culture

Culture Versus Conscience

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culturePaul Rosenberg – Culture has always been the antagonist of conscience.

Once we see ourselves as part of a larger entity – once we identify with it – we feel a necessity to conform to it. If we don’t, we begin to lose the existential crutch that larger entities offer us. And, partly as a result of living with that collective identification, most of us are emotionally unprepared to stand alone before the world.

You’ll notice, however, that more or less all our big steps forward have come from people who stepped out alone. Here’s just a brief listing of such people: Continue reading →

Two Culture Leaders Changing Today’s World

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David Prentice – History has shown, in countless examples, the reality and value of leadership – George Washington, Ulysses Grant, Eisenhower, and Churchill, to name a few.

Studying the movement of history, it’s clear that the character, resolve, and intelligence of these leaders played a big part in historical change.  Great leaders often changed the course of their times.

There is another kind of leader who is less obvious.  Dub them culture leaders – a description of those who wrote and spoke new historical trends into existence.  They are as important as the generals who won victories.  Think of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams for the Revolutionary War.  Think of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln as the most famous who wrote and spoke prior to the Civil War.

One of Breitbart’s most famous and compelling lines was “Politics is downstream from culture.”  He saw that one pretty clearly.  He is one of the reasons the center-right is now prevailing in this current cold civil war.  Breitbart began a revolutionary transformation with the center-right media.

Let’s speak of two current, and great, leaders. Continue reading →

IQ: A Skeptic’s View

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Fred Reed – Intelligence is worth talking about because both the reality of intelligence and perceptions regarding intelligence set limits on the possible and influence policy. For example, if the population of India on average really is below borderline retardation, the country can never amount to anything. If Latino immigrants really are as stupid as white nationalists hope, then they will always inhabit an underclass and, through intermarriage, enstupidate the American population. IQists–those who believe that IQ  is a reliable measure of intelligence–insist that intelligence is largely genetic, which it obviously is, and that IQ tests reliably measure it. The latter is doubtful.

A bit of history: For years I was on Steve Sailer’s Human-Biodiversity List, now defunct. It focused on IQ and on natural selection with the fervor of snake-handlers in the backwoods of North Carolina. Contradictions in their views were stark in regard to intelligence, which was assumed identical to IQ.  In communities of like-thinking enthusiasts, contradictions go unnoticed.

For example, American blacks, the Irish, and Mexicans had IQs accepted by the list as being 85, 86, and 87 respectively—almost identical. It seemed odd to me that identical IQs had produced (a) the on-going academic disaster of American blacks (b) an upper Third World country running the usual infrastructure of telecommunications, medicine, airlines, and so on, and (c) a First World European country. This, though  IQist doctrine argued vociferously that IQ correlates closely with achievement. Well, it didn’t.

I was struck by the perfect acceptance of these numbers even though they made no sense. IQists simply do not question IQ. I pointed out the obvious conclusion, that if Mexicans could run the infrastructure of modern nations, decent if not spectacular universities, and so on, then so, on the basis of IQ, could blacks—none of which they in fact do, or have done.

When I pointed this out, there came the IQist shuck-and-jive: Well, black IQ you see was actually a bit lower, 83 or maybe even 81, and maybe the Mexicans were as much as 89 or even 90, etc. That is, IQ varies with the argument being made. (For the record, Mexicans have been promoted from 87 to 90, IQ being remarkably fluid.)

Photo: Cartagena, Colombia.  

Do you really believe that this city was designed and built by people with a mean IQ of 84? That is six points below Mexicans, and below American blacks? As a matter of  logic, it follows that if people of IQ 84 can design, build, and operate a city with all the credentials of modernity, so can a population of IQ 85. It’s either both can, or neither can, or something is wrong with the purported IQs. For what it’s worth, my wife and I recently spent a month traveling widely in the country. No sign of stupidity.

Continue reading →

The One Thing We Completely Understand

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machinePhilip Shepherd – One of the most difficult tasks we face is to uncover the hidden assumptions that shape our living and thinking.  The reason it’s difficult is found in the history of such assumptions – we have often absorbed them into our psyches while we were too young to question them.  The difficulty of uncovering them, though, is offset by its importance: as long as those assumptions lie buried and unseen, they will continue to drive us and shape our actions without ever being held to account.

But how do we shed light on the dark roots of what we know and how we know it?  We could start by recognizing that we come to new knowledge by a process of comparison.  When we seek to understand something, we don’t start from scratch – we begin by comparing it to other things we already know.  And we naturally tend to find such comparisons by turning to the phenomena we understand most thoroughly, rather than to phenomena that leave us puzzled.

Consider this, then: what if there were only one thing in all the world that we understood completely?  If we harbored any such absolute understanding, we would naturally lean on it first and foremost, tending to make it the basis for understanding everything else.  As it happens, there is just one thing in the world we completely understand, and it is the machine.  We understand it because we are its creators.  We imagine it, design it and build it.  We maintain it, fix it when it breaks, and modify it to improve its performance.  Our relationship to the machine is god-like.

Of course the reason we completely understand the machine is because, as its creators, we ourselves establish the parameters for that understanding – and they are very narrow indeed.  Simply put, a machine is made to do our bidding.   So we are concerned almost exclusively with its specific, limited function, and the way we can achieve that by designing a controlled sequence of cause and effect.  Machines have neither the free will, nor the life, to step out of that established sequence of cause and effect.  Furthermore, and the impact of this is hard to overestimate, our understanding of machines stands independent of feeling: you can understand the workings of a machine without feeling a thing.

When you examine how our culture sees the world, you begin to see how deeply our seeing relies on the machine model of understanding, asking it to provide the foundation for our understanding of all else. The effect, naturally, tends to mechanize everything, including life – and it is so widespread that it is difficult to summarize.  We can gain a glimpse of it, though, by outlining five different but related conclusions the machine model encourages us to make.

Our understanding of machines invites us to believe that:

  • The world is knowable.  If we can completely understand the machine, we can completely understand anything.  You just have to break something down into all its bits and pieces and see how they interact.  Everything that happens can be traced back to cause and effect.  Such understanding is reliable because it is objective. Continue reading →