Social Reform (1)

The civil rights movement of the 1960s in America didn't rally start then but more closely to 1815 with the Treaty of Ghent when the U.S. Senate and President James Madison ratified it in February. The civil rights movement began with the closure of the War of 1812. It was then that Americans were able to begin looking at the nation introspectively, and some of them saw social ills they felt required their energies to cure. No more war of Manifest Destiny but rather the creation of Heaven on Earth in our new Promised Land. America turned inward.

While European powers pursued a policy of further imperialism throughout the world, America implemented the Monroe of 1823, not always seen rightly as a civil rights declaration. America was on a politically moral course from that time, and the people were supportive of at least neutrality in the realms of European power politics so long as the imperialist powers stayed away from the people and nations of the New World. The post-war years gave Americans time to reflect and to examine the nature of life from a non-military viewpoint, though from one of moral superiority over the native Indian residents. The open and greater frontier allowed Americans to see the spread of America as a blessing to all involved. But to bring the benefits of civilization to the masses meant those doing so must be moral regarding those already blessed with American identity. America was not perfect. There were many and deep social ills in America in the 19th, and to bring America to the people, the work of reforming the already standing nation had to succeed in order to make America just for all if it were to be a valid project rather than simply internal imperialism. thus arose a civil rights movement aimed at improving the lives of the industrial workers in the cities, of bringing rights to women, of stopping the evils of slavery, of freeing children from work and of educating them to take their places in the world of literate Christians who could confront their faith without the tyranny of the priests. There was much work to do, and one thing was nearly as important as another: to stop the evils of drunkeness and to free the slaves and to improve the working conditions of those living in city slums. America took on the vocation of social reform.

To endure the drivel of today's American and Western Leftist is usually more than the average man can do without becoming disgusted when the usual cliches about slavery and poverty and other social injustices arise. It is in the nations of our triune revolution that the questions of social injustice arose in the first place, and there that they were addressed, often at the cost of blood and death on the parts of those who advocated for reform and jusitice. To this day it is in the Modern West that such questions and movements have their hearts and souls, and they seldom exist outside the West. It is we who are the Modernist revolutionaries who make questions of civil rights important and known as such to the world at large; and it is we who spend our time criticising ourselves for not doing enough to cure these social evils, not the barbarians we try to save from their own evils. We revolutionaries of Modernity are the ones who began the struggle for universal Human rights, and it is we who forced them on an unwilling world, and it is we who continue to do so to this day. And it is our own Left who criticise our successes and attempt to destroy our great progress.

We've looked at the concept of progress as a thing possible. We know that it is a rare idea in the history of Mankind. Walters writes:

"By 1814 .... a combination of theological and economic developments led many men and women to assume that the world did not have to be the way it was and that individual effort mattered. such notions are not terribly ancient; nor are they universal among human societies."

[Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815- 1860. Hill and Wang: New York; rpt. 1997, p 3.]

We have looked at the question of authority, of where it comes from and who has the authority to decide and to do. In part this idea of free men conducting their own affairs is a legacy of the Protestant Reformation, of the individual being his own source of authority in terms of reading the Bible, a task made easier thanks to Tyndale and Gutenberg, and a task brought to fruition among the masses in large part by the missionary efforts of John Wesley. When the Catholic Church held supreme authority in the Christian world men were bound to it; but with the Reformation man became to a great extent his own moral authority as he found it in the Bible and Christian exegesis. As his own authority, he might well have felt his authority extended also to others not as authoritive as he. but it was authority based on Christianity that motivated him. Ironic now to listen to the Leftists complain about the evils of Christianity as the worst of all movements in the history of Humanity. social reform is at root a Protestant and often an American movement, as Walters writes: "[some] scholars presented antebellum reform as the product of evangelical Protestantism...." (Walters: p. ix.) And aside from conspiracy theorists, most will understand that to be the true case.

Christianity gave rise to " 'the Sisterhood of Reforms' ... [and] it was a rare person who engaged in only one of them." [Walters: p. xiii.] Christians did not stop at anti-slavery agitation, nor at anti-war activities. They embraced a whole suite of causes as standard within the ethos of Christianity, and "they tended to have been evangelical Protestants from New England families ... noble idealists who saw wrongdoing and tried to stop it... [or] as irresponsible fanatics or as neurotics and malcontents...." [Walters: p. xv.] Social reform was originated and lead mostly by evangelical Protestants; and the reasons for it are to do with commerce, with the availability of cash that freed the average person to pursue missionary work rather than mere subsistence and pitiful existence. "Before 1800 very few people had been able to give themselves over entirely to moral or social causes.... Only with the technological and social changes of the nineteenth century did it become possible for large numbers of Americans to make a livelihood out of agitation.... Reform was a demanding profession...." [Walters: p. 13.]

Anyone who knows the history of 19th century America and Western Europe knows it to be a time of terrible cruelty and needless suffering. It was a century in that respect no different from any other. What is different about the West in the 19th century was the rise of reform movements to improve the lot of the masses and to spread that improvement to universal mankind. Where there was injustice and harm the reformers, radicals and revolutionaries sought to make conditions better. In many instances those who performed the greatest social good in progressive terms were the so-called robber barons, those who provided wealth to the masses, if not as quickly as many would have liked, then at least solidly for the future base of the world's populations. The difference between the 19th century and all that came before it was one of the real improvement of the Human condition and the hope and right expectation of further improvements indefinitely for all Mankind regardless. There were obvious social and economic injustices, and the social reformers attempted to address and correct them. The system itself likely did more organically than any amount of social agitation could ever have done. However, the social reformers were also imbued with millenialism, with the need to create Heaven on Earth, and that as soon as possible so they could experience it themselves.

As we've seen before in the history of social workers, it was women who were bored and wasted by the social system, women who were for the first time educated generally and well, and women who were excluded from the mainstream of activities outside the home. It was often missionary-minded women who lead social reform movements.

As the 19th century began, social relations changed radically, moving men from farms to cities, from home to factory and business. Men but not women. Work continued but not as before. "[I]f she was middle-class, she no longer worked in ways that society recognised as work. Low-paid servants, schools, and fewer children reduced some traditional duties of home-making; store-bought bread, clothing, and candles took away others.... Implicitly rejecting the notion that the household was their only sphere of influence, American women from the 1810s onward participated in public life through voluntary associations of their own and by providing organisational and financial support of other, male-dominated ones" [Walters: pp. 104-106.] bored and frustrated middle class housewives turned to social activism for the sake of something satisfying to do with their lives. Often and perhaps mostly they turned to Abolitionism as the cause du jour.

" 'The investigation of the rights of the slave,' wrote the South Carolina-born abolitionist Angelina Grimke, 'has led me to a better understanding of my own.' What she came to realise was that power and domination were sexual as well as racial. In the antebellum period Grimke and thousands of other reformers created the first 'feminist' movement in the United States...." [Walters: p. 103.]

Bored middle class childless Protestant housewives began the social reform movement that today is the worst enemy of Human progress on our beautiful Earth. When we look at the so-called "nanny-state" we see its birthplace in early 19th century New England households. The "Sisterhood of Reforms" comprises a plethora of issues, ranging from anti-slavery, feminism, children's' rights, anti-poverty campaigns, and so on. We see anti-war movements, pacifism, and philobarbarism. Today we see all those and an anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Semitism combined with environmentalism and general anti-Modernity contained within Left dhimmi fascism. It's hard to know which Left fascist aspect is worse for our Modernity as all of them combine into a hatred of freedom and individuality and the pursuit of privacy. We can see clearly the effects of Left dhimi fascism in philobarbarism, perhaps a unifying aspect of this general evil: The barbarian is infantalised, as are the majority of people regardless; his culture is prized as utopian if not now than before the rise of Modernity; man is reduced to his culture as he is stripped of his personhood and sent to the collective brotherhood of man; man is idealised and made into a parody of a man, made into a cigar-store Indian; man is 'protected' from the brutal European; Earth becomes the home of man, Gaia its Mother; the Human household is regulated by the spinster mother who doles out the scare resources of subsistence life; all must share equally according to the Great Mother who knows. And philobarbarism then grows into a thing of its own, having been created in the barren minds of the barbarian in the first place: School teacher/Mother trains the barbarian to think he is abused and harmed by the Adult culture of the modern West. Turned into a romantic child the barbarian is set up to pose as a clown in a phantasy world of middle class women and effete fools of all kinds. the barbarian, having no ideas of his own from outside his culture, no sense of general history, believes the lies and phantasies of the gnostic nanny. Were it to end there it might not be so terrible.

Social Darwinism (2)

How you approach the concept of History decides the kind of life you live and the kind of person you are.

Many people in our world today think of History as an endless loop of subsistence living and eventual death; and from that point they diverge into religious conceptions of an afterlife, too many to discuss. The point being, though, that they have a sense of endless repetition of Human life, one generation living after the next without any real change possible, without any real sense of progress beyond ones own salvation in the afterlife. The idea of life is something like "the circle of life".

Those without a religious outlook see life as linear, as life and then non-existence. "I was not, I was, I was not."

