My last post, in response to a race realist, was mostly written for my own amusement. It wasn’t a particularly serious post. Something about that kind of intellectual dishonesty is compelling. But I wonder how much of it is self-deception, being taken in by one’s own ideological rhetoric. I had no desire to analyze race […]
I wanted to share some passages from the book that has been preoccupying me lately, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). Quite the mouthful. The book is still in print or can be bought as an ebook, but the entire text can be found various places for free online […]
I feel the impulse to take stock of my thinking, he says with a heavy sigh. I’m going to attempt the amazing feat of connecting together various strains of thought that have been mulling in my braincase these past few years. This is my way of warning you that the following is going to be […]
Again and again, I return to the issue of conservatism. What or who defines it? How is or should it be defined? It’s endlessly mesmerizing, at least to my more liberal mind. There are two typical answers to the question of conservatism’s definition. First, (true) conservatives want to conserve. This a nice notion, but doesn’t […]
“One of the most striking features of the nature-nurture debate is the frequency with which it leads to two apparently contradictory results: the claim that the debate has finally been resolved (i.e., we now know that the answer is neither nature nor nurture, but both), and the debate’s refusal to die. As with the Lernian […]
The reactionary mind is obsessed with reified abstractions translated into symbolic visions and causes. This is seen with Edmund Burke’s moral imagining of the overthrow of the French monarchy (nearly a rape fantasy of the queen), to which Thomas Paine noted his lack of concern for the actual people harmed by that monarchy (more concern […]
Consider this a public service announcement. The moment someone turns to twin studies as reliable and meaningful evidence, it’s a dead give away about the kind of person they are. And when someone uses this research in the belief they are proving genetic causes, it demonstrates a number of things. First and foremost, it shows […]
“All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.” “The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is able […]
“The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them.” ― Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia Nostalgia is one of those strange medical conditions from the past, first observed in 17th century soldiers being sent off to foreign lands during that era of power struggles between […]
The breast is best. That signifies the central importance of breastfeeding. But one could also take it as pointing to our cultural obsession with human mammary glands, something not shared by all cultures. I’m going to make the argument that the breast, at least in American society, is the main site of social control. Before […]
