Against Kimball: Science Advances by Breaking the Rules

Everybody says that they are in favor of logic and reason: St. Thomas Aquinas; the rational Enlightenment; conservatives. Even radical lefties say that modern capitalism and liberalism is all a lie because the truth is that capitalism and liberalism are all about oppression.

Now comes Roger Kimball with a piece in American Greatness on "Science!" He starts with statement that the two great scientific fraudsters, "the egregious Michael “hockey stick” Mann and St. Anthony “mask theater” Fauci, have recently received gratifying comeuppances." About which we can all agree. But then he starts attacking all my favorite guys:

[Paul] Feyerabend maintained that science is no more cognitively privileged than (for example) astrology, voodoo, or necromancy. The “only one principle that can be defended,” he wrote in Against Method, “. . . is anything goes.”

[Thomas Kuhn.] According to Kuhn, [in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,] scientific truth is “paradigm relative.” For example, what was considered true under the Ptolemaic view of the solar system differs from what we, having read Copernicus, believe. 

[Karl] Popper’s 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery made the curious argument that the distinguishing mark of a scientific theory was not (as everyone used to think) that it was verifiable by empirical evidence. On the contrary, Popper argued that a theory was scientific to the extent that it was “falsifiable.” 

Well, I think all three are right and Roger Kimball is wrong.

Feyerabend: The point here is that the record of the last century or so is that a new theory always busts up the assumptions of the reigning methodology. Maybe just a little, maybe a whole lot. Newton was based on absolute space and time; Einstein said that space and time are relative.

Kuhn: His argument is that the reigning princes of science will always defend the old ways. Only when the old generation dies off can a new "paradigm" get a foothold.  Of course this applies to everything. The current 80-year-old princes of the Democratic Party are about to retire and the Dems will only then complete their paradigm shift to lefty wokism.

Popper: The point of "falsification" is that if your theory explains everything it isn't useful. Climate change is an example. Everything that happens, from extreme weather to hurricane frequency, is said to demand that we stop using fossil fuels. Genuine science makes predictions upon which the theory stands or falls. The famous example of the 1919 confirmations of General Relativity is an example, including the "Perihelion precession of Mercury" -- which could not happen according to Newtonian theory -- and the "Deflection of light by the Sun" of a star that was close to the Sun during a solar eclipse. If these experiments "falsified" Einstein's equations instead of confirming them, it would have been "back to the drawing board."

The point that these three scientists are making is that every scientific theory is a stitch-up, good enough for government work. But once you start trying to apply it to more and more situations, then you are likely to find that, at some point, it doesn't work. The most obvious case is Newton's mechanics. It works at Earth scale. But when you get out into the universe, then it doesn't predict close enough.

And when scientists have to explain their anomalous results with things like "dark matter" and "dark energy" that is a "tell" that "Houston we have a problem." Nothing shameful about that: happens all the time. Here is an article that proposes that the "dark matter" explanation arose because scientists used Newtonian gravitation instead of relativity to model the behavior of galaxies. (Waat? Really?)

Now, my belief is that to understand what is going on here you need to understand the German Turn in philosophy and knowledge -- and Feyerabend and Popper were both born Austrians. Kuhn? He was Jewish American with a German name.

I have a lot to say about the German Turn, but it starts with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a Prussian. He wrote that we cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances. When we humans experience light hitting our eyes we process and interpret that light in our brains, and out of that processing we create an image of the world we are seeing.

For instance, I am sitting at a table. Hey, what more do I need to say? Well, if I wanted to construct a table, then I need to know more about the construction of tables, about materials, about tools, and so on. And if I were to use metals in my construction I would have to learn about the mining and smelting of metals. Behind what George Lakoff calls a "basic level" object hides an infinity of possibilities.

My argument is that Kant's theory of things-in-themselves and appearances set off the German Turn that leads directly, do not pass go, to relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are ridiculous at a "basic level."

So, whatever you believe, I suggest that you take the notions of Feyerabend and Kuhn and Popper, and ponder them in your heart.

Now, we conservatives and nationalists tend to ridicule the left and its "critical theory." Writes Andy Ngo in Unmasked, "Have you heard it argued that there is no such thing as objective reality and truth?" But the critique of objective reality and truth doesn't just come from Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Kant's masterwork was titled "A Critique of Pure Reason."

My point is that if we want to own the future and banish lefty rubbish from the face of the Earth "we" need to understand "critical theory" from Kant to Kuhn and then go beyond it. That's Sun Tzu: To beat your enemy you must first understand him.

And this begins with admitting that there is no such thing as "objective reality." All realities are constructed, in our minds.

Towards a Critique of Meaning

One of my little conceits is to parrot Douglas Adams' line in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Only, I got it wrong.

I just looked it up in my five-books-in-one Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, and that is not how it is presented. Chapter 24, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"O Deep Thought computer," he said, "the task we have designed for you to perform is this. We want you to tell us..." he paused, "The Answer!" 
"The Answer?" said Deep Thought. "The Answer to what?"
"Life!"urged Fook.
"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.
"Everything!" they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
"But can you do it?"
Again, a significant pause."
"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."
"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement.
"A simple answer?"added Lunkwill.
"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

Now, at La Wik, they phrase this as the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." And the Answer, of course, is 42.

So I got it wrong. And so did La Wik. But I am going to have to change my quote. I think that I will henceforth refer to "the meaning of  'Life, the Universe, and Everything.'" Just to make it fair.

The thing about the meaning of Life is that everyone wants a short-cut. And why? Because you need to have some idea about the meaning of Life before you get up in the morning. It is much harder to live life in the knowledge of ignorance, that you don't have a clue what is going on, than living life when everything has been decided on the meaning front by your local priest or your local activist.

The fact is that the meaning of Life is unfathomable. Indeed, the more we know about "the Universe, and Everything" the more we wonder. How is it possible? How did it come to be? How big is it? Is there Life elsewhere? What is Life? What is the Universe?What is Everything? And what does it all mean?

Also, the question of the meaning of Life only occurs for a being that has a conscious mind. If you are a dog or a lion or a mosquito, you just live the life you are programmed to live, as we now think, by your DNA. You don't think about it; you don't worry about it: you just wake up in the morning and go about your business.

So our primitive forbears didn't think about the meaning of Life. They just went about it. And as they began to acquire the glimmerings of a conscious mind, they initially attributed all the angst of life to evil spirits. Notice that, at this stage, the human does not yet feel responsible for his life. Therefore, he does not really need to know the meaning of Life. The gods have decided all that. All the primitive human has to do is get on with it. And suffer, if the gods will it.

It is only with the gods of the Axial Age that humans get to be responsible for their own lives. Even then, God has decided pretty well everything you need to know about the meaning of Life. God just says: now you are responsible for organizing your Life according to the meaning of Life that I have vouchsafed to the Prophets.

Indeed, I would say that down to the Protestant Reformation, all the Average Joe had to do was listen to the priests, and do what he was told.

But with the Reformation a new concept arises. With the advent of printing, your bourgeois citizen wanted to read his own Bible. But that meant that the bourgeois citizen was taking on the new responsibility of trying to figure out what it all means in the Bible.

And now, with Nietzsche's Death of God, we are on our own. It's up to you to figure out the meaning of Life on your own.

