Great Reaction: Vengeance in the 1400s

OK. I finally started reading the great classic by Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages. And it was because I picked up my unread copy of The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe by Pieter Spierenburg and saw references to Huizinga. Hmm, I thought; I should really read Huizinga first. So I got my unread copy of Autumn out and started to read.

The first chapter is all about how everyone was beating each other up with a culture of vengeance back in the 14th and 15th century, whether it was the kings and princes like Charles the Bold and Philip the Good and their ancestral wars or the city folk with their party colors. And then there was the intensity of life.

The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us... The great events of human life -- birth, marriage, death -- by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery.

Yes, and vengeance.

Whoever would write a history of the House of Burgundy would have to let the motif of revenge sound through their narrative like a pedal point... [B]lood revenge was the essential element that dominated the actions and fates of princes and countries...

The attachment to the prince was childish-impulsive in character; it was a direct feeling of fidelity and community... [and] blazed into reckless passions during feuds and strife.... [Thus] in purely feudal times, separate and isolated feuds can be seen everywhere, in which one cannot find any other economic motive than envy by one side of the wealth and possessions of the other... [and] not less importantly that of honor. 

Of course, I am stringing this out because of my belief in my notion of the Great Reaction, and how the left represents a return to the old culture -- slavery, feudal hierarchy, tribalism, vengeance, and a sort of Quixotic attachment to the knight-errantry of activism.

Of course, when I first set this up, or when it came to me out of nowhere at 2:00 o'clock in the morning, it was just a notion, just supported by a hunch. But really, when you observe progressive politics, what else can you say: "fidelity" to the progressive tribe. Vengeance and envy towards "the rich" and "the corporations" the stirring up of racial emotions. And, as I say, the notion that our modern politics is civil war by other means.

This appears to me in stark terms because one of the big themes that comes out of reading George Eliot's Adam Bede in the last week is the feeling of vengeance that Adam feels towards the young master Arthur Donnithorne, who has seduced the young girl that Adam hoped to marry, and how people like the Rev. Irwine talk Adam out of it, and how the saintly Dinah Morris by her example makes vengeance seem petty and unworthy.

For the question is: what changed? What changed between the tribal, feudal culture of the late Middle Ages and the rural Commoner culture of 1800 (viewed by George Eliot from sixty years later) where in people like Adam Bede and Dinah Morris their own personal behavior was more to be judged than the insults against them? And in people like the tenant farmer Poysers honor consists in having a spotless character in the community.

And what has changed today where the progressive left epitomizes all the qualities of the Autumn of the Middle Ages with its violent politics-with-everything and its partisan with-us-or-against-us ethos?

Well, I say that the old ways are never far below the surface. That is the point of concepts like Jung's archetypes, to remind us that our rational conscious mind is but a surface effect rippling on a vast depth of instinctive, coded behavior.

Now I do not assert that we moderns are more moral than the ancients -- or indeed our progressive pals. I think that the reason that slavery, feudalism, tribalism, and vengeance have retreated somewhat is because they do not pay when compared to the alternative, the market culture. For most all of us we can live a much better and more prosperous life by attaching to the culture of the market, which is founded on the notion of trust: trust all those that behave trustworthy towards you. And the untrustworthy? Don't deal with them; don't try to teach them a lesson; just stay away.

Now I believe that our progressive friends do not live so much in the market culture. They live much more in hierarchical, party organizations, from government education to government research to political activism. And as for the arts scene! So, for them, the old ways make more sense.

You are on the tenure track at a university? You size up the politics of your department: Whose side should you be on? Which senior academic should you support? What are the right opinions that will identify your party colors and help you get in with the in-crowd?

Wanna be an activist? So which monster of oppression are you going to attack and how are you going to publicize your activist campaign? In the progressive culture getting along with everyone is not the ideal. The ideal is to find a good enemy and attack! Oh, and, as Herod said to Emperor Claudius in Robert Graves' I, Claudius: Trust No One!

On this view, the strategy of the Commoner racist-sexist-homophobes should be to try to alter the payoffs in the culture of the educated gentry to reduce the payoffs of party loyalty and discipline. And to soften the feudal attractions of the welfare state by privatizing as much as possible.

