Forever Becoming: Deneen

Showing posts with label Deneen. Show all posts

Uncontained

Contained - Uncontained
Receptive - Formative

Uncover - Create

Imitate - Imagine

Complete - Incomplete

Preserve - Innovate

Fixed - Plastic

Closed - Open

Past - Future

Old - New

Society - Personality

Masculine - Feminine

John Locke made clear that the new political and economic system he proposed in his Second treatise of Government, liberalism’s foundational text, would result in a different ruling class. In one of its key chapters, “Of Property,” he divided the world into two sorts of persons: the “industrious and the rational” and “the querulous and contentious.”

In the world of prehistory, he wrote, both kinds of characters might have existed in some number, but a subsistence economy marked above all by absence of private property made it impossible to tell them apart.

In such a world, each person gathers only enough food and requirements for each passing day, and any differences of talent, ability, and promise are wholly unrealized. Locke offers the Indians in the Americas as an example of such a “pre-history”: subsistence societies in which neither "industriousness and rationality” nor "querulousness and contentiousness” can become salient.

In such a world, a potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is so busy hunting or fishing for each day's meal that his potential goes wholly unrealized.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.136

Forms of oppressive “opinion” were mainly manifest in everyday morality—what Mill witheringly criticized as “Custom.” While Mill at times argued that a good society needed a balance of "Progress” and “Custom,” in the main, he saw custom as the enemy of human liberty, and progress as a basic aim of modern society.

To follow custom was to be fundamentally unreflective and mentally stagnant. “The human faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is a custom, makes no choice.”

The unleashing of spontaneous, creative, unpredictable, unconventional, often offensive forms of individuality was Mill's goal. Extraordinary individuals - the most educated, the most creative, the most adventurous, even the most powerful - freed from the rule of Custom, might transform society.

“Persons of genius,” Mill acknowledges, “are always likely to be a small minority”; yet such people, who are “more individual than any other people,” less capable of “fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides,” require “an atmosphere of freedom.”

Society must be remade for the benefit of this small, but in Mill’s view vital, number. A society based on custom constrained individuality, and those who craved most to be liberated from its shackles were not “ordinary” people but people who thrived on breaking out of the customs that otherwise governed society. Mill called for a society premised around “experiments in living”: society as a test tube for the sake of geniuses who are “more individual.”

We live today in the world Mill proposed. Everywhere, at every moment, we are to engage in experiments in living.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.145-6

For Cassirer the unity of culture across the separate spheres inter alia of science, technology and art is given by the human capacity for symbolic self-expression, our capacity to create whole worlds of objective meaning.

Cassirer derived from Kant this image of the human being’s constructivist or formative powers of world-making. Heidegger by contrast insisted on the image of the human being as gifted with a receptive openness to the world. Receptivity is the attitude which allows things to appear rather than challenging them forth.

The two normative images of humanity thus describe two fundamental relationships to the world, spontaneity and receptivity, and thus two fundamentally opposed understandings of technology, tied in the case of Heidegger to an originary ontology of disclosure and in the case of Cassirer to a ‘modernist ontology of construction.’

If Cassirer offers us a modern answer, it is not one premised on a distinction between ancient and modern technology. On the contrary, the very first use of tools set in train an ongoing process of revealing as unconcealment, that is, the uncovering of what is present but hitherto concealed in the world.

The nature waiting to be shaped and given form by technology is thereby revealed as essentially incomplete. From the beginning technological ‘discovery’ signifies the experimental path of formation and transformation mediated by the essential plasticity of nature.

The spirit of technology therefore resides for Cassirer in its capacity to reveal the latent in nature, waiting to be actualized. This spirit requires an attitude capable of withdrawing from a given reality in order to posit the possible.

Cassirer terms this ‘possibilization’ of the world ‘the greatest and the most remarkable achievement of technology.’

Modern art ‘discovers’ the spirit of creation, hitherto concealed by the doctrine of imitation, just as in turn the recognition of human creativity announces the metaphysical need of the moderns to discover the new and bring it forth.

The work of art, but also the work of technology, become ontologically original once the closed cosmos of tradition is left behind.

And what this signifies […] is nothing less than the displacement of nature by art and technology, which now express the exemplary possibilities of human being as creativity. The modern spirit is in this sense ‘after nature’: imagination takes the place of the imitation of nature, technology emancipates itself from the model of physis to become the evolutionary supplement of nature.

[David Roberts]
'Technology and modernity: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, Cassirer', Thesis Eleven, 2012, p.26, 31-2

[William James’s] uncertainty about the moral value of submission and self-surrender illustrates the difficulty of carrying on an essentially theological controversy without its theological context.

Even more than Emerson and Carlyle, James believed that this context could now be dispensed with. In its absence, however, Emerson’s affirmation of the goodness of being would tend to be construed either as fatuous optimism or as the product of an emotional need for absolute security and reassurance, while heroism, on the other hand - notwithstanding James’s warning that “mere excitement is an unworthy ideal” - would degenerate into Nietzsche’s “will to power.”

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p. 294

Modern productions completely miss the severe pattern of ritualistic renunciation in As You Like It. Rosalind is not Peter Pan, nor is she Virginia Woolf’s reckless, cigar-smoking Sally Seton. Rosalind is never madcap or flippant. Behind her playfulness of language and personae is a pressure of magisterial will.

Multiplicity of mood tends toward anarchy. Shakespeare’s Renaissance wisdom subordinates that multiplicity to social structure, containing its exuberant energies in marriage. In the Renaissance as now, play must be part of a dialectic of work, or it becomes decadent.

At the end of her play, Rosalind demonstrates the subordination of personality to society by relinquishing her theatrical androgyny and metamorphoses for obedience in marriage. Hierarchy is restored, in home and palace.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.209, 227

The poets of the Iliad and the saga writers were implicitly claiming an objectivity for their own standpoint of a kind quite incompatible with a Nietzschean perspectivism.

What Nietzsche portrays is aristocratic self-assertion; what Homer and the sagas show are forms of assertion proper to and required by a certain role. The self becomes what it is in heroic societies only through its role; it is a social creation, not an individual one.

Hence when Nietzsche projects back on to the archaic past his own nineteenth-century individualism, he reveals that what looked like an historical enquiry was actually an inventive literary construction. Nietzsche replaces the fictions of the Enlightenment individualism, of which he is so contemptuous, with a set of individualist fictions of his own.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.150

[...] Goffman's sociology, since it claims to show us not just what human nature can become under certain highly specific conditions, but what human nature must be and therefore always has been, clearly makes the implicit claim that Aristotle's moral philosophy is false.

[...] the Aristotelian account of ethics and politics would have to rank for Nietzsche with all those degenerate disguises of the will to power which follow from the false turning taken by Socrates.

[...] it was because a moral tradition of which Aristotle's thought was the intellectual core was repudiated during the transitions of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that the Enlightenment project of discovering new rational secular foundations for morality had to be undertaken.

And it was because that project failed, because the views advanced by its most intellectually powerful protagonists, and more especially by Kant, could not be sustained in the face of rational criticism that Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors were able to mount their apparently successful critique of all previous morality.

Hence the defensibility of the Nietzschean position turns in the end on the answer to the question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle?

[...] the power of Nietzsche's position depends upon the truth of one central thesis: that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail and that therefore belief in the tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set of rationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will.

[...] either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.136-7

Scale

Concentrate / Decentrate

The Romantic Attitude

Individual / Collective

Heroism

Ruptures

Held Together

Shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon their autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the state.

Nisbet saw the rise of fascism and communism as the predictable consequence of the liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities. Those ideologies offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of the associations they had displaced, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious membership, a kind of church of the state.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.60

Scale

Cutting Ties

Free - Tethered

Separate - Connected

Shallow - Deep

Short Term - Long Term

Liberalism tends to place the emphasis on the individual and on the universal collective that contains all individuals. Groupings - those intermediary levels between the individual and the global collective - are generally deemphasised, or discouraged.

By its nature a group is exclusionary, defining its identity as much by what it is not as what it is. The more vivid the identity of the group, the firmer its boundaries. Because liberalism is predicated on the notion of individual freedom and autonomy, and on the free flow of goods, services, ideas, and people within a universal, global market, it must work against anything that may inhibit this flow. In this context, groupings - with their localised customs and norms - act as circuit breakers, impeding the wider flow.

Accordingly, liberalism tends to focus on the restrictive aspect of groupings, characterising them as systems of oppression that place unnecessary and tyrannical inhibitions on the individual. The project of liberalism is to dissolve the boundaries of the group and to set the individual free within the global market - in other words, to maximise flow. Groupings are permitted to the extent that they do not impede this flow in any serious way.

Liberalism points out that groupings are artefacts of culture, rather than nature, and that our natural state is as autonomous individuals. Groupings are, in other words, constructions. They may once have served a purpose, but most are old relics that can be deconstructed.

When the idea of the group loses its positive meaning then to be ensconced unthinkingly within a group becomes pathological - ‘groupthink.’ The modern person must seek autonomy and is encouraged at all times to 'think for themselves', independently of custom and local norms, and to question received wisdom.

