Religion as Sacred History

One of the tasks of religion is to deal with the problem of Creation. How did the world begin? And who or what created it? But then there is the how and why of what came later, what we now called mythology, the story of the Earth and of humanity.

But another important function of religion is to document the trials and tribulations and overcomings of the past. The most famous is the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt that Jews celebrate to this very day.

First we were slaves; now we are free is a very big part of what we might call "sacred history." It is obviously the major component of religion as practiced by the modern left.

First we were slaves as workers; then we won our rights. First we women were slaves of the patriarchy; then we got education and abortion. First we blacks were slaves of the white man; then we got our freedom and civil rights.

You can also see this narrative in the American revolution. First we were taxed by the bloody Brits to pay for their bloody French and Indian War; then we taught 'em a lesson they'll never forget.

There is another form of sacred history, that we were never slaves. The Brits have a version of this, with the idea that the last time Britain was invaded was in 1066. "Britons never never never shall be slaves," goes the line from "Rule Britannia!" Well, back in the day, most Brits were serfs. And, on my information the Dutch Prince William invaded Britain with a 500-ship navy in 1688. So what is that all about? It is about the Brits saying that they aren't victims, not nohow.

Obviously, in the modern age, the "we were victims" sacred hsitory has become almost universal. Really, you don't count unless you have a sacred history of victimhood. In the narrative of Christianity, this narrative is about the personal liberation from the bondage of a state of sin into the freedom of salvation through a personal acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior. But in the modern left-wing sacred narrative we are talking about the whole group's enslavement and the whole group's liberation from bondage through the agency of a political savior.

If you ask me there is a bit of a problem here. In the narrative of personal salvation there is a clear tendency to revisit the occasion of sin, and even, perhaps to wallow in it. In fact our lefty friends tend to be particularly critical of the whole guilt thing. My pal Nietzsche piles on with his critique of "the priests" that taught us to hate ourselves.

But our lefty friends do exactly the same thing with their holy victims narrative. Clearly, the workers are to be victims forever, and don't you forget it. Likewise women and minorities. It doesn't matter that we have enacted about a century's worth of pro-worker legislation, or that women have had the vote for about a century, or that the slaves were freed 150 years ago and obtained full civil rights 50 years ago. The victimization of racism, sexism, and homophobia are real and if you question the narrative you are a racist sexist homophobe.

Now, I've been reading some unapproved ideas lately, and it has occurred to me that maybe you can overdo this victimhood thing. I'm not at all sure that the Jewish obsession with going nuclear on anti-semitism is always a good idea. But, when you are a small minority, it seems like you need to be permanently mobilized against the possibility of danger. Perhaps because Jews have been an important part of the left since the beginning, all leftist movements share this culture of permanent mobilisation.

Is this culture of permanent mobilisation a good idea? It's a good question. If you want to maintain a group identification forever I suspect that the culture of mobilisation is essential. I don't think that the Jews could have maintained themselves as a people over thousands of years without their fierce culture of self-defense. But whatabout the workers? Do workers want to self-identify as embattled workers forever, now that workers are no longer starving and indeed sharing in full measure the prosperity of the modern era? Do women want to keep rehearsing the bad old days when women could not get an education and could not pursue careers? Do blacks want to maintain a separate racial identity from the rest of America?

Back in the day the declared purpose of the various left-wing movements was to mobilize people so that they could take their place at the table.and be recognized as the equal of anyone else in society. But the culture of mobilization keeps groups forever separate, forever rehearsing their grievances against the majority culture. This perpetuates a permanent division. And in fact indexes of memes like Google's Ngram have been documenting increased use of terms like "racism" and "sexism" in recent years. Really? Things are worse than they used to be?

We can see that the modern sacred histories are the same as the old sacred narratives. In fact, as Nicholas Wade writes, there is only one way that the gods can die, and that is if people stop believing in them. So it is with secular religions. The priests will continue serving the faithful as long as there are faithful. It is only when believers fall away that a religious movement starts to die and the priests are out of a job.

I suppose that the recent intensification of old left-wing narratives is an indication that the priests are worried. They evidently feel that their believers need to be energized and their faith renewed. But there's a problem. Whereas the old gods of Olympus needed to be propitiated with sacrifice forever, and the occasion of sin in Christianity is everlasting and the hope of salvation must be renewed constantly, the average left-wing religious movement begins, at least, as a specific attempt to right a specific wrong. Once the workers get their rights, once women get their abortions, once blacks get civil rights, once gays get their marriage, then, surely the urgency of bending the arc of history towards justice recedes.