Let's consider History itself, regardless of the personal. There are those who do not grasp the concept of History as progressive, who see it as simply there eternally or so, an endless circle of Man, if in different bodies. Ones life is the same as those who were before and as those who come later. Life is set and determined and cannot and should not and must not change. History is ended and there is only life to live for the sake of oneself in communion with the universe. Anything that threatens that universal order is evil.

There is an outlook that History is changing, but at a glacial and geological pace, that Man is not capable of making anything happen of any genuine significance, that evolution is measured in terms of millions of years rather than in days and years.

History can be seen as something Men can change by their will and determination and talent. Those men can become revolutionaries and social activists, some utopian and totalitarian and murderous in their pursuit of perfection and the fulfillment of their gnostic dreams of the end of history and the Heaven on Earth they so desire to create.

Some feel that History is not exactly linear but dialectical, that it moves one way now and in the opposite direction next, then combining into a new synthetic mode that splits into its internal contradictions and begins the dialectic all over again.

One man I met suggests that "History is bunk." forget about it and get on with the tasks at hand; leave aside all that introspective and myopic nonsense and pass the ammunition.

All of it decides how we live and who we are as individuals and societies. History is in our hands to change or it isn't. It is in our hands to change and we should or we shouldn't. That we can make history in our time or we cannot. Your outlook on your abilities to make your own life in our time determines how you will live and act in the world. Social Darwinists were split into numerous kinds of actors in this context. Out of their valuations of History we live today with the aftermath of those who reacted against them. We live with the residue of those who feel that Man is not capable of determining his own life and history but that it is in the hands only of those who can see beyond the fog of assumptions, who can rise above the cloud of unknowing to see the Truth, that they can guide the masses by changing the environment of the masses so the masses will react to social conditions in the same way any living thing reacts to its environment, covering for warmth, shedding for heat,and so on. People are determined by their surroundings, and to make history conform to ones idea of its right, then one can make conditions such that people will move accordingly. Those who were Social Darwinists and those today who are determinists share the idea that people have not much choice in their lives outside of how the material world treats them and how they are given to react. That is history. Those who are special and insightful and gifted will know what the lesser among us do not; and the gnostic, he who has knowledge, will create the world for Man in the beneficence of the Gnostic's vocation. The Gnostic believes in the changeability of History but not in the sense of progress. He believes only that Man can be bettered in behaviour and reaction but not in essence, that man is essentially evil, and that the only hope of Man is in his adherence to the Plan that is made for him by the gifted Gnostic. Man will always be an animal but he might behave better if he's provided with a nicer barn to live in. That's not really Progress.

There are those who are revolutionaries. We in the West are, mostly, those ourselves. We have proof of our revolutionary status in obvious terms: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, not to mention the technological revolution we are currently experiencing, and all the other revolutions of daily living, revolutions in thought of all kinds from child rearing to feminism to food production and house-cleaning liquids. We are revolutionaries and unashamed. "Revolutionary" is a cliche. But it is true that we are very revolutionary, and that we are unlike any other people in our Human history. We accept and even demand revolution as a way of life.

Revolution as history is a volitionary attitude. We do not accept X as given and permanent. If we don't like X we work to change it. We are not content. Our understanding of History demands that we change it to something we would prefer, and we accept that it is us who must do the work of change. That attitude puts us at odds with those who would not merely halt change as it is now but who would turn back our changes to Human conditions and the volition of Man. those who would stop our revolutions are both reactionaries and "Progressives" who would turn back our revolutions to a time of the Golden Past.

Revolution, evolution, or devolution. And then there are the Relativists.

How one sees history, even if it's at an unthinking level, determines how one will live ones life. If history is unchanging, then one will not consider attempting to make history different from what has always been and will forever be. And if history is a series of disconnected and random bubbles of social events, as mid 20th century French nihilists have it, then one cannot affect historical change beyond ones time anyway, the past having no connection to future events and people. Everything is relative and isolated and meaningful only to those who live during some set period. These approaches lead to passivity and apathy. Only select groups of gnostics can have any impact on history, they knowing more than others, having insight and therefore the right to power. No linear history means there is no progress and no telos, no meaning, no reason.

Children ask where babies come from. Adults ask where people came from. It is the beginning of history, this question and the creation story. Having asked and perhaps having answered, one will in time have to address where we go from our beginning, why, and when will our existence end. How we address those problems of the mind decide for us afterward how we will conduct our private lives. It comes to the meaning of life. It comes to control over that meaning and purpose. Do you have control or must you accept that you do not? Are you active or passive?

Social Darwinists range across the spectrum of possibilities.

Though many people in the late 19th century would have understood immediately the phrase "Social Darwinism" it wasn't coined until 1944 when Richard Hofstadter used it as the title in Social Darwinism in American Thought . Beacon Press: Boston; rpt. 1962. We live, mostly unaware, with the legacies of Social Darwinism, using phrases from the ideologies therein such as "survival of the fittest," not coined by Darwin but by the nearly forgotten leading light of Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer. It is that phrase more than any other that we today resist as an obvious evil, one that leads to pain and exploitation of the weaker and the less technologically advanced. It has to do with our conceptions of history, of how we understand the nature of change in Human relations and being in the world. Yes, the phrase is tautological, but it is also essential that we accept it as it is meant and as how we react to it in those terms. That the strong survive and the weak do not is seen today as justification for evil committed against the undeserving. It is a matter of our outlook on history that decides our approaches to the problem of Good and Evil in this question of what to do about the weak and the poor, the rich and the strong. Social Darwinism is with us today even more vividly than it was over 100 years ago, and it is nearly invisible because we live with its mirror image: relativism.

If all people are products of their culture. and if their culture is organic as von Herder and Fiche argue, then all cultures are somehow right in themselves, not open to criticism from outsiders, and within somehow valid as group expressions of the general will of the people. To interfere with a people's Will is likely a bad thing, an imposition of one will unjustly on others. To the colonialist and imperialist, to the triumphalist and the slaver and the filibuster it hardly matters what "others" think or feel. One acts anyway. To the Modernist, action is beneficial to all, not only to the actor himself in pursuit of profit but to the primitive or the weaker or the less developed. Action is good in that it is progressive and leads to higher standards of culture and some enlightenment beyond the usual state of Man's rural idiocy. To crack open a closed system and to bring it the benefits of Modern society is right. In many cases, the idea of right progress is central to Social Darwinism. But not in all cases.

Of two of the leading lights of the ideology of Social Darwinism, Hofstadter writes: "To Sumner as to Spencer, society was a superorganism, changing at a geological tempo. In [Sumner's] view, the social meddlers had been laboring under the delusion that, since there are no natural laws of the social order, they might make the world over with artificial ones; but he expected that Spencer's new science would dissolve these fantasies.... They started from the premise that 'everybody ought to be happy' and assumed that therefore it should be possible to make everyone happy." (Hofstadter: p. 61.)

There we see a Right Social Darwinism arguing that there is social progress but one that is so slow it's not worth thinking about; and there is the counter, that one must act to improve life in an accelerated evolution, in fact, sometimes in a revolutionary programme. Both groups saw change as unstoppable, but the Right saw it as a matter of increasing commerce and capitalism, and the Left saw it as a matter of social engineering for the benefit of the poor. the one emphasises the actions of the private individual, the other the actions of the gnostic individual. The one is concerned with wealth, the latter concerned with redistributing the wealth there is, hearkening back to the conception of goods as limited to subsistence economies. Thus, we see the Right static party at odds with the Left reactionaries; those who believe in progress through individual actions against those who believe in reaction as the progress of the many. The one is concerned with riches, the other with poverty. Hofstadter continues writing on Sumner:

"If poverty is ever to be abolished, it will be by a more energetic prosecution of the struggle, and not by social upheaval or paper plans for a new order. human progress is at bottom moral progress, and moral progress is largely the accumulation of economic virtues. 'Let every man be sober, industrious, prudent, and wise, and bring up his children to be so likewise, and poverty will be abolished in a few generations.' " (Hofstadter: p. 61.)

Sumner's is a social progressivism that one cannot find in the collectivism of feudalism. In today's terms, Sumner is not considered a social progressive. And yet he most certainly is objectively. His Social Darwinism is one of survival of the fittest in that progress will come to those who are progressive themselves; even those who are poor now will, like most immigrants to the New World, grow rich by their own efforts and talents. Obviously it's true that those who work toward personal progress are successful and those who do not are failures in the usual sense. Economic success is a moral struggle, and winning the economic struggle is winning morality. Increase in wealth is a moral gain as much as an economic one. Socialism is also a moral deficit. The struggle in itself is good and moral. To deny struggle, as the left must do, as they do by denouncing it as theft from a limited resource of common wealth, is reactionary and entirely anti-progressive. Capitalism, in a turn-around of our common assumptions of meaning, is progressive and sustainable. By doing little or nothing by way of public social activism, the Right became the social engins who moved society forward, who created the means of social progress the Left lays claim to.

