Oh boy just found out that politics are coming directly to my conservative college campus this fall.

Yay.

Reciprocity implies that something is given and another thing is given back (A gives to B who gives to A or to C who gives to A); but first of all, it entails an obligation binding the participants. The whole point is the debt created by the initial gift and the chain reaction that it puts in motion. The active principle of this process is, of course, the moral obligation binding the debtor to the creditor through the debt thus created. This is, in essence, an unequal relation: A, the creditor, is superior to B, the agent incurring the debt. This is indeed a powerful mechanism and could pass as a “social contract” in Rousseau’s or Hobbes’ sense (Godelier 1996). It is to society what an engine is to an automobile.

More recent research has shown, however, that sharing is based on a different principle: it is a division of an object, commodity or good, between persons or groups, without anyone being seen as giver and no one being in a position of incurring a debt. It looks strange, a gift without a donor, something like the zen koan of one hand clapping, but it is actually something that has an empirical basis. There are various ways to achieve this. For example, large animals caught by hunters–Hazda or Inuits—are declared to be gifts of nature and must be shared, often by someone who is not the hunter. Another way to achieve this has been called “demand sharing” (Peterson 1993), whereby the person who owns an object lets himself be dispossessed of it under the request put to him by someone else. This concept is similar to “tolerated theft,” a notion used in the study of primate behavior. In all these cases, there is no expectation of reciprocity. You cannot give back something that is not given to you in the first place.

Sharing has been confused with what Sahlins called general reciprocity (Sahlins 1965) and with the moral concept of generosity. It is neither, although it looks like it. Avoiding debts was a very intentional position and clearly something people were aware of. Inuits said famously “with gifts one makes slaves” (Freuchen 1976). The main lesson that sharing has to teach is the affirmation of equality. Gifts entail a debt that creates inequality. This is why sharing, even if it is not the only way people allocate resources, is a moral dimension of equality and a requirement in maintaining a state of anarchy.

- Charles J-H Macdonald,   “The Anthropology of Anarchy” (2009)

We have no social contract. There seems to be an ever widening gap between what is considered ok or not. Aside individualism - there’s nothing inherently wrong with that - no longer do we have any moral code that guides our behaviour and interdependency with each other as inhabitants of a shared space. The lines are blurred or non existent. Tolerance seemingly is increasing - it’s not really, we just put forward the case that everyone should be allowed to do what they want. What is the outcome - anecdotal or otherwise? As long as we are in some pursuit of success (wealth, fame, popularity) then screw the social contract, right?

As a principle based person this is a struggle for me. I can’t engage with someone who’s principles explicitly don’t align with mine. The internal disequilibrium and anxiety and paranoia it can cause isn’t worth it. If what you deem ok to do and say differs to my own ways……….no can do I’m afraid. No exceptions. What someone is capable of doing to one person they are surely capable of doing to me…eventually.

Bad, Future, and I Bet: The five stages of red-pill 1. Generic conservative: The generic conservative realizes something about society doesn't quite sit right with him, there is a "gut feeling" that "something is wrong" with the way people conduct themselves in terms of behavioral norms, moral standards and so on. However, he is unable to articulate his opposition to liberalism outside of a liberal context and accepts liberal principles such as a belief in the moral goodness of equality as taken for granted, so liberals generally run rings around him Typical argument: "First gay marriage, what next? Pedos marrying kids? Bestiality?" Typical liberal response: "Slippery slope fallacy much? They said the same thing about black people being allowed to vote 2. Libertarian: The libertarian takes his opposition to liberalism and tries to establish a philosophical foundation for most "generic conservatives" do not merely voice their opposition to the perceived speaking, the libertarian takes this sm impracticality of liberal plans, economic tep further and l framework of one based around economic freedom t degree, he is capable of attacking the current system effectively, but utterly ineffective in challenging it morally or ethically since libertarianism tends to adopt a non-interference attitude to ethics and Typical argument: "You do not right have to right to appropriate other people's wealth. Taxation is theft. Typical liberal response: "Tell that to the Scandinavian states that achieve so much with high tax rates. I bet you believe in creationism too." 3. The radical right Most people on the right stop at stage 2 of the red pill process, those who dig deeper go further however start to realize that something isn't quite right about libertarianism's general refusal (outside of people like Hoppe) to take a moral stand against degeneracy. This leads them to unorthodox political philosophies that stand well beyond the pale of acceptability, such as fascism. For the first time in their lives, they start to articulate moral and ethical opposition to liberal principles rather tha pical argument: "if you import third world people, you import third world problems. We need to act for our people and our Nation, not for Jews, Blacks or Hispanics res 4. Traditionalism: efourthstage is traditionalism. The red-pilled individ soteric (by present day ra ards ua erarc rea entire trajectory for the past two centuries s Revolt of 1789 has been disastrous. Typically the traditionalist will identify with traditional modes of European government IC ical arqument: simply point out the error of principle that has provided the foundation of this constitution and that has led the French astray since the first moment of their revolution. ons like its predecessors, has been drawn up for Man. Now, there is no such thing in the world as Man. In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc. I am even aware, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian. But, as for Man, I declare that I have never met him in my life. If he exists, I certainly have no This constitution is capable of being applied to all human communities from China to Geneva. But a constitution which is made for all nations is made for none: it is a pure abstraction, a school exercise whose purpose is to exercise the mind in accordance with a hypothetical ideal, and which ought to be addressed to Man, in the imaginary places which he inhabits.. What is a constitution? Is it not the solution to the following problem: to find the laws that are fitting for a particular nation given its population, its customs, its religion, its geographical situation, its political relations, its wealth, and its good and bad Now, this problem is not addressed at all by the Constitution of 1795, which is concerned only with Man. Typical liberal response: Imao so u think women shouldn't vote 'n shiet? Get with the times grandpa xD It's 2016, not 1816 5. Hoppean Libertarianism The fifth and final stage of the red pill is Hoppe libertarianism. Realizing the traditionalist morals of old would not be sufficient to guide a modern society, not to mention its penchant for coercion, the red-pilled individual will seek guidance in the works of Austrian economist Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Alas, Dr Hoppe's works on why monarchy is better suited to protect individual rights than democracy will certainly capture the attention of the now-traditionalist 4th-stage-pilled individual. Even more, Dr. Hoppe's conclusions that there can be no tolerance towards democrats, socialists, communists or any other collectivist mindset in the free society will seduce the red-pilled individual into realizing a world composed of thousands of different privately-owned microstates would usher in a prosperous and glorious age Typical argument: "Predictably, under democratic conditions the tendency of every monopoly to increase prices and decrease quality - will be only more pronounced. Instead of a prince who regards the s private property, a temporary caretaker is put in charge of the country. He does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his proteges' advantage. He owns its current use usufruct but not its capital stock. This will not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it will make exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock, i short-sighted. Moreover, the perversion of justice will proceed even faster now. Instead of protecting pre-existing private property rights, democratic government becomes a machine for the redistribution of xisting property rights in the name of illusory social security A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person but falls instead into the same moral category a domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a "free good") or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest). On the other hand, there are members of the human species who are capable of understanding the [value of the division of labor] but...who knowingly act wrongly... [Blesides having to be tamed or even physically defeated [they] must also be punished... to make them understand the nature of their wrongdoings and hopefully teach them a lesson for the future imal of either the harmless sort (to be Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are a cultural conservatism. And in trying to combine what cannot be combined, much of the modern libertarian movement actually contributed to the further erosion of private property rights (just as much of contemporary conservatism contributed to the erosion of families and traditional morals). What the countercultural libertari that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social "discrimination" and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives ely a combination as socialism and iled to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is ilies, authority, communities, and social ranks are the empirical-sociological concretization of the abstract philosophical-praxeological categories and concepts of property, production, exchange, and contract. Property and property relations do not e apart from families and kinship relations." Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference. And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental-indeed foundationalfact of families and intergenerational kinship relations inship relations imply cultural absolutism. Typical liberal response: None. This degenerate would've already been employed as a consumer good or been physically removed from society

Communication Ethics

“Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.”

- Jim Rohn

I've always struggled with how to interact with others while listening intently and comprehending without offending them. There are times when we don't know how to cope with a situation because we don't know what to do, thus we have communication ethics, which answers to our needs and aids us in having good communication with others. Lacking appropriate knowledge of communication ethics leads to a variety of communication issues, including legal violations, offensive messages, untruthfulness, and many more.

We have communication ethics to assist us get enough understanding of communication. Communication ethics helps us understand how a person utilizes language, media, journalism, and builds connections that are directed by a person's moral and values. These ethics emphasize being mindful of the repercussions of one's actions, as well as "respecting other people's points of view and tolerating dissent." Honesty, fairness, and the integrity of one's own words are all ethical principles. Ethical communication is critical because it emphasizes people's obligation to maintain civic society. With the rise of fake news in today's culture, the significance of ethical communication has never been more important.

Ethics in communication affects not just individuals, but also enterprises, corporations, and professional organizations. A company that uses unethical communication methods is less effective than one that uses ethical communication methods. A organization with unethical communication methods, for example, may suppress proof that it is hurting the environment or breaching the law due to a lack of transparency, whereas a company with ethical communication practices will issue a news release to the impacted parties right away. In this case, openness benefits the company since it alerts future or existing clients, providers/suppliers, or other affiliates to a potential environmental danger or legal infringement. In other words, openness will inspire trust and good faith in this case, since an effective business will not hide what is in its audience's best interests. In the case of trade secrets, when a design method or management tactic is not openly revealed in the name of competitive advantage, or when terms of agreement/use that a business may have with a service provider forbid transparency, there may be a time when censorship is the more effective business practice. In the latter case, a company may use social media to promote, but the social media service provider may impose restrictions on its customers' behavior. If the company believes social media to be a vital tool for advertising, it may be forced to censor its product or service in order to keep its contract with the social media provider. Here are some examples of effective communication that can be achieved by following communication ethics and taking an honest action toward the individual with whom you're interacting. This can increase respect for and confidence in the communication profession.

The problem for anyone declaring the death of liberalism is that it has not one but several pillars and dimensions: legal, political, economic and moral (or religious). The weakening or disappearance of one or two liberal pillars or tenets would not be enough to declare liberalism as a whole dead. For example, one might express skepticism toward key liberal principles such as the commitments to individual agency and individual choice, while maintaining a commitment to freedom of expression. In the same vein, one might be skeptical toward unregulated markets or trade, but embrace other essential features of liberalism such as nondiscrimination under law, security of property rights and freedom of contract. Neither does liberalism require open borders, but it opposes limits on immigration based solely on what the potential immigrants look like, where they come from, what language they speak or their religious preferences. Liberals disagree, often vociferously, with one another over just how free markets and trade should be – hardly anyone thinks that they should not be regulated at all or that they should be centrally planned by self-anointed experts. They also differ over how strongly to protect property rights versus competing interests and, more generally, the size, scope, and intrusiveness of ‘the government’. These disagreements are themselves emblematic of the internal diversity and complexity of liberalism. There are, however, some fundamental tenets on which nearly all liberals agree. For example, they agree that individual improvement and social progress are both possible by the cultivation of what Adam Smith in 1759 referred to as the ‘moral sentiments’ and the application of reason to evidence in accordance with the scientific method. They believe that institutional structures – the constitutional and legal rules and policies that society establishes – are always experiments. And they adhere (though not always enough) to a counter-ideological humility based on the brute fact of human fallibility. This moderating feature of liberalism, most closely associated with Popper, is fundamental because it requires liberals, in contrast to theocrats and other ideologues, to cultivate dialogue and treat political and other disagreements seriously, without self-righteousness and with respect for opposing views (assuming the toleration is mutual). As such, liberalism creates a big tent for many different conceptions of the ‘good life’, in accordance with its commitment to individual choice. Some have seen this feature as a weakness of liberalism. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset could not have disagreed more. Writing at a moment when liberalism’s death was being widely proclaimed in the Western world, he argued in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) that liberalism should best be defined as ‘the supreme form of generosity’. In liberal regimes, he argued, the majority, which has power on its side, concedes to weaker minorities the right to live on their own terms, thus announcing the determination to share existence with – and respect those – who have a different view of the good society. That such ‘generosity’ can be a source of real strength is attested by liberalism’s real successes. Late in his life, Popper, a self-described liberal ‘optimist’, named several liberal achievements as undeniable facts. At no other time, and nowhere else, he pointed out in 1986, have human beings been more valued, as individuals, than in liberal societies: ‘Never before have their human rights, and their human dignity, been so respected, and never before have so many been ready to bring great sacrifices for others, especially for those less fortunate than themselves.’ Popper was no Dr Pangloss. He did not believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Nor did he overlook social problems that persist in liberal societies. But he appreciated that modern liberal societies are the best political systems we fallible humans have managed to create. He believed that such societies create the best conditions for individual development and social improvement. By contrast, he was deeply skeptical of utopian claims based on beliefs of human perfectibility. Even in liberal societies, Popper observed, power corrupts, civil servants sometimes behave like ‘uncivil masters’, and ‘pocket dictators’ persist. Nevertheless, throughout the liberal and free world, many of life’s ‘greatest evils’, including slavery, abject poverty, unemployment, race- and class-based legal differences, and religious discrimination have been eliminated or greatly ameliorated. Popper celebrated liberalism a half-decade before the Iron Curtain disappeared in eastern and central Europe. Millions from that region then saw liberalism as a major hope for their countries, promising individual freedom, above all, along with economic prosperity. The sudden collapse of communist regimes was, in fact, a remarkable ‘success’ for liberalism. But only liberalism in its broadest sense triumphed in 1989. For liberalism is not an intellectually rigorous system, manifested in a single institutional form. It is, as the political theorist Alan Ryan put it in The Making of Modern Liberalism (2012), a somewhat ‘awkward and intellectually insecure system’ whose achievements can never be more than equivocal and ambivalent.

| Daniel Cole, The many deaths of liberalism

I also learned the term ‘ordoliberal’ from Cole’s piece, as defined in Wikipedia:

Ordoliberal theory holds that the state must create a proper legal environment for the economy and maintain a healthy level of competition (rather than just "exchange") through measures that adhere to market principles. This is the foundation of its legitimacy.[8] The concern is that, if the state does not take active measures to foster competition, firms with monopoly (or oligopoly) power will emerge, which will not only subvert the advantages offered by the market economy, but also possibly undermine good government, since strong economic power can be transformed into political power.[9]

Quoting Stephen Padgett: <mark>"A central tenet of ordo-liberalism is a clearly defined division of labor in economic management, with specific responsibilities assigned to particular institutions. Monetary policy should be the responsibility of a central bank committed to monetary stability and low inflation, and insulated from political pressure by independent status. Fiscal policy—balancing tax revenue against government expenditure—is the domain of the government, whilst macro-economic policy is the preserve of employers and trade unions (Funk, 2000, pp. 20–21; Dyson, 2001, p. 141)."[10] The state should form an economic order instead of directing economic processes, and three negative examples ordoliberals used to back their theories were Nazism, Keynesianism, and Russian socialism.[11] The Ordoliberal idea of a social market economy is often seen as a progressive alternative beyond left and right[12] and as a third way between collectivism and laissez-faire liberalism.</mark>[13]

The downfall of labor unions and other ordoliberal institutions in the US shows that we’ve been captured by laissez-faire liberalism, where state institutions are canted toward ‘producers’ and away from ‘consumers’. 

