Making Nobody Happy

   It is part of the essence of beauty that it invites you to participate in it and make it part of the extended idea of yourself. That’s why we wear beautiful clothes, want to move to or visit lovely places and make them our home, why we make our homes beautiful and surround ourselves with loveliness. 

     I believe that the feminine is the original object of the love of beauty, and women are the original embodiment of that spark for the aesthetic sense. And so our ideas of beauty are tangled up with the idea of the feminine. Woman is the ultimate vessel of beauty, the most inherently beautiful thing. Nature, growing life, and the sea are two other primordial sources of beauty, ancient beyond imagining. And we associate living nature, the earth, in culture after culture, with the feminine. The sea also is very often viewed as feminine. And women have a body shape the arouses comparisons with sea creatures.

    Three of the great environments we have inhabited as a species are the living world/nature, the world of water/the sea, and one another. And we have all literally inhabited our mothers as a primordial environment. We have all emerged from them as species emerge from nature and life from water. All are literal or figurative wombs, places of gestation. At some point we become conscious and we turn to regard those environments, and we conceptualize the feminine. Because that is the first thing our personal and mythological awareness touches. 

   The feminine is grasped quite effectively by other species, but on an entirely unconscious and instinctive level. They don’t need to understand it to be compelled by it, for it to structure their world and desires and affiliations. The capacity to conceptualize the feminine would require being able to conceptualize the self, and since animals can’t quite do that, they worship in ignorance by pure compulsion what we worship knowingly and can either embrace or reject. 

    Once the feminine has been grasped as a distinct conceptual entity attaining to certain primordial forces and specific entities, you can begin to represent it. It is beautiful, it is desirable. One might even say that it is desire, as it is the avatar of that which is desirable. And there are motivational associations built into us so deeply that they become tangled up and used by our more complex systems and conceptions. There is a certain amount of borrowing and overlap. Why invent new essential desires and associations when we already posses and can recontextualize them? Ripe fruit, good food, is desirable. Our visual senses are keyed to identity the colors and shapes of these desirable objects. And when we look at women we see the blush of the young cheek, the roundness and softness of breast, hip, and buttock. It’s not a coincidence, not merely a poetic serendipity. It is convergence. Not only of one with the other, but of both with one another. Fruit is feminine, and the feminine is fruitful. 

   The question is, what makes seeing beauty necessary? Because it isn’t obvious, except for the fact that we do. There are many senses we don’t have, an almost infinite array of things of which we are not aware, do not perceive, and do not possess as evaluative categories. “Why not?” is an easy question, because by default it contains everything. Plenty of animals get by without seeing most of what we see and without caring about much of what we care about.

    So why is seeing beauty necessary? Because it isn’t obviously just an extension of utility. Art is, in its nature, not necessary. It is creative. It doesn’t have to be. And often the purpose of beautiful things isn’t closely tied to some merely functional utility, though it can be a very reliable marker of it. But lots of very useful things aren’t very beautiful, and lots of beautiful things don’t seem especially useful, especially for the amount of attention we give them and the fact that we don’t necessarily do anything with them other than appreciate them.

    One could argue that appreciation is a kind of use. That beauty is a psychological good, or existentially useful object, and we use it by participating in it. By appreciating it, by making it part of our experience and making it part of our mental landscape and our extended idea of ourselves and our world. That is a kind of use, but it’s a very odd one. It doesn’t explain itself much, and it doesn’t explain what demands it to exist as a perceptive capacity. What makes seeing beauty necessary, and what makes valuing that beauty necessary? It apparently is. But why? 

    I believe that, in a mythological, originational sense, women make seeing beauty necesssary. Women use beauty as a signal for biological health, for reproductive fitness, for desirability. I don’t mean as a matter of craft and design, although it has become a conscious feature of humanity so we make its production a conscious goal, but women use beauty as an unconscious signal, entirely without intention. And men and women both process it as a signal, entirely without intention. We also do it intentionally, but the system would work even if (and before) we were aware of it. It is pre-cognitive.

    Men also possess beauty, insofar as lack of it is an honest indicator of a lack of health, and insofar as we are all ultimately part of a shared species and so share to varying degrees in all the qualities it possesses. But it isn’t a primary signal in male signaling, nor is it a primary evaluative criteria for women. A lot of the qualities males specifically possess as males are detrimental to their beauty. Males also fixate to a greater degree on beauty as a signal, whereas women include it among a host of complex and interacting considerations. Men will take other qualities and factors into consideration, but will typically conceptualize them as extensions of beauty, a sort of meta-beauty. But women don’t generally do that to men. They don’t by habit define men’s attractiveness across multiple domains as an extended concept of beauty. 

    So as a necessity for the life and function of the species, you must be able to perceive beauty. Women cannot be escaped. And the features of the feminine are foundational and primordial. And beauty is part of their essence, or part of our response to their essence. We call that response love of beauty. That response is innate, a fundamental instinct to seek that which is inherently good and fruitful and desirable. It emerges with consciousness out of the underlying systems that structure life and make it possible. Women make us see beauty. They open our eyes to it, as a species. And that is a lovely thing, and worthy of its veneration. Fearful and terrible as it may be. For few things are as terrible and fearful as love. 

   There’s a deep need for certain instincts to have a mascot. Black people are mascots for one kind of instinct, white people for another. I think Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell have thoroughly covered what forces of the collective consciousness and collective unconscious black people are a mascot for. It’s a religious role, an iconic and emblematic role in the modern mythological narrative. You can’t get rid of the narrative, but you can shuffle around who plays the parts and performs the functions. 

   Whiteness is a newer mascot. Tracking down what instinctive roles it is assuming isn’t quite as easy. The best guesses come from practice, seeing how the idea of whiteness is being used. Mythology isn’t about theory, after all, it’s about practice, it’s about enacting a kind of ritual that deals with the innate pressures and urges we as humans feel. Zeus and Odin differ from one another just as the many gods of war and love and order differ from one another across cultures in their specifics. But they all serve similar functions and embody similar dimensions of human behavior.
    What functions does “whiteness” serve? Well, it certainly plays the role of a disease, an impurity, an infection, something that must be expunged and cured from the body of society. It also plays the role (a sort of Cain and Abel role) of a recipient of undeserved merit. It’s a parasite. It hasn’t succeeded by doing what is good, its competitors have done just as much, and it has stolen the results for itself. This was very much the Soviet narrative about the bourgeois, the Nazi argument about the Jews, the Malay argument about the Chinese, the Hutu argument about the Tutsis, etc etc. It’s a common trope. 
    The Soviet narrative was the most abstract, since it didn’t rely on familial or racial solidarity or animosity to function but expected to supplant those loyalties of land, city, blood, and history with a purely economic or class distinction. But because that kind of distinction is much less obvious and tangible than other kinds of difference, it got very vague and messy in its application, and it also didn’t really work very efficiently as a way to seperate the sheep from the goats. And people very much need to be able to do that.

    People need to know who is safe and good and part of the family and who belongs within the circle, and who is dangerous and predatory and bad and who belongs outside the circle. We need to know the difference to survive, not just practically but also psychologically. It’s a distinction we literally can’t live without. It’s a human universal. You can change the players, but the roles persist. Someone has to play the parts. 
   Identifying whiteness with immorality, with the embodiment of the negative, predatory human social entity, is a nice compromise between modern abstract distinctions and archaic familial distinctions. It’s broad enough that you can apply it to just about anything (even black people, if need be) but tangible enough to be easy to apply and to carry with it the forces of familial solidarity and suspicion of predatory outsiders. You can see white people, and you can conceptualize whiteness. 
    White people also essentially play the role of Satan in our society. A powerful, hidden figure that is responsible for all the evil that exists in the world. They are a container for all evil, a universal explanation. And a container for evil is useful, because it keeps the evil inside it and outside you. Evil can be localized. It can be explained. And if the container can be addressed, then evil can be addressed. And if the vessel can be eliminated, then evil can be eliminated, and happiness and paradise would be possible, perhaps inevitable, with no further action or change on our own part to produce it. Goodness, then, does not suffer from being difficult to produce, but only suffers from a vulnerability to being stolen. If it was not being stolen by evil, our innate goodness would flourish by its nature.
    Of course, giving white people the role of Satan ascribes far more power and coordination and singularity of identity and purpose than is really reasonable to grant any group, much less one so vague and internally divergent. But that’s not the point. One alternative to such magical thinking that also accounts for existing historical disparities is the theory that white people are, in some way, the actual favored children of God (or reality, or rationality or some universal determining force), the sons who have made the proper sacrifices and so been granted victory and blessing. White supremacy is the most extreme and exaggerated version of this theory existing at the opposite end from the Satanistic theory. But even if they don’t claim innate superiority, the argument that white people are simply following God’s laws, or the natural currents of a practical universe, and owe their success entirely to that, isn’t a popular position. 
    The Jews basically said that this is exactly who they were, and it didn’t win them many friends. Their success and influence on world history only made their claims more annoying. It begs for other explanations. Theft, distortion, dark dealings, parasitism, infection, deceit, manipulation. And all these were attributed to them.
     The fact that the Jews (or at least their scriptures) made it perfectly clear that they could break their bargain with God at any moment and be cast down and destroyed if they stopped following him (meaning that they didn’t possess God but rather that he possessed them), and that choosing to follow him was sufficient to become a part of his people (again reinforcing that he doesn’t belong to you but you to him, and choice was sufficient for both inclusion and exclusion from his people), did not make Jewish identity any easier to accept.

    It doesn’t really matter that the blessings of the Jews were contingent on their behavior, or that those blessings were essentially open universally to all comers who truly wished to possess them. The Jews served as reminder of our own finitude and sin, regardless. Their claim was of such import that it had to be answered or eliminated.
    I don’t think white people are the “new” Jews, although I have heard some Jews complaining about being tarred with the same brush for their whiteness as they have in the past for their Jewishness. Being treated similarly and receiving similar accusations. But it’s not quite that simple, in part because our culture is so complex and contains so many novelties. And “white” itself is a far newer and wider blanket term containing a vast quantity of heterogenous elements compared to the close kinship and historical and religious unity of the Jews.

    However, attitudes toward groups that succeed in distinction from other groups are similar across cultures and circumstances. On seeing someone who is succeeding, you can either revere them and practice imitation (often blindly, through hero worship) or you can resent them and practice defenestration (also, often blindly). This isn’t unique to the Jews, it’s a worldwide historical phenomenon. And because people and the world are complex, there’s always enough evidence available to take either position. And people have, and they have gone to both extremes with whiteness. 
    Whiteness is clearly playing some pretty weird roles in society right now. So weird that many white (and nonwhite) people are feeling very confused, surprised that things like being on time, logic, evidence, restraint, and math are declared uniquely “white” possessions and cultural artifacts, along with slavery, injustice, capitalism, gender roles, family structure, war, expansion, government, and inequality. It’s not clear if they should feel like lowly parasites or like gods, capable of anything. Or whether we should revere and imitate them or resent and defenestrate them. So much is attributed to them and to witness that it gives one pause. Just who are these people and how in earth have they done all this? 

