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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What do you think you failed to communicate in that thread?

The nature of "we know how to solve all our problems", mainly. I am in fact convinced that it is a uniquely Enlightenment concept, but if your first counter-example is traditional Christianity advocating unity with God as the end purpose of human existence, I've clearly failed to communicate the insight, and need to reconsider my approach. I have pretty limited time to do that these days, sadly; I think I started writing replies two or three times, but never got them finished.

We could take your example:

"For man's happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, which is his last end."

and compare it to, say, a passage from Walt Bismark's description of why he is no longer a white nationalist:

In my opinion this is a loser mentality. America was conquered by pilgrims and pioneers and hardscrabble immigrants—a good American is supposed to chase opportunity wherever it exists. When we smashed Dixie we were also smashing the feudal lord-peasant fixation on some cheesy loyalty to “the land”.

But these Midwesterners aren’t descended from entrepreneurial adventurers like the rest of us. Their forebears were conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics who fled Bismarck’s kulturkampf to acquire cheap land under the Homestead Act. These people mostly settled areas where aggro Scotch Irish types had driven off the Injun decades ago, so they never had to embrace the risk-tolerant, enterprising, itinerant mindset that had once fueled Manifest Destiny. Instead they produced families that became weirdly attached to their generic little plot of fungible prairie dirt, and as a result we now have huge pockets of the country full of overcivilized and effete Teutons with no conquering spirit who treat outsiders like shit.

These people think of themselves as “Real America”, but they are in fact the least American in their outlook of all the country’s regions. They are the least individualistic, the least ambitious, the most inclined to prioritize comfort and safety over everything else in life. America has left barely any mark on them—in temperament they’re just a bunch of stodgy Rhinelanders.

...and then compare them to the A and B passages, and ask which matches to which. To me, it's obvious that the passage you linked is much more like the style of A, making a precise, well-bounded claim with clear foundations and clear limits, and the passage above is much more like B, claiming systematized knowledge of uninterrogated validity. The former is inside looking out, the latter is pretending to be outside looking in. Unfortunately, that distinction didn't seem to communicate either, so who knows.

The same for the discussion of Freud a while back. I have zero doubt that you've read much more Freud than I have, and if you believe that Freud's thought can be described as "conservative" in some sense, I'll buy that there's an insight there. On the other hand, I don't think I'm wrong about Freud's impact on the culture as a whole, and regardless of how much his views could be described as "conservative", his impact on society was pretty clearly revolutionary, and also pretty clearly based entirely on lies. He said things that were false, people believed these false things, and as a direct result of believing these false things embraced radical, untested social changes from top to bottom; his disciples and their disciples in turn repeated this process, and we are just now beginning to crawl out from under the resulting rubble. My argument isn't about what Freud believed, but about what he did; and the same for the rest of the Enlightenment's giants.

If you have an affinity for those positions, then perhaps we're not as far apart as you might think.

Likely not, but again, time and effort cost a lot more than they used to, which is why my posting frequency has dropped so precipitously. Putting together cogent arguments gets much harder when a little one decides their new favorite game is shutting daddy's laptop on his fingers. Increasingly often, I'm forced to let my opposite have the last word, and hope to address it next time the topic comes around.

I think I understand the difference in perspective you're trying to articulate here. But, as usual, I simply disagree that it divides the space of political ideologies cleanly in two.

It'll come around again.