There is a confusion in the mind of the Left today that there is a struggle for survival in the world, and that by taking profit and creating something useful from nature the capitalist is destructive. There is a Left idea that the spread of AIDS is the fault of multi-national corporations who refuse to give away the medicines the drug companies produce. Yes, then, there is a struggle for survival the average AIDS carrier is likely to lose without the give aways from the drug companies. There is also something to be said about those who carry AIDS. Some of them are very likely rape victims. However.... the struggle for existence is not the over-heated rip and tear today that one can see it as in the mid-19th century factory system in Manchester or in Mayhew's London. Survival in a modern capitalist economy is not that difficult even for the most hard-core unemployed person. Hofstadter continues:

"What is called the struggle for existence in modern society is really a struggle of the means of enjoyment. Only the desperately poor, the pauperized, and the criminal are engaged in a struggle for existence.... The struggle of enjoyment... is in no way analogous either to natural selection or to the artificial selection of the horticulturalist." (Hofstadter: p. 96)

Capitalism creates such an over-abundance of wealth that the struggle for existence is silly. There is no struggle in any meaningful sense. The working classes have won enough that they are a satisfied part of the capitalist system's victory. So we come back to the concepts of activism and progress. If the victors within capitalism are successful, they must be co-conspirators in the general robbery of the masses outside the capitalist world, as seen and understood by gnostic neo-feudalists. Within capitalism there cannot be a real struggle for survival, so there must be a struggle for equality. that kind of idiocy rings hollow in the empty minds of even the stupidest of Leftists; therefore, most fall back on the philobarbarist option of "defending" the barbarian victims of imperialism.

There is no such thing as linear history, if the left is correct, there is only incoherent bubble of identity and culture. All of those cultures are equally valid in bubbles of temporality, all relative to each other except those that overpower the weaker, i.e. the Western Modernists overpowering the barbarians. To correct this problem of obvious historical progress, the Left must deny there is such a thing as History, and that there is only cultural stasis being privileged by its members and impenetrable by outsiders; therefore cultures lesser and weaker and special and in need of protection from the stronger, those who would ruin the struggle for survival of the weaker by the fitter, must have power to survive the assaults of our racist Modernity. The progressive Left must deny progress in time to promote relativity of cultural value. No history. No progress. Western capitalist Modernity is simply one model of social organisation among many, and not special or better than any other; but because it is more powerful and because it uses resources, it must then be stopped from taking the limited resources that make up the universe so that all might have their fair share of the limited pie of subsistence. Because capitalism is active, it is therefore bad for those who are not aggressive; and capitalism must therefore be stopped from continuing its course, which is not progress but simply movement to take from the whole of Mankind.

If all cultures are in a state of relative being, there being no "progress" other than random events within social contexts, no telos, no "reason," then for one culture to dominate another is to interfere wrongly in a culture valid in its own terms unjudgeable by another as better or worse, simple one that is not powerful enough to defend itself. In short, it's wrong in a higher sense, to bully. There being no "history" to compare one state of development to another in cultural terms, all states of development are equally valid. But one can see from the Left view that capitalism is not simply a state of development in itself, it is an attack on all other cultures by its very existence. It is an out-of-control predatory culture, and to protect states from it capitalism must be stopped from furthering the harm it does. The Leftist must stop the imperialism of capitalism so all other cultures can continue their internal developments as they will organically. Not only should capitalism not judge other cultures according to capitalist values, capitalism should examine its own harmful acts against other cultures that do no harm to the world, and to Nature itself. It's no longer any good to attempt to restore the "balance" to the people within capitalism, they having sold out to consumerism and now being lackeys and dupes of the capitalist system, the Leftist must protect the new "workers" from capitalism before they too are co-opted into the capitalist vision of life. One must go further than protecting the primitive and promote the primitive as more at one with nature, as more authentic, as more valid than the capitalists. All that seems to be economic progress is capitalism, and that is in itself not historical progress but simply a growth of harm. For the progressive left, turning back history is history. Generic Social Darwinism, the competition for enjoyment of life, is seen as plundering and rape and murder. It is seen as that by the Left as world-wide and growing.

If we deny the fact of History we leave ourselves in a state of passivity. We can at best allow for external influence, for example, economic conditions over which people have no control. We can claim the effects of geography are determinant. We can claim any external force to be the one that makes people live as they do; and so long as will and energy are dismissed as peripheral to social change we will end up with an ahistorical worldview that leads us to insh'allah. If we deny the existence of history we will give the power of volition to others who will lead by Gnostic vision. Even without the vision of History, the Gnostic will claim power to adjust social conditions as a means of engineering behaviour right for all in this view. We see it most clearly in our time in the form of imposed Shari'a. There is no History in Islam, there is only submission and adherence to the Traditions. It is the near-perfect expression of Left social engineering. Without the vision of progressive History and telos, there is only the personal state of farm animal existence as tended to by the manager. The Social Darwinists went both ways in looking for the answers to the riddle of teleological History. Change is imposibly slow in Human life and character and nothing real can be done to make it different; that social conditions can change quickly in a greater economy than in a lesser one; and that social conditions can create a New Man if there is enough focus on the external conditions that make man adapt to his surroundings. At heart it depends on ones view of History. It is or it isn't. One can change it or one must allow the world to change it. change is so slow it will never make a difference. Or that one can chnge things radically by changing the enviornment. Or that change, thosugh possible, is bad and must be stopped before further harm comes. How one decides these questions is fundamental in how one lives ones life as an individual. If no change is possible, you will be passive. If change is bad, you will be a reactionary. If change is possible only through environment, you will be a radical reformer; and if Man himself is capable and right in pursuing Progress, then you will be a revolutionary.

Our Muslim cousins are static; our Left is reactionary; and we Modernists are revolutionary. History will show who wins out. That will be determined by the survival of the fittest.

Died of Embarrassment

The diner sits in his chair at the Chinese restaurant having some spicy meal he's not used to. He coughs a bit after a taste of curry. A-heh, a-heh. It seems fine for a second, but then it's not. He tries to clear his throat again, a-hah, a-heh, and it doesn't really work. He sips some water, and no, that doesn't work either. He soon can't even hold the water tumbler. He's choking. He slowly rises to go to the bathroom to choke loudly in private, not wanting to make a spectacle of himself in the diningroom. In the cubicle he coughs and chokes and it gets worse and worse and soon enough he suffocates to death. His throat is swollen shut in reaction to the spice. Happens too often. People die of embarrassment rather than sit it out and get help and live and avoid curry next time. Whadda ya do?

We sat at the library last Thursday and asked why our own people in the West sit in terror of terrorism and murder and do nothing, turning their heads when someone is blown to bits on the subway train or in an office building. We don't want to make a spectacle of ourselves by being concerned and visible. We don't want to be seen to be involved in things at all because it's so uncool to show interest in life and Human doings. We dress down so we won't be noticed. We shuffle so people don't notice us. We hunch so we don't look like tall poppies. If anything looks like it might call attention to us we sneak off into the toilet to die of embarrassment.

Most of us have friends and colleagues who are more or less "liberal." Most of us mention the war in Iraq the way someone choking in a Chinese restaurant would cough. We don't usually make a big deal of our discomfort about anti-Semitism in a crowded room of people who probably sympathise with Hizballah. We might cough and wish we weren't so choked, and if we can't control ourselves we might sneak out and swear not to return. But when ones friends are doing the social thing it's hard not to follow. Most of us want to be liked ands accepted, and that requires following the crowd and doing as they do. Bringing McDonald's take-away to a Chinese diner to join ones friends for dinner is, take it from me, bad form. And bringing political disagreement to a party of any is also seen as bad form. Death? Well, better that than upsetting the social scene.

At what point do people stop swallowing fascist cliches that make people choke to death? At what point do we say out loud that this is totally wrong and we won't swallow any more of it? How many more people have to die before we get over our embarrassment about seeming to be anti-social?

We have met each Thursday evening at the library and other venues earlier since January to discuss the state of our nations and our approaches to combating Left fascism and fascist Islamic jihad. We never get attacked by fascists. It's not as dangerous as eating at a Chinese diner. But few wish to join us in sitting openly as we cough and choke over the state of things. We are not embarrassed. We are visible and known as the ones who choke in public. We do more than that. We show up at rallies the Death Hippies put on. We are out there, and we don't care who might be embarrassed. It's not important. What do our friends think? Mine think I'm nuts. Or, rather, they used to think I'm nuts. Now they don't say as much. They're uncomfortable about their previous positions. They even come round singley to wish me luck and to give encouragement and to say they're busy that day. And then there's getting thrown out of a store by the frothing and angry book-dealer. Do I care that a mild and nerdy guy who listens to discordant jazz all day is also underneath his meek demeanour a very angry guy who can't speak without convulsing when it comes to "the joooos"? What? The guy is a cock-roach. Do I care about his opinion of me? Do I want to give the man free reign to set the public attitude? Do I care if he goes purple over the Jews? Am I going to be so concerned about his opinion of me that I go into hiding and let other people die just because I'd be unpopular in social circles for contradicting the majority of vocal activists?

How many of us are embarrassed about ourselves? How many of us slink off to the toilet and choke in private? Your friends won't like you any more? You'll stand out in a crowd? People will point at you and criticise? What? Why would you even want to live a life of fear like that? Be unpopular. Your friends will appreciate it eventually. And if not you'll find new friends. I'd die of embarrassment if I couldn't find the courage to stand up and face a crowded room and tell them I'm choking to death.

