ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
3hr ago
How would you describe this "modern worldview"? Empiricism, materialism, skepticism, rationality, something along those lines?
"We, as individuals, are capable of discovering the physical and moral laws of the universe and in so doing creating a more perfect society."
The short version is that as Science began delivering massive, obvious benefits, people noticed that they could lie and claim to be Scientists doing Science, and as long as they engaged in a certain minimal amount of social posturing, the empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality could simply be bypassed, and they could reap all the social, fiscal and political benefits of Contributing to Science without actually having to contribute anything meaningful at all. The more people explicitly or implicitly locked into this paradigm, the lower the incentive to resist the bypass became. The result was a parasite class of "intellectuals" growing fat and happy, while at best actively burning value to accomplish nothing, and more often burning value to produce dangerous forms of self-replicating deceit to plague mankind generally.
While this parasitic class clearly exists today, the benefits of scientific advancement were not obvious enough in 1789 for this to be a primary motivator of anyone involved in the French Revolution. Three years later China could still imperiously dismiss the Macartney Embassy, and the idea that Britain would go from producing nothing that they needed to kicking down their doors and taking whatever they wanted by force within a single lifetime was as far from European minds as it was from Asian ones.
You should be able to recognize the hostile takeover in the architects, actions and character of the French revolution. You should definitely be able to recognize it in how subsequent generations spoke about the French Revolution; Mark Twain is one of my favorite examples of a purportedly intelligent person spouting insane, mindkilled horseshit. By the time we get to Marx and Freud, it seems to me that failure to recognize the pattern must in some sense be willful; and then there is the 20th century, where we must laugh lest we weep.
This is why I ask people to identify whether the American or French revolution was a more central example of the Enlightenment. My impression is that the consensus answer is the French revolution is the more Enlightened; yet the industrial revolution came out of Britain and then America, both of which stubbornly resisted the succession of ideologies spawned by the French Revolution far longer than their European peers, to their enormous benefit.
I don't hold that more Enlightened = better, only that some minimum threshold of Enlightenment needed to be passed for the Industrial Revolution to occur. Beyond that point, that ideological train was almost certain to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Therefore, I will raise Mark Twain one better: modern technology and Communism were separate but inevitable consequences of the Enlightenment, and the hundred million dead at the hands of the latter were a fair trade for the former.
Likewise, the universal literacy that was an obvious precursor to the scientific and industrial revolutions was a product of Protestant Christianity
Bit of a tangent, but we do have examples of highly literate societies that did not produce a scientific revolution, namely Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate and pre-colonial Burma.
The empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality were never rigorous in any population-level sense. Superstition and ignorance changed their masks, and nothing more. Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down and we have had a moment to collect ourselves, a modest amount of actual skepticism and curiosity and a memory broader than the last fifteen minutes is sufficient to tear the whole rotten edifice wide open.
No argument from me here. I think our priority should be salvaging what is valuable from Western civilization before it implodes and incorporating it into a more sustainable philosophical tradition.
ResoluteRaven
9hr ago
The rule is not that the police have to literally undo all their previous actions or not act to address an imminent threat in the event of a procedural mishap, intentional or otherwise, it's just that evidence obtained in that way is not admissible in court, increasing the chances that the kidnapper and terrorists in your examples would walk free. In the most egregious cases, I imagine you could get a jury nullification-adjacent situation where the jurors, despite "not being allowed to consider" the tainted evidence, unanimously vote to convict.
ResoluteRaven
16hr ago
It seems to me like you're trying to draw an arbitrary box around "bad political ideas from the 18th century" and label it the Enlightenment, when I was always taught that it meant "the entire intellectual project of Europe and its colonies between approximately 1650 and the present." There were plenty of figures like Thomas Jefferson who spanned both the scientific and political sides of this tradition and in their eyes and mine there was little daylight between the two. If I start reading Newton's Principia and finish with Mill's On Liberty I don't observe any discontinuity or hostile takeover halfway through, but a gradual transition from a medieval worldview to a modern one. And yes, this means that Lavoisier and the revolutionaries who chopped his head off were all equally part of the Enlightenment. Obviously the technologies of the West can be copied by other societies today without copying our liberal politics, but I don't buy the argument that they could be invented in the first place without them (N=1, obviously, so if we disagree on this we come to a bit of an impasse as far as the available evidence is concerned, apart from the lack of internal combustion engines in the Roman Empire, Song China, or Mughal India).