We see this in the work of many twentieth century psychologists - from Jung, to Laing, to Berne, to Winnicott - whose theories of psychological development were all grounded in the liberal, progressive mindset. In their view an optimum, healthy person is unencumbered by group-ties, which are generally seen in only their negative light, as shackles to be thrown off.

[…] not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him: it throws him back for ever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

[Alexis de Tocqueville]
Democracy in America, part 2, book 2, chapter 27

During the last four centuries political thinkers in the West have concentrated mainly on limiting [wider] claims. They have put genuinely heroic efforts into cutting bonds. They have managed to free people from endless forms of oppression, both political and domestic, and of course this has been a splendid achievement. The difficulty is just in seeing what it leads to now.

Freedom itself is a negative ideal. Its meaning depends in each case on what particular bonds it frees us from.

The reformers who fought each special kind of oppression were always led by a vision of a particular kind of freedom that would replace it, a special way in which society would be changed when they had cut a certain kind of bond. But it has gradually become plain that this bond-cutting sequence is cumulative, which means that it cannot go on for ever.

Humans are bond-forming animals. When all the bonds are cut - when the various kinds of freedom are all added together – when a general vision of abstract freedom from every commitment replaces the more limited aims - then, it seems, we might be left with a meaningless life. It begins to seem doubtful whether any kind of human society is then possible at all.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.21

Pintupi concepts of the emotions constitute a subjectivity that recognizes a significant identify with important others, such that these others are represented as part of the self.

The self is not an aggressive, self-contained, egotistic, or entirely autonomous individual. Rather, one must be malleable to others, not "hard.” One should be moved, not stolid in willfulness.

Going through initiation provides the means by which young males become able to exchange with older men, a step in the direction of equality. Initiation entitles them to take control of the sacred knowledge that is necessary for the performance and direction of ceremonies.

This control is a token of their personal autonomy, but the central theme of Pintupi sociality remains, that one cannot be autonomous by oneself. "Freedom” requires the help of other men.

When a young man at Yayayi tried to assert himself as free of obligation to others, older men chastised him in a revealing way: "Did you become a man by yourself? We grew you up. We made you into a young man!"

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.124, 174

While there is no basis in subsistence production for inequality among adults, this is not true of the larger process of social reproduction. One can feed oneself, but it is easier to do so in concert with a larger, cooperative group - a "band."

Furthermore, living with a larger group offers some protection from the danger of attack. Finally, the division of labor makes it important for men and women to have access to each other's labor. Thus, marriage is desirable.

All these activities require sustaining one's relationships with others.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.254

In the same way that courses in economics claim merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors, but in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds.

Not only are all political and economic relationships seen as fungible and subject to constant redefinition, so are all relationships to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion.

[…] the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even personal relationships became dominated by considerations of individual choice based on the calculation of individual self-interest, and without broader consideration of the impact of one's choices upon the community, one's obligations to the created order, and ultimately to God.

Liberalism encourages loose connections.

[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.33-4

Tocqueville points out that the constant movement of Americans from place to place and from one profession to another deprives people of their ties to one another.

It causes them to abandon their friends and families and makes the people in each profession “strangers to one another, each indifferent and almost invisible to all the rest.” This compounds the severing of connections between individuals in democracy that makes them “at once independent and weak.”

It also changes men’s relationship to their work. When people are frequently changing their professions, few experience the satisfaction that comes from long mastery of a craft or art. There is, Tocqueville reflects, “something unexpected and in a sense improvised about [Americans’] lives. Hence they are often forced to do things that they barely learned, to speak of things they scarcely understand, and to engage in labors for which no long apprenticeship has prepared them.”

Thus, democracy makes it harder to take satisfaction from work, even as it puts paid work at the center of men’s lives.

[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.450

Liberalism has always been animated by a vision of how humans “ought” to live, but it masked these normative commitments in the guise of neutrality. Like its competitor ideologies, it called forth a massive political and economic apparatus to fulfill its vision - in the process both reshaping and damaging humanity.

One of liberalism's most damaging fictions was the theory of consent, an imaginary scenario in which autonomous, rational calculators formed an abstract contract to establish a government whose sole purpose was to “secure rights.” This view of consent relegated all "unchosen” forms of society and relationships to the category of “arbitrary” and thus suspect if not illegitimate.

Liberalism takes the fundamental position that “consent” to any relationship or bond can be given only when people are completely and perfectly autonomous and individual.

I recall a chilling conversation when I was teaching at Princeton University about a book that had recently appeared about the Amish. [Following a ritual period of separation from Amish life an] overwhelming number [of young Amish adults], approaching 90 percent, choose to return to be baptised and to accept norms and strictures of their community that forbid further enjoyment of the pleasure of liberal society.

Some of my former colleagues took this as a sign that these young people were in fact not “choosing” as free individuals. One said, "We will have to consider ways of freeing them.” Perfect liberal consent requires perfectly liberated individuals, and the evidence that Amish youth were responding to the pull of family, community, and tradition marked them as unfree.

Liberalism renders such ties suspect while papering over the ways in which it has shaped its own youth to adopt a particular form of life, set of beliefs, and worldview; these are never subject to appraisal by any standards outside liberalism itself. The traditional culture of the Amish (one can also think of other examples) gives its young a choice about whether they will remain within that culture, but only one option is seen as an exercise of choice. Acquiescence to liberalism, however unreflective, is “tacit consent,” yet membership in a traditional community is "oppression” or “false consciousness.”

Under this double standard, religious, cultural, and familial membership is an accident of birth. Yet for modern humanity in the advanced West and increasingly the world, liberalism is equally an unwitting inheritance, and any alternatives are seen as deeply suspect and probably in need of liberal intervention.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.188-90

I would like to suggest in 2021 that most people dislike the pressure and uncertainty of not knowing what they will do with their lives, and that there are significant costs imposed by the freedom to choose.

I wonder how much anxiety is induced by people feeling that they never found something they were good at; that they never found their niche in life; that they never achieved what they wanted to. This is the downside of freedom. I wonder how many would exchange the pressure, uncertainty and anxiety for the static, but relatively safe and stable situation of [the 1300s blacksmith].

[Academic Agent]
‘Issues with Libertarian Arguments Against Socialism, Part 3’

You will see very often that people divorce and remarry again and again and always make the same mistake. Then who ought to decide? Perhaps we might imagine that if something is wrong with a marriage, a psychiatrist should decide whether or not it should be broken.

There is difficulty there. I do not know whether it holds true of America, but in Europe I have found that psychiatrists for the most part think that personal welfare is the most important point.

Generally, therefore, if they are consulted in such a case, they recommend a sweetheart or a lover and think that this might be the way to solve the problem. I am sure that in time they will change their mind and cease to give such advice.

They can only propose such a solution if they have not been the trained in the whole coherence of the problem, the way it hangs together with the other tasks of our life on this earth; and it is this coherence that I have been wishing to offer for your consideration.

[Alfred Adler]
What Life Could Mean to You, Chap. XII ‘Love and Marriage’

The laws abolishing corporations exemplified liberal ideology in its purest form: “There are no longer corporations in the State; there is no longer anything but the particular interest of each individual, and the general interest. It is permitted to no one to inspire an intermediary interest in citizens, to separate them from the public interest by a spirit of corporation.”

Faced with an all-out assault on organisations that regulated the price of labour, arranged funerals, and helped out members in hard times, artisans “found the corporate idiom … entirely appropriate,” Sewell explains, “as a framework for organising practical resistance to the atomistic tendencies of the new system.”

The “new socialist vision” advanced by workers in 1848 “was founded on a very old sense of craft community.”

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p. 214

The symbolism of the melting pot - “this great new continent that could melt up all racial differences and vendettas” - made quite explicit what had always been implicit in the ideology of progress: the dependence of progress on amnesia.

The “enlargement of political units” in the modern world was an eminently desirable development, since it broke down the "emotional feeling of the solidarity of the group" and led people “to recognize equal rights for all individuals."

The mass migrations of modern times, culminating in the latest wave of immigration to the United States, had the same effect. The "masses in our modern city populations, having known nothing of the "conservative influence of a home in which parents and children lived a common life," had escaped the "unconscious control of traditional ideas."

Cultural pluralists agreed with Zangwill and Boas in condemning racial and ethnic intolerance, but they objected to a definition of democracy that laid so much stress on uniformity and the eradication of group memory. Bourne's 1915 essay, "Trans-National America," though directed against a cruder version of the assimilationist ideal, implicitly questioned more refined versions as well.

Unlike Boas, Bourne did not see the disintegration of "nationalistic cultures" as a positive development. In his view, it produced "hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob."

The melting pot brewed a "tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity."

Boas thought that men and women uprooted from tribal loyalties had a chance to become individuals. Bourne thought they became the “flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.354-5

Like Brownson, Bourne maintained that individuality had to rest on early instruction in a definite, particular set of cultural practices.

His position also resembled - and in this case was strongly influenced by - Josiah Royce's defense of provincialism, even though Bourne referred to his own "trans-national" ideal as a form of cosmopolitanism. For years, Royce - the third member of Harvard's distinguished triumvirate of philosophers - had been warning against the "levelling tendency of recent civilization," which threatened to "crush the individual."

"Frequent changes of dwelling-place” destroyed "community spirit,” according to Royce. Newspapers, "read by too vast multitudes," fostered a "monotonously uniform triviality of mind." "Industrial consolidation" and "impersonal social organization" strengthened the "spirit of the crowd or of the mob."