Look at us. Are the histories of our time going to conclude that we died of embarrassment?

Thursday evening. Public library. 7-9:p.m. Your town.

Social Engineering

There are some poisonous snakes in the jungle that are actually creepier than the average activist passivist. Yes, it's true. I encountered a snake once that to this day that gives me shudders. This thing came from somewhere slimy and slithered in front of us and was so deadly that if he'd penetrated my boot I'd have died on the spot. It's all the creepier because two of my companions weren't wearing boots. They were totally at risk and survived only because this thing came for me instead of them. Let's not go into the details of my reaction. Instead of going on about that snake, let's look at Determinists, particularly at Social Engineers.

There are two kinds of people on this Earth: those who are active and and interested in taking care of their own lives to the best of their abilities and interests on their own. Those people are agents of their own lives, those who feel that they have free will and personal volition. Those people feel that they can do what they can do because they are free in the universe of life to act and to do and to be simply because they are alive. They have choice, responsibity, and are deserving of whatever comes to them, good or bad. And they also accept that sometimes things happen that simply out of their control, that there are Act of God, that there are quirks and follies and weirdnesses and accidents and innate properties of existence that are because of the nature of living. They accept that men are men, that trees are green, that this is this, and that is that, and that one might within ones abilities and reason make something into something else if possible. Life is set within boundaries but within those boundaries is as open as the infinity of chess moves in three dimensions or more, tossing in for fun lots of accident. Even Marx, in a moment of poetic inspiration and good sense, writes:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs on the minds of the living like a mountain."
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

And typically he screws it all up. Of course we live from point to point in the course of our time. Within that we are bounded to do as we can. Marx takes it further, out of reality and into the idiot zone. There we find him in company with some of the snakiest intellectuals of our day. We find him in company with our Social Engineers.

Pull on your boots and let's take a hike through the jungle of slimy ideology to see these low and poisonous creatures who would rule from on high. They are the activists of Passivity, the nattering nabobs of nihilism, the Gnostics of Gnada.

Skim over the following dozen or so paragraphs from wikipedia and I'll meet you at the end of it to continue our tour of Gnostic Jungle Phantasy Land.
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Social engineering is a concept in political science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behavior on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups. In the political arena the counterpart of Social engineering is: Political engineering.

For various reasons, the term has been imbued with negative connotations. However, virtually all law and governance has the effect of changing behavior and can be considered "social engineering" to some extent. Prohibitions on murder, rape, suicide and littering are all policies aimed at discouraging perceived undesirable behaviors. In British and Canadian jurisprudence, changing public attitudes about a behaviour is accepted as one of the key functions of laws prohibiting it. Governments also influence behavior more subtly through incentives and disincentives built into economic policy and tax policy, for instance, and have done so for centuries.

In practice, whether any specific policy is labeled as "social engineering" is often a question of intent. The term is most often employed by the political right as an accusation against any who propose to use law, tax policy, or other kinds of state influence to change existing power relationships: for instance, between men and women, or between different ethnic groups. Political conservatives in the United States have accused their opponents of social engineering through their promotion of political correctness, insofar as it may change social attitudes by defining "acceptable" and "unacceptable" language or acts.

Social engineering through history

Before one can engage in social engineering, one must have reliable information about the society that is to be engineered, and one must have effective tools to carry out the engineering. Both of these only became available relatively recently - roughly within the past one hundred years. The development of social science made it possible to gather and analyze information about social attitudes and trends, which is necessary in order to judge the initial state of society before an engineering attempt and the success or failure of that attempt after it has been implemented. At the same time, the development of modern communications technology and the media provided the tools through which social engineering could be carried out.

While social engineering can be carried out by any organization - whether large or small, public or private - the most comprehensive (and often the most effective) campaigns of social engineering are those initiated by powerful central governments.

Extremely intensive social engineering campaigns occurred in countries with authoritarian governments. In the 1920s, the revolutionary government of the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens, to replace the old social frameworks of Tsarist Russia with a new Soviet culture, to create the New Soviet man. The Soviets used newspapers, books, film, mass relocations, and even architectural design tactics to serve as "social condenser" and change personal values and private relationships. Similar examples are the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution" program and the Khmer Rouge's plan of deurbanization of Cambodia.

Non-authoritarian regimes tend to rely on more sustained social engineering campaigns that create more gradual, but ultimately as far-reaching, change. Examples include the "War on Drugs" in the United States, the increasing reach of intellectual property rights and copyright, and the promotion of elections as a political tool. The campaign for promoting elections, which is by far the most successful of the three examples, has been in place for over two centuries.

Social theorists of the Frankfurt School in Wiemar Germany like Theodor Adorno had also observed the new phenomenon of mass culture and commented on its new manipulative power, when the rise of the Nazis drove them out of the country around 1930 (many of them became connected with the Institute for Social Research in the United States). The Nazis themselves were no strangers to the idea of influencing political attitudes and re-defining personal relationships. The Nazi propaganda machine under Joseph Goebbels was a synchronized, sophisticated and effective tool for creating public opinion.
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Social engineering can be used as a means to achieve a wide variety of different results, as illustrated by the different governments and other organizations that have employed it. The discussion of the possibilities for such manipulation became especially active following World War II, with the advent of television, and continuing discussion of techniques of social engineering - particularly in advertising - is still quite pertinent in the western model of consumer capitalism.

Karl Popper

In his classic political science book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume I, The Spell of Plato, Karl Popper examined the application of the critical and rational methods of science to the problems of the open society. In this respect, he made a crucial distinction between the principles of democratic social reconstruction (called 'piecemeal social engineering') and 'Utopian social engineering' [1]

Popper wrote "the piecemeal engineer will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evil of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good." For him, the difference between 'piecemeal social engineering' and 'Utopian social engineering' is "the difference between a reasonable method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an intolerable increase in human suffering. It is the difference between a method which can be applied at any moment, and a method whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favorable. And it is also the difference between the only method of improving matters which has so far been really successful, at any time, and in any place, and a method which, wherever it has been tried, has led only to the use of violence in place of reason, and if not to its own abandonment, at any rate to that of its original blueprint" [2]

Wikipedia, "Social Engineering."

Plato and Skinner and their ugly babies are Social Engineers. I hate these people because they deny Man's free will and then go about proving themselves hypocrites by actively attempting to control Man by manipulating his life according to their own activist schemes.

Social engineers decide that Man is infantile, and that the social engineer is better suited to arrange the life of Man than the average man himself. The social engineer decides that Man is infantile and is in need of the services of the Gnostic genius who will mould the man's environment to make him suitable for his own existence. It transcends hubris and even contempt for Humanity. It rises to the level of poisonous jungle snakes.

Plato begins this contempt for Man in his proto-fascist utopian nightmare, The Republic, in which Man is divided into metaphoric metals according to Plato's concept of the varying worth of people's abilities to understand and live in their right places in the nature of things. Plato, having no love or respect for the individual as person, reduces all to categories, the Golden Ones at the top, the Gnostics who see further and deeper, those who will become by innate ability, breeding, and training, Philosopher Kings. They will take on the knowledge of the way it really is and then lie to the masses for their own good, the ambiguity being intentional. the Gnostics will have a special knowledge they will use to guide and form the mass of man for his own good. It is exactly social engineering. BF Skinner's utopian Walden Two is little different in tone and temper. People are animals who must be lead, fed, and tended. They are not good in themselves, they are animals. To tend them is a priestly calling reserved for the specialfew.

Man's will, to the extent he has any, is malleable, and he is in need of the special person to make the life of Man good if not perfect. Well, yes, even perfect. It requires the sacrifice and expertise of the specialist, the highly trained social engineer to know what to do to change the environment of Man into something man can live rightly within, in reaction to his social conditions, like a pin ball in a machine going only where he is guided.

Conditions make the man, according to the social engineer. If one can adjust the conditions, man will fall into right behaviour. He has so little will of his own that he will adapt to conditions regardless. Experts, the Gnostics who know by talent and training, can create such conditions for the right life of Man. Today we see this in practice in nearly every aspect of our daily lives, not as the writer above tries to explain it but in details we reduce to "politically correct" ideology. And of course it's all for our own good. Only a renegade or social wrecker or Kulak would try to prevent this wondrous New Man from arising.

To create the New Man one must create new conditions for him to emerge from. Those new conditions need to be engineered. If the conditions arise organically, they are the same old conditions that give rise to the old world of competition and war and sexism, racism, homophobia, and capitalism. Those, by the by, are bad things. To eliminate those bad things from the Human experience, one must destroy the structures that allow them to arise and then to replace them with new structures that allow for the emergence of the New Man who is free of the ability to do bad or to think bad thoughts, and who knows better how to create the perfect system for Man than the specialist, the special person, the Gnostic?

