Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Update on a forthcoming book

I had planned to turn these three posts addressing each section of the neoreactionary trike into a $0.99 essay to put up on Amazon with a little extra material.

When I actually got to working at it, it blew up into something quite a bit longer with some more meat to it. It’s shaping up into a short eBook of about 20-35k words on the same topic, but substantially expanded into a lot of areas that I’ve wanted to cover but haven’t had the opportunity to.

The writing is also a bit higher quality than most of what I put up on blogs. It started off as a little bit too inside-baseball, but now that it has more supporting material, it’s become more accessible and probably more interesting to a broader audience.

If you already like my work, you will probably also like the book. If you want me to continue devoting time & effort to writing of this nature, a good way to put that desire into action will be to buy it and to encourage your friends to buy it. Every buck that I make off the book will go towards more time & effort towards future projects of that nature. I have a longer book project that I put on ice more than six months ago just because the volume of the research that it required took more time than I had to allocate to it.

My main goal in working on this project is to help to make a market for other authors in our space and to make my existing readers happier than I can by just blogging. Talking about fighting a culture war is just talk without producing more quality products to that end.

I should have a release data announced some time in the next couple weeks, and will be sending out advance copies for reviews. Send me an e-mail if you’re interested.

If you are too broke to buy it, but have a blog or a free account on Amazon, a timely review would be worth more to me than the money, whether or not it’s positive.

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The Middle Class Campus Rape Craze

We seem to be going through a period of hysteria around the phenomenon of the purported rapes of middle class girls on co-ed college campuses.

Less than 40 years after feminists broke down gender segregation in the academy, lowering standards and blowing up the doctrine of in loco parentis, many of those feminists have come to decrying their unique project, the co-ed institution of higher learning, as a place where rape is endemic.

In the words of activists, these aren’t typically violent rapes. They are instead rather more rapes via intoxication and seduction, which are not necessarily obviously rape for everyone involved until later on, when there is no evidence or eyewitness testimony to corroborate the reports. It is a subjective conception of rape that never meets the evidentiary standard that American courts require to convict someone of a crime.

UVA: Educating the a future generation of leading group sex fans and permanently damaged therapy patients

 

The latest article on the topic is a feature for Rolling Stone about a ‘gang-rape’ at one of the most prestigious public universities in the country, the University of Virginia. UVA was founded by Thomas Jefferson.

The article recounts a scene of the dean responsible for investigating rape complaints:

If Dean Eramo was surprised at Jackie’s story of gang rape, it didn’t show. A short woman with curly dark hair and a no-nonsense demeanor, Eramo surely has among the most difficult jobs at UVA. As the intake person on behalf of the university for all sexual-assault complaints since 2006, it’s her job to deal with a parade of sobbing students trekking in and out of her office. (UVA declined to make Eramo available for comment.) A UVA alum herself, Eramo is beloved by survivors, who consider her a friend and confidante – even though, as only a few students are aware, her office isn’t a confidential space at all. Each time a new complaint comes through Eramo’s office, it activates a review by UVA’s Title IX officer, is included in UVA’s tally of federally mandated Clery Act crime statistics, and Eramo may, at her discretion, reveal details of her conversation with the student to other administrators. (Jackie was mortified to learn later that Eramo had shared her identity with another UVA administrator.) After all, a dean’s foremost priority is the overall safety of the campus.

…

When Jackie finished talking, Eramo comforted her, then calmly laid out her options. If Jackie wished, she could file a criminal complaint with police. Or, if Jackie preferred to keep the matter within the university, she had two choices. She could file a complaint with the school’s Sexual Misconduct Board, to be decided in a “formal resolution” with a jury of students and faculty, and a dean as judge. Or Jackie could choose an “informal resolution,” in which Jackie could simply face her attackers in Eramo’s presence and tell them how she felt; Eramo could then issue a directive to the men, such as suggesting counseling. Eramo presented each option to Jackie neutrally, giving each equal weight. She assured Jackie there was no pressure – whatever happened next was entirely her choice.

