The Need for Chaos

March 7, 2024 By Gene Veith

We’ve been blogging about different political theories. Here is another one: Political Nihilism.

That term came up in an article about research documenting some people’s “need for chaos.” Researchers on conspiracy theories found that some people revel in and pass around stories detrimental to both sides of our polarized political landscape. This inspired more research. A cross-section of Americans were asked a series of questions including these:

“We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”

“I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.”

“When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’”

As reported by Derek Thompson, in The Americans Who Need Chaos, in The Atlantic, “The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the ‘need for chaos,’ which they defined as ‘a mindset to gain status’ by destroying the established order.” They found that nearly a third of those surveyed express this need for chaos. About 5% go further, rejecting all sides in their “desire to see the entire political elite destroyed—even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.”

Thompson quotes from the publication of the research:

“These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.” To sum up their worldview, [lead researcher Michael] Petersen quoted a famous line from the film The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Comments Thompson, “Everywhere I look, I seem to find new evidence that American politics is being consumed by the flesh-eating bacteria of a new nihilism—a desire to see existing institutions destroyed, with no particular plan or interest to replace and improve them.”

As expected in an article published in The Atlantic, Thompson interviews some Trump supporters as evidence of his concern. Indeed, I’ve been hearing Republicans utter those very words in the survey as reasons for their unwavering support of the party’s standard bearer. No wonder also-ran Nikki Haley’s campaign line about how Trump brings chaos wherever he goes didn’t work for her. For a lot of voters, that’s exactly what they like about him!

But the same sentiment also exists on the Left. In fact, the study found that the largest demographic with the “need for chaos” is black males.

To be sure, when a system is totally corrupt and dysfunctional, it does need to be torn down before it can be rebuilt into something better. But you need to know what you want to build in its place. Once you unleash chaos, what can rein it in, once the old order is destroyed? Only an even greater power that will turn out to be even more oppressive than the one that was overthrown (think Napoleon after the French Revolution, Lenin after the Communist Revolution, Khomeini after the Iranian Revolution, etc.). Fortunately, the American Revolution didn’t meet that fate because its leaders dismantled the tie to the English monarchy without ever allowing the country to descend into chaos.

I invite those who are interested in political nihilism to see what that looks like today in Haiti, whose government can no longer exert its authority and the country has dissolved into indiscriminate murder and cannibalism.

Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr, CC by 2.0

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We Contemporary Westerners Are WEIRD

March 6, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Yesterday we blogged about Gemini, Google’s attempt at an AI chatbox and image generator, and its ludicrous attempts to apply Woke principles no matter what. We drew on an article by Ian Leslie, who said something else that deserves its own post.

From The Google Gemini Debacle Shows Us Why Office Politics Matters More Than Ever: On the Real Alignment Problem (my bolds):

Gemini’s quirks seem more likely to have been the output of a corporate culture that doesn’t realise how weird it is.

In my recent post on how to fix DEI I suggested that organisations make an effort to understand how the cultural-political worldview of their staff compares to their median user (or voter). It’s not that all organisations should try and be a mirror of the public, it’s that, in a highly politicised environment, they should be self-aware enough to know how the profile of their staff differs from the profile of the people they serve.

The anthropologist Joseph Henrich famously reframed our supposedly neutral, objective Western worldview as a WEIRD one (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic). His point wasn’t that WEIRD is bad, just that it’s, well, weird; shared by only a minority of the global population. For an individual or an organisation, it’s not necessarily a good thing to be normal, but it’s nearly always a good thing to know when you’re not normal. To adapt the poker truism, if you look around the table and you can’t see who the weirdo is, it’s you.

This has applications far beyond the internet, Artificial Intelligence, and the necessity of businesses to consider the values of their customers and not just those of their senior executives (as in the Bud-Lite fiasco).

There are just over 8 billion people in the world. Of these, about 335 million are Americans. and there are some 745 million Europeans. So there are about 1,080,000,000 “westerners” in the world. By my calculations, that comes to 13.5% of the world’s population.

Keeping in mind that some non-westerners have western values and that a big slice of westerners reject woke secularism, we can say that an extremely tiny percentage of humanity hold to the ideologies that loom so large in contemporary American culture. Those who do are, technically speaking in Joseph Henrich’s term, WEIRD. And, in the sense of the dictionary definition, “strange and different from anything natural or ordinary,” they are also weird.

Thus, we can conclude that. . .

Believing men can marry men and women can marry women is weird.

Believing that there are more than two sexes is weird.

Believing that we can change our sex is weird.

Believing there is no deity is weird.

Believing we can do without religion is weird.

Believing that culture is just a matter of one group oppressing some other group is weird.

