text:
The most neglected statement of Jesus is that Hillel's "Golden Rule" is what "SUMS UP" the entire Law. His detractors were of course focusing directly on the Law, even atomizing it into more and more "principles". Christianity followed suit, only dropping the more "Jewish"-associated laws, and eventually placing a great emphasis on sexual-related principles. Islam, drawing on both religions followed suit, exchanging some Hebrew laws for more Arabic-flavored ones.
All have at times aimed to keep their respective "cultures", (if not seeking to expand them to the world), "pure".
This will always involve believing oneself has met the "standards" of the Law, and is thus now "called" to enforce them on others, in the name of "preserving morality" if nothing else.
So, recently taking a job "Security Awareness" class, and hearing about the latest threats from ISIS, to create easy to build rail devices to derail trains, and various ways to attack Times Square, I kept thinking, "Who appointed these people the judges and executioners of the 'infidels'?" The same thing with many conservative Christians; and though it may seem unfair to compare them, the MINDSET, and its underlying presumptions ("righteousness" of the Law, and the need to spread "God's truth"), are the same. What's different is the power held.
Judaism once held formidable power over its people in Bible times (even enough to influence the mighty Romans over them, to a certain extent). What we saw in the New Testament was the final death throes of its power, as it was rapidly going down, and would end as a power structure only a few decades later.
The church arose from this, but quickly followed suit, gaining tremendous world power, even over the big bad Romans, and the Western civilizations that sprang from it. But with this power comes great compromise of Biblical principle, and great corruption, as a lot of stuff has to be justified, which in turn is often attempted to be compensated by overemphasizing certain other points of "morality", in order to maintain the "righteous" appearance.
So it too reached a peak, and it was technology (starting with the printing press) that caused it to crack and start to come down. Hence, all the complaints of loss of power, beginning with the Enlightenment, and continuing through the last century of sociopolitical developments.
Islam, being the youngest of the three religions, is simply not as far down that pattern, but still vying for power. Christians have naturally turned up the heat on them as a "false religion", and also political enemy, but both seem to be in agreement that America is sinful and needs to be punished. When natural disasters hit here, and conservative Christians pronounce them as "curses", you would think they should be on the same side as the Islamists who simply seek to punish us directly, themselves, as "God's agents" (which Christians also used to do, when they had more power, and some more radical groups wish they could still do today).
But the Christians are the ones who upheld the Gospel teaching that no men are "good", for "all have sinned". Many had loudly leveled this at the modern "world" and liberal segments of the Church, which had begun arguing for the "goodness" of man, especially in the face of the teaching of Hell.
But the problem was, when it came to applying that to themselves (and those under their sphere of control, which included the whole "nation" or "culture" of past times), they essentially overrode it with concepts like "regeneration", "providence" and "exceptionality". They now could act like every other greedy or warring group of people while in the very breath of condemning them for it, because it's "different" when they do it. They were the "called", and "chosen", and "sanctified". But then that's what the religions before them said.
The difference they claim is that they follow Jesus, the Savior. But He taught that the Law was fulfilled by "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you". By going back to the points of the Law, they could actually engineer it so that killing, stealing, and even raping, could sometimes be justified, even while "normally" condemned in the Commandments, as they preached them to others.
Going along with this, Christians were also instructed "If it be possible, as much as lies in you, live peaceably with all men" (Romans 12:18. When it comes to this chapter, many focus more on the first two verses, and then believe living peaceably is not possible as they see "the world" encroaching on them. But they don't see the many ways they actually provoke the world, including under the premise of trying to control it).
They've gone from excoriating modern liberal culture for turning from the overly sensitive propriety of the past (where even the word "pregnant" was too 'dirty' for TV), to now trying to be John Wayne and mocking them as "snowflakes" and "whiners" who need to "grow a pair" instead of running to their "safe spaces". They themselves largely follow this current president, who embodies everything they used to scold society for, from vulgarity to infidelity. Is being "tough and insensitive" ungodly, or is it now the new "godly"? Make up your minds!
The standard always changes, when focusing on point-by-point morality. (Which is basically opposite of what Christians have always said; that turning away from black and white rules "relativizes" morality! They've long preached against the "relativism" or "situational ethics" of people saying "what we're doing is OK as long as we're not hurting anyone else", but this is actually closer to the intent of the Golden Rule).
To show how this happens, if you go strictly by the letter, of "thou shalt not steal", then you can engage in (or at least condone) various devious financial practices, yet maintain it was all technically lawful (such as "predatory lending", or the reasoning that "prices and wages are what you agreed upon, and if you don't like it, go elsewhere") and be able to truly reason that you (or the system you're defending) have not violated the commandment. You can even go as far as to appeal to "conscience", and "the conviction of the Spirit" (which many will say is what supersedes "the letter" of the Law, and is supposed to be all the "more binding", and "proof" of salvation), and just the technical legality of it can still justify just about any measure taken.
Even the so-called "spirit of the Law" from the Sermon on the Mount you can excuse yourself from. You can condemn others for "bitterness" and "envy" ("spiritual 'murder'") towards those who have the upper hand, while displaying a lot of hostility towards those you think you have "just cause" to be angry about, especially by declaring them "anti-God", or any other entity you identify with, such as "the nation". We end up with only certain people ever having the right to voice displeasure at anything, while the standard (we preach to and judge others by but aren't following ourselves) is that man is supposed to only be "thankful".
But if you go by "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"; that would instantly sweep away all of these sorts of rationalizations. So it's actually much easier (for the "flesh", believe it or not) to stick to a discrete "commandment"! You look "lawful" and "obedient", and get to compare and preach to the "lawless", on top of it!
Meanwhile, what they continue to step up their energies against is leftism, gays, in addition to Islam, of course. The Gospel that starts with the sinfulness of all men (and therefore no room for them to "cast the speck out of someone else's eye") is left out, as it's presumed that some have "repented" into a virtual goodness, and so it's them against all the bad, [unrepentant] "sinners".
One common statement I've seen is "The Christian view of our moral condition is that, apart from Christ, 'no one does good, not even one' (Rom. 3:12)."
This makes it sound like once you "receive" Christ, then you CAN do good, in the sense Paul is denying here (instead of that 'goodness' being imputed from Christ). This leads both to presuppositionalism (my interpretations, anger at others behaviors, etc. must be right, because I've been 'regenerated' and the other side's position can be dismissed because they aren't), but also judgmentalism toward those not seen as doing good enough.
On top of this is "God gave His law (filled with commands and comfort) so that we'd know how to live as His image bearers in a broken world." Both of these statements from CRI articles (one of the centers of mainstream evangelical doctrine); it clearly indicates a notion of the Law being given to maintain order, to help fix the world, as well as benefit the individual. So, putting it together, with Christ, we are more able to do the "good" of keeping the Law, and thus be both more "moral", and more emotionally healthier. They will all admit that we're "not perfect" at it, but in practice, it becomes at least we are better than the unbeliever, the doubter, the "backslider", etc.
In actuality, this position is already moderated down from earlier teaching, whose modern adherents will often criticize the "new evangelicals" for "making God's Law all about us". While they have a point there (which I often cite in regards to the popular "Christian victory" teaching), still this often stems from a view where God's Law and order is a totally disconnected thing that just happens to benefit man sometimes (such as the niceness society would have without killing, stealing, etc.), but it's really about "His own pleasure/Glory/holiness" etc.
So we had better order our lives by the moral Law, just to make Him happy, but it really in the end doesn't matter how we treat our fellow man; that's just a fringe benefit, if other people are deserving of it; but most really aren't, since man defaults to being a sinner. This is another way we can justify a lot of unkindness toward men (appealing to instances such as the Canaanites, or just God's "hatred" and judgment of sin in general).
Jesus had showed people what that Law really required, making it obvious it was really futile to seek justification through it; and leaving people to walk away thwarted, but likely to pretend it never happened, and just go back to where they were and keep plugging on as much as they could (and then pointing at others). The people had taken the "letter" and focused on certain aspects of it, even adding to them, to make sure the basic commandment wasn't violated; while omitting "the weightier matters".
I keep thinking how the Islamists need to hear the Gospel message which begins with the fact that "none are good", but they've already heard overall Christian messages, and never got from them this sense. Instead, what they heard was basic agreement on moralism, but the difference was which religion, and associated culture was to bear the rule in enforcing it. So the Islamists maintain that it's theirs, and the Christians insist it is theirs. They talk right past each other, and then the only thing left to do is to fight.
Both groups seem to believe that "sinners" have forfeited their right to live freely (if, at all). But to live is our natural instinct, and so people have the right to at least resist being under the control of those who show themselves to be a threat to living. They don't get the whole "chosen ruler" concept, and see no difference between all the different people and groups claiming it. Anyone and everyone can and is saying that. They can't all be true. God or conscience can't have "showed" anyone that all of them are right. But they can all possibly be wrong, though!
(PS, in the class, someone asked why the Las Vegas shooter wasn't considered a "terrorist" like the Islamists, which is a big point liberals are making to show the categories are racist, and we were told "terrorism" is defined as having a religious or political motivation, while they still don't know what exactly the Vegas shooter's purpose was. That's why people like him get assumed to be simply "mentally ill". If they find that the shooter was some Christian or other conservative trying to punish "Sin City", would they then upgrade him to "terrorist" status? Possibly, as Timothy McVeigh was considered a terrorist).
There had already been a demonstration by White Nationalists in May, which was eerily comparable to Klan rallies of old, complete with flaming tiki torches, designed to evoke fear. This when plans were announced to remove Confederate statues. So forward three months later, when they're removing them, new demonstrations occur, which erupt into a full blown unrest, with one driver charging into a crowd and killing one person, injuring many others!
The reacting left is being dubbed the "antifa" (antifascists), with Trump adding the term "alt-left" and casting them as violent.
Is this the start of a new Civil War, as some have feared?
White Supremacists Show Up To A City That Didn't Want Them, Chant 'Blood And Soil'
A state of emergency has been declared after violent clashes in Charlottesville.
Ex-KKK Leader David Duke Says White Supremacists Will 'Fulfill' Trump's Promises
"We are determined to take our country back," Duke said.
Driver in custody after car rams into crowd following Virginia white nationalist rally
This Is What 'Oppressed' White Men Look Like
How To Tell If You Go To A White Supremacist Church
How To Tell If You Go To A White Supremacist Church
(And all of this as the other major story is the way Trump's words with N Korea escalates:
Why Black America Isn't Worried About the Upcoming Nuclear Holocaust
Elle Dowd (FB)
These Neo Nazis, Confederates, and Klansmen have jobs. Inside institutions.
They don't just protest one day and then put their prejudices on the shelf when they go to work.
They are bankers who deny loans.
They are teachers who file kids of color through the school to prison pipeline.
They are police officers. Did you see all the Blue Lives Matter flags on the livestream, next to Nazi symbols and Confederate flags?
They vote. They sit on juries. They run for office.
AND. They coach little league and watch Netflix on the couch with their wives and seem like "good guys."
They have families and friends who have been too nervous or too polite to confront them.
