We have a winner

I crowdsourced the task of finding a word to describe the political and social order that is leading us to doom, in a way that explains the fundamental driving forces, explains why the left always wins.

Hwan Lewi:

How about ‘atheocracy’? It should be instantly recognizable as derivative of ‘theocracy’ and thus retain most of the descriptive and shock value, and it gets around the deism/non-deism issue.

From now on, atheocracy it is. In addition to being clear, it avoids pissing off those reactionaries who favor a genuinely Christian theocracy.

Digressing, I fully agree that that a genuinely Christian theocracy would be a good system. I also think that a theocracy genuinely based on the pagan religion of the early Roman monarchical period would be a good system.

The Roman monarchy worked fine when the King was elected for life by the Senate and the people of Rome, and endorsed by the Gods. When the Gods started to bend to whatever the prevailing wind was, the monarchy started to become corrupt and decadent. So Kings were removed. Thus began the Roman Republic. Elections were now more much more frequent. This worked fine for a while, but almost immediately the Republic started an ever leftwards drift, which soon became intolerable – so intolerable that the army stopped tolerating it.

The leftward drift was abruptly reversed by Sulla, who implemented a hard reset similar to that advocated by Mencius Moldbug and restored the old Republic. The restored old republic worked fine for a generation, but this failed to fix things permanently, since the reset led to a drift to military dictatorship. One generation later, civil war resumed and dictatorship followed.

38 Responses to “We have a winner”

  1. jim says:

    Well, my memory is vague, but I thought Whites involved in exploitation of rubber were somewhat involved in providing native rubber-gleaners with some very savage (dis)incentives.

    The natives had to pay a tribute in rubber. If tax not paid, the colonialists shot them. They also had to provide forced labor. If they goofed off, they got flogged with rhinoceros hide whips, if they ran away they got shot. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were shot. But supposedly the evil colonialists genocided millions, which millions were primarily those suffering from war and famine, rather than those failing to pay tribute in rubber and labor. Since war and famine is bad for business and interferes with tribute collection, I am inclined to believe that the colonialists reduced, rather than caused, these wars and war related famines, though of course, it is impossible to prove causation.

    Moldbug argues that whites need an autocratic regime – which may well be true if democratic welfare state winds up making most whites underclass, as the Roman bread and circuses did. But any argument for blacks needing an autocratic state is obviously stronger than whites.

    I recall Garnet Wolseley warming praising the Ashantee Monarchy, and suggesting that it provided black people better government than did the English – in large part because of its liberal use of immediate execution for any disobedience, while nonetheless inspiring patriotic enthusiasm among its subjects. He observes that Chinese are smarter than Britons, but very badly governed, and that blacks are stupid, lazy, and violent, and for the most part very badly governed, but he was full of praise for the Ashantee monarchy.

  2. RS says:

    > Blaming whites for the mass murders in the Congo under the early period of white rule is almost as strained and artificial as blaming whites for the genocide of the Tutsi.

    I agree, it’s hard to blame Whites for the Tutsi thing. I mean, Whites created ‘technology’, but ‘our’ complex of technologies, from machine tools to short-stalked cereal strains, has delivered teeming billions from starvation and monstrous infections. Also from slavery, and from what might as well be slavery — it may suck like hell to bust ass 60 hours a week at $4.50 the hour, but try $0.85 on for size… We should not coddle the imagination by thinking that most pre-industrial folks pulled anything like $4.50 purchasing power. And the main alternative to that 80-cent malthusian cradle-to-grave purgatorio is to be ever-exposed, like forager peoples, to massive per capita brutality… typically garnished with plenty of torture to terrorize the enemy, which is surely several times worse, in many, many a case, than just being killed. (The alternative is this or some other pretty tough combo of mass violence and bone-grinding poverty — whose product would basically be a constant across all times/places.) We look at Roman marbles, but there as in all civil places, 95% of people were such toilers, not rarely incented a bit now & again by the lash.

    Notably, 97.036% of these worldwide nonwhite beneficiaries have done jack shit for Whites, or slightly less. Which is ‘fine’ and more or less to be expected — ‘we’ didn’t give the Sumerians anything for inventing food, either — I’m just sayin’.

