Bruce Charlton's Notions

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Three ideas - all, none, one or two of which might be correct:

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1. Getting into proximity

Perhaps, as a reproductive strategy, women want high status positions to get closer to high status men so they can marry them.

However, this is not necessary.

In the past, when Oxford and Cambridge universities were male institutions, women got effectively close enough to high status men (and often married them) not by becoming undergraduates or dons; but by attending secretarial and language colleges in the same city, or training as nurses, or working at sociable jobs in public places such as shops and cafes, or attending churches and social events, or even working as servants.

Wherever the attractive women were, men would seek them out - if at all possible. (See The Double Helix by James D Watson for examples.)

So high status education, training and jobs are not necessary in order to meet and marry high status men - women merely need to be accessible.

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Indeed, as we now realize, it is a counter-productive reproductive strategy to attain proximity by competing for status, since a woman attaining high status for herself strongly reduces the likelihood of her getting married and of having children.

Reasons include that the pool of men a woman finds both attractive and potentially a marriage partner will (on average) diminish as her status increases, because she is attracted (only) to men of higher status than herself - the higher her own status, the fewer such men she will encounter.

Furthermore, men are not much/ hardly at all attracted to status in women; but mainly to personality, intelligence and appearance (i.e. to an appearance which signal youthfulness and health - hence reproductive potential).

The process of attaining high status (education, training, working-up the hierarchy, building a business) usually takes a long time, and as the years roll past the woman will (on average) less attractive even as she becomes more selective concerning the men who she regards as suitable marriage partners.

Consequently, higher status women are less often married, more often have zero children. 

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Still, it is quite possible that modern women falsely believe that they need to compete alongside men in the same institutions and work in order to get close enough to marry them (or have a satisfying relationship).

But why would modern women believe something so obviously wrong?

Answer: mass media brainwashing, probably.

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2. Institution a proxy for family 

Perhaps women don't really want high status - they want the high status environment.

A high status environment (such as an Ivy League college, a top law firm, an elite hospital) might be subjectively perceived as equivalent to being married to a high status man, or living with a high status father.

But why would women be so mistaken about this; why would they perceive a high status institution to be equivalent to membership of a high status family?

Answer: mass media brainwashing, probably.


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3. Pathology

Perhaps a few strange and unusual women really do want high status (even though it does not benefit them either biologically or psychologically) - and they want status for themselves for what are essentially pathological reasons: and then (from their positions of influence) this small minority of status-driven women encourage the mass of non-status-seeking women into emulating this pathological behaviour.

(Steve Moxon - in The Woman Racket - speculates that the rare situation of a genuinely status-seeking woman may be due to masculinization, maybe in the womb.)

These rare and abnormal status-seeking women may not just gather in high status institutions, but when they have the right set of abilities, actually do high status things: like becoming big time entrepreneurs or politicians, or creative intellectual geniuses/ near-geniuses.

Of course, being pathological does not stop status-seeking women from making a major societal contribution (or, at least, having a major effect on society). After all, the annals of genius are packed with crazies.

But how could a tiny cadre of genuinely status-seeking women manage to convince the mass of women to emulate their pathological behaviour?

Answer: mass media brainwashing, probably.

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So, why do so many modern women want to achieve high status?

Whatever the answer, the mass media are surely necessary to this becoming a widespread condition.

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The single largest factor in shaping world demography has been the global decline in childhood death rates.

Throughout human history around half of humans died during childhood, and without reproducing:

http://137.140.1.71/jsec/articles/volume2/issue4/NEEPSvolkatkinson.pdf

In developed countries, almost all children (about 99 percent) now survive to adulthood, and even among the most impoverished, ignorant or undeveloped segments of these populations, the proportion of children who die during childhood is biologically almost insignificant.

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The above 50 percent childhood death rate is only an average - among the poorest sector of the population the childhood mortality probably approached fairly close to 100 percent.

So it did not matter much how many children were born to the poor, since almost none of them would survive - and extra children born to the poorest and most ignorant classes probably served merely to reduce the survivorship of those children who had not reached adulthood.

But childhood mortality was probably considerably lower than 50 percent among the wealthier, more intelligent, higher in status.

Therefore, the modern population in developed countries (you and I) are almost entirely the offspring of the wealtheir, more intelligent, more conscientious, higher status classes of history.

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So, in the past, it was childhood death rates which - mostly - drove demographic change. Things that reduced childhood death rates (more food, less disease, less violence, fewer fatal accidents, better hygeine, better medicine, better - more loving, intelligent and conscientious - mothers) would increase reproductive success.

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-are-women-so-intelligent.html

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But in the modern world nowadays reproductive success is essentially a matter of birth rates: of fertility. Childhood mortality is so low it can (almost) be ignored (I mean ignored from a strictly biological point of view).

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No matter how relatively underdeveloped and underprivileged a population - no matter how stupid, feckless and uncaring the mothers - for almost everywhere in the world at present, childhood death rates are all-but irrelevant to reproductive success: almost all children are 'kept alive' by 'society'.

Consequently, for the first and only time in human history, pure fertility drives demographic change - and also evolutionary change.

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There is a mis-match between human psychology - which mostly evolved in a context of hunter-gatherer societies - and life in modern society: but the mis-match seems to be much more extreme in women than men.

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Essentially, the mis-match is evident in terms of human choice and especially in relation to 'reproductive success'.

(Happiness is irrelevant to this - natural selection operates on reproduction, and happiness is merely a means to that end.)

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Reproductive success of a person is, roughly, the relative proportion of viable offspring it contributes to the population - this is, roughly, measured by the number of children born to a person (minus those children who die before completing their reproductive lifespan).

In the modern world where death rates are very low, reproductive success can pretty much be measured as the fertility rate: the number of children.

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If you look at figures 1 and 2 in this paper -

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/amnat.pdf

you can see that the situation is very different for men and women.

Men are biologically reasonably well adapted to modern society - but not women: the graphs go in opposite directions in this particular sample.

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Overall, as men become wealthier and higher in status it either increases the number of children (which is what would be expected, biologically - and is the reason why men strive for status) - or at least does not damage reproductive success too much.

(Of course, in a sample worldwide, this would not hold, since less wealthy men would have a lot more children. This argument only applies to modern, developed societies with control of reproduction.)

But as women become more wealthy, more educated (and even more so with respect to increasing IQ) the number of children declines sharply and the proportion of women who are childless increases.

