A note about the day: I've read the idiotic Fulton County indictment, and have nothing new to say about it. It's madness, and a symbol of decline and institutional failure. See this discussion:
First time reader sticking my neck out for the hell of it.
In New Zealand, in the middle of the North Island is an 'historic' castle called 'The Chateau'. Gorgeous place. It was deliberately sabotaged over the years with poor management, overseas investors etc., the usual routine employed to destroy a nations heritage
This is happening in all the five eyes countries- the 'countries of intelligence'.
They are trying to tell us something. The intellect built the modern material world.
Nietzsche said God was dead and we killed him for the overuse of our collective intellect. Iain McGilchrist says the left brain (intellect) used exclusively, will destroy itself.
These five eyes countries built the globe with their intellect and refuse to let go.
They're trying to get us to let go of the material world and seek options.
Those options are not of this world. And in case anyone accuses me of being a christian, I am not. Religion is an external crutch as well, and has to be abandoned, just like our attachments to the material world.
I live in Georgia now, and have lived in many parts of the country, from New England, Indiana, Northern California, Philadelphia, northern and Tidewater Virginia, Charleston, the lower Hudson Valley. One generality that is bad and yet funny everywhere I live is the disdain for neighboring states. My late father swore at Maryland drivers when he was stationed at the Pentagon. My husband, a Georgia native with a lineage of many generations, told me regretfully that the first winner of the Georgia state lottery was from Alabama, where he said he was going to buy him a double wide. Charleston looks down on Savannah as founded by convicts. My new neighbors moved here from Michigan and I was shocked and a little hurt by their blunt assessment of Indiana as a state of losers, but then I remembered hearing Kentucky similarly dismissed when I lived there...
Leftist miserablists have to problemize everything. They have no appreciation for history, and are always using modern standards to judge the past. This "presentism" is what gave rise to the statuary purgation during the Floyd riots, and which continues to this day.
Much of Vermont has poor/no cell coverage. I have a TracFone for emergencies; if I need to use it I've got to drive 9 miles to the next village to get a signal. It never occurred to any of us that this is a hardship.
Your comment reminded me of this article by Rod Dreher, "Amalfi Coast, You Have Failed Lexi Jordan" in which a young "influencer" finds that carrying her own suitcase on vacation in one of the world's most beautiful places is "literal manual labor".
Tracks perfectly with the apotheosis of laziness we are witnessing among the modern youth: without any sort of meaning to which to aspire, they consider the challenges of adulthood to be unnecessary "hardships" and sacrifices to be superfluous. Witness the "antiwork" movement gaining popularity (though some blame must indubitably be placed upon our modern capitalistic economy).
"The dismal culture war in America is, among other things, a struggle between people who value a complex past and want to protect it, and people who can’t see the past because they only see themselves in everything. Every community working to save a historic structure is a rebuke to their emptiness."
Narcissism is a key word here. We think we're better, smarter, holier than those bad old Americans of the past. We should know we have our own unique flaws and blind spots. Even as we've made progress in some area, we've regressed in others.
"Greatness" as in MAGA should not be a personal measure. But narcissism sees everything as connected to the self. And this is true of politics as well. Trump is a narcissist. So too is Biden. Most politicians are. They are surrounded by fawners and lackeys. Trump and Biden: each is hollow in his own unique way.
Give me a leader with vision, committed to serving the public, especially the working classes, and I give this country a better chance. And give me people who are selfless rather than committed to taking selfies, and I give this nation a better chance.
Re-create the CCC (civilian conservation corps) and rebuild our country. Call the imperial troops home and put them to work here. America needs to save itself rather than trying to dominate the world.
Let's start by saving our history, and knowing it as well, warts and all.
I'd love for there to be "a leader with vision, committed to serving the public, especially the working classes...." I don't think I've seen that IRL in my lifetime.
The people trying to re-write history are self-absorbed narcissists that probably haven't worked hard a day in their lives - where else would they get all the time to brood about themselves?
Aug 15, 2023·edited Aug 15, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
The decline of historical consciousness. Family is the generator of historical consciousness. Family declines and individuals have less and less personal history apart from their own experiences. They can't imagine a family or tribal history, because they are unaware of their own. Their tribe hates tribalism.
The more disconnected you are from the history of your parents, the more disconnected you are from all history. We aren't repudiating our constitution and the rule of law. We can't remember the context of the people (our people) who bequeathed it to us.
I think that’s largely a result of never actually reading primary sources - getting social studies through textbook treatments instead of learning history by engaging with the actual actors in the record they’ve left us.