Neo-nazis and white supremacists are celebrating Trump's remarks about the Charlottesville riots
His "many sides" is obviously designed to be ambiguous and easy to fill in by the Right, to whom these "sides" are all subsets of the "other" side from them: the blacks themselves, BLM, the liberals, the Democratic Party, etc. or "the real haters: the SJW/Marxists who've attacked our guys", said one commenter on the far-right, pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald, or the "Antifa", which is short for antifascist organizations. —Anyone but the Right and the confederate sympathizers themselves.
When Does a Fringe Movement Stop Being Fringe? (Is Charlottesville a turning point?)
Even the most feared white supremacists in the lore of Jim Crow were just regular white men.
I've also seen two people now point out that instead of racism "dying out", most of the people in these protests are in their 20's.
I think a large part of the problem was liberals not taking the Right seriously through all those decades of "dog whistling" (the coded racial language made to look "colorblind"), where they ignored it and simply pushed agendas (probably figuring "well, they're gonna die off soon anyway"), while the conservatives built arguments, that went largely unanswered and thus took root as an entrenched narrative of blame.
This is what could sway a whole new generation, when it really should have been dying out by now. So now, many look up, with Trump in the White House, Hillary who seemed certain, lost, and all of these alt-right people coming out in full force, and it's like "what happened"?
Of course, with all of this comes a new wave of whitewashing Lee, claiming he was actually against slavery:
The Myth of the Kindly General Lee
The legend of the Confederate leader's heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.
Here is part of a quote from him:
The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.
On the alt-right site, they're even trying to disown the driver, claiming there's a difference between the alt-right and white supremacists, even, he's a Jew, etc. and right after insinuating he was only reacting to car "being attacked on all sides by a roving mob of Antifa when he slammed the gas pedal and accelerated". (So which is it? Is he one of you and justified, or not justified, and not one of you?)
So they are the ones "cucking" now! (there's also a dispute among them as to whether Trump was cucking in his statement).
Finally, a much needed call for the Church to take a clear stand:
White Christian conservatives should oppose protests by white supremacists
you should really dig into black African slave trade and the black slavers that allowed it to happen.
So, by your rationale, ALL aspects of white Europeanism, automatically transfer to American decendants? We're all Nazis, all rapists, and all racists and slavers at heart because white europeans did? That's the same rationale that actual racists use to say all blacks are criminals and hoods.
We are a fallen people, utterly imperfect, so, yes, white europeans CAN claim to be the founders of the most moral value system, framed into a governement, that the world has ever known, WHILE being decendants of, related to, or from the same place as, people who committed those terrible atrocities.
The thing is, when you appeal to the Fall, (e.g. "we are all fallen people", etc.) you don't get to use that to excuse one group's participation in the evils of fallen humanity, but then turn around and get to claim for that group the most virtue in human history. You mention the Fall, you're appealing to the Biblical Gospel, and in that Gospel, it doesn't work like that. That's basically "our good outweighs our bad", and any conservative Gospel tract will tell you no one will be justified by such reasoning. We all have good, from bearing the image of God, but because man did fall, then ALL nations are "concluded under sin", and all of our righteousness is "filthy rags" (Romans 3).
So it doesn't matter who did more good. (the point there is, that Western civilization may have done the most good, but ALSO did the most evil, so it basically balances out. And before God, the bad wipes out the good, not the other way around!)
And this is talking about individuals. How do we even figure a "nation" or "culture" we are apart of will carry some merit for us? This is exactly the way the corrupt countrymen that rejected Jesus thought; that because they were apart of the "chosen nation", they would be "saved" through becoming the rightful rulers of the world through their inheritance and lawkeeping. But in reality, they were as lawless as anyone else, and it came out, and escalated, in the immediate time after Christ (just like things are escalating now, as one group thinks they're being eradicated), and they too declared in slightly different words that their nation would "rise again". America or other "Western" nations aren't even the Biblical children of the Promise; they just assumed they replaced ancient Israel because of their Christianity, but then they're making all the same mistakes, but should have known better.
This is where conservatives went wrong, and unfortunately, liberals usually didn't challenge it on a soteriological level (like this post is doing now), but only on a "social justice" level. (Which is why conservatives now think social justice causes are unbiblical).
When Does a Fringe Movement Stop Being Fringe?
Even the most feared white supremacists in the lore of Jim Crow were just regular white men.
(another small post: "if DonaldTrump had seen Amistad he'd have been like: well, yeah the slavers were violent but I mean c'mon, both sides…")
If it's a civil war, pick a side: Donald Trump, white nationalism and the future of America
Tim Wise
But statuary to confederates are not intended as history texts, and those who erected them — mostly in the early 1900s, long after the war, and during a time when lynching and the re-assertion of white supremacy in the South was at its zenith — never intended them to be so. These are altars of worship, where the faithful come to drink of the blood and taste of the flesh of their Great-Great-Grandpappy Beauregard, whose perfidy and characterological rot they still refuse to face. To defend these statues on the grounds of historical memory is perverse, for they misremember that history entirely and the cause for which Lee and others were fighting.
Yes, Jefferson was a slave owner, and this fact should be understood and not sanitized or considered a mere time-bound failing on his part (as it often is at the University of Virginia, for instance). But still, there is a difference between someone who said "all men are created equal" even if his actions suggested he didn't mean it, and those who said (as did Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens) that white supremacy was the "cornerstone" of their new government. One provided us with a flawed yet visible exit from the national nightmare in which he himself was implicated. The others — including leaders in the states who issued declarations of causes for their secession, and in each case named the maintenance of slavery as their purpose — would have extended that nightmare in perpetuity, and without hesitation. Whether Jefferson intended it or not, he gave us a blueprint, however blood-spattered, for building a functioning democracy. Lee and his cohorts had no interest in such things, nor the vision to even imagine them. And that matters.
The Real Story Behind All Those Confederate Statues
"Most of these monuments were not erected right after the Civil War. In fact, all the way to 1890 there were very few statues or monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders. Most of them were built much later…during times when Southern whites were engaged in vicious campaigns of subjugation against blacks…to accompany organized and violent efforts to subdue blacks and maintain white supremacy in the South." [Particularly 1895-1915 with Jim Crow, and 1955-1970, the Civil Rights era. The statue in Charlottesville, IIRC was inbetween that, in the 20's, when "Jim Crow reigns safely throughout the South". This is "something that even a lot of liberals don't always get"].
See also: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf
Tools of Displacement: How Charlottesville, Virginia's Confederate statues helped decimate the city's historically successful black communities.
Race, the Gospel, and the Moment
Franklin Graham: Blame White Terrorism On Those Who Voted To Remove The Racist Monument
Also addressed now (as I've mentioned before) is why the Jews are being included in the hatred:
Why the Charlottesville Marchers Were Obsessed With Jews
Anti-Semitic logic fueled the violence over the weekend, no matter what the president says.
'Jews will not replace us': Why white supremacists go after Jews
"The successes of the civil rights movement created a terrible problem for white supremacist ideology. White supremacism — inscribed de jure by the Jim Crow regime and upheld de facto outside the South — had been the law of the land, and a black-led social movement had toppled the political regime that supported it. How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone? … Some secret cabal, some mythological power, must be manipulating the social order behind the scenes. This diabolical evil must control television, banking, entertainment, education and even Washington D.C. It must be brainwashing white people, rendering them racially unconscious.
What is this arch-nemesis of the white race, whose machinations have prevented the natural and inevitable imposition of white supremacy? It is, of course, the Jews. Jews function for today's white nationalists as they often have for anti-Semites through the centuries: as the demons stirring an otherwise changing and heterogeneous pot of lesser evils."
I had focused on Jews being blamed simply because blacks did not have enough power to be blamed for everything, such as world economics, so they had to shift to another group, which happened to be the Jews, who had already originally been blacklisted by corrupt Christian views as the "murderers of Christ" and then blamed for the problems of Germany. But this shows they are also specifically being resented for supposedly promoting this other race of "inferiors". The Nationalist site Firstfreedom mentions "the ultimate goal of the One World Order – to brown AmeriKa and annihilate our Anglo-Celtic-European culture!"
When you look at the insistence of how the white race is the greatest and has created everything good in civilization, yet their domination is nevertheless on the wane, and their prided civilization is going down (you can even see this discussed in the Stormfront forum discussion "Are We Really White Supremacists?"), it's like "that wasn't supposed to happen!" Everyone knows all about the patterns of other great historical empires: Rome, The Muslim empire, Egypt, Babylon, etc. and the lesson of no matter how powerful they are, they still get too big for their own or anyone's good (and often become decadent as well), and then burst. But no; not us!
There is just no thought (even among those on this board who disclaim "supremacy" in favor of mere "separation", but still as "more intelligent", etc.) that you are still just a mortal man, and everything mortal man does is stained with corruptibility and will fail). So someone else has to be blamed for this, and attributed this power that is [for the moment] greater, but nevertheless evil, with the promise that the good power will eventually prevail.
This has clearly become a religion, and as it emanated from a "Christian worldview", you wonder what happened to the conservative teaching on the sinfulness of all men (which they loudly and incessantly berated liberals and other religions or irreligion for rejecting)? That no man or nation can point to their technological advancement as having any merit before God.
For one of the other familiar sellouts:
He just needs to be sent back into the past and see how good this political philosophy he defends would have treated him. (Or if they got their way and took the nation back, where he would be. And this isn't even the mainstream Right we're dealing with anymore; this is the alt-right, and you ain't even a "good one", no matter how much you champion their beliefs; there are no "good ones"; you got the brown skin, you got the genes; you're still just an "n_____"!).
This one does make a point I've noted on "privilege theory", which may be true in one sense, but it's a matter of tact, in constantly shaming all whites for it:
Maine Gov. Paul LePage Says Taking Down Confederate Statues Is Like Removing 9/11 Memorial
FB discussion:
Christian Pyle "Would only be true if the 9/11 monument was to the terrorists."
Mel Stewart "Here's an idea. We erect a monument to Bin Laden at ground zero so we never forget. Sound good?"
Sharon Thomeczek Brohammer "You make too much sense for this group!😉"
Stephen Tonnies "…taking down the statues doesn't change history. These statues are nothing to do with history. They just glorify men who were on the wrong side of history. These men were traitors to the legitimate government of the United States. They seceded from the USA to form their own country. Why do we revere them? You won't find many statues of Washington and Jefferson in Great Britain. Washington and Jefferson were at least fighting against a Distant government that was screwing the colonies over with no representation. Very very different to the reasons for the Civil War."
Connie Jaquess "9-11 memorials are for the victims. Confederate monuments are honoring Confederate War heroes. Big difference."
One big story all day is that even:
Stonewall Jackson's Great-Great-Grandsons Call for Removal of Confederate Monuments
Decided that the best way to frame the perception perspectives is simply
Where S was said by Jung to "register reality as real" or cover "what is", N was connected to time; "where it's heading". This does not explicitly mention space for S, but when you think of it, all sensory perception is spatial. We see or hear waves that come to us through space, smell particles that float to us through space, and touch and taste things we reach out for through space. This occurs in time as well, but all the perceived objects are experienced through space. Time is where occurs the "idea" of them and the "possibilities" of where they can go. I got into this a bit here: https://erictb.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/another-crack-at-function-definitions-relationships-of-objects/#comment-1962
Like you can have a tangible unit like a building or even our bodies, but if every part (or our cells) are replaced one by one, then is it still the same material? What passes down through time is really an "idea" that the tangible "here and now" parts simply make up instant by instant. Matter itself may actually be waveforms that transfer from one string to another as the forces of acceleration or inertia "push" all the energy of the string from one location to the next, relative to other objects. The best way to think of this is a moving image on a screen of pixels. Nothing's actually "moving" except an "image", conveying, essentially, an "idea" programmed into the electronic circuits. Again, functions are by nature "mixed together" or "undifferentiated in reality, and only separated out by our consciousness.
