Category Archives: Greatest Hits

The Eternal Hive

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The late Joe Sobran produced the metaphor of the insect hive to describe the group behavior of the Left. It was a useful way of describing the spontaneous cooperation that has always been a feature of the Left. It is the dominant feature. Progressives will suddenly flock to an issue, all chanting the same lines and howling the same protests, as if they are a trained army of lunatics unleashed on the rest of society. It is a behavior that looks coordinated, but it is spontaneous and instinctive.

The most recent example of this was the reaction to the Dylann Roof shooting at the black church. All of sudden, as if commanded by a super villain from a secret lair, the Left began chanting in unison about the Confederate battle flag. Even the sober minded had to wonder if this was not a planned effort. Within a few hours we went from indifference to Confederate symbols to roving bands of lunatics toppling over statues and digging of Confederate graves.

Imagine the sort of person, who, upon hearing about a shooting, immediately thinks it is time to topple over a statue in their local park. What sort of person sees their coreligionists howling and then begins howling uncontrollably? Imagine what it is like to have no agency, in terms of how you react to public events. Presumably, there is something stimulating these people. Perhaps the swarm behavior releases endorphins, freeing the adherent from the torment of reality for a while.

It is an important question. A generation ago, progressives were programmed to swarm over economic issues. Socialism still provided the general framework of their imagined utopia, so they regularly launched into assaults on business, claiming to defend the interests of the working class. Yet, when socialism collapsed, progressives quickly shifted from socialist utopianism to sexual and racial utopianism. The same people who used to put Darwin fish on their Subaru, now howl about racism.

Sobran was correct to point out that progressives have the same reaction to perceived threats as bees when they fear a threat. The resulting attacks are not indiscriminate, but they are excessive. The progressive has a binary view of the world, where those inside are allies and those outside are enemies. In this regard, progressivism functions like cult, where the focus of the adherents is always on a devil. The difference is their devil is a shapeshifter, taking on new forms to fit every occasion.

It is tempting to assume that a pattern must have some causal agent, some intelligent force behind it. It is the nature of man to confuse cause and purpose. In fact, this is why efforts to oppose the war on the culture have always failed. The defenders assumed an intelligible purpose behind the actions of the Left so they invested their time in defeating those arguments. In reality, the cause of progressive rage was always a biological response to what the group has determined to be a threat to the hive.

Another way the Left functions like a hive is how individual members react to being cut off, even temporarily, from the hive. A lefty in a room full of people it perceives as hostile will become very passive. Reverse the roles and put a normal person in a room full of progressives and they will attack him relentlessly. It is why far left TV shows have a narrow, but loyal following. It is how the isolated Progressive can connect with the other members of the hive. These TV shows are the televangelists of the Left

This is probably why the Left has become obsessed with purging dissent. Social media now supplements the pheromones used to synchronize behavior. Twitter and Facebook are becoming neural pathways for the hive, so that far flung members can pick up cues from other members. “Trending on Twitter” is becoming a way for progressives to know what they are supposed to like and, more important, what they are supposed to hate. Right wingers on social media scramble the signal.

Even though observed patterns may not have a central control mechanism, they must have a cause. In the case of progressives, it is clearly something biological. Even those who manage to leave the cult, never really lose the hive mindedness. Like reformed smokers, they usually direct this instinct to criticizing their former hive mates. You never see a former progressive activist, living a quiet life alone somewhere. When Lefty leaves the hive, it is to serve another queen.

Most likely, this behavior traces back to the dawn of man. A deep, emotional commitment to the group would have evolutionary advantages. Status within the group would be higher for those who were most ferocious in defending the group. Well into the agricultural age, the leader of a people was often the best warrior. Perhaps this small group instinct manifests in an organized society, as social fanaticism. In all times and all places, the reformer imagines himself protecting the weak from the strong.

Fanaticism has its utility. The Greeks figured this out when observing that warriors were most ferocious when fighting on their own land. When advancing into foreign lands, they became more conservative. A focused, controllable fanatic is useful in war. Similarly, organized religions can never have a shortage of those willing to risk it all to spread the good word. More than a few zealots ended up in the cannibal’s pot, but there were always more zealots ready to convert the cannibal.

This innate hive-like behavior of some elements of society has obviously not been a detriment to progress. The thing is though, there has always been a transcendent set of limiting principles, operating like a leash on the fanatic. Christianity, for all its faults, puts hard limits on what people can do to one another. When that is removed, the zealots are free to attack perceived enemies without restraint. Like Africanized honeybees, utopian socialists have slaughtered millions they saw as threats.

The key insight of Sobran was that the hive-like behavior of the American Left was not caused by socialism or radical ideology. The relationship reversed. The hive-like behavior was a constant, a part of the American biology. When the socialist paradise collapsed, the Left switched to sexual and racial utopianism. That means when the current rage heads burn what is left of society, only to not arrive at the promised land, they will find some new fantasy to embrace. The Hive is eternal.

The Social War

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For most modern Americans, the issue of “rights” is talked about in spiritual terms, more than practical or legal terms. The concept of Natural Rights has lost all meaning to the modern person, even though our system depends upon the concept. That is not necessarily a bad thing. As Western societies have evolved since the Enlightenment, the concept of rights has expanded and evolved as well. Today, what we think of as “our rights” fall into three general areas, civil, political and social.