Aug 16, 2023·edited Aug 16, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
I offer Winston Churchill as a modern example of what I am talking about. Few men of the last century had a keener historical consciousness. When he started writing histories (biographies) he literally wrote about his father, Randolph, and his forefather, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. One of the few places here you can use the word 'literally' correctly.
The profoundly historical Torah is, again, literally a family history. But, talk about primary sources, you've got me there.
Historical consciousness, exists perhaps most pervasively in illiterate, primative societies. Their problem is they are failures at remembering. History is, after all, the remembered past. We can't remember long if we can't record the words. Primary sources are necessary to develop and mature historical consciousness. But written sources birth no baby. We need the flesh and the blood. We need to hear historical consciousness as we learn to talk. Because that is how we learn to think.
Good luck with that watching Sesame Street. The internet is 100 times worse.
Great article. It reinforces in me the thought that much of the moral outrage that is so prevalent in the U.S. these days (and to an extent the world at large) is human nature and its insularity. People tend to believe that what they experience in their lifetime is what has always been the norm - they never look past it. Even within their lifetimes, they tend to forget what things were like 5 minutes ago, much less 5 decades ago. This notion of insular thinking was reinforced this morning reading Raymon Ibrahim's essay on Rutger's University professor Brittany Cooper, who has come under fire for expressing the belief that 'all whites. need to be taken out...because they are committed to being villains', and that it is only whites who ever participated in the subjugation and enslavement of other people, all of whom were non-whites. Mr. Ibrahim goes on to give a short tutorial on the origins of the word 'slave' and just whom it was that did a good portion of the enslaving. To Ms. Cooper, it was only black and brown people who were victims and only whites who were perpetrators. Her ancestors (of likely people who looked like her and her ancestors) were enslaved, so, we have that for evidence of her 'lived experience'.
The second article that caught my eye this morning is on UnHerd, by John Michael Greer, titled 'Stormtrooper Syndrome Has Seduced The West', which posits that the undying support at all costs of the Ukraine effort to defeat Russia is buoyed by this notion that Ukraine will not lose because they are the Good Guys, and the Russians are the Bad Guys and the Good Guys always prevail. I guess history is not studied much in the West.
One more indication of the notion of insular thinking is the very derisive - in my view at least - use of the term 'flyover country', as if the land in between the coasts (you know, where all of the 'good people' live, is just an inconvenient obstacle in getting from good point A to good point B. Besides, those 'flyover people' don't think right anyway, and their way of life is yucky.
What is not experienced by me has not and is not experienced by anyone....
Thanks for the YouTube links. You were spot on about the narcissism of the current empty vessels asserting their moral superiority under the guise of criticizing America's past.
The narcissistic infantilism engulfing our society is a major factor in our malaise. It’s compounded by superficiality brought on by partial mastery of nature via technological advancement and endless propaganda aimed at glorification of commercial success, physical beauty, and a vacuum of meaningful intellectual and emotional dialogue. We’ve now perfected the transactional model of interpersonal relationships. Pay a fee for an app, select a sexually appealing potential mate /profile , make a “match”, move on. Rinse and repeat. Simultaneously nobody knows nuffin’.
Reading a book? Passé for the vast majority.
Dig in and get the real story- not happening for the sheeple.
There is no country with a morally pristine past. Nor is there any country with a morally pristine future. The national struggle session underway won’t make us a better place. It will make us dumber, meaner, poorer , and unhealthier. It’s already done this to us. Instinct is not to be ignored. When your reptilian brain tells you it’s about to get real, pay attention. Joe Biden’s talking carcass should make the hair on your neck stand up.
This country has many good and capable people with astounding talent. The small town is making a comeback in some places. People want out of the “Deep State prison cities”. We are not destined to be turned into Commie pagans with nanosecond attention spans by corrupt perpetually scamming imbeciles, but we have to fix it. Nobody else is gonna swoop down in a cape and write our history. No time like the present.
The dismal culture war in America is, among other things, a struggle between people who value a complex past and want to protect it, and people who can’t see the past because they only see themselves in everything.
It is due to sentences like this I became, and continue to be, a paid subscriber.
i belong to a group on facebook called Our Old House. i am continually amazed by the number of young couples who take on massive restoration projects and post photos of some glorious old relic, saying "this is our first house and we can't wait to bring her back to her original glory." when i can't take another minute of Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates telling me i have to be happy in the carbon neutral future of owning nothing that they envision for me, i take great comfort in seeing the energy and the pride that these people take in saving and restoring beautiful old structures and i have faith that they will defend their homes with every fiber of their being.
