Amerika

Again, people confuse Right and Left because they have no idea what either is or what they believe. Right means order, which is larger than the individual; Left means defending the individual against that order. It really is that simple and any other dialogue misses the point: conservatives are realists, Leftists are individualists.

Some even go as far as the statement from one of the few Christian mystics worth reading, Bruce Charlton, who claims that the only authentic Right would be one that was based in dualism:

I have often noted that there can be no political Right that is genuinely distinct from the Left; unless it is rooted in religion.

In other words, what people call the Right (including the “far Right” – whatever that may be) are from a Christian perspective and at root, just a type of Leftism – that is, they are all this-worldly and aiming at hedonic outcomes (i.e. human psychological gratification).

This shows us the dangers of dualism; in dualism, there is an imperfect Earth and a perfect Heaven. This is commonly compared to body and mind, since the body decays but the soul endures, at least in religious theory. That however misses the point that both body and mind exist for a reason.

Those who believe in dualism see their mortal lives as an endurance test before they get to the good stuff after death. Whether or not an afterlife exists, this is dangerous thinking, since it rejects both survival and nature, setting the person up to not just ignore reality but actively resentfully defy it.

For a high-end thinker like Mr Charlton, dualism translates into trying to make himself as refined as possible in mental organization. He is trying to import Heaven into his Earthly body and make his mind clear of all animal and neurotic influences. This is how a smart person approaches a paradoxical philosophy.

However, only a handful of people will see that. What everyone else will see is a need to sacrifice physical reality for promises of Utopia in a symbolic world. This will lead them to destroy their physical world and themselves in the belief that they have found union with the symbols they adore.

With this in mind, it becomes clear that to a dualist there can be no belief except dualism, and they will consider it conservative merely because it competes with a similarly self-destructive Utopian vision, egalitarianism, on the Left.

Others argue that conservatism involves accepting the limits of our knowledge and relying on historical results instead of theory:

It is a network of commonly accepted attitudes, beliefs and practices that has grown up through strengthening of things that have worked and rejection of things that have led to conflict and failure. It therefore comprises a collection of habits that have proved useful in a huge variety of practical affairs, and a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive experience and thought. Through it we know subtle and fundamental features of the world that would otherwise escape us, and our understanding of those things takes on concrete and usable form.

The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on theory. Taking theory literally can be costly because it achieves clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to articulate. Such things can be important; the reason politics and morals are learned mostly by experience and imitation is that most of what we need to know about them consists in habits, attitudes and implicit presumptions that we couldn’t begin to put into words. There is no means other than tradition to accumulate, conserve and hand on such things.

This views the human brain as a great simplifier that reduces meaning in order to fit its descriptions of reality into handy symbols. This loss of nuance leads it to miss the cryptic details that turn out to be structurally important, and that in turn results in self-destructive obliviousness.

On the other hand, tradition describes cause-effect relationships. We see an event in the past, and notice how it turned out, and how reality responded to our attempts to deal with it. We remember those experimental results, like in the scientific method, and refine them over time.

In this way, tradition is a form of Darwinism: successful adaptations survive, unsuccessful ones do not, and less successful ones are gradually replaced when better ones become available. The gradual nature means that each adaptation is tested against all possibilities that it will encounter.

Like the difference between gene editing and selective breeding, this ensures that no one thing becomes the focus to the exclusion of all others. In gene editing, one gene is tweaked, but the consequences are only apparent over generations and frequently include unintended side effects.

Tradition works around this by testing whole things against all of life. It is more thorough than meritocracy, which is based on human-designed tests, symbolism designed by humans, or theory which fits more into language and the needs of the audience than completely into reality.

In this way, tradition continues the natural law of natural selection which applies to all notions, configurations, forms, and patterns: test against all of reality, keep what sticks.

One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical physics — position and speed, say — are selected from a menu of quantum possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.” As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a hallmark of classical behavior.

This idea, called quantum Darwinism (QD), explains a lot about why we experience the world the way we do rather than in the peculiar way it manifests at the scale of atoms and fundamental particles. Although aspects of the puzzle remain unresolved, QD helps heal the apparent rift between quantum and classical physics.

Instead of a purposeless universe, we see one where the process of life itself is a sorting and organizing of all that is into a coherent whole that is internally varied enough to avoid collapsing into randomness or repetition.

This fits into Platonism, which unlike neoplatonism or dualism holds that the world is monistic, with the body being a manifestation of something that exists elsewhere, and therefore an expression of it that in death is severed from the body and exists as information.

The Platonist view expresses a notion of information/knowledge and body as expressions of the same form, part of an immutable order which is the cause of our actions on Earth, but is also informed by them, much like the quantum tradeoff between work and information:

And when real philosophers consider all these things, will they not be led to make a reflection which they will express in words something like the following? ‘Have we not found,’ they will say, ‘a path of thought which seems to bring us and our argument to the conclusion, that while we are in the body, and while the soul is infected with the evils of the body, our desire will not be satisfied? and our desire is of the truth. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being: it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body; and by reason of all these impediments we have no time to give to philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we are at leisure and betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is always breaking in upon us, causing turmoil and confusion in our enquiries, and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the truth. It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body—the soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers, not while we live, but after death; for if while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows—either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth.’ For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure.

Most of Christianity is a simplified, commodified, and commercialized take on the following:

Suppose we consider the question whether the souls of men after death are or are not in the world below. There comes into my mind an ancient doctrine which affirms that they go from hence into the other world, and returning hither, are born again from the dead. Now if it be true that the living come from the dead, then our souls must exist in the other world, for if not, how could they have been born again? And this would be conclusive, if there were any real evidence that the living are only born from the dead; but if this is not so, then other arguments will have to be adduced.