Only, of course, most people don't do that. If they can't believe in God anymore then they pick up the secular gods of their school teachers. Or the meaning of Life revealed to them by a political leader, or a religious guru.

I would say that the urgency of knowing the meaning of Life has increased radically in the last century. It is not an accident that with Freud and Jung we see the beginning of a new age in which we have highly trained specialists to help us with our angst. And it is not just a question of taking the word of a priest or a guru to solve your existential problems. With "analysis" it is the patient, the analysand, that is supposed to do the heavy lifting, not the expert psychologist.

The less that society has already determined the meaning of Life, the more the responsibility falls on the individual. And the heavier the weight on the shoulders of the individual.

Even so, nearly everyone picks up a pre-packaged Meaning of Life kit at the store, or the church, or the meeting, or the activist group. Because, really, the alternative, to stand in the full horror of not knowing what you are here for, and what you should do next, is a terror that few of us have the resources to deal with.

But I think with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we should at least begin to recognize that different people need different meanings of life.

In my reductive system, we can say that your average Subordinate should not worry about such things, but just do what his lord orders him to do. The average Responsible has the overall divine plan all set out for him, but he has to fill in the details, and that is not easy.

Obviously we can see that the Creatives, that are supposed to be figuring it out for themselves, are in completely over their heads. That is why, for the last 200 years, they have been grabbing whatever half-baked canned cults and religions are on offer, like passengers on the Titanic grabbing for life-belts.

Maybe that's as it should be. I just wish that the cults and religions that the Creatives have been grabbing for were, as the Brits say, "fit for purpose." That is what my Great Reaction theme is all about. It is about Creatives grabbing for something to steady their lives: only time and time again, they lurch back to the primitive, to belief systems that are more primitive than the Axial Age religions that they can no longer believe in. Because they are not yet ready to face the Universe without he comfort of a ready-made belief system.

That is the real challenge and the real problem. How do you face the world if you accept that you do not know the meaning of Life and never will, and accept that it is a cop-out to just buy a ready-to-wear suit right off the rack?

How About a Critique of Critique?

We all know that everyone who is anyone has created a "critical theory." The current rage for "critical race theory" is just the latest effort from the global sophomores.

Now, in the official introduction to its Critical Theory page, La Wik writes that critical theory is

an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures.

Very commendable. In case you weren't aware, 

critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. 

And we can't leave La Wik's article without this gem:

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

"Challenge power structure." "Liberate human beings." Couldn't agree more, Max old chap. Because I'm sure if you were alive today you'd agree with me that today's "power structure" is a lefty power structure, and its objective is to enslave the minds and the bodies of so-called "deplorables." For their own good, of course.

Now "critique" starts with Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason where he argues that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.

Then along came Marx with his "critique of political economy," that is to say the economics of the classical economists. He was only just in time, because his critique was exploded in 1870 when the marginal revolution in economics completely set aside the opposition of exchange value and use value that the classical economists used and that Marx critiqued. You could look it up.

Our modern critical theory is a post-WWI phenomenon, based upon the post-Marx reality that needed a non-economic basis for its critique.

And in my opinion it is just as wrong. Here's why. It was crazily wrong for Marx to propose that capitalism was an essentially oppressive system. Why? Because in the first place the market economy rewards people for serving the consumers. Because in the second place, capitalism is associated with an unprecedented rise in income, over 30 times in 200 years. Thirdly, because the capitalists then and the ordinary middle class today are not that interested in power.

So, to develop a critical theory based on the theoretical foundation that the one thing needful is to attack and destroy "power structures" misses the point. Under the market system, power structures come and go.

We see this with the fairy tale of "systemic racism." We made systemic racism illegal half a century ago with the civil rights acts. We made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or sex. And ever since we have had lefty activists, funded by lefty billionaires, running around looking under every rock to find discrimination and root it out.

Oh, there's discrimination still, of course. People are wary around young black males. And when young black males mostly peacefully protest a lot of people head for the suburbs.

Actually, city people have been wary around young uneducated unemployed males since whenever. Because young unassimilated males are dangerous and violent. What do you think Dickens' Oliver Twist was about?

So you can see that for me, there is a desperate need for someone to come along and liberate lefty minds "from the circumstances that enslave them."

Now, when I awoke from a dream during the night the book's chapters presented themselves to me thus:

A Critique of Meaning 

A Critique of Religion 

A Critique of Creativity

A Critique of Morality 

A Critique of Revolution 

A Critique of Activism 

A Critique of Politics 

A Critique of Force 

A Critique of Responsibility 

A Critique of Slavery

I think that will do for a start. Of course, you can see what I am about. I am trying to find a framework in which to fit my overwrought ideas, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, to "downstreamism" -- that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- to my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, to my critique of Activism Culture, to my various critique of the Left's Conceits, Crimes, and Errors, to the problem of the Little Darlings.

And it all starts with the eternal question: why do humans seem to need, nay demand, a sense of "meaning?"

White Privilege vs. Little Darlings

Who should get the COVID vaccinations first? Not White Man, apparently, because white privilege and social justice. I love this bit from The New York Times (H/T Powerline).

Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

So we lordly white "allies" -- no "white oppressors" here! -- will put our social-justice thumbs on the scales of racial justice and fix things.

We are seeing a similar dance with regard to appointments to the Biden administration, where pressure groups for people of color are advocating for more of their kind of color.

Yep. I sure would like a bit of the privilege that gets you -- whatever your color or gender -- into the higher ranks of the ruling class where you become a candidate for promotion into the ruling clique. I suspect that one of the qualifications is to have -- let us say -- successfully "harvested" a million votes or so.

For as I say in my Maxims.

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

And it doesn't matter what the game is, whether it is handing out fiefs to loyal barons, or handing out benefits to the workers, or handing out research grants to the scientists, or starting "to level the playing field a bit" in favor of people of color. Government is in the business of loot and plunder, as a reward to its supporters. Period.

Naturally, when governments do this they enlist the assistance of the priests and the moralists, so that it is only fair and just to hand out benefits to the supporters of the ruling class. Hey! "Equality never hurt anyone," as a rich liberal with a house at the top of the hill announces with a hand-painted yard-sign, featuring a clenched BLM fist.

Whatabout my "white privilege?"

Well, my dad's father lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, as the representative of the family firm, and died before World War I. Then his widow and three children got out of Russia in 1918 with nothing but the clothes on their backs. However, the family knew a friend of a friend that got my dad into St. Paul's public school as a charity case. My dad got an engineering degree as an external student while working as an apprentice at a manufacturer. Then he went out to India to design electric power stations and rose to become a top manager at the firm he worked for. But then, of course, came Indian independence, and white guys need not apply. So he came back to England and eventually rose to being a Director at AEI Export Co. And so I got to go to a British public school.

Privilege? Yeah, I'd say, from a family that picked itself up after reverses and made lemons into lemonade and somehow managed to dodge the Bolshevik revolution and two world wars.

Or maybe an Act of God.

But I want to say a word to the "traditionally marginalized" folks that are to be the beneficiaries of the new level playing field. Take your bennies. But then make it on your own.

Why? Why not just connect your electric car to the free charging station forever and enjoy?

Because people that plug into the loot and plunder handed out by the ruling class are what I call "Little Darlings." The ruling class isn't really helping you because it believes in "justice." It is helping you because it wants your vote. The way a rich guy gives presents to his mistress.

