26 Comments

Wow. Wish I had a keyboard- i'd bore you folx to death. Jesus at the end: Jonathan haidth. Conservatives have tradition +fuel of beliefs to restore to society those left out; progressives are used for grift.

That's a mouthful.

Thnx guys, i'm behind on podcasts, twitter, 7th grade science exam tomorrow.

Expand full comment

I don't consider all "gay rights" to be a good thing. That's very odd, I know, but at least I have 99.9% of humanity over time agreeing with me on it. All people deserve to be treated fairly and decently, but that's not the same thing. One of my foundational examination principles now is that the things that "everyone knows" are the most likely to hide untruths. What "everyone knows" are precisely those things that people want to be true and not have to talk about. Intellectually, that a combo that's a disaster.

Expand full comment

I hear where you are going with that, but where is there not the pathology? Families moved from war torn El Salvador to stable affluent America only to find LA’s gang lands. I guess I wonder where you think doesn’t have any of that culture…? Steve gave the example of skinheads having the same culture.

Expand full comment

I really enjoyed this conversation. I am really intrigued by the application of this frame on understanding culture. I have always thought that the root of most of these issues is culture, which often is heard as racist or victim blaming or whatever, but it seems there are dozens of cultures just in the US. Perhaps some people lean modernist but are distinctively traditionalist on family or religion etc. for example, fundamentalist/evangelical Christians and mainline Protestant and catholic groups have very different culture (on average). The idea that post modernism was an answer to the failings of modernism rings true. I would have described myself as a progressive until maybe 10 years ago when they crossed into what seems like utter nonsense to me. The things that appealed to me were exactly what Steve articulated: fixing the excesses of capitalism, equality, the environment. I wonder if embracing that egotism/proto traditional/ warrior culture and its embrace of violence and tribe is also a reaction of traditionalists to the failures they perceive in battling modernity/postmodernism.

Expand full comment
founding

That was a great episode. If I understand Steve correctly, humans need to adopt a form of consciousness that is derived from one of the moral traditions. Progressivism is a moral tradition that evolved because Modernism was imperfect. But Progressivism is doomed to fail as it isn't sufficiently inclusive. So, the first thing I got was that ultimately, the pluralistic nature of Modernism will defeat Progressivism. The other thing I understood him to say is that inter-generational poverty is a function of group formation that has not adopted one of the existing traditions of consciousness, and that the way to help people escape that situation is for governments to do some type of soul building. I think this approach will always fail. A more effective way of doing soul building is to disburse those people and help them relocate so they are among groups that have adopted one of the traditional forms of consciousness. If you take someone from MS13 and help them to relocate to a place where the gang doesn't exist, they will be motivated to adopt the moral tradition of the place they have relocated to because of their need for absolution (which is a fancy term for fitting in.) This explains why prison reform doesn't work. When you send people who commit crimes to prison, they end up in the same culture and that perpetuates their ego-centric culture. The way to reform them is to break their connection to that culture.

I often post a link to this wonderful article by Malcolm Gladwell but the model to fix this problem is encapsulated in here.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/starting-over-dept-of-social-studies-malcolm-gladwell

Expand full comment

Steve, your way out on a rotten limb, I wish you were right. Postmodern progressivism is a flight of fantasy.

Expand full comment

I believe Steve McIntosh is saying that for post modernism to keep us developmentally moving forward and uniting people, not regressing us into a simpler state of relating through a shared ideology, which I would label a less authentic form of human connecting, genuine relationship matters. Igniting the light in one another's eyes and growing a shared understanding from that deeply felt human meeting, is my idea of real progress. The strain of differing points of view can be tolerated within an emotionally, co-regulated, meeting between people.

Expand full comment
Sep 1, 2022·edited Sep 1, 2022

I listened to the whole 67 minutes... It felt very much like Steve McIntosh was dealing with the symptoms of the disease and not the causes.

For example...

The concept of "morality" in the absence of a concept of "God" ultimately devolves into a narcissistic endeavor of maximizing "good feelings" across a group - however you define the group (self, family, community, gender, race, nation etc). This is the core conflict between traditional (God-centric) societies and the post-modernist worldview.

The concepts of "respect", "tolerance" and "acceptance" have different meanings in the post-modernist world and that makes it difficult to discuss issues and resolve differences. For example, if we have different concepts of "respect" how can we talk about one of the most mundane, everyday acts such as that of commerce and capitalism?

Expand full comment

Another person with tremendous [religious] faith in progress.

Expand full comment

Paused at time 5:00(will resume). Thanks for exploring culture of politics. I comment on high level single parent households among blacks. We whites are “competing” as our numbers are going upward in same category. My military relatives make jokes about the “single parent serving cereal for dinner because the military spouse is in Afghanistan or Iraq, etc” Does military spouse have a “magic solution” to share with non-military households that have one parent?

Expand full comment

I found the concepts to be too vague, let alone Steve's attempt to derive meaning through their comparison(s), to be able to garner anything substantive from this conversation.

Expand full comment
Aug 29, 2022Liked by Nikita Petrov

Superlative episode! Standing ovation.

Expand full comment

I'm glad you haven't recorded the interview with John McWhorter yet, because now you'll be able to talk about Ibram X Kendi starting shit with John on Twitter. :)

Expand full comment

Modernism transformed the world, post modernism compels “us” how to speak about the world. Post modernism wall papers over every fact that runs against its narrative. By elevating style over substance, post modernism will remind you of every failure from a failed business venture to a failed marriage to a failed attempt at sobriety. It embodies failure on a deep structural level and in doing so it perpetuates calls for its own necessity.

Expand full comment