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Why should women be so much more adversely affected - from a biological perspective, purely in terms of reproductive success, by modernity?

Because, almost certainly, in the past (in the pre-contraceptive era) increasing wealth among women almost certainly strongly increased reproductive success.

It is contraception which is the main factor.

Women seem predisposed to avoid or minimize childbearing, in proportion that they are more intelligent, educated, wealthy and high status.

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This is surprising, and remarkable, and - currently - pretty much unexplained.

Here are some ideas.

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In biology in general, females are (almost always) the investing sex: they invest a lot more resources into offspring (before and sometimes after birth) than males.

In order to allocate investment most female mammals will temporarily suppress reproduction under conditions of stress - fear of violence, starvation, disease etc.

This can be conceptualized in terms of saving resources for better times which may be ahead.

Reproductive suppression may be achieved by not ovulating, by reabsorbing the fetus, by abandoning or even killing newborn offspring etc.

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Maybe women in modern society are engaged in reproductive suppression (mostly by means of contraception and abortion): maybe there is (at some level) a perception of 'stress'; maybe (in some way) the modern situation is perceived as alien and hostile to such an extent that reproduction is deferred (in hope of better times ahead) - but since this situation does not change, better times never arrive and reproduction gets (in practice) deferred permanently - until the reproductive lifespan is over.

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Or could it simply be distraction? Any focus on reproduction is overwhelmed by the multiple attractions and distractions of modern evolutionary novelties.

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In historical societies reproduction just happened as a by product of instinct: people sought 'happiness' and the children just came along (and there was no way of stopping them).

Now, with the presence of so many evolutionary novelties, people in general are confused and distracted, such that if they 'do what comes naturally' it does not lead to having children - but merely to (mostly short lived) pleasure/ avoidance of suffering.

In modern societies this means that women behave much more bizarrely (from a biological perspective) than men - from a biological perspective, women (by choice) make themselves ugly and unattractive (with fashion, by their behaviour), and (biologically) waste their time and resources.

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But why should women be more 'confused' by evolutionary novelties than men?

Perhaps because women are more peer oriented than men.

Each man is, in a biological sense, a loner who seeks status, seeks to become the dominant male and get the lion's share of reproduction. Each man is against other men - except that self-interest dictates that one way to pursue self interest is via alliances.

But in historic societies, alliances were very difficult to sustain unless underpinned by genetic relatedness: most gangs and tribes were of male relatives.

Otherwise male v male competition would tend to break them up.

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But women seem more able and motivated to form alliances with unrelated women (perhaps because a women would usually move to the husband's tribe, and needed to establish herself among female strangers?). Therefore, whatever the reason for greater peer orientation, women are strongly influenced by the opinions of other women (or, more exactly, by what they perceive to be the opinions of other women.

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So women will do almost anything which they perceive to be necessary to fit with what they perceive to be the peer group of other women - from the mild level of sending innumerable greetings cards, through adopting fashions which (nearly always) usually make them less attractive; up through drunkenness and promiscuity, to tattooing, foot-binding and other self-mutilations.

(By less attractive I mean objectively so, from a biological perspective such as the massive amount of data on male sexual preferences cross-culturally and the correlations between attractiveness and signals of reproductive potential and what makes a potentially good long term partner and parent.)

All of these originated and enforced by that biggest and most influential of evolutionary novelties: the mass media, which in this instance functions as a super-stimulus interpreted as representing the female peer group.

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So, a couple of ideas ...

1. that the very high level of maternal investment in humans makes women relatively highly likely to engage in reproductive suppression under situations of stress: and modern society is perceived as extremely stressful - so reproduction is deferred, indefinitely...;

or,

2. that because women are more peer orientated, they are more vulnerable to influence by the mass media - which is an evolutionary novelty functioning as a superstimulus that is perceived to represent the female peer group...

but the phenomenon seems undeniable and calls out for explanation.

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To restate the question:

Why are women so much more adversely affected (in a biological sense: reproductive success) by modernity than are men?

Or, why do modern women choose - on average - to damage their reproductive success?

Or, why does the pursuit of happiness – under modern conditions – cause de facto reproductive suppression in women so much more strongly than in men?

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I have condensed and re-ordered these points from An Experiment with Time by J.W Dunne, Revised third edition of 1934 - Chapter III - The Experiment. 

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I have just re-read (for the first time since I became a Christian) JD Salinger's three most religious stories: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, Zooey, and Seymour: an introduction.

I enjoyed them all, but most appreciated Zooey.

RHTRC struck me as a perfect short story, but - in terms of Salinger's ouvre - transitional; Zooey is IT, a perfect short story that is uniquely and 100 percent Salinger; and Seymour crosses the line from short story into a kind of fictional essay.

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As well as its brilliant character delineation, dialogue, density and description; I was fascinated by the religious aspect of Zooey - and the light it shone on the big unifying question of the Glass chronicles: why did Seymour commit suicide?

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Zooey begins with Salinger's characteristic eclectic, syncretic 'perennial philosophy' New-Age-ish -type spirituality; and builds towards Salinger's most wholly-Christian epiphany - the famous Fat Lady parable at the end.

This trajectory is one which is - apparently - undergone by Franny, Zooey and Buddy; but not by Seymour.

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Seymour's suicide was - I believe - caused by what Walker Percy termed the 're-entry problem.

(see WP's Lost in the Cosmos and my earlier blog posting http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/03/re-entry-problem-for-artists-and.html )

This is intrinsic to any worldly spirituality - perhaps to any non-Christian religion - which does not include a heavenly afterlife with a process of theosis - or movement of the human towards becoming a Son of God.

Seymour seems to have had only a vague kind of transcendental belief (he does not quite seem to believe that Truth, Beauty and Virtue are objective, real - and to the extent he does he regards them as immanent - within nature - rather than supernatural).

Indeed, Seymour's spirituality is characterized by a belief in reincarnation rather than afterlife.

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Yet reincarnation (even if true) is no answer to anything - or rather it is merely a superficial answer to specific questions (such as explaining a person's character and behaviour) not ultimate questions.

Reincarnation merely pushes the problems of life backward or forward, without providing any understanding of the human relation to The Good, to reality, to meaning or purpose.

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Seymour argues (I think) that this worldly life here on earth is perfect - if only we looked at it correctly.

The fault is with people and their perspective.