And there will come a time when the ruling class does not need your vote any more. The obvious case today is the white working class. Back in the day, the ruling class loooved the working class, and created programs and benefits and wage-and-hour laws to benefit the poor helpless workers. Because social justice and because the bourgeoisie, like the feudal lords of old, had frankly and brutally exploited the subordinate classes. Yeah! Everybody knew that!

But then came 1965 and the civil rights laws and the ruling class decided to buy the votes of privileged white women and blacks. And in due course gays and all "people of color."

And the white working class got cut loose. It started with Affirmative Action; then segued to sneering at the white working class, as in Archie Bunker and All in the Family. Then, in due course, we had Barack Obama speaking to a fundraiser patronizingly about "bitter clingers." Then it was Hillary Clinton's open contempt for her "basket of deplorables." Today? Well, "society is structured in a way that enables [white people] to live longer."

Wait a minute! Just last March I was reading about the white working class "dying of despair." In The New Yorker, so it must be true. So how does that all stitch up?

So my message to the Little Darlings of the ruling class is: grab your goodies while you can. But know this: the day will come when the ruling class no longer needs your votes. And when that day comes you had better be ready to take up the slack and make it on your own, without benefit of government loot.

Because if you don't, you Little Darlings, you will end up like the white working class, that found out one day that those good union jobs at the steelworks were gone; that the police and firemen jobs had to be shared with the "traditionally marginalized," and that the upper-class white women in HR were making them go to critical race theory training. That the rulers didn't care about people like them. Not any more.

But by all means, enjoy your day in the sun.

Let's Kritik Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

Let's start with La Wik, which says that critical race theory is based on the following notions:

• Firstly, that white supremacy exists and exhibits power maintained over time, and, in particular, that the law plays a role in this process.
• Secondly, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, as well as achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, are possible.

By "white supremacy" is meant the academic use meaning, per Frances Lee Ansley:

By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.

Notice that in both definitions, the writer comes close to, but does not quite say "it's a conspiracy!" They do not quite say that White Men got together and decided to Take over the World!

(Although, parenthetically, our lefty friends do have a plan to take over the world).

The point is: could there be an innocent explanation of white supremacy, that explains it as a consequence of White Man being in the right place at the right time with the right ideas and the right technology? In the same way, say, that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a man of undoubted skills and smarts, just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right ideas at an opportune technological moment so that, even though Einstein said that "God does not play dice," our pal Zuck won the lottery and here he is, master of all he surveys.

Because that is how I understand "white supremacy." Here is a likely story:

Back in the day, about 1500, Europeans had developed the technology for ocean-going sailing ships. One thing led to another and pretty soon a chap like Vasco de Gama was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and landing in India. As La Wik says:

Traveling the ocean route allowed the Portuguese to avoid sailing across the highly disputed Mediterranean and traversing the dangerous Arabian Peninsula.

I have a more "overdetermined" narrative.

Back in the day the Europeans were being monstrously oppressed by Arab supremacy and the outrageous and exploitative prices of spices. See, when spices came from India -- and a lot of the spices were grown in the Western Ghats as I have seen with my own two eyes -- they got to Europe by an overland route that went through the desert of western India and through Arabia. And every stop on the way meant a nice little excise tax for the local yokels. Wow! Talk about oppression! Talk about racial power! And whatabout the law! What law in the world could justify all those oppressive princes and potentates making the poor helpless White Man of Europe pay through the nose for spices!

Well, in the event, the Portuguese started trading for spices on the west coast of India, and then the Brits got in on the act. The bloody Brits! Who invited them?

And pretty soon the spice trade through the western desert of India and points westward to the Mediterranean collapsed -- as I have seen with my own two eyes and heard with my own two ears from the guide at the once-powerful desert city of Jaisalmer in western India.

Well, when you set up a trading port on the coast of India, guess what happens? You may not be interested in the various princes and potentates nearby but they are interested in you. And so the Ports and the Brits got involved in local politics, and pretty soon young Robert Clive, East India Company "factor," learned a thing or two about soldiering. One thing led to another and in 1757 Clive won the Battle of Plassey against the Nawab of Bengal. With 1,100 Europeans and 2,100 sepoy troops, and with nine field-pieces, Clive beat the Nawab's army of 18,000 horse, 50,000-foot and 53 pieces of heavy ordnance, served by French artillerymen.

Hello "white supremacy!"

Now, I've read The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon and perhaps the most significant moment of the whole 1,200 pages is in 1825 when some Brit opined that "these people don't really like us," old chap.

Do you understand the importance of this comment, dear lefty friends and all the ships at sea?

The importance is that, prior to 1825, no ruler in the world gave a damn about whether the people he ruled "liked" him. Nobody gave a damn about white supremacy, Muslim Supremacy, Brahmin Supremacy, Western African Tribal Supremacy or any other kind of supremacy. The rule was simple: the strong ruler set the rules, and if he decided to kill every man in town and rape every woman, well, that's how the cookie crumbled. Until 1825.

Notice that this attitude has not exactly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Joe Stalin: do you think he cared whether the Russian people "liked" him? Mao Zedong: do you think he cared whether the Chinese people "liked" him?

Or whatabout our modern Wokies: do you think that a single Wokie gives a damn about what the average white deplorable thinks about him? Exactly. The average Wokie thinks only about bending the arc of history towards justice and crushing systemic racism and white supremacy until the rubble bounces. "Liking" has nothing to do with the case.

No. The interesting thing about "white supremacy" is that White Man is not that interested in white supremacy. Of course, he likes his own people best, and his own religion of logic and reason and market supremacy best. And he wants to water and weed his 401k until it blooms nicely for his retirement. But, all in all, he is remarkable in that, by and large, he is pretty well copacetic with letting other peoples' sleeping dogs lie.

Unlike our lefty friends.

Now let's talk about "intersectionality." La Wik:

Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these aspects are gender, caste, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, and height.

Couldn't agree more, old chap. You certainly wouldn't want to be a young short white guy from Appalachia at a swank eastern selective college that said the wrong thing about trans people of color within earshot of some Good Little Girl that had been indoctrinated in critical race theory and intersectionality since first going to her snobby pre-school in Manhattan. 

And I certainly wouldn't want to be a Dalit working at Brahmin-dominated Google being harassed all the time by snobby Brahmins feeling for my non-existent "sacred thread!" Oh boy!

To say nothing of being a Google employee being fired and humiliated across the rapidly warming planet for innocently writing an essay in response to a solicitation for feedback to say that "while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination."

Now I say that all this hysterical babbling about postmodernism and critical race theory and intersectionality is due to the fact that our lefty friends do not understand the import of Kant and the whole "German Turn."

Poor dears.

Oh, so you want to mend your ways and actually join the human race instead of doing a Koba or a Mao and just eliminating the deplorables?

Well, reduced to an "overdetermined" simplicity, the German Turn says that because we cannot know things-in-themselves it means that all our knowledge -- from our division of life into genera and species to our fabrication of LED Christmas light strings -- is really only "the story so far," be sure to tune into next week's exciting episode. It means that it behoves everyone to cool their jets instead of winding up the turbines preparatory to launching a crusade against the unbelievers. Because next week we will discover something that changes everything.

And anyone that declares that those haters over there are the oppressors and we here are the noble allies and friends of the oppressed peoples might very well be wrong. After all, we can't know things-in-themselves, and for sure what is going to change next week is today's dominant cultural and political narrative.

