Opening Remarks
Bit Of Background
Perspectives
Cultural Impoverishment
The University
The Elite’s Real Agenda
Collapsing Narrative Network
Closing Remarks
Cultural Impoverishment
The point we were getting at by the end of Part III was that CRT is, in part, a consequence of the three historical perspectives mentioned earlier. The Western Tradition (The Great Chain of Being), US History (From Explanatory Complexity to Cultural Impoverishment) and the University* in the 20th century (Publish and Perish). In Part IV we'll focus on how all of these moved irresistably in the direction of cultural impoverisment.
* For this entry our focus will be on the University in the United States.
In one way or another, all of us have been affected by the West’s movement in the last 200+ years toward cultural impoverishment, myself included. In fact, it’s why I dedicated my life to the Western Tradition. Because I didn’t want to lose contact with that tradition of learning after my first real encounter with it in my early 20’s. Of course, PRC is very much a part of that. It’s one man’s way of keeping that tradition alive in himself and for anyone else who might find it relevant, useful and inspiring. And it can be all of that. Which is exactly why the elite want it erased, so that no one has any contact with it. Of course. Again, they’re not called the hostile elite for nothing, or nation wreckers.
So, if CRT is a deposit, or example, or consequence, of the overall cultural impoverishment of the West in general and the USA especially, how do we know? How did that come about?
Toward a Contemporary and Historical Perspective
In this part we’ll look at the three roads mentioned above that led to our current state of cultural impoverishment. Cultural History in the West, US History, and the University in the 20th century.*
The idea being that a better historical perspective will make for a better contemporary perspective. And, as events of late have made obvious, or should have by now, we need both, badly.
Note: This is not to say that there aren’t any roads that lead us out of our current state of cultural impoverishment, of course not. But, more on that in a future entry.
*Of course, to the three roads we could add the all important Population Explosion and Communications Revolution. But we'll save them for our upcoming entry on Romanticism.
The Great Chain of Being
For cultural history we’re using The Great Chain of Being.
To outline what that idea implies we’ll reduce the concepts involved to their essentials.
The shift in European thought was a shift from conceiving the world as a static mechanism to that of a dynamic organism.
By static is meant that all of reality was realized from the beginning (by God, or a people chosen by God, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition), or by a world of ideas, or empire (Greco-Roman tradition). The idea is that perfection is outside of time, either in a future promised land (the Jewish tradition, or political revolutionary utopias) or a future heaven (Christian) or the world of ideas (Greek). And that there’s a perfect hierarchy from God to nothingness, all of it top down, from an other-worldly authority, to this-worldly authorities, on down to the most basic bio-social unit (the family). Of course, this includes what the Left often refers to derisively as The Patriarchy, clueless as ever to the fact that they are operating out of the exact same top-down structure.
The point is, for all of their many differences, the four pillars of Western Civilization were all united by a static vision with a hierarchical structure from the very top to the absolute bottom.
That has been so deeply ingrained in us that it’s a hard habit to even see, let alone break (witness the Left). For the most part it hasn’t been broken at all, because it hasn’t even been seen. At least not by the majority of people in the West. On the contrary.
For most people it still remains the unrealized base for most of their values, intellectual, social, moral, religious and aesthetic (just think of how many people still hate - hate - modern art).
This human rage for order goes way back. In fact, it’s even pre-human. Given a piece of chalk and an unfinished circle the monkey will complete the circle. So, it’s deep in us folks.
Note: To anticipate our point here, CRT is, from a human point of view, the crudest attempt now available for completing the circle from the perspective of both explanation and behavior.
Now, this rage for order was satisfied by a belief in a higher authority, God, and experienced on earth through religion, in other words, through ecclesiastical transmission and sanction.
When, during the Enlightenment, the belief in God moved toward a belief in Nature, religion was replaced by politics. But the religious impulse got stronger, not weaker, and the priestly-types became academics, journalists and politicians. The Enlightenment can be reduced to a single principle. Perfect Adaptation. Perfect adaptation of the individual to the group and the group to the environment was, properly speaking, seen as the basis for all intellectual and moral decisions - for everything. Yeesh!
This implied a belief that the structure of the mind was identical to the structure of nature. But because of human ignorance and stupidity, because of religious and political tyranny, that social structure, it was believed, was out of line. The revolutionary effort of the late 18th century was designed to correct that fault, to line up mind, nature, and society into one unitary system.
Sound familiar?
But, at the same time, there was a conservative Enlightenment, best represented by Edmund Burke. He saw mind, society and nature as an organic system that had gradually developed over time and that any revolutionary effort would damage and destroy the delicate balance between mind, nature and society. So, reform, not revolution is the basis of the conservative Enlightenment. Revolution, not reform, that of the liberal.