   The empirical question, I suppose, is what to do about whiteness. We could begin by asking what other societies that have appended such magical and mythological properties to specific racial or cultural groups in the past have done, and how things went. Genocide has, of course, been a popular option, but isn’t always practical. The obvious, more reasonable thing to do is to find some way to simply take away the Satanic, parasitic, unjustified gains of the offending group and get them back into the hands of the righteous. Hopefully without too much fuss. Ideally, by free consent, but the historical precedent for that is about as rare as self-immolation.

    The annoying ability of certain groups (like the Jews, but there are many others) to succeed and have influence despite our best efforts to level the playing field only increases the need to use direct force against them. Our inability to remove their pernicious influence sufficiently to allow all others to rise to their level just goes to show how deep their distortion of the fabric of reality must be, how thoroughly and fundamentally it is baked into all the structures of society, and how necessary direct efforts to bring them down (not just bring others up) truly are, to the point that a wholesale restructuring of society may be necessary. The revolution, as the French and the Russians and Chinese and Cambodians discovered, never goes far enough. Perpetual revolution may be a moral necessity.

    I’ve certainly heard that argument from both the right and the left. And there is a grain of truth in it. Righteousness isn’t a moment or a structure, but an ongoing process of self-evaluation and individual practice. But if you’re using the dawning of utopian justice as the justification for individual injustices and the use of revolutionary deconstructive force to “correct the scales”, but the scales can never be corrected and the utopia can never really be reached or the perfect and pure structure built, what then? At some point you have to build something. You can’t spend your whole life in criticism, correction, redistribution, and deconstruction. Or maybe you could, but only in academia. 

The four great existential burdens are: finitude, mortality, meaning, and guilt. And every belief system must discharge them as duties. Any belief system that leaves a remainder will generate deep existential dread and confusion even if it otherwise appears stable. And people within it will keep seeking solutions, even if none present themselves. And it is hard to say what will result from that.

Each of these burdens is very distinct, but all are entertained concurrently in our nature. It isn’t always clear to us which we are dealing with. And a collapse of one may bleed into another, just as action in one may bleed into another.

Finitude is the problem of particularity. We aren’t everything, we aren’t a perfect thing. We are one, small, limited, inadequate thing. We are born at a particular time into particular circumstances, and we will all live and die within these limits. We don’t get to choose much of the particulars that really matter either; who our parents are, when and where we will be born, what innate qualities we will possess, what the world that we inhabit and the people and circumstances we have to deal with will be like, what twists and turns of fate and fortune we will encounter. We may be able to influence and choose these matters somewhat for other people, like our children, but cannot do so for the persons closest to us, ourselves. And even our control over them for our children is miniscule compared to the largeness of the world and what we cannot control.

There is an enormous existential burden attached to the foundation factors I’ve mentioned. And finitude is no exception. We find ourselves tossed unceremoniously into the world and then tossed out of it. And even when we’re in it, we are constantly reminded of how small and individual we are. We struggle with it. We strive to stamp our mark on the space around us, to bring it into alignment with our inner world of desirea, so that we should not be so small and so in conflict with everything around us, so in danger of being swallowed up. We search for an identity that will give us some defenses, some stability, some extension. Anything to avoid being a mote in a landslide, carried along, ground down, lost.

Our finitude presents problems on the most basic day-to-day level. In our struggle to find pants that fit right, in the way people don’t respond to us quite the way we would like or don’t easily agree with everything we say, in the thousand tiny compromises that must be made, dues that must be paid, to the fact of our individuality. We need help to reach something on a high shelf, we can’t afford to buy what our neighbor just got, someone scored higher than us on a test, someone else has a job we wish we had got, we buy music because we can’t play it, we buy art because we can’t paint it, we watch athletes compete because we couldn’t keep up, we watch people eat and live and travel somewhere we can’t, we hug other people because we can’t hug ourselves, we pay people to move things and fix things because we can’t.

All of these are tiny humiliations that could breed resentment. They are all reminders of our own inadequacy and distinctness. We are finite. To be an individual is to have limits. To be this and not that. To begin at a certain time and end at a certain time, and no more. To live the life that we have, and no other, to have the body and mind and personality we have, and no other.

Yes, there is room for improvement, yes, with effort we can extend ourselves a little more. But always, always, always within limits and at the cost of something else we must give up or miss. Love itself is a kind of admission of our own inadequacy. We can’t hug ourselves or even hold our own hand, much less propagate ourselves.

Sex is a monument to our finitude and inadequacy. There is no single version of humanity that is sufficient. It is only in compromise and cooperation and tension and conflict with another that we exist. There is no adequate physical pattern for humanity, no sufficient behavioral strategy. The very existence of the other sex defies any argument that ours is complete. As long as they exist, they exist in defiance of our sufficiency, a threat to our autonomy, a reminder of our finitude.

And to the problem of finitude there are two primary reactions. Acceptance and rejection. Rejection can take many forms, but is strangely uniform. Resentment, anger, perhaps a wish to grow to encompass more of the universe, to bring more of it within oneself, or a desire to hide and retreat, to shrink the walls of the world so they no longer press on and offend us. Rersentment seeks to hide the truth. Anger seeks to confront it. Both can give birth to a genocidal instinct, a wish to destroy that which challenges our completeness. Other cultures, other sexes, maybe just other people altogether, as there is more than enough difference between everyone at an individual level to provide all the challenges of finitude even if you have equalized all other factors of race, politics, economics, nationality, generation, belief, and gender.

We hunger for an equality that is the destruction of individuality. We may even come to believe that if we can only eliminate individuality at one key level, that somehow all others will come into harmony and alignment, and we will each finally feel sufficient unto ourselves and not feel the pressure of our finitude upon us. This, I think, is part of the instinct toward socialism, as well as certain kinds of aggressive nationalism. They both seek to take the whole world into themselves so there will only be one thing. And it will be us.

Capitalism, however, acknowledges difference, accepts it, and tries to make use of it, to leverage our differences, our competition, our particularity and selfishness, for our common benefit. And make no mistake, it can be terrible, as finitude and its consequences are often terrible. But it seeks to work with the nature of humanity and individuality, rather than eradicate or remake it. It allows for individual power, because the power that would need to be created and brought to bear to eliminate all difference, all consequences of finitude, would be too great and terrible for any person to wield. And there is simply too much of the world to wield it against. The effort to bring peace would only bring unending suffering, because it is selfhood itself that must be corrected.

I’m not going to sing the praises of capitalism, except to say that it’s a strategy to make the best of an intractable problem. And although we conceive of it in economic terms, something like it has been the basis of all biological productivity for eons. The rainforest itself isn’t a planned economy. It is emergent, as capitalist systems are. They are a function of the emergent intelligence of cooperation and competition between individual species, and even within individual species. And it is beautiful and productive and wasteful and terrible all at once. That’s life.

In life, each species is distinct and has its limits and exists in tension with other species, in a complex interplay of struggle and mutual benefit, and that pattern scales up to the highest level of ecosystems and down to the lowest level of the individual. And it isn’t all a happy exchange. The reproductive capacities of the rabbit are designed around the predatory capacities of the hawk and the coyote. And they would destroy them just as surely as their predators seek to, if they ever lost the murderous contribution of their aggressors. That’s finitude, written all over the daily daliances of the beasts of the field.

We may be bigger, we may be more complex, we may be more aware. But we are no less constrained. We posses the intelligence to outwit and find ways around or alter the conditions of our limits. But to be limited, to be individuals, is in our nature.

Even those powers that we bring to bear to relieve our limits often only serve, in the end, to create new differences. Minimize the pressure of one factor that restrains us and you maximize the ability of our other individual capacities to produce differing outcomes. Instability produces poverty, which promotes equality of wealth as well as equality of destitution. Stability enables productivity, which promotes inequality of wealth, even as it produces greater equality of freedom from destitution. Removing the restraints of instability and destitution allows the individuality of each person to express itself more freely, as differences in ability, resources, fortune, and choices are allowed to maximize their effect.

Even as some factors become more uniform or less important in an environment or society, others are enabled to predominate and become less uniform. Take away the challenges of difference in nationality, so that all people in an area are of one nation, and you maximize differences between regions and towns. Take away differences of sex, so you are in a space such as an all-girls school, dealing only with those of your own gender, and you maximize differences of personality or class or family or physicality. There is always plenty of finitude to go around, plenty of individuality. And equalizing one dimension by force simply shifts it to maximize somewhere else.

This is why the myth of achieving absolute equality is so hopeless for individual creatures such as ourselves. Even changing the overall position of people is insufficient to eliminate the concerns of our finitide. People don’t see the world in absolute values, they see it in relative proportions. People don’t respond innately, in a social sense, to absolute poverty, they respond to relative poverty. Everyone takes for granted that however things are for most people is the norm. And they calculate variation and social responses off of that relative value.

Thus young men respond with crimimality and violence in a society with a high baseline wealth just as they do in a society with a low baseline wealth standard. It doesn’t matter what they have, all that matters is whether others exist who have more or less.

Go spend some time in small towns and you will see how differently the people view their neighbors, despite seeming almost identical to an outsider. Difference is calculated relative to the prevailing conditions, not outside them. Give people pages of colored dots and tell them to find the blue ones, and they will. Reduce the number of blue dots, and they will simply shift their definitions and maximize certain criteria of difference to continue finding them. We don’t calculate relations according to fixed criteria, but rather adapt them to our environment. That allows those abilities, those innate psychological and social mechanisms that are built on an understanding of our innate finitide and difference, to continue functioning across widely differing circumstances.

It allows human societies, very functionally similar societies, to exist in all kinds of places and under all kinds of circumstances, across a vast tapestry of time. And it allows us to find one another intelligible and to recognize our common nature in operation, even across vast gulfs of cultural, temporal, economic, historical, circumstantial, and physical difference. We see individuals, like ourselves. Struggling with their finitude, working it out in their lives and their dealings with the world and with each other. We are united, not by our material or social circumstances, those can never unite us; but by our fixed nature, our shared struggle. This is the shared gift and burden that we bear.

So enough for now about finitude. It’s such a big problem that much of the total activity of humankind is daily devoted to dealing with it, and much of all that has been said in thought has been said in response to it. So I’m not likely to dispose of it in a moment, what has taken all of human history to explore. It’s enough to say that much of everything we do and think is an attempt to deal with this existential burden. And the correct way of dealing with it isn’t exhausted by a single statement or action or ideology and movement.

Mortality, meaning, and guilt still remain to be dealt with. We are, indeed a deeply burdened and laboring species. We work as no other species can, having the awareness of our burdens that other species carry without knowing, having instinct and adaptation, reproduction and death, to carry them through their daily struggle. And even when we do survive and attain some degree of safety and comfort, there is still the problem of meaning to be dealt with, and as security grows it may loom ever larger rather than smaller. And guilt, the last of these hounds, is the dark companion of all humanity, that must live in a world of choices and consequences, with knowledge of the past and power over the future.

These three I will have to deal with at another time and in other ways. Like finitude, each of them has required all the effort and concentrated thought of humanity across the eons to carry.

