Way back in 1992 I was communications director for a pro-life referendum in Maryland. After a televised debate I looked around the room and noticed that the pro-lifers were relaxed, smiling, chatting with each other--and the pro-choice were rigid, grim, and cold. It was counter-intuitive because our side was likely to lose (we did, 40-60). Yet we had peace and good cheer, and they didn't. I still puzzle over that. Our faith in Christ was probably a big factor. Also, as Christians, we knew we were supposed to love each other, while people without that might feel comfortable back-stabbing and maneuvering for power. It's an interesting question.
The difference between conservatives and liberals seems to boil down to the idea that conservatives do not want to live in a debauched, libertine world, and for liberals that is the goal.
I'm going to argue for a philosophical framework that allows both for meaningful categories AND the existence of transgendered individuals.
If people have souls, and their souls are more "important" or "fundamental" than their bodies, a person who has a man's soul in a female body would, by virtue of the primacy of the soul, be a man. Believers in traditional faiths would deny that one can have a man's soul in a woman's body, but if you believe that such is possible, this would allow the gender binary and trans people to coexist.
I'm not trans myself, but I think that the people who argue that the gender binary doesn't exist are erasing trans people in a way. The trans people I know present themselves as men or as women, not as members of the amorphous genderless mass of humanity.
In general, I think categories like gender DO exist and have tremendous importance. I just think they're more nuanced and complicated than we have previously acknowledged.
2011 was about the time social media (especially Facebook) became a force in politics, and initially on the Left not so much the Right until later- I recall analyses of the Romney campaign in 2012 noting the Democrats capitalized on social media while the GOP largely ignored it in favor of emailing as if it were still 2002. Hypothetically this created vast echo chambers where people reinforced rather than questioned each other's priors thus forcing dubious beliefs and assumptions into a sort superior reality state where it seemed disloyal, even impossible, to question anything: the "logic" of a mob in digital guise.
I was in one of those echo chambers for some years (I no longer am in touch with the group, only with several individuals from it), though broader contacts, notably with Rod's blog and commenters, kept me from going all in with the spirit of it. I recall after the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision-- which I thought wrong and still do-- I opined to the group that this was but a single loss for social liberalism amid a sea of wins. And was thoroughly flamed for raising any doubt against the self-reinforcing pessimism and alarmism that was the flavor of that day-- you would have thought the world of the Handmaid's Tale was just around the corner.
Of course there is a caution here too as there is no reason whatsoever why the Right would be immune to this sort if thing when they form their own echo chambers, and in fact I do see evidence that some groups (like Qanon) already have parted company with reality as a result.
My goodness, your friend needs a guest column! "We hear much about toxic masculinity, but the Overton window does not include the necessary conversation about toxic femininity. With this unbalanced and unchecked self-referential victim narrative, we are engulfed in suffocating, narcissistic Longhouses." This is highly compact and vivid TRUTH! At the same time, I am really very sorry for what he is going through. I have a friend in a similar situation...he is sticking it out for the kids.
Let's get right to the meat of your argument, which is that conservatives are happier than liberals because of their beliefs. That's not what the original article actually says:
"Among the most socially privileged group, male adolescents with highly educated parents, conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many (Jost et al., 2008). This group presumably benefits from the American cultural myth of an equal playing field in which exceptional social positions are thought to be earned through hard-work and talent rather than inherited through codified privilege (Turner, 1960). Among underprivileged groups, such as those without a parental college degree, especially Black female adolescents, conservatism alone was not protective for mental health.
Socially underprivileged liberals reported the worst internalizing symptom scores over time, likely indicating that the experiences and beliefs that inform a liberal political identity are ultimately less protective against poor mental health than those that inform a conservative political identity. This may be due to an emphasis on the awareness of social inequity (Jost et al., 2008) within an increasingly politically conservative climate, with compounding effects for those with intersecting minoritized identities who acutely experience societal maltreatment and are therefore more likely to acknowledge it." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438
In other words, for boys / men, it really does all come down to wealth and power. If you have it, the world is your oyster.
