The Two Paths: for Rich Kids After the Death of God

Today the formerly-Facebook-censored Dennis Prager issued part 3 of his "Explaining the Left" series. Quoting Victor Frankl, he writes:

[T]he greatest drive of man is meaning.

Frankl's book is titled "Man's Search for Meaning." And golly, whaddya know, Jordan B. Peterson's book is titled "Maps of Meaning."

That is what God and religion down the ages is all about. As Douglas Adams jokes in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: it's "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

But now God is Dead, at least to the educated people of the West. So what do we do? The Left is one answer to that question. Prager:

The answer to the great dearth of meaning left by the death of biblical religion in the West is secular religion. The first two great secular substitutes were communism and Nazism. The first provided hundreds of millions of people with meaning; the latter provided most Germans and Austrians with meaning.

In particular, both ideologies provided the intellectual class with meaning. No groups believed in communism and Nazism more than intellectuals. Like everyone else, secular intellectuals need meaning, and when this need was combined with intellectuals' love of ideas (especially new ideas -- "new" is almost erotic in the power of its appeal to secular intellectuals), communism and Nazism became potent ideologies.

And, after Communism and Nazism failed the God is Dead crowd, inspired by the Frankfurt School, adapted a new secular religion. You will notice that it curiously combines the class warfare of Communism with the race warfare of Nazism.

What is notable about both Communism and Nazism and the modern derivative we call postmodernism, or political correctness, or "woke" -ness, is that it is a doctrine of political power: we will redeem the world with a political movement to eliminate the sins of the world.

It is telling that the old religions all conceded that we were not going to be able to create a heaven on Earth. Eternal Bliss was only available in the afterlife, and only to the folks that got with God in this life. But with the growth of science, maybe we could do better!

Now it is my belief that the left's faith in politics is a Great Reaction, a nostalgic move back to the old days when political or military power was all in all, because it was needed to defend your tribe's patch of land and its life-giving food. In that world you had to be perpetually armed against all others, because only one tribe could eat the food from a patch of land.

So I understand the left's secular religion as a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the Death of God. The left is reacting rather as the Germans reacted after the disaster of World War I. This most advanced country in the world -- that had invented modern philosophy, modern cars, modern physics -- returned to the pre-modern faith in race and land. People normally do this when the world turns against them, according to new-age philosopher Ken Wilber. They instinctively seek a return to "what worked."

But here's the thing. There is an alternative to the left's nostalgia, and it has been here all along and, in many ways, it reflects the left's return to the past, with a difference. We are talking about the cultural movement represented by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jung, Frankl, and people like Joseph Campbell, and this year's sensation, Jordan B. Peterson. All of these people are looking back to the old religions to figure out what religion and myth were all about, and then used their new understanding of the role of religion and myth in human life in order to inform the present.

If you read Campbell, and I just checked through my late mother's copy of Creative Mythology, you find copious references to Nietzsche and Jung. Ditto Peterson. So what is going on?

I will tell you what I think.

The rise of science in the last millennium has changed the way we think about the world. In the old days we used to think that God created the world and all we could hope to do was to live in it according to his plan. But science has taught us that we can learn a lot about how the world works, and successfully do something about it. In other words, we are now able to go about the world creating things. So Creation is no longer a monopoly of God. Mankind has figured how to get in on  the creative action.

That is why the top dogs of my reductive Three Peoples theory are the People of the Creative Self. We are people that realize that we are not born into this world to be subordinate peasants or merely responsible individuals. We are called into the world to create.

The lefties have chosen to create according to a Gospel of Force. They will use force, through politics and government, to wash away the sins of the world, inequality, oppression, exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia and create a new world.

But the gospel of Nietzsche is different. He tells us not to change the world but to change ourselves, to "become who you are," to go on an individual journey of self-discovery like his Zarathustra, to rise above the herd and become exceptional.

The gospel of Campbell is to live The Hero's Journey of myth and descend into the underworld (i.e., the unconscious) and only after you have learned your lessons well to return to the world to give your life and knowledge to your fellow humans. The gospel of Peterson is to live on the edge of order and chaos and become the Sacrificial Hero that dies to redeem the world.