Some people aren’t bothered by the idea of an apocalypse. It doesn’t seem to them like a big deal if all life was extinguished, whereas the prospect of the death of a loved one carries a lot of weight. And some people even pride themselves on the clinical detachment and calmness they show in the face of such threats, while other criticize them for their lack of concern. Why is this?

I think the idea of an ultimate catastrophic disaster seems like less of a big deal because we can can’t seriously entertain it or process it. So we think we’re being detached, but we’re really just alienated. It’s too foreign a concept to grasp, so we assume that we have grasped it and that it wasn’t that big a deal.

If you really think it through, the apocalypse is a sort of existential solution. Not to the problem of your individual life, but to the question of the value and meaning of life itself. It turns out, none of it was for anything! And now it’s all gone forever. The universe falls silent. There isn’t even anyone around to be interested in our remains. Life is over and forgotten, from the tallest skyscraper to the lowest invertebrate. It wasn’t going anywhere, it wasn’t for anything, it didn’t mean anything.

So what was life? Life was a weird physical anomaly, a strange side effect of physics and chemistry in one tiny spot, now rubbed out and gone forever and forgotten, as if it had never been. A corrected abberation, a passing curiosity. But it has passed, a brief interlude in an eternity of space and time where it doesn’t figure. Now there isn’t even anyone or anything left to arouse such concerns and questions.

Even a frog, in its own way, raises such questions, even if it cannot reflect on them. Why should a lump of matter behave in such odd ways? Why organize itself so, why seek to perpetuate itself so? What does matter gain by being so ordered and perpetuated? The protons don’t benefit, the electrons don’t benefit, the neutrons don’t benefit, the chemicals don’t benefit. Nothing physical benefits in any coherent sense from having been part of a biological process.

It seems that the only true benefactor of all of this kerfuffle we call life is information. But information isn’t tangible; it’s not clear how it benefits from being, much less from continuing to be or from growing in size or complexity or imposing itself on more matter.

But now, after a proper global catastrophe, at least such strange questions are finally settled, as they are all moot. The questions themselves have decohered, along with the frogs. It isn’t even tragic, because there’s nothing and no one for it to be tragic to or about.

If you have to think about of this now, when all of it, including us, is still here; well, it all flies in the face of our experience. I mean that quite literally. Life exists and acts as if it matters, in defiance of all the consistency and good sense of nothingness and unliving matter. Simply by being, it generates a defiance of unbeing, as crazy as that is.

So long as it manages to escape universal obliteration, life’s very existence argues madly in favor of some purpose or value or meaning, coming from where we do not know and going toward what we cannot guess. Life believes by its very existence and nature that it is meant to exist and can’t contemplate a world without that strange kind of destiny. Only a good old-fashioned meteor or stellar explosion could shut up those questions for good.

If the death of everything did come, the questions would be answered. But not answered in the way that life desires. By existing, life generates questions that the rest of the physical universe lacks any capacity to engage with and that make no sense in a properly ordered world.

The answer of death must always be unsatisfactory to life, because it isn’t really an answer, it’s the cessation of that which provokes the question. And life, if still living, cannot help but be confused and dispirited and feel contradicted by it.

Imagining the end of all life, as a living thing, simply isn’t a coherent concept. It cannot be properly entertained by us, except in absentia, by ceasing to be. And so we cannot take it seriously, as living is a premise of our being so fundamental as to be inescapable while we yet exist. It cannot be properly entertained, either while we exist or when we don’t. So, naturally, it’s hard to have a proper or accurate or realistic perspective on it.

Whatever any of us feel about the end of the species, it’s sure to be a bit disconnected from the reality. And it always will be.

   

   I usually try to avoid reading what celebrities have to say on subjects. Wisdom, practicality, and intellectual sophistication aren’t exactly their stock in trade. But I did happen to read some of what Rebecca Ferguson had to say about the movie, and book, Dune, which she stars in as one of the main characters. She was very critical of the book, dismissing it as sexist trash, despite having never read it. 

    People these days are very prejudiced and don’t have much tolerance for a diversity of views. Anything that isn’t representative of whatever is fashionable among them at the moment is garbage that needs to be changed and “fixed” and brought up to the standards of the moment.

    I’m not at all surprised that she wasn’t remotely interested in the book and doesn’t have any respect for it. People these days have no ability to read or learn from or appreciate the people of the past. And the persistent idea that those of us who are alive now are fundamentally better or smarter or wiser than everyone else who has ever lived before us is part of the problem.

    It’s the usual hubris of the young. They think everyone who lived before them was an idiot and a Neanderthal and that they’re the be-all end-all perfect-end-point of human evolution who sees all and understands all, a veritable kwisatz haderach. They have absolutely no capacity to learn from and understand, much less enjoy, what anyone different from them has to say or thinks. Only people and ideas from their own time and culture please them, and not even all of those.

    And that’s a shame, because learning to love and understand the past, or the theoretical future, is one way to learn to love and understand and, yes, even see the faults in your own time. Is the world of Dune similar to our own? No, it’s a crazy place, made of a crazy mix of ideas pulled from the depths of human nature.
    I suppose Rebecca would prefer to see Jessica turned into another generic “strong, independent” modern woman, like the dozens of others we see in films that date themselves dreadfully and echo one another so much you can predict everything they’re going to do. Instead of fitting this popular mold, Jessica is something strange and unique. A mother, a concubine, a lover, a widow, a ruler, a secret agent, a witch, a warrior, a spy, a charlatan, a seductress, a politician, an exile, a witch, a rebel, a religious icon, a shaman, a time traveler.

    We certainly need to update such a boring and outdated stereotype and make her more interesting and worthwhile, or modern audiences might find her a bit shallow and pathetic. And actressesses might be embarrassed to have to play such a poor and limited role.

     Having seen the movie, I will say that they did make Jessica much less interesting than she is in the book. But that’s due to the limitations of film, not the book’s fault. In the book Jessica gets lots of screen time and is awesome and complex. She probably could have been better in the movie if Rebecca had taken the time to read the book and invest some of that completity into her performance. But she thought she already understood it and that it has nothing to offer her, and she had everything to offer it. And that is the wrong approach to take with great art. 

    I often hear people like John McWhorter refuting people like Ibrim X Kendi by saying, “Yes racism is still a problem and it has been a problem. But it’s false to claim that things haven’t changed or at the same or worse than they were in the past. Maybe in 1950 a black man couldn’t get a fair trial and the police were openly hunting them and racism was universal. But that’s not true today, and it’s disengenuous to claim that it is. Maybe in 1950, but let’s stop pretending that it’s 1950.”

    Even in 1950 and in 1850 these things weren’t true in way that D’Angelo and Kendi say they are, with their monolithic, conspiratory rhetoric. They weren’t true in that way, as a universal, reductive, uniform reality, in 1650. They were certainly completely true about some situations and some people, and for others the situation was something else. Not what it is now, not perfect by any stretch, not even good, but it was a lot of other things other than the simplistic, universal racism these two authors espouse. 
  There was enormous complexity, both here in America between different groups, and abroad throughout the world. Even hundreds of years ago there were people who strove for universal brotherhood, and there were people who didn’t care if you were black or white so much as whether you were inside or outside their group, and there were others who took a refined, progressive, intellectual approach to race relations (who believed in slavery), and there were some people who thought it was every man for himself and might makes right, and there were those who took slavery for granted as a human universal, and there were those who didn’t like it but didn’t know what to do about it, and there were a hundred other perspectives.

    There were African tribes who made their living off of slavery and that had to be stopped by white people from trading flesh, and there were those who thought we had no right to interfere in the affairs of others, and there were black slave owners, and there were white slaves, and there were plenty of people both slave and enslaving who were neither black nor white.
    It was a very, very complicated world, as far back as you could wish to go. There wasn’t just some single conspiracy of white against black. History isn’t that simple. It took a lot of time, money, effort, and blood to get us to where we are today. And a lot of it was spent by white people, because it seemed to those specific people that it was the right thing to do. And as a result things are a lot better in many ways. 
     So as much as slavery is a fact, the reality is that it’s a bigger, more complex fact than we give it credit for. It is a human universal. And relations between the races being perfect and harmonious was never been something that was guaranteed, or even expected, by anyone at any point in history. Quite the opposite. The fact that we are where we are isn’t something we can only criticize and only take for granted and only attack. It’s not something we can casually endanger, assuming the natural state is for everything to be just fine, and that no effort has been put in, no price paid, to get us to where we are today. If we don’t understand that we are somewhere particular and got there by a particular process and don’t have some appreciation of what it is, we may not be able to maintain it. We may even destroy and hurt those we are trying to help.
    Life and history have never been as simple, nor judgements about them as cut and dry, as Kendi and DiAngelo would like to imagine them. It makes for a good story, especially if you’re trying to whip people up and sell books and gain political power. Reductionism and oppositionism are very well-worn tools for that use them. But it’s no way for a serious thinker who genuinely wants to understand and to make things better to behave. It’s the playbook of petty dictators, rabble rousers, and political opportunists, not saints, wise men, or heroes. But they certainly seem convinced that that’s what they are. 

    The deception is in convincing people that unless you take such attitudes, that you’re aren’t taking the problem seriously. That if you don’t approach things through the lens of reductive extremism and political antagonism, that you don’t really care about the problem. This is a common tactic, and one of the reasons why extremists so often manage to lay claim to the position of moral authority in a conflict. People who won’t take a side and buy in simply and absolutely for the cause are seen as wishy washy, or even traitors. People who genuinely care and who have excellent ideas that differ from the rabble rousers and populists often get sidelined. It’s harder to market a complex and nuanced view of the world, and easy to sell ideologies that play to our emotional and tribal instincts. 

    I’ve seen people who have been branded race traitors shed tears over the plight of their people, seen them struggle and suffer indignities and slander at the hands of the very people they wish to help. But they’re willing to pay that price because they do genuinely care so much. As for those who win money and influence and praise for encouraging balkanization and reductive ideologies, I’m not really sure how much they care. But since I cannot know their hearts I will have to assume good intentions and misunderstanding on their part rather than ill intent and capture by the darker forces of their ego. Even being on the right side of an issue isn’t any protection against that risk, and it’s something even the best of us should fear (and I hardly count myself among that group). 

America is facing a crisis. A crisis of division. At this point, many people in America are actually living in such absolutely different cultural worlds with radically divergent conceptions of their most basic fundamental premises about reality, that they cannot be said to be living in the same country any more. Or perhaps even the same universe. And it’s creating understandable conflict.

If you haven’t grasped just how dire this problem is, then you haven’t been paying proper attention. And if you’re feeling optimistic, then you haven’t spent enough time studying history. You need to challenge your assumption that the natural and most common outcome for radically divergent cultures across history is for them to easily share the same territory with no problems. Each day that passes brings us one step closer to the justification of open conflict.

That’s the bad news. Now for the good news. This isn’t a new problem. It isn’t new for people in general, and it isn’t new for America. People of other nations have generally solved such conflicts by waging periodic war on each other. The downside of this solution is that it’s fairly destructive and deprived you of a decent portion of your male population every generation or so. America has the unique problem that our factions do not hold discrete territories, like France and England. Our territories overlap enormously with our opposing factions, and our lives are deeply intertwined. We are dependent on one another in an integrated society. De-integrating it would be extremely difficult.

