• "Polarization does not change people. It does not cause them to hate each other. Instead, polarization is an unveiling." First-time reader here, I'm going to have to grapple with this some more.
• My model of political ideology is that it is down-stream from media institutions, including churches, blogs, mainstream media, streamers, authors, publishing houses, etc. You mention that people have genetic predilections toward some narratives over others, but even accepting the role that nature has to play, it seems that ideologic exacerbation of these tendencies to the point of civil war would be a bad thing. How do you reveal people's differences (gender, race, personality) without leading to physical violence?
• Wokism is the idea that when there are differences between people, you should defer to the weaker party. This is the opposite of social Darwinism, where you always defer to the stronger party. The problem with social Darwinism is that it creates instability -- the #2 guy is always trying to assassinate the #1 guy. Wokism, on the other hand, creates hyper-stability.
• Prior to wokism, Christianity served this stabilizing function, and even in Greek paganism, there was an ethic of being kind to widows and orphans, and being kind to guests (as the guest might be Zeus in disguise, a kind of Rawlsian Golden Rule that if you don't treat every guest like Zeus, Zeus might show up and punish you).
• If wokism is not stable (unlike classical liberalism, which has been around longer), is there a way to revert to a more stable form? If not, what would be the next form? Maybe a synthesis is needed.
1) How do you reveal people's differences (gender, race, personality) without leading to physical violence?
This is the hardest problem of political theory and I tend to believe historical answers are right. At least considering the perspective that America is the perfect regime (i.e. the West Coast Straussian perspective) is worthwhile here.
Nonetheless, explaining *why* the American regime works and how it interacts with perceived or real inequality is not a question that can be answered easily. My short answer is that we should at least consider marginally more honesty about individual or group differences that have proven to be more stable than the present.
2) If wokism is not stable (unlike classical liberalism, which has been around longer), is there a way to revert to a more stable form?
I never thought wokism was even a stable ideology in the left-wing elite. I think we're already seeing the next major form of left-wing ideology, the "democracy of institutions".
Good article! The churches around DC have definitely been corrupted by politics, but I'm still not sure whether liberalism created the metaphysical void or simply inhabited it. In the 19th century many churches reacted poorly to the Industrial Revolution and dramatically fell in status. If Harvard had kept mandatory Unitarian church attendance many institutions would probably be far more Christian and less liberal today. Then again, it might have been inevitable with multiple religions. I have a theory that Jefferson came up with the idea of separation of church and state as a way to try to lock the Catholics out of power because it's one of the most Unitarian ideas you can have.
Classical liberalism didn't create a metaphysical void. It displaced the previous framework for how decisions and especially exercises of political power could be questioned or justified, how to adjudicate related questions and controversies, and who was most appropriate to do so, and to what extent they had just authority to issue these opinions in a manner to which others should be expected to defer. It attempted to replace "the magisterium" with what I call a "transmagisterium" that attempted to follow the standards of rigorous empiricist (i.e., "objectivist") dialectic and then make the fundamental error by assuming it could be intellectually coherent to apply those underlying assumptions to irreducibly non-empirical political questions, with many attempts over centuries deploying a variety of approaches (e.g., consequentialism, utilitarianism, welfare economics, etc.) all ending, as they inevitably must, in insoluble dead ends or just a mass of delusions.
This pendulum had swung over and over in the world's various legal (and power-legitimating) traditions for thousands of years. The formalists run into the trouble of justifying formalism without divine revelation, and their winning argument is that, as any trial lawyer knows, if doing what you want requires you to play the game the right way to manipulate procedural outcomes, and at some point that requires you to submit the right kind of evidence, then you do everything in your power to deliver the necessary evidence in the procedurally-dictacted acceptable and admissible manner, even if that means telling lies, making it up, or otherwise conspiring to defraud the tribunal. That is, it creates the motive for epistemic corruption. If I can rely on formal authority, then I don't have to justify myself with empirical evidence and arguments, then I will leave the people and institutions interested in answering such questions alone. If I do have to rely on such evidence and arguments, then I get to generate a cover story that lets my ideology, power plays, or pursuit of personal venal interests masquerade as "objectively correct policy" and shield the irreducibly political and sneak it past your intellectual defenses by wearing the uniform of expert authority-sanctified empirical "facts", as if they were technocratic solutions to problems in social engineering in perfect analogy to the best available technical solutions for problems in mechanical engineering.