PENN PENS-IN INCLUSION

The next colonial tale this blog wishes to review is that of Pennsylvania, but as promised in the last posting, a short overview is helpful. That would be a comparison between initial natural rights view and a federal view.  The reason for this insertion at this time is that the development of Pennsylvania took place mostly during the 1700s – it started its existence as a colony in 1681 when William Penn was issued the land grant by King Charles II.  And, the ensuing years, as this blog has already described, saw an increased influence of Enlightenment ideas.

         Along with those ideas, John Locke’s arguments were being considered by the American educated class. Locke would pose serious questioning of prevailing either feudalistic notions, to the extent they existed in America, but also Puritanical rationales that promoted a more equitable social arrangement – as opposed to an Anglican/Roman vertical view that supports hierarchical church structures and power distributions.  Locke’s ideas, as he initially proposed them, promoted what would he called a “social contract” approach to the founding and development of polities.

         In formulative language, he described polities being initially created by free-standing individuals.  With complete freedom to act as each person wished, to formulate an authoritative entity for mutual benefits, each would surrender those rights – and only those rights – that allow for such an arrangement and retain all other rights.  This is a social contract.  And given the retention of each person’s bulk of rights – naturally endowed – this approach to government and politics can be called the natural rights approach or view.  These ideas were part of the array of Enlightenment ideas which also supported non-Lockean arguments.

Here is how Stanford Encyclopedia describes Lock’s contribution:

 In the Two Treatises of Government, [Locke] defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society.  Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property.  Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments.  Locke is thus also important for his defense of the right of revolution.  Locke also defends the principle of majority rule and the separation of legislative and executive powers. In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke denied that coercion should be used to bring people to (what the ruler believes is) the true religion and also denied that churches should have any coercive power over their members.  Locke elaborated on these themes in his later political writings, such as the Second Letter on Toleration and Third Letter on Toleration.[1]

 What this blog has shared is that the ideas of Locke have been misinterpreted today – a philosophic point of contention – and have, therefore, helped lead the nation to the current polarized political landscape.  So, to help understand Pennsylvanian history and to help understand the current political debate, it is useful to review a set of distinctions between natural rights view and federal view.

         This review is organized by comparing the positions of these views in relation to a list of issues. The issues are general conception amongst people, moral role of government, era of dominance in American history, and expectations of individuals.

 ·       General conception amongst people:  natural rights view sees that political order is equal to marketplace relationships (competing interests); federal view sees that political order is equal to a commonweal (undivided interests)

·       Moral role of government:  natural rights view is neutral to this issue, it provides protection for individual moral positions and its emphasis is on governmental procedures (e.g., due process rights); federal view provides structural prerequisites for self-rule by which local/communal moral positions vie in the consideration of proposed policy

·       Era of dominance:  natural rights view has been dominant in the last 70 plus years; federal view was dominant from the beginning of colonial existence to the late 19th century with strong influence, if not dominance, through the New Deal and World War II period

·       Expectation of individual:  natural rights view expects people to be respectful of others’ rights and behavior from a self-interest point of view; federal view expects active participation in creating a common environment and caring attitudes of fellow citizens and for the whole community.

 So, with these general distinctions, one can better understand Pennsylvania evolvement.

         Pennsylvania (or Penn’s Woods) was granted to Penn late in the 1600s.  Actually, the territory is named for Penn’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn.  The family retained ownership of the grant until the American Revolution at which time the family was expelled.  The grant would eventually lead to two colonies, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

         Original settlers were mostly Penn’s fellow Quakers.  That religion was originally a radical form of Puritanism.  In addition to British Quakers, the area attracted large numbers of Germans and Scot Irish people.  One can detect that German influence by the number of towns or areas in Pennsylvania holding German or German derived names.  Roughly 30 percent of current Pennsylvanians claim German ancestry.[2]  And while initial relations with indigenous people, the Lenape, were cordial, eventual war broke out between settlers and local tribes (especially as extensions of the French and Indian War hostilities).

         The first efforts to establish a government was an extension of the land grant.  William Penn was the appointed governor, although he did not live there, and a 72-member council and larger general assembly constituted the colonies governance.  This did not work, and subsequent “frames of government” were written and put into effect in 1683, 1696, and 1701.  The last instrument was known as the Charter of Privileges and served as an organizing document until the American Revolution.  The next frame was to be a constitution, i.e., a compact-al instrument.

         Admittedly, Penn’s initial and subsequent “constitutions” were not occurrences in which a people gathered to hammer out an organizing document to arrange for a structure of governance and spelling out the other functions of government.  But Penn can be judged as being highly influenced by federal principles. Here is a short overview of his handiwork:

 [Upon visiting America in 1699], he put forward a plan to make a federation of all English colonies in America.  There have been claims that he also fought slavery, but that seems unlikely, as he owned and even traded slaves himself.  However, he did promote good treatment for slaves, and other Pennsylvania Quakers were among the earliest fighters against slavery.[3]

 One can readily read that he was biased toward inclusion and, given his Puritanical view, was biased against hierarchical structures.        

         But in all of this, one should not lose sight that Pennsylvania was a business arrangement and, unfortunately, Penn was not above racists attitudes prevalent during his time (and one can argue, still exist today).  But he had a demonstrable federal bent.  He attempted inclusive policies and even sided at times against his commercial interests.  And to put a finer point on this portrayal, this blog has clearly indicated that the federal views that existed at the time limited their inclusiveness to white, European peoples and has given that version of federalism the name parochial/traditional federalism.

         This blog will at this point stop this story and pick it up in the next posting with the political developments that characterize that colony’s experience in the years leading up to the Revolution and independence.  What one generally sees in that history is the story of an industrious people and the development of the colonies’ first prominent urban center, Philadelphia.

[1] “Locke’s Political Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005/2020), accessed May 10, 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/#:~:text=Locke%20used%20the%20claim%20that,better%20ensure%20the%20stable%2C%20comfortable .  What exactly Locke’s views mean is of great philosophic debate.  This blog, from time to time, has alluded to the fact that even Locke did not believe what has come to be seen his ideas to mean today.  This citation goes on to describe this point.  There are those who emphasize, even to the exclusion of other concerns, that Locke posed a position of natural rights.  This position argues everyone can do what he/she wishes as long as he/she does not interfere with the rights of others.  But there is another interpretation:  that is, once formulated under governance, individuals have certain duties and obligations under a principle of natural law.  Here, the door is opened to consider religious notions of what makes up natural law.  Be that as it may, the point is that a purely hedonistic view of rights would be averted if this latter view was adopted.

[2] See “Pennsylvania German Language,” Wikipedia (n.d.), accessed May 10, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_German_language .  Of note also has been the immigration of a good number of Dutch people.

[3] “Brief History of William Penn.”  William Penn (n.d.), accessed June 8, 2020, https://www.ushistory.org/penn/bio.htm . 

(via 8 Principles of Collaborative Leadership | Jesse Lyn Stoner)

By Jesse Lyn Stoner

Anyone can be a collaborative leader — no matter whether you are the president, a mid-level manager or a front-line supervisor…. no matter whether you are in government, a large corporation, a small business, or a non-profit.

On the other hand, just because you’ve been elected or assigned the role of leader, does not mean you are providing leadership. You can force people to do what you say through coercion, power and authoritarianism, but that’s not leadership.

Leadership only occurs if you influence the direction people are going and unite them in accomplishing a common goal. Leadership is the result of a social contract, an understood agreement between those who attempt to influence (lead) and those who follow.

The principles of collaborative leadership center on sharing leadership. Leadership is not a role assigned to a specific individual. The person who is best prepared to advance the mission at any given moment is the one who steps forward to provide leadership. Each moment holds a leadership opportunity.

Organizations and communities are best served when each member is prepared to provide leadership when they are able and is committed to be a responsible follower at other times. Being a responsible follower does not mean being a “sheep.” When those providing leadership are creating divisiveness and harming the community, it is the responsibility of the followers to call it out.

Collaborative leadership is the most effective way to move collectively toward a positive future. But it requires a willingness to set aside one’s desire for power and control.

Unfortunately there are too many people in leadership positions that are only concerned with their own needs, driven by the desire for power and control. They create divisiveness, not collaboration, pitting groups of people against each other. The result of this divisive leadership is polarization – an “us versus them” mentality, with winners and losers. The end result is personal gain for those in authority positions, and unfortunately as history shows us, in the long run, the organization or community suffers from the poor decision-making and lack of concern for the greater good.

If you are interested in becoming a collaborative leader, these principles of collaborative leadership will set a strong foundation.

1. An inclusive vision is the glue.

When your team or organization has a shared vision or clear purpose that benefits all stakeholders, it can serve as the guiding force and the glue and you can give up the idea of being in control. According to John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, “You cannot create collaboration if you think leadership is about control.” He says making the shift from a “command and control” mindset is not easy, but is crucial to creating engaged workplaces.

2. Create networks, not boundaries.

Collaborative leaders understand that one of their more important roles is to create communities – but not communities with closed boundaries. When you consider all your stakeholders, their myriad of relationships and interdependencies, it becomes pointless to act as if your team or organization is a closed system. What happens in one area affects other areas you could never anticipate. Distributing power and pushing decision-making authority to those as close to the customer as possible makes your organization smarter, more flexible, and more resilient.

3. Focus more on asking good questions than giving the right answers.

Crucial information is held in too many different places for you to be able to have all the answers. Instead of seeing your role as providing answers, learn to ask really good questions. A good question can be worth a lot more than a quick answer because it opens up possibilities for creative new ideas and solutions. When you learn to tolerate ambiguity, great solutions arise from unexpected sources.

4. Open the flow of information.

Technology has changed the landscape. Information is accessible, whether you want to share it or not. But that’s good news because organizations benefits when information is freely shared. People can do their job better when they have easy access to the information they need. And it becomes possible to create productive partnerships with other organizations, changing a competitive advantage to what Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls a collaborative advantage.

5. Involve people in decisions that affect them. People want their organizations to be successful, and when given an opportunity to participate in decisions affecting them, they bring their best thinking and contribute fully. Through involvement, people develop deeper understanding of the issues and goals and become more committed to implementing decisions. Inviting them to actually participate in decision-making creates stronger buy-in, builds their leadership capabilities for the future, and increases their level of trust in each other and in leadership.

Creating opportunities for involvement does not mean decisions need to be made by “group think.” When people feel their viewpoint has been considered and they understand the rationale for a decision, they will support it because respect and trust are byproducts of dialogue.

6. Seek and utilize diversity.

Diversity is the bedrock of innovation. When diverse perspectives are combined, discussions are richer, more robust, and more relevant and we find better solutions. Conflict and creative disagreement, when focused on issues and not personalities, serve as the “grain of sand in the oyster” to produce creative new ideas, approaches and solutions.

7. Align your personal and public behavior.

Who you are as an person is not different from who you are as a leader. Act as if everything you do will become public knowledge, because it can and it will. Values-driven leadership is essential. You can’t hide your morals behind closed doors. It might once have been possible to get away with questionable ethics, but there’s nowhere to hide anymore.

8. Treat people like human beings, not human resources.

People are not assets. They are human beings. Without them, there is no organization. The health and well-being of your team or organization is dependent on the health and well-being of its members.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it on Jesse Lyn Stoner’s blog.]

***

You’re working on your goals, and your team’s goals. We can help you spring into action and develop a real plan that you can implement in a smart way, so you’ll start seeing results immediately, before you feel discouraged. If you feel that you’ve already gone off-track, we can help you get your focus, courage, and motivation back.

At  Creative Sage™, we often coach and mentor individual clients, as well as work teams, in the areas of change management, building resilience, making personal, career or organizational transitions — including to retirement, or an “encore career” — and facilitating development of leadership, creativity and collaboration capabilities. We also work with clients on work/life balance, focus and productivity issues.

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Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss your situation. You can also call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley. Let’s talk! An initial exploratory phone conversation is free. When you talk with me, I promise that I’ll always LISTEN to you with open ears, mind and heart, to help you clarify your own unique path to a higher vista of success.

              ~Cathryn Hrudicka, Founder, CEO and Chief Imagination Officer of Creative Sage™, Executive Coach, Consultant, and Mentor.

***

Liam Booker (Faking It): ISFP

Dominant Introverted Feeling [Fi]: Liam has very strong morals and is first and foremost concerned with doing the “right” thing. His conscience rules him, and if he does anything that contradicts his internal values, he obsesses over it until he’s able to correct his perceived shortcoming. Liam takes a stand for what he believes in. He is socially, economically, and environmentally aware, and wants the way he lives to reflect his principles. He’s opposed to lying and sneaking around, which makes his relationship with Karma difficult for him because he’s under the impression that Karma is dating Amy. He doesn’t want to get in the way of their relationship, and even though he cares about Karma, he feels that getting in the middle of their relationship is wrong. That’s just not who he is. Liam values honesty and hates that Amy is forcing him to keep their secret from Karma. He just wants to fess up, tell her the truth, and deal with the consequences. He can’t live with the guilt. Liam believes in punishing himself when he breaks his moral code and vows to abstain from sex after sleeping with Amy. He doesn’t like to openly discuss how he’s feeling, and prefers to do something to fix things rather than talk about it. Liam is very loyal to the people he loves and gives up his dream to get Karma and her family out of jail. He doesn’t tell her about this, though, because he didn’t do it to gain favor with her. He wants to earn her forgiveness and had no intention of using his good deed to sway her. He’s outraged when Karma considers taking the $250,000 check Mr. Booker wrote her to keep her away from Liam. He turned Zita down after she threw herself at him while Karma was contemplating accepting the bribe money, which hurts even more, because he knows she wouldn’t consider it for a single second if the money was given to her to stay away from Amy.

Auxiliary Extroverted Sensing [Se]: Sometimes, Liam makes shortsighted decisions in the heat of the moment and often comes to regret them after having time to reflect. He keeps seeing Karma, even though he’s against being with her behind Amy’s back. When he’s angry or upset, he tends to react without considering the ramifications. After his breakup with Karma, he learns that she had faked her relationship with Amy. In his outrage over being lied to for so long, he sleeps Amy and becomes immediately remorseful of his actions following the incident. Liam enjoys sensory pleasures, particularly sex, and is a talented artist. He expresses himself by creating, and is very good at translating his feelings into the works he produces (Fi-Se). Liam tends to work through his feelings physically – whether it’s by producing art or going to a mixed martial arts class with Theo.

Tertiary Introverted Intuition [Ni]: If Liam gets a hunch about something, he usually believes in it, fully committing to the idea, even if he’s completely mistaken. When Jackson Lee takes a special interest in him and his art, Liam is convinced that Jackson is his real father. He begins investigating to confirm his suspicions, and believes that he found “evidence” to prove it (his mother in the same photo as Jackson). However, it never occurs to him that it’s just a coincidence and his theory turns out to be incorrect. When Liam has a goal in mind, he can become singularly focused on achieving it, particularly if it’s something that is important to him morally.