We could go on. (Feel free to cite other tenets of our weirdness in the comments.)

This does not mean cultural relativism, though, another weird idea. Some things are universal, applicable to everyone, by virtue of being human. Modern medicine works for westerners and non-westerners alike. Facts, scientific or otherwise, are independent of culture. So are other objective truths–philosophical, moral, religious–whether we in the west or they in the non-west like them or not.

The west has a lot to offer the majority world. And we in the minority can learn a lot from them. The majority world has appreciated western medical care, technology, and economic progress, and in many cases has gladly received that religion that originated in the Middle East but came to them through the west, namely, Christianity. But we must take care not to impose our unique perspective on them.

Today’s woke progressives, weird though they may be, condemn the west’s colonialism. And rightly so. It’s hard to imagine how it could be right to just move in and take over someone else’s country. And yet woke progressives are eager to impose their values of transgenderism, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, and other weird ideas on Africans, Asians, South Americans, Pacific Islanders, and others in the majority world.

This is colonialism–not just the political and economic kind, but a colonialism that strikes deep into the heart of any culture, the family, being the foundation of every culture, as well as the larger convictions that sustain that culture.

Meanwhile, those of us in the west who also reject those culturally-destructive and soul-destroying ideologies should take heart. We may feel beleaguered here, but the world is on our side. The secularists and the wokesters are the outliers, the weird ones.

Photo by Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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“Welcome to the End of Democracy!”

February 28, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Democratic republics devoted to protecting individual liberties are not obvious. Throughout history and throughout the globe, they are quite rare. Letting an autocratic ruler have the responsibility of governing so the people don’t have to has its appeals, as we discussed yesterday. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that thinkers from both ends of the political spectrum are turning against “liberal democracy,” especially as the worldviews that gave rise to it are fading.

I have been warning about that in this blog. Getting rid of democracy is not just the agenda of radical political theorists. Now grassroot political activists are saying as much. A speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) said, as quoted by Mediaite,

“Welcome to the end of democracy!” [Jack] Posobiec declared. “We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here,” he said, holding his fist in the air. “That’s right, because all glory is not to government, all glory to God.”

Right about that last part, but democracy, by diffusing political power among the people and ensuring their rights puts limits on government, whereas non-democratic systems concentrate that power in a few, resulting in unlimited government that claims lots of “glory.”

When Posobiec hailed the overthrow of democracy, Steve Bannon, a key MAGA theorist and Trump advisor, reportedly could be heard saying, “All right! Amen!”

Many worriers about democracy being replaced by autocracy tend to focus on the alleged threat from Donald Trump. But the loss of a democratic mindset is also happening among Democrats (despite their name).

Democrats keep saying the January 6 riot at the Capitol building was an attempt to overthrow democracy by preventing Congress from certifying the election results. This has become such a pervasive criticism of conservatives that some conservatives, such as Jack Posobiec, seem to accept it themselves.

But now some Democratic lawmakers are saying that if Trump gets elected, they may not certify his election. The Atlantic has published an article by Russell Berman entitled How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t.

It hinges on what the Supreme Court does with the Constitutional challenges to Trump’s candidacy based on section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies from public office anyone who has “engaged in insurrection.” The Colorado supreme court and Maine’s secretary of state have ruled that this prevents Trump from appearing on state ballots, since he allegedly encouraged the January 6 riots. Trump has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the case has been argued, and we await the court’s ruling. If the court does not decide the issue in a definitive way, some constitutional scholars are saying that Congress could make that decision of whether or not a candidate is eligible. And whether or not Trump was engaged in insurrection, a crime that he has never been convicted of.

Democratic leaders in the House would not commit to certifying a Trump election unless the Supreme Court finds him eligible. If the election gives Democrats a majority in the House, which is quite possible, they would have to make the decision of whether to put the hated Trump in office or overturn the results of a democratic election.

All of that is very unlikely, of course. And the Democratic lawmakers did say that they would certify a Trump victory if the Supreme Court says that he belongs on the ballot. The Supreme Court seemed in the oral arguments to be aware of the problem. And for many reasons it’s hard to imagine the court throwing Trump off the national ballots.

Tomorrow I’ll blog about a British observer who sees an even more pervasive threat to democracy.

Illustration by James Vaughn via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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What Do the Nones Believe?

February 23, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Now that 28% of Americans are “Nones,” claiming to hold to no religion, they have become the nation’s biggest religious cohort, just ahead of evangelical protestants (24%) and Catholics (23%). So Pew Research has drilled down to find out more about Nones and what they believe.

Here are some details from the report of Pew’s research. . .

