Been a while since I read it, but the modern progressive reminds me of Hazel Motes in WiseBlood with his "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ,". You see this with Harry Potter, who love all the trappings of historical Britain while simultaneously wanting to tear it all down. It's like arguing a person will be more complete once we rip his pesky heart out of his body.
Great post and great to have you back Dave, hope all well. Summarises both Harry Potter and where we are in discourse with the left right now extremely well
With the exception of midwit libs and suburbanites, the public is losing faith in authority and institutions. So when your Professor resorts to arguments from authority he is remodeling a house on a foundation already destroyed.
Thank you for the post. My wife is a Harry Potter fan and it's sometikes important to serve these arguments in a way that's palatable to normie millenials.
A good read. I think the term post progressive is apt, because it includes more camps than a simple right or left. I think that too is what drew me to the title of the piece, The subtext of which im assuming is the ones who walk from Omelas. There is no need to espouse a conservative or liberal view point in order to express a disgust with where institutions, politics, neo liberalism, and technocracy have led us. We will all haze upon the wretched thing in this nations basement and come to our own conclusions. I think as many malfoys as there are, there are just a many grangers and potters that cannot stomach what hogwarts has allowed to occur within its confines. That is to say, I dont claim to share your perspective or beliefs but I do believe I share your conclusions, and I think thats more important.
"the imperative of love. Here, I don’t just mean love for each other and our families, but love for higher things, chief among them Truth, the virtue of sincere curiosity"
Is this conclusion not an endorsement of the Rowling perspective? Is it substantially different than "love conquers all?" HP is a woo-woo Boomer-ish take on Christianity with evil conceived of as Promethean ambition (immortality & absolute dominion). Rowling for some inexplicable reason (presumably just the default of her worldview) associates this evil with late 20th century American liberal ideas about racism. I think this is more superficial to the books moral perspective, which is why the Malfoy redemption arc is quite easy to identify and why he and Slytherin house are acceptable in the end.
I've interacted with McManus and was less than impressed. It is evident to me that he's not particularly interested in truth at least not publicly. To me, he argued that America's economic growth was more owed to public schooling promoting literacy than market dynamics (literacy was seeded and spread in the Anglosphere by the Protestant Reformation), and also was attempting to make arguments about political economy predicated on the labor theory of value.
I feel like Twilight deserves mention as well. Also, didn't it have a little bit of a red state fan base? I definitely remember that being a thing. It'd be neat to know how that affected a bunch of North Dakota Bellas. Also, I think Hunger Games has a lot in common with right wing ideas of rebellion, specifically how easy it's supposed to be to show those effete snobs in the capital. I realize neither had anything like the staying power of Harry Potter, but I'd love to hear what you have to say on them.
The YA sewer is your best beat, Dave. I love all your commentary, but I save and rewatch/reread all your stuff on 2000's culture rot.
To make a crass summary of your third part: those who are of Malfoys kin should commit to crossing the Red Sea, establish the laws of Leviticus to create a new proper culture, and prepare for a generational Desert Wandering until the people are ready to embrace to this new Order.
I’m a bit confused by the frequent references to Rowling’s take on the Slytherins being disjointed, bizarre, a contradiction etc.
As you say: “The great perceived evil of our time is also a pillar of our historical legacy, academic institutions, and traditional social order.”
The Slytherins do not just contain the richest, most aristocratic blue bloods but also the most ambitious students are sorted into this house. Of course, despite the general societal distaste for dark magic, the Slytherins continue to endure and thrive.
Sometimes the excesses of Slytherins produce a Voldemort and then there is a counter-reckoning where the scrappy ambitious Slytherins are blown up by Aurors or confined to Azkaban. But the Malfoys and their ilk survive. Their riches and connections protected them from the aftermath of both wars. That’s not incoherence of Rowling’s part; that’s an accurate view of society.
I think this analysis gives the "New Right" too much leeway and we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. It is difficult to condemn liberals for failing to have solutions to modern problems and then end with a call for the "New Right" to develop solutions. If the New Right doesn't have solutions, what right do we have to criticize?
