Category Archives: Ethics

Return to the fold

Ethics, Everso, Judaism

Aporia is intolerable for individuals.

But groups gripped with aporia is inescapable, all-pervasive, all-encompassing hell.

What immediately transcends the aporia-gripped mesoperson (the all-too-divisible “individual”), is yet another aporia-gripped macroperson.

No where to go. No escape. No hope.

Collective aporia is experienced as anomie.

Anomie dyspires violence: scapegoating, persecution, war, and collective suicide.

A collective can be two, three, a dozen, a gross, legion, myriads…

A collective can be a shattered individual person.

The sole way out of anomie is a return to within: principled integrity.

Metanoia is necessary but insufficient.

Teshuvah alone — echad — is sufficient.

Everso.

Even a two-millennia-old collective aporic — a mutating being at war with itself, spasmodically oscillating between perverse antiworld-religiosity and revolutionary anti-religious worldliness — can return to the fold.

Treatment for mistreatment

Autobiography, Ethics

I just capped my Wimbledon Hooligans fable with a nice, pat moral:

We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.

Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.

My mistake has been moralizing respect.

Respect is an ethical principle, not a moral principle.

I prefer respect, of course, because I flourish only in a respectful ethos. But this is always where the moralizing vice strikes. “What is good for me defines what is good.”

The world as it is right now has very little genuine respect. We have only the remains of respect — vestigial manners. Manners have degraded into behaviors having nothing to do with establishing or maintaining mutual respect. In work settings, manners are instruments of professional depersonalization. In social settings manners are class performances. In corporate-political life manners govern socially-acceptable forms of petty sadism — subjugation, humiliation, recreational coercion, etc.

So be it.

The new program:

  • Do not cheapen respect by throwing it on the street like shriner’s candy. Do not run around expressing every admiration you feel. In the market, oversupply cheapens.
  • Exchange respect with the precious respectable few, who are capable of receiving, valuing and reciprocating respect in kind. Treat the rest with cheerful dispassion. It is nobody’s fault that they have become whatever they are, but it is also not to their credit.
  • Just as liberalism is an ethic at home only in a liberal ethos, respect is an ethic at home only in a respectful ethos. Do not follow the rules of a game nobody else is playing, and then resent them for not playing along. Mutuality is for the mutual.
  • The world is what it is. The world is not obligated to conform to your ideal or bow to your judgment.
  • Lower daily dose of vitamin B, and start loading up on vitamin N.

Philosophical ethnomethods

Enworldment, Esoterism, Ethics, Philosophy

I got annoyed by a friend who had an intuitive epiphany concerning ontology and announced the inadequacy of all prior conceptions of ontology.

The annoyance was not about the content of the epiphany, nor about the challenging of any sacred definitions. I am not all that invested in any particular definition of ontology, because ontologies are (according to my meta-ontology) manifestations of an enworldment. This makes me an ontological pluralist, at least with respect to the domain of philosophy.

What bothered me concerned the domain of philosophy — the ethos of philosophy and the ethics that govern and sustain it. Or we could say, the game of philosophy and its rules. Or we could say, the social being of philosophy and the ethnomethods by which participants in philosophy make sense to others, and by which others make sense to us. These are all flavors of what I mean when I say “enworldment”.

Philosophers absolutely can, and should, propose new conceptions of ontology. The most radical ontology will necessarily entail meta-disputing the being of ontology itself.

But these alternative conceptions are philosophical conceptions of philosophical concepts and, as such, are subject to philosophical scrutiny.

In mysticism, one can bluster about making exalted gnostic claims of ineffable knowingness.

In philosophy, we make proposals, demonstrations, arguments, analogies, and the like.

Philosophy is done with others, within the ethos of philosophy, according to the perpetually contested ethical norms of philosophy — and whoever scorns these things should not pretend to philosophy at all.

Whenever mysticism does that infuriating thing it always does — running around comparing itself to philosophy and finding philosophy’s attempts to articulate, convey, or share its intuitions inferior to its own inchoate, felt intuitions — not only is it not doing philosophy, it is not really doing mysticism anymore either.

Rather, it is doing what mature mystics warn neophytes about when they say that esoteric thinking is dangerous. The danger of unguided esoterism is hubristic spiritual inflation, and the aggressive double-ignorance that comes with it — the endemic curse of youth.

This general subject always brings to mind a cold line from Borges: “Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”

Dreamers dream. Writers write. The difference between a dreamer and a writer is that the writer writes those dreams so others can read them and join them in the dream. Dreamers dream of writing and being read.

