ShrinkWrapped

Our Post-Modern Left

The story of the week is the response of the Left-Liberal intelligentsia to the Arizona shootings.  By now, all but the most partisan recognize that the shooter was a seriously disturbed psychotic man who was responding to his own internal delusions and had no relationship with the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, or any Conservative ideology.  The attempt to hijack this incident for political gain is noxious in the extreme; sadly, it is further evidence of the Left's need to demonize its opponents rather than engage their arguments.  There is a relatively simple reason why they need to follow this well marked path:  Leftism, as an ideology, has failed, is incoherent, and is truly post-modern; in other words, there is no core belief system for Leftism, there is merely emotional resonance disguised as rational argument.

For the Left, the use of martial metaphor and terminology by the Right creates a climate in which violence, even when non-political or coming from the Left, is caused or increased.  At the same time, political violence from the Left and their allies is never considered to be symptomatic of Left wing excess.  At one time this formulation worked to control the speech and thinking of most people; the Media was the gate keeper, not only of information, but of narratives, and when you hear the same story line repeated over and over again, most people do not spend the requisite time and energy to question the narrative.  As I have noted on many occasions, our brains and our minds (which may overlap in the space they inhabit but are not equivalent conceptually) are conservative, that is, they aim to limit the expenditure of energy.  In other words, biology is lazy.  There is nothing wrong with recognizing that truism, but it does mean that when the narrative imposed on reality is limited, it is, for most people, too much work to question.  That has changed with the advent of new media.  The great problem for the Left is that the new media narratives are easier to understand and better reflections of most people's quotidian reality than the more complex narratives constructed by the post-modern Left.

A brief example should suffice:

For the Left, Anthropogenic Global Warming was an excellent narrative when it was first proposed.  It explained warming trends, justified a massive expropriation of money and power from the wealthy world to the power brokers of the international elites (under the rubric of helping the poor who rarely ever saw a fraction of the appropriated money and none of the power), and it served as a useful weapon against the hated capitalist system.  The problem was that as time went on the dire consequences of the world failing to end on time meant that the narrative had to be amended time after time.  Now we are told that human derived CO2 is causing Climate Disruption or Anthropogenic Climate Change, née Anthropogenic Climate Warming.  Granting there is a non-zero risk that through so far unexplained and undiscovered feedbacks, tiny increases in trace gases in the atmosphere are throwing the entire system into chaos, the current Conservative narrative is simply easier to understand and fits the visible facts better than the Ptolemaic epicycles built by the AGW proponents.  That is, climate varies naturally, probably in relation to the sun's output and other long term variables over which man has no control; technology will increasingly allow us to reduce our dependence on carbon emitting energy sources; and the single greatest protection we have against Climate Change, human derived or otherwise, is increasing wealth, also enabled by our burgeoning technology.  Game, Set, and Match to the AGW skeptics!

Because the post-modern Left has no core beliefs, they are capable of the most overt contradictions.  For example, if they truly believe that martial verbal productions create a climate of fear and violence, then they should be appalled at what occurs on a daily basis in the Muslim World.  Professor Barry Rubin explains:

If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?

When one crazed or ideologically obsessed gunman named Jared Loughner  starts shooting in Arizona, people condemn him and start bemoaning the state of their society. How about a place with ten million people like that who are treated as heroes?

America this week is awash in a huge and passionate debate over whether angry political disagreements and harsh criticisms of certain views or groups inspired the attack on an American congresswoman (Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, by the way). I’m not going to enter into that argument right now but I want to point out the Middle Eastern ramifications of what's going on here.

Every day for more than a half century, Arabs and Muslims have been inundated every day with hatred for Israel, America, the West, Jews, and often Christians. You can read transcripts of Syrian broadcasts or Palestinian speeches from 50 years ago that sound just like what is being said by their successors  now.

Let’s say that the proportion of lies, slanders, extremism, and incitement in the American discourse is one-tenth of one percent of all the words spoken on controversial issues. The equivalent figure for the Middle East is well over 95 percent.

In addition to that tone, there is not only a total lack of balance but an absence of the other side altogether. It's all one-sided.

And in addition to those two points, the level of factual accuracy is farther away from reality than anywhere else in the world. (Though, admittedly, that gap has been narrowing in recent years as Western academic and journalistic standards decline).

And in addition to those three points, while extremists tend to be marginal in the United States, they are in control--either politically or at least setting the terms of discussion--throughout the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority worlds.

Thus, the level of incitement, imbalance, lies, and the hegemony of hatred in that region towers above that in the West like the World Trade Center towers over an anthill.

Oh, the World Trade Center doesn't exist any more. Well, that has something to do with this situation, too, doesn't it?

Or to put it another way, in the Middle East, the crackpot is often (usually?) given more credit than the rational or factual.

I won’t take your time with lots of examples but one might start with the widespread belief that the U.S. government or Israel carried out the September 11 attacks, coupled with the contradictory belief—held often by the same people—that it was something to be proud about. Or all the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Israel, as in the cases mentioned here and here. Or the editorial in al-Ahram, the most important Egyptian newspaper, that claimed all terrorism in Iraq was a U.S. plot to divide Muslims.

Read his whole post; it is replete with smart insights and includes a wonderful image that should be seen and savored.

Once again, the lack of core beliefs dictates that the Left must create its post-modern ideology on an ad hoc basis.  There are general guidelines, such as "Capitalism bad, Socialism good" and "America and Israel bad, Arabs and Europeans good" but there is no coherence to the structure.  As a result, those who follow such a belief system are forced to censor their own perceptions and attempt to limit the perceptions of others; too much reality threatens the narrative. 