As for girls, it has nothing to do with the "Great Awokening", or it would have happened in the 1970s, with the Women's Movement. You may believe that, but that's not what the original research article says:
"Girls have not only experienced greater declines in mental health than boys (Keyes et al., 2019; Mojtabai et al., 2016), but also heightened levels of sexual harassment, both on and off-line, which have been directly linked to poor mental health outcomes (Bauman, Toomey, & Walker, 2013; Brown et al., 2016). The growing digital social sphere has led to an increase in the prevalence of online bullying where women are the most frequent victims (Kessel Schneider, O’Donnell, & Smith, 2015; Mojtabai et al., 2016)." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438
Instead, it's about bullying and harassment.
As far as I can tell there's nothing new going on.
Also, I've seen just as much of the following on the conservative side:
"She is constantly, constantly, the victim, and every little thing that goes wrong is the Twilight Of The Gods."
"But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause."
For example:
Green M&Ms quit wearing high heels! OMG!
Cracker Barrel is offering vegetarian sausage! OMG!
Lady Ghostbusters! OMG! A Black Little Mermaid! OMG! Big Bird got a Covid shot! OMG
Hasbro dropped the "Mr." and now it's just "Potato Head"! OMG!
Xbox announced they're adding a power-saving shutdown mode: “They’re trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age.” Host - “You’re right - they’re going after the children!” OMG!
Though I generally find conservatives jollier than leftists, I have encountered one type of extremely dour, unsmiling right-winger: the extreme conspiracy theorist who thinks that the Freemasons run everything, and that an army of liberal ballot tamperers is lurking in the shadows of every polling station. Such people, however, may be miserable for the same reasons that young leftists are: because they feel like victims of ruthless, powerful and pervasive forces they can't control, and not free agents.
By the way, thank you (or rather, thank that liberal journalist you cite) for explaining to me the origin of 'bowdlerise'!
Your friend with the BPD wife must seriously consider leaving this marriage. He is placing his children in (mental health) harm's way. A thought about Borderline Progressives. I agree with the boys over at Triggernometry that it is now time to stop with the easy piling on of those not living in reality and to move forward with a positive vision of conservatism. If all we have is "Ha, ha! Look how stupid and evil these people are!", we will lose any driving force to move things back to sanity and the middle.
Rod, I’m gonna try to say this carefully to preserve the confidentiality of everyone involved, but you’ve got some off ideas about BPD.
In fact BPD is a very controversial diagnosis and one that is in flux. There’s not a whole lot we can say about it with absolute certainty.
However.
1) You cannot diagnose someone with BPD without a thorough evaluation by a professional.
2) part of what makes it so tricky is that BPD also looks like A LOT of things, including long term PTSD.
3) BPD is not an organic brain disorder in the same way schizophrenia is. BPD brains do show abnormalities but given the causes of BPD it’s likely an interplay of cause and effect.
The real cause is almost always deep childhood trauma.
This makes me DEEPLY skeptical of men who claim their wives have it during a divorce. Because if she has it now, she had it when you married her.
4) It’s incurable the same way depression is. No, there is no cure but there are a LOT of treatment options. It’s not insoluble.
You’re right that it can be difficult to get patients to recognize that they need treatment and BPD can be more resistant to that. Depression and anxiety make people miserable so they’re more likely to seek help than people with situations like BPD. But it’s not impossible. If someone has seen a therapist the therapist will recognize signs of BPD and offer evaluation and treatment.
I’m not trying to pick a fight here but you’ve got a dog in it already, so I think your take here isn’t accurate, and it’s inaccurate in a way that is potentially dangerous. Please, if you’re going to write about a medical condition, I beg you, don’t write it based on what you were told by a guy you know who claims his soon to be wife is BPD. Please talk to a professional first. Some of the things you have written here are irresponsible and contribute to how difficult it is for people who have BPD to seek and get treatment.
This isn’t something you can diagnose based on behavior at the end of a marriage.
