I read the whole thing: In Defense of Conservatives Credit, where credit is due

a comment left on Apple Pie

Okay, I read the whole thing at In Defense of Conservatives Credit where credit is due

I've been through a similar progress when I was about 30 (couple of years after consciously choosing to be a doer)(previous to this I thought I could change the world by reading books).

Consider the use of parentheses with (words words) as notes to self.

TL;DR At this point we have to level up and go looking a different place to argue about it

_________________

At the section "Accommodating both findings" I stood in a similar place for a while looking for a sign, umm-&-arrh-ing, but I had a deep distrust of animism/structuralism/gnosticism/just-so explanations.

This was the mid-90s so chaos terminology had been around for a decade in the popular literature, I was looking for an emergent “thing”.

I knew the word meant meeting.

Also evolution, why does a population survive with a variety of options. Social insects do not do this, how do we do it?

In particular how is that a pool of useful responses to situations are maintained (as a type of unused until needed insurance) across the generations (we sort of know how it is transmitted outside of genetics by waving our hands at the word culture).

At this point I read the work of a conservative Catholic anthropologist called Mary Douglas. (brace yourselves its another quadrant mapping thing).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_theory_of_risk

(If you read Mary Douglas you will find what you have said in other words/frames).

The key point for me was not the accuracy of the mappings but three points:

① Bias (we are partial beings) with regard to perceptions of risk (existential risk)

(in this framework bias in perceptions of risk [to morality/nature]) which provides the movements the terrain allows, and does not focus on singular points(of view) on the landscape, which are seen as accessories or fashionable spas. Place to watch and bee seen.

_______________________

(the mountains on the landscape is often what we measure/climb and seek to justify – because it is there)(and then confuse fitness with rightness because it suits us).

_________________

(We measure outcomes of a process-- how tall, how intelligent, how honest.

Often when we do so we are given to create just-so stories -- that hill is there becasue the devil threw it there in anger (don’t be angry), or regret/disloyalty/nostalgia turned her into a pillar of salt (obviously).

Worlding can be taught in the physicality of the landscape as well as who you live with/against -- the story about the devil once ‘moral’-ised helps you keep an eye out for psychopaths when the lions and lice have been dealt with.

Measuring honesty may not help us understand how the world was made, but we ‘know’ (as you say/show) that without it there is no world (morality/nature). It needs no other explanation or gene.

I disagree that what we know is what we think it is, I think we have seen the mountain that the good one has thrown.

Which is why I agree that it is up to us (even in notions of conscience we see this (subjugated as it is to a hierarchy)). This is why we both feel the existential fear (the perceptions of risk) so strongly and why we cannot think realistically about the others among us, without whom there is no world at all.

The saviour and the threat are the same. It drives us crazy, at times of bad-worlding, when we are given to believe in the worst among us. This is what gives dogma a bad name. It is dogma that gives traditional maintenance a bad name. And can also make the threat look like a saviour and not a devil.

__________________________

I’ve argued that currently novelty is the traditional form in the arts -- since the later 1800s if not before. Tradition is usually not associated with novelty, but it can happen. (From 2012 https://formeika.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/the-unmaking-of-conceptual-art/ )

__________________

Doubled-down the notion of honesty is called truth (a doctrine based on the rite of honesty). (((Science has a whole further set of rituals and routines and surveys which meet/discuss/ their way into truth things.))

___________________________

②

Healthy societies (good world-building) maintain a range of options and do not go doctrinal (do accept that people enjoy just-so stories but do not let them be enforced literally) however this egalitarian/openness impulse has its limits (starvation may make the openness less possible when children's brains/pscyhes have been starved during a childhood of famine or drug-fuelled neglect, then we throw-back to more primative [sic] ways). Some conservative thinkers even see hierarchy as natural, well, more natural than openness to equality, and thus more moral. (Like I’ve said elsewhere values are like vowels https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/choose-cultural-or-bayesian-morality/comment/44232359)

To do good worlding & world-building one has to both maintain what one has and be able to adapt to changes, and both require resources. How doe we maintain them? "Culture" answers that.

“Culture wars” are about those human resources, obviously there is a mismatch here, we have never had it so good. Everyone should be feeling ‘relaxed and comfortable’, virtuous and generous… should never be at war.

Now our various responses to perceptions of risk are resources too, and maintaining them without using them (when they are not needed directly) also requires resources, there is a trade-off here, for war destroys them, discussion creates them. Are both not forms of argument by other means?

(Recently I've learned ritual is a way of managing human resources, which is why emperors/dictators love to control/channel/be-top-dog it.) (Hierarchies are a way to subjugate resources, and stop civil war, but even so are not necessarily the best way to maintain a variety of resources through time, even if only because hierarchies are only one resource among others).

The maintenance of varied resources: physical ,cultural and psychological ---is done through argy-bargy: meals, meetings, feasts and masses -- holidays and confrences -- where we decide and recognise things both small and important as we both self and world among others. This type of maintenance is done through the activities of exchange and recognition, in both market and place. Rituals by other means.

___________________

(The split between big life events and the everyday maintenance - which have become increasing distanced from each other ---because economics --in market and place--- which has got rid of the lions and the lice and replaced them with psychopaths and covert narcissists(opportunistic infections??) only encourages culture wars as they turn people's preferences into a niche-cult of flying monkeys.

_________________

③

the hope for good is the world-ing that arises out of all of that, it does not exists unless we make it, and we must do that together—

(and not ‘must’ as in ‘should’, ‘should’ just makes us do it day to day and on big days of birth death and marriage)

…and we will still create a world, if badly, as long as we survive, and we are surving… just…???

yes

Yet, it is the perceptions of constant existential risk to (morality/nature) that cause us to go berserk when we do not world well and fail to talk with each other, both in agreement, in ritual and in discussion, and so then fail to reflect, and realise that in talking to each other we are worlding well.

There is a story about this called Henny Penny (Chicken Little). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny

(Narcissists and psychopaths always intervene to separate us from each other, and concierge information flows, this Machiavellian technique is not realistic in the long term. The world returns after a cycle of violence.

The world is always there if only because we argue about it. The world is not real, how could it exist otherwise?

__________

Narcissists and psychopaths gain power in any/all systems, they are the untrue neutrals among us, they have no biases except their self-as-world, by controlling informations flows and human resources (ritualistic & doctrinal) so they can amass both doers and maintainers, are able to combine do-gooders and do-badders and always commit to worlding-badly. Not just in cults but in whole organisations and cultures and countries.

Machiavellian techniques are not realistic in the long term. and this is possibly why impetuousness cannot be excluding/selected against from the dark triad, even those with deadeye smiles like low affect Stalin. Of which Putin's dead face is bad pastiche. This is why we haven't yet wiped ourselves out.)