Hi L.P. first, this is an excellent post, thank you for it, and it raises a lot of very interesting points. What stood out to me in particular is your use of Nietzsche, your identification of societal values with egalitarianism and universalism, your exploration of how people grow and change over time, and how each of us have different strengths, weaknesses and outlooks that contributes to our own unique destinies. I've going to respond at length, apologies in advance.
1. I believe Nietzsche is quite important and that he was the last philosopher. This is because he was the first to correctly identify the prior transvaluation of values that had occurred under Christianity from paganism; only after another societal transvaluation of values occurs will important philosophy restart, based upon whatever the new societal values are.
2. You correctly identified society's core values as egalitarianism and universalism. I like atheist Tom Holland's quote on this in his book Dominion: "The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practiced a particularly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with - about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold - were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those whose triumph is to be taken for granted.”
3. The core problem with modern society, in my opinion, is that we have gone full-boar toward Christian inspired egalitarianism or Nietzsche's "priestly" energies. Historically Catholicism provided rigid hierarchical guardrails against the word extremities of this, which were then weakened by (1) the reintroduction of Aristotle's works by the Muslims and (2) the invention of the printing press, which eviscerated the Church's authority and led directly to Protestantism. This then led, via Unitarianism, to drop the outright belief in God but retain the underlying egalitarian/universalist belief concepts, which then took over the universities and propagated worldwide, an argument originally pushed by Moldbug here: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/ultracalvinist-hypothesis-in/
Anyway, my core point is that I think there needs to be some sort of transvaluation of values that results back into a priestly/warrior energy balance (I don't advocate for a full-on Roman-tier all-warrior energy). The ideals of inequality and master morality should be appreciated for its positive values, such as its emphasis on greatness, strength, directness, honesty, nobility, and for its benefits of creating stability and accountability, while balanced with a priestly degree of equality, dynamism and other-worldliness. Whether such a balance comes from a new secular movement, a new religion (as the pro-Chinese blogger Spandrell argues), or a reinvigoration of hierarchical Catholicism, I don't know.
🗨 what C. S. Lewis in his Abolition of Man would call “the Tao”: i.e., “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
Absolutely brilliant as always Luc.. you really stimulate my mind so as to make me look much more closely at my beliefs morals values thoughts and ideas and where the heck did I form all of them. I have been a rebel since my teenage years struck it seems and have never really looked back for the most part as I found most everyone that conformed to be pretty boring and very predictable and also very unwilling to take any kind of a chance or risk without being 100% assured of the outcome. They displayed no “joie de vivre” along with any sense of spontaneity which was also missing which I still love to this day, but yes my acting out definitely got me into hot water multiple times throughout my life yet I hardly ever regretted those decisions because I looked at it like those were always “my big learning lessons.” Honestly I’ve come to believe we are put here on this earth to learn as many frigging lessons as we possibly can, why I don’t know but for me life has been a series of learning so many different and hard lessons and always the hard way and all the way through to now and STILL learning.. never stops. My other observation is I have experienced times in my life of both Ying and Yang, my lesson learned is to treasure the good times for they will not last forever and I know we can make it through the bad times because they will not last forever either or so life has taught me to now in my mid 60’s. Conformity is rather boring you must aim for some joie de vivre too or what is the point?
I like most of your post quite a bit, but I do have a couple of bones to pick.
1. The specific situation: It is difficult to tell what is right but that does not mean that right or wrong changes, only that our own limitations make it difficult to ascertain right or wrong. You argue effectively against those who have 'easy answers' and condemn others, usually of things that they are guilty of themselves. But I find that generally when I do wrong, that is after the fact I am convinced that I acted from wrong motives or did not give someone what they are legitimately due, it is because that is what I intended to do or at least I was indifferent to the affects of my actions. Spending a long time trying to determine right and wrong in hypotheticals or anecdotally is always a waste of time. The solution is to keep our eyes on the task of living the present situation well. Ethics is not an armchair sport and we can just regard any ethics that come from the sidelines as a waste of time in my book.
2. Levels of development: If you substitute the word 'journey' for 'process' in your sentence, 'It is a process that must always be blind to the details of its destination.' you will see my objection to this portion. Actually though, your own use of 'destination' makes the objection quite clear on its own. A process may have an endpoint but it cannot have a destination, destination implies that you have somewhere that you want to be and that you are directing your steps to get there. Odysseus might wander the entire Aegean world but his destination is Ithaca and Penelope. He isn't even on an Odyssey if he isn't trying to return home, he is just a wanderer and this process has no moral significance. If we are to actually GET someplace then we must have a destination in mind. We must fix the goal in mind of being right.
You are absolutely right that we ought not to judge others, in a condemning sense. But this is because ethics is not principally related to external matters but internal, and we have no knowledge of what is within another. The rock bottom fact to me is that we do not have the ability to do what we are not called to do and none of us is called to be a judge of others, except in the sense of external compliance with law which is only tangentially connected to ethics, what you have called functional morality and I usually call public morality. We are called to judge our own actions and motives and we are provided all that we need to accomplish that task if we will just stop trying to judge everyone else and use what we have been provided as it is intended.
I don't see that circumstances have any serious impact on a person's ethics. No generation, or group of any kind, starts out ahead of any other where ethics is concerned. The terms of ethics are 'with your whole heart, and mind, and soul, and strength' that is with your whole being in whatever condition you find it. A more 'advanced' if there is such a thing, person simply has a more advanced task which requires the whole of his more advanced heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Hi L.P. first, this is an excellent post, thank you for it, and it raises a lot of very interesting points. What stood out to me in particular is your use of Nietzsche, your identification of societal values with egalitarianism and universalism, your exploration of how people grow and change over time, and how each of us have different strengths, weaknesses and outlooks that contributes to our own unique destinies. I've going to respond at length, apologies in advance.