Provincialism - loyalty to the "small group" - furnished a necessary counterweight, Royce argued, to the homogenizing effect of modern life, as long as it did not degenerate into "ancient narrowness."

Neither Bourne nor Royce explained what would happen if particular loyalties came into collision. How would the resulting conflicts be resolved? It was the fear that they could not be resolved short of open warfare that made the assimilationist program attractive as the best hope of social peace.

Groups, it appeared, were inherently warlike and contentious. They operated according to the principle of exclusion: all that held them together was a common antipathy to outsiders. Social order, accordingly, seemed to depend on the dissolution of groups into their constituent individuals.

Individuals had rights that could be recognized and guaranteed by the state, but groups characteristically refused to recognize the rights of competing groups, even to recognize their humanity. "Those who are not members of the tribe are not human beings," Boas noted with disapproval.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.356

I can tell exactly how many people have this attitude: all the people who remain pampered children. This is a dangerous type in our social life – these grown-up pampered children whose style of life has been fixed in the first four or five years of life and who always have the scheme of apperception: "Can I get all I want?" If they can't get everything that they want, they think life is purposeless. "What is the use of living," they ask, "if I cannot have what I want?”

They become pessimistic: they conceive a "death wish." They make themselves sick and neurotic and out of their mistaken style of life they construct a philosophy. They feel that their mistaken ideas are of unique and tremendous importance: they feel that it is a piece of spite on the part of the universe if they have to repress their drives and emotions. They are trained in this way.

Once they experienced a favorable time in which they obtained everything they wanted. Some of them, perhaps, still feel that if they cry long enough, if they protest enough, if they refuse cooperation, they will obtain their own desires.

They do not look to the coherence of life but to their own personal interests. The result is they do not want to contribute, they always wish to have things easy, they want to be refused nothing; and, therefore, marriage itself they wish to have on trial or return, they want companionate marriages, trial marriages, easier divorces: at the very beginning of marriage they demand freedom.

[Alfred Adler]

Liberalism, then democracy, then socialism, then radicalism, and finally Communism and Bolshevism, only appeared historically as steps taken by the same evil, as stages in which each one prepares the next in the complex unity of a process of decline.

The beginning of this process is the point at which Western man shattered the fetters of tradition, rejected every superior symbol of authority and sovereignty, claimed a vain and illusory liberty for himself as an individual, and became an atom instead of a conscious part in the organic and hierarchical unity of a whole.

In the end, the atom was bound to find that the mass of the other atoms, the other individuals, had turned against him, and he was dragged into the plight of the kingdom of quantity, of pure number, of masses that are given over completely to materialism and who have no other god than the sovereign economy.

[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, V

We should attribute to the evil consequences of a ‘free culture’ that is within everyone’s reach the fact that the individual is left open to influences of every sort, even when he is the sort of person who cannot be actively engaged with them or know how to discriminate and judge correctly.

[…] young people in particular should recognise the poison which has been given to an entire generation by the concordant varieties of a distorted and false vision of life that has affected their inner forces.

In one form or another, these poisons continue to act in culture, science, sociology, and literature, like so many hotbeds of infection that must be identified and attacked. Apart from historical materialism and economism, of which we have already spoken, among the most important of these are Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism.

[Julius Evola]
‘Orientations’, IX

Nietzsche calls Apollo “the marvellous divine image of the principium individuationis,” “god of individuation and just boundaries.” The Apollonian borderline separates demes, districts, ideas, persons.

Western individuation is Apollonian. The western ego is finite, articulated, visible. Apollo is the integrity and unity of western personality, a firm-outlined shape of sculptural definitiveness.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.73

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.

It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment."

[Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels]
The Communist Manifesto

[...] one way of re-envisaging the emotivist self is as having suffered a deprivation, a stripping away of qualities that were once believed to belong to the self.

The self is now thought of as lacking any necessary social identity, because the kind of social identity that it once enjoyed is no longer available; the self is now thought of as criterionless, because the kind of telos in terms of which it once judged and acted is no longer thought to be credible.

In many pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership in a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not characteristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover 'the real me'. They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties.

Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast.

To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress - or to fail to make progress - toward a given end.

This conception of a whole human life as the primary subject of objective and impersonal evaluation, of a type of evaluation which provides the content for judgment upon the particular actions or projects of a given individual, is something that ceases to be generally available at some point in the progress - if we can call it such - towards and into modernity.

It passes to some degree unnoticed, for it is celebrated historically for the most part not as loss, but as self-congratulatory gain, as the emergence of the individual freed on the one hand from the social bonds of those constraining hierarchies which the modern world rejected at its birth and on the other hand from what modernity has taken to be the superstitions of teleology [...] the achievement by the self of its proper autonomy.

The self had been liberated from all those outmoded forms of social organization which had imprisoned it simultaneously within a belief in a theistic and teleological world order and within those hierarchical structures which attempted to legitimate themselves as part of such a world order.

[...] the peculiarly modern self, the emotivist self, in acquiring sovereignty in its own realm lost its traditional boundaries provided by a social identity and a view of human life as ordered to a given end.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.38-9, 72

From the standpoint of individualism I am what I myself choose to be. I can always, if I wish to, put in question what are taken to be the merely contingent social features of my existence.

I may biologically be my father's son; but I cannot be held responsible for what he did unless I choose implicitly or explicitly to assume such responsibility. I may legally be a citizen of a certain country; but I cannot be held responsible for what my country does or has done unless I choose implicitly or explicitly to assume such responsibility.

[...] the Englishman who says, 'I never did any wrong to Ireland; why bring up that old history as though it had something to do with me?' or the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries, exhibit the same attitude, that according to which the self is detachable from its social and historical roles and statuses. And the self so detached is of course a self very much at home in either Sartre's or Goffman's perspective, a self that can have no history.

The contrast with the narrative view of the self is clear. For the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide.

What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.255-6

The third stage of agrarian reform, constituting the basic feature of the “Great Leap Forward,” merged the 750 thousand collective farms into about 26,000 agrarian communes of about 5,000 families each. This was a social rather than simply an agrarian revolution, since its aims included the destruction of the family household and the peasant village.

[…] it was expected that the communes would totally shatter the resistant social structure of Chinese society, leaving isolated individuals to face the power of the state.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.735

[…] the social costs of business are borne in different ways in European and Asian social markets. Both are threatened by the American model because each business bears social obligations that in the United States it has shed.

The social costs which businesses carry in social market economics enable them to function as social institutions without undermining the cohesion of the larger societies in which they operate. At the same time these social costs must become burdens in any competition with enterprises operating in free markets. American firms have few such obligations.

In the long haul of history, Europe’s social markets may be as productive as American free markets. In the short run, in terms of rivalry in a global free market, they simply cannot be cost-competitive.

The conditions that confer a strategic advantage to the free market over the social market economies of the post-war period are unregulated global free trade in conjunction with unrestricted global mobility of capital. In a free-trading global market the advantage lies (other things being equal) with firms whose costs are low.

A global free market operates to ‘externalise’ costs that better regimes ‘internalised.’ In environmentally sensitive economies tax and regulatory policy is designed so that firms are required to pay for the costs their activities impose on society and the natural world. This has long been the case in the countries of continental Europe. Global free markets put heavy pressure on such policies. Goods produced by environmentally accountable firms cost more than similar goods produced by enterprises that are at liberty to pollute.

If advanced societies are able to protect their environments in this way it will be partly because they are able to export pollution by moving production to Third World countries where environmental standards are looser. The advanced countries will remain clean at the cost of other parts of the world becoming dirtier.

[John Gray]
False Dawn, p. 79-81

The chief indirect effect of Reagan’s presidency was to condone economic inequality in the United States, and produce a business culture in which the social costs of enterprise could be ignored with a good conscience.

Political deregulation freed managers’ elbows. A political climate encouraged them to take less account of non-economic considerations. Corporate business imposed greater inequality. Conservative doctrine rationalised it.

The structure of the American free market coincided with the imperatives of human rights. Who dares condemn the burgeoning inequalities and social breakdown that free markets engender, when free markets are no more than the right to individual freedom in the economic realm?

The philosophical foundations of these rights are flimsy and jerry-built. There is no credible theory in which the particular freedoms of deregulated capitalism have the standing of human rights. The most plausible conceptions of rights are not founded on seventeenth-century ideas of property but on modern notions of autonomy. Even these are not universally applicable; they capture the experience only of those cultures and individuals for whom the exercise of personal choice is more important than social cohesion, the control of economic risk or any other collective good.

In the United States, as it has been reshaped by the Neo-conservative ascendancy, the authority of rights has been used to shield the workings of the free market from public scrutiny and political challenge.

[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.108-9

Today, however, a father's upper-body strength is no longer needed to provide for children; his personal courage is seldom called upon to protect them. A mother can get clothing and even prepared food from stores more easily than produce those things at home. In other words, the domestic economy has been "outsourced."

Leisure activity is replaced by the passivity of diversions such as television or music-listening that involve no interaction between family members. Child psychologists distinguish a phase of "parallel play" before children discover that cooperation will enable them to do more interesting things: our families might be seen as reverting to the parallel-play stage.