I made my first cross country trip from NYC to Eugene, Oregon in 1971. My roommate and I were students at the University of Oregon. I never realized how big America was and how different. The first McDonalds I was in was in Iowa. The counter girl was wearing a uniform and called me , "Sir." Dinner cost about a $1.10. Radio stations lasted about thirty miles but it didn't matter because it was all so different; the people, the topography and the endless road. Coming out of the Cascades into California was the reality of the first chapter of Steinbeck's East of Eden. I imagine if I was a nineteen year old today making that trip I would have missed most of it because my eyes and consciousness would have been focused on my IPhone!
Lots of accounts of American history focus on The Frontier, or the Individual and His Expansion of the Founders' Rights, or set-up a bad-capitalist Individualism v. good-bohemian Individualism mixed in with accounts about the Federal Govt's role in all that, and there are other basic framings, such as hard-core libertarian ones, ethnicity-is-the-key ones, etc., but one theme and driver way too often left out is the importance of the small community, of the TOWN, something not at all negligible, at least up until the 1930s or 1960s. And town's history, oddly enough, is often linked to that of the congregation, or at least two or three (typically feud-prone) congregations. See As a City Upon a Hill: The Town in Americans History, by Page Smith, or the less brass-tacks more intellectual-history book The Idea of Fraternity in America, by Wilson Carey McWilliams.
A note about the day: I've read the idiotic Fulton County indictment, and have nothing new to say about it. It's madness, and a symbol of decline and institutional failure. See this discussion:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/15/how-stupid-is-the-georgia-anti-trump-case-they-indicted-trump-for-tweeting-at-people-to-watch-tv/
And read the whole indictment here:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23909543-23sc188947-criminal-indictment
See also:
https://www.revolver.news/2023/08/with-this-one-little-trick-affirmative-action-georgia-da-magically-made-trump-tweets-illegal/
First time reader sticking my neck out for the hell of it.
In New Zealand, in the middle of the North Island is an 'historic' castle called 'The Chateau'. Gorgeous place. It was deliberately sabotaged over the years with poor management, overseas investors etc., the usual routine employed to destroy a nations heritage
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/483676/chateau-tongariro-closes-its-doors-permanently-today
This is happening in all the five eyes countries- the 'countries of intelligence'.
They are trying to tell us something. The intellect built the modern material world.
Nietzsche said God was dead and we killed him for the overuse of our collective intellect. Iain McGilchrist says the left brain (intellect) used exclusively, will destroy itself.
These five eyes countries built the globe with their intellect and refuse to let go.
They're trying to get us to let go of the material world and seek options.
Those options are not of this world. And in case anyone accuses me of being a christian, I am not. Religion is an external crutch as well, and has to be abandoned, just like our attachments to the material world.
Depressing to see that hotel die. Thanks for this.
It's really sad.
I mean, it's frustrating and breathtakingly shameless, as well -- but I weep for my country.
Been feeling the same way since they stole the 2020 election.
Ya'll ever been to Georgia? Not a hot bed of intellect.
Lived there. The Fort Formerly Known as Benning. I liked it! Athens and Savannah, especially.
Some people left their hearts in San Francisco. I left a large chunk of my liver in Athens
And enjoyed every second of it.
I'm sorry.
LOL
😉
Me too...
Hooah, Airborne❗️
I haven't been there, but I'd have to agree with you at this point!
Typical of Atlanta, not the state as a whole.
All generalities are bad.
-Georgia native
I live in Georgia now, and have lived in many parts of the country, from New England, Indiana, Northern California, Philadelphia, northern and Tidewater Virginia, Charleston, the lower Hudson Valley. One generality that is bad and yet funny everywhere I live is the disdain for neighboring states. My late father swore at Maryland drivers when he was stationed at the Pentagon. My husband, a Georgia native with a lineage of many generations, told me regretfully that the first winner of the Georgia state lottery was from Alabama, where he said he was going to buy him a double wide. Charleston looks down on Savannah as founded by convicts. My new neighbors moved here from Michigan and I was shocked and a little hurt by their blunt assessment of Indiana as a state of losers, but then I remembered hearing Kentucky similarly dismissed when I lived there...
Leftist miserablists have to problemize everything. They have no appreciation for history, and are always using modern standards to judge the past. This "presentism" is what gave rise to the statuary purgation during the Floyd riots, and which continues to this day.
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/the-great-statucide
I'm going to use "miserablists" forever.
Le Miserablisme!
They have an elite too....the miserabliscenti
I think James Lileks coined "miserabilism" and it's one of the the great neologisms of the 21st century.
I liked the play, Less Miserable, and look forward to the sequel, Even More Miserable.
Basket of miserablists
Miserablists love company.
but only in the virtual world, where everyone is safe 24/7. reality is way too messy - germs and stuff
Clever! Infinite possibilities ;)
i have to agree!