    One has to see the total picture, and obscuring it is one of the left’s favorite techniques.

    > The alleged evils of colonial rule in the Congo is more an example of how deluded and extreme the left version of is. Supposedly those black people would have been living in peace and harmony if it was not for the evil white people stirring them up.

    Well, my memory is vague, but I thought Whites involved in exploitation of rubber were somewhat involved in providing native rubber-gleaners with some very savage (dis)incentives. I wasn’t talking about warfare/massacres. Of course, I learned this in a typical leftist uni classroom, though I doubt that what I learned was entirely fake, in terms of the fundamental, basic facts: the ‘technique’ is more to intentionally miss the big picture, obfuscate, hyperbolically impugn, distort the relatively interpretive facts like directions of causation or relative valences of causes, and a bunch of other smooth moves that we all know well — and maybe get a minority of fundamental facts wrong.

    E.g., you have Gould’s wholly mendacious and/or erroneous claim that the old ‘scientific racists’ found Ashkenazim to have lower IQs than autochthonic Euros — but these basic-factual fallacies are not mainly what Gould & friends traffic in. Mainly they obfuscate the other side’s facts, and exaggerate the social dangers of biorealism, underrating the very grave but slow-gathering dangers of bio-irrealism. For instance, ignoring the severe dysgenesis in US Blacks will likely precipitate a humanitarian crisis if it goes on much longer. They could very well become so dysfunctional that people will just let (most of) them die / kill each other, or might even more or less kill them. Dysgenesis in Western Whites can certainly also give birth to colossal conflicts and disasters, but it is less confirmable — we know the inferior (in IQ, C) Whites breed more, but it is hard to really rule out the existence of ongoing Flynn-effect-style environment-governed phenotypic improvements that haven’t been discovered yet. (The Flynn-Lynn effect itself seems to be exhausted since ~1980, at least in Whites, but other comparable effects don’t necessarily have to be exhausted yet.) In Blacks, the differential fertility by inferiority/superiority is ~1.7 times (or more) stronger than what it is in Whites (and very similar is true for Hispanics), so we may approach a fair level of confidence that any environment-governed phenotypic improvements are being considerably overbalanced by genetic degradation, yielding a considerable and probably soon-disastrous decline in the phenotype. I can conceive US Blacks may have realized less IQ gains in the last 100 years than US Whites, because of their worse differential fecundity (which goes back generations), though there may exist high-quality data to rule that out. It’s also more than possible that their C has been declining for perhaps 100 years. It seems fairly likely that the White-Black (IQ*C) gap in the US has grown a bit over the last 50-100 years.

    What the hell will people do in a mere 50 years, by when US Blacks will very likely be far worse, at this rate? While plenty of them are pretty cool, on average they are quite dysfunctional already. So if 90% of their males like doing major felonies in the America of 2060, will we just have 80% of those aged 15-45 in prison at any given time, savaging each other? Apparently no one cares but me, even though I freely admit to caring considerably more about my own people than about the fate of Blacks.

    Your point that there will be more or less voluminous savagery in Congo in any event, is of course one I fully accept. There always will be, until a lasting colonial conquest and/or a powerful eugenesis takes place (natural or anthropogenic).

    We can probably agree that harm to Africa by the West goes on, but it is all done by leftists and globocrats (including of course many Ashkenazim — not to get into ‘all that’, but the modern ‘West’ is rather bipartite in terms of power centers, and I wouldn’t want to pin it all on ‘my people’). You have the frank meddling in Cote d’Ivoire(?) which you have treated of. And then, there’s a regime in Rwanda(?) that was actually doing good, creating order and spreading electricity and generally having an excellent effect — but media and ‘NGO’ Westerners were badgering the poor son of a guns about the regime being autocratic in type. And surprisingly, some good fellow laid down the law (in The Guardian of all places) about how idiotic, how potentially-and-actually mass-harmful, and how very self-indulgent these type of preposterous idealists can often be, vis-a-vis Rwanda and other places… and Moldie linked this piece of his, that’s how I encountered it.