To suit the agenda of the ruling class of the moment.

Yes, lefties. Did you ever notice that all speech in any society has to stay pretty close to ruling-class orthodoxy? So, if you chaps are allowed -- nay encouraged -- to mouth off about critical race theory and intersectionality and marginalize the notorious White Man it must mean that the ruling class believes that such activity supports the regime and its power.

Hmm. I wonder why.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

Critical Theory in Brief

Let's take Max Horkheimer's definition of critical theory.  He wrote that a theory is

critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

The impulse to this idea came to Horkheimer in WWII as he experienced that fascism was already encoded in the notion of enlightenment and reason.  Thus he and Adorno wrote in The Dialectic of Enlightenment that "What man wants from nature is to dominate it and other men."

So you see that critical theory is all about liberation and enslavement and domination.

But where does critical theory come from?

Oddly, it has nothing to do with leftism. It goes back to Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason. 

Accepting Hume's argument that correlation isn't causation, Kant argued that there could not be absolute knowledge because we could not know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances. So all human knowledge is a story, a "narrative" about things observed in the world, that tries to make a connection between appearances and the unknowable "things-in-themselves." Notice that if we can't know "things-in-themselves" it means that we never know whether our last scientific theory is really the last word on reality. 

Then Fichte argued that "All our thought is founded on our impulses," a creative act of imagination, the first stirring of the idea of the unconscious mind.

If thinking is not the mechanical application of reason and logic, but impulsive narrative, it stands to reason that powerful people have the power to impose their impulses and "narratives" on the less powerful. Thus, it makes sense that the experience of marginalized peoples will be suppressed by the narrative of the ruling class. Thus Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory is how most of us encounter critical theory, and CRT takes critical theory to the max. Here are the highlights of Wikipedia's breakdown:

• Critique of liberalism e.g., Enlightenment, rationalism, legal equality.
• Storytelling, "naming one's own reality" "The use of narrative (storytelling) to illuminate and explore lived experiences of racial oppression."
• Revisionist interpretations e.g., that civil rights laws were passed "in order to improve the image of the United States" abroad.
• Intersectional theory Intersection of "race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination (i.e., their intersections) plays out in various settings."
• Empathetic fallacy "Empathy is not enough to change racism" because most people live in a bubble.
• Non-white cultural nationalism argument for racial "separation and reparations" for oppressed peoples.

What is interesting is how left-wing thinkers and activists take the notion of critical theory, that all knowledge is a narrative of power, and demand that we accept their critical theory as Holy Writ. Or else. Narrative of power, anyone?

Anyway, Critical Race Theory is based on the notion that only the powerful have a voice, but that the non-powerful have experience that is valid for them, and who is to say that their experiences are any less valid that the narrative of the powerful. 

But what if the powerful people are right about a few things? For instance what if capitalism creates prosperity for the marginalized worker while socialism creates killing fields? What if an education without a lefty in sight creates capable people while graduates in critical race theory turn out to be mind-numbed robots?

If we accept the ideas of Kant and Fichte then it is not hard to see how they license the impulsive ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics, that completely liberated us from enslavement to the bonds of the mechanical world of Newton.

Critical theory has been an astonishing success in science. But it is much easier to determine whether an impulsive idea in science works, and much harder to do that with ideas about human culture and politics.

Climate Change illustrates the operation of critical theory. How would we know that the scientific theory of climate change is correct? We won't, not for decades or centuries, not until critical discussions among scientists have understood climate much better than now. But meanwhile the rulers and the experts want us to act and they do not permit a critique of climate theory from people without power. How do we know if the critical race theorists are right? We don't, because you are not allowed a "revisionist interpretation" on race, so we either acquiesce to the dominatory ideas of the rulers or we oppose them, even unto death.

Lefty Jürgen Habermas tried to get beyond the opposition of Enlightenment vs. a liberated world free of hegemony and domination. He developed the idea that we are not just mechanical wind-up toys, cogs in a rational machine or helpless victims of the powerful, but communicators. So his Theory of Communicative Action proposes that the systems world of Enlightenment and instrumental reason should be balanced by a life-world of communication and negotiation.

Notice that the "life-world" of Habermas understands the critical race theory's notion of "lived experience." But in his world the differences in lived experiences are there to be communicated and negotiated not fought out in the streets with mostly peaceful protest or imposed in the classroom by government teachers.

The notions of critical theory have interesting ramifications in the work of Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. How does a new scientific theory gain a foothold? When the old generation of scientists dies off.

Strictly speaking, critical theory ought to be the standard of the truly marginalized in their battle against The Man. Yet in our day critical theory is the weapon of choice for our ruling class and its supporters in education, media, and politics against the ordinary middle class.

Go figure.

Critical Theory Table of Contents

Critical Theory -- Table of Contents

A Critique of Critical Theory

1. Critical Theory: Not Just a Punching Bag
   
   
2. Time for Conservative Critical Theory
   
   
3. Critiquing Obama from the Enlightened Left
   
   
4. Government Professor Attacks Austrian Economics
   
   
5. "How Can You Tell a Racist?"
   
   
6. It's Not Time for Reading Books, It's Time for Action
   
   
7. The Story So Far, from Juergen Habermas
   
   
8. Adorno: Cultural Marxism Isn't All Bad
   
   
9. Obama's Phone-and-Pen Politics is a Weakness, not a Strength
   
   
10. How to Turn Left Through Modernism and Postmodernism
    
    
11. Frankfurters for Breakfast
    
    
12. Frankfurt School Analysis, Part Two
    
    
13. Yes, Liberals, Critical Theory Applies to Your Ideas Too
    
    
14. What's All This About Treason?
    
    
15. Real Critical Theory: How About a Critique of Leftism
    
    
16. Anti-Barker: Don't Know Much About Philosophee
    
    
17. No, Critical Theorists, Creativity is Not The Only Thing
    
    
18. The German Turn: How Germans Invented the Modern World
    
    
19. My "1584 Project"
    
    
20. Let's Kritik Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality
    
    
21. White Privilege vs. Little Darlings
    
    
22. How About a Critique of Critique?
    
    
23. Towards a Critique of Meaning
    
    
24. Against Kimball: Science Advances by Breaking the Rules
    

The German Turn: How Germans Invented the Modern World

If you want to understand the modern world, a good place to start is with Kant, woken up from a dogmatic slumber by the philosophy of David Hume.

What it meant was the end of the Age of Reason, the conceit that humans had banished ignorance and superstition with the triumph of human logic and reason.

It started with Kant and ran for over a century. Whether you consider it ended when Hitler flung the brain of Germany across the Atlantic to the US of A, or perhaps later with Marcuse and Habermas, I call it the German Turn.

Back in the day it was called "the German pestilence that would ruin almost two millennia of facts about the Bible."

My relationship with the German Turn began when I read this, from F.S.C. Northrop of Yale. It's in The Meeting of East and West, Chapter V, German Idealism:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature, which defined the foundations of traditional French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

If you have never heard of F.S.C. Northrop, here is a clue from British philosophy popularizer Bryan Magee, who wrote "F.S.C. Northrop... remains one of the only two people I have ever met with what tempts me to call... a genius for teaching."

