Looking Outward vs. Upward

If you don’t look upward, you will look outward. If you don’t look to God for validation, you will look to your fellow man with all the misery associated with status competition. Inasmuch as we Americans are looking upward less, we are looking outward more and social media magnifies this outward-looking orientation to a significant degree. This, as much as anything, probably explains the dramatic rise in depression, suicide, and other indicators of general unhappiness in recent years.

A short summary of our time

Technology is in a race with foolish and foolish seems to be winning

Symptoms vs. Causes of Racial Disparity

We can’t solve lung cancer with cough suppressants, and we can’t solve the racial inequity problem with affirmative action. Opening up spots at NASA and Yale for a handful of racial minorities might (if we assume no talent mismatch problem) benefit a handful of people, but the tens of millions of others in minority groups won’t be helped even if elite institutions can pat themselves on the back for alleviating a cough. The dogma that all racial disparities are caused by racism and discrimination underlies most of our action on the racial advancement front these days, and yet it’s obviously misguided. Indian Americans have better outcomes (especially on income) than do white Americans, and since this clearly isn’t the result of racism/discrimination, we must turn elsewhere for explanation. Culture is the most likely culprit and if there are cultural problems (lung cancer) killing the patient (poor white performance relative to Indian Americans), then getting to the cultural problem (opioid addiction, family breakdown, honor culture, devaluation of education) is the only solution. A palliative to suppress the cough might make a doctor feel better, but it won’t do anything for the patient. Can we call “malpractice” on those prescribing similar “cures” when it comes to racial issues?

Inaction as a Criterion of Greatness

It seems to me that a prejudice in favor of political action is a fundamental and unjustified human bias. It makes us celebrate leaders who fight wars and engage in bold government activity without due consideration of the value of those activities. Since government inaction is generally preferable to action, then, as a general rule, the less active the political leader, the higher they score in my book. By that metric, Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge are two of the greatest American presidents, and Henry III and Elizabeth II are two of the greatest English monarchs. R.I.P.

Might makes right? Might makes wrong?

The Pre-religious worldview said “might makes right”; The post-religious worldview now says might makes wrong. The religious worldview says right makes right and this is the only coherent moral position.

Is the political spectrum useful?

Which belief is more likely to produce hostility? 1. There are only two types of people in this world: good people like you on one side of a spectrum who are right about everything, and evil others on the other side of the spectrum who are wrong about everything 2. There are many types of people in this world and you will you will have many points of agreement and disagreement with everyone The second answer is not only less likely to produce hostility, it also happens to be true

Nature and Analogical Thinking

If Kevin Kelly is right that the invented increasingly resembles the created (Out of Control), and if Clay Christensen is right that associative/analogical thinking is the key to innovation (The Innovator’s DNA), then shouldn’t we be examining nature much more with an eye to getting innovative ideas? E.g., look at trees to figure out buttressing? Birds for flight?

Balancing community and individuality

Communalism without individualism is slavery; Individualism without communalism is misery

The Fascism Formula

The best way to get fascism in society is to convince people that something equivalent to fascism is the opposite of fascism, thus leading them to run to fascism in the name of getting away from it.

The Pinker Delusion

Psychologist Steven Pinker often says that we believe in God because our brain is playing a trick on us—we’ve evolved for survival, not for truth and so we believe untrue things that had survival value for our ancestors. But in other contexts, Pinker says that we should rely on reason because the truth is useful and so our brains evolved to give us the truth. The contradiction is obvious. Should we believe our brains because it tells us to believe in God and our brain evolved for truth, or should we refuse to believe our brains because they are deception machines in which case we shouldn’t believe rationality either? To say, “We should only believe our brains when it tells me something I like” is unfounded prejudice. Why reject part of our brain’s truth apparatus, but not another? Pinker has no answer.

The third desire

Fukuyama postulated that history would end in liberal democracy since it satisfied our material and thymotic desires. But beyond our need for material goods and recognition is also our need for worship. We can’t understand the current world and its fractures, zealots, and move towards illiberalism if we don’t understand that something more than material well being or superiority was behind the Salem Witch hunters of the 1690s, the Catholic inquisitors in the 1490s, or their woke equivalents today. The need to worship explains why universities have become medieval in their approach to free speech, why irrationalism has taken over the Republican Party, and why Putin is invading Ukraine. The God shaped hole in the heart is the crucial explanatory variable left out of most social theories today and until we recognize it, we can’t find the only appropriate solution.

Rise of Intolerance from Lack of Pluralism?