  3. RS says:

    > Both the Atheocratic Left and the Secular Right derive from the same deep root – utilitarianism. The only difference is one of emphasis.

    What about Nietzsche, who said (roughly) of suffering “we opposite ones — we would really rather have it be higher and worse than ever!” And also opined that great leaders could justly inflict any amount of suffering on people when and if there was no other way to ‘elevate man’ to a superior cultural and affective life.

    That doesn’t sound very utilitarian, nor do his ‘attacks’ on ‘happiness’. This eudaimonism or virtue ethicism was taken up by Germany’s identity, vis a vis Britain, in the first war and then again in the second. Nazism wasn’t exactly secular, but it was far more Nietzschean than Christian.

    These things are a huge tangle, and I always get tangled up. How about Epicurus? He had utilitarian ‘feet’ and shoes in denying any intrinsic good/bad other than pleasure/pain. But his conclusion was virtuist or eudaimonist ; he said one must seek virtue and strength for the greatest happiness in the long run — thus he sounded in the end like a stern old Heraclitus of the old Greek mores. The pre-Socratic old morality in which, pace Nietzsche, attempting to explore and justify everything ratiocinatively a la Socrates was felt to be degenerate and immoral: if one was a nobly-born soul, one was loftier in nature than Socrates and knew the ethical truth by clear and unsullied intuitions ; the confusion and dazzlement of a Socrates would be a threat to firm action in the world, and to confidence in the necessity for unflinching martial virtue and sacrifice, and hence must be considered degenerate.

    Of course, the virtue he and Nietzsche are talking about is closer to fascist or Spartan heroic virtue, than it is to any balmy Christian or Platonic outlook wherein one should benefit the enemy alongside the friend. The fascists, in a non-malthusian world (at least it was non-malthusian before the war began) had more of a choice than the Spartans had, about whether to act like fascists, but I would still say that in every other sense and perspective, Sparta was just as ‘fascist’ as fascism was.

    Nietzsche speaks of “moraline-free virtue” (a play on caffeine, nicotine, etc), by which he is giving us shades of the original Latin virtv, strength — and not connoting indiscriminate kindness to all as a moral obligation, the way it does in a Platonic, Christian, or postwar Western context. One showed kindness to friends and relatives ; enmity was not necessarily personal, but was an ineluctable fact for the Hellenes and Romans other than Plato. For Nietzsche, the purpose of this strength is its intrinsic value (‘the feeling of power’), plus its ‘utility’ in one’s own self-development and self-enhancement (but /not/ toward the ‘narrowly-utilitarian’ ‘happiness’ that he routinely abased), plus its ‘utility’ for causes one chooses, plus its utility for “enhancing the type ‘man'” in the larger picture.

    These ethical systems do exist… e.g. in a Christian Germany during both wars — religiously Christian, but really employing these virtuist and eudaimonist ethics, not deontological ones stating that one must heed the ethical prescriptions of the Christian godhead.

    My point is basically that virtue, and utilitarianism’s dialectic with virtuism-eudaimonism (Epicurus), are big cans of worms and pretty tangled. IMHO one can discover difficulties in your formulations about left/right virtue/utility without necessarily being pedantic.

    Of course, I don’t really believe there are complete and consistent accounts — whether in Sinn or Bedeutung, intention or extension — of what left and right are, either. (I know ’cause I’ve tried a lot.) Although in practice we mostly understand what is meant. One mustn’t get too carried away, like a deconstructionist, with the ultimate impossibility of perfect definitions and clarity… a certain degree of ill-definedness just has to be lived with, that’s life.

    My contention has actually been that all rightists are considerably eudaimonist or virtuist, so my view is quite a contrast with yours. For example, we rightists don’t like to hear a lot of whinging about minute degrees of inequality of opportunity… one could attempt a utilitarian justification of our taste — but my guess is that the truth is that such plaintiveness over very little is a poor character trait to our minds, and as such is an intrinsic ‘bad’. That’s virtue ethics.