Never have I known anyone so excited by ideas; and he was able to pass on not only the ideas but also the excitement. He would walk into the room already talking, and from then on perfectly formed sentences would come geysering out of his head as if he were a gusher blowing its top... [W]e were stimulated as I have never known any other teacher stimulate his students. Bright young graduate students would emerge from his seminars thrilled by the prospects they had just glimpsed and impatient to pursue them... and they would rush straight to the library, lusting to get at the books.

But what does this mean?

It means, to begin with Kant, that we don't experience the world directly as commonplace objects like mothers, tables, chairs, dogs, horses, and food, as we imagine. We cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only the sense impressions from our five senses, most notably vision, that have been processed into a vision of the world by our brain and its "categories."

What, you might ask? What craziness is this, when we can't even accept the reality of the every-day world around us? Well, I would now say, after 20-odd years reading and thinking and writing about this, it is the beginning of wisdom.

Here is what I wrote, for American Thinker, nearly 15 years ago in "Conservatives and the Creative Impulse." Let us start with the phenomenon of Freud and the notion of the unconscious underneath our conscious mind.

Freud's psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, irrational outburst from Teutonic Europe.  But his psychology develops naturally out of Kant's conscious ego, Fichte's impulsive ego, Hegel's stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer's theory of repression.  The key link in this chain is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because he isolates the key factor in human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world?  Descartes thought that knowledge came from a scientist making logical inferences from known indubitable facts to a necessary theory.  But Fichte showed that facts are dead, and dead men tell no tales.  It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that breathes life into facts to create a new theory.  And that act comes from impulse: "All our thought is founded on our impulses," he wrote.  It was surely Fichte that gave the great generation from Einstein to Heisenberg permission to think the unthinkable and shock the world with modern physics.

Of course Fichte’s discovery applied not just to scientists. Artists and writers were delighted to think the unthinkable—and do it too. A century later, Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id and to fear that repressing it would lead to neurosis. 

I am in the middle of reading Freud's On Dreams, and I must say I find it indigestible, partly because I find Freud too mechanical and Newtonian. I prefer the chap that came after Freud, C.G. Jung, who connected the unconscious with all the myths of mankind, as an expression, a welling up, of the human unconscious. Oh yeah. Whatabout Richard Wagner, who created a four-opera cycle about German pre-Christian mythology, The Ring of the Nibelungs, right in the middle of the German Turn.

But notice that Freud did not just appear out of nowhere, and did not invent his idea of the unconscious out of whole cloth. He is the heir to the German thinkers that came before him. Jung says that C.G. Carus invented the unconscious, and Eduard von Hartmann reinterpreted Schopenhauer's Will and Idea into unconscious and conscious thought.

Actually, you could say that the whole German Turn is the development of understanding about the unconscious. When Kant says that we don't know things-in-themselves, but only sense impressions, he is telling us that, unbeknown to us, our unconscious mind is creating an image of the world out of our sense impressions, a theory about the actual things-in-themselves or whatever it is out there.

Jordan B. Peterson comments on this. He says that we -- and the animals -- walk around in the world on the unconscious's autopilot until the moment that something unexpected happens. Then we freeze until we figure out what is going on. In other words, our unconscious theory of the world has broken and we need to mend it with a spot of conscious thought before we proceed.

So the point of the German Turn is to say that the magnificent skyscrapers of logic and temples of reason are built on hidden foundations that we ignore at our risk. These foundations are the hidden depths of the unconscious. Indeed, it may be that 90 percent of our brain action goes on in the unconscious. And, some naughty boys have suggested, maybe the conscious mind is just a movie -- think The Matrix -- that our unconscious mind runs in our brain to make us feel good about ourselves.

One of the consequences of the German Turn is the modern culture of creativity. To repeat Fichte: "All our thought is founded on our impulses." This, of course, is what artists and writers experience. Their stories and theories do not come from pure logic and reason; they come from somewhere deep in the unconscious, or, as opera composer Puccini said of Madama Butterfly, "the music of this opera was dictated to me by God."

Notice how the notion of creativity replaces the old notion of a fixed mechanical universe, and before that of a world run according to the whim of the gods. In the old days, we understood that we were the mere playthings of the gods, and subject to the power plays amongst them. How to get in their good favor? Sacrifice. Then, with the Axial Age religions, we might discover the workings of God's or Nature's universe and we spoke of God's Law. But now we are in the business of creating the future, not merely understanding God's plan and executing it. And our lefty friends are busy creating the future and heaven on earth with their critical theory and activism and peaceful protest.

I have tried to give expression to all this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. My People of the Subordinate Self are people that believe that powerful forces run the world, and that they need to find protection under a powerful lord. My People of the Responsible Self are people that believe in God's Creation and his rational Divine Law, and the point of life is to use reason and logic to find out and live God's plan. My People of the Creative Self are people that believe that they are creating the world through creative process. They are the people inspired by the German Turn.

However, there is a problem. You may have noticed it. There is a tendency for humans only to respect and understand their own kind. Thus People of the Subordinate Self have a tendency to believe that the  rest of the world is out to get them; The People of the Responsible Self have a tendency to think that the Subordinates are lazy bums and that the Creatives are whacky immoralists. The People of the Creative Self tend to believe that Responsibles are racist-sexist-homophobes and that the Subordinates are helpless victims of the bigoted Responsibles.

But I think that my wonderful Three Peoples theory, as a stage theory of consciousness -- see Hegel above -- understands and respects humans at all levels of consciousness as it also understands why people at different levels mistrust and dislike "the other."

I have recently come into contact with Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" and his three-layer model of society, of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Says he:

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

So great minds think alike.

Now, I believe that Kant's dictum that we don't know things-in-themselves leads directly to the revolution in physics, of curved space in relativity, of indeterminacy and the state function in quantum mechanics.

I believe that Fichte's "impulse" theory of thought leads directly to our notion of creativity and the Freud and Jung theories of the unconscious.

I believe that Jung's theory of the individual and the collective unconscious and the archetypes allows us to connect with and understand our pre-rational ancestors and their mythologies.

And I believe that Nietzsche's theory of the will to power is what powers the modern notion of creativity and perhaps even Schumpeter's notion of economic "creative destruction." For instance, I was just reading Nietzsche this morning and he talked in Will to Power §784 about freedom and power.

One desires freedom so long as one does not possess power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still too weak to do so), one desires "justice," i.e., equal power.

And this echoes Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to dominate it and other men.

In other words, the German Turn leads to all things, both good and evil. And "creativity," rather than being the innocent craving of starving artists and writers for inspiration, is really a program of power. For, even back in mythology, it was understood that the god of creativity was also the god of destruction. As in Schumpeter's "creative destruction."

In a way, the German Turn is another expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Before Kant we were innocents in the Garden of Reason and Logic. But now we realize our nakedness, and are ashamed. We have learned frightful powers, and yet, as ever, there is no return to the Garden of Eden. Once you have tasted the apple of the Tree of Knowledge there is no going back.

So we go forward, terrified of our powers, and yet inspired to discover more, still the social animals of Africa that added a new dimension to social cooperation with language, still the creatures that developed logic and reason out of the need to keep our story straight in social interactions, and now conscious of our amazing and frightening creative powers.

That we have the power to make the world anew. And also to destroy it all in less time than it takes to say it.

Thanks to the German Turn it is the best of times; it is the worst of times: the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness.

As it ever was, and is, and shall be.