Hence, both S and N are involved in these examples. But to divide them, S is the spatial (random access) aspect, while N is the sequential (causative) aspect.
So, "What is" refers to what is sitting there in space, while what "could be" implies a time element; what could take on a tangible shape in the future, or even what could have been, in the past.
So now, to factor in the attitudes, extraversion deals in the "environment", while introversion is about the individual. Both space and time consist of linear "dimensions", of biploar "directions", by which every conscious entity immersed in it divides reality. (And I've been expressing the functions and attitudes themselves as divisions of reality). Space has three (randomly accessible, again), and time has one, which is one way.
So Se is basically what you experience in the immediate environment, as you look out into any of the three dimensions of space. Again, the visual and audial waves, olfactory particles, and gustatory and tactile contact.
Si is the same spatial data, but stored individually in memory.
So Ne then involves what you experience when following the chain of occurrences when looking through the dimension of time. Its inferences occur along this time line (its "environment"). Hence, what "could" happen. Also, following past patterns, and continuing their trajectories to get a sense of what will happen. (Of course, things can change, and so Ne remains "open").
So then Ni (what I devised all of this to continue to try to get a better understanding of and way of expressing) also looks at the dimension of time, but its inferences do not come from the timeline, but rather from the individual, which is the unconscious. This is the domain of the "archetypal" (images that are collective, and not tied directly to our external experience), and what do we often describe archetypal images as? "Timeless"! (meaning pervasive through time; not on our individual timeline of experience).
So, for the perception attitudes, space and time are the corresponding "environments" that define the extraverted perspective. Introversion, (just like the stereotypical picture of an "introvert") withdraws from this, to the individual perspective, to conjure up images either of spatial reality, or temporal patterns.
The way this was once described to me, was that N overall dealt with patterns or the salient points of a pattern that can be abstracted from one situation to give meaning to another, transferring the acquired patterns to new contexts, largely unconsciously, in order to get the gist of a subject; and operating by inferring from a few elements some larger arrangement in which they're characteristically included. Ne attempts to understand a situation (or otherwise disparate external elements) in terms of a pattern (the larger arrangement that give them meaning; and also "stored in memory"), while Ni begins with and looks outside of the pattern (the existing arrangement of elements) and infers what's being left out; what it doesn't take into account.
This was helping me get a better understanding of the difference, but for some reason wasn't totally clicking. Me, in my Ti fashion, needed a better system of parallel, like S, T and F all handle the same things (tangible, mechanical and anthropic or "soul"-related), but the "e" attitude determines what "is", is "true" or is "good" from the environment, while the "i" attitudes determines them from within the individual.
The obvious word I took notice of for N was "pattern", and it was tempting to simply define "N=patterns". But I held off from that, because for one thing, "patterns" could be sensory as well, such as a "pattern" on a fabric, or music. (Actually, these, especially the latter, are timelike as well as spatial/tangible, and with visual patterns, you can think of them as timelike, in it requires time to compare one part to another and see the markings look the same).
Also, because I thought the general N description, and Ne sounded similar: involving comparing or transferring one thing to another and the "larger arrangement that gives them meaning". (But of course Ni deals in this latter part; the so-called "big picture" too. And I had to think whether the "pattern" referred to the "larger arrangement" for one or both attitudes, or if the "larger arrangement" was what's outside the pattern, or if both the initial thing and what it was being compared to were both "patterns" and "larger arrangements" in this particular description, etc.).
And Ne dealt directly with the external pattern, making me think then that Ni was inferring from a "subjective pattern" (such as the "templates" I mentioned in my earlier descriptions of Ni). But instead, it looks "outside" a pattern.
So what really was the common "element" or "product" that tied together both attitudes of iNtuition? It's clearly not the "pattern" itself. If anything, it made Ne sound internal ("patterns stored in memory", which also makes one think of Si) and Ni sound external ("outside the pattern").
Really, the problem in distinguishing Ne vs Ni was the need to determine what exactly the "environment" of iNuition was to begin with! (It was obvious for S, T and F, and so what happened was that we assume the same "environment", often called "the outer world" held true for N. But what really did that mean; especially since iNtuition is all technically "internal", and imagines possibilities for things on the external world?)
So upon reading Beebe's book, where he pointed out Jung associated N specifically with time, that got me thinking more about it. (Also, even more recently, in reviewing The Iceman Inheritance, where time was mentioned as the awareness that came with our sapience as developed hominids).
In my view, space and time together make up sort of a partial "trinity" reflection, with space comparable to the "Son" who appeared physically in space, and time, with the invisible "Spirit" who afterward came over the time since, to indwell man. I for some reason had not directly associated S with "space", because I realized time was involved as well. But just in the past few days, "trying on the idea", it really fits!
Ne's patterns "stored in memory" by which it actually does its looking down through the dimension of time is precisely what makes it work with its opposite tandem mate, Si. Hence, both are associated in the new "Intentional Styles" model, with "Inquiring"; which is basically going mentally through (e) time (N) to access previous (i) spatial experience (S).
So Si technically also has a time element, as stored memory is from the past. But the difference is that N is about objects or models that play out in time, while Si is about models of objects in space remembered through time (and also current internal senses).
Se's immediate (e) space (S) orientation then works with Ni's immediate "outside (i) the [timelike(N)] pattern" awareness, and hence are called "Realizing".
Lenore had defined Ni in the book (p223) as "liberate our sense impressions from their larger context, thereby creating more options for perception itself", which might be hard for non-Ni types to really grasp. The timeline idea explains it. The "larger context" is what occurs in the time dimension, but the "unconscious impressions" are from outside of the time dimension, and so you can get more kinds of interpretations than what were available in the temporal environment.
The example given is raising the question in one's mind of the possible reasons a suntan is valued by people today, when the original circumstances that gave it its meaning have changed. Again, we see the time element of this, and the pondering steps outside of this timeline to raise the question of why it's still considered attractive.
(Likewise, "perspectives" is the single word nickname Personality Hacker gives to Ni, and they describe it as "not married to its own perspective", and "watching your mind form patterns", and eventually, over time, you're going to get the 'pattern of the pattern'" [hence, "meta-awareness"], and so when listening to another person they can shift out of their own perspective and into the other person's perspective and get a sense of what's going on with them, and be able to guess "I bet this is the pattern created in the other person's mind", so it looks like reading their mind. These would be the "internal connections" corresponding to Ne's "external connections" They also describe Ne as asking "what if" and Ni as asking "why"?).
So Ni is like Fi in thinking "if that were me, I would…"; Fi says "feel this way", and Ni says "perceive it this way". This affinity is why both are so "deep" and the hardest to understand or explain. Both N and F are the most complex as their products only have meaning to sapient beings, where S and T is "what is", whether anyone is there to perceive or assess it or not.
I would also say if you consciously compare patterns, that's Ne, while a feeling more like a premonition of what something means, or what will happen is Ni.
(For me, when the premonition is good, I don't trust it; when it's bad; I try to resist and fight against the outcome playing out in life,or I just grudgingly go with it and become totally down and pessimistic).
Looking at the temporal patterns limits us to what we can see from them, where we can't see the future, and so the possibilities in the environment remain "open". A lot of different things "could" happen. Looking outside the pattern is "open" in an internal sense, as you don't have to rely on patterns of experience. However, it ends up creating less "open" environmental possibilities, and also working with extraverted judgment, which makes the observations and solutions more "closed".
As Ni looks "outside the pattern" to access the unconscious, Si could likewise be seen as looking "outside the immediate [material] environment" to access the stored images of experienced tangible reality.
Beebe quotes from Joseph Henderson (San Francisco psychiatrist regarded as the pre-eminent American Jungian analyst, d.2007) on the difference between the two functions: "Introverted intuition perceives the variety and the possibility for development of the inner images, whereas introverted sensing perceives the specific image which defines the psychic activity that needs immediate attention".
So it's like the "model" of space and time, respectively, with the "image" itself being the spacelike static "item" in this imaginary space, and "where it can head" as the time dimension in the inner world. (Where Ne is described as spotting "the still unrealized possibilities in things"; and thus referencing "the real world"; i.e. actual "things", which may be technically "images", but if we make time itself the "environment" of N, then as stated before, both attitudes of N deal with images that have never matched the [spatial] environment (where with S, they either do currently match the environment [e], or once did match it [i]), but Ne's images are based more on real world objects or sequences (that can be shown to others, even if by implication), where Ni is like the "image of the image" (and hence, the "meta" form again).
So if we make the S/N environment "space/time", then by extension, T/F could be something like things vs people (i.e."social"). (And we are also still "things", hence we can be looked at through a T lens).
space—time—things—people = the environment of reality
tangible—potential—mechanical—anthropic = our immersion in reality
More examples of N=time:
Typology; patterns of behavior observed through time.
Numbers: represent hypothetical sensate objects in space (like if we see three groups of three items, and we know the total is really nine objects sitting in space), but when we begin representing them with numerals and operator symbols, we have turned them into ideas that only work through time.
"Discover vs uncover" [Ne vs Ni, discussed here] further betrays the timelike nature of N.
Things like higher dimensions are hypothetical ideas of things we can't see, but would be waiting [i.e through time] to be "discovered" or "uncovered".
Bruzon ("Fundamental Nature of MBTI") description of N as the "motion" component (represented as a whole grid) while S was the "static" objects on the grid.
"Motion" of course is only possible in time.
I once read about tests that had been done in type classes, of showing an image of a triangle with horizontal bands. With a surprising amount of consistency, the Sensates describe it just like this, or as a three-sided plane with parallel bands. The Intuitives say they see a railroad track or a striped dunce cap. Each side can see why the other described it the way they did, but the S's heard: "What are the properties of this image?" and N's heard "What does this image mean to you?"; that is, what pattern is it like in your tacit memory?
This is timelike in that these "patterns", again, are constructs formed over time, where the S's simply described exactly what they saw immediately in space.
I had begun using the term "implications"/"inferences", in addition to "conceptual", "ideational", "mental constructs", "filling in", "intangible" etc.; and implications and inferences point through time (which is intangible in the moment) via the mental ideation and constructing and filling in processes used to become aware of them.
"The big picture" also, is in practice timelike, as it's something that "comes together" or basically revealed in time. Ni deals with an existing "big picture" by "filling it in from the images of the unconscious. Ne forms its sense of the "big picture" by putting together the "objective" patterns, stored in memory, filling in the patterns with fitting elements of each other. Both the "putting together" and "memory" are technically "internal", to the "subject", which is what made this confusing; but it is in the dimension of time, not space, that they are external objects!
