Q: To pick up where we left off. You said, in effect, that because of the instability of meaning, culture is constantly threatened with disintegration, undermining and impoverishment. Right?
A: That’s right.
Q: You added that culture not only channels behavior, it is also responsible for the spread of behavioral deviance from what the culture might consider to be the norm. So far, so good?
A: Yes. So far, so good.
Q: Great. Ok. And you also said that though culture channels behavior it can’t do the job by itself. So the question becomes: What maintains culture? And you said social institutions. Right?
A: That’s right.
Q: Perfect. Could we pick up the conversation from there?
A: Of course. Because culture is constantly threatened with disintegration, undermining and impoverishment, controls are set over culture. Those controls are social institutions, of which five may be distinguished: teaching-learning institutions (the family is the initial institution), value institutions (which maintain the individual’s self-ascription of value, which subsumes judgments of competence, but because these are in fact judgments made by imperfect human beings those judgments themselves and the behavior they are intended to control are themselves unstable), economic institutions, governmental institutions, and idea institutions (the Arts & Sciences, Philosophy, Scholarship, etc. that function both in and outside of teaching-learning institutions). All five of these institutions are interdependent. Meaning, they all share each other's attributes. For example, a family is a teaching-learning institution, but also a value institution, economic, governing and even idea institution.
Q: Interesting. And in what way are the social institutions connected to Explanation and Power?
A: The structure of the interaction among institutional levels is the structure of Explanation itself.
Q: Why is that?
A: Because the verbal behavior within an institution is that of an Explanation, or, specifically, an Explanatory Regress.
Q: And by Explanatory Regress you mean an Explanation that terminates in a single word, or idea?
A: Yes. Exactly. I’d say, to simplify things for now, an explanation that terminates in a single word.
Q: Like the word God, for instance?
A: Yes. Or, to use the words that have replaced God in the West today in general and the USA in particular, Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation and related words, such as racism, sexism, anti-semitism, and all the rest.
Q: Those words have replaced the word God?
A: Obviously.
Q: So you’re talking about Identity Politics then?
A: Yes. Of course. It's the dominant ideology of the West today. That is to say, it's the dominant explanatory system.
Q: What do you think of it as an explanatory system?
A: It's sick, crazy, and stupid.
Q: In what way?
A: The whole thing is based on an Oppressor/Oppressed nexus. Whites being the oppressor and nonwhites, which includes both Jews and what is referred to absurdly and pretentiously as people of color. But it's the dominant ideology of the Western world today. Begging the question: How can anything dominant be oppressed? Correspondingly, Whites as Whites have no institutional power or cultural control anywhere in the world today. White in this sense is simply a racial descriptor. Culturally it's an empty category. Meaning, it is not a word that can be used to describe an organized group of people capable of acting in their own interest. Begging the question: How can a non-entity be an oppressor? Worse, to the extent Whites is a valid category, it is only as a racial descriptor. As I just pointed out, They have no institutional power or cultural control as Whites. Begging the question: How can a powerless entity be oppressive?
Put bluntly, Identity Politics is the explanatory system of Cultural Impoverishment, of Nietzsche's The Slave Revolt In Morality, of Ortega's The Revolt of The Masses and The Spoilt Child of History, and of Phillip Reif's The Triumph of The Therapuetic. More importantly and from the point of view of our Q & A as a system of explanation it is fundamentally incompetent and inept and therefore dangerous.
Q: Why is that?
A: Well, though I can't promise anything, I'll try to be brief so as to not take us too far from the point of our Q & A, which is a summary of Peckham's Explanation and Power. The point of any Governmental Institution is to resolve ideological incoherence. From this a general principle may be derived.
Q: Which is?
A: The higher the explanatory regress a social institution maintains, the farther from the exemplificatory frontier, the real world we all live in where explanations are carried out, the more unstable it is, and the more it depends on the ultimate sanctions and therefore, the more it must depend on politics for its survival.
Q: Why's that?