First of all, very few Nones don’t believe in God. Only 17% are atheists. 20% are agnostics. By far the largest group, 63%, say their religion is “Nothing in particular.” Contrary to the impression we have been given, that’s not the same as saying they have no religion. They have no “particular” religion. Like the syncretists of the interfaith movement who believe that all religions are equally valid, they see no need to identify with one religion in particular.

And yet the “Nothing in particulars” are not usually sophisticated philosophers of religion. While atheists and agnostics are typically more educated than those who are affiliated with religion, “nothing in particulars” on average are less educated than religious Americans. They are, in fact, mostly members of the white working class, the “least churched” demographic.

When asked why they aren’t connected with a religion, 60% say they question a lot of religious teachings; 47% don’t like religious organizations; 41% don’t see a need for religion in their lives; 30% have had bad experiences with religious people; and 12% just don’t have time for religion.

Are the Nones taking over the country? Not really. Pew sums up their findings:

By a variety of measures, religious “nones” are less civically engaged and socially connected than people who identify with a religion. On average, they are less likely to vote, less likely to have volunteered lately, less satisfied with their local communities and less satisfied with their social lives.

That is to say, atheists and agnostics vote at about the same rate as the religiously affiliated. “Nothing in particulars,” though, drag the numbers way down.

As for the non-atheist Nones, what kind of deity do they believe in? Some 13% say they believe in the God of the Bible, while 56% believe in “a higher power.”

Are they “spiritual but not religious”? Says Pew,

About half say spirituality is very important in their lives or say they think of themselves as spiritual. Most “nones” believe animals other than humans can have spirits or spiritual energies – and many say this is true of parts of nature, such as mountains, rivers or trees.

Are they hostile to religion? Yes and no. Some 43% say religion does more harm than good; 41% say religion does an equal amount of good and harm; and 14% say it does more good than harm.

How do Nones approach morality? That is, how do they decide between right and wrong? Subjects could choose more than one answer, but this is what they said: 83% cited the desire not to hurt people; 82% cited logic and reason; 69% said it feels good to do right rather than wrong; 60% cited the desire to stay out of trouble; 52% said they go by how they were raised; 46% believe “what goes around comes around” (cf. karma); and 12% cited religious beliefs.

Black nones are a special case. As Kate Shellnutt observes in an article in Christianity Today, “Nearly all Black nones believe in a higher power, and a third still believe in the God of the Bible. Barely any consider themselves atheists.”

This doesn’t sound like a wave of secularism that threatens religion in America. It sounds like the fields are white for harvest (John 4:35).

Illustration via Facebook

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Cultural Warfare vs. Spiritual Warfare

February 16, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher, university professor, and journalist. A “public intellectual,” he has written about postmodern ethics, the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, and the crisis in the Irish Catholic church.

So it is somewhat surprising to see someone of his background taking the positions that he does in his article for The European Conservative entitled “The Religion of Antichrist” with the deck, “Let us avoid talk of a ‘culture war’ when what we are engaged in is nothing less than a lethal spiritual conflict.” The article begins. . .

The biggest mistake we make is in believing that we are in a so-called ‘culture war.’ The phrase ‘culture war’ assumes that both sides have rival cultures they are battling to defend and promote. However, the enemies of civilisation, of life, and love, have no culture. If anything, their aim is not only to destroy the great cultural and spiritual achievements of the West, but to lay waste to anything that transcends the diabolical and obscene. Culture presupposes beauty, order, and tranquillity. It assumes those moral and spiritual values upon which harmony and holiness depend. In word, rite, song, and ritual; it idealises what William Blake termed “the human form divine.” In our “brave new world,” however, the human form is considered neither divine nor worthy of reverence or respect. It has been reduced to what Roger Scruton called its “animal essentials”—a purely natural object that can be remade in the image and likeness of anything but God. Put simply, the only ‘culture’ that is on offer is that of death and desecration, of defilement and the demonic.

Therefore, let us avoid talk of a ‘culture war’ when what we are engaged in is nothing less than a lethal spiritual conflict. If you perceive the assault on marriage, the family, innocence, and the very nature of the biological order, as a culture war, you will be at a loss to explain why there is a such a ferocious attack on the sanctity of sexuality. You will struggle to explain to children why heterosexuality is not simply one of many competing options, or why euthanasia is not an act of mercy for the critically ill, or why puberty blockers are not a lifestyle choice but an outrageous violation of natural sexual development. That is why we must see this confrontation for what it is: a spiritual war in which the forces of darkness are seeking to ravage everything that is good, beautiful, and true.

[Keep reading. . .]

