...I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.
It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyound the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew gardens and a jeweller’s shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.
Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.
It is as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. Mechanization and a collective economy seemingly aren’t enough. By themselves they lead merely to the nightmare we are now enduring: endless war and endless underfeeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire, women dragged shrieking to the block, cork-lined cellars where the executioner blows your brains out from behind. So it appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.
...I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus.
I find that hard to believe. I would expect even a wasp to notice this.
Yes, before anyone pitches in with that observation, M.M. would surely quote the above with some glee. I’m confident that he’d refrain from posting the essay’s ending, though:
Mr Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia, the kind of thing that seemed possible and even imminent before Hitler appeared, but it had no relation to the actual future. [1] What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police. There is very little chance of escaping it unless we can reinstate the belief in human brotherhood without the need for a ‘next world’ to give it meaning. It is this that leads innocent people like the Dean of Canterbury to imagine that they have discovered true Christianity in Soviet Russia. No doubt they are only the dupes of propaganda, but what makes them so willing to be deceived is their knowledge that the Kingdom of Heaven has somehow got to be brought on to the surface of the earth. We have not to be the children of God, even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists.
The very people who have dynamited our civilization have sometimes been aware of this, Marx’s famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say, at any rate in that place, that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said that it is something the people create for themselves to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’ What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly.
[1] Okay, that’s the one bit Orwell got wrong… maybe. Industrial murder did mark everything forever, though.
Yes, before anyone pitches in with that observation, M.M. would surely quote the above with some glee. I’m confident that he’d refrain from posting the essay’s ending, though:
Why? My mental model of M.M., admittedly based on the very few things of his that I’ve read, has him not disagreeing with the above section significantly.
He’s very firmly against all past and future attempts to bring forth the aforementioned Kingdom of Heaven (except, needless to say, his own—which has the elimination of hypocrisy as one of its points). He sneers—I have no other word—at patriotic feeling, and wages a one-man crusade against ideological/religious feeling. He might dislike hatred, but he certainly believes that greed and self-interest are “enough”—are the most useful, safe motives one could have. Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
He sneers—I have no other word—at patriotic feeling, and wages a one-man crusade against ideological/religious feeling.
Orwell wasn’t exactly a supporter of patriotism or religion either. In fact, in paragraphs you quoted you can see Orwell sneering at religion even as he admits that it can serve a useful purpose. My understanding of Moldbug’s position on religion is that its pretty similar, i.e., he recognizes the important role religion played in Western Civilization including the development of science even if he doesn’t like what it’s currently evolved into.
Orwell wasn’t exactly a supporter of patriotism or religion either.
No offence, but I think you need to read a dozen of his post-1939 essays before we even talk about that. He was a fervent British patriot, occasionally waxing nostalgic about the better points of the old-time Empire—even as he was talking about the necessity of a socialist state! - and a devout Anglican for his entire life (which was somewhat obscured by his contempt for bourgeois priesthood). You’re simply going off the one-dimensional recycled image of Orwell: the cardboard democratic socialist whose every opinion was clear, liberal and ethically spotless. The truth is far more complicated; I’d certainly say he was more of a totalitarian than the hypocritical leftist intellectuals he was bashing! (I hardly think less of him due to that, mind.)
It is as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. Mechanization and a collective economy seemingly aren’t enough. By themselves they lead merely to the nightmare we are now enduring: endless war and endless underfeeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire, women dragged shrieking to the block, cork-lined cellars where the executioner blows your brains out from behind. So it appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.
I don’t see how this brutality was lacking when humans were more religiously observant. Furthermore, the quote seems to argue for religion.
Meaning the conclusion and the conclusion’s reasoning are both wrong.
I don’t see how this brutality was lacking when humans were more religiously observant.