For Americans, the concept of civil rights has been tangled up in racial politics, mostly because of baby boomers nostalgia. As a result, three generations of Americans have been steeped in the mythology of the Civil Rights Movement, thinking it only applies to black people. Putting that aside, we expect equality before the law and due process. The law should apply to everyone equally and the administration of the law should follow a transparent and predictable process.

While civil rights are about equality before the law, political rights are about equality in formulating the law. That means having an equal shot to participate in the political process which creates the laws. Equality before the law is not worth a lot if your enemies have the exclusive right to dictate the law. The real change in the Civil Rights Movement was in the political realm. Blacks are now fully included in the nation’s political process.

As civil and political rights have expanded, social rights have contracted. The right to live your life unmolested by others is increasingly difficult. It used to be a given that a man had a right to anonymity. That is just about impossible today. More important, it is increasingly difficult to hold unorthodox opinions and beliefs. Half a century ago, people dreamed of a colorblind future, but today, people dream of not getting fired for posting FBI crime stats on Facebook.

This relentless intrusion on our social rights is in the news on a daily basis. This story from Tampa is a representative example. Here is a woman, hounded by bigots, because she holds unapproved opinions. You can be sure that the ululating fanatics will be badgering her school system to fire her from her job. We now live in a society in which thinking things that were commonly understood a generation ago, is used to ruin a person’s life, making them a pariah in their own community.

This erosion of social rights is not just in the public sphere. If a group of people holding unapproved thoughts wants to socialize privately, the bigots will seek them out and call down the rock throwers on them. This story from Michigan is typical. These people are going to great lengths to avoid drawing attention to themselves, yet the local progressives are hunting them down, hoping to prevent them from having a private dinner together. Iran has more social liberty.

Of course, the war on social rights is just the start. The orchestrated assault on the nation’s oldest political rights organization is one example of the effort to extend the denial of social rights to the denial of political rights. The ongoing legal effort to deny Americans their civil rights, based on their thoughts, is another aspect to this war on our general liberties. The plaintiffs are asking the court to create a new legal status for heretics, which denies them the rights and privileges of citizenship.

Now, the reason Western societies evolved political systems that respect civil rights and allow for near universal participation in politics is to reduce political violence. When the working class can organize around the candidates of their choice, they do not have to stage bread riots. When minority groups can expect equality before the law, they do not have to make war on the majority. Participatory democracy, in theory, gives everyone a stake in the system and a reason to defend it against subversion.

What is happening today is a unilateral declaration that a growing list of opinions and ideas are off-limits. Anyone that embraces them, or is suspected of embracing them, is outside the sphere to which civil, political and social rights apply. These outside people become fair game, as they have no legal avenue to seek redress. A person who loses his job because he agrees with what his grandfathers thought, is quickly becoming a man without a country.

In this Tucker Carlson profile, he makes the point that he lives in a great neighborhood with smart wonderful neighbors. It is America as it was in 1955, so naturally the people living there are deeply satisfied with their work as a ruling elite. The reason for that is they have no idea what is happening out in the hinterlands. They avoid the consequences of their preferred polices. If hordes of migrants show up in their schools, they will not be so self-satisfied.

The same logic applies to what is happening in this social war being waged against political dissidents. The people hounding schoolteachers out of their jobs can feel self-satisfied, because they get to avoid the same treatment. The people harassing companies to break ties with the heretics, have no skin in the game, so they are free to overindulge in righteous indignation. At some point, this leads to violence, either against the victims or by the victims.

That is why the current climate is so dangerous. Nature supplies more men with nothing to lose than any society can need. A political system that systematically marginalizes large swaths of young men, telling them they have no place in the world, is a society begging for political violence. Rebecca Klein of the Huffington Post may be feeling smug, for having “outed” a bad thinker, but she is not going to be so smug when her Prius blows up when she tries to start it.

During the Civil Rights Movement, there came a point where the people in charge faced a choice. They could let reasonable men on both sides find an accommodation, or they could let the unreasonable men on both sides fight it out. Today, the people in charge have that same choice. They can put their unreasonable people on a leash and deal honestly with the reasonable people in dissent, or they can continue to wage this social war and invite the war into their streets and their neighborhoods.

This will not end well.

Reality Returns

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All of the usual suspects are freaking out over Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum. Most of it is by silly people. Some of it is simply the innumerate throwing yet another tantrum about the bad man who vexes them. Some of the hysteria is due to the fact that people in the chattering classes were sure they had talked this bit of reality into going away for good. Reality, however, is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. The reality of trade is now back.

The amusing thing about trade debates among the chattering classes is that they never bother to mention the trade-offs that come with trade policy. Trade is like any other public policy. It is all about trade-offs. Our rulers, however, were sure they had sacralized their preferred set of trade-offs a long time ago. It turns out that the only people on whom this worked were the innumerate numskulls in the press. The rest of us remain skeptical about “free trade.”

Trade between countries is a net benefit to both countries. Open trade with Canada means they can sell more beaver hats and hockey sticks to Americans, thus making the typical Canadian richer. Similarly, it means Americans can sell more apple pies and boomsticks to Canadians, thus making the typical American richer. In reality, there will be Canadians who suffer from free trade with America and Americans who also suffer in the exchange. That is how the world works.

While the hockey playing folks of northern Virginia will benefit from cheap hockey sticks from Canada, the suddenly unemployed hockey stick makers in Minnesota are the ones paying the price for it. Similarly, the apple growers of Canada get stuck with the bill for the suddenly cheap apple products in Toronto. The hidden cost of free trade is a lot of people you do not know losing their jobs. When you are the guy getting the pink slip, the cost is not hidden and that has a social cost, as well.