[F. Roger Devlin]
'Home Economics', Sexual Utopia in Power, p. 128

Dependent / Independent

Separation / Connection

Self-development

Individual / Collective

Alone with my Self

Right and Responsibilities

Everything is Connected

Control System

None of modern science has the slightest value as knowledge; rather, it bases itself on a formal renunciation of knowledge in the true sense.

The driving and organizing force behind modern science derives nothing at all from the ideal of knowledge, but exclusively from practical necessity, and, I might add, from the will to power turned on things and on nature.

In fact, the concept of "truth” in the traditional sense is already alien to modern science, which concerns itself solely with hypotheses and formulae that can predict with the best approximation the course of phenomena and relate them to a certain unity.

And as it is not a question of “truth,” but a matter less of seeing than of touching, the concept of certainty in modern science is reduced to the “maximum probability.” That all scientific certainties have an essentially statistical character is openly recognized by every scientist, and more categorically than ever in recent subatomic physics.

The system of science resembles a net that draws ever tighter around a something that, in itself, remains incomprehensible, with the sole intention of subduing it for practical ends.

These practical ends only secondarily concern the technical applications; they constitute the criterion in the very domain that belongs to pure knowledge, in the sense that here, too, the basic impulse is schematizing, an ordering of phenomena in a simpler and more manageable way. As was rightly noted, ever since that formula simplex sigillum veri (simplicity is the seal of the true), there has appeared a method that exchanges for truth (and knowledge) that which satisfies a practical, purely human need of the intellect.

In the final analysis, the impulse to know is transformed into an impulse to dominate; and we owe to a scientist, Bertrand Russell, the recognition that science, from being a means to know the world, has become a means to change the world.

The more "comfortable” ideas and theories become "true," in regard to the organization of the data of sensorial experience. A choice between such data is made consciously or instinctively, excluding systematically those that do not lend themselves to being controlled; thus also everything qualitative and unrepeatable that is not susceptible to being mathematized.

Scientific “objectivity” consists solely in being ready at any moment to abandon existing theories or hypotheses, as soon as the chance appears for the better control of reality. Thereupon it includes in the system of the already predictable and manageable those phenomena not yet considered, or seemingly irreducible; and that, without any principle that in itself, in its intrinsic nature, is valid once and for all. In the same way, he who can lay his hands on a modern long-range rifle is ready to give up a flintlock.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 131-2

The imperative to overcome culture as part of the project of mastering nature was expressed with forthright clarity by John Dewey, one of liberalism’s great heroes. Dewey insisted that the progress of liberation rested especially upon the active control of nature, and hence required the displacement of traditional beliefs and culture that reflected a backward and limiting regard for the past.

The savage tribe manages to live in the desert, he wrote, by adapting itself to the natural limits of its environment; thus “its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use."

A “civilized people” in the same desert also adapts; but “it introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a rose.

The savage is habituated; the civilised man has habits which transform the environment”.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.71

One can safely generalize what Burns and Stalker say about the need to allow for individual initiative, a flexible response to changes in knowledge, the multiplication of centres of problem-solving and decision-making as adding up to the thesis that an effective organization has to be able to tolerate a high degree of unpredictability within itself.

Attempts to monitor what every subordinate is doing all the time tend to be counter-productive; attempts to make the activity of others predictable necessarily routinize, suppress intelligence and flexibility and turn the energies of subordinates to frustrating the projects of at least some of their superiors (Kaufman 1973 , and see also Burns and Stalker on the effects of attempts to subvert and circumvent managerial hierarchies).

Since organizational success and organizational predictability exclude one another, the project of creating a wholly or largely predictable organization committed to creating a wholly or largely predictable society is doomed and doomed by the facts about social life.

Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.123

Our social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone's, control. No one is or could be in charge .

Belief in managerial expertise is then, on the view that I have taken, very like what belief in God was thought to be by Carnap and Ayer. It is one more illusion and a peculiarly modern one, the illusion of a power not ourselves that claims to make for righteousness.

Hence the manager as character is other than he at first sight seems to be: the social world of everyday hard-headed practical pragmatic no-nonsense realism which is the environment of management is one which depends for its sustained existence on the systematic perpetuation of misunderstanding and of belief in fictions.

The effects of eighteenth-century prophecy have been to produce not scientifically managed social control, but a skillful dramatic imitation of such control. It is histrionic success which gives power and authority in our culture. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.

To this many managers and many bureaucrats will reply: you are attacking a straw man of your own construction. We make no large claims, Weberian or otherwise. We are as keenly aware of the limitations of social scientific generalizations as you are. We perform a modest function with a modest and unpretentious competence. But we do have specialized knowledge, we are entitled in our own limited fields to be called experts.

[...] but it is not claims of this kind which achieve power and authority either within or for bureaucratic corporations, whether public or private. For claims of this modest kind could never legitimate the possession or the uses of power either within or by bureaucratic corporations in anything like the way or on anything like the scale on which that power is wielded.

So the modest and unpretentious claims embodied in this reply to my argument may themselves be highly misleading, as much to those who utter them as to anyone else. For they seem to function not as a rebuttal of my argument [...] but as an excuse for continuing to participate in the charades which are consequently enacted.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.124-5

Living in Hazard

Certain / Uncertain

Escaping Uncertainty

Conscious / Unconscious

Information and Knowledge

Human Nature

Stages of the same deviation

[…] when a few people have become conscious of the disorder of these days [...] and when these people try to 'react’ in one way or another, the best means for making their desire for ‘reaction' ineffective is surely to direct it toward one of the earlier and less 'advanced’ stages of the same deviation, some stage in which disorder had not yet become so apparent, and was as it here presented under an outward aspect more acceptable to anyone not yet completely blinded by certain suggestions.

Anyone who considers himself a 'traditionalist' must normally declare himself ‘anti-modern', but he may not be any the less affected, though he be unaware of the fact, by modern ideas in a more or less attenuated form; they are then less easily detected, but they always correspond in fact to one or another of the stages passed through by these same ideas in the course of their development; no concession, even unconscious or involuntary, is admissible on this point, for from the very beginning up to the present day, and beyond that too, everything holds together and is inexorably interlinked.

In that connection, this much more must be said: the work that has as its object to prevent all ‘reaction' from aiming at anything further back than a return to a lesser disorder, while at the same time concealing the character of the lesser disorder so that it may pass as ‘order', fits in very exactly with the other work carried out with a view to securing the penetration of the modern spirit into the interior of whatever is left of traditional organizations of any kind in the West; the same ‘neutralizing’ effect on forces of which the opposition might become formidable is obtained in both cases.

Moreover, something more than mere ‘neutralization' is involved, for a struggle must necessarily take place between the elements thus brought together as it were on the same level and on the same ground, and their reciprocal enmity is therefore no more than an enmity between the various and apparently opposed productions of one and the same modern deviation; thus the final result can only be a fresh increase in disorder and confusion, which simply amounts to one more step toward final dissolution.

As between all the more or less incoherent things that are today in constant agitation and mutual collision, as between all external ‘movements’ of whatever kind they may be, there is no occasion to ‘take sides’, to use the common expression, whether from a traditional or from a merely 'traditionalist’ point of view, for to do so is to become a dupe. Since the same influences are really operating behind all these things, it is really playing their game to join in the struggles promoted and directed by them; therefore the mere fact of ‘taking sides’ under such conditions is necessarily to adopt, however unwittingly, a truly anti-traditional attitude.

[René Guénon]
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p.212-4

Accepting the premise that there is an underlying symbiotic relationship between right- and left-liberalism would undermine the deepest commitments of the various sides - in spite of the diurnal spectacle of highly contested politics - to what is ultimately the same project.

[…] what is bemoaned by the right is due not to the left but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to liberal economics. And […] what is bemoaned by the left is due not to the right but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to the dissolution of social norms, particularly those regarding sexual behavior and identity.

The "wedding” between global corporations and this sexual agenda is one of the most revealing yet widely ignored manifestations of this deeper synergy.

[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.xxi

Early-modern liberalism held the view that human nature was unchangeable - human beings were, by nature, self-interested creatures whose base impulses could be harnessed but not fundamentally altered.

But this self-interested, possessive aspect of our nature could, if usefully harnessed, promote an economic and scientific system that increased human freedom through the capacity of human beings to exert mastery over natural phenomena.

The second wave of this revolution begins as an explicit criticism of this view of humanity. Thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Marx, from Mill to Dewey, and from Richard Rorty to contemporary “transhumanists” reject the idea that human nature is fixed. They adopt the first-wave theorists' idea that nature is subject to human conquest and apply it to human nature itself.

First wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives,” who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature. They support any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological “enhancement.”

Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies.

Today's political debates occur largely and almost exclusively between these two varieties of liberals. Neither side confronts the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature defended by the preliberal tradition.

Today's classical liberals and progressive liberals remain locked in a battle for their preferred end game—whether we will be a society of ever more perfectly liberated, autonomous individuals or ever more egalitarian members of the global “community”—but while this debate continues apace, the two sides agree on their end while absorbing our attention in disputes over the means, thus combining in a pincer movement to destroy the vestiges of the classical practices and virtues that they both despise.