So about Ne sounding like N in general; N can be described as grasping a pattern that two otherwise disparate situations have in common, and gambles that the new situation is going to operate in the same general way as the one already known. First, here we see the clear time element; the predictive sense; based on "patterns" that themselves deal in some kind of "motion" (change) that is not necessarily spatial. Both Ne and Ni do this, but Ne simply looks along time at the motion component (whether temporal, spatial, or just mental) of the pattern to make the "guess", while Ni references the archetypal images to gain something more like a "hunch".
So to do the completed function attitudes:
Se awareness of objects in space is stimulated by the environment (as it emerges in the external world)
Si awareness of objects in space is stimulated by individual reference (filtered through internal recollection)
Ne awareness of patterns through time is stimulated by the environment (one pattern implies another "externally")
Ni awareness of patterns through time is stimulated by individual reference (looks outside the pattern to the internal subconscious)
Since all of science (including psychology) realizes naturally that we deal in space and time (in addition to impersonal mechanics, and personal affect), putting the functions in these terms (again, one or the other preferred by our divisions of reality) would have a better chance of proving the theory is not some ridiculous idea like astrology.
(I also thought, if S as space corresponds to the Son and N as time corresponds to the Spirit, then what corresponds to the Father? It would be the "transcendent function" of course, which would correspond to what I've considered the Father-like continuum, or "Patrix", the "chance" medium. But that's on the axis of S and N. What about T/F, which is the other axis the transcendent function lies between? I would think T would be more material, like the Son, and F, dealing with "the heart" as like the Spirit. I had considered T="matter" and F="soul", but I used "material" for S; and again, this shows that both S and T deal in "what it is" in their own ways; and "soul" could include animals, but they don't have a Feeling "function"; it's all instinct for them, and though I use "soul-affect" for F, this does extend to animals, inasmuch as we relate to them and their emotions. But without our sapience, F would have no meaning).
I've also been informed that Socionics considers S as space and N as time (and T as "objects" and F as "energy") http://en.socionicasys.org/teorija/dlja-novichkov/aspekty.
An example of Ne's time orientation:
|Like I liked to look at possible subway service patterns, and was particularly interested years ago, when the Manhattan Bridge was stuck, seemingly forever, in the "north side tracks open only" configuration, allowing the 6th Avenue traffic to run over the bridge, but not Broadway. So the Broadway "Q" was moved to 6th Avenue, while the express "N" was moved to the Montague tunnel, where it could access the Broadway line, but as a local and via a much longer path. The next phase of the work was to close the north side, and reopen the south side, allowing the Broadway expresses to cross, but not the 6th Avenue service. It had switched from this pattern several years before, but since this was initially planned to be temporary, they created a makeshift arrangement where the 6th Ave. B and D service ran in two sections; one rerouted to Broadway, and terminating at one of its terminals in Manhattan or Queens, and the uptown halves already on 6th, from uptown, terminating at 34th St. The two halves actually overlapped between 34th and 57th, so that you had two separate routes with the same letter, and different route colors running through midtown Manhattan. I thought this was an incredibly sloppy arrangement.
But then when I found out that there was a time when 6th Avenue didn't connect to the bridge at all (the north side used to connect to Broadway, and the south side, to the now severed Nassau St. loop, which had very little service as it was), and that the old service pattern included a "T" train that was replaced by the "B" I was familiar with, and a "family" of "Q"'s replaced by the D, and the primary Nassau service was on the West End, much the way the M had been moved from the Brighton to the West End, so that was similar also. So I got the idea for the next time to just restore that old pattern and the letter "T" instead of a second "B", and since the Q locals used double letters, which were no longer used, then the new Brighton local would be "U", because it sounds like "Q", is used with "q" in written language, and the lines were really just an express and local version of the same line, not going anywhere different, like when a 6th Avenue and Broadway line run there.
I took the pattern from one situation, and moved it to a similar situation according to the infrastructure, and then forecasted what "could" be done. This also involved judgment, in determining from an internal framework what would be "correct" (different lines should each have their own letter, and letters should be allocated to the same line, even if unused for a long time).
Thankfully, however, the same "environmental" criteria; this time, rider confusion, led them to eliminate the "split" B and D, which had already had provisions on the new signs, with both orange and yellow sets of both routes. Instead, they used an existing "W" (which was allocated on the signs for the Whitehall St. short line service it appears as today) for the West End (it had become my second choice in suggestions, for the Brighton local when I found out about the letter being on signs), and came up with a "diamond Q" sign for the Brighton express (with the circle as the local, since they had decided diamonds would now only be used for express versions of local lines that run at the same time; the only other examples now being on the 6 and 7. While I had also had ideas for a dreaded "bridge fully closed" scenario ⦅that looked like a real possibility throughout the whole time⦆, and we imagined what the final "bridge fully open" scenario" could be like, as it turned out, the B and D would not even return to their old lines when the work was finished, but actually switch places).
I'm not sure how Ni would handle this. From what I heard, it would gather a final conclusion, and "work its way backward" to find holes in the pattern and see which way the data "wants" to go, which I imagine would then be assessed for the correct course of action with Te. The decisions of Transit are basically Te+S (with computers doing the "timelike forecasting" work, and decisions based off of the "tangible" spatially perceived data produced).
So we see how it's all timelike, in comparing the patterns over time, and what could be done in time. Those "patterns" in this case also involve the routing of trains, moving from one place to another.
R.I.P. legendary Persuasions' singer Jimmy Hayes
They were a somewhat known a-capella group, and while perhaps not well known in younger pop circles, were at least big enough to guest-star for the backgrounds for Stevie Wonder's "Please Don't Go", the closing track of Fulfillingness First Finale.
A couple years after that; I would say at least by '76 or '77, he and a few others from the group moved to the block I grew up on (and I believed that was where he still was; for the rest of his life; I would sometimes ask when visiting, and last time, a few years ago, was told he was still there), so they were like the resident celebrities.
We knew each other pretty well, and he would often be around, like when everyone was outside, and the adults would sit on the sidelines, or be in the superintendent's shop or someone's house, either hanging out, or playing cards. They even had my father and I and a few others go to the Electric Lady c.1978, to watch them rehearse. (My only time in the studio! It was also one of Stevie's "homes" back in the Contract 2 era that ended with FFF. Marveled at the odd looking façade shape. Jimmy actually teased me there that night by announcing on the mic he was going to give me some T-shirt with an unhappy frog saying "I'm so happy, I could s___"; IIRC may well have looked like a forerunner to today's "Pepe"; I was embarrassed because I had been conditioned to shun curse words!)
He was originally from Hopewell, Virginia, and my interest in the state had already been raised by my two summers at my aunt in Cumberland, and passing through or spending a day in nearby Richmond while there, and then seeing Norfolk and the rest of the huge looking urban areas on the map, and wondering what they was like. (And then, a "Norfolk by the Sea" brochure coming in the paper a year or two after my last trip there).
Even though Hopewell was closer to Richmond, he still knew about Norfolk, and so I got all my info from him, like the rough area being the Church St. corridor (Huntersville, so I already knew that when I arrived down there in college a couple of years later and had to pass through the nearby area to get downtown; they then began clearing it, and eventually building the current suburban-like neighborhood), and about the segregation on the beaches (likely Ocean View) in prior decades.
Since he worked with Stevie once; I thought it so interesting that I was only "two degrees of separation" from him! (Around the same time, the block and the neighboring lot on Flatbush where some stores burned down years before —and we used to play stickball; used to be visited by some older guy who was supposedly the father of "Thelma" on Good Times! Made me excited that I was only three degrees away from Janet Jackson, who played on the show and had become my dream girl when she greatly "blossomed" on the following show, Diff'rent Strokes).
From Evangelical Protestant "orthodoxy" to Eastern (Greek) "Orthodoxy": Leading Apologist Converts to the original "Historic Church"
I'm over a month late on this, and the big clue was the CRI e-mail about the question of whether president Hank Hanegraaf "left the faith" http://www.equip.org/article/left-christian-faith. I get these in a side-email that I only read on the phone, usually on breaks at work. For some reason, I brushed it off, thinking maybe it was some late April Fool's joke, or perhaps some radical movement saying he's gotten too soft on some point of doctrine or morality or something (like IFB's have long said CRI was too soft on Catholics and "separation"; the "psychoheresy" critics say he has "compromised" in the issue of "counseling"; the KJVO's of course will think he errs on translations, etc). I was still getting CRI/Equip e-mails from him, so he wasn't ousted from that organization. I think I did actually glance at that article, and all it was, was him reaffirming the universal doctrines of the "historic Church" that he always championed: The deity of Christ, original sin, the Church and the scriptures, the Trinity, Jesus as incarnate savior, salvation by "grace through faith", making one a "new creation", and the resurrection of the dead and the life to come.
So on that same side e-mail, today, where I also get notifications from the old Baptistboard about ongoing threads, I see a new one saying directly, "Hank Hanegraaff Converts to Greek Orthodox". In it, someone points out the topic was already covered, in a month old thread matching his own blog article, "Has Hank Hanagraaf left the faith?". (Both of these were in "Baptist only" sections which always seem to have the most interesting topics, but non-Baptists are not allowed to post there). Now, I find on CRI his direct Q&A about Orthodoxy: http://www.equip.org/questions-answers-orthodoxy/ There was a link to this on the other page, but I thought "Ask Hank: Questions and Answers About Orthodoxy" meant what he formerly considered "orthodoxy": evangelical Protestant "orthodoxy"!
It was right there on the BB, over a decade ago, where I had heavily debated several Eastern Orthodox believers, and some Catholics. (One EOC "catechumen" was for some reason rejected from admission, and ended up Anglican instead. There was another Anglican as well, and they argued on the side of "catholicism" on most of the points, especially Eucharist and "tradition"). For a time, they had swarmed the board, and gotten pretty aggressive, until the admins began cracking down on it. This is what led me to put up a page answering "Catholic" arguments, and consisting in part (the second half) of the key points copied from those very debates: http://www.erictb.info/tradition.html
To reprint the opening text:
I myself always looked with interest at the Eastern Orthoodox Church, since becoming acquainted with the claims of an "original true Church" through the literature of the Church of Christ years ago, and then finding similar claims by the Worldwide Church of God (Armstrongism), Jehovah's Witnesses, and even some Baptists use it. I always found the claims of those groups being preserved through such small sects as the Waldensians, Catharii, and Anabaptists to be farfetched, as those groups were vastly different from these modern groups. I quickly realized that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches had more of a stake to that claim, since they were the historical "Church" stemming from the original Churches planted by the Apostles. And I further figured out that the EOC has an even greater claim than the RCC, because the latter was actually one single patriarchate of the original five of the Church, which broke off because it was continuing to add new doctrines the other four patriarchates did not accept.
Still, I do not believe that the EOC of the 11th century and after was the same as the first century Church either, as is assumed by EOC advocates. However, some have now begun to become aggressive in claiming to be the true Church, and condemning Protestantism and "sola Scriptura", "with its thousands of splinter groups", instead of "just following the [oral, apostolic] traditions of the Church". Many of those groups that claim to be the original Church had a point in pointing out that the Church rapidly began changing after the death of the apostles. You can even see the warnings of apostasy in the writings of the apostles themselves.