"BPD sufferers have no choice; mentally healthy progressives do. But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause."
A political ideology whose members truly can not stop engaging in behaviors that even they know to be self-destructive -- is that not a de-facto mental disorder? I think you extend charity too far when you say they fear "breaking faith with the Cause". Some of them are just lost; their Self has been completely subsumed by the Cause.
I see the headlines now: "DSM 8 recognizes Progressive Victimization Disorder; Progressives claim harm."
Regarding conservatives seeing the world as more hierarchical, I wonder if it's really more theological than hierarchical. Do conservatives see a natural cosmic order while liberals see random chaos? It would explain a lot of things, but that doesn't make it true. The hierarchy distinction just feels wrong though; wouldn't people who see hierarchy and order be MORE likely to have faith in progress and improvement? Something feels off there.
SOME REFLECTIONS FROM A NON-LIBERAL, NON-CONSERVATIVE CONTEMPLATIVE ANARCHIST
I’m writing here as someone who has conducted psychological research (exploring the relationship between hierarchical levels of cognitive flexibility and the ability to utilize mindfulness to reduce physical pain – not merely the “perception” of it but as indicated by clear physiological measures).
Psych and social science research is VERY iffy. I can’t recall, Rod, if you’ve cited Haidt’s moral dimensions research here, but I know at least one Cambridge University scientist who, to the best of my understanding, has completely and reliably undermined any claim to validity in that particular area of research.
As far as assessing levels of depression in large populations – two clinicians can barely agree on diagnoses of individual patients they’ve seen numerous times (I know this having conducted several thousand psych evaluations, seeing numerous varying and at times conflicting diagnoses in a patient’s record)
And part from the science, we all might want to be careful drawing conclusions about various political orientations based on our rather primitive neuroscientific and psychological sciences. One study “claims” to show that conservatives tend to have less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is an area of our brain supposedly responsible for our capacity for empathy.
However much that may have more firmly ensconced liberals in their assessment of conservatives as having no heart, it could easily have been turned the other way by conservatives: “See, liberals have higher activity in that area; we TOLD you they were just bleeding hearts.”
And can anyone anymore give a coherent definition of “liberal” or “conservative” (let’s not even get started on “Right” and “Left’ which seem more like sports teams than representative of coherent political philosophies)? And if you believe you can, do you really believe empirical science – subjecting elusive, qualitative views and values to precise measurement – is the place to find reliable insight? (it probably won’t surprise you to hear, in spite of several very successful research studies, I concluded by the end of my doctoral work that research was not a fruitful area to discover wisdom!)
which takes us nicely to Iain McGilchrist. You might be interested (and I hope not surprised) to hear that in a recent live Q&A, someone asked him whether capitalism was primarily a representation of LH (left hemisphere) or RH (right hemisphere) functioning.
“Oh, LH without question,” Mcgilchrist quickly responded. Now, is that an anti-conservative statement?
I would think, if there is any beauty and goodness and truth to a genuine conservative view, one which rightly values hierarchy and non-material values, a person with such a view would be quick to call for an economic and governing system that does NOT (as unchecked capitalism tends to do) flatten out all hierarchy, all values, and eliminates as much as possible all subjectivity – instead subjecting all value to a precise dead LH measurement,
I don’t have any conclusions for you except for this. Surely you know Paul was quoting the great pagan poet Epimenides (and another poet whose name escapes me at the moment) when he spoke of God as He “in whom we live and move and have our being?”
If I have any political orientation, it is close to what Indian poet-sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of as “contemplative anarchy.” Remembering that Sri Aurobindo was the first leader (prior to Gandhi) of the Indian independence movement, was considered “the most dangerous man in India” by the British Empire, and was consulted by Indian leaders (and not a few British ones… quietly) for 40 years after he went into “retirement” from political action) – keeping all this in mind (as well as the fact that Sri Aurobindo was one of the finest Greek and Latin scholars who ever attended Cambridge University) you can be confident that “anarchy” in his sense refers to the greatest freedom possible, a profound understanding of the spiritual foundation of equality with a balanced understanding of the spiritual foundation of hierarchy
Find the Christ within, live from that, and all else, as Julian of Norwich put it, will be well. Or as Augustine put it more simply (not misunderstood as in Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss”) “Love and do what you will.”
