Author: Bill Vallicella

Machiavelli on the Pleasure of Study

Although he was decidedly of the world and not merely in it, Machiavelli knew how to retreat from its brutality into the serene precincts of the life of the mind and lose himself there, for a time, in conversations with the ancients.

I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them . . . and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus.

See here.

Related: Studiousness as Prophylaxis against the Debilities of old Age

The Age of Decadence

Jeff Groom:

Emphases and comments added.

Immigration increases to levels too high for effective assimilation, and new ideas and cultural norms displace those of the founding stock. Like Robert Putnam, Glubb stresses that immigrants aren’t inferior, but erode cultural cohesion. Indeed, Glubb notes that “many of the foreign immigrants will probably belong to races originally conquered by and absorbed into the empire” and “when decline sets in, it is extraordinary how the memory of ancient wars, perhaps centuries before, is suddenly revived, and local or provincial movements appear demanding secession or independence.”

This was not true in the past because immigrants were vetted and assimilation was demanded.

A decline in power and wealth combined with internal strife results in a feedback loop creating pessimism and “frivolity.” A populace that cannot be roused to action slips into escapism instead. Glubb compares Roman mobs’ demand for “bread and circuses” to British and American consumption of soccer and baseball. He even writes that “the heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor,” rather than a statesman, a general, or a literary genius as in previous eras. Remember, Fate of Empires was published in 1977. 

Panem et circenses give way to beer, football, legalized dope, and 24/7 pornography, all  to keep the masses distracted and sedated.

Other hallmarks of the failing empire include a rise of the welfare state and a decline in religion. Check and check. The former affluence of the nation leads the populace to the “impression that it will always be automatically rich” and “causes the declining empire to spend lavishly on its own benevolence, until such time as the economy collapses.” These trends are easily observable in the United States. What is the Fed’s balance sheet by the way? Worse, does anyone care?

The religion of the Founders is banned from the public square while the religions of invaders are given a pass.

Glubb notes that it is doubtful that collapse can be avoided by studying the meta-history of empires. Rather, he writes that “in our present state of mental chaos… we divide ourselves into nations, parties or communities and fight, hate and vilify one another over developments which may perhaps be divinely ordained and which seem to us, if we take a broader view, completely uncontrollable and inevitable.”

Events are unfolding in ways we can just barely understand. Our technology has a life of its own and is altering our language and modes of social interaction. Marshall McLuhan should see us now! We become ever more dependent on an incredibly complex  and fragile technology while giving no thought about how easy it would be to bring it crashing down. Instead we worry about such phantoms as 'systemic racism.'

If this sounds pessimistic, don’t forget the last three words of Glubb’s title are “Search for Survival.” It is far better to see the world with clear eyes than foolishly hope for a return to “High Noon.” Progressives and populists tend to agree that the future can be better; they just disagree on the route to that better future. We will survive if we are honest in what we face. Yet, questions remain how to proceed. Should we partition the country into separate nations in the hopes of mitigating what may be a Spanish-style civil war or a soft police state of tech overlords?

We need a conversation about partition.

Notable thinkers like Charles Murray suggest that only a religious revival can save the United States. If Glubb is correct that wholesale salvage is impossible, should we protect the embers of Christianity via Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” in the hope that future generations can one day enjoy the full light of Western Civilization? Glubb seems to insinuate this as well, noting that in the depths of decadence the “seeds of religious revival” are sown. As our nation approaches 250 years—a quarter millennium—we should be grateful to have lived in what may be the greatest nation God has known. Perhaps, after the coming unpleasantness, we will find something even greater.

Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

On Transcending Tribalism

Jonathan Haidt:

Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings.

The key, as Cicero observed, is proximity, and a great deal of modern research backs him up. Students are more likely to become friends with the student whose dorm room is one door away than with the student whose room is four doors away. People who have at least one friend from the other political party are less likely to hate the supporters of that party.

But tragically, Americans are losing their proximity to those on the other side and are spending more time in politically purified settings. [. . .]