So we’re stuck living with our enemies. But that’s no big deal, America was actually founded in such a situation. If you take the time to study history, you will find that the original colonies were radically divergent from one another. They came together to throw off England, but even then it was entirely unclear how such a band of misfits could ever hope to work together in any long-term endeavor. Each colony was essentially its own separate nation-state, with its own identity and laws. And many of them despised each other and rejected each other’s identity only slightly less than they despised and rejected King George.

Even those groups that came from the same country, such as the English peoples of the Puritan and Cavalier cultures, were so divided from one another that they had fled England to avoid the war that had been raging between them. Their vision of the world, of their identity, and of what society should be like were radically repugnant to each other. These were not natural friends or allies. These were enemies, living right over the next mountain range. That was the reality of early America.

So how then, did they avoid constant rebellion and civil war? Or at least keep it to a minimum? How did they manage to exist and work together as a group under such circumstances? The problem they faced then was much the same as what we face today. How do you get radically divergent cultures to share the same territory without undue bloodshed and destruction, and secondarily how do you maximize what cooperation is possible between them?

Many people on the continent said that there was no solution, that the alliance between the states would quickly fall apart and disintegrate into infighting and overt political opposition between the groups, just as things had always been in Europe. But the founding fathers, a collection of representatives from these many divergent cultures, sat down and tried to argue out a diplomatic solution.

Their solution of course, was the American political system. But at the time it was very different from what we have today. We have lived in the recent past through the noontide of American unity. Unity is always relative. But ours was relatively high, for such a uniquely divergent and cobbled-together culture as our own. There were powerful forces that held us together and brought us nearer to one another.

Commerce and war both played their parts. The world wars especially. The military helped unite us, common goals and threats helped unite us. Commerce provided shared products, businesses, and economic institutions. Religion, although divided into once-bitterly opposed sects, still acted as a force for unity by providing a mostly-shared metaphysical and ethical background. The MacGuffey readers provided unity through education. The American small town provided a unity of social experience for many generations of people. And the media, when TV and radio came along, provided a limited set of shared experiences that helped unite a scattered people.

All that, of course, has changed greatly over the last forty years. Our society mixed and moved and reached a maximum of uniformity, or as much as can be expected for the most mixed society ever to have existed, some time in the last century. When exactly is debatable. Our identity as members of specific towns or states or even families took a back seat to our shared identity as Americans. We felt fairly free at the end of the twentieth century to go anywhere, move anywhere, and have it not matter that much.

The degree to which we might disagree with that statement is really a function of how much we think it is fair to assume and take unity and uniformity for granted. Today we are outraged by the fact that it isn’t completely easy and things aren’t perfectly the same for everyone everywhere, when they should be. But that has never been the case anywhere in the history of the world. Historically, the moment you were out of your proximate safe space; your family, your town, and much later your state; you were in the wilderness. But Americans don’t assume that, in fact we’re offended and indignant when that’s not the case and when things aren’t easy or similar. In the most diverse nation ever, we became addicted to uniformity. But the forces that brought that brief confluence to its apogee have faded with the passing of time.

Moreover, things have changed very rapidly recently. We are emerging out of the era of unity into a new era of divergence. A bit more “many” and a bit less “one”. We’re becoming more, not less, heterogenous and struggling with it and with our expectations. We are faced again with the old problem. How do you keep a functional unity and peace between radically divergent cultures and cultural and political visions?

The original answer for America was anti-federalism. Decentralization of power. De Toqueville goes on quite a bit in his classic work about the eccentricities of American politics and the strange way that political power increases as you move down the ladder, rather than up. So the most sovereign entity in America is an individual citizen, and the least is the abstract unity of the federal government.

The whole purpose of anti-federalism is to allow for internal diversity. If the federal government holds too much power, then it becomes a forced, shared territory, obligating the divergent members of the unity to fight over it. But if each state is given, as much as is possible, the ability to pursue its own identity and means and methods and structure and vision, then they need not come to blows with one another. They can preserve their uniqueness and unique territories while still cooperating together for the common good.

That’s why the earliest version of the federal government was so limited. It was in charge of money and diplomacy and defence, but it wasn’t in charge of providing a uniform structure and experience for all Americans in all the differing places and among all the peoples that made up the nation. It’s purpose wasn’t to homogenize the nation. It was to provide some basic common services that all the states required, as a cooperative enterprise created by them, as well as provide a place for them to arbitrate their conflicts with one another. And of course the system was built to work that way right down to the granular level. With individual sovereignty and autonomy maximized, with the scope of rule reduced with each step up the ladder of congregation: family, town, county, state, country.

This was the proposed solution for the problem of aggregation, which is that the further up the ladder of collectivism you go the more small portions of power aggregate, until at the level of the nation tiny individual contributions are aggregated into immense economic, political, and military power that could overwhelm the rights of the lesser entities. Our system of checks and balances and all the mechanisms that make it harder and harder to get things done the further up the ladder you go is entirely deliberate and intentional.

Today we have new aggregate institutions. Twitter, Facebook, Google. Algorithms. Technology whose very goal is to sift the sands of a million words and lives and passions and deliver them with precise targeting. With their assistance, the power of the mob can be assembled and applied virtually anywhere, at a moment’s notice. On any subject, against any target. That is a major sea change in the nature of power and conflict in society. It’s the functional equivalent of growing a new arm or developing a new sense. It completely changes the nature of the game. It restructures reality itself.

Unfortunately, our political system does not provide immediate solutions for such massive changes to the structure of society like the rise of the digital world or the massive increase in the size and power of the federal government. These factors have both blown out or circumvented most of the checks that were put in place to restrict them. That’s part of why inter-group conflict has inevitably risen. As our shared territory is forcibly increased, our unique and individual territory is eroded, and our ability to aggregate and apply power in any place, against any person, no matter the distance between us, grows ever stronger.

It has been said that good fences make good neighbors. It could be said that this is because because the alternative is going onto their property and forcing them to be good neighbors. There is a need we humans have to bring our individual territory into harmony with our personal moral, structural, aesthetic, practical, and political vision. We have to deal with anything that lies within our territory that might be a threat to that order. We have to fix things and make things work so they will contribute to the ends we desire. That’s just something people do. Everyone. Without exception. Everyone is always doing this all the time. Which creates a problem of boundaries.

Other people are different from us. They may not share our vision, our aesthetic, our goals, our means. Maybe because they are radically culturally and intellectually divergent from us, maybe because they’re just a different sort of person with a different personality. My brother and I live our lives differently, even though we share much in common culturally, because we’re very different people. Luckily, we don’t have the share the same home or abide by each other’s decisions when it comes to our own families. We have our own territories in which to pursue our own discrete strategies and goals.

And yet we are united and often come together in cooperation and for pleasure. But even someone whom I love could be a serious threat to me, a major problem, if we didn’t have some protections between us. Imagine how much more other people, who are far more divergent, could be a potential problem, if we had to inhabit the same territory. The only options for a problem like that are, as I said, borders or force. Forced seperation, enforced limits on collective territory and sovereignty, preserving localized independence, the tyranny of the individual; or forced conformity, me forcing you to come into harmony with my vision, or the vision of my particular faction, the tyranny of the mob.

This tension between borders, freedom, unity, and cooperation isn’t a fixed formula. It’s a dance. One that is always shifting, always moving. It sways from one end of the room to the other, sometimes slow, sometimes quick and violent, sometimes elegant and poised, sometimes stomping and stumbling. It isn’t the case that we need all of one and none of the other. What we are actually trying to achieve is a kind of harmonious balance.

That’s what a dance is. That’s what life is, what makes it grow and develop. Elegant tension. The vision for America isn’t just “Many” or “One”, it’s unity in diversity, e plurbis unum. That’s a fundamental tension. The system we were given is meant to preserve and help us navigate that tension. Our political system is trying, as best as it can, to have it both ways. To maximize individual freedom by limiting the power of the federal government, while also maximizing (or perhaps optimizing is the better term) the cooperative aggregate benefit of the federal government for the lives of individuals and the interests of individual states.

There is also a strong sense in the founding documents that you should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s. In America that might mean that taxes, military or political service, and legal and political obligations toward other parties or other states are owed to the federal government. But with the citizen as the most sovereign entity, not a king, not a centralized government; that means there are things that are owed to you, or to your community, whether town or state. The obligations don’t flow in only one direction. Each party has their own appropriate rights and dues.

That extends to religion, your own highest vision of life and truth and value. God is representative of your own highest conception of value, an ideal that defines who you are, what the world is, and how you should live in it. So you as an American, all Americans, must be free to render unto God those things that belong to him. Your mind, your speech, your beliefs, your choices, your self-conception. Those things belong to your God, therefore they must be retained by you so that they may be given. They cannot be made the possession or territory of the government. They belong to you, they are owed to you, because you owe them to something even greater. Those things are not tangible, not wealth or possessions or position, but they are territory. Sovereignty. Responsibility. That is what our essential freedoms protect.

If you take away the ability of people to give what they owe to their gods, you have broken the fundamental bargain of America. These things cannot be made the possession of or territory for regulation and control by the government. They must belong to the people, so they can be rendered to an even higher claim, the claims of individual conscience. This sovereignty must be respected, because it is a sacred responsibility, and a heavy one.

We do not recognize a system where it is the government that possesses sovereignty over these things and renders them to God on our behalf. Our minds, our hearts, our souls, our morality, are ours, for better or worse. Or we are not America. It would be better to have a king who takes responsibility for the state and for making it devoted to God.

People cannot worry about everything, and they cannot control everything. Except by wielding tyrannical power. And that violates the individual mandate of each person to render what is owed to God. I cannot render it for you on your behalf. The government cannot render it on your behalf. You alone must stand before your god and be judged for how well you discharged that duty.

Government cannot make you good by force, and it cannot lift that responsibility from your shoulders. It does not have the right to take something so precious. If we wish to live with one another we will have to learn to start making some room for one another, including our differing duties to our own personal gods. And we must resist the urge to enshrine those duties and obligations in the actions of collectivized power, however tempting it may be.

We must concentrate our devotion at the lowest levels, doing the most the nearer those institutions come to our selves, and be content with doing the least at the highest and most centralized level, lest we undermine individual authority and autonomy and responsibility and abdicate our immediate duties for a distant collective territory that must always be the subject of bitter fighting and division.

This isn’t a perfect solution to a truly difficult problem. But it is at least one that works. And that is a rare and precious gift.

On of the most cult-like elements of wokeism, or critical theory, or whatever you wish to call it, is its persistence in separating you from your culture by any means necessary. It’s adherents are orphans of time, isolated and cut off from their family, their culture, their history, all the traditional anchors of the self. Your history exists to be criticized and deconstructed, your family must be challenged and deconstructed. You’re told of your family, your history, your life, your cultural artifacts, not that they might be sinful, but that the only question is finding the sin and exposing it. They are all inherently and fundamentally sinful. And your job is to be the inquisitor taking them apart. Only by making yourself their informer can you escape their punishment.