The assumption was the society's epistemic institutions were robust and healthy enough to indefinitely remain tethered to objective reality and thus separate from politics and resistant to attempts at corruption from power's ambitions, thereby reliably serving the function of a limiting roadblock. But there is no diode or check valve between power and epistemics, and if the stakes are high enough, power will not sit idle to be thwarted and will simply work to exercise a corrupting influence further and further upstream, one way or another, manipulating the most socially accepted truth of all power-exercise-legitimation claims, usually by manipulating the institutional ecosystem processes determining who gets selected to win the credentials and to occupy the positions perceived to grant exclusive authority to make such claims, and by arranging the framework of personal incentives, carrots and sticks, that supply the right motivations for these right- thinking people to echo, amplify, signal-boost, and participate in the continuous manufacturing and bolstering of the perception of solid "the science is settled" consensus among all the highest status honest experts, with all claims in dissent emanating from not good-faith expert contrarians, but either from liars (at trial, the hired-gun mercenary expert witness who will happily testify to whatever you need him to say), or else the incompetent and/or mentally unwell crowd of kooks and cranks.
"We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence." - Sam Harris
It is amazing that he does not realize that people can just do there own different things. He has the metaphysics of consensus but when thinking hard about his morality he comes to a 3d moral landscape that has many different mountains of goodness but that is theoretical in his day to day life he fights against heathens to his one true god of consensus.
This was very interesting. I hadn't considered the dynamics of the desire for consensus in our politics and organizations.
I wonder if the feminization of Western society has something to do with the drive for consensus? Consensus IS a value that seems to be a premium one among modern people, who are uncomfortable with uncertainty or conflict or debate. Could this just be a feature of a broader social shift, as we empower new kinds of leaders and move deeper into bureaucratization?
• "Polarization does not change people. It does not cause them to hate each other. Instead, polarization is an unveiling." First-time reader here, I'm going to have to grapple with this some more.
• My model of political ideology is that it is down-stream from media institutions, including churches, blogs, mainstream media, streamers, authors, publishing houses, etc. You mention that people have genetic predilections toward some narratives over others, but even accepting the role that nature has to play, it seems that ideologic exacerbation of these tendencies to the point of civil war would be a bad thing. How do you reveal people's differences (gender, race, personality) without leading to physical violence?
• Wokism is the idea that when there are differences between people, you should defer to the weaker party. This is the opposite of social Darwinism, where you always defer to the stronger party. The problem with social Darwinism is that it creates instability -- the #2 guy is always trying to assassinate the #1 guy. Wokism, on the other hand, creates hyper-stability.
• Prior to wokism, Christianity served this stabilizing function, and even in Greek paganism, there was an ethic of being kind to widows and orphans, and being kind to guests (as the guest might be Zeus in disguise, a kind of Rawlsian Golden Rule that if you don't treat every guest like Zeus, Zeus might show up and punish you).
• If wokism is not stable (unlike classical liberalism, which has been around longer), is there a way to revert to a more stable form? If not, what would be the next form? Maybe a synthesis is needed.
1) How do you reveal people's differences (gender, race, personality) without leading to physical violence?
This is the hardest problem of political theory and I tend to believe historical answers are right. At least considering the perspective that America is the perfect regime (i.e. the West Coast Straussian perspective) is worthwhile here.
Nonetheless, explaining *why* the American regime works and how it interacts with perceived or real inequality is not a question that can be answered easily. My short answer is that we should at least consider marginally more honesty about individual or group differences that have proven to be more stable than the present.
2) If wokism is not stable (unlike classical liberalism, which has been around longer), is there a way to revert to a more stable form?