Unacceptable interruptions

Autobiography, Ethics

Jews famously interrupt a lot. It’s just how Jewish conversations go.

And apparently, even healthy married couples constantly interrupt.

Many interruptions happen in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and I barely notice them.

But there are three varieties of interruption that I will no longer tolerate.

  • Aggressive interruptions. You know it is an aggressive interruption because if you keep talking through the attempted interruption, the aggressor continues. It is a conversational stare-down. I’m not having that. And I will not be in a relationship with a person who does that. It is a sign of low arrogance.
  • Disregard interruptions. The partner just does not value what is being said, has no curiosity about where it is going, and feels too little respect for the speaker to ignore whatever they’re saying to the end of the sentence.
  • Apprehensive interruptions. These happen when a conversation presses against the comprehensibility limits of one of the partners, and they try to divert them conversation back to safe regions. The interruptions are self-defense against aporias.

I am not fucking around. If I feel disrespectfully interrupted, I might give one warning and I might not, before I bring things to a sudden and awkward close.

I’ve already ended several meetings both in and outside work.

I have accumulated too many people in my life who have made me doubt their respect. Part of the problem is they have never learned to signal respect. They have also never been taught to refrain from inconsiderate behaviors. I have too little time and patience to allow people like this in my life.

I don’t command respect. But if someone withholds respect from me, there will be no effort to establish respect. I will remove myself from the source of offense, or remove them from where I am.

Me being leftist

Autobiography, Design, Ethics, Politics

A job offer should include not only salary and benefits but a service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing conditions conducive to effective, rewarding work.

This is especially important for “labor of love” professions, which are typically lower paying.

For such professions, the instrinsic reward of the work is more than half of the value exchange that makes the work feel worth it..

These professions often attract “empathy workers”.

Empathy workers are typically terrible at negotiating decent salaries. A person seeking a good faith win-win will fare poorly facing off against a bad faith opponent seeking a win-lose.

But tragically, empathy workers are also terrible at resisting unreasonable demands and pressures that cheat them out of the non-money half of their value exchange. They are, by nature, agreeable, flexible and accommodating. and this makes them the perpetual path of least resistance for workaday psychos looking to stampede and climb over and crush whatever is between them and the top of whatever hill they trying to be king of.

So empathy workers end up with lower salaries and depressingly impossible work conditions that burn them out and make them even less able to push back on the assholes who mercilessly squeeze, exploit and immiserate them.

Red Card

Ethics, Letterpress, Politics

There is room for disagreement on immigration policy.

As a staunch agonist, I honor even extreme, bitter conflict on such issues.

Those who disagree with current policy have every right to protest it publicly.

There should be less room around enforcement of current policy. Policies are designed to narrow possibilities into practical particulars of enforcement.

Protesting policy by actively interfering with its enforcement is a dangerous line to cross, if we wish to preserve rule of law, which is a fundamental precondition of liberal democracy.

But enforcement outside the bounds of policy is at least equally dangerous, and repugnant to any decent citizen of a liberal democracy.

Civil rights are non-negotiable and sacred.

This is why I have donated to the Red Card Campaign, and why I think every decent American liberal or conservative, ought to donate, too.

I am compelled to letterpress print Red Cards. All sacred ideas call me to the press.

Absolutism, Sarcasm and Alienation

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Polycentrism

Sarcasm is what we do when we are forced to do the ironic work another refuses to do themselves.

As Richard Rorty taught, irony is a core virtue of citizenship in a liberal democracy.

A good citizen must both hold to their own ideals while also respecting the fact that others do the same — and that everyone egocentrically thinks their ideal is manifestly superior for what are manifestly the best reasons.

Liberal-democratic irony can be summed up in a pluricentric maxim: “I am not the only center of the universe.” It is a supplementary update to the Golden Rule.  A patch, if you will.

Liberal-democratic institutions are intended to operationalize this respect for universal egocentricity.

It is true that they rarely achieve this noble goal perfectly. But they do it far better than one group deciding that its collective egocentricity is so self-evidently superior that it can just unilaterally impose its own moral whim.

And if one egocentric person or one egocentric group loses its pluricentric irony and begins to naively assume that the noble goal of liberal-democracy is identical to the ideal it egocentrically believes… and if that group condemns liberal-democratic institutions whenever those institutions deviate from its own egocentric ideal… or worst of all, and sees such deviation as evidence that these institutions are no longer liberal-democratic!…

Well, the irony here is that it is the egocentric person or group who has lost its liberal-democratic virtue of irony. It is only because they no longer know what liberal-democracy means that they think it is lost.