Inferior Extroverted Thinking [Te]: When Liam believes in something, he does something about it. He organizes protests and inspires others to rally around him and fight back. When in protest mode, Liam is able to take charge, make decisions, and shout commands to the crowd. He doesn’t like when things are done for money, power, or control, which is why he refuses to drive a fancy car or buy expensive clothing, even though he comes from a rich family. He doesn’t like what money has done to them and rebels against that lifestyle. Liam is very upfront and lays down rules when need be – he tells Brandi upfront that their relationship must be casual sex or nothing. He’s not looking for a girlfriend, and if she can’t handle that, they have to stop hooking up. He knows what he wants, and has no problem speaking up.

Enneagram: 1w9 4w3 7w8 Sx/So

Quotes:

Brandi: Where have you been, Pooh Bear? Who’s this bitch? Liam: Whoa, Brandi, you’re drunk. Brandi: He’s mine, so keep those nipples to yourself. Karma: That was my goal from the beginning, I promise. Liam: Look, I am not your boyfriend. We’re just good friends who occasionally have sex, but if that’s too confusing for you, then we have to stop. [to Karma] What? Karma: Nothing. Liam: Look, I’m not a douche bag, all right? I’m always clear about my ground rules. And girls, they always agree to them, and then they get- Karma: Clingy? Women are genetically wired to mate and start a family. In fact, if we weren’t, our entire species would’ve died out, so have some respect.

Shane: They’re here, they’re queer, they need your votes. Nice work, minions. Liam: Anything to help the gays.

Karma: Liam’s parents are rich, but he drives a beat-up biodiesel, which means he’s socially aware. His best friends are a gay guy and a feminist, which means he’s tolerant and accepting of strong women. And he’s an artist, which means that deep down inside he’s wounded.

Liam: I’m glad you got back together with your girlfriend. You two are like the school’s Portia and Ellen. Karma: Which one am I? Please say Portia. Liam: Trust me, you’re the Portia. Which is why we probably shouldn’t make out again. I don’t want to be the asshole that breaks up Hester’s cutest couple.

Liam: We can see through your lies! She’s just trying to buy us! Robin: Trust me, no one is trying to buy you. Though you’ll each be getting new Skwerkel smartphones and tablets. Liam: What do you get out of this? Robin: The satisfaction of helping a school in desperate need of money. Also, Skwerkel will own all data collected on these devices. Karma: That means our photos, our emails, our text messages. They want to make us their digital slaves. Are we gonna let them? Crowd: Hell, no! Liam: Time to occupy Hester. Man your stations!

Liam: Money has made my family secretive, image-obsessed ass. I want nothing to do with it or them.

Liam: Look, maybe you two are okay with this sneaking around thing, but I’m not. I tried to be, but it’s just not who I am.

Liam: They’re right. I knew Karma had a girlfriend, but I kept seeing her. Shane: Why are you beating yourself up like this? It’s not your fault they broke up.

Liam: Six months? That’s forever. Karma: I know, I’m sorry. But if people at school think I left Amy for you, they’ll hate us more than oil companies. Liam: And Amy is okay with this? I just, I really don’t like lying.

Amy: This is kidnapping. Shane: It’s really more blackmail. Lauren: We’re going to take photos of this assjolr that are so shocking and deviant, he’ll never tell anyone my secret. Shane: Conveniently, my mom sells sex toys out of the trunk of her car. Amy: Guys, guys, this is illegal and highly disturbing. Lauren, how bad could this secret be? Lauren: Ugh, I’m not telling you my fucking secret. Shane: She’s not. Trust me, I tried. Liam: Guys, I’m with Amy. Maybe it’s a good thing this thing gets out. They say you’re only as sick as your secrets. Amy: What? No, who says that? Who, the voices in your head? Tell ’em to shut up. I changed my mind. I’m on board. This is America. We are all entitled to our secrets. Will you excuse us for a second? What the hell was that? “You’re only as sick as your secrets”? I’m sorry, but the guilt is killing me. Amy: Oh, this little piggy went boo-hoo-hoo all the way home. Man up. Look, it’s killing me too, but what would it do to Karma if she found out that her soul mate slept with you? Liam: So what, we just pretend it never happened? Amy: What happened? See how easy that was? And before we never speak of this again, do I need to add contracting syphilis to last night’s list of tragic events?

Shane: You’re still hung up on Karma, aren’t you? I don’t get it. Are her lips dusted with cocaine or something? Liam: No, this is not about Karma, and I’m only hung up on her because Little Liam wanted to meet a lesbian, so he needs to be put in time-out. Shane: Why are you punishing your penis? Hey, Karma is the one who lied. Liam: Trust me, I deserve to be punished. Shane: No, you deserve to move on, and the best way to get over someone is to get under someone new, stat. Unless you don’t want to get over her. Liam: Of course I want to get over her. I just think celibacy is the best way to do that. Shane: I don’t know. In my experience, it only leads to blue balls and long, incoherent speeches about wolves.

Amy: This is your last chance. Promise me you won’t tell Karma or I’m about to make a scene so juicy I might win a daytime Emmy. Liam: What if I tell her I slept with someone and I don’t say that someone was you? Amy: Not a negotiation, last chance. Liam: Wow, you’re completely mental. This is what secrets do to people. Amy: Three, two – Liam: You wouldn’t dare ’cause then you’d have no leverage. Amy: [hits Liam in the face] How dare you? That was one. Liam: Amy, come on. Amy: Don’t touch me! Liam: Amy. Amy: Do you know where I met Liam? At a protest. And do you know what we were protesting? Skwerkel. Mr. Booker: Liam. Amy: But it turns out, he was just seducing me. He never told me his father founded the company. Who are you, Liam Booker? Liam: That’s hilarious. Amy has been taking improv classes, and she’s getting very good. Amy: And if that weren’t enough of a betrayal, I also found out that he slept with my best friend.

Liam: I cannot believe – Did I just really say all of that out loud? Amy: You did. And your family… Liam: Probably disowned me, but right now, I do not give a fuck. I have a huge weight off my back. Amy: Now I get why you’re so hung up on honesty. Liam: Yeah, well a few years ago I accidentally found my original birth certificate and my whole world cracked. It weighed me down ever since. I wish somehow I could un-know it, but, I can’t. I don’t want to tell Karma something she can’t un-know, I care about her way too much. Amy: That’s just how I feel, thank you.

Shane: Quit taking it out on these innocent art supplies. Liam: Shane, really, I don’t want to talk about it. Shane: That’s just your straight guy resistance to talking about your feelings. Push through it. Theo: What are y’all on about? Shane: It’s Karma’s birthday, and Liam can’t be with her for reasons too complicated and fucked up to specify. Theo: Wanna go hit stuff? Always makes me feel better. I’m taking this mixed martial arts class downtown. Shane: Nice try, Theo, but what Liam needs is to talk it all out over some grilled cheeses at Millie’s Diner. Theo: What is this, The View? Liam: Shane, I’m sorry, but that class is just what the doctor ordered. Shane: You’re not the doctor. You’re the patient. You can’t prescribe your own medicine. Theo: Wow, you really think you know what’s best for everybody, don’t you? Shane: It’s a gift. Liam: We’ll talk it out later, I promise. But right now, I just want to punch someone in the face without getting arrested. You wanna come? Shane: I’ll pass. It all sounds a bit too aggressively heterosexual for me.

Karma: If she can’t handle our relationship, then maybe it’s not meant to be. Do you want some dessert? They have homemade doughnuts. Liam: She doesn’t want doughnuts. She wants Reagan. Karma: Amy loves doughnuts. Liam: Karma, we get it. You know all of Amy’s favorite foods, but can’t you see that she’s really into Reagan? You can fix this, but you’ve gotta go and stop her. Amy: You’re right. Liam: No, Karma. Karma, this isn’t about you. You need to give them space.

Karma: You gave up art for me? Liam: Zita told you? Karma: The real question is why you didn’t. Liam: Because I didn’t do it to buy your forgiveness. I want to earn that. But do you think I ever will? Karma: Look, I want to forgive you. You’re doing all the right things. I’m just scared of getting hurt again, which is why I need to be in control. Liam: I’m okay with that. Karma: Then put your hands behind your back.

Shane: Grr! Young Jackson Lee was cute. Liam: And that’s Robin in the same picture. That’s proof! Shane, he’s my dad! Shane: I don’t know. I’ve been in plenty of pictures with people I haven’t impregnated. Liam: No, it all makes so much sense now! Being an artist is in my blood, and now my dad has come back to build some kind of relationship with me. I’ve dreamt about this moment. Shane: Liam- Liam: Shh! When I dreamt about it, there was no talking.

Amy: Who wouldn’t consider taking $250,000? Liam: I’ve been such an idiot. Karma: It could help my parents get back on their feet, help pay for college. How could I not consider it for even a second? Liam: After you left L.A., Zita kissed me. She made it very clear she wanted more, but I turned her down. It didn’t take me a week to think about it. Karma: Oh, yeah, well, too bad you didn’t think before you slept with Amy. Amy: Karma, please leave me out of this. Liam: Here we go again. You’re taking a bribe to stay away from me, but I’m the one defending myself? Karma: I’m not rich, Liam! I didn’t fall asleep in class because I’ve been studying. I’ve been working every catering gig I could get. And I live in a freaking juice truck! Liam: It’s so besides the point, it’s not even funny. If you were offered that money to stay away from Amy, you wouldn’t have considered it for one second!

Principal Turner: These are all of the school’s known visual artists. One of them has to be “B.” All right, you Banksy wannabes. You’ve had your fun. Now if someone doesn’t admit to being “B,” you will all be suspended. And yes, I can do that. Again, read the Terms & Conditions. Liam: It was me, okay? I am “B.” Now, let everyone else go. Principal Turner: B for Booker. You know, I think we might just skip right past suspension to full-on expulsion Penelope: Stop! It wasn’t Liam. It was me. “B” is for Beaver. I mean, Bevier.

Liam Booker (Faking It): ISFP was originally published on MBTI Zone

Norman Young’s book review

Ever since the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election, pundits across the country have struggled to understand what has changed about America’s political landscape. A broad, consensus view is that something has gone terribly wrong—that the changes brought about by Donald Trump’s presidency represent a grave threat to progress. Some even go so far as to suggest that the very survival of the West might be in danger. One of the more hopeful members of this group, psychologist Steven Pinker, worries that young people are not grateful for the technological benefits brought about by Enlightenment science. Less hopeful pundit Jonah Goldberg thinks that the West might be committing suicide, because people no longer assume “that ideas matter and character matters.” Yes, that is a potshot at the political pragmatism and moral failings of the current president. Ben Shapiro’s diagnosis is more nuanced than either Pinker’s or Goldberg’s. 

Pinker largely blames a malfunctioning news media for the fact that people have lost faith in the global ruling class which he believes is the force behind the steadily improving quality of life in the world. Goldberg blames people’s lack of faith in “a bundle of ideological commitments” (limited government, natural rights, etc.) which sustain the West’s commitment to capitalism. Ben looks deeper and finds the problem in the fact that the West has lost touch with traditions which, until recently, defined and sustained it: Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion. His solution involves more than merely learning to be grateful or adhering to a few, hard capitalist dogmas. It is only by educating citizens about the importance of Athens and Jerusalem that we can… make the West great again!

In Shapiro’s view, Greek philosophy contributed three fundamental ideas to the West.

Natural Law—the belief that morality derives from the purposes of things that are discoverable in their very nature.

Objective Truth—the belief that the reality of the world outside oneself is discoverable through reason.

Political Government—the greek city-state set an example of democracy, civic virtue, checks and balances, the social contract, and much more.

Jewish religion contributed four fundamental ideas to the West.

Monotheism—the belief that all of nature is one unified thing (a “universe”) because it was created by one God.  

Revealed Morality—the belief that there are some moral truths which human beings cannot access through reason alone, but require divine revelation.

Linear History—the belief that human progress is possible because history is not an endless series of repetitive cycles.

Man as the Image of God—the belief that every human being, not just imperial dictators, have free moral agency.

The combination of Greek and Jewish ideas established the foundations of the West. When the Greek idea that there are objective truths discoverable by reason mixed with the Jewish idea that everything was created by one lawgiver, the foundation of modern science was laid. When the Jewish idea that every individual has free moral agency was added to Greek ideas about political governance and civic virtue, the modern understanding of democratic politics began to develop. The combination of Greek Natural Law and the Ten Commandments became the cornerstone of Western morality.

By now, we’re a third of the way through The Right Side of History. And, so far, so good.

In chapter four, Ben Shapiro begins to describe the historical period from 0 to 1776 AD. Unlike typical narratives which feature a prominent decline into Dark Ages followed by recovery during Reformation or Renaissance, Ben’s narrative looks more like a gradual progression toward ever greater Enlightenment. In some ways, Ben’s unusual description of this period reflects a needed corrective to anti-Catholic or anti-Christian historical bigotry—for instance, he admits that “the age of scientific progress didn’t begin with the Enlightenment” but instead began “in the monasteries of Europe.” In other ways, however, Ben’s narrative merely perpetuates typical Enlightenment-era errors.

The most disappointing aspect of Shapiro’s description of this period of history is the unnecessary distance he puts between Judaism and Christianity. For instance, Ben insists that the Christian doctrine of the deity of Christ makes Jesus “no longer a Jewish figure.” He fails to acknowledge any connection between the Christian concept of incarnation and the Jewish understanding of God’s indwelling in both the temple and the tabernacle. Ben also incorrectly describes Christianity as antinomian, insisting that Christianity “dispensed with the need for [commandments]” because of its focus on faith. This is quite an odd assertion given the centrality of faith to Judaism. In the Old Testament, the covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people is based on mutual faithfulness—God remaining faithful to His promises and His people remaining faithful to His commandments. The Torah was given precisely so that Israel could demonstrate its faith.

Similar problems saturate the remainder of The Right Side of History. The places where Ben believes his Judaism is deeply divided from Christianity are precisely the places he should acknowledge fundamental agreement between the two faiths.

Ben Shapiro and Protestant Evangelicalism

I suspect that Ben’s desire to distance Judaism from Christianity stems from a deep-seated disdain for Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer who infamously harbored anti-semitic views. In Ben’s account of history, the Reformation sparked by Luther was not a flowering of religious piety but instead a “rise in religious fundamentalism” which turned the Christian religion into “an obstacle to secular learning.” The reader is never informed exactly how Ben squares this viewpoint with the Protestant founding of America’s great Universities or the fact that Protestant pastors traditionally wear academic robes (as opposed to clerical ones).

Ben’s unfriendly understanding of Protestantism colors his perception of the early history of Western Christianity, as well. In one of Martin Luther’s many fits of overblown piety, he insisted that Reason (especially the philosophical reasoning of the Scholastics) was “the devil’s prostitute” sent to seduce the faithful. This outburst was not representative of Protestant faith, let alone the historical Christian faith of Church Fathers like Saint Augustine. However, by reading Luther’s anti-scholastic views back into early Western history, Shapiro insists that, because of Christianity, “reason had been made secondary to faith.”