Now, trade can be beneficial to both countries in that it promotes efficiency. The lazy and unscrupulous hockey stick makers in Maine, suddenly have to compete with the crafty canucks. This means better hockey sticks, but also less waste. Protectionism, like all public polices, comes with a cost too. That cost is more often than not carried by the consumer. Worse yet, it often promotes the sorts of corruption of public officials that erodes public trust in institutions.

That is why the ruling class is in a panic over the Trump trade policies. It is not about the cost of steel and aluminum. It is not about the possibility of retaliation. The real fear here is that Trump is re-opening the debate about trade. It means all of these trade-offs that come with trade between nations will have to be discussed. The billionaire class that has benefited from the current set of polices, is in no mood to defend their fiefs from the rabble. So, in waddles the clown army.

The current trade regime, has proven to be the boondoggle critics like Pat Buchanan warned about 30 years ago. Open trade with Canada, an English-speaking first world country, is mostly beneficial. Trade with Mexico, a third world narco-state that now operates as a pirate’s cove, has been a disaster. NAFTA has made Mexico a massive loophole in American labor, tax, environmental and trade policy. A loophole ruthlessly exploited by alien predators like China.

The current trade regime is also at the heart of the cosmopolitan globalism that seeks to reduce nations to a fiction and people to economic inputs. This neoliberal orthodoxy has eroded social capital to the point where the white middle class is nearing collapse. It is not just America. The collapsing fertility rates in the Occident are part of the overall cultural collapse going in the West. Slapping tariffs on Chinese steel is not going to arrest this trend, but it does open the door a debate about it.

That is the reality our betters would like to avoid. What defines France is the shared character and shared heritage of the people we call French. What defines a people is not the cost of goods or the price of labor. What defines a people is what they love together and what they hate together. It is the collection of tastes and inclinations, no different than family traditions, which have been cultivated and passed down from one generation to the next.

Even putting the cultural arguments aside, global capitalism erodes the civic institutions that hold society together. Instead of companies respecting the laws of host nations and working to support the welfare of the people of that nation, business is encouraged to cruise the world looking for convenient ports. There is a word for this type of work. It is called piracy. Global firms flit from port to port, with no interest other than the short term gain to be made at that stop. Globalism is rule by pirates.

That is the reason for the panic in the media. To question “free trade” is to question the arrangements that keeps the current regime in place. It may seem like a small thing, tariffs on steel, but it is the sort of thing that can unravel the entire project, because it legitimizes the sorts of questions that threaten the regime. To his credit, Trump seems to get this, which is why he has pressed ahead with this. He is flipping over an important table in this fight.

Not My President

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There is a debate in dissident circles about the political acumen and the integrity of President Trump. One side looks at all the zigzagging and flip-flopping on DACA and concludes that Trump is just a liar, who has figured out how to con well-meaning white Boomers. The other side looks at the same issue and sees a strategy intended to move the ball forward on the immigration issue as a whole. His latest antics over the gun issue, however, suggest that is he is just a stupid bullshitter who got lucky.

The gun issue has always been the one thing in American politics where you can reveal both the integrity and the intelligence of someone. Gun grabbers are always very stupid or very dishonest. Sometimes they are both. The 2A people are often just reflexively opposed to gun grabbing, without having thought it through, but gun grabbers are never honest or informed. It is the main reason that the NRA has been successful. They have been blessed with an enemy incapable of honesty and unwilling to learn the facts.

Now, that enemy includes President Trump.

Trump knows even less about the gun issue than he does about marital fidelity, so no one on the 2A side figured he would be our champion. The assumption was that he knew enough to avoid the topic and not get in bed with the gun grabbers. On an issue like guns, doing nothing is usually the best course. Most states are sensible on guns, so letting the states handle it is good for us. Instead, it turns out that Trump is making the classic Republican error of taking advice from his enemies.

It would be one thing if Trump did the rope-a-dope, promising to sign a bill that everyone knows has no chance of becoming reality. Shining people on like he is doing with DACA is standard politics. This gun grabbing lunacy he is spouting is damaging to the cause of gun owners and it reveals Trump to be a mendacious blockhead, with no idea why he is in the White House. It is no longer possible to argue that his maneuverings are super-clever 4-D chess. Trump is simply an unreliable liar.

What is most offensive to the 2A community about what Trump is doing is that he is legitimizing that which our side has worked for generations to de-legitimize. One is using non-democratic methods to get around the people on gun control. His plan to ban bump-stocks by fiat is dangerous lunacy on its face. Worse yet, his endorsement of extra-judicial confiscation of guns on mental health grounds, elevates a crackpot scheme of the Left to something worthy of public debate.

Put another way, this jackass has undone generations of hard work by the very people who put him in office. Not even that feckless nitwit George Bush did something this egregiously stupid. Even Barak Obama was unwilling to go this far. This idiocy is right up there with Poppy Bush breaking his tax promise in order to get the Democrats in Washington to like him. It worked. They loved him, which was why he was a one term president. Trump is now setting himself up to follow Bush into the void of stupidity.

