Compared to our great-great grandfathers we're all liberals.
So let's not kid ourselves that we're really going to stop progress. What we can hope to do is to attempt to steer this hulking ship in some fashion and some way that would be better than another (and according to the Advocatus Diaboli and Ferdinand Bardamu that's even futile). The Unabomber may have made some good insights about the psychology of over-socialized leftists, but I'm not in his camp wrt rolling back technological advance. Tech advance = human advance. And I think most of us want something better out of humanity. Ask Pro-Male Anti-Feminist Tech, I'm sure he'd agree.
One new blog I find myself clicking to over and over is Liberal Biorealism. Just a month or so ago, there was some discussion across the HBDosphere about whether or not HBD (HBD, being a euphemism for human biodiversity, which is a euphemism for human biological differences, which is a euphemism for race realism, which is better stated as biorealism, since the differences between and among human races is not the sole focus, though it is a major one, sex differences being the other) was inherently conservative, or if widespread knowledge and acceptance of it would hasten more liberal policy initiatives. Well, let's just say that the writer of Liberal Biorealism has taken up the real challenge, not of convincing rightists of further reason to be rightist (as is the case with many political HBD sites), but of mounting a defense of our Western Enlightenment ideals in light of 'new' biological knowledge.
And I wish him well on his quest. In fact, like I stated at the top, we're all basically liberals, it's just the degree to which we are 'liberated' may differ. We're all liberated from the farm and subsistence living. Many of us are liberated from religious doctrine, if not it's feeling. It just may happen that some people don't function as well in a liberal society/civilization, and for biological reasons. Of course I'm being a mite facetious when I say may, because I obviously believe that those in the bottom cellar of the cognitive ability curve (lower than ~85 IQ) are not tooled for life in the complex world of post-industrial, highly-anonymous society.
I say transparency of knowledge is the best way to go, which is Liberal by the way. Put it all on the table, what we know about human differences and similarities and the degrees to which these affect (softly determine) our behaviors. Most so-called 'liberals' are not Liberal in this regard. Many believe either one or more of the following,
A) Such interest or research into human differences is morally wrong (or it aligns with 'bad feelings' anterior to thought on the subject).
B) Such interest or research into human differences will eventuate justification for discrimination or for "right-wing" political use against affirmative action, EO, EEOC, etc. policies.
C) Such interest or research into human differences will cause mental/emotional harm to individuals who are members of low-performing groups.
There are more reasons, but I think I should start by answering these.
Regarding A, calling some action or thought into question as "morally wrong" necessitates a lengthy description as to why it is morally wrong. At that point, the liberal has two options, either explain further justifications for deeming the action morally wrong (as in calling on B or C or others), OR cite a 'bad feeling' connected with the idea of interest or research into human differences. I do not simply eschew the 'bad feeling' defense out of hand. Intuitions of 'wrongness' are as human as breathing. They are similar to the feelings of disgust we may feel when considering unsavory hypothetical situations. Again, this may be a situation where one person's intuition is at loggerheads with another, which could possibly be explained by HBD.
Regarding simply B (without notions of Kantian wrongness), it is mainly a 'slippery slope' type rationale: If we acknowledge human differences except the most superficial (RACE=skin color, SEX=differing genitalia), then we are simply making official common prejudices (common inferences), thereby causing further discrimination, a retrograde behavior that violates fairness, which we take to mean equal treatment. A counterargument to this might be that HBD knowledge would, rather, lend more (substantial) credence to the enactment of further affirmative action-type policies BECAUSE of inherent differences.
Regarding C, because of what is found in books like The Bell Curve or The Global Bell Curve or the vocabulary test on the GSS or from every grade school classroom across the entire nation, the officialization of such knowledge without complaint or the interdiction of plausible-sounding scenarios of withheld accomplishment WOULD create an atmosphere of defeat and bad feelings on the part of individuals who "happen to be" part of a disadvantaged group. And so the harm done to them individually and as a group tagged as inferior in some domain ought to be remedied. One counterargument to this would be that "life isn't fair", but I don't think that would go over.
One major component that is missing from my post here is that of value priority. In a utilitarian mode, what is it that is good about interest or research into human differences? Does that good ever trump the good of fairness as defined by liberals or the notion of equality? I hope to talk more about this later.
I DO GET what the liberals are saying. But how long do they think they can obfuscate the facts of inequality? Do they have the power and prestige of the Catholic Church of the Medieval Age? Yes. But for how long? What is their endgame? Order, Progress, or just simply feeling good inside?
Maybe we need a little more Liberalism and a little less liberalism.
The end game is always power and control.
Tech advance = human advance. And I think most of us want something better out of humanity. Ask Pro-Male Anti-Feminist Tech, I'm sure he'd agree.
You know me well, Prime.
I will be addressing all of this when I get a chance. The very brief answer things are better and worse than your think, and there's a massive rear guard action problem. I know this will take a lot of explaining.
The idea that all people are equal was one of those big points in Enlightenment philosophy. Of course, it meant equal in the eyes of the Law.
People are not perfectly equal biologically, and America has been trying to defy the math on this one.
We're not quite to the point of Harrison Bergeron, yet. However, our education system has been giving Gold Stars for Effort for a long time. Not to mention our social welfare infrastructure.
I'm not a utilitarian in the least, but I agree (for different reasons) that a better understanding of our drives at a lower (physical) level is not only important, but necessary. It isn't like the people on the back-end of the bell curve are being treated as a mere means . . .
@ Talleyrand,
For many if not most political uses of liberalism, the primary motivation may be control. But, in an intellectual/philosophical/personal vein, the instigator of liberal thought is the ultimate good of freedom of choice and autonomy (requiring personal responsibility).
Most modern political liberals (MPLs) derive their political identity from their opposition to religious and military authorities (and now corporate authorities) because of their authoritarian natures, which are illiberal.
While most MPLs would rather be ignorant of foreign religious, military, and corporate authoritarianism, some are so swept up in a fit of progressive (spiritual-like) ecstasy that they wish to use foreign authoritarians as a wedge against domestic authoritarians. And so this battle would purge at least their own of the sin of authority (the supposed "illiberal" sine qua non).
@ Max,
Not only MPLs, but conservatives EQUIVOCATE on the use of 'equal' all the time. The most dastardly, thickheaded conservatives I know take Jefferson's words, well, just that one statement, to be gospel, which cannot be questioned. Jefferson, Locke, et al. meant one thing, but now "equality" is being used to mean "absolute equality in any and all domains of comparison".
Re Harrison Bergeron, I had to look that one up. Obviously, I'm not a big Kurt Vonnegut reader. Definitely looks like a good read though.
Here's a recent article from Nature calling on the educated community to celebrate genetic diversity:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/Lahn.pdf
"I'm not in his camp wrt rolling back technological advance."
"Industrial Society and Its Future" contains a lot of great info.
"So let's not kid ourselves that we're really going to stop progress."
Check out the critiques of technology, mass-industrialism, rootless cosmopolitanism, and 'progress' by the Southern Agrarians @ http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/White/anthology/agrarian.html -- much of the 'progress' gained via technology has come at the expense of weakening our culture, our nations, and our racial stock.
From a pro-White racialist standpoint, too much technology has allowed billions of comparatively weak and non-intelligent non-Whites to proliferate at the expense of stronger and more intelligent Whites.
Only 100 years ago Whites were around 1/4-1/3 of the world's population -- this was back when we had sole control of the high technology which we ourselves invented.
High technology soon spread worldwide and Whites are now only 10% of the world's population and still declining as we are becoming more and more swarmed and swamped by non-Whites in our own nations via their use of the very technologies that we Whites invented. Non-Whites -- especially Asians of all kinds, Africans, and Hispanics -- have used White-invented technologies in relation to agriculture, medicine, sanitation, transportation, energy, and so on to overpopulate and stretch themselves far beyond what they could have gained on their own. Do you understand that?
This is the crux of the problem and why the rise of mostly White-invented technologies has profound implications in relation to HBD.
Learn more by reading Spengler's MAN AND TECHNICS: http://www.archive.org/details/ManTechnics-AContributionToAPhilosophyOfLife193253
"In 1931 he published Man and Technics, a book that reflected his fascination with the development and usage, past and future, of the technical. The development of advanced technology is unique to the West, and he predicted where it would lead. Man and Technics is a racialist book, though not in a narrow “Germanic” sense. Rather it warns the European or white races of the pressing danger from the outer Colored races. It predicts a time when the Colored peoples of the earth will use the very technology of the West to destroy the West." - http://www.toqonline.com/2009/06/spengler-an-introduction/
Technology is the game changer.. sadly for many of you, it is neutral.
It does not care who uses it, and looking at the ethnic composition of future scientists.. never mind *S*
Hey PW, I'm a Southerner so I have soft spot for the old ways, i.e. before industrialization. BUT, I still like my toys and photos from space and all that. I read some of the Southern Agrarian stuff back in college and while it's too bad they lost in one sense, I can't imagine having grown up on a farm.
That said, Spengler is very interesting. I haven't read Man and his Technics though. But, I can't really in any way condemn the development of technology. The people who exported it were not the same ones who made it. Is this incorrect? In my mind there's a cleft between the really smart research/creative scientists/inventors and the less smart, but socially savvy political MBA-types who use the creations of smarter men for financial gain. Maybe that's just a prejudice of mine, and you see it often in movies.
This is not about forcing everyone to go back to farm living, slaving away in the fields from sunrise to sunset. All I'm saying is that we need to get back to the basics more instead of continuing to decline and degenerate due to the undue complexity of modern living.
My preference would be to concentrate science and mass-industrialism (and thus pollution) in intelligently scaled-down cities whilst nearly everyone else lives simpler and healthy lives in ecologically sustainable small towns/suburbs, rural areas, farms/ranches, and so on.
We do not need to entirely abolish technology, no way, but simply use it more sustainably; right now the complexity of the modern world is driving a lot of people semi-insane or into a severely alienated state, and systems which are too complex always crash because of their inherent instability...we are headed toward that situation at present as all here can at least sense, the wheels are beginning to slip and come off of the global techno-industrial system. Our nervous systems (which were designed for slow and steady rural or semi-rural living) are becoming increasingly unhinged due to the unnecessarily 'fast living' of modern times. Compared to even 100 years ago in many areas, the modern world is a VERY unstable and anarchic place. A lot of people are just withdrawing altogether from many modern technological-industrial-urban societies because the complexity of the modern world is just too much for our still mostly primitive brains and nervous systems to handle. Again, a managed 'back to the basics' is in order to hopefully prevent the impending collapse of this overly complex system: home, hearth, food, the family, friends/networks, healthy religious ideals, the local/regional environment, local/regional economic systems, etc.
(continued from above)
The people who think Asia will pull ahead of The West in the coming decades due to their irresponsible and unethical mass-appropriation of Western science/technology are delusional. Why? Because they can't handle it; the fact is that huge swathes of Asia are becoming or already are virtually uninhabitable because of rampant ecological destruction due to the heavy pollution of industrialism. Their rivers are choked, their air is toxic, and people shuffle around like sick ants to the whistle of the urban-industrial system. It's a nightmare, and healthy/well-adjusted humans cannot thrive in those types of environments at all. Many of the people who are born, raised, and come out of those Asian hyperindustrial cities are deeply damaged and unhealthy people, it's a sad fact -- I've met some of them. Untold millions of Asians seek to flock to The West because it is much cleaner, less crowded, and ecologically sustainable. South Korea is a great example of this, one of the most technologically 'advanced' nations on Earth. Yet it is a rather miserable place, totally paved over, little of the natural world left, people adrift with no purpose, people living little better than ants in a mass-industrial urban-machine. The South Koreans even recently tried to BUY much of Madagascar because they need farmland to feed their own population and space to spread out.
