Worker and Parasite

In this episode Jerry and Stably discuss True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier by Vernor Vinge et al. Next time we'll discuss The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch.

In this episode we discuss Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann. Next time we will discuss True Names by Vernor Vinge. Some highlights from Whiteshift: Many people desire roots, value tradition and wish to maintain continuity with ancestors who have occupied a historic territory. This means we’re more likely to experience what I term Whiteshift, a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage, but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions No one who has honestly analysed survey data on individuals – the gold standard for public opinion research – can deny that white majority concern over immigration is the main cause of the rise of the populist right in the West. This is primarily explained by concern over identity, not economic threat. We are entering a period of cultural instability in the West attendant on our passage between two relatively stable equilibria. The first is based on white ethnic homogeneity, the second on what the prescient centrist writer Michael Lind calls ‘beige’ ethnicity, i.e. a racially mixed majority group. In the middle lies a turbulent multicultural interregnum. We in the West are becoming less like homogeneous Iceland and more like homogeneous mixed-race Turkmenistan. But to get there we’ll be passing through a phase where we’ll move closer to multicultural Guyana or Mauritius. The challenge is to enable conservative whites to see a future for themselves in Whiteshift – the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation. Anyone who wants to explain what’s happening in the West needs to answer two simple questions. First, why are right-wing populists doing better than left-wing ones? Second, why did the migration crisis boost populist-right numbers sharply while the economic crisis had no overall effect? If we stick to data, the answer is crystal clear. Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to understanding the populist moment. Because Western nations were generally formed by a dominant white ethnic group, whose myths and symbols – such as the proper name ‘Norway’ – became the nation’s, the two concepts overlap in the minds of many. White majorities possess an ‘ethnic’ module, an extra string to their national identity which minorities lack. Ethnic majorities thereby express their ethnic identity as nationalism. I contend that today’s white majorities are likely to successfully absorb minority populations while their core myths and boundary symbols endure. This will involve a change in the physical appearance of the median Westerner, hence Whiteshift, though linguistic and religious markers are less likely to be affected. Getting from where we are now, where most Westerners share the racial and religious features of their ethnic archetype, to the situation in a century or two, when most will be what we now term ‘mixed-race’, is vital to understanding our present condition. In our more peaceful, post-ideological, demographically turbulent world, migration-led ethnic change is altering the basis of politics from class to ethnicity. On one side is a conservative coalition of whites who are attached to their heritage joined by minorities who value the white tradition; on the other side a progressive alliance of minorities who identify with their ethnic identity combined with whites who are agnostic or hostile towards theirs. Among whites, ethno-demographic change polarizes people between ‘tribal’ ethnics who value their particularity and ‘religious’ post-ethnics who prioritize universalist creeds such as John McWhorter’s ‘religion of anti-racism’. Whites can fight ethnic change by voting for right-wing populists or committing terrorist acts. They may repress anxieties in the name of ‘politically correct’ anti-racism, but cracks in this moral edifice are appearing. Many opt to flee by avoiding diverse neighbourhoods, schools and social networks. And other whites may choose to join the newcomers, first in friendship, subsequently in marriage. Intermarriage promises to erode the rising diversity which underlies our current malaise. Religion evolved to permit cooperation in larger units.31 Our predisposition towards religion, morality and reputation – all of which can transcend the tribe – reflects our adaptation to larger social units. Be that as it may, humans have lived in large groups only in the very recent past, so it is reasonable to assume tribalism is a more powerful aspect of our evolutionary psychology than our willingness to abide by a moral code. Today what we increasingly see in the West is a battle between the ‘tribal’ populist right and the ‘religious’ anti-racist left. Much of this book is concerned with the clash between a rising white tribalism and an ideology I term ‘left-modernism’. A sociologist member of the ‘New York Intellectuals’ group of writers and literary cri

On the podcast this week, Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump by Andrey Mir. Next time: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann and Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the "Real America" by Kevin D. Williamson. Some highlights from Postjournalism: The greatest harm caused by media is polarization, and the biggest issue is that polarization has become systemically embedded into both social media and the mass media. Polarization is not merely a side effect but has morphed into a condition of their business. Engagement, much needed for the platforms’ business, appeared to be tied to polarization. The news media business used to be funded predominantly by advertising, but advertising fled to the internet. The entire news media industry was forced to switch to another source of funding – reader revenue. People almost always already know the news before they come to news websites because they invariably start their daily media routine with newsfeeds on social media. Increasingly, therefore, if and when people turn to the news media, it is not to find news, but rather to validate already known news. The