I never thought wokism was even a stable ideology in the left-wing elite. I think we're already seeing the next major form of left-wing ideology, the "democracy of institutions".
https://www.fromthenew.world/p/poltiical-theory-for-the-contemporary
https://www.fromthenew.world/p/political-theory-for-the-institutional
https://www.fromthenew.world/p/political-theory-for-the-institutional-b5d
Good article! The churches around DC have definitely been corrupted by politics, but I'm still not sure whether liberalism created the metaphysical void or simply inhabited it. In the 19th century many churches reacted poorly to the Industrial Revolution and dramatically fell in status. If Harvard had kept mandatory Unitarian church attendance many institutions would probably be far more Christian and less liberal today. Then again, it might have been inevitable with multiple religions. I have a theory that Jefferson came up with the idea of separation of church and state as a way to try to lock the Catholics out of power because it's one of the most Unitarian ideas you can have.
Classical liberalism didn't create a metaphysical void. It displaced the previous framework for how decisions and especially exercises of political power could be questioned or justified, how to adjudicate related questions and controversies, and who was most appropriate to do so, and to what extent they had just authority to issue these opinions in a manner to which others should be expected to defer. It attempted to replace "the magisterium" with what I call a "transmagisterium" that attempted to follow the standards of rigorous empiricist (i.e., "objectivist") dialectic and then make the fundamental error by assuming it could be intellectually coherent to apply those underlying assumptions to irreducibly non-empirical political questions, with many attempts over centuries deploying a variety of approaches (e.g., consequentialism, utilitarianism, welfare economics, etc.) all ending, as they inevitably must, in insoluble dead ends or just a mass of delusions.
This pendulum had swung over and over in the world's various legal (and power-legitimating) traditions for thousands of years. The formalists run into the trouble of justifying formalism without divine revelation, and their winning argument is that, as any trial lawyer knows, if doing what you want requires you to play the game the right way to manipulate procedural outcomes, and at some point that requires you to submit the right kind of evidence, then you do everything in your power to deliver the necessary evidence in the procedurally-dictacted acceptable and admissible manner, even if that means telling lies, making it up, or otherwise conspiring to defraud the tribunal. That is, it creates the motive for epistemic corruption. If I can rely on formal authority, then I don't have to justify myself with empirical evidence and arguments, then I will leave the people and institutions interested in answering such questions alone. If I do have to rely on such evidence and arguments, then I get to generate a cover story that lets my ideology, power plays, or pursuit of personal venal interests masquerade as "objectively correct policy" and shield the irreducibly political and sneak it past your intellectual defenses by wearing the uniform of expert authority-sanctified empirical "facts", as if they were technocratic solutions to problems in social engineering in perfect analogy to the best available technical solutions for problems in mechanical engineering.
The assumption was the society's epistemic institutions were robust and healthy enough to indefinitely remain tethered to objective reality and thus separate from politics and resistant to attempts at corruption from power's ambitions, thereby reliably serving the function of a limiting roadblock. But there is no diode or check valve between power and epistemics, and if the stakes are high enough, power will not sit idle to be thwarted and will simply work to exercise a corrupting influence further and further upstream, one way or another, manipulating the most socially accepted truth of all power-exercise-legitimation claims, usually by manipulating the institutional ecosystem processes determining who gets selected to win the credentials and to occupy the positions perceived to grant exclusive authority to make such claims, and by arranging the framework of personal incentives, carrots and sticks, that supply the right motivations for these right- thinking people to echo, amplify, signal-boost, and participate in the continuous manufacturing and bolstering of the perception of solid "the science is settled" consensus among all the highest status honest experts, with all claims in dissent emanating from not good-faith expert contrarians, but either from liars (at trial, the hired-gun mercenary expert witness who will happily testify to whatever you need him to say), or else the incompetent and/or mentally unwell crowd of kooks and cranks.
"We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence." - Sam Harris
It is amazing that he does not realize that people can just do there own different things. He has the metaphysics of consensus but when thinking hard about his morality he comes to a 3d moral landscape that has many different mountains of goodness but that is theoretical in his day to day life he fights against heathens to his one true god of consensus.
The jump from Schmitt to Strauss reminded me of Thiel's essay "The Straussian Moment"!
Great article.
Thank you!
This was very interesting. I hadn't considered the dynamics of the desire for consensus in our politics and organizations.
I wonder if the feminization of Western society has something to do with the drive for consensus? Consensus IS a value that seems to be a premium one among modern people, who are uncomfortable with uncertainty or conflict or debate. Could this just be a feature of a broader social shift, as we empower new kinds of leaders and move deeper into bureaucratization?
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/feminism-as-entitlement-pt-4