Not much revolutionary or counter-revolutionary terror, no death camps, comparatively little secret police. Little police and policing in general, actually; you could ride from one end of Europe to another without any prior arrangements, and if you looked alright everyone would let you in. The high and mighty being content with merely existing at the top of traditional “divinely ordained” hierarchy and not having the Will zur Macht that enables really serious tyranny, not attempting to forge new meanings and reality while dragging their subjects to violent insanity. I agree that it was a cruel, narrow-minded and miserable world that denied whole classes and races a glimpse of hope without a second thought. But we went from one nightmare through a worse one towards a dubious future. There’s not much to celebrate so far.
Furthermore, the quote seems to argue for religion.
It argues for a thought pattern and attitude to life that Christianity also exhibits at the best of times, but against the belief in supernatural.
Much of this is simply not the case or ignores the largescale other problems. It may help to read Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” which makes clear how murder, and warfare (both large and small) were much more common historically.
I’ve read a summary. I’m mostly playing the devil’s advocate with this argument, to be honest. I have a habit of entertaining my far-type fears perhaps a touch more than they deserve.
Not much revolutionary or counter-revolutionary terror, no death camps, comparatively little secret police.
What exactly was the war on heresy?
The high and mighty being content with merely existing at the top of traditional “divinely ordained” hierarchy
Peasant revolts based on oppressive governance costs didn’t happen?
If we don’t count the denial of a glimpse of hope to “whole classes and races” (and genders) of people, then most of what I personally don’t approve of in the time period drops out. But even if that isn’t included in the ledger, it wasn’t all that great for the vast majority of white Christian men.
Dude, I completely agree. I’m far from a reactionary. I’m just thinking aloud. Might the 20th century have indeed been worse than the above when controlled for the benefits as well as downsides of technical progress? I can’t tell, and everyone’s mind-killed about that—particularly “realist” people like M.M., who claim to be the only sane ones in the asylum.
Let’s cash this out a little bit—Which was worse, the heresy prosecutions of the Medieval era, or the Cultural Revolution? I think the answer is the Cultural Revolution, if for no other reason than more people were affected per year.
But that’s based on technological improvement between the two time periods:
More people were alive in China during the Cultural Revolution because of improvements in food growth, medical technology, and general wealth increase from technology.
The government was able to be more effective and uniform in oppressing others because of improvements in communications technology.
Once we control for those effects, I think it is hard to say which is worse.
In contrast, I think the social changes that led to the end of serious calls for Crusades were a net improvement on human, and I’m somewhat doubtful that technological changes drove those changes (what probably did drive them was that overarching unifying forces like the Papacy lost their legitimacy and power to compel large portions of society). Which isn’t to say that technology doesn’t drive social change (consider the relationship between modern women’s liberation and the development of reliable chemical birth control).
As a percentage of total planetary population, a large number of historical wars were worse than any 20th century atrocity. Pinker has a list in his book, and there are enough that they include wars most modern people have barely heard of.
I’m trying to compare apples to apples here. Wars are not like ideological purity exercises, nor are they like internal political control struggles (i.e. suppressing a peasant revolt, starving the Kulaks).
I’d have to get a better sense of historical wars before I could confidently opine on the relative suffering of the military portions of WWII vs. the military portions of some ancient war. And then I’d have to decide how to compare similar events that took different amounts of time (e.g. WWI v. Hundred Years War)
Keep in mind that to take such ideas seriously and try give them a fair hearing is in itself transgression, regardless if you ultimately reject or embrace them.
At least Copernicus was allowed to recant and live his declining years in (relative) peace.
Nicolaus Copernicus was never charged with heresy (let alone convicted). Moreover, he was a master of canon law, might have been a priest at one point, was urged to publish De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by cardinals (who also offered to pay his expenses), and dedicated the work to Pope Paul III when he did get around to publishing it. Also, one of his students gave a lecture outlining the Copernican system to a crowd that included Pope Clement VII (for which he was rewarded with an expensive Greek Codex). Even had he lived two more decades, it is very unlikely he would ever have been charged with heresy.
And on that note the Galileo affair was an aberration—it’d be unwise to see it as exemplary of the Church’s general attitude towards unorthodox science. The Church was like half Thomist for Christ’s sake.
