I had not - thanks for the heads-up. The consistency of reduction is pretty impressive (e.g. IL-6 error bars don't even cross 0).
Does it mean vaccine is suppressing innate immunity, and IRL responsible for surge in viral infections, maybe. Obviously, need unvaxxed controls (even in this study it would have been a nice touch). I would note that there was an RSV pre-print this winter and most of the kids with RSV had not been noted as vaxxed. But vaxxed kids being more susceptible would still lead to general increased transmission of bugs.
Aug 28, 2023·edited Aug 28, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Ryszard Legutko and yourself have some excellent insights, my only real point of difference though it could be a merely semantic one, is that it's more about ideology than politics.
Much of it is about creating ideological struggles between newly formed identity groups, providing cover for new power structures and their sources of funding to dominate various government and media institutions.
I've yet to properly look into the Lockean vision part but last night was listening to a podcast from Benjamin Boyce's which I _highly_ recommend 'Woke Narcissism & Complex Trauma with Jaco van Zyl'
This helps shed valuable light on how guilt and conscience from a cultural religious background though good qualities in an of themselves, can be manipulated into tolerating if not supporting this new culture war.
Where do you see in the devolution of liberal the influence of progressivism as it emerged particularly in American politics with politicians such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and educational reformers like John Dewey?
The vision of Locke and John Stuart Mill is in most respects contrary to the utopianism that is notional liberalism today, and seems to me to be derived more from the Progressive movement of the early 20th century than from classical liberalism.
Right, and that's more in line with what Legutko proposes - liberalism was conceived as limiting of democratic excess and state power and increasing of freedom, so why this paradoxical outcome, because the 1960s leftist revolution.
So in part ii I will look at how a line goes from Jefferson and Founders to Lincoln to what we understand "classical liberalism" to be today, this focus on equality and rights and free expression, were problems built into the Anglo-American refusal to define all these ideas in terms of one specific social class. 20th C Progressivism diverges with this tradition in important ways, i.e woman's suffrage isn't necessarily feminist or liberal, and racism and eugenics are "scientific" but do not dream of equality under the law. Certainly FDR gave us Federal dominance in politics but Democrats held the South in every midterm and presidential election.
Will it be convincing, I dunno. But there are problems with blaming the 1960s given that all the things classical liberals want to "defend" from Wokism are embraced by the so-called right and Republicans in the intervening decades. And these are considered "good" because they brought is toward some notion of the founding, via what else, the Civil Rights Act. So there's contradictions to work out in calling the problem leftism.
The "right/left" paradigm is and should be considered as merely an artifact of the French Revolution and nothing more--a far more useful phrasing from the French Revolution is Jacobinism, which helps illuminates the attempt by the Revolution to make a radical break with the societal norms of the ancien regime.
"Leftism" as such is in modern usage gets greatly misused, becoming a reflexive abjuration of radical philosophies and ideologies, without any serious interrogation of those philosophies, how they arise, and how they propose to address real or imagined societal defects.
As the Jacobinism terminology invites a more analytical path to approach the radicalism of the French Revolution (and similar revolutionary movements since, in particular Bolshevism in Russia and Maoism in China), "Progressivism" invites us to consider the intellectual shifts within American political thought beginning in the 1890s, an era which was in many was as profound a period of societal change in the US as the 1950s and 1960s were. This was the period when America transitioned from a mostly agrarian society to a mostly industrial one--around 1890 is when the percentage of the working-age population engaged in industrial occupations exceeded 50% for the first time, with agriculture falling below 50%. Accordingly, this was the time period when the basis for the economic philosophy evangelized by Adam Smith, and the libertarian ideals espoused by Locke as well as John Stuart Mill begins to erode. When the prototypical "working man" is no longer a farmer but a factory worker, and when a farmer's fortunes become dependent on an increasingly industrialized transportation infrastructure to move his produce to ever more distant markets, the social, cultural, and political dynamics of communities, states, and ultimately the nation as a whole are bound to shift.