The fact is that in the present time our lefty friends act as if they have a profound need to occupy religious space with a powerful victim narrative; otherwise someone else is going to elbow them aside with the urgency of their own misery.

Maybe conservatives need to play this game with our own narrative of monstrous injustice. Maybe that's the name of the game we have to play. But I don't like it. Suppose we beat the liberals at their own ame and create a narrative of conservative victimization. Will conservatives in their turn become so enamoured of their victim narrative that they can't leave go of it?

I'd say that there is another way to create a sacred history, one that avoids the trap of permanently mobilized victimhood. It would advertise America as the last best hope of mankind on Earth, the city on a hill that is "still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home." Hey, President Trump's notion of Making America Great Again is, in part, about renegotiating great trade deals with our major trading partners to make sure that everyone gets into a win-win proposition. It creates an inclusive narrative of America to which all belong, as opposed to an exclusive narrative of competing victimhoods.

Here's the challenge. I reckon that every human community needs a sacred narrative to establish where it is coming from and where it thinks it is going. The Christian narrative, of sin and redemption, is one such narrative, but it is clearly challenged by the left's victim narratives. We need a new narrative for Americans, indeed for all humans, to attach to, one that supercedes and overarches the lefty victim narrative with something that is higher, nobler, more inspiring than the lefty victim narrative of us against the world.

I get the utility of the victim narrative, especially if you want to maintain the identity of a small group in a large world. But the trouble with such a combative narrative is that it might encourage non-group people to think that they really are in a no-holds-barred fight against the small group, or use the small group as a sparring partner to maintain its own identity.

At any rate, I would say, non-lefty Americans either have to come up with a sacred narrative that goes mano-a-mano with the lefty victim narrative or we have to come up with a better, wiser narrative that marginalizes the victim narrative into a shriveled nothingness, for a simple reason, that our better, wiser sacred narrative appeals to ordinary Americans much more directly and inspirationally than the dreadful everyone-a-victim siren song of the left.

Ruminations on "Politics is Downstream from Culture"

We all know the Breitbart dictum, that politics is downstream from culture. That is to say, before you "win" in politics you need to win the culture. Then I read sci-fi writer John C. Wright, and he extended the maxim: "politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion."

How true. And that is the problem for conservatives right now, that not only do our liberal friends have control of the culture, through literature, education, the arts, journalism, but also through the dominatory hegemony of their secular lefty religion of political correctness.

For instance, I was to several Shakespeare plays over the last year, from Seattle, to Ashland, Oregon, to Stratford-on-Avon, UK, and every one of the plays had modern LGBT gender-bending. So this means that, over the whole English-speaking arts world, the culture of the educated elite and its promotion of LGBT culture is hegemonic. Personally, for me, this is unfortunate, because I believe that LGBT culture is dull and superficial. But you better not dissent from the idea that having general gender chaos in Shakespeare with women playing male roles and lesbians and transgenders showing up all over, because homophobia.

Now, I believe that the reason that today's elite culture is so superficial issues from the superficiality of its religion. The elite religion is that the current elite creative culture is the only thing in town: everything else is bigotry and superstition. The purpose of today's elite culture is that we elites get to practice our elite creative culture and your job is to like it. And the more it humiliates you racist sexist homophobe proles, the better.

I would say that the most bigoted and superstitious religion in history is the current superficial religion of creativity of our educated elite. But what would I know?

I believe that an authentic creative culture would issue from an authentic creative religion. And that religion would echo the Jungian notion that the creative process exists on the borders of order and chaos and that usually the creative experience ends in disaster for the would-be creator and also for those associated with him. Thus a true religion of creativity would be drenched in the humility of that knowledge, that the true creative hero is a tragic hero, a sacrificial hero.

Now we travel into new territory.

It seems to me that the function of religion is to translate and transform our unconscious instincts into the conscious culture of a religion. Obviously -- or, at least, obvious to me -- the nature of that transformation will reflect the reality on the ground and the needs of the particular human community that the religion serves. The religion of a hunter-gatherer band will be different from the religion of an agricultural people will be different from the religion of a city people will be different from the religion of a creative educated elite. And this is right and proper.