Please watch Melanie Phillips explain to an Israeli interviewer how abysmally Israel has failed in their hasbara, ie public relations; especially pay attention to her explanation of the difficulty Israel's positions have in gaining any oxygen among the British intelligentsia:

My fondest wish is that Melanie Phillips appear more often and in more venues.  Americans still tend to hear better when a speaker has a refined and delightful British accent, perhaps a remnant of the respect one has for one's parents even after having declared independence from them.

The committed Leftist cannot help but force all data to fit his narratives; when the narratives change, the data is reinterpreted to fit.  They have created a protean ideology that has no core and is impossible to combat in the realm of ideas (in part because they can not and will not argue ideas but can only argue power and money.)  The Left and the parts of the economy that they dominate are losing power and influence as the need to become more efficient in producing the tangible assets requisite for life becomes ever more overt.  Their livelihoods are threatened since they are fundamentally parasitic; (when was the last time a Left wing Professor of Literature produced anything of tangible value?) and as with any life form that feels its life is threatened, their defensive struggles are only going to become more and more vicious until they are marginalized and defeated. 

If we are lucky, 2008 will one day be seen as having been the high water mark of Leftism, the moment when its inevitable decline into irrelevance began.  More likely it will persist and return to threaten the freedoms of succeeding generations; in the future, however, the growth of uncontrolled information sources means that they will never again be able to control the narratives as they once did.

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

In the last century evil ideologies emerged which denied human nature and were consciously devoted to enabling the emergence of a "New Man," Utopia to follow.  These ideologies were socialist in nature and required that those who were not "part of the solution" would need to be removed so that the Utopian socialist vision could be realized.  We remember one of the versions of socialism, National Socialism, (collectivism based on ethnicity rather than class) as the most profoundly evil system, one based on the genocide of innocents.  Yet, while Communism has been responsible for more death and destruction than Nazism, the Left has managed to obscure its historical roots in genocide and retains the moral high ground in much of its posturing.

"The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.* [...] They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust."**

- Karl Marx

*Marx. People's Paper. April 16, 1853

**Journal of the history of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1981

Genocide is a necessary component of any ideology that professes to believe in the need for the development of a "New Man"; certainly the modern Left would prefer to raise consciousness by education (and coercion), but when their desire for power is thwarted by "counter-revolutionaries", the only answer is to destroy their enemies.  Note how the rhetoric of the (true believer) radical environmentalists has become increasingly eliminationist as the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming has been increasingly repudiated. 

The idea of improving the volk by eliminating undesirables is an old belief of the Progressive movement and goes back to its roots.  It usually surprises Liberals-by-Temperament when they are told that Planned Parenthood, for example, explicitly promoted abortion and birth control in order to rid society of undesirables:

How Planned Parenthood Duped America

At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

This does not mean that all Leftists, or any Liberals-by Temperament for that matter, support genocide.  Almost all would be horrified to accept that those most committed to their ideological preferences, inevitably must support evil once they accept that their end (saving the planet, protecting the people from [projected] enemies, ensuring dominance for one's ethnic or religious group) justifies any means. 

The greatest threat facing Civilization today is the alliance between the Left and Sharia Islam.  Most Liberals-by-Temperament have bought into the belief that Islam is under assault by the Right wing in this country.  The lack of anti-Islamic hatecrimes (whose numbers are dwarfed by anti-Semitic hatecrimes) does not impact this belief, a belief actively being promulgated by apologists for, and collaborators with, genocidal Islam.  Patrick Poole summarized the state of the "stealth Jihad" for Pajamas media last week:

2010: The Year of Islamist Infiltration

While the domestic terror trend has continued unabated, elements of pre-violent, or rather stealth, jihad are taking firm root in our government, military, judicial, and educational institutions, without the slightest opposition from the Obama administration and our homeland security agencies. In fact, if we’ve seen anything this year, it has been the willingness of government officials to lend their support to aid this stealth jihad.

The failure to recognize the “civilizational jihad” being waged against us is a bipartisan problem. Driven mainly by Muslim Brotherhood front groups and pushed by non-violent Islamist organizations in the West, the threat remains badly underrated by our national security establishment. But it was placed front and center by the report titled “Sharia: The Threat to America,” issued by the Team B II panel of national security experts including former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and former DIA Director Lt. Gen. Ed Soyster.

His summary, offered after voluminous documentation of the ways in which radical Muslims have insinuated themselves into our government, is telling:

This list is not exhaustive. Certainly more examples could be cited. The Obama administration’s failure to understand the problem of Islamic radicalization and terrorism is fundamental, fueled with an outreach-to-anyone-at-any-cost policy that is perhaps best typified by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s July statements that his foremost mission was to improve relations with the Muslim world. What these twelve examples demonstrate is that our national security, intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic establishment are utterly defenseless before the stealth jihad that is attacking the heart of our Western society.

If 2009 was the tipping point for domestic terror, 2010 is sure to be remembered as the year that the “civilizational jihad” continued apace. Hopefully in 2011, it will be clear to at least some of our political, civic, and religious leadership that a dramatic change in national policy is urgently needed.

