Allan Bloom: on undermining the American vision
I’ve written in praise of Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind several times before, but here I go again.
It was published in 1987, which is now very close to 30 years ago. And yet its relevance has only grown in the intervening years. Here’s an example that resonates today:
Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus…All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal—certainly not in France, Italy, Germany, or even England…Belonging to one of these peoples may be expained as a sentiment, an attachment to one’s own, akin to the attachment to father and mother, but Frenchness, Englishness, Germaness remain, nonetheless, ineffable. Everybody can, however, articulate what Americanness is…
But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist…
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
Every sentence of Bloom’s usually contains more food for thought than most entire books do. The Closing of the American Mind is so dense with thought that the reader has to pause frequently to mull it over and digest it, as one would a particularly rich meal. And not only do I agree with most of it, but it’s expressed in prose so clear and yet so lively, so succinct and yet deeply erudite, so detailed and yet broadly linking widely disparate thoughts and knowledge, that my admiration for the author (who continued in his lifetime to identify as a liberal, by the way) is enormous. Bloom was a man who was not only unique in his thoughts, but courageously unafraid to speak and write them regardless of where it might lead him and who might disapprove.
If you read the above passage of Bloom’s and think about our political position at the moment, I think you will realize that Obama was no anomaly, no outsider come to undermine America, but the culmination (so far, anyway) of at least a century of hard work. The ground was prepared long ago, and what Bloom wrote in 1987 could be considered a sort of prophetic vision of things to come, but not one of the extra-sensory variety.
[NOTE: Everyone who reads this blog at all regularly knows what I think of Donald Trump. But I do know that one of his main appeals—and probably the only thing about him that I think is both appealing and sincere—is the fact that he ascribes to the traditional vision of America described by Bloom, the one that so many people (including me) are angry at having seen undermined for so long.
By the way, when Bloom speaks of “equality” he’s not referring to the leftist idea of equality of outcome, but to the more traditional American idea of equality of opportunity.]
Neo-neocon, you may perhaps enjoy reading an essay by John P. East (at the time of his writing a professor of political science, later to become Sen. John East) which I first encountered only a few days ago, though it seems to have been first published in 1977. The essay addresses more or less the same teaching Bloom himself worked upon, titled Leo Strauss: Escaping the Stifling Clutches of Historicism. East’s essay is a sort of brief field survey, so it does not descend too awfully deep into the proper weeds of our concern.
(I beg pardon for the georgics — in defense of which, I suggest merely that some sort of cultivation seems to be at issue in Bloom)
Did he identify as a classical liberal or a modern mutation? The term has changed meaning a fair bit over the years.
That looks like a book I should go find. Thanks for sharing!
Did he identify as a classical liberal or a modern mutation?
What of the other possibility that he “identif[ied]” as neither, Tesh? Identity politics as such isn’t actually Bloom’s gig. In this instance, the first couple of sentences of his Preface to The Closing reads:
Yes, Bloom meant more equality of opportunity, but to be even more precise, he meant equality under the law. That is the part that increasingly is being lost, and the corrosive effects are becoming more and more pronounced.
Well at least he did not live long enough to experience the on going train wreck. We are not that so fortunate. Facts are irrelevant to the masses today. It is all about feelings and “good intentions”. Never about facts and reality. Rest in Peace Mr. Bloom and thank you for your insights. Too bad more of our leaders do not have your depth and insight 🙁
“Allan David Bloom (September 14, 1930 — October 7, 1992) was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon and Alexandre Kojé¨ve. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, é‰cole Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago. Bloom championed the idea of Great Books education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.[2] Characterized as a conservative in the popular media,[3] Bloom denied that he was a conservative, and asserted that what he sought to defend was the ‘theoretical life’.[4] Saul Bellow wrote Ravelstein, a roman é clef based on Bloom, his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom
Peter Wood (h/t Insty): “How Anthropology was Corrupted and Killed”
Regard the transition from the “open” to the “closed”.