But Seymour apparently couldn't get the right perspective and keep it. He could get himself into the correct frame of mind for periods, but would at some point have to re-enter the perspective which saw the world as mundane, painful, full of ugliness, lies, cruelty, short-termist selfishness.

And it was this re-entry which he found unbearable; and which (it seems to me) led to his suicide.

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Seymour simply could not live up to his own ideals, his own aspirations - could not maintain his own temporary achievements.

And, lacking a conception of Original Sin, and lacking a belief in the possibility of Christian salvation - he had nowhere to go, nothing to turn to but (as he imagined) extinction and (he hoped) an end to his own suffering.

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Since 1945 (and building up for a couple of centuries before), intellectuals in the West have risen to hold power in the World.

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The first Western intellectual elite was probably Germany, from the late 19th century up to 1933 - when the country was led by 'mandarins' - mainly the senior state administrators, Professors and major Gymnasium teachers.

However, unlike nowadays, the German mandarins also had a military ethos and presence - such that intellectuals were screened by university dueling fraternities for the military virtues such as dominance, masculinity, hierarchy, nationalism, obedience, group loyalty and physical courage.

(But their self-assertion was their downfall.) 


[See Fritz Ringer The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933].

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An even greater dominance of the intellectual elite emerged after WWII

This time, however, and especially since the mid-1960s; the elite was anti-military: pacifist, submissive, quasi-equalitarian, xenophilic, feminist (indeed, increasingly female), and lifestyle-rebellious.

(And their self-hatred was their downfall.)


[See Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve.] 

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Well, all this has been in place for the past couple of generations, and what have we got?

The intellectuals promised inspirational High Art, Pure Science and the Social Virtues.

What they delivered was ugly and depressing art, dishonest and incompetent science; and moral inversion.

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What we have is fashion-driven, novelty-seeking, self-indulgent, lazy, cowardly, unprincipled, careerism/ holiday-making - all of this disguised by ever thicker and more garish coatings of public relations, hype and spin.

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The intellectual class wanted to run things, they had they chance and ran things, and they failed...

We failed.

We won't get another chance. 

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An Experiment with Time by J.W Dunne was a major influence on The Inklings, and forms a background to the posthumously-published and unfinished novels The Notion Club Papers by JRR Tolkien and The Dark Tower by C.S Lewis.

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One of the most striking passages in The Dark Tower is the following:


" '... that we see the future is certain. Dunne's book proved that - '

"MacPhee gave a roar like a man in pain.

" 'It's all very well, MacPhee,' Orfieu continued, 'but the only thing that enables you to jeer at Dunne is the fact that you have refused to carry out the experiments he suggests. If you carried them out you would have got the same results that he got, and I got, and everyone got who took the trouble. Say what you like but the thing is proved. It's as certain as any scientific proof whatever.' "

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Dunne had recorded his dreams in detail and in writing the instant he awoke. The method he describes is very specific, and he is clear that unless this method is followed, then the necessary information will not be available.

Dunne's conclusion - surveying these results, from himself and others - was that some parts of some dreams consisted of recollections of past events (especially the day preceding the sleep) mixed with anticipations of future events - quite thoroughly mixed, so that which-was-which only became apparent later.

My sense is that Lewis and Tolkien both accepted this by the late 1930s into the 1940s, sought an explanation, and discussed its implications - presumably in Inklings meetings.

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Let us assume that Dunne was right and that Lewis and Tolkien were right to accept his evidence.

And let us take the evidence of the Dark Tower and the Notion Club Papers to conclude that Dunne's experiments were replicated, were verified, at least by Lewis and Tolkien and (probably) some other of the Inklings.

Then why has this idea died-out? Why do so few people nowadays believe that dreams can predict the future?

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The reason is easy enough to understand on reading Dunne - that the dreams were a mixture of past, future and apparently irrelevant material - but there was no way to evaluate which elements were predictive until after they had been confirmed.

So, although Dunne seemed to show convincingly that some aspects of some dreams were visions of the future - this had no practical value: specifically this partial and mixed knowledge offered no powers.

You could not - therefore - use future visionary dreams to make money (e.g from bets), manipulate people, avoid disasters or anything of that kind.

To the modern mind, this means that Dunne's work seemed trivial, hence ignorable, and was eventually discarded (without consideration) as being fake, or gullible, or something...

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That dreams contained visions of the future was, of course, believed by everyone until a few hundred years ago - and probably is believed by the vast majority of people in the world even now. But in ancient times, the ability to interpret dreams, and decode the future visions - so that the knowledge they contained might become useful, was regarded as a rare gift (and one associated with a lot of fakery).

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On the other hand, if Dunne was correct (and I find the testimony of Lewis and Tolkien hard to ignore) then this is very interesting for what it may tell us about the human condition.

Among other things, it suggests to me the following:

1. That dreams have a natural function - and not just related to memory (the past) but also to the future.

2. That this natural function happens during sleep and does not require conscious awareness (since most people most of the time do not recall dreams - and Dunne's results depend on specific techniques of rapid recall, association and the making of an objective record, which techniques were apparently not done by anyone before him; and by very few since).

3. That - therefore - although containing material from the future, the natural function of dreams is not predictive; and that the use of dreams to predict the future is a special, individual, learned skill.

4. My guess as to one function of dreams is therefore that they locate each person in time ('in the world') in an unconscious, implicit, non-verbal way; that dreams provide our relation to reality, our embeddedness in time, which we carry with us as a background to waking, conscious life.

(Dreaming is not, then, functioning only to 'consolidate' past memories, but perhaps also to prepare for the unfolding future - time stretching-out on both sides from the present moment of the dream.)

5. That it is therefore possible that the lack of dreams, or of dreams of the right kind (perhaps as a result of some illness, or unnatural lifestyle, or drugs or something) might cause alienation: might cause someone to feel isolated, un-integrated with life, solipsistic, that life has no meaning nor purpose.

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Note: The above was adapted from a posting on my Notion Club Papers blog.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2011/05/experiment-with-time-by-jw-dunne-and.html


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Reading biographies and memoirs - as I do - I am often struck by the vivid, detailed recall of those who met eminent people - and contrast it with my own hazy recollections of meeting the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._E._M._Anscombe -

who was, if not exactly eminent, someone that appears as a minor but significant figure in the annals of the twentieth century in relation both to Wittgenstein and to C.S. Lewis. Lewis, for example, regarded her as much more intelligent than he was.