In my opinion, our President is more ideological than the usual Liberal-by-Temperament and is quite comfortable with totalitarians and murderous thugs; he barely can rouse himself and his administration to criticize atrocities committed by the varied thugs who comprise much of the International Community, ie the UN, is tolerant to a fault of attempts to limit the freedoms of individuals, whether at home or abroad, and is facilitating the spread of pernicious ideas that can serve to enable International Law, with all its limitations on speech and behavior in the name of combating bad thoughts (hate speech), to supersede American Constitutional protections for the individual.

The current war being fought between the regressive and repressive forces allied with political Islam and Western Civilization will not be fought with massed armies on battlefields; it will not even be fought primarily in terror-counterterror struggles; it will be fought in the realm of ideas; ideas, which when they finally are allowed to come to their fullest fruition, mandate the death and enslavement of millions in service to the perfect ideology. 

If we close our eyes to the battle that is already underway, just as we have been blinded to the past, we will lose.

The film I have embedded below is long and painful to watch.  It is a worthwhile antidote to those who imagine that their ideology (whether a modern pathology like Socialism or an ancient scourge returned like political Islam) justifies any and every horror inflicted upon its (real, imagined, or manufactured) enemies: [HT: Dr. Sanity, who is once again blogging regularly.]

The Soviet Story

“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now…

The current Left-Islamist alliance is the heir to the Communist-Nazi (and concomitant Nazi-Islamist) and post-WWII Communist-Islamist alliance of WWII.

The evil that is/was an inextricable aspect of Communism and Socialism has been effaced from our historical memory.  It has been a remarkably effective whitewash; just as remarkable is the current self imposed blindness of the West to the evil that infects Islam.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

-Verbal, aka Keyser Soze

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part I

Over the weekend I finally saw Avatar (on IMAX 3D) and it struck me, on the most superficial level, that we are one step closer to fully immersive virtual reality.  The movie was, as so many have commented, visually stunning in its depiction of a new planet with a complex biology (although the biology, for all its complexity, seemed rather animal-species poor and the waters appeared to be uninhabited.)  On the other hand, the story was simple and simple minded.  James Cameron is a brilliant film maker but the movie suggests he knows next to nothing about the complexities of business or military affairs, religion, biology, or a host of other disciplines, which is why his humans and aliens are so one dimensional. 

Coincidentally, Clare Spark posted on The Glenn Beck Problem on Saturday:

This blog is about the danger of allowing media personalities to do our thinking for us. As my long-time friend political scientist Stephen Eric Bronner wrote in one of his first books (this on German Expressionism), making a passionate work of art or viewing it, though valuable in itself, cannot substitute for the thoughtful study, investigating, organizing and other activity that resists illegitimate authority. [Emphasis mine-SW] Professor Bronner wrote enthusiastically about Rosa Luxemburg too, as well as other radical social democrats who were associated with the Second International. These activists were called left-wing social democrats, because they meant to educate the masses in the most advanced industrialized societies and through majority acquiescence (as opposed to bureaucratic centralism) make the transition from capitalism to socialism. Luxemburg herself was an anti-Bolshevik and argued with Lenin about issues that are still red-hot today, such as supporting anti-colonial social movements that were antidemocratic and backward. (I am updating the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin, originally about the nature of imperialism, and about self-determination in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, not about Third World dictatorships of today. (Thanks to Steve Bronner for the correction. But as Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson taught the debate in a session I audited, the issue concerned  left-wing alliances with antidemocratic entities, so I extrapolated to the present, when the hard Left does ally itself with dubious entities.) 

[I have been reading Clare Spark's blog for quite some time and can't figure out her politics, beyond a baseline Libertarianism, which is either an indictment of my powers of discernment, an indictment of her writing, or a tribute to her thinking, which is my preference.]

Now, consider these comments about Ted Kaczynski from a June, 2000 profile in The Atlantic: [HT: CBDenver, in a comment to my post Friday on Terror and Terrorism.]

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber

It was at Harvard that Kaczynski first encountered the ideas about the evils of society that would provide a justification for and a focus to an anger he had felt since junior high school. It was at Harvard that he began to develop these ideas into his anti-technology ideology of revolution. It was at Harvard that Kaczynski began to have fantasies of revenge, began to dream of escaping into wilderness. And it was at Harvard, as far as can be determined, that he fixed on dualistic ideas of good and evil, and on a mathematical cognitive style that led him to think he could find absolute truth through the application of his own reason. [Emphasis mine-SW]  Was the Unabomber -- "the most intellectual serial killer the nation has ever produced," as one criminologist has called him -- born at Harvard?

By this time you might reasonably be wondering what common thread I could have possibly found between Avatar/James Cameron, Glenn Beck, and Ted Kaczynski/Harvard?

Splitting is the quintessential mental function which becomes the quintessential primitive defense mechanism.  It is based on the earliest operation of the differentiating mind as the infant begins to recognize the difference between himself and an external world filled with other minds.  As the child matures, his sense of those who fit into the primary categories of "self/like-self" and "other/like-other" becomes more sophisticated and nuanced.  A fully mature adult appreciates that there are many people who live in his tribe(s).  "Like-self" begins with the family and then over time enlarges to include his friends, his classmates, his communities (social, religious, business, professional, political, sports, etc), his state, his country.  All through development, the core organization of self/not-self persists, overlain by more mature mental organizations, but always existing in potential for expression during periods of stress induced regression. 

The tendency to resort to splitting into "all good" and "all bad" objects and their derivatives is ubiquitous.  In an immature person, who lacks the leavening afforded by an appreciation of the complexity of people and the world, or who needs to simplify his experience in order to mitigate anxiety, the basic defensive splitting can overwhelm intellectual knowledge and lead to extreme views.