This reflects a time just before I started moving toward the Fulfilled View, and so still believing the "end" was future, and that the "falling away" was something starting in the first century, and continuing down through all of Church history, to our time and beyond. It was these debates, including the point that was mentioned, of all the "thousands of splinter groups", that made me finally grow weary of futurism. Yes, that fit into the so-called "falling away" it was plugged into, but it fell so far away that nobody can really agree on much of anything regarding what the truth of scripture is; everyone just claims to be scriptural and reads their doctrines into scripture, and it seemed anyone could make scripture say anything they wanted. There's no longer any central [spiritual] body representing the original truth like there was under the apostles, though some organizations are claiming to be that body; again, reading their doctrines and institutional structures into scripture.
So it seemed like that "body" was never designed to go on through centuries of changing leadership and political influence, and without the supernaturally guided original apostles. It was only designed to last a "short time", —which is precisely what we see promised by Jesus Himself and the apostles!
So when the preterists next began to turn the volume up on their doctrine on the board, I likewise fought hard against that, but later found the "pantelist" variation or "Fulfilled view", and it all finally clicked. It's the only thing that explains why God would allow "His Church" to spiral out of control like this, as the watching world takes it as the ultimate evidence that the whole religion is just a human fabrication.
I still thought about the EOC in the back of my mind, passing the St. Demetrios Cathedral in Astoria every day right next to the elevated N and W trains I worked back then, and feeling the pull of and "ancientness" of a cathedral that leads many others to "catholic" churches, I then decided to scout out the EOC's counterpart to the RCC's St. Patrick's Cathedral (the head of the denomination for the NYC area), and find it's the Holy Trinity Cathedral, which is a rather small, modest basilica wedged sideways in the middle of the block on E 74th St. between a row of old Civil War era tenements and a newer highrise and with a Presbyterian Church on the other side of that. I swing by at the end of a service, to get a sense of what it's like (would be much easier to get to now, being near the brand new Second Avenue line), but the people seemed rather distant and just into their own little cliques.
Anyways, Hanegraaf's move would mean he no longer believes in at least two of the "core essentials" he once defended, of Grace alone through faith alone, and "sola scriptura". (Even though he did claim to still believe in the former). The "Catholic/Orthodox" position on the role of "works" in "faith" is similar to that of several of the "cults", such as Jehovah's Witnesses, radical sabbatarians such as Armstrongism, and the Church of Christ.
As he was the de-facto number one "apologist" for the general body of evangelical "orthodoxy" (as understood in the "Protestant" form), this is very surprising. So the perhaps next leading evangelical apologist, James White of Alpha & Omega ministries, quickly began commenting on it.
https://youtu.be/ezaECk7cBQs (this video even shows the tweet of Hanegraaf being received into the Church via chrismation!)
You would think the two ministries would be pretty much in lockstep agreement on most doctrines; since they uphold the "basics" of evangelical doctrine, but apparently, there was a bit of a light "falling out" between the two fourteen years ago, when White realized it would be his last invitation to the Bible Answer Man, as he described what he calls a pre-planned "ambush" to promote "synergism" (which is basically the technical term for "free-will" cooperation in salvation), which he says "backfired" on the hosts. White is of course, solidly Calvinist (monergistic), where Hanegraaf always seemed to be more neutral on that dispute. (I can remember him describing a "racist" attack, when some hyper-charismatic "revival" leader whom he had denounced fired back something about him being an "intellectual Calvinist" or something like that, which was assumed simply from him having a Dutch background).
White addresses the issue of the "catholic" definition of "faith" in this second video on the subject: https://youtu.be/F5EPs9EqIsc He points out how the single word "alone", as in "grace/faith alone" makes a big difference. Removing it and substituting something like "faith working through love" (taking from Paul in Galatians, but using it differently from what he originally meant), as a Catholic he cites does, "opens the door" to the entire sacrificial system of Rome, and all the doctrines that go with that (baptismal regeneration, different kinds of sin, etc. Already, Hanegraaf can be heard in a clip talking about how [canonized] saints pray for us, though he says we can't pray to them. White shows how the still professed "sola scriptura" is actually redefined, and around 20 minutes in excellently points out how the EOC "traditions" were "frozen" or "fossilized" in the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries [and not the 1st, 2nd or 3rd], by the threat of the rise and rule of Islam, which forced them to maintain "this is what we believe and we must defend it"; where the Western Church had the freedom and increased power to continue developing its doctrine).
I'm actually not as totally surprised as you think I would be. He is so into the "historic" aspect of the "faith"; "historicity" seemed to always be the ultimate arbiter of doctrinal matters, including how to interpret scripture, which is of course the official final authority, but as we see all too often, does get interpreted differently by nearly everyone. I always pictured him having a soft spot for some form of "catholicity" (which again, he was always criticized for not being hard enough on. He does have articles on "Catholicism" http://www.equip.org/category/catholicism, but these seem to be more focused on the specific Roman branch of catholicism. Again, the EOC doesn't have quite the same stigma as the RCC; as it didn't add some of the really bad doctrines like purgatory, indulgences, etc. Also, it not being as familiar here in the West. It was the RCC that Protestantism broke away from).
This is truly a major shift in evangelicalism!
The Iceman Inheritance Micael Bradley
©1978 Michael Bradley; originally published by Dorset Publishing, Inc.; reading 1991 Kayode Publications (New York) 1st printing
Figured I should finally read this and review it, since I have thought of and mentioned its premise a lot over the years. I first saw this IIRC in the 90's. My family had it, and my father was talking about it, IIRC. It was a printing I can't find now, where the cover showed an actual man made of ice, displaying a very aggressive looking expression.
The premise was that the rough environment of Ice Age Europe is what led "Western" civilizations to be overall "aggressive", leading to their conquest of much of the world. The very first words; the "contention" (also the title of Part One), "This book is racist!" The irony being that the race being critiqued ("I will attempt to show that racism is a predisposition of but once race of Mankind…") is the white race, and and by a white Canadian author!
Already hearing so much of what's now called "dog whistling" rhetoric for over a decade back then, which extolled the virtues of the White Western Christian civilization, contrasted with the "laziness" of the black race (now encoded as "Western/American exceptionalism"), and developing a presentation of the Gospel as teaching all men are equal (made in God's image), but "fallen" into being "sinful" (though in different manifestations often), it made sense as an a great proof of the Bible teaching.
But when I glanced at it, I found it full of discussion of prehistory and particularly evolutionary theory, such as frequent mention of the "Neanderthals". While I was never a solid [young earth] "Creationist", I at that point did not know what to make of either theory, and while opposing the conspiratorial rhetoric and rigid literalism of the more fundamentalistic creationists; I still was not ready to really deal with taking the problem as far back as neanderthals (pre-homosapiens or "mankind" proper; think: "cavemen" who are seemingly half-ape). I wanted something that placed man's problems with "the Fall" into sin, that occurred in our current homo-sapiens state.
So I basically put it aside, and eventually gave the book away.
My mother later is given another one; the copy I have now, with the standard cover showing a hand smashing something with a rock. (This could also be found on Afrocentric book tables on the street). One time, later, when she was giving away books, including this one, I this time decided to keep it. So it sat on my shelf for years.
Forward to today's political climate, where the more radical racists are coming out into the open, dubbed the "alt-right" (even to the point of denouncing the old dog-whistlers for their indirect language, which they call "cuckery"), and boldly pitching white supremacy in contrast to black "pathology". They dress down all of our "problems", and put together patterns of bad character, as I have cited in Makers-Takers and think nothing of how they could happen to end up in the "good" group. It's just "fact" and "truth", supported by statistics. As far back as the old writings on the Right Wing, I had cited the premise of the book, and pointed out that what is being pointed at in the black community is basically the same effect on a smaller scale. The rough environments we've been placed in have made us more aggressive; hence all the much touted "crime" in the cities. So we're proven to be essentially all the same, just like the Gospel teaches!
This is basically the liberal response to everything, from crime, to even the genetic "bell curve" hypothesis, which had actually reared its head again in that mid 90's period. But the alt-right just dismisses this, and focuses on what's seen now, in the statistics, deeming the blacks "insoluble", and going as far as to criticize the nation and its founders for bringing us here in the first place, and even dismissing the Constitution. (So the other conservatives who uphold those things are seen as betraying the race in favor of country, hence the likening it to "cuckolding"!)
Meanwhile, life seems to be getting rougher and rougher (for the average person), both economically, and organizationally (like how litigiousness causes agencies like mine to pile more and more rules and harsher penalties for breaking them), with those on the top (in power) gaining more and more, exponentially!
And all of this is justified with the rhetoric of "rugged individualism", where this is just the way "nature" is; basically Darwinism's "natural selection" being true socio-economically, (even to the staunch Creationists who blamed "Darwinism" for the fall of the nation!) and the poor and weak are always to blame for not "pulling their bootstraps". Those who make it to the top are uncritically assumed to have an almost blameless character (and thus, the only ones who have "earned" their "freedom", and thus should have almost no regulation in how they rule over others).
I kept finding myself more and more saying how they are creating a practical "Ice Age", where it's "dog eat dog" and survival of the fittest. This came to mind especially when watching Zeitgeist, with its discussion of the illusion of "scarcity" presented while there's really an "abundance" being hoarded away. This is basically the survival instinct of an environment like a frozen wilderness, where you have to keep taking, storing, taking, storing… etc.; not because you necessarily really need all of it right now, but just in case you run out and can't get any more. That is how the corporate world is geared, and passing it down to everyone else. And the aggression used to acquire stuff, and the "rugged individualism" used to justify it all, are just apart of the mindset.
All of this, in total irony given the right's claim of how "exceptional" this society is. (Or, when they acknowledge what they think is wrong with it, it's always other groups' fault; whether the blacks, the Jews, or just the compromising "cucks" of either left or right. This, in the same breath of accusing blacks of "never accepting responsibility for anything").
So this had me thinking more and more about this premise, and I figured I should finally sit down and read it, to see what it really says. Whether evolutionary or not, there must be something to it.
The 1990 foreword mentions an unpublished manuscript by Sigmund Freud (published as "A Phylogenetic Fantasy") that suggested that Western man's psychosexual aggressions were produced by glacial evolution during the last European Ice Age, as Bradley had first argued seven years earlier.
The introduction, by John Henrik Clarke of Hunter College summarizes the history of race. "There was no Europe in ancient times. The geographical area that would later be called Europe was not a functioning entity in world affairs when early civilizations were being developed in the Nile Valley and other river valleys in Africa and later in Western Asia (now mistakenly called the Middle East) and in mainland Asia in countries like India, China and later, Japan". The first real show of European literacy began around 1250BC, with Homer's Odyssey and the Iliad. They then "soon made a glaring discovery – Europe could not furnish them with enough food to properly feed them or enough material to properly clothe them. They began to look with covetous eyes at the more developed parts of the world". What followed were the invasions of parts of Africa and Asia by the Greeks, Assyrians and Iranians (Persians).
The racism that plagues us today would have its origins in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Europe was stricken by poverty and established the slave trade to begin its economic recovery. The "official rationale of the Atlantic slave trade" started with a papal-sanctioned authorization of Spain and Portugal to reduce to servitude "infidels", who had held Europe at bay since the age of the Crusades. While Europeans did enslave other Europeans for a much longer time than they enslaved Africans, this did not give birth to racism, but did lay the basis for feudalism.