So what?
Well, so, from the same belief-system, with the same values of perfect adaptation, two diametrically opposed positions had emerged and in a way they never had before in human history.
And, from the perspective of both, two was one too many.
So, both justified the slaughter of the other, as WWI and WWII made perfectly obvious. And now we’re back to CRT. Because it’s appearance today is itself symptomatic of that same struggle.
Note: Romanticism and Cultural Transcendence, the central task of the Romantics, was the response and alternative to this unsatisfactory situation of social and political polarization of the Right and Left. Of course, it's been the theme of my entire adult life and the very justification for PRC International.
The History of the United States: A Quick Look
If only we could stop here. But, we can’t. We promised two other historical perspectives to help us gain a much needed contemporary perspective, one that is both clear and strong.
The first is a quick look at the history of the USA.
The history of the United States is the history of the westward movement of European culture into alien physical environments and in constant contact with less developed cultures, the Indians, Aftrican slaves and the provincial poor from Europe. The result?
European culture in the United States was transformed over the course of two centuries into a frontier culture. Frontier patterns are still the basic patterns of the United States, and the frontier values are still that country’s fundamental values. So, what is a frontier culture? What are its patterns and values?
Note: I never heard these questions asked once while growing up in the United States, from either those defending or those attacking the country. Then again, I never heard a truly intelligent and considerate discussion about freedom and democracy and its impact on our social institutions, starting with the family, either. That being the case, since things are primarily cultural, not political, and since the family is an essential part of that culture, is it any surprise that the family and the culture are falling apart, and along with it, the country? In any event, you would think that if someone wanted to criticize, or defend the country, or do both, they would want to know as much about it as possible.
The best way to answer this would be to compare frontier culture with high culture, which, again, is the subject of our next entry.
The highest level of any culture is marked by extreme richness.
Even in its solutions it contains innumerable ambiguities, ambivalences and puzzles and problems. So, anyone who lives at that level is as much involved with and interested in discovering and creating problems as they are in solving them.
Second, the members of high culture require social protection and psychic insulation, because both of those are necessary, not just to experience problem-exposure, but for making it tolerable.
Third, that level maintains itself by an alliance with political power, social status, and wealth. Why? Because these are the social and economic defenses for its psychic insulation. In fact, a crude example would be the tenure system in the United States.
This brings us to the fourth character of high culture. It’s wastefulness. Just think of the block of marble and then the sculpture, or the mess that any artist makes to create their work.
Better yet, think of the birth and after-birth, in the ultimate creative act of a human life, and the corresponding pain and joy.
Note: In fact, and in passing, it’s exactly because of the deterioration of intellectual and spiritual life, especially among the elite, that so many feminists and their misled followers in the public think a woman gives birth by herself (when she has a child), and to herself (when she aborts that child). Neither is a matter of freedom of choice, but of imprisonment to narcissism. It’s all about her. My body. My choice? Are you kidding? You're not giving birth to yourself. How narcissistic can you get?
High culture is exceedingly wasteful and in every possible way.
Why? Because the human capacity for problem-exposure, solution-postponement and controlled innovation is so limited that a tremendous loss is involved in any genuinely high culture creative breakthrough. In short, no breakdown, no breakthrough.
The fact is that few people have the tolerance for high-level problem-solving, even fewer have the capacity for significant creativity, and even fewer have the opportunity for either.
It must always be remembered that the highest cultural level exists because human beings need it in order to adapt to their physical and social environments and vice versa.
What is the explanation for this need? Briefly, it amounts to this:
Perception - Orientation - Reality
To every situation we bring, by picking up clues from the situation, a perceptual, or cognitive, model, or orientation.
But, since this model is only prepared to deal with a category of situations, but with no particular situation, there is a disparity between the data and the model. That disparity is reality.
Our general tendency is to suppress as much of that disparity as possible. Why? Because any awareness of that disparity produces cognitive tension, psychological disorientation and emotional disturbance. This is the explanation for why few people have a capacity for, or interest in, problem-solving or innovation.
The safer, the more protected, the human organism, the more it can afford to be aware of the disparities, to search for problems, to account for the disparities, to solve those problems, and, above all, to correct their model or orientation by feedback.
And now we’re back to the article linked in Part III. So, what’s the connection? Is there any? There certainly is, and it's this:
No one has complained louder about Safe Spaces than Cancel Culture. No one. And CRT is central to Cancel Culture. CRT writers, speakers, etc. have all benefited from those safe spaces, in the sense that those safe spaces have been made available to them, and yet they know nothing about what we’ve just been discussing, and even less than nothing about problem-solving.