Anyone who is engaged politically must struggle with their own tendency toward splitting.  Confirmation bias is an aspect of splitting that is recognized and manageable when done in moderation but can become the source of significant problems when unrecognized or unmodified.  (We see the edifice of AGW crumbling primarily because the proponents became so convinced of their correctness in the absence of adequate significant data that they systematically elided inconvenient data and eventually began to invent data in the service of their "greater truth.")  Political partisans will almost always have an initially positive reaction to proposals from their "side" and negative reactions to proposals from their opponents.  It takes mental and psychological effort to consider the actual proposals themselves; it is easier and requires far less energy to accept or dismiss an idea because of it's provenance.

The Atlantic story on Ted Kaczynski (which I came to for the first time this weekend) is a classic story of a young person following the logic of his beliefs, unaware that his immaturity led him to rely on his perception of the world filtered through a prism of splitting.  The author, Alston Chase, believes that Kaczynski was started on his intellectual road to despair and animus (which reinforced his emotional bleakness) by the Gen Ed program at Harvard, meant to inculcate the Judeo-Christian ethic but used by the sophisticated Harvard profs to teach the opposite, that there is nothing more than a relativistic morality; from Part II:

According to a study of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that included Kaczynski's class of 1962, conducted by William G. Perry Jr., the director of the university's Bureau of Study Counsel, the undergraduate curriculum had a profound impact on the emotions, the attitudes, and even the health of some students.

According to Perry, intellectual development for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates typically encompassed a progression from a simplistic, "dualistic" view of reality to an increasingly relativistic and "contingent" one. Entering freshmen tend to favor simple over complex solutions and to divide the world into truth and falsehood, good and bad, friend and foe. Yet in most of their college courses, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, they are taught that truth is relative. Most accept this, but a number cannot. They react against relativism by clinging more fiercely to an absolute view of the world. To some of these students, in Perry's words, "science and mathematics still seem to offer hope."

Nevertheless, Perry wrote, "regression into dualism" is not a happy development, for it "calls for an enemy." Dualists in a relativistic environment tend to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude "requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any 'establishment'" and "can call forth in its defense hate, projection, and denial of all distinctions but one," Perry wrote. "The tendency ... is toward paranoia."

As is evident in his writings, Kaczynski rejected the complexity and relativism he found in the humanities and the social sciences. He embraced both the dualistic cognitive style of mathematics and Gen Ed's anti-technology message. And perhaps most important, he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) "there was no logical justification for morality."

It is not a surprise but worth reinforcing that the distinction between the soft sciences and hard sciences represents a basic (and illusory) split in our mental apparatus between emotion and reason.  It requires mental work to struggle against the easy splitting and maintain complexity; few consistently succeed and the lies people tell themselves to celebrate their embrace of a complexity they fail to grasp are telling.  The idea, for example, that morality must be all-or-none is itself a result of splitting.  Morality can neither be wholly relativistic (which can easily lead to anarchic social organization) nor can it be puritanically inflexible (which can lead to the Talibanization of society.) 

This is already long enough and has only scratched the surface of the problem of duality/splitting and the development of a functional morality; further, both the story of Ted Kaczynski and Avatar, in their own ways, share a failing that is worth its own post: both fail to appreciate the need for Integration and Synthesis. 

To be continued...

Apes and Angels

In January I offered my take on The 10,000 Year Explosion and called it a most A Most Dangerous Book.  I suggested that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending had fired an early salvo in a battle that is going to reshape or destroy our culture, and probably our world, in the next 20-30 years (the time frame is mine.)   The book does not aim to solve the "Nature vs Nurture" conundrum but presents evidence from the field of population genetics to support their theory that, contrary to conventional wisdom in evolution and sociology, evolution has been speeding up in the last 10,000 years rather than remaining static.  As more and more evidence accrues elucidating the influence of genetics on behavior and population abilities, a clash is inevitable between science and political correctness.  I commented:

In Race, Ethnicity, and the Genetic Time Bomb I discussed the coming collision between the accumulating body of scientific data regarding human evolution and differentiation, and the PC shibboleth that all men and all populations are exactly equivalent.  The corollary to this assumption has become conventional wisdom, ie that any differences in outcome between populations can only be the result of discrimination by the powerful against the weak.  Various iterations of this assumption have become so deeply ingrained in science and society that it is considered a career destroyer to publicly question the idea. 

I cautioned in that post that as the science accumulates, the demarcation between scientific investigation and social transgression would become increasingly difficult to maintain.  Simply asserting that a minority group may have different levels of ability can mean academic death.  Now, more than ever before, the legacy of Darwin, supported by evolutionary biology, is bringing political (ideological and religious)  shibboleths into stark question.  Both the left and the right have exhibited an unconscious splitting in their relationship to Darwin's monumental achievement and this is the field of interest of Apes or Angels, by Neil Troost.  This slim, readable volume could well be considered a companion piece to Cochran and Harpending's book.  Dr. Troost unflinchingly examines the distortions of both left and right that interfere with an understanding of the meaning of Darwin's theory and the implications of our growing knowledge of evolutionary biology that is putting flesh onto the skeleton of evolution.  

