Signaling spirals

1800: Oh, you still have slaves? I freed all of mine.

1860: Did you know they still have slaves in the South? My sons have enlisted to kill those evil slavers.

1920: You listen to classical music? I go to a Jazz Club, there's a black musician who is so awesome.

1950: I have a black secretary.

1970: I have a black friend.

1980: I have many black friends. I even slept with one.

1990: I have a black child. Well, half black.

2000: I adopted a fully black child. Straight from Africa. Zero white admixture.

2010: I adopted two black children. One from West Africa and one from East Africa.

2016:

This past Sunday, my gorgeous wife – a white evangelical, like me — gave birth to our beautiful African-American triplet daughters whom we adopted as embryos. These sweet girls will hopefully soon be coming home to meet their 3-year-old African-American brother and 2-year-old biracial sister, both of whom we adopted as infants.

People forget that Christians invented holiness signaling.

As a friend said, hopefully liberals will see that they can't compete with evangelicals and will move to the other side. If that happens I'll salute Mr. and Mrs. Halbert for saving civilization.

[…] Signaling spirals […]

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

Ok. But why has this signalling been successful?

Successful?

It made it into newspapers, it is social beneficial (it gives the individuals prestige,) and it is getting even more extreme- so why has this occurred? why this form of signalling, and not another form? I can provide an answer - because the power system (from the very top) has signaled that this is socially acceptable/ beneficial, and why? well slavery was a useful cudgel against the south, or against slave owners. Power promoted by default. Then you have the civil rights era - power funded equality to undermine cities and states, and to beat republicans about. Power promoted by default again. Each time the filter goes one way In a society in which this was not occurring, this signaling would either not happen, or would be ineffective. This is just the caste off from the high-low mechanism. Christianity didn't do this. Power did.

Why does it propagate, indeed. Calling it "power" is like calling it "God", you're begging the question. What is power? Who is power? Power is the successful signalers of yesterday; and signaling becomes a spiral because the only way of replacing or at least joining those in power is by pushing in the same direction, just a little further. Everything that happens is able to happen because people with power allow it to happen; well, sure. That's occasionalism. That's Ghazali's argument. The cotton doesn't burn because you heat it with fire; the cotton burns because Allah makes it burn.

Well, no. What get's past the gate keepers into the public eye? what the gatekeeper let through. Who lets the gate keepers get into the positions they get into? those who can make the decisions on who are the gatekeepers. So the central power (the state) and the actors within it fund and employ X people, and engage X laws making what we have legal (and what we don't have illegal.) So you have the likes of Milner and his allies in the UK, and the various progressive elite in the USA, all funding the same stuff, all going along the same direction, and all promoting the same things. Yes, people signal in line with this, but they don't get into power unless those in power let them in, most of it is just signaling in line with the winning team. Colonel House, Charles Merriam, Lionel Curtis, Alfred Milner etc these are the guys who got this really rolling in the extreme in the early 20C, but it had been going for sometime before (going back to the monarchical period according to De Jouvenel.)

But Lionel Curtis or Alfred Milner aren't "the state". They are Lionel Curtis and Alfred Milner. They were other people in positions of influence in the British state in their time. There were other governments in other countries with other people. I don't like getting too abstract, but if the model is that there are people in power and they perpetuate their own faction, why do ideas ever change? Progressivism has gotten a great deal worse from the times of Alfred Milner. If power is that powerful it should be able to be more stable. That political ideas get increasingly worse implies conflict and instability.

Amazing. It's hard to compete with a couple like this who have such courage in their convictions. Compared to them, what am I? I am a coward who posts a pseudonymous blog comment. But see: the couple are mad. Brave, courageous madmen. That's what they are. You can't help but to admire such exquisite lunacy.

A perfectly orthodox Christian as a Platonist, I don't care for spandrell's anti-Christianity any more than I care for Edward Gibbon's or John Derbyshire's; but I admire all three writers, facts are facts, and spandrell is right about the signaling. The Church has always seen itself as countercultural, because that is mostly what it is. Between the Church and the secular culture, I have no way to prove to you which direction the arrow of causation points, but all my own experience, all my reading, tends to suggest to me that it points from the Church to the secular culture. I would very much like to imagine that this were not so.

[…] The Song Dynasty’s Decline […]

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

What's cowardly about being pseudonymous? What would you accomplish by tearing off your shirt and howling your convictions to the heavens? Would you convince anybody of anything useful? Would you change anything meaningful? Would it make better provision for your children or relatives? Keep your powder dry. When the day comes when it's needed, it will REALLY be needed.

> What would you accomplish by tearing off your shirt and howling your convictions to the heavens? Nothing that I know. > Keep your powder dry. When the day comes when it’s needed, it will REALLY be needed. Sound the trumpet, brother! In my late 40s, I have advanced past military age, and am not getting any younger, more's the pity. Having a family, one eventually makes one's peace with the regime. The fire no longer burns so hot. I have sons. Maybe some would fight. The thought may be glorious to them, such is youth; but dreadful to me, their father, such is age. Sound the trumpet! Beat the drum! Vainly I hope that you are wrong.

It's hardly courage to agree with the state religion. Madness it is, and yes there's something eerily admirable about being completely consistent in madness. But I'd rather have my own family and keep it safe.

A real page turner. Please go on

I'm getting a lot of enjoyment and value from your Asian historical narratives. Thank you. Never read that much about the Song because they were never as powerful as other dynasties. They always showed up as kind of an afterthought in historical atlases I was looking through, only to show the expansion of the Mongols. I've often wondered why the USA puts such high priority on its military forces when it's a state based on commerce and without any neighbors that could threaten it. The Song had some good ideas. It always astonishes me how overwhelming numbers of troops were beaten by a few steppe tribesmen in episodes throughout East Asian history. Perhaps it shows how fragile the control of elites is when the vast majority of people have no stake in the state. The average peasant may simply not have cared much who was in power, making it possible for a small force to take over a nation of millions.

That's pretty much it. The Song were especially bad with frequent peasant revolts. They solved the threat of military coups but they sacrificed the allegiance of the peasantry by giving too much power to the mandarin aristocracy. The Song army was particularly inept; but the advantage of horse archery in the era before gunpowder was immense. The only limit to the destructive power of a nomad army is discipline and the number of soldiers. Once the Mongols figured that out they conquered everything that was worth conquering on earth.

[…] hard. Echoes of Innsmouth, and Snowcrash. Cashless. Deep State signal. The black pill. Ever higher holiness. Horror (1, 2). The weekly round, plus […]

Horse archery is hard. Need really good bows, good men able to take care of difficult to care for bows, and able to shoot accurately from the back of a horse. Assume you have a thousand horse archers. If you run into foot soldiers with shorter range weapons, you can keep the correct distance and kill any number of foot soldiers, no matter how outnumbered. If you run into two thousand foot archers with range equal or better than your own, you avoid them, and look for a patrol containing a hundred foot archers. Maybe you go after the supply chain, or attack the army when it spreads out to forage. But because your forces are mounted and can live off the land, you have superior mobility and no supply chain. This makes it easy for you to concentrate forces from a wide area to attack a vulnerable enemy force, and then disperse them over a wide area when a strong enemy force comes looking for you. Wait till the strong enemy force splits up for reasons of supply, or in order to control a wide area, and then WHAM!