Now, the counter argument you will hear is that Trump is just playing more 4-D chess and this will amount to nothing. Well, a smart politician would know enough to not do that with this issue. This is not a parlor game. The pro-gun voter has no sense of humor on this stuff and they have zero tolerance for limp-wristed politicians too afraid of the girls to do the right thing. Speaking only for myself, I would vote for a gay black Muslim over Trump right now. That is right. I would vote for Obama over Trump.

I think everyone who voted for Trump understood they were getting a guy who would be long on bullshit and short on tangible accomplishments. The point of voting for him was to send a message, but also legitimize populist issues. Trump was the guy who would flip over the tables and discredit the status quo, opening the door for ambitious politicians to run on patriotic issues like immigration reform. Trump would maybe do a few things, but the real work would be up to those who come next.

So far, Trump is looking like he is not going to deliver anything other than blowing his own horn every day. Worse yet, the trade-off for his vanity will be the undermining of the one cause that truly defines what is left of old stock America. By legitimizing gun-grabbing and executive fiat, he has just made it possible for the next President Obama to DACA the gun issue, by issuing new gun laws via executive order. Trump is proving to be one step forward and ten steps backward.

The one lesson of the Trump era is to not put too much stock in what Trump says. He is, after all, a bullshitter. He is also a guy who will wheel on a dime if he senses he is on the wrong side. He is rather shameless in that regard. Still, the damage he has done to the cause of gun rights is incalculable and it will not be forgotten. Unless he eventually signs off on some bold pro-gun laws, lots of his voters will choose to spend next election day at the range, rather than cast a vote for a duplicitous gun grabber.

Post-Christian Liberalism

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During the French Revolution, radicals made no bones about attacking the Church as a source of oppression and an obstacle to progress. Marxists, of course, were hostile to religion of all types, but they really hated Christians. In America, direct attacks on Christianity started in the early 20th century, as progressives abandoned the Social Gospel, in order to bring Jews into their movement. The point being, the Left has always had it in for Christianity.

We no longer have Jacobins. We still have a few Marxists kicking around, but they are mostly museum pieces. Exactly no one in a position of authority in the West embraces Marxism or communism. As for progressives, we have plenty of them in America, but their thing has morphed into a weird identity cult that hates white people. Of course, there are precious few Christians around, at least in the ruling classes. In fact, it is hard to find any Christian leaders in the West.

The West is post-Christian now. Leaders of all Western countries agree that Christianity has nothing to offer, in terms of public affairs. You never hear any of them make appeals to the deity or make references to Christian teaching. Every Western nation embraces some form of liberal democracy. Some nations lean toward social democracy, while others embrace neo-liberalism. American leaders will occasionally mumble something about freedom of religion, but otherwise, we are ruled by non-Christians.

The thing is, Christianity brought together certain cultural and political elements that made liberalism possible. There is a reason that things like equality before the law and representative government never took root in Africa. The Roman Republic and ancient Athens had some features of liberal democracy, but they were largely ruled by a collection of families of equal rank. While the Greeks were produced great genius, they did not produce liberal democracy.

To understand this, we need to start with God. The ancients were sure the gods picked sides, played games with man and did so without a grand plan. That means the gods did not see all men as being equal. Jews, of course, were really sure God picked sides, their side, as they are the chosen people. It was the Christians that refined the idea that all men were in equal in the eyes of God. That is the foundation of equality before the law and egalitarianism, at least as far as natural rights.

Another idea, essential to liberal democracy, is the concept of an ordered universe with fixed rules. This was a concept borrowed from Greek philosophy and carried through Europe by Christianity. Not only is an orderly universe essential for the development of science, but it is also essential for the development of rational government. If God has created an orderly universe, governed by immutable and discoverable laws, human society should follow those rules.

You cannot have a free society without contracts. The bargain between men certainly predates Christianity, but it was the Jews who produced the idea of a covenant, a contract that even God would abide. Christians inherited this. The idea that making a contract and sticking to it, because it would displease God to do otherwise, makes it possible to enforce contracts. You cannot have anything resembling liberalism without contract law.

Finally, morality without the divine is just a set of man made rules. Christians were certainly not the first to ascribe the moral code to the supernatural, but they expanded on the Jewish concepts to create a whole body of morality that elevated humanity in the eyes of God. Doing the right thing by your fellow man, even when no one is looking, because God will judge you in the afterlife, allows for the development of the hidden law, a moral code. It allows orderliness to spring forth organically.

That is an extremely broad overview, but the point is that what we take for granted about liberal democracy, has its roots in the Christian past. Within one lifetime ago, Western people expected to be ruled by Christian men. Even when the rulers were not very Christian, they kept it to themselves. It was just accepted that public character tracked with Christian morality. Now that we are ruled by post-Christian women, how long before all of these ideas wither away?

We certainly see some unraveling with the modern notion of egalitarianism. We have gone from men being equal before God, to all people being equal to each other. Lacking the limiting principles that come with religion, progressives are a click away from demanding that all of us pretend we are exactly the same. The story Harrison Bergeron has gone from satire to divine scripture. The Christian regard for the complexity of God’s creation has been completely lost in the post-Christian age.

We are seeing the return of occasionalist magic in the modern era. When the Left talks about “institutional racism” or “white privilege”, they are not talking about definable things that one can measure. These are mystery forces acting on man in the same way Old Scratch used to play the role of trickster. The difference is they assume humans lack the agency to resist these mystery forces. In many respects, Norse pagans were more empirical than the modern progressive.