The only value of a safe space at a university, a social institution supposedly dedicated to higher learning, is to learn. Specifically, to learn about one's relationship to the problem-solving process.
A safe space isn't supposed to be some place where people go to feel sorry for themselevs and lie about their own history. It's a place where one goes to think and feel deeply about the problems they face, individually and socially and, in relation to the university, where they can apply the intellectual habits they were supposed to have learned at the univeristy. The habits of rigorous thinking, consistent reasoning, and cautious judgment.
That way, upon graduation, they can then put those skills into practice in the other social insitutions that, though they have already been a part of, will now more fully enter as truly well-educated young adults, and not as brainsoiled sub-adults who call themselves well-educated. But that's obviously not the case today, anywhere, and hasn't been for a very long time. Just look around.
The more recent deposits of our teaching-learning institutions do not know the history of the West in general, or of the country in particular (though they think they do), and nothing about the problem-solving process and how it impacts and challenges the individual, intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally.
On the contrary, the university today, like much of the culture itself, is a place where the young receive an intensive training in things like Narcissistic Personality Disorder and The Dark Triad.
The result? They know nothing about how to create and preserve.
For a long time now they have been learning, from the best, about things like infiltration, subversion, betrayal, destruction, and death. But nothing at all about competent social management.
Obviously! Look at everything they manage. The social institutions now under their control are in free fall - all of them.
Correspondingly, people like Emily Jashinsky, though well-intended, and certainly trying to push back as thoughtfully as they can, are entirely clueless, because they can’t properly identify the problem anymore than those they disagree with. This explains why the Right so often comes off as the Elmer Fudd of politics.
In short, the two sides of Dogma are both products of the same cultural impoverishment that now threatens human survival. Even the elite are feeling the threat. Hence their hysteria and paranoia.
In fact, the elite's hysteria is even worse than the public's, and that's saying a great deal. So, it would appear the two are locked inside a vicious cycle that neither one seems to know how to stop.
We’ll go into this a bit more in Part VI. For now, let’s continue with our discussion of US History and its relation to CRT.
External Frontier
If we don’t have to act for our own defense and survival, we can become aware of the disparity between model and data, what PRC refers to as disparity awareness. But, we can also become aware of and sensitive to the difficulties, ambiguities, ambivalences and puzzles, in our own mental models as well!
That's why cultural transcendence is self-transcendece.
At the deepest level, this is what is meant by self-awareness.
Note: All of this is why PRC sees itself as an alternative. We reject, under the strongest possible terms, the Right and Left, Liberal and Conservative, Revolutionary and Reactionary, because they both come from the same basic idea, Perfect Adaptation, which to PRC is not only untenable, but insane, and a threat to our chances of survival. And perhaps those chances are not that great. It very well may be. But, until we know that for sure (and we can only know for sure when there are no more human beings to know it) we’re going to continue to act As If. And that’s why we value our response. This is our justification and validation of the explanation we offer in response to the problems facing us all today. It requires a heroic going against the grain. But, it can be done, and it's worth it.
In a crisis situation, one interpreted as requiring action, we can’t afford such luxuries. So, behavior in crisis situations is invariably simplistic. And now we arrive at a fact of great importance.
A life history involving continuous exposure to crisis situations effects an increasing simplification of behavior and a continuous reinforcement of increasingly simplified mental models.
A frontier is a crisis situation. The USA is a frontier culture. So, our conscious responses to the cultural problems we face are themselves based on unconscious, impulsive and therefore automatic, unreflective and habitual responses. The results?
A siege mentality the origins of which most are entirely unaware of, and a devastating social incoherence and corresponding culture crisis, the likes of which we have never seen before.
Note: This culture crisis explains the purpose, importance, and urgency of our values at PRC.
This is why journalism has become more important than philosophy. Let’s restate that. This is why the lowest level of the most sensationalistic journalism in history is culturally more important to the overwhelming majority of people (for or against any specific issue) than the high-level problem-solving and significant innovation associated with the arts & sciences. And now we are back once again to Critical Race Theory. Because, it is from the bowels of this cultural impoverishment that CRT was deposited as so much human waste material that no one has, as yet, gotten around to flushing down the toilet. Pardon the crude analogy, but given the subject matter, CRT, it fits. After all, why do you think the educational system in the US stinks so bad!
Returning to the crisis situation of all frontier cultures, the tendency of Europeans on the American frontier, whether North or South America, was necessarily to apply European cognitive models by simplification, reductionism, and reinforcement, rather than by feedback and correction. For example, violence, though certainly present in Europe, tended to be ritualized in areas under the influence of high culture levels, such as war.