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
We've had multiple scientific revolutions, yes, most didn't have anything to do with the Enlightenment or its ideas though.
Which ones would those be? Isn't the entire concept of a scientific revolution the product of Enlightenment thinking? You could claim that the Enlightenment resulted in a mutilation of man's soul, a great disenchantment that replaced his heart with metal and wheels, but our understanding and mastery of the material world is the one fundamental, undeniable truth about our civilization. To claim that any other society in the 300 millennia that modern humans have walked the Earth has even come close is to claim that Venus is brighter than the Sun. Prometheus may be punished for his hubris, but the fire is real.
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
What they say there and in other threads is that Kamala downplayed her Indian identity, and it's a common attack by her opponents of any background that she's not very smart, but I've only heard the complete thought "she went to Howard and played up her blackness because she was dumb" in person.
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
At the moment, I like:
Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
Tchaikovsky's ballets
Anything by Chopin
Holst's The Planets, as others have mentioned
Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin
And for variety's sake here are some pieces that are "classical" to non-Western instruments:
Tsugaru Jongara Bushi for the shamisen
Liu Tianhua's erhu compositions
General's Command for the yangqin
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
When I was taking piano lessons, my teacher showed me a video of a Japanese 4 year old playing that Clementi Sonatina and dared me to do better. At the time I was infuriated to be shown up by a toddler, but it's probably the reason I still remember and enjoy the piece.
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
Well, me for one, but mostly just anecdotes from my disproportionately male and either apolitical or tech right adjacent Indian-American peers. You can see similar opinions being downvoted in reddit threads like this one.
ResoluteRaven
2d ago
The aversion to cold water is based on traditional Chinese medicine i.e. the belief that cold drinks will sap your Qi and shorten your life, although I'm guessing that the true reason is that in the past serving hot drinks was a way to prove that you had boiled water for your guests and weren't trying to get them sick.
ResoluteRaven
2d ago
It does confuse me a little - as I understand it, all Brazilians, say, are Hispanic, even though they are ethnically diverse and include white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race people.
ResoluteRaven
2d ago
And to be extra fair, it's not like Obama ever had a real choice about publicly identifying himself as black. Realistically, given how American society views race, he never would have been able to pass himself off as a white man. 99% of Americans look at him and immediately think "that's a black guy", they don't think "that's a half white, half black guy".
My vague recollection and also this bit by Trevor Noah is that Obama was referred to more often as mixed-race early in his campaign before he was properly accepted by the wider black community. It was certainly also a conscious decision on his part to lean into it, but not one he made as early as say Kamala Harris, who chose to attend an HBCU (the story told among Asian-Americans being that she was too dumb to get into a better school and realized that she could only achieve success by black standards and not Asian ones).
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
I believe the exams were scored by officials who had previously passed, except for the highest levels, where essays would be personally judged by the emperor. So for the weed-out stages there was some sort of rubric that over time accumulated increasingly arbitrary standards for how to compose a properly formatted "eight-legged essay," but there was always a bit of randomness based on the emperor's personal whims.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
I only got vague answers as to what the actual questions were—something about understanding Confucius' ideas or writing about proper government structures.
The types of questions I know of (not sure which dynasty or level of exam) were something like "Imagine you are the magistrate of [province] during [recent natural disaster]. Describe how you would respond to this crisis and justify your priorities with appropriate quotations from the Five Classics" or "[Oblique reference to a particular geopolitical incident during the Warring States period]. Please discuss."
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
I don't see progressive ideology as an existential threat and so have not lifted a hand to fight it. Is not the man who does perceive it as such but does nothing except fume about it in an anonymous forum more spineless than me?
