Lewis Spurgin on politics in evolutionary biology:

So why hadn’t Haldane — a brilliant and inventive biologist ­— taken the idea of kin selection to its natural conclusion? In a startlingly honest interview for the Web of Stories website in 1997, the eminent evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, a former student of Haldane’s, said that this failure was partly political:

“I have to put it down, to some extent, to political and ideological commitment… We were, I think, very reluctant, as Marxists would be, to admit that anything genetic might influence human behaviour. And I think that we didn’t say consciously to ourselves that this would be un-Marxist so we won’t do it, that’s not the way that the mind works; but it was a path that our minds were not, so to speak, prepared to go down, in quite an unconscious sense, whereas Bill [Hamilton] was very prepared to go down it… to make big breaks in science, which Hamilton did, it’s not enough to have the technical understanding of some technical point, it’s got to fit in with your world view that you should pursue this road.”

Some unusually brilliant Druidic prophecy from John Michael Greer:

Whether the crisis is contained by federal loan guarantees and bank nationalizations that keep farms, factories, and stores supplied with the credit they need, by the repudiation of debts and the issuance of a new currency, by martial law and the government seizure of unused acreage, or by ordinary citizens cobbling together new systems of exchange in a hurry, as happened in Argentina, Russia, and other places where the economy suddenly went to pieces, the crisis will be contained.  The negative feedback here is provided by the simple facts that people are willing to do almost anything to put food on the table, governments are willing to do even more to stay in power, and in hundreds of previous crises, their actions have proven more than sufficient to stop the positive feedback loops of economic crisis in their tracks, and stabilize the situation at some level.

None of this means the crisis will be easy to get through, nor does it mean that the world that emerges once the rubble stops bouncing and the dust settles will be anything like as prosperous, as comfortable, or as familiar as the one we have today. That’s true of all three of the situations I’ve sketched out in this post. While the next round of crisis along the arc of industrial civilization’s decline and fall will likely be over by 2070 of so, living through the interval between then and now will probably have more than a little in common with living through the First World War, the waves of political and social crises that followed it, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism, followed by the Second World War and its aftermath—and this time the United States is unlikely to be sheltered from the worst impacts of crisis, as it was between 1914 and 1954. [Read the whole thing]

(Combining large-scale historical vision, cybernetic theory, and extraordinary native intelligence, Greer is one of the most important voices on the reality-relevant blogosphere. His model of Catabolic Collapse, in particular, is an indispensable reference. Outside in will be visiting his ideas repeatedly over the next few weeks.)

Claus Offe lucidly explains what the proponents of ‘solidarity’ are hoping for utterly hopeless about in Europe. The entire article is so thoroughly saturated in doom-drenched, soul-scouring melancholia that by the end I was searching for Odysseus-style restraints to prevent myself doing a wild happy-dance around the office. From the Euro-progressive perspective, things look seriously bleak.

As a bonus, there’s a great gloss on degenerative ratchets: “… those fatal errors which, once committed, prove irreversible, closing off any return to the status quo ante.” By carrying everything relentlessly to the brink, they’re more of a nightmare for the perceptive left than they are for us. By this stage in history, the left has much more to lose. It’s their regime that is going over the cliff. (Yes, I realize this reboot-friendly Schadenfreude will earn a spanking from Goulding.)

ADDED: France is in its worst shape for more than three decades, since François Mitterrand nearly blew up the economy in the early 1980s trying to stimulate growth through government deficits and nationalisations. Unemployment is at 10.5 per cent and climbing. The economy is contracting. And overseeing the shambles is the suety, confidence-draining face of François Hollande.

Nick B. Steves schools the Pope.

As requested by fotrkd: Let sonic mayhem erupt.

(The (un)sound thing is ripped off Kode9 btw — it helps that it’s an Apocalypse Now reference.)

Thales: “‘Battle of the Bands’ might prove to be an evergreen thread, easily eclipsing any previous or subsequent OI comment thread …” — macabre possibilities heave themselves from the depths …

Goldman: “There wasn’t before, there is not now, and there will not be in the future such a thing as democracy in Egypt.”

(Except for that, though, things look really bad.)

When it comes to the libertarian suicide race, Bryan Caplan leaves Don Boudreaux in the dust. Caplan takes the Non-Aggression Principle and runs with it, all the way into a maximum-velocity self-directed death cult. (Self-directed, solely in the ideological sense, of course.) Given the considerable merits of this book, in particular, it’s a sad thing to see.

American libertarianism has always been vulnerable to neo-puritan spiritual extravagance. Caplan systematically pushes this tendency to its limit, divorcing its arguments from any realistic estimation of consequences, and transforming it into a form of deontological moral fanaticism, in which self-defense, retaliation, and boundaries are strictly prohibited. He envisages a world of games in which only unilateral altruism is permissible to the libertarian player. It would be fun to go a few rounds of prisoner’s dilemma with him.

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As Napoleon famously advised: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” Understandably, but still unfortunately, the Egyptian army have just done exactly that.

Daniel Pipes has pipped me to the post on this (here or here). The short summary that pre-empts me most specifically is this: “Morsi was removed from power too soon to discredit Islamism as much as he should have.” It took seven decades of chronic failure to associate the Marxist command economy with hopeless dysfunction in the eyes of the world, and even then, the lesson remains far from complete. It can scarcely be imagined that a few months of Muslim Brotherhood misgovernment is going to sear any lasting scars into the global Islamic soul. So: an opportunity missed.

Clearly, the forces of the Egyptian deep state were in no position to be as utterly indifferent to humanitarian considerations as  Outside in. Their hand was forced, since whatever the educational virtues of mass starvation, it takes a certain distance to fully appreciate them. In any case, with Egypt now clearly unsprung, it is at least possible to find entertainment in the spectacle of popular anti-democratic protest, concluding in firework celebrations of authoritarian restoration.

Adam Garfinkle covers the nuts-and-bolts well. Goldman’s regional analysis is highly convincing. Steyn does the quick historical overview, no less persuasively.

Satanists complain that cultural leftism is giving them a bad name.

However awkward the acknowledgment may be, there is no getting around the fact that philosophy, when apprehended within the Western tradition, is original sin. Between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, it does not hesitate. Its name is indistinguishable from a lust for the forbidden. Whilst burning philosophers is no longer socially acceptable, our canonical order of cultural prohibition – at its root — can only consider such punishment mandatory. Once philosophers are permitted to live, established civilization is over.

For philosophy, the whisper of the serpent is no longer a resistible temptation. It is instead a constitutive principle, or foundation. If there is a difference between a Socratic daemon and a diabolical demon, it is not one that matters philosophically. There can be no refusal of any accessible information.  This is an assumption so basic that philosophy cannot exist until it has passed beyond question. Ultimate religious transgression is the initiation.

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