They also at the time began colonization of the world, and what they call "colonization" of the Bible and the image of God. This created a contradiction, where they portrayed God as loving mankind and "no respecter" of men, but also who favored them over other people. Meanwhile, "The Europeans who were successful in Europe generally stayed in Europe", so the New World became established by "a large number of people who were failures at home". So, "Many of these Europeans felt called upon to make non-Europeans feel inferior so they they could convince themselves that they were a superior people".
In the 20th century, with the rise of the "Yellow Peril" of Japan, this was when pseudoscientific racism began, and the propagation of the Teutonic origin theory.
Chapter 1 is on the "Greek gift" of Western technology and discusses medicine, nuclear war and the affect on the climate (greenhouse gas, etc), done in the name of "progress", the "grain of truth" which "we" brought to "them".
Chapter 2 is the "Greek gifts" of Western psychology and philosophy.
"Paradoxes" become "conflicts" (struggle between the spiritual and material, "free world" vs communism etc). "This weakness is alienation", either from one truth of the paradox, or the other. We have to separate things."
(Within Western religion, "paradox" is only used as a last resort to cover up incoherencies in doctrine, to silence questions when they have no further explanations. Examples are many arguments for the Trinity, God's "love" versus "hatred", free will vs election, and salvation or "sanctification" by "grace" (and imparted "power") versus our own efforts. So in practice, they have become "conflicts" that have done what else, but cause "alienation" and division in the Church, into hundreds of denominations, many loudly denouncing others for "rejecting truth", that to them is embodied in these "paradoxes" that they see as only becoming "conflicts" because of their opponents' obstinance).
He then introduces the concept of "The Cronos Complex"; the title of his earlier book. That is that we differ from other species by our conception of time as a "territory". Animals of course have "territories" that are spatial. I define space as a set of coordinates that are randomly accessible. You can go back and forth from one point to another. Time is sequential; about causation, and where we can't go back to already passed points. This, animals can't comprehend. So if you think of it, they really do not think in terms of time. They, with their "instincts" are totally in the "here and now". Something happens, and they instinctively react. They do have memory, including things learned through stimulus-response. But they do not have the ability to preserve the past or plan for the future. Man has institutions like burial and religion, which is "past-present communication", where writing is a "present-future communication".
So just like with spatial territory, "we brought with us into the new dimension means of asserting and defending our territory" (p.16). This right away reminds me of conservative Christians' polemics on the downfall of America, or even the West or white race in general. Clearly, they are defending "territory" (from the past) they see as being taken from them (in the present and future). So this territorialism actually ends up holding back further "progress", where we feel threatened by the future. (p17f). So, "Man is a biological creature attempting to inhabit an environment that is non-biological. This is the paradox of human existence." (p.18-9).
But he still got the sense that the Cronos complex didn't tell the whole story; there was a second level of understanding, which was racial. This leads to chapter 3, "Child of Fire and Ice". He starts off going into different mythologies, such as the Nazis' "fourth cycle" the legend of Niord, the first hunter, who defeated the Worm Oroubourous by the use of fire, and deep in the earth, he became encased in ice, and Neitzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, about the Persian prophet trying to keep the Iranian religion pure in the Caucasus and other middle eastern mountains. So most European peoples preserved some memory of coming from the east and originating in the Caucasus-Pamir chain of mountains.
Basically, it was during the "ice age", called Würm I, where we had the cave fires amidst all the ice. Hence, "fire and ice".
So (p.26), it is right away pointed out that out of this geological backdrop, "Not intelligence, nor morality, not 'spirit', but aggression, is responsible for the white man's superiority. Aggression is responsible for the expansion of Caucasoids, both geographically and culturally, at the expense of other races." As far as psychosexual matters, "We have a low frustration level because glacial adaptation robbed us of sufficiently effective sexual displacement activities. Our philosophical and religious conflicts are the result of a glacial distortion of primate behavior-patterns".
This would explain the sexual repression in historic Christianity, where sexual mores were so meticulous and obsessively focused on and the "morality" of nations, and "holiness" of individuals were primarily judged based on, while other evils were OK if not championed. The one the most notable to me, being racism.
He then points out there is nothing innate or external about "superiority", for in an earlier epoch, the ape-tending pongids were "superior" to hominids in adapting to the forests covering much of the earth. But it was the change of the earth's climate, from Miocene to Pliocene, where the earth entered a drought millions of years long, "hominid liabilities in the Miocene became assets during the Pliocene". The failure to adapt to the forests left adaptational options open for the new environmental conditions. Neither the pongids nor the hominids had the least responsibility for this. It was basically "fate", or the matter of timing, even over talent and temperament. This is something today's "rugged individualists" refuse to comprehend.
Not intelligence, morality, nor 'spirit', but aggression, is responsible for the white man's "superiority", meaning their expansion at the expense of other races. There is nothing innate or external about this
Part Two is where we get into the Neanderthal-Caucasoids.
Chapter 4 "The Concept of Race" starts off discussing the viewpoints of two writers, Lother Tirala, a Nazi proponent of "Race", and Ashley Montagu, an liberal proponent of "non-race". Linnaeus (1785) was an early includer of man in the animal world, recognizing only one species, divided along the continental masses, into "europaeus", "asiaticus", "americanus" and "afer". Buffon (1749) introduced the term "race" to mean "variety".
Montagu had shown that modern racism stems from two separate fonts: a justification of slave economics, and inherent ans erroneous assumptions in systems of classification in evolutionary constructs. So, "It is ironic that both religion and Darwinism were used to justify racism, since each system vehemently opposed the other" (p.34). Both have used it against each other, down to the present. (I remember being so irritated to see racism mentioned in creationist Henry Morris' Revelation Record; the first time I had ever seen it addressed in a fundamentalist apologetic work; but only to be blamed on evolution —along with every other evil in the world! What about all the Genesis-believing Christians who [erroneously] said that God cursed "Ham", the supposed father of the black race?)
At this point is introduced another name used frequently, C.S. Coon, who divided the blacks between the "Congoids" or contemporary black "negroes", and the "Capoids", who were the Bushmen and Hottentots, who differed from the [Congoid] Bantu they were enslaved by. This became one instance of race-based slavery the medieval world would know about. So, "what the blacks imposed on the Capoids was soon to be imposed upon the blacks by white Europeans". (Coon's full racial classification consists of "Caucasoid", "Mongoloid", "Australoid", "Congoid" and "Capoid". I believe the official system now narrows it down to Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid).
Yet, the natives of Africa and the Americas would actually be described by explorers (such as Vasco da Gama and Columbus) as superior in some ways (especially morally) to Europe's peasants! Yet only a century later was when they would suddenly be characterized as "filthy, lazy pagans, of bestial morals, no better than dogs, and only fit for slavery" (which is what we are more familiar with in our history today). This was because medieval Europe considered slavery a circumstance rather than a mark of moral inferiority, and so, enslavement would be justified purely by the technological ability to do so. But it was the Church that aimed to provide a rationale for the circumstances, which was, regardless of how moral and intelligent they were, they were not yet Christians, and so slavery offered an opportunity for their conversion and the saving of their souls! (We see here how the Gospel was changed into purely a political tool, and no longer had anything to do with scripture. And the Christian world would later wonder why so many people reject it as "irrelevant". What's not covered, and you don't really hear about anymore, is the earlier period of slavery, where they tried to forbid the converting of slaves. This probably connected with them not being seen as human. Eventually, of course, conversion became a handy tool to dominate over them).
So we see the origins of the debate that rages on today, as to whether the poor (and the minority "community" in general) are suffering from a series of bad circumstances, or their own moral inferiority.
There was also a division in both Europe and America, between North and South, where in both cases, the North was the first to oppose slavery. The north, because of the climate, became more industrial (through steam power), where the south remained more agricultural, and the large numbers of Africans and Amerinds were easy to exploit (p.37).
Where "Generations of slavery and lack of social and educational opportunities for black and Amerind fulfillment had inevitably resulted in poor development of these people and their offspring in comparison with the whites", nature began to be appealed to as creating this inferiority, and by extension, "the order that God established", and on the other front, notions of "less evolved" races, perhaps held by Darwin. He surmises the "sobering thought" that if Origin of Species had been published a decade earlier, the US might still be afflicted by slavery today! (p.40).
Basically, from here, much of the book gets into the origins of all men, rather than just the Caucasoids, especially when comparing Coon's and the other anthropologists' theories. He says he agrees with Coon's theories of the races having different pre-human (Homo-erectus) ancestors, the Australoid-Pithecanthropus and Mongoloid-Sinoanthropus lines who crossed the 'sapiens threshold' separately (p47ff); but questions his objectivity in certain areas of the origins of races, where they lend to racist doctrines; like the Caucasoid and Mongoloid passing the sapiens threshold the earliest and thus being the most highly evolved, some Australoids straddling the threshold, and the Congoids being the newest and "mysterious". Africa was the cradle of civilization, but only in the sense of being a "kindergarten"; "Europe and Asia were our principal schools".
So ironically, I've seen where the alt-right, also accepting Neanderthal origins, uses it as more evidence of their supremacy, rather than any maladaptation. This would probably represent the strain of Coon's theory.
P52-3 is a discussion and illustration of how all the major continents are cone shaped, narrowing toward the south, and so southern groups of people, such as the Bushmen (Capoids) and Australoids, were trapped, and easily conquered, or having to flee the continent (as in the case of the Australoids).
Chapter 5 is now on the Neanderthal-Caucasoids, which starts off on the "Heidelberg jaw" and other fossils. Coon tries to argue for a 300,000 or 400,000 year antiquity of sapience in Europe, against the disagreement of other experts.
The "Neanderthals" were named after Joachim Neander, originally "Neumann"; both meaning "new man", which then was used by Dr. H. Schaaffhausen for a skull found in Neander's Valley two centuries later.
The last glacial period; Würm, began 100,000 years ago, deepened into intense cold which then moderated 40,000 years ago in what's called the Göttweig Interstadial, and then became savagely cold again until 8-10,000 BC with the last retreat of the glaciers. The Neanderthals died out with the warmer weather of the Göttweig Interstadial, when more modern men migrated to Europe. So the last Würmian cold snap was endured by modern men who were the ancestors of modern Europeans today.
I would have thought these peoples' maladaptation to that climate would be the premise, but it seems this book focuses more on the Neanderthals. Mentioned (p.70) is that some scientists are divided in their opinion of the Neanderthals, and that they may have moved to Eurasia from elsewhere as the advancing Würmian glaciers drove more modern men out (so they were from the European-Caucasoid stock mixing with the Sinanthropus-Mongoloid), but there is some evidence some Neanderthal traits developed in Europe itself.
We next get into descriptions of the Neanderthals, beginning from the skull of LaChapelle aux Saints. They had the low broad skulls, with foreheads sloping back from large brow ridges and the prognathous jaw. You know, the typical "caveman" image. Eventually, Cro-Magnon was discovered and upheld, while Neanderthal came to be despised. Neanderthal did have some culture (awareness of the "past-present-future" continuum) though, with evidences of burial and religious sophistication.