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
If one were to genuinely try, then how does one convince someone who no longer is uninterested, but actively places negative value on your institution, that you are worth preserving?
Let's say you're stuck on a deserted island with a small group and the only one of you who knows anything at all about food preparation is Sylvester Graham. Obviously, most of you are going to hate whatever Sylvester cooks (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that he can't be reasoned out of his position that spices are evil), so what then do you do? You could kill him in his sleep to rid the world of his bland slop, and you would be happy at first, but then you might all starve. Or you could ask him to teach you how to cook and try to figure out yourself which elements are intrinsic to the process and which are just his kooky ideology talking, all the while continuing to eat his terrible food.
For the latter course to be preferable at least two things have to be true: the activity in question must be intrinsically necessary or valuable in some way and the existing gatekeepers must possess some special knowledge that cannot be trivially rederived from first principles in the event that they all drop dead. In the case of Sylvester, perhaps some of you argue that since everyone eats it should be easy enough to figure out how to prepare food on your own, and others argue that only Sylvester knows which plants are safe to eat and which are poisonous and that this is information you can't afford to lose. In the case of the Academy, its defenders would have to make the case that America's economic prosperity is dependent on its activities and that the Trump administration's attacks will harm that capacity in some demonstrable way e.g. capricious defunding of federal grants leads to a mass exodus of scientists to Europe, causing the collapse of the American phamaceutical, chemical, energy, etc. industries because PhD's take years to train and cannot be replaced on a dime.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
It's not so much that they reference older periods in talking about how things are. It's like if Americans talked about the Trump admin the same detached way they talk about the Victorian era. It's all very descriptive. Like I said, it may just be because I'm hearing it from a naturalized American explaining it to a foreigner. But there's also something to a giant mosoleum to a WW2 leader right next to a 1300s mosoleums and treating them both the same.
I suppose it's partially the fact that there are no cities in America old enough for buildings from wildly separated historic periods to be right next to each other, the way you might find a mosque next to Roman fortifications in Istanbul, or a Gothic cathedral next to a brutalist office park in Europe. I would say that Chinese speakers in general tend to talk about things like the government in a more detached way than Americans, seeing the actions taken by those on high as more akin to weather that one has to prepare for than decisions that they have a real say in. The only place this has really changed is Taiwan in recent years, and the transition was something both confusing and unpleasant to the older generations, who view that sort of active participation in a democracy about the same way they do rolling around in the mud with pigs.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
I suppose I'm just tempermentally different in some fundamental way from many people here, but despite going through the same Great Awokening experiences as most college-educated individuals with heterodox views, I never felt this crushing sense of repression that others seem to. It has never been more than a minor annoyance to me that I had to attend diversity trainings, disinterestedly listen to whatever my progressive peers have decided to rant about that day, or that I would be mildly discriminated against by college admissions and hiring committees on account of my race(s), and one day in the past few months things seamlessly flipped over and I started being mildly annoyed instead that federal research grants were being canceled on account of including banned words. So it goes.
Perhaps I just never had any naive expectations of fairness, or that things like freedom of speech counted for much in practice, so the fact that I couldn't talk about race or sex differences in public didn't strike me as some sort of betrayal that needed to be avenged. Perhaps I don't have any real principles, and so, like the average person, I have no qualms about passively accepting whatever the ruling ideology happens to be and getting along as best I can without taking a stand for Truth and Justice. Perhaps I spent enough time in the third world that Americans complaining about basically anything at all strikes me as laughable. Whatever the reason, I notice that I am confused by this in the same way I am by the broader "mental health crisis" that has double digit percentages of my generation popping SSRI's like they're candy.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
There is a 9-story pagoda, essentially a Chinese tower, that we stop in to get a good view of Nanjing.
If I'm not mistaken, this was a replica of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, which was considered by some to be a Wonder of the World before its tragic destruction during the Taiping rebellion (Nanjing sure went through a rough century).
There is something about the Chinese worldview that is still hard for my American brain to grok. They speak about ROC and CPC much the same as they speak of the Ming and Qing. Yat-sen may as well have been an emperor. We're living through another era in a long history.