In his introduction, he describes the conflictual relationship of both left and right to Darwin and his implications:

While we can thank Darwin for identifying our family tree and disabusing us of our wishful thinking, we are less certain of his revelations of human diversity.  As modern genetics increasingly supports Darwin's observations on human variability, the West is embroiled in a political war over the interpretation and meaning of these findings.  Secular humanism, set adrift from Christianity in part because of Darwin, now opposes the facts of human inequality first pointed out in 1871 by the great naturalist.  As in Galileo's day, science is under siege for discovering uncomfortable truths.  Pope's are no longer the enemy, but doctrinaire liberals within the scientific community are!  Darwin, the immortal hero of science, gave us ideas that offend both sides in the culture wars.  Liberals generally accept evolution and make it a foundation of their materialism, but they despise the idea that human races might be unequal.  Conservative Christians hate the idea of evolution without god, but, until recently, they accepted biological inequality without debate.  To understand who we are we must have the courage to follow Darwin's route to human nature, clearing the brush of superstition and myth while recognizing that  our common humanity may not be enough to overcome the problems of extreme diversity.  Struggle and strife, part of the basis of evolution, may well be ineradicable.

Dr. Troost spends the first part of the book reviewing Darwin's theories and some of the implications of his findings.  He has a habit of asking obvious but dangerous questions:

(p. 30)  Belief in inequality is not racist if we are talking about biological facts.  Darwin was against slavery but accepted inequality.  If I see a Kenyan runner and runners from Italy or Belgium, I am not a racist if I "stereotype" Kenyans by predicting victory in a marathon based upon race and nationality.  This is simply scientific generalization based upon evidence.  Racism is either a false generalization used denigratingly or the use of a true generalization to suppress or punish people.  One can believe in the fact of inequality and treat people as individuals, knowing that group differences are statistical.  As Steven Pinker put it: "equality refers to fair treatment and not human biology."

Sadly, a significant proportion of the population will take offence at his statements and accuse him of racism for merely acknowledging reality.  At the same time Dr. Troost offers ample ammunition for the religious right to attack.  He has little tolerance for Supernaturalism.

(p. 106) Evolution does produce increased diversity, complexity, amount, and scope of life.  Is this the work of a divine agency?  Since such an agency is unnecessary for evolutionary purposes, it is illogical that a purposeless process would result in process.

Between the Cosmologists who can theorize that the universe evolved out of nothing (quantum fluctuations in the vacuum) and evolutionary biologists, it is clear that a plausible, scientifically consistent explanation can encompass our origins and development without the necessity of a deity.  Faith in G-d must be maintained, if at all, in contradistinction to science.  (Whether religion has instrumental utility is another and longer discussion altogether, barely touched upon by Dr. Troost.)

If Darwin erodes the philosophical underpinnings of religion, leaving the religious right adrift, the greater danger going forward is that work in evolutionary biology will erode the philosophical underpinnings of the liberal ideal, leaving the left adrift.

As we understand how genes and genetic controls respond to environmental effects, we will be able to approach the answers to explosive questions, such as:

What is "g", the measure of general intelligence often described by IQ?  What genes encode for what proteins that lead to more efficient nerve conduction, more complex neural networks, and the resulting advantages in mentation and better problem solving that are the core biological substrate of intelligence?

At that point, the finding that certain genes are over-represented in some populations and under-represented in other populations is going to create problems that  our society, crippled by PC imposed elective mutism in relation to such subjects, will have great difficulty metabolizing; synthesizing our knowledge in ways which do not threaten social cohesion and amity will only be possible if we can talk about forbidden topics in a candid manner.

For the last 100 years we have known that there are persistent, reliable differences in IQ between groups and for the last 50 years there has been a mountain of material published attempting to deny the implications of such distinctions.  Dr. Troost's contribution is useful in illuminating just how heavily the scientific data weighs in one direction.

The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part III

[The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part II
The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part I]

In Part I of this series I discussed an interview with Stephen Hicks to illustrate how the Post-Modernist Left has mis-used and aggrandized Post-Modernism as an assault upon Reason.  Post-Modernism is a useful, though ultimately minor, philosophical idea (it falls far short of being a theory) that helps offer an understanding of subjectivity and the problem of objectivity; when the Post-Modern idea was abrogated by the Left for their ideological purposes it abandoned reality and reason and became merely a tool of intimidation and power.

In Part II I considered Richard Landes's discussion of PoMo as a tool used for its utility in disguising the failures of Leftist ideology, akin to (failed) Millenialists' denials.  In Richard's words:

In millennial studies jargon that’s cogntive dissonance at recognizing (and denying) the failure of one’s outrageously hopeful expectations, at the horror of witnessing the God that failed.

Here, rather than acknowledge that the failure of expectations was due to a misreading of human nature, we have people throwing out the very effort to accurately read the world of humans.

The third leg of the stool supporting the PoMo narrative is the Psychological.  Post-Modernism, an idea that facilitates intellectualization, is the perfect defensive structure for the Narcissist, fulfilling many unconscious needs.  The core of the Narcissist's relationship to his own outputs was eloquently captured in a quote that Stephen Hicks offered in his interview with David Thompson (and that Richard used in his post, PoMo Unpeeled: David Thompson talks with Stephen Hicks, as well):

SH: Pomo is rhetoric-heavy, yes. But rhetoric is a tool, so one can ask how it’s being used and why it’s being used that way. The postmodernists have rejected reason, and along with it concern for evidence and consistency. What then is the purpose of rhetoric? In pomo practice, there are a couple of possibilities.