Very true, replied Cebes.

Then let us consider the whole question, not in relation to man only, but in relation to animals generally, and to plants, and to everything of which there is generation, and the proof will be easier. Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? I mean such things as good and evil, just and unjust—and there are innumerable other opposites which are generated out of opposites. And I want to show that in all opposites there is of necessity a similar alternation; I mean to say, for example, that anything which becomes greater must become greater after being less.

The important thing about the Platonic argument is that its analogue to “Heaven” comes before life, not after, and the doctrine includes the idea of reincarnation as well as possible transfer to another type of place, since in the monist view all states of being are places in a vast cosmic map though not necessarily a linear one:

Yes, he said, Cebes, it is and must be so, in my opinion; and we have not been deluded in making these admissions; but I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence, and that the good souls have a better portion than the evil.

Cebes added: Your favorite doctrine, Socrates, that knowledge is simply recollection, if true, also necessarily implies a previous time in which we have learned that which we now recollect. But this would be impossible unless our soul had been in some place before existing in the form of man; here then is another proof of the soul’s immortality.

You will note familiar language that Ackbars, Juden, and Xoids later appropriated:

For if the soul exists before birth, and in coming to life and being born can be born only from death and dying, must she not after death continue to exist, since she has to be born again?

In the Platonic doctrine there is not just quantum Darwinism, but also the trading of work to gain information, following the Promethean or Luciferian model of eudaemonic sorting by the process of intelligence:

In theory, Maxwell’s demon can decrease the entropy of a system by opening and closing a door at appropriate times to separate hot and cold gas molecules. But as physicist Leó Szilárd pointed out in 1929, entropy does not decrease in such a situation because the demon’s measurement process requires information, which is a form of entropy.

Like the SZE, the quantum heat engine does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because entropy, in the form of information, never decreases in these systems. The physicists also note that the quantum heat engine is not cyclic, so the memory does not return to its initial maximally entangled state. In other words, the quantum information is not free, and work must be done to recover the initial state.

In other words, there is a cosmic reason for the existence of life and choice (like “free will” but for realists). Life exists to sort material, and that information relates to or is conveyed to the larger space in which physical existence is but one part.

Certain things work against this process. Socialism and egalitarianism inherently rejecting sorting; diversity does the same, and by interrupting the work-information cosmic cycle, it creates degenerate societies which fail as a result of their diversity and the ensuing low-IQ low-ability grey race zombie people that are common in the third world:

Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem. Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations.

Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans and Chechnya. Also look at the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare — I mean the beautiful mosaics — in Third World hellholes like Afghanistan, Rwanda and South Central, L.A.

“Diversity” is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: “Cancer is a strength!” “Pollution is our greatest asset!”

We see this best portrayal of this mixture of ennui, anomie, apathy, and fatalism in portrayals of modern people from Michel Houellebecq, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Crichton, Don DeLillo, and William S Burroughs, the first to advance the thermodynamic argument: society has lost not just its purpose, but its cosmic function.

Diversity is the destruction of information. This reflects exhaustion, or the breakdown of a system by entropy, which is both too much repetition and too many choices for any one to make any difference; entropy is what happens when complexity loses its hierarchical structure and becomes categorical, or a flat logical structure in which categories are both absolute and without relation to each other except for physical separation.

Robert Putnam warned us of entropic diversity and the loss of social capital (information! wisdom! knowledge!) through the obliteration of culture caused by replacing it with a big anticultural bag designed to fit the parts of all cultures that might be offended:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

Putnam claims the US has experienced a pronounced decline in “social capital,” a term he helped popularize. Social capital refers to the social networks — whether friendships or religious congregations or neighborhood associations — that he says are key indicators of civic well-being. When social capital is high, says Putnam, communities are better places to live. Neighborhoods are safer; people are healthier; and more citizens vote.

“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes.

In my view, then, the formulation persists:

• Conservatism: order. This is one order not many; it is not flat categories, but a hierarchy. The cosmic, natural, divine, moral, and human orders not only complement each other in parallel, but are extensions of the same structure; structure is that which is larger than the granular individual.
• Liberalism: individualism. They defend the granular individual against the imposition of cosmic, natural, divine, moral, and human order by arguing that the preferences, desires, judgments, feelings, responses, and emotions of the individual come first before others and before reality.

Do not expect this to make sense on one read. The people who get it have spent years reading Plato, thinking about philosophy, and getting degrees and life experience. Your mileage may vary, but like all knowledge, this is esoteric and takes time to sink in and does so to varying degrees.

As Judge Smails says, “the world needs ditch-diggers too.” Those who are biologically/genetically liberal will not get it, but that is fine because they need to be picking turnips and cotton. Personally I dig my own ditches but that is because hard work is a path to mental clarity.

For context, you may find articles by other writers the most persuasive, after you finish your Plato and Nietzsche of course, and more parallelism might differentiate holism from narcissistic, solipsistic, egoistic, codependent, and abusive — as it always is! — individualism, the opposite of Darwinian adaptation and the root of what BoomerCons call “collectivism.” (Hint: pillows.)

So what do conservatives believe? Nothing: we adapt to the order around us, and trust in it to be good (faith). We do not need religion to be what we are, but we will always defend conserving the time-honored, including the idea of religion (but not a specific organized religion), culture, race, ethnicity, and above all else, realism.

Tags: ann coulter, cosmic sorting, darwinian adaptation, diversity, don delillo, entropy, Idiocracy, information, quantum darwinism, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, robert putnam, social darwinism, thomas pynchon, william s. burroughs