes and cures of Western cultural decline, that's a whole different topic, for another thread. It's not what this thread has been about, as far as I'm concerned. It's been about the status competition issue, Hesperado's wild theorizing that I'm a gnostic, the reason my radical critique of liberalism provokes such hostility, and so on. There's a limit to what one thread can hold.
Also, discussions develop organically, not because one party demands of a second party that he discuss the topic that the first party wants him to discuss. Finally, the causes and cure of Western decline are too large a subject for a comment discussion. This is a topic to be addressed in a full length article, not comments.
Mr. Hannagan, I think you are generally right. As someone who misspent a couple of youthful adult years in an authoritarian Christian sect, I might say there are cultic elements in there, too. "Cult" as in the modern idiom, not the way Russell Kirk used it.
Whittaker Chamber in Witness said about communism: "the world's second oldest faith" whose "promise was whispered in the first days of the new Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods.' " It might as well apply to what you're describing.
(I'm only quoting Chambers from a Sam Francis essay on Chambers; he makes it sound like Witness would be worthwhile reading.)
The so called "post Christian" society is in fact a society based upon Marxism. Read Marx/Engles and you will know that. You will also understand why the left had to tear down these social institutions in order to effect the change that it has.
A rootless society is a society that can be reformed into anything the ruling elite wants:
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_tyranny_of_tolerance/
RobertB
Hesperado, you really ought to be more precise in your word usage. If you use Whig terms like "True progress" but don't mean the Whig meaning, you must tell us plainly you don't mean what you say.
And of course I insinuate about your blog's popularity, just to tease. Your words would carry some punch if you had 100 comments per post and, instead of theorizing about open commenting, we could see you meant it.
Mr. Mangan said:
Not blushing; basking.
Bask away! I'm sure if we went over the line you'd censor us, but I'd be happy to be censored in the cause of upholding civilized conversation.
Sailer's statement that "In other words, White Guilt is just another ploy in the Great American White Status Struggle. Minorities are merely props for asserting moral superiority over other whites." makes sense in the religious context I have described above.
Just as the Pharisees made a great show of their benevolence, ritual observation and thereby morality, in the new religion there is the same status struggle to exemplify to the world your moral worth. Hypocrisy is no obstacle.
The extent to which one is tolerant, anti-discriminatory, egalitarian, an observer of recycling, make statements about man-made global warming etc is definitive of moral worth and thereby self worth and how deserving of the in-group's adulation one is. The extent to which one vocalises the above displays to the other initiates that you're in the in-group.
Like all religions there is the demarcation between us and them.
It's no surprise that no matter how much the general population opposes these ideas, the fact that the elites hold them, gather together in world forums mixing with others of a like mind, promoting others of a like mind, that you have the complete overhaul of western consciousness.
We are in the out-group and our temples are being torn down. New temples will arise in their place.
Sailer's statement makes sense in the paradigm of a new religious movement.
Jaz, it's news to me that the Whigs have determined for all time what the meaning of the phrase "true progress" has to mean. I suggest that you adopt a little more terminological flexibility when reading people, including taking in a little more of the larger context of their writings, before pigeon-holing certain juxtapositions of adjective-and-noun (scil., "true progress") they might employ.
I acquit Hesperado of charges of whiggery.
(You probably saw that coming, huh?)
Wade Coriell,
Lawrence Auster,
The Catholic traditionalist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn said that "Discrimination is a law of life."- www.mmisi.org/ir/33_01/leddihn.pdf
However, in the The Principles of The Portland Declaration, [http://www.phillysoc.org/Portland.htm] states that "We share with the beasts a craving for sameness and a gregariousness which makes us desire the company of people of our own age, sex, race, creed, political conviction, class and taste. But it is exclusively human to have a thirst for diversity, i.e., to be happy in the company of those who are different from us in every respect, as well as to travel, to enjoy other foods, hear other tunes, see other plants, beasts, and landscapes. The delight in the variations of creation distinguishes man from beast as much as religion or reason.
It is the low drive for sameness and the hatred of otherness that characterizes all forms of leftism, which inevitably are totalitarian because, defying the divine diversity of the universe, these ideologies want to convert us by force to sameness -- sameness being the brother of equality. The leftist vision enjoins uniformity: the nation with one leader, one party, one race, one language, one class, one type of school, one law, one custom, one level of income, and so forth. Since nature provides diversity, this deadening sameness can be achieved only by brute force, by leveling, enforced assimilation, exile, genocide. All forms of totalitarianism, all leftist ideologies, reaching their culmination in the French, Russian, and German Revolutions, have gone that way -- with the aid of guillotine, gallows, gas chambers, and Gulag."
This declaration by Kuehnelt-Leddihn is a conundrum for me because this sounds as a typically politically correct and multiculturalist statement.