We've discussed numerous times here and at least as often during our weekly Thursday evening meeting the concept of faith. We often discuss it in relation to the opposite, the gnosis of the hater. The gnostic goes beyond a simple disregard for his fellows and actively decides and then acts to remake the man in the image of the Gnostic's phantasy of what man should be. You and your life, according to the Gnostic, are no good as you are, and you not only must not be and act as you are, you must change according to the visions of the Gnostic. And like it or not, the Gnostic will often have the power, the social and political and practical power to have you killed. Even those who stop short of murder and extermination will go out of their ways to fuck up you life just because you do not conform to their idea of the phantasy they have of how things should be. It would merely be creepy if not for the fact that so many of these snakes are poisoning so many people to the point of death.

Our Human life has a deep suspicion of Human life. We see it clearly and brilliantly even in the works of Plato, and we see it today in the work of our social engineers around the world and in every aspect of our daily lives. The paranoid phantasies of the conspiracy theorist pale to nothing in comparison to the realities of the average school teacher's work in the classroom in a modern city.

Our intelligentsia seem to have bought into the idea that they know something special that the rest of us are too stupid or venal to grasp on our own. But this: Not only are we stupid and venal and barely under control, we actually suffer from false consciousness in thinking we are pretty much OK in our private lives when in fact we are not, according to the knowing Gnostic who sees reality as it is, who sees Moore than the rest of us, who knows that the West is an evil thing destroying The! Palestinian! Peeple!, that the masses of the consumerist West are raping Mother Nature, and so on. These Gnostic creatures, these snakes, are our public intellectuals, and they try to convince the masses, often successfully, that the West is bad and must be either remade or destroyed. Our own hate us because the special people don't see us as Human at all, merely as beasts who must be tended. They have no faith in Humanity as good because they hate Humanity in itself. If the Gnostics didn't hate people they'd leave people alone to do what people do by their own lights. The gnostic hates people, and therefore determines to remake them according to the Gnostic awareness he is blessed with.

The social engineer is a gnostic who hates people. Those who would create a better world are those who would murder millions in a blink of an eye. Yes, we should hunt them down and kill them. They are poisonous snakes in our midsts. But we, not being Gnostics, have the sense to realise that people have the sense often enough to come to a better understanding of their own lives than the Gnostics give them credit for. Most people will, if not already, see the Gnostic vipers for what they are, and then, if we don't lynch these slithery things, we'll at least contain them and display them in glass cages so they can't poison others unawares. Intelligent and sensitive people will spot the snakes for what they are and will take right precautions once it's known who to look for and what. One must have faith that the average person is bright enough to know a snake from a saint. In the meantime, lace up your boots as you walk through the jungle of Modernity. The snakes are hiding. Know who and what they are, and then make sure they don't get too close to get their fangs into you. They will tell you they have some special knowledge you too can have if you follow their advice, but I suspect you have the good sense to know in advance what they offer.

Social Darwinism (1)

"Social Darwinism" makes most people shudder at the sound of it. Social Darwinism is thought to be the theoretical framework of pseudo-scientific racialism and eugenics that the Nazis used to legitimize their extermination campaigns. Even without the Nazis, Social Darwinism is seen to be the ideological cover for robber baron capitalism, for sweat shops, for child labour and horrific exploitation of the working classes in the 19th century and beyond. for the average person, Social Darwinism is not an attractive idea. To this day most social science is a reaction against Social Darwinism. Much of our Western worldview is a reaction against Social Darwinism. We take for granted that what we think is good and that what came before us was the evil of Social Darwinism that we suffered from and should never allow to rise again in any fashion. We are so much against Social Darwinism that we don't even have to understand anything about it to know it is evil and that we are against it.

There is a mindless revulsion agianst Social Darwinism, and yet most have no idea what it is. There isn't a single Social Darwinism, to begin with. As in most theories, there is a range of approaches, here moving from Left ot Right and back again. It is generally considered to be a Right movement, and below we will see that fallacy of that attitude. We must know this to understand why we have such a strong set of opinions about some of our most cherished opinions today, such as our automatic liking of "multi-culturalism" and our automatic hatred of "racism." We must know the roots of our ideas to make sense of why we hold our current opinions, and we can see much in the ideologies of Social Darwinism that wil show us why we think we think what we do.

If we can understand the roots of Social Darwinism, then we can begin to understand the roots of Social Engineering. If we know why we think as we do, then we can begin a long process of rethinking our assumptions and perhaps we can find better ways of conducting our affairs.

So let's look at Social Darwinism and see how we came to this place in the public mind that we are at today. What is this ideology that we hate so intensely? The following is from wikipedia. Next installment we'll look at Social Darwinism from Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought. ****

Social Darwinism is a term used to describe a range of political ideologies which are held to be compatible with the concept that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution of biological traits in a population by natural selection can also be applied to competition between human societies or groups within a society.

Initially expressed in the writings of English philosopher and author Herbert Spencer, and those of William Graham Sumner, Social Darwinism became popular in the late 19th century and continued in popularity until at least the end of World War II. The ideology did not necessarily reflect Darwin's views, and though he did introduce Spencer's term of "survival of the fittest" as an alternative phrase for "natural selection" in the 5th edition of The Origin of Species, he subsequently rejected it in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). In all cases, the ideology of Social Darwinism should be distinguished from the scientific theory of evolution developed in The Origins of Species (1859).

The term "Social Darwinism" itself was only coined in 1944, when the American historian Richard Hofstadter published a book entitled Social Darwinism in American Thought. Historically, proponents of Social Darwinism have used the theory to justify social inequality as being meritocratic. At various times it has also been used to justify laissez-faire capitalism, racism or imperialism. Social Darwinism is closely tied to earlier conceptions of unilineal evolution which were common until at least the second part of the 20th century. Those who endorsed these views, however, may disagree on political choices. Some believe "natural selection", which they claim is a principle valid as much in evolution of the animal kingdom as in human societies, can be consciously affected by human beings. Those who take this view believe that governments should implement policies that would guide human evolution in a positive direction. The specific policies supported by such Social Darwinists vary greatly, from eugenics and compulsory sterilization to laissez-faire, free markets and governmental non-intervention in the economy.

However, other Social Darwinists argue that human beings cannot control their evolution any more than animals can, and that governments and their policies, like all other aspects of human society, are themselves subject to evolution rather than being able to control it. Therefore, they do not recommend any political policies; in their view, it is inevitable that human societies will select those policies that are most beneficial to their evolution. These Social Darwinists promote a kind of passive acceptance of any social or political change, because they believe all such changes are driven by evolution.

Theories of social evolution and cultural evolution are common in European thought.

The Enlightenment thinkers who preceded Darwin, such as Hegel, often argued that societies progressed through stages of increasing development. Earlier thinkers also emphasized conflict as an inherent feature of social life. Thomas Hobbes' 17th century portrayal of the state of nature seems analogous to the competition for natural resources described by Darwin.

Social Darwinism is distinct from other theories of social change because of the way it draws Darwin's distinctive ideas from the field of biology into social studies. Darwin's unique discussion of evolution was distinct in several ways from these previous works: Darwin argued that humans were shaped by biological laws in the same way as other animals, particularly by the pressure put on individuals by population growth, emphasizing the natural over the supernatural in human development. Unlike Hobbes, he believed that this pressure allowed individuals with certain physical and mental traits to succeed more frequently than others, and that these traits accumulated in the population over time to allow the emergence of a new species. However, Darwin felt that 'social instincts' such as 'sympathy' and 'moral sentiments' also evolved through natural selection, and that these resulted in the strengthening of societies in which they occurred, so much so that he wrote about it in Descent of Man:[1] Thus it seems Darwin did believe that social phenomena were shaped by natural selection.

Theorists and Sources of Social DarwinismHerbert Spencer.

Despite the fact that Social Darwinism bears Darwin's name and Darwin's works were widely read by Social Darwinists, the theory also draws on the work of many authors, including Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Darwin distanced himself from social darwinism in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Herbert Spencer's ideas, like that of evolutionary 'progressivism', stemmed from his reading of Thomas Malthus, and his later theories were influenced by those of Darwin. However Spencer's major work, Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857) was released two years before the publication of Darwin's Origin Of Species, and First Principles was printed in 1860. In regards to social institutions, there is a good case that Spencer's writings might be classified as 'Social Darwinism'. He argues that the individual (rather than the collectivity) is the unit of analysis that evolves, that evolution takes place through natural selection, and that it affects social as well as biological phenomena. In many ways Spencer's theory of 'cosmic evolution' has much more in common with the works of Lamarck and August Comte's positivism work than Darwin. Darwin's theory is concerned with population, while Spencer's deals with the way an individual's motives influence humanity. Darwin's theory is probabilistic, i.e., based on changes in the environment that sooner or later influence the change of individuals, but do not have any single, specific goal. Spencer's is deterministic (the evolution of human society is the only logical consequence of its previous stage), fatalistic (it cannot be influenced by human actions), single path (it travels a single path, cannot skip any stages or change them) and progressively finalistic (there is a final, perfect society that will be eventually reached). Darwin's theory does not equal progress, except in the sense that the new, evolved species will be better suited to their changing environment. Spencer's theory introduces the concept of social progress — the new, evolved society is always better than the past.