    Of course, many rightists could be utilitarian on the level of theory (pleasure/pain are sole intrinsic goods), and virtuist on the level of prescription — very much like Epicurus. (Which, taking place on two separate ‘levels’, is not really the same as an unstructured mediation between the two schools or accounts [logoi or whatever].) That much I completely accept. Which logos these men actually belong to, I couldn’t say.

  4. Remnant says:

    How about “Moldbug’s Second Law of Political Thermodynamics”?

    This is the idea that in the human political sphere, as well as in the world of physics, society tends towards a state of entropy and disorder. I add Moldbug’s name to this law in honor of his discussion of the principle at the following post:

    http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters.html

    Under this idea, “order” stands for right or reactive politics, while “disorder” is the principle of leftist or progressive politics.

    • jim says:

      The problem with Moldbug’s analysis in that post is that some divine right monarchies are pretty good, and some are dreadful. Should Nero rule absolutely, something is missing from the concept of order expressed in that post.

      Rather, orderly government should be like a reliable electricity utility – unobtrusive except when absent.

      The government under which the southern slaves lived was far better than is remembered, and for many slaves, freedom killed them because they lacked the moral characteristics needed to look after themselves – but for those people who had the moral characteristics to look after themselves, the government under which the slave owners lived was better than the government under which the slaves lived.

      • Remnant says:

        I wasn’t focusing so much on the particular form of government Moldbug advocates (which, it should be noted, is not monarchy but neocameralism: i.e. absolute sovereign control by the owners of the society; could be a single person [monarchy], could be a group, like shareholders with a board of directors.).

        Rather I was addressing your original question: “describe the political and social order that is leading us to doom, in a way that explains the fundamental driving forces, explains why the left always wins”

        I would say that Moldbug’s analysis on this particular point is pretty good. Essentially, it is the idea that the advocates of “progress” are ALWAYS (whether they know it or not) advocates of chaos and disorder. It is this coequivalence between progress and disorder that makes me think Moldbug (or Carlyle, if you prefer) is identifying the correct force at work.

        It is somewhat similar to O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over
        time become left-wing.”

        Matthew Arnold’s tract “Culture and Anarchy”, which contains in the title another succinct expression of the phenomenon, is relevant here.

        Anyway, leaving aside the question of _which type_ of government would be most effective at combatting leftism, it seems to me that the “fundamental driving forces”, per your questions, are a tendency towards chaos and disorder that characterizes leftism. I.e. it is the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the human realm.

        • jim says:

          If leftism is disorder, and rightism is order, the second law still fails to explain the inevitable movement leftwards, since society is not a closed system

          Social order is exemplified by Singapore, where the bankers do not steal money, and kids do not spray graffiti, yet while Singapore is one of the few places not ruled by progressives, order is more a symptom, than a defining characteristic.

  5. RS says:

    > [Jim in other post] And indeed, by and large the doubters did favor slavery, in the sense that they believed that blacks needed white rule for their own good or they would revert to savagery. And by and large, the doubters were right. For example, when the whites fled the Congo, cannibalism and genocide returned.

    This is a bad or ironic example to use, as the Congo (when it was solely controlled by the Belgian Crown) was probably Europe’s nastiest colonial episode. To the credit of our race, some Europeans found out about it and a protest movement formed — but it’s still a blot on the record.

    Of course that doesn’t make postwar decolonization a good thing. There’s no doubt that it was very harmful to Africans.

    • jim says:

      There was cannibalism, slavery, and genocide in the Congo before the whites ruled it. Genocide continued when the whites first ruled it, but soon stopped. When they left, something close to genocide returned. Should we conclude that the bad things that happened during the early period of white rule were the result of white rule?

      Blaming whites for the mass murders in the Congo under the early period of white rule is almost as strained and artificial as blaming whites for the genocide of the Tutsi. The alleged evils of colonial rule in the Congo is more an example of how deluded and extreme the left version of is. Supposedly those black people would have been living in peace and harmony if it was not for the evil white people stirring them up.

  6. red says:

    Merry Christmas Jim. Thank you for the fine blog posts over the proceeding year. It’s been very enlightening.

