Friday, May 02, 2014

How Liberal Policies Promote Cosmic Inequality

Think about that the implications of that one: monogamy made us human. If that is the case, then what the excuse me fuck are we doing? Trying to undo civilization and progress?

Well, yes. But only for the undesirables. Doing so maintains the power of the powerful because it preemptively diminishes the competition.

It is similar to how racial preferences shrink the pool of qualified or gifted Asians, Jews, and white males. It's a fantastic scam for white elites. If excellence is your competitor, well, just make it more difficult for the excellent to compete. Better yet, make it against the law, as per the Wise Latina.

Likewise, why else would black elites -- i.e., poverty pimps, race hustlers, liberal house negroes, and tenured bullshit artists with PhDs in Historical Fantasy -- so adamantly oppose school choice? Because it is a direct threat to their gig. If more blacks do well, then the parasites who feed on failure and resentment would have to do something productive. But not one of them is qualified to sharpen Thomas Sowell's pencil.

In Charles Murray's Coming Apart, he points out how liberal elites preach one thing but practice quite another. That is, in the lower classes, "welfare dependence and single motherhood are rapidly becoming the norm."

To illustrate the point, in 1960, 85% of the adults ages 30 to 49 in his apocryphal Fishtown "were living as married couples. Now the figure is 48 percent. In 1960, 81 percent of households had someone working full time in the workforce. Today it is only 53 percent." And most disastrously, "Divorce rates have climbed from 5 percent to 35 percent, and children living in broken homes or with single mothers rose from 2 percent to 23 percent" (in Tucker).

Or in other words, mission accomplished. We don't have to worry about these children becoming our competitors. Predators, yes. But so long as we confine them to certain areas, or the predators mostly prey on each another, then it's cool. Liberal polices promote and celebrate nothing less than psycho-cultural genocide.

Again, what is most striking about this is the hypocrisy of the anointed, who insist that these underclass boobs should not imitate what they do, but rather, do as they say. That is, "although many of the attitudes that denigrate the importance of marriage originate among the intelligentsia and the upper middle class, that stratum of society has so far managed to keep its families intact" (ibid).

The result is that we are truly facing a crisis of inequality, but income is an effect, a marker, a measure, of something more fundamental.

That is, the vast majority of people living in poverty are single mothers and fatherless children. Factor out these two categories and poverty almost disappears. But this material analysis does not and cannot measure the soul damage, nor does it even recognize such a thing. Rather, the left starts by materializing man, so it is a case of animal in/infrahuman beast out.

So, the gap in marriage equality results in "a yawning gulf of economic inequality," so much so that marriage is "the fault line dividing the American classes" (Murray, in Tucker). No one can deny that "those who form traditional families succeed; those who don't fail" (Tucker). Nor would any leftist ever acknowledge that monogamous marriage is the telos of human sexuality, i.e., its proper end. Which is just one more reason why leftism is the quintessential doctrine of failure, a recipe for cultural decline.

To zoom out to the Cosmic perspective, one thing which which I failed to entirely think through in the Coonifesto is why, if human beings evolved or are created to be monogamous, there is so much polygamy? All human cultures regulate sexuality and recognize marriage, but, as Tucker notes, "the practice of polygamy was almost universal outside the Christian West."

Long story short, if you want to look at it in a purely scientific way, human beings were definitely selected for monogamy, in that hunter-gatherer (HG) tribes practice monogamy, and something like 99% of our evolution occurred within, and was shaped by, this cultural matrix.

It seems that polygamy doesn't appear until the emergence of agriculture and herding. The HG lifestyle can only support a group of limited size, and it is vital that everyone in the group -- especially the males -- get along and cooperate. Therefore, the one-to-a-customer rule prevents a war of Each against All for access to Feminine Charms.

The transition to monogamy happened so early in our development that it is completely entangled with what it means to be human: "In other words, we never would have become human if we hadn't adopted monogamy." One thing to which Tucker fails, in my opinion, to give sufficient emphasis, is the role of the Helpless Baby in all this. After all, it is the baby, not the adult, who will carry the genes, the evolutionary memo, into the future. Thus, the baby becomes the hinge of civilizational advance and of Cosmic Evolution. Be as children is no joke.

Tucker does briefly touch on this, noting that upright walking was accompanied by a narrowing of the pelvis, just when our brains were getting so oversized. Ouch!

Note that in Genesis, our exodus into time and history is accompanied by the "in pain you shall bring forth children" business. No pain, no brain. Or Cane.

