Usually when libertarians talk about marriage, it’s about how the government shouldn’t be involved. When we talk about children, we debate whether or not we can sell them. Rarely do we ever talk about the role of the family in a free society. The US is experiencing a huge decline in the nuclear family, and with it, some very clear economic costs. Fewer people are getting married and the ones who do are waiting longer to take the leap. The average number of children per family is down to .9 from 1.3 in 1970, causing some people to refer to our current period as the “baby bust.” In the face of these statistics and the popularity of social experimentation among young libertarians, it is essential to take another look at the role of the nuclear family in relation to both the well-being of society and the individual.
At first glance, it’s easy to look at these statistics and sing the praises of human progress and individualism. In his article, Capitalism and the Family, Steve Horwitz argues it was capitalism that pulled women out of the household and into the workforce, while simultaneously reducing the demand for child labor. In other words, the birth rate declined and women were able to focus on building their careers before getting married.
While I admire independent women (and men, for that matter) and respect a couple’s personal decision to have fewer or no children, I think my generation is going to experience a huge amount of non-buyer’s remorse for choosing the #singlelyfe or the increasingly popular DINK life. To be clear, I think that less child labor and more working women is likely a good thing; I just think that the pendulum may have swung too far to the other side in an attempt to rebel against the “shackles” of traditionalism.
“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, –a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” -Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay
“Sexual pleasure is not pleasure. Sex-pleasure is the most devitalizing and de-moralizing of pleasures. Sexual pleasure is not pleasure at all. It is mental delusion. It is false, utterly worthless, and extremely harmful.” -Swami Sivananda Saraswati
An old painting of Kali in Kalighat painting style. This is a blend of traditional Bengali folk styles, and European painting. An in-between version of this scene, not as sexualized as ancient depictions, but not as tame as modern ones either. Image Source.
Westernized or Anglicized Hinduism describes the religious system which is adhered to by most Hindus living in the United States and Britain, as well as by those in the modern Hindu urban elite, middle class, and urban working class. Essentially, any Hindu population which has experienced the impact of a modern education system for a few generations now subscribes to a Westernized variant of the belief system.
Initially I was planning on titling this piece “The Anglicization of Hinduism,” as that is what the bulk of this article pertains to, but that would entail a slight misnomer. This is because aside from morphing under British pressure, the most ancient substratum belief of the Hindu philosophical tree– namely Tantra– has been under a far longer lasting, but less severe morphing due to the influence of Vedic Brahminical tradition which arose in the Western part of the Indian subcontinent. Then, in the British period orthodox Vedic Brahmins eagerly collaborated with the colonial regime. Using it as their vehicle, both the Brahminical and Victorian worldviews, began to permeate the Hindu cultural landscape in unison.
Thus, Hinduism has been “westernized” in two senses: Recent, and rapid influence from Britain, and ancient, gradual influence from Western India. Anglicization and Sanskritization.
Basic Characteristics of Westernized Hinduism in Hindu terms: Modern, Westernized Hinduism is essentially a modified form of Advaita Vedanta, though ISKON (a dualist sect), the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Gandhian Hinduism, and indeed nearly every major Hindu religious movement since 1800 can be characterized as Westernized Hinduism, Anglicized Hinduism, or Neo-Hinduism. It is normally highly monistic, and places an emphasis on Bhakti and/or Karma Yoga. Tantra, especially left-hand path Tantra is conspicuously absent. Most Neo-Hindus see Hinduism both as a specific religion, and also as a meta-religious framework, which encompasses all religions. The most popular text in this branch of Hinduism is the Bhagavad Gita. More on all of this later.
Formation of Westernized Hinduism: That covers the Hindu lineage, but there is of course a Western lineage as well. it is also the product of a violent and rapid change in the Indian social order– namely the advent of British colonialism, and eventually modern capitalism. The British Raj accorded a privileged role to Christian values and Western concepts. Starting in about 1858, when the British East India Company was forced to transfer power to the British monarchy, the British began to more actively inject their civilizational model into the subcontinent. The imposition of British political institutions and laws on Indian society, the state the support of British missionaries, the state encouragement of convent education and other forms of British education, and the selection of conservative, orthodox Brahmins for use in writing and interpreting what became “Anglo-Hindu law,” and the uniform application of that law to all of Hindu society, are all examples of this sudden change in traditional Hindu society.
“All that is said by any of us can only be imitation and representation. For if we consider the likenesses which painters make of bodies divine and heavenly, and the different degrees of gratification with which the eye of the spectator receives them, we shall see that we are satisfied with the artist who is able in any degree to imitate the earth and its mountains, and the rivers, and the woods, and the universe, and the things that are and move therein, and further, that knowing nothing precise about such matters, we do not examine or analyze the painting; all that is required is a sort of indistinct and deceptive mode of shadowing them forth.” — Critias
“If thou dost not now recognize thine own thought-forms … the lights will daunt thee, the sounds will awe thee, and the rays will terrify thee.” — Tibetan Book of the Dead
I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered.
*****
Tom Bertonneau investigates the myth of Atlantis, and finds himself quite sympathetic to its expositors:
Historians have long since tidied up history and set all the dates. The professors know what they know.
But do they really know what they know or are they merely being professional such that, like all professionals nowadays, their choler boils over preemptively concerning any idea not fully vetted by the peer-review committee of Soporifica? Or on the other hand is there not in the imaginations of Messrs. Rudbeck, Spence, Haggard and Hyne, and their kith and kin, something like a profound intuition?
What kind of intuition?
“A great universal civilization in deep prehistory,” Michell called it, the memory of which persisted until the moment when the Enlightenment ceased to countenance anything except itself about midway through the Eighteenth Century.