Notice the difference between the two gospels? One is a gospel of force, conducted by people who already know what the world needs. The other is a gospel of self-discovery, conducted by people who know they have have a lot to learn, and that one day, by the grace of God, they may find a way to benefit their fellow humans.

Notice that even at the level of economics the differences are stark. The lefties already know what needs to be done: the only thing necessary is to encode their doctrine in beneficial legislation, even to the extent of molding the entire economy into a government administrative bureaucracy.  But the market economy requires each of us to go out into the world to discover how each of us might find something with which to contribute our labor and our skills and our ideas to the world. Only after self-discovery do we find out what our contribution might be.

It is telling that Peter Thiel's book about the market economy is called From Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build  the Future. Yeah. How do you get from Zero to One?

It needs to be said that the life of creative discovery is much more challenging than the life of a subordinate peasant or modern "victim," and also more challenging than the life of a responsible citizen and worker. It is not for everyone, nor yet for everyman.

But let it be said that, for the well-born, folks that have had all the advantages of being born to intelligent and resourceful parents, there are Two Paths. One path is the nostalgia of political "activism," that has bewitched young rich kids ever since Marx and Engels. The other path is the existential challenge of self-discovery in the hope of one day getting from Zero to One.

One of the Two Paths fails in blood and misery every time it is tried. The other has brought us from $3 per person per day to the present $150 per day, and a world of astonishing peace and trust.

And we, each one of us, get to choose which path to take. What a world.

The Problem with Grand Strategy for Empires

Just in the last few days I have encountered articles proposing that Presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia are strategic geniuses setting their countries up for global domination.

The Chinese one was from "Spengler," or David P. Goldman. He thinks that the Trump tariff threats are a strategic error because the Chinese economy is much stronger than Trump's advisors (and also supply-sider Art Laffer) think. Anyway China is in the midst of an economic transition at the end of which it will rule the world.

Deng Xiaoping began a convulsive transformation in 1979, launching the largest migration in world history, a movement of 550 million from countryside to city – two Americas, or the whole of Europe from the Urals to the Orkneys. Xi Jinping is presiding over another convulsive transformation, from a smokestack-and-export economy to a high-value-added, consumption-focused economy.

In the first transition "Thousands of years of custom, habit and history have been uprooted in a single generation, and China has created a new people." In the second:

China is engaged in a second transformation, from a country of industrial workers one generation removed from the farm, to an economy led by technology and services. And the Chinese propose to accomplish this in a single generation, while shifting a great deal of their industrial operations to cheap-labor venues from Turkey to Malaysia. That is part of the object of the One Belt/One Road initiative.

Well, yeah. Maybe. Or maybe the top-down my-way-or-the-highway ideology isn't that well adapted to the creation of a creative market-driven economy of "technology and services." Maybe the folks left behind, like the white working class in the US, will rebel at being catapulted into the 22nd century.

OK, now let's look at Russia, where Andrei Martyanov thinks that Putin is the second Pyotr Stolypin. Stolypin was Prime Minister of Russia in the aftermath of the failed 1905 Revolution.

[Stolypin's] strategic dictum was simple to grasp: “Give Russia 20 years of internal and external peace and quiet and it will change beyond recognition.” Vladimir Putin and his team follow this dictum to the letter.

And the major objective of this, then and now, is to be a world-class military power. China seems to agree too, as they build a blue-water navy.

But I think this is all rubbish.

Look, I think it is great that Russia and China are serious about playing catchup. This chart from usgovernmentspending.com shows what they need to do on the GDP front.

This chart shows that Russia, China, and India are all playing catchup with the West and Japan. So yeah, they should all be copying what we are doing and becoming global, trading nations that live by trade rather than political domination.

But then what? That is where the strategic mindset fails. For it assumes that power is everything, and that the wise ruler should have a long-term power plan going out to the near horizon.

Frankly, I doubt that.

Put it this way. The US, you might notice, is on the top of the heap, GDP-wise. Did the US come up with a magnificent strategy 100 years ago about how to rule the world? Hardly. We just stumbled and bumbled along, as usual, making it up as we went along. And along the way we were the leaders in a number of technological revolutions, from electricity to air transport to computers and the internet. All completely unforeseen by the smart set. So it is probably a good thing that our ruling class didn't have a clue, because sure as can be, whatever grand strategy we might have formulated in 1900 or 1950 would have been useless in 2020.