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The meeting was, I am pretty sure, in the summer or autumn of 1985, and comes from a rather lost episode of my young adult life (lost, because it did not lead on to anything), while I was working on my doctorate in neuroendocrinology.  I have no written evidence from this period, and I didn't discuss my plans very widely, so I am forced to operate purely on the basis of memory.

I was, at the time, much under the spell of Wittgenstein, and (therefore?) wanting to study philosophy as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge on an accelerated (2 year instead of 3 year) degree - possible because I was already a (medical) graduate.

I must have written to some people, and arranged some meetings and then I travelled to Cambridge where I had lunch with Anscombe at her college New Hall, then in the afternoon met with the admissions tutor of Trinity and their philosophy tutor (Nick Denyer).

So I was probably with Anscombe for an hour and a half or so. What do I recall?

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Of the lady, that she struck me a very much the same type as the minor country gentry I had encountered in Somerset and Northumberland; a chunky, pugnacious and somewhat 'masculine' elderly woman (of course, masculine or not, she had had numerous children). Her speech was clipped and 'military' in style, the content I remember as cliched and at a superficial social level.

Her car was very muddy and full of bits and pieces.

The lunch at New Hall, and the college itself, I can picture as being similar to, but somewhat better than, a secondary school dinner - there was some kind of gimmick by which the lunch counter rose up out of the floor (electrically powered) to bring up food from the kitchens below, I imagine. In general I felt rather underwhelmed, disappointed.

The only remark I can recollect was in response to a query about her meeting with Wittgenstein - she said something about having heard about him while she was studying in Oxford, then concluding this to comment that 'of course, he had a first-rate mind'. This struck me at the time as a characteristic bit of Cambridge boilerplate.

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So, in my memory at least, I have to admit that I was not impressed by G.E.M Anscombe, indeed I rather disliked her - yet of course she was both generous and tolerant to meet up with me, give me lunch, and talk with me - I who was someone merely considering applying to Trinity, and with no connection with her or with the university. I hope that I was suitably grateful.

(And I very much doubt whether G.E.M Anscombe was at all impressed with me! I can't recall saying anything which, even momentarily, captured her attention or interest. Quite likely, this was a basis of my slight feeling of resentment - that I did not, could not, impress her? Maybe I was hoping to be recognized as 'the next Wittgenstein'? - that unlikely notion would indeed be entirely consistent with my self-conceit of that era.)

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The episode led nowhere because, although I was indeed offered a place at Trinity to read philosophy, when I saw the size of the college fees (on top of the university fees and the need to support myself for two years of very hard academic work) it was very obvious that I could not afford it.

But also, the visit had rather put me off the idea of studying undergraduate philosophy at Trinity, Cambridge; as I recall I was glad of a cast-iron excuse not to follow-through my plans.

In the event, I went to Durham to study for an MA by thesis in English (only one year, and with a British Academy scholarship - so easily affordable) - and this turned out to be a much more fruitful path for me.

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(Although Durham English did not cure me of Wittgenstien - in fact things got even worse as I continued reading philosophy alongside the English, and moved on to Richard Rorty and deep into the lunacy of 'postmodern' thinking, which I had successfully resisted up to that point. It took a few more years to extricate myself from that mess.)

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The Cambridge affair now feels like a near miss or lucky escape - a madness of a few weeks - on those rare occasions I remember it; and maybe that interpretation colours or extinguishes my memories.

But what a feeble set of recollections I have concerning this meeting!

For some people, such a meeting might have provided sufficient incident to fill a 15 000 word memoir!

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Charles Williams always insisted on what he termed accuracy - a trait essential to an editor of the Oxford University Press; but more than this, C.W. regarded inaccuracy as a sin: characteristic of evil.

And he was right!

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What is accuracy? the main components are validity and precision.

Validity mean that a measurement is truly representative of what it claims to measure.

Precision refers to the statistical exactitude of a measurement.

So, if we were measuring the average height of the adult English population it might be valid but not accurate if the sample was 1000 randomly chosen subjects (because a random sample is representative of the whole population), but if the scale was only segmented in metre lengths, the estimate would not be precise - because the measure would only be to the nearest metre.

A sample using a one millimetre scale applied to a non-random sample (e.g. the first 1000 people you found in the telephone directory or met in the street, or 1000 women but no men) would be 1000 times more precise (because measured in millimtres not metres) but would not be valid, because the sample would not be representative of the English population.

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As a professional epidemiologist I fought a constant, losing, battle to emphaisize the greater importance of validity than precision.

e.g. http://preview.trialsjournal.com/content/2/1/2 and references.

It is more accurate to have imprecise but valid knowledge than precise but non-valid knowledge - yet precisely measured garbage is the material of modern science, administration and politics.

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This applies to everything in life - it is always infinitely better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

The sin of inaccuracy is in claiming or assuming that precision somehow compensates for invalidity, or that greater precision somehow renders validity irrelevant.

This sin is endemic in modern administration - large, complex, quantitative databases are regarded as both essential and sufficient for policy - despite that the information in such databases is always invalid.

Always invalid because the process of data collection is not-even-trying to be valid - the data collection is indeed part of the policy, designed to support policy and not trying to understand the world.

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I once termed this system Infostat -

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/cargocult.html

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So accuracy properly implies maximum validity as an iron rule, and precision only as an optional aspiration.

And this is not a technical, methodological point: it is a moral imperative.

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There is a dark side to science - indeed science is now almost exclusively dark - in the sense that science is done for reasons of power rather than love.

There was a time when science really was done - mostly - for love; by people who loved knowledge, and were not intending to *use* it.

Naturally, this was an amateur science.

Professional science always always trends to become a means to an end - science purports to generate power: Professional science - in effect - sells power.

Medical science is the dominant world science - and it (falsely, in practice) promises to cure disease, relieve suffering etc: pursues knowledge, therefore, purely a means to an end.

But originally even medical science was done for love, by doctors and other clinicians, as an overflow from their practice: they wanted to understand, not to control.

As a by-product, in practice, the old medical scientists actually made more frequent, more useful, more powerful discoveries than we do nowadays in the vast industry of careerist drones - and this efficiency was not a paradox, because theirs was true knowledge, knowledge less-tainted by expediency, more dependable: in other words it was knowledge rather than marketing, spin, hype and BS.

Understanding enabled control, control came via understanding - aiming directly at control yielded not control but merely corruption. 

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In days when I depended more on the physical company of other people, I was endemically frustrated by the facetiousness of conversation among people of my acquaintance.