Now I think -- from five minutes ago -- that the religion of a people tends to be specific and conscious, and its purpose is to set the parameters for the unconscious culture of that people.

Huh?

Well, I think that the purpose of religion is to reformulate and redirect the unconscious instincts of a human group to set its members up to inhabit a new world of unconscious instinct -- that we call culture -- adapted by some prophetic visioniary to suit the new world of the group and to train its members how to act in their everyday lives, by consciously putting on the new suit of the religion and thereafter unconsciously wearing that new suit in day-to-day life.

On this notion, politics would be the conscious expression of the culture in connection with the specific communal problems of the society, and specifically those questions that require the use of force, of which the major items are the defense of the community from enemies foreign and domestic.

The point is that normally the day-to-day culture of the people will resolve all problems, because people instinctively and unconsciously follow the unwritten rules of the culture. But those that do not respond to gentle persuastion need specific encouragement -- perhaps throught the use of force -- and problems that seem to be beyond the ability of the unconscious culture rise to consciousness in the rhetoric of politics to be dispatched by communal decision and executed by government force.

It seems to me that the actual operation of government is, again, a return to unconscious process. The fact is that government goes on in its dilatory way, in its various programs of government force, from the collection of taxes to the policing of criminals to the education of children, in another unconscious culture, where people are not really thinking about what is going down. People do not think about being forced to pay taxes or send their children to government school, but they pay their taxes and send their children to school. They obey the law without really thinking about it.

Only when the application of government force is experienced on the receiving end as injustice does it then rise to consciousness and into politics.

Now you can see why the Breitbart dictum about politics being downstream from culture is important. Because culture is an unconscious thing. It is what it is, and it does what it does. And one of the thing it does is set the agenda for politics by setting the unconscious agenda of what "everyone" accepts as day-to-day reality. So, if you don't like the way that politics frames the problems of society you now realize that to do that you have to change the culture.

But then, you understand, after John C. Wright, that to change the culture you need to change the religion.

And that is not a small thing.

As I say, the problem with the world at this time is that its educated elite has developed a false and malicious religion. Its religion of creativity is a religion of self-worship that basically says that everything that educated creative people do is good and anyone that disagrees with them is a racist sexist homophobe that should be named, shamed, ostracized, canceled, fired from their job. And think themselves lucky that they haven't been sent to the guillotine.

Now I think that we have all the knowledge we need to solve this problem. We have the psychology of Jung which explains how our conscious culture is necessarily entangled with our personal unconscious and with all the collective unconscious and its archetypes down the ages. We have Nietzsche telling us that creativity is a hard and lonely path, as his Zarathustra explained. We have the developmental psychologists from Piaget to Wilber that demonstrate how different people have different levels of consciousness and how only people inhabiting the higher levels can understand people at lower levels, and that people at lower levels think that people not at their level are either dumb idiots or crazy loons.

What we need is our creative class to understand that only a few people are ready for a religion of creativity. Most of the rest of us don't want to live creatively and wouldn't know how to anyway. So a True Religion of Creativity would start with the knowledge that the creative life is not for everyone.

And most important of all, the True Religion of Creativity would start with the advice of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Do you know what the advice was? There are variations, but it starts with advice to a young actress being bothered by the affections of older actors.

It doesn't make any difference what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."

Interesting isn't it, that our liberal friends seem to have the opposite idea, that the whole point of a creative life is precisely to stampede the horses in the street and then shoot them for being too skittish.

Why We Have Another Eruption of Left-wing Extremism

The last eruption of left-wing extremism in America was in the 1960s. That was the famous age of campus rage and long-hairs, and of course, the end of the New Deal Democratic Party in the famous Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

Now it's happening again, with "all" the Democratic candidates supporting left-wing extremism from Medicare for All to climate change to LGBT. Even a noble liberal spear carrier like author and journlist George Packer has expressed his concern because it is hitting him where it hurts, in the education of his child in the New York City schools.

I am come out with a new maxim to deal with this issue. It points out the problem when the tribalis of politics intersects with the moralism of religion.

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

Actually I missed something out. Because of course the true totalitarianism mixes all this with government force. So totalitarianism is the one that makes appoints "us good people" as police enforcers of morality over the "them bad people."

It seems to be instinctive in humans to want to "deal" with the problem of bad people. And this, I suppose is natural, for morality distills down to a fiery spirit, the need to enforce social standards. The point is, of course, that there is a difference between a furrowed brow judging someone else's moral lapse, or the "I can't believe she said that" of the culure of complaint with a law to send a moral leper to jail.