So let's use the example of African-American racial issues. I think it's fair to critique post-Obama liberals for not really having a solution. Obama wasn't everything MLK promised but it's very hard to square that achievement with widespread BLM riots more than a decade later in the liberal worldview. Fair enough. What's the New Right's solution?
Because I get the feeling there will be some general handwaving about a return to religion, return to the family, and I agree with the theory, but is any of it practical or actionable? There's no US Department of the Family, there's not really specific laws besides handwaving at divorce laws which would a....significant political challenge. There's definitely room for discussion of media and culture but...is anything actionable short of a radical change in the ownership structure of all media or a widespread religious revival? And, even given the most radical powers, bringing the entire US into the Catholic church, do you honestly feel this church, this pope, with this history, is in a position to credibly solve the social and spiritual ills of 300+ million people?
Because that's not the vibe I get. You're not ending on a note of having the right answers, your ending on a note of exploration, of experimentation, of preserving what's good of the past and mixing it with new innovations. If you're struggling to find answers, and I think we are, that's fine, but it's unfair to critique liberals for not having answers you or we ourselves don't have.
But the thing I'm most concerned about is you having a debate with McManus both laying out your positions and issues and then not really addressing the other's position. For example, I think it would be fair to say "Here are the three big concerns of the New Right, do liberals have any credible solution?" And I don't think they do and I think it's very worth holding that ground and pointing out that they have no solutions to what you value. But at some point, McManus gets to say "Here are the three big concerns of the liberals and/or left, does the New Right have any credible solution?" And if you and/or the New Right don't, your criticism falls kinda flat.
Sorry for the delay, and maybe I was unclear in my post, but this doesn't really answer the concern.
The Right and Dave are very concerned about the decline of family formation. Liberals and Leftists don't really have a solution to this. This is a fair criticism.
Liberals and Leftists are very concerned about equality of outcomes for racial groups. I don't see where the Right and Dave have solutions for this.
We've all got different values, different problems, and different proposed solutions. If you complain that the other side's proposed solutions don't address your problems, you need to be able to argue that your side's solutions at least somewhat address their problems. You can't argue that their values are basically wrong and they should change them because you wouldn't accept that from them.
And if it's just down to trying to change the other side's values, pure culture war, why the pretense of a liberal debate or discussion?
Equality of outcomes is not a desirable End state. That’s high entropy.
Not all values are equal either. I don’t particularly care if other people change their values. That’s on them. But again, it’s pretty clear what it takes to lead a good life.
Well I don't know about Dave, but the solution of any "Right" that deserves the name is simple: equality of any kind between different racial groups is impossible and undesirable because the different races are unequal, have always been unequal and (barring some massive miracle of eugenics) will always be unequal. Therefore the only solution is separation. Segregation if you like, which people of all races already practice (White people, including liberals, covertly and non-Whites overtly and unabashedly) anyway, since that's just human nature.
Happily, since the Balkanization of America and every Western former nation-state is inevitable, the question of persuading anyone to change their values (impossible in any event since values are determined by personality type, which like race, ethnicity, height, IQ, everything important is inherited and innate) is irrelevant. We're long past the talking phase, and even the shouting phase and well into the punching phase. The shooting phase is fast approaching or, depending on what kind of pattern significance you ascribe to the latest round of mass shootings/stochastic violence, has already begun. The only question is a) how soon it happens and b) how bloody it will be. The sooner it happens, the more overwhelming the advantage the erstwhile White majority will have, and hence the less bloody it will be. The later it happens, the more even the odds, and therefore the more bloody. Hence why it's in everyone's interests, non-Whites included, that it happen sooner rather than later.
I see what you did by way of narrative weaving, but I disagree with marrying the mere fact of existence as a dissident to the limits of the Slytherin group, because they are dissidents. I'm not well versed in the Potter universe nor do I particularly care to be (I saw the movies back in the day, thought they were fun, never read the books; compared to say LOTR, which I've read a few times).