Haidt is right that tribalism can be transcended, at least to some extent, and that proximity and interaction can facilitate the transcending.  But he is far more optimistic that I am.

What Haidt ignores is that there is no comity without commonality, as I like to put it.  You and I can live and work together in harmony only within a common space of shared values and assumptions and recognized facts.  But that common space is shrinking.

Take any 'hot button' issue, Second Amendment rights, for example.  What do I have in common with the anti-gunner who favors confiscation of all civilian firearms, or only slightly less radically, wants to ban all hand guns or semi-automatic weapons?  To me it is evident that my right to life grounds a right to self-defense, and with it a right to acquire the appropriate means of self-defense.  If you deny this, then we have no common ground, at least not on this topic.  On this topic, we would then be at loggerheads.  If you then work politically or extra-politically  to violate what here in the States are called Second Amendment rights, then you become my enemy.  And the consequences of enmity can become unpleasant in the extreme. Push can come to shove, and shove to shoot.

In a situation like this, proximity and interaction only exacerbate the problem.  Even the calm interaction of scholarly argument and counter-argument does no good.  No matter how carefully and rigorously I argue my position, I will not succeed in convincing the opponent, with only a few exceptions.  This is a fact of experience over a wide range of controversial topics, and not just in politics.  The only good thing that comes of the dialectical interaction is a clarification and deeper understanding of one's position and what it entails.  If you think, say, that semi-automatic weapons ought to be banned for civilian use, then you and I will never find common ground.  But I will perfect my understanding of my position and its presuppositions and better understand what I reject in yours.

After we have clarified, but not resolved, our differences, anger at the intransigence of the other is the likely upshot if we continue to interact in close proximity whether in the same academic department, the same church, the same club, the same neighborhood, the same family . . . .  This is why there are schisms and splits and factions and wars and all manner of contention.

Anger at the intransigence of the other can then lead on to the thought that  there must be something morally defective, and perhaps also intellectually defective, about the opponent if he holds, say, that a pre-natal human is just a clump of cells.  One advances — if that is the word — to the view that the opponent is morally censurable for holding the position he holds, that he is being willfully morally obtuse and deserves moral condemnation.  And then the word 'evil' may slip in and the word 'lie': "The bastard is not just wrong; he is an evil son-of-a-bitch for promoting the lie that an unborn child is just a clump of cells, or a disposable part of woman's body like a wart." The arguably false statements of the other get treated as lies and therefore as statements at the back of which in an intent to deceive. And from there it ramps up to 'Hillary is Satan' and 'Trump is Hitler.'

One possible cure for  this unproductive warfare is mutual, voluntary, segregation via a return to federalism.   I develop the thought in A Case for Voluntary Segregation.  I say 'possible' because I am not sure the federalist route is sufficient.  Secession and partition are other options, not to mention the one no sane person could want: full-on hot civil war.  We are already beyond cold civil war, what with the Left's violent Stalinist erasure of monuments and memorials (and not just that).

So while Haidt is right that proximity and interaction can promote mutual understanding and mitigate hostility, that is true only up to a point and works only within a common space of shared assumptions, values, and recognized facts.  (His examples, by the way, were poorly chosen: Romeo and Juliet were young Italians; the French, German, and British soldiers were Europeans.)  Absent the common space, the opposite is true: proximity and interaction are precisely what must be avoided to preserve peace.  

The Problem and Three Main Solutions

The problem is how to transcend tribalism.  I count three main solutions, the Liberal, the Alt Right, and the Sane (which is of course my view!)

There is first what I take to be Haidt's rather silly liberal solution, namely, that what will bring us together is proximity and interaction. He assumes that if we all come together and get to know each other  we will overcome tribalism.  This borders on utopian nonsense.  It is precisely because of proximity and interaction that many decide to self-segregate.  The more I know about certain individuals and groups the less I want to have to do with them.  The Marxist thugs of Black Lives Matter, for example.  By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.'  'Thug' means thug.  Look it up.  The Antifa fascists are another example. The anti-white White Fragility racists. I could go on.

