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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

I think I agree with Chesterton here. If everyone who believed some particular thing happens to be dead now, that does not imply that they were wrong.

There’s an argument that dead people didn’t have the chance to learn what we have learned and be convinced of it, but I also disagree with this when it comes to the fundamentals of humans who are dealing with one another in a social scene. It looks different now, is mediated in unrecognizable ways and with some qualities exaggerated, but we’re not aliens to our ancestors.

Thomas Paine's preemptive repudiation of Chesterton on this from when he was giving Edmund Burke both barrels:

There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence.

Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how

I am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor for nor against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole nation chooses to do it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where, then, does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away and controlled and contracted for by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead, and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.

There was a time when kings disposed of their crowns by will upon their death-beds, and consigned the people, like beasts of the field, to whatever successor they appointed. This is now so exploded as scarcely to be remembered, and so monstrous as hardly to be believed. But the Parliamentary clauses upon which Mr. Burke builds his political church are of the same nature.

To me, one important difference maker is that dead people have no skin in the game. Broadly, one might posit that dead people had a preference that humanity keep surviving and, as such, they could be considered to have some retroactive skin in the game, and as such their votes could be helpful for humanity continuing to survive. However, I'd contend that the actual preference could be described as genuinely believing that one's preferred ideas would lead to humanity surviving after one's death, rather than as actually wanting humanity to keep surviving after one's death. After all, there's no way to check the latter. At best, one can check the trajectory of humanity (or subset that you care about) while one dies and assume that a trajectory that looks good now will look good in the future after one is dead. That's valuable, but also limited. So I think it makes sense to at least discount people's votes based on accident of death, even if we don't automatically disqualify them. If those people's votes lead us towards hell, they're not the ones who will be suffering that hell, and so we can't trust them to weigh the risks of hell creation properly.

That may be true but it's nowhere near sufficient. There are plenty of good reasons that the death tax isn't 100%. For example, we want to incentivize people to work towards the future rather than squandering their wealth on more temporary and hedonistic endeavors. "Dead people have no skin in the game", as a counter-consideration, is not even worth mentioning by comparison.

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