This is a big topic, but it is something that is worth examination. It is assumed that the stock of human knowledge is always growing, but that does not mean nothing is lost. Western people have abandoned a large chunk of knowledge that had been formalized in Christianity. Some of it can be replaced with science, but the parts underpinning civil morality and our moral philosophy are not easily replaced by secular alternatives. Like the game Jenga, we may have removed a vital peg from liberalism.

This Way Be Monsters

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An analogy I am fond of using to describe my efforts is of a ferryman, taking people over a river. One side is the political, social and moral arguments based on the blank slate and egalitariansim. On the other side are the arguments based in biological realism. When people finally grow dissatisfied with the failure of the old arguments, the ferryman takes them over the river to the other side. What they do once across the river is their business. I just take them over the river.

Now, this way of stating things wildly overstates my role and influence, but it is useful in describing the whole body of writers, bloggers, podcasters and so forth, making the sorts of arguments I make here. The analogy serves another purpose. It helps frame the intellectual conflict in our current age. The people on our side know all the arguments on the other side. We were there once. The people on the other side, however, are wholly ignorant of what is happening over here.

This came to mind when perusing National Review the other day. I was sure they would have some posts slobbering over the Black Panther movie. No group is as enthusiastic for anti-racism as the modern conservative. They turn into a puddle of emotional goo whenever they see an even a mildly successful black person. It is why CPAC was just a long line of white people taking selfies with the four black people at the event. Instead, I found this review from Jim Geraghty with a very promising headline.

It was the subhead that got my attention, because the last thing I would expect to see at National Review is the mention of human nature. The place is stuffed to the brim with foaming at the mouth blank slaters. Normally, I would skip a Jim Geraghty post, because he is not interesting. Of course, his movie review was his normal banal nothingness. Even by the standards of movie reviews it is bland. What was striking though is there is no mention of human nature.

I re-read the thing a few times thinking I may have skipped over a line about race realism or even the reality of Africa. Nope. The closest he gets is a throw away line at the end about governance being about trade-offs. Unless you were in a coma for the month leading up to the release of Black Panther, you had to know the movie was explicitly about race. Somehow, Geraghty missed that and never mentions race once in his review of a film about race.

Thinking about this, it occurred to me that the so-called conservatives have turned a strange corner. Back in the olden thymes, the paleocons were sure that their wussy compatriots knew the score but were just too frightened of Lefty to be honest about human nature, especially with regards to race. Maybe it was wishful thinking but listen to some of the old guys, many of whom worked for outfits like National Review, and they used to talk about these things with the wuss-right types.

Maybe it is isolation, maybe it is a platonic form of assortative mating, but the remaining husk of Buckley Conservatism is stocked with people lacking the cognitive toolkit to understand the human condition. It is no longer about avoiding taboo subjects with these guys. They are now true believers in the blank slate, so whole swaths of knowledge are no longer available to them. They are forced to conjure solutions from a limited inventory of information about the human condition.

I mentioned this in one of the podcasts, but it is worth repeating. Sometime ago, I was chatting with a woman and the topic of Somalia came up. I mentioned that Somalis have some of the lowest IQ’s measured. Her question was “Is it the lack of schools or is it how they are taught in their schools?” In other words, nature was no longer in her set of possible answers. Like so many, she had fallen so far down the rabbit hole of nurture, it is all she knew. It is all there is.

This also helps explain why so-called conservatives are baffled by the sudden collapse of their movement. They moan and groan about Trump, using the language of the Left, which sounds rather silly to the rest of us. They cannot see that. They do not know what is on the other side of the river, the side we are on, because they do not know there is another side to the river. For them, biology is the edge of a vast ocean, because they believe there is nothing on the other side, not even monsters.

The New Druze

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In the late 10th and early 11th century, a form of mysticism evolved that incorporated elements of Islam, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, bits from other esoteric faiths, which existed in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The person credited with spreading this new faith was a guy named Muhammad bin Ismail Nashtakin ad-Darazi. He came to Egypt in 1017 and began preaching and attracting converts. He was branded a heretic and executed in 1018 by the sixth Fatimid caliph.

The Caliph, al-Hakim, was not hostile to the new faith, so much as hostile to ad-Darazi, who he thought was suffering from megalomania. His move against ad-Darazi was to put Hamza ibn ‘Ali ibn Ahmad in charge of this new religious sect, which would eventually be known as Druze. Despite not being a member of this new religion, the sixth caliph became a central figure for it. His decision to kill ad-Darazi changed the nature of the religion and allowed it to spread.

This is an interesting bit of serendipity, but it has a connection to our own age in a few important ways. The most obvious, if you are a fan of the period, is al-Hakim is often blamed for starting the crusades. His decision to persecute Christians sent ripples through Europe, eventually leading to the call to recapture the Holy Land.  There were other forces at work, but it is generally accepted that al-Hakim played a crucial role in the clash with Christendom.

Eventually two main strains of Islam came to dominate the Arab world, while Christianity dominated Europe. The Levant has remained a place with lots of diversity. The Druze live mostly in Lebanon. The Samaritans are in the Palestinian territories. Maronites, Eastern Orthodox and Melkite Catholics exist in Lebanon. Syriac Christians and Alawites exist in Syria. Of course, various flavors of Judaism dominate in Israel. It is not an accident that instability is the only constant in the Levant.

That is an obvious lesson when examining this part of the world. If one wanted proof of the axiom, Diversity + Proximity = Violence, the Levant has more than enough for any argument. The pathological zeal of Western leaders for inviting the world into Western lands, can only have one end. That is the what we see in Lebanon, a country blessed with a great location, abundant natural resources and natural barriers. Yet, it is a land riven by sectarian violence and the lack of a unifying identity.