membership payers do not pay to get news for themselves (they already know the news), they pay for news to be delivered to others. The membership is payment from below but driven by motives from above. They require newsrooms to operate with values, not news. This slowly forces journalism to mutate into crowdsourced propaganda – postjournalism. The media are incentivized to amplify and dramatize issues whose coverage is most likely to be paid for Covering polarizing issues for better soliciting of support, the media are incentivised to seek and reproduce polarization for the next rounds of soliciting. They change the picture of the world and they change their audiences, agitating them into more polarization, for profit. The media relying on ad revenue makes the world look pleasant. The media relying on reader revenue makes the world look grim. The decline in the media business caused by the internet has not distorted the picture of the world in the media; it has distorted the habitual distortion. The media system based on ad revenue manufactured consent. The media system based on soliciting the audience’s support manufactures anger. The ad-driven media produced happy customers. The reader-driven media produces angry citizens. The former served consumerism. The latter serves polarization. The least obvious and yet most shocking aspect of the discussion about the death of newspapers is the fact that we are discussing the fate of journalism, not just papers. This is neither a cyclical crisis nor a matter of transition; this is the end of an era. Because of the Trump bump, the New Yorker, the Atlantic[21] and the Washington Post[22] doubled or tripled their subscriptions in the first year of Trump’s presidency. Due to media conditions shaped in the mid-2010s, news organizations were forced to choose a side. The evolution of the media as an instrument of commercial and political communication created the conditions that led to the formation of modern society, both in its economic and political dimensions. Journalism is inherently designed to sell news downward, to the end user – a reader. However, as it is an intrinsic part of a whole social context, journalism inevitably switches to selling agendas upwards, with some news traded downwards as a side business. This gives us two ultimate ‘ideal’ models of the media business. Journalism is either paid from below by those who want to read news or paid from above by those who want others to read news. These two opposing models, in different mixes, have been employed by journalism throughout it 500-year-long history. There was always someone from above who came and forced or seduced the media to sell the audience upwards, not news downwards; first political patrons, then political parties, then advertisers. Journalism has simply lost the publishing monopoly. It has become clear that it is not the quality of content, nor the social function, but the technological monopoly over content communication that was at the core of the media’s existence. The cost of the telegraph limited not only the number of messages that could be sent but also the size of messages, as the charge for messages was based on the number of characters. This forced correspondents’ writing to become concise and substantive, and the telegraphic style of journalism emerged. When a conveyed message is literally charged by the letter, nobody will subsidize someone’s opinions. Only naked and solid facts were therefore telegraphed. The cost of messages made facts more valuable than opinions, simply by the design of the medium. By the end of the 19th century, the cost of the telegraph had decreased, which made it widely affordable. Newspapers became saturated with international news.

On the podcast this week, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age by John Gray. Next time: Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization by Andrey Mir. Normally Jerry writes an ideological Turing test summary for the book we discuss, but it’s impossible with this one as you’ll hear us say. So here are some of Jerry’s highlights from the book itself: If the Enlightenment myth of progress in ethics and politics continues to have a powerful hold, it is more from fear of the consequences of giving it up than from genuine conviction. the collapse of communism was a world-historic defeat for the Enlightenment project. Communism was not a type of oriental despotism, as generations of Western scholars maintained. It was an authentic continuation of a Western revolutionary tradition, and its downfall – after tens of millions of deaths were inflicted in the pursuit of its utopian goals – signalled the start of a process of de-Westernization. It is an inquiry into the right whose agenda is justice and whose content is given, not by any investigation of human beings as we find them in the world, with their diverse histories and communities, but by an abstract conception of the person that has been voided of any definite cultural identity or specific historical inheritance. Consider, in this regard, the central category of the intellectual tradition spawned by Rawls’s work – the category of the person. In Rawls’s work, as in that of his followers, this is a cipher, without history or ethnicity, denuded of the special attachments that in the real human world give us the particular identities we have. Emptied of the contingencies that in truth are essential to our identities, this cipher has in the Rawlsian schema only one concern – a concern for its own good, which is not the good of any actual human being, but the good we are all supposed to have in common, which it pursues subject to constraints of justice that are conceived to be those of impartiality. In this conception, the principles of justice are bound to be the same for all. The appearance of a plurality of ciphers in the Rawlsian original position must be delusive, since, having all of them the same beliefs and motives, they are indistinguishable. The subject matter of justice cannot, except indirectly, be found in the histories of peoples, and their often tragically conflicting claims; it must be always a matter of individual rights. It is obvious that this liberal position cannot address, save