The noted free market economist Ludwig von Mises rightly observed that, ‘Political ideas that have long dominated the public’s mind cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe…’
In so many areas and on so many levels are storm clouds gathering around America. And all of it is due to men free to exercise their stupidity and full of the arrogance that calls stupidity… cleverness.
Here is what the LIVs fail to grasp;
“A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.” Ludwig von Mises
Europe is at the beginning of the end in proving von Mises’ assertion. Western Europe will become ‘Eurabia’ and Eastern Europe will be forced to accept Putin’s ‘protection’.
sdferr,
A man who believes in our having a soul… is not one of today’s leftists. Classical liberal is the label that applies.
Classical liberal is the label that applies.
No Geoffrey, not if Ancient liberal applies more nearly.
Semantic games are beneath us 😉 Perhaps we can compromise with ‘ancient classical liberal’?
This is no semantic game, I’m sorry to have to say. It amounts to the difference between having a concern who Bloom says he is, and having no concern at all.
A Trumpster offers his take
Wading Into Left-Speak: The Closing of the American Mind
http://articlevblog.com/2016/05/wading-into-left-speak-the-closing-of-the-american-mind/
and/or
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3426690/posts
I don’t know how I managed for so long to put off reading Allan Bloom’s 1986 The Closing of the American Mind..
I’m only through the Preface and Introduction, and the condition of American higher education he described thirty years ago is chilling. I might not read any further. The young people of that era are now the heads of various university departments and occupy high positions in government including the presidency. Today, the students of Bloom’s book coddle all the dangerous nonsense we’ve recently seen in the form of moral relativism, Black Lives Matter, White Privilege, LGBT baloney, and the active importation and protection of Mexicans and Muzzies at the expense of Americans.
Bloom regarded his work as a report from the front, which implies he might be just a disinterested embedded reporter. Uh, no way; he is a protagonist in the fight to save Western Civilization.
Rather than attempt to present his observations in a smoothed essay, I’ll list some of the highlights I’ve collected in the form of bullet points below. Like me, you’ll catch the drift of how Obama’s team and the media rationalize the destruction of our republic.
– Bloom wrote that almost all students say they believe the truth is relative. No matter their backgrounds, they are unified in their relativism and allegiance to equality. These have replaced the traditional inalienable natural rights that used to be the American grounds for a free society. This isn’t the equality of our Framers before God and the Law.
– We, the True Believers, are dangerous. History proves the world was mad. Men were so mad they thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecution, slavery, etc. Don’t bother to correct mistakes. Rather, don’t think about being right at all.
– Relativism is important because it is necessary to openness, which is the only virtue inculcated by the last fifty years of primary education. While the term suggests a student body in search of the truth, it is precisely the opposite.
– Before: Emphasis on natural rights, in which class, race, religion, national origin, became dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which gave men common interests and made them truly brothers.
– Modern openness rejects all that. There is no attention to natural rights. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything.
– Leftists resist the notion that outsiders must give up their culture and individuality. They are angry that one must participate in natural rights or be doomed to an existence on the fringe.
– Openness was to give ethnic groups respect from those not disposed to give it, like the WASP majority. Modern social science is designed to do away with the WASP majority.
– Our Founders’ principles are impedimenta.
– Recall our Founders didn’t much care for factions, yet they didn’t even try to suppress them. Instead, they came up with an elaborate governing structure in which factions tended to cancel each other out, and make way for the common good.
– The Constitution was to protect fundamental rights from majoritarianism.
– Thus, the great Leftist opening is actually a great closing. Values are relative. Create whatever lifestyle you wish. Leftists might consult a guru from time to time, yet they’ll avoid the historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hours from each busy day “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.”
– Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. Openness as practiced is meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys the good.
– Cultural relativism destroys the West’s intellectual claims and renders it just another culture.