There is another lesson from the history of the Levant and that is the cauldrons of diversity tend to create more diversity. The reason this part of the world was popular with schismatics is its diversity attracted these people. Diversity turns the culture into an open are market for every idea imaginable. The openness to new ideas is constantly destabilizing society, open the door for new cracks and crackpots. Diversity rewards diversity, which makes stability impossible.

That is something to keep in mind as Europe works to invite the world. Throw a bunch of people together with a wide range of beliefs and inevitably it spawns a bunch of new combinations. The flow of Muslims into Europe, a land that has abandoned Christianity for various secular passions, is going to spawn new spiritual movements. The recent conversion to Islam of an AfD leader is the sort of thing that is happening with increasing frequency. Islam is now a thing in Europe.

The other aspect to this is the West is now an open country, when it comes to the religion business. Just as Catholicism faced a dying collection of pagan beliefs, Islam is now flowing into a world held together by pointless social fads. The soul of Europe died a long time ago. To be a European today means to be a deracinated stranger in a land that is increasingly unfamiliar to you. That makes Europe fertile ground everyone looking for converts..

That does not mean Europe will be Islamic. Islam always adapts to the local environment. Islam in Asia is Islam with very Asian characteristics. Islam in the Caucasus is a mountain man version of Islam. Biology is the root of everything and that means cultural items like religion flow from it. The Islamification of Europe will inevitably result in something that is very European. The Germans will have their take, the Danes will have theirs and the French will do something French.

It also means all sorts of other permutation that result from mixing Western empiricism, Oriental mysticism and traditional Christianity. The Druze we started with in this post combine Ismailism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Pythagoreanism and Hinduism. It is an esoteric faith that is also an ethnicity. The Druze do not accept converts and they do not allow out-marriage. A person who marries outside the faith is no longer Druze and their children will not be Druze. Imagine something like that happening Bulgaria.

The point of this somewhat disjointed post is that Europe is dead. The civilization that was created by the culture born of the Enlightenment carries on, but the culture that is the West is dead. Something will come to replace it and that something will, in whole or part, be carried by the people now attempting to replace the Europeans. The resulting culture that rises next will be some combination of the ingredients being tossed into the cauldron, but it will look nothing like the ingredients.

Life After The Afterlife

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Is it possible for humans to have a transcendent moral code if they no longer believe in an afterlife? Some Christians today argue that it is impossible to have any sort of morality without belief in Christ, but that is largely a self-serving claim. God’s role in the affairs of man, in the Christian context, is primarily as the ruler of Heaven. Those, who live a moral life, a Christian life, will spend eternity in Heaven. The people who live wicked lives, will be condemned to an eternity out of the sight of God.

All of the word’s great religions have an afterlife. The Abrahamic faiths, of course, all share a similar conception of Heaven and Hell, with God ruling the former and Satan ruling the latter. Eastern religions have more esoteric approaches. Buddhists believe in a cycle of death and rebirth. Through eventual enlightenment, they hope to escape this and achieve Nirvana, an end to suffering. Hindus believe that through knowledge and wisdom, you can achieve a liberation of the soul in the afterlife.

The conception of an afterlife as a reward and an escape from human suffering is relatively new to humanity. The Greeks did not have an afterlife. A Greek lived his life so he would be remembered. Maybe his shade would end up in Hades, but that was not much of a reward. The morality of the Greeks assumed that punishment for angering the gods happened in this life. Sacrifices to the gods were all about getting good fortune now, not after death.

The Egyptians had an afterlife, but it was only for the elite. Given their habit of burying servants with the dead, the afterlife could also include the attendants. Like the great man’s other possessions buried with him, it was assumed he would need some slaves and servants once he entered the afterlife. It does not appear that this conception of an afterlife spawned a corresponding moral code. It was not a reward for a life lived well, but a reward for having been born to the right station in life.

It is largely believed that the people who gave mankind the concept of an afterlife, one open to everyone who lived righteously, were the Zoroastrians. They believed those who lived on the side of good spent the after life in the House of Song, which they also called the Abode of Light. The Zoroastrians taught that everyone, who followed a proper code, could live forever and that the soul mattered. Those who sided with evil in this life would be condemned to an eternity of darkness and torment.

The Zoroastrians gave us the concept of God and Satan. Ahura Mazda is the creator of the world and father of the two spirits, Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu. The former is the “good” spirit, the latter, is the destructive and evil one. This conflict between good and evil is central to Zoroastrianism and provided the foundation of their moral philosophy. It is also the first known example of a religion basing a moral code on something beyond the here and now.

The Jews picked this up from their time in captivity. The Pentateuch has no reference to Satan, but the Book of Job, written much later, has Old Scratch. In Daniel, Heaven and Hell appear for the first time. Given the history of the Jewish people at this time, it is most likely that they borrowed these concepts from the Zoroastrians. The Satan that Jesus describes is pretty much the Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu. Christian morality is entirely built on the concept of the battle between good and evil.

This is why Nietzsche blamed the Zoroastrians for morality. He and most Europeans scholars of the age were familiar with Zoroastrianism and understood its influence on the Abrahamic religions. Thus Spake Zarathustra is his effort to turn Zoroastrian moral philosophy on its head. Rather than an eternity of good versus evil, he has a re-imagined Zarathustra discover his error and correct the mistake. Nietzsche is a tough read, but the implication is there can be no morality without God.