as an inconvenient datum of human psychology, the sense of injustice arising from belonging to an oppressed community that, in the shape of nationalism, is the strongest political force of our century. The task of political philosophy is conceived as one of deriving the ideal constitution – assumed, at least in principle, to be everywhere the same. This is so, whether its upshot be Rawls’s basic liberties, Nozick’s side-constraints, or Dworkin’s rights-as-trumps. The presupposition is always that the bottom line in political morality is the claims of individuals, and that these are to be spelt out in terms of the demands of justice or rights. The consequence is that the diverse claims of historic communities, if they are ever admitted, are always overwhelmed by the supposed rights of individuals. The notion that different communities might legitimately have different legal regimes for abortion or pornography, for example, is hardly considered. If the theoretical goal of the new liberalism is the supplanting of politics by law, its practical result – especially in the United States, where rights discourse is already the only public discourse that retains any legitimacy – has been the emptying of political life of substantive argument and the political corruption of law. Issues, such as abortion, that in many other countries have been resolved by a legislative settlement that involves compromises and which is known to be politically renegotiable, are in the legalist culture of the United States matters of fundamental rights that are intractably contested and which threaten to become enemies of civil peace. Communitarian thought still harbours the aspiration expressed in those forms of the Enlightenment project, such as Marxism, that are most critical of liberalism – that of creating a form of communal life from which are absent the practices of exclusion and subordination that are constitutive of every community human beings have ever lived in. Old-fashioned toleration – the toleration defended by Milton, and by the older liberals, such as Locke – sprang from an acceptance of the imperfectibility of human beings, and from a belief in the importance of freedom in the constitution of the good life. Since we cannot be perfect, and since virtue cannot be forced on people but is rather a habit of life they must themselves strive to acquire, we were enjoined to tolerate the shortcomings

On the podcast this week, History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America by Bruno Maçães. Here is Jerry's ideological Turing Test book summary: Like Europe, from which it descends, America is organized around individual liberty, but what liberty means has diverged. Just like Rome incorporated Greek culture just as that civilization was reaching its end, America has incorporated European. That is just repetition, however. The real act of creation came when the Roman Empire fell and a new beginning from the ruins was possible. Maybe that’s where America is today, and what looks like the abyss to progressive liberals is actually empty space full of possibility. Maçães does not care for Tocqueville, who he thinks missed the point of America because he saw it as the culmination of European history rather than the beginning of something new. He likes William James the pragmatists: unlike the liberal European instinct to arrive at a final truth, they believes not that there is not truth, but that there are many truths, all equally valid if they help us, even if they are contradictory. To Maçães this means a world open to possibilities and creativity. American culture is antithetical to European culture because it is focused on efficiency and productivity. In a society where everyone works, there are no classes, which is a problem for European conservatives. Everything is mass-produced and there are no limits imposed by tradition, religion, or class. In such a world, man is beset by angst. The European solution is to reorder society, while the American solution is escapism. Socialism never took root in the U.S. because you could always go west. The U.S. resisted taking on world leadership after WWI. America was the economic and military center of the world, but it didn’t want to take on the cultural mantle from Europe. That’s not stainable. The Soviet threat papered-over the differences between America and Europe and now they are surfacing. With that threat gone, it’s crazy to expect the U.S. to continue to accept the limits imposed on it by the liberal world order, especially when the likes of China break the rules. Meanwhile, Europe cannot fathom any path that is not in the direction opposite Nazism. Americans experience life as a movie of TV show, and this explains guns, the death penalty, religion (which in America is about possibility, not limitations). Political correctness is about portrayal rather than any reality. Reagan wasn’t really a liberal (or an American conservative), he was an American who wanted people to find their own happiness in their own truths—they should be able to play the characters they want in their own movies. Europe, by contrast, is incredibly limited in its possibilities of existence. Westworld is right about race. Television taught Americans to think of themselves as characters in a stories, and the Internet is an extension of that where one is character and creator at the same time. On the internet you have to act to be seen and to exist. Nothing is real, everything is an invented story. Americans don’t pine for the real world but for their own story. Everything is symbolic and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Liberalism has been so effective at specifying the conditions of a free society that is produces an answer to every political question, thus there is no freedom in liberalism. This is anti-American so Americans are pursuing a post-liberal, post-truth way of living based on the principle of what Maçães calls unreality: “everyone can pursue his or her own happiness so long as they refrain from imposing it on others as something real—as something valid for all.” No universal truths, except perhaps one, which is the right to exit, to change the channel. Westworld again. Meanwhile, Europe wants to freeze