Not only is there always a state religion, but there is always a king of some sort, a father of the country. Likewise there is always a class of priests and judges, always a class of warrior nobles, always a class of merchants, always monastics and hermits, a market, a language, families, patriarchs, prophets, sex roles, etc. These things are built into man. They can be suppressed for a while, or injured, but not permanently eliminated from the constitution of human society. You can’t get rid of them, any more than you can get rid of the pancreas or the spleen. The functions they mediate must be mediated, and one way or another they will be mediated.
Language for example will insist on telling the truth about things no matter how much you try to prevent it doing so, because that is its function: to convey accurate information. The truth must be spoken, or it’s no good saying anything. So you can’t make true statements impermissible, or impossible, and still have a society. Free speech then about everything except what is holy is a practical forecondition of society as such. The truth cannot be gainsayed; not for long; not for more than a few minutes, really. This is why our PC commissars must keep inventing new euphemisms for that which must not be noticed but is nevertheless always, willy nilly, noticed. E.g., “youth.” No one is ever fooled by such nice circumlocutions, not for a moment. The language itself, by its very nature, shreds them to rags almost the instant they are fabricated; for they cannot work even as circumlocutions unless everyone knows quite well just what it is that they would like to indicate without mentioning.
Likewise, unless most people suddenly change their minds about what is good and desirable, a black market will spring up if you make the matter thereof illegal, or otherwise make it inconvenient for buyers and sellers to find each other and reach agreements. Exchange must happen, or society can’t. No deals, no agreements, no societies, no shares, no sharing, no companies, no companionship. Exchange is how we arrange to break bread together, and operates within and among all social organisms, even within families. Forbid or prevent it, and you prevent social intercourse as such, by preventing honest speech: language is the means by which we negotiate with each other about what is to be done; so Mercury is god both of language and of markets and their merchants, his namesakes.
Again, people need and want men who are moral authorities, wise about the true relations of the world to its ultimate source, end, and context, and thus its meaning, to guide their thinking, and correct their policies, and mediate their reconciliations with reality when they have erred and wounded. So they will have them, even when priesthood is ostensibly illegal. There will then always be priests of some sort: literally, presbyters, elders, men old in sapience if not in years thanks to their long study at the pinnacles of thought and experience. Nor can society do without sages and holy men, who can run schools where the young learn how things really work, and so how men ought to behave, and who can maintain the daily round of prayer and chanting that must never cease if the world is not to come undone.
A people without sages, without seers or prophets – the genuine article, mind, not some ersatz huckster peddling mumbo jumbo and farming a coterie of followers – is witless indeed, and lost, and not long for this earth. So there are always sages, in societies that are not dying, or in the bits of them that still live. They might not be officially recognized, of course. But everyone in the neighborhood knows the local sagamore, and the local wise woman.
What then also would we do without poets and musicians, comedians and fools? Or eccentrics, loners, wags, odd ducks, black sheep? Think of Newton, or Spinoza, ill-fit for society, yet indispensable for their quirks.
Similar considerations can be adduced for fathers and mothers, technicians, craftsmen, and engineers, builders and masons, scribes and lawyers, doctors and nurses, merchants, brokers, and traders, and market makers. And soldiers, of course: grunts, cops, condottieri, dukes, earls, fell hard practical men, of good character or bad.
Nature abhors a dearth of any such sorts of people, for their characteristic operations are each needful if society is to work as it should.
Almost by definition, projects of social reform propose to deform or delete one or another social function, or its functionaries, so that it doesn’t work properly any more. But society is a dynamic and homeostatic system, that needs – and, so, wants – all its natural functions working right. When it is pushed on, it responds accordingly, to restore its natural and proper balance, in just the way that the body diseased or wounded coordinates all its activities toward healing. E.g., the more that the feminist establishment insists that women and men are basically the same, and that women should be just like men, the more women dress to emphasize their sexual differences from men. Immodest fashion is the compensation of the female sex for the feminist deformation of their wonted, natural and proper political role.
Just as you can’t mock God, can’t argue with truth, can’t fool Mother Nature, so you can’t succeed at being inhuman.
The Orthosphere 
Another highly enlightening piece.
Interestingly with regard to priests and judges, I have pined for the destruction of secular judiciary, and its absorption into an ecclesiastic structure, essentially rendering the execution of the law, which is at heart based in the Christian morality, to an elite class of clerics well versed in Scripture and brought up in an environment that is toxic to corruption and anti-Traditional thought. These highly pious men would carry out the law at the behest of the reigning autocrat under the supervision of the Church, a ministry between the two as it were.