At the other extreme we find the 'alties' and neo-reactionaries.  They have a sound insight, namely, that there are unassimilable elements and that they must be kept out.  For example, Sharia-supporting Muslims are unassimilable into the U. S. because their values are antithetical to ours, perhaps not all of their values, but enough to make for huge problems.   

The success of e pluribus unum depends on the nature of the pluribus.  A viable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many.  (Cute formulation, eh?) The members of the manifold must be unifiable under some umbrella of common values, assumptions, and recognized facts.  One proposition nation cannot be made out of many tribes of immigrants unless the many tribes of immigrants accept OUR values, American values, and our propositions.  The tribalism is overcome or at least mitigated by acceptance of a unifying set of American values and ideas.

The alt-rightists, however, do not really offer a solution to the problem of transcending tribalism since their 'solution' is to embrace an opposing tribalism. They are right about the reality of race, as against the foolish notion that race is a social construct, but they push this realism in an ugly and extreme direction when they construe American identity as white identity, where this excludes Jews. American identity is rooted in a set of ideas and values.  It must be granted, however, that not all racial and ethnic groups are equally able to assimilate and implement these ideas and values.  Immigration policy must favor those that are.  

The sane way is the middle way.  To liberals we ought to concede that diversity is a value, but at the same time insist that it is a value that has to be kept in check by the opposing value of unity.   Muslims who refuse to accept our values must not be allowed to immigrate.  They have no right to immigrate, but we have every right to select those who will benefit us.  That is just common sense.  The good sort of diversity is not enhanced by the presence of terror-prone fanatics. Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. 

What we need, then, to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, but less; fewer 'conversations' not more; less government, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law.

Will any of this happen?  Trump has taken steps in the right direction.  Flawed as he is, he is all we have, and best we have who is ready, willing, able, and electable. You know what you have to do come November.

The Cancel Culture’s Icons are Subject to Cancellation

Arnold Ahlert:

“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” —Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

The American Left has embraced a cancel culture whereby those who evince even the slightest deviation from moral perfection, no matter how long ago it occurred, is grounds for turning ordinary Americans into pariahs — and obliterating the historical contributions of prominent ones. That this moral perfection is defined by a generation of progressives with contempt for American history and culture, with no remorse for 60 million abortions, and with anarchy, looting, arson, and murder framed as “peaceful protests,” is beyond arrogant — even more so when it’s applied to historical figures who lived in wholly different times. What about progressive icons? Shouldn’t the same deficiencies precipitate the same cancellations?

Among the Iconoclasts

Glancing at my referrals, I noticed a link from a weblog by the name of Idlings. The entry, Among the Iconoclasts, caught my eye, and a good entry it is. Excerpt:

You can see that the battle is already lost in the rising generation of ideologues: kids chanting slogans and marching lockstep round the elementary school; college sophomores spitting on a cultural inheritance they don’t understand; younger members of the newspaper editorial staff booting old-school liberals out the door for the impertinence of still believing, a little, in free speech and open debate. Rather than being educated into a sense of common purpose and shared endeavor, the young today are indoctrinated into faction and grievance.

The battle may well be lost. But we don't know that it is. So we ought to fight on.  But the Political does not exhaust the Real, and so the fight against our political enemies must remain a part-time affair.  This puts us conservatives at a disadvantage, but it would be worse to become like those we oppose.

So contemplate the constellations; read the great books our enemies would burn; retire from the desperate cities into nature. And if you can, look beyond time's horizon to the Source of this passing show the vanity of which will be verified by its vanishing.

You’ve been Cancelled and Sacked; Why Grovel?

Here:

Even liking the wrong tweets can cost you your career. Mike McCulloch, a math lecturer at Plymouth University, was recently investigated by his employer for liking a tweet that read “All lives matter.” Here in Canada, Michael Korenberg, chair of the board of governors for the University of British Columbia, was forced to step down because he liked some tweets praising Donald Trump. Nobody is safe—not even the phenomenally popular author J.K. Rowling, who has been hounded and harassed for saying that, when it comes to trans women, biology is still a thing.