– Unfortunately, the West is defined by its need for the justification of its ways or values, by its need for discovery of nature, by its need for philosophy and science. This is its cultural imperative. Deprived of that, the West will collapse.
– The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature. What makes its political structure possible is the use of the rational principles of natural right to found a people, and thus uniting the good with one’s own.
– IOW, the government established by the Constitution promised untrammeled freedom to reason — the essential reason that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion. And this regime, contrary to all claims to the contrary, was founded to overcome ethnocentrism, which is in no sense a discovery of social science.
End
Don’t reach for the razor blade. Evidence of the superiority of Natural Law is all around. The rise of Trump alone reflects an electorate disgusted with our national trajectory, a trajectory created by over a hundred years of Leftism!
If America was so drugged on the moral relativism of Bloom’s book, over half of the states wouldn’t have challenged Obamacare and Obama’s open borders. Progressive California wouldn’t have passed both a statute and constitutional amendment in support of traditional marriage. Sure, college kids who do not yet have a positive stake in real life, and very well paid senior members of government and almost all of media can afford to goosestep toward the Utopian cliff, yet how often have you read of parents in support of Common Core? I’m not aware of any parents standing up at a local school board meeting to demand that educators make their children stupid.
I do not wish to imply that our situation isn’t critical, yet Natural Law is real. The history of repressive regimes show that while our nature can be suppressed, it cannot be destroyed. Our task is to channel national disgust away from the bad and toward the good.
Voting every two years is insufficient effort. Contact and press your state legislators to apply for an Article V convention; volunteer to the Convention of States.
Here is more support for Bloom’s thesis:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434834/jason-riley-virginia-tech-speaking-invitation-rescinded
“Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes”
As an example of what kids are taught… some time ago “All the Right Stuff” by Walter Dean Myers was required reading (still is). It is a redemptive story about a boy in Harlem headed down the wrong path in life. The book and author received many accolades.
The reader is introduced to the Socratic concept of the “social contract”, that the boy is mentored on. The boy realizes there are “rules” he has to abide by, and that it is his responsibility to make something of his own life within those boundaries.
Good so far.
But there are parts of the story that use the social contract concept to mean one group imposing their rules on another. For example, it portrays the colonists and westward expansion simply as the “white folks” imposing their social contract over everyone else’s.
This and other examples leave the impression that might makes right, and that there isn’t an inherent / objective / G0d given basis for right vs wrong, nor are there “natural rights”, but that we have our rules merely because that is what those in power want them to be.
This is where the idea of “moral equivalence” starts to take hold.
Also, IMO it seems to subtly imply the concept of “white guilt”, and “privilege”.
These were not the main takeaways, and the story does end with the boy focusing on his education, and avoiding all the foolishness going on around him.
We, at least, could address this issue so there is no confusion that we don’t agree with the concept. But, most parents won’t/can’t read what their kids are assigned, so this gets past them.
It is not like there is a conspiracy to inject all this into the curriculum, but, like the MSM, it is the overriding bias of those who are making decisions that this meets their “standards”.
Yet, the seeds are planted, just the same, sending millions of children adrift in a fog about why America is even exceptional.
I wouldn’t try to classify Bloom politically. If you read his book, you’ll see that he isn’t arguing for any particular position.
The early and late portions of the book describe the current scene, and are most often quoted. But the middle of the book, the guts of it, discusses the philosophers of the Enlightenment. It doesn’t draw conclusions, and in that respect it maddens some people. What it does is lay out that there is a Western tradition that has grappled with these big questions. It’s a philosophy course hidden inside a bestseller. It doesn’t advocate for a particular philosophy; it advocates for the cause of thinking.
Japan is getting close with India, as of 2 years ago. Japan is well on the way to re arming.
If things happen as I predict, this won’t merely be Civil War 2 for America, but will also involve the ME, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Korea, and India.
Basically another world war. Oh goody. Sounds like the End Times in all those dystopias.