At any rate, only one thing makes this possible, and it is a very weird solution, the real key to our humanness: all of us "are born prematurely.... This means we arrive in a more helpless state, requiring constant care and attention" (Tucker) for a lengthy period of time. It is in this period of development that we forge the intersubjective foundation of our psyche, and "only a pair-bonded couple could offer" the protection needed to nurture this space.

What Tucker fails to emphasize is that -- well, I suppose this is just my opinion -- the kind of uniquely intense intimacy characterized by human pair-bonding rests on that foundation of infantile attachment. In other words, the helpless baby brings about the familial circumstances necessary for its own survival. Only because we were neurologically incomplete infants intensely attached to the mother can we form the later intense attachment with an opposite adult of the complementary sex.

Another key development was the loss of estrus, thus making the human female sexually available all year 'round. This prompted men to buzz close to the hive instead of polynoodling with all the other honeys in the annual whambam and scram.

But then the Agricultural Revolution occurred, changing everything.

To be continued...

Thursday, May 01, 2014

How Homosexual Marriage and Other Deviant and Dysfunctional Attitudes Rendered Us Less Than Human and Destroyed Civilization

What's the most important subject in the world? It is possible that it is human monogamy.

In his Things That Matter, Krauthammer makes a persuasive case that it is politics, since, if you get that one wrong, everything else goes south with it:

"Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything -- high and low and, most especially, high -- lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away."

Ah, but what is a humane and successful political system built upon? What is its foundation? Intelligence? No, because all human groups have that. Supposedly. Genes? In fact, Nicholas Wade's new book suggests that we can no longer rule that out a priori, as do liberal creationists.

But genes are not what make us human. First of all, they are necessary but not sufficient to account for our humanness. But also, they are simply an encoded memory of, and plan for, genetic fitness, AKA reproductive success: a memoir of the future.

Besides, there is no such thing as an individual human being, or at least our individuality can only be understood in the context of an irreducible intersubjectivity. Since the I-Thou relation is "built into" our genes, it means that human beings are literally programmed for transcendence (if you want to look at it from a strictly scientific standpoint; obviously there are deeper and higher perspectives).

Consider this highly coonworthy book, Marriage and Civilization. Note in particular the subtitle: How Monogamy Made Us Human. It doesn't get any more Cosmic than that, because we are talking about the conditions that permit humanness to emerge from mere biology.

One could also express it inversely, say, How Homosexual Marriage and Other Deviant and Dysfunctional Attitudes Rendered Us Less Than Human and Destroyed Civilization. That book is yet to be written, nor does Tucker put it that way. Nobody wants to replace Donald Sterling as the sap du jour in the roiling cannibal pot of the proglodyte left.

It is always gratifying when a respectable person confirms some of the multi-undisciplinary speculation of the Coonifesto, in this case the intimate connection between humanness and monogamy. Just the other day I read how this deliriously self-satisfifed idiot thinks it's Time to Ditch Monogamy. Why? Because it's time to jettison civilization, as have the subcultures that have already successfully eliminated the norm of marriage and reverted to barbarism.

Interestingly, this downward-cutting edge view goes back to the cultural Marxism of Marx and Engels, who -- once again turning reality on its head -- suggested that marriage and monogamy are the origins of that curse word property, in that woman becomes the first possession of man: when man "took command in the home," "the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children" (in Tucker).

Yeah, it's just like that around here.

When we talk about civilization, what are we really talking about? For starters, we are talking about the domestication of man. Not woman, mind you. Women are already domesticates, and quite literally so, since the female body is the domicile of the baby, which is to say, the human future. In short, mother-baby is built into nature. The category of Father -- in distinction to sperm donor -- isn't. Father is the first purely cultural category, the one that makes all the others -- politics included -- possible.

How the hell do you civilize a man, of all things? Well, since it happened, we need to examine the circumstances under which it happened, but also the circumstances under which it failed to do so -- at least up to my standards.

Tucker notes that "the adoption of social monogamy by early hominids created something unique in nature -- a society where males cooperate at common tasks with a minimum of sexual competition."

In most other species it is a violent free-for-all to determine Who Gets the Chicks. Males spend the majority of their time competing with other males for access to the holiest of holies. (Recall what Chagnon discovered about those ignoble savages of the Amazon basin, constantly at war over the ladies.)