One is that rhetoric becomes a kind of subjectivist expressionism - you play around with language and hope that something interesting pops out. Derrida is often like this - I think of him as a performance artist of postmodernism. In its darker moods, this approach recalls a line from Kate Ellis, a sympathetic-to-postmodernism commentator, who noted “the characteristically apolitical pessimism of most postmodernism, by which creation is simply a form of defecation." [Emphasis mine-SW] Whatever’s been processing and churning up inside you - you just let ‘er rip.

Leonard Shengold, in his essential book on child abuse, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, described Defensive Anality, in which all distinctions are reduced to an homogenized inchoate mass, feces.  The abused child does this (unconsciously) in order to make sense of the impossible, to allow himself to believe that the parent who hurts him also loves him, to square the circle of bringing his perceptions into accord with his abuser's prescriptions.  It is an impossible psychological task and the abused child's mind surrenders by turning it all into shit.  Love, sex, hate are all then made equivalents.  This defensive style is common to Narcissistic defenses and to Leftist Post-Modernism.  Why and how does the Narcissist resort to such a primitive defense?

For the Narcissist, any failure is a narcissistic injury, threatening to cause intolerable shame and a catastrophic collapse of his self-esteem.

[One response to this conflict is commonly seen in the college student who has difficulty studying for a test: to not study and do less well than hoped is a minor disaster; what else could you expect? (while secretly hoping to do well and show your brilliance.)  Alternatively, to study and then fall short is a catastrophe; your feared stupidity is confirmed!  The defense was poorly adaptive at one time, when grades actually reflected accomplishments.  In our PC college culture, one has to put in great effort to do poorly in terms of grades and the defense works tolerably well for our increasingly narcissistically damaged youngsters.]

If failure can never be tolerated or admitted ways must be found to hide evidence of failure and deny failure.  Post-Modernism is the perfect tool for the job and has shown itself to be up to the task.  Since there can be no objective standards for anything, no one can ever conclude that a liberal theory or policy has failed.  The Emperor may be stark naked but in the world of the Post-Modernist, imagined clothing can be as beautiful as the finest couture; in fact, since to the Post-Modernist it is the language that describes the clothing that lends it beauty, the naked Emperor is actually considered to be better clothed than the conventional Emperor of dead white male infamy!  This is the power of Post-Modernism; all nonsense is accorded the same, or higher, degree of authority than the most painstakingly, experimentally confirmed scientific theory.

Only Post-Modernists could fail to understand the brilliance of Alan Sokal's Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.  The Post-Modernists can mouth the words of science but understand nothing of the concepts and think they have received wisdom.  Because Sokal can use their language, which they idealize above the reality that language at its best approximates, they elevate feces to an ideal.

Narcissism stems from an early age and receives a tremendous surge of psychic investment during the anal period when the child is becoming civilized and learning to control its bodily urges.  When a child is first being toilet trained it is common for the parents to treat its outputs, the feces, as a treasure.  As the child develops they soon learn that feces is not a treasure but if offered in the wrong place and time a source of shame.  The Narcissist defensively regresses to a state in which undifferentiated, meaningless verbiage (feces) are no longer considered to be distinct from more sophisticated verbal outputs.  To the Narcissist any theory they adopt or invest in is important because it comes from within them.  Proof or evidence is unnecessary because its provenance supplies all the justification it needs.  Since it is their "crap", it must be important!  The Narcissist is like the little child, desperate to please its mother, struggling to push out a treasure for her.  The fact that their undifferentiated mass has no intrinsic value is of no consequence.

Post-Modernism, Left wing ideology, and Narcissism are thus a menage a trois of mutual dependency.  The Narcissist who needs to see himself as more caring, smarter, and more moral than the crypto-fascists on the right, can never admit that a liberal policy has failed because the failure of an idea he holds is an injury to his self-esteem.  An attack on his belief is thus an attack on him; the two cannot be separated.  This is also why so much discussion from the Left contains so much invective and so few attempts at reason or marshaling of evidence; since they are so emotionally invested in their beliefs, they must defend them as if they are defending themselves.  It is no wonder that our political discourse has been so coarse.

The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part II

[The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part I]

Communism, and its more liberal offspring, Socialism, appeal to the young because it is superficially more fair than Capitalism.  The Utopianism inherent in Socialism appeals to those who feel that life is unfair and that it should be more fair.  What child hasn't, at one time or another, uttered that immortal phrase that so many parents have so much troubling resisting, "Its not fair!"  By the time the youngster begins to support him or herself, in modern Western cultures usually by the age of 30 or 40 (pardon the mild hyperbole, though there are efforts afoot to increase that age to never) they begin to recognize that the world is, in fact, not fair.  The Universe does not care if you are a good person or a bad person (leaving religion out of the mix) but only whether or not you can support yourself and those who depend upon you.  Modern liberal capitalist states have become so incredibly wealthy over the last century that we can now afford to support a growing dependency cohort which naturally evokes the infantile wish among the dependent to be treated more fairly, ie, that to each according to his needs should be the rule.  The upshot is that there is an inherent tension in our society between those who pay and those who are dependent.  This can and does create cognitive dissonance among those who have incorporated the ethos of Socialist compassion without spending time and energy understanding the far greater moral imperative of personal responsibility and freedom (two inextricable values.)

The last century's grand experiments in Communism and Socialism led to the impoverishment of millions, authoritarian and totalitarian rule and the deaths of millions.  History has rendered its verdict and Communism and Socialism have failed.  This has led to a crisis for the Left.