So… how’s the next US Messiah going to use elections and dominating power politics to save us then?
“This is no semantic game, I’m sorry to have to say. It amounts to the difference between having a concern who Bloom says he is, and having no concern at all.” sdferr
Bloom’s courageous analysis tells us who and what he was, far better than a label could ever do.
Events, beginning with the IRS destruction of the Tea Parties, continuing with the specter of a Lonesome Rhodes v. Lucretia Borgia election, have me so demoralized I can barely make a fist. I am in awe at your resuliance.
Y,
I have foreboding thoughts that the geopolitical/global financial stage is being set for WW3. When all else fails, slaughter millions. I keep these thoughts to myself for the most part as I am of the never give up think positive type who nonetheless prepares for the worst. If it happens the event horizon is no more than 5 years in the distance.
We can look to the wiki cited above and see Bloom seeks to defend the “theoretical life”. Chasing the footnote there [4], we find Bloom’s next book Giants and Dwarfs [pages 17-18] the source of the citation. There Bloom’s Preface to Giants and Dwarfs consists in his address to Harvard University given in 1988, the year after publication of The Closing. We find Bloom speaking of the many false attacks on his Closing book, both from the political left and from the political right, attacks seeking to portray Bloom as many things he is not. His reply to these attacks is much the same to either. To gist: I’m a friend of philosophy; my way the way of philosophy.
Bloom then speaks of Arthur Schlesinger’s attack and to Schlesinger contrasts the attack of Walker Percy, of whom Bloom says that Percy “suspects that I am a nihilist”. Bloom then writes:
It’s a difficult business, teaching the meaning of philosophy [whether in ancient times or in any time] to moderns who reject the ancients as men incapable of knowledge the like of our own, as men of so superstitious and so dark a time. Such is the recurring hubris of human beings, eh wot?
Nolanimrod:
It ain’t easy.
But other people have kept writing, and somehow kept their spirits up, though a lot worse.
Reading about Socrates’ trial did teach me about human nature and how fallen people truly are. Even the ones with the “right politics”, it doesn’t actually matter all that much to have the right politics. It’s sort of like being born in the “right religion”. It doesn’t matter what you belong to if you never made a conscious choice to seek it out.
Here’s some Socratic wisdom:
“I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet in law ought any man use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death, if a man is willing to say or do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs deeper than death.” – Socrates before the Athenian death panel
The Christians admire Jesus and saints for similar reasons, the literal inability to Submit to Evil Authority, no matter the cost. Unfortunately for humanity, most humans tend to find these individuals and then try to kill them.
What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools.
True. He might have added that it also filters down into and molds every aspect of culture eventually.
Come on folks!
Our Founding Fathers had it so much worse than us. They literally had to put their lives and all their wealth on the line.
If Trump wins the nomination, then is surely is Hillary for four years.
If Hillary gets in, we look more like Europe. Not great by any means, but not Venezuela by a long shot. Yes, the corruption. But not on a Brazil/Argentina scale.
Japan is is running deficits with Debt levels at 200% of GDP for over a decade now, and their aged is well ahead of our Boomer population bulge – precarious, but not a disaster for them. We breached 100% in 2012 and are still just over 100%. We will survive.
Trump wins nomination and then presidency – may be a different story. A hot head with an authoritarian bent who has no governing philosophy.
Not so fast, resigning ourselves to a Trump nomination…
I read that total NY primary votes were lower than Romney’s in 2012, when he already basically had the nomination in hand (sorry, lost the link today).
Guess what? People stayed home!
This is how we lose!!!!
We get absorbed into a funk and believe the press on Trump’s “momentum” when the facts suggest it is not all that it is being spun as.
If the good folks of Indiana are convinced of the same, guess what happens?? Self-fulfilling prophecy anyone?
I’d be happy even if it comes to the delegates sitting on their hands in the first round, even if they are “committed” to Trump (who says they have to vote?). Or not showing up in the first place.