What we're really looking for is a kind of gap in nature, or a "place" where prehistory verticalizes and becomes transnatural, i.e., jumps into civilization and history. In my opinion, it ultimately -- which is to say, ontologically -- takes place in the infant (I saw it happen with my own eyes!) -- but there are existential conditions that have to prevail in order to give birth to premature and neurologically incomplete babies.

I just noticed that I'm way outta' time here. To be continued....

Monday, April 28, 2014

Compulsory Joy in the Command Economy of Time

The subject of chronopathology seems to have touched a nerve in a few readers, which means that it failed to do so in the rest. Perhaps because it seems like a remote or abstract idea, when it is really as experience-near as experience itself. Because what is experience? Right: conscious awareness of the passage of time, which appears as the perpetual changing of phenomena.

We've discussed in the past how time is all we have, and yet, we never really have it, do we, because it's like Lileks' Uncooperative Rope: this rope travels "through your hands, and you grasp a knot" -- the knot being one of those little moments of temporal density, which only happen all the time.

But they're slipknots, so when they happen, it's as if the rope temporarily slows down. But then it's like when you're livestreaming something and it's slow to load but then hurries to catch up with itself. Similarly, it's as if time can slow down for a moment, but then scurries to return to itself, right through your blistered fingers.

You never know when or which one of these temporal knots will "stick" and become part of the more enduring fabric of your life. I have no patience for people who essentially try to force a moment to become an enduring knot. My wife tells me that her father once turned a European vacation into a pedagogical death march.

Think, for example, of the people who have those huge vulgar weddings, desperate to make the wedding more than it is. It's already plenty, so you can really only make it less than it is.

I guess it's the same reason I detest posed photographs rather than spontaneous ones. At least with the spontaneous ones you have a chance to catch a temporal knot. But you can't force one. At best you can tie a pseudo-knot of someone. Sometimes a whole life can be a stream of pseudo-knots. It's probably that way for celebrities and politicians.

I suppose this oncefamous book on pseudo-events goes to the subject. I've never read it, but it's more relevant than ever, since end-stage journalism has spread to the whole body politic.

Just the other day I was talking with the wife about the things we do to render time qualitative instead of just quantitative. I was thinking in particular of how the Church places mere duration within a higher sacred time, marking the latter with various festivals and celebrations. You could say that salvation history attempts the same vis-a-vis profane history.

But again, it's difficult to manufacture a temporal knot, as they usually sneak up on one unawares. I was reminded of this just yesterday at our baseball practice. It was just a perfect day on our absurdly beautiful field -- way too beautiful for kids, since they don't notice. I had the impulse to tell a kid, "you know, you're going to remember this moment for the rest of your life." But who knows? Maybe he will, but not likely, even though it was a perfect moment to which nothing could be added. Besides, he would have looked at me like I was crazy.

I've noticed that some parents will forcibly remove their kid from a situation in which they are experiencing the spontaneous flow of temporal density, in order to drag them to some attempt at manufactured density. This usually results from a guilt-ridden effort to manufacture "quality time" in order to make up for the absence of quantity time -- like a grim determination to Have Joy on command.

But what if you're already happy? Then being forced to do something else can only make one less happy, no matter how elaborately contrived the pseudoknot.

But in reality, how little is needed to access Life. It seems to me that -- and I discussed this in the Encirclopedia Raccoonica -- people try to make up for a loss of sensitivity by piling on the sensations. But the latter can never make up for the former, because the gross can never replace the subtle. Ten or a hundred or a thousand porno films do not add up to a single moment of actual transphysical intimacy.

What worries me about our pornified culture is that young people may confuse its images with human sexuality and end up knowing nothing of the latter. The gross can completely eclipse the subtle if we don't hone the facility to deepen it.

But perhaps this is just an extension of children raised in daycare who know nothing of real maternal intimacy, which cannot be doled out at the mother's convenience without becoming something else -- something based upon the mother's pleasure (which objectifies the child) as opposed to the child's spontaneous need for, and entitlement to, this constant background of maternal presence.

You can't magically conjure those momentary knots of intimacy. For one thing, they have a rhythm all their own, which you can disrupt but not compel. You cannot fundamentally reject the present and then call it back at your will, expecting it to do your bidding. You can only pretend to do so.

Remember the film Ordinary People? There's a great scene where they're trying to capture the perfect photograph of the family, a Happy Moment:

I definitely remember beautiful moments like that in my ordinary childhood. Maybe that's why I'm so repulsed by them.

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