Dooley goes on to make the case that demons are real and that the seemingly progressive side of the “culture war” controversies is, in fact, demonic. Not only that, his arguments are taken right out of the Bible, supported by quotations from throughout the New Testament. And the spiritual warfare he calls for is grounded in the gospel of Christ, as we oppose the forces of darkness with His light. He closes the article with a line from St. Paul that is quite remarkable but that I had never noticed before: “the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true” (Ephesians 5:9).

I don’t expect that sort of thing from a cutting-edge European intellectual with postmodernist credentials. But here it is. This is an encouraging sign.

Philosopher John Betz has said that the thought of J. G. Hamann is the only way forward from the nihilistic dead-ends of both modernism and postmodernism. And, as we have blogged about, Hamann was simply applying on a very sophisticated level his Christ-centeredness and his faith in God’s Word.

Maybe at least some contemporary thinkers are starting to realize the demonic darkness inherent in today’s “cultural” controversies and are rediscovering Christianity as the only way forward.

Illustration: The Dragon and the Beast from the Apocalypse Tapestry (1377-1382) by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France – La tenture de l'Apocalypse (Angers)Uploaded by Markos90, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20845125

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Trump and the Failure of the Elite

February 15, 2024 By Gene Veith

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“Trump is the sign and symbol of elite failure.” So says Martin Gurri in The Free Press in an article entitled Trump. Again. The Question Is Why?

He is trying to account for the Trump phenomenon, both why, despite everything, he has so many dedicated supporters. And why he inspires so much visceral hatred from his opponents.

Put simply, Gurri argues that the elite expect to run things. But they haven’t been doing a very good job. When to their surprise the iconoclastic rude and crude Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, they realized that they were not controlling the country anymore. He was elected because so many Americans no longer trust the elite establishment.

In this climate, Gurri agrees that democracy is threatened, but not because Trump is an authoritarian. But because the elite, as its contempt for Trump broadens into contempt for the ordinary Americans who elected him, is turning against the ideals of representative democracy.

According to Gurri,

The importance of Trump isn’t Trump. He is what philosophers call an epiphenomenon—a surface symptom of a deep and previously hidden malady. Trump appears to act as a sort of funhouse mirror on which the progressive elites who run most institutions, including the federal government, see themselves reflected in the most monstrous and frightening light. The malady now exposed is this: the elites have lost faith in representative democracy.

This turn against democracy on the part of the elite is manifested in the elite’s “visceral contempt for voters.”

The undisputed champion in this sport is Hillary Clinton, whose “basket of deplorables” seemed like the supreme expression of aristocratic disdain for the peasantry until it was exceeded by her recent call, in the spirit of the Khmer Rouge, for “formal deprogramming” of Trump supporters. Not too many years ago, such abuse of ordinary voters by a politician who once led her party would have been a cause of mass astonishment. Today, it’s just another voice in the choir. President Biden, for example, has accused those loyal to Trump of “semi-fascism.” These enemies within “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence,” the president holds.

And if the citizens who support Trump are “semi-fascist,” or even “fascists,” as I have heard them described, then they must be harshly dealt with. To be sure, the elites think of themselves as fighting to protect democracy, but Gurri notes, they tend to say they want to protect “our democracy.” That is, the democracy that belongs to them, the democracy that they have controlled.

The implications are clear. Not only Trump, but the nearly 75 million Americans who voted for him, must be silenced and crushed. To save democracy, it must be modified by a possessive: “our democracy.” Only one side of the political divide has legitimacy. The progressive elites and their Democratic allies must rule in perpetuity since any defeat entails the triumph of fascism. Given their criminal and subversive tendencies, Republicans and their ilk must be smothered under the heavy hand of the state. Dissenters to the progressive creed of identity should be treated as domestic terrorists. Disfavored opinions—about Russia, about Hunter Biden, about Covid-19—must be barred from the prestige media and censored in social media. Noble lies must be told by scientists and intelligence experts. In “our democracy,” the ideal election is a choice of one: Trump must be knocked off the ballot. He should be investigated, impeached, prosecuted, not just once or twice but as many times as it takes to destroy him forever.

Ironically, when the elite does this, that inflames ordinary citizens against them even more and intensifies their support for Trump.

The public, we saw, deeply mistrusts the established order. In this context, Trump is once again an epiphenomenon: a club in the hands of an alienated public, with which to bash the elites and their unresponsive institutions. . . .We should never think of Trump’s vulgarity and weirdness as personal attributes. They are political signals. It’s his way of saying, “I am not them,” of standing apart—while making rude noises—from the petrified dignity of elite politicians.

Every attack validates his stance. . . . The frenzied assaults by institutional forces give him an air of authenticity. He looks, to the public, like a true agent of revolt.

What do you think of this analysis?

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