I like your conclusion. I agree on everything you wrote about love and numinous as guides, about God, although I'd add, while it's understandable Christianity plays such a large role in reminiscing for a past golden age (which never existed beyond the 1950s, which was more of a hocus pocus illusion created artificially post WW2 and ironically helped birth feminism in the 60s: if it tickles your fancy there's interesting research done on how music changed in 1956 with Elvis, that it might not be as spontaneous as we're led to believe), personally I can't help shake the feeling institutional Christianity is part of the problem and from the outside looking in, everytime I come across conservatives quoting bible verses as literal truths (as opposed to allegorical wisdom), I can't help but feel there's some stunted development and hypocrisy: yes progressivism is a religion (like most/all ideologies), but all religions are tedious and fundamentally corrupt in terms of their inevitable hierarchical social control they enable and become intertwined with (power corrupts, who would have guessed?).
My point is, even Yarvin has his contradictions and the monarchic archetype he proposes is short on details on how it wouldn't succumb to the tyranny of centuries past, just as aristocracies have done likewise. And democracy, leading to plutocracy and kleptocracy is not worse, unless you're a dissident and Truth believer holding virtue as a ideal. Which is why I also agree on the point about bloodlines. Even here on substack I'm continually amazed by the lack of self awareness of a number of amateur conservatives on their privileges (racism or sexism was worse before, but assuming they don't or can't exist is just as myopic as progressives waxing lyrical about DEI) and inability to extend empathy beyond their narrow ingroup association.
Here in Italy (and Europe more broadly) things are more complex: postmodern progressive American originated interpretations of reality are superimposed on the real world with wild revisionist outtakes on how life ought to be without any evaluation of their outcomes elsewhere. For instance, I'm a multicultural ex global nomad and I find myself warning leftist family and friends about the dangers of reducing citizenship requirements from 10 to 5 years. The public discourse here, save a few niches, is very NPC molded and manipulated.
So anyway. I disagree on the need to allow the Slytherin faction to exist. Maybe that's the real story of why second wave feminism in the 60s emerged how it did and can trace its origins both to the Marxist intellectual dialectic and (because conservatives are prone to ignore inconvenient truths) to the use of propagandistic manipulation techniques in advertising post WW1 (cigarettes as freedom sticks; Bernays "propaganda").
Dangerous ideas (ex. Eugenics, racial supremacy, satanism, etc) shouldn't be suppressed as much as limited in their reach by making them accessible only within a laboratory like setting.
I think another underappreciated externality greatly influencing progressives today is the free ride through disbursement of entitlements through the state purse, which ever since globally we abandoned the gold standard (USA, 1971; Europe mid 20s), has created this lopsided illusion of materialistic wealth while we've gradually been impoverished (the first official billionaire emerged at the start of the 20th century, whereas today...). Incidentally this is what enabled social welfare to go exponential in the USA in the 60s (and Europe). All this, our relationship with money and the false dichotomy between socialist communists and traditional or libertarian conservatives in ideological underpinnings of how they must think or else they're "traitors" to their respective houses, is tied in with the need to raise "Truth" as the lighthouse guide to analysis and the need to seriously reevaluate our relationship with materialistic commodities (as Marxism would say): in the modern world we are slaves of the material reality, so it's not surprising the numinous has a hard time being a part of our lives. Conservatives and nearly all boomers irrespectively don't want to see the value of their homes exposed for the fraud it is.
On your initial point, yes progressives attack the messenger and not the message to virtue signal as opposed to intellectual debate, but this is to be expected in any tyranny. And it's more insidious than just a tyranny of academic Ivory towers and the various PMC underlings reinforcing the narrative underpinnings projected onto reality (and you can hardly fault them individually for being afraid to stray off the reservation; it takes courage to be truth seeking and let outcomes emerge). But CY is not an innovator, unfortunately. I've read his stuff for years now, and just like BAP, his criticisms are often on point and even if he gets stuff wrong it's stimulating to read or listen to him.
Sorry for rambling but I enjoyed your essay.
I think we in the West are victims of an overemphasis on good and evil. And I think the church is part of the problem for its intellectual poverty. And maybe because of it we got the reformation and the explosion of innovation from the 13th c. onwards not seen elsewhere.