    I found a book that’s an excellent example of our system of propaganda: “The better Angels of our Nature” by Steven Pinker. Just enough truth mixed with lies & noise to point everyone to the only answer of just how awesome the left is. It’s complete with changing definitions of what’s good in life from chapter to chapter, complete fabrication when suitable, and with lots of formerly “we can’t say that due to PC” that we can say because of the ever changing PC standard. It’s a masterful piece of propaganda that pushes all the right buttons.

    • spandrell says:

      Damn right. And we all we hear is how smart Pinker is. Well he is smart, in a Goebbels way.

    • jim says:

      You earlier commented on my post on Pinker, wherein I commented that he mistook progressive repression for peace, imprisonment for peace, and progressive violence for non violence.

      • red says:

        No doubt your are correct about his thesis. It’s the way he put together the propaganda that I found fascinating. If there’s anything I’ve learned from the 20 century it’s the side with the best propaganda machine usually wins.

  7. SDaedalus says:

    Happy Christmas, Jim and thanks for the linkage throughout the year.

  8. Aaronovitch says:

    I like the word atheocracy but I don’t think it accomplishes what you originally set out to do. Progressives are fine with non-Western religions and theyr’re even OK with Christianity as long its very progressive.

    • jim says:

      Not sure what you are saying.

      Are you saying that if we call them theocrats, they will respond that they don’t believe in god, and if we call them atheocrats, they will respond that they tolerate non western religions, earth worship, and progressive Christianity?

      • Aaronovitch says:

        Admittedly I skimmed a bit but weren’t you trying to develop an idea of progressivism as a secular religion and one coupled with complete state and cultural control, thus a sort of theocracy?

        The problem with the theocracy metaphor was there wasn’t a real clear way to distinguish between an ideological regime (the USSR) and a theocratic regime (the Taliban, hypothetically Anglosphere progressivism).

        • jim says:

          Obviously the communists perceived the Orthodox Church and Islam as a direct (and intolerable) competitors for the same mindspace, and proceeded to do stuff such as turning mosques into pig styes.

          Whereas the progressives take the view that one can be a progressive and a Jew, or a progressive and a Christian, or a progressive and a Muslim, provided one is primarily a progressive and reject what is unprogressive about one’s theoretical religion (which is to say, just about everything)

          Thus on the face of it, Marxist regimes were more consciously theological than Progressive regimes.

          • bgc says:

            “proceeded to do stuff such as turning mosques into pig styes.” – Also imprisoning and killing thousands of Bishops, tens of thousands of priests, millions of devout Christians… The scale was about the same as that of the Nazi Holocaust, spread over a longer period – but the subject has not been given similar attention, is not really of interest, is indeed rather embarrassing for the Western elite (who regard Putin as worse than Stalin and who positively worship Lenin).

          • Aaronovitch says:

            In your model, is there an ideological regime that isn’t also a theological regime?

            • jim says:

              If the key element of the faith is that true believers in the faith should rule …

              Of course, theoretically, Marxists believe not that Marxists should rule, but that the proletariat should rule. If they actually believed what they theoretically believed, the they would not be an atheocratic regime, but, of course, they also believed that workers suffered from false consciousness, which is to say failure to agree with Marxism, and that true worker rule meant rule by workers that were true believers.

              If the ruling elite just happens to mostly subscribe to a particular ideology, then that would be an ideological regime that is not theocratic or atheocratic, but if subscribing to regime ideology is a requirement to be part of the regime, and the regime promulgates and inculcates the ideology so as to legitimize the rule of those who subscribe the regime ideology, then theocratic or atheocratic.

  9. bgc says:

    Atheocracy is a very good world for it. A useful word, and one which deserves to catch on.

    NOW you need to describe the distinction between the atheocratic Left, and the Secular Right – to explain why the secular right would NOT lead to atheocracy.

    I don’t think this can be done – because the similarities are greater than the differences.

    Both the Atheocratic Left and the Secular Right derive from the same deep root – utilitarianism. The only difference is one of emphasis.

    The Atheocratic Left emphasizes transcendental morality/ virtue, the Secular Right emphasizes transcendental truth/ honesty.