My own field, journalism, has become notoriously full of little inquisitors. In the most disturbing example, James Bennet, opinion editor of the most important paper in the world, the New York Times, lost his job in June for publishing an opinion piece that many of the younger staffers didn’t like. It was written by a Republican senator, Tom Cotton, who argued that Donald Trump would be justified in deploying military troops to cities if local police could not maintain order in the streets. Staffers claimed the piece was so toxic that it put some of their colleagues’ lives in danger. Like many others, Mr. Bennet departed with a grovelling apology.

If you think the radical mob is now editing your daily paper, you might well be right. Last month, Stan Wischnowski, top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was forced to resign over a headline that read, “Buildings Matter, Too.” All of this is dolefully reminiscent of China’s Cultural Revolution, during which students denounced their elders and made them parade through the streets in dunce hats before they were packed off to the pig farms for re-education.

And there is no statute of limitations. Last week, Boeing. Co.’s communications chief, Niel Golightly, abruptly resigned after an anonymous employee filed an ethics complaint over an article he wrote in 1987, 33 years ago. In it, the former military pilot had expressed the opinion that women shouldn’t serve in combat (a mainstream position at the time). “My argument was embarrassingly wrong and offensive,” he said in another cringeworthy mea culpa. “The article is not reflective of who I am.”

If you have lost your good, well-paying job, and are now persona non grata among the bien-pensant, why grovel? The worst has already happened. The Left has yet to build its re-education camps; so at the moment you needn't fear incarceration and 're-education.'  

So why  the grovelling apologies as in the fourth  and sixth examples?

Why did Golightly go so lightly?

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

Loosely translated: No pain, no gain. Der Fleiß (Fleiss) is German for diligence. Thus 'Heidi Fleiss' is a near aptronym, diligent as she was in converting concupiscence into currency.

Another interesting German word is Sitzfleisch. It too is close in meaning to diligence, staying power. Fleisch is meat and Sitz, seat, is from the verb sitzen, to sit. One who has Sitzfleisch, then, has sitting meat. Think of a scholarly grind who sits for long hours poring over tome after tome of arcana.

And that reminds me of a story. Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann were German philosophers of high repute, though Scheler was more the genius and Hartmann more the grind. As the story goes, Scheler once disparaged Hartmann thusly, "My genius and your Sitzfleisch would make a great philosopher!"

But you are probably more interested in the later antics of Miss Fleiss than in dead old white German philosophers.  According to this undoubtedly reputable source,

Fleiss moved from Hollywood to Pahrump, Nevada where she lives on a bird sanctuary and cares for parrots.

Although I've been everywhere, man, crossed the deserts bare, man, I never did make it to Pahrump.  Now that's a name verging on an aptronym that I could have some fun with. But I will resist temptation.

Gotta go. Time to mount the mountain bike. Ohne Fleiß kein Preis.

A Need of the Flesh?

According to Vanity Fair, Jeffrey Epstein needed three orgasms per day by three different girls.  That need would be ill-described as a need of the flesh.  It would be better described as an artificially induced 'need' of a degraded spirit who freely attempted to extinguish his spirit in the diaspora of sensuousness.  With apologies to St. Paul, it is not so much that the flesh is weak, but that the spirit is perverted.

POTUS at Rushmore: A Great Speech

If you agree with the speech, you are either an American or appreciative of American values; if not, a hate-America leftist.  The speech could be taken as a test of where one stands.

There was nothing "dark and divisive" about it. Trump is not a divider, but the Great Clarifier. He is not a divider because we have long been divided.  Part of what he has accomplished is to make clear the division and to give a forceful voice to the American patriot.  A patriot is neither a chauvinist nor  a jingoist; a patriot is one who loves his country with an ordinate love, a love consistent with criticism of country and its government.