But a greater emphasis on right and wrong, on duty, on the meaning of life, on the study of the mind (like with Hinduism and Buddhism) would have created a wider foundation from which to draw from. We can hardly blame the classical philosophers for ignoring the wealth of knowledge emerging from Asia (everything from the Vedas, to mindfulness, Confucius, etc). Today we have no excuse, except if we create one by holding dearly to Christianity as fanatics of a religion without being honest about how much damage it wrought in ages past. All Abrahamic religions have serious issues: Judaism and Islam too. They all offer tremendous wisdom.
But if tomorrow we find ourselves manipulated into a global war with eschatological underpinnings because of our steadfastness in being Christians, that'd be a shame too. And Harry Potter is much too simplistic to explain the layers of the onion of reality.
"First, for the respected professional and academic set (needing to justify their own institutional power) modern progressivism became justified via technocratic performance and excellence towards serving people's needs while steering clear of troublesome teleological and essentialist concepts. The task was proper management and “best practices”, nothing to do with moral or spiritual identities relying on metaphysics that the 19th-century philosophers called into question.
Second, for the younger and more ideological set, in search of “meaning”, the left provided a revolutionary and identitarian formulation for itself. Progressivism was about fighting the evil of the old colonial order, tearing down systems of oppression, and uplifting the identity groups of marginalized peoples. And equality (or “equity”) would be achieved imminently through incremental reforms pursuing the endpoint of the broad Civil Rights movements. Leftism was core to establishing and vindicating one’s internal spiritual identity and giving one’s life narrative purpose. And both your identity and purpose WERE VALID."
Been a while since I read it, but the modern progressive reminds me of Hazel Motes in WiseBlood with his "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ,". You see this with Harry Potter, who love all the trappings of historical Britain while simultaneously wanting to tear it all down. It's like arguing a person will be more complete once we rip his pesky heart out of his body.
Great post and great to have you back Dave, hope all well. Summarises both Harry Potter and where we are in discourse with the left right now extremely well
With the exception of midwit libs and suburbanites, the public is losing faith in authority and institutions. So when your Professor resorts to arguments from authority he is remodeling a house on a foundation already destroyed.
Thank you for the post. My wife is a Harry Potter fan and it's sometikes important to serve these arguments in a way that's palatable to normie millenials.
A good read. I think the term post progressive is apt, because it includes more camps than a simple right or left. I think that too is what drew me to the title of the piece, The subtext of which im assuming is the ones who walk from Omelas. There is no need to espouse a conservative or liberal view point in order to express a disgust with where institutions, politics, neo liberalism, and technocracy have led us. We will all haze upon the wretched thing in this nations basement and come to our own conclusions. I think as many malfoys as there are, there are just a many grangers and potters that cannot stomach what hogwarts has allowed to occur within its confines. That is to say, I dont claim to share your perspective or beliefs but I do believe I share your conclusions, and I think thats more important.
"the imperative of love. Here, I don’t just mean love for each other and our families, but love for higher things, chief among them Truth, the virtue of sincere curiosity"
Is this conclusion not an endorsement of the Rowling perspective? Is it substantially different than "love conquers all?" HP is a woo-woo Boomer-ish take on Christianity with evil conceived of as Promethean ambition (immortality & absolute dominion). Rowling for some inexplicable reason (presumably just the default of her worldview) associates this evil with late 20th century American liberal ideas about racism. I think this is more superficial to the books moral perspective, which is why the Malfoy redemption arc is quite easy to identify and why he and Slytherin house are acceptable in the end.
I've interacted with McManus and was less than impressed. It is evident to me that he's not particularly interested in truth at least not publicly. To me, he argued that America's economic growth was more owed to public schooling promoting literacy than market dynamics (literacy was seeded and spread in the Anglosphere by the Protestant Reformation), and also was attempting to make arguments about political economy predicated on the labor theory of value.