They don’t teach history anymore and very few people take the time to read a book about any historical event.
Nowadays not having a strong cell phone signal on a drive is considered a hardship.
Much of Vermont has poor/no cell coverage. I have a TracFone for emergencies; if I need to use it I've got to drive 9 miles to the next village to get a signal. It never occurred to any of us that this is a hardship.
Your comment reminded me of this article by Rod Dreher, "Amalfi Coast, You Have Failed Lexi Jordan" in which a young "influencer" finds that carrying her own suitcase on vacation in one of the world's most beautiful places is "literal manual labor".
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/dreher/amalfi-coast-you-have-failed-lexi-jordan/
Great article linked!
Thanks!
I consider it a benefit.
I agree but then how do I get likes and clicks?🤣🤣
Tracks perfectly with the apotheosis of laziness we are witnessing among the modern youth: without any sort of meaning to which to aspire, they consider the challenges of adulthood to be unnecessary "hardships" and sacrifices to be superfluous. Witness the "antiwork" movement gaining popularity (though some blame must indubitably be placed upon our modern capitalistic economy).
"The dismal culture war in America is, among other things, a struggle between people who value a complex past and want to protect it, and people who can’t see the past because they only see themselves in everything. Every community working to save a historic structure is a rebuke to their emptiness."
What a beautiful paragraph.
The left (Marxist) don't want the public educated in history.
They plan on repeating it.
Narcissism is a key word here. We think we're better, smarter, holier than those bad old Americans of the past. We should know we have our own unique flaws and blind spots. Even as we've made progress in some area, we've regressed in others.
"Greatness" as in MAGA should not be a personal measure. But narcissism sees everything as connected to the self. And this is true of politics as well. Trump is a narcissist. So too is Biden. Most politicians are. They are surrounded by fawners and lackeys. Trump and Biden: each is hollow in his own unique way.
Give me a leader with vision, committed to serving the public, especially the working classes, and I give this country a better chance. And give me people who are selfless rather than committed to taking selfies, and I give this nation a better chance.
Re-create the CCC (civilian conservation corps) and rebuild our country. Call the imperial troops home and put them to work here. America needs to save itself rather than trying to dominate the world.
Let's start by saving our history, and knowing it as well, warts and all.
I'd love for there to be "a leader with vision, committed to serving the public, especially the working classes...." I don't think I've seen that IRL in my lifetime.
DJT 2024
25 in 25
That's a vision
The people trying to re-write history are self-absorbed narcissists that probably haven't worked hard a day in their lives - where else would they get all the time to brood about themselves?
"... and people who can’t see the past because they only see themselves in everything."
Genius.
The decline of historical consciousness. Family is the generator of historical consciousness. Family declines and individuals have less and less personal history apart from their own experiences. They can't imagine a family or tribal history, because they are unaware of their own. Their tribe hates tribalism.
"Family is the generator of historical consciousness."
An interesting thought.
The more disconnected you are from the history of your parents, the more disconnected you are from all history. We aren't repudiating our constitution and the rule of law. We can't remember the context of the people (our people) who bequeathed it to us.
I think that’s largely a result of never actually reading primary sources - getting social studies through textbook treatments instead of learning history by engaging with the actual actors in the record they’ve left us.
I offer Winston Churchill as a modern example of what I am talking about. Few men of the last century had a keener historical consciousness. When he started writing histories (biographies) he literally wrote about his father, Randolph, and his forefather, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. One of the few places here you can use the word 'literally' correctly.
The profoundly historical Torah is, again, literally a family history. But, talk about primary sources, you've got me there.
Historical consciousness, exists perhaps most pervasively in illiterate, primative societies. Their problem is they are failures at remembering. History is, after all, the remembered past. We can't remember long if we can't record the words. Primary sources are necessary to develop and mature historical consciousness. But written sources birth no baby. We need the flesh and the blood. We need to hear historical consciousness as we learn to talk. Because that is how we learn to think.
Good luck with that watching Sesame Street. The internet is 100 times worse.
Great article. It reinforces in me the thought that much of the moral outrage that is so prevalent in the U.S. these days (and to an extent the world at large) is human nature and its insularity. People tend to believe that what they experience in their lifetime is what has always been the norm - they never look past it. Even within their lifetimes, they tend to forget what things were like 5 minutes ago, much less 5 decades ago. This notion of insular thinking was reinforced this morning reading Raymon Ibrahim's essay on Rutger's University professor Brittany Cooper, who has come under fire for expressing the belief that 'all whites. need to be taken out...because they are committed to being villains', and that it is only whites who ever participated in the subjugation and enslavement of other people, all of whom were non-whites. Mr. Ibrahim goes on to give a short tutorial on the origins of the word 'slave' and just whom it was that did a good portion of the enslaving. To Ms. Cooper, it was only black and brown people who were victims and only whites who were perpetrators. Her ancestors (of likely people who looked like her and her ancestors) were enslaved, so, we have that for evidence of her 'lived experience'.