They, themselves, are the enemies of what they believe they epitomize.

When a citizen of a liberal democracy lacks the virtuous irony required for participation in liberal-democratic life, and fails to exercise it, this is first, comical, then frustrating, then offensive, then alienating, then just infuriating.

You can try to explain it to them, but if they lack ironic sense, they will fail to understand.

They will object, “This doesn’t make sense.” Lacking all irony, if it makes no sense to them, they will assume the idea itself has no sense — that it is nonsense.

Ironically, I’ve known experts in irony who had no idea at all how to be ironic. They knew all about irony, but in practice they were entirely unable to think ironically.

They speak of history testifying unambiguously about moral shortcomings of this nation. Of how this history unambiguously implies their preferred forms of activism. Of how it is responsible use of power to compel those subject to one’s power — and unable to resist — to conform to one’s own socio-political and ethical ideals.

According to them, power disparities are bad only when they are abused.

Sure, people in the past thought they were using their power for good, but they were naive and wrong.

Unlike us.

Notice the sarcasm. Notice the contemptuous tone.

Respect is irony we exchange in dialogue.

Respect acknowledges that when we look at another  and see them in our world, they look back and see us in their world. It says that we each are the center of a universe in which we somehow both dwell together.

Contempt is lack of this respect — for the other, for togetherness in pluricentricity. Contempt takes one’s own naive egocentricity for reality itself, and cares nothing about what the other thinks or feels about it.

Sarcasm is contempt for another person’s contempt. It is irony frustrated to the point of alienation.

Sarcasm is what we do when we must do another’s ironic duty for him, because he will not do it himself. We say contemptuously for the other what he should have said himself with ironic self-awareness.

So all you brave defenders of democracy — with your unmatched intelligence, self-awareness, humanity, sensitivity, empathy, moral decency and courage — thank you for all you have done, or at least tried to do.

Thank you for instructing us on our unconscious prejudices, our cognitive biases, our motivated reasoning, our unearned, unjust privilege, our self-interested abuses of power.

Hopefully, you and your true-believing allies will soon get the unlimited, unopposed power you need to remake the world into a kinder, juster, more equitable and more diverse place.

Conscience warfare

Autobiography, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I am blessed-cursed by an overactive intellectual conscience.

That intellectual conscience conducts incessant pincer attacks on my complacent certainty.

On the right flank my intellectual conscience attacks with the challenge: “But what do you really believe?” And sadly, since the late 1980s — when my future wife taught it a devastating form of feminine skepticism — it rolls its eyes at arguments, and contemptuously swats away appeals to logic, authority, and so on. It cares zero about my head, with its talkative brain and mouth: “Just because you can argue it, it doesn’t follow that you believe it.” It goes directly for the heart: “Would you bet your life on it? Would you bet a loved one’s life on it?”

This line of questioning often ends the battle. Rarely does this interrogation produce a simple “yes” or “no”.

But then on the left flank my intellectual conscience attacks with a complementary challenge: “But what are you missing?” If any simple “yes” or “no” survived the right flank attack, the left flank normally sweeps it out effortlessly. Despite its bluster, certainty is rarely the fruit of superior understanding. And it is with this indubitable truth — which has not only survived the “would you bet your life on it” test, but has been toughened and strengthened by it — that the left flank attacks and annihilates certainty.

My intellectual conscience is now attacking my most recent religious beliefs.

Wish me luck. This might get ugly-beautiful.

And all this is only for private thought.

I have a whole other intellectual conscience for public thought.

My public thought intellectual conscience is solely about arguments, adherence to principles, respect for institutions, and their formalities and rules, refusal to be the only center of the universe. It tolerates no heartfelt passion imposing itself on unconsenting recipients.

My public thought intellectual conscience demands perfect liberalism.

Overall, my intellectual conscience draws the sharpest and darkest lines it can over the blurry, slimy, hazy, fuzzy, irregular, shifting, multilayered surfaces of the lifeworld — dividing private from public, public from private.

For many “the personal is political”.

But let us not confuse descriptions and moral norms.

The personal should not be political.

And the political should not be personal.

Conflating them destroys both.

And indeed, today, because of public-private conflation, each of us and all of us are coming apart.

I respect my intellectual conscience(s) more than anything else.

I would love to be generous enough to judge only myself by it.

I live my life choking down the superior judgment of others.