Thomas Malthus

Spencer's work also served to renew interest in the work of Malthus. While Malthus's work does not itself qualify as Social Darwinism, his 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population, was incredibly popular and widely read by Social Darwinists. In that book, for example, the author argued that as an increasing population would normally outgrow its food supply, this would result in the starvation of the weakest and a Malthusian catastrophe. According to Michael Ruse, Darwin read Malthus' famous Essay on a Principle of Population in 1838, four years after Malthus' death. Malthus himself anticipated the Social Darwinists in suggesting that charity could exacerbate social problems.

Another of these social interpretations of Darwin's biological views, later known as eugenics, was put forth by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in 1865 and 1869. Galton argued that just as physical traits were clearly inherited among generations of people, so could be said for mental qualities (genius and talent). Galton argued that social mores needed to change so that heredity was a conscious decision, in order to avoid over-breeding by "less fit" members of society and the under-breeding of the "more fit" ones.

Francis Galton.

In Galton's view, social institutions such as welfare and insane asylums were allowing "inferior" humans to survive and reproduce at levels faster than the more "superior" humans in respectable society, and if corrections were not soon taken, society would be awash with "inferiors." Darwin read his cousin's work with interest, and devoted sections of Descent of Man to discussion of Galton's theories. Neither Galton nor Darwin, though, advocated any eugenic policies such as those which would be undertaken in the early 20th century, as government coercion of any form was very much against their political opinions.

Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy addressed the question of artificial selection, but it was built against Darwinian theories of natural selection. His point of view on sickness and health, in particular, opposed him to the concept of biological "adaptation", forged by Spencer's "fitness". He criticized [....] Haeckel, Spencer and Darwin, sometimes under the same banner. Nietzsche thought that, in specific cases, sickness was necessary and even helpful [2]. Thus, he wrote:

Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.[3]

The publication of Ernst Haeckel's best-selling Welträtsel ('Riddle of the Universe') in 1899 brought Social Darwinism and earlier ideas of "racial hygiene" to a very wide audience, and is recapitulation theory became famous. This lead to the formation of the Monist League in 1904 with many prominent citizens among its members, including the Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald. By 1909 it had a membership of some six thousand people. The simpler aspects of Social Darwinism followed the earlier Malthusian ideas that humans, especially males, need competition in their lives in order to survive in the future, and that the poor should have to provide for themselves and not be given any aid, although most Social Darwinists of the early twentieth century supported better working conditions and salaries, thus giving the poor a better chance to provide for themselves and distinguishing those who are capable of succeeding from those who are poor out of laziness, weakness, or inferiority. Darwin also believed that males are superior to females, [....] which can be attached to Social Darwinist theory. Social Darwinism and Race

Further information:

Racism and Scientific Racism.

Tied to Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the idea of racial superiority and competition. Although a simple racial view of Social Darwinism was that the white nations had to civilize the savage colored nations of the world, there were other more complicated ones. Darwin's theories of evolution were used to distinguish differences between the races of man based on genetic branching and natural selection. Genetic branching is the process that occurs in all species, including humans, in which groups of a species become separated from one another, each developing their own genetic characteristics different from other groups. It is because of genetic branching that we today have the human races or human populations. Popular at the time was the idea that the Nordic race of Northern Europe was superior because it evolved in a cold climate, forcing it to develop advanced survival skills that it later applied in modern times by being expansionist and adventurous. Natural selection was also thought to have worked at a faster pace in the frigid north, eliminating the weak and unintelligent more thoroughly than it did in warm climates such as Africa. Nordicists reasoned that if animals adapted to their own climates, both physically and mentally, then humans did as well. These ideas were wholly supported by the leading anthropologists and psychologists of the day, including the esteemed biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, an early defender of Darwin's theories, for which he was nicknamed "Darwin's Bulldog", and the influential psychologist William McDougall. A simpler racial attitude based on Social Darwinism is the belief that races just need to be aggressive in order to survive. Darwin's theory of natural selection clearly saw each individual and species as being in a constant struggle for existence, with the best fitted prospering and less well suited tending to diminish in numbers, gradually leading to extinction. This was modified in Social Darwinism into the belief that throughout history it was the weak species and races that died out or were exterminated, with the White race regarded as the greatest race because it had an attitude of superiority and a will to conquer. The White man had conquered the savages in some places and in other places had simply wiped them out, as the Americans had done on their continent and the British had done in New Zealand and Australia. It was the White race, the race that had created the great Western Civilization, that deserved to survive from the viewpoint of "survival of the fittest", but in the modern world the White race was falling victim to inner politics while the yellow and brown hordes of Asia were building up their strength in preparation to overthrow the White man's domination of the globe. Many believed that it was only a matter of time before the White race and its Western culture were supplanted by "inferior" races and cultures. These ideas were supported by many influential men in the early twentieth century, including the American journalist Lothrop Stoddard in his book "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy" and later the heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh believed that the White nations should keep technological advances, especially aviation, to themselves for their own advantage.

Influence of Social Darwinists

Europe

Social Darwinism enjoyed widespread popularity in some European circles, particularly among German and British intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Competition for empire encouraged increasing militarization and the division of the world into colonial spheres of influence. The interpretation of Social Darwinism then emphasized competition between species and races, rather than cooperation.

United States

Spencer proved to be an incredibly popular figure in the 1870s, particularly in the United States. Authors such as Edward Youmans, William Graham Sumner, John Fiske, John W. Burgess, and other thinkers of the gilded age all developed theories of Social Darwinism as a result of their exposure to Spencer (as well as Darwin). Sumner abandoned Social Darwinism by the mid 1880s, and some contemporary historians do not believe that Sumner ever actually believed in Social Darwinism.[4] The great majority of American businessmen rejected the anti-philanthropic implications of the theory. Instead they gave millions to build schools, colleges, hospitals, art institutes, parks and many other institutions. Andrew Carnegie, who admired Spencer, was the leading philanthopist in the world (1890-1920), and a major leader against imperialism and warfare. HG Wells was heavily influenced by Darwinist thought, and novelist Jack London wrote stories of survival that incorporate his views on

Social Darwinism[5].

Criticisms and controversies

In the past, socialists have alleged that capitalists used Social Darwinism to justify laissez-faire capitalism and social inequality. Others have used it to justify a variety of beliefs such as racialism or imperialism. Many used Social Darwinism crudely to argue against any sort of universal morality or any sort of altruism. At its most extreme, some pre-twentieth century doctrines subsequently described as Social Darwinism appear to anticipate eugenics and the race doctrines of Nazism. Critics, particularly proponents of creationism, have frequently tried to link evolution, Charles Darwin and Social Darwinism in the public mind with racialism, imperialism and eugenics, making the accusation that Social Darwinism became one of the pillars of Fascism and Nazi ideology, and that the consequences of the application of Social Darwinist policies by Nazi Germany created a very strong popular backlash against the theory.[6] Such criticisms are sometimes applied (and misapplied) to any other political or scientific theory that resembles Social Darwinism, for example criticisms levelled at evolutionary psychology (which had a conversely, Jewish origin).

Another example is recent scholarship that portrays Ernst Haeckel's Monist League as a mystical progenitor of the Völkisch movement and, ultimately, of the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler. Scholars opposed to this interpretation, however, have pointed out that the Monists were freethinkers who opposed all forms of mysticism, and that their organizations were immediately banned following the Nazi takeover in 1933 because of their association with a wide variety of progressive causes including feminism, pacifism, human rights, and early gay liberation movements.[7]

Similarly, capitalist economics, especially laissez-faire economics, is attacked by some socialists by equating it to Social Darwinism because it is premised on the idea of natural scarcity, also the starting point of Social Darwinism, and because it is often interpreted to involve a "sink or swim" attitude toward economic activity. However, there were few "Social Darwinists" after the 1880s who advocated capitalism and laissez-faire. Most of them demanded a strong government that would intervene in the economy or society to weed out inferiors. They did not believe the marketplace could do that. For example, Ludwig von Mises, an advocate of laissez-faire, argued in his book Human Action that Social Darwinism contradicts the principles of liberalism.

Social Darwinist theory itself does not necessarily engender a political position: some Social Darwinists would argue for the inevitability of progress, while others emphasise the potential for the degeneration of humanity, and some even attempt to enroll Social Darwinism in a reformist politics. Rather, Social Darwinism is an eclectic set of closely interrelated social theories -- much in the way that Existentialism is not one philosophy but a set of closely interrelated philosophical principles. The key argument is that nature works by survival of the fittest; so does society; those who have survived or flourished did so by natural processes; it is unnatural and inefficient to try and change that through philanthropy. Success or failure is usually dependent on natural traits.

Modern legacy

Social Darwinism as a movement has dwindled in credibility, as evolutionary theory has de-emphasized inter-species competition as well as the importance of violent confrontation in general.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
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I'll return with my own borrowed contributions to this topic next time.