Or not. The fact is that the world has not changed since the Middle Ages because some cunning strategist planned it all out in an OODA loop. Things changed because they changed, and nobody knows why.

Mrs. Poyser and the Plague of Karens

The general opinion, experts say, about Mrs. Poyser, the tenant farmer's wife in George Eliot's Adam Bede, is that she is a "comic character."

To which I say: you experts are missing the point. George Eliot gives Mrs. Poyser a comic turn because otherwise she would appear so serious as to make her a deeply unpleasant character. And all the characters in George Eliot's novels have some redeeming quality. Because George Eliot was that kind of woman. Henry James:

Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her… Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.

Everybody loved George Eliot, despite themselves.

Now for a bit of throat-clearing. We are told by our betters that the society of old was a white patriarchal society where women were oppressed and kept in their place. Maybe so. But, on the evidence of George Eliot, it was also profoundly matriarchal. If the men were patriarching out in the field, the women were matriarching back in the home. And how.

Mrs. Poyser in Adam Bede is the mother of three children -- two rambunctious boys and baby Totty. She is also mothering two orphaned nieces, Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel. She is running a dairy, renowned for its cream cheese, and keeps a remarkably clean kitchen, that visitors never forget to praise.

Mrs. Poyser's big problem is the unmarried girls in the household, dairymaids and whatnot. Because these single girls think of nothing but "finery," all except the sainted Dinah. These days we refer to "finery" as the "baubles, bangles, and beads" of the song made memorable by Peggy Lee.

One interesting thing in Adam Bede is that the married women all rate highly the provision of a "bit o' victual" to their husbands as the major thing they do. I take that to be George Eliot's hint that getting food on the table in 1799 during the Napoleonic Wars was not a trivial matter.

In brief, far from the world being a patriarchy, for the Commoners it was a serious matter where everyone's contribution, men and women, mattered. I dare say it was a matter of life and death rather than a choice between Whole Foods and Trader Joes.

The other thing that seemed to be a matter of life and death was the reputation of the family in the community. Any misdeed by any member of the family shamed and humiliated not just the sinner but the whole family. So when Hetty Sorrel kills her out-of-wedlock baby the Poyser family immediately decides to pick up and leave the land they have farmed since whenever and move to another place where their shame is unknown.

Mrs. Poyser seemed to think that the only way the unmarried girls could be got to do their work around the house and in the dairy was through detailed supervision, featuring constant nagging and complaining. Who are we to say that she was wrong?

It is clear that women today still think that constant supervision and nagging and complaining is the way to get the world to work, and we have come to call this attitude "Karen" that we understand as "an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman." Some opinion-makers have suggested that many women in public office exhibit this characteristic, especially during the current plague.

Who am I to disagree? But I would advise all women in public life to think seriously about this issue. It may be possible to run a household on this basis, and maybe its strategic value is to encourage all unmarried girls to get out of the household as soon as possible and start making his "bit o' victual" for a darling husband.

But in the larger world, detailed supervision does not work. That is the meaning of the market economy. You offers your price, for your labor or your product, and the miracle of the price system works the whole thing out without any Karens -- or Stalins -- having to order anyone about.

And, by the way, it is also the judgement of the German General Staff, which determined during and after World War I that detailed supervision of lower ranks did not work in the "lethal battlefield" of rifled guns and artillery. Responsibility had to be pushed down the chain of command as far as possible.

In my view, Karenism is a disease of the whole liberal woke-aholic world. It is the idea that educated, evolved Gentry were born to supervise and nag the ordinary Commoners of the world. Because of their bigotry and superstitions.

This, as they say, is worse than a crime, it's a blunder. It may be possible, it may be desirable, to run a household as Mrs. Poyser ran the Hall Farm. But anything beyond the scope of the family -- and maybe the neighborhood -- does not respond to Karenism. And, for sure, bossy supervision should not be enacted into law, as in regulating whether people can have drive-in church services or whether the sale of seeds at Walmart is an essential service or not.

Oh, I get it. In the present plague, politicians are desperate to seem decisive and leader-like. And bureaucrats are desperately trying to come up with stuff to make it look like their flaccid and inefficient operation is "fit for purpose."