time because it thinks it’s at the end of history, at the apotheosis of a free society except “we should keep very quiet or else the magnificent edifice of freedom might be shaken too hard.” The reaction from both sides is grasping for hard truth: socialism/green religion or tradition. American populism by contrast arrives at a different conclusion from the fact of relativism. It’s about a constant appeal to voters/viewers with new content. Everything is permitted, even the illiberal. Technological progress is predicated on massive inequality, which is why we need universal basic income. The Truman doctrine went from tactic to principle and led to Vietnam. Iraq was about the struggle for meaning—creating a new reality after 9/11—and it also turned out badly. If the U.S. wants to create its own reality, it has to do so in a way that allow others to find their place; where other value systems are accepted. Neoconservatism is over. The U.S.’s permanent strategic goal has always been to prevent a single power from controlling Eurasia. This has meant standing up to European powers, but now the threat comes from China. Maçães doesn’t think a Cold War model will work against china because we

On the podcast this week, The Jungle Grows Back by Robert Kagan. Here is Jerry's ideological Turing Test book summary: Peaceful liberal world order is not the natural state of affairs; it exists because, like a garden, it has been artificially created by the United States. If the United States stops tending this garden then the jungle of great power competition and chaos will reemerge. The order is not perfect, but the alternative is worse. Only the United States, given the power it has by virtue of its geography, is capable of imposing order. Spheres of influence should be a discredited notion, except for the U.S. as order-keeper. Like the prewar world, disorder means a world dominated by powers hostile to American interests and principles. Indeed, American security would be threatened directly by such a state. Left alone, Hitler would have invaded the U.S. It is not unthinkable that prewar-like disorder with Hitlers and Stalins can return, and indeed the conditions for the emergence of such characters seem to be reappearing. After the war, the U.S. sought to pursue its own security and interests, but to foster an “environment of freedom” (Acheson) that ended great power competition and disorder. The decision to shoulder this responsibility was made before the Cold War when we still believed the Soviets would be part of the order. Maintaining the order means “operating in a gray area in which wars [are] fought not for security, but for less easily measured ends: stability, prosperity, progress, liberalism.” People do not share a universal desire for freedom; very often they prefer order and security. Sometimes you have to convert adversaries to liberalism, presumably at gunpoint. The struggle has no end. The U.S. guaranteeing the security of the members of the order (and indeed by allowing no other alternative), liberated Germany, Japan, China, etc. to focus on economic growth. “To criticize this as free-riding is to miss the profound and historically transformative choice they were making.” The order depended on the U.S. not abusing its dominant position, but instead competing on a level playing field, although sometimes it didn’t. It certainly never respected the rules when it came to security and Cold War strategy. Nevertheless, the Cold War ended peacefully because the Soviets could see the U.S. wasn’t going to be revanchist. Britain, Japan, and Germany were allowed to give up empire without penalty—to the contrary. Americans before and after the Cold War have consistently rejected the idea that they have a responsibility to foster an order. This democratic opinion gets in the way of properly tending the garden. Bush I didn’t go to Baghdad, Clinton didn’t invade North Korea or take out al Qaeda, and Obama didn’t invade Syria out of deference to public opinion—all mistakes. The exceptions to this was immediately after WWII and after 9/11. Americans accepted the post-war plan first because they did not think it would be as costly as it turned out, and after the onset of the Cold War because they believed the Soviets to be an existential threat. In retrospect, communism probably didn’t pose such a big threat to American “way of life.” After 9/11, “fear in the United States was much higher, and actions that had been unthinkable before became thinkable.” The Bush administration took the opportunity to invade Iraq even though there was no connection to 9/11. It turned out that Iraq was not the threat we thought. Without the Soviets or the fear of terrorism, Americans are back to their habit of denying the need to intervene broadly to maintain the order. After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. only imposed sanctions and didn’t even sell Ukraine defensive weapons. Hillary Clinton was so cowed by public opinion she turned on her own Trans-Pacific Partnership. Russia today is not acting out because it’s concerned about its security, but out of national pride. NATO expansion shouldn’t have bothered it because it knew it didn’t threaten its security, only limited its ambitions. In any event, it was really good for the expansion nations, so it’s worth “[w]hatever the effect on the Russians may have been.” Putin is also worried that the U.S. wants to drive him from power. “Behind every democratic revolution on former Soviet territory, in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, he saw the hand of the West, and particularly the United States,” but he really shouldn’t be so paranoid since “the role of outsiders was not the decisive factor in the toppling of the authoritarian regimes in those countries.” Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland. China today is not acting out because it’s concerned about its security, but out of national pride. The Chinese are merely unhappy that the U.S. wants to limit its ambitions, namely unifying with Taiwan and controlling the South China Sea. European, and particularly German, nationalism is on the rise, due largely to increased immigration from the Middle East and Africa that the people perce