Regarding the quotation of Kuehnelt-Leddihn, I think the commenter may be creating a problem where there isn't one. EKL is not attacking the normal cultural homogeneity of a traditional nation, a uniformity that is relative, not absolute; he's attacking the complete uniformity of an ideological state.
Notice also, that the diversity he praises is placed in the context of travel, meeting people from other countries, and so on. He is not calling for some multicultural collection of incompatible cultures within a single society, with each of the cultures considered equal, and with the traditional majority culture of the society downgraded and delegitimized.
I was confused at first by the reference to a "Portland Declaration," because it seemed to be referring to the famous "Portland Plan," a seminal statement of multicultural education from the 1980s. But EKL's Portland Declaration has nothing to do with the Portland Plan. I've never heard of this Portland Declaration and have no idea why he gave it that name, unless perhaps it was intended as a traditional conservative response to multiculturalism.
Those of a conservative disposition are fighting a rearguard action. They seem bound to lose because (as Orwell noted) at any given moment there is an orthodoxy of ideas which is it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. At the present time, so-called progressive ideas are in the ascendancy.
Modern liberalism may be a temporary folly, but dissenters from the liberal consensus risk becoming social pariahs.
Regarding the name of Kuehnelt-Leddihn's grand declaration, I recall in Leftism Revisted that he mentions it was created on the far rim of Western civilization. I suppose that means he was in Oregon when he created it. I don't really know the background though.
Further quotes from EKL:
"The patriot is a "diversitarian"; he is pleased, indeed proud, of the variety within the borders of his country; he looks for loyalty from all citizens. And he looks up and down, not left and right."
So I've had a little trouble figuring that out, particularly the last sentence. My guess is that he tolerates or favors immigration in the context of a conservative state (he would surely loathe Know-Nothing immigration policies that tried to keep American protestant). Whether he would tolerate immigration to a nanny state, I don't know. It's obvious that American welfare programs and lax law enforcement attract a certain group of people; I haven't read anything he has said on the subject of immigration in particular.
How to characterize EKL in general? He calls himself both liberal and arch-conservative (as well as a monarchist).
As far as PC MC goes, he's "all over the map". He sounds pro-diversitarian in the above quotation, but he also dismisses criticism of South Africa's large-scale apartheid. (It's petty apartheid - segregated facilities in diverse areas - that he can't stand.) He denied that there was anything sinister about the federal nature of pre-Mandela South Africa, with blacks ruling black-majority areas, etc. (I'll provide the quote when I dig up my copy.)
So it looks like he disagreed with both ethnic nationalists and anti-apartheid folks.
This seems like a good place to close comments to this post. If Lawrence Auster would like to have the last word, however, he is welcome to do so, seeing as this started as a critique of his ideas and to a certain extent, of himself.
I believe that most will agree that this has been a stimulating discussion, and I thank all those who participated.
Above all, I thank Lawrence Auster, who, despite some fairly critical and even harsh things said here, linked here and participated in a strong defense of his positions.
Reference has been made, both here and elsewhere, to Mr. Auster's style. For example, Black Sea wrote: "Auster does at times seem a prickly, thin-skinned, and intellectually combative personality. These qualities, in part, make him a writer whose work is worth attending to. A nicer guy might not be nearly so honest, and he is honest on topics that nice guys generally avoid entirely."
Most writers and indeed anyone who creates are at least partly motivated by egoism. To expose one's works and oneself to criticism takes a person who has a high degree of belief in his own value. This must be all the more so when dealing with such a contentious subject as the decline of America and of the West.
Mr. Auster is known to be a man who doesn't back down, who fights in print for his ideas and beliefs, and who's made quite a few enemies in the process. If in his disputes he seems to show an above-average ego involvement, it's also the case that one with less such involvement wouldn't be fighting as hard or would have gone missing in action ages ago. But the ideas that he fights for are those that would help to defend and revive our nation and our civilization, and we need people like him who are fearless, combative, and fighting for the right.
Mr. Mangan's purpose in his last comment is to support me and my ideas, and I appreciate it very much, and I think it's overall been a very worthwhile discussion. At the same time, I wonder why the main focus has to be on the question of my ego. Of course no one can see himself as others see him, and Mr. Mangan may be right in what he says my "above-average ego involvement." But it seems to me that if were motivated primarily by ego, or if the fuel of what I'm doing were egocentrism, then I wouldn't be blogging in semi obscurity, I would have done things to bring myself more before the eyes of the world.
If I'm forceful, it's because I care about the things I care about, and because I have confidence in the truth and importance of what I'm saying, not because I'm trying to push myself or have a great view of myself. But, again, no one can see himself as others see him.
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