Even in America this was a common mindset until the 20th century decline in classical education. The Founders spoke of the Greeks and Romans and their forms of government in the same breath as contemporary examples as they were drafting the Constitution, and politicians were quoting ancient playwrights like Aeschylus well into the 60s (e.g. RFK's speech on the eve of MLK's assassination, if I remember correctly), not to mention all the Shakespearean references. I think there's value in participating in a millennia-long conversation about political philosophy, poetry, the meaning of life, etc. and hope we can bring a bit of that attitude back someday.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
I've heard more than one Russian nationalist complain that the Soviet Union was run by a cabal of Jews, Balts, and other minorities to the detriment of the Russian majority, but I digress. The implication of the science+smuggled ideology take is that whatever you try to replace the existing order with ought to have the same basic command of the hard sciences in order to be seen as legitimate, and the ongoing attempts to defund and intimidate universities and national laboratories into compliance with the new administration's agenda seem likely to damage that core competency, unless parallel private organizations (i.e. Bell Labs 2.0) are set up at lightning speed to take their place.
If the right were to admit that they simply don't have the "elite human capital," to use Richard Hanania's term, necessary to rebuild the institutions they are currently destroying, then that would make them nothing more than Vandals plundering Rome out of spite. Perhaps the Romans were immoral and degenerate and deserved to be conquered by the virtuous and strong Germanic tribes, but the latter couldn't build an aqueduct or a bridge worth a damn and their civilization was poorer for it.
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
I remember my dad making a big deal about me "choosing a signature" the first time I got a debit card or something and had to sign it, saying that it would stick with me for the rest of my life. I've not always liked the one I picked then, but I've made my peace with it and even been complimented once.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Why must every border in the world be drawn according to 19th century European nationalist principles? Multiethnic empires, religious caliphates, city-states, mercantile republics, and tribal confederations all existed long before the national revivals of Mitteleuropa and I do not see why they should be considered inherently less legitimate forms of political organization.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Yes, many second-generation African and Caribbean immigrants from an upper middle-class, college-educated background have this personality type, just the same as their peers of whatever race.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Whether it's the Ukrainians, Kurds, Taiwanese, Irish, Palestinians, or (Anglo) Canadians, denying the existence of a people seems like a guaranteed way to conjure one into being or rescuscitate one from the brink of extinction. Few remember or care today, but during the Revolution and the War of 1812 there was a bitter partisan struggle across the St. Lawrence frontier between Patriots and Loyalists that divided families, wiped the Iroquois off the map, and whose brutality shocked the British-born officers sent to take charge of the situation. I for one do not wish to needlessly invite conflict with such people when time was our ally in forging a peaceful economic and political union.
ResoluteRaven
11d ago
There have been a number of shifts in the common definition of "white" (which has occasionally gone by other terms like "WASP")
I don't think WASPs ever self-described as such. My (boomer WASP) relatives tell me that they had never heard the term until they went to college in the 60's, where it was used in a half-joking, half-derogatory sense by their Jewish classmates i.e. "we have a slur for every other group, so we need one for you guys too." "Anglo-Saxon" was definitely used in the past, but it wasn't meant to imply that non-Anglo-Saxons weren't white (yes, Ben Franklin once wrote the 18th century equivalent of a Twitter shitpost arguing this position, but I've never seen any other evidence that this was a widespread opinion in his day or afterwards).
I sometimes wonder if we'd all get along better if we actively tried to culturally expand that definition to include all Americans, rather than focusing on divisive "hyphenated Americans" (a term which dates back to the late 1800s). But it seems an unpopular idea in political activist circles.
Calling everyone white would be needlessly confusing when we already have the word American. Sure, Spanish-speakers and heritage American ethnic nationalists will be upset that we aren't conforming to their definitions of the word, but this is already how 90% of the population is using it so at this point it's just descriptive linguistics.
The perceived lack of driving ability of everyone else on the highway and the best kind of barbecue sauce.
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