I commend to you Rune Soup’s Whisky Rants, all of them. He’s like the Moldbug of chaos magic. The one on Atlantis is very interesting and asks some good questions; I’m not really convinced that the Cuban underwater city is quite worth getting excited about yet, but let’s run with it for a minute:
Atlantis has been found. If you admit that fact then the museum is in immediate need of miles and miles of redecorating. And this is just one place. The whole edifice of the western European narrative starts to slip like a clown’s face in the rain. …
There is a fucking city of step pyramids and processional streets stretching thousands of square metres at the bottom of the sea.
There are several of those, but the specific one in question does have something of an unusual story, involving a Soviet defector named Paulina Zelitsky and her Canadian husband, Paul Weinzweig. There hasn’t been a subsequent expedition since the ‘discovery’ was made in 2001, which is unfortunate but given political realities involving Cuba, not necessarily indicative of any kind of cover-up. Zelitsky more or less disappeared, with the exception of this report about her being arrested in Mexico, until about a year ago when her two-volume memoir, of sorts, came out. I haven’t read it, but the description on Amazon says:
Paulina concludes in her arguments that the main strategy of the current Russian Government is to attain global dominion, naturally prioritizing it in the Arctic which is absolutely strategically important for Russia in military and economic terms. The “sabre-rattling” strategy adopted by the current Russian government not just in Arctic but also in the Gulf of Mexico is directed toward military intimidation of their Arctic neighbors in order to maintain full military control and develop Arctic resources without interference from other Arctic neighbors. The nuclear deterrent cycle is about to repeat once again with Russian government rebuilding its previously abandoned military bases in Cuba and once again secretly sending its navy equipped with nuclear missiles to Cuba.
Sounds crazy, right? But just maybe a little prescient, given this news two weeks ago. She’s also taken up internet commenting, posting largely on Ukrainian affairs — she was educated in Odessa — and is clearly quite opposed to Russia’s new self-assertion on the world stage.
Marxism has been fermenting for long enough in the more well-concealed crooks of windows of the cathedral, generally out of eyeshot for all but the tallest, and of absolutely no merit during the putrefactio stage: like so many hermetically-sealed vessels of cheap solipisitic, Kool-Aid-imitative substance, those who attempted to taste the prison hooch before enough time had elapsed, digging up the orchard promptly found themselves catching brewer’s sickness. Other than those lost their minds, faith, or life if they weren’t lucky enough to come back akathesiac, catatonic-neurotic husks of the men they were to their families, busted road signs to their home towns down so many stretches of politically contested highway, these remnants of the vanguard, finalists in the ceremonial rites of the intoxication olympics, strive to deliver, uninterrupted pieces of time from the outer rim, indivisible in and of themselves and integral only as virtual energy, must like the conservation of the angular velocity of an orbiting electron briefly excited is suddenly apparently replaced (if we’re being crudely mechanical) In reality, there were three things, the beginning, middle, and end of an indivisible moment: excitation, acceleration, sudden-indelible-intensive-return-transformation.
Hip-hop is, ultimately an undertaking on the order of magnitude of permitting and preventing, affirming and denying holocausts
If the invisible hand (the real one, the grabby junky one that’s not so good with money) can be made to loosen its grip on the central form on the potters wheel. But know that, as long as the matter is sufficiently fluid, lassitude of grip can only serve to keep (You/The Author/The Artist) utterly from deciding, where this matter will not go.
Only after relapse is prevented, discipline elapses sufficiently; now the moment of inertia of the incipient res can be roughly fixed in the sense of the artist. Fluid must be fully integrated into the medium for catastrophe to subside. Operations can not be performed in a state of catastrophe. Substance can finally learn how to begin to express its new trust to the author, in his essential motivation as the author to catch her as gravity begins to exert an entirely different effect, as the short term collapses into the present and the concrete future stretches into teleovirtual conformity with the attractor eidos.
Freedom of the press usually means no prior restraint. That is, anyone can publish anything, whether or not the government likes it. While a lack of prior restraint seems to be a necessary condition for freedom of the press, I am becoming increasingly convinced that it is not a sufficient condition. It is possible for government to have a significant impact on news by restricting access to reporters who are likely to write favorable stories. A mild version of this is when disliked members of the press are not invited to news conferences. A extreme version involves selective leaks to press who will spin a story positively.
The problem was aptly noted by a number of press organizations in an open letter to President Obama.
Over the past two decades, public agencies have increasingly prohibited staff from communicating with journalists unless they go through public affairs offices or through political appointees. This trend has been especially pronounced in the federal government. We consider these restrictions a form of censorship — an attempt to control what the public is allowed to see and hear.
The stifling of free expression is happening despite your pledge on your first day in office to bring “a new era of openness” to federal government – and the subsequent executive orders and directives which were supposed to bring such openness about.
Recent research has indicated the problem is getting worse throughout the nation, particularly at the federal level. Journalists are reporting that most federal agencies prohibit their employees from communicating with the press unless the bosses have public relations staffers sitting in on the conversations. Contact is often blocked completely. When public affairs officers speak, even about routine public matters, they often do so confidentially in spite of having the title “spokesperson.” Reporters seeking interviews are expected to seek permission, often providing questions in advance. Delays can stretch for days, longer than most deadlines allow. Public affairs officers might send their own written responses of slick non-answers. Agencies hold on-background press conferences with unnamed officials, on a not-for-attribution basis.
In many cases, this is clearly being done to control what information journalists – and the audience they serve – have access to. A survey found 40 percent of public affairs officers admitted they blocked certain reporters because they did not like what they wrote.