In theory, there were plenty of well-informed people with similar interests around me; in practice the conversation was unrelentingly superficial and continually attempting wit, jokes - a light and unattached attitude to life was prevalent.

I found this diet of daily discourse profoundly unsatisfying, and would travel the length of the country for a few hours of 'deep' talk with one of the handful of friends who were able and willing to provide it.

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Whether this is specifically English, and whether things have always been like this - I don't know.

But things are still the same - as far as I can judge.

Intellectual life is still populated almost exclusively by people who never drop their facade of unseriousness - indeed, who have perhaps become the facade such that there is nothing to drop. They are not 'hiding' anything; what you see is what there is.

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This applies even to writers, scholars, scientists whose work is interesting - whose work I admire and have benefited-from; many of them come across as utterly superficial people.

Specifically, the intellect seems to be dissociated from the emotions - so that there is no depth: nothing behind the surface rationality.

The facial expression, the eyes, are 'glassy' - even while the words may be eloquent.  

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I wonder, too, whether this could be a class thing, and an hereditary thing. My ancestors are 'working class', and I find that social conversation among people whose ancestors are solidly upper middle class generally strikes me as afflicted with this species of apparently inescapable triviality.

Presumably I strike them as dull, naive and over-serious.

But there it is!

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At the end of the day, the general intellectual discourse among English intellectuals is - I find, on the whole - disappointingly annoying and uninteresting: even at the highest level, among people that I would expect or hope to be enlightening.

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Professional, specialist conversation can, by contrast, be very interesting; and that was the basis for most of the best types of discourse; at least it *was*, until professional conversation became afflicted by political correctness, dishonesty, and fear.

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Since political correctness is (more or less) egalitarian in its aim, it is superficially hard to explain why the PC is so power-seeking: why they seek to subordinate every human decision (public or private) to government regulation. Surely this is to favour one group (the PC elite) above all others?

The answer is simple - albeit unconvincing.

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The aim is to take all power into the PC elite, who will use this power to make the world safe for PC - by using power to extirpate all trace of resistance to political correctness (all trace of racism, sexism and the various 'phobias') - and then to relinquish this power.

More exactly, to install systems that prevent all forms of prejudice - then when these systems are indestructibly installed - to walk away from power.

So that no individual human being or group of persons will have any more power than another human being or group of persons: all will be subject to the same algorithmic processes of social justice.

*

The unconvincing bit is that there will be nothing and nobody that makes the PC elite walk away from power. There is only the PC elite's trust in their own good intentions, and trust in their own ability to carry-out these good intentions.

Of course, the time to walk away from power will never come if there is any residual trace of non-PC resistance (real, or imagined)...

And since PC is social constructivist (believes neither in God/s nor in human nature) this means that to ensure they will indeed walk away from power, when the time comes, the PC elite must be sure first to brainwash themselves completely and irrevocably...

*

*

By Monk Vsevolod (Filipyev)

Reprinted from “Orthodox Russia,” No. 14, 2006

http://www.holy-transfiguration.org/library_en/mod_tolerance.html

*

Nowadays in Russia and in the whole world a certain principle has become topical – that of “tolerance.” The modern meaning of “tolerance” comes from the Latin tolerantia and is interpreted as “religious tolerance.” The concept of tolerance is being actively introduced into mass consciousness: entire books are written about tolerance, and diversely-scaled events are being conducted within its framework.

For Russian society the apotheosis of the policy of tolerance was the World Summit of Religious Leaders, which took place in Moscow on 3-5 July 2006 at the initiative of official representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate and clearly with the active support of the government. The summit gathered the leaders and delegates of Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Shinto communities from 49 countries. The final result of the work of this interfaith assembly was a joint “Declaration of the summit of religious leaders.”

(...)

The document states: “We need to build a world order which combines democracy – as the way of harmonizing different interests and as people’s participation in national and global decision-making – with respect for the moral feeling, way of life, various legal and political systems, and national and religious traditions of people.” That is, the superstructures may be different, but the base must be the same – democracy.

At this point the words of the righteous Saint John of Kronstadt come to mind, that “in hell there is democracy and in Heaven there is a Kingdom.” No matter how strange such words may appear to the modern “civilized” Christian, but if one stops to think, he will invariably come to the conclusion that at least the second part of the statement is correct.

Truly in Heaven – to which all Christians are striving – there is the Kingdom of God, and not a republic or a democracy.

(...)

 In the above-mentioned citation [the leaders of world religions] indicate directly the kind of world order we must establish, and they further explain that “the world should have many poles and many systems, meeting the requirements of all individuals and nations.” Thus not only all expressions of religious zeal, but all monocultures in general (which Christianity is to some degree) fall under the suspicion of being untrustworthy.

(...)
It seems to us that a substitution of concepts is now taking place: there is an attempt to replace genuine religious tolerance and love of mankind with indifference and lukewarmness.

Christ taught tolerance and love for all people, no matter what their faith: if a person is in need of help, he should be fed, clothed, visited in prison, or simply offered compassion. But Christ did not teach tolerance for such a person’s false beliefs. We must love people, but at the same time reject their false faiths.

(...)

Aside from the above-mentioned citations, the “Declaration” contains many more general words and utopian slogans, which are crowned, from the Orthodox point of view, with a truly apocalyptic appeal: “Let us help one another and all well-intentioned people in building a better future for the entire human family.”

Belief in a better future here on earth for the entire human family is – at best – the chiliastic heresy condemned by the Church, and – at worst – a conscious attempt to participate in the creation of the universal government of the universal ruler who, according to the Scriptures, will be the Antichrist. Such an appeal is already an open apostasy from the Christian doctrine expressed in the Creed: “I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come.”

Nowhere in the Creed does it speak of an expectation of earthly happiness for the entire human family, but it does clearly speak of an expectation of a forthcoming eternal life in Christ. In general, the entire contemporary principle of tolerance, with its fruits that are similar to the current Moscow summit – is very earthy and worldly.

*

We are subjected to an inexhaustible fund of naive (or hypocritical?) speeches about a bright future, about mankind’s universal overcoming of natural disasters, illnesses, and wars.

And not a word about the repentance that is truly needful for the salvation of mankind!

(***)


H/T Joanna Higginbotham - http://startingontheroyalpath.blogspot.com/

*

*

We live in a culture of suicide: a culture in which pleasure is the only good must inevitably be a culture of suicide since pleasure cannot be guaranteed - and when life has more suffering than pleasure, and the future prospect is bleak: why not suicide?