“That quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner”

Ethics, Existentialism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Each time I see a young people’s eyes light up at the mention of the word “ethics” — and, oh, how they do light up! — I remember this Nietzsche passage:

So, how many people know how to observe? And of these few, how many to observe themselves? ‘Everyone is farthest from himself — every person who is expert at scrutinizing the inner life of others knows this to his own chagrin; and the saying, ‘Know thyself’, addressed to human beings by a god, is near to malicious. That self-observation is in such a bad state, however, is most clearly confirmed by the way in which nearly everyone speaks of the nature of a moral act — that quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner, with its look, its smile, its obliging eagerness! People seem to be wanting to say to you, “But my dear fellow, that is precisely my subject! You are directing your question to the person who is competent to answer it: there is, as it happens, nothing I am wiser about.”

This is also true of aesthetics and of religious/spiritual/philosophical insight.

Cultivating moral judgment, aesthetic taste or profundity of insight is certainly personally rewarding, but it is a stupid and noxious mistake to expect recognition or acknowledgement for it. Because in each and every one of these subjective fields our appreciation for anyone else’s accomplishments is entirely constrained by what we have accomplished ourselves.

Unless we work at perceiving it, we each are always the apogee of everything that really matters.

Wouldn’t it be a comical paradox if it turned out that the closest a human can come to apotheosis is finally overcoming natural misapotheosis?

They had reasons, too

Ethics, History, Judaism, Politics

People also thought they had good reasons for hating Jewish people in 1933. And in 1821. And in 1894.

The reasons change.

The name for it can only be used once before it must be abandoned in disgrace, and a new one coined.

But the target is constant.

The justifications always look reasonable, or at least convincing from the inside, but they are obviously distorted when seen from outside that fact-bending, standard-doubling field.

The cycles start hot with resentment and hate intoxication. They mellow into thoughtless conformity. (“If every person I respect has this anti-judaism/anti-Jew/anti-Israel/anti-zionism attitude, it must be a respectable attitude to have.”)

People thought they had good reasons for hating zionists (or vaguely sympathizing with zionist-haters) in 2023-2025.

They will all want to pretend you resisted this. But, right now, in the present, I only know a few non-Jews with the humanity, moral integrity and intellectual honesty to look at this situation and say what it is. Everyone else tries to blur, qualify, equivocate, squirm into conformity with the illiberalism they are in bed with. They want to reserve their right to “criticize” so they can remain in good standing with their morally bankrupt peers.

I am observing this blurriness with the sharpest eyesight.

I am watching and learning.

I will never forget how each and every person in my life behaved in this crucial time.

Most do exactly what most people did in 1821, 1894 and 1933 did: Stand quietly on the sidelines trying to look exactly as indifferent as they truly are, harboring a lukewarm mixture of confused conflicting opinions in their loose minds.

Whatever they try to blur, they will never blur the sharp resolution of my memory and of my understanding.

Now that I think about it

Esoterism, Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

A broken faith is experienced by the faith-breaker as revelation of a new meaning with a new story.

One tells a revisionist story that invalidates the old story by which one lived. “I mistakenly believed x-story, but I can see now that y-story is true, and was true all along.”

Broken faith says: “Now that I think about it…” and proceeds to reverse hero and villain, angel and devil, love and hate, virtue and vice, sacred vow and vile enslavement — producing wave after wave of estrangement. Whoever was closest is cast out with the most violence.

A person of weak faith, who lacks social and relational structures to hold them in a steady psychic state is always teetering on the edge of betrayal. Whoever is friends with such a person on one day might meet only an enemy and a ghost the next.

And, by person, as always, I mean any cohesive psychic unit — an individual, a family, a sub-culture, a people, a nation, an inter-national class. Personhood is scalar.

Dialectic transcendence is a whole other kind of change. In it, oppositions are not simply reversed but sublated within higher-order truths. It is not just metanoia, it is t’shuvah.

Pluralism

Esoterism, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I agree that many moral and theoretical ideas historically treated as absolute were more relative than their adherents realized.

I also agree that such relative beliefs — being approximate and contextual — can be true in their own way, with different trade-offs — even as they conflict.

But I no longer believe that all truth is relative or pluralistic. Some truths transcend relativity and pluralism: to deny them in thought is wrongheaded; to defy them in practice is immoral.

We can debate where the boundary lies between the relative and the absolute.

But if you argue that no such boundary exists — why are you arguing?

Complicit in evil

Ethics

The type of person who believes the essence of evil is injustice — bias, greed, selfishness, callousness, and so on — tends to interpret more radical forms of evil as justified reactions to injustice.