Chapter 6 returns to the theme of "Fire and Ice: Psychobiology", which basically continues the previous chapter with physical and cultural descriptions (Neanderthal faces were twice the size of modern ones and their heads an inch bigger in every direction but up, and also their short, stocky bodies likely "absurdly" round). Here, he discusses the Venus figurines and makes the odd suggestion of their wide hips or "hippiness" (larger than the norm for other races), being "typical" of European women (p.93, 107), and thus a holdover from the Neanderthals. That would make sense for them, but among today's people, the Caucasians are usually slimmer, and blacks and other warm-climate women have the stereotypical "child-bearing hips". So I'm not sure what this claim is about.
We also get a drawing of their huge feet and the insinuation that surviving remnants may have been the "abominable snowmen" of central Asia north of the Caucasus chain! (p.96, But for some reason, not the "Yeti" of the Himalayas).
In quotes from Montagu and Ivan T. Sanderson (respectively, below), debunked is the myth that Caucasoids are the most refined race, and Negroids are the most primitive; but rather closer to the opposite: "If racists would take the trouble to visit their local zoo and for a moment drop their air of superiority and take a dispassionate look at one of the apes, they would find the hair of these creatures lank, and that their lips are thin, and that their bodies are profusely covered with hair. In these characters the white man stands nearer the apes…". I remember the Ansaars; the one time Brooklyn-based pseudo-Islamic sect that used to sell all the oils in the subway, had in one of their books a crude illustration making this point. People apparently associate Africans with apes because of the brown color, but for African people it's their actual skin color. For apes, the color is mostly the fur, and under the fur, as the Ansaar booklet pointed out, is pinkish skin!
"The Negro so-called 'race' is apparently the newest and is the least pongid-like of all" (Ironically, Coon had tried to use the Negroes being newer as proof they were more primitive!) Sanderson then points to the same points regarding the lips and hair, as Montagu, and adds that the Mongoloids are very different from both. These primitive characteristics are inherited from the Neanderthal.
Next, he goes back into the cronos complex and territorialism, including through religion, and comparisons of the Congoid and Capoid and sexual dimorphism.
Part Three takes simply the title of the book. We think, finally, he's going to get more to the central point. Chapter 7 is on "Love and Expression". "Love is the middle ground between aggression and the ability to reproduce. A pair-bond, 'love', is displaced aggression. It is aggression 'shoved aside', literally, so that the partners can reproduce without threat." (p130) "Lovers' quarrels" and "playful fighting" are examples of this displaced aggression. While all peoples have similar courtship antics, only the West is said here to have a fully developed concept of "love", as seen in the church-approved 'courtly love'. A distinction is made between "eros" and "agape" (representing all other forms of love. It ignores the further distinctions, as found in scripture, of "philos"; and also "storge", which is familial). "Just as the 'love' we call eros allows us to reproduce in the face of threat and aggression, so the 'love' we call agape allows us to live in the material world while yearning for the relationships awaiting us in eternity. Agape is that place where the needs of material survival are met while the realization of a past-present-future continuity is preserved." He eventually gets into subjects such as female orgasm in western society and religious groups such as the Catharism/Albigensianism that produced the Troubadours of Provençal (langue-d'oc) fame and were destroyed by the prevailing Catholicism.
(Ironically, the Cathars/Albigenses are appealed to by some Baptists and various sects, in what's called the "Trail of Blood" theory, where they try to trace their denominational lineage back to the original apostolic church via this persecuted group and others, seen as representing "the true Church through the ages", in contrast to the powerful Catholics. Most of these modern sects have a heavy pietistic strain, and would probably reject the "romanticism" of the Troubadours as "sensual", so they really do not know what they are talking about in identifying with this associated religious group, but then some try to say our knowledge of all of them is distorted by the persecutors.)
He along the way points out that the ancient Egyptian civilization was not a Western, Caucasoid achievement, but rather a multi-racial achievement. By 1500BC,
they began to record the invasions of the "sea peoples". (p141) Rather than them swamping the Egyptian cultural influence (their numbers weren't yet sufficient enough), they themselves were "Egyptianized". (Mentioned is George Gurdjieff, a mystic who also created the "Enneagram of personality" concept discussed increasingly it seems, in typology circles. He was influenced by central Asian literacy and regarded Western fiction as "irrelevant"). Our "novels" focus on themes such as "love conquers all", "love lost", "love searched for", or conflicts between eros and agape.
Chapter 8 is "Psychobiology in History and Society". This discusses man's control over nature, and defining "progress" in terms of increasing materialism. It then quickly goes back into the history of the different groups, and holds up ancient Egypt and China before the coming of maritime Europeans. Both incorporated progress, but neither were threatened by it, and should be emulated by Caucasoid civilization. Also is a discussion on how these civilizations differed in war. Being a soldier was not something romanticized as a glorious occupation in Egypt or China, and ships were designed differently, with Europeans having multiple levels in order to have more manpower, while Chinese and Egyptians simply made the one deck longer if needed, until materials limitations halted the size. This gets into the Western "frustration with nature", leading to the urge to control it, through the desire to increase power and output.
Spending so much time on ship design, "we will not have to spend so much time on other progressive achievements which have more relevance to our crises", so briefly mentioned are affects on health such as acupuncture, color and music (which Gurdjieff claimed the Egyptians used to stimulate plant growth). The orientation of pyramids affected the decomposition of organic substances! Where Westerners turned away from the "excess of sensation of technology and materialism", then the cure must be the "asceticism" of some eastern philosophies. But the civilizations of China, Egypt and pre-Caucasoid India were not stable (and perhaps more fulfilling) because of asceticism, they were balanced, being highly erotic as well. (All three societies being "obsessed with fashion and cosmetics and jewelry), and had erotic art, yet both men and women were sex objects, rather than just women). So this then goes into western sexual maladaptation (and its resultant aggression) compared to those societies. So "our sexual-sensual behavior is not typical of civilized society but more resembles the sexual-sensual behavior of 'primitive' cultures retarded by adverse environmental conditions" (p184). This then uses as examples the dresses that overemphasize (distort) the hips or buttocks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the demand for differentiation in sex, like parents' complaints not long before the book, of boys wearing long hair.
Chapter 9 is "Ouroubouros Unfettered"
This mainly discusses the possible future outcomes of "the Iceman inheritance" on the world:
1) Western man will destroy all of visible life off of the planet
2) Western man will destroy its own culture and industrialism and the rest of mankind will establish something similar to the ancient Egyptians and Chinese, with perhaps some vestiges of Western technology
3) Extra-terrestial intervention which might impose some new pattern upon us
4) Western Man, through self-examination, can overcome his problem and modify his behavior
5) Western man and the rest of the world can continue to "progress" along the lines already established by contemporary culture and technology
The first and last are right away eliminated as "vanities of power", as human life is too resilient and adaptable to be destroyed by Western folly, but yet, the environment is too limited and delicate for things to go on as they are. (I'm surprised he didn't mention the danger of us destroying all human life and possibly all life together, with our nuclear technology).
That leaves the other three. The one he believes is most likely, based on the pattern of history, is Western Civilization collapse on itself. (Looks that way to me as well).
He still then addresses the other two scenarios. So then we get several pages on the possibility of extra-terrestrial life (including UFO sightings, scientific evidence, with Carl Sagan and others mentioned). I myself too have wished, or thought this might be our only hope. Technically, God would fall into this category, hence my believing in a "Second Coming" of Christ when I saw that this was the key message of the Bible. However, since it seems that was something already fulfilled by the events shortly after the scripture canon was closed, it's back to square one on that front. So likewise, even after all of this, intervention still appears unlikely and that "we will be left alone to solve our own problems".
So he ends on the final possibility, of consciously changing our behavior. Hope-offering examples are provided of Neanderthal-Caucasians being able to live in relatively gentle and non-expansive communities (with the Celtic-Cathars/Albigenses as the main one), in addition to the other cultures. Drawing upon Cyrano de Bergerac, our main adversary is our vanity. "Instead of denying the existence of biological determinates in our behavior, we must somehow find the courage to look them straight in the mirror. If we can only find the courage that Cyrano lacked, we may yet live. And if we do not find love, we may at least discover compassion for ourselves ad others".
It is the (often unnecessary) aggression based upon the notion of cultural-religious-moral racial rightness that makes Western behavior unique, over the "comparative aggression" of others. No other people has shared this justification for aggression and expansion
The appendix is "Objections, Counter-arguments and Retorts". The main one being the complaint we've heard a lot in today's racially charged rhetorical environment, of non-White societies being made into paradise, when they were really full of "Comparative aggression". When writing Makers-Takers, I ran across a South African White Nationalist site where in the same breath as blacks being portrayed as subhuman monsters, but rebuffing criticism of the white race and western civilization, a commenter asks, incredulously, that according to the "liberals", "How could one civilization [i.e. whites] be so bad?" (Shouldn't the question be, how could they think blacks could be so bad, or whites could be so good? If it's possible for one group to be so bad, then it's possible for the other one as well).
Now, while just finishing this, someone posts some new video of some cowboy looking person challenging an Indian telling him to get off his land with the "fact" that that Indian's tribe had moved in and killed off a previous tribe. The point, if it was OK when you did it, then it's OK for us to do the same to your land. Commenters give their usual tripe about "the losers whining after centuries" and "that's life, get over it". Of course, this ignores that those same people, the descendants of the conquerors, are now whining, or no, screaming more than anyone else, that they are being "conquered", or even destroyed (by the very people they are giving all of this tough talk to; whether the minorities, illegal immigrants, the godless liberals giving everything away to them, etc.) Why is that any different?
Recently, calling this out on a similar FB post, I'm given the whole rationale. Life doesn't give past losers the right to complain, but it does give people currently under "attack" the right to "defend themselves". So this means, they can tell others to "stop whining" and to be "thankful" for all the goodness of this society, but they can whine about being destroyed (when others simply oppose them for their aggression), or this nation "no longer" being "great, and thus themselves not be thankful for anything. In other words, they have "rights" to demand better things in life, but not others. It basically corresponds to this division they've made between "rights" and "entitlements", with those criticizing others for "entitlements" being the ones who truly have the "rights", —based simply on who's in power now. It's "Might makes right", pure and simple. (Some of them, perhaps in the back of their mind realize that the same "nature" or God that allowed them to rise to power can one day allow someone to usurp it from them, but part of their "self-defense" is the blaming of what they fear will happen in the future on those seen as making them weak and giving the birthright away to others; so they can hypothetically lose some day, but it will be the fault of "the forces of evil", like liberals and moderates, and so they can do all they can to try to prevent this now by vigorously fighting these enemy "others").
That's what explains this huge attribution shift; why both can do the same things (Romans 2), but only one is right. Who determined this (i.e. who has the "right" to complain, or what is a "right" or an "entitlement"), we don't know. (But since there are so many Christians in this movement, then the idea that "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away" still condemns their attitude, since it means they might be fighting God's will. Also, from this, and even a nontheistic perspective; the neurotic focus on survival of the "race" or "culture", especially as many of these people, Christian or not, claim to be "post-racial"). It's "extended ego", not any concern for the laws of either God or nature, and so the whole premise is mired in pure deceit.