And this has been a problem with leftism since its birth in the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.

And so the good old American idea of the separation of church and state rather cunningly deals with this issue. Your church ladies can mutter away with their Culture of Complaint that "I can't believe he did that" and by such means bring social pressure upon moral defaulters. But they do not have the power to put people in jail and get them fired from their jobs. On an unverified accusation.

But we have a problem. The dominant religious culture in our society, which is left-wing "wokism," does not have a church. Its institutional structure is government, whether it is the Democratic Party, the government schools, the government university, the media. People that subscribe to the left-wing of race and gender want to express their faith in government programs.

Yes, lefties, but that means, as you told us many moons ago, that you believe in "legislating morality."

And let's be clear. When you call for Medicare for All, you are making a moral argument, that it is sick and wrong for anyone to be deprived of medical care. When you call for America to stop fracking you are making the apocalyptic and prophetic point that, unless we act now, the god of the arc of history will bring the world to an end. When you outlaw single-sex bathrooms in the school attended by George Packer's kid you are making a moral point about the exclusion from the mainstream of non-binary genders. And you are saying that government should enforce these moral arguments with fines, jails, and social exclusion.

I think there is a basic problem with this totalitarian collapse of morality and government into a single agent of morality and force.

Not that lefties are the only people playing that game. We all do. It's just that, back in the day, our Founders thought we ought to keep a distance between the arena of force and the arena of moral disapproval.

Maybe I need to expand my maxim as follows.

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Government is the division between "enforcers" and the "prisoners." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good enforcers" and "them evil prisoners."

And it is so easy to progress from a comfortable feeling of "us" to the conflation of "us" with "good" and "moral" and to then make the step of enforcing "our goodness" over the barrel of a gun.

Whaddya think of them apples? 

Giving Our Guys a Pass

In politics we usually give our guys a pass, but pick up on any accusation against someone on the other side.

Thus, for instance, the guys at Powerline expatiate endlessly on the various accusations against Rep. Omar (D-MN), including that she allegedly entered into a sham marriage with her brother for immigration purposes. But Omar's hometown newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, seems remarkably reluctant to probe into the doings of its Somali-born US Representative. Recently, there have been reports that Omar has entered into a relationship with her campaign manager and is separated from her husband.

Imagine if a Republican US Representative had been accused of such behavior.

There are also accusations of sexual harassment against the Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax of Virginia. Conservatives seem inclined to believe the accusations. Democrats? Nothing to see here.

Then we have the poorly sourced accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that were rather obviously flaky when Christine Blasey Ford made them before the Senate Justice Committee and less so when two NY Times reporters got out a book with more poorly sourced accusations against the Justice.

Oh, and then there were the poorly sourced accusations against President Trump that were boosted for two years by the entire liberal media.

It all does rather show the value of the rules of evidence in evaluating an accusation. And it does rather show the problem with mixed-sex college drinking and partying. Humans are easily tempted to make rash accusations, especially against their political enemies. And people can remember all kinds of things that happened at mixed-sex drunken parites decades ago.

What is difficult to evaluate is how people react when their side is gettin its ox gored. Does our side get riled up and determined to go vote no matter what? Or does it slink away in shame?

It helps, I suppose, to have the media on your side. That's why Republicans, up until Trump, learned the hard way that it does not pay to go up against the guy that buys his ink by the barrel. On the other hand it is also said that Republicans always trail in the approval ratings until the time comes to fight it out with paid media, as in a campaign.

The truth is, I suppose, that when the other guys are screwing your guy over, you need to get out there and give 'em hell, just like Harry Truman did. For unless you rile up your supporters with the vile injustice of the other guys, and get them out to vote, then the rightness of our cause doesn't mean a thing.

How to Control the Global Elite

The Zman has another interesting question, about the problem of our current elite. The problem is that the current constitution was written before the creation of the current global elite, the educated ruling class that runs all the western governments.

Back in the day, he writes, the Senate was a committee of the local elites, appointed by state legislatures. But now? Well, the problem is that there is nothing in the current design that provides a proper balance between the global elites and other interests, such as the ordinary middle class. Zman thinks that maybe we need a third house of Congress that represents the interests of the rich, the corporations, and, I would say, the educated.

