Chicago Boyz Archive

Quote of the Day: Jordan Peterson on Fatherhood

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Without the encouragement of your father the world is a dismal place. It is difficult to be a courageous person unless you have your father behind you in body and spirit. It is very demoralizing. … If your father rejects you, or doesn’t form a relationship with you, it’s as if the spirit of civilization has left you outside the walls as of little worth. It is very difficult for people to recover from that.

 
Query: What becomes of a society that mocks and despises fatherhood? A society that creates cohorts of tens of millions of people over several generations without fathers? These generations have been cut off from their history, from any continuity. Of course they hate America. Of course they hate Western civilization. They have been left outside the walls. They are not part of it. They want to destroy the thing that has excluded them.

It all makes sense.

QOTD, William Stubbs, the English Constitution as an old country house

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Of all constitutional systems the English combines the greatest political with the greatest personal liberty. You will accept this on the testimony of foreign writers on politics, to whom for centuries our polity was the model of free institutions. You will not be less likely to accept it after reading the history of the newer constitutions in Europe and in America which have copied many of the leading features of our own, but have not tempered them or adapted them so wisely to their own circumstances that they seem a natural and spontaneous growth, or have not calculated their forces so well as to secure an equable and uniform working. You will further, I think, realise the fact that a national polity is not the creation of a single brain or of a royal commission of brains, but grows with the growth and strengthens with the strength of the nation; cannot be changed without changing much of the spirit of the people, and is strong in proportion to the distinctness of its continuity.
 
Our own English constitution is like many old country houses which have a great history of their own if they could tell it; have been now castles, now abbeys, now manor houses, or farm buildings; in which every room has often changed its destination, and the granary become a dining-room, the chapel a billiard room, and the dairy a bath; about which many little turrets have been run up and tumbled down; some have been battered down by enemies, and some pulled down because they made the chimneys smoke; in which chimneys themselves are a novelty, and drains and hot-water pipes a new development of luxury; in which no one room now answers the purpose for which it was built, but has answered many others and more useful ones that were not contemplated. Such a house is generally beautiful, sometimes a little inconvenient to people whose ideas are bounded by a front door and five square windows, but it has its history, it has seen a great deal of happiness, and would not be what it is unless it had seen and been adapted to many changes.
 
Well, so the constitution begins with the little farmhold in the Teutonic clearing; it grows up and becomes a feudal manor; it builds a national church and a court of justice, and towers and crenellates its roofs and walls; the church becomes the mother and nurse of liberty, and then liberty takes on itself to reform and remodel the church; the court of justice develops into a parliament; trial by jury grows out of compurgation and ordeal. It retains much that it could do without, and goes without much that might be well added if it were not that the addition would stop the working of some more important part. It will, however, like an old house, also stand a great deal of alteration and adaptation without losing its identity.

Lectures on Early English History, William Stubbs (1906)

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Iconoclasm

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Something was nagging at the back of my mind about the recent push to destroy all Civil War monuments in the South. The argument usually advanced is that these statues celebrate the Confederacy and slavery so they should be removed. That case is facially plausible.

However, the destruction of monuments seems to be accelerating, with a move from organized removal, lawfully conducted, to mobs toppling the statues spontaneously.

Watching this video is a good example of the trend.

Then I saw today that activists are demanding that statues of Theodore Roosevelt be taken down, because he was apparently also “racist”.

And today the Lincoln Memorial was vandalized.

In the past, there have been outbreaks of this sort of behavior, and they have tended to get out of control. There was the original iconoclast movement in Byzantium. There was a massive destruction of religious images during the Reformation. There was a similar outbreak of mob attacks on religious statues and images during the French revolution. During the early days of the Spanish Civil War, mobs spontaneously attacked and destroyed churches. There is a famous photo of men in civilian clothes taking pot shots at a large crucifix, somewhere in Spain in 1936.

The Wikipedia article lists many such outbreaks.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution seems the most apt comparison to where this is going. The Red Guards tried to stamp out the entirety of Chinese history up to their own time. Everything that had occurred before their revolution was corrupt and any attempt to preserve it was a political offense requiring the harshest possible personal attack, including violent attack, and including death. Further, the activities escalate because people must engage in increasingly extreme behavior to show their commitment and fervor. Slacking off becomes suspect.

The fact that this is a recurring phenomenon, with similar patterns repeating in various cultures over thousands of years, suggests that there is a generalized psychological impulse which can express itself anywhere if conditions are right, especially an ideological motivation.

The inner logic of Political Correctness, in the USA, in 2017, has no stopping point.

The existence of Trump is a helpful rhetorical crutch, since people can say that they are just striking out in rage at having a fascist in the White House. But that is a justification not a cause.

Genuine, deep hatred of the past, of everything the USA has been and stood for, is the motivator.

This is the result of several generations of indoctrination, in the government schools. The indoctrination has been spectacularly successful.