They have a truncated conception of evil. Anything  beyond injustice on the spectrum of moral negativity — sadism, hatred, vengeance, malevolence, the desire to annihilate — is as invisible to them as ultraviolet.

Unfortunately, their conception of good is equally truncated. This type views the essence of good as the fight for justice against injustice. As a result, they are all too inclined to interpret radically evil actions as aggressive — but righteous —  resistance to injustice, deserving their full, enthusiastic support.

Consequently, this type not only tolerates radical evil, but supports it — and at times actively participates in evil.

Moral misappropriation

Ethics, Judaism

Jewish prophets innovated speaking truth to power.

It was Jewish monotheism — worship of the one God above all, to whom all must answer — that, for the first time in human history, distinguished goodness from political power. Only this world-transcending authority authorized a righteous man of God to rebuke a king.

And speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless — this, too, was a Jewish invention.

Before the Jews, there was no distinction made between might and right, and the powerlessness had no moral standing or significance.

This moral vision has been so thoroughly appropriated by modern leftists that they take it for granted, and no longer recognize its source. And when these leftists step on the neck of “zionist” Jews, allegedly in the name of justice, they do so standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants.

If you want to understand modern antisemitism, Mary Douglas’s forward to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift offers an important insight:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. it might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

And if you think a freely-given gift generates resentment, that is nothing compared to a stolen “gift” that the “recipient” wants to possess as their own natural birthright, theirs to have without any debt of gratitude.

We see this in right-wing supersessionism, and in left-wing appropriation of the Jewish invention of social justice, which is really just post-religious christianoidal appropriation of vestigial spiritually-unrooted moral attitudes.

Against philosophy?

Autobiography, Ethics, Philosophy

This post started out one thing and became another.

I started off thinking about subjective honesty, and how much I value it.

Then something took a wrong turn and I ended up more or less longwindedly paraphrasing Issac Brock:

Everyone’s afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you’d be disappointed, am I right?
No one really knows the ones they love
If you knew everything they thought
I bet that you would wish that they’d just shut up

I’ve left it raw.

It is much harder to prove subjective dishonesty than objective dishonesty.

And because it is so much harder to prove, it is much easier to justify refusing to prove it.

As with so many matters, the rules of private conduct differ from public conduct. In private life, a mere suspicion that a person is subjectively dishonest is sufficient to cut off discourse.

But in public life, such matters must be rigorously established.

(This is one motivation behind my current revived interest in Habermas.)

Years ago I had a friend who I believed fell into a circular logic and lost contact with concrete reality. He lived a strange life that allowed him to avoid all real participation in any organization. He had no experience of organizational life, of playing an organizational role with defined responsibilities, spheres of authority and obligation, interacting with others with their own defined roles. He had no experience at all negotiating within organizational constraints to find alignment and to make progress toward shared goals.

He was, as far as I could tell, entirely unaware of the kinds of reasoning one must do to succeed in such organizational efforts. So his notions about organizations and how they function was based on fiction and ignorant speculation. This would have been perfectly harmless if he simply lived his life apart from organizations, ignoring them and focusing on what he knew firsthand, which as far as I could tell was made up mostly of carefully compartmentalized individual relationships with no burden of mutual responsibility.

Alas, his worldview was hyperfocused on organizations, nefarioys ones who were doing all kinds of nefarious things, in pursuit of even more nefarious goals.

And even that would have been fine, had he been capable of conversing about other topics. But he was not. I was unable to find any topic of conversation that he would not, within five minutes, redirect directly into a conversation about what nefarious organizations were doing.

Eventually, I told him that I believed he was mentally ill. And not only mentally ill. He mentally ill in a very, well — nefarious way.

He demanded proof. He said this was a serious accusation, and that such accusations demanded justification. And the only way to justify it was to show that his factual assertions were not factual, but delusional. Because if his facts were grounded in reality, it was I, not he, who was deluded. And this was precisely what was at issue. And there was only one way to find this out. It turns out that I was morally obligated to discuss his conspiracy theories even more thoroughly — exhaustively, in fact — examining and disproving the innumerable facts that constituted his theories, and addressing the innumerable finer points, qualifications, epi-explanations and counterarguments.

I could either do that, or I could retract my statement that I believed there was something deeply and darkly wrong with him. Except I didn’t want to discuss those theories at all, let alone exhaustively, and I still believed something had gone horribly wrong with his faith and his thinking.

I can’t, in good faith, retract that statement. What I should have done instead is, in good taste, not shared that belief in the first place. I should have done what most normal, polite, conflict-avoidant people do when they recognize that the person they were pleasantly chatting with is a conspiracy theorist.