1. I believe Nietzsche is quite important and that he was the last philosopher. This is because he was the first to correctly identify the prior transvaluation of values that had occurred under Christianity from paganism; only after another societal transvaluation of values occurs will important philosophy restart, based upon whatever the new societal values are.
2. You correctly identified society's core values as egalitarianism and universalism. I like atheist Tom Holland's quote on this in his book Dominion: "The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practiced a particularly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with - about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold - were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those whose triumph is to be taken for granted.”
3. The core problem with modern society, in my opinion, is that we have gone full-boar toward Christian inspired egalitarianism or Nietzsche's "priestly" energies. Historically Catholicism provided rigid hierarchical guardrails against the word extremities of this, which were then weakened by (1) the reintroduction of Aristotle's works by the Muslims and (2) the invention of the printing press, which eviscerated the Church's authority and led directly to Protestantism. This then led, via Unitarianism, to drop the outright belief in God but retain the underlying egalitarian/universalist belief concepts, which then took over the universities and propagated worldwide, an argument originally pushed by Moldbug here: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/ultracalvinist-hypothesis-in/
Anyway, my core point is that I think there needs to be some sort of transvaluation of values that results back into a priestly/warrior energy balance (I don't advocate for a full-on Roman-tier all-warrior energy). The ideals of inequality and master morality should be appreciated for its positive values, such as its emphasis on greatness, strength, directness, honesty, nobility, and for its benefits of creating stability and accountability, while balanced with a priestly degree of equality, dynamism and other-worldliness. Whether such a balance comes from a new secular movement, a new religion (as the pro-Chinese blogger Spandrell argues), or a reinvigoration of hierarchical Catholicism, I don't know.
🗨 what C. S. Lewis in his Abolition of Man would call “the Tao”: i.e., “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
Absolutely brilliant as always Luc.. you really stimulate my mind so as to make me look much more closely at my beliefs morals values thoughts and ideas and where the heck did I form all of them. I have been a rebel since my teenage years struck it seems and have never really looked back for the most part as I found most everyone that conformed to be pretty boring and very predictable and also very unwilling to take any kind of a chance or risk without being 100% assured of the outcome. They displayed no “joie de vivre” along with any sense of spontaneity which was also missing which I still love to this day, but yes my acting out definitely got me into hot water multiple times throughout my life yet I hardly ever regretted those decisions because I looked at it like those were always “my big learning lessons.” Honestly I’ve come to believe we are put here on this earth to learn as many frigging lessons as we possibly can, why I don’t know but for me life has been a series of learning so many different and hard lessons and always the hard way and all the way through to now and STILL learning.. never stops. My other observation is I have experienced times in my life of both Ying and Yang, my lesson learned is to treasure the good times for they will not last forever and I know we can make it through the bad times because they will not last forever either or so life has taught me to now in my mid 60’s. Conformity is rather boring you must aim for some joie de vivre too or what is the point?
I like most of your post quite a bit, but I do have a couple of bones to pick.
1. The specific situation: It is difficult to tell what is right but that does not mean that right or wrong changes, only that our own limitations make it difficult to ascertain right or wrong. You argue effectively against those who have 'easy answers' and condemn others, usually of things that they are guilty of themselves. But I find that generally when I do wrong, that is after the fact I am convinced that I acted from wrong motives or did not give someone what they are legitimately due, it is because that is what I intended to do or at least I was indifferent to the affects of my actions. Spending a long time trying to determine right and wrong in hypotheticals or anecdotally is always a waste of time. The solution is to keep our eyes on the task of living the present situation well. Ethics is not an armchair sport and we can just regard any ethics that come from the sidelines as a waste of time in my book.
2. Levels of development: If you substitute the word 'journey' for 'process' in your sentence, 'It is a process that must always be blind to the details of its destination.' you will see my objection to this portion. Actually though, your own use of 'destination' makes the objection quite clear on its own. A process may have an endpoint but it cannot have a destination, destination implies that you have somewhere that you want to be and that you are directing your steps to get there. Odysseus might wander the entire Aegean world but his destination is Ithaca and Penelope. He isn't even on an Odyssey if he isn't trying to return home, he is just a wanderer and this process has no moral significance. If we are to actually GET someplace then we must have a destination in mind. We must fix the goal in mind of being right.
You are absolutely right that we ought not to judge others, in a condemning sense. But this is because ethics is not principally related to external matters but internal, and we have no knowledge of what is within another. The rock bottom fact to me is that we do not have the ability to do what we are not called to do and none of us is called to be a judge of others, except in the sense of external compliance with law which is only tangentially connected to ethics, what you have called functional morality and I usually call public morality. We are called to judge our own actions and motives and we are provided all that we need to accomplish that task if we will just stop trying to judge everyone else and use what we have been provided as it is intended.
I don't see that circumstances have any serious impact on a person's ethics. No generation, or group of any kind, starts out ahead of any other where ethics is concerned. The terms of ethics are 'with your whole heart, and mind, and soul, and strength' that is with your whole being in whatever condition you find it. A more 'advanced' if there is such a thing, person simply has a more advanced task which requires the whole of his more advanced heart, soul, mind, and strength.