City Knights (5)

Why do they hate us? It's a matter of attitude. It's a matter of worldview, and that is both taught and learned. In the Modern West our attitude is one of self as individual, and it is an attitude of the city. The city is a marketplace, not merely of goods and service and cash but of ideas. The city culture requires ideas, more and better ideas all the time; the city requires innovation and experiment and failure and wild attempts at something else. The city requires of individuals that they do not repeat the past but try other ideas freely as persons with a stake in the success, in competition with others, the marketplace deciding the winner, right or wrong. And it all comes to man deciding for himself that he will attempt to control his own events to the best of his abilities. There are two opposing views of control of life, and each must be based on legitimate authority. In the Modern West one is the authority in oneself. In the primitive world the authority is not the individual but the group. The question is one of legitimate control of existence and the meaning of life. In the Modern West, one controls ones own meaning of life. That is not so with the primitive. We've looked at Skinner and Frankl in this regard, and next we'll look at religion and socialism to see if we might find further understanding of "why they hate us." In the primitive world Man has no legitimate right to control the meaning of life, not even his own life's meaning. That authority rests entirely and exclusively in the will of higher power, whatever that might be. there is a Great Chain of Authority, as a rule, especially in the Muslim world. The average man has no right to tamper with or to question the nature of meaning. Insh'allah, humdillilah, baksheesh. But no active decision is allowed on the part of Man. Life is set and the course of it is determined by absolute authority that cannot ever be questioned. It's hardly different with the social determinists of the Left. The worldview is that one is not free to make ones own life in the face of higher power and authority. To be an individual is to separate oneself from the authority of the Will. To witness one disobeying the Will by ones volition is to witness a cosmic rebellion. It's not simply one man doing his own thing: it is an affront against the Will and the nature of the meaning of life. For the committed believer there is likely nothing more horrifying than the sight of one who is free to decide for himself his own life. To see an entire city of individuals doing new and innovative things on a continuous basis, to see them excel, to see them gain power and control over the primitive himself, that is to witness the horror of rebellion against the Good and the triumph of Satan. And that is to see the greatest threat to life there could be in this life and the next: The triumph of evil.


If Man is free, then he is free firstly from God. Imagine the affront to the fanatic believer. It doesn't get any better for the fanatic. It only gets far worse. Free man is free from the set destinies of the ordered and set plan, from the way it is and must rightly be. Free man decides for himself, and that leaves God with a secondary role, if any. It threatens the order of the universe. It attacks the meaning of life itself. And once the authority of God is challenged and even defied or even-- worse-- dismissed as not being at all, then the authority of the lesser is sure to follow: the authority of the state, the authority of the leader, the authority of the nation, father, family. There will end in no authority, all life being chaos. And it is in the city that such chaos begins and grows and takes on the signs of outward success. Free man in a city is beyond control of the group. He is a threat to the emotional existence of the primitive. And as the free man is mostly freest in the city, and that in the city there are more free men, then the city itself, designed for apostasy and evil alone, then the city is the ultimate in evil, a collective evil in itself, a cold machine that devours the formerly righteous, a machine dedicated to evil and the destruction of God and His plan. where man is free he must be brought back to the fold and redeemed, meaning the city must be destroyed. The city is an obvious success, even to the primitive. What we must question is the worth of the success. To the primitive, the success is in defiance of God and order and meaning. The sophistication of the city is contrary to the simplicity of the life of the primitive. All success in the city is therefore a further movement away from the Good. All that is good in the city is bad. More individuality is more apostasy and atheism. More freedom to think and innovate and create is to remove oneself further from God's right plan. More power is more use against the primitive, a sign of the devil overcoming the forces of Good. The city must be destroyed to restore the order of the good and of God.


In The Rat: A Perverse Miscellany, Barbara Hodgson writes that the rat lives in a state of continuous and life-long fear, not only of outside predators but of other rats. That fear is the normal state of primitive man. The only relief from the fear is in the faith he has in god or the higher will to conduct his affairs by the authority of the higher power. The primitive does not take control of his own fate or his own life because to do so would be to lose the protection of the meaning of his life as guided by the higher power. The primitive has no faith in himself or other men to control Nature or even other men. The primitive is determinedly passive in nearly all aspects of his life and that of others. He follows the set patterns of the past as closely as he may. He gives up to the fear of living and allows himself to die as he dies, never trying to change or better himself or others for fear of making all things even worse. Man as defeated rat.


The Rat-man's existence is out of his control. He must be in all ways passive and subject to the higher power that makes this life whatever it is, a test of some horrible kind. To resist by trying to control ones fate is to rebel against the Will. Rat-man doesn't, though others do. That others do is to bring down upon Rat-man all the ills of the uncontrollable universe that has always been a mystery and a terror. that the self-willed man is successful in his control is to show clearly the success of the counter-Will. The rise of the city and the success of independent man is only proof of the evil of the city and of free man.
Subsistence man is not one who merely lives in material poverty. That in itself is relative and relatively meaningless. The problem is in the subsistence of the mind. Communal man must hoard ideas and save them from others, doling them out sparingly and not allowing any to have more than his fair share. A new idea is not a net gain but a threat to the current store of ideas, a poisoning of the set that is what the communal man requires. A new idea is a bad thing in that it upsets the balance of the pie of subsistence. The meaning is clear in that it is not clear; and any attempt to clarify the meaning is to declare oneself in opposition to the meaning as it is. A book, a thought, a conversation with an outsider, a movie, all of these things can lead to a corruption of the meaning as it is; and that can only lead to confusion and chaos, to destruction. The city is endlessly new.


The greatest product of the city is in its being as the marketplace of new ideas, all of which are threatening to the primitive in and of themselves. Anything new is disruptive and destructive of the old and the valued. the new must be kept out or turned into the old. V.S. Naipaul in Among the Believers writes that Western technology is seen as Islamic, not as Western, regardless of its origins. One can in some cases assimilate new technology but not the ideas that create it. Even Muslims can have a city but they cannot have a marketplace of creativity and innovation that creates free men who further innovate creatively. Hence, Muslim cities become sprawling garbage heaps of primitives in densely packed communal areas, cities that are not cities at all. The primitive's city is a series of contiguous rat nests. The idiocy of rural living is brought home to the slum, and it is set in stone. All the insecurity of living a life of a passive man is then compounded by the press of poverty and the constant desire to work, all thwarted by the refusal of the culture of passivity to accept innovation and individuality. The limited pie of subsistence is continuously inspected for the first signs of diminishment. Then the rat-fear. Then the blame and the hatred of those who succeed. And the signal refusal to accept that one can act individually and personally as a free man to improve. Refusal because to act is to act against the Will. The only recourse is to react against the evil that is the city, that is Modernity and the West.


Why do they hate us?


The city is neither "natural" nor "organic." To proclaim oneself as a "child of nature" is to proclaim oneself as infantalised, to claim that one has no will or freedom to do other than what is in a state of resignation to the higher power. One disclaims ones volition in favor of infanthood. To go further and to claim that all are children of Nature is to infantalise the Human race itself. To strive for the "natural and organic" is to promote the dismissal of the Human volition. It is to dismiss and antagonise oneself against the city. To be an "ecologist" is to rebel against the city and against the primacy of Man. To do so is to promote passivity in the face of nature and to desire no control but that of the higher power outside oneself. It is primitive and infantile. And here we find two things seemingly in contradiction: The philobarbarist who proclaims the superiority of the primitive in touch with nature, as it were; and we see the philobarbarist also acting in loco parentis, acting as surrogate parent for the primitive who is incapable of taking care of his own life without the superior guidance of the enlightened parental gnostic from the Modern West, the typical Left dhimmi fascist.


The morally superior dhimmi fascist gnostic, like some latter-day Prometheus, is cast out from the heavens for helping Mankind better itself; and the punishment from the higher Will is torture unending. The dhimmi will never know the true bliss of ignorance as the primitive lives it in his state of noble savagery, but the dhimmi can take on the role he cannot lose in the saintly vocation of protecting the savage from those who would destroy him, those destroyers being the denizens of the city. the dhimmi, like a frantic and stern nanny, must control the bullies of the city who would ruin the pristine lives of the primitives, must forever watch to keep them in line and prevent them from harming the helpless, must forever defend the weak and the righteous idiots of primitivism. For the gnostic dhimmi there is only redemption in the making of all in the likeness, however inauthentic, of the primitive, the noble savage who is close to nature. To recreate the conditions of the communal farm in the city if the city cannot be destroyed is the highest goal. To make the city as "natural" as possible, to make life as "organic" as possible, and to keep the city from further encroaching on the natural is a high goal. For the gnostic, for the Philosopher King who sees beyond the limits of the Brass People, it is a sacrifice of self for a noble cause, that of protecting the children of nature. The only thing the city person can ever do is further destroy the organic and natural life of the primitive; therefore the best the gnostic dhimmi can do is stop wherever possible the Modernist in the protection of the primitive. The gnostic lives in a worldview that is learned and taught. It is not organic or natural.