Like many schools, UVA has taken to emphasizing that in matters of sexual assault, it caters to victim choice. “If students feel that we are forcing them into a criminal or disciplinary process that they don’t want to be part of, frankly, we’d be concerned that we would get fewer reports,” says associate VP for student affairs Susan Davis. Which in theory makes sense: Being forced into an unwanted choice is a sensitive point for the victims. But in practice, that utter lack of guidance can be counterproductive to a 19-year-old so traumatized as Jackie was that she was contemplating suicide. Setting aside for a moment the absurdity of a school offering to handle the investigation and adjudication of a felony sex crime – something Title IX requires, but which no university on Earth is equipped to do – the sheer menu of choices, paired with the reassurance that any choice is the right one, often has the end result of coddling the victim into doing nothing.

“This is an alarming trend that I’m seeing on campuses,” says Laura Dunn of the advocacy group SurvJustice. “Schools are assigning people to victims who are pretending, or even thinking, they’re on the victim’s side, when they’re actually discouraging and silencing them. Advocates who survivors love are part of the system that is failing to address sexual violence.”

We ought to perhaps consider, that whether or not these sexual acts are actually rape, whether or not this is the kind of culture that is capable of maintaining a global empire of any significance, or really a country of any significance at all.

These are what, in the historical context, we would call show trials. There is no evidence presented beyond hearsay. In many cases, as with the recent charges leveled against Bill Cosby in the media, there’s nothing but a long parade of hearsay, with no evidence presented, amid an ideological climate that states that the testimonies of women should be trusted no matter what, whether or not it meets the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard.

The press has also become comfortable repeating thin non-evidence in a libelous manner, and the government does not seem to care that major television stations, magazines, and newspapers are making a mock of American laws around libel and defamation.

What do we really get out of co-education?

 

Given that co-education has not delivered the promised results, as with all socialist programs, there must be a set of wreckers to be blamed for the institutional failures. In this case, the failure of co-education to do anything but deliver vastly damaged standards of public intellect and lowered public morals, the wreckers blamed for this failure are young male pseudo-rapists, who are really more accurately termed fornicators.

Having driven out older norms and rituals around sexual behavior, the left expresses shock that the result has been widespread unhappiness. Having lost the language to call women ‘ruined’ with fornication, or for calling promiscuous young men rakes, or for even distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate sex, there is only the language of therapy and trauma to take its place.

Regrettable, morally-damaging sex falls into the only legal category that seems to hold the moral weight that contemporary liberals haven’t destroyed: rape.

Whereas before there was a wide taxonomy describing different forms of sexual misbehavior, today, we only have ‘harassment’ and ‘rape.’

Women are supposedly strong and independent, but even the girls who attend some of the most selective institutions in the country are neither strong nor independent enough, apparently, to enforce their own consent, or to make intelligent decisions about protecting themselves from unseemly sexual encounters.

If so among the most intelligent and socially well-positioned young women, what does that say for the gender as a whole? These are students that are at least in the top 5%, IQ-wise. It is perhaps more likely that the ancient philosophers were more correct about the limitations of this sex than we tend to give them credit for today, even by the piously trumpeted admissions of the feminists.

This has always been a major philosophical problem for assigning legal rights to women: it makes a whole lot less sense when someone else always has to enforce the rights of that entire class of human being. Almost any man can clobber any woman in a physical struggle, and given the vulnerability of their sex, the law before the revolution had different expectations for women.

Going back 60 or 70 years, this set of consequences was foreseeable and was foreseen.

Diminished standards, diminished morals, and ruined graduates

 

‘Jackie’ from the article was most likely not raped. But the damage done to her is certainly real, as is the emotional ball of screw-up-edness that she and whomever is stuck marrying her is going to wind up having to clean up.

“Everything bad in my life now is built around that one bad decision that I made,” she says. “All because I went to that stupid party.”