Unsurprisingly, this is also the period where we begin to see the rise of progressive thought, and in particular where we begin to see the deification of "science" as the answer to all things. This is the period where germ theory became broadly accepted as the basis for medicine. This is also the period where F. W. Taylor began to introduce the concept of "scientific management" in industry with his seminal time-and-motion studies (which I tend to view as the beginning of the modern obsession with "expertise", as opposed to the Jeffersonian ideal of the well-rounded gentleman).
As you point out, not all progressive thought is necessarily bad. Progressives challenged the institutional racism that had become entrenched in post-Civil War society. Progressives challenged the traditional roles of women in society in a time when traditional society was steadily ceasing to exist.
However, one aspect of progressive thought which has repeatedly proven to be its Achilles Heel has been its seemingly organic lack of self-awareness. The nature of government as envisioned by Locke and championed by Jefferson intrinsically was reflective and, to a degree, self-correcting. Many of the early evolutions of the Federal government under the Constitution illustrate this, from the Militia Acts of 1794 to the 12th Amendment addressing unforeseen defects in the Electoral College system. Not every evolution was necessarily a positive--the Missouri Compromise of 1820 kicked the slavery can down the road for forty years, until the US encompassed all the land on which cotton could be grown (and thus where slavery had a sustaining economic logic), making the inevitable clash unavoidable--but the general notion of Constitutional governance was that it would not be perfect, but perfectible (which using 18th century grammar and usage is what is meant by "more perfect").
Progressivism, on the other hand, being imbued with the aura of "science", is not constrained by any such humility. Whereas Locke and Jefferson saw good government as a system that was constantly improving, Wilson in particular viewed "scientific" government as a system that was the apotheosis of rational human thought, and thus needed no improvement. We see that hubris repeatedly in government today--and in particular in the repeated government failures of today (Obamacare, the COVID lockdowns, Bidenomics, et cetera).
Yet we must also acknowledge that progressivism gained its footing particularly in education and politics because classical liberalism failed to confront the reality of a changing society. What notionally passes for social conservatism today still does not consider how much 21st century society is different from its 18th century counterpart, which makes attitudes such as its reflexive genuflecting towards "traditional" gender roles absurd and unrealistic. It is easy to celebrate a vision of extreme libertarianism when every man is a farmer tending his own crops and thus structurally more independent and self-sufficient than is possible in a modern technological society; it is much more challenging to argue libertarian ideals in a society where people are structurally interdependent on each other to a degree Locke, Jefferson, or Smith could ever have envisioned.
By shifting the origin from the 1960s back to the 1890s we also can see how Progressivism mingled with classical liberalism, in large part by changing the vocabulary. We can also see why "leftism" is an inadequate labeling, because the intersection of Progressivism and classical liberalism shifted what would notionally be considered the political center. Thus "libertarian" thought is today viewed as being a creature of the political right, when a better appreciation of libertarian ideals puts them orthogonal to the classic left-right paradigm. As Milo Yiannopoulos observed in the mid 2010s, the current transition in political thought globally is not about left vs right, but rather a transition to the perpendicular paradigm of authoritarian vs libertarian. It is in that transition that we see where the inherent lack of humility in Progressivism tilts it inevitably towards authoritarianism and away from libertarianism.
The contradictions in calling the problem leftism are easily resolved simply by jettisoning the left-right terminology in favor of terminology more descriptive of current political trends.
Interesting. Have the leftists unwittingly struck the nihilism match to only then burn their own house down?
So, was I wrong about Utopianism leading always to Despotism?
Is it instead Utopianism-->Nihilism-->Despotism?
Wait, I answered my own question. Of course they will burn their own house down. Duh. Always and every time.
Babel-->Tower of Babel-->Scattered abroad
Completely unrelated but have you seen this?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2023.1242380
I had not - thanks for the heads-up. The consistency of reduction is pretty impressive (e.g. IL-6 error bars don't even cross 0).