    Because feeling oneself to be virtuous is much more popular than feeling honest, and because people hate wickedness much more than they hate lies, the Atheocratic Left will always beat the Secular Right.

    • spandrell says:

      Well what is one supposed to do? Read on Relating morphic fields to the nature and activities of angels?

      I’m sorry but that’s a tough sell. Utilitarianism is bad but revelation is worse. The fact that people prefer to be virtuous than to be honest is a problem to be solved.

      • Bill says:

        Even if that were an accurate description of what theologians do, so what?

        Universities run by Christian theologians upheld very high standards if debate, much higher than today’s. Whig delusions to the contrary notwithstanding, science has never been impeded by Catholuc theocracy. The contrary is true.

        Atheocrats can claim nothing similar, and their poison is spreading further and further, killing more and more real science by the day. With global warming, it has spread right to the very core disciplines of science, chemistry and physics. Who knows what insane delusion will have to be “proved” by “science” next?

        And what if the orientation to virtue is hard-wired?

        • jim says:

          Universities run by Christian theologians upheld very high standards if debate, much higher than today’s. Whig delusions to the contrary notwithstanding, science has never been impeded by Catholic theocracy. The contrary is true.

          Galileo might doubt this.

          Science and the scientific method was low status until England under the restoration of Charles II in 1660.

          Science got a rough deal both from the old theocracy of the Roman Catholic Church, and the new theocracy of Cromwell which grew into present day progressivism. The highest status of science and the scientific method was when both checked each other, the anglosphere 1660 to 1870.

          • Bill says:

            Right. Science should be low status. Making it high status has been a disaster. Science was a respectable but not very high status activity for a long time. Its status increased as it took credit for advances in technology, and then exploded in the 19th and 20th centuries as it began to rot.

            Science got no rough deal from the Catholic Church, and Galileo is the canonical example of the contrary argument because he is the only example even sort of on point. And the example is weak. He got in trouble not for his ideas but for how they were expressed. And the ideas he expressed badly and got in trouble for were either dumb or unoriginal. His loud endorsements of something like the scientific method were similarly boring. He was reflecting, not moving the ideas then current in Italy.

            • jim says:

              Science got no rough deal from the Catholic Church, and Galileo is the canonical example of the contrary argument because he is the only example even sort of on point.

              The charge against Galileo was that he taught heliocentrism, and he was threatened with torture unless
              he renounced it. Galileo was shown the instruments of torture, forced to recant, and imprisoned.

              Roger Bacon was placed in solitary confinement on bread and water.

              Copernicus refrained from publishing until on his deathbed, and therefore beyond the reach of the inquisition.

              Albertus Magnus was threatened with burning at the stake.

              William of Ockham was excommunicated and charged with heresy. If he was not tortured and burnt at the stake, it was because he fled into exile when the inquiry into his scientific writings began.

              Jean Buridan’s works were banned as heresy and suppressed, implying that he himself was in grave danger of being suppressed if he did not shut up and stick to safer activities – which he did.

              Thomas Bradarwine’s speculation that the cosmos was infinite, and the stars were suns, was banned as heresy and suppressed, implying that he himself was in grave danger of being suppressed if he did not shut up and stick to safer activities – which he did.

              You may choose to accept the new (1942) version of history, in which Roger Bacon was not imprisoned in solitary confinement on bread and water for advocating the scientific method – but everyone on the above list except Galileo acted as if Roger Bacon had been imprisoned in solitary confinement on bread and water for advocating the scientific method.

          • red says:

            Science should be low status. Making it high status has been a disaster. Science was a respectable but not very high status activity for a long time. Its status increased as it took credit for advances in technology, and then exploded in the 19th and 20th centuries as it began to rot.

            Everything I’ve ever read indicates if you want useful results you should make the pay low and the status high with lots of healthy competition for that status.

            What happened during the 19th and 20th century was the left slowly co-opting and perverting science. What your seeing today isn’t rot, science has simply been replaced with a leftist fact generating machines. I looked into becoming a computer scientist and decided there wasn’t any science going on in the field.