A: Explanatory statements such as Things are the way they are because of a divine being or Things are the way they are because of white racism are far more easily undermined than such a statement as When you stand in the rain without an umbrella, you get wet, because rain is water and water is wet. One could only dream to find such a charmingly straightforward statement in all of Critical Theory or Identity Politics. But even to dream of such a thing you'd be wasting your time. It's never going to happen. That's why as the dominant explanatory system in the West today it is causing us all so much trouble. A bit of Kierkegaard is helpful at this point.
Q: Kierkegaard? Why?
A: Because he realized that the moment you accept a statement like Things are the way they are because of God (or white racism) you create the possibility of what I refer to at PRC as subsumptional incoherence, for example, let's put it this way:
White racism is about power! is a statement that is a product of, and subsumed by, the dominant explanation of the West today, which everyone must obey, or else. An explanation, moreover, that is aggressively and unapologetically antiwhite.
A better example of a paralogism - an unconscious violation of one's low logic - would be hard to imagine, because the term is refuted by the reality it is attempting to explain and the people those who use the term are trying to control. But it's the kind of logic one so often finds in the thinking of all dogmatic people.
In short, it's an example of subsumptional incoherence.
That's why the more power they get the crazier they are. The crazier they are the faster the things they control fall apart. You can see this in families, companies, cultures and civilizations.
What's interesting is the structure of this kind of thinking one so often finds on the political Left is like that of Religion, especially Christianity, which they openly hate - and with total impunity -since they have all of the institutional power and cultural control that they attribute to whites. Anyway, the similarity in the structure of their thinking can be seen by looking at the following two examples ("God is good, therefore everything is good." And yet there is evil) and ("Whites are bad, We're not white, therefore we are good." And yet they do bad like everyone else.)
Q: But there's a difference, no?
A: There's a big difference.
Q: And that is?
A: That at least with Christianity (or any explanation of the world concerned with Ethics, whether it's found in something more secular, like Romanticism or Pragmatism) there are things like confession, forgiveness, redemption, learning, change and growth. But with Identity Politics there's just projection, no confession, no forgiveness, and no redemption. Just White Guilt and Nonwhite Innocence. All of life for them is boiled down to Us Good/Them Bad, when it's so obvious that all of us are capable of both good and bad. And not because of some barbaric, pre-modern concept like Original Sin, or the Enlightenment equivalent of Human Ignorance, but because of an obvious and easy to verify imperfection. Which is why human imperfection is the justification for continuous learning, change and growth.
This whole Us Good/Them Bad reductivist mode of thinking is why Identity Politics is a parody of polarization. They're trapped in it. Talk about mind-forg'd manacles. And now we're back to why they're so incompetent at resolving ideological incoherence.
Because, again, the higher the level of abstraction, the more verbal examples and nonverbal instances the explanation claims to subsume, but the less precise the controlling directions are for responding to any particular example or instance. Whether it's the liberty, equality, fraternity of the French Revolution or the diversity, inclusion, equity (DIE) of the Woke revolution, the principle is the same: the higher the abstraction, the greater the violence. But there's no comparison between the two when it comes to cultural impoverishment. In that regard, Identity Politics has no equal in human history. That's why it's causing us all so much trouble and why the longer it stays in power the worse off everyone will be, because they are so resistant to exposure. The result of demanding to be placed above criticism, or else. Insane!
Q: Ok. Now that is definitely another important conversation all on its own. So, to continue with our talk, if I understand you correctly you’re saying that an institution is an explanatory regress. Is that right?
A: Yes. An institution is an explanatory regress. Institutions don’t simply use explanations. An institution is an explanation.
Q: Yes. That's one of the phrases you have used a lot in our meetings. I like that one. So, could you go into a bit more detail?
A: Sure. In fact, we could easily tie this into what we were just talking about in regard to Identity Politics, or any other ideology.
Q: How so?
A: An ideology consists of the high and terminating levels of an institution. Behavior within government institutions, for example, is either of governance (the resolution of ideological incoherence), or politics, which is more concerned with stabilizing or destabilizing governmental institutions.