When you love, truly, Divinely, you WILL be doing God’s will.
Half a lifetime ago, when I was about 22 and tormented by my first real relationship, I went to a Freudian analyst just for kicks, having already tried the latest form of behavioral-whatever therapy juiced by legal drugs of some sort. To hell with that obvious scam, so I figured I should see a classic adherent of a venerable science.
Within minutes of starting my first session, he asked me if I was sexually interested in his secretary, who was very attractive.
Within fifteen more minutes, he diagnosed my girlfriend as borderline, never having met her, and me as a narcissist. It was all very scientific, and fascinating. I proceeded to see him for a while longer, and heard about his deep personal issues, why he became a therapist, the brokenness, the scars.
Later I ran into him in the street just randomly one day, while walking around downtown. We chatted, he seemed lonely.
Borderline Progressive Disorder? I'm definitely seeing this among the lefty women I know. The more lefty they are, the more they sound like they have it.
Every single policy development remotely related to women that they disagree with, is a crisis and an attack against women. Everything is the end of the world.
Moving onto some other things on my mind, I was thinking about your discussion on TAC about Naomi Wolf and her review of the Return of the Gods.
I couldn't respond there because I'm not a subscriber.
Here's what's interesting to me. She writes that it was around 2020 that things seemed to shift radically. If anything, they shifted much earlier than that, and she contributed to that shift.
Back in the 1990s, Wolf was a well-known third wave feminist thinker, a liberal woman writing about women and sexuality, a sex-positive feminist.
Now I'm presuming she had some type of conversion since then, and if she did, I'd be interested in reading more about it.
Way back in 1992 I was communications director for a pro-life referendum in Maryland. After a televised debate I looked around the room and noticed that the pro-lifers were relaxed, smiling, chatting with each other--and the pro-choice were rigid, grim, and cold. It was counter-intuitive because our side was likely to lose (we did, 40-60). Yet we had peace and good cheer, and they didn't. I still puzzle over that. Our faith in Christ was probably a big factor. Also, as Christians, we knew we were supposed to love each other, while people without that might feel comfortable back-stabbing and maneuvering for power. It's an interesting question.
The difference between conservatives and liberals seems to boil down to the idea that conservatives do not want to live in a debauched, libertine world, and for liberals that is the goal.
I'm going to argue for a philosophical framework that allows both for meaningful categories AND the existence of transgendered individuals.
If people have souls, and their souls are more "important" or "fundamental" than their bodies, a person who has a man's soul in a female body would, by virtue of the primacy of the soul, be a man. Believers in traditional faiths would deny that one can have a man's soul in a woman's body, but if you believe that such is possible, this would allow the gender binary and trans people to coexist.
I'm not trans myself, but I think that the people who argue that the gender binary doesn't exist are erasing trans people in a way. The trans people I know present themselves as men or as women, not as members of the amorphous genderless mass of humanity.
In general, I think categories like gender DO exist and have tremendous importance. I just think they're more nuanced and complicated than we have previously acknowledged.
2011 was about the time social media (especially Facebook) became a force in politics, and initially on the Left not so much the Right until later- I recall analyses of the Romney campaign in 2012 noting the Democrats capitalized on social media while the GOP largely ignored it in favor of emailing as if it were still 2002. Hypothetically this created vast echo chambers where people reinforced rather than questioned each other's priors thus forcing dubious beliefs and assumptions into a sort superior reality state where it seemed disloyal, even impossible, to question anything: the "logic" of a mob in digital guise.