Who cares?
Did Jackie’s family get their money’s worth? Did the state of Virginia get its money’s worth? Was this education worthwhile for her? Was it terribly worthwhile for the men who ran a train on her? Do we want people of such low moral quality leading the country? Why are we still assigning to much weight to these institutions if, by the loud admissions of liberals, they are churning out ‘rapists’ of this type?
Out-of-state tuition at UVA is over $18,000 per semester. Are their parents getting a good return on their investment if this is at all representative of the moral level of the student body?
The influence of the ‘party culture’ is perhaps over-rated, as there are many students who choose to opt out, but in my estimation it isn’t by much. If you host a party with kegs of cheap beer and have plenty of solo cups, you won’t lack for attendees.
Calling the problem ‘rape’ or ‘rape culture’ is not accurate.
The sexual revolution has more unpleasant consequences than has been advertised. It is common to hear American men say that they don’t particularly want to marry or have relationships with American women. One of the reasons why is that they tend to accumulate all sorts of baggage as they pick up a dozen or more sexual partners by the time they hit their early 20s, whether or not they’re educated. For our grandmother’s generation, that would’ve been unthinkable, the sort of experience that they would expect a prostitute to have and not a respectable young woman.
Whether or not Jackie deserved to be ruined, what kind of idiot would want to marry her?
There is this sort of idea, promulgated by the revolutionaries, that women are simultaneously hyper-durable, people who gain in vitality and worth as they accumulate sexual experience, while simultaneously saying that women are hyper-delicate creatures who can be emotionally scarred for life by an unhappy sexual encounter which might not meet the legal standard of rape.
Like in many other cases, our ancestors had more accumulated cultural knowledge than we give them credit for. Discarding historically accumulated morals and rituals as if they were worthless and ‘irrational’ has caused an enormous amount of human suffering that liberals only seem capable of acknowledging in such a way that blames everyone except themselves and their own proudly trumpeted doctrines of the sexual free-for-all.

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Excerpts from Carlyle’s “Latter Day Pamphlets”

Since I’ve been on a Carlyle kick lately, and have acclimated to his style, I made it through Latter Day Pamphlets rapidly. There’s no particular theme to this collection of essays — it’s more of a running commentary on issues contemporary to the author.

Foseti has already written capably on the book, and you may want to start with his review for context.

This will be a selection of quotes plus my commentary, intended to encourage people to go and read the book themselves.

Here’s Carlyle on chronic kinglessness and the resultant rule via manipulation of public opinion:

And everywhere the people, or the populace, take their own government upon themselves; and open “kinglessness,” what we call anarchy,—how happy if it be anarchy plus a street-constable!—is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians, I have known nothing similar. And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except the Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrel-head, in leading article; or getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament to harangue.

Here’s Carlyle prefiguring the baby boomers:

In times when men love wisdom, the old man will ever be venerable, and be venerated, and reckoned noble: in times that love something else than wisdom, and indeed have little or no wisdom, and see little or none to love, the old man will cease to be venerated; and looking more closely, also, you will find that in fact he has ceased to be venerable, and has begun to be contemptible; a foolish boy still, a boy without the graces, generosities and opulent strength of young boys. In these days, what of lordship or leadership is still to be done, the youth must do it, not the mature or aged man; the mature man, hardened into sceptical egoism, knows no monition but that of his own frigid cautious, avarices, mean timidities; and can lead no-whither towards an object that even seems noble.

Carlyle on some of the issues with the voluntary principle, which is an issue that many current and former libertarians are likely to struggle with:

But henceforth, be it known, we have changed all that, by favor of Heaven: “the voluntary principle” has come up, which will itself do the business for us; and now let a new Sacrament, that of Divorce, which we call emancipation, and spout of on our platforms, be universally the order of the day!—Have men considered whither all this is tending, and what it certainly enough betokens? Cut every human relation which has anywhere grown uneasy sheer asunder; reduce whatsoever was compulsory to voluntary, whatsoever was permanent among us to the condition of nomadic:—in other words, loosen by assiduous wedges in every joint, the whole fabric of social existence, stone from stone: till at last, all now being loose enough, it can, as we already see in most countries, be overset by sudden outburst of revolutionary rage; and, lying as mere mountains of anarchic rubbish, solicit you to sing Fraternity, &c., over it, and to rejoice in the new remarkable era of human progress we have arrived at.

