Readers' Questions
What is the value of dissent? And will doctors ever beat death?
What are the differences you know and see with state schools and elite schools like Eton? And what can be done to bridge the gap? It seems all the top positions in whichever field are constantly filled by people who went to these top schools.
Family is the most significant determinant of educational success. And there is also the fact that elite schols are selective. Education can’t change IQ. It merely reflects it. There is nothing that can be done about this. Equality of outcome is impossible. But a return to the grammar school system, which produced, for example, many heads of civil service, would help bright students from normal backgrounds to excel. But that really just means selecting by IQ.
Should we be building a Parallel Polis?
In the sense of living by the truth, yes, but I'm not convinced by Dreher's idea withdrawal will 'reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society'. There is a lot of fighting to be done. People who have forgotten that have allowed Christianity to be driven from the public square, starting in at least 1950 - an age many conservatives mistakenly idealise as golden.
Dr David A Sinclair sees ageing as a disease that will be cured. We are making advances on scarcity of resource. The two combined might take away the dangers of the current chaos over order. Could it be that our evolution is beyond male and female?
What he actually means by ‘curing’ ageing is defeating death. The desire for immortality is as old as human beings. It’s even been developed into an argument for God. If that object alone which can fully satisfy all man's desires can give man all the happiness he craves, but God alone can fully satisfy all man's desires, therefore God alone is the object which can give man all the happiness he craves, and hence is man's objective last end.
Death won’t be defeated by man. ‘Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.’ The second law of thermodynamics means the whole of the universe is decaying. Is Dr Sinclair going to make the sun live forever as well? No, ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.’
There has never been a time in human history without scarcity of resources, and there never will be. This is because our desires are infinite. For example, if workers today were content with the material standard of living that workers in Marx’s day had, they would have massive amounts of leisure time. But they prefer consumer goods to leisure free. That is one of the many things Marx got fundamentally wrong about human nature.
The conflict between chaos and order isn’t fundamentally between human beings and the world. Without even testing their formulas, physicists can pick the one that is going to most accurately describe physical reality by using the criteria of simplicity, harmony and beauty. The real battle between chaos and order occurs between human beings and, ultimately, within each human being.
Regarding a possible evolution beyond male and female, the left is - whether consciously or not - trying to move humans in the direction of being a eusocial species like ants and bees. This means almost all individuals don’t reproduce but instead serve a few or even one who does. There is extreme task specialisation and communal rearing of young. No vertebrates do this except mole rats. And pair-bonding in humans is as old as human beings. As usual, then, this leftist fantasy isn’t looking grounded in reality, but even it doesn’t involve moving beyond male and female. The desire to do so is another fundamental rejection of human nature, related to the rebellion against death. ‘Male and female He created them.’
I believe that this is also the correct way to see the transgender movement: a consequence of liberalism affirming the sovereignty of the individual.
I see this trend is gaining popularity: young parents I talk with are preoccupied with these ideas of not giving punishments or rewards, replacing discipline with addressing all the kids’ emotional needs, never labelling kids’ behaviour as "bad" only seeing it as result of their unmet needs.
Judge this by its fruits. It ends in disaster because it gets human nature wrong by assuming man is thoroughly upright in nature, inclined only to good. That is Rousseau’s view, and he is at the root of most modern errors in childrearing and education. Opposed to him at the other extreme is Hobbes, who saw man as utterly depraved. That is also wrong. Humans are inclined both to good and evil.
At the root of the approach to parenting you mention is an aversion to authority. But no society, including the family - the most fundamental and primitive society - can survive without authority. There are at least three reasons why:
Remedying ignorance. While the general principles of natural law are evident to everyone, the remote conclusions are harder to grasp. They need enforcing by someone with the moral power and authority to do so for the common good.
Enforcing justice. Man is quick to claim benefits but prone to shirk duties. Greed as to be restrained and sloth stimulated. Not only direction is required but also enforcement. And this requires the right to use penalties if necessary.
Providing leadership. Even if everyone agrees on the goal of a society, what if there are disputes on the means to be used to attain it? Someone must choose the means and the cooperative use of them. This is impossible without direction and control.
The first two points highlight the substitutional function of authority: it remedies human deficiencies either of intellect or of will. Paternal authority, for example, disappears when the child reaches adulthood. Similarly, corrective authority doesn’t hold sway over the criminal after he has been reformed. But the function of authority highlighted by the this point would exist even in a society of perfect human beings.
Do you see a correlation between patriarchy in societies vs political climate in modern countries? It seems to me some of the richest and most advanced countries are turning matriarchal (with mothers becoming "heads of families" and becoming leaders, men being passive), whereas some countries are still quite traditional and patriarchal. How does that influence politics in the country?
It is true that the differences between men and women, taken as groups, are stronger in some cultures than others. And social constructivists expected these differences to be greatest in poor, traditionalist cultures. As countries become wealthier and more individualistic, they expected, the differences would become less pronounced. But the opposite is true. It is one of the biggest surprises in modern psychology. Greater gender equity leads to greater divergence. In other words, human nature, when given the opportunity, becomes even more pronounced. In poorer countries, some women might be forced to do work traditionally done by men. They’ve got no choice. Given a choice, however, they choose according to their femininity.
Regarding politics specifically, I think it’s a big mistake to be misled by the prevalence of female CEOs and politicians. The male oligarchs who have their hands on the real levers of power wantwomen in these positions because women are more agreeable and therefore more biddable, easier to control and easier to manipulate and intimidate.
Can we discuss the concept of 'dissent' as a desirable character trait and force in society? Is it not the case that all the major advances in human society over the millennia are the result of dissenting voices? Ridiculed and scorned at the time, aren't those people brave enough to go against the prevailing narrative generally those who come up with new ideas that benefit society and civilization in the long term?
Free speech isn’t a value in itself. Its value is instrumental. We care about free speech because we care about truth. I often quote the proverb ‘the pearl is formed by abrasion’. How you’re describing dissent here is exactly that abrasion. It is certainly important.
For example, woke academics often point out that Arabs had better knowledge of the work of classical Greek authors such as Plato and Aristotle. That is true because of the persistence of Greek/Byzantine culture in conquered Arab territories. But what the woke academics don’t point out is the failure of the Arab world to actually do anything with it.
Muslim intellectuals read the Greek philosophers how they read the Qur’an: questioning or contradicting wasn’t allowed. For example, the twelfth-century scholar Averroes said Aristotle’s physics was complete and infallible. If observations contradicted Aristotle, the observations had to be wrong.
By contrast, among the early Christian Scholastics, a young scholar usually enhanced his reputation exploring, disagreeing, correcting and innovating. The found faults that the Arab world didn’t.
This is not to say that dissent is valuable in itself, however: as Chesterton said, the point of an open mind is to allow truth in. Keeping your mouth open but never eating would be stupid.