James Madison understood that freedom is well-served by pluralism, particularly pluralism in religion since it is the realm of life that addresses the most basic, sacred, and fundamental of our beliefs. Until recently, there was a Judeo-Christian “background orthodoxy” that framed the value structure of society in broad terms shared by major American religions, but there was religious pluralism nonetheless which led people of whatever faith to value free speech, tolerance, and openness for the sake of self-preservation if nothing else (when everybody is a religious minority, the Nash equilibrium in game theory is to cooperate on tolerance of minorities. That is now changing with the rise of a new religious majority. As traditional religion declines, woke religion rises to fill the void and, unlike its predecessor, the woke religion is monistic and unitary rather than pluralistic and diverse. There aren’t multiple sects of Wokism with competing dogmas as there were multiple sects of Judeo-Christian religion in previous eras. Tolerance and free speech were well-served by the pluralism that prevailed throughout most of American history, but they are poorly served by the monism of our current religious era.

Comparing Lockdowns to the Iraq War

Both seem to follow a seven-step pattern:

1. SCARY PROBLEM causes panic among the population (9/11, COVID-19 outbreak)

2. General feeling that politicians must do SOMETHING to stop SCARY PROBLEM

3. Politicians roll out a SOMETHING despite the fact that there is no evidence the SOMETHING will do anything to solve the SCARY PROBLEM (Iraq War, lockdowns)

4. Public (and media) supports politicians doing this SOMETHING, assuming they can trust the experts and that politicians wouldn’t be advocating for it if it wasn’t going to help solve the SCARY PROBLEM

5. The SOMETHING doesn’t do anything to stop SCARY PROBLEM and actually causes more harm than good, but the public doesn’t recognize it and still continues to support the SOMETHING as a matter of inertia

6. Public finally realizes that the SOMETHING is actually doing more harm than good, and that their politicians are more inept and less driven by evidence than they thought

7. Public loses trust in those in the government who advocated the SOMETHING (Rumsfeld, Fauci)

“If not A then B” Thinking

One of the scourges of our time is “if not A then B” thinking. It might also be named the “false binary” fallacy or, in some senses, the “law of the excluded middle.” The idea is that if you are against one thing, then you must necessarily be in favor of a specific something else. If, for instance, you are against wokeness, then you must be a Trump supporter. Getting past this fallacy is one of the key challenges of our time, but it requires more nuanced thinking. The political binary of “left vs. right,” makes it especially hard, since we are told there is a “spectrum” and if you don’t want to be on the “left,” then you must necessarily be on the “right.” The idea that there are more options than two doesn’t even occur to many people because their operating paradigm doesn’t allow for it. But, sadly, both A and B are wrong in our current time and the Book of Mormon warned of problems we are seeing in both. Stoking of racial grievance and judging people based on ancestral wrongs is a problem warned of in the Book of Mormon, as is the tendency towards supporting an immoral strong man in defiance of democratic norms (King Men). The correct approach to most realms of life, including politics, is “neither A nor B” and until we can collectively get to this point, we will see a lot of people supporting a lot of really bad stuff from A, and a lot of really bad stuff from B.

Passing Fad or Permanent Trend?

The spread of wokism to all corners of society, with a concomitant tendency to restrict speech, fire heretics, and establish orthodoxy, is clearly a reality, but the question is, will it burn out, or is it a more permanent trend? In my optimistic moments, I see the comparisons to previous witch hunts (such as the McCarthy era) where, in the short term, decent people were cowed into silence by the powers that be, but in the long term, public opinion turned and the leaders of the witch hunts went from enjoying unchallenged power to being historical villains (Sewell, McCarthy). The opinion cascade peaked and reversed with a well-placed “have you no decency, sir?” in a public forum. But the differences make me think we are watching not a fad that will burn out, but a general move into a new medievalism. First, wokism isn’t just a hysterical reaction to a perceived new threat (communism), but an entirely new worldview. McCarthyism operated within an overriding Judeo-Christian worldview while Wokism is itself a new overriding worldview. Second, the spread of wokism has been long in developing. Whereas the red scare emerged quickly after World War II, the wokist perception of “oppression embedded in systems” has been growing and expanding for at least a generation. It’s not a sudden overreaction to a perceived threat, but a longstanding, long building worldview that didn’t flame into existence suddenly and so probably won’t flame out of existence suddenly. Third, the elites, by and large, were never on board with McCarthyism. It had the support of the masses, many politicians, and some cultural elites (e.g., the Hollywood studio heads), but it had significant opposition—virtually all academics, novelists, and journalists were vocally anti-McCarthy from the beginning. There is no such opposition today. Wokism dominates media, Hollywood, and academia with almost no concerted cultural pushback. Where are the Arthur Millers writing Broadway plays denouncing the cowardice and conformism? The religious elements of wokism and its takeover of virtually the entire elite culture make me believe that it’s a new revolutionary force, establishing orthodoxy much as Catholicism did at the time of Constantine, or Protestantism did at the time of Luther. The historical metaphors to 500AD seem more apropos than the metaphors to 1950AD.