This is a typical tactic of all cults. People must be separated and orphaned from their traditional identity structures, as they might provide competition or refuges against the annointed vision. I’ve known people who did fall into cults, and one of the first tasks undertaken was to separate them from their parents, so they have to look to the group for what their parents were providing. And so on it goes, to friends, community, culture, and all other competing loves. All other refuges and avenues of stability and sanity and meaning and self are eliminated as options. That way the full self can be devoted to the cause and the society to be, the new structure, the new history, new family, new culture.

That’s why socialism has so often emphasized the breaking down of local and familial affiliations. As long as you had loyalty to someone just because they were your father, you might not inform on them to the state. So long as you had loyalty to someone just because they were your neighbor or countryman, you might not consent to letting them be purged as an agent of oppression. And both of these were considered serious problems in the Soviet Union. Familial attachment and community attachment were an impediment to the state’s monopoly on your love, loyalty, meaning, and morality.

Never mind that the state can’t really love you or care about you as your parents do. The promise is there. These are things standing in the way of your happiness, and you can’t reach that paradise or vision of righteousness unless you can let go of all lesser attachments and subject them to the rule of the vision.

There’s a sacrificial instinct in humanity, an understanding that giving up something now can help you secure something better. And the more precious the sacrifice, the more pleasing it is, the more devout you are, the more righteous you then become, and the more you do to advance the kingdom. And that instinct isn’t exactly wrong. But it can certainly go wrong. That’s the trickiest thing about it.

Wokeism demands human sacrifice. It is a greedy and devouring and merciless god. Unlike the Christian God who pays the penalty for us, who forgives us and loves us and provides the ram, wokeism possesses no such mercies and offers no such redemption or substitution. Only sacrifice, forever and of all. Sin is innate in all things. It is not a question of if you and your family and culture and gender and history were sinful, but only how. Only exposure and crucifixion can cure them, only fire, only sacrifice. The more precious and dear, the better, the more true your devotion.

The sacrifices must be continual. You must always be giving something or someone up to show your devotion to the cause. In the big things and in the small things. Bring your movies, your books, your jokes, your music, your friendships, your food, your profession, your government, your money, your speech. Bring it all so that it can be offered up, in hope that the perfume of it will rise up to the great judge, and that it will satisfy her, so that she will pass over you for today.

For she is a devouring and perfecting flame that promises all and devours all, a god of guilt who judges all the powers and products of man and demands they be given up, because only in her hands can they be pure and righteous and just. Only when all differences and all particulars, all earthly loyalties and all freedoms are consumed and made obesiant to her, will all be perfect. Then all will be as one, in her. This is the kindness she offers, the equality, the love.

And her name is Ammit.

Anyone who has had children and has had their eyes open should have seen through all this victimhood culture in an instant.

I have a child whose entire approach to life is to explain everything she does as either someone else’s fault or an accident. She never claims any kind of agency. And I’ve told her, I could at least respect her even for doing something terrible if at least she said “I did it”. But what truly hurts me is that she’s constantly arguing against her own humanity and existence as a conscious, responsible human.

I love her, and I love her because she’s a person. Able to choose, to learn, to act, to understand. But she’s constantly assaulting that precious identity, which is unique to humans, by claiming that she’s just a pawn, a piano key, a machine, an animal. She’s doesn’t see, doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, doesn’t choose. She doesn’t know why she does things, they just happen, or other things happen to her and make her play the tune she plays. She can’t be held responsible for any of it.

That’s her deepest instinct, to violate her own existence as a human in order to escape responsibility. And I’ve tried to tell her, that’s not a bargain worth making. Responsibility is a dreadful weight, but there’s nothing more precious you could purchase. What it buys you is godlike, your own humanity, moral and intellectual agency. It means that you’re more than just an animal or mechanism. There’s a you there, a true subject.

Even a bad human is a greater thing than a mere mechanism, which can’t even take credit for its own failings. What kind of a life is that? Who would wish that on someone or condemn them to such insignificance? I fight that attitude in my child every time it comes up, because all it does is disempower her. All it does is remove her sense of control and sense of self, her ability to learn and choose and improve, her very soul. It steals my child away. And I want her to grow.

Only a cruel parent who wants a mere possession, a tame and dependent mechanism that exists only as a function of their own power, would wish such a fate on their child. And the compassionate political left 100% treats black people (among many other groups) like children. That’s one reason why it strikes so many people instinctively as a reprehensible attitude. At the very least it’s extremely patronizing. It’s a denial of something essential to the activity of humanity. Even an enemy pays you the respect of treating you like a credible threat.

I don’t want want my daughter to be treated like that, not for any beneficence. And I don’t have any interest in raising an animal or an automaton or a puppet. I want to raise a human, a person, a daughter, a future friend and partner and successor.

So every time she tells me that she’s just a puppet, that it was an accident, that she doesn’t know why she did what she did; her sister did something and that’s why she acted, she’s not responsible for anything she’s done, she’s not responsible for breaking the rules because she played no part in her own actions, she essentially wasn’t there when she broke the rules, I tell her, “At least give yourself the credit of having done the things that you do. I’m not that worried about some little thing you took from your sister or that you shouted at her or hit her. Those can be mended. But at least recognize that it was you that did them and it’s you that’s living your life. Don’t push off your existence into someone else, don’t give it away so easily just to escape a little responsibility. That’s a bad trade.”

The instinct toward victimization is powerful and innate. I had to work hard to grow my older daughter out of it. It wasn’t easy, for me or for her. I want to abdicate responsibility and agency too. It’s such a burden. It would be so much easier to just give it up and be less than I am. It’s a struggle for me every day. And I fear encouraging victimhood in others because I fear what it would do to me. I fear what it would do to my daughters. It would eradicate their future, their potential as humans, for the sake of their comfort.
Animals might rest easier in a world where there is no ‘I’ that must carry the weight of the past and future and individual responsibility. And we feel keenly what tiny, helpless things we are in such a big world. And we want to ascribe godlike qualities to external forces, of whose whims we are mere puppets, like the pagan gods of Greece. And maybe today the nearest thing we can find (and some disgustingly embrace it) is white people, with their apparent command over all the forces of the universe that shape our experience.
It isn’t any surprise that people seek gods to thank or blame in the face of the great and terrible world we live in. It’s no surprise that we should wish to return to the position of mere animals or infants living an unaware and helpless and dependent existence, mere toys of callous divine forces. These are universal temptations. And the world does make good arguments for them.

It is enormous work to daily lift ourselves out of these temptations, or to push someone else out into the terrible world of responsibility and agency. As I’ve made clear, it’s a daily struggle with my own daughter. But I believe in her. I believe she could be more than she is. I believe she has the capacity to take hold of that burden. But she can’t reach its rewards without accepting its judgment, the burden of agency and responsibility.

Only someone who can lift that load has any hope of changing the world around them. Only a demigod has a chance of challenging the gods and changing their fate. That’s why the ancient myths revere them, even when their tales are tragic. The world is big, the world is scary, the world is tragic and complicated and uncaring and unpredictable. It is not set up for our pleasure. It contains many things and many forces that do not care about us or set themselves against us. We are inadequate, we are imperfect, we are misguided, we are ignorant, we are impulsive, we are petty, we are weak, we are resentful, we are naive.

Who can lift the burden of such impediments? Who has the power to struggle against them? Not animals, not puppets, not infants. Only man, humans, realized men and women. People who have seized on the one great power they do have in the face of all that tyranny and chaos: agency. Their selves, their own ability to choose and to be and to learn and know and take responsibility for their part of their selves, their tiny corner of being. They have staked a claim to it, ownership of it. They belong to themselves. They can choose what to do with that possession, and whatever the consequences, they will own it.
And you just can’t solve that problem by pushing it off onto someone else. No one can give you yourself. And no one can take it. That is the deepest lesson of religion and philosophy. Your deepest fate lies in your hands, as the gift of God. The world can take life, freedom, pleasure, wealth, and family from you. But it cannot take you from yourself. Only you can do that. That is the lesson of the book of Job and the Apology of Socrates.

This is a dearly bought truth, and it is one we are in danger of forgetting, surrendering ourselves back to the pagan void of insignificance. Awakening to our own power means awakening to the pain of knowledge and responsibility, including knowledge of our own frailty and insignificance. That all we truly have is ourselves, this one little corner that we can truly possess and control. But that is enough. It is the whole world, in a mote. It is everything, when the alternative is nothingness. We must rage against the idea that we are mere puppets, lest we become them, lest we become as helpless as we imagine ourselves to be.

P.S. On a personal note, from the moment she was born, my daughter was the most lovely thing in the world to me. In a way that I can hardly understand or explain. She’s very different from me, and in ways that I often struggle with. But that’s also why I adore her so much. Learning to love and to help her has been and is a very dramatic and challenging journey for me.

Her older sister was much easier because she’s much more similar to myself. Reaching across that divide was easier; we fought things out and loved one another on the same terms. I knew how to reach her and it was easy to talk things through together. But my younger daughter is an adventure into unknown lands and strange customs. She amuses me, she delights me, she confuses me, she frustrates me. She’s an education. I think she was given to me to help me understand and love the world better. She’s my treasure.

I just saw the weirdest REI ad, and it took me a while to figure out what it was saying. I got it in the end.

    I believe the argument of the ad was “The outdoors is racist, it’s hard for black people to be outside because it’s so racist, and we can all work to make nature less racist. Buy REI crap.”

    It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, and I’m going to deliberately avoid that store because of it. Apart from the absurdity of the claims being advanced and the disgusting act of using them as part of an advertising campaign to sell products, attempting to profit off both racism and accusations of racism, it was itself one of the most racist things I’ve ever seen on television.

   Treating black people like infants who can’t even go outside and do things in nature like everyone in the history of the world has done, unless the holy white people come along and help the babies feel comfortable with some nice branded REI crap, is absurdly condescending and paternalistic.

   If black people don’t want to buy overpriced kayaks and down jackets, and want to spend their money and time somewhere else, that’s their decision. And maybe it’s a good one. 

The only real difference between the far right and the far left is loyalty. Both view life as a zero sum game in which the most meaningful divisions are oppressor and oppressed, or more accurately predator and victim. They only differ on who they believe you should back.

If you can win, you should, you deserve to, is the argument of the far right. If you can win, you should deliberately give some to those who can’t, is the argument of the far left. Their ideologies are the same, they simply identify with different parties and use different strategies. The left relies on the odd strategy of needing to convince the predators that it’s bad to be predators and they should voluntarily lose or give up some of their winnings to support those who can’t. If they truly are predators though, oppressors by nature, why should they do this?

The tactics used by the left involve guilt and social pressure and lots of communication and exhange. They also have their own captive predators, good doggies who will do what they’re asked to make things safe for the helpless perpetual victims, perpetual because they never truly disappear as a class, the left always finds them, or even makes them. They need them to be so they can be who they are.

There is a primordial element to all these dynamics, all these arguments, all these tactics, all these identities. They hold power because there is something deep within us that responds to them. We are prey, and have the instincts of a prey animal, the herd defenses. But we’re also predators, and we have the instincts of a hunter, the cunning and determination of the pack. Moreover, we’ve figured out how to use the opposing instincts for their opposite purposes. We know how to use our predatory nature to protect others, and our prey nature to attack as a group.