Richard Landes discussed David Thompson's interview with Stephen Hicks at the Augean Stables and his comments are illuminating.  He first points out some of the value of PoMo and then follows with some of the contradictions at its core: [All emphasis mine- SW]

PoMo Unpeeled: David Thompson talks with Stephen Hicks

The rejection of the “objective” is a reasonable linguistic move: language cannot possibly be transparent on reality, especially the reality of human experiences. Even if something “really did happen,” there’s no way to reduce it to verbal formulae, no way for verbal formulae to somehow lock on to the objective reality at which it points. Epistemologically, it’s possible to push it all the way to radical doubt — we can’t know what we can’t know.

One of the more interesting directions pomo thought takes this axiomatic relativism, is the rejection of the “Grand” or “Meta-Narrative,” the all-encompassing, totalistic narrative that includes, gives order and priority in meaning to the multiplicity of “little narratives” that emerge from any event. Pomos have declared the “death” of the Meta-narrative, apparently feeling that having slain the reigning Meta-Narrative (modern, scientific objectivity), they would not allow a new one to gain hegemony.

All of these ideas are interesting and potentially enormously fruitful. The danger I find most pervasive though, is in the lack of understanding and appreciation that post-modernists have for their exegetical freedom. Not realizing that in most societies in most parts of the world for most of history no one, not even the most privileged figures had anything remotely resembling their freedom to interpret and criticize and even reinvent the meaning of the culture’s major texts. As a result, they tend to abuse their freedom, decoupling the key pair of freedom and discipline for an extraordinarily self-indulgent display of solepsistic “creations.”

Indeed, in their eagerness to flaunt their freedom, the unconsciously replicate the ancestors they thought they had slain, those Meta-Narrative driven figures like Hegel and Vico, who saw in history the inexorable march of freedom. And yet, unlike earlier heroes in the heroic narrative — Washington’s refusal to become king comes to mind — they fail to appreciate either the gift they’ve inherited, or the audience to which they, as the culture’s interpreters, are responsible. Alas for us.

After that introduction Richard addresses the interview and remarks upon the use of PoMo to obfuscate the failure of the Left's ideology:

In millennial studies jargon that’s cogntive dissonance at recognizing (and denying) the failure of one’s outrageously hopeful expectations, at the horror of witnessing the God that failed.

Here, rather than acknowledge that the failure of expectations was due to a misreading of human nature, we have people throwing out the very effort to accurately read the world of humans.

Please read the whole thing; it helps clarify how the Left's alliance with Islamism is rationalized and the ways in which our public intellectuals entertain the most convoluted mental gymnastics in order to justify their support of the insupportable.  I highlighted certain passages to underscore the point that the failures of Communism stem from the shortcomings (and glories) of human nature.  It is the human Psyche, including the Psyche of those on the Left, that dooms Communism.  The theory is perfect; the fault lies within our all too human desire for more than just fairness.  We also desire freedom and we desire more.  Capitalism, by harnessing human nature, makes a virtue of necessity; Communism pretends that if only enough force is used and enough counter-revolutionaries are destroyed, that Utopia will prevail.  It cannot work because even the "vanguard of the revolution" is composed of fallible human beings.  (This is, of course, the same reason a Caliphate will never be reinstituted by the Islamists; they are human and contain more than their share of fallibility.)

The failure of Communism has Millennial implications for the Left.  There can be no Left if they admit or accept that their ideology has failed.  The adoption of the PoMo narrative represents a desperate attempt to retain their theory in the face of reality.  Professor Landes, as noted, is an expert on Millennial movements and he makes an extremely strong case that the Left is reacting as if their grand edifice has failed and they need to deny that intolerable reality.

In a key point in Richard's post, he first offers this quote from the Stephen Hicks interview:

SH: Pomo is rhetoric-heavy, yes. But rhetoric is a tool, so one can ask how it’s being used and why it’s being used that way. The postmodernists have rejected reason, and along with it concern for evidence and consistency. What then is the purpose of rhetoric? In pomo practice, there are a couple of possibilities.

One is that rhetoric becomes a kind of subjectivist expressionism - you play around with language and hope that something interesting pops out. Derrida is often like this - I think of him as a performance artist of postmodernism. In its darker moods, this approach recalls a line from Kate Ellis, a sympathetic-to-postmodernism commentator, who noted “the characteristically apolitical pessimism of most postmodernism, by which creation is simply a form of defecation.” Whatever’s been processing and churning up inside you - you just let ‘er rip.

And concludes:

And yet, and yet, pomo is not a-political, it just disguises its refusal to face the failure of the revolution in a pseudo-a-politicism. Terry Eagelton is a good example. He wants revolution at any cost — even the cost of reintroducing religion, as described by Stanley Fish in an essay I hope to feature here. [What’s a Straw Man of a Straw Man? Fish features Eagelton’s rediscovery of religion]

Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

I like the image of creation as defecation. It’s as if, somehow, the process of digesting meaning went from chewing one’s cud and producing life-giving milk, to sucking the nutrients out of the text and crapping all over your readers.

"Creation as defecation" is a quintessential Narcissistic defensive maneuver; it is a core concept of pathological Narcissism.  It is the human psyche that defeats Utopian movements and the intersection of PoMo, the Left and Pathological Narcissism is an organic development which I will further explore in my next post in this series.

The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part I

You cannot understand modern politics, especially the role and behavior of the left understanding the basics of Post-Modernism.  Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, by Stephen Hicks is a must read which can help clarify such superficially puzzling questions as the conceptual basis for the alliance between radical Islam and the Left. 