OK, so we did have a grand strategy from 1950 to 1990, to "contain" communism. And it worked.

Moreover, the grand strategists are usually backward looking, trying to keep the existing regime going, and usually making a mess of it. Think of the German and Russian and Austrian emperors that bumbled into World War I and crumbled into dust, giving us the Great Reaction that featured Bolshevism and Fascism. Think of Hitler's grand strategy of blood and soil. Think of Mao ZeDong's strategy of cultural revolution.

Right now, for instance, in the United States, the ruling class is transfixed with the idea of erasing the guilt of colonialism and racism and the age-old subjection of women. Is this a brilliant idea or a Great Reaction into a neo-oppressive politics that subjects the entire population to the latest wizard wheezes of intersectional crazies? My belief is that the current ruling-class obsessions have nothing to do with the case. It is all just the posturing of rich kids, churned out by our elite finishing schools, that have been educated in useless mush.

No wait. When you think about it, the ruling class is doing the sensible thing. By filling young elite heads full of mush they are making sure that the little geniuses never have an original thought in their heads and thus never think how the whole ruling class ideology sucks from head to tail.

Look. Of course Russia and China need to play catch-up. And they need to stay out of trouble and let the market breed peace and prosperity, and lead their people out of the country into the city and then socialize them to the market economy.

But as to what happens after that, let's be clear. Nobody has a clue. If Russia and China look to emulating the US so they can become world hegemons in their turn, I have this to say to them.

When you guys reach up to US levels of GDP, meaning that your intangible capital reaches to 80 percent of total capital just like it is here, then the game will have changed.

I hope that the US will have stumbled onto the right road by that time, in accordance with Bismarck's dictum that there is a "special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America."

But you never know.

Great Reaction: The Story So Far

For me, the great social movements that have dominated the headlines and dug the mass graves of the last century and a half -- Communism, the welfare state, environmentalism, identity politics -- amount to a Great Reaction against the most astonishing event in world history, the Double Revolution, that in physics that has given us relativity and quantum mechanics, and in everyday life has given us the market economy.

When the world is suddenly utterly changed it is natural for people to look back to the past. New-age philosopher Ken Wilber describes it as people stepping back to "what worked" when it seems that things are all going to hell around them. So of course, with the unparalleled changes of the last two centuries there are many people that yearn for an older simpler time.

This nostaglia was evoked by Archie Bunker in the title song of All in the Family, "Those Were the Days" of the time when "Girls were girls and men were men." And the whole point of All in the Family was to sneer at the white working class that was all of a sudden finding itself left behind by history. Or at least by the ruling class.

Or, in a less innocent manner, it was natural for the Germans to revert to blood and soil after the disaster of World War I. And that is what Hitler offered them: a pure Aryan race, and a Drang nach Osten for land to the east of Germany. Absolute insanity for the nation that had invented the automobile and the new physics and left behind the old faith of slave-farmer Gerald O'Hara that "land was the only thing that lasts."

Every effort in the Great Reaction is to re-invent some social or religious or economic facet of the good old days, so my way of illustrating this is to "neo" everything about it.

Most obviously, there is the neo-feudalism of the welfare state. In the good old days of feudalism, the peasants were held in thrall, as semi-slaves, to the warrior class. The peasants tilled the fields and grew the food, and surrendered a good part of their labor to their lord in return for his protection against pirates and other lords that might come and relieve the peasants of their food and land. Same thing now: the ruling class makes all kinds of promises to the workers and offers all kinds of benefits, and people feel secure in their work and in their lives. But this is an illusion, a confidence trick. As the feudal peasants found out when the lords threw them over, and as  the white working class has found when the ruling class went global about half a century ago.

Then there is the neo-tribalism of identity politics, that unscrupulous politicians and ideologues use to divide modern voters into race and religious and gender tribes. In the modern era we have tried to use the nation state to create a new kind of membership, to get people to feel membership in something bigger than their kindred and their tribe. But the truth is that our natural human instinct is for the clan of about 120 people, and any politician worth his salt knows how to activate those ancient instincts.