I feel like Twilight deserves mention as well. Also, didn't it have a little bit of a red state fan base? I definitely remember that being a thing. It'd be neat to know how that affected a bunch of North Dakota Bellas. Also, I think Hunger Games has a lot in common with right wing ideas of rebellion, specifically how easy it's supposed to be to show those effete snobs in the capital. I realize neither had anything like the staying power of Harry Potter, but I'd love to hear what you have to say on them.
The YA sewer is your best beat, Dave. I love all your commentary, but I save and rewatch/reread all your stuff on 2000's culture rot.
To make a crass summary of your third part: those who are of Malfoys kin should commit to crossing the Red Sea, establish the laws of Leviticus to create a new proper culture, and prepare for a generational Desert Wandering until the people are ready to embrace to this new Order.
Thank-you! This provides a clear analysis of our time and points to a realistic path forward. Hopeful. I'll be sharing this.
I’m a bit confused by the frequent references to Rowling’s take on the Slytherins being disjointed, bizarre, a contradiction etc.
As you say: “The great perceived evil of our time is also a pillar of our historical legacy, academic institutions, and traditional social order.”
The Slytherins do not just contain the richest, most aristocratic blue bloods but also the most ambitious students are sorted into this house. Of course, despite the general societal distaste for dark magic, the Slytherins continue to endure and thrive.
Sometimes the excesses of Slytherins produce a Voldemort and then there is a counter-reckoning where the scrappy ambitious Slytherins are blown up by Aurors or confined to Azkaban. But the Malfoys and their ilk survive. Their riches and connections protected them from the aftermath of both wars. That’s not incoherence of Rowling’s part; that’s an accurate view of society.
This was the most intellectually-stimulating thing I've read in a fair while. Thank you.
I think this analysis gives the "New Right" too much leeway and we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. It is difficult to condemn liberals for failing to have solutions to modern problems and then end with a call for the "New Right" to develop solutions. If the New Right doesn't have solutions, what right do we have to criticize?
So let's use the example of African-American racial issues. I think it's fair to critique post-Obama liberals for not really having a solution. Obama wasn't everything MLK promised but it's very hard to square that achievement with widespread BLM riots more than a decade later in the liberal worldview. Fair enough. What's the New Right's solution?
Because I get the feeling there will be some general handwaving about a return to religion, return to the family, and I agree with the theory, but is any of it practical or actionable? There's no US Department of the Family, there's not really specific laws besides handwaving at divorce laws which would a....significant political challenge. There's definitely room for discussion of media and culture but...is anything actionable short of a radical change in the ownership structure of all media or a widespread religious revival? And, even given the most radical powers, bringing the entire US into the Catholic church, do you honestly feel this church, this pope, with this history, is in a position to credibly solve the social and spiritual ills of 300+ million people?
Because that's not the vibe I get. You're not ending on a note of having the right answers, your ending on a note of exploration, of experimentation, of preserving what's good of the past and mixing it with new innovations. If you're struggling to find answers, and I think we are, that's fine, but it's unfair to critique liberals for not having answers you or we ourselves don't have.
But the thing I'm most concerned about is you having a debate with McManus both laying out your positions and issues and then not really addressing the other's position. For example, I think it would be fair to say "Here are the three big concerns of the New Right, do liberals have any credible solution?" And I don't think they do and I think it's very worth holding that ground and pointing out that they have no solutions to what you value. But at some point, McManus gets to say "Here are the three big concerns of the liberals and/or left, does the New Right have any credible solution?" And if you and/or the New Right don't, your criticism falls kinda flat.
I think he has made the attempts to do just that
https://youtu.be/UkEwHQTv9IY
I'll add that the solutions are very clear and straightforward...
Sorry for the delay, and maybe I was unclear in my post, but this doesn't really answer the concern.
The Right and Dave are very concerned about the decline of family formation. Liberals and Leftists don't really have a solution to this. This is a fair criticism.
Liberals and Leftists are very concerned about equality of outcomes for racial groups. I don't see where the Right and Dave have solutions for this.