But guess what! We humans are social animals. We are at our best and most social during an emergency. This is exactly the time when we should relax the rigid web of supervision and Karenism and encourage all our good citizens to "have a go" and figure out something that might help their fellow humans.

I am afraid that some of our fellow citizens are going to have to find this out the hard way.

Adam Bede, the Exemplary Commoner

In the current Age of Social Distancing I am re-reading my favorite Jane Austen and George Eliot novels.

And what I am finding out is that Nothing Has Changed. If you read Jane Austen you read about women having Satisfactory Emotional Experiences, each one depending on where Austen puts the character in the emotional Bell Curve of feminine experience.

And one of the most important parameters is the extent to which the character publicly exhibits her emotional state. Austen's heroines tend to keep their emotions guarded. Her villains and idiots tend to let it all hang out.

A good example of this is Mansfield Park where the three sisters, Mrs. Price, Mrs. Norris, and Lady Bertram, are all examples of what not to be: Price a helpless emotional victim, Norris a vile emotional bully, and Bertram a lazy emotional zero.

But whatabout Fanny Price, the timid heroine of the book? Well, she is an emotional hurricane, feeling everything to the very depths of her being, but being the poor cousin taken in by the Bertrams, she cannot express her emotions publicly.

You can see that this is a problem when you decide to dramatise Mansfield Park for TV. How do you show Fanny being emotionally overcome when she first meets the stern patriarch Sir Thomas? Or her delight when it turns out that she will not have to live with her monster Aunt Norris? Or her helpless love for her cousin Edmund who is the only person at Mansfield Park that treats her like a human being?

For instance, there is the scene where Edmund helps Fanny write a letter to her beloved brother William.

Fanny's feelings on the occasion were such that she felt herself incapable of expressing; but her countenance and a few artless words conveyed all their gratitude and delight, and her cousin began to find her an interesting object.

The point of Mansfield Park to my mind is all about a Commoner girl thrown into a nest of Gentry swells. How on Earth does such a girl survive it? The answer, of course, is steadfastness and principle, living to rule.

The same thing applies to George Eliot's great novel Adam Bede, that I would subtitle "Story of a Commoner."

But first an aside. What happens in the first scene in the carpenter shop where Adam and his brother Seth work? The men interact with a Culture of Insult. No kidding. You mean that back in the day in George Eliot's England, the men were insulting each other in an almost friendly way just like men do today? I Can't Believe They Did That.

And when Adam goes home to his mother after working late, what happens? She issues into an orgy of Complaint -- about just about everything.

You mean to say that George Eliot knew all about the masculine Culture of Insult and the feminine Culture of Complaint? So it's not just me making it up? Well I Never.

Anyway, the whole point of the novel, from beginning to end, is the examination of Commoners trying to do the right thing. They do it, of course, by reference to the Bible, trying to understand its maxims and their application to their own lives. Both Adam Bede and his heroine the Methodist lay preacher Dinah Morris are always pondering the right action to take. In comparison their antagonists, Hetty Sorrel and Arthur Donnithorne are governed by their emotions and instincts, do not think about the consequences of their actions and turn out badly.

Aside: Adam Bede was written shortly after Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter featuring the lovers Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. You tell me that George Eliot wasn't commenting on the unlikely duo in Massachusetts, who do not "head out West" as any real -- rather than fictional -- youngsters would have done in their situation.

The Introduction to my copy of Adam Bede speaks about the book being about "ordinary people" who had not previously appeared in English novels except as "clowns and buffoons and criminal types."

Such people were disenfranchised in Victorian times as to political power and, until George Eliot came along, were more or less disenfranchised as citizens of the English Novel.

But really, what has changed? Today the ordinary Commoner is just as despised and disenfranchised as ever. The whole point of the wokerati and the Get Trump movement is to stop any effort of Commoners to secure a decent treatment from the modern state that is run by for and on behalf of the Educated Gentry. And as to the enfranchisement of Commoners in today's American or English Novel! Well, Darling! The Very Idea!

The point, of course, is that George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, was born a Commoner, daughter of a carpenter that became a steward or land-agent. He is represented in Middlemarch in the character Caleb Garth, whose daughter Mary Garth refuses to marry the unsteady Fred Vincy until he shows himself "willing and able to live seriously, practically and sincerely." La Wik.