Liberalism is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world. Its two revolutions - its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature - created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.36-7, 62

Standardised

Standardised - Bespoke

Machine - Human

Unit - Individual

Large scale - Small scale
Efficient - Inefficient

[…] quantity will predominate over quality in individuals to the extent that they approach a condition in which they are, so to speak, mere individuals and nothing more, and to the extent that they are thereby more separate one from another […]

This separation turns individuals into so many 'units’, and turns their collectivity into quantitative multiplicity; at the limit, these individuals would be no more than something comparable to the imagined ‘atoms’ of the physicists, deprived of every qualitative determination; and although this limit can never in fact be reached, it lies in the direction which the world of today is following.

A mere glance at things as they are is enough to make it clear that the aim is everywhere to reduce everything to uniformity, whether it be human beings themselves or the things among which they live, and it is obvious that such a result can only be obtained by suppressing as far as possible every qualitative distinction; but it is particularly to be noted that some people, through a strange delusion, are all too willing to mistake this ‘uniformization’ for a ‘unification', whereas it is really exactly the opposite, as must appear evident in the light of the ever more marked accentuation of 'separativity’ implied.

It must be insisted that quantity can only separate and cannot unite; everything that proceeds from ‘matter’ produces nothing but antagonism, in many diverse forms, between fragmentary ʻunits' that are at a point directly opposite to true unity, or at least are pressing toward that point with all the weight of a quantity no longer balanced by quality […]

[René Guénon]

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 47-8

[…] according to the traditional conception, it is the essential qualities of beings that determine their activity; according to the profane conception on the other hand, these qualities are no longer taken into account, and individuals are regarded as no more than interchangeable and purely numerical ‘units'.

The latter conception can only logically lead to the exercise of a wholly ‘mechanical’ activity, in which there remains nothing truly human, and that is exactly what we can see happening today.

It need hardly be said that the ‘mechanical’ activities of the moderns, which constitute industry properly so called and are only a product of the profane deviation, can afford no possibility of an initiatic kind, and further, that they cannot be anything but obstacles to the development of all spirituality; indeed they cannot properly be regarded as authentic crafts, if that word is to retain the force of its traditional meaning.

There is thus no difficulty in seeing how far removed true craft is from modern industry, so much so that the two are as it were opposites, and how far it is unhappily true that in the reign of quantity the craft is, as the partisans of 'progress' so readily declare, a ‘thing of the past'.

The workman in industry cannot put into his work anything of himself, and a lot of trouble would even be taken to prevent him if he had the least inclination to try to do so; but he cannot even try, because all his activity consists solely in making a machine go, and because in addition he is rendered quite incapable of initiative by the professional 'formation' - or rather deformation - he has received, which is practically the antithesis of the ancient apprenticeship, and has for its sole object to teach him to execute certain movements ‘mechanically’ and always in the same way, without having at all to understand the reason for them or to trouble himself about the result, for it is not he, but the machine, that will really fabricate the object.

Servant of the machine, the man must become a machine himself, and thenceforth his work has nothing really human in it, for it no longer implies the putting to work of any of the qualities that really constitute human nature.

The end of all this is what is called in present-day jargon ‘mass-production’, the purpose of which is only to produce the greatest possible quantity of objects, and of objects as exactly alike as possible, intended for the use of men who are supposed to be no less alike; that is indeed the triumph of quantity, as was pointed out earlier, and it is by the same token the triumph of uniformity.

[René Guénon]

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 58, 60-1

The conclusion that emerges clearly from all this is that uniformity, in order that it may be possible, presupposes beings deprived of all qualities and reduced to nothing more than simple numerical ‘units'; also that no such uniformity is ever in fact realizable, while the result of all the efforts made to realize it, notably in the human domain, can only be to rob beings more or less completely of their proper qualities, thus turning them into something as nearly as possible like mere machines; and machines, the typical product of the modern world, are the very things that represent, in the highest degree attained up till now, the predominance of quantity over quality.

From a social viewpoint, ‘democratic' and 'egalitarian' conceptions tend toward exactly the same end, for according to them all individuals are equivalent one to another.

This idea carries with it the absurd supposition that everyone is equally well fitted for anything whatsoever, though nature provides no example of any such 'equality’, for the reasons already given, since it would imply nothing but a complete similitude between individuals; but it is obvious that, in the name of this assumed 'equality’, which is one of the topsy-turvy 'ideals' most dear to the modern world, individuals are in fact directed toward becoming as nearly alike one to another as nature allows - and this in the first place by the attempt to impose a uniform education on everyone.

It is no less obvious that differences of aptitude cannot in spite of everything be entirely suppressed, so that a uniform education will not give exactly the same results for all; but it is all too true that, although it cannot confer on anyone qualities that he does not possess, it is on the contrary very well to suppress in everyone all possibilities above the common level; this ‘levelling’ always works downward: indeed, it could not work in any other way, being itself only an expression of the tendency toward the lowest, that is, toward pure quantity […]

[René Guénon]

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 51-2

But alongside this convergence there has become visible the conditioning power of one and the same “system,” manifesting as the tendency to destroy all the higher values of life and personality.

The prevalent and determining trends are, and will be increasingly in future, the passive destructive processes from which can only arise a squalid uniformity, a reduction to types that lack the dimension of depth and any metaphysical quality, defining themselves at an existential level even lower than the already problematic one of the individual and the person.

Among other things, the machine itself may appear as a symbol, and everything that has taken form in certain sectors of the modern world in terms of pure functionality, especially in architecture.

The machine symbolizes a form born from an exact, objective adjustment of the means to the end, with the exclusion of everything superfluous arbitrary, irrelevant, or subjective. It is a form that precisely realizes an idea: the idea, in this case, of the purpose for which it is made. On its own plane, it reflects in a way the same value as the classical world knew through geometrical form, number as entity, and the whole Doric principle of “nothing in excess.”

[…] one can define a realism that signifies coolness, clarity, seriousness, and purity; detachment from the world of sentimentalism, of ego problems, of melodramatic tragedy, of the whole legacy of twilight romanticism, idealism, and expressionism: a realism that entails the sense of the vanity of the I and of believing oneself important as an individual.

Matzke wrote: “We are objective, because for us the reality of things is great, infinite, and everything human is too small, limited, and polluted with ‘soul’.”

The essential traits of the new attitude were well described as distance, otherness, loftiness, monumentality, a laconic quality, and the revulsion against all that is warm proximity, humanity, effusiveness, expressionism; the line of objectivity in figures, of coolness and grandeur in forms.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 31, 114-16

Roughly put, taking place in all areas of human life from religion and law to music and architecture, rationalization means a historical drive towards a world in which “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” [Weber 1919/1946, 139].

For instance, modern capitalism is a rational mode of economic life because it depends on a calculable process of production. This search for exact calculability underpins such institutional innovations as monetary accounting (especially double-entry bookkeeping), centralization of production control, separation of workers from the means of production, supply of formally free labour, disciplined control on the factory floor, and other features that make modern capitalism qualitatively different from all other modes of organizing economic life.

The enhanced calculability of the production process is also buttressed by that in non-economic spheres such as law and administration. Legal formalism and bureaucratic management reinforce the elements of predictability in the sociopolitical environment that encumbers industrial capitalism by means of introducing formal equality of citizenship, a rule-bound legislation of legal norms, an autonomous judiciary, and a depoliticized professional bureaucracy.

Further, all this calculability and predictability in political, social, and economic spheres was not possible without changes of values in ethics, religion, psychology, and culture. Institutional rationalization was, in other words, predicated upon the rise of a peculiarly rational type of personality, or a “person of vocation” (Berufsmensch) as outlined in the Protestant Ethic.

The outcome of this complex interplay of ideas and interests was modern rational Western civilization with its enormous material and cultural capacity for relentless world-mastery.

'Max Weber: 3.2 Calculability, Predictability, and World-Mastery', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[…] under liberalism, “culture" becomes a word that parasitizes the original, displacing actual cultures with a liberal simulacrum eagerly embraced by a populace that is unaware of the switch.

Invocations of "culture” tend to be singular, not plural, whereas actual cultures are multiple, local, and particular. We tend to speak of such phenomena as “popular culture," a market-tested and standardized product devised by commercial enterprises and meant for mass consumption.

Whereas culture is an accumulation of local and historical experience and memory, liberal “culture" is the vacuum that remains when local experience has been eviscerated, memory is lost, and every place becomes every other place.

A panoply of actual cultures is replaced by celebration of "multiculturalism,” the reduction of actual cultural variety to liberal homogeneity loosely dressed in easily discarded native garb. The “-ism" of "multiculturalism” signals liberalism's victorious rout of actual cultural variety.

Even as cultures are replaced by a pervasive anticulture, the language of culture is advanced as a means of rendering liberal humanity's detachment from specific cultures. The homogenous celebration of every culture effectively means no culture at all. The more insistent the invocation of “pluralism” or “diversity” or, in the retail world, “choice," the more assuredly the destruction of actual cultures is advancing.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.89

Not everything improves with time.

There are a number of things that people did better in the past, both because of lost wisdom but also simply because in the past things weren’t mass-produced. Beautiful older dresses, hand-stitched rugs, even kitchen appliances used to be sturdier and last longer. You can go purchase a mass-produced cheap samurai sword online, but you’d be a fool to use it in a fight against a blade of 20-times folded steel, even if the latter were ancient.