You can’t really resolve the argument between the two because we aren’t only prey, not only herd animals. And we aren’t only solitary predators. Our success lies in a blending of the two and being able to adapt to any niche. We are superadaptive because we aren’t just a species, we’re an ecosystem unto ourselves. We can simulate the whole in one. That is why the arguments from both sides often seems so silly, and so similar. We are each very accurately accusing one another of being exactly what we are and of possessing the strengths and vulnerabilities and powers and dangers that we do, in fact, possess. That’s not an abberation, that’s the human race.

There’s no way that this story is meant to be only two movies. This is clearly just the first third. If they were intending to have two movies, they would have gone further into the story. The score is a but overdone and repeats itself a little. It could have used more internal variety so the big dreadful moments could arrive with more weight by being different and distinct. Instead it all sounds very heavy. 
    It was a good movie. It strayed outside the original narrative just a little by inserting some modern American anachronisms, but overall did very well at telling the story. The casting was good. Jessica was a little too emotional. She had too many negative emotions too often, so it watered down the moments when her composure breaks down because she breaks down way too often. In the book she is both much softer (in a positive way; kind, inspiring, loving, mourning, hopeful, ambitious) and more imperious and confident. She spends too much time here reacting to all the scary stuff.

    In fact the movie works a little too hard trying to sell you on the scary stuff and all the drama and doesn’t let the positive elements breathe enough. Oscar Issac hits the right notes; he’s right on the nose. And Josh Brolin and whoever played Thufir were pretty good too, if they had only had more time to explore their characters. You need to learn the love the Atreides before you can be properly upset by seeing them come crashing down.

    Oddly enough, I think Jason Momoa was excellent. He helped balance things out and added some tangible warmth and texture to what could have become an overdone drama. He helps keep the tone balanced and helps you see what there is to love about the good guys before it all gets swallowed up in darkness and drama.
   Overall, it was very good. It could have been a bit longer. It could have taken just a little more time on Arakkis before the attack. The turnover happened so quickly it seemed like the Harkonnens left one day and came back two days later, which must have been pretty inconvenient for them. All that packing and unpacking, only to have to pack up and go right back again. The story took its time on Caladan, then got a bit rushed once they were on Arakkis.
     Also, there were way more visions of Zendaya than the plot really needed. It made it seem too much like Paul’s gift and his destiny were all about her, instead of being connected to the entire universe and the whole span of past and future time and infinite possible paths through it. Instead, we got tons of Zendaya, which is basically paid off when he…uh, meets her, which is sort of, not a huge deal in the actual movie because it has no real consequences.
    The design and style of the movie was great, right down the the outfits and the weird rituals with the Sardukar and whatnot. The ineradicable religious nature of humanity, whether that means worshiping God, or strength, or sand worms, or an ideal, or the Emperor, or spice, or a vision, is a big part of the book. And you can communicate it without using so many words through visual storytelling. In fact my only major criticism on that matter is that the movie didn’t get to do it more. Everyone in this story has a vision, a religion of a kind, and is selling it with full pomp and circumstance in the book. Even the Bene Gesserit, who claim only to serve, are really just as manipulative and power hungry and ambitious as everyone else. They think they’re justified in manipulating other people, even whole societies, because it’s all for the greater good, their idea of the greater good. And they’re the ones worthy of controlling it all. 
    Paul is a unique and interesting character because he’s not quite what anyone was expecting or hoping for. He’s not the political leader the Landsraad wanted from the Atreides. He’s not the controllable tool produced at the proper moment that the Bene Gesserit wanted. He’s not what the Fremen were expecting. He’s not what his parents were trying to make of him. He’s not what Thufir or Guerney were trying to make of him, a mentat or a warrior.

    He’s a properly interesting Messiah because all these people had their own mythology and their own plans and had an idea of what they were going to make of Paul and use him for. And even time and the species itself seem to have some role they demand of him. And he’s all of those things and none of them. He’s trying to chart his way through a life of immense possibility while not being swept along by the machinations, schemes, demands, and visions of everyone around him.

    He’s struggling to be an individual and make the right choices. And he’s dreadfully aware that the wrong ones could lead to not only his death, but to his becoming nothing more than a figurehead in someone else’s plans for the universe. He knows that even victory is dangerous, that the Fremen and even the memory of his father are terribly dangerous. And that’s a knowledge that few people ever have to bear, and none with the kind of keenness of vision into the possible futures that Paul has. He can literally see how the victory of each of the competing factions vying for his loyalty all lead to differing disasters. And he has to make his way in the desert, the way that leads to life, when death lies in all directions.
    The book contains all sorts of amazing depths, but the character of Paul and his situation are the deepest. Frank Herbert was really thinking hard about the nature of vision, agency, choice, destiny, demand, and all the deep forces that unite individuals to the sweep of history and the journey of our species.

   As a hero, Paul is an ideal. But it isn’t his power that makes him an ideal. Like all good fairy tales and all good sci-fi, his power is an exaggeration that helps us look at ourselves and who we are and what we can do and what sort of world we inhabit. We have vision, we have agency, we are surrounded by many people, many forces, many plans, many visions that would make use of us, and have us take part in them and navigate them. And we don’t always know what will result.

    We carry the terrible burden of moral awareness. We understand our own power, and we possess the capacity to see the danger lying along many paths, even victorious ones. And we have to navigate that somehow. Paul is a great hero because he is us. His power is our power, blown out of proportion so we can see it playing out more clearly, in a drama of scale we can understand a bit better. And we love it and love watching him go through it because that is what we wish for ourselves, to find a way to walk the path of life in the unforgiving dessert. That’s why Dune is a classic. 

Like all bigots of the past, you think that your judgment is justified. 

What was wrong with the judgements and bigotry of the past wasn’t that they identified the wrong group. And maybe if they had just got the group right, like I have, it would have been fine. 

You’re setting yourself up, not to address or deal with individuals in your life and your relationships, but for collective action against a group. That’s not living. That’s war. That’s blind aggression. 

The lesson of history isn’t that the people of the past picked the wrong people as the enemy. The lesson of history is that we can’t afford not to treat and judge people as individuals. Because we are going to judge. There is no way around that. The question is, are we going to accept easy and reductive heuristics, or are we going focus on the content of each person’s character?

Identity politics is bigotry. It is the war of the gods. It is primitive tribalism. And it doesn’t matter that you’ve picked a different tribe, or picked the underdog or the alpha in this situation or that. You can’t buy virtue that cheaply. You can’t reduce moral judgment to that simple of a formula. 

   You have to think. You have to do the hard work. You have to judge. You have to treat people as people, as agents. You have to treat faith as a matter of individual conscience, not as a matter of group filial connections or inheritance or deterministic identity or subjective historical positions. You have to become wise. 

A series of discussions about men, women, and feminism. In particular, some of the bad outcomes of certain types of feminism, and who is to blame. The video that sparkes this discussion is listed below. But to summarize, this lady argues that classical feminism has somehow been captured and used to promote values and messages that are actually counterproductive to the feminine interest and wellbeing, and reflect a forced adoption of masculinized values that have robbed and subordinated feminine culture. She feels like feminism and even ownership of femininity itself have been taken from women, to some degree. And she’s not happy about it. 

She’s got a pretty good handle on things. She lacks understanding of some people on the other side of things from her. And I don’t mean trans activists or other kinds of feminists, I mean men. And religious people or “common people”, she doesn’t understand them very well either. She still has a contempt for both that holds her back.

    When she’s made her peace with them, she’ll be even closer to the center. But she’s doing great work. This reaction was an almost necessary reaction. It was inevitable that some feminists would eventually realize that the arguments behind trans activism actually undermine feminist interests and would start pushing back and defending their territory. Feminism is an inherently partisan ideology. If you dissolve the borders between the sides, that partisan advocacy becomes incoherent. Part of fighting a war is being able to identify who is on your side and who is the enemy, what territory you’ve taken and what territory remains hostile.

    And to answer Benjamin’s question about where to go from hetr, the answer is that just because all systems are prone to error doesn’t mean you can afford to have no system. Any system is better than none. Any stability and predictability creates greater positive outcomes than no system. So you have to be courageous. And the good news is, sex is so simple that literally every other animal that is much dumber than us can figure it out just fine. I think if everybody were forced to get off the internet and walk around naked for one year, we would all figure it out.

——

After saying this, I was told by someone that men are to blame for feminism having been hijacked by gender ideology (trans activism), and for taking being female away from women. I was also told that “men think they can do whatever they want and have been oppressing women for thousands of years, and trans activism is just the latest injustice against women by men, seeking to take even being a woman from us.” The writer also blamed men for hijacking feminism and making it about being like men, including sexually, focused on short term pleasure, for their own selfish benefit. Men tricked them into it. 

    And I think she also made a dig at my manhood. She said that “This woman (meaning the woman in the video) isn’t missing anything, but you certainly are, and I don’t mean your dick.”

   That seems to be a response to my comment that it was a good talk but Helen could benefit from more understanding of men. I assume what she means is that, like Helen, she’s unhappy with the results of modern feminism and trans activism, but is still also very unhappy with men, and even blames men for these developments.

  Although she said that it wasn’t my dick that I was missing,  bringing it up like that does seem to imply it in a backhanded way. Or maybe she means that because I have a dick, that I am a dick, and I’m espousing typically male oppressive idiocy. She could have disagreed with me without bringing up my penis. So clearly she has a bit of a fixation on my identity as a male, specifically associated with a certain offensiveness.

    In any case, my suggestion that it might be worthwhile for Helen to add to her wisdom wisdom by gaining a little more understanding of men was not welcomed. Apparently women know all they need to know about men, which is that they’re the worst and are the blame for everything.

    To all of which I replied… 

——-

    And that’s why you can’t espouse a reductive ideology without it leading to bad outcomes. There isn’t a good for women independent of men, any more than there is a good for men independent of women, or a good for white people independent of blacks, or young independent of old. And if you try to pursue it, it inevitably devolves into an ideology, which are defined by reducing the totality of truth, goodness, and beauty to something less than its unified self. It reduces the human story to something less than what it is, and so mangles it, creating new problems.
     Some men think strength means you can do whatever you want, and some men are also right about that. Try to prove them wrong. I’ve been beaten up plenty of times by people far stronger than me. And it’s hard to argue with them that they can’t do it when they are, in fact, doing it. The proof is in the pudding. 
    But some men haven’t believed in that creed of might makes right. Or at least they have redefined might as something more like moral virtue rather than mere strength. And these men have been fighting those others for millenia. In fact men have fought and died and worked and suffered, for women specifically, for milennia.