Mary Garth is a Commoner. Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, is Gentry. Dorothea can afford to make a few mistakes in life. And she does. But not the Commoner Mary Garth. She better get it right first time. And she does.

See, my line is that we are in the middle of a great Culture War to determine whether 21st century Commoners have the right to live our ordinary lives free of the oppressive cultural hegemony of Gentry liberals.

What Gentry liberals want you to believe is that the only thing is to do the Don Quixote thing and tilt at windwills until the poor helpless victims of the world are all saved. But if you are a Commoner you should stand aside until the glorious lefty effort to bend the arc of history towards justice is complete and all the medals and sinecures have been handed out to deserving liberals.

I say there is a word for the culture of the left and its cultural and poitical agenda.

That word is: Injustice.

And the place to start to understand all this is in the pages of Adam Bede.

The Problem with Two-Layer Cultural Analysis

I'm a three-layer man. I believe that you need to understand human society as a three-body problem, and not as an Us vs. Them two-body problem.

And that is especially important for Us, whether you call Us the far-right, conservatives, Responsibles, or Commoners.

The three-body analysis reduces to an Us vs. Them analysis, of course, in this way.

If you are Curtis Yarvin and his Gentry, Commoner, Client three-layer system you notice that while the three layers have three different cultures, the politics devolves into a coalition between Gentry and Clients against Commoners.

I'd say that if you start with a two-body problem, such as Cloud People vs. Dirt People -- from Dennis Price and adopted by the Zman -- or Anywheres vs. Somewheres -- from Brit David Goodhart -- you are missing the point.

(Actually, Goodhart's two-body theory is really a three body one. He reckons Somewheres at 50 percent of the population of Britain, Anywheres at 25 percent, and the rest as "Inbetweeners.")

You can see my complete list of Three Layer theories here.

But it is easy to make the mistake, because the third layer, the Clients of Curtis Yarvin or the Subordinates of my reductive Three Peoples theory, is not an actor on the political stage. That should be obvious from its name. Clients and Subordinates, whether working class whites in the 19th century or the "marginalized" of today, are people that attach to a leader and expect the leader to represent them and act on their behalf in the political square.

In other words, in return for protection the Clients and Subordinates sign on to the agenda of their leader, and usually that agenda is political power.

Today we have a piece out of The Federalist by John Daniel Davidson that says that Bernie Sanders "won" the Democratic nomination because Joe Biden has pretty well adopted his "democratic socialist" platform.

Yeah, and the point about the current rage for "democratic socialism" is all the power it gives to Bernie Bros and AOCs and all other kinds of educated Gentry to order other people around.

The point about all left-wing platforms since Marx and Engels is that, whatever socialism or identity politics or postmodernism may do for the helpless victims -- that I call Little Darlings -- the bottom line is All Power to the Lefties.

That was true with the Communist Manifesto; it was true with the Fabian socialists; it was true with the Frankfurt School; it was true with Antonio Gramsci's ΅march through the institutions;" it is true with Marcuse's "repressive tolerance;" it is true with today's wokerati and Green New Dealers and the latest New Thing, "degrowth."

My point is that you are missing the point if you don't understand that the game of the lefty message-of-the-moment is always to capture the support of the lower-order victims, whether workers or blacks or immigrants -- or fake victims like gays and feminists -- so that the left can have power.

If you say, oh well, Cloud People vs. Dirt People, at least it's a fair fight, you are missing the point, because really the Cloud People are buying the support of lower-order victims in order to make war on the Dirt People.

If you say, oh well, Anywheres vs. Somewheres, at least it's a fair fight, you are missing the point because really the Anywheres are buying the support of the Inbetweens in order to make war on the Somewheres.

When you put it that way, things look a bit different.

Now I say that the three layers are all natural and physical "stages" in human cultural evolution. A large chunk of humans have felt themselves subordinate and understood that the road to survival is the shelter in place as the subordinate of some powerful lord. People who have graduated into the culture of the market economy accept the abstract rules of the market economy and the monotheist God and they have a perfect right to live like that. Highly educated people see themselves as creators, fashioning something new out of the unformed clay of human evolution. So they want to practice their creative ideas in the world.