And on that note the Galileo affair was an aberration—it’d be unwise to see it as exemplary of the Church’s general attitude towards unorthodox science.
For instance, most instances of heresy were crushed successfully without them bearing fruit or gaining influence. (In some part because most incidences of heresy are actually false theories. Because most new ideas in general are wrong.) The Galileo incident was an epic failure of both religious meme enforcement and public relations. It hasn’t happened often! Usually the little guy loses and nobody cares.
(The above generalises beyond “The Church” to heavy handed belief enforcement by human tribes in general.)
Right, but note I said unorthodox science. Heresy was crushed, but it wasn’t common for scientific theories to be seen as heretical. Galileo just happened to publish his stuff when the Church was highly insecure because of all the Protestant shenanigans. Heretical religious or sociopolitical teachings, on the other hand, were quashed regularly.
Yet more of St. George:
Notes on the Way
I find that hard to believe. I would expect even a wasp to notice this.
Yes, before anyone pitches in with that observation, M.M. would surely quote the above with some glee. I’m confident that he’d refrain from posting the essay’s ending, though:
[1] Okay, that’s the one bit Orwell got wrong… maybe. Industrial murder did mark everything forever, though.
Why? My mental model of M.M., admittedly based on the very few things of his that I’ve read, has him not disagreeing with the above section significantly.
He’s very firmly against all past and future attempts to bring forth the aforementioned Kingdom of Heaven (except, needless to say, his own—which has the elimination of hypocrisy as one of its points). He sneers—I have no other word—at patriotic feeling, and wages a one-man crusade against ideological/religious feeling. He might dislike hatred, but he certainly believes that greed and self-interest are “enough”—are the most useful, safe motives one could have. Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Orwell wasn’t exactly a supporter of patriotism or religion either. In fact, in paragraphs you quoted you can see Orwell sneering at religion even as he admits that it can serve a useful purpose. My understanding of Moldbug’s position on religion is that its pretty similar, i.e., he recognizes the important role religion played in Western Civilization including the development of science even if he doesn’t like what it’s currently evolved into.
No offence, but I think you need to read a dozen of his post-1939 essays before we even talk about that. He was a fervent British patriot, occasionally waxing nostalgic about the better points of the old-time Empire—even as he was talking about the necessity of a socialist state! - and a devout Anglican for his entire life (which was somewhat obscured by his contempt for bourgeois priesthood).
You’re simply going off the one-dimensional recycled image of Orwell: the cardboard democratic socialist whose every opinion was clear, liberal and ethically spotless. The truth is far more complicated; I’d certainly say he was more of a totalitarian than the hypocritical leftist intellectuals he was bashing! (I hardly think less of him due to that, mind.)
I don’t see how this brutality was lacking when humans were more religiously observant. Furthermore, the quote seems to argue for religion.
Meaning the conclusion and the conclusion’s reasoning are both wrong.
Not much revolutionary or counter-revolutionary terror, no death camps, comparatively little secret police. Little police and policing in general, actually; you could ride from one end of Europe to another without any prior arrangements, and if you looked alright everyone would let you in. The high and mighty being content with merely existing at the top of traditional “divinely ordained” hierarchy and not having the Will zur Macht that enables really serious tyranny, not attempting to forge new meanings and reality while dragging their subjects to violent insanity.
I agree that it was a cruel, narrow-minded and miserable world that denied whole classes and races a glimpse of hope without a second thought. But we went from one nightmare through a worse one towards a dubious future. There’s not much to celebrate so far.
It argues for a thought pattern and attitude to life that Christianity also exhibits at the best of times, but against the belief in supernatural.
Much of this is simply not the case or ignores the largescale other problems. It may help to read Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” which makes clear how murder, and warfare (both large and small) were much more common historically.
I’ve read a summary. I’m mostly playing the devil’s advocate with this argument, to be honest. I have a habit of entertaining my far-type fears perhaps a touch more than they deserve.
What exactly was the war on heresy?
Peasant revolts based on oppressive governance costs didn’t happen?