*

It is ironic that when 'life' - vitality, gratification, comfort, fun - is the primary goal, then the opposite predominates.

So that the whole argument boils down to short-termism versus long-termism.

The short-termist lives on a knife edge; but usually obliterates suffering ASAP with technology or any other available distraction.

The long-termist response is that when suffering overtops pleasure, then suicide should be considered seriously, and postponed (never utterly rejected) only if the long term quantity of pleasure outweighs the short term quantity of pain.

(But why should we suppose that gratification is arithmetical?)

*

"But, who knows what the future will bring... The safest thing is to die now, before there is a chance for anything bad to happen..." This sounds like parody - but surely it is precisely mainstream belief of teenage ethics, mainstream pop culture ethics, mainstream media ethics: the positive value placed on a beautiful corpse.

*

Then there is the intense interest in euthanasia, when pleasure is insufficient to compensate suffering then die; indeed why not die - get yourself killed - before you get to that point, to be on the safe side.

*

(Of course, it is equally insane to hold the view - which seems mainstream in the Roman Catholic Church, that it is on the one hand a duty for society to do anything and everything that the application of modern technology can devise to sustain human existence, and at the same time to regard the hastening of death - for instance by withdrawal of this modern technology - as utterly morally abhorrent.

(Apparently - by this reasoning - people must intervene technologically to prevent corporeal death, then must sustain at all or any cost whatever form of living-death may be a consequence of such intervention.

(But this is monstrous nonsense, and is indeed a variant of political correctness. A proper moral perspective on death surely entails an understanding that there is a right time and situation to die, and right level of intervention to prevent death - varying by context - and an acceptance of fate insofar as it can be discerned. And a recognition of the moral chasm between killing and letting-die.)

*

What is remarkable is that suicide is not endemic.

But maybe it is endemic, in the sense that political correctness is suicide - since any self-blinding, mandatorially non-consequential reasoning is implicitly suicidal.

*

[Note added - plus of course, the endemic suicide of awareness - the suicide of awareness from continuous distraction by compulsive and continuous usage of the mass media and electronic interpersonal communications, organized busyness, overwhelming pleasurable inputs including - junk food/ high cuisine, intoxicating or energizing drinks, drugs, sex, dreamy physical pleasures such as baths and sunbathing, exercise, shopping, fashion, fantasy... or whatever. Without the ability for most modern secular people most of the time to escape at will into such immersive stimuli - so abundantly provided by modern society - it is likely either that 'things would change' or else that actual physical suicide would be much commoner.)

*

(The politically correct are engaged in creating a society which they, personally, would find intolerable. How do they imagine that they would cope? Answer: they won't cope. They imagine that will either let themselves die or, if that is too slow or creates too much suffering, they will take matters into their own hands.)

*

I strongly suspect that a suicide fantasy lies behind the hedonism and political correctness of modern society. The idea that if, when, things don't work out - and it is time to pay the costs of recklessly self-gratifying and evasive policies, then there is a 'way out'.

*

All of this depends on the belief - unique to intellectuals living under modernity - that the soul is unreal and that there is no existence after death.

A belief in the unreality of the soul is a crutch to hedonism.

Extinction after death is the 'get out of jail free' card for political correctness.

*

*

From Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Oscar W Firkins, 1915

*

The secret of Emerson may be conveyed in one word, the superlative, even the superhuman, value which he found in the unit of experience, the direct, momentary, individual act of consciousness. This is the centre from which the man radiates; it begets all and explains all.

He may be defined as an experiment made by nature in the raising of the single perception or impression to a hitherto unimaginable value.

(...)

...the theory of the conduct of life is plain.

Life is a quest of thoughts, a pursuit of inspirations.

Beside these ends, land and goods and house and fame are nothing, and wife and child may count themselves lucky if they escape relegation to the class of baggage.

...for Emerson all values, even truth-values, are experimental; nothing counts that is not enjoyable, consumable, digestible; even knowledge is either nutriment or refuse.

(...)

Life is subjective, life is internal.

Receptiveness is the normal and happy state and conduct is instrumental to reception.

(...)

If the single experience is to be uniformly exalted, the universe must be cleared of evil; the grossest act or heaviest calamity must be viewed as the stammering of the divine power in its first untrained efforts to articulate.

Love, also, must be removed from individuals and concentrated on universal powers, if its riches are to be continuously available as the ornament and sustenance of life.

So, again, with the virtues. To give the moment its acme of exaltation, virtue must be viewed not in its special or partial aspect as justice, benevolence or fortitude, but in its supreme and pervasive aspect as the outcome and expression of the divine mind.

The whole philosophy contributes to the ascension and irradiation of the moment."

***


Comment.

Firkins' masterly compression of Emerson's masterly exposition of the philosophy of the moment is not - nowadays - distinctively Emersonian, but mainstream in the thought of the 'spiritual but not religious', New Age mode among the intellectual elites of the West.

This has been an expanding line of thought from the beginning of the industrial revolution and through the decline of Christianity among the elite (Emerson got it (selectively) from the Romantics and Transcendental philosophers - the difference being that for Emerson it was primary and primarily a matter of conduct).

For Emerson, the journal, a collection of such epiphanic moments, was the primary mode of literary production - from which all others (lectures, essays, poems) were derived.

*

To live consistently by the philosophy of the moment - which Emerson did only very intermittently, since he functioned as a respectable and industrious patriarch - would be the act of a conscienceless psychopath: a parasite at best and perhaps something much worse.

But that is mere name-calling - what is wrong with this philosophy is that it is self-refuting: a self-conscious celebration of un-self-conscious life: an intellectuals abstract reflection upon the unreflective animism of the child or tribesman.

The intellectual takes his best moments, his moments of animistic connection, of bliss; and constructs from them (or tries to construct) his life: these moments are (presumably) to be held in mind, in memory, and used as a background to the mundane - or at least as a holiday from the mundane.

But the act of identifying, collecting, reflecting upon these moments is itself a movement away from them; a movement into abstraction.

So that life is an oscillation; what is worse an oscillation in which the meaningless predominates.

*

But then, why continue to live?

If life is about the moment, best it is perhaps to die during the absolute moment - rather than trying (and mostly failing) to capture more such moments.