How about the neo-piracy or neo-plunder of modern taxation? Back in the old days under slavery the lords would appropriate as much of the slaves' or serfs' production as possible. Then in the 19th century the expropriation of taxation came as low as 10 percent of GDP. Now it is back up to 35-40 percent in the advanced countries. But what is this expropriation but a return to the old days when the way to get rich was to steal resources from the neighboring tribe? We are better than that, because for us wealth comes from the ideas and labor of humans and the knowledge in between their ears.

Then there is the need to propitiate the gods, in neo-sacrifice. In the good old days humans would sacrifice animals -- or even the first-born son as Abraham nearly did with Isaac -- to propitiate the anger of the gods. René Girard proposed the notion of the scapegoat, an individual sacrificed to carry all the blame for social discord, as a way to restore social harmony in a social group divided by conflict. Our modern politicians are masters at this. Recessions and financial crashes are never the result of reckless government policy but always the fault of greedy bankers and speculators. Or The Jews. The disasters of socialist regimes are always due to "saboteurs and wreckers." Also, of course, we have the environmental movement that wants us to "live simply so that others may simply live" which assumes that there is a fixed amount of resources and that my sacrifice is needed to put food in the mouth of somebody else.

Don't forget the rise of neo-guilt. Nietzsche blames Christianity and "the priests" for the widespread incidence of guilt. He represents this as a cunning trick to get us to turn our healthy tribal hate and cruelty back on ourselves. I like to propose a more innocent notion, that turning warrior rage back on ourselves in Original Sin tames us for the market economy in the city where Viking berserkers are really not helpful to a prosperous economy. Back in the day our modern evangelizers were, like Nietzsche, anti-guilt and anti-Christian. But now all the best people are trying to make white people guilty about their "white privilege" and men guilty about their "toxic masculinity." I think we need a new history of guilt so that we can really understand the social origin and significance of guilt.

One of the most obvious manifestations of the Great Reaction is the emergence of the neo-tyranny of totalitarianism. It's remarkable that, despite the universal horror of tyranny, of man's inhumanity to man, we have seen the most tyrannous political regimes in history in living memory: Stalinism, Hitlerism, and Maoism, and various lesser lights. And here in the United States we have the neo-tyranny of the politically correct to stamp out "hate speech" using the power of the state.

Now my judgement is that these neo-isms reflect basic human instincts that cannot really be abolished. The fact is that many people prefer to live in subordination, and thus we will always need institutions in which they can diminish the risks and rewards of life. But I'd say that it is best for such people to go work for a corporation rather than saddle us with the weight of the welfare state. We humans are tribal down to our toes, but we are also smart enough to imagine new, less exclusive, ways of belonging. We humans need ways to resolve conflict, but we can surely find new ways to do that without blood sacrifice and guilt-tripping whole communities.

And surely there is a higher, better way to provide for common needs than by taxing -- that is, taking by force -- from every worker over a third of his wage.

The Great Reaction is a challenge to us all to imagine something for this age, after the Double Revolution of modern physics and the modern economy, something higher and better than a cowardly return to Old Ways of olden times.

What to Say to People That Want More Government

Introducing his latest piece on the nightmare of California, Steven Greenhut introduces a Good Little Girl:

At a conference examining California’s housing crisis, one of the more liberal audience members expressed her frustration at those of us who even talked about free markets... Couldn’t we just get back to discussing government regulations and programs?

One of my pet prejudices is that women, more than men, actually believe what they are taught in school and by their friends. Men, I feel, are a bit more skeptical. Since we are famously expendable, we at least affect a certain disbelief for the conventional wisdom that might choose to sacrifice us on battlefields to the gods of the ruling class.

Evidently the woman in question is a Good Little Girl that learned to mouth liberal pieties not later than her sojourn in the nunnery of her undergraduate college.

But what she is saying is that voluntary trust and cooperation are for the birds. Only government force and prescription will do. She is calling for the clunking fist. Of course, nobody ever told her that. She has been raised to belief that the application of government to social and economic problems is to correct the vile injustices of the market system.

But markets are about free exchange: governments are force; politics is division; system is domination.

Yeah, and here's a piece that reports that millennials lose a lot of support for the welfare state when they are told how much it costs.  No kidding.  How could they have got through K-12 without knowing that?

So what are we to say to the Good Little Girl that gets up at a community meeting and says, enough of talking, I call for force!