Ironically, despite his desire to distance himself from Protestant faith, much of Ben’s perspective on politics springs from Protestant evangelicalism. His cultural analysis mirrors the counter-countercultural conservatism of his parents’ generation (the heyday of the “religious right”) which tended to see society’s increasing moral and cultural relativism as the work of the devil. The influence of the evangelical perspective is obvious in Ben’s earlier works which complain that young Americans live in a Porn Generation, that students have been Brainwashed by secular college professors, and that conservatives swim upstream against the entertainment industry’s Primetime Propaganda. But, it is also noticeable in The Right Side of History when Ben argues that the cultural Marxists of the 1960s were engaged in “pagan revelry” with slogans (e.g. “make love, not war”) which encouraged “unbridle[d] Dionysian paganism.”

It is worth illustrating how Ben attempts to connect Marxism to paganism. Monotheism, he argues, “require[s] that logic govern the universe,” while “the [polytheist] universe must be an interplay of various minds battling with one another for supremacy.” For pagans, “all logic could be deconstructed into interplay of social forces,” which is why pagan empires could absorb an infinite number of gods into their pantheon while the Jewish people believed in absolute truth (tolerating “no other gods,” per Commandment 1). Voila! Tolerance, relativism—these are the values held dear by cultural Marxists, aren’t they?

Not quite. First off, mere relativism is not paganism; it is, in fact, closer to nihilism. Confusion on this point is understandable because nihilists can very quickly become pagans. Humanity abhors nihilism the way nature abhors a vacuum. People tend to believe in something, and paganism—the worship of the self immortalized in the tribe—is the most natural belief system for human beings to fall into. This is why a Nietzschean philosophy of overmen quickly filled the gap left by the “death of God” in Europe.

Secondly, Marxists are neither nihilists nor pagans—although they will weaponize both relativism and tribalism against cultures they want to subvert. Marxists are true believers in a pseudo-Christian utopian vision for society based on principles excised from the Western tradition. Thus, Marxism is best understood as Christian heresy or false messianism. It is no accident that the intersectional culture on America’s left-leaning college campuses perversely embodies Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of God, where “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

Shapiro is right to see both Marxism and fascism as enemies of Judeo-Christian values and religious belief, but he is wrong to think that this makes both ideologies equally pagan. Ben uses the word “pagan” the way those of us on the religious right use it: as a stand-in for the unfashionable term “infidel.” Religious conservatives sometimes call Marxists pagan when we really mean to say that Marxists are infidels who reject the truth of the Bible and reduce Christian values to expressions of bourgeois class status. We also call fascists pagan when we really mean to say that they are infidels who reject religious belief and subsume religious traditions under the direction of the state.

Despite the confused terminology, Protestant evangelicals instinctively oppose both the neo-pagan fascists on the alt-Right and the neo-messianic Marxists on the far-Left. In order to defend the West against these twin enemies, some on the religious right have elevated a quick-witted Orthodox Jew into a prominent leader of their Culture War. Is it too much to ask that, in return, Ben Shapiro refrain from describing their Protestant faith as an obstacle to Western greatness?

Ben Shapiro and Protestant Nationalism

An appreciation of Protestantism would also improve Ben’s understanding of nationalism. As it stands, Ben’s view falls somewhere between Jonah Goldberg’s distaste for “romantic nationalism” and Yoram Hazony’s praise for the kind of nationalism that respects basic human rights and other nations’ borders. However, in order to make his middle position cohere, Ben needs to resolve a dissonance between their disparate perspectives. Yoram insists that the problem with history’s worst nationalist regimes was their universalism; Goldberg insists that the problem was their tribalism. In reality—and Ben should like this—the heart of the problem was their rejection of Judaic values.

For all of Yoram Hazony’s criticism of universalism, he is actually a closeted universalist. That fact is hidden in the title of his book: The Virtue of Nationalism. Without a conception of value that is universal, how could he possibly judge nationalism to be a virtue? Yoram’s respect for “the Protestant construction of the West” is really an endorsement of the way Protestant nations followed the Biblical example in their conception of nationhood. His judgment that Westphalian nationalism is virtuous involves the universalization of his own Judaic values that are derived from the Hebrew Bible.

That said, Yoram Hazony’s perspective on nationalism provides a needed corrective to Jonah Goldberg’s orthodox understanding of the Thirty Years’ War. Pro-Enlightenment thinkers like Goldberg tend to assume that the Peace of Westphalia resulted, not from ideological development, but rather from the sheer exhaustion of both sides of an internecine religious conflict. I found it surprising that Ben Shapiro agreed with Goldberg’s view in his book, since he is typically loathe to reduce historical forces to a material substrate. I expected Ben to endorse the perspective put forward in Yoram’s book, which says that the Thirty Years’ War, far from reflecting religious divisions, actually fell along national lines and reflected Europe’s growing national consciousness. If Yoram’s view is correct—and I think it is—the conflict was not so much a “religious war” as the birth-pangs of nationalism.

What really exhausted itself during the Thirty Years’ War was not religion, but paganism. During previous centuries, a decline in the moral legitimacy of the Catholic papacy coincided with growing infidelity and religious schism. By the 17th century, paganism had filled much of the space left open by a decline in Christian belief. Renewed interest in pagan classicism during the Renaissance period was not, as pro-Enlightenment theorists often believe, a flowering of “secular learning” over and against “religious superstition.” On the contrary, this period saw a surge of pseudo-science and spikes in witch-hunts and inquisitions. The leaders of the Thirty Years’ War, although nominally Protestant and Catholic, were fighting to replace the dominant position once held by the Catholic Church with empires ruled by their own particular “chosen” ethnicities—a truly pagan ambition.  

The Protestant construction of the West was not merely a side-effect of the failure of neo-pagan empires to gain the upper hand in Europe. It was also a return to the Judaic values embedded in Christianity which circumscribed the pagan ambitions of European nations. For centuries after Westphalia, when Western nations made appeals to “international law,” they did not refer to a multilateral body with enforcement powers, but to a generally-acknowledged moral minimum endorsed by Nature and Nature’s God. It was to this standard that America’s Founders appealed in order to justify their revolution against the British Crown.

Ben Shapiro considers the United States of America to be the “crown jewel” of the West, but he gives most of the credit for its founding to the Enlightenment philosophy of one particular Englishman. He never acknowledges Locke's debt to Puritanism. He never mentions that nearly every one of those who were willing to risk their lives for a new birth of freedom by signing the Declaration of Independence were Protestant. Is it too much to ask for Ben to acknowledge the role played by Protestantism in the founding of America?

Ben Shapiro and Protestant Existentialism

Cheerleaders for the Enlightenment tend to agree with Ben that a shift in the West from an Aristotelian conception of the universe to a humanist one “obliterat[ed] mankind as the jewel of the cosmos, bringing him low, returning him to the animals rather than allowing him to aspire to join the divine.” In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. Humanism turned man into the only thing of value in the cosmos, making him “the measure of all things,” and transforming the very nature of morality into concern for humanity’s material well-being. To this day, the only thing secular humanists will consider quasi-divine is the brain’s ever-mysterious spark of consciousness—leading some to even start calling themselves “sentientists.”

The advent of humanism transformed science into a project with the sole purpose of promoting human flourishing through technological advancement. As Francis Bacon put it, knowledge should be “a spouse, for generation, fruit, and comfort,” and not “a courtesan, for pleasure and vanity only.” Ben correctly notes, in his book, that “Francis Bacon dispensed with the Aristotelian notion of final causes in science” which had provided the basis for the belief that nature has ends of its own which must be respected. Ben does not mention that this philosophic change corresponded with colonial expansion and the displacement of an old, feudal order—one which respected natural law and claimed to be legitimized by it—by a new, increasingly powerful bourgeoise.

Ben claims that the historical trajectory set in motion by the new science of Francis Bacon culminated in the atheistic philosophy of David Hume, which represented “the final step away from ethical monotheism and Greek teleology and toward outright atheism.” Yes and no. While it is true that the removal of form and purpose from science disenchanted nature, the new scientific understanding of the natural world was hardly a threat to “ethical monotheism.” In fact, it strengthened it. Deism placed God safely outside of nature, where He (and only He) could be the source of moral purpose. So long as humanity continues to conceive the natural world as it is described by humanist science, David Hume will remain precisely correct: no description of what is(what scientists will agree to be objectively true) can ever tell us what ought to be.

In the face of this cold and morally indifferent scientific cosmos—which would become increasingly brutish and cruel with the development of Darwinism—religious existentialists took a leap of faith. Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber described the scientific outlook on the world as an “I-It” relationship to the cosmos, which he contrasted with a religious “I-Thou” relationship that is open to revelation. I find it shocking that Shapiro—an Orthodox Jew seeking to bring together Greek reason and Judaic revelation—never once mentions Buber. The only religious existentialist Ben discusses is Kierkegaard, whose Christian philosophy he curtly dismisses as equivalent to “the view of Nietzsche” which “would lead not to God, in the end, but to worship of subjectivity.”

However, only pages after unjustifiably dismissing religious existentialism, Ben unwittingly recapitulates the religious existentialist view. In imitation of Kierkegaard, Ben explains his own personal exegesis of Genesis 22. The true meaning of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Ben explains, is that all parents “are asked to put [thei]r own children in danger for the sake of a higher ideal.” “What God asks of us,” he continues, “is not only that we become defenders of valuable and eternal truths, but that we train our children to become defenders of those truths as well.” In other words, as for Ben and his house, they will remain faithful Jews even if the Nazis rise again and threaten the Jewish people with annihilation. God bless him. That requires a real, existential leap of faith.

When the Nazis did rise, that very same leap was taken by Reformed theologian Karl Barth and Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who resisted Nazi policy in Germany by standing firm on a theology that was existentially committed to Judaic revelation. Once again, Ben Shapiro fundamentally agrees with faithful Protestants who risked their lives to preserve the very values he holds dear. Is it too much to ask for Ben to refrain from dismissing their faith as mere Nietzschean subjectivism?

The Problem of Antisemitism

Ben Shapiro says—and I agree—that one of the most important values of the West is found in Genesis 1:26, when God says, “Let us make man in our image.” As a Protestant, I am tempted to follow Ben’s interpretation of this verse as being primarily about individual rights, but I do not think that this understanding is correct. The Judeo-Christian perspective on rights is that they come from God’s inviolable covenant with His people, whereby God binds Himself by His promises and remains faithful to His Word. As Ben says in his book,

“...the patriarch Abraham asks God to abide by His own rules for right and wrong … Abraham argues with God over right and wrong, and asks God whether collective punishment is appropriate … God answers him; God doesn’t merely ignore Abraham or silence him. Rather, He engages with him.”

In Judaism and Catholicism, God covenants with His people as a group, protecting the whole community against rulers and powers of this world. In Protestantism, God covenants directly with every individual believer. This is why, in the American conception, a personal connection with the Creator becomes the source of individual rights—especially the right to be free from coercion in religious matters. If we remove the Protestant gloss from Genesis 1:26, the verse still powerfully undermines the claims of kings and emperors. However, it does so not by making every individual a tiny sovereign, but rather by insisting on a radically egalitarian vision of humanity that pulls powerful men down to the level of the common person (a theme that saturates the whole Bible). Nietzsche reacted against this Biblical vision when he said,

“It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, ‘the wretched are alone the good; the poor, the weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is salvation.’”

Nietzsche is right—Judaism flipped the moral equation on the powerful. Rather than blessing the powerful with victory, as pagan gods would do, Jehovah sent His wrath against those who preyed upon the weak and the lowly. The blood of those unjustly killed “cries out to me from the ground,” says the Lord in Genesis 4:10. Ben Shapiro and the evangelical Christians who comprise the bulk of his audience fundamentally agree on this point, which is why we all deeply oppose abortion. We know that any justification for killing the weakest and most undesirable members of society is a step out onto the slippery slope which descends into the eugenic evils of Nazism.

Nietzsche also correctly recognizes that Christianity is a branch from the root of Judaism. Ben agrees, but worries that a nefarious kernel is buried within Christianity which occasionally springs forth in outbursts of antisemitism. He cringes at the Apostle Paul’s criticism of “Judaizers” and at Jesus’ condemnation of Pharisees and money-changers because he knows that these words were used to slander and persecute Jews many times in European history. Ben’s fear is understandable, and only slightly misplaced. The problem of antisemitism is not inside Christianity, but inside Christians. Within every Christian believer (and every Christian nation) is a man (or a people) that is naturally pagan, and must be converted anew with every passing generation. All too often in the history of the West, the trappings of Christendom existed as a thin veneer or tribal identifier covering essentially pagan peoples who had not absorbed Judeo-Christian values.

It is not hard to tell the difference between Gentiles who are Christians and those who remain unconverted pagans. For one thing, their understanding of the New Testament is entirely opposite. A pagan who reads the book of Matthew and hears about Israel’s rejection of Jesus gets angry at the Jews. If he watches a passion play, he jeers at the conspiring Jewish Sanhedrin because he imagines that he belongs to a superior stock that would be incapable of such actions. A converted Christian reading the same story or watching the same play directs his anger inward. He does not holler at Christ’s Jewish persecutors, because he realizes that he shares Israel’s tendency to fall away from God. The inner pagan scoffs at the prideful Pharisee, but the Christian recognizes, as did King David, that “I am the man who has sinned against God.” In other words, while a pagan thinks Jesus was crucified because they sinned, a Christian knows that Jesus really died because I sin.

Christians who have absorbed Judaic values seek to emulate the Jews, not replacethem. Protestant Separatists who landed at Plymouth Rock deeply identified with Biblical Israel and its journey through the wilderness into the Promised Land. At the height of Europe’s greatness, Protestant nations deliberately modeled themselves after the Kingdom of Israel as described in the Old Testament. Today, Protestant evangelicals who desire to make America great again stand allied with Ben Shapiro in staunch support of the nation of Israel. I hope that, going forward, Ben will recognize that any antisemitism that comes from those who profess Christ is really a backslide into paganism caused by the sin of ethnic pride.

Conclusion

Modern-day pagans often voice support for Western greatness. But, they do not love the West for what it is; they love it for being Caucasoid. Modern-day secular humanists also support Western greatness. But, they do not really love the West at all; they just want to be able to continue enjoying the material comforts afforded to them by Western technology. The former are parasites who corrupt the West from within. The latter are freeloaders who cannot be relied upon to defend the West in the breach. Ben Shapiro is neither of these. Like the counter-countercultural Protestants of the “Silent Majority” generation, like the Protestant signers of the Declaration of Independence, like the Protestant existentialists who resisted German Nazism, and like the Protestant evangelicals who make up the bulk of his audience, Ben is a real defender of the West and a true believer in the values that make it great.