Absolutely everything that occurred in the American past is necessarily, in this view, tainted and corrupt, valueless and worthy only of elimination. For example, most of the Founders were slave-owners. All depictions and references to them must be destroyed. George Washington, a slave owner, was no better than a Nazi. All institutions and documents associated with slave-owners, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, are no better than Nazi documents. All of them must be destroyed.

Christian churches have traditionally been associated with condemning homosexuality as sin, or fighting against Islam. These religious buildings and their images must also be destroyed, by this logic.

Buildings traditionally associated with male privilege, or capitalism, for example old office buildings with traditional lobby spaces, or clubs that were once restricted to men, are tainted. These also have to be destroyed.

At a certain point public monuments will be attacked if they are old or have figurative statues simply because everything from the past falls short of the ideal politically correct standard and is therefore evil.

If you watch the video of the crowd tearing down the Confederate soldier statue, they are not engaged in any kind of rational political act. They are in a frenzy. They are motivated by hate, and they are literally angrily kicking and punching an inert mass of crumpled metal.

Mobs, once they taste the pleasure of mass violent action and ritual destruction, will want more of it. The conduct will not stop, but will escalate. It is a process that can get out of control.

The psychological compulsion to engage in this behavior, and the feeling of group solidarity which comes with the activity, the chanting, the sense of triumph in destroying something that is valued by people the attackers hate, is intoxicating.

Conventional politicians on the Left will find it hard to find a principled way to condemn the behavior, and will say they understand the impulse but condemn the excess.

Conventional politicians on the Right will apologize for racism and oppression in the past, but insist on law and order.

Neither will engage with the revolutionary and nihilistic impulses which underlie this behavior, or the indoctrination which made it possible.

Expect to see this behavior continue, ratchet up, break out in many places.

Expect high levels of serious vandalism and arson directed at the types of monuments and buildings I mentioned.

As usual with such predictions, I hope I am wrong.

Let’s see how it looks over the next few months.

UPDATE:

TThat didn’t take long!

In Chicago today: Local pastor calls on Emanuel to change names of 2 Chicago parks.

Bishop James Dukes sent a letter to Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago Park District on Monday asking the City of Chicago to rename Washington and Jackson Parks which commemorate former presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson, key historical figures and known slave owners.

The article notes: “On the topic of removing the statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, the president said, ‘I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?'”

President Trump is a pretty smart cookie!

But it didn’t even take a week.

According to the article, this pastor “is meeting with a city official soon to discuss the process for changing the names.”

We have a whole damn state named after Washington!

That has to change.

And Washington’s head has to be dynamited off of Mount Rushmore.

And the money? Washington’s face is on the money! That has to change!

And all those statues! Take ’em down!

That will help to bring about healing.

Stand by.

UPDATE 2:

Executive director and general counsel of the Congressional Black Caucus calls for statues of George Washington to “come down”.

Jordan Peterson: 12 Principles for a 21st Century Conservatism

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If you are not familiar with the videos of Dr. Jordan Peterson, you should acquaint yourself with them, and him, forthwith.

This one is a good introduction to the style and substance of the man.

Peterson starts talking about 18 minutes in, after a lengthy and rambling introduction which you should skip.

If two hours is too much here are shorter snippets:

The consequence of trying to build imaginary utopias out of real human beings.

Stop saying things that make you weak.

Proven differences between men and women.

Go out and make something of yourself.

The temptation of victim identity.

Clean your room.

Peterson on starting an online humanities university.

The twelve principles from the video are as follows:

1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distal, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.

“London is above all a metropolis of merchandise.”

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London has never been planned. Beside other eighteenth-century capitals, London is remarkable for the freedom with which it developed. It is the city raised by private, not by public, wealth; the least authoritarian city in Europe. Whatever attempts have been made to overrule the individual in the public interest, they have failed. Elizabeth and her Stuart successors tried bluntly to stop any expansion whatever. They failed. Charles II and his pet intellectuals tried to impose a plan after the Great Fire. They failed. Nearly every monarch in turn projected a great Royal Palace to dominate at least part of his capital. All failed until George IV conspired with Nash to cheat Parliament into rebuilding Buckingham House, scoring no triumph in the process. The reasons for all this are embedded deep in England’s social and political history. London is one of the few capitals where church property and church interests have not been an overriding factor; where Royal prestige and prerogative in building matters have been set at naught; where defense has never, since the Middle Ages, dictated a permanent circumvallation to control the limits of development. London is above all a metropolis of merchandise. The basis of its building history is the trade cycle rather than the changing ambitions and policies of rulers and administrators. The land speculator and the adventuring builder have contributed more to the character of the Georgian city than the minister with a flair for artistic propaganda, or the monarch with a mission for dynastic assertion.

From Georgian London, by John Summerson

In the introduction Summerson engages in some classic English understatement: “This book originated in a series of of lectures prepared for the Courtauld Institute in 1939, but not delivered owing to the turn of events.” He then mentions that he was unable to finish the book during the war: “The whole period has, of course, been somewhat unpropitious for a book of this sort. The subject matter has been bombed from time to time and any papers, plans and drawings of whose existence I was aware have been totally inaccessible.”