Indeed, if each moment - properly appreciated - is all; then why should we spend our efforts in trying to accumulate such pearls; why try to make life a continuous chain of pearls if a single pearl contains everything?

And yet life goes on.

*

Hence the Emersonian life contains meaning but no purpose; and its meaning is (or ought to be) once for all - except for the deficiencies of the human mind - of memory - or the limitations of circumstance.

So, even regarded strictly on its own terms (and leaving aside its incompatibility with Christian truth), the Emersonian life is impossible, paradoxical, un-liveable.

Yet at the same time it captures - magnificently, a partial truth: that every moment potentially contains eternity.

Humans glimpse this partial truth, but for creatures such as we are, living in time, this truth is properly subordinate.

*



 

*

Around 1995-1999 Ralph Waldo Emerson was probably my number one spiritual mentor  - the period culminated in a pilgrimage to Emerson's house in Concord, Massachusetts through which I wandered as if in a dream.

I never found him easy to read nor to understand, never found myself able to read much at a stretch; but I regarded Emerson as a great soul and an example of how to live - I consciously modelled my life on his.

As well as Emerson's essays, journals and letters; I read great quantities of biographies and memoirs - of which there are exceptional numbers in exceptionally high quality.

*

The first biography which made a really big impact was Robert D Richardson's Emerson: the mind on fire (1995).

My memories of the under-employed summers of 1996 and 1997 are sitting in the back garden on a blanket under the tree, reading this book, again and again.

*

Richardson provides a handy list of Emerson's key ideas (which did not change through his mature life). I would then have subscribed to all of these ideas, insofar as I understood them:

1. The days are gods. That is, everything is divine.
2. Creation is continuous. There is no other world; this one is all there is.
3. Every day is the day of judgment.
4. The purpose of life is individual self-cultivation, self-expression, and fulfillment.
5. Poetry liberates. Thought is also free.
6. The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs; each new day challenges us with its adequacy and our own.
8. Fundamental perceptions are intuitive and inarguable; all important truths, whether of physics or ethics, must at last be self--evident.
9. Nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm.
10. Life is an ecstasy; Thoreau has it right when he says, “Surely joy is the condition of life.”
11. Criticism and commentary, if they are not in the service of enthusiasm and ecstasy, are idle at best, destructive at worst. Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you love.”


*

Now I would regard them all - except perhaps number 11 - as wrong, profoundly wrong, dangerously wrong!


They were fine for Emerson himself, a good and gentle man who was brought up as a strict Calvinist then as a mild Unitarian - but lethal for elite consumption in a secular and materialist society - where indeed such ideas are more or less mainstream among people who have anything like a spirituality.


*

Emerson was reacting against the harshness and legalism of Calvinism, and against the arid rationality of  Unitarianism - and these were, indeed, indefensible.


It is the old, old story of heresy piled upon heresy - each new heresy forged by a genius who achieves remarkable results, great things; but who is followed by generations of disciples that progressively reveal the dark side of the Master - the incoherence, nihilism, selfishness and pride (that above all) which lies beneath the superficially exciting and liberating message.


*

I still read and enjoy Emerson, albeit in a bracketted and more selective way, and love to daydream of that brief decade or two of fresh, innocent New England Transcendentalism; but can never again let myself fall wholly under his intoxicating spell - or, at least, not for long.


*

*

Ever since the summer of 1981 I have been periodically re-reading a trilogy of JD Salinger novellas: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, Zooey and Seymour: an introduction (supplemented by the linked long short story of For Esme - with love and squalor.

(At the time I also loved Catcher in the Rye, but have never felt inclined to re-read it since.)

Sometimes I think I have left behind the Glass family saga, but it turns out not; I keep returning.

*

The reason is probably somewhat related to my loving for Tolkien - the sense of reality, depth, detail - the impression that these are not fictions but windows onto a world.

*

I also revel in the precision and (yet) flexibility of the writing. Every re-read I seem to notice things I hadn't noticed before.

This corresponds to the way the stories were written. They were revised (and the last two were edited, by William Shawn - editor of the New Yorker) over many months and hundreds of hours, literally word by word.

While this minute obsessiveness would probably kill most authors (it would certainly kill me!), and would certainly kill their prose - it created something unique and wonderful in this instance.

*

My favourite sentence - from RHTRBC is the first in this passage:

It was a day, God knows, not only of rampant signs and symbols but of wildly extensive communication via the written word. If you jumped into crowded cars, Fate took circuitous pains, before you did any jumping, that you had a pad and pencil with you, just in case one of your fellow-passengers was a deaf-mute. If you slipped into bathrooms, you did well to look up to see if there were any little messages, faintly apocalyptical or otherwise, posted high over the washbowl.

*

Salinger was also a very interesting personality, and was last year the subject of one of the most impressive biographies of my experience: J.D.Salinger: a life raised high, by Kenneth Slawenski.

The most surprising discovery of which was to learn that Salinger experienced just about the most arduous conceivable frontline military campaign of the Western Sphere of WWII, from the D-Day landings, through the Battle of the Bulge and up to the surrender of Germany.

That fact is worth holding at the back of the mind when contemplating the jewelled fastidiousness of his fiction.

*

*

One of the reasons that mainstream moral commentary is asinine is that people pretend to evaluate issues impartially - this is regarded as the only sophisticated approach, the only sound and decent approach.

For instance, in discussing wars, or religious conflicts, or national conflicts; educated people are extremely careful not to talk in terms of a good and bad side - that would be to descend to the level of children - at best - and more likely that of genocidal Nazis (or whatever...).

This is, of course, complete and utter nonsense.

Moral disputes can only be evaluated after a decision concerning who are the 'goodies' and who are the 'baddies'

- everyone throughout human history knew this until a few decades ago; and the vast majority of the people in the world still regard this as obvious and unchallengeable common sense.

Yet, within the bubble of Western political correctness, the media, the education system, public administration, NGOs, and (especially) the mass media - everybody insists upon and operates on the insane, self-destructive and evil assumption that ethical maturity entails impartiality!

*

Watch out for this! Before embarking on a moral discussion insist that protagonists define who they regard as the goodies and who as the baddies - insist that all participants state who they want to win. 