How about something like this:

Madam, I can't believe you said that! Do you not realize that you are saying that peaceful cooperation cannot work, and that only force gets the job done? You are echoing the cry of every young hunter-gatherer that ever called for a dawn raid on the neighboring village, every Viking that called for a run up a river in England to steal the grain, kill the men, and sell the women and children into slavery. You are echoing the vile dictators of the 20th century, of left and right, that called for the supremacy of the political leader, whether the supremacy of a Stalin, of the Thought of a Mao Zedong, or that Austrian chap. And these men had over 110 million humans killed, not counting war deaths.

Have you not been taught the science? That Marx's economics was exploded back in 1870 with the marginal revolution? That an Austrian Jew predicted, in 1918 less than a year after the Bolshevik revolution that socialism, the ownership of the means of production by the rulers, could not work because it could not compute prices. That another Austrian told us that 10,000 administrative and regulatory bureaucrats could not out-think and out-plan millions of producers and consumers? That an American academic told us that regulation could never work because it would always result in regulatory capture of the regulators by the folks they were supposed to regulate?

In our age we have seen income rise by more than ten times. What has done this? Surely not government, the fount of force, but the unexpected and unsought for inventions of the last 200 years: the textile revolution that brought cheap machine-made clothes to the poor; the steam revolution that brought trans-continental migration to the poor; the medical revolution that brought death-rates for women, and especially women in childbirth, below the death rate for men; the machines that diminished the premium for physical strength and allowed women to participate in the work-for-wages revolution; the contraception revolution that allowed women to control their fertility for the first time ever.

Madam, I beg you, with all my strength, not to pray to government and its God of Force. Have faith  instead in your fellow humans, their ability to cooperate, their capacity for trust, their commitment to dealing one-on-one for mutual benefit, provided the rules are set up to reward fair dealing and trust, and above all their commitment to work with each other without invoking the divine intervention of the lightning bolt of government, and its terrible twin, Force.

Have faith in people, not in force.

Who is the Most Riled Up for the Midterms?

I'm not that much up on the details of political campaigning. But I do understand that part of it involves motivating your side to get to the polls, and another part of it involves demoralizing the opposition so that they are too discouraged to go to the polls.

So, the question is: how does the Mueller investigation work out for the midterms? Does it demoralize the Republican voters or does it rile them up? I have no idea. I suppose that the Manafort conviction and the Cohen plea bargain are supposed to demoralize the Republican faithful. But does it?

On  the other side is the censorship of conservative voices on social media. I wrote about this yesterday as a kind of cluelessness of the social media companies that up to now have been censoring conservatives because that is what the lefty activist groups like Media Matters have been demanding. So, for social media and for other corporations, the path of least resistance is to accede to the demands of the lefty activists. But, I argued, the censorship of conservative voices riles up the conservative faithful, and may encourage a bigger turnout of Republicans in the midterms.

The normal result in a midterm election is for the president's party to lose seats in Congress. That is basically because the president's supporters are usually happy with things, and thus are not all riled up, and thus do not all turn out to vote. On the other hand the opposition party's supporters are all riled up, outraged at the monstrous corruption and injustice of the current administration. Take the Reagan era from usmidtermelections.com. The Democrats gained 26 seats in 1982, 6 seats in 1986, and 8 seats in 1990. In the Clinton era the Dems lost 54 seats in 1994 but gained 8 seats in 1998.

Yeah, what was going down in the 1990s? Well, Hillarycare was on the ballot in 1994, and that rallied Republicans from far and wide. And the Clinton impeachment was on the ballot in 1998, and that rallied Democrats to support their president.

So what happens in 2018? On the one hand, as I said, we have the Mueller investigation. Does that rally Democrats or does it rally Republicans? Or both?

On the other hand, we have the social media attack on conservatives. Does that rally Republicans railing against social media injustice, or does it encourage Democrats uniting against white supremacy? Then there is immigration. Does that unite Republicans against illegal immigrant killers or does it rally Democrats against separating children from their parents?

Then we have the improving economy. Does that help Republicans, or just put Republican voters to sleep?

Because I am a conservative partisan I naturally rally to the conservative and Republican side of these issues. I would like Republicans to hold Congress and for Trump to win reelection in 2020, and for the Democratic left to be well and truly humbled as the left was after the Reagan era. But I realize that the world is full of people that disagree with me, and it may well be that we are going to see a revival of the left: a Democratic "blue wave" in the midterms and a rounding defeat of President Trump when he runs for reelection.