            It’s very hard to tell if science drove technology or technology drove science because our histories are written by those promoting the supremacy of leftist scientism.

            • jim says:

              Technological progress continues, particularly in Asian states. Science progress does not. Thus suggests that technological progress drove science.

              How did people figure out that the theory of continental drift was true?

              They gained the capacity to see what was happening in the deeps, at the margins between the plates.

            • jim says:

              I looked into becoming a computer scientist and decided there wasn’t any science going on in the field.

              Mencius gives a similar report, yet while “Computer Science” generates bullshit, it is not apparent to me that its bullshit is political, except of course in regard to female participation in STEM fields.

          • red says:

            It’s less overtly political than it is the general methodology of the left owns it.
            With computer science it’s the same general academic committee must design useless standards and create make work projects. They also build pie in the sky systems that are never implemented in the real world to make themselves feel important.

            The real kicker was AI. I looked into the field back in the late 90s and found they still had not examined how the human brain works in order to try to duplicate it. It was nothing but blank state theories with neuron nodes that didn’t do crap because the human brain is a layer of systems just like a cpu. You can’t produce useful stuff when the results don’t matter and you have to wear ideological blinkers.

            Oddly enough by the 1990s we had already created useful AI systems. We did things like analyzing how doctors make diagnoses and reduces those choices to set of 30 or so rules. We have actual working AI systems that can diagnose patients according to a book call “How doctors think”. We ran them against doctors in Chicago and the machines machines did much better than most of the doctors did. We still don’t use them. Huge cost savings but doctors have no intensives to use them and the government is not interested in them. Since then the field has been ignored and it’s stagnated.

          • Bill says:

            And the charges against the Knights Templar were that they spit on the cross and engaged in faggoty orgies. These charges were cut and pasted from earlier people and groups the French Crown had gone after. Galileo was supported by the Papacy until he directly attacked and mocked the Pope. And he had no supporters because he was a complete asshole his whole life. That is what he was punished for. If you can even call it punishment. It certainly did not stop him doing science. It just stopped him ranting about heliocentrism. He is sort of like Ward Churchill.

            Even if Bacon was confined to his cell and fed a plain diet (and there is extremely scant evidence that any such thing happened), there is certainly no reason to believe that this was either involuntary or as a result of his scientific ideas.

            Copernicus was encouraged throughout his life by Church authorities. There is no evidence that he delayed because of any fear. One of the alleged benefits of today’s “publish or perish” system is that it forces anal retentive, tinkering, perfectionist geeks like Copernicus to publish. Besides, his work was known before publication.

            William of Ockham was not excommunicated for his scientific ideas. Same with Buridan. Same with St Albert the Great — a bishop in life, patron of St Thomas Aquinas (I seem to remember that the Church kind of likes that guy), canonized a saint in death, made a Doctor of the Church after that, and, you know, called “the Great,” in life. Thomas of Bradwardine was an important scientist, one of the Merton Calculators (one of the famous victims of Galileo’s plagiarism). Whatever the Church did to him (and I know nothing about it) seems to have worked out swimmingly for science.

            The Church was powerful, and men were men. They fight over prerogatives. They get jealous when others are smarter than them. They become enemies with people who slight them. Academics were as nasty and venal then as now, and they used political and ecclesiastical processes to get at their rivals.

            The list is kind of boring. Whomever compiled it and for whatever reason, it reads as if it were compiled by assembling the names of every scholar ever excommunicated or threatened with same and then intersecting it with a list of everyone who had any plausible connection to science.

            What I guess we are not supposed to notice is that these guys are mostly or all employees of the Church doing science “on the clock” as it were. Plus, I guess we are not supposed to notice all the many, many other scientists employed by the Church and doing their thing.

            This idea that the Church somehow was the enemy of science rather than the best friend it ever had is a good example of the power of the left’s rhetoric machine. On examination, there is never any evidence of persecution and great heaping mountains of evidence of support for science.