The question for our age is can we maintain a moral code when no one believes in God or an afterlife? This is clearly something our betters struggle with, even though they do not think of it in these terms. The New Religion that progressives are trying to impose upon us has no explicit god or eternal reward for the faithful. Instead, they are forced to conjure mystical stand-ins like the “tides of history”. Even their appeals to science are really just appeals to an unnamed and mystical deity.

Right wing progressives suffer from the same dilemma. It is not an accident that you never hear conservative pundits make explicit appeals to Christian morals or even Jewish morality. Instead, they argue that Donald Trump is immoral because he vexes the shade of Ronald Reagan or Bill Buckley. They may not come out and call these guys deities, but they certainly treat them as prophets. Their gods are the people from the past who fit their current needs.

This is the root of our current cultural troubles. For example, on whose authority was racism made a mortal sin? If it is, then what? From whom do you ask forgiveness? If the racist and the anti-racist molder in the same ground together after death, what is the point of being a devout anti-racist? Perhaps that’s the real reason they are digging up Confederate soldiers. They lack an afterlife beyond the graveyard, so that will be their heaven and only the righteous will be buried.

Now, it does not follow that we are condemned to an age of coercion. The Greeks got along fine without worrying about the afterlife. They did have a set of gods, who had to be mollified. Otherwise, bad things would happen to man in this life. Given the shape of our nature cults and the fanaticism of our secular elites, it is clear that we have not evolved past the point of needing a transcendent morality. That suggests some new deity will replace the Christian god..

Alternatively, the recent efforts to fashion a civic religion will fail as it lacks the necessary moral authority to induce voluntary compliance. The Christianity that flowered in the Middle Ages may be on the ropes, but something new will surely spring from its ruins. Perhaps the flood of Islam into the West is part of that process. The soul abhors a vacuum. Maybe we are on the edge of a great religious experiment, like that which birthed Zoroastrianism.

The Tectonic Paradox

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On my morning run, the local temperature read -3° F. That is an unusually low temperature for this part of the world, but not unprecedented. Modern times makes extremely cold weather not much more than a curiosity. Everyone has shelter and plenty of heat. Even the poor have HVAC in their homes and plenty of resources to get their energy bill paid for by others. The local bums had to be rounded up, but there are shelters for them as well.

Not long ago, extreme cold resulted in a lot of death and damage. A hundred years ago, deaths from cold were common in the northern parts of the world. Some of it was due to disease spreading quickly among people huddled together indoors. There was also the poor nutrition that came from not enough food in the winter months. Even so, people did not have what we have now to deal with the cold, so it was common for people to die when a serious cold snap hit the region.

Go back further and the problem gets even more perilous. A thousand years ago, humans living in extremely cold areas were faced with unique challenges. This required long term planning in order to have enough food, heat and shelter for the winter. It also required a different type of cooperation. Specialization increases productivity so a people facing long winters would be more dependent on one another. Many hands make a light load, but many different skills make it even lighter.

It is generally accepted that humans migrated out of Africa about 60,000 as genetically modern humans. Most likely this meant following a path along the Red Sea and then into Asia and Europe. As the ice sheets receded, humans followed them north to settle into northern Europe and Asia. When the ice sheets began to expand again, these more adaptable and resourceful people moved south, conquering and displacing the people to their south. These people became the stock of settled civilization.

Most of this is speculative, but genetics is slowly filling in a lot of blanks. The implication has always been that harsh environment selected for more resourceful people, who figured out large scale cooperation, burden sharing and so forth. That sounds good until you consider that settled societies did not first start in the north. They began in the mild climates of the Middle East. The data says that the first settled farming communities were in Mesopotamia, which is why it is called the cradle of civilization.

Further, when the Egyptians were building the pyramids, the people in the British Isles were building Stonehenge. That is an interesting structure, but it was built by people who were barbarians compared to the people of Egypt. When the Sumerians were writing down things on clay tablets, Europe was lightly populated by people, who had just barely mastered stone tools. Even into the late Roman Empire, the tribes of Europe were hard pressed to do much more than organize a primitive village.

Of course, all of this has changed. A great puzzle to the blank slate crowd is why it is Europeans rocketed ahead of the rest of the world, in terms of technology and organizational might, starting around the late Middle Ages. When Europeans arrived in Africa, they found a people, who had yet to master the wheel. The ancient civilizations of the Middle and Near East had fallen into squalor. In the New World, the Incas were about where the Egyptians had gotten 5,000 years prior.

It is widely understood that modern humans, homo sapiens, emerged from the speciation phase of sapient humans in Africa about 100,000 years ago. Genetics support this conclusion and it provides details in support of the dispersal. Not only are all modern humans walking around today descended from those original humans, but a baby born today is not vastly different genetically from humans of 100,000 years ago, at least in terms of physiology.

The archaeological record, what there is at least, says that humans dispersed around the world over the next 50,000 years without much change in behavior. Then seemingly all of a sudden, humans began to change culturally. The first agriculture appears in Mesopotamia and soon after large scale settled societies. New technologies spread in fits and starts as people figured out how to contend with and modify their natural environments. This is the tectonic phase.