Courts in the Modern age have become a joke. It’s yet another example of a rigged game where religion is unjustly and automatically excluded from deliberations even while it is absolutely INTEGRAL to the question of right and wrong, of ought and ought not. And is that not exactly what a judge is for?
Conservatives continually whine about the tyranny of men in black robes, or judicial fiat and oversteps. What do they expect? The entire judicial class of the West from judges to the highly lucrative lawyering industry is a cesspool of corruption and rammed full of people whose moral framework is either abject leftism or useless nihilism.
The left has for years taken all of the sacred positions you outline and deformed them, defrocked them, in many cases outsourced them to unsuitables. Nowhere is this more clear than in the sexual revolution and the mutilation of gender dynamics.
Speaking of the lawyering industry, I myself briefly considered entering that field. It is amazing what a mess the law is. I started to call it anarchy by too many laws. We have so many laws and judicial fiats, none of which make any sense with each other, especially considering the base of our Common Law system in Biblical Law, that there is no hope of coming to good conclusions. The law is whatever the last judge to rule says it is. Now, I went to a conservative Christian university, and they tried to work their way around this by asserting various different doctrines that are fundamentally trying to alleviate the contradictions, but none of them very useful practically, especially as long as our system is hostage to hostile Leftists. The utterly abysmal state of the whole thing, even on cursory glance, is one of the things that pushed me into full blown Reaction.
What amazed me was that folks didn’t seem to make the connection to the non-law law and the Platonic observation that democracy devolves into anarchy. When I heard those two things in close proximity to one another, it was like the light turned on: Our government is in the process of devolving from a democracy to an anarchy.
It’s anarcho-tyranny on steroids. Here’s what is about to happen. This summer, the Supreme Court will find that the Constitution forbids states from forbidding gay marriage. After that, in very short order, it will be polygamy, and the end of laws against incest. At that point, the whole shooting match breaks down. Every social arrangement predicated upon traditional marriage – which is to say, almost every social institution whatever – will dissolve.
Spouses cannot be compelled to testify against each other. So defendants will marry sympathetic witnesses who might otherwise have had to ruin their defenses. So spouses will be compelled to testify against each other.
Or take the estate tax. A man and wife could marry all their children, and confer all their property upon them as community property, which is exempt from taxation at the death of the first spouse. The next generation could do the same. So community property will be abolished.
Delete the limits of private action, and you delete the limits of state action. Perfect libertarian freedom is perfect totalitarian tyranny, for that sort of tyranny is the only way to achieve such liberty. And that perfect liberty, guaranteed and imposed by the tyranny of the state, regulating and intermediating every detail of all our transactions with each other, spells the deliquescence of true society, understood as a brotherhood or company, a community of coordinate affections. Society consists in a system of limits upon our otherwise untrammelled freedom of action, for there’s no way we can be together except by adjusting ourselves to each other. When men are prevented from discovering these limits by way of their immediate encounters with one another, they cannot ever truly agree. They can then only either knuckle under to their tyrant, or die.
As you notice, this tyranny cannot achieve anything but a dysphony of laws, regulations and policies, a chaos of confusion, for lawyers and their clients; for there’s no way to specify and consistently account for the myriad details of a whole people’s intercourse that can hope to approach adequacy.
Want to put some money on that prediction?
This sounds like a great argument for legalizing same-sex marriage.
I’m not a betting man, a.morphous. But the drums are already beating in the media and the judiciary to normalize paederasty, incest, polygamy, and even bestiality.
Your second comment mystifies me. From the fact that society consists in limits (albeit, certainly, not *only* in them), it does not follow directly that there ought to be this or that particular limit. You might with equal cogency have said something like, “sounds like a great argument for legalizing contract killing.”
I believe it was the point man involved in bringing sodomite marriage to the Netherlands who said when asked about Polygamy… “That’s what we’re working on next.”
These people are sick. They belong in the wilderness or a mental hospital.
German high ethics council declares people have a fundamental right to incest
http://www.theweek.co.uk/law/60587/incest-a-fundamental-right-says-german-ethics-council
The proposed bet was on your assertion that almost every social institution would dissolve in the wake of legalized SSM. Probably too vague a statement to be wagerable, but still — I’m pretty sure they won’t.
You suggested that men must be free to discover their limits by their own social interactions, which should not be limited by “the tyrant”. That is exactly what SSM advocates desire. Your statement does not suggest a specific policy, but it does suggest support for the liberal idea of individual pursuit of happiness, and a similar liberal approach to the role of government in dictating which human relationships are approved. Maybe you should join our side.