The city is the reified metaphor of Modernity. The city is only a serious problem of the primitive and the retrograde Modernist in the past 250 years, but now it is the most serious problem they, and therefore we, face. Europe suffers worse than most other places on Earth, the cities there being newer in relation to the past experience of the feudalist commune of traditional life, a memory not forgotten, though not well understood and often romanticised by fascists for their own phantasist purposes. The recent rise of the Modernist city is a blight on the fascist mindscape. The fact that it's real is a severe pain in the mind of the Left dhimmi fascist. It is a pain he struggles to rid himself of continuously. And it is a pain he cannot live without. The Left dhimmi fascist cannot be without not being the Modernist. To be against the city is to exist in his own mind. Thus, the world and the worldview of the Left dhimmi is set on a foundation of phantasy. The real metaphor laid in concrete is the metaphor of evil for the phantasist dhimmi gnostic.


The Modernist city begins in Britain in c.1750 and the reaction against it in 1789 with the French Revolution. Prior to those two revolutions, the Industrial and the French Revolutions, feudalism and communalism held sway over the majority of the world's people. At the time, America was far away and sleighted as degenerate. In Europe and Britain, the centres of the civilised universe, Modernity broke out in force and began sweeping away the past Marx sentimentalises so cloyingly. The infantalisation of the masses that is the process of feudalism was crumbling, and the cities opened and expanded to take in the now orphaned peasants of past communes and obligation, men and women who had then to live as they would and they could as free men in a free market in which they sold themselves according to their abilities on a block that paid little heed to their inherent worth as Human but cared only for their labour. People, shoved from the subsistence life of the feudal collective into the harsh new reality of the city, found themselves without the former ties of family and feudal bond. They were, like it or not, free-- and free to starve to death. No more sharing, not more giving back to the community, no more organic life close to nature: now only industry and factories and division of labour that made no natural sense to the piecemeal worker under-paid, over-worked, fined, and brutalised by Capital. Family, clan, tribe, God Himself, all disappeared from the life inside the city. Man was free, and he was alone, one of the mass of other free and solitary men alone.


With the build-up of industry in Britain and the violent overthrow of feudalism in France came man's parole papers, unwanted often, and perplexing more often. Man was suddenly free from the bonds of feudalism but free to die without protection by the lords and priests of yesterday's system. Man was suddenly a property owner, and the property was his own life, worth next to nothing in itself. And so man took his worthless life to the city to trade it for existence. Thereafter and till this day and beyond, set in the reaction. Man, cast out from the pitiful parody of Eden, found himself alone in the city ever-growing. And some, like retarded children, fought to return to his natural home, though the room was now rented out and he could not come back. The reaction was fought not just among the titled and the land-owning aristocracy but also by the peasants now proletarianised and atomic. The reaction was fought most successfully not by any of them but by the priests of intellect, by the gnostics, by the Romantics and the phantasists, by poets and intelligent consumptives. The rise of the city and of individualism within was fought by those who hated freedom from the order of Nature. The reaction was fueled and spread by the intellectuals who desired a return to the nature of the peasant in his rightful place on the land in a state of subservience, the intellectual in his rightful place as priest of gnostic wisdom, and Nature ruling all. The revolutions, the work of the French and the Jews, had to be stopped and reversed and destroyed to restore the natural order of the universe. That battle continues to this day.


The Germans, the German Romantics, took the lead in the reaction against our triune revolution. Others across the world joined in, and today continue to do so. They are all united in a hatred of Modernity and man as owner of his own life as his own property. The modern man is free from the blood and soil of the feudal past. Many see that as a bad thing. Many see it as something so bad it must be destroyed entirely and order restored so Nature again holds sway. Man who is atomic and living in the city is not part of the group any longer. Man in the city outside the control of the commune is free to choose, and he often chooses a woman who is not of the same commune. The blood is mixed, and the purity of the blood is lost. Man, choosing himself to leave one city for another, loses his language and adopts another, leaving behind his organic ties to his family and his people, losing his organic thoughts in a cosmos of Babel. Not being within the realm of his communal soil he is alienated from the volk. He has no boundaries to identify himself as one of them or one of us. He is cosmopolitan. He is not a part of Nature, and he is therefore inauthentic, a phony man. He lives in an unnatural setting, and he pollutes the purity of Nature by his existence as he is now. He is the city, and the city is corrupt. Man is no longer the colorful peasant working in his rightful place: he is now a part of a teeming mass of drab and unhealthy creatures fed daily into machines for the sake of mere profit. He no longer takes his place in a decorative tableau on the local manorial estate, he is a thing like the other things swarming in the city. The Romantic individual sees him not as a free man and owner of a private life of worth but as a part of a mass of aliens crawling and swarming and devouring Nature for the sake of cash rather than for the sake of purity and Nature and high feeling among sensitive people. Today the mass man is the city man, and the peasant left is the primitive. It is the primitive the sensitive Romantic must preserve to recreate the phantasy of the tableau of the Golden Era. To the Left dhimmi fascist he city is a marring blight on the vision of perfection of the utopia that was and should again be.


In our previous look at the intellectuals and the masses we saw DH Lawrence and TS Eliot and others hoping for the extermination of the masses to make way for the revived esteem of the intellectuals. We've seen similar or worse in Pianka, some kind of cartoon character in the field of ecology. And we have seen full-blown Nazi Party officials such as Darre and Heidegger sentimentalising about Nature and Man's place somewhere in its embrace as another minor part thereof. Let us turn briefly to Buruma and Margalit for their view of the city and its critics, first Engels, a premier Communist and hater of Modernity and the masses.


The following quotations from Engels' work are from Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, who "saw something 'repulsive' in the city crowds of Manchester and London.... The city is where people of 'all classes and all ranks crowded past each other,' indiscriminately, promiscuously, and, above all, indifferently. What repelled Engels was the lack of solidarity in this society of "atomised" individuals, each going after his own 'selfish' interests." [Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism. New York: Penguin, 2005; p. 25.]


Most of us would call that individualism and privacy and really not our concern. but most of us aren't Communist philosophes. Those see man as a thing to be managed and determined by his alterable environment. The city is a sore on the body of Mother Nature, and they mostly see it as something to be done away with where possible. The lot of them, from von Herder to Marx to Nietzche to Heidegger to Pianka are fascists who hate Humanity as a collection of individuals and who in turn reduce men to mass. They do this mostly in reaction the the French Revolution and the revolution of Industry. Where and when man is a private being he cannot be managed as a farm animal. The city is not a farm, and man, not a child, is hated for displeasing his would-be masters. When man is the owner of his own life he doesn't quite want the gnostic Philosopher King telling him how to live and why. The gnostic knows this quite well, and his resentment at having lost his place of privilege is deep and dangerous. Our intelligentsia, then, fall away from the past project of saving the working classes to now saving the primitives in the Third World. Abandoned by the working classes in the West, the intelligentsia now lurch toward the Muslim world for candidates for their superiour wisdom and leadership. The hatred of the intelligentsia is still the same, the hatred of Man as private being, and the cause, Modernity and Capital, are still the same enemies. The centre of all is the Modernist city. Betrayed by the ungrateful working clases who make a living and don't care about the gnostics, the latter now flock to save the noble savages, particularly The! Palestinian! People!, from the hated Jews and other cosmopolitan people of Modernity. What really is not our concern obsesses the anti-Modernist counter-revolutionary Left dhimmi fascist. They hate the city because it allows for individuals to own their own lives as private possessions without regard for the gnostics, without homage, without respect for the intellectuals and the idiots who claim themselves as such anyway. The intellegentsia now promote the cause of those who will follow them, the primitives of the world and the local reactionaries of our Modernity. Hence, we arrive at philobarbarism in search of a community of farm animals they can lead and emote about. the primitives will likely kill them. Perhaps it's only a hope.

Why do they hate us? They are the primitives living in a poverty-striken state of the mind in which nothing can come or go without severe loss to the group. No idea can enter and no thing can leave without the poverty of the mind being left in a state of shock followed by rage, hatred, blame and violence.


Why do they hate us? Because we are private. We do as we do and we succeed or fail regardless of the poverty of the mind of the primitives. They really don't count for much in our world. But we do in theirs: we are the harrowing of the Will that the primitives fear will provoke a retribution that might affect them, more than likely postivily when our arrongance is crushed by the gods in revenge for our rebellion against Nature and the meaning of life as the primitives understand it.


Why do we hate us? We hate our own because we are free to think for ourselves, and we just don't need a load ot frilly Romantics telling us how bad we are. Our intelligentsia hate us because they have empty lives and empty minds and they are fatuous and pretentious and stupid, and they don't like it when we don't take them as seriously as our mediocre intelligentsia feels we should take them. They turn instead from our laughter and scorn to the primitives who are too stupid and ignorant and crazy to know our intelligentsia for what they are. Yes, our intelleigentsia hate us because we laugh at them. In turn, our intelligentsia support those who destroy our cities and our buildings and our Modernity.


They hate us because their attitudes demand it. People are taught and people learn attitudes. Today our intelligentsia teach and learn that the West is a bad place and a bad concept. People hate us because that's what they learn. It's still a marketplace of ideas, and ours are obviously not selling so well as one would expect them to. Perhaps we should innovate and try new ideas to bring out those buyers who have sense and decency and intellectual capital. If we do so we will create in our lands and across the world a new Revolution. It all comes to man deciding for himself if he will attempt to control the events of his own destiny.