All I say to the creatives is: practice your creativity on yourselves and not on the people. Why? Because 97.2 percent of all creative endeavors end in failure. And the more people that are enrolled -- or drafted -- into your experiment the more that will suffer in the event of failure.

This is nothing remarkable. It is baked into the ancient notion of the Hero's Journey. Wanna be a Hero? Then you must go down into the Underworld of your unconscious and grow some wisdom, become a sadder wiser engine, before you come back into the actual world of the everyday and start saving society.

This is our fundamental problem today. The Creatives -- or Cloud People or Anywheres -- think they have a warrant to order the rest of us around, because they are special.

Fine, Sunshine. Just don't forget that everyone else, the non-specials, have a right to live according to their lights, and not according to your lights.

The key thing to understand is that the Hero's Journey usually ends in Sacrifice, not in Hosannas from an adoring populace.

Are you prepared for that, Sunshine? Have you studied up on the Sacrificial Hero?

Didn't think you had.

COVID-19 Lesson: What You Are Not Allowed to Say

The problem with China is that its government can lie without consequences. Ditto Putinist Russia. Etc.

That's why we can't trust them.

But our liberal friends all seem to be getting a liberal Hive consensus that the whole Wu Flu thing is about anti-Chinese racism. Such as Ben Stein's 78-year-old friend:

“It’s not the ‘Chinese virus’ like Trump says. It’s just a virus and to call it the Chinese virus defames all of the wonderful people of Chinese descent in our country. It’s racist and I don’t want to hear it.”

A gay artist acquaintance has the same take. Of course he does. Because liberal anti-racism has been the most glorious moral crusade since the Frenchies' Reign of Terror. They ain't gonna give up on this one until we ram it back down their throats and choke them.

But my truth is that wherever there is something that you are not allowed to say, then there is a problem. Like the N-word. Which even I don't dare write.

Message to African Americans: Suppose you all declared that the ban on the N-word was over because we got the power and who cares about a couple of gap-toothed racists back in the hills? Talk about liberation!

Now we hear about universities determining what you are allowed to call the Coronavirus that seems to have originated in Wuhan, China. Anything else, you are not allowed to say. Because racism.

Message to Asian Americans: When liberals decide to end the anti-Asian quotas at Harvard then you will know that you can start to believe liberals when they yell and scream about anti-Chinese racism.

So here's my idea. When anyone says "you are not allowed to say X" then you cannot trust that person.

Because Trust is a two-way street. If you say that I am a liar and a racist, then you are saying that I don't have a right to have an opinion. That I can't be trusted.

Well, hello Sunshine! When you say that "I" don't have a right to have an opinion it means that "you" can't be trusted.

Because the first thing that a human does when they have shut down the opposition is they start lying. Humans are like that. They only lie when they think they can get away with it.

As you recall, the Chinese doctor that first tried to publicise the Wu Flu got taken in by the Chinese police and told the facts of life.

Now I am not one of those that think we should teach China a lesson. I don't say this because I am a wimp, although I certainly am a wimp. Otherwise I would have the courage to use the N-word.

No. We just need to proceed on the basis that we can't trust the Chinese government and we can't trust anyone paid to echo Chinese government propaganda, and we can't trust anyone on whom the Chinese government might have power.

When you have a counterparty that you know you can't trust, well, that changes things.

For the last 20 years we have given China the benefit of the doubt, assuming that in good time it would emerge from its genocidal Maoist past and join the modern world of trust and reciprocity.

But obviously, with President Xi appointing himself president-for-life and with the Chinese government lies about the Wu Flu we have to understand that we can't trust the Chinese government. And we likely won't be able to trust it until the day dawns when the ruling party recognizes that even a glorious ruling party like the Chinese Communist Party needs an opposition.

Of course, beyond having an opposition there is the Cloud Cuckoo Land of actual alternation in office with that opposition. Imagine!

Yeah. Imagine if in America's universities conservative voices were actually allowed to be heard. Forget the idea that a Harvard or a Yale might actually appoint a conservative as president.

Hello Google! Do you see how the James Damore kerfuffle broadcasts to the whole world that it cannot trust Google? And do you see that that might be a problem for Google? Especially if some stockholders were ever to sue Google?