*

*

The Notion Club Papers - an unfinished, posthumously published novel by JRR Tolkien - open with the character Ramer's accounts of what are often termed Lucid Dreams - that is, dreams in which the dreamer is aware they are dreaming, has some degree of control of the dream, and in which the dream experience feels real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream

One question is whether Tolkien uses Lucid Dreaming as a literary device (although at the time he was writing there was no concept of Lucid Dreaming - but there was a long tradition of dreams of this type - whether shamanic, mystical, prophetic or pure imagination or fantasy - e.g. 'opium dreams'); or whether, on the other hand, Tolkien was using Ramer to report his own experiences.

I have argued in my Notion Club Papers blog that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Tolkien was indeed expressing his own dream experiences in a fictional form.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/

*

This inference has now been confirmed for me by a personal experience of Lucid Dreaming.

From this it is even clearer that Ramer's experiences are consistent with being precise reports of Tolkien's experience of Lucid Dreaming.

*

From the perspective of the NCPs, the striking feature of a Lucid Dream is the feeling of sensory contact with the dream world.

In most instances, dreams are 'dreamy' - they have a feeling of imprecise unreality due to the constant shifting of association and the shortness of memory - so that the dream is happening to the dreamer (who is trying, but failing, to make sense of it), rather than in Lucid Dreams being dreamed-by the dreamer.

The Lucid Dream is not 'dreamy' - except in that it is known to be a dream, and that events unfold in a somewhat slow motion and emphatically experienced way. By contrast, it is more sensitively appreciated and considered than normal everyday reality: as if realer than real.

*

Furthermore, in a Lucid Dream moral agency is preserved: the dreamer consciously makes choices. This chimes with Tolkien's discussion in NCPs that there is potential for evil influences to enter dreams, but that this can only happen if the influences are invited by the dreamer.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2010/10/evil-minds-attacking-during-sleep.html

By contrast, normal dreaming is not subject to the agency of the dreamer, and the dreamer is not responsible for what he dreams - because he cannot help what he dreams.

*

Assuming that Tolkien was indeed a Lucid Dreamer - and one for whom this was a regular experience, rather than my own one off experience - this leads onto further speculations.

The Lucid Dream turns out to be phenomenologically (experientially) identical to Tolkien's description of how elves might create Faerian Drama (as described in the essay On Fairy Stories and again discussed in the NCPs) - I mean the presumed elves experience of creating this kind of drama.

*

Furthermore, the rather overwhelming experience of Lucid Dreaming raises may of the problems about fantasy, its validity - and the nature of that validity, and the potential benefits and hazards; matters with which Tolkien so often grappled in his writings.

After all, Lucid Dreaming approximates to being given Absolute Power, and none knew better than Tolkien that Absolute Power has a strong tendency to corrupt.

*

In sum, I am suggesting that Faery, for Tolkien, was directly experienced via Lucid Dreams; and in that sense he was an intermittent visitor to Faery; and perhaps in that sense it was fear of a cessation of Lucid Dreaming which provoked Tolkiens mid-life poem The Sea Bell/ Frodo's Dreme/ Looney - and when the Lucid Dreams had actually stopped in Tolkien's experience, provoked Tolkien's late story of Smith of Wootton Major. The story was his farewell to Faery.

*

I make the tentative guess that Tolkien was always aware of the fragility and unpredictability of his ability to experience Lucid Dreams of Faery; and that when Tolkien stopped having Lucid Dreams in later life, he was (as it were) no longer 'allowed' to visit Faery himself, but had only fading memories of these experiences, and the hope that the ability would be passed-on to others - as the Faery star was passed-on by the eponymous Smith.

*

*

Why are the most selective schools and universities so highly valued?

After all, if you control for intelligence and personality, differences between schools and colleges make approximately zero difference to 'hard' life outcomes such as jobs and salaries

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/07/replacing-education-with-psychometrics.html

So, as we realize that elite education nowadays makes no real difference, people are ever-more hysterical about its importance.

The reason for the elite education bubble, regular readers will not be surprised to hear, comes down to political correctness.

*

Of course, what content you learn does make a difference - but a big feature of the education bubble is that people are all-but-indifferent to educational content: what is important is going to the prestigious schools and colleges - simply attending elite educational institutions, as a warm body...

(And of course, it must be officially attending the institution: since 'merely' getting the benefit of teaching - as an elective student or or 'auditing' courses - does not count. This relies on elite institutions as proving a reliable 'screen' for admissions - but implicitly acknowledges that, aside from this, they are not superior.)

(Yet we know for sure that admission to elite institutions are not a reliable screen - since they all deploy affirmative action, and also admit women and men in equal proportions - or an excess of women, both of which mean they cannot be picking the highest aptitude students.)

*

Well, it doesn't make sense until you remember what intellectuals 'know' when (as they almost all are) in thrall to political correctness.

1. PC Intellectuals know (correctly) that there are big differences in average success between the graduates of different educational institutions - they know (correctly) that the children in their PC Intellectual social circles almost-all get into elite educational institutions and move onto elite jobs.

So they seek an explanation...

2. PC Intellectuals 'know' (falsely) that all humans are equal in ability when they are conceived, because they 'know' that intelligence and personality (and other factors that influence success) are equally distributed between sexes, social classes, and races.

3. PC Intellectuals also 'know' that the intelligence and personality are NOT hereditary (or, at least, not to any significant extent) - these are 'known' to be shaped by childhood experience.

4. PC Intellectuals therefore 'know' that intrinsically everybody can do anything - unless prevented from doing so by their environment.

5. PC Intellectuals therefore 'know' that the huge differences in adult success 'must' be caused (substantially) by educational differences.

6. Therefore, PC Intellectuals 'know' that if they can 'get their kids into' the most successful schools and colleges, their children will have the best chance of success. Therefore elite education is perceived as an investment. It may cost a lot of time, money and effort, but all this will be worth it in the long term.

*

Hence the hysteria around access to elite education, and the rapidly inflating prices.

All a consequence of politically correct 'knowledge'.

*

*

Anyone who hopes that resurgent Western Catholicism might be the force that defeats policial correctness/ liberalism should take a look at this wonderful blog:

http://badvestments.blogspot.com/

The content is very funny - at first; but then induces despair.

*

For a shred of hope you might then take a look at:

http://www.sspx.co.uk/

which has an inspiring banner on Google Search that reads:

"Dedicated to providing training for the Catholic priesthood without any trace of modernist doctrine, morals or worship."

"...without any trace..." - I love that bit!

*

(Sadly, there is an awful lot of Bad Vestments Catholocism: while the SSPX brand is very small and continually persecuted... although certainly things have improved consderably under Pope Benedict XVI.)

*