            • jim says:

              Galileo was supported by the Papacy until he directly attacked and mocked the Pope. And he had no supporters because he was a complete asshole his whole life

              He mocked the Pope for suppressing science and the scientific method, to which the Pope responded by suppressing Galileo.

              Copernicus was encouraged throughout his life by Church authorities. There is no evidence that he delayed because of any fear.

              His publisher amended the manuscript to say that this was merely a method of calculation – therefore his publisher was afraid.

              William of Ockham was not excommunicated for his scientific ideas

              He was excommunicated because when invited by the Inquisition for a little chat about his scientific ideas, he ran like a rabbit into exile, and denounced the papacy, which implies that had he shown up, he would have suffered not excommunication, but torture

              The list is kind of boring. Whomever compiled it and for whatever reason, it reads as if it were compiled by assembling the names of every scholar ever excommunicated or threatened with same and then intersecting it with a list of everyone who had any plausible connection to science.

              And who then were the scientists who were not repressed?

              If the Church was the best friend science ever had, name some of its pals.

              Someone gave a list of all the great scientists sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church. I looked up everyone on his list, and found that every one of them had been persecuted, except for Copernicus who published on his deathbed and a politically powerful French guy close to the King. And that is how I compiled the above list: From a list of great scientists supposedly encouraged by the Church. Seems that Church encouragement was a dangerous business.

              As I have often remarked, the Church sponsored science by telling scientists what they should think. Scientists that advanced science, were scientists that deviated from what they were allowed to think, whereupon they were repressed.

          • Bill says:

            red says . . .

            Everything I’ve ever read indicates if you want useful results you should make the pay low and the status high with lots of healthy competition for that status.

            What happened during the 19th and 20th century was the left slowly co-opting and perverting science.

            Depends what you mean by status. If you mean status in the sense of people looking up to scientists and thinking they are virtuous, then, sure, that is a good thing. But, in this sense, science was high status long before the 17th C. If what you mean by status is the ears of the powerful and a general acknowledgment by the good and the great that policy should be made according to the views of scientists, then, no, this is a bad thing.

            Why did the left decide to subvert science, rather than, say, astrology, necromancy, or prostitution? Because it is high status—it is a road to power. It would be much better for astrology to be high status.

        • spandrell says:

          I see no difference between debating the minutiae of Global warming, and debating the behavior and nature of angels. Its all pointless magical thinking.

          And if the orientation for ‘virtue’, i.e. an undefinable status marker, is hard-wired, then we’re all screwed.

    • Leonard says:

      The “soft” secular right — democracy supporters — are indeed unsound. But this is not because they are utilitarian; it is because they support democracy. They will be beaten by progressives, because democracy is a formula for atheocracy.

      The reactionary right, being anti democracy, does not have the same failure mode. Of course, nobody lives forever, so even if reactionaries did take over, the challenge is in how to keep a government stable in the long term. Many systems can work for one generation, running on personal loyalty to a charismatic leader. In other words, the challenge is to build a governmental structure that is antidemocratic and stays that way. Neocameralism answers that challenge. The neocameral state stays undemocratic for the same reason that all large corporations do: by harnessing greed.

    • jim says:

      NOW you need to describe the distinction between the atheocratic Left, and the Secular Right – to explain why the secular right would NOT lead to atheocracy.

      I am an empiricist, scientific method and all that. What you are calling the secular right tends to be that way.

      Some of the commenters argue that Christian theocracy was not so bad, and indeed it was not so bad, because being other worldly, was less inclined to meddle – but Galileo, Copernicus, and Roger Bacon would argue it was bad enough.

      The reason I keep referring to the not-left rather than the right, is that the left has a thousand points of doctrine, and one is required to adhere to each and every one, and disagreeing on any one of these points makes one a “right winger”, so “right wingers” are apt to be right wing in any of a thousand different ways.

    • jim says:

      Both the Atheocratic Left and the Secular Right derive from the same deep root – utilitarianism. The only difference is one of emphasis.

      Ayn Rand is the most famous example of a non utilitarian secular rightist

      By and large, the secular right is in large part, probably for the greater part, anti utilitarian. Repeating once again: Darwinian Natural Law, and Good and Evil from self interest

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