But what exactly is the problem? I would say that it is that the educated and the activist occupy all the bandwidth of the public square and almost unconsciously mute the voices of the rest of us.

For instance, the Uber driver taking us to the airport at 4:00am told us that he preferred to drive at night because during the day the traffic on I-5 and elsewhere was impossible. And the other day I was talking to an Amazon friend who was down for the whole educated-class agenda, from climate change to mass transit.

Now my belief is that the interest of the ordinary middle class is for more highways, more office parks, schools for every taste and need, and more leafy suburbs. But good luck with that, because there really is no bandwidth in our current public square for the ventilation of that kind of agenda. Why? Because all the activists and interests are aligned with the educated class and its "urbanist" agenda of transit, bike lanes, "woke" education, and dense housing. Because climate. Because sprawl.

And the problem is that the legal system and the administrative hierarchy is completely dominated by the culture and the power interests of the educated elite. Good luck getting a word in edgewise against the blaring horns of the activists and their bribed apologists in the administraive hierarchy and the media.

Wait, there's a bigger problem, that the educated elite has no idea, no conception, that its agenda is narrowly focused on its own selfish interests, the interests of the educated elite, and is utterly oblivious to how its agenda affects and cramps the lives of ordinary people. And the important thing to understand that the educated class's agenda is mostly about being in the catbird seat and ordering other people around -- in their best interest, of course.

Of course the educated elite is engaged in things that benefit the educated elite, but not self-consciously, becauses its agenda is experienced by itself and advertised to the rest of us as merely doing good -- or as President Obama so innocently said, bending the arc of history towards justice.

Parenthesis: when Martin Luther King, Jr. used the phrase he talked about the arc of history bending towards justice, as though it would do it on its own. But with Obama, we, the cultural and political elite, are talking about consciously taking the arc of history and bending it towards justice ourselves. I'm sure that our educated elite has no idea about the rather significant difference between the two recitations.

So I don't know whether fiddling with the constitution or adding another house of Congress is going to do much for us.

For I believe that the problem is upstream of politics, in culture, and upstream of culture, in religion.

Now I am reading a bistory of Protestantism, by Alistair McGrath, Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution -- A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-first. Wow, what a mouthful! I'm only at the beginning, but already there is useful stuff.

For instance, we tend to think of the Protestant Revolution as Martin Luther and his 95 Theses. But McGrath is saying that the revolution spontaneously arose in a bunch of German cities all at once, led by some local rebel priest: Luther in Wittenberg, Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva. Now, the question is, what was going on in those German cities that was throwing up these troublemakers and what was it about the citizens of these cities that the Luthers and Zwinglis and Calvins connected with them?

What was going on was something different than the fake activism of the educated class and its well-born scions that we experience today. But, we might say, there is something vaguely similar between the spontaneous eruption of Protestantism and the rise of Trump and Brexit and nationalists all over Europe. Because "nobody" saw it coming. I mean, nobody that was anybody, darling.

But, now that we see the populist nationalism right before our very eyes we can see the parallel with the Protestant Reformation. Back then, what with the Bible now available in print thanks to Gutenberg, so that many city people could read it themselves, the people in the city were saying, OK, we are going to br ptacticing our religion ourselves based on our own interpretations of the Bible, thank you very much, and we are not going to take it all on faith from the Catholic Church and its corrupt hierarchy.

Now, here in the good old US and A, and Brexit Britain and elsewhere, people are saying that we've had it up to here with you preachy and insufferable educated-class wankers -- sorry for the Britism -- and we are not going to take direction from you clowns any more. Because you are clueless.

I'd say that our beloved educated ruling class, at present, does not get it. I am not even sure if they have got to the "natives are restless" stage of realizing that something is up. Because the easiest way to understand the Get Trump culture and the Get Kavanaugh culture and the Cancel Culture is that our rulers have not got past the outrage someone is making a noise out in the public square and it is interrupting important ruling-class ceremonies. We have not got beyond an "out of the way, peasants" irritation among our august rulers.

The question is: what will happen when our rulers realize that something serious is going on, and that a genuine movement has formed in opposition to their rule? Because their reaction will determine what happens next.

If tbey realize, wow, we have a problem here Houston, and we better understand it and respond in a manner that accepts that the rulers should only rule with the consent of the governed, then we will get a period of reform and everything will be copacetic. But if the rulers continue in their current train and imagine that they can solve the problem by canceling Trump and canceleing Kavanaugh and canceling anyone that ever tweeted a racist sexist homophobic tweet ever since they were five and a half, why then we might end up with a revolution.