So the tasks of ideological institutions are maintaining ideological redundancies, exemplifying them (a particular task of the Arts, though not unique to them), and criticizing them, either by evaluative criticism or the critique, which is the ideological mode of undermining ideologies. Or, maintentance, exemplification, criticism, and critique.
In fact, to extend this a bit, the importance of ideological institutions is indicated by the fact that a revolutionary government aims as soon as it can at complete ideological control over not just ideological institutions, but all institutions.
Q: You mean, like what Identity Politics is doing now?
A: Yes, exactly. Of course. Just look around.
Q: Interesting. Ok. So, how could we bring this back to our talk about Culture and Explanation, in short, to your Irreducibles?
A: Cultural levels are the levels of Explanation in all institutions in general and in ideological institutions in particular. So, the higher the cultural level the greater the exploitation of behavioral instability, and the lower the cultural level the greater the behavioral stabilization. I experienced this in a profound way when I moved from the United States to Argentina.
Now, I have to say here, or acknowledge, that I am well aware that these five kinds of institutions are, in a sense, analytical abstractions, because each institution carries on all five institutional functions at the same time.
Q: You mean, in other words, and as you mentioned earlier, they’re all interdependent?
A: Yes. Exactly.
Q: How is Cultural History related to this? Because I know it’s a subject near and dear to your heart. Is there a connection?
A: Yes, very much so.
Q: And what would that connection be?
A: From the point of view of our talk, Cultural History is the gradual emergence of institutions which specialize in one particular kind of institutional control over culture, using the other kinds as subsidiary and subordinate modes of control.
Q: Could you give an example?
A: Sure. The Church in the Middle Ages, the State since the Enlightenment, and the Individual in the age of Romanticism (not Individualism or Individuality. But the Individual Self.
The self behind the role or roles we play as our price of admission into society, any society. Romanticism discovered the self).
What's happening now in the West. and not just the West, is that the hostile elite has drastically oversimplified its explanatory behavior while increasing its power over human and natural resources. In short, the hostile elite has presented the world with a two-fold problem of oversimplification and expansion. And this has never happened before in human history - ever.
Q: What does this entail, or what does this mean exactly?
A: It means that the elite has rendered itself incapable of responding not only to the environment's demands on us in general and the elite in particular, but also to the elite's demands on the environment. Which of course includes billions of people.
The elite has created a situation of irreversible maladaptation.
Q: I’d like to return to the Individual. But for now, do you think you could summarize what we’ve been talking about so far?
A: Certainly. The argument so far can be summarized with the following conclusions:
Culture controls behavior
Culture consists of performatory and regulatory semiotic redundancy systems
Words control redundancy systems
The defining attribute of verbal behavior is Explanation
Explanation is hierarchical
Behavioral control is therefore hierarchical
All institutions are hierarchically organized
Behavioral control is a matter of learning socially validated performances
Performances consist of responses appropriate to the presentation of particular signs
Behavior control depends upon the meaning of those signs
Smooth behavioral interaction of any kind depends upon the illusion that meaning is immanent
But since meaning is not immanent appropriate response can ultimately be maintained only by the application of force in the form of the four sanctions of economic deprivation, imprisonment, torture and death.
Q: Wow. Any hope here?
A: The bright spot (and, I would argue, the only bright spot) is the capacity of our teaching-learning institutions in general and the Arts and Sciences in particular to exploit ideological instability, so as to make our institutions more viable, more flexible and adaptive to the many demand that are being made on them.
Q: And your argument is that this is the direction the West was moving in even well into the second half of the 20th century?
A: It’s not my argument. It’s a fact. An easily verifiable fact.
Q: Could you verify it for us now?
A: Sure. As you know, one of the things I like to talk about in PRC meetings with our partners to help us understand this is Cars - Computers - Concepts. Cars and computers were both created and developed exactly because people were open to innovation when it came to transportation and information. In other words, everyone involved, from the specialists to the general public took for granted the notion of exposing ideas in these areas to a process of continuous feedback and correction.
And now we need to do that with concepts in relation to Explanation and Behavior as both relate to Social Management.
