Modern Life as Cargo Cult

We are nominalists, so we can’t know where true virtue lies; indeed, as nominalists, we are sure that it does not lie in any real particulars; so that, really, it does not lie anywhere, at all. Still, we find that we are compelled for reasons native in and obscure to us to adhere to some notion of virtue or other, even though we feel sure that there is no such thing as virtue in reality. So, to satisfy that compulsion, we will now and henceforth *signal* virtue, as our forebears did – albeit, without any ugly untoward recollection of the really appurtenant deontological distinctions among men & their acts that our fathers drew between virtue and vice. All our moral evaluations are pretenses. But, to save our appearances, we shall pretend that they are not.

Our pretence prescinds its pretence.

So, and despite all the foregoing – which might lead to an appearance of pretence or uncertainty on our part – we utterly condemn all those who have not volubly vouchsafed their adherence to … the stuff that we these days adhere to.

We shall *act* as though we understand what it is to act badly.

Bad Faith as Endemic – ergo, Fundamental – to Modernity

The basic idea is that moderns cannot as such believe anything honestly and with a whole heart. This follows straightforwardly from their nominalism – which, often, they do not even suspect might be in them operative. So, their beliefs are all tentative, ad hoc, only their own and private, nowise dispositive of any reals external to themselves, certainly not at all authoritative (over anyone else, or even over themselves) and thus *not truly believed.* This is why moderns are so prone to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.

They don’t believe the Narrative in their hearts. But the Narrative is all they have to go on; and one must perforce go on. They have no confidence in anything else.

New book!

I’ve been playing hooky from this site for a while, but I hope no one minds if I show up to announce I have a new book coming out, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church. It’s about the old identities that worked (man, woman, Catholic, American), the new ones that really don’t (Latinx, nonbinary), why the change, whence the lunacy, and what to do about it. The problems go pretty deep, and like everything else today they’re not going to get better unless we change a lot about how we live and think about things.

 

Correcting Some Errors in Lippincott’s Culture War Essay

[JM Smith beat me to the punch, but my punch is different.]

At American Greatness, Josiah Lippincott opines that conservatives need to back off from culture war and focus on saving the country via immigration control, tariffs, no foreign wars, and law and order. These are all needed, but they’re not enough.

At a first reading, Lippincott’s thesis seems to be that conservatives must stop fighting the culture war because doing so will cause them to lose elections and therefore be unable to save the nation. A closer reading reveals that he counsels backing away from culture war at the national level, but acknowledges that cultural victories are still possible at the state and local levels.

Problem is, this nuance will be lost on many readers. The impression one gets from the article is that all conservative politicians and the voters who support them need to back off from culture war because they’ll only get crushed. That’s not right.

Also, Lippincott’s main thrust – – judging by how many words he devotes to it – – is that Christianity is too weak to win political fights over cultural issues. If that’s correct, his distinction between what’s possible at the national versus the state and local levels becomes irrelevant.  If Christendom is too weak to win then it’s too weak to win at all levels of government, in which case Lippincott should be counseling us to avoid cultural combat at all levels. And if it’s strong enough sometimes to win then his counsel needs to be more nuanced.

I have copied Lippincott’s text in full below the asterisk, with my comments in italics, preceded by AR.

What One Sentence Conveys the Most Information About the Modern World?

In his celebrated Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman posed a thought experiment. If the record of all scientific knowledge save one sentence were destroyed in a great cataclysm, what single sentence would pass on to our successors the greatest amount of useful scientific information in the fewest words?

Feynman’s answer:  “All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”

In a similar spirit I ask, what one sentence conveys the most information in the fewest words about the current situation in America and the West?

This is not an academic exercise. There are millions of ordinary people who do not know what is going on. They need to wake up.

*

My proposed maximally-informative sentence:

American society has become revolution in the name of leftism, atheism, and egalitarianism but with the apparent actual goal of destruction, and the revolutionaries are punishing Christians, white people, and men.

ChatGPT and Intellectual Heat Death

It is speculated that ChatGPT may replace many professions: teacher, journalist, legal assistant, anyone who writes for a living.

ChatGPT scours the Web and internalizes the majority beliefs about everything it encounters. Thus the recent buzz about how ChatGPT declared it would be better to allow a nuke to slay millions than to disarm it by saying out loud the Dreaded N-Word.

It’s possible that ChatGPT is being controlled so that it does not simply internalize the majority view but has a baked-in woke bias. For this article I’m assuming it is as presented.

Since it only “knows” the majority beliefs (or rather, the textual expressions of these beliefs) which exist on the Web, if ChatGPT takes over the bulk of mankind’s production of text then heterodoxy and heresy will be averaged out. Outlying concepts and beliefs will be averaged away from the contents of the Web as ChatGPT ignores outliers and swamps them with its own output. Outlying beliefs will become more and more rare, and regime-compliant beliefs will become increasingly common.

Hi You Pathetic Dickless FBI Weenies

Now that we know that the FBI has been targeting traditionalist Catholics such as we *in our own churches* – and, no doubt, the devout in the temples also of our Evangelical and Orthodox brethren – we can be *absolutely sure* that they have been tracking all of us here.

We all of us here are known to the FBI. They have all our contact info, and all our email traffic. Those utter fools consider us enemies.

So pathetically sad. You infamous impotent weenies of the FBI. How can you live with yourselves?

Probably you compensate for your profound weakness with sadism of some sort. How forsooth could you bear up from one day to the next, otherwise?

So absurd; so sad, your lives, so wicked and so sordid.

May God bless and keep you, and may he make his coruscant light to shine upon you. It can’t give you peace, unless you repent.

Repent, I beg you. Don’t go to Hell.

Blackface Bad, Dragface Good

The  President of [West] Texas A&M has just manfully stepped up to declare in public that drag shows “degrade women and are ‘derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.’” This has prompted the predictable storm of manufactured gayfake outrage from the Commies, which he must have known would be sure to follow his remarks.

Now, while his courageous act is extraordinarily unusual these days in any figure of prominence, the most remarkable aspect of this turn of events is I think that *it had never before occurred to anyone that, in effect, drag shows treat women the way that the old blackface vaudeville productions treated blacks: with contempt.* This had not even occurred to me, and I wager that I am fairly unusual in my extreme sensitivity to and morose cynical enjoyment of the manifest and absurd contradictions espoused by the Left (whatever the character of its current skin suit).

For white men to make themselves up as black in public performances is bad, horrible, a sin that cannot be forgiven. But for men to make themselves up as women in public performances is totally cool.

So funny.

The Vipers Are Now in Charge

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

Matthew 3:7

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For, out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Matthew 12:34

The Pharisees whom both John and his cousin Jesus called a brood of vipers were in first century Palestine the counterparts of what today we would call the Woke Enforcers of Political Correctness. Not of Justice, properly so called. Just of Political Correctness.

Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist

Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”

I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?

One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?

Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit: