The change from a culture of honour to a culture of dignity was accompanied of course by a great loss of dignity.

Modern life draws deep from the surface of things.

The expectation that someone will turn up and do the logically impossible is the reverence that misology pays to inventive genius.

Let niceness be reckoned amongst the most powerful forces of the underworld. Once the Devil is unchained, niceness invites him to tea.

With every step of the social and political movement for emancipation, there arises the kind of man who is more in need of repression than the one before, and so advances the movement for enslavement.

Art and religion are always a danger to the mechanical regime. They threaten the restoration of humanity.

Stereotypes possess high-predictive value. It is odd that so many self-declared friends of science reject them.

A Celebrity Speaks. — “At least 260 species of animal have been noted exhibiting homosexual behaviour but only one species of animal ever, so far as we know, has exhibited homophobic behaviour — and that’s the human being. So ask which is really natural.” ¹

  Countless species of animal have been noted exhibiting coprophagy, some species are even able to fly, but only one species of animal, ever, so far as we know, has exhibited rational and moral behaviour, albeit sometimes boasting the ability to make glaringly-bad arguments — and that’s the human being. So ask which is really natural. 

. . .

1. Stephen Fry, quoted by Richard Alleyne, “Stephen Fry: 260 animals have gay tendencies but only humans are homophobic”, telegraph.co.uk, 5th October 2012.

The Nuclear Age. — How does one rationally argue with people who are so sunk in irrationalism that they refuse to admit — when it suits them — the validity of logical thought? With those who take the nuclear-option against one’s arguments (but not, of course, against their own): that logic itself is just word-juggling with no rational link to reality? The answer is easy and soothing: one should try not to. But the realisation of the pervasiveness of this so-called postmodern attitude is hard and shocking.

A Voltarian Spuriosity Translated. — I disapprove of what you say, and, whilst vilifying you, I will not pass up the opportunity to sound magnanimous.

The Idea of a Sham-King. — “A king’s duty is to remain above politics” — impossible: he who remains above politics is not a king — “. . . and call a halt when the ship of state is about to crash into the rocks.” ¹ If he can call a halt, then he is not above politics.

. . .

1. Taki, “The Magical Mystery of Monarchy”, Taki’s Magazine, 21st July 2012.

Under Egalitarianism. — To praise as superior is still permissible, and even commended, so long as it is clearly untrue.

He who seeks to cast off what he feels to be the burdens of history and inheritance may well succeed in achieving the levity of an idiot.

If the fact/value dichotomy were a fact, it would derive no value from it.

The cosmopolitan belief in world-peace and universal brotherhood would have remained a poky little European affliction had it not been for warfare, global conquest, and mass-extermination.

Wallow-Drunk. — “I think ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are either zombie or capture algorithms when not tied narrowly to a system’s persistence optimization”, says some fellow [1], who, I would guess, believes he is being scientific or rational: it is always the image such men are after, however far it may drift from reality; and I would say that this man has ended up much closer to modern performance-art.

     It is amazing to think that it has taken only a few hundred years from relative calm to this kind of madness. Lately I have had in mind the role of romanticism: the intoxication with feelings, the beautiful-soulism, the individualism which bids a man to fancy that he can define reason and truth in line with his passions, and the irrationalism which has made a fatal pact with the image of reason, science, and progress. [2] But the roots of the madness go very deep, seen in the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century, seen in the nominalism of the late middle-ages, and then we look at Old Greece, and there it is again: some kind of intoxication, some desire for formlessness, some humanity-denying animality. It was such that Plato saw and set out to fight.

     Things are not repeated in quite the same way, but it seems that man, when he reaches a rank whereat his humanity is starkly reflected back at him, may, if wisdom has not reached the same rank, conceive a desire to sink into beasthood, as if the sight of what it is to be specifically human frightens him with its calling and responsibility. For that calling is the good life, the rational life, the examined life, and the responsibility is always to it, far away from a life of moral indolence and devil-may-care free-spiritedness. But what a ghastly thing to the man who wishes to cut loose in a spree of thrills and feelings! Better to be a wallowing swine than a striving man — or so the pig-philosophers teach. [3] 

     By this desire for sinking, however, I do not mean the longing for a simpler life. On the contrary: therein one can be fully human. Oddly it seems that man can use all the sophistication of his rational nature to try and thwart that very nature. In our advanced technology and in our complex, long-accumulated systems of thought, we are far better able to bestialise ourselves than were the Old Greeks.

[1] Hopefully Anonymous, comment of 16th December 2010, to TGGP, “Barack Obama as Rockefeller Republican?”, Entitled to an Opinion (weblog), 2nd December 2010. (Transhumanists, in denying their human nature, that is, in refusing to understand themselves as essentially rational animals, or as anything spiritual, but rather in mistaking themselves to be mechanically-determined, algorithmic genebots, or somesuch, are slipping from the human towards the merely animal, whilst pathetically dreaming of reaching the godly.)

[2] See Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919). Therein: “Man is in danger of being deprived of every last scrap and vestige of his humanity by this working together of romanticism and science. For man becomes human only in so far as he exercises moral choice.” p.262.

[3] For vain protestation against the accusation of pig-philosophy, see J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Parker, Son, & Bourn, 1863), above all, pp.11-14.