Social coordination can become difficult when it becomes impossible to form and maintain permanent relations of any kind. The forerunner of revolutionary violence is a breakdown in other peaceable relations that make the phenomenon of society possible.

The author on the superior quality of British workers:

For it is the glory of England that she has a turn for fidelity in practical work; that sham-workers, though very numerous, are rarer than elsewhere; that a man who undertakes work for you will still, in various provinces of our affairs, do it, instead of merely seeming to do it.

We ought to perhaps consider that the poor productivity seen in many foreign countries may not be entirely due to bad policies, but that bad policies might come with an inferior human stock with inferior morals poorly suited to production.

Carlyle does not much believe in reformatory justice, and defends the principle of just revenge:

“Revenge,” my friends! revenge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to revancher oneself upon them, and pay them what they have merited: this is forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man. Only the excess of it is diabolic; the essence I say is manlike, and even godlike,—a monition sent to poor man by the Maker himself. Thou, poor reader, in spite of all this melancholy twaddle, and blotting out of Heaven’s sunlight by mountains of horsehair and officiality, hast still a human heart. If, in returning to thy poor peaceable dwelling-place, after an honest hard day’s work, thou wert to find, for example, a brutal scoundrel who for lucre or other object of his, had slaughtered the life that was dearest to thee; thy true wife, for example, thy true old mother, swimming in her blood; the human scoundrel, or two-legged wolf, standing over such a tragedy: I hope a man would have so much divine rage in his heart as to snatch the nearest weapon, and put a conclusion upon said human wolf, for one!

This made me think of the pop-art phenomenon of the action movie. Most men feel, at least in the base of their brain, that revenge is a legitimate form of justice. Even if at a higher level, in public speech, most people affirm enlightenment conceptions of a ‘justice system’ which sentences criminals not to punish but to reform, in practice, at the emotional and aesthetic levels, none of that translates. When a script-writer wants to fill movie theaters, they tell a story about a man getting bloody revenge to set the world to rights.

Carlyle is not a great believer in the correlation between the rhetorical excellence of a man and his greatness in other pursuits:

No grand Doer in this world can be a copious speaker about his doings. William the Silent spoke himself best in a country liberated; Oliver Cromwell did not shine in rhetoric; Goethe, when he had but a book in view, found that he must say nothing even of that, if it was to succeed with him.

So it is that we all ought be skeptical of glib and prolific bloggers, also.

Closing comments

Foseti seemed to read this in light of this extended post by Moldbug explaining his perspective as to why Carlyle is so important. I read that particular Moldbug post some time ago, and did not re-read it in advance of going over this, so what I focused on in my reading was not quite the same.

Carlyle is only difficult to understand from a more contemporary perspective. When read keeping in mind that he would have been writing to an audience largely familiar with classical works and much more familiar with the long record of Christian theology, it’s just a lot easier to see his perspective as right and normal and the more left-wing perspective as odd and un-rooted.

One perspective has deep roots, and the other is more of a hydroponic type of perspective; a plant in one of those indoor farms with no soil and carefully applied nutrient fluid, sunned by a heat-lamp.

What’s harder for modern readers to grasp, and perhaps for me, is the difference between a more historically rooted perspective and one that attributes great weight to concepts like individualism and rights.

As 21st century people, we collectively believe in these notions of individualism and of abstract rights, in a way that suffuses our culture in such a way that it’s the water in our fish bowl. Carlyle is writing at a time that’s still transitioning to this world of equality-fraternity with its sacrament of divorce, so it was possible to conceive of and see both visions of humanity in the present.

Even Americans of 1850 would have taken the motto ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ rather differently than Americans of 2014. Each word in that motto meant something different then relative to what it means today.

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