But violence on the frontier is the response to the individual who cannot afford the luxury of correcting their adaptational models, but can only apply them by eliminating any disparity from the environment, not by understanding it. This is why feminism, for example, hasn't changed the culture at all, but has actually made it worse. It has simply transferred the very toxic behavior they complain about, but don’t understand, from men to women. Far from solving our cultural problems they’ve simply further impoverished the culture while increasing the toxic behavior they lecture everyone about. Again, psychotic arrogance (itself symptomatic of a toxic environment produced by a multigenerational, protracted crisis situation of a frontier culture), and self-awareness don’t go together. How could they?
The culture makes such self-awareness a virtual impossibility.
How progressive. More like how clueless and pathetic. And, since psychotics fear exposure, above all else, no wonder they demand to be placed above criticism and blindly obeyed. The whole point of this is the de-ritualization and hence simplification of cultural patterns in the realm of violence. This violence has become endemic in America, from the family to the universities. This will bring us to our last perspective from which to view the verbal cancer that is CRT and the corresponding need of the elite to infect everyone with it. But, before we turn to that, a final word on the frontier culture, it’s patterns, values and consequences.
In terms of the patterns of frontier culture, oversimplification, reductionism, and violence, consider the Either/Or Polarization in public discourse. The response to anything one doesn’t like is automatically dismissed as a Conspiracy Theory. Which, as we said, only goes to show that the person making the accusation doesn’t know what a theory is or does. Because the key word in Conspiracy Theory is Theory. Obviously. So, if it is a theory then let the person test it and if it fails, then it fails. Why the hysteria?
We all know why.
The accusation is used in the same way words like racist, sexist, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and nativist are used, to silence debate and destroy the enemy. Or, as they liked to put it in The Old Testament, Death to The Transgressor! Again, how progressive. How tolerant.
Another example is in the founding documents of the United States. Although Enlightenment thinking at its best was very rich, the founding documents of the Democratic Constitutional Republic of the United States are almost a parodic simplification of Enlightenment philosophy. A fact that even modern day conservatives seem oblivious to, and not just them. After all, the negative response of the Left today to the US Constitution is not only made on grounds that are childishly oversimplified, but that are also, ironically and embarrassingly, based on the same patterns of behavior found in the frontier culture of the very country they hate and are in the process of destroying.
Another example, as a total behavioral pattern, can be found in Jackson Pollock’s version of European abstract painting, which
was a striking simplification involving a minimally corrected, rapid (unreflective) and violent attack on ever larger canvases.
But this simplification, reductionism, and reinforcement of behavioral patterns that over time constitutes vulgarity, has two further consequences, one flowing from the other, and both highly pertinent to our considerations in this entry.
The first is that the process was necessarily seen as good. Since it was necessary for survival on the frontier, it was, as values always are, universalized. In fact, it was actually interpreted as an enoblement, even a redemption, of European culture.
Here is the source of the myth of America as a Paradise, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, and of the absurd myth of the American as the new Adam. The result? A culture in which behavioral simplification became the ideal. Here is the source of the anti-intellectualism in American life. The irony, of course, is the fact that the Left is now acting out of the exact same cultural patterns. Because the Left’s consciousness has not been historicized it has not experienced the real alienation from its culture that leads to a genuine cultural transcendence, as I have.
On the contrary, they simply, or simple-mindedly, chose the polar opposite of their hated brothers and sisters on the Right.
This, of course, is exactly what is meant by Polarization. Proof
of this can be seen in the fact that anyone - anyone - who disagrees with them is automatically a member of the far-Right.
Note: Steven Pinker, no Right-winger, speaks of this in his excellent description of The Left Pole.
Once again, how progressive. More like how culturally and historically illiterate (and to an almost unbelievable degree).
The second consequence, flowing from the first, has meant a peculiar American helplessness before the enormous social problems industrialization and uncorrected exploitation of natural and human resources brought into being in the 20th century (only to continue with the technological revolution).
Everything from the automobile, to modern warfare, to the collapse of the family, to racial tensions and race riots. The best way to describe, or define, the American response to all of their social problems is not merely incompetence, but helplessness.
But, let no European feel superior in this regard. Because, all of this - simplification, idealization of that simplification, violence and reinforcement was exported to Europe during the 20th century and found there a welcome and intensification. Why should this be so? What can help explain all of this?
Internal Frontier
Well, we’ve already looked at the external frontier. So, let’s look at the internal frontier. In other words, the exposure of lower cultural levels (the ones many of us came from) to higher, which is an important part of US history in the 19th and 20th century.*
*Though not in the 21st century, since high culture has pretty much been successfully eliminated, with the exception of PRC and other scattered individuals and websites. Which is why some have suggested that we’re a biologically maladaptive species doomed to extinction, since we can hardly survive without high level problem-solving that serves the culture and functions beyond technology.
Comments