Of course the standard conservative fear right now is that if the Dems win the midterms and the social media companies continue to censor conservative voices then any non-lefty voice in America is finished, because, after all, anything that disagrees with the lefty line of the moment is "hate speech." No doubt that kind of fear is an overreaction, because, after all, nobody is going to start rounding conservatives up. I mean, this is America!

All true, except for one thing. Republicans and conservatives believe that politics and government are blunt instruments that aren't good for much more than defending against enemies foreign and domestic. But our liberal and Democratic friends believe in politics as a saving truth. Bully for them. But that means that they believe that force is appropriate to move America towards that saving truth of a world free of oppression and exploitation, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Because government is force.

So what do you do when your guys think that force is seldom useful, and the other guys think that force --  instantiated through politics and government -- is a saving truth?

Unfortunately the answer is obvious. You have to meet force with force until the other guys cry uncle.

And I don't like that at all.

See I Think That Social Media Censorship of Conservatives is a Good Sign

I know that we are all supposed to be outraged by the censorship of conservatives on social media.  Because where will it all end?

But I think it is the best thing ever. Because I think that gradually, over the next year or two, the social media guys will wake up to the fact that they are being rolled by the left, and they will realize that the left has tricked them into a whole world of hurt.

The point is that that social media are presently the useful idiots of the left's campaign to silence the opposition. Here's a report by WND on the plans of left-wing group Media Matters to target the social media guys to eliminate "right-wing propaganda and fake news." Back in January 2017.

In other words, without the impetus from lefty activist groups the social media guys would never have thought to start censoring "hate speech" and violent rhetoric. The social media guys are kids educated at the nation's elite colleges and they, not particularly interested in politics, just accept as received wisdom whatever is coming down in the elite media.

So of course they would fall into line and accept that any group that the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a "hate group" ought to be banned from social media. They don't get that the SPLC is just a fundraising operation that makes its bones by getting nice liberal ladies to pony up cash to fight discrimination, so there must be hate and xenophobia out there. They don't get that the whole of lefty "activism" is just a rich-kid excuse to avoid getting a real job.

Because it is much more fun fighting injustice than figuring out how to serve your fellow man in the marketplace. Do you  see the difference. All you need  to be an activist is to repeat the slogans taught you by your "studies" teacher and go out and preach. But to be a success in the marketplace takes smarts, courage, luck, persistence, and a genuine desire to be of service to other people.

So we have had PragerU censored and shadowbanned, the crank Alex Jones pretty well removed from social media. And various mainstream conservatives censored, as detailed by Breitbart News.

I get it. I really do. This is just a replay of the descent of the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror. The problem was and is that the promised heaven on earth of secular lefty politics never lives up to the advertisement.

So when the promised heaven on earth doesn't show up, what do you do?  The answer is obvious. If you think that the application of politics is the requirement for a just society and the first application of politics doesn't do the job, why the solution is more politics!

What lefties from the French Revolution on down to today's AntiFa cannot get into their tiny little minds is that there is very little that politics can do to make the world safe for the oppressed. And the more you apply political force the worse it gets.

Today's lefties have convinced themselves that it is conservative hate speech that is preventing the arc of history from bending towards justice. So if you ban conservative hate speech then you can move forward to the Promised Land. Yay!

Well, you can try that. Stalin tried it. Mao tried it. Stalin gave up his purge when he needed the Russian people to defend Mother Russia from the Nazis. Mao never gave up with his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but eventually he died and his successors lifted the weight of oppression from the shoulders of the Chinese people enough to bring the Chinese economy from $2 per person per day to the present $30 per person per day. Imagine!

The current lefty revival will also fail. But not before it ruins the lives of millions of people.

Meanwhile, the left is doing the deplorables the compliment of trying to silence our voices in the public square. We will see where that gets them.

That is why I insist that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

And there is nothing quite like silencing voices of the other side in the public square to get people of the other side all riled up.

You would think our lefty friends would understand that.

But they don't. And they still won't understand when the social media guys start de-leftying their algorithms. And they will still not understand when the social media guys start to realize that SPLC and BLM and AntiFa are left-wing thugs that lie about everything and are messing up their nice social media business.