I was in one of those echo chambers for some years (I no longer am in touch with the group, only with several individuals from it), though broader contacts, notably with Rod's blog and commenters, kept me from going all in with the spirit of it. I recall after the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision-- which I thought wrong and still do-- I opined to the group that this was but a single loss for social liberalism amid a sea of wins. And was thoroughly flamed for raising any doubt against the self-reinforcing pessimism and alarmism that was the flavor of that day-- you would have thought the world of the Handmaid's Tale was just around the corner.
Of course there is a caution here too as there is no reason whatsoever why the Right would be immune to this sort if thing when they form their own echo chambers, and in fact I do see evidence that some groups (like Qanon) already have parted company with reality as a result.
My goodness, your friend needs a guest column! "We hear much about toxic masculinity, but the Overton window does not include the necessary conversation about toxic femininity. With this unbalanced and unchecked self-referential victim narrative, we are engulfed in suffocating, narcissistic Longhouses." This is highly compact and vivid TRUTH! At the same time, I am really very sorry for what he is going through. I have a friend in a similar situation...he is sticking it out for the kids.
Let's get right to the meat of your argument, which is that conservatives are happier than liberals because of their beliefs. That's not what the original article actually says:
"Among the most socially privileged group, male adolescents with highly educated parents, conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many (Jost et al., 2008). This group presumably benefits from the American cultural myth of an equal playing field in which exceptional social positions are thought to be earned through hard-work and talent rather than inherited through codified privilege (Turner, 1960). Among underprivileged groups, such as those without a parental college degree, especially Black female adolescents, conservatism alone was not protective for mental health.
Socially underprivileged liberals reported the worst internalizing symptom scores over time, likely indicating that the experiences and beliefs that inform a liberal political identity are ultimately less protective against poor mental health than those that inform a conservative political identity. This may be due to an emphasis on the awareness of social inequity (Jost et al., 2008) within an increasingly politically conservative climate, with compounding effects for those with intersecting minoritized identities who acutely experience societal maltreatment and are therefore more likely to acknowledge it." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438
In other words, for boys / men, it really does all come down to wealth and power. If you have it, the world is your oyster.
As for girls, it has nothing to do with the "Great Awokening", or it would have happened in the 1970s, with the Women's Movement. You may believe that, but that's not what the original research article says:
"Girls have not only experienced greater declines in mental health than boys (Keyes et al., 2019; Mojtabai et al., 2016), but also heightened levels of sexual harassment, both on and off-line, which have been directly linked to poor mental health outcomes (Bauman, Toomey, & Walker, 2013; Brown et al., 2016). The growing digital social sphere has led to an increase in the prevalence of online bullying where women are the most frequent victims (Kessel Schneider, O’Donnell, & Smith, 2015; Mojtabai et al., 2016)." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438
Instead, it's about bullying and harassment.
As far as I can tell there's nothing new going on.
Also, I've seen just as much of the following on the conservative side:
"She is constantly, constantly, the victim, and every little thing that goes wrong is the Twilight Of The Gods."
"But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause."
For example:
Green M&Ms quit wearing high heels! OMG!
Cracker Barrel is offering vegetarian sausage! OMG!
Lady Ghostbusters! OMG! A Black Little Mermaid! OMG! Big Bird got a Covid shot! OMG
Hasbro dropped the "Mr." and now it's just "Potato Head"! OMG!
Xbox announced they're adding a power-saving shutdown mode: “They’re trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age.” Host - “You’re right - they’re going after the children!” OMG!
Though I generally find conservatives jollier than leftists, I have encountered one type of extremely dour, unsmiling right-winger: the extreme conspiracy theorist who thinks that the Freemasons run everything, and that an army of liberal ballot tamperers is lurking in the shadows of every polling station. Such people, however, may be miserable for the same reasons that young leftists are: because they feel like victims of ruthless, powerful and pervasive forces they can't control, and not free agents.
By the way, thank you (or rather, thank that liberal journalist you cite) for explaining to me the origin of 'bowdlerise'!
Your friend with the BPD wife must seriously consider leaving this marriage. He is placing his children in (mental health) harm's way. A thought about Borderline Progressives. I agree with the boys over at Triggernometry that it is now time to stop with the easy piling on of those not living in reality and to move forward with a positive vision of conservatism. If all we have is "Ha, ha! Look how stupid and evil these people are!", we will lose any driving force to move things back to sanity and the middle.