If we don’t count the denial of a glimpse of hope to “whole classes and races” (and genders) of people, then most of what I personally don’t approve of in the time period drops out. But even if that isn’t included in the ledger, it wasn’t all that great for the vast majority of white Christian men.
Dude, I completely agree. I’m far from a reactionary. I’m just thinking aloud. Might the 20th century have indeed been worse than the above when controlled for the benefits as well as downsides of technical progress? I can’t tell, and everyone’s mind-killed about that—particularly “realist” people like M.M., who claim to be the only sane ones in the asylum.
Let’s cash this out a little bit—Which was worse, the heresy prosecutions of the Medieval era, or the Cultural Revolution? I think the answer is the Cultural Revolution, if for no other reason than more people were affected per year.
But that’s based on technological improvement between the two time periods:
More people were alive in China during the Cultural Revolution because of improvements in food growth, medical technology, and general wealth increase from technology.
The government was able to be more effective and uniform in oppressing others because of improvements in communications technology.
Once we control for those effects, I think it is hard to say which is worse.
In contrast, I think the social changes that led to the end of serious calls for Crusades were a net improvement on human, and I’m somewhat doubtful that technological changes drove those changes (what probably did drive them was that overarching unifying forces like the Papacy lost their legitimacy and power to compel large portions of society). Which isn’t to say that technology doesn’t drive social change (consider the relationship between modern women’s liberation and the development of reliable chemical birth control).
As a percentage of total planetary population, a large number of historical wars were worse than any 20th century atrocity. Pinker has a list in his book, and there are enough that they include wars most modern people have barely heard of.
I’m trying to compare apples to apples here. Wars are not like ideological purity exercises, nor are they like internal political control struggles (i.e. suppressing a peasant revolt, starving the Kulaks).
I’d have to get a better sense of historical wars before I could confidently opine on the relative suffering of the military portions of WWII vs. the military portions of some ancient war. And then I’d have to decide how to compare similar events that took different amounts of time (e.g. WWI v. Hundred Years War)
The line between these is not always so clear. Look at the crusade against the Cathars or look at the Reformation wars for example.
I agree that the categories (war, ideological purification, suppression of internal dissent) are not natural kinds.
But issue is separating the effects of ideological change from the effects of technological change, so meaningful comparisons are important.
Keep in mind that to take such ideas seriously and try give them a fair hearing is in itself transgression, regardless if you ultimately reject or embrace them.
You mean then, or now?
Remember what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard when he merely asked the question?
Does the phrase “Denier” cause any mental associations that weren’t there in the late 90s?
At least Copernicus was allowed to recant and live his declining years in (relative) peace.
Nicolaus Copernicus was never charged with heresy (let alone convicted). Moreover, he was a master of canon law, might have been a priest at one point, was urged to publish De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by cardinals (who also offered to pay his expenses), and dedicated the work to Pope Paul III when he did get around to publishing it. Also, one of his students gave a lecture outlining the Copernican system to a crowd that included Pope Clement VII (for which he was rewarded with an expensive Greek Codex). Even had he lived two more decades, it is very unlikely he would ever have been charged with heresy.
And on that note the Galileo affair was an aberration—it’d be unwise to see it as exemplary of the Church’s general attitude towards unorthodox science. The Church was like half Thomist for Christ’s sake.
For instance, most instances of heresy were crushed successfully without them bearing fruit or gaining influence. (In some part because most incidences of heresy are actually false theories. Because most new ideas in general are wrong.) The Galileo incident was an epic failure of both religious meme enforcement and public relations. It hasn’t happened often! Usually the little guy loses and nobody cares.
(The above generalises beyond “The Church” to heavy handed belief enforcement by human tribes in general.)
Right, but note I said unorthodox science. Heresy was crushed, but it wasn’t common for scientific theories to be seen as heretical. Galileo just happened to publish his stuff when the Church was highly insecure because of all the Protestant shenanigans. Heretical religious or sociopolitical teachings, on the other hand, were quashed regularly.
Yes, and Summers has gone on to be a presidential adviser.