The Left has an outsized influence in the West via their control of much of the Academy and much of the MSM, which allows them to establish the acceptable bounds of discourse (Political Correctness, Hate Crimes, etc.)  Further, the Left's Post-Modern narrative is now the baseline for Europe and threatens to become the accepted framework for discourse in America.  Their ideas reside at the core of the Democratic Party and and exert tremendous influence upon our ruling elites in both parties.

Recently David Thompson posted an interview with Stephen Hicks discussing his work.  The interview is well worth your time.  It establishes some of the fundamentals of the current iteration of Post-Modernism in the Academia and its spill-over effects in politics.  Here is an excerpt from David's interview (all highlighting and emphases are his):

Postmodernism Unpeeled

DT: You say, “The postmodernists have rejected reason, and along with it concern for evidence and consistency,” and I suspect some readers will find this hard to accept. It sounds outlandish. But, as you point out in the book, Lyotard explicitly rejected notions of truth and clarity as being synonymous with “prisons and prohibitions.” Foucault shared these sentiments, claiming “reason is the ultimate language of madness,” suggesting that nothing should constrain our beliefs and political preferences, not even logic or evidence. Frank Lentricchia, another left-wing theorist, said the postmodern movement “seeks not to find the foundation and conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” And Stanley Fish, who rushed to defend Social Text after the Sokal hoax, had previously argued that theorising and deconstruction “relieves me of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting.” There is a pattern here.

SH: It is hard to accept the rejection of reason, especially if you’re outside of academic circles, but it’s no secret inside. You nicely quote some representative statements - it’s also worth noting that the leading pomo thinkers cite Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Existentialists as their forerunners, and the rejection of reason runs deep in those lines of thought too. 

DT: A while ago, I quoted a chunk of Derrida prose that’s hilarious nonsense. I’ve defied several Derrida enthusiasts to explain what this particular passage means, or might mean if you squint and tilt your head, but so far no-one has managed to tell me. And the essayfrom which the quote is taken has numerous, equally baffling, paragraphs which could be arranged in almost any order with no perceptible difference. Much of the essay is wilfully incomprehensible, like some Dadaist prank that no-one dares to mention. And there seems to be a taboo against even entertaining the possibility that such a thing could happen, and happen quite often, with little if any protest from colleagues and students. It’s unthinkable that such a con could be perpetrated, and maybe that’s why it goes on happening.

More recently, in a piece about the art world’s reliance on postmodernist rhetoric – what’s often called “art bollocks” - I pointed out that the artist Aliza Shvarts was mouthing opaque gibberish while pretending to be profound. The text she’d written and presented as a key part of her art was clumsy, incoherent and often simply meaningless. It was a kind of verbal flailing and rhetorical camouflage. (It’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is.) One postmodernist commenter took exception to my criticism - first by accusing me of arguing things I clearly wasn’t arguing, then by saying I was holding “entrenched positions” in which “aesthetic values” (in scare quotes), “scientific reality/clarity” (again, in scare quotes) and my own “reliance on logical consistency” (ditto) were obstaclesto comprehension. Specifically, they were obstacles to comprehending Shvarts’ alleged (but oddly unspecified) “arguments of power, control [and] dominance.” The tone was, of course, condescending and self-satisfied. I’m guessing the commenter in question didn’t pause to consider the possibility that one might find pomo bafflegab objectionable precisely because it represents the “power, control [and] dominance” of what amounts to a priestly caste.

SH: A lot of what you’re getting from your various commentators seems like third-raters playing the game, so it’s probably not worth focusing on them - instead of attending to the lessons they’re learning from the leading pomo strategists.

Another clue is that some postmodernists prefer “neo-pragmatist.” Rorty, Fish, and many of the legal postmodernists sometimes use that label. Pragmatism as a school of thought thinks of knowledge, truth, and certainty as chimerical quests and suggests that we focus our efforts on what works.  In politicized forms, then, postmodernists will behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point. Sometimes contradictory lines of argument work. Sometimes your audience’s desire to belong to the in-group can be played upon. Sometimes appearing absolutely authoritative works to camouflage a weak case. Sometimes condescension works. And so on.

[It is important to note that early, more diffident Post-Modernism presented a very useful integration of ideas about subjectivism and reality; that is, we must necessarily filter reality through our individual perceptual apparatus which creates a model for reality and therefore should remain skeptical of assertions of "Truth."  The later Post-Modernists, in the service of their political ideologies, extended the concept to devalue the concept of reality itself.  In their conception, arising out of the crisis of the failure of Marxism, reality is dictated by the powerful for their own benefits at the expense of the victimized.]

Stephen Hicks and David Thompson are interested in describing how the Post-Modernists distort and corrupt our discourse.  If reality is only what the powerful construct then it follows that the powerful, in the service of a "greater good", by virtue of their nobility of mien and elevated moral standing as champions of the oppressed, have the right and obligation to create a more congenial reality.  The multiple attacks on "white male privilege" follow from just such a political philosophy (which, as noted, is a corruption of what was valuable in Post-Modernism when it was a limited theory, rather than the all encompassing theoretical structure it has degenerated into.)

Richard Landes has added depth and complexity to the David Thompson-Stephen Hicks interview in his post, PoMo Unpeeled: David Thompson talks with Stephen Hicks.  Professor Landes's area of expertise is on Millennial movements and he adroitly places Post-Modernism into context of the failure (denied) of Marxism.  I will return to this topic shortly and will attempt to add another layer of explanation to the mix.