Sometimes, defending the West can be a messy business. Sometimes it requires associating oneself with an obnoxious figure who has deep, moral failings. This gives observers a chance to confuse our principled stance with hypocrisy or an endorsement of immorality. Unfortunately, that is a price defenders of the West often have to pay. Some people—especially those who pride themselves in their Judeo-Christian moral purity—find that price to be too high. Their timidity is understandable. It is far more comfortable to retreat into an intellectual monastery than to get one's hands dirty with the realities of the political world.

We Protestants have never had much use for monasticism. We have chosen to fight. We cannot and will not recant—for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here we stand. We can do no other. God help us.

Bad, Future, and I Bet: The five stages of red-pill 1. Generic conservative: The generic conservative realizes something about society doesn't quite sit right with him, there is a "gut feeling" that "something is wrong" with the way people conduct themselves in terms of behavioral norms, moral standards and so on. However, he is unable to articulate his opposition to liberalism outside of a liberal context and accepts liberal principles such as a belief in the moral goodness of equality as taken for granted, so liberals generally run rings around him Typical argument: "First gay marriage, what next? Pedos marrying kids? Bestiality?" Typical liberal response: "Slippery slope fallacy much? They said the same thing about black people being allowed to vote 2. Libertarian: The libertarian takes his opposition to liberalism and tries to establish a philosophical foundation for most "generic conservatives" do not merely voice their opposition to the perceived speaking, the libertarian takes this sm impracticality of liberal plans, economic tep further and l framework of one based around economic freedom t degree, he is capable of attacking the current system effectively, but utterly ineffective in challenging it morally or ethically since libertarianism tends to adopt a non-interference attitude to ethics and Typical argument: "You do not right have to right to appropriate other people's wealth. Taxation is theft. Typical liberal response: "Tell that to the Scandinavian states that achieve so much with high tax rates. I bet you believe in creationism too." 3. The radical right Most people on the right stop at stage 2 of the red pill process, those who dig deeper go further however start to realize that something isn't quite right about libertarianism's general refusal (outside of people like Hoppe) to take a moral stand against degeneracy. This leads them to unorthodox political philosophies that stand well beyond the pale of acceptability, such as fascism. For the first time in their lives, they start to articulate moral and ethical opposition to liberal principles rather tha pical argument: "if you import third world people, you import third world problems. We need to act for our people and our Nation, not for Jews, Blacks or Hispanics res 4. Traditionalism: efourthstage is traditionalism. The red-pilled individ soteric (by present day ra ards ua erarc rea entire trajectory for the past two centuries s Revolt of 1789 has been disastrous. Typically the traditionalist will identify with traditional modes of European government IC ical arqument: simply point out the error of principle that has provided the foundation of this constitution and that has led the French astray since the first moment of their revolution. ons like its predecessors, has been drawn up for Man. Now, there is no such thing in the world as Man. In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc. I am even aware, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian. But, as for Man, I declare that I have never met him in my life. If he exists, I certainly have no This constitution is capable of being applied to all human communities from China to Geneva. But a constitution which is made for all nations is made for none: it is a pure abstraction, a school exercise whose purpose is to exercise the mind in accordance with a hypothetical ideal, and which ought to be addressed to Man, in the imaginary places which he inhabits.. What is a constitution? Is it not the solution to the following problem: to find the laws that are fitting for a particular nation given its population, its customs, its religion, its geographical situation, its political relations, its wealth, and its good and bad Now, this problem is not addressed at all by the Constitution of 1795, which is concerned only with Man. Typical liberal response: Imao so u think women shouldn't vote 'n shiet? Get with the times grandpa xD It's 2016, not 1816 5. Hoppean Libertarianism The fifth and final stage of the red pill is Hoppe libertarianism. Realizing the traditionalist morals of old would not be sufficient to guide a modern society, not to mention its penchant for coercion, the red-pilled individual will seek guidance in the works of Austrian economist Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Alas, Dr Hoppe's works on why monarchy is better suited to protect individual rights than democracy will certainly capture the attention of the now-traditionalist 4th-stage-pilled individual. Even more, Dr. Hoppe's conclusions that there can be no tolerance towards democrats, socialists, communists or any other collectivist mindset in the free society will seduce the red-pilled individual into realizing a world composed of thousands of different privately-owned microstates would usher in a prosperous and glorious age Typical argument: "Predictably, under democratic conditions the tendency of every monopoly to increase prices and decrease quality - will be only more pronounced. Instead of a prince who regards the s private property, a temporary caretaker is put in charge of the country. He does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his proteges' advantage. He owns its current use usufruct but not its capital stock. This will not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it will make exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock, i short-sighted. Moreover, the perversion of justice will proceed even faster now. Instead of protecting pre-existing private property rights, democratic government becomes a machine for the redistribution of xisting property rights in the name of illusory social security A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person but falls instead into the same moral category a domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a "free good") or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest). On the other hand, there are members of the human species who are capable of understanding the [value of the division of labor] but...who knowingly act wrongly... [Blesides having to be tamed or even physically defeated [they] must also be punished... to make them understand the nature of their wrongdoings and hopefully teach them a lesson for the future imal of either the harmless sort (to be Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are a cultural conservatism. And in trying to combine what cannot be combined, much of the modern libertarian movement actually contributed to the further erosion of private property rights (just as much of contemporary conservatism contributed to the erosion of families and traditional morals). What the countercultural libertari that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social "discrimination" and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives ely a combination as socialism and iled to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is ilies, authority, communities, and social ranks are the empirical-sociological concretization of the abstract philosophical-praxeological categories and concepts of property, production, exchange, and contract. Property and property relations do not e apart from families and kinship relations." Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference. And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental-indeed foundationalfact of families and intergenerational kinship relations inship relations imply cultural absolutism. Typical liberal response: None. This degenerate would've already been employed as a consumer good or been physically removed from society

What We’re Talking About: A MAHG Reading Roundup 4

Every summer, TeachingAmericanHistory brings together scholars and teachers from around the nation to our campus in Ashland to enjoy week-long seminars on focused topics in American history and government. These courses can be taken for graduate credit, or simply for your personal enrichment — some participants describe the experience as an “intellectual retreat” where they can enjoy both conversation and collegiality.

If you aren’t able to join us in person this summer, we hope you’ll consider joining us in spirit by checking out some of the myriad texts we’ll be discussing. If you’re reading along, we invite you to join the conversation using #TAHreading to share your thoughts!

Lucas Morel, GREAT AMERICAN TEXTS: RALPH ELLISON

My Ralph Ellison course will focus on his novel Invisible Man as a great American text. Although I supplement discussion of the novel with several of his essays and interviews, the course begins with discussion of one of his short stories, “In a Strange Country.” Published in 1944, eight years before the publication of Invisible Man, the story illustrates some elements that will Ellison will employ in his great novel: irony, music, and interior monologue to name a few. More importantly, the plot raises questions about race, diversity, humanity, inclusion, and the meaning of America, in general, that Ellison will return to not only in his novel but throughout the rest of his writing career. The story involves a black American named Mr. Parker, who is on shore leave in Wales during World War II. The plot thickens quickly when he is mugged by a group of bigoted white American servicemen and rescued by a Welshman, who takes him to a pub to recover. They eventually spend the rest of the evening at the Welshman’s private singing club.  The harmony of the diverse Welshmen as they sing a variety of songs impresses Mr. Parker, who then is surprised and befuddled as they launch into the American national anthem, as they expect him to help them along. The story closes with his musing about “The Star-Spangled Banner,” thoughts and feelings reeling, as he notes, “For the first time in your whole life, he thought with dreamlike wonder, the words are not ironic.” What is the “strange land” of the story’s title: Wales or America?  For racial minorities, or any numerical minority, is an imperfect America worth fighting for? How can diversity be a strength rather than a weakness of a free society? These and other questions come readily to mind, demonstrating Ellison’s close observations of American social and political life. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

William Atto and Thomas Bruscino, THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR

Thomas Bruscino: My recommendation is General Orders No. 100, Lieber’s Code, 1863. It seems so banal–just a list of 157 articles, published with little fanfare and no preamble in 1863.  Perhaps that is why General Orders No. 100 is not more well known.  But a closer look at the code, written by Francis Lieber and issued by President Abraham Lincoln to govern armies in the field, reveals a document of remarkable importance and reach.  General Orders No. 100 is one of the key documents in the laws of war, but more than that, it is the original American counterinsurgency manual, a wartime manifestation of the opposition to slavery built into the constitution, a guide to American principles of justice and fairness, and the fundamental expression of the American mind for war.  As such, Lieber’s Code is one of the most important documents in American and world history.  It deserves careful reading, study, and deliberation. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

Sarah Beth V. Kitch, RACE AND EQUALITY IN AMERICA

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), a philosopher and political actor, observes that many persons regard care for justice as someone else’s task. Some persons, however, share in suffering in a way that moves them to awaken their communities to injustice. Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) invites her audience to experience the pain of racial injustice in her account, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Her account makes fresh a phenomenon that familiarity sometimes render abstract.

An invitation to ethical sensitivity, the narrative highlights the phenomenon of what Heschel would later call indifference to evil. Specifically, she reveals how Americans have accepted as part of their political order the oppression of some persons on the basis of race. Through thoughtful storytelling, Jacobs summons readers to name practices that degrade persons. “These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.” She then shows the reader how an order contrived on racial inequality protects persons who commit sexual violence, breach her motherhood, and attack her practices of conscience and faith. The narrative creates a ringing awareness of the human capacity, whether consciously harsh or unconsciously habituated, to tolerate evil.

Jacobs concludes that the injustices she and others have experienced dehumanize both those who commit harm and those who suffer. As she unveils slavery, Jacobs beckons the reader with to consider its legacy in American political life today. She leaves the reader with a reminder of our common need for home along with a challenge to thoughtful action. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

Jeremy Bailey and Marc Landy, THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY II: JOHNSON TO THE PRESENT

Jeremy Bailey: My serious recommendation is easy. I was just on the American Political Science Association American Political Thought organized section book award committee.  And the best was Jonathan Gienapp’s Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution (Harvard University Press:2o18) shows how the Constitution became “fixed” in the 1790’s and regarded as a settled agreement with its own authority. Allen Guelzo’s short Reconstruction (Oxford University Press: 2018) is also very good, as well as Daniel R’ Rodger’s history of the city on hill speech in As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton).

My summer-y recommendation is Mark Synnott’s The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life (Dutton), which gives a very good account of the free solo climb in the context of American climbing culture in the last several decades. For more recommendations on modern American politics, check out what we’ll be reading in class on the syllabus.

Jason Jividen, THE PROGRESSIVES (online)

Charles E. Merriam (1874-1953) was a professor at the University of Chicago and an early leader in the twentieth century discipline of political science.  He was also an influential public intellectual in the Progressive Movement. Often cited as one of the founders of the “behavioral approach” to political science, he argued against the usefulness of “mere” theory or formal law and institutions in understanding politics. Rather, Merriam claimed, political scientists ought to derive data from the behavior of political actors and subject these things to quantitative analysis. For Merriam, if it is to be in any way useful, political science also ought to help citizens, politicians, and administrators realize progressive social, economic, and political reform.

In his 1903 book, A History of American Political Theories, Merriam surveyed the historical development of American political principles and ideologies, and he saw this history as setting the stage for the Progressive Movement. In the eighth chapter, Merriam examined “recent tendencies” in contemporary social science research. Among these recent tendencies was the willingness of progressive scholars to reject many of the theoretical principles associated with the American Founding, e.g. the state of nature, natural rights, social contract theory, limited government, and separation of powers.   Few standalone pieces highlight so succinctly the basic tenets of Progressivism and its critique of America’s Founding principles. This piece is regularly taught across several sections of AHG 505 (The Progressive Movement).

Ken Masugi, THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES (online)

My favorite Abraham Lincoln speech to teach (next to the Gettysburg Address) is his Temperance Address. With our current increase in caustic political exchanges, its penetrating (and witty) reflections on social and political extremism are most instructive.  

The Temperance Address was delivered on February 22, 1842 in a church at a meeting of the Washingtonian Society, a recently organized group of reformed alcoholics. Lincoln used the occasion of Washington’s Birthday to praise the Washingtonians for their rational persuasion in gaining members. He reminds a greater audience that such rhetoric is essential for self-government. In moving citizens toward a candidate or policies, persuasive speech, which appeals to self-interest, is the alternative to force. Hellfire and damnation preaching promotes civil war.

Throughout his political career Lincoln would use the rhetorical principles of the Temperance Address to teach supporters of noble causes, such as the abolition of slavery, how best to advance them. In its argument and the action Lincoln sobers us up for the duty of self-government. Among the moral and political vices, being drunk on power is possibly the worse.

I will teach this speech in my late August course on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

The post What We’re Talking About: A MAHG Reading Roundup 4 appeared first on Teaching American History.

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After ten years of teaching Mindfulness-Based Programs, I continue to be blown away by the potential of mindfulness training to help people with a wide range of backgrounds, personalities, and life challenges.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), for example, is highly effective at training greater awareness of how we entangle ourselves in suffering through such habits as operating in auto-pilot, being attached to “doing mode,” overreacting to stressors, and so on. Through daily meditation practice, the psychological cost of these problematic patterns can become clear. Empowered by this greater awareness, we learn to interrupt automatic reactions, step back from difficult thoughts and feelings, and respond to challenges with greater insight and intention. As these skills become refined and integrated, we develop a reliable capacity to change how we relate to difficult moments. For many, the disruption of habitual reactions is deeply destabilizing, but ultimately constructive. In my experience, a skillful teacher and supportive group provide a safe context for participants to do the work of rebuilding a healthy sense of stability and connection. At least three decades of research indicates that this is a powerful method for cultivating well-being.

As these skills become refined and integrated, we develop a reliable capacity to change how we relate to difficult moments.

As my experience teaching mindfulness and working in mental health deepens, though, I am increasingly sensitive to some limitations of our contemporary approach to the practice. My biggest concern stems from the fact that Mindfulness-Based Programs are “value-neutral” by design and therefore do not necessarily equip participants to develop and clarify their values and cultivate a sense of purpose for their lives. The importance of this “values work” may not be obvious to participants, who are primarily concerned with reducing suffering. Yet, it can have a deep and lasting impact on well-being – even if it doesn’t explicitly address the roots of suffering itself.

Left to Our Own Devices

The MBSR curriculum is fairly clear about what constitutes unskillful reactions to difficulty but remains non-committal on what ideals or principles we should invoke to guide more skillful responses. As teachers, we are hand-cuffed here. We may have strong moral convictions, hard-won insights from our own practices, or a sense of care for our participants. But all of that must be held judiciously in awareness because it is not our role to impose a psychological compass on participants.

Rather, they are encouraged to search their own cognitive and emotional resources for the wisdom they ostensibly already have. There appears to be an assumption that mindful observation of experience will inevitably reveal the importance of particular values such as compassion and gratitude.

Yet, I would suggest that well-being may be more effectively cultivated in the long run if we invest in formulating a more explicit sense of what is meaningful and important to us, personally and collectively. This “values work” has the potential to extend beyond our own preoccupation with greater health and happiness, to a reflection on the broader context of our lives, our relationships, and the world around us. In time, such reflection would yield a coherent sense of purpose: an inner guide that aligns ideals and actions.