But philosophical argument is a deliberate suspension of such discursive etiquette.

Instead of suppressing our beliefs about other people’s beliefs and foregrounding our common ground, we plough up our deepest disagreements, which typically concerns precisely what holds our souls in shape — the integrity of our personal faiths.

Sometimes I suspect philosophy is a terrible fucking idea. Sometimes, today for instance, I believe philosophy is essentially rude.

If we want subjective honesty, maybe we should just leave others out of it and make it an inward practice. Outwardly, we should just settle for a polite objective honesty.

So how in hell can we ever have deliberative democracy? I am terrified that Hobbes might be right, and that deliberative democracy is a leviathan-concealing shell game. Can this game be played without an absolute referee who isn’t each of us, each fighting to be referee?

In this game contestants compete to become the game’s referee. We don’t try to become referee in order to win the game. We win the game in order to become referee.

Confessions of a chicken hawk

Autobiography, Ethics, Politics

This one is difficult.

I was driving around the Emory campus yesterday and saw a sign for Oxford Road. It made me want to hear Bob Dylan’s song “Oxford Town”. This song was especially relevant to me right now because I am in the middle of a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a Jewish leader in the civil rights movement. “What do you think of that, my friend?” I think what you do, Bob. All decent people must think that. We fucking know it.

I decided to listen to the “Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan” album from the beginning.

The third song on that album is “Masters of War”. I tried to place myself in 1963, when this song and this attitude was new. It was difficult to do. The countercultural ethos has followed the well-worn path of religious degradation, from the shock of world-transformative revelation, to inspired movement, to new vital establishment, to commonsense conventional wisdom, to the default doctrine for all educated Americans, to ready-made attitude equipped with bromides and logical formulas.

And in this last, most degraded state, any war of any kind is automatically viewed as illegitimate, unnecessary and the manufactured product of masters of war trying to get rich on death.

The response to any war is a “surely there is another way” recited as automatically as a libertarian’s “deregulate it” or progressivist “institutional racism” or “cognitive bias” as all-purpose diagnoses and remedies.

They aren’t even responses. They are strings of words erected as a barrier to engaging the problem. I realize I am paraphrasing Hannah Arendt:

“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”

The particular reality that from which counterculture fundamentalists want protection is moral obligation.

We hate the idea — I, personally, hate the idea, and have always hated it — that there are times when people are obligated to kill and risk death to protect our own people from those who want us to suffer and die.

And, like it or not, people really do exist who actively want the suffering and annihilation of other people. This desire for suffering and annihilation of others is what evil is.

Suffering and annihilation are what war is about. But for evil, suffering and annihilation is the whole purpose, and war is its own end. Part of the joy of evil is forcing others to play their war games, and to taste violence, to face seduction of violence, in the effort to stop its spread. And if they can drag their enemies into evil with them, or create such confusion that people lose the ability to see the difference, so much the better.

Of course, masters of war want to paint every conflict as a simple Good versus Evil struggle. They are despicable moral manipulators. But to abuse this truth by using it to claim the opposite — that there is never Good versus Evil conflict — is hardly better. It is the evil of equating defense against evil with evil. It is the evil of denying evil, and relativizing everything so thoroughly that we willfully ignore evil and allow it to flourish.

Most left-leaners want that to not be true, or to treat this problem as one they can evade. They try to complicate the situation, blur it, muddy it, distance themselves from it. “I can’t understand something this complex.” “I cannot do anything about this, so it is not my problem.” “This is the outcome of a long and tragic process, so we cannot assign blame.” Or “Life is simply tragic. It will never not be tragic. So let it be tragic.” As if simply calling life tragic allows us to transcend the tragedy and look at it from above as mystical spectators and not within as participants. This latter is Christian nihilism, and this mystical nihilism can linger on long after Christian doctrine evaporates from the soul. Faith outlives its beliefs.

They all boil down to “I don’t want to care.” We might say “I don’t give a fuck” with punk bluster, as if we are proud of it, as if we are shameless. Hopefully we are lying, because dishonesty is less damning than genuine shameless selfishness.

How do I know any of this? Because I am guilty of it myself. I was even more guilty in the past, when I was young and draft eligible. I have never been brave enough for combat. I have always been mortified of war. That is shameful.

But I am even more ashamed to pretend shirking one’s war duty is not shameful. Most shameful of all is withholding gratitude and admiration of soldiers who do answer the call and risk their lives to defend their families, their people and all they hold sacred.

