Harry Baird wrote: ↑Sat Dec 03, 2022 2:11 pm
So, despite our conversing on a philosophy board, and despite my explicitly outlining my basic principles in this respect, you're not interested in debating or even just discussing those principles, nor even in supplying your own principles.
The principles that you work with are binary in the extreme. They lead you to totalizing assertions which, as you well know, are designed to be answered in one way only. Your latest *set-up* was to present a simple model of the theft of, say,
a pencil and the answer you seek, which in your mind is unavoidable, leads to your interlocutor admitting that point which is your sole and primary point.
Those issues that have to do with human populations, their expansion; with the encounters between modern and technologically advanced people and those living at a stone-age level, especially when the examples are historical such as the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and the same to the southern tip of Africa -- these issues are non-amenable to the simplistic analysis that, through your own choices I think, has you in its grip.
So when I converse with you in written form, and present larger blocks of ideas that should be taken in blocks and responded to reciprocally, you hunker down into your cherished reduction from whence all your *analysis* proceeds.
I have asserted that this binary system, this ethical-moral model, derives from Christian ethics. The ethical principles in question are one thing naturally, but I am more interested in the adoption of the *philosophy* (
such as it is but it is a social philosophy that you recommend and on its base you make extraordinary demands) which when I examine it seems to be more similar to *religious conviction*. You objected to the term 'woke' (and I said I had trepidation using it) yet I am at a loss as to what terms to use to describe you, on one hand, and this class or segment of people, usually white and usually middle or upper middle class, who take issue with everything that has made them them, and provided all they have, and develop what I call a *poisonous* philosophy which then is conveyed to others through processes that remind me of
religious enthusiasm.
As Bowden said:
This is a white European grammar and we have stumbled through the early phases of . . .
Religious enthusiasm
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America, established society branded as “enthusiasts” those unconventional but religiously devout extremists who stepped across orthodox lines and claimed an intimate, emotional relationship with God. John of Leyden, Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, and George Whitefield all shared the label “enthusiast.” This book is a study of the enthusiasts who migrated to the American colonies as well as those who emerged there—from Pilgrim Fathers to pietistic Moravians, from the martyr-bound Quakers to heaven-bent revivalists of the 1740s.
This study of the role of religious enthusiasm in early America tells us much about English attitudes toward religion in the New World and about the vital part it played in the lives of the colonists. Both friends and enemies of enthusiasm revealed in their arguments and actions their own conceptions of the America they inhabited. Was religion in America to be an extension of Old World institutions or truly a product of the New World? Would enthusiasm undermine civilized institutions, not only established churches, but government, social structure, morality, and the economy as well? Calling enthusiasts first heretics, then subversives and conspirators, conventional society sought ways to suppress or banish them. By 1776 enthusiasm had spilled over into politics and added a radical dimension to the revolutionary struggle.
One idea I am working with, and my topic area is the contemporary United States, deals with an examination of social hysteria and social manifestations that begin around some inspiring event (a police shooting of an alleged criminal) and then get *invested* with a great amount of other content, all of which is bound up in intense sentiment and unloosed
feelings. What, for example, really animated the mobs who went on *righteousness rampages* with a nearly religious zealousness to attack and topple hundreds of monuments of important historical personages? It is not *idea* that moves them but emotions about what they are doing. Thus the experiences are 'enthusiastic' in this religious sense.
However, most of those who are participating are certainly post-Christians and yet, it seems to me, they are still captured by and moved by zealotry that has a religious tone to it. So what interests me in you (when you reveal the core and animating ideal of your existential philosophy) is that it is (as I say)
totalizing. You have taken a very limited theme and blown it up into a 'totalizing' political philosophy. You genuinely believe that it not only can be applied but that it should be applied, and you are serious when you (unreally) indicate that you would submit an opinion-survey to the Aboriginals asking them
Should we stay or should we go? I'll abide by your decision! (with your wee suitcase dutifully packed in anticipation, some sunscreen in your pocket, a map, etc.)
So while it is true that
I would not have placed you among The Woke (which is not precise enough of a term) you are, in certain ways, definitely linked to these sorts of ideas. That is, the social justice warriors, etc. Those who define, who have and who hold (i.e. who work as activists) the lists of the politically-correct views which are inculcated among others inclined to them.
If in regard to what we have just recently been discussing -- South Africa -- I am to set out a set of principles I would say that they are definitely revealed in what I am writing and what I have written. The issue is that you are fundamentally unfamiliar with their
matrix and, at the same time, vitally and also zealously oppose to them whatever they are or might be. I ask you therefore to participate in a conversation you are largely unprepared for (or unqualified). You do not read. You have no real interest in the affairs of the day. But you do seem to have a *pet focus* which, as I say, seems enthusiastic and obsessive. But this is not just you. Many share a similar *position* or *location*).
I have alluded to those I am examining (Guénon, Evola) who start from extremely different points of analysis vis-a-vis 'modernity' and certainly 'liberalism'. I think that you gather that I am inclining
away from conventional liberal notions, and also that I tend to see them leading to what I have termed 'liberal rot'. The ascendency and domination of American Liberalism has led (is leading) to fracturation and dissolution. So, with that said, you seem to focus down into minutia where you can play philosophically with *righteous ideas* (that you establish a priory as
unassailable) whereas I am examining *things* from a wider perspective, or in any case one that I consider to be removed or elevated (a position above).
I suppose that those who read what I write imagine that I am attempting to redefine or perhaps *apologize* for Apartheid? Or that I am looking at things through racist or racialist lenses? I do not think that my ideas fit into those frames. And I also think that those frames are terms which have been so intensely politicized that they can hardly function anymore as proper designations. Could these ideas be talked about on this forum and among this group of people? I wonder. I don't think so though. The reason? Everyone here has been so deeply programed in the terms of the *politically correct* that entire conversations are conceptually off-limits. So much preamble is necessary to counter the established ideas, and this is so intensely conflictive, that it simply becomes *ugly*. So I have to at least say, because it is fair to do so, that I have read
so many of those who are progressive and liberal proponents of the core tenets of left-progressivism. I have their books and I can cite from them.
And I have also read a whole range of writers who are *forbidden* and are not allowed to be read. I mean this seriously. Not allowed to be read (thought about, referred to). Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wilmot Robertson and many others. What I find is that the *picture* that the Left-Progressives offer is always skewed and tendentious. They offer *re-descriptions* and *paraphrasing* and when they do this the
restate. When you read the original sources of those whose ideas have been pushed out of the acceptable zone of allowed conversation, you see that they are making sense and, in my view, that their ideas should not be uniformly dismissed. It does not help me, necessarily, to arrive at solidified and certain positions (it may hinder that in fact) but it does indeed widen my perspectives on how different people think and interpret their world.
Finally, I find that conversing with you is similar in some ways to conversing with Immanuel Can. You are totally fixed in your idea structures. They are reduced, binary and absolute. He
will not be moved, and you
will not be moved. And that is one more reason why I have to wonder at how it came about that you wind up in this state. And then the larger question is How have we all wound up in the state we are in?