Science is a Social Activity, Pt. 742

One of the startling things about the modern era is that, by admitting that we don't have a clue about the gods, about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, we have paradoxically learned more about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything than we ever imagined.

OK, so back in the Age of Reason we figured we had it all figured out. I suppose that was what Descartes was all about. But through the British empiricists and skeptics we finally arrive at dear old Kant, who famously declared that we could not know things in themselves, only appearances.

Does that mean that science is impossible? Not at all. It means that science is merely a theory about things in themselves. If the theory is a good fit with the appearances of things, then it is a good theory, and we can go ahead and use the theory to, e.g., make LED lamps based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is true.

But then we have Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The point here is that every theoretical system begins with assumptions. And then there is Tarski's theorem about the undefinability of truth. The short meaning of this is that science will always involve guesses and leaps in the dark, not the careful unraveling of reason and logic.

Or, if you like, Thomas Kuhn's assertion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science is a social endeavor, where most scientists most of the time act like conformists, staying within the boundaries of accepted doctrine, and only occasionally do total crackpot scientists dare to step outside the consensus to propose a new theory, or paradigm, that brings the consensus science into question.

The dear old Atlantic has a confirmation of Kuhn's notion. It's an article by Bianca Bosker "The Nastiest Feud in Science" about the brouhaha among paleontologists about the great dinosaur extinction -- or Ct-P extinction event to us chaps in the know -- 66 million years ago. Was it an asteroid strike, right here in Yucatan, as physicist Luis Alvarez proposed in 1980? Or was it a 100,000 year outbreak of volcanism, belching volcanos pouring out all manner of eevil pollutants just like in the modern era with our fossil fuel mania, as proposed by rough tough Swiss-born Gerta Keller?

Yes, you knew there had to be a rough tough kick-boxing girl scientist in there somewhere. Otherwise no article in The Atlantic. Because everybody knows that the real scientists were women all along, like Einstein's wife. Remember her?

As you can imagine, where liberal academicians are involved, the whole argument about the Ct-P extinction event has been a 30 year pissing match where partisans have deep-sixed academic articles they didn't like and used their power to retard the careers of rising academics that didn't properly toe the line. In other words, exactly like climate science.

Yeah. Read the whole thing.

All very interesting. Because we humans love to obsess about the End of the World.

But I must say that the takeaway for me was the notion that these scientists sure are having a ball spending money on our dime. Who wouldn't grab at the opportunity to travel all through the Deccan Traps in India, where a lot of the volcanic lava back then seeped out into the innocent environment and where you can get a look at the evidence by finding useful rock outcrops and confusing the natives.

See, I think it is time to do a radical reform of the universities. And my first priority would be to stop government financing of research. Really, research is a rich man's hobby. For chaps like Darwin. Or Einstein in between important bureaucratic deadlines working as a patent-office clerk.

And the study of "toxic masculinity" and the rest of the lefty racist sexist agenda should be for rich girls to play Mean Girls with other Mean Girls. But not with money taxed from deplorables.

All this stuff, from Yale-Harvard graduates getting a lock on Supreme Court seats and NYT house racist slots to the general uselessness of all the people  in the foreign policy/intelligence bureaucracy, is just jobs for the scions of the elite -- the kind of guys satirized by Trollope as Sir Raffle Baffle -- and I don't hold with any of it. It is all bullshit.

Yeah, it would be really cool to know how the various extinctions occurred. Asteroids, Deccan Traps, Aliens. You name it.

But really, people should be paying for the opportunity to do this stuff. It's a game for rich kids, like wineries and the new craze for craft breweries and distilleries. And I'm all in favor of it: science and craft breweries.

I just don't think that anything improves when it is associated with politics. It's the old story. When you mix ice-cream and ordure, the resulting mixture is ordure.

And you can tell what is going down in The Atlantic article about extinction events when it inevitably gets into climate change. Surely, Bianca Bosker, you are better than that.

Like I say, the only warrant for political power is existential peril. If the Persians aren't messing with the Hebrews or the Mongols aren't messing with the Russians or the Nazis aren't messing with Jews, or good faithful progressives, then the only thing to scare the ordure out of people is climate change.

And I don't hold with that.