Mindfulness with Values Incorporated

Some mindfulness-based group programs address values more directly. For example, the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) curriculum makes self-compassion an explicit guide for intention and action. MSC is widely appreciated and there is mounting evidence for its effectiveness in promoting mental health. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) focuses almost exclusively on preventing preventing relapse of depression and has a strong track record in this regard (for example,  Kuyken et. al, 2015).

The more circumscribed but well-defined aims of these programs facilitate participants’ conceptual understanding of the material and their capacity to cope with specific types of difficult emotions.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a mindfulness-based psychotherapy, maintains a broader conception of values at the center of its model. Mindfulness is necessary but not sufficient for well-being: you may have the capacity to decenter from entangling thoughts and feelings, but may nonetheless continue to struggle without a clear sense of direction for your actions. While ACT remains value-neutral, it encourages us to explore and clarify what is subjectively important to us and commit to actions aligned with those values. At Mindspace, we ended up developing an ACT program called Mindfulness Tools for Valued Living specifically to respond to a question commonly posed by MBSR graduates:

“OK, I’m mindful, now what?”

There is plenty of evidence for the importance of this ACT principle: having well-articulated values enhances eudaimonic well-being, a sense of meaning and direction through life’s ups and downs. Furthermore, progress toward values-congruent goals is correlated with subjective ratings of well-being (Bedford-Peterson et al. 2018). Values also promote resilience insofar as they help us tolerate and accept the pain and difficulty that inevitably arise in a meaningful life (Wilson & Murrell, 2011).

What Values are Most Valuable?

Nonetheless, all of these approaches to values work have important limitations. Programs such as MSC & MBCT do not explicitly encourage reflection on the interconnectedness of self and the broader social context. Also, while the process of deriving our own personal values system in ACT supports greater autonomy, it also leaves us stuck reflecting on values in a vacuum: how do you know which values will provide the greatest well-being and for whom?

While the process of deriving our own personal values system in ACT supports greater autonomy, it also leaves us stuck reflecting on values in a vacuum: how do you know which values will provide the greatest well-being and for whom?

The effort to restrict values work to health-related concerns in mindfulness-based programs makes these approaches accessible and politically correct. But this tradeoff leaves something to be desired. For one, this approach comes up short on inspiring head-on engagement with ethics and collective well-being, which we urgently need. Humanity is facing unprecedented moral challenges including climate change, economic inequality, and technological transformation. To make matters worse, the near-total breakdown of public discourse has robbed us of important corrective mechanisms.

But if those concerns are too abstract to move the motivational needle for you, consider the evidence that some values actually lead to greater personal well-being than others. For example, research by Kasser among others has shown that intrinsic and “self-transcendent” values are associated with greater well-being than materialistic or “self-enhancing” values. This raises the intriguing possibility that adopting and acting on values that focus on collective well-being may ultimately be the most direct means to enhance an individual’s own well-being.

So whether we are motivated to enhance our own well-being or make the world a better place—or both—a clear sense of purpose and alignment of actions are worth cultivating, in addition to mindful awareness.

Exploring Values: A Contemplative Practice

Here is a practice adapted from the three-minute breathing space from the MBCT curriculum that can help in cultivating a sense of purpose and aligning our actions with clear values.

Settle into a comfortable, but dignified sitting posture on a chair, cushion, or meditation bench. Close your eyes if you’re comfortable doing so.

For a minute or two, open your awareness to all that is already present in your interior experience, including thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. There is no need to do anything about these mental events. Simply take stock of and be with whatever is present, just as it is.

On an outbreath, gather and focus attention at the abdomen, observing the sensations of breathing (the soles of the feet and the fingertips are excellent alternative anchors, if attending to the abdomen is destabilizing in any way). Notice the sensations of expansion and contraction in the belly as you breath in and out. If attention is pulled away by some other content such as a thought, sound, body sensation, etc., that’s OK, simply acknowledge that content and redirect attention back to the breath. Continue this practice for 2-3 minutes.

On an outbreath, begin expanding awareness to other parts of the body. Notice where else you feel the breath; for example, in the chest, shoulders, back, or ribs. Continue slowly expanding awareness, including the arms, legs, and head, until the entire body is in awareness. Stay with this spacious awareness for a minute or two.

On an outbreath, begin to notice the limits of the body, including points of contact with clothing, whatever you’re sitting on, and the ground. Notice where your skin is contact with the air in the room. Notice if there are any sounds around you. Stay with these sensations for a minute or two.

Now begin to consider what you will be transitioning to after this practice. Over a period of two-three minutes, ask yourself the following questions, noting whatever answers arise, without elaborating on or suppressing any particular one:

What am I doing today?

Am I doing what is important? Am I spending time with who is important?

What values are these actions in the service of?

Do I need to make any changes to my plans for the day

What mindset would be best to cultivate as I approach what is coming up?

Once the answers to these questions have clarified, consider articulating an intention for the day that integrates what came up during the reflection. Repeat the intention to yourself a few times.

When you’re ready, open your eyes, slowly stand up, engage in some light stretching and move on with your day.

Like many mind-training practices, this exercise will get easier and more accessible with time. It may take some repetition to achieve clarity of purpose with this practice. When this is achieved, it often contributes to feeling calm, concentrated, and also energized and engaged. But it’s also totally OK if you don’t achieve this state of clarity. Feeling clouded, distracted, or confused may actually be helpful in identifying where mindful inquiry or additional reflection may be called for.

The post When Meditation Meets Deep, Collective Human Values appeared first on Mindful.

Argumentative Essay against Abortion - Part 2 Free Short Essays - Assignments



Argumentative Essay against Abortion - Part 2

Argumentative Essay against Abortion

During the course of Western history, Judeo-Christian culture has been a significant source of limits on individual freedom - Argumentative Essay against Abortion introduction. One Christian tradition has viewed nature as “God’s rules” and has therefore tended to oppose human tampering with natural processes. From this tradition has emerged the idea of the sacredness of human life, a belief which has affected modern attitudes toward the abortion issue. Some Catholic leaders have placed the protest against abortion within a larger ideological framework of the need to preserve all human life (Cleghorn p.129-142). From this perspective, the rejection of abortion accompanies the condemnation of nuclear warfare and capita punishment, along with efforts to eliminate such deadly problems as poverty and malnutrition. All such issues form a “seamless garment,” the purpose of which is to preserve human life. Conceivably, the nobility of this cause has led some people, and especially Catholics, to refuse any withdrawal from the line of conception as the beginning of human life. However, research suggests that the “seamless garment” argument might apply only to a small, perhaps elite, segment of Canadians (Jelen p.118-125).

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More Essay Examples on Abortion Rubric

Another Christian tradition relevant to abortion emphasizes the sinfulness of human nature, views desires for physical pleasures or comforts as corrupting, and emphasizes the need to control the human’s baser nature. This puritanical perspective finds expression in a commitment to various traditional moral rules. Thus, research has consistently found that opponents of legalized abortion hold traditional ideological views about gender and family such as the belief that woman’s place is in the home (Luker p.160); a condemnation of sex education in the public schools (Schwartz p.10-12); and an opposition to various forms of sexual freedom, divorce, and pornography (Neitz p.270). Such attitudes have been collectively identified as “social traditionalism”. The head of the Pro Life Action has said, “There’s more to life than the viscera twitch, and I think using sex purely for pleasure is sort of animalistic” (quoted in Ridgeway p.29). Thus, a second ideological basis for opposition to legalized abortion is a commitment to social traditionalism.

Another secular, ideological basis for limiting arguments based on individualism is political conservatism. Prominent conservatives tend to distrust human nature and spontaneity (e.g, Kirkpatrick p.81-94). “Historically, conservatives have been distrustful of man’s basic nature and have emphasized the need for restraining institutions” (Lenski p.221). Not surprisingly, a positive relationship has been found between political conservatism and social traditionalism. Also, an antiabortion stand has generally been associated with politically conservative people and groups.

In sum, the acceptance of legalized abortion among people is a consequence of individualism which finds expression in libertarian and feminist ideologies. On the other hand, opposition to legalized abortion finds its ideological justification in the religious tradition, specifically in natural law or puritanical doctrines. This paper provides arguments against abortion.

For years, two arguments about religious liberty have formed a significant part of the abortion debate. The first–that public policy should not be based upon narrowly-construed sectarian perspectives–reflects the concern that First Amendment protections be safeguarded by policymakers. The second–that no group should seek to impose its own moral/theological beliefs upon others who hold differing beliefs regarded as equally personal and sacred–requests that religious communities and/or leaders be faithful to the social contract of tolerance.

The wisdom of this approach seems increasingly evident as the heat the abortion debate generates has intensified over the past three decades. The deep investment in the issue by various faith communities has led to acrimonious and divisive rhetoric and heavy-handed actions that threaten the cohesion of the social fabric, especially the civility that is necessary to maintain tolerance among and for all religious groups in a free and open society.

The aim of this essay is not to deal with abortion as a moral problem, but to explore the meaning(s) of religious liberty.

Defining the Religious Issue Locating or defining the religious nature of the abortion debate is of central importance. Those who campaign to ban abortion contend that no religious issue is involved because it is simply the killing of innocent human life, something both believers and atheists can agree to oppose. Abortion is merely a legal issue to be settled by the politics of majority rule (Horan et al. p. 34)

Since the Supreme Court has not dealt with abortion in terms of the Free Exercise/No Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment, some have concluded that there are no such issues involved. Roe v. Wade evaded the question, even while recognizing the philosophical/ religious conundrum in the notion of fetal personhood. Justice John Paul Stevens raised the establishment issue in Webster, and both he and Justice Harry A. Blackmun alluded to religious liberty concerns in Casey. Up to this point, however, decisions guaranteeing a right to an abortion have relied upon the “fight to privacy” and “personal liberties” assured under the Fourteenth Amendment. Even so, First Amendment concerns have considerable importance and thus clarification of these issues with regard to the abortion debate is needed.

It has been established that there are certain matters which do not constitute violations of the First Amendment. First, religious leaders may address issues of moral import in the public arena. Freedom for religion means that religious people have every fight to engage in the democratic process of shaping public opinion and policy.

Second, a simple coincidence between religious doctrine and certain laws or regulations does not necessarily violate the First Amendment. The charge that a sectarian doctrine lies behind public policy restricting access to abortion (Swomley p. 16-17) fails to prove entanglement or favoritism amounting to religious establishment.

Even so, I believe both establishment and free exercise issues are at stake in the abortion debate. These may be seen in efforts to establish protections for the pregnant woman, the attempt to attribute personhood to gestating life, the constraints imposed upon women seeking abortions, and the latitude permitted religious groups who seek legislative power through political processes. Of special concern are those proposals regarding fetal personhood that rest on abstract metaphysical opinion, and the actions of various religious groups whose determination to shape policy results in actions which infringe upon the religious liberties of others.

The issue for public policy, of course, is a definition of personhood that is appropriate in and for a pluralistic society. To be sure, any legal definition might resemble a religious opinion; the question is whether the definition is reasonable, and whether it enhances or restricts protected personal liberties. The first principle of religious liberty is that laws will not be based upon abstract metaphysical speculation, but will be fashioned through democratic processes in which every perspective is subject to critical analysis. Any proposal must be open either to revision or rejection.

Part of the genius of Roe v. Wade (now affirmed by Casey) was putting forward the standard of viability: that stage of development at which the fetus has sufficient neurological and physiological maturation to survive outside the womb. Prior to that, the fetus simply is not sufficiently developed to speak meaningfully of it as an independent being deserving and requiring the full protection of the law, i.e. a person. The notion of viability correlates biological maturation with personal identity in a way that can be recognized and accepted by reasonable people. It violates no group’s religious teachings or any premise of logic to provide protections for a viable fetus. The same can hardly be said for those efforts to establish moral and legal parity between a zygote (fertilized ovum) and a woman, which create substantive First Amendment issues.

The first is the claim to special knowledge. The proposal to ban abortion legally is based on a claim that a pre-embryo is a person, whether other people believe it or not. No matter what ordinary logic might indicate, the (philosophical) opinion of the theologian is really the truth. Those who disagree are misguided, uninformed, or willfully ignorant.

A second feature of this approach is the contention that such moral premises are not sectarian or religious in nature. The Catholic dogma which holds that abortion is the taking of innocent human life is regarded as a principle of natural law. (Harrison p. 112-121) Natural law is a construct employed by theologians which attempts to bridge the worlds of religion and reason, or of revelation and nature. It has roots in Greek philosophy but was wedded to Christian moral thought most systematically in the works of Thomas Aquinas. Basic to his approach was the notion that the laws of God permeate nature and may be discerned by human reason. descriptive essay topics for college students by God is necessary since all people are endowed by reason, he argued. The divine logos permeates all of creation and provides a link between the Divine and human mind; the very structures of nature are available universally and embody the absolute moral law of God. It is thus held to be true for all people. Since it is available to and by reason, which all people have, and since it permeates nature, which everyone might observe, every person, whether believer or unbeliever, is obligated to obey the moral law.

Since neither nature nor reason is the special monopoly of the religious, secularists or atheists are also capable of discerning the divine mandate–it requires no special revelation. The only advantage of the church is that it is devoted to the God of the universe and has the special calling and divine appointment to carry God’s authority to teach the truth by which all people are to live. The moral rule can thus claim both religious and non-religious meanings and attempt to win the allegiance of both believers and nonbelievers. Such an argument allows the contention to be made that efforts to prohibit or severely limit abortion are not being made on the basis of religious or sectarian dogma and thus pose no First Amendment problems. The natural law construct makes that contention possible, but it is hardly persuasive.

The final step is from morality to law. When the truth of God is made obvious, the laws of the state should conform to it. Thus, the strict moral rule against abortion articulated by clergy should be implemented by civil law. The relation between the moral and the civil law is one that underscores the “duty of the public authority to insure that the civil law is regulated according to the fundamental norms of the moral law in matters concerning human rights, human life and the institution of the family.” (Ratzinger p. 12)

What seems obvious and convincing to the natural law theorist, however, often appears unconvincing if not ludicrous to the critic. To claim a monopoly on truth on both secular and religious ground is self-serving in the extreme. It fits well in the scheme of the sectarian claim to be the final arbiter of all truth and the embodiment of divine revelation, that is, to claim an absolute grounding for conclusions supposedly based on human reason. The ultimate outcome of that line of thought was found in “The Syllabus of Errors” (Pope Pius IX p. 41) which claimed, among other things, that error has no rights. The Inquisition itself had been conducted on the fervent belief that the church was doing heretics a favor by saving them from the damnation to which their false beliefs would most certainly lead.

The absolutist attitude against abortion claimed by evangelicals of the new right makes similar arguments but appeals to the authority of Scripture instead of natural law theory. The fact that scholars equally committed to biblical authority do not agree with fundamentalist or evangelical interpretations does not deter them from the claim that the Bible teaches that zygotes are persons and that abortion is murder. They also claim a type of “special knowledge” though its roots are ostensibly in revelation, not reason. Their intolerance toward people with different opinions reflects assumptions about the special nature of their calling and the particularly offensive nature of elective abortion.