Stradivari violins, hand-crafted by members of the Italian Stradivari family, are legendarily considered to have a superior and unique sound compared to violins made with even the most modern techniques.

[Erik Hoel]
'Why we stopped making Einsteins', The Intrinsic Perspective

Two issues in Britain are running side by side at the moment. Extremely high excess death among natives (for whatever reason) and the highest levels of immigration in history. The logic of Globalism means that those dying can simply be replaced by foreigners because humans are interchangeable.

We can see here the way that Globalism devalues a population, to the point of making it worthless. If mass immigration was banned a government would have an incentive to value the population which it ruled over. As it stands the endless flow of human capital allows that government to view the native stock with complete indifference, if not contempt.

Nationalism on the other hand has (or should have) the inherent value of the native stock at its core. Our people are not widgets that can be exchanged or replaced, and they're not inconvenient statistics when they die.

[Morgoth]
Telegram

The religion of Christianity is to a large extent narrative. Festivals such as Easter, Whitsun and Christmas are key narrative moments within an overall narrative which provides meaning and orientation. Every day is given a narrative tension, is made meaningful, by the overall narrative. Time itself becomes narrative, that is, meaningful.

Capitalism lacks narrativity. It does not narrate anything [erzählt nichts]; it merely counts [zählt]. It deprives time of all meaningfulness. Time is profaned, reduced to labour time. Thus, all days resemble each other.

Capitalism […] erases the distinction between the sacred and the profane by totalizing the profane. It makes everything comparable to everything else and thus equal to everything else. Capitalism brings forth a hell of the same.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.44

Caesar’s Roman world-view is a desiccated or devivified Apollonianism: hierarchical order and dignity, intellectual categorization, the sharp-edged unitary ego, separation from sexuality and the sensory. Caesar’s patron is, to use Nietzche’s phrase, “Apollo, the founder of states.”

Cleopatra’s world-view is promiscuously Dionysian: abolition of limits and boundaries, multiple personae, eating and drinking, sex, anarchic energy, natural fecundity.

Caesar and his retinue call Antony effeminate, yet Antony is more masculine than Caesar in the usual sense. Caesar, a bland managerial type, is sexually neuter. He is an Apollonian androgyne. The dominant sexual persona of Spenser’s Faerie Queene has completely lost its glamour in Shakespeare’s Dionysian genre. In Antony and Cleopatra, Apollonianism is merely officiousness, the spite and banality of small minds.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.215

[...] in all human traditions there has been a very great antagonism against all this counting business.

I don't know how many of you still know your Bible, but you can find it in two places, in Chronicles and Kings. The first chap who arranged the census was King David, and when he arranged the census the Lord was utterly furious. He gave him a choice between three penance punishments. And David, said, Yes, yes, I know I have sinned. He didn't argue back. You know, those old Jews used to argue back very freely.

He immediately understood there was something wrong in having a census which treats people as if they were units, whereas they are not. Each is a universe.

[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 145

The United States is engaged in a revolutionary make-over of the world economy. Its policies on trade and competition condemn to extinction every other economic civilisation.

If Japanese corner stores, or European guaranteed markets for bananas, are judged to be restraints on competition as that is understood in the terms of the American free market, they must be prohibited, whatever their benefits in social cohesion.

The demands made on Japan by the Washington consensus go further than dismantling its small shops. They include lowering savings rates, abandoning its full employment culture and embracing individualism. Together they amount to the demand that Japan cease to be Japanese.

[…] the solution to Japan’s economic problem is its wholesale Americanisation […] Japan will resolve its economic difficulties only on condition that it cease to be Japanese. At times this is stated bluntly. As a writer in an American neo-conservative journal has noted approvingly: ‘America has the IMF to do Commodore Perry’s job.’

The result of such a policy of enforced westernisation would not only be to extinguish a unique and irreplaceable culture. It would be to destroy the social cohesion that has gone with extraordinary economic achievement in Japan over the past half-century - without resolving the deflationary crisis that Japan presently confronts.

[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.173, 204, 227

Efficient / Inefficient

Instrumentalism

Narrow Contexts

Information and Knowledge

Conscious / Unconscious

Inheritance

The ideas of the fathers in the nineteenth century have been visited on the third and fourth generations living in the second half of the twentieth century.

The men who conceived the idea that ‘morality is bunk’ did so with a mind well-stocked with moral ideas. But the minds of the third and fourth generations are no longer well-stocked with such ideas: they are well-stocked with ideas conceived in the nineteenth century, namely, that ‘morality is bunk’, that everything that appear to be ‘higher’ is really nothing but something quite mean and vulgar.

To their originators, these ideas were simply the result of their intellectual processes. In the third and fourth generations, they have become the very tools and instruments through which the world is being experienced and interpreted.

Those that bring forth new ideas are seldom ruled by them. But their ideas obtain power over men’s lives in the third and fourth generations when they have become a part of that great mass of ideas, including language, which seeps into a person’s mind during his ‘Dark Ages’.

[E.F. Schumacher]

Small is Beautiful, p. 73, 82

The past can instruct, but there can be no return and no "restoration."

The triumphant march of liberalism has succeeded in at once drawing down the social and natural resources that liberalism did not create and cannot replenish, but which sustained liberalism even as its advance eroded its own unacknowledged foundations.

Its successes were always blank checks written against a future it trusted it could repair.

[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.18, 30

Nested in Tradition

Tradition provides what MacIntyre calls a 'narrative unity' - a unitary framework based on a specific idea of the 'good for man' and the 'communal good.'

All our actions are based on our religion - if that goes, we go as a people.

[Bernard Second]

There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

[Pierre Trudeau]

In the market place, for practical reasons, innumerable qualitative distinctions which are of vital importance for man and society are suppressed; they are not allowed to surface.

Thus the reign of quantity celebrates its greatest triumphs in 'The Market’. Everything is equated with everything else. To equate things means to give them a price and thus to make them exchangeable.

To the extent that economic thinking is based on the market, it takes the sacredness out of life, because there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price. Not surprisingly, therefore, if economic thinking pervades the whole of society, even simple non-economic values like beauty, health, or cleanliness can survive only if they prove to be ‘economic'.

[E.F. Schumacher]

Small is Beautiful, p. 37

We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing, and in heedless urbanisation.

If we permit them, this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over.

This is quite inevitable. How could it be otherwise? Nature, it has been said, abhors a vacuum, and when the available ‘spiritual space' is not filled by some higher motivation, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower - by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalised in the economic calculus.

I have no doubt that a callous attitude to the land and to the animals thereon is connected with, and symptomatic of, a great many other attitudes, such as those producing a fanaticism of rapid change and a fascination with novelties - technical, organisational, chemical, biological, and so forth - which insists on their application long before their long-term consequences are even remotely understood.

In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most precious resource, our entire way of life is involved, and before our policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change.

It is not a question of what we can afford but of what we choose to spend our money on. If we could return to a generous recognition of meta-economic values, our landscapes would become healthy and beautiful again and our people would regain the dignity of man, who knows himself as higher than the animal but never forgets that noblesse oblige.

[E.F. Schumacher]

Small is Beautiful, p. 96

In every traditional civilisation, as there has often been occasion to point out, every human activity of whatever kind is always regarded as derived essentially from principles. This is conspicuously true for the sciences, and it is no less true for the arts and the crafts, and there is in addition a close connection between them all […]

By this attachment to principles human activity could be said to be as it were 'transformed', and instead of being limited to what it is in itself, namely, a mere external manifestation (and the profane point of view consists in this and nothing else), it is integrated with the tradition, and constitutes for those who carry it out an effective means of participation in the tradition, and this is as much as to say that it takes on a truly ‘sacred' and 'ritual’ character.

[René Guénon]

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 56

Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

Traditional values are to be 'debunked' and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.

[C.S. Lewis]

‘The Abolition of Man’, Selected Books, p.426

Almost all commentators on Machiavelli say that his principal innovation, and the essence of his method, was to “divorce politics from ethics.”

Thereby he broke sharply with the Aristotelian tradition which had dominated medieval political thought. His method, they grant, freed politics to become more scientific and objective in its study of human behavior; but it was most dangerous because, through it, politics was released from “control” by ethical conceptions of what is right and good.

Machiavelli divorced politics from ethics only in the same sense that every science must divorce itself from ethics. Scientific descriptions and theories must be based upon the facts, the evidence, not upon the supposed demands of some ethical system […]

Machiavelli divorced politics from a certain kind of ethics - namely, from a transcendental, otherworldly, and, it may be added, very rotten ethics. But he did so in order to bring politics and ethics more closely into line, and to locate both of them firmly in the real world of space and time and history, which is the only world about which we can know anything.

Machiavelli is as ethical a political writer as Dante. The difference is that Machiavelli's ethics are much better.

[James Burnham]
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, p. 35

The same structure has been preserved in all so-called syncopated jazz. These syncopations are like delays that tend to liberate energy or generate an impulse: a technique used in African rites to induce possession of the dancers by certain entities, the Orisha of the Yoruba or the Loa of the Voodoo of Haiti, who took over their personalities and "rode” them.

This ecstatic potential still exists in jazz. But even here there is a process of dissociation, of abstract development of rhythmic forms separated from the whole to which they originally belonged.