The whole experience of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is based on the expansion of the boundaries of trust.

Back in the old days you would only trust your kin. (They say that the old days still apply in China).

Then you could only trust people in your tribe. Then people in your nation.

And now in the global elite you can trust everyone in the globalist elite.

But the real rule is that you trust anyone that acts trustworthy towards you. If they act untrustworthy then you stop trusting them. That is the lesson of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game's TIT-FOR-TAT strategy.

Obviously, if someone comes right out and says that they can't trust you, because racism-sexism-homophobia, then you can't trust them.

Like I say. This is not that hard.

Understanding the Left's Secutar Religion

Radio host Dennis Prager, author of The Rational Bible, proposes that the left's worship of nature is a return to the old religion. Quoting G.K. Chesterton, he writes

"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." 

One of these substitute gods has been nature. 

Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship. Every religion prior to the Bible had nature-gods -- the sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain and so on. 

That is why the farther Western society gets from biblical, i.e., Judeo-Christian, religions, the more nature is worshipped.

And, of course, this new religion has adopted all the trappings of the old. He quotes Ross Douthat at The New York Times,

"The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs: a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of 'thou shalt nots,' and a piping-hot apocalypse."

But I take a different tack, which you may accept or not, as you wish. And, of course, my tack is informed by my reductive Three Peoples theory, and its adjunct, the notion of what religions the Three Peoples believe in. I set out the following notions:

The God of the People of the Subordinate Self is the great lord or patron.

The Subordinate does not experience the possibility that his actions may make a difference. He is like the Achaeans before the walls of Troy, whose battles were completely determined by the Olympian gods. He doesn't pretend to know how the world works; he just submits to the power of his lords and gods.

Compare that with the God of Responsibles.

The God of the People of the Responsible Self is the abstract, though personal, God of the Axial Age religions... The problem for humans is no longer to submit to the actual power and might of the ruler, but to submit to the abstract rules of the Law.

The Responsible still does not understand how the world works, but he acts on the general principles of God's Divine Law in the faith that such action will be successful.

But the world of the Creative is different.

The God of the People of the Creative Self is the Creative Self. If the old God was the creator of the universe, or at least in on the design, the modern creative self aims to become as God. The nature and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not a mystery known only to God, but a Gordian Knot that creative man himself is unraveling and will eventually master. That is why our modern ruling class is full of plans for improvement and bending the arc of history towards justice. Society is, for them, a creative project.

The point is that in the modern age since the scientific revolution mankind has come to believe that he can understand the world enough to make a difference. It is no longer a question of following orders from the Olympican gods or following the Divine Law of the Axial Age God. The world seems to be understandable. That is why, as Prager notes,

When you ask atheists, as I have for decades, what they believe in, the most common answer is "science."

The point is that, if you believe in science, you believe that humans can make a difference through improving their understanding of science, or "how the world works."

And "we" all believe this, these days.

The question is, of course, whether human knowledge should be a social project, of humans in social cooperation, or a political project, deploying science with force.

The basic fault line between Right and Left, I would say, is the question of force. Shall we use science to enact a forced march to the future? Or shall we let the natural social cooperation of humans, informed by experiment -- and most important of all by mistakes -- to illuminate the future.

Yes. The $64,000 question. Shall we lordly rulers permit our underlings to make mistakes? In my view we humans advance to the future over the rubble of our mistakes.

Now it is my belief that the left's faith in political force represents a return to the past. Because I think that the whole principle of all social animals is the principle of the reduction in force.

You see this in the present Chinese Virus epidemic. Our lefty friends are horrified by the off-the-cuff remark by President Trump about the encouraging prospect of (hydroxy)chloroquine. Where was the FDA approval? Where were the double-blind studies? Where was the protocol?

And CNN journalist Jake Tapper just asked President Trump about the return to normal: "What's the plan?" In that he echoes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who campaigned on the theme of "my plan is..."

Well, it was the Prussian general von Moltke that said "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." He meant that, once the battle starts, everyone from the general in charge to the lowliest subultern is going to have to improvise and react to the changing conditions on the ground.

