causticus: trees (Default)
Please forgive me if the following comes off as moralistic preaching, but I feel compelled to shout from the rooftops that I have no business telling other people how to live their lives. Nor do you. Specifically, I mean that I have no business providing unsolicited advice to strangers and casual acquaintances. Now, what about those people within my own little circle of immediate family and close friends? If I feel so inclined, I may offer a few pointers and other forms of light feedback on whatever is it they are doing or expressing, granted the person in question seems at all interested in what my opinion might be on whatever is troubling them. And even if the issue is something that’s bugging me quite a bit, I’ve learned over the years to tread lightly, and mind my own P’s and Q’s before gawking at the mote in an eye that is not mine.

I’m going to define Moralism here as the art and science of telling strangers how they should and shouldn’t conduct their own affairs. It’s an art and science usually based on some sort of religious or philosophical code, or simply whatever the prevailing social norms happen to be at the time. But first, we need to get definitions out of the way. What is a stranger? Well, pretty much the entirety of humanity, I’d have to say. I think I sort of get at this in the above paragraph. Since those of us who are inmates of the contemporary industrialized Western word are now mostly atomized, and thus without community-proper, anyone outside of our own personal bubbles is effectively a stranger.

When your Facts touch my Feelings

Am I going to get a bit cranky when I see someone wearing ratty sweat pants out in public, like say in the supermarket? Sure. How about those skin-tight, spandex “yoga pants” that are all the rage these days among young women? No comment. Ditto for vulgar displays of tattoos, piercings, and other forms of so-called “body art” that come off to some of us as an expression of self-vandalism rather than beauty. How about when someone dumps their garbage out their car window and onto the road? How about when someone drives like an utter maniac on the same road I happen to be driving on?

Fortunately there are laws and ordinances in place to address those last couple items. But I think you might be getting the point here. One of the great struggles of life here on this planet is dealing with how utterly obnoxious, rude, and self-unaware other people can be. Those behaviors which yield manifest externalities can be justifiably dealt with via the aforementioned legal process. But it’s the subtle things that often irk us the most. It’s when we attempt to legislate against those subtle transgressions of common decency that the problems start happening. This is when the situation calls for a priesthood of one type or another to determine when, where, and how to censure those behaviors and actions which don’t do any harm in a directly-measurable manner, but might do harm in the long term if not contained, according to the gut feelings of many members of the community. Now we get into the icky territory where facts and feelings collide and create an intractable mess.

Middle Class Insecurities

I’m going to assert that Moralism is a modern-day phenomenon. It’s a very middle class (bourgeois, in the old lingo) type of social control. Our Moralism arose long after the dissolution of the self-policing societies of yore. By this, I mean the clans, tribes, extended families, and other intimate forms of social organization; those that had no need to write down their systems of rules, obligations, and entitlements. Contrast this with the Nation State, which is an entirely modern creature. Or really, it’s the Polis expanded out onto a wider territory. The modern Nation State is the vain attempt to create a family where there’s only masses of strangers who happen to inhabit the same geographic expanse, speak the same language, and have some vague sense of common origin or collective purpose. It actually seems to work ok (to an extent) when everyone residing within the geographic expanse-in-question does in-fact speak the same language, follow the same type of religion, and most members of the nation look not too dissimilar from one another. But nothing beats the old-type family network, where the web of accountability and reciprocity was an up close and personal affair. Under this arrangement, transgressions against familial norms elicited face-to-face consequences. Compare this to the impersonal state of the modern era, where it’s some form of byzantine jurisprudence that has been put in place to deal with myriad forms of social turbulence which might arise.

Fear-based Righteousness

Now we might see that Moralism is the outer expression of an inner angst that goes something like, “THAT PERSON is behaving in a way that makes my blood boil but there is nothing I can actually do about it!! Arrrgh!!” That’s right, it’s the type of existential torment known as powerlessness.

The Old Ways would of course counter with this simple piece of advice, “If they’re not your family, why do you even care?”

I think I have to defer to the ancients on this one. Really, if you have no formal social connections with another person, and they are not directly doing harm to you, then why is their business your business? On what authority do you have the right to police their conduct?

The inner turmoil of the Moralist is one that is fueled by the loss of membership in meaningful social arrangements. When we feel a sense of powerless over our surroundings, fear starts to bubble up. And that fear grows until it finds a release. The is the stuff or moral panics and “mass formation” sorts of collective outbursts that end up making life miserable for anyone within earshot.