Oh boy.
Rod, I’m gonna try to say this carefully to preserve the confidentiality of everyone involved, but you’ve got some off ideas about BPD.
In fact BPD is a very controversial diagnosis and one that is in flux. There’s not a whole lot we can say about it with absolute certainty.
However.
1) You cannot diagnose someone with BPD without a thorough evaluation by a professional.
2) part of what makes it so tricky is that BPD also looks like A LOT of things, including long term PTSD.
3) BPD is not an organic brain disorder in the same way schizophrenia is. BPD brains do show abnormalities but given the causes of BPD it’s likely an interplay of cause and effect.
The real cause is almost always deep childhood trauma.
This makes me DEEPLY skeptical of men who claim their wives have it during a divorce. Because if she has it now, she had it when you married her.
4) It’s incurable the same way depression is. No, there is no cure but there are a LOT of treatment options. It’s not insoluble.
You’re right that it can be difficult to get patients to recognize that they need treatment and BPD can be more resistant to that. Depression and anxiety make people miserable so they’re more likely to seek help than people with situations like BPD. But it’s not impossible. If someone has seen a therapist the therapist will recognize signs of BPD and offer evaluation and treatment.
I’m not trying to pick a fight here but you’ve got a dog in it already, so I think your take here isn’t accurate, and it’s inaccurate in a way that is potentially dangerous. Please, if you’re going to write about a medical condition, I beg you, don’t write it based on what you were told by a guy you know who claims his soon to be wife is BPD. Please talk to a professional first. Some of the things you have written here are irresponsible and contribute to how difficult it is for people who have BPD to seek and get treatment.
This isn’t something you can diagnose based on behavior at the end of a marriage.
"BPD sufferers have no choice; mentally healthy progressives do. But they have worked themselves up into such a state about politics (cultural and otherwise) that to fail to be on maximum freak-out mode 24/7 is to somehow break faith with the Cause."
A political ideology whose members truly can not stop engaging in behaviors that even they know to be self-destructive -- is that not a de-facto mental disorder? I think you extend charity too far when you say they fear "breaking faith with the Cause". Some of them are just lost; their Self has been completely subsumed by the Cause.
I see the headlines now: "DSM 8 recognizes Progressive Victimization Disorder; Progressives claim harm."
Regarding conservatives seeing the world as more hierarchical, I wonder if it's really more theological than hierarchical. Do conservatives see a natural cosmic order while liberals see random chaos? It would explain a lot of things, but that doesn't make it true. The hierarchy distinction just feels wrong though; wouldn't people who see hierarchy and order be MORE likely to have faith in progress and improvement? Something feels off there.
SOME REFLECTIONS FROM A NON-LIBERAL, NON-CONSERVATIVE CONTEMPLATIVE ANARCHIST
I’m writing here as someone who has conducted psychological research (exploring the relationship between hierarchical levels of cognitive flexibility and the ability to utilize mindfulness to reduce physical pain – not merely the “perception” of it but as indicated by clear physiological measures).
Psych and social science research is VERY iffy. I can’t recall, Rod, if you’ve cited Haidt’s moral dimensions research here, but I know at least one Cambridge University scientist who, to the best of my understanding, has completely and reliably undermined any claim to validity in that particular area of research.
As far as assessing levels of depression in large populations – two clinicians can barely agree on diagnoses of individual patients they’ve seen numerous times (I know this having conducted several thousand psych evaluations, seeing numerous varying and at times conflicting diagnoses in a patient’s record)
And part from the science, we all might want to be careful drawing conclusions about various political orientations based on our rather primitive neuroscientific and psychological sciences. One study “claims” to show that conservatives tend to have less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is an area of our brain supposedly responsible for our capacity for empathy.
