The hagiographies of science are full of paeans to the self-correcting, self-healing nature of the enterprise. But if raw results are so often false, the filtering mechanisms so ineffective, and the self-correcting mechanisms so compromised and slow, then science’s approach to truth may not even be monotonic. That is, past theories, now “refuted” by evidence and replaced with new approaches, may be closer to the truth than what we think now. Such regress has happened before: In the nineteenth century, the (correct) vitamin C deficiency theory of scurvy was replaced by the false belief that scurvy was caused by proximity to spoiled foods. Many ancient astronomers believed the heliocentric model of the solar system before it was supplanted by the geocentric theory of Ptolemy. The Whiggish view of scientific history is so dominant today that this possibility is spoken of only in hushed whispers, but ours is a world in which things once known can be lost and buried.

(source: Scientific Regress by William A. Wilson)

Twenty or ten or even a few years ago, I thought white racism was a radically diminished factor in American life. Obviously it is not now. Was I wrong all along? Or did it decline and come back? I would argue for the latter, given that the new racism is so different from the old. But that’s not a hill I’d die on, either. I could be persuaded that I was simply insensitive to what was there below the surface.

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. The present is never identical with the past but always grows out of it in some way.

These thoughts are prompted by Kevin Williamson’s outstanding defense today of his outstanding article on why many white working class communities are dying and can’t be saved by any possible means. He says today:

Conservatives thought so highly of Cosby for saying these things that when he was accused of rape, the New York Post protested that he was being “crucified for being conservative.” When the allegations first started coming out, Rush claimed that they were getting media play only because Cosby had enraged liberals by insisting that black men “start accepting responsibility.” Jerome Corsi, Trumpkin extraordinaire, fell over himself with praise for Cosby, whose speech had gone “against the grain of politically correct rhetoric that defines white racism as the cause and black inequality as the result.” (Conservatives of this stripe are big on being “politically incorrect” — about blacks.) Sean Hannity joined in.

Black man tells black underclass to get its act together, he’s a hero to white conservatives. White man tells white underclass to get its act together, different story. If you wanted to know whether white identity politics inspired by Donald Trump is going to be as foolish and morally reprehensible as black identity politics inspired by Al Sharpton, there’s your answer.

Houston, we have a white racism problem.

I think it really does come down to a choice between modern, liberal constitutional democracy or the abyss.

I keep coming back to Allan Bloom on this. The big question he was really posing was simply: Must liberal democracy destroy itself? And the context he sought to provide for the question was twofold. 1) If it does, we do not seem to be capable any longer of generating any other kind of humane social order; if liberal democracy does destroy itself, the only alternative seems to be totalitarianism. You can say (as I do) that this is because the great tradition culminated in modern, liberal democracy and cannot now be found outside it, or you can say (as Bloom did) that the great tradition died because we became aware that we could choose between many traditions and thus none of the traditions can now function for us as a tradition. In the end perhaps they’re two ways of saying the same thing. 2) Our minds have been shaped for a century by a radical European thought tradition that takes for granted liberal democracy must destroy itself, and we are now so deep in this thought tradition that we are not aware of the alternatives. Thus the American mind has become “closed” to even the possibility of the American experiment, and we cannot think freely again until we recover some awareness of why people found that experiment plausible in the first place, so we can evaluate for ourselves whether they were right.

Interesting times to live in. It will be fascinating, though not necessarily fun, to see what the Lord has for us next.

The defense of bad Christian artists is usually along the lines of, “they were trying to do a good thing. They entrust their work to the Holy Ghost. Imagine if it touched even one heart!” Consider what life would be like if this was how we judged other professions. Imagine if a bad trauma surgeon was defended with this excuse, after he’d punctured somebody’s heart. Imagine a second grade teacher who was illiterate but tried very hard, for Jesus. Imagine if Michellin-starred chefs suddenly started serving beanie weenies and trusting the Holy Ghost to move their patrons anywhere but the toilet– not the toilet-shaped chapel but the real one. This would be blasphemy. Yet artists somehow get a pass.

(source: I Am Very, Very Ashamed: The Problem With Bad Christian Art)

Behold the ravages of “material poverty”!

In his new dissemination, Frank the Hippie Pope declares that “we know” the following statement is true:

In some countries, de facto unions are very numerous, not only because of a rejection of values concerning the family and matrimony, but primarily because celebrating a marriage is considered too expensive in the social circumstances. As a result, material poverty drives people into de facto unions.

Note: “primarily.”

As Allan Bloom once said in another context, its ridiculousness quenches indignation.

On NRO today, Ian Tuttle examines how and why Donald Trump has attracted the support of so many white racists. One thing that stands out to me as important in this article is that contemporary white racism is no longer – as I think it really was, say, twenty years ago – merely an incohate collection of instincts and attitudes. It has learned to think and speak in a new pseudo-intellectual vocabulary – one that is markedly different from the old pseudo-intellectual vocabulary that gave mental structure to white racism sixty years ago.

Gone is the claim of purely biological difference, which was the very lifeblood of white racism from the American founding to the Civil Rights era. Today the claim is not to a superior nature but to a superior second nature – a superior culture that is, allegedly, so deeply ingrained that it actually changes biology, creating racial differences where none existed prior to human action. The superiority of culture over nature established by advanced or “post” modernity now extends even to racism, formerly the most atavistic pro-natural form of thought.

Our liberation from ancient superstitions into a real knowledge of nature has led, among other things (many of them good), to a deep dissatisfaction with the limits of nature. Locke, perhaps the key leader of the liberation from superstition, emphasized the need to accept those limits. But we have not. “Culture,” which (when divorced from God) seems infinitely malleable and responsive to our desires, was proposed as as a substitute source of ultimate meaning – leading us straight back into the loving arms of superstition.

Allan Bloom once joked that his critics, who embodied so unambiguously the rejection of reason that he had diagnosed in Closing of the American Mind, could have been sent by central casting for a Hollywood adaptation of the book. So could the pseudo-intellectuals of the “Alt Right.” It is becoming increasingly clear that Bloom was not in the least hyperbolic when he warned that America was playing with the same matches Germany had been playing with in the 1920s.

The conclusion of Tuttle’s article struck me particularly as one Bloom – or Martin Luther King – would appreciate:

They also seem to think that liberal democracy itself was an abstraction tyrannically imposed on an unwilling populace. It wasn’t. It was a slowly and painfully forged response to centuries of challenges. The Western, liberal-democratic order is wracked with problems, of course; but it always has been. The question is, Has it been more fruitful, more liberating, more constructive in promoting the common good than have the various orders that came before it? And if so, is there a compelling reason for throwing it over in favor of the ancient belief that some men are, indeed, born with saddles on their backs, and a favored few born booted and spurred, entitled to ride them?

This is the question the Alt-Right poses. As it happens, it’s an old question, and one to which our forebears gave powerful answers. But every generation has to relearn them. The larger the Alt-Right grows, the clearer it is that ours hasn’t.