    That’s part of the story of men, as much as the other side. There are and always have been degenerate males, and there are and have been noble males, just as there are and have always been noble and degenerate females who have taken part in both the triumphs and the tragedies of moral life. It’s not clear at all from either history or psychology that women are in any way innately morally superior to men, only that their virtues and vices take different forms. 
    Casting all of humanity and all of history in terms of a simplistic, oppositional gender narrative is exactly the result one would expect from a reductive ideology. Worse, it’s a counterproductive ideology, one that deprives itself of goods, allies, and even its own history for the sake of resentment and a clear identification of “the enemy”. 
    But men aren’t the enemy, they’re half the species. They’re your fathers, your brothers, your sons, your neighbors, your coworkers, your friends. They’re as much a part of you as you are of them. We have walked down the long and twisting roads of history together. We are made up, quite literally, of one another, a man and woman together producing each single part in the hereditary story of who we are. I am ten thousand mothers, and I am ten thousand fathers, and the labors of both and failures of both live in me. 
    Even the changes of recent history are the work of men as well as women. Women didn’t win any war to get the position they have. They didn’t defeat men. They didn’t start a new species and society without them. Men voted for those laws. Men fought and died to protect those freedoms from external threats. Men made room for women; they gave up territory voluntarily, or secured it by restraining those who resisted. If men as a whole had ever actually been seeking merely domination of and exploitation of women, they would have done it. They could still have it now if they wanted it. But they restrain themselves, because that’s not what they wanted or were seeking or doing, and they fight to restrain and hold back those who do want that. And women aren’t without their own means and ends. 
    You can’t carry on a campaign of vengeance on a whole sex for thousands of years worth of grievances. If you try, you’ll only make yourself into a resentful and angry and bitter person, and you’ll isolate yourself from half the species, plus whatever part of your own half still believes that our partnership is more than a mere total farce. You’ll lose perspective on your own personal moral responsibility and agency by investing it entirely in the actions of another group.
    The line that divides good from evil doesn’t divide along lines of sex, whatever that means these days. It runs down each human heart. We can’t make a container for a whole sex that contains all the evil, while that of another contains only good. I learned that from my mother.

     My mom, my sister, my grandmothers, my aunts, all were strong and capable people who had far too much dignity and respect for themsleves, as well as love and respect for others, plus a recognition of their own humanity, with all its universal faults and virtues, to succumb to any simple, reductive gender ideology. My mom would consider it profoundly dishonest, as well as humiliating, selling all the women of the past (and present that aren’t on board) short as mere puppets and pawns, perfectly angelic infants chased around by big scary male monsters. That’s not only dishonest to women, it’s dishonest to men, who were and are more than mere universal tyrants and monsters. But some people believe that even to the point of blaming men for feminism and its recent negative developments and products. As if women weren’t capable of producing something destructive. Something that could, without care, without oversight, somehow go wrong in some ways and cases. 
     This is much like the outcry against online bullying and the outrage over the negative effects of social media on girls, that carefully ignore the fact that it’s largely girls who are committing as well as as receiving the bullying, that girls are the ones girls are meeting on social media and being bullied by. Girls are suffering and someone deserves blame. Since it’s not possible to blame girls for anything that happens to them, because they’re not agents, merely helpless victims, we had better turn our eyes toward the alternatives.

    Boys don’t suffer as much as girls, making them unable to be part of the victimized crowd, because sadly they just don’t use social media as much, and when they do they interact socially far less and far less personally. They’re more into video games. So by and large they’re not the enemy that girls are encountering on social media, even if they do make the occasional contribution. They just aren’t invested enough to matter. 
    The enemy that women encounter on social media is themselves. They matter there, they are powerful, and they are trying to get something more from it. Even the platform can’t really be blamed, it just provides the means and opportunity for women to interact and treat one another as they are inclined, with the benefit of a little digital distance.

     Even if you could remove all men from the world, it wouldn’t be the end of violence or the oppression of women or their suffering or subjugation. It might take different forms, find distinct expressions. I think social media is actually a lesson in what such a world would be like. But all the good and all the evil of humanity would still exist, even if the last man were eradicated and women freed forever from their influence. Because it isn’t along lines of sex that good and evil are divided, but among all. And rejecting all the good in an entire group, while assuming only good in your own, is a quick step down a dangerous path. 
    You can’t defeat sexism with sexism, you only escalate the conflict and alienate your allies and partners. And humanity isn’t the sort of thing where good and evil can be sectioned off into compartments of sex without doing violence to the very nature of the species. The marriage between men and women is the basis of our species-life. We don’t have any life without it. We don’t have any good without it. That is why there cannot be a coherent and non-degenerating feminism any more than there can be coherent and non-degenerating masculinism. To create it is to do violence to the species identity. It must inevitably sicken, it must inevitably become unbalanced and distorted over time, it must inevitably go wrong to the ruin even of itself. 

    It’s far easier to understand the problem with hate speech laws when you realize that “hate speech” isn’t really a descriptor of the subjective state of the speaker, it’s a statement about the subjective state of the listener (or regulator).

   When someone says “free speech is protected, hate speech is not protected”, what they really mean is “free speech is protected, speech I hate is not protected”. And thus the inherent dangers and contradictions in the laws begin to become clear.

   It’s easy to become confused about what is meant, when you have try to reconcile the intended meaning of “hate speech” with its practical and historical usage. It only begins to make sense when you realize that it is, and in fact must be, a statement about the listener’s feelings. Once you can see that, what happened in Venezuela and what is happening now in places like Canada, Scotland, and Australia begins to make sense.

    You can’t really make a law pronouncing knowledge of and control over the subjective states of others. It’s not just untenable and tyrannical, it’s impossible. We don’t have access to the subjective states of others. But you can make a law based on your own subjective states. And you can express your subjective states through a law and enforce them on other people through it. That is possible.

   The problem is, any time you attempt to make a law preventing hate (maybe even for admirable reasons), you end up creating a law that expresses it. That’s not really anyone’s fault, it’s just part of the (often unrecognized) structure of being. No matter how many times you try to turn lead into gold, you’re going to end up with a chain around your neck. 

Someone once asked me, can we evolve beyond lying. Here is my reply. 

No. The seeds are sown in the nature of our subjectivity. I don’t mean that truth is necessarily subjective, but that we can only experience it subjectively and communicate it subjectively. Therefore everything from interpretation to uniqueness of perspective to distortion to motivation to dysfunction are structurally inherent possibilities and even inevitabilties.

     There’s no way to evolve past that that doesn’t involve evolving out of the fundamental nature of our humanity. If we devolved back into something far less sophisticated and unaware of our own existence, into something like a fish, then lying would cease to exist. Or if we evolved out of the experience and knowledge of our individual existence by becoming more like an ant colony, perfectly united by some biological and psychological means where we exist collectively and individuality and subjectivity has been wiped out so that there is only one truth, one purpose, that would also eliminate lying.

   But both of these options thrown the baby out with the bath water. Both require that you, as a subject, be eradicated to achieve their end. If we’re going to exist as subjects, then we’re going to have to struggle with the truth, until the end of time.

   Why do businesses capitulate to popular social demands? That’s a very good question, but I don’t think the fellow who tries to address that question in this video quite understands business, and the motivations at work, probably because he’s an academic. As someone who has actually owned and run a business for over a decade and worked with many businesses, I can tell you that one of the main things businesses actually want is to be left alone to do their work. And that’s not that easy to do. 
   What a business does is already terribly complex and overwhelming, so that it takes many people to do what it does, usually. And the world is complex, full of pressures and regulations and demands and all kinds of threats and issues that you’re not always well-equipped as a business to deal with. And so a business is almost always asking itself, what’s the lowest cost way to mitigate those risks and discharge those demands?

    It’s hard to overstate how much people can damage a business, if they decide to go after it. One angry customer or employee can create a mountain of problems. And these days there are so many people who are willing to be angry with you and make it their business to go after you.

     So as a business, you want the cheapest way possible to protect yourself from that so you can get on with the actual work that keeps the lights on. And the present demands on businesses to not only do their work but also fulfill a ton of other needs and social demands is at an absolute historical maximum. You are constantly being challenged, constantly forced to defend your right to exist and to be doing what you’re doing. The need for legitimacy and for approval is enormous in our media and opinion-driven world.
   So I think people who accuse businesses of simply toadying up to the popular ideologies are doing businesses a disservice. Yes, they’re being cowardly and disingenuous, often. But they’re doing it to survive. They’re doing what’s demanded of them. Their real concern is to do their work, so what do you expect them to do, when their very ability to do it is under constant assault and dealing with this kind of issue is not what they’re designed for? Of course they’re looking for the easiest way to deal with it. And they’re probably going to get a lot of flack from those making the demands for not really having their heart in it and not doing enough, because of course it isn’t and of course they aren’t, you’re forcing them. So they’re going to be in trouble with everyone. 

    For a historian, he has a very modernist view of fairness. The modern idea is very similar to how a child views fairness, as whether I got the same as the other kids when mom was handing out the goodies. It’s distributionary fairness; it takes production and wealth for granted, and sees the actors as recipients or beneficiaries. It sees that as the most important, and perhaps only, field that matters for determining fairness. It assumes that everyone is of equal standing and therefore has an equal right to their share of the pot. 
    The older ideal of fairness was more like appropriateness, how fitting something was, karma, just desserts, consequences. It was very consequentialist. This kind of justice or fairness was a very different kind of principle to pursue and to violate, and it came with different assumptions. This paradigm of justice was more like a father handing out rewards for performance among competing children trying to earn rewards for doing assigned chores. The focus was on appropriate rewards for differing investments and accomplishments. You assumed that there would not be uniformity of status or rights to a certain share of distributed goods, but rather variability, with a right to your negotiatied share in the results of whatever you have undertaken to produce.

   Certainly, you could have a bad and unjust father who managed that task very badly. But this system isn’t injustice, and may in fact view uniform distribution and “fairness”, when inputs and performance vary, as a kind of injustice and unfairness. There is a genuine and genuinely different idea of fairness at work from the modern ideal. Fairness was conceived as justice, and justice was diverse and individual, because people and their actions were diverse and individual.

   Justice, in the more ancient sense, was consequence without subversion, action and reaction. Each action leading to its own and proper product. Loyalty to love, valor to honor, oathbreaking to vengeance. People were viewed as agents, not recipients. Their focus was on production, with distribution as an afterthought, or secondary, and on competition between producers, between means of production, and between strategies (personal and societal).

    You wanted what could succeed to succeed and be rewarded, and you wanted what could fail to fail and be rewarded in kind, so you could learn and guide your actions toward what was best and most productive. The proof was in the pudding, and justice was emergent as long as consequence was free to operate without interference. People were not children receiving status, but adventurers producing and securing it.
    Although our culture has gone all-in on the first understanding of fairness and largely forgotten the latter, modern fairness is not a new idea. It’s an innate universal that has always existed alongside the latter conception. Why? Because they must. Because neither is actually universal enough or effective enough to stand alone.

   Generally, these twin conceptions have been maintained primarily by the feminine and masculine sexes, who have broadly specialized in distributive and productive justice. And their practice has historically been restricted in scope, with distributive justice ruling around the hearth, at the intimate scale, and consequential justice ruling beyond the walls, in matters between less closely affiliated groups and in matters of distance.

     Although there is much value in bringing both conceptions into both spaces, proximate and distal, there are also unperceived dangers if we try to oust the existing hegemony. We don’t quite understand, often, how the justice of one domain will work when it is applied in another domain for which it is not optimized. And we are often unwilling to admit the correction of another perspective into our domain, seeking to universalize our own concept of justice in a way that isn’t warranted.
     It isn’t a bad thing that these concepts of justice differ. The only true error is in failing to recognize that there are two concepts, and that they exist, in fact must exist, in tension with one another, and in cooperation. They’re both right, and they’re both wrong. True justice isn’t found in one or the other approach, but in the proper relationship between them. And it’s when that relationship is broken, when you lack knowledge of the other perspective or have contempt for it, that you have gone truly wrong and caused injustice to reign.