Do you understand what that means, Jake Tapper? It means that now, six weeks into the Corona War, the plan, if there was one, is dead and buried. All the administrative state procedures and chains of command and expert advice are there only to enforce "settled science" and medical knowledge. But when the war starts all that safe-spaces stuff goes out the window. Because we are now all guinea pigs, and nobody knows what will work.

The perfect example is the AIDS epidemic. Gay AIDS activists did a remarkable job putting pressure on the medical and administrative hierarchy to permit the use of experimental drugs on AIDS patients. Because when you are under a death sentence, you are not worried about double-blind studies and administrative regulations. You are willing to be a human guinea pig and try anything that might save your life.

So I don't think that our secular religious friends are going back to the past with their nature religion. Of course Nature is amazing. Indeed the more we learn about Nature the more we are amazed.

My problem with our secular religious friends is the return to force, the idea that we know all we need to know and here is The Plan. Or else.

And that's why I call the left a Great Reaction.

Human Sense and Sensibility Never Change

A couple of days ago I just couldn't take it any more, so I whipped out my copy of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and reread it.

Every time I reread Jane Austen I seem to penetrate to a new depth.

For instance, it seems to me that all the characters, for all that they are Regency era swells, are no different that humans today.

All the women in Sense and Sensibility are prone to "hysterics" except our heroine Elinor.

OK. We are not allowed to use that word today. Sexism, dontcha know. But today almost all women jump at the chance to have a Satisfying Emotional Experience. So what's the difference? Both emotional experiences are predicated on the presumption that someone will show up and pat the little dear and tell her how helpless and innocent she is.

So, in those days we had "hysterical" females. Today we have females that get totally bent out of shape by a "microagression."

The exception, our heroine Elinor Dashwood, has all the emotional responses that all the other women are having. Only she keeps it bottled up, because someone has to keep on carrying on.

Eventually, her sister Marianne realizes what a heavy load Elinor has been carrying, and begs her forgiveness. But only in the novel, not in real life.

The men, except for the peerless Colonel Brandon, are moral cretins. They flop around engaging the affections of all the unattached young women, without a thought for what they are doing. And only in retrospect do they realize what bounders they are. Or, like John Dashwood, they are analyzing the world purely in monetary terms, of pounds a year in income, and assuming that everyone else sees the world that way.

Of course the women, whoever they are, spend the whole novel judging the other women and their behavior. So nothing has changed there.

But here is a puzzler. It raises the question of just how satirical Austen was. For instance, in Volume III, Chapter VIII, Elinor ruminates on the dastardly Willoughby, and judges his "extravagance and vanity," his every "faulty propensity," as though she were God.

I suppose the genius of Jane Austen is that we can never really be sure when the character is speaking, when Austen is speaking, or indeed when Austen's Muse is speaking.

Maybe if I took the time to read Austen's letters with her sister Cassandra in Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others I might find out.

In any age, of course, people are busily judging others with complete confidence in their authority to do so. Ben Stein reports on a 78-year-old liberal lady castigating him for a comment on China.

“I don’t want to hear that,” she said angrily. “It’s not the ‘Chinese virus’ like Trump says. It’s just a virus and to call it the Chinese virus defames all of the wonderful people of Chinese descent in our country. It’s racist and I don’t want to hear it.”

Sweetie Pie Ben "didn’t want to argue about it for even a moment." But I rehearsed in my mind the sort of comeback appropriate for the occasion. Maybe this:

I don't know about that, but have you ever thought that pejorative rhetoric like that is what is going to get us more Trumps?

I am doing a long think piece right now that is anchored in this thought from Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

Humans are obsessed with the question of suffering, and I would argue that it is not just "primitives" that are obsessed with it. Axial Age religions are obsessed with Sin and Redemption, where Sin is the consequence of trying to avoid suffering, and post Death of God secular ideologies are likewise all in unison that the sufferings of the marginalized and oppressed are all the fault of someone, a someone that is probably white and probably male and certainly privileged.

But what if our obsession with suffering is just a human conceit? That suffering is nobody's fault, least of all racist-sexist-homophobes and Satans and Old Scratches. That life, the universe, and everything is uncertain, with a quantum theory roll of the dice every moment.

Surely it cannot be so. Because what would all the moral arbiters and bullies do then, poor things?