Does it mean vaccine is suppressing innate immunity, and IRL responsible for surge in viral infections, maybe. Obviously, need unvaxxed controls (even in this study it would have been a nice touch). I would note that there was an RSV pre-print this winter and most of the kids with RSV had not been noted as vaxxed. But vaxxed kids being more susceptible would still lead to general increased transmission of bugs.
Thanks, Brian.
Tiny study group with no control doesn't make for an impressive result but hopefully it's enough to spark some curiosity and get a bigger study done.
Ryszard Legutko and yourself have some excellent insights, my only real point of difference though it could be a merely semantic one, is that it's more about ideology than politics.
Much of it is about creating ideological struggles between newly formed identity groups, providing cover for new power structures and their sources of funding to dominate various government and media institutions.
I've yet to properly look into the Lockean vision part but last night was listening to a podcast from Benjamin Boyce's which I _highly_ recommend 'Woke Narcissism & Complex Trauma with Jaco van Zyl'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDRInMwr8pI
This helps shed valuable light on how guilt and conscience from a cultural religious background though good qualities in an of themselves, can be manipulated into tolerating if not supporting this new culture war.
Anyway now to read the latest post :-)
Excellent post, and I hope to comment at length later, but a quick word for now is that 'The Demon In Democracy' in audiobook form on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8ZqEN0xwCfPDqiUIy0SH55pLYLPOpSsb
There's also a number of long form interviews on Youtube in English, though the sound quality isn't the best on some of them.
Where do you see in the devolution of liberal the influence of progressivism as it emerged particularly in American politics with politicians such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and educational reformers like John Dewey?
The vision of Locke and John Stuart Mill is in most respects contrary to the utopianism that is notional liberalism today, and seems to me to be derived more from the Progressive movement of the early 20th century than from classical liberalism.
Right, and that's more in line with what Legutko proposes - liberalism was conceived as limiting of democratic excess and state power and increasing of freedom, so why this paradoxical outcome, because the 1960s leftist revolution.
So in part ii I will look at how a line goes from Jefferson and Founders to Lincoln to what we understand "classical liberalism" to be today, this focus on equality and rights and free expression, were problems built into the Anglo-American refusal to define all these ideas in terms of one specific social class. 20th C Progressivism diverges with this tradition in important ways, i.e woman's suffrage isn't necessarily feminist or liberal, and racism and eugenics are "scientific" but do not dream of equality under the law. Certainly FDR gave us Federal dominance in politics but Democrats held the South in every midterm and presidential election.
Will it be convincing, I dunno. But there are problems with blaming the 1960s given that all the things classical liberals want to "defend" from Wokism are embraced by the so-called right and Republicans in the intervening decades. And these are considered "good" because they brought is toward some notion of the founding, via what else, the Civil Rights Act. So there's contradictions to work out in calling the problem leftism.
The "right/left" paradigm is and should be considered as merely an artifact of the French Revolution and nothing more--a far more useful phrasing from the French Revolution is Jacobinism, which helps illuminates the attempt by the Revolution to make a radical break with the societal norms of the ancien regime.
"Leftism" as such is in modern usage gets greatly misused, becoming a reflexive abjuration of radical philosophies and ideologies, without any serious interrogation of those philosophies, how they arise, and how they propose to address real or imagined societal defects.
As the Jacobinism terminology invites a more analytical path to approach the radicalism of the French Revolution (and similar revolutionary movements since, in particular Bolshevism in Russia and Maoism in China), "Progressivism" invites us to consider the intellectual shifts within American political thought beginning in the 1890s, an era which was in many was as profound a period of societal change in the US as the 1950s and 1960s were. This was the period when America transitioned from a mostly agrarian society to a mostly industrial one--around 1890 is when the percentage of the working-age population engaged in industrial occupations exceeded 50% for the first time, with agriculture falling below 50%. Accordingly, this was the time period when the basis for the economic philosophy evangelized by Adam Smith, and the libertarian ideals espoused by Locke as well as John Stuart Mill begins to erode. When the prototypical "working man" is no longer a farmer but a factory worker, and when a farmer's fortunes become dependent on an increasingly industrialized transportation infrastructure to move his produce to ever more distant markets, the social, cultural, and political dynamics of communities, states, and ultimately the nation as a whole are bound to shift.