Thus, given the desacralization of the environment and the nonexistence of any institutional framework or corresponding ritual tradition, any suitable atmosphere or appropriate attitude, one cannot expect the specific effects of authentic African music with its evocative function; the effect always remains a diffuse and formless possession, primitive and collective in character.

This is very apparent in the latest forms, such as the music of the socalled beat groups. Here the obsessive reiteration of a rhythm prevails (similar to the use of the African tom-tom), causing paroxysmal contortions of the body and inarticulate screams in the performers, while the mass of the listeners joins in, hysterically shrieking and throwing themselves around, creating a collective climate similar to that of the possessions of savage ritual and certain Dervish sects, or the Macumba and the Negro religious revivals.

Here we are no longer concerned with the specific compensation that one can find in syncopated dance music as the popular counterpart and extension of the extremes reached, but not maintained, by modern symphonic music; we are concerned with the semi-ecstatic and hysterical beginnings of a formless, convoluted escapism, empty of content, a beginning and end in itself.

Hence, it is completely inappropriate when some compare it to certain frenetic, collective, ancient rites, because the latter always had a sacred background.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 164-5

With drugs we have a situation similar to that of syncopated music. Both were often transpositions onto the profane and “physical” plane of means that were originally used to open one up to the suprasensible in initiation rites or similar experiences.

Just as dances to modern syncopated music derive from ecstatic Negro dance, the various drugs used today and created in laboratories correspond to drugs that were often used for "sacred" ends in primitive populations, according to ancient traditions. This is even true for tobacco; strong extracts of tobacco were used to prepare young Native Americans in their withdrawal from profane life to obtain "signs” and visions.

A similar claim can be made for alcohol, within certain limits; we are aware of the tradition centered on “sacred beverages," as in the use of alcohol in Dionysian and similar rituals. For example, alcoholic beverages were not prohibited in ancient Taoism: on the contrary, they were considered "life essences” inducing an intoxication that, like dance, could lead to a “magical state of grace,” sought by the so-called real men.

In addition, the extracts of coca, mescal, peyote, and other narcotics have been, and often still are, used in the rituals of secret societies of Central and South America.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p.167

Art in a traditional and organic civilization never occupied the central spiritual position that the period of humanist and bourgeois culture accorded to it.

Before the modern era, when art had a true, higher meaning, this was thanks to its preexisting contents, superior and prior to it, neither revealed nor "created” by it as art.

These contents gave meaning to life and could exist, manifest, and act even in the virtual absence of what is called art, in works that sometimes might seem “barbaric” to the aesthete and the humanist who have no sense of the elementary and primordial.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 156

If I continued the discussion of modern science and its technical applications, it would be easy to highlight this process of increasing autonomy, a process neither checked nor restrained by any higher limits or guidance: hence one often has the impression that technical-scientific development takes man in hand and faces him with difficult, unexpected situations full of unknowns.

I need not dwell on the specialized fragmentation, the lack of a higher and unifying principle of modern knowledge, as it is quite evident. These are the consequences of one of the dogmas of progressive thought, the unassailable "freedom of science” and of scientific research, which is a simple, euphemistic way to indicate and legitimize the development of one activity dissociated from the whole.

That “freedom” is not unlike the "freedom of culture” celebrated as a victory, with which the active processes of dissolution likewise manifest in an inorganic civilization (as opposed to what Vico recognized as proper to all the “heroic periods” of preceding civilizations).

One of the most typical expressions of the “neutralization” of such a culture is the antithesis between culture and politics: pure art and pure culture are supposed to have nothing to do with politics. In the direction of literary liberalism and humanism, separation has often turned into overt opposition.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 151

Since these different supposed conflicts concern different areas of life and thought, they clearly involve different conceptions of what science itself is - different conceptions of why it is excellent and of what it is trying to achieve […] And these various conceptions cannot help having a social meaning.

To take sides for or against various elements in society in these various wars is inevitably to choose a particular notion of that society. To oppose some particular current ideology is to espouse and express a different one - an alternative idea of life as a whole, a distinctive view of what is important in it.

Such opposition cannot just be something internal to science. It is not 'value-free'.

Asking for more science and less of some thing else is itself a social and political move. This move can be quite legitimate but it must not be mistaken for a part of a pure mysteriously objective science which stands outside society.

Past changes should surely make us think carefully about why we are now inclined to think of particular attitudes as demands of science.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p. 66-7

The trouble is that terms such as consciousness and experience belong in a different category to those of physical science, a category which is deliberately kept out of science just because, in terms of our whole thought, it has a more general application.

Words like these become appropriate when we have moved right away from the specialised scientific angle to another wider and more basic one, namely, the angle from which we normally look at the world when we remember clearly - instead of deliberately forgetting - that we, and many others, are sentient beings within it.

Of course this wider point of view is not hostile to science. It is the background framework within which the sciences arise. The scientific point of view is itself an abstraction from it. The scientific angle is the one from which we attend only to certain carefully selected abstractions which are meant to be the same for all observers.

When we move away from that specialised angle to the wider, everyday point of view we are not being ‘subjective' in the sense of being partial. Instead we are being objective - i.e. realistic - about subjectivity, about the hard fact that we are sentient beings, for whom sentience is a central factor in the world and sets most of the problems that we have to deal with.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.140

One of the main goals of the expansion of commerce is the liberation of embedded individuals from their traditional ties and relationships.

The liberal state serves not only the reactive function of umpire and protector of individual liberty; it also takes on an active role of "liberating" individuals who, in the view of the state, are prevented from making wholly free choices as liberal agents.

At the heart of liberal theory is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit of human existence, the only natural human entity that exists.

Polanyi describes how economic arrangements were separated from particular cultural and religious contexts in which those arrangements were understood to serve moral ends and posits that these contexts limited not only actions but even prevented the understanding that economic actions could be properly undertaken to advance individual interests and priorities.

Economic exchange so ordered, Polanyi argues, placed a priority on the main ends of social, political, and religious life - the sustenance of community order and flourishing of families within that order.

According to Polanyi, the replacement of this economy required a deliberate and often violent reshaping of local economies, most often by elite economic and state actors disrupting and displacing traditional communities and practices.

The “individuation" of people required not only the separation of markets from social and religious contexts but people's acceptance that their labor and its products were nothing more than commodities subject to price mechanisms, a transformative way of considering people and nature alike in newly utilitarian and individualistic terms.

Yet market liberalism required treating both people and natural resources as these “fictitious commodities”—as material for use in industrial processes in order to disassociate markets from morals and "re-train” people to think of themselves as individuals separate from nature and one another.

As Polanyi pithily says of this transformation, “laissez-faire was planned.”

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.50-2

Preindustrial forms of culture and social organization used tools no less than technocratic societies, [Neil] Postman writes, but the tools they employed "did not attack (or more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization.”

The tools adopted by a Technocracy, by contrast, constantly transform the way of life.

Postman writes, “Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development ... Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”

From technocracy we have entered the age of "technopoly,” in which a culturally flattened world operates under an ideology of progress that leads to "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology."

The old-order Amish are often regarded as a society with a phobia towards technology, but this view reflects a preliminary misunderstanding of technology - in particular, an incapacity to recognize that the technology that is adopted by that culture reflects a prior commitment to certain social ends, just as liberal adoption of technology seeks to effect its own distinctive ends.

Some of the decisions of the Amish - like their rejection of zippers - are incomprehensible to many of us, but what is most of interest is the basic criterion they use to decide whether to adopt, and more important how to adopt, technology in their society.

All technological developments are subject to the basic question, "Will this or won't it help support the fabric of our community?"

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.96, 105-6

We know that innovation does occur among Pintupi, even in the norms. The Dreaming has been constantly revised and elaborated through dreams, strange encounters, and mystical experiences, but innovation took place in the idiom of The Dreaming itself.

Even in revising, Pintupi seem to perpetually search for the precedent outside themselves that accounts for current arrangements, although objectification is understood to exist prior to the event.

What is most important is that acceptance of these norms built a relationship among those who shared the Law: they became "one country, one Dreaming." In this way, the Law objectified a form of association that linked people through space.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.267

[...] it seems to me a truth about living, that if a society sticks too much to the same and what is known, it fossilizes [...]

[...] an active and working tradition [...] is the only way in which you can innovate. Traditions don’t fossilize things. They are the current in which you can go on to produce new things, which are coherent with what you know from the past. Not just random ideas that have no context.

[Iain McGilchrist]
'EP 154 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things', The Jim Rutt Show, Youtube

The encyclopaedic, the genealogical, and the Thomistic tradition-constituted standpoints confront one another not only as rival moral theories but also as projects for constructing rival moral narratives.

Is there any way that one of these rivals might prevail over the others?

One possible answer was supplied by Dante: that moral narrative prevails [...] which is able to include its rivals within itself, not only to retell their stories as episodes within its own story, but to tell the story of the telling of their stories as such episodes.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p.80-81

Descartes broke with tradition, made a clean sweep and undertook to start afresh, finding out everything by himself.

This kind of arrogance became the ‘style’ of European philosophy. 'Every modern philosopher,' as Maritain remarks, 'is a Cartesian in the sense that he looks upon himself as starting off in the absolute, and as having the mission of bringing men a new conception of the world.'

