No East, No West
No red. No blue.
If I were to read Popper’s Myth of the Framework once again, then I would have some moderately detailed way of reconciling it with Pinker’s latest book on common knowledge that I still haven’t finished reading. There is a certain joy in sitting through every movement, but I got the gist in the overture. They are saying the same thing which is basically this. The truth converges and truth seekers, if they are earnest and ethical have no reason to be in disagreement. Alas we are not as reasonable as we would like to be in our defense.
It is this defensiveness that I wish to overcome in my journey towards wisdom and forty-two and all that. One of the things I recognized halfway through my current vacation in New Orleans, is that we instinctively prefer zero-sum games. In the middle of the Honey Island swamp, our pontoon boat happened upon a tribe of trash pandas. I hate them. I hate cockroaches. When we happened upon the wild boars, I wanted to ask how much is a hunting license. I hate animal pests, and I am aggressive towards them in a way that surprises me. They simply have no business making incursions into my civilization.
This week a couple of annoying liberals accused me of defending what they read as an agenda of revenge as demonstrated by my invocation of the following line.
Remember, the LA riots where 64 people were killed? What was the political fallout that either party was able to exploit?
I expect reasonable people to know that no significant policy changes were the result and that only rhetorical patronage was paid in the never-ending meta battle for controlling narratives of partisan engagement. I expect reasonable people to know that deaths are the ultimate price to pay for any wayward political power. But after all, perhaps it is not reasonable for me to assume that others want to be reasonable. I’m more sanguine than that, but I know those two individuals on Facebook better than that. I probably shouldn’t have engaged in the first place. First world problems.
I am scheduled to be on some sort of podcast of rebellion in the coming weekend. Apostate Radio I think is the name. I expect it to be young and saucy, so I think I am to provide some hot takes. This essay therefore is the overture to that, and here is my hottest take.
The problem with American politics is that it is trying to achieve Western Democracy without establishing a concrete philosophical commitment from ‘we the people’. Our use of the term ‘we’ is too fast, too loose, too ambitious, too lazy and too indiscriminate. Present company excepted, ‘we’ are not sufficiently disciplined and reasonable to agree to ultimately agree. We are too much in a hurry to be partitioned into various generations, racial factions, political sides, religious sects and zero-sum gender identities. This is the consequence of a slapdash multiculturalism which got a healthy diet of irrational exuberance from wishful thinkers representing underprivileged minorities and over-privileged elites, two stupid factions of damnable sophists taking up too much oxygen from common Americans with common sense. The secondary problem is that American politics are driven by ideology that wishes to dominate culture by having it judged by partisan loyalties rather than aesthetic standards of truth and beauty. Political thought is too ubiquitous and we’re leaving the music and dance to computers and robots.
What I know deeply is the ethics of the Tao, the aegis of Christianity, the discipline of Stoicism. What I am coming to appreciate is how those in combination with the orientation of the Atman, allow me to see without participation.
What’s wrong with our system. We as a people are grasping in the Western form of an external god. Of a sort of revelation and Deus Ex that come from externalities. Instead of reaching within to find an inner peace and personal solace we lay waste our powers getting and spending. Even with this realization we seek to get from Gaia, and from The Science and attention from the Narrative. Our entire spiritual economy is outsourced to a supply chain of dubious providers.
So there it is. We are subservient to external validation. That validation is a scarce resource which claims monopolies on half-truths in a compressed world that cannot handle the whole truth. So the reasonable and rational are considered subversive by not playing the half-truth game. And I’m saying the Western half of the world doesn’t have all that truth. Not to be oppositional, but to be humble in the face of that which is only dimly appreciated.
Could we even imagine or calculate how much time we waste trying to win titles of righteousness rather than simply working to be virtuous? Grasping when we could be basking.
To agree to disagree is the basis of making an enemy. And when you've decided to cancel or avoid them, you don't get a first hand ability to understand their priors, or the degree to which they actually care about matters. So you are free to make anything of that absent party and speak with tacit approval of your authority. So on your side, it becomes bullies all the way down, and you expect as much from the other side, those which you have agreed are your enemies. Presented with their logic from your side, you believe you are bridging every reasonable gap and grant yourself even more righteousness. And the more you prune apostates from your own camp, the purer you believe your arguments to be.
This is a good reason to learn a foreign language. Perhaps especially German. Somebody should AI slop together some Hitlerian version of opposition speeches.