Unsurprisingly, this is also the period where we begin to see the rise of progressive thought, and in particular where we begin to see the deification of "science" as the answer to all things. This is the period where germ theory became broadly accepted as the basis for medicine. This is also the period where F. W. Taylor began to introduce the concept of "scientific management" in industry with his seminal time-and-motion studies (which I tend to view as the beginning of the modern obsession with "expertise", as opposed to the Jeffersonian ideal of the well-rounded gentleman).
As you point out, not all progressive thought is necessarily bad. Progressives challenged the institutional racism that had become entrenched in post-Civil War society. Progressives challenged the traditional roles of women in society in a time when traditional society was steadily ceasing to exist.
However, one aspect of progressive thought which has repeatedly proven to be its Achilles Heel has been its seemingly organic lack of self-awareness. The nature of government as envisioned by Locke and championed by Jefferson intrinsically was reflective and, to a degree, self-correcting. Many of the early evolutions of the Federal government under the Constitution illustrate this, from the Militia Acts of 1794 to the 12th Amendment addressing unforeseen defects in the Electoral College system. Not every evolution was necessarily a positive--the Missouri Compromise of 1820 kicked the slavery can down the road for forty years, until the US encompassed all the land on which cotton could be grown (and thus where slavery had a sustaining economic logic), making the inevitable clash unavoidable--but the general notion of Constitutional governance was that it would not be perfect, but perfectible (which using 18th century grammar and usage is what is meant by "more perfect").
Progressivism, on the other hand, being imbued with the aura of "science", is not constrained by any such humility. Whereas Locke and Jefferson saw good government as a system that was constantly improving, Wilson in particular viewed "scientific" government as a system that was the apotheosis of rational human thought, and thus needed no improvement. We see that hubris repeatedly in government today--and in particular in the repeated government failures of today (Obamacare, the COVID lockdowns, Bidenomics, et cetera).
Yet we must also acknowledge that progressivism gained its footing particularly in education and politics because classical liberalism failed to confront the reality of a changing society. What notionally passes for social conservatism today still does not consider how much 21st century society is different from its 18th century counterpart, which makes attitudes such as its reflexive genuflecting towards "traditional" gender roles absurd and unrealistic. It is easy to celebrate a vision of extreme libertarianism when every man is a farmer tending his own crops and thus structurally more independent and self-sufficient than is possible in a modern technological society; it is much more challenging to argue libertarian ideals in a society where people are structurally interdependent on each other to a degree Locke, Jefferson, or Smith could ever have envisioned.
By shifting the origin from the 1960s back to the 1890s we also can see how Progressivism mingled with classical liberalism, in large part by changing the vocabulary. We can also see why "leftism" is an inadequate labeling, because the intersection of Progressivism and classical liberalism shifted what would notionally be considered the political center. Thus "libertarian" thought is today viewed as being a creature of the political right, when a better appreciation of libertarian ideals puts them orthogonal to the classic left-right paradigm. As Milo Yiannopoulos observed in the mid 2010s, the current transition in political thought globally is not about left vs right, but rather a transition to the perpendicular paradigm of authoritarian vs libertarian. It is in that transition that we see where the inherent lack of humility in Progressivism tilts it inevitably towards authoritarianism and away from libertarianism.
The contradictions in calling the problem leftism are easily resolved simply by jettisoning the left-right terminology in favor of terminology more descriptive of current political trends.
Well said.
.
Living Among Morons
- While Tedious ...
Is Never So Fascinating
As When They Kill Themselves
By, With, And Because Of
Their Own Stupidity.
.