No, Critical Theorists, Creativity is Not The Only Thing

In a Thanksgiving Day piece, Michael Walsh accuses the Critical Theory chaps of "nihilism." If, by nihilism he means: "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless," then I don't think so. The Critical Theorists do believe in something. They believe in the world-historical destiny of the creative individual -- the artist, the writer, the intellectual, the activist -- to change the world.

And crucially, as the Brit academics say, the Critical Theorists believe that the only way for a creative age to dawn is by destroying the bourgeois Christian European capitalist civilization of which we've heard tell.

Now I believe that this notion is worse than a blunder, worse than a crime, worse than a tragedy, worse than a disaster. It is, I would say, cosmically wrong; it leads to cultural extinction. This is because the creative individual stands on the shoulders of his former self, the middle-class responsible bourgeois. That is why, almost to a man, lefty Critical Theory intellectuals are children of the middle class. You have to be born middle-class to aspire to creative apotheosis.

So if your program is that to usher in a world of creative freedom you need to first destroy the responsible culture of the middle class I am here to tell you that you will destroy everything, because the creative culture is founded upon the rock of the middle-class culture.

I don't know when this creative cult got started. Was it with Descartes, and "I think, therefore I am?" Or Kant, who proposed that our minds are busy processing sense impressions into mental impressions and theories about the thing-in-itself? Or Hegel with his dialectic? Certainly by the time we get to Nietzsche we are definitely trying to understand who or what the creative individual is and how he should live. And Freud's Ego, das Ich, is clearly a creative ego trying to elbow its way past the unconscious Id and the cramping moral instincts of the Superego. In Jung we are trying to balance personal unconscious, collective unconscious with self-consciousness, and combining all the memes of cultural history into a meta-theory of existence, featuring a sacrificial hero exploring the boundary between order and chaos.

Now, it is my belief, drawing on my study of developmental psychology, that a good way to understand the world we humans live in today is with my reductive Three Peoples theory. Of course, the world isn't really that simple; but all theories of the world are simplifications of some kind or another. The question is: does the theory help me understand the world?

My Three Peoples theory begins with the idea that all peoples across the world are dealing with the challenge of living in the city, after millennia of "rural idiocy" as slaves or serfs in the agricultural age. When people arrive in the city as migrants from the countryside -- one of my great-grandfathers was a dairyman, another was a maltster -- we are People of the Subordinate Self, subordinate to some rural lord or squire. We are defined by our caste or rural role, and we are conservative in that we observe the traditional rules of farming, knowing that not to plant at the right time, not to rotate crops, not to preserve food with the traditional methods is to invite starvation and famine. But once we come to the city we have to learn personal responsibility and submission not to a lord but to the prices of the market, including the labor market. Then, after a struggle, we enter the world of the People of the Responsible Self; we become middle-class bourgeois, citizens rather than country folk.

The necessity of this journey, for every migrant to the city, is what the Marxist left denies, and they are wrong, cosmically wrong, and they have visited extinction upon the urban working class. That is why the white working class in the US is reportedly "dying of despair." Because the left led them into a cultural, economic, and political ditch.

But remember, for your average lefty sporting a #WeBelieve sign in the front yard, the question about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is no longer the question of adapting to the wrenching cultural challenge of making it in the city. Been there, done that, in your parents' or grandparents' generation. The challenge now is to find something creative, something original to do with your life.

Hey, I know! Champion the rights of women! The rights of minorities! Advocate for migrants! Fight the hate of xenophobes and Islamophobes! That was the genius of the Frankfurt School and the Critical Theorists: they adapted Marxism from advocating for the working class to advocating for every other victim class arriving at the gates of the city.

But the problem is that, as with the working class, the left is teaching these new migrants to the city culture and its public square not to adapt to bourgeois and middle-class norms but to maintain a separation; not to become Americans, but Feminist-Americans, African-Americans, Arab-Americans. And I believe that just as the left drove the white working class into the ditch of cultural despair, the left will do the same for its current clients.

In fact, I believe that the current female-driven movement of special snowflakes that object to microaggressions and insist on safe spaces and seeing sexual harassment everywhere are a harvest of the left's war on the bourgeoisie and the culture of the People of the Responsible Self. These women are saying that they do not want to become responsible individuals armed with the culture of the middle-class; they just want to be protected from scary things and scary people.

Right now I am reading Nietzsche, and what he is trying to do is to imagine what it means to be a creative individual and what it takes to become one. How do you make yourself into a person with the courage and the fortitude to do scary, original things? It is notable that Nietzsche was not very good at that. He had what we would now call "mental health issues." He could write about being a creative Übermensch -- just barely -- but lost his mind actually trying to be that sort of person. The truth is that being a true creative individual is a very hard thing to do, day to day, and most of us don't have the intestinal fortitude to do it, to live it day to day.

Really, when you think of it, this dreadful error of the left is nothing remarkable. You think that we humans would sally forth into the Creative Age without so much as a single glitch? I gotta bridge to sell you, for that is not the way of the world, which advances through the debris of disaster and failure.

The truth of the creative life is the truth demonstrated to us by Nietzsche, who said that the creative person needs to he hard, and Jung's hero whose personality only develops through struggle, suffering, and sacrifice. It is only after the creative hero descends into the underworld of his unconscious and confronts his personal demons and learns some wisdom from the encounter that he can return to the world of society and contribute to its welfare.

That is just to say that you don't get to be a creative hero and bend the arc of history towards justice and get your ticket to the People of the Creative Self until you have learned discipline and responsibility among the People of the Responsible Self.

Anti-Barker: Don't Know Much About Philosophee

Our liberal friends at The New York Times just published an apology for Marx written by an associate professor of philosophy in Seoul, Korea: Jason Barker. His piece appears  to be part of a book of essays.

But what does he argue? Let's go through his points, one by one. He starts by quoting Alain Badiou that "Marx had become the philosopher of the middle class."

I believe he meant that educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit — is correct.

Oh dear. The class struggle argument, that I thought was exploded by World War I, when the workers fought for their nations, not for their class. I thought that was why the Frankfurt School had to come up with the race struggle and the sex struggle as a replacement to justify the argument for revolution and "activism."

As for the class struggle, it hadn't really occurred to anyone until Marx invented it, in the Communist Manifesto  as a way to smear capitalists with the tar of feudal lords. In the feudal age there were lords exploiting the peasants; in the capitalist age the bourgeoisie exploited the proletarians. QED.

Only, under capitalism the daily per capita income has increased by 30 times in 200 years and 70 percent of Filipinos are now on Facebook. Some exploitation!

And oh dear, the surplus labor argument, that was completely demolished in 1870 with the marginal revolution. But you see, you will read Marxists for an eternity without encountering any economic ideas birthed later that 1865. If there is a grain of truth in the surplus labor argument it is that everywhere under capitalism people mark up prices. The chap that buys grain from a farmer marks it up before he sells it. The engineering consultant marks up the cost of labor before he bills the client. But here is the thing. Even with the markup the employer may not make a profit on his capital. Profit, you see, is not the markup on labor. It is whatever is left after paying for labor, for materials, for rent, for interest, and for paying the equity investors.

OK, what next? How about the capitalists grabbing all the wealth?

Marx arrives at no magic formula for exiting the enormous social and economic contradictions that global capitalism entails (according to Oxfam, 82 percent of the global wealth generated in 2017 went to the world’s richest 1 percent).