Either way, and this is key… all the while saying “the rules are rigged” since Trump got more than his “fair share” of delegate allocations based on the vote results.
Turn the G.D**n argument around on Trump!
What’s he going to do about it then?
Stamp his feet? Throw a riot? Sue? Leave?
Messy. Hardball. But, if the rules allow for it (or are grey), all good if we can say… Bye. Bye. Donny boy!
Big Maq:
If I were in a primary state right now, there’s no way I’d stay home unless I literally was unable to get there. I’d crawl over the proverbial broken glass…
And I cannot understand people who wouldn’t put forth the utmost effort to vote in this primary.
That said, I do feel that a lot of people have given up. I’m not planning to. Nor should the GOP—nor the delegates—surrender to an “inevitable” that is not inevitable. For months now—many many months—Trump supporters have been singing the “inevitability” tune. Trump may end up the nominee, but it’s not inevitable unless enough people think it is.
The donald can not be the nominee if he comes to the convention with 1236, unless Kasich is able to persuade enough of his delegates to put djt over 1236 in exchange for the VP slot on the second ballot. . Although Kasich states he would never settle for VP, he, like Boehner, is a prostitute. IMO, if Cruz takes IN and CA, djt’s only path is through Kasich. Rubio is not going to fall on his sword for the donald.
Tomorrow and later in CA will write the 2016 gop history. Death of a party or one party rule is at stake.
I’m voting for Cruz on June 7 in California no matter what. He may win my 1st congressional district bordering Oregon, but not many others. How he does tomorrow will pretty much tell the story.
This came in on my email today, from my FIL, who sends me things because my MIL has drunk the MSM kool-aid completely. He retired some time ago from the AF after being a fighter pilot in 3 wars, and desk jockey up to the 3-star level.
*
I think this is one email that needs to be forwarded until every American with a computer receives it, including those in Washington DC…
_________________
The year is 1907, one hundred and nine years ago.
Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907.
‘In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.’
Every American citizen needs to read this!
KEEP THIS MOVING!!!
The Other Chuck:
“What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools.
True. He might have added that it also filters down into and molds every aspect of culture eventually.”
While conservatives should be undertaking a full-spectrum social activist movement, Bloom’s work goes to why if conservatives will or can only invest in activism in one area, that area should be the campus and academy.
The campus and academy are primary fount and incubator, as well as vector, of social ideas and culture. For that reason and because of the microcosmic scale, activism on campus offers the best return on investment for activists with limited means. That’s why social activist movements are often born on campus.
The strategic evaluation and effectiveness that inform the Left’s vigilantism on campus are the same reasons that conservatives should be zealously, vigorously competing in the activist game on campus.
Eric,
There should be an effort to inform appplicants and students how much money they will be paying back on student loans to keep these diversity administrators in their offices. Then clearly ask them whether they are tough enough to get through college without them. The college administrators should start to notice some significant decreases in both students and applications.
Yet you keep supporting Cruz.
There’s an old proverb: a crazy man is the one who wants something to change but keeps doing the same.
Yann:
Your comment is completely devoid of logic.
I wrote [emphasis mine[ “the only thing about Trump that I think is both appealing and sincere.” Get it? The ONLY thing.
And I’m being generous and giving Trump the benefit of the doubt there in alleging he sincerely holds those feelings.
But what I didn’t write, although I certainly might have, is that Ted Cruz most definitely has that attitude of support for and belief in “the traditional vision of America described by Bloom.” Not only that, he understands it, and seeks to promote it, and is smart enough to understand how to do so (he supports and understands, among other things, the Constitution, and small government).
And in your last sentence, what on earth are you talking about when you say “the same”? Are you under the impression that Ted Cruz (or any true conservative, for that matter, since Reagan) has been president for a while?
The book was published in 1987. Do you think that Reagan didn’t believe in that traditional vision? Do you think George HW Bush didn’t either?