Now my belief is that ordinary folk, that just want to wive and thrive and raise a family and hope for our children to do better than we did, need to get with a vital truth. And that is this. Much as we might like free stuff, the problem is that the more free stuff we expect from our rulers the more power we ive them to order the details of our lives. We may not like to have to sweat it out in the market economy and do without all kinds of entitlements and benefits, but listen up. The more goodies we get from the government the more that the educated class gets to rule over us. And the more injustices we expect our rulers do Do Something about the more that we are encouraging ruling-class activists to come up with more ways in which they and their kind get to order us about.

I don't know if there are many of us that are ready to look that truth in the face. And I don't know if there will be that many of us ready to accept that truth a hundred years from now.

If politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion we are talking about a religious revolution in which the common sense, the conventional wisdom of all good little girls that right now are putting #WeBelieve yardsigns out front, would change so that they would be saying instead: "I can't believe that people are protesting the result of a normal presidential change election." Or "I can't believe that people are losing their jobs for a tweet sent 20 years ago." Or, "I can't believe that I can't send my kid to the school of my choice."

See what I mean? We are light years away from that, because good little girls today, especially good little educated girls, are good little supporters of the current educated ruling class. Because that's what good little girls do.

My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense

One of the complaints of conservatives is the death of common sense. Logic and reason and common sense are what we assume inspired the Founders when they rebelled against the Brits to form this more perfect union.

And, we complain, the lefties have declared "War on Common Sense." Thus, Robert Curry in American Greatness:

Political correctness is quite simply a war on common sense. It is a war by the elites on the common people and on the shared understanding of basic realities of life that has made it possible for us to rule ourselves under the Constitution. Once this common-sense understanding of reality has been vanquished, it is “mission accomplished” for the Americans who reject America.

I would have agreed 100% with this 20 years ago. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop in The Meeting of East and West.

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... has been showed by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

And, of course, our Constitution and political culture in the United States was based on the truth, the common sense, of Descartes, Locke, and Hume. So began for me an intellectual journey in which I made my way through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and now finally Nietzsche and Jung.

I still think our lefty and politically correct friends are wrong, as Curry does, but not because they are opposed to common sense and logic and reason. I think they are wrong because I believe that the German Turn does not invalidate the British empirical philosophers, but puts a new layer on knowledge on top of it, in the same way that relativity does not replace Newtonian mechanics completely, but only when dealing with astronomical distances and speeds close to the speed of light.

See, the "common sense" of the politically correct is that there is not one correct view of life but that diffferent cultures experience a different view of the world. It's all relative and uncertain.

And indeed modern science argues that all living things must choose, from the overwhelming amount of data pouring in through the senses, which data is important to them.

Prior to the Germans we Anglo empiricists thought there was mind, and matter, and common sense to put it all together. But actually Hume, the skeptic, noted that we cannot, for instance, justify the notion of cause and effect. Just because some event comes after another does not mean the first event caused the second. It is our faith -- in science, in Newtonisn mechanics, in common sense -- that connects the two.

Then Kant came along and questioned everything. Never mind cause and effect, he said. Really we cannot know things-as-they-are. All we know is what comes in throught the senses as sense impressions, and the theories we spin in our mind to make sense of it all. It is my belief that this radical notion, that really we are making it all up, leads directly to Einstein's relativity, do not pass Go. Because Einstein tells us that space and time are not absolute, as openly assumed in Newton's mechanics, but relative.

Do you see the amazing thing here? By casting loose from the notion of absolute space and time and matter vs. idea and believing that we know reality we humans made the most radical step forward ever in understanding how the Universe works.

Another thing that got moving in the German world was modern psychology. By the time we get to Freud and Jung we are saying that our conscious mind is just a tiny thing riding on the top of a fathomless unconscious. That really we are not conscious rational actors, but mostly the slave of our unconscious instincts. I recently read that scientists have discovered through brain scans that our mind makes its decision to act about 1.5 seconds before we experience the decision in our conscious mind.