You don’t yet apprehend the incipient dissolution of most social institutions, eh? Well; just wait. You will. Charlie Hebdo is just the beginning. Sooner or later, if things go on as they have lately gone, your turn will come.
There will be survivals here and there, of course – little platoons, holding out. But they’ll be illiberal. That’s why they’ll survive.
See, that’s the thing, a.morphous: there’s no way for a thing to survive as just itself unless it rejects what is not itself – a *totally* illiberal move. But there’s no gainsaying it, for it is a metaphysical truth, and thus inescapable under all circumstances whatsoever: you can’t be two things at once; can’t serve two masters. Diversity is death. To thine own self be true; or, die.
Homosexual “marriage” advocates don’t want the tyrant out of marriage, but precisely the opposite. The whole homosexual “marriage” movement is about the tyrant coercing everyone to recognize what is not marriage as marriage. It is exactly like Winston Smith being forced to agree that 2 + 2 = 5. If people were just left alone, marriage would carry on just as it has done for the last several millennia.
You’ll have to unpack for me how Charlie Hebdo has anything at all to do with the dissolution of social institutions. Did 9/11, which killed a couple of orders of magnitude more people, cause the dissolution of American social institutions?
You seem to be lost in a personal fantasy. I can’t really respond to that.
What things are you talking about?
The idea that things define themselves by rejection strikes me as a doctrine of the weak. The strong are able to relate to and incorporate diversity. This is why diverse and cosmopolitan cities, dens of iniquities though they may be, are the strong centers of civilization. Purity is death.
Same-sex marriage is found in many cultures. A Roman tyrant that converted to Christianity decided to ban it a few millennia ago. It took us awhile to throw off that particular form of tyranny but looks like it is happening.
Your construct is very odd, as if “people” were not the ones agitating for same-sex marriage. You apparently are so self-centered you think that the only reason gays want to get married is to vex your limited sense of propriety. But in fact they are people and want to live like people.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre and 9/11 were just skirmishes in a wider, deeper war. It will continue, and worsen (and, sooner or later, become painfully apparent to you). The “immune system” of the West is so vitiated by the nihilism and attendant moral laxity that have sapped our will to live, that we have welcomed millions of our bittermost enemies into the hearts of our homelands and provided them with civil protections for their inimical plots. But this is just a symptom of the true rot. The war of the left against everything that made the West the West is having an effect.
Any thing. Every thing.
To select x is ipso facto to reject -x. It’s not timorousness, it’s logic.
There’s the cosmopolitanism of a strong culture that retains its patrimony as a common living tradition, and thus its cultural integrity and vim – the Vienna of the Habsburgs, or the Rome of Augustus come to mind – and there is the cosmopolitanism of a weak culture that hates itself – e.g., the Weimar Republic, and latter-day America. Only a very strong and confident culture can withstand much diversity (viz., the history of Israel). We don’t have one.
So are slavery, murder, gladiatorial combat, and human sacrifice. This argument cuts no ice.
It’s not just that gay marriage is now allowed, but that the state is forcing everyone to treat it as normal and proper, when in actual fact it is not. It thereby forces us all to lie about the nature and meaning of all our marriages. The tyranny involved in this moral, practical, legal and economic inversion far outweighs the constraint of normality – of, to put it differently, the fact that one sort of family arrangement works best in reality as we actually find it – that chafes homosexuals.
NB that reality won’t stop chafing homosexuals that way just because we change a few sections of the law.
I’ll respond to your last point in a new post, as soon as I have time.
Omnis determinatio est negatio.
Exactly.
Sodomites seek ‘marriage’ for a few reasons, some financial in nature, others with a more sinister motive, for instance acquiring children for sexual purposes, as happened in Australia with an adopted Russian baby. These people are in many cases mentally ill and were classified as such until political machinations (not any scientific studies) led to their de-categorization.
Your profoundly liberal arguments and appeals to emotion “they just want to live like people!” might wash on some conservative blog, but we’ve typically moved beyond such things here. I don’t even really recognize ‘homosexual’ as an actual thing, its a liberal concept created for political purposes of attaching a sinful behavior with some kind of innate identity.
Those who make sin their identity are obviously enemies of Reaction. Typically such people also engage in the worst, most perverted attacks on the Lord, are so insecure about what they’re doing they will actually sue people out of their livelihoods in order to force affirmation, and of course worse still are lockstep in supporting myriad other elements of Modernity.