Moral Sovereignty

Back in the ancient past, it was the Clan Chieftain, or Tribal Elder, or Parish Priest (or some equivalent figure) who was tasked with nipping these things in the bud; they were empowered to take quick, decisive action before the petulant whiners and complainers of the tribe could slowly brew up a fresh batch of bubbling hysteria over this or that contentious issue. That Clan Elder, or Friendly Neighborhood Rabbi was probably on a first-name-basis with anyone in the community who mattered.

So fast forward back to our crappy today. Instead of getting all in tizzy about what the countless human abstractions around us are doing, why not find or join a family? (Whatever that Family is, it can take on many forms; blood relation need not be required) And then stopping stressing out about whatever harmless idiosyncrasies non-family might be acting out?

I suppose now I can boast about my blissful indifference to total strangers thumbing their nose at what is proper and decent.
causticus: trees (Default)
Historically, pre-Christian polytheistic religions of Europe were all about the tribe, the clan, the family, and the land. There was no such thing as social atomization or abstract notions of individualism back in those days. The people around back then would have seen atomized living arrangement as being totally alien to their own way of life and probably an abomination. Most of the attempts of our atomized contemporaries to practice the the Old Ways (in which connection to the land has long been severed from the everyday reality of the ordinary person) is just a recipe for the "religion" being little more than some petty intellectual or aesthetic indulgence, or some weekend diversion for bored, affluent people.

If we're to rekindle the "real deal" today, it seems like we must form new “tribes” and “clans” based on the practical and spiritual needs of today; as opposed to looking only to the past to get a sense of tribal identity. In Europe, clans ceased to exist as tribalism gave way to feudalism and the ideological hegemony of the Roman Church. Yes, there were a few mostly-Celtic nooks and crannies where clan societies held on for quite awhile, but this was the exception, not the rule once Christianity spread and took over everything in its path. Christendom became the great tribe, and the church parish and the fiefdom/lordship became the replacement for the clan. Nobility Peerages became the class-tribes of landed aristocrats.

Guilds, Fellowships, and Fraternities

As Europe urbanized and became affluent, the trade guild functioned as the de-facto clan organization for artisans and merchants. The industrial revolution eventually rendered those associations obsolete, as machine-driven mass production replaced handcraft as the primary means of producing goods. In 19th century America, a great variety of Fraternal Orders and Mutual Aid societies sprung up to fulfill the needs of the people. These fellowships and brotherhoods did a remarkable job of instilling clan-like community bonds in the hearts, souls, and hands of Americans. These organizations operated in tandem with the countless church denominations that altogether formed the basic foundation of American social life. Eventually those associations mostly disappeared thanks to the runaway growth of centralized government and the many social "services" this behemoth now doles out to people who are financially destitute or between gigs and without much in the way of family support. Because of the metastatic growth of impersonal bureaucratic institutions, people have had less and less of a practical need for intimate social networks.

From a psychological and spiritual perspective, such a development has most certainly been not a good one! We could say that humans are wired to thrive in small trust networks consisting of people whom one has established face-to-face relationships with. The face connection usually ensured some sort of system of natural accountability is in place. We can use the Old English word Frith to describe this type of relationship.

Peace is a product of Reciprocal Relationships

Frith is often mistranslated as “peace.” Peace is certainly an aspect of Frith, but it’s nothing approaching the whole concept. Frith is a state of social stability and general wellbeing that results from mutually-beneficial (i.e. reciprocal) relationships between people belonging to a community. Because we lack no concise term for this concept in Modern English, trying to elaborate on Frith without a singular term becomes quite the mouthful of abstractions. Frith was in essence the social contract of our ancestral societies. Under this arrangement, things like rights and liberties have corresponding duties and obligations. One must give to receive, and vice versa. Outside the protection of the community, lofty abstractions like “rights” and “the law” simply didn’t exist. The English word “outlaw” used to literally mean a person outside of the law. In other words, without the benefits of belonging to the community, the only law for the outlaw was the law of the jungle.
causticus: trees (Default)
One of the greatest cliches out there in the land of political discourse is the idea that something called "the people" is a meaningful representation of anything that actually operates in the real world.

Let's try a little thought experiment and entertain the idea that there is in fact no such thing as "the people"....that perhaps such an utterance is silly, near-meaningless abstraction; and more often that not, this utterance that is little more than a emotional slogan; one that has for a long time been a favorite of agitation propagandists and rabble-rousers.

On the contrary, We could say that in actuality (empirically), people and peoples are sorted into factions, tribes, ethnic groups, religious sects, priesthoods, socio-economic classes, cultures, subcultures, ideological cults, professional societies, oligarch cliques, ect. Each of these groupings has their own collective interests and that "real politics" when shorn of all its bloviating, moralistic pretensions, is the process of negotiating and mediating the often-conflicting interests of these groups.

