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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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You should probably explain why instead of just quipping your way out of addressing James Burnham and contemporary elite theory at large.

Well the short answer is I'm not a Marxist and that I believe that the whole field of "generative anthropology" is for all intents and purposes bunk. The desire to reduce the entire span of human behavior to originating scene governed by a simple equation is at best futile, and at worst misguided if not outright evil. In practice it's mostly just intellectual types going on about how a certain quirk of some language proves some Marxist talking point.

Accordingly I put about as much stock in it as I do dialectical materialism and its practitioners, or I would a joint lecture from Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein about the importance of fighting "rape culture".

The long answer is probably a 10,000 word post in itself.

This is a bunch of nonsense. Pragmatic political science making falsifiable predictions has nothing to do with the origin of the word. And insofar as it does all of the scholarship of the humanities including history, economics and psychology are subject to your criticism.

The long answer is probably a 10,000 word post in itself.

I mean it is, but given you're proposing to throw out every analysis of power relationships since Machiavelli in the same bin as Marxism on the grounds that the object is just too complicated and irreducible you're going to have to make a more convincing argument than saying De Jouvenel is self serving, even as his analysis destroys much of the liberal assumptions he ostensibly holds dear.

I find it weird to accuse a school of thought that includes people with such dissimilar political views as Pareto, Mosca and Schmitt of being mere ideological vehicle. Surely if we take your analogy, that would amount to holding a lecture that included both Harvey Weinstein, Valerie Solanas and the Pope.

And what then would the lecture be about that they'd agree on if not the structure of relationships between the sexes in a purely descriptive sense.

No what it sounds like to me is that you'd really like to believe in your own particular idealism and that shattering it into object level power politics must be defended against for reasons that are beyond rationality.

You seem to be conflating the specific belief in generative anthropology with faith in the wider fields of anthropology and social science.

Granted, this is a conflation that the advocates of generative anthropology encourage, but I see no contradiction in believing that Machiavelli and Pareto have important things to teach us while simultaneously condemning post-modernism and believing that Eric Gans is full of shit.

Explain how elite theory is generative anthropology then? You haven't explained that and yet you seem to be dismissing Burnham on those grounds.

Okay, I want to see that post. Flipping through the GA Wikipedia and a couple articles was surreal. It really raises some questions about the commonly asserted leftist monopoly on academia.

The desire to reduce the entire span of human behavior to originating scene governed by a simple equation is at best futile

Liberalism isn't guilty of this? Liberalism presupposes an ahistorical "state of nature" from which individuals consented to Social Order in order to protect their rights that are said to come from God.

The alternative view is that the social order precedes the individual, and that individual consciousness is and always has been inherited from the social order, and that rights are a consequence of the social order rather than a moral justification for its existence. That strikes me as much less hand-waving than the former story.

It also doesn't restrict these power conflicts to material conditions. Things like identity and race matter as much and often weigh more than material conditions. Liberalism is closer to Marxism in its emphasis on material conditions and de-emphasis of identity and race in comparison to nationalism.

Liberalism isn't guilty of this?

Perhaps you ought to clarify what you mean by "Liberalism" in this context, because at first glance I'd say the answer is "no". Further more I'd point out disagreement on the historicity and precise nature of "the state of nature", along with everything that implies, is at the core of the divide between the classical right and the classical left along with it's various successor ideologies (Marxism, Progressivism, Post-Modernism, Et Al).