It is non-negotiable. When the destined hour that Kristor references comes, sodomy will be relegated to the status it held in the 1300s, a perverse anti-societal, anti-Traditional activity and a sin against God for which the cost is high. Any notions you have that your little liberal utopia is some kind of ‘Thousand Year Reich’ are foolish. In the long span of history, the current climate for sexual ethics will be a regrettable blip.
you:
me:
you:
Dude, sauce for the goose. If you are allowed to argue based on past history, so am I.
No, it doesn’t. And if you think it does, you are simply blinkered; you can’t see past your own extremely narrow interests.
I didn’t suggest that you were not allowed to argue from history. I suggested that your historical argument fails. “It cuts no ice” means “it is not compelling.” Diseased and wicked behaviors are found everywhere in human culture, and throughout nature. That doesn’t make them A-OK.
Really? Really? Upending life for 98% of humanity and forcing them to lie at every turn so that 2% can continue living in their fantasy is less tyrannical than letting the 98% alone, letting them continue with functional lives that usually reproduce successfully, while disappointing the 2% by preventing them from living a lie? I suppose we’ll just have to disagree about this one, and I’ll accuse you of being unable to see through your own blinkers.
What we don’t need to disagree about, though, is that the tyranny involved, the forcing, is inescapable either way. Either you tyrannize the 2%, or the 98%. Either way, you cut. Legalizing gay marriage is not a *reduction* in tyranny. It just shifts the tyranny around.
I would draw a comparison between the sodomitical elite of the Modern West (well-placed in media, judicial bodies, schools, and corporations) to the privileged eunuch class of the old Chinese empires who mutilated themselves for access to the royal court. These men were corrupt and typically crawled out of the sewage into positions of influence, and thus eventually ended up hated by the people even though they could not criticize them openly.
It seems very clear to me with knowledge of what is going on today, why sexual deviants in particular were singled out for scrutiny in the old Texts. It’s not mainly their deviancy that threatens society, but the other aspects of the personality of those with peculiarly rogue temptations that lead them to egoistic, predatory, and often malicious abuses of power: the thing they crave at all costs.
I do not understand how anybody’s life is “upended” by same-sex marriage unless they actually are in one. That other people might have to make small shifts in their social expectations is not “upending” in any normal sense of the word.
You seem to be using “tyranny” to mean “any form of law whatsoever”, which comes as a surprise to me, since you aren’t an anarchist and presumably believe in the concept of lawful authority of government. I am in no way “tyrannized” by ssm despite being in the 98%, and neither are you, no more than I am tyrrannized by having to drive on the right.
Consider the life of the orphan who might formerly have been placed under the care of a loving couple by a Catholic adoption agency, but who will now be subjected to being raised by two gay men. Consider the additional taxes that will be needed to fund all this, particularly the taxes relating to Social Security benefits. Consider the life of the baker who cannot in good conscience bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Consider the fact that Britain is now engaged in rewriting all the laws they have ever passed – laws of more than a millennium, in all jurisdictions – so that they are gender neutral, and the bedeviling hassles that will accompany compliance with those changed laws and regulations. The list could go on and on.
If lives are not upended by a new policy, then the policy is not having any effect. *All* changes to policy upend lives.
No. Applying your analogy, it is as if there were 2% of the population who objected to driving on the right, and insisted that they ought to be able to drive on the left and be treated – not just by the cops, but by everyone – as if they were driving on the right, while 98% of the population was perfectly content to have everyone keep driving on the right, and make it illegal to do otherwise. If the 98% were to win that dispute, it would not be tyranny. If the 2% were to win, the only way that the new policy could possibly be enforced would be to have the cops involved in regulating every journey by automobile. And that would be tyranny.
Tyranny is cruel, unreasonable or arbitrary use of power or control. A law that can be enforced only by deforming natural and reasonable behavior through constant intervention by state regulation in individual activities is either unreasonable or arbitrary, or both, and therefore cruel, and thus tyrannical. By this standard, yes, many – perhaps most – of our current laws are tyrannical. But not all of them. The rule against driving on the left is not tyrannical. It precipitates organically out of a Nash equilibrium. So for example do the weights and measures established by the Federal government. And so did traditional family law, once upon a time.
@Kristor / Mark Citadel
The fundamental problem is that the illiberalism that flourishes after a societal collapse is not the illiberalism of the Church but the illiberalism of the Mafia. Now, the Mafia may have its own pious myths; it may go to Church on Sundays, and retain chaplains to absolve it of the day-to-day sins of the job and give the Mafia enterprise an air of respectability and grandeur. This turns from cynical manipulation to dangerous delusion if the officers of the Mafia come to believe their pious myths, and consider that doing their job constitutes the defence of Christianity.