Are you saying 82 percent of wealth generated? Or income? Are you sure? The point is that wealth is not "generated" or "accumulated" as Thomas Piketty argues. It is discovered when, e.g., the stocks of frackers vault into the stratosphere when fracking brings down the price of oil. Or when John D. Rockefeller makes a billion by creating an oil industry that reduces the cost of illuminating oil from 89 cents a gallon to 8 cents. So consumers benefit from lower prices and investors benefit from taking a flier on a crazy kid with a crazy idea. Now that is what I call a contradiction. Lower prices and gigantic wealth!

OK how about this:

Marx and Engels wrote: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

Well, I don't think that stripping the halo off medieval guilds and their modern equivalent cabals of lawyers and doctors is such a bad thing. Nor is wage labor such a bad thing. The point about a regular hourly wage or a monthly salary is that the laborer -- or noble professor of philosophy -- trades away risk. He says: just give me a regular income and you, Mr. Employer, take the risk that my labor will have any value when you come to calculate profit and loss at the end of the year. For most of us, that is a pretty good deal, and it is echoed by Stanley and Danko in The Millionaire Next Door. How do millionaire businessmen educate their children? They educate them to the elite professions, because the regular salary of a professional is much less risky than the income of a businessman.

OK, let's proceed to the classless, stateless society. By turning Hegel on his head and substituting materialism for German idealism, plus the death of God, Marx proposed doing away with classes and with states.

The idea of the classless and stateless society would come to define both Marx’s and Engels’s idea of communism, and of course the subsequent and troubled history of the Communist “states” (ironically enough!) that materialized during the 20th century. There is still a great deal to be learned from their disasters, but their philosophical relevance remains doubtful, to say the least.

Actually, the philosophical relevance of the Communist states is clear. If you try to do away with the state you get the ultimate Hegelian negation, a state founded on brutal and unremitting terror that makes even Genghis Kahn look like a piker, and a rigid class system by which the lordly party viciously exploits the vast mass of proletarians and, as often as not, starves them into their graves, as in the Soviet Union's Ukraine famine, China's Great Leap Forward famine, and now Venezuela.

But Marx's real legacy is not philosophy, but critique, as in

"the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."

Ah yes. Critical Theory.

Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress...

But enlightened or rational thinking is not enough, since the norms of thinking are already skewed by the structures of male privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use. Changing those norms entails changing the very foundations of society.

But, Professor Barker, there is one kind of critique that is not allowed. It is the critique of any and all liberal ideas, the ideas of the educated elite, the ideas of people like you. Because, as all the world knows, any critique of the left is automatically "hate" speech and subject to criminal sanction.

So let us rephrase your text. Let us say that the norms of thinking are skewed by the structures of liberal privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use.

In America today, and even more so in Europe, you are not allowed to disagree in public with the privileged educated elite like Jason Barker. And people know it. As Dennis Prager writes today in "Fear of the Left," he gets people coming up to him all the time and whisper in his ear: "I am a conservative."

This happens just about everywhere I speak. People whisper -- yes, whisper -- that they are conservative or they support Trump. The last time I experienced people looking around to check whether they were seen speaking to me was with dissidents in the Soviet Union.

Where is the white privilege if people have to whisper their political identity? Where is the male privilege when men get convicted in the court of public opinion for an accusation of sexual impropriety? Who gets to dominate "the language we use?" Certainly not anyone to the right of Jason Barker.

The point about the left is that its ideology of hegemony and domination is the ideology of today's ruling class. So-called "Critical Theory" is a license for the bribed apologists of the ruling class to beat up on ordinary powerless people that are not represented by the ideological militia of the ruling class such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. That is why ordinary people are reduced to whispering "I am a conservative." Because if "they" found out the truth the conservative whisperer might easily lose his job,

Some male privilege. Some "critique." Some liberation. Some emancipation.

Nothing has changed since Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution. "In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."

Only you are not allowed to say things like that. Because "hate" speech.

Real Critical Theory: How About a Critique of Leftism

In a review of Jordan B. Peterson's interview with Cathy Newman on BBC Channel 4, Uri Harris makes a point that drove home with me.

We need a Critical Theory of leftism, he proposes, on the same principle as the left's Critical Theory of the bourgeoisie. Following Marx, the left has conducted a nearly two-century critique of capitalism's claim to universalism.

Critical Theory draws heavily on Karl Marx’s notion of ideology. Because the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, Marx suggested, they controlled the culture. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie. And importantly, people were unaware that this was the case. In other words, capitalism created a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who controlled society—were made to appear to be universal truths and values, when in fact they were not.

I think that this is an excellent point. It's all very well for the comfortable middle class to think that everyone should be like them, hard-working, responsible, assuming that the market economy that is so good to the bourgeoisie is also good for, e.g., the working class. The argument at the center of Marxism and now identity politics is that the market economy and "middle-class morality" is not good for the traditionally marginalized, and not good for creative types that want to live a live higher and better than mere responsibility and service. The market exploits the working class and constricts the creative class.

So I say, go for it, lefties. Critique capitalism and the middle class all you like.

But there is this. It turned out that the market economy, that Marx said would "immiserate" the working class, did nothing of the kind. The capitalistic economy, in the event, lifted all boats, and lifted the working class into the middle class. So maybe the claim of universal truth was not far off the mark. Nor was the market economy the enemy of traditionally marginalized groups. There is no doubt that white males have done best with the market economy; but everyone else has benefited too. If you wanted to keep blacks and women down you had to write laws to do so, because the market economy doesn't care who you are, it just cares what you can produce. And there is the bottom line to the market economy, the Great Enrichment. Per-capita income in the capitalist countries has risen by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years.

But now let us do a bit of Critical Theory on the left. Let's call it Real Critical Theory, and let us rephrase Uri Harris's words quoted above.

Real Critical Theory turns Karl Marx’s notion of ideology on its head. The problem is no longer the ideological superstructure of the capitalistic productive forces, but the ideological structure of the educated ruling class that not surprisingly privileges the creative pursuits and the power project of the educated class, from the arts to sexual experimentation to identity politics, as the highest and best form of life. Because the educated class controls the arts, the media, and education, we propose that they unjustly control the culture and marginalize all voices that might oppose their agenda. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflects the class interests of the educated class. Increasingly, people are becoming profoundly aware that this is the case. In other words, progressivism creates a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who control the public square of ideas and approved thought—represent their selfish and unjust class interests as universal truths and values, when in fact they are not.

Of course my entire work and world view are intended as a critique of the left's world view and its selfish and unjust power project.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to show how the educated class, the People of the Creative Self, stand in relation to the other main experiential groups in society, the People of the Responsible Self, and the People of the Subordinate Self, and how their whole project is designed to oppress and exploit the People of the Responsible Self.

My critique of the left's activism culture is intended to show the bankruptcy of activism, always searching for a reason to apply political force and "peaceful protest" to a society that really does not enforce injustice and can be easily persuaded to reduce injustice by the ordinary political process of elections and legislation and a peaceful discussion of the issues.

My notion of "little darlings" is intended to publicize the dead end in store for those that are today's beneficiaries of progressive identity politics. Like the white working class, the educated ruling class may loove you today. But the day will come when the ruling class casts you aside, like wounded soldiers have ever been cast aside by armies on the march.