The fact that Inquisitions and heresy hunts are now more subtle than those of the pre-Reformation era often conceals the fact that the same structure of thought and authority is still at work. When religious authorities make absolute pronouncements as if they were patently true and obviously obligatory for all people whether acknowledged as a faith commitment or not, an authoritarian claim is laid bare that is inimical to democratic processes and undermines respect for differing religious beliefs. The clear message is that those who disagree are to be corrected or coerced to conform, since their opinions have no right to moral standing and thus are not to be respected in the court of conscience or, finally, even by civil law.

The appeal to privileged knowledge that is available only to those within a special circle but is somehow mandatory for everyone is especially problematic. The assertions of religious authorities must finally be submitted to the critical scrutiny of common sense and reason in a secular or pluralist society. (Wenz p.112) Whether or not a zygote is a person is a question for reflective analysis by jurists, theologians, philosophers, sociologists, embryologists, (Gardner p. 453-56) and a host of other people–most all of whom are interested in good public policy, solid morals, and family values.

It can be concluded that abortion should not be legalized as religion does not permit its practice.

Cleghorn, J. Stephen. Research note on Cardinal Bernard in’s ‘seamless garment’. Review of Religious Research, 1986 28(2t:129-142.

Gardner, Charles A. “Is an Embryo a Person?” in Abortion, Medicine and the Law, 4th ed., eds. J.D. Butler and D.F. Walbert (New York: Facts on File, 1992), 453-56.

Harrison, Beverly W. Our Right to Choose (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1983).

Horan, et al, eds., Abortion and the Constitution: Reversing Roe v. Wade Through the Courts (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University, 1987), xiv.

Jelen, Ted. Religious belief and attitude constraint. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990, 29(1):118-125.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. Dictatorships and double standards. New York Simon and Schuster. 1982.

Lenski, Gerhard. Conservatives and radicals. In Contemporary Sociological Theory, edited by Fred E. Katz. 1971. 220-222.

Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the politics of motherhood Berkeley University of California. 1984.

Neitz, Mary Jo. Family, state, and God: Ideologies of the right-to-life movement. Sociological Analysis1981, 42(3):265-276.

Pope Pius IX, “Syllabus of Errors,” 1864.

Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain Questions of the Day. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Rome: The Vatican, 1988), Pt. III.

Ridgeway, James.The profile juggernaught. The Village Voice, 16 July1986, pp. 28-29.

Schwartz, Amy E. Bitter Pill. The New Republic, 18 February 1986, pp. 10-12.

Swomley, John.”Supreme Court’s Abortion Decision Parallels Roman Catholic Bishop’s Position,” The Churchman’s Human Quest (September-October, 1989): 16-17.

Wenz, Peter S. Abortion Rights as Religious Freedom (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1992), 112.

Cuomo said he intends to sue in the next two weeks and that it would be based on three legal theories…

Andrew Cuomo (screen shot: CNBC/Youtube)

(Erin Durkin and Jillian Jorgensen, New York Daily News) NEW YORK —New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will sue the federal government over its policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, as more than 70 of those children have wound up in facilities in New York State — with a federal source telling the New York Daily News the number of separated children here is even higher, 311.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the morality of this practice but we also believe that this practice is illegal and we are intending to bring suit against the federal government,” Cuomo said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon.

Cuomo said the children are being held in private facilities, including three in the Bronx, that are contracted by the federal government to provide services to unaccompanied alien children — minors who cross the border alone and who the Office of Refugee Resettlement temporarily houses while seeking family sponsors.

“But these are not unaccompanied alien children. These are children who were separated from their parents,” Cuomo said.

A federal source told The Daily News that the ORR’s population of unaccompanied minors in New York State’s lower 14 counties was 1,321 as of Monday — but of those, 311 are actually in shelters as a result of separation from family held in detention centers. All of the facilities in the area house boys and girls, except one that houses boys 14 to 17, the source said.

** MORE ANDREW CUOMO COVERAGE at Liberty Headlines **

Cuomo said that while the state has oversight of the facilities, they have been told they cannot provide services to the children in them without approval from the Department of Health and Human Services, which he said told the state would take weeks.

As for the suit, Cuomo said he intends to bring it in the next two weeks and that it would be based on three legal theories.

“First that it’s a violation of the constitutional rights of the parent to the care, custody and control of their children,” he said, and a violation of their due process as the children were removed without any hearings.

The second theory, he said, is the policy violates the terms of the 1997 Flores settlement that set national standards on the detention, release and treatment of children in immigration detention “and underscores the principle of family unity.”

And third, he said, “it is outrageous government conduct.”

Cuomo said the state had the legal right to bring such a suit.

“New York has standing, these agencies have standing, because there are children in New York who are, who have been taken from their parents without due process,” Cuomo said.

His counsel, Alphonso David, said, “The state is vindicating due process, familial association rights, of the children who are located in New York State. In addition New York State is protecting the health and welfare of children within its jurisdiction.”

Some of those children are being held at MercyFirst in Syosset, L.I., as reported Monday.

“We have about 10 facilities in the state. We haven’t spoken with all of them,” Cuomo said. “We know there are over 70 children just by the ones that we have talked about, but they are in Dobbs Ferry, Lincolndale, Yonkers, Irvington, three in the Bronx, one in Syosett and one in Kingston.”

In a follow-up interview with the Daily News, David declined to characterize these facilities, saying they offer varying degrees of security and services. The facilities are co-located in facilities that provide state-certified foster care programs, David said, but the immigrant children are not part of the state’s foster care network. Instead, the agencies contract directly with the federal Office of Health and Human Services and its Office of Refugee Resettlement.

A second federal source said the HHS-funded facilities in New York for unaccompanied minors were not comparable to conditions at the facilities along the border, which include chain-link cages.

Typically, unaccompanied minors arrive in New York because they have family nearby, and they are held in such facilities while the government looks for relative sponsors to place them with.

Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry — which has a contract with ORR to provide such services— describes its program as a “family-like and nurturing environment,” that offers education, recreation, medical care and family reunification. It declined to comment on its unaccompanied minors program or whether it had children who were separated from their parents at the border.

In the Bronx, Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Guardian Services have federal contracts to provide services and shelter to unaccompanied minors. The communications office at Lutheran Social Services said it could not answer questions about whether it housed children separated at the border; Catholic Guardian Services did not return a message left Tuesday afternoon.

Cuomo was not alone in terms of ripping the federal policy Tuesday.

“It’s horrible to begin with if a child is taken from their parent even in the same town in Texas and held apart for days,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said at an unrelated news conference. “But it’s much much worse if they’re separated by 1,000 miles, and you have no idea when that family’s going to get reunified. And that’s what we fear we’re seeing, and we just have to do everything we can to stop it.”

De Blasio, who said he is considering visiting the border, said if visiting a facility here would help, he’d also consider that.

“I want to do whatever I can to stop this broken, inhumane policy,” said, calling the border the immediate issue. “I also want to see anything we can do to stop New York City from being used as a place to send children separated from their parents.”

Former council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito — who just returned from a trip to the southern border — said it was as if the children had been “disappeared.”

“It tells you the enormity of this issue,” she said of having to house children separated at the border all the way in New York. “That’s what that tells you.”

Public Advocate Letitia James also ripped the policy, as she held a baby following an unrelated news conference on childcare.

“It is unconscionable in this country that we are basically snatching babies from the arms of their families, their mothers,” she said. “We should not be cooperating in this policy that separates families.”

©2018 New York Daily News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Original Source -> NY Gov Cuomo to Sue Fed Govt over Zero Tolerance Immigration Policy

via The Conservative Brief

Why Ethnicity Matters: The Scientific Basis of Ethnic Nationalism

New Post has been published on http://www.mindcoolness.com/blog/science-ethnic-nationalism/

Why Ethnicity Matters: The Scientific Basis of Ethnic Nationalism

One often hears the argument that only a single worldwide civilization, with a total mixture of all races, would resolve the tensions and conflicts between groups. That does not appear to me necessary or desirable. If one could teach man to be tolerant, i.e., to be ready to understand and accept other lifestyles both within civilizations and between various peoples, then ethnocentrism will find itself defused without it being necessary for groups to surrender their cultural uniqueness nor pride in their own civilization. Establishing peace among peoples need not be accomplished over the dead bodies of civilizations and races. (Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt)

Introduction

Liberal dreamers, who bestride modern Western civilization, praise individualism, globalism, multiculturalism, and mass immigration. We must be aware, however, that their ideology, which primarily benefits corporate capitalist superpowers, is precisely that: an ideology. It is not a truth, it is not based on facts; it is wishful thinking.

Although unanimously preached by major educational institutions, media companies, and all world religions, liberal egalitarianism has no rational basis. Its strategy is not to find a reasonable voice that speaks from a true understanding of human nature, but to be the loudest voice out there: “All humans are equal!” It enthusiastically evokes the mellifluous ideal of ‘world peace’ and drowns out those who speak of biological facts in search for an objective ethical foundation of metapolitical ideas.

Objective morality is constituted by scientific facts about what promotes human flourishing and maximizes the general well-being of sentient creatures (see Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape). Yet the common gut reaction—”So we need a world state that unites all human beings in joy and peace and harmony!”—merely blurts out the innards of our modern liberal indoctrination. Have we ever had a world state? Who would rule it? And does this ideological vision factor in the reality of human nature? I will argue that it doesn’t. Why? Because ethnicity matters.

Ethnicity is not an obsolete concept or a dwindling reality that needs to be overcome. Rather, it is still an essential quality of what it means to be human. Ethnicity denotes a people’s common ancestry, culture, language, society, homeland, and history. Ethnic nationalism is defined as a sociopolitical system that promotes the interests of a particular ethnicity such that citizenship builds on genetic ancestry rather than social contract. In this article, I explain why—contrary to the liberal ideology rooted in religion—ethnic nationalism is rooted in biological facts that have distinct psychosocial consequences and thus objective ethical implications. I will even go so far as to claim that true humanism must be nationalistic.

Battle of Vienna, 12 September 1683

1. Biological Foundation

Ethnic genetic interests constitute the biological foundation of ethnic nationalism. In this section, I introduce the underlying evolutionary principles and address a few popular objections. All main ideas and quotes in this section are taken from Frank Salter’s book On Genetic Interests.

1.1. Ethnic Genetic Interests

1.1.1. Inclusive Fitness

‘Survival of the fittest’ is the basic principle of evolution. Those who are best adapted to their environment will pass on their genes to the next generation, whereas the genes of those who are not fit enough to reproduce will die out.

Nonetheless, if we observe natural life, we will find, in insects for example, a stable caste of sterile worker bees that never reproduces and yet never dies out. They devote their entire lives to the hive while the queen undertakes all the procreation. In other words, some genes seem to be able to consistently produce infertile organisms without being weeded out of the gene pool. How is this possible? W. D. Hamilton’s answer: Although worker bees have zero individual fitness because they do not create offspring, their inclusive fitness is high.

Inclusive fitness is “the idea that within a species an individual’s reproductive success—his or her fitness—depends partly on the reproductive success of other individuals who share some of the individual’s distinctive genes” (p. 37). Hence, a sterile worker bee’s genes are fit to survive because the queen, who does all the reproducing, shares a large fraction of its genes.

A special case of inclusive fitness theory is kin selection, the evolutionary strategy that favors the reproductive success of an individual’s relatives. Mathematically, the strength of kin selection depends on the degree of genetic relatedness (r): it is strongest between identical twins (r = 100%), still strong between parent and child and between full siblings (r = 50%, resp.), less strong between grandparent and grandchild (r = 25%), still weaker between first cousins (r = 12.5%), and so forth.

Kin selection explains the phenomenon of altruism, solving the problem of how it can be adaptive for a man to sacrifice his life for more than two brothers, more than four grandchildren, or more than eight cousins. This flies because >2*0.5 equals >1, >4*0.25 equals >1, and >8*0.125 equals >1. As soon as a kinship calculation equals more than 1, self-sacrifice can be genetically beneficial.

In other words, every man has a genetic interest in the preservation of his relatives’ genes. If his family is in serious danger, that interest can even outweigh his interest to live. His ‘genetic will’ to protect can trump his ‘egoistic will’ to survive because, ultimately, all that matters is the survival of genes. In the end, every organism is just a “means by which genes replicate themselves” (p. 27), not an end in itself.

1.1.2. Ethnic Kinship

Naturally, the evolutionary mechanism of kin selection does not arbitrarily stop at the family level. According to inclusive fitness theory, it also extends to a man’s clan, tribe, ethny, and species, though with declining practical impact. This is called extended kinship—belonging to a kind of superfamily. Although the degree of genetic relatedness gets smaller as kinship extends and genetic distance increases, it never drops to zero.

“An individual’s genetic interest in a particular group is the number of copies of the individual’s distinctive genes carried within the group by reproducing individuals” (p. 38). Every individual shares a number of distinctive genes with his tribe. Therefore, a human being living in a tribe has a tribal genetic interest. Similarly, every individual shares a number of distinctive genes with his ethny, which is “a population sharing common descent” (p. 30). Therefore, a human being living in an ethny has an ethnic genetic interest.

Most tribal behaviors like “food sharing, cooperative child care, and mutual exploitation and defence of territory” (p. 30) can be explained by reciprocity, the social principle of ‘you help me, I help you’. But when reciprocity is delayed into the distant future or when a conflict between tribes calls for self-sacrificial behavior, tribal altruism comes into play. Importantly, altruistic solidarity is always relative to a specific form of competition. In the absence of tribal conflict, tribal altruism would be maladaptive.

Now, even though tribal altruism is stronger than ethnic altruism because tribes have a higher concentration of distinctive genes and thus a greater mutual genetic interest, ethnic altruism is still an adaptive evolutionary strategy, at least under the right competitive circumstances. For example, the patriotic altruism that motivates soldiers to die for their country has, despite obvious cultural and ideological aspects, a solid biological basis, at least if the country is ethnically homogenous and under a serve attack that endangers a large amount of his coethnics.

1.1.3. Conclusion

This biological basis—inclusive fitness and extended kin selection—also explains why ethnic nationalism is an adaptive evolutionary strategy, particularly in times of mass migration: because nationalism serves ethnic genetic interests. “For all past human experience and still today, control of a territory is a precious resource for maintaining ethnic genetic interests in the long run” (p. 61). From a biological perspective, “ethnic monopoly of a territory is ‘a fundamental ethnic collective good’ because it facilitates efficient mass investment in ethnic interests” (p. 185) that supports an ethny’s genetic survival. Therefore, ethnic nationalism is “an adaptive ethnic group strategy” (p. 221).

1.2. Common Objections

1.2.1. Out of Africa

How can ethnicity matter from an evolutionary perspective if all modern humans originally came out of Africa? Is mankind not genetically unified? And even if some populations have left Africa and developed their own genetic lineages, have those populations not mixed so much that a pure lineage no longer exists? Does the human species not form one large population?