However much that may have more firmly ensconced liberals in their assessment of conservatives as having no heart, it could easily have been turned the other way by conservatives: “See, liberals have higher activity in that area; we TOLD you they were just bleeding hearts.”
And can anyone anymore give a coherent definition of “liberal” or “conservative” (let’s not even get started on “Right” and “Left’ which seem more like sports teams than representative of coherent political philosophies)? And if you believe you can, do you really believe empirical science – subjecting elusive, qualitative views and values to precise measurement – is the place to find reliable insight? (it probably won’t surprise you to hear, in spite of several very successful research studies, I concluded by the end of my doctoral work that research was not a fruitful area to discover wisdom!)
which takes us nicely to Iain McGilchrist. You might be interested (and I hope not surprised) to hear that in a recent live Q&A, someone asked him whether capitalism was primarily a representation of LH (left hemisphere) or RH (right hemisphere) functioning.
“Oh, LH without question,” Mcgilchrist quickly responded. Now, is that an anti-conservative statement?
I would think, if there is any beauty and goodness and truth to a genuine conservative view, one which rightly values hierarchy and non-material values, a person with such a view would be quick to call for an economic and governing system that does NOT (as unchecked capitalism tends to do) flatten out all hierarchy, all values, and eliminates as much as possible all subjectivity – instead subjecting all value to a precise dead LH measurement,
I don’t have any conclusions for you except for this. Surely you know Paul was quoting the great pagan poet Epimenides (and another poet whose name escapes me at the moment) when he spoke of God as He “in whom we live and move and have our being?”
If I have any political orientation, it is close to what Indian poet-sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of as “contemplative anarchy.” Remembering that Sri Aurobindo was the first leader (prior to Gandhi) of the Indian independence movement, was considered “the most dangerous man in India” by the British Empire, and was consulted by Indian leaders (and not a few British ones… quietly) for 40 years after he went into “retirement” from political action) – keeping all this in mind (as well as the fact that Sri Aurobindo was one of the finest Greek and Latin scholars who ever attended Cambridge University) you can be confident that “anarchy” in his sense refers to the greatest freedom possible, a profound understanding of the spiritual foundation of equality with a balanced understanding of the spiritual foundation of hierarchy
Find the Christ within, live from that, and all else, as Julian of Norwich put it, will be well. Or as Augustine put it more simply (not misunderstood as in Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss”) “Love and do what you will.”
When you love, truly, Divinely, you WILL be doing God’s will.
Years ago I remember Canada being described as the Shiny Happy Gulag. I suspect it’s less happy now.
Half a lifetime ago, when I was about 22 and tormented by my first real relationship, I went to a Freudian analyst just for kicks, having already tried the latest form of behavioral-whatever therapy juiced by legal drugs of some sort. To hell with that obvious scam, so I figured I should see a classic adherent of a venerable science.
Within minutes of starting my first session, he asked me if I was sexually interested in his secretary, who was very attractive.
Within fifteen more minutes, he diagnosed my girlfriend as borderline, never having met her, and me as a narcissist. It was all very scientific, and fascinating. I proceeded to see him for a while longer, and heard about his deep personal issues, why he became a therapist, the brokenness, the scars.
Later I ran into him in the street just randomly one day, while walking around downtown. We chatted, he seemed lonely.
Such is life, my friends.
Borderline Progressive Disorder? I'm definitely seeing this among the lefty women I know. The more lefty they are, the more they sound like they have it.
Every single policy development remotely related to women that they disagree with, is a crisis and an attack against women. Everything is the end of the world.
Moving onto some other things on my mind, I was thinking about your discussion on TAC about Naomi Wolf and her review of the Return of the Gods.
I couldn't respond there because I'm not a subscriber.
Here's what's interesting to me. She writes that it was around 2020 that things seemed to shift radically. If anything, they shifted much earlier than that, and she contributed to that shift.
Back in the 1990s, Wolf was a well-known third wave feminist thinker, a liberal woman writing about women and sexuality, a sex-positive feminist.
Now I'm presuming she had some type of conversion since then, and if she did, I'd be interested in reading more about it.