Now, I believe in "common sense." It's just that my common sense is built upon all the work of Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung. I walk around the world realizing that my eyes are seeing far more stuff than I am aware of. It's just that my mind ignores 97 percent of the visual information and only concentrates on what it thinks is important. That could be a problem if I am stopped at a stop sign and my visual processing system fails to notice a car coming up in the corner of my eye. Indeed the whole modern concept of "situational awareness" understands that the processing of information in our brain is a tricky thing. And they say that at 79 your situational awareness starts to make such a serious decline that over-79s get involved in lots of "failure to yield" accidents at stop signs. Roll on driverless cars!

Now, I think that my journey, from the common sense of the British empiricists to the common sense of the post-Jungians is a glorious and liberating thing. Because it means to me that I can understand all the people in the world that have a different view of common sense than I do. And I have the conceit that I know where they go wrong. So I can forgive them, the poor little dears.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to show how it is perfectly natural and physical that people are different. The People of the Subordinate Self are workers and peasants; they think the world is run by vengeful gods and lords and political bosses. They do not yet know science. The People of the Responsible Self are citizens, that live and work in the city. They believe in a God that created the world and then told humans to get on with it, and he'll judge our performance on Judgement Day. Thus is pays Reponsibles to develop science and laws and stuff to make sense of the world and act responsibly in it. The People of the Creative Self are people that realize that humans are like gods, they can create the world anew, and change the Law, and even dream of a world of perfect justice.

But, if the People of the Responsible Self treat the People of the Subordinate Self like slaves and use them up as slave workers in satanic mills and slave plantations and factories with child labor then they are monsters. That is what Marx was talking about. Actually, the People of the Responsible Self were not that interested in driving slaves; that's why they abolished slavery just about at the moment that lefties first appeared over the horizon. They were OK with giving the workers rights and giving them the vote. So everything is now copacetic on the border between the Responsibles and the Subordinates.

However, if the People of the Creative Self treat the People of the Responsible Self as racist sexist homophobes, and declare them to be deplorables, and create politcal regimes to deliberately oppress and dis-empower Responsibles then they are monsters. And that is exactly what Stalin and Mao did, and plenty of Creatives to this day have failed to utterly deplore and condemn this great crime of history.

Yes, lefties, the People of the Responsible Self may be a bit slow, and bigoted and superstitious, compared to the woke, the educated, the evolved folks like you. But they still have a right to live according to their lights. Just as you chaps insisted, back in the day, that the workers had a right to live according to their lights and demand their rights even if it was mighty inconvenient to the bourgeoisie.

The point of any knowledge or world view is: does it help me understand the world? I say that my "common sense" helps me understand why lefties are going bat-shit crazy right now.

The lefty world view says that lefties are involved in a sacred project to "bend the arc of history towards justice." Obviously anyone that tries to stop this process is a monster and should be named and shamed and ostracized and fired from their job and deplatformed from social media. And yet, Donald Trump and his deporables!

Do you see how it makes complete sense that liberals would be beside themselves right now? Call it a Failure of Prophecy. By now, all the old racist sexist homophobes were supposed to be a thing of the past. And yet here we are, with a president elected by the votes of white working class deplorables in the old industrial states that liberals once loved and revered.

How could this have happened! What is going wrong! Obviously, the only thing to do is to redouble our efforts to bend the arc of history towards justice and suppress all the hate speech and toxic masculinity and extremism and fake news from whacko sites on the internet. This sort of reaction is normal. It is explained by Leon Festinger et al. in When Prophecy Fails and also by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution as the Reign of Terror that revolutionaries enact when their revolution fails to transform society in ein Augenblick.

See how my world view enables me to understand the Trump Derangement Syndrome of our liberal and lefty friends? My world view must be a good one, that's what I have to say.

And there is this. The world seems to be one religious outburst after another, when some religious group prophesies the end of the world unless we act now. As in socialism and as in climate change. But the overwhelming majority of people, most of the time, just want to get on with life, wiving and thriving and raising a family and pursuing happiness. When these two cultural forces clash then you are going to see some fireworks.

And by the way, that is why our Founders decreed a separation of church and state. So that religious fanatics could not seize the reins of state. Hey, I just came up with this maxim:

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

And the problem with our liberal and lefty friends is that they are mixing their politics of big government with their religion of bending the arc of history towards justice. History tells us that nothing good comes of uniting religion and government.

Let us end with a word from Nietzsche, who suggests in The Gay Science §292, to preachers of morals that they deprive the best things of honor and worth by praising them all the time.