Of course, if nothing is sacred, there is nothing to admire or despise. There is no cause for pride or shame. Intellectually honesty knows better. We fucking know better, most of all when we refuse to admit it.

Chord: Intellectual Conscience

Chord, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Someday I will collect the passages that reshaped my soul. This one, by you-know-you, would certainly be among them:

The intellectual conscience. — I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress — as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.

Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors {“discordant concord of things”} and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice.

Another:

The two principles of the new life. — First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon. Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

But then there is this:

The need for little deviant acts. — Sometimes to act against one’s better judgment when it comes to questions of custom; to give way in practice while keeping one’s reservations to oneself; to do as everyone does and thus to show them consideration as it were in compensation for our deviant opinions: — many tolerably free-minded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as ‘honest’, ‘humane’, ‘tolerant’, ‘not being pedantic’, and whatever else those pretty words may be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child for Christian baptism though he is an atheist; and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations; and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ‘It doesn’t really matter if people like us also do what everyone does and always has done’ — this is the thoughtless prejudice! The thoughtless error! For nothing matters more than that an already mighty, anciently established and irrationally recognised custom should be once more confirmed by a person recognised as rational: it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself! All respect to your opinions! But little deviant acts are worth more!

Confession: this rabbit hole excursion was inspired by an article by Mary Harrington, “Truth Seeking Is Not a Pathology”. A couple of standout quotes:

Does anyone here remember James Damore? He was fired from Google in 2017 for circulating a memo arguing, with all possible reference to the scientific evidence, that not all sex differences in employment choice are down to discrimination. He was pilloried and punished in essence for telling the truth. Now, just recently I read a Free Press interview with Damore, who lives in Europe now. It was a sympathetic piece; in the course of it the writer suggested Damore may have an autism spectrum disorder.

First: a necessary disclaimer. Lots of people find it helpful to have a label and diagnosis for those ways they feel different. What follows is in no way intended to dispute or invalidate that experience. But it’s also widely accepted that there’s a cultural component to what reads as “normal” or “different” in people’s psychological makeup. So what if another way of looking at at least some individuals who get lumped in with these supposed “disorders” is less as “disordered” than as outlier personalities, more oriented toward truth than social consensus?

Another:

The two World Wars were the climactic frenzy of Europe’s industrial civilisation – and the second of the wars was ended by truth-seekers, who split the atom just to see if it could be done. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who developed the atom bomb, perfectly expresses the engineering, truth-seeking mindset, when he said in 1954: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

This is, at its core, the engineer mindset. Engineers want to know: is it technically sweet? And: does it work? The “why” or “what to do about it” as Oppenheimer puts it, is for many a secondary consideration to whether it’s technically sweet, and whether it works.

In the case of the bomb, it did work. The consequences were apocalyptic for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the cultural ripple effects are still with us.

….

What if our turn away from the world of atoms, to the world of bits, was a civilisation recoiling in terror from the cataclysmic achievements of these truth-seeking engineers? My hypothesis is that in response, we turned our technical skills inward and set about re-engineering ourselves. And this is how, in the 1960s, we arrived at the twin engines of the transhumanist revolution: computing and biotech. But as a consequence, it was also the point at which the engineering mindset turned on itself.

And:

The quintessential character of the long, post-Hiroshima twentieth century has been the application of nominalist science to ourselves, while multiplying institutional power and managerial bureaucracies to cover the resulting concatenating falsehoods. The kind of people who succeed in this managerial culture are those that prioritise social consensus over truth.

…

Think of the HR edict: “Bring your whole self to work”. Anyone who thinks about this for a moment will realise that it isn’t actually an invitation to bring your whole self to work. It’s a trap for truth-seekers.

Most people have enough sense not even to bring their whole self to Christmas dinner with the family, let alone work. The edict is designed, consciously or not, to surface people like James Damore, so they can be offloaded in favour of people who are better at calibrating for social consensus. Over time, then, the aggregate effect of policies like this is to increase the number of consensus-seekers, which is to say those adapted to managerialism, and to decrease the number of truth-seekers.

Unpleasant left-liberal musings

Ethics, Politics

Can we stop pretending that efficiencies ever serve meaning?

The perpetual false promise: X technology will help us do our meaningless tasks more efficiently, and free up time to spend on more meaningful work.

No. When we do meaningless tasks more efficiently it means we can allot less time to the work. And that meaningful work that woven so awkwardly into the meaningless tasks is now squeezed all the way out. Now we can do twice as much work in the same amount of time. And half the workforce can be cut.

That is how things actually go down.