But the Mafia will not tolerate the chaplains’ claim to an independent moral witness, and it will pick and choose the parts of the Tradition that are more suitable to its purposes, and retain chaplains that won’t object to this process. Chaplains that do object will end up beyond the pale, so the real Church, and behaviour that is proper to Christianity and not some pathological derivation from it, will be found on the margins of such a society and not in its core structure.
To look at this dynamic in full force, study the recent trajectory of Russia. That has the KGB setting the tone rather than the Mafia, but the picture is deplorably similar to what I have outlined.
And these are supposed to be mutually exclusive categories? They aren՚t, which is the point.
As with “tyranny”, you are stretching a word beyond its normal use in order to make a point (or appear to be making one, I should say). That is, yes, policy changes have effect on lives, but that is hardly “upending”, and whatever upending goes on must be balanced against righting other lives.
Every so often you say something interesting. Not that I agree. What we are seeing now is the evolution of a new equilibrium for human pair bonding, based on a natural evolution of the liberal principles of individual freedom that the country was founded on. Nobody, not even its supporters, expected SSM to achieve mainstream support so fast, which I take as evidence that yes in fact the culture was nudged into a new equilibrium, and against the idea you are pushing that it is some kind of totalitarian imposition from above.
As I indicated elsewhere I have no interest in debating the merits of ssm since I think there is not the slightest possibility of changing your mind or you changing mine. I՚ll respond to particular points if I have something worth saying.
They are indeed mutually exclusive categories, if you will allow me the traditional meaning of “couple” in reference to parents of children. That you will not shows how pervasive is the upending of ordinary life – reaching even to the depravation of quotidian commonplaces such as “loving couple” – imposed upon society by the legalization of homosexual marriage. Husband, wife, male, female, he, she: all these basic terms of discourse are now fraught with legal and political uncertainty and anxiety. Soon no one will be able to use any such terms blithely. And because they are crucial to the routine business of life, the mental tax this will impose upon everyone will degrade intellectual performance, even as the concomitant increase in social discomfort reduces trust and increases friction and transaction costs – i.e., lessens society. Yet no actual reality of the sexes will be changed and no one will be at all fooled by this unnecessary foolishness. But everyone will pay, some only a little, many a lot, a few with their lives or livelihoods.
“So what?” That’s what you’ll say, have indeed already said, like any good revolutionary leftist utopian: “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Thus have tyrants ever spoken.
Death is a state of equilibrium, too. It is the analogue of that state of traffic wherein nothing can move due to pervasive head-on crashes caused by a few fools driving on the wrong side of the road.
Some equilibria are more equal than others. Death is easier to attain than life. It is closer to thermodynamic equilibrium. The equilibria that living systems homeostatically seek are far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and thus relatively fragile and easy to degrade. That’s why all living systems eventually die.
Homosexuality is effectually a proposal that we should stop reproducing, and that the species should die. It is dangerous, for that reason. It is the last sort of thing that a culture interested in its own survival should promote. That ours is now promoting it, along with contraception, divorce, abortion, and all the panoply of sexual disorders, does not indicate that we have somehow graduated to a new and more enlightened plane of existence in which we have escaped the constraints of our biology and opened new horizons for self-realization, for there is no such escape below the orbit of the moon. It indicates rather that our culture no longer wishes to live.
[Cultures can go mad, and commit suicide. They can be led into madness by their mad aristocrats. This is what is happening in the West. Our judges and storytellers have gone mad, and convinced their more gullible and less rational countrymen to follow them. Those few are now engaged in trying to force everyone else to go along with their revolution in human affairs, and cooperate with it, and fund and help it, rather than leaving them alone to live their wonted lives (that’s the tyrannical part)]
Homosexual marriage, then, like abortion and irreligion, and liberalism generally, is a self-correcting pathology, in that it tends to the destruction of the only sort of cultural host in which it might possibly gain traction. By “cultural host” I do not mean “culture,” but “person.” Cultures are mediated by persons who credit their principles, and carry them into practice. When those practices redound to the destruction of such persons, their cultures tend to vanish.
“Every so often you say something interesting. Not that I agree. What we are seeing now is the evolution of a new equilibrium for human pair bonding, based on a natural evolution of the liberal principles of individual freedom that the country was founded on.”
Hahaha, lol. You really think Thomas Jefferson really believed that “all men are created equal”? A country is not founded on ideas, it is founded by a people or a folk. Do you really believe this stupid Fox News-style mythology? That Thomas Paine had an idea pop into his obnoxious diseased brain and all of a sudden America just plopped out of nowhere, completely replacing the culture and folkways of the 13 Colonies that preceded it?