The second article that caught my eye this morning is on UnHerd, by John Michael Greer, titled 'Stormtrooper Syndrome Has Seduced The West', which posits that the undying support at all costs of the Ukraine effort to defeat Russia is buoyed by this notion that Ukraine will not lose because they are the Good Guys, and the Russians are the Bad Guys and the Good Guys always prevail. I guess history is not studied much in the West.
One more indication of the notion of insular thinking is the very derisive - in my view at least - use of the term 'flyover country', as if the land in between the coasts (you know, where all of the 'good people' live, is just an inconvenient obstacle in getting from good point A to good point B. Besides, those 'flyover people' don't think right anyway, and their way of life is yucky.
What is not experienced by me has not and is not experienced by anyone....
Thanks for the YouTube links. You were spot on about the narcissism of the current empty vessels asserting their moral superiority under the guise of criticizing America's past.
The narcissistic infantilism engulfing our society is a major factor in our malaise. It’s compounded by superficiality brought on by partial mastery of nature via technological advancement and endless propaganda aimed at glorification of commercial success, physical beauty, and a vacuum of meaningful intellectual and emotional dialogue. We’ve now perfected the transactional model of interpersonal relationships. Pay a fee for an app, select a sexually appealing potential mate /profile , make a “match”, move on. Rinse and repeat. Simultaneously nobody knows nuffin’.
Reading a book? Passé for the vast majority.
Dig in and get the real story- not happening for the sheeple.
There is no country with a morally pristine past. Nor is there any country with a morally pristine future. The national struggle session underway won’t make us a better place. It will make us dumber, meaner, poorer , and unhealthier. It’s already done this to us. Instinct is not to be ignored. When your reptilian brain tells you it’s about to get real, pay attention. Joe Biden’s talking carcass should make the hair on your neck stand up.
This country has many good and capable people with astounding talent. The small town is making a comeback in some places. People want out of the “Deep State prison cities”. We are not destined to be turned into Commie pagans with nanosecond attention spans by corrupt perpetually scamming imbeciles, but we have to fix it. Nobody else is gonna swoop down in a cape and write our history. No time like the present.
re
The dismal culture war in America is, among other things, a struggle between people who value a complex past and want to protect it, and people who can’t see the past because they only see themselves in everything.
It is due to sentences like this I became, and continue to be, a paid subscriber.
i belong to a group on facebook called Our Old House. i am continually amazed by the number of young couples who take on massive restoration projects and post photos of some glorious old relic, saying "this is our first house and we can't wait to bring her back to her original glory." when i can't take another minute of Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates telling me i have to be happy in the carbon neutral future of owning nothing that they envision for me, i take great comfort in seeing the energy and the pride that these people take in saving and restoring beautiful old structures and i have faith that they will defend their homes with every fiber of their being.
i know i'm not leaving my house alive!
I made my first cross country trip from NYC to Eugene, Oregon in 1971. My roommate and I were students at the University of Oregon. I never realized how big America was and how different. The first McDonalds I was in was in Iowa. The counter girl was wearing a uniform and called me , "Sir." Dinner cost about a $1.10. Radio stations lasted about thirty miles but it didn't matter because it was all so different; the people, the topography and the endless road. Coming out of the Cascades into California was the reality of the first chapter of Steinbeck's East of Eden. I imagine if I was a nineteen year old today making that trip I would have missed most of it because my eyes and consciousness would have been focused on my IPhone!
In 1971 my family drove across the country as well. My two sisters had their noses in books the whole three days.
Technology changes people don't.
Lots of accounts of American history focus on The Frontier, or the Individual and His Expansion of the Founders' Rights, or set-up a bad-capitalist Individualism v. good-bohemian Individualism mixed in with accounts about the Federal Govt's role in all that, and there are other basic framings, such as hard-core libertarian ones, ethnicity-is-the-key ones, etc., but one theme and driver way too often left out is the importance of the small community, of the TOWN, something not at all negligible, at least up until the 1930s or 1960s. And town's history, oddly enough, is often linked to that of the congregation, or at least two or three (typically feud-prone) congregations. See As a City Upon a Hill: The Town in Americans History, by Page Smith, or the less brass-tacks more intellectual-history book The Idea of Fraternity in America, by Wilson Carey McWilliams.