Now available is my discussion with J. Burden, who offers “History, theology and politics from the best anonymous accounts.” (I’m not anonymous, but I strongly support online anonymity and pseudonymity, whatever the annoying Jordan Peterson says nowadays.) We talk about technology, its promise and limitations, Foundationalism, and how women in the military, in any capacity, is an utterly insane sign of societal suicide.
You can find the episode here on YouTube, or embedded below, and also on the standard podcast platforms.
Curious, what’s your beef with Jordan Peterson?
I intend to write a piece about this, or make it part of a larger piece, since it’s overly negative to just talk about why people suck. In short, my complaint about Peterson is that (a) he used to direct his message to young men, the most abused and oppressed demographic in America today; (b) this was extremely useful to the Right, and therefore dangerous to the Left; (c) through some combination of his own weaknesses and enemy action, he had a mental breakdown; and (c) since he has returned, he never directs any message to young men at all, rather he cries and acts as un-masculine as possible all the time. Why? As far as I can tell, because he is weak and fearful of returning to the dark place he was in, or because he is being manipulated for money by his malign daughter, or he has been threatened to never inspire young men again. Or all three.
Excellent discussion.
You two discussed briefly technology – your belief in “space” as a civilizational aspiration, among the discussion. You also mentioned your (somewhat reserved) techno-optimism. I would love to be a techno-optimist – believing that much technology can be used by culture for Good and Truth. But much of what we take for granted today is deeply corrosive to real society. For example, carrs and suburbia destroy the physical fabric necessary for true urban (and even rural, in villages) community. Centralized production also frays the human fabric by pulling it apart from the production side Kilpatrick Sale mentions this second point in The Human Scale and he has an entire book endorsing the Luddites, which is on my ever growing on-deck list, but has already been acquired.
And especially media – media media media. All types of more-than-local media draw attention away from the real and concrete and move it towards completely irrelevant and abstract issues. Both “irrelevant” because it’s someone else somewhere else and “abstract” because the lack of grounding in the near and personal experience causes the discussion to move to abstract ideas like “rights” or “environmentalism.”
The necessary connection between societal issues and technology was laid out well in a short compact mag article: https://compactmag.com/article/why-conservatism-failed
How can we create any sort of truly functioning society when the practical, physical aspects are so antithetical to true community? Or maybe you don’t agree with the premise?
My feeling is that there’s deep civilizational rot here that needs to be cleaned out. Really there are two issues: government and centralized/centralizing technology. This goes well beyond regime change. Regime change may – and emphasize greatly may – be able to remove some aspect of government from production but will anyone have the balls to look down the barrel of how much of our economy is actually propped up and controlled by government? Is anyone prepared to accept that we have no f-ing idea how to plan cities or build buildings without a government commissar looking over our shoulders?
Do we have the balls to smash the big machines and build better, human-serving, local ones in their place? Do we need to?
Anyway, this was going to be a comment asking if you had any recommendations for reading about technology and society in line with the compact mag issue or Sale books I mentioned, but turned into a more existential one.
Best