If you complain that Trump cannot unite us, that is certainly true; no one can. Unity is possible only under the umbrella of shared principles, and Left and Right do not share principles. To invert the metaphor, the citizens of the USA no longer occupy common ground.  Will the Left give up its illusions and lies and come to our side? No chance of that, as little as any chance that we will give up our cherished principles for lies and illusions.

Here:

But as a statement of America’s founding principles, Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was as eloquent and powerful a speech as any elected official has made in a long, long while, precisely because it contained, at its core, the emotional truth every immigrant holds to be self-evident: Knowing that it’s here and only here that accidents of birth can be transcended with relative ease and the full bloom of one’s genius allowed to flourish precisely because the cultural soil is so rich and so varied and contains multitudes.

[. . .]

To reject this vision as dark is to turn your back on America’s foundational covenant, the same spirit that animated anyone from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr., which, sadly, is the case today among so many of the guardians of our institutions.

And here:

Donald Trump did not launch the latest culture war: The left-leaning press, political foes, Marxist-believing activists, and corporate and educational institutions did. When President Trump stood before a patriotic crowd on Friday night, under the watchful eyes of our country’s greatest presidents, his pronouncement that the silent majority will not retreat or surrender our founding principles was not divisive. It was American.

Point of No Return

The 2020 presidential election will not be Biden versus Trump; Biden is but a shell, a puppet, a has-been on cognitive life support. The election will be Biden's keepers versus Trump. But even this observation does not cut deeply enough. 2020 will be a referendum on whether the people want the preservation of the Republic or its dissolution.  Conrad Black:

President Trump spoke nothing but the truth at Mount Rushmore on Friday when he said “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they are doing this but some know exactly what they are doing.” 

It is inconceivable that the FBI—particularly with the opprobrium it has rightly attracted for its antics in the Russian collusion canard—is not close to being able to indict the leadership of Black Lives Matter and Antifa for sedition and incitement to a range of violent crimes, including murder and arson. It is also inconceivable that the country could fail to choose the president’s championship of patriotic continuity with strong emphasis on racial equality and the highest standards of civilized law enforcement over the nihilism and Americo-phobic mob rule of the post-George Floyd rioters whom the Democrats in their decadent insipidity have appeased.

The almost inexpressibly contemptible Democratic de Blasio regime in New York City has reduced the police budget by $1 billion as violent crime has more than doubled. The president’s reopening of the economy brought back nearly 5 million workers out of unemployment in June and this process should continue. The fatality rates of the pandemic have declined by nearly 90 percent from their high, with spread of the virus now concentrated amongst those who can best resist it. The subject of pathetic Democratic hand-wringing, the surge in new cases is effectively irrelevant other than that it increases national immunity to it.  

Former conservatives and pillars of the pre-Trump Republican Party are now facing the point of no return. If they confirm their support for the almost leaderless Democratic Party now closely allied with pestilence and racist mayhem, they will never have any political influence in any party again. The time to choose between irreconcilable opposites is almost at hand.

Words of the Day

Thanks to, or rather, because of 'liberal' dumbing-down, people these days have terribly limited vocabularies. Here are a couple you should know. Both definitions from Merriam-Webster.

Definition of avulsion

: a forcible separation or detachment: such as
a : a tearing away of a body part accidentally or surgically
b : a sudden cutting off of land by flood, currents, or change in course of a body of water especially : one separating land from one person's property and joining it to another's. 

Definition of affine

 (Entry 1 of 2)

: a relative by marriage : in-law

affine

adjective

Definition of affine (Entry 2 of 2)

: of, relating to, or being a transformation (such as a translation, a rotation, or a uniform stretching) that carries straight lines into straight lines and parallel lines into parallel lines but may alter distance between points and angles between lines affine geometry.
 
Here is an interesting use of 'affine' that I found this morning in  Dietrich von Hildebrand, In Defense of Purity (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1962, p. 37):
 
But not only are insensibility and purity in no way identical; insensibility [Unsinnlichkeit] . . . does not even constitute an environment particularly favorable to the virtue of purity. For it is not even the temperament  which is affine to that virtue and which makes it easier. That is to say, it is not the temperamental counterpart of purity.