Also, homosexuals do not pair bond anywhere near the level of men and women. If you actually knew anything about either evolution or the natural world you would realize this(I know you were referring to the evolution of an idea in a Hegelian way but still). Read some Darwin or Sir Richard Francis Burton. All you and your type does is use the theory of evolution to bash the creatards in Jebusland but you never actually support evolutionary theory when it goes against your denial of nature and in your delusional belief in equalamatie.
“Nobody, not even its supporters, expected SSM to achieve mainstream support so fast, which I take as evidence that yes in fact the culture was nudged into a new equilibrium, and against the idea you are pushing that it is some kind of totalitarian imposition from above.”
If by the Mainstream you mean the Mainstream Media, than no, no one should be surprised. If you mean Middle America, well, you are wrong. Middle America, as a whole, does not support gay marriage.
“As I indicated elsewhere I have no interest in debating the merits of ssm”
“Merits”, lol.
“since I think there is not the slightest possibility of changing your mind or you changing mine.”
As if that will stop you from trying to prattle on about how anal-raiding is a beautiful and wondrous thing lol.
“I՚ll respond to particular points if I have something worth saying.”
Please, don’t do that. Then you’ll never be able to speak. And then I’ll be bored. Being bored makes me a saaaad panda.
I live in the San Francisco Bay area, where the process of treating gay couples as normal is quite well advanced. There are good and bad things about the culture here, but I haven’t noticed a lot of degraded intellectual performance, certainly not because people might have to use gender neutral terms like “partner” more than is “natural”. You are using the intellectual products of extremely gay-friendly places like Google on a daily basis, and trust me, the people there seem to be pretty damn smart despite having to fine-tune their pronouns.
I suppose by your logic we should soon see rural Kansas surpassing us as a center of intellectual activity since they won’t have to pay the onerous mental costs.
I too live in the Bay Area. It’s a difficult place to live, culturally, because of its diversity. And it gets harder and harder with each passing year (I’ve lived in Berkeley for 30 years). Because I am inured to it from one day to the next, I don’t notice this difficulty too much until I go to visit relatives in the rural Northwest, which is still quite homogeneous, culturally. Every time I go up there, I notice a substantial reduction in the effort I must expend in coping with cultural differences. All the store clerks up there are Anglo. Actually they are mostly Scandinavian, but same thing: they are native Americans, who have spoken Standard English since birth.
It’s the most curious and astonishing thing, how much of a relief it is when every single person one meets speaks English natively. But it’s not just that. All their idioms, mannerisms, body language, rituals of social politesse, and so forth are completely familiar to me, and mine to them. I expend no work at all understanding them, nor do I have to do any work to make myself understood. Consequently I am more relaxed about social interactions than I have to be in the Bay Area. I find that my hackles are lowered. It makes every waking minute a bit nicer.
My interlocutors up there likewise are more relaxed than they are down here. What I have noticed is that the lack of that relaxation in the Bay Area is automatically a reduction of trust among my interlocutors, and this is expressed as low grade anger, suspicion, wariness, surliness. How not? Store clerks in the Northwest on the other hand are living lives just as hard as lives anywhere, but they express more happiness and friendliness and good cheer.
In the Bay Area, it is rare for me to encounter native-born Americans in day to day life, and when I do they are often psychologically damaged freaks of one sort or another, whose fit to culture is deeply wounded: heavily tattooed, or pierced, or gay, or grotesquely dressed, or all of the above. It sometimes seems that almost no one in the Bay Area outside the law, IT and financial firms where I spend my working hours is just … normal. Almost everyone I meet is a cultural challenge of some sort. Not bad, just challenging.
And everyone else who lives here is in the same boat, *especially* the people who are themselves the strangest. I get some relief with family, friends and colleagues, but their lives are an unremitting cultural challenge.
No single one of these costs amount to much. Indeed, they are all trivial. But they add up. A confusion here, a disconcerting interaction there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.
Let’s not pretend that all these challenges don’t cost money. They do. Heterogeneity is expensive.
The case is exactly analogous to what we see with Federal and state regulation. Any one regulation might make total sense in its own terms, and on a cost/benefit analysis. But multiply the regulations to 80,000 pages, and you are talking *serious* reductions of efficiency, and thus of prosperity, for the whole population. Regulations cost money. More than half of what we pay banks in fees (and they pay us in interest) goes to cover their compliance expenses.
So, yeah, the people in the Bay Area are plenty smart, and life here can be really great. Who knows how much more they’d get done, and how much happier they’d be, if everyone they encountered was culturally assimilated? The difference would be marginal, to be sure, but it would be noticeable.