We've all got different values, different problems, and different proposed solutions. If you complain that the other side's proposed solutions don't address your problems, you need to be able to argue that your side's solutions at least somewhat address their problems. You can't argue that their values are basically wrong and they should change them because you wouldn't accept that from them.
And if it's just down to trying to change the other side's values, pure culture war, why the pretense of a liberal debate or discussion?
Equality of outcomes is not a desirable End state. That’s high entropy.
Not all values are equal either. I don’t particularly care if other people change their values. That’s on them. But again, it’s pretty clear what it takes to lead a good life.
Well I don't know about Dave, but the solution of any "Right" that deserves the name is simple: equality of any kind between different racial groups is impossible and undesirable because the different races are unequal, have always been unequal and (barring some massive miracle of eugenics) will always be unequal. Therefore the only solution is separation. Segregation if you like, which people of all races already practice (White people, including liberals, covertly and non-Whites overtly and unabashedly) anyway, since that's just human nature.
Happily, since the Balkanization of America and every Western former nation-state is inevitable, the question of persuading anyone to change their values (impossible in any event since values are determined by personality type, which like race, ethnicity, height, IQ, everything important is inherited and innate) is irrelevant. We're long past the talking phase, and even the shouting phase and well into the punching phase. The shooting phase is fast approaching or, depending on what kind of pattern significance you ascribe to the latest round of mass shootings/stochastic violence, has already begun. The only question is a) how soon it happens and b) how bloody it will be. The sooner it happens, the more overwhelming the advantage the erstwhile White majority will have, and hence the less bloody it will be. The later it happens, the more even the odds, and therefore the more bloody. Hence why it's in everyone's interests, non-Whites included, that it happen sooner rather than later.
Lol, are you still this butthurt about Kaschutta and the Jew York Times? LMAO EVEN!
I see what you did by way of narrative weaving, but I disagree with marrying the mere fact of existence as a dissident to the limits of the Slytherin group, because they are dissidents. I'm not well versed in the Potter universe nor do I particularly care to be (I saw the movies back in the day, thought they were fun, never read the books; compared to say LOTR, which I've read a few times).
I like your conclusion. I agree on everything you wrote about love and numinous as guides, about God, although I'd add, while it's understandable Christianity plays such a large role in reminiscing for a past golden age (which never existed beyond the 1950s, which was more of a hocus pocus illusion created artificially post WW2 and ironically helped birth feminism in the 60s: if it tickles your fancy there's interesting research done on how music changed in 1956 with Elvis, that it might not be as spontaneous as we're led to believe), personally I can't help shake the feeling institutional Christianity is part of the problem and from the outside looking in, everytime I come across conservatives quoting bible verses as literal truths (as opposed to allegorical wisdom), I can't help but feel there's some stunted development and hypocrisy: yes progressivism is a religion (like most/all ideologies), but all religions are tedious and fundamentally corrupt in terms of their inevitable hierarchical social control they enable and become intertwined with (power corrupts, who would have guessed?).
My point is, even Yarvin has his contradictions and the monarchic archetype he proposes is short on details on how it wouldn't succumb to the tyranny of centuries past, just as aristocracies have done likewise. And democracy, leading to plutocracy and kleptocracy is not worse, unless you're a dissident and Truth believer holding virtue as a ideal. Which is why I also agree on the point about bloodlines. Even here on substack I'm continually amazed by the lack of self awareness of a number of amateur conservatives on their privileges (racism or sexism was worse before, but assuming they don't or can't exist is just as myopic as progressives waxing lyrical about DEI) and inability to extend empathy beyond their narrow ingroup association.
Here in Italy (and Europe more broadly) things are more complex: postmodern progressive American originated interpretations of reality are superimposed on the real world with wild revisionist outtakes on how life ought to be without any evaluation of their outcomes elsewhere. For instance, I'm a multicultural ex global nomad and I find myself warning leftist family and friends about the dangers of reducing citizenship requirements from 10 to 5 years. The public discourse here, save a few niches, is very NPC molded and manipulated.