But that changed NOTHING.
Ted Cruz would be another more conservative president, not that different from those two ones. And then you would have a new Obama, and America would continue its decline.
Conservatives don’t like risks. Cruz would be likely quite a good president for more civilized times. But we are not in civilized times anymore. Either you take some risks, either you’ll be a banana republic in a few decades. Look at Venezuela, because that could be your future.
Right now, America is going down, and you will need something more that Ted Cruz to stop the decline. Perhaps Trump won’t be able to do anything about it. Indeed, quite surely he wont, since it’s too late, but at least maybe, only maybe, you could have a chance.
Bloom and several commenters here are correct. It is a question, almost metaphysical, of a changing anthropology and self-understanding.
Whatever you believe strongly enough to assert in public aside, one could not have more divergent and antithetical views of human meaning and existence than between the idea of “man” in the scholastic tradition of Christendom (or even late antiquity) and the postmodern … I don’t even know what to call it since it is not even intellectually coherent … “view”, I guess.
On the one hand you have a rational creature with a dual nature; part material and passing, part everlasting and supernatural; a being which is directly related and responsible to the creator and sustainer of being itself.
On the other hand you have an ultimately unintelligible monism in which elements of an meaningless material field pointlessly organize themselves with varying degrees of complexity to the point wherein some of them “internally” register their own existence – for a period – until they pass and permanently, irretrievably, disintegrate. Sparks, impelled upwards into the darkness by a fire which will itself wink forever out, or reconstitute in a way in which all that was, will be so completely eradicated that it will, in fact, have never existed at all.
In this second scheme there really is no place for virtues or excellence, or even rights and wrongs, since kinds themselves do not exist as objective entities or categories. To be a female for instance is simply to be a consciousness subject to the “tyranny of biology”, and from that standpoint no excellence as a female makes any difference.
In fact the entire notion of humanity disappears and becomes so fuzzy that talking to some of these people is like talking to someone mentally ill – which might often be the case when it comes to your talking to modern liberals.
I have been surprised recently, despite my constant harping on this same chord, at how deeply this nihilism has penetrated nowadays into “everyday people” who will quite blithely or even vehemently admit that human being per se means nothing to them, but persons (whatever that mask is supposed to represent or signify) do – sort of.
It is not just the mentally ill jabber of some academic somewhere, which nowadays places the life of a monkey above the life of a human infant. “Normal”, if you can call them that, people are saying it as well.
Now just what a post-rational “human”, ideologically abstracted from his biological teleology is supposed to ultimately and essentially be in this trans-human world, I cannot say; and have not been able to get any of these types to clearly say.
I used to sarcastically refer to them as having reduced themselves to will-to-power bags of meaningless appetite. That is all I could see as logically left to them after performing the reductions and transmutation which their own ideology entailed.
I think now that many fewer of them would feel insulted by this characterization than were just a decade or so ago. They have entered the void, and they are content. You can tell by the delirious shrieking, that they are happy there.
Japan is getting close with India, as of 2 years ago. Japan is well on the way to re arming.
——————–
Not just India. I’ve heard of Japan making agreements with a number of nations in the region, including Vietnam. And also note that Abe recently managed to get approved a new reading of the “Japan renounces war” section of the constitution that allows Japan to engage in hostilities in defence of a military ally.
If China does decide to make a military grab against one of its neighbors, look for a new round of attempts to guilt Japan over its actions in World War 2.
If China does decide to make a military grab against one of its neighbors, look for a new round of attempts to guilt Japan over its actions in World War 2.
A lot of those are just China keeping their slavish workers hating on foreigners.
It’s similar to white slave lords in 1830 getting whites to hate/fear blacks, Republicans, and abolitionists.
CCTV is pretty much China’s version of a world propaganda arm. And they can reach pretty far.
Abe’s problem is all the anti nuclear people in Japan. They are going to need nuclear power, and more, if they want to be a strategic alliance.