As with most other things, the tell is easy to derive if we run a gedanken experiment: taking two societies otherwise exactly the same, but differing only in that one is strongly homogeneous while the other is strongly heterogeneous, which is more likely to prevail? My money is on the former: strong cultural homogeneity is just more efficient than strong cultural heterogeneity.
The case is exactly analogous to what we see with Federal and state regulation. Any one regulation might make total sense in its own terms, and on a cost/benefit analysis. But multiply the regulations to 80,000 pages, and you are talking *serious* reductions of efficiency, and thus of prosperity, for the whole population. Regulations cost money. More than half of what we pay banks in fees (and they pay us in interest) goes to cover their compliance expenses.
To wander off onto a tangent, it’s interesting to think about what happens to the rule of law as regulatory burden increases. At some point, it becomes more cost-effective to buy yourself a legislator or regulator than to try to comply with the mass of regulation. Once buying yourself a legislator goes from unthinkable to unremarkable, how long can there be a rule of law? You have India.
I wonder if the tangent comes back to the subject at hand. Does too much diversity lead to a similar breaking point? Do you eventually get a contraction in de facto cosmopolitanism from increasing de jure cosmopolitanism? Of course the breaking probably goes the other way in this case. By smashing all these people together what you get at the end is a very low context, thin, commercial-only culture. A culture of the strip mall.
I think there is certainly something like inflation at work in the realm of regulation. It would be odd if regulation were different in that respect than anything else. As a general rule, if you have zillions of x, then any one instance of x is inconsiderable. There are too many regulations for all of them to be really important, and thus worth taking into account. It’s really only a few biggies that you can afford to worry about. No one has the bandwidth for more. So all the rest are mostly noise, except for lawyers, regulators, and compliance professionals, who all know perfectly well that their work is mostly a waste of time: like TSA agents in suits, their work is a purely ostensive measure, a gesture in the direction of an overall intention to right action.
Likewise if the market is too cosmopolitan you are going to get all sorts of messed up deals, agreed to under confused understandings, that then lead to disputes. I.e., noise. Your costs for search, information, and transaction will all go up. Your velocity and size of deals will then have to drop considerably in order to make up for that increased friction of costs afflicting all deals.
In the limit, you get business slowing to a crawl. Buildings take so long to build that they start to erode before they are finished. People value siesta more than work. And so forth. The fake economy then has metastasized and fatally crippled the real economy.
Back to cosmopolitanism: if the culture of the street is diverse enough, you get “vibrancy” – i.e., danger. Then no one ventures forth without a gun. Feud and vendetta start to take over from the cops. Most people stay home, especially the women.
It’s fair to say that under no circumstances should avowed sodomites have any authority over Christians. They should not serve as judges over Christians, politicians over Christians, industry leaders over Christians, etc…
The fact that Modernity allows this is another case on the 1,000,000,000,000 count indictment against it.
Now, being from San Fran-sicko, Sodom on the Pacific, is obviously highly influential here, as rump rangers run that town top to bottom, and have aided in the de-whitening of that area that Kristor points out, turning it into a multicultural cesspool to boot and making sane people feel like aliens.
Pointing out the popular support for something as a sign of some kind of equilibrium change without government enforcement is baseless and easily proven false. If what you were saying was true, then sodomites would have simply gone the route of popular referendums to forward their agenda. The fact that they have gone to corrupt secular courts to enforce their will is a knock-down blow to this argument. Yes, more people are tolerant of sodomitical marriage today, and that is no surprise, since the agenda for schools across the country is increasingly controlled by pro-sodomy elites in the DofE. Don’t pretend that isn’t the case because I have sat in such classes in the past where teachers went out of their way to ridicule the Christian idea of marriage and pillory those who opposed expanding its definition as bigots who should be jumped on by their classmates.
Why do schools need to do this? Because the default natural reaction for 97% of males at least, to same sex activity, is disgust. Its the same reason why schools have to indoctrinate out of children any desire to be among their own kin rather than people from other cultures. As was pointed out in Svar’s statement on evolution, the left likes to reject evolutionary adaptations such as these in a display of blatant hypocrisy and irony.
As for “merits” of this movement, there are none. Discounting any reasons based on hollow Modern ‘values’ such as diversity, tolerance, separation of church and state, sexual freedom, equality, smash the patriarchy, and on and on and on, there are no merits for this concept of marriage between people of the same sex, women and men both. Making people feel like they have overcome “oppression” is not a merit.
What is with all these arch-reactionaries who somehow find themselves living in the most progressive area of the United States? You were quoting economic jargon at me awhile back, maybe you should look up the theory of revealed preference sometime.