And by this, "the state" is nothing the enforcement arm of whatever coalition of the above type of groups happen to exert the most control over it at any given time. "The state" itself is just an administrative abstraction.
causticus: trees (Default)
By "American Nobility," I of course don't mean those people belonging to the Neoliberal Mandarinate (see: 'The Cathedral' a la Mencius Moldbug) who fancy themselves as the legitimate and rightful guiding force of American society. What I've been thinking about is the concept of how a nobility might evolve in a future American society; one that done away with foolish egalitarian fantasies and returned to a natural social order.

This hypothetical future American nobility (after the collapse of the current mess we have) would probably not utilize the sort of fancy hereditary ranks and titles of Medieval Europe's nobility. America's founding cultural ethos absolutely rejects the idea there should be a hereditary parasite-landowner class or really any pompous aristocratic overlord class. Many of the founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, envisioned America as being a nation of independent yeoman farmers. According to this general spirit, civic recognition is earned through hard work, virtuous conduct, patriotic loyalty, and of course the ability to generate wealth. This is really little different than the civic ideals of the Roman Republic. In ancient Rome, a person's (really, their family's) worth was measured by how much agricultural land they owned. This system of course degenerated into abject plutocracy and urban supremacy, as the lower ranks of the Roman nobility were permitted to engage in commercial activities and thus accumulate far more wealth than if they were restricted to just land ownership. The American system succumbed to the same degenerative pattern, but perhaps at a faster rate; as from the beginning of our republic there was never any real distinction between farmer and merchant; in fact, there were usually one and the same.

Right now, the entire Western world is undergoing a rapid collapse of the now 1,000-year-old Faustian culture that originally emerged out of Germany. This collapse will probably have less of a destructive effect here in America (we were never the Faustian epicenter; that would be in Western Europe), though we might see a significant contraction of the hyper-inflated urban economies of the coastal regions. After a period of economic shrinkage and depression, we might see cultural power shift back to the hinterlands; the so-called "Middle America." In those regions there will be a renewed focus on small towns and rural life. Ecologically-destructive and monolithic factory farms will give way to the small family farms of yore. Whatever pieces of high technology of this boom era that can be salvaged and reworked into the new decentralized context will be reintegrated into the new system. The section of the American people who place the most importance and family values and self-sufficiency will be the inheritors of whatever remains of today's technological bonanza. The people who double down on current-era hubris and fail to adapt will become tomorrow's peasant class.

The hypothetical future American nobility will be a new Yeoman Mannerbund. Service guarantees citizenship (see: Starship Troopers). The USA may even break up into independent regions. There may even be "kings" governing these regions; though probably kings in an elective rather than strictly hereditary-monarchical sense. That would simply be quite "un-American," to use an old out-of-style buzzword. The American Spirit tends to reject all-things-pretentious. And let us remember that the archaic Roman "kings" were more elected dictator-magistrates than men who happened to be the great-great-great grandson of someone supremely important at some point in time.

A threefold class structure like this may emerge: (1) Yeoman Nobles, (2) Townsfolk specialists, (3) Workers/Laborers who lack specialized skills and expertise for whatever reasons.
causticus: trees (Default)
I do believe True Friendships do occur, but they aren't all that common.

In my view, friendships between non-related individuals are usually more temporary and situational than they are enduring beyond specific situations. By situational, I mean friendship based on a common intellectual interest, occupation, hobby, athletic activity, ect. Such situations are usually bound to a specific place and span of time. Being time-based there is a built-in expiration date on these common types of friendships.

For example, a friendship with a workmate might come to an abrupt close if I were to move to another job and after that we had little in else in common to converse about. We could see from that particular situation, our amicable social interactions probably revolved around things confined to the work environment; conversational topics like complaining about the bosses, gossiping about co-workers. On top of that we may have discussed frivolous things like sports, pop culture, and things of that nature. And perhaps being on good terms with that workmate conferred material advantages for me. Let's say he was chummy with our immediate manager and thus maintaining a friendly rapport with this workmate would reduce the probability that he might speak despairingly about me behind my back to the boss. Upon leaving that job, there's no real material reward from investing the time and energy required to maintain this rapport. And thus when the investment ceases, the relational bond begins to degrade until finally both parties become completely estranged from each-other.

Aristotle, in his great work on ethics, distinguished three types of friendship:
(1) Friendships of use
(2) Friendships of pleasure
(3) Philia, or True Friendships

Friendships of use are those relationships based on mutual advantage, where we hang out with people who do us some good; business acquaintances, e.g. Use-Friends wish each other something of use. Like pleasure-friends, use-friends can easily stop being friends; they do whenever one is no longer of any use to the other. Such friendship can be criticized, says Aristotle.

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