Deny these good things, withdraw the mob's acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again concealed secrets of solitary souls; say that morality is something forbidden.

That way, writes Nietzsche, you might win over the only people that matter, the heroic.

Well, that's a thought. Maybe our liberal and lefty friends are making the case for tolerance and good fellowship by demanding absolute conformity to woke morality and lock-step conformity. 

Jane Austen and the Resumption of Manners

Last week the Wall Street Journal did a piece on Jane Austen and manners, "Jane Austen Knows That Manners Make the Man." Author Paula Marantz Cohen notes that, when Jane Austen became respectable, in the 20th century, the question of "manners" and "civility" was depreciated by critics. They preferred her "moral depth and astute satire."

And of course, by the mid 20th century manners went right out of fashion, and things have only got worse in the decades since.

But Cohen wants us to understand that in Jane Austen, civility and manners are a guide to morality, and that manners "need to be strengthened by practice." Maybe so, but I would say that the current moment shows a revival of interest in manners. The whole #MeToo movement is not so much a movement against sexual harassment as an attempt to revive the importance of manners.

So when the feminists bring out accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, they are really complaining about the lack of manners. A girl can't go to a party and expect the men to behave themselves any more. A girl can't work in an office without some man making her uncomfortable.

I think this raises an interesting question. Back in the day, when rough tough feminists were telling us that women could do anything a man could do, they were really telling us that the old rules, where women expected to be protected, were over. Women could take it, and they could give it right back. We are still in the aftertow of this, with female superheroes and rough, tough female helicopter pilots in Avatar.

I think we are seeing that those days are over. Women have now instinctively returned to the old culture, in which women expect to be protected. That is what special snowflakes, microaggressions, and safe spaces are about. It is women, now dominating the culture of the university, demanding a return to a protected space.

Of course, because it is lefty women leading the charge, it will be a complete mess, because lefty women "literally know nothing," in the famous phrase.

Now I believe that the culture of manners is the way that women dominate the domestic space. Among themselves, men do not have a culture of manners. Indeed, as I say, men have a Culture of Insult. This is related to the nature of honor among men, which is the reputation for courage, for in the casual insult between men, the guys are raising the question of courage. They are wondering if the other guy would really rise to the occasion when the chips were down. They are also testing the current state of the male hierarchy.

But women have a culture of manners among themselves and for mixed company, and they are pretty good at naming and shaming and even ostracizing people with bad manners. My notion of women having a culture of complaint, and of complaining about other women with "I can't believe she said that" is my way of understanding the women's culture of manners. By the way, the women's culture of complaint ties into the nature of honor among women, which is a reputation for chastity. I don't just mean sexual chastity, but being an all-around good little girl. Being a good little girl is the price she pays for protection and the right to complain about other people.

The dirty little secret about the sexual revolution -- and women's liberation -- is that it did not liberate women. By dismantling the culture of manners, women dismantled the major way in which women dominate the face-to-face culture of daily life. The point is that when there is a culture of manners in place then women dominate. That is the point of Jane Austen. The men in Jane Austen are mostly ciphers. The women run everything. And some of the women -- well you wouldn't want to get anywhere near their force field. I am thinking of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park.

Oh sure. The women don't own the mansions and the income. They don't have to. They command the domestic space, and that is nearly everything. Indeed, you might say that the overriding issue in Jane Austen is how a young woman crosses the bridge from vulnerable singlehood to a secure domination in her own married household. It is made perfectly clear at the end of each novel that the heroine, newly married, is to become mistress of all she surveys.

Think of the sexual revolution as the sexual equivalent of going off the Gold Standard. This usually happened because of war, back in the day. Getting back on the Gold Standard was called "resumption," and it usually included a tough time of deflation and social disruption, as after the Napoleonic wars, the US Civil War, and World War I. And the truth was that the losses suffered in the wartime inflation could never be made up, not without hurting innocents.

So I would advise that the resumption of manners is not going to be pretty. And the reason is that the educated women who will likely be in charge of the resumption are, like most men and nearly all women, completely blinded by conventional wisdom. These are the women that in North Seattle are putting #WeBelieve and "We're Glad You're Our Neighbor" and "Hate Has No Home Here" yardsigns in their front yards and thinking that they are demonstrating their superior morality and wisdom.

So, in many ways, it's going to get worse before it gets better. But nobody said that life was a bowl of cherries.