That is to say, obviously there is something about Sodom-by-the-sea that you find worthwhile, even to the point of having to deal with the pain of ordering your burrito from people who may not speak English.
Well, that is just stupid, because you are only considering the costs of heterogeneity and not its benefits, such as cross-fertilization and hybridization of ideas and culture. Cosmopolitan multiethnic cities have always prevailed over rural homogeneity, and apparently you realize that on some level or you’d move to rural Idaho to take advantage of the fresh air and white nationalism.
Conversions to reaction are *more* likely to occur in cosmopoleis than in the hinterland. It’s easier to maintain liberal delusions in the countryside, far from daily insults to their credibility. The very rich can pay for the same sort of masking of the downsides of diversity, even in the big city.
I’m not saying the Bay Area is a hellhole. Some parts are, but most of it is still very nice. But nevertheless I’ll be moving to the country soon.
A strong and healthy culture can afford to pay the costs of diversity so as to reap its benefits. We don’t have one.
And they always eventually ran out of gas, and fell into desuetude (Rome) or were conquered and their cultures destroyed (Constantinople, Alexandria).
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As if right on cue, Patriactionary has just penned an update on the state of incest advocacy
Apparently it is already legal in New Jersey and Rhode Island.
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It surprises me that the principals at this site (who are mostly Catholics) do not more often mention natural law as a witness to the right order of things. Especially since natural law = moral order of the universe = inherent intuition of right and wrong = unspoken base for lawgivers and judges to expound positive law = the character of the Creator to make a simple case against what Francis Schaeffer called “radical autonomy” which is the demolition of what Kristor calls “homeostasis and cultural health. Even a.morphous inherently knows natural law (the will of God) but ignores it on the basis of ideology.
Speaking for myself, the notion of natural law is so deeply embedded in my thinking about society that I have a hard time isolating it for consideration. When you see me using the terms “reality” and “logos” (the small ‘l’ Stoic logos) and “Logos” (big ‘L’ Christian Logos), I am invoking a natural law argument. the logos is of course a department of the Logos.
On the claim that the 98% are not tyrannized by the 2%, see here: “Couple fined for refusing to host same-sex wedding on their farm” (http://nypost.com/2014/11/10/couple-fined-for-refusing-to-host-same-sex-wedding-on-their-farm/)
From the article:
Mr. Bertonneau, I don’t know if you know much about hunting let alone dangerous game hunting, but this whole situation reminds me of leopard hunting. Leopard is usually done with dogs and the hunting party usually consists of a PH and a client. When the dogs bay and hold down the leopard, the leopard will start to fight back against the dogs. Until he gets a sight of the hunter. That’s when he starts to realize the true source of his problems.
It’s time to look beyond the dogs.
Does that really apply here? I can see the analogy working for Muslims in the West, as they are almost all pawns. But unlike impoverished minorities, sodomites are actually in the elite, the media, and the judiciary in particular. Like all elites then, they must face retribution when the time comes.
There are some gays in the Elite but even fewer than gays in the general population. Also, since they are not a self-propagating entity they do not have the same avenues to keep power within their lines like the Elite.
Think of a group that is known to push for constant social revolutions, eternal upheaval. A group known to push all sorts of deviancy and iniquities. I’ll give you a hint: they’re minorities but anything but impoverished.
@Thomas – And you could find at least 6 similar cases in the last year alone.
This is what I mean by an accompanying pathology with sodomites. Their twisted nature necessitates forcing their perversion onto others (particularly children) and they do it with gleeful zeal. I’d point to pedophilia advocate Peter Tatchell, the leading sodomite in the UK, who has sought the persecution of anyone who disagrees with their insidious agenda.
Here is a quote from a New York Times sodomite, in an editorial just released.
“I support the right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish—in their pews, homes and hearts.”
See the inherent betrayal of the very values that liberalism claims to stand for? He is saying here, that Christianity should be criminalized everywhere but the mind, the church, and the home. In public, and in government, it should have no hearing.
Of course, advocates like a.morphous will tell us this isn’t tyranny. Well, if we’re going to get fast and loose with the definition of tyranny, then perhaps when members of the oh-so-special ‘community’ get thrown from the tops of buildings in Syria, we will call that not tyranny, but house cleaning.
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It seems more like Modernism is trying to ‘redefine’ sagehood, rather than eliminate it, by removing overt signs of holiness (like piety, transcendental wisdom, and equanimity) and move them towards the academia (humanism, glorification of human rights, progressive identity).
It won’t work, for the reasons you’ve examined. Nature abhors a vacuum.