The sapient paradox is the puzzle as to why it took so long for humans to go from hunter-gathers to settled people. The genetic evidence and lots of wishful thinking say that people in Africa 50,000 years ago were not much different from people 10,000 years ago in the Tigris River area. Why did the people in Mesopotamia figure out how to plan and organize large agrarian societies, while the people in Europe were still living off the land in small tribes? Why did take so long?

The tectonic paradox is the puzzle as to why modern Africans were never able to master the wheel or build a structure taller than a man. When Europeans were conquering the globe, the people in sub-Saharan Africa had yet to adopt a written language. At the same time, how is it that the English, who were no more advanced than Arabs in 1066, were the ones to lead the Industrial Revolution? The great gap  between the big races is recent and unmistakable.

Genetics is starting to unriddle this great puzzle. Even though the genetic difference between human groups is tiny, it turns out that small difference can have huge downstream consequences, particularly with regards to cultural evolution. The high risk environment of northern Europeans, for example, is most likely the root of the wide variety of hair and eye colors that do not appear anywhere else. A small difference results in people who look like a different species.

What this means is that human evolution is not just recent and local, but the behavior differences between populations is not amenable to social engineering, at least not in the short term. The Arabs flowing into Europe are going there because like all mammals, they seek safety and easy access to food and shelter. They are not Germans, however, and no amount of proselytizing will change Mother Nature’s mind on the subject.

We may not know exactly why people are different, but we know they are and there is no changing it. Short of making great leaps in genetic engineering, the differences in the races are as permanent as anything in this world. That means the cultural collision that arises when different people are forced together is not changing. People used to know this and accept. Good fences make good neighbors. What has changed is our betters no longer accept Mother nature’s word for it.

The New Zeros

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In the coming decades, Western nations are going to be faced with a number of problems stemming from the technological revolution. We are now post-scarcity societies, where we have more than enough food, medicine and housing for our citizens and even some non-citizens. The pruning force of scarcity is no longer doing its magic to keep the population fit or even sensible. The next big problem is what to do with the tens of millions of extra humans, no longer needed to contribute to society.

The hardest part of the automation wave will simply be language. What do you call people who no longer have any purpose, in terms of producing goods and services through their labor? For as long as anyone has been alive, the small slice of the population that has fit this definition could simply be dismissed. The underclass is assumed to be lazy or anti-social. Trying to fix this has been a good way to keep the useless off-spring of the middle classes busy in social work.

When the numbers swell as automation eliminates the need for human labor in wide swaths of the economy, it will be impossible to dismiss the idle. When many of the idle are people who formerly occupied office jobs or semi-skilled laboring positions, blaming their condition on a lack of ambition is not going to be possible. The current labor participation rate is about 63% right now. In the coming decades, that number will fall below 50% due to automation and demographics.

The other challenge is how to support the swelling ranks of the useless in a way that keeps them from causing trouble. The hot idea currently is the universal basic income, which is being experimented with in Finland. In the US, some states are talking about how to replace their welfare programs with something simpler like the UBI. Libertarian economists like the idea of the UBI, because it theoretically allows the under classes to participate in the market economy, unencumbered by the state.

The trouble with this idea is math. If all citizens have a floor, in terms of their basic income, whatever that floor is, will be the new zero. The only possible way to have a negative income, in real terms, is if someone is paying their employer. There may be some bizarre situations where that exists, but in the main, zero is the smallest number that can appear in box #1 of your W2. If that number is bumped up by the UBI, that becomes the new zero, the lowest possible.

Imagine the government decides to help BMW sell more cars, so they offer every citizen $5000 if they spend it on a BMW, rather than some other car. BMW is now facing a wave of people coming into American dealerships toting a $5,000 check. The logical thing for BMW to do is raise the price of their low end models by $5000. That way, they do not increase production costs, but they increase the profit per car. In effect, the floor for entry level buyers was just raised by $5000 by the government.

There is a fairly good real world example of this. The government decided to do something to help working class people get into college. Since many need remedial help, before taking on college work, the scheme was to offer a subsidy to be used for community colleges. The students would use the money to prep for college then head off to a four year university, presumably using loans and aid at that level. The result, however, was the community colleges just raised their tuition.

The UBI would most likely follow the same pattern. By guaranteeing that no one would earn less than some amount, in lieu of traditional welfare payments, the absolute floor becomes the subsidy level. In effect, the new zero becomes the subsidy so all other wages would be based off that number. It is really no different than printing up money and dropping it from helicopters into the ghetto. The UBI would be as inflationary as debasing the currency.

The truth is the zeroes that our rulers will be forced to address are zero population growth and zero TFR among the surplus populations. For example, you could fix Baltimore in a generation with mandatory Norplant for the underclass. A generation of childless females means the last generation of 80 IQ residents. The reason Baltimore is a violent city is not an excess of hard working, college educated STEM workers, but a surplus of violent stupid people.

It also means zero immigration. When 80% of today’s immigrants end up on public assistance, the immigrants of tomorrow will be nothing more than useless people to police, feed and house. Japan is the model to follow. They have no immigration and their population levels are about to drop in the coming decades. They are the only nation on earth that is truly ready for the automated future, as they have the demographics to meet a shrinking demand for labor.

There is one other zero and that is zero participation. The fact is the free-market and democracy work when the right answer is not obvious. As automation takes over more and more tasks, the number of issues that need to be hashed out collectively will diminish. Rule by robot means exactly that, which means voting and popular government will have to be reconsidered. What is the point of being mayor when there are no more patronage jobs to dole out to friends and family?