And with that we come to the beating heart of this Q & A about Peckham's masterpiece Explanation and Power, which still stands as the zenith of human thought. No one has come close to what he achieved in that book and not just that one. And yet all he did was what anyone involved in the creation and development of cars and computers did. He exposed his ideas to a proces of continuous feedback and correction until he arrived at something that was satisfactory to him at the time. And that is all anyone can ask of anybody. This is why he was able to innovate the single most original, relevant and useful theory not only of explanation and behavior, but of cultural history too, while transgressing and transcending the boundaries of his professional field. Of course, the fact that he was a genius didn't exactly hurt either. In any event, his work is the best evidence or proof we have of the direction the advanced cutting edge of culture was moving in.
Q: And this has been halted by Identity Politics.
A: Not just halted, but irretrievably lost. That is unless something drastic is done about it. But as long as they have power they will block any attempt by anyone else to do anything about it.
Q: I’ll just ask you point blank. Do you think the US is savable?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: The short answer?
Q: Ah, ok.
A: It’d be like trying to unscramble an omelette.
Q: Too far gone?
A: Too far gone.
Q: That’s why you’ve been too long gone?
A: Yep. The ideologues killed the United States. From the point of view of Cultural History, at a time when the country, head to toe an Enlightenment nation, needed to move toward Romanticism, it stayed stuck in the Enlightenment. That is to say, the notion of perfect adaptation. Which, ironically, but not surprisingly, created a situation of perfect maladaptation. And by the way, I don't mean that everyone in the country needed to move in that direction. Just enough to form a critical mass.
Q: So your solution would be to return to the direction the West was heading in pre-Woke America?
A: I’m not interested in returning to anything (especially the US). Besides, the direction has been kept alive in me. So, there’s nothing for me to return to, since I never left it in the first place.
Q: But you had to leave the United States to keep it alive in yourself, no?
A: Yes, that’s right.
Q: But are you enough?
A: I’m enough for me. I can’t answer for anyone else, nor have they asked me to and nor would I want to.
Q: But you would like to see things improve for others in the West in general and the US in particular, wouldn’t you?
A: Of course. You know that I would or you wouldn’t be here.
Q: So then what would you like to see happen?
A: I’d like to see public discourse in general and the intellectual world in particular advance from mythological conceptions of things like Race, for example, and toward verbal conceptions of causality, and from that to an understanding of Explanation and Behavior. And we would be able to do that because in our discussion of causality we could see the difference between the predictive function of cause and the explanatory function. And this has everything to do with everything that is happening now.
Q: How so? In what way?
A: Because the predictive function of cause is a verbal instruction to do something in the real world, while the explanatory function is just an instruction to do something with language. That's why so many people today are talking so much bull shit with a straight face, as if the truth itself had flung its doors open to them and them alone. They're not even trying to make sense, let alone solve problems. Worse, they're demanding we believe them, or else.
In short, I'd like to see our attention redirected to exactly what we have been talking about in this Q & A. Otherwise we're doomed.
Q: Why?
A: First and foremost, because central to the position offered here is biological adaptation itself, between us and the world we live in and have to respond to to stay alive. Secondly, and just as important, the approach offered here is a helluva lot healthier.
Q: So, not just survive, but thrive?
A: Yeah. You could put it that way.
Q: Could you quickly summarize your position here?
A: Sure. By the second half of the 20th century, in the West in general and the USA in particular, as you put it, was to be found the greatest proportion of the population which experienced the life enhancement of the inversion of the four ultimate sanctions.
Economic Ease
The Privileges of Freedom
The Pursuit of Happiness (not the promise of it)
The Value of Life and the enhancement of the Individual's own value (which frees the individual member of society from the greatest danger that society presents to itself - overconformity).
In human history this has only happened in the geographical areas of Western Europe and North America (the land of whiteness) and only in the past couple of hundred years. This is what the hostile elite, et al. are trying to destroy. And it is insane.
But, it has to be said, so we can gain an even richer comprehension of human behavior, that the individual is the cyclonic center of disturbance of human behavior. In other words, the individual is the very Catch-22 of it all.
Q: So we should turn to a discussion of the Individual next. Does that sound good to you?
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