So anyway. I disagree on the need to allow the Slytherin faction to exist. Maybe that's the real story of why second wave feminism in the 60s emerged how it did and can trace its origins both to the Marxist intellectual dialectic and (because conservatives are prone to ignore inconvenient truths) to the use of propagandistic manipulation techniques in advertising post WW1 (cigarettes as freedom sticks; Bernays "propaganda").
Dangerous ideas (ex. Eugenics, racial supremacy, satanism, etc) shouldn't be suppressed as much as limited in their reach by making them accessible only within a laboratory like setting.
I think another underappreciated externality greatly influencing progressives today is the free ride through disbursement of entitlements through the state purse, which ever since globally we abandoned the gold standard (USA, 1971; Europe mid 20s), has created this lopsided illusion of materialistic wealth while we've gradually been impoverished (the first official billionaire emerged at the start of the 20th century, whereas today...). Incidentally this is what enabled social welfare to go exponential in the USA in the 60s (and Europe). All this, our relationship with money and the false dichotomy between socialist communists and traditional or libertarian conservatives in ideological underpinnings of how they must think or else they're "traitors" to their respective houses, is tied in with the need to raise "Truth" as the lighthouse guide to analysis and the need to seriously reevaluate our relationship with materialistic commodities (as Marxism would say): in the modern world we are slaves of the material reality, so it's not surprising the numinous has a hard time being a part of our lives. Conservatives and nearly all boomers irrespectively don't want to see the value of their homes exposed for the fraud it is.
On your initial point, yes progressives attack the messenger and not the message to virtue signal as opposed to intellectual debate, but this is to be expected in any tyranny. And it's more insidious than just a tyranny of academic Ivory towers and the various PMC underlings reinforcing the narrative underpinnings projected onto reality (and you can hardly fault them individually for being afraid to stray off the reservation; it takes courage to be truth seeking and let outcomes emerge). But CY is not an innovator, unfortunately. I've read his stuff for years now, and just like BAP, his criticisms are often on point and even if he gets stuff wrong it's stimulating to read or listen to him.
Sorry for rambling but I enjoyed your essay.
I think we in the West are victims of an overemphasis on good and evil. And I think the church is part of the problem for its intellectual poverty. And maybe because of it we got the reformation and the explosion of innovation from the 13th c. onwards not seen elsewhere.
But a greater emphasis on right and wrong, on duty, on the meaning of life, on the study of the mind (like with Hinduism and Buddhism) would have created a wider foundation from which to draw from. We can hardly blame the classical philosophers for ignoring the wealth of knowledge emerging from Asia (everything from the Vedas, to mindfulness, Confucius, etc). Today we have no excuse, except if we create one by holding dearly to Christianity as fanatics of a religion without being honest about how much damage it wrought in ages past. All Abrahamic religions have serious issues: Judaism and Islam too. They all offer tremendous wisdom.
But if tomorrow we find ourselves manipulated into a global war with eschatological underpinnings because of our steadfastness in being Christians, that'd be a shame too. And Harry Potter is much too simplistic to explain the layers of the onion of reality.
He's been pretty clear on "freedom of association" and the likely failures of egalitarianism...
Dave Greene and the entire Old Glory Club are BAPTards and Claremont Institute BUTTFAGGOTS Who Take Money From Peter Thiel.
Isnt this his explanation of the transition?
"First, for the respected professional and academic set (needing to justify their own institutional power) modern progressivism became justified via technocratic performance and excellence towards serving people's needs while steering clear of troublesome teleological and essentialist concepts. The task was proper management and “best practices”, nothing to do with moral or spiritual identities relying on metaphysics that the 19th-century philosophers called into question.
Second, for the younger and more ideological set, in search of “meaning”, the left provided a revolutionary and identitarian formulation for itself. Progressivism was about fighting the evil of the old colonial order, tearing down systems of oppression, and uplifting the identity groups of marginalized peoples. And equality (or “equity”) would be achieved imminently through incremental reforms pursuing the endpoint of the broad Civil Rights movements. Leftism was core to establishing and vindicating one’s internal spiritual identity and giving one’s life narrative purpose. And both your identity and purpose WERE VALID."