Another unpleasant truth to understand: When there is a need for exploitative labor, people are exploited. When there is no need for exploitative labor, people are eliminated.

This is why equality is a reasonable political goal. Only roughly even distribution of power guarantees general human dignity. Equality is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When equality becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of envy and resentment, which is the dark heart of illiberal leftism.

If a free market actually delivers roughly even distribution of wealth, it is a good thing. If it delivers gross inequality, it is a bad thing. A free market is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When a free market becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of pure greed, which is the dark heart of — I’ll coin it, now: illibertarianism.

J’accuse

Ethics, History, Judaism

I wrote two long diatribes against supersessionism today, but I’ve thrown them out.

I’m just going to start by saying something simply and bluntly: There are not three religious faiths with equal claims to the Holy Land. There is one faith alone with a legitimate claim, and two with utterly ludicrous claims, based on violence, lies and delusions.

Allow me to explain.

The only reason the Holy Land is considered Holy is because Jewish scripture says so.

The only reason Christians and Muslims also think the Holy Land is holy is because they believe what Jewish scripture says about the holiness of the Holy Land. They believe this scripture because they stole it. They stole their scripture from the Jews, and they tried to steal the whole tradition and deprive the Jews of what Jews developed.

They did not simply say “We, too, see value the wisdom of this tradition, and wish to incorporate it into our new flavors of this faith.” Had they done that, everything would be different.

Of course, some modern Christians and Muslims have come to see things this way, and I respect the religions these two faiths have evolved to become. They are true, good and beautiful, and those of these faith partake of these qualities. None of the true and unflattering things I have to say about supersessionists apply to them.

But it must be said that both of these upstart faiths began as supersessionist. They believed their faith was not some new, improved version of Judaism, but rather its replacement. Supersessionist Christians think Christianity replaces Judaism, that Judaism is null and void as a faith, and Jews who continue practicing it are heretics who deserve the punishments of heretics. Supersessionist Muslims think the same thing.

And central to this doctrine is the belief that whatever belongs to the Jewish people — including scripture and territory — now belongs to them.

No European or Arab cared about the Holy Land until Europeans and Arabs converted en masse to Christianity and Islam. This happened thousands of years after the Jewish faith began its history. They are both late chapters of a much older story.

So Jews built a civilization on a small patch of land over thousands of years. They claim God enabled this to happen. You can get all secular about this and say God had nothing to do with it. Fine. But that only makes it even more the property of the Jewish people, doesn’t it?

Then Christians made up a religion that says the Jewish tradition was magically transferred over to them. If you think it really happened that way, congratulations, I can’t argue against that. But if you are secular, that makes this whole issue the furthest thing from a religious quibble. This makes it an act of political aggression, justified by the most spurious of religious claims.

And Islam is somehow even more spurious, and much more recent. The Muslim hoards were an invading foreign army, using the Jew’s own scripture which they stole for themselves, to justify stealing everything else belonging to the Jews.

And it did not stop there. Since the Jewish diaspora, followers of these supersessionist faiths have persecuted Jews wherever they tried to live. They resented the continued existence and flourishing of Jews. The hatred of Jews found innumerable channels of expression. You can come up with your own theories on why this would happen. Projections of guilt? Unconscious envy of the covenant and unconscious worries about the validity of one’s own status? Who knows? But antisemitism has been a real problem, and it continues to be a real problem. It has continued to break out sporadically wherever Jews have lived, however much they have tried to assimilate.

And this problem necessitated zionism. The outbreaks of antisemitism have always happened with little warning. And they were always accompanied by outbreaks of total indifference among folks who pretended to be friends and allies of Jews. Jews have learned and relearned in the hardest way that they never have friends and allies when they most need them. We have only ourselves.

During the last great outbreak of antisemitism, cowardice and indifference, when Jews needed a place to go, the United States refused. Canada refused. England refused.

And judging from how “friends” have behaved since October 7, 2023, they would refuse us again.

Had Israel existed, they would have been taken in.

And this is why Israel must exist.

And now, somehow, today’s antisemites blame Israel itself for antisemitism. Or Israel’s stubborn insistence on defending itself from constant attacks from these assholes. But how then do you explain Muslim’s 1942 collusion the German Nazis to murder all regional Jews even before Israel even existed? You can’t because you probably don’t know about it. You don’t have a dog in this fight.

So, actually, never mind. Israel doesn’t care what antisemites and indifferent cowards think. Israel will do what it takes to ensure its safe and prosperous existence. We might fail. But we are not counting on your loyalty, nor are we asking your permission, to succeed.