So Bradley denies, saying that examples of non-Western aggression had been offered. "I have not intended to suggest that Neanderthal-Caucasoids have always proved more aggressive than anyone else… but merely that this major group of Mankind has a tendency toward higher aggression and that this has, in the aggregate, affected the pattern of history in obvious ways.
On the other hand, some examples given for exceptional non-Caucasoid aggression do seem to evaporate under closer scrutiny, especially with the quality of the aggression manifested."
For the Mexican-Indians, he connects their aggression, especially connected to their religion, to Old World ideas and behavior, and hence, "yet another iceman inheritance imposed upon non-Western peoples". (The Spaniards, for instance, found many religious parallels between Europe and Mexico. The suggestion, apparently, is that some of this had been brought over the Bering Strait by their ancestors). Until more data is analyzed, "the religious wars of Middle America's populations cannot be used as an argument against this thesis."
For the Mongol expansions, it's about the quality of the aggression, meaning it was "normal" aggression, motivated by overpopulation (environmental necessity) rather than psychological motivation. "The West has expanded even when unnecessary…in order to impose Western culture and religion on others. Or from the motivation of sheer greed, or from all these motivations combined in a mutually supportive justification structure. It is this expansion and aggression based upon the notion of cultural-religious-moral racial rightness and intolerance that makes Western behavior unique. I submit that no other people has shared this justification for aggression and expansion…certainly not the Mongols."
He also presents argument regarding Japan, the Eskimos, and the Capoid and Australoid extinction at the hand of non-Caucasoid people.
This of course ties into the whole "Scriptural" component of the justification. Scripture really condemns the means of "expansion" and also condemns self-justification; we are supposed to admit our own sin and then show the same mercy we believe we have received, toward others. But scripture instead was taken out of context, where conquests or judgments seen in the Old Testament were taken as commands for "Christian" nations thousands of years later who did not receive the actual commands recorded there.
This is part of what Western "Christian" civilization has been held up to, and their validity dismissed for (Romans 2:24). But all conservative defenders can do is point to others; "what about them"? (Even though they know this would never fly, before God; but they are so sure they are right with God, and again, they criticize others as "never accepting responsibility"!) But those "others" are the ones you consider to be "godless heathens", and yourselves the faithful Christians. You're supposed to set the example of godliness, as the "light to the nations", not appeal to them as justification of your own ungodliness in the same breath as condemning their ungodliness! This is why it seems popular culture is so against traditional Western and Christian "values". (See also, Eph.4:27, John 9:41, Luke 12:48).
So the book does make and support its point, but it goes off into so much other details, it seems more like a general study of anthropology. So it doesn't seem really hard-hitting enough. (I of course am looking for something that will be a good counter to both mainstream Right "dog whistling", and alt-Right "supremacy"). It's too easy to get lost in all the details about human evolution in general. What I had hoped to see was more specific connections with modern behavior and beliefs.
What I find as a cause for concern is the direction the author has seemed to go in the nearly 40 years since publishing the book, and as I saw in researching him for this project, it is possibly anti-semitism. Jews were barely mentioned in the old printing, but this newer publication promotional: http://www.michaelbradley.info/books/iceman/iceman_promo.html is subtitled "A frightening publication history of Jewish media suppression". It's compared to the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.
So on the page, he covers his history promoting the original publication.
Then, in early 1981, someone figured out the implications for Jews in the book's presentation of evidence…
I had never considered this myself because it had been a long time since I had taken my own Jewish origins into any account. I had never even thought about any "Jewish implications" of the book. Neither did the Jewish publisher of the original Canadian edition, Larry Goldstein. And, obviously, Dr. Judith Posner had not thought about any "Jewish implications" either when she wrote an Introduction for The Iceman Inheritance – unless, of course, courageous Judy Posner simply had more affinity with all of humanity than with her own ethnic group. Jews were blandly mentioned on half a page in the 226-page book.
After 1981, some bookstores that had formerly carried the book were threatened with boycott and fire-bombing by Jewish pressure groups.
This eventually leads into something called the Khazar theory. I had recently been hearing this, probably from some FB "friends" with some radical "libertarian" or paleo-con leanings (who post things that may ultimately tie into the alt-right). It basically says the common "white" Jews (particularly the Ashkenazis) were actually descended from a Caucasian tribe from the Russian steppe. They "converted en-masse to Judaism about AD 740 in order to avoid religious, cultural and political control by either Moslems in Persia or by Christians in Byzantium. These 'Jewish' Khazars, along with Alans, Bulgars, Magyars and other minor steppe tribes, were subsequently dispersed all over Central and Eastern Europe about 500 years later by the Mongol invasion of AD 1218."
He even points to the common physical traits, such as the faces of people like Barbara Streisand and Julia Roberts. (BTW, Donald Fagen would be a textbook example of that as well).
On one hand, this view was enticing, because I've always held the position that the original Israelites of the Bible were people of color, like the modern Palestinians and others, and even some current day Israelis. But it seems when you look at most people called "Jews" today, they are pure "white", many even with blonde hair and blue eyes. Even though "white supremacists" reject them as part of their race, when growing up, they were always called "white" and identified themselves as such. The Census even considers them "Caucasian".
So it is so easy to assume, as apparently the entire Church did, that these were what the people of the Bible looked like. Sure enough, nearly every Sunday-school and Bible illustration of Moses, Joseph, Judah, David, all the prophets, and Jesus and the apostles, are all white. It's then further assumed the Israelites were the original racial stock, so the whiteness is then further projected back to Abraham, Shem (even though most will acknowledge the true Caucasian race as stemming from Japheth along with the Mongoloids), Noah, and the first humans, Adam and Eve.
This went right along with the racism of the Western Church. Whites, whether Israelite or not, were the "chosen" race. Blacks were "cursed" Ham.
(Hislop's Two Babylons clearly identified Nimrod as "black". Herbert Armstrong, who I entered the faith through, drawing upon Hislop in Mystery of the Ages, then proclaims all the "chosen" figures, from Adam to Noah and his sons, to "God's chosen nation Israel", to Jesus, as "white", of course taking care to add "not that the white race is in any way superior" ⦅these people, including today's "dog whistlers", refuse to understand how innuendo works⦆, and admitting "God does not reveal in the Bible the precise origin of the different races", but with what Wikipedia would call "weasel words": "it is evident", "happened to be", prefaced with "undoubtedly", with no evidence!
The point, the main sin in the pre-flood era and the Tower of Babel afterward was intermixing of races, which God had "separated"; and a desire "still inherent in human nature today", with talk of the "unblemished, perfect lineage", and an analogy to animal "thoroughbred or pedigreed stock"! (p148. The eternal "Wonderful World of Tommorrow" he concludes the book on, will continue these "boundaries" God has set!)
Also, some white supremacists held black skin as the "Mark of Cain". Though all of Cain's descendants were supposed to have perished in the Flood. They'll probably say Ham's wife had the genes; just as Armstrong says Eve had the "yellow" and "black" genes, passed through Noah's son's wives, though without ever connecting this to Cain.
Armstrong also held to "Anglo-Israelism", which says that the US and Britain are two of the lost ten tribes of Israel, with other northern European nations being the other tribes. One of the conclusions from this is that all of the conquest and slavery that benefited these nations were fulfillment of the "promise" made to Abraham! He also took the prophecy of Amos 9:9, about the exiled nation "For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth" as proving the race is totally "pure". They never mixed with any other group; not one single person apparently, so all the "Israelites" you see today: Jews, Anglos, Nordics, etc., are the same exact pure "race" we read about in the Bible!
Anglo-Israelism is one of the main "heresies" evangelical apologetics condemns Armstrongism for, but you really wonder why they would even bother on that point, when it is compatible with, and in actuality, the logical extension of, much of traditional American evangelical preaching on politics and morality! Think, "God is taking away his blessings on our nation and cursing us because of all the sin today!", as if we are breaking a specific national-divine covenant like the one made with Biblical Israel. Only Armstrongism is fully consistent in that.
Of course, to white supremacists, "Judah" rejected her Messiah, so then it's their racial "cousins", the other "chosen" people, the white "Christian" nations, whether linked lineally to Israel or not, who now inherit the "birthright" as the new "chosen" nations!)
So this "Khazar" theory would totally debunk that whole premise, and explain why Jews appear to be Caucasian (aside from trying to argue that it's purely from mixing). So Bradley is tying it in with his Neanderthal "Iceman" premise, and now claiming they are trying to suppress the theory because of it. You can see more of this here.
So looking up the Khazar theory, I see it is lumped in with "antisemitism", and also (as it would figure) held by alt-right groups. It's claimed to have been refuted, as no real genetic evidence connects Jews to this eastern group. So I'm not messing with that theory. (At least not until there is some more solid verification of it, and agreement that it is not simply antisemitic propaganda). There may have been some mixing with that group, but I just don't trust anything alt-righters say. (Of course, they claim everyone is suppressing their "truths", and it ultimately becomes more pre-supposed, biased conjecture than anything else).
Interestingly enough, those other "Russian steppe" groups mentioned above are the ones associated with the "Gypsies", who were already, historically despised by Westerns. So it figures antisemites would benefit by tagging the Jews in with those peoples.
However, the initial basis of antisemitism, that they were the "murderers of Christ", would then fall flat, as the gentile Khazars, being hundreds of miles away, had nothing to do with the Crucifixion. The modern advocates of this theory don't seem to be thinking of that.
Of course, alt-righters are also against blacks, while this guy's original premise seemed to be to admit the error of racism, explaining it anthropologically. So I'm really not sure where he's coming from. (Him being part Jewish doesn't necessarily help. Hitler himself apparently was as well. There are self-hating Jews, just as there are self-hating blacks). As mentioned before, some alt-righters even hold the Neanderthal origin theory as proving superiority.
Still, I think there is something to the basic premise, regarding "aggression" (whether it goes all the way back to Neanderthals, or the "modern people" who suffered similar conditions later). This is essentially what's being held up in the Right as the very "character" others, especially the blacks, lack, and particularly in the whole "rugged individualism" premise of modern politics and economics (drawing upon their heavily romanticized "American frontier" roots).
Again, it feels like this society is becoming a virtual Ice Age, not literally, but politically and economically. They insist it is "exceptional", but then they appeal to raw "nature" (including, again, the Christians; who largely voted for the unscrupulous Trump), and everything is being run like a frozen cave in the middle of Würm. Everyone just covers themselves and passes the buck to the less powerful, and no one cares. Again, dog-eat-dog; survival of the fittest, in the name of the "market" as justification for unbridled "nature". Yet, we're so much above the animals, and other people!
So with the alt-right on the warpath today, with the utter gall to be boldly wielding their views as infallible "truth" as if God shouted it down from Heaven, and never thinking in the least, that it might be "too good to be true" that they are so superior, or having no sense of any negative side to their achievements, this is something they should be checked with, especially since they hold to a central part of the premise, regarding the Neanderthals. Aggression is not really "superiority". Perhaps in a survivalistic sense, but definitely not in a moral sense! For every "good", there is a shadow of "bad", so what is "exceptional" with technology and even religion has also been exceptionally "bad", in some of what has been done with it. So this is something they should constantly be made aware of. And it's certainly better than other theories, such as the ones of black "Muslim" and "Hebrew" groups that explain these things by "demonizing" the race, quite literally!