Even if the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis is true and its competing hypothesis, the multiregional hypothesis, is false and even if populations have mixed, this “presents no difficulty for the concept of genetic ethnic interests, since we know from direct measurement that significant genetic variation exists between populations” (p. 48). To cite one example:

Sykes’s mitochondrial analysis of European origins was confirmed by an assay of Y-chromosomes of 1007 European males conducted by an international team that included Cavalli-Sforza. This chromosome, which determines male sex, is passed down the paternal line. This study confirmed the 20 percent admixture of Near Eastern genes in European populations and found evidence of ten founding tribes in the Palaeolithic. Thus clusters of Europeans, while showing some relatively recent admixture from outside Europe, are a largely autochthonous people who can trace their origins back for several tens of thousands of years to a small number of founding tribes. […] Ethnic genetic interests exist within a region even as criss-crossed with migration routes as Europe. (p. 53)

Ok, granted that there exists some genetic variation between populations: is it really significant?

1.2.2. Human Genetic Variation

Humans share 99.5% of their DNA with other humans. With the human genome containing 19,000 genes, the genetic difference between two human beings can be no more than 95 genes. Does this not prove that ‘we are all just humans’ and that ethnic differences and interests are negligible?

Evolutionarily speaking, no. “A universal altruist, one who distributed resources randomly, would be outbred by a kin altruist, one who restricted generosity to kin. So within a few generations the gene that caused universal altruism would have fallen in frequency in the population and be slipping towards complete replacement by genes that directed altruism towards relatives” (p. 91).

Besides, who says that those 95 genes are unimportant? For all we know, a single genetic mutation can have huge effects: it can be the difference between health and disease, between life and death. There is also no denying the fact that racial differences can be striking: in appearance, in ontogenesis, in athletic performance, in general intelligence, in temperament, and in sexual behavior (see J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution and Behavior).

Lastly, the genetic difference between humans and chimps is less than 2%, which does not seem to prevent humanists from valuing human life over that of other primates. “They shouldn’t!” exclaims the animal rights activist. But any moral line of genetic demarcation is arbitrary—grass has genes too, you know. This then raises the question why ethnic genetic interests should at all matter for conscious beings. Are they not…

1.2.3. Too Abstract?

Most people would agree that genetic interests in the form of familial belonging are a good thing. We love our parents and we love our children. Hardly anyone would argue that we have a moral obligation to overcome our primitive human desire to care for and protect our family. Yet as soon as kinship is extended to an ethnic group, all that seems to change. Why? Maybe ethnic genetic interests are too weak, too abstract for our minds to care? Where are they anyway in our daily lives?

On a social level, ethnic genetic interests manifest in large-scale tribalism, patriotism, conservativism, and religious solidarity.

On a psychological level, we see their manifestations in a sense of ethnic identity, collective pride, and cultural mindset. [An ethical comment: Liberal ideologues categorically demonize in-group favoritism, but demonization is not an argument. Rather than preaching the need to ‘overcome’ our tribal nature, ethnic nationalists seek to conserve a social environment that minimizes the negative effects of our primordial instincts realistically.]

On a linguistic level, the Nazi slogan ‘Blut und Boden’ (blood and soil) expressed very concretely the idealized desire for racial unity and rural life. In our current understanding, blood would be a phenotypic metaphor for ‘genes’ (genetic interest) and soil a metaphor for ‘the geographic region where those genes are most adaptive’ (territorial interest). [An ethical comment: On the one hand, strong metaphors unite minds and motivate political action. On the other hand, they elicit emotions that facilitate irrational behavior. Since we cannot use those metaphors without implicitly glorifying the atrocities of Nazism in World War II, we have a moral obligation to refrain from incorporating them into our speech. The ‘blood and soil’ slogan triggers either deep moral aversion or shallow mob mentality. Either way, it undermines rational decision-making.]

I have now shown that ethnic genetic interests matter biologically. Yet we cannot directly derive ethical principles from biological facts. Why do ethnic genetic interests matter morally?

2. Psychosocial Consequences

In this section, I will first present the psychosocial consequences of ethnic nationalism and then discuss some problems stemming from the reality of multiculturalism already being a part of our modern Western civilization.

2.1. Ethnic Nationalism Increases Human Well-Being

2.1.1. Main Argument

Humans are social beings. People who feel disconnected from society are unhappy and have poor mental health (depression, anxiety, etc.). By improving social cohesion, ethnic nationalism promotes human flourishing and increases overall well-being, which is the ultimate ethical objective. But what is social cohesion and how does ethnic nationalism improve it?

2.1.2. Social Cohesion

Social cohesion or solidarity implies a host of positive behaviors, attitudes, and emotions:

People feel that they belong to a community and that they can trust their neighbors. They also have more close friends, spend less time alone at home watching television, and are happier overall.

They are more willing to cooperate to solve collective problems and work on community projects. They are also more generous (give more to charity) and altruistic (volunteer more frequently).

They experience a strong sense of democracy and political efficacy. They vote more, feel better about politics, and have more confidence in the government.

They have freedom, which is ensured only in a stable society.

Sociological studies have repeatedly shown that ethnic diversity in communities disrupts social cohesion, impairs social trust, and reduces solidarity. Examples include an Australian study on trust by Leigh (2006), Putnam’s E Pluribus Unum (2007), a replication of Putnam’s study in the Netherlands by Lancee & Dronkers (2008), and a study investigating the underlying causality with a British sample by Laurence & Bentley (2016). Moreover, an agent-based model by Neal & Neal (2014) demonstrated that diversity and community are incompatible goals. Finally, reduced solidarity in multicultural societies is also reflected in social policies:

World surveys of ethnic diversity and welfare find a robust inverse relationship between the generosity of redistributive welfare and ethnic diversity. Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government’s share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States, Africa, and South-East Asia find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. Moscow beggars receive more gifts from fellow ethnics than from other ethnies. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller proportion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities. Those public services included education, roads, sewers, libraries, rubbish removal, and welfare. A major cause of parsimonious welfare in the United States is the racial gap between predominantly white taxpayers and disproportionately black welfare recipients, contributing to taxpayer motivation to vote against generous welfare. (Frank Salter, On Genetic Interests, pp. 145-46)

The problem with citing studies, however, is that intelligent people will always find interpretative loopholes or other studies that allow ethically positive interpretations of the same phenomenon. Therefore, I will not discuss any studies in depth, but rather ground my argument in a sociobiological principle.

2.1.3. Ethnic Nepotism

Ethnic nationalism improves social cohesion through ethnic nepotism, the human tendency to favor people who are ethnically more similar to oneself, which facilitates ethnic altruism. This is why ethnic genetic interests matter! When a man volunteers for his community, selflessly helps his ethnic brothers, or fights for his country, he is ‘investing’, evolutionarily speaking, in his inclusive fitness, which includes his coethnics’ ability to pass on their genes to the next generation. Their propagation is also in his genetic interest because he shares most of his genes with them.

In a multiethnic society, however, solidary fitness investments benefit not only one’s coethnics, but also inter-ethnic free riders, for example, non-European immigrants who exploit European welfare states. Social altruism is then no investment in one’s inclusive fitness, for it also benefits people of other ethnicities; worse, it decreases relative fitness due to genetic competition.

Morally, this is not a problem per se, but biologically it is because, over generations, it causes altruistic motivations to be selected out of the gene pool. We humans have an evolutionary pressure not to waste our altruism on free riders, not to misdirect our solidarity to genetic competitors. In modern terms, being a ‘cuck’ who invests in someone else’s reproduction at the expense of his own is a biological disaster. The same holds for ‘cuckservatives’ who condone multiculturalism.

It is therefore more biologically adaptive for people living in ethnically diverse communities to hunker down at home, to mistrust all neighbors, no matter their ethnicity, and to care only about themselves and their close family. And as sociological studies have shown (see 2.1.2.), that is precisely what people tend to do in the real world. If we want more trust and solidarity to increase human well-being, we can either pray for moral progress to the liberal God of equality, or implement ethno-nationalistic policies based on the reality of human nature.

The modern political strategy of the West is to force ‘moral progress’ by mixing ethnic groups with the naive hope that at some point all people will ‘look beyond their differences’ and start to love each other equally strongly. This can certainly work on an individual level. After all, modern humans identify with multiple non-ethnic social groups anyway. But the great folly of leftists is their extrapolation from individual capacities to society at large: “If I can be non-judgmental or judge people solely by their individual merits and character, then everybody can; if my parents could teach me to see all people as equal, then everybody’s parents can; and if the Dalai Lama can love all human beings the same, then everybody has the potential to do so.” True on an individual level, false on a societal level. Why? Because people have genetic interests, and we cannot completely override and substitute our biology with ideology.

History is full of such failures: Jesus failed in overriding adultery, Marx failed in overriding greed, Gandhi failed in overriding violence, and the West is failing in overriding racism. Adultery, greed, violence, and racism are morally bad, at least to the extent that they cause more suffering than joy. However, a political system aimed at maximizing human well-being must manage the dark side of human nature, not ignore or suppress it.

In a sense, the multicultural strategy does work: it dilutes ethnic genetic interests and magnifies the problem of free riders to such an extent that ethnic nepotism becomes maladaptive. But is this a moral victory? It does not make people more altruistic towards their fellow humans; it merely makes them less altruistic towards their ethnic brothers. Rather than spreading passionate love all over the world, it replaces love with cold, intellectual respect. Inter-ethnic egalitarianism (“all humans are equal”) does not extend the scope of altruism to include all humans, but narrows it to include nobody. Multiculturalism is a victory only for elite free riders: politicians, bankers, and big industrialists who benefit tremendously from mass immigration and the social alienation of obsessively self-interested individuals consumers.

2.1.4. Global Ethnopluralism

For ethnic nepotism to maximize the general well-being of all humans, every ethnic group must be allowed to favor, care for, and protect their own ethnicity. Ethnic nationalism is morally right only if it follows the international Golden Rule that people respect racial and cultural diversity on a global level. By contrast, ethnocentric imperialism—as practiced radically by the Nazis and insidiously by Islam—is morally wrong.

One might still think that Nazism, as aggressive and expansive as its pathological ethnocentrism was, could make sense from a non-ethical, raw biological point of view, but it doesn’t. “Fascism is an over-investment in national interests” (Salter, p. 176). National Socialism merely created a speculative “fitness investment bubble” (ibid.) that was bound to pop eventually, as it did, killing millions of Germans.

According to global ethnopluralism, every ethnic group has a right to be different. This right forestalls ethnic invasions such as imperialistic war or mass immigration. Salter calls this “a universal nationalism that might optimize global genetic interest” (p. 248). Thus, from an ethical and rational perspective, nationalism is the only true humanism.

2.2. Some Problems

2.2.1. Does promoting ethnic nationalism not motivate xenophobia and racial hatred, both of which decrease social cohesion and human well-being in a multicultural society?

We must distinguish between individual human beings on the one hand and sociocultural principles on the other. Miserable people will always find a way to hate others, but negative emotions are no prerequisite for positive political change. Furthermore, we should logically expect more homogeneity to decrease racial hatred simply because in a less ethnically mixed society there are less people to hate based on race and less occurrences to trigger such hate.

2.2.2. In a society where multiculturalism is already a reality, do new nationalistic policies not pose the danger of devolving into an inhumane ethnic cleansing (holocaust)?

It is extremely important never to lose sight of objective morality. We must do our very best to find creative political solutions (advertising remigration, etc.) and to evaluate their effects on overall well-being while balancing short-term and long-term outcomes. This is our great challenge: not to overestimate immediate consequences, as emotional leftists do, nor to be blinded by an ideological vision of a distant future as we march over untold suffering into some idiotic utopia, be it aracially globalist or white supremacist.

2.2.3. Since ethnic purity is unrealistic, will an ethno-nationalist state not impair the well-being of ethnic minorities (discrimination, social exclusion, etc.)?

Life is not fair. Maximizing overall well-being mathematically implies that a positive for a majority justifies an equally large negative for a minority. If that negative threatens to go out of hand, we must trust in our moral nobility, conscience, and compassion, not delegate our personal moral responsibility to the state, which only makes matters worse (see, e.g., Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World).

2.2.4. Should an ethno-nationalist state prohibit interracial families?

If the biological foundation of ethnic nationalism is true, there should be no need for such a prohibition in a relatively homogenous nation. He who thinks that the protection of an ethnic lineage must be legally enforced has moved from reality to ideology. Human desires and motivations are complex, so there will always be outliers who practice miscegenation. However, as Salter writes: “A steady trickle of migration between tribes does not very much affect the ceiling of within-tribe relatedness” (p. 42). Therefore, individuals who choose to go against the norm by mixing races are as little a danger to an ethnic identity as a minor influx of immigrants who assimilate to the host culture. In fact, prohibition may even have an antagonistic effect since romantic love is strengthened by external obstacles.

In general: To accomplish sociopolitical change, we must militantly repel individual stories that only trigger irrational emotions. Whether it is the white woman who has sex with black men exclusively or the tragic destiny of a refugee fleeing from a brutal war, as long as we operate on the level of ‘grand politics’, we must keep our minds cool to make rational decisions that yield an ethically excellent outcome.

3. An Analogy

In our modern, settled society, children’s well-being is heuristically maximized when all families care mostly about their own kin. An exception to this simple organizing principle are orphans, but a strong community can support a reasonable amount of them. Similarly, people’s well-being is heuristically maximized when all peoples care mostly about their own extended kin. An exception to this simple organizing principle are immigrants (ethnical orphans), but a strong community can assimilate a reasonable amount of them.

Now, replacing familial love, trust, and belonging with a social contract that delegates all child rearing to public institutions would negatively affect children’s well-being (as it generally does in foster care). Similarly, replacing ethnic love, trust, and belonging with a social contract that cuts ethnicity out of nationality would negatively affect a people’s well-being. This is why civic nationalism is wrong.

Conclusion

If we want to maximize universal well-being, we should generally care in degrees of genetic distance. We should care first for ourselves (to build the strength to support others), then for our family (kin), then for our ethnicity (extended kin), then for our species (all human beings), then for all sentient beings, and then for all living things.

If everybody cared like that without causing unnecessary suffering for any other group, we would maximize both our inclusive fitness and our universal well-being, that is to say, we would live in an ethically ideal world. If you think that I am wrong, I encourage you to tell me why in the comments below.

Read More

On the Ethics of Ethnopluralism

Why Freedom Isn’t What You Think It Is (Modernity Vs. Tradition)

Not Islam, but the Nazis Killed Europe

Are Ethnopluralists Racist?

Caveat: I’m European, so I’ve written this article from a European perspective. I doubt that I’d have formulated my points in the same way if I were American. But I’m not an American. White Americans and native Europeans don’t share the same culture, language, territory, history, and society, which all are aspects of ethnicity. Hence, for me to write about the ethics of sociopolitical principles in America would be ethnocentric (in the epistemic sense). Although theoretical ethical principles are universally objective, their practical implementation is always relative to a particular civilizational reality.