My "left's errors" is a catalog of the errors and the human misery that left-wing and progressive ideas have caused in the last 200 years. 

My Perfect Plan is a solution to the murrain of leftism, for it proposes solutions to the two main evils of leftism. Against the policy of encouraging pre-urban cultural norms in its little darlings -- first the working class and now women and minorities -- I propose that our society should encourage, by all kind and gentle means, the traditionally marginalized to acquire the middle class culture of individual responsibility that is the key to a productive and meaningful life in the exchange economy and the urban society. Against he left's culture war on the middle class I propose a culture of compassion and tolerance in the People of the Creative Self towards the People of the Responsible Self lately anathematized as "deplorables."

And failing all else, there is always my Communism Week, a blow by blow critique of the left and everything it stands for.

The big thing is this. You can criticize capitalism and the mean and narrow-minded bourgeoisie all you like. But the middle-class culture has produced the Great Enrichment, a 3,000 percent increase in real individual income in the last 200 years. The fact is that leftism, communism, socialism, progressivism has failed every time it was tried. Most tragically it was tried and it failed in Russia, in China, and in India, by educated elites that thought that Marx's ideas were the secret ingredient to the west's dominance. Over a hundred million human deaths later, each of these great nations has realized that the opposite is true. Communism, Marxism, socialism, progressivism is the fastest route to national ruin ever devised by a canting intellectual. Hello Venezuela.

The reason that capitalism has worked is this. It extends the truth of social cooperation one step further. In the old days, animals and humans learned that social cooperation is beneficial, indeed, necessary for successful life on Earth, because it reduces the incidence and crippling costs of violence. In both animal and human society this social cooperation was achieved by a status and hierarchy culture that reduced the incidence of costly and destructive violence substituting force with shows of force. But we moderns have discovered another dimension to social cooperation: private property and the price system. These remarkable inventions allow social cooperation to proceed without the cost and pain of hierarchy systems, but simply through the daily fluctuations of prices in the exchange economy that tell everyone what to do, and more particularly, what not to do. It is the most astonishing discovery ever.

And yet our educated ruling class wants to return to the good old days: a neo-tribalism with identity politics, and neo-feudalism with the welfare state.

What is wrong with these people that a Real Critical Theory that exposes their errors and self-satisfied assumptions won't set right?

What's All This About Treason?

Remember back in the day when liberals were really touchy about patriotism? Hillary Clinton spoke for all liberals back in the Bush administration when she said:

I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.

Yes indeed. Then came the Obama administration. Fortunately, the Obamis and their willing accomplices in the media did not question the patriotism of regime opponents. They just called them racists if they opposed the president.

So on the one hand you are not allowed to criticize Democrats for opposing a Republican administration, because, hey, we're Americans and we got rights. But you are not allowed to criticize a Democratic administration because racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Or any other  pejorative that the intersectional SJWs at Activism Central might come up with.

Back in the Cold War it was insupportable to dare to mention the "T" word. Oh No! That was McCarthyism! How dare anyone accuse Alger Hiss of Treason and  spying for the Commies. And how dare anyone say a word against the noble and innocent Rosenbergs, condemned to death and executed -- for what? McCarthyism, straight up.

But now, pore little Donald Trump Jr. has a meeting with a curious Russian character, you know, the lady that was given a special waiver to enter the US without a visa by the Obama Justice Department, and Democrats start talking about Treason!

I  am just starting a book by überlefty Jürgen Habermas about Theory and Praxis and how the purely theoretical approach of the ancient philosophers and the Natural Law chappies had to be replaced by a critical theory that combined both theory and practice in an environment of proper communications where ordinary people are included in the conversation.

But today, we have a "depoliticized public" that is not involved in "a general discursive formation of the public will". Only the left-wing media and Democratic politicians and lefty NGOs are allowed to participate in the conversation. Everybody else is afraid to speak.

That is because liberals and progressives and Democrats and all their activist groups are yelling pejoratives from dawn to dusk; there is no chance for conversation.

When Habermas advances his theory of communicative action, recognizing, after Wittgenstein, that humans are fundamentally communicative folks that use language to interact and cooperate, he is assuming that lefty communication and theory and practice will replace the flawed bourgeois notions of "advanced capitalism."

That is assuming that Habermas is serious about serious non-hegemonic communications. I suspect though that he imagines that non-hegemonic communication is inherently critical and inherently leads to the deconstruction of "advanced capitalism" and its replacement by an egalitarian liberatory society where people are truly free rather that formally free.

Suppose he is wrong, and that open dialog  and conversation leads to a small government society without a starring role for a lefty educated class? What does the robin do then, poor thing?

What the robin does then, poor thing, is to start to shout and sing, and drown out any discouraging word, and starts to call ordinary elite Americans traitors.

The robin is telling us that the whole lefty project is in real trouble, from its theory of society to its practice of centralized administrative systems. And don't forget it was from Frankfurt School lefties that I got my meme of "System is Domination." It really is getting a little old that in a society where the ruling class is all over anyone that dares to challenge its left-wing assumptions that old-fashioned oppression and exploitation are still as bad as ever. Is it really true to say, as this Good Little Girl does:

I believe in liberation. I believe it is our duty to obliterate white supremacy, anti-blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism.

And obliterate it with what? Leftist supremacy, anti-whiteness, anything-but-hetero-archy, socialism, and lefist cultural imperialism?

The fact is that our lefty friends are in a trap. They have been implementing their cultural and political agenda in the name of liberation for the last century, and the truth is that lefty liberation doesn't liberate; its imprisons. They are no longer saying that their top-down centralized administrative dominatory systems are a wonder. So they are reduced to saying that if you touch a hair of Medicad [sic] then millions will die. They find themselves accusing their opponents of treason.

They are in the position of President Maduro of Venezuela that is desperately saying and doing anything to keep his socialist disaster from imploding.

We conservatives, we normals, are often intimidated by our liberal friends, who so confidently expound upon race and sex and equality. But when they are "resisting" the election results for the second time in sixteen years, and when they are starting to accuse people of treason in addition to the regular menu of racism, sexism, and homophobia, then we have to assume that something is going very wrong for them. Confident people, secure in their world view, do not have to accuse and blame. They accept electoral defeat with a wink, knowing that the next election, or the next but one will be "time for a change."

But if the times are out of joint, if the Inconceivable! has happened, if a rank beginner has routed the ruling class despite all its advantages and its patronage, then the ordinary timid peaceful protester and Progressive Activist, Second Class, starts to quiver. Something is going wrong; perhaps the racist sexist insurgents are at the gate.

McCarthyism flourished in the late 1940s after the Democrats had won five presidential elections in a row. Republicans started looking under the bed to figure out what was going on. They suspected treason and espionage and actually they were right. There were people on the left that had let their enthusiasm for a better world trump their loyalty to country. Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy; the Rosenbergs did steal atomic secrets. So maybe the Republicans of the era had an excuse for a bit of paranoia.

But Democrats got paranoid that George W. Bush won in a normal Time for a Change election after two terms of Bill Clinton. Now they are resisting after another Time for a Change election after two terms of Obama. You have to be a particularly dull kind of person not to understand that the political pendulum swings to and fro and this is a good thing that keeps the nation from civil war.

And if your partisans are screaming Treason when the son of the president meets with a foreign national, what is their problem? And what is your problem?