Large portions of the techno-industrial world are 'technologizing' themselves in to oblivion, and for what? iPhones and iPods? Cheap refrigerators? The garbage spewing out of the television? Plastic widgets from Wal-Mart?
The fact is that most everything is suffering under mass-industrialism and high technology: families are falling apart, gender relations have been turned upside down, irresponsible hedonism is rampant, pollution is defiling our own nest (the Earth), manners and social norms are increasingly non-existent, atheism and nihilism is widespread, and worst of all the lower human specimens are beginning to entirely swamp and drown out the higher specimens via the dead-weight of their mass numbers. This points to a much worse future for Earth unless we bring the techno-industrial system back under our control, because right now it is becoming unhinged and devouring everything and everyone in sight just as Kaczynski wrote in his above-mentioned manifesto. Technology has certainly made our lives better in certain respects, I'm not disputing that, but in other ways it is leading to the personal and social degeneration of our species as well as the environment of the Earth as a whole. Overall, it hasn't been worth it.
Read the excerpt from I'LL TAKE MY STAND which I linked to above, it explains a lot -- the troubling trends they outlined in that introduction have only gotten worse since it was written in 1930. Also, John Michael Greer's book THE ECOTECHNIC FUTURE is recommended - http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4051 - it partially outlines how we need to use technology much more intelligently and sustainably instead of continuing to allow technology to use and abuse us.
ME:"Again, a managed 'back to the basics' is in order to hopefully prevent the impending collapse of this overly complex system"
Instead of "impending" in the above statement, it ought to be "slow-motion" -- it's a "slow-motion collapse," not one that is going to happen all at once next week or next year.
We need to intelligently manage the decline and thus build back the healthier ways of the past, what has been proven to work, instead of allowing it to completely overtake us.
Why do white idiots believe that they can control destiny, when they cannot even control events in the next week/ month. I think many whites have the delusion that they have a hotline to 'god'.
The difference between ants and humans is that humans can appreciate their insignificance. Do not ascribe to competence what can be better explained by chance.
The end result of mass urbanism and rampant technology inevitably results in the following if run by the wrong people: http://deathofdurban.blogspot.com/
Fuck off Advocatus Diaboli: you are probably some Asian scum. Hope you enjoy living in your sardine box 'apartment' back in some soulless shit-stinking mega-city back in Asia once we get our shit together and ship all you Asiatic parasites back to where you belong.
Advocatus Diaboli, that last comment does betray some Buddhist fatalism. You ought to pick your handle better if you plan on using a western 'devil' to mouth eastern concepts.
But Anonymous, only I get to tell someone to fuck off here. I certainly don't want visiting aliens...err...Asians to get the idea that they aren't welcome. And don't think that we are shipping anybody anywhere. It's not going to happen, maybe the Muslims at some point with an amendment to the Constitution, but that would be it.
BTW, that deathofdurban.blogspot.com site is great. there should be more of those covering cities in SA or wherever 'urbanism' has struck.
Also, if anyone was offended by my asian=alien, i was only kidding. I don't worship east asians, but I do admire their cleverness.
Prime,
You seem to confuse my perspective and objectivity with fatalism.
Fatalism assumes that the world is beyond hope, something I have never said. If you want to climb out of a hole, you have to first accept that you are in one.
HBD is based on magical thinking, appeals to authority and esotericism, the hall marks of a religion. Any religion= wishful thinking.
You should read "Religion Explained" by pascal Boyer for a cognitive anthropological view of religion. Makes a good case that the common "religion=magical thinking" trope is just that; it's not a very good description of what makes up a religion.
Believing in equality is magical thinking.
Prime,
I don't think what you and AD are saying are all that different. In our time today, Science is regarded by many to be a religion, as is Atheism, Global Warming, and so on. In other words, it is part of the Human Condition to believe in SOMETHING, and HBD is no different. In fact, I've deal with this albeit in a slightly different way, over on my blog, just posted it up this morning: theobsidianfiles.wordpress.com.
Check it out.
The Obsidian