How weird to define someone in terms of what they aren’t. My dad is a doctor and has been told by his hospital system they’re not supposed to say “women” any more. He also says that his nurses are enraged by it. One obvious problem with this is that it’s going to feed enormous resentment in a large section of the populace. As well as absolute derangement. This is no way to understand or conceptualize yourself.

    Woman and mother are not only foundational psychological concepts, motherhood is perhaps the most fundamental psychological concept we possess. It’s the first that you form, the first relationship, the first light that enters your world as a new being, even before awareness of yourself. And that’s not unique to us, that’s a relationship that is central to the entire kingdom of mammalian. It is the foundation of our very life and being. 

   There is an odd argument being made here that you have a right to remove by force any phenomenon in which all people cannot have an equal share and standing. And the problem with that argument, the reason that it has led to this current absurdity, is that that is f@#&%ing impossible! This argument could be used on literally everything.

    I’m excluded from and marginalized by Chinese and Indian cultures. Does that give me the right to cancel them and tell them they can’t have them and have no right to them, no franchise? They’re a far more massive majority than my little people. And that’s hardly the furthest extreme. There are a thousand cultures and subgroups, big and small, based around athletic ability, sex, artistic ability, personal interest, familial connection, locational history, and physical and psychological distinctiveness, all of which I do not have equal standing in and cannot fully participate in. It’s a big world! Humanity is big and diverse. And we are each limited and distinct, confined to one tiny point in time and space and being. 

    The only thing that could justify me canceling or restricting all of these multitudes is a deep seated belief that I should be the defining limit of the world and that everything can only exist at my license, for my pleasure. Well, if that’s the case, then someone needs to put me in my place and explain to me that I don’t have the right to hold the whole world hostage with my outrage at my own existential insignificance.

    The fact that we are small, individual, and unique–meaning limited, meaning there are some things we are and some we aren’t, some places we are and some we aren’t, some things we have and some we don’t–is an existential fact of our existence. You can’t correct for it without correcting life itself out of existence. And that’s what we’re coming to. We’re trying to correct for the basic facts of human existence. Which we used to do by learning to live with them, accept them, grow strong enough to deal with them, maybe even capable enough to correct them in ourselves if that’s within our power and desire. But we never possessed any innate right to anything but what we are, nor any right to hold others hostage for possessing what we don’t. 
    The only way to carry out this kind of vision is to remove the reality and activity of life itself. It is fundamentally opposed to the basic realities of human existence. And in that way it is opposed to the activity of life itself. It isn’t kind, it isn’t nice, it isn’t helpful. It is rejecting humanity and human nature. It is anti-human. In fact it is rejecting, quite soundly, the entire notion of human diversity. It is denying diversity the right to exist, attempting to hold all life hostage until it will stop being what it is, unless it can be given to me. It is seeking to erase any reminders that others and ourselves as distinct and finite beings exist, anything that might remind us that we are different, variable, limited, localized, inadequate, particular, mortals. Mortals who cannot be everything and so must rely on others to be them and grant them space to be what we cannot. 
    That’s why other movements of this kind have always ended up as completely draconian and murderous. The amount of things you would need to correct for is almost infinite, and they are intrinsically tied to the nature of human life itself. The amount of power you would have to grant someone to be able to make those kinds of corrections is also nearly infinite.

    If what you are trying to correct for is essential to the sweeping tide of human life itself, then in order to stop that tide in its tracks and “fix it” you will need power sufficient to arrest the very life of the species itself and hold it in place. That means siezing control of life itself, from the biggest to the smallest, at every level of being, exercising power and administrative control over every little operation. Engineering and correcting humanity, from the society-wide level down to the level of the smallest, silliest abberations of individuality, like a Halloween parade.

   This isn’t an absurd conclusion or exaggeration. It’s inevitable, if that’s your vision. If you set yourself an impossible and universally antipathetic goal, you will have to do impossible and unbelievable things. Religions set themselves similar goals, but typically have far more humility, wisdom, and experience contained in their premises than the grand political and ideological visions that seek to re-engineer the nature of humanity and existence itself today.

    Also, many religions set the locus of control and burden of correction at a more reasonable point, at the point of the individual and their choices, which are contingent and are within our sphere of reasonable influence and authority, rather than forcible reeingineering of the very essence of the species based on a fashionable theory. Most religions contain a fairly functional understand of what humanity is what what it’s nature and problems are, based in a tradition of immense practical experience and empirical refinement. We aren’t obligated to control or eradicate or restructure the whole nature of being to follow their path, only to direct our own path according to that which is most in harmony with the nature of being itself.

     The ideology of this new school of thought is a true nightmare because no such activity can be sufficient. It obligates you to an assault on the very nature and existence of the world, humanity, society, and other people. And that is a genocidal urge, however kind and prosocial it may pretend to be. 

People radically underestimate the attractiveness of unhappiness. Until you’ve seen a close friend or relative who has genuinely and willingly given themselves to it, it’s hard to really believe in it.

There’s a strangely compelling allure to the negative emotions. It is a way of getting along in the world. We think we dislike negative emotions, but we don’t. They’re very keen, very stimulating, and far easier to arouse than the positive emotions. There’s a certain kind of high they provide. And that kind of mental, emotional, and neurochemical overstimulation can be very addictive.

I lost an aunt to festering resentment. I lost my cousin and uncle to depression. And especially in my aunt’s case, who I had direct discussions with about her grievances, it was easy to see that her anger was more precious to her than whatever she might gain by giving it up. She treasured it, she coddled it; it gave meaning and structure to her life.

It’s not a pretty process to watch. And you can’t always save people from it, any more than you can save people from their other addictions.

People have always had this proclivity to live for their unhappiness. Technology has provided new platforms and new opportunities for expression, and that has fed our collective social pathology. Social media, in a way, has made us sick. But social media isn’t the drug. We create the drug. It’s alive in us, produced in our very nature, our love of our own unhappiness. The media helps us procure it, helps administer it. But we are our own dealers and addicts.

    Tradition is about learning to apply love and fear to their proper objects, and passing on that knowledge. And it’s not that easy a thing to figure out. Knowing which things are most loveable, what will genuinely benefit us on the deepest and widest timescale, and which are most fearful, which we should genuinely be afraid of on a deep and wide timescale, requires an immense and lengthy process of experimentation and selection. This process carries devastating consequences and has to be developed over the course of uncounted years of practical experience and experimentation, in the ultimate petri dish (the varied and unstable environment of the world), with the highest stakes (life or death).

    The idea that you personally could figure all that out, with your limited amount of perspective, intelligence, and time; with no need to rely on the wisdom of others, especially the wisdom of the past; is hubris on the level of delusions of godhood. And that’s what we believe today. We think that we’re God. We think we can dictate terms to the universe and judge all of time and creation from our lofty perch and direct the world to all its proper ends. We believe that wisdom was born with us and we no longer need the wisdom of anything that came before us. But in the vast scale of life our ideas and passions are so small and so young and so untested that we have more in common with the babe born yesterday than with any great and timeless sage. 

    Our own smallness shouldn’t cause us to give up or despair or stop innovating or thinking, but we need to maintain our perspective. As much as we posses many advantages over the people of the past when it comes to gaining individual understanding, we also possess some serious disadvantages. For one, our technology and our longevity place us at a much farther remove from the consequences of our own actions. We gain our knowledge and spend our efforts very cheaply.

    The wealth and security and knowledge purchased by long effort through the struggles of hundreds of generations places us in a position where we are insulated from the consequences of our choices, and our mistakes and blind spots. We have far greater inheritances and safety nets than they did, which means we must carry far less of our wealth and safety within our own persons.

   That’s what traditions did for us. They were largely internal, not external. They were a technology, an inheritance, we could carry with us to give us power and security whereever we went. And if you didn’t have them or lost them or tried to avoid them, the consequences accrued very quickly and directly. Because you didn’t have a lot else to sustain you, and nothing so well-developed and effective and reliable. Today, we no longer need to carry our traditions within us because we have so much outside us to provide their function of protecting us and providing for us. We have built, or inherited, so much structural power in our environment that we are no longer required to submit to or spend resources on an internal tradition. We can do as we please and expect fairly good results. 
    The truth is, we don’t have the slightest idea yet whether our supposed advancements and innovations are actually good or bad. They haven’t had time to accrue. They’re still too near, they take too long to work out their meaning before we’re already on to the next thing. And as innovation piles on innovation, theory on theory, how can you take the time or even make sense of their overlapping effects to see what they have truly done? You have a verification crisis, where the only real incentive is to keep producing novel creations. 

    And there is always glory and creativity to be claimed in taking apart the things of the past. We possess the accumulated structures of centuries, so we have plenty to keep busy with pulling them down, noting no immediate differences, before moving on to the next set. But bit by bit the effect is accumulating, working itself out. The new terrain slowly, slowly emerges. We can tear things down in a year, but because of the sheer quantity of all that we have inherited and the sheer length of human life, and how long it takes for the generations to turn over, it requires decades for the meaning of our actions to be realized.

    The impact of your choices on the world isn’t really felt until you’ve left it, or at least until two generations on, when your grandchildren are standing in the same point you were when you decided how to live your adult life. That’s when you start to see. How will you be seen by your grandchildren, as they begin to make lives and families of their own. How will they see themselves? That is when you begin to see. True knowledge is always multi-generational.
    I’ve sometimes said that there is no such thing as a human life. There is only one life, and we all share in it; each take it up for our portion of time, and hand it on to those who must come after. There is no division between us and the people of the past. We are them. Their life never ceased. There was never a clean break, never a moment when the life that was in them ended and the life that is us began. A living part of them became the life that is us. It is still alive. And we hand it on. It becomes others. Life is a tradition. There is no us standing alone and seperate, by our own devices. There is only the small part we play in the great story, how well we play it, what we take from the past, and how well we hand it on.

   A tradition that has not been handed on and lived, or that cannot be handed in, that is only for you, is no tradition. It is not a viable life. It is not viable knowledge. It has not been lived. Innovation and reinterpretation is always needed to keep tradition alive and comprehensible for the current moment and the people who must live in it. But the people and the knowledge of the moment must live to become part of the tradition.

    If you cannot find your place within it, then you aren’t anywhere yet. You are merely in the first stage of an explosion of novelty and experimentation that will play out across generations and be littered with the corpses of failed attempts, to be dissected in the fossil record of time when some distant others look back. We love for our moment, in the eternal present, for the unique future we creatively devise. But we live to become part of the past, as the present embodiment of the past reaching into the future, with the foundation and essence of all that came before us, and which we shall in time ourselves become a part of. One more layer of growth on a tree whose roots reach back beyond our imagining. And whose branches must reach far beyond where we now stand. 

    That is the power of tradition. It is the life we are handed, the life we live, and the life we hand on. We cannot despise it without despising what we were, what we are, and what we will be.