[E. F. Schumacher]
A Guide for the Perplexed, p.18

[…] it is again focused on individual change, not group change. We evolved to make decisions not as individuals but within the constraints of families, clans and tribes.

Much of such learning is implicit in understanding and critically enables diversity in process and action. It is also pragmatic and avoids a lot of the new age language associated with the whole transformation agenda.

[Dave Snowden]
'Stairways to Heaven'

It was a cardinal tenet of Romanticism that “the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues," as Ruskin put it, and that art could not flourish if it isolated itself from the workaday world or served merely to add a veneer of refinement to activities otherwise dominated by the pursuit of wealth.

In France, on the other hand, intellectuals who condemned bourgeois society in the name of art inherited the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment. They had little enthusiasm for country life, handicraft production, or the art of the folk.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.136

In the same work [Brownson] continued to attack the separation of church and state, which rested, he now argued, on a philosophical separation of spirit and matter, mind and body, that ran counter to the doctrine of the Incarnation and to the whole Christian tradition.

Three years later, he criticized the idea that clergymen should not "meddle in politics" on the grounds that "all man's duties are intimately connected," that "religion and politics run perpetually into one another," and that "a religion which neglects man's social weal, is defective in the extreme," while a politics set apart from religion degenerated “of necessity into Machiavelism.”

In 1842, he said that it was “wrong, wrong,” to cite medieval history on the dangers of clerical oppression, as if it were improper for secular authorities to submit to spiritual authority. On the contrary, “it was well for man that there was a power above the brutal tyrants called emperors, kings, and barons, who rode roughshod over the humble peasant and artisan.”

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.186

While the notion of a theory as being a “map of the world” is used in Western science, our maps tend to be relatively impoverished in their connotations and hold little in the way of social value.

By contrast, Native maps contain spiritual and social values. They bind people to each other and to their past and they are magical and sacred. The world of Native maps is endless and its connection to Native science is profound. Indeed, one could hazard the speculation that to a great extent the map is the science, while, by contrast, within the West it is said by philosophers that “the map is not the territory.”

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.273

For most Western mathematicians, the heart of their topic lies in abstraction.

But in seeking to understand sacred mathematics we should never forget the great principle of Indigenous science, that it is based on both traditional knowledge and direct experience, which includes the whole world of dreams, visions, spirits, and powers.

Within sacred mathematics, a number is never abstracted from the animating spirit that gives it life, nor from the concrete situations in which it is used.

The number four is not an abstraction that stands on its own without reference to any process or object in the world of spirit and nature. The number four is the Four Directions and the Four Winds.

Again and again one sees that, from the perspective of Indigenous science, sacred number is not abstract but concrete and experiential: The spirit of each number unfolds into an interlocking multiplicity of different meanings and teachings.

Sacred mathematics is not a branch of knowledge or a particular discipline that can be taught separately from other subjects and disciplines.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.161-2

In seeking its objectivity and freedom from subjective values Western science has cut itself free from pursuits such as art, religion, etc. In this way Western thought has become profoundly fragmented.

Scientists also feel that their discoveries are, in a sense, absolute truths that are beyond moral values. They are neither good nor bad and their potential use lies outside the province of science. The result of this fragmentation is a knowledge that is divided into a number of specialized compartments, along with such by-products as an accelerating technology, ecological damage, alienation, high-tech medicine, etc. Science itself has become divided into a number of specialized branches of study.

By contrast, Native science cannot be separated from spirituality, art, ceremony, and the whole social order. Every action is a spiritual act and has its effect on nature and the individual.

[…] For example, in Indigenous science the healing power of a plant should not be studied simply in terms of some molecular component that acts on cells in the human body according to a particular mechanism; rather, the plant becomes enveloped within ceremony and story: The plant possesses a spirit. It may only be collected and used in a certain way.

Within Indigenous science the whole meaning of the plant, and of healing, can only be understood within a wide, multilevel context. Meaning is always context-dependent, rather than absolute and context-free as in Western science.

However, the idea of a context-dependent meaning and interpretation is now being forced on Western science as well by the quantum theory.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.262-3

Cosmology is not abstracted as a particular branch of Indigenous science but is fully integrated into the unity of nature and of all living things, the harmony between the world of spirits and the manifest, the special names and roles of plants and animals and the life-path of each individual.

Indigenous cosmology provides a set of values, social integration, and validation for The People. It is a way of life, a relationship to the natural world, a deeper reason for ceremonies and daily practice, a foundation for song, art, and artifact.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.268

[...] all those various concepts which inform our moral discourse were originally at home in larger totalities of theory and practice in which they enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived.

Moreover the concepts we employ have in at least some cases changed their character in the past three hundred years; the evaluative expressions we use have changed their meaning. In the transition from the variety of contexts in which they were originally at home to our own contemporary culture 'virtue' and 'justice' and 'piety' and 'duty' and even 'ought' have become other than they once were.

We all too often still treat the moral philosophers of the past as contributors to a single debate with a relatively unvarying subject-matter, treating Plato and Hume and Mill as contemporaries both of ourselves and of each other. This leads to an abstraction of these writers from the cultural and social milieus in which they lived and thought and so the history of their thought acquires a false independence from the rest of the culture.

Kant ceases to be pan of the history of Prussia, Hume is no longer a Scotsman. For from the standpoint of moral philosophy as we conceive it these characteristics have become irrelevances.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.12-13

[...] the categories political, dramatic, philosophical were much more intimately related in the Athenian world than in our own.

Politics and philosophy were shaped by dramatic form, the preoccupations of drama were philosophical and political, philosophy had to make its claims in the arena of the political and the dramatic.

At Athens the audience for each was potentially largely and actually to some degree one and the same; and the audience itself was a collective actor. The producer of drama was a holder of political office; the philosopher risked comic portrayal and political punishment.

The Athenians had not insulated, as we have by a set of institutional devices, the pursuit of political ends from dramatic representation or the asking of philosophical questions from either. Hence we lack, as they did not, any public, generally shared communal mode either for representing political conflict or for putting our politics to the philosophical question.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.161

[...] heroic poetry represents a form of society about whose moral structure two central claims are made.

The first is that that structure embodies a conceptual scheme which has three central interrelated elements: a conception of what is required by the social role which each individual inhabits; a conception of excellences or virtues as those qualities which enable an individual to do what his or her role requires; and a conception of the human condition as fragile and vulnerable to destiny and to death, such that to be virtuous is not to avoid vulnerability and death, but rather to accord them their due.

None of these three elements can be made fully intelligible without reference to the other two; but the relationship between them is not merely conceptual. It is rather that all three elements can find their interrelated places only within a larger unitary framework, deprived of which we could not understand their significance for each other.

This framework is the narrative form of epic or saga, a form embodied in the moral life of individuals and in the collective social structure. Heroic social structure is enacted epic narrative.

The characters in the epic have, as I noticed earlier, no means of viewing the human and natural world except that provided by the conceptions which inform their world-view. But just for that reason they have no doubt that reality is as they represent it to themselves. They present us with a view of the world for which they claim truth. The implicit epistemology of the heroic world is a thoroughgoing realism.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.149-150

Every individual has a given role and status within a well-defined and highly determinate system of roles and statuses. The key structures are those of kinship and of the household. In such a society a man knows who he is by knowing his role in these structures; and in knowing this he knows also what he owes and what is owed to him by the occupant of every other role and status.

But it is not just that there is for each status a prescribed set of duties and privileges. There is also a clear understanding of what actions are required to perform these and what actions fall short of what is required. For what are required are actions. A man in heroic society is what he does.

Hermann Friinkel wrote of Homeric man that 'a man and his actions become identical, and he makes himself completely and adequately comprehended in them; he has no hidden depths . ... In [the epics] factual report of what men do and say, everything that men are, is expressed, because they are no more than what they do and say and suffer' (Friinkel 1975, p. 79). To judge a man therefore is to judge his actions.

[...] any adequate account of the virtues in heroic society would be impossible which divorced them from their context in its social structure, just as no adequate account of the social structure of heroic society would be possible which did not include an account of the heroic virtues.

[...] morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society. There is only one set of social bonds. Morality as something distinct does not yet exist. Evaluative questions are questions of social fact.

It is for this reason that Homer speaks always of knowledge of what to do and how to judge. Nor are such questions difficult to answer, except in exceptional cases. For the given rules which assign men their place in the social order and with it their identity also prescribe what they owe and what is owed to them and how they are to be treated and regarded if they fail and how they are to treat and regard others if those others fail.

Without such a place in the social order, a man would not only be incapable of receiving recognition and response from others; not only would others not know, but he would not himself know who he was.

It follows that we cannot identify the Homeric virtues until we have first identified the key social roles in Homeric society and the requirements of each of them. The concept of what anyone filling such-and-such a role ought to do is prior to the concept of a virtue; the latter concept has application only via the former.

On Aristotle's account matters are very different. Even though some virtues are available only to certain types of people, nonetheless virtues attach not to men as inhabiting social roles, but to man as such. It is the telos of man as a species which determines what human qualities are virtues.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.142, 144, 214

Everything is Connected

Centre / Periphery

Guiding Fiction

The Bottom Line

Playing with the Pieces

Information and Knowledge

The Romantic Attitude