SECRETARY TILLERSON

SECRETARY TILLERSON: Good morning. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you.

Are we on? Can you all hear me back there in the back? Can you hear me now? (Laughter.) Can you hear me now?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

SECRETARY TILLERSON: All right. I told them I have to walk around. My wife has always said if you tied my hands down to my side, I would be a complete mute. (Laughter.) So I’m not great at podiums. I do know how to read a speech, but I thought today we’d just have a chat.

So I’ve been here about three months now, we’ve been working alongside one another, and so I thought it’d be worthwhile to just share a few of my perspectives with you on where I think we are and some things that are coming that I know are of interest to you.

But before I do that, I would be remiss if I did not thank all of those who have stepped into acting roles during these past three months to help me, and starting with acting Deputy Secretary Tom Shannon, who’s just been stellar. (Applause.) But I also want to acknowledge the large number of people who are – stepped into under secretary, assistant secretary roles, director roles, and a number of chief of missions around the world as well. Your willingness to step up and not just fill that role, but to take responsibility for the role and to lead the organization through some pretty challenging first 90 days – it’s not like we haven’t had some things to work on. And so I want to express my appreciation to all of you for helping me and helping my team as we came on board. And I’ve just been really gratified at the work that everyone’s undertaken in that regard.

So I thought we’d talk about a couple of things. I want to share my perspective as to how does this administration’s policies of “America first” fit into our foreign policy and foreign affairs. And so I want to touch on that. And then I’ll take a quick walk around the world. Most of you have some familiarity of what’s going on around the world, but I thought just regionally I’d hit each one of them very quickly, to share with you my perspective on kind of where I feel we are, and then in some areas where we’ve not yet had time to devote the attention to we would like, and I don’t want that to be in any way considered that we don’t think those are important. It’s kind of a – what’s the hottest fire that we’ve got to deal with?

So I want to talk about that a little bit, and then spend some time at the end talking about where we’re going in the future of the department, USAID, and, as you know, we just kicked off this listening exercise.

So let’s talk first about my view of how you translate “America first” into our foreign policy. And I think I approach it really that it’s America first for national security and economic prosperity, and that doesn’t mean it comes at the expense of others. Our partnerships and our alliances are critical to our success in both of those areas. But as we have progressed over the last 20 years – and some of you could tie it back to the post-Cold War era as the world has changed, some of you can tie it back to the evolution of China since the post-Nixon era and China’s rise as an economic power, and now as a growing military power – that as we participated in those changes, we were promoting relations, we were promoting economic activity, we were promoting trade with a lot of these emerging economies, and we just kind of lost track of how we were doing. And as a result, things got a little bit out of balance. And I think that’s – as you hear the President talk about it, that’s what he really speaks about, is: Look, things have gotten out of balance, and these are really important relationships to us and they’re really important alliances, but we’ve got to bring them back into balance.

So whether it’s our asking of NATO members to really meet their obligations, even though those were notional obligations, we understand – and aspirational obligation, we think it’s important that those become concrete. And when we deal with our trading partners – that things have gotten a little out of bounds here, they’ve gotten a little off balance – we’ve got to bring that back into balance because it’s not serving the interests of the American people well.

So it doesn’t have to come at the expense of others, but it does have to come at an engagement with others. And so as we’re building our policies around those notions, that’s what we want to support. But at the end of it, it is strengthening our national security and promoting economic prosperity for the American people, and we do that, again, with a lot of partners.

Now, I think it’s important to also remember that guiding all of our foreign policy actions are our fundamental values: our values around freedom, human dignity, the way people are treated. Those are our values. Those are not our policies; they’re values. And the reason it’s important, I think, to keep that well understood is policies can change. They do change. They should change. Policies change to adapt to the – our values never change. They’re constant throughout all of this.

And so I think the real challenge many of us have as we think about constructing our policies and carrying out our policies is: How do we represent our values? And in some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting our values, we probably can’t achieve our national security goals or our national security interests. If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests. It doesn’t mean that we leave those values on the sidelines. It doesn’t mean that we don’t advocate for and aspire to freedom, human dignity, and the treatment of people the world over. We do. And we will always have that on our shoulder everywhere we go.

But I think it is – I think it’s really important that all of us understand the difference between policy and values, and in some circumstances, we should and do condition our policy engagements on people adopting certain actions as to how they treat people. They should. We should demand that. But that doesn’t mean that’s the case in every situation. And so we really have to understand, in each country or each region of the world that we’re dealing with, what are our national security interests, what are our economic prosperity interests, and then as we can advocate and advance our values, we should – but the policies can do this; the values never change.

And so I would ask you to just – to the extent you could think about that a little bit, I think it’s useful, because I know this is probably, for me, it’s one of the most difficult areas as I’ve thought about how to formulate policy to advance all of these things simultaneously. It’s a real challenge. And I hear from government leaders all over the world: You just can’t demand that of us, we can’t move that quickly, we can’t adapt that quickly, okay? So it’s how do we advance our national security and economic interests on this hand, our values are constant over here.

So I give you that as kind of an overarching view of how I think about the President’s approach of “America first.” We must secure the nation. We must protect our people. We must protect our borders. We must protect our ability to be that voice of our values now and forevermore. And we can only do that with economic prosperity. So it’s foreign policy projected with a strong ability to enforce the protection of our freedoms with a strong military. And all of you that have been at this a long time understand the value of speaking with a posture of strength – not a threatening posture, but a posture of strength. People know we can back it up.

So with that in mind, let me just quickly walk around the world and give you my assessment of where we are in some of the early stages of policy that’s underway and some that’s yet to be developed.

So as all of you clearly understand, when we came in to the State Department, the administration came in, was sworn in, immediately confronted with a serious situation in North Korea. Now, the prior administration, as all of you know, President Obama told President Trump this was going to be your greatest threat that you’re going to have to manage, and he was right.

So it was – it’s right on the doorstep. And so it got immediate attention. It was the first policy area that we began to develop in terms of what is our overarching strategic approach and how do we want to execute against that. In evaluating that, what was important to us and to me to understand was, first, where are our allies? And so engaging with our allies and ensuring that our allies and we see the situation the same – our allies in South Korea, our allies in Japan.

And then, secondly, it was to engage with the other regional powers as to how do they see it. And so it was useful and helpful to have the Chinese and now the Russians articulate clearly that their policy is unchanged; they – their policy is a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. And of course we did our part many years ago. We took all the nuclear weapons out of South Korea. So now we have a shared objective, and that’s very useful, from which you then build out your policy approaches and your strategies.

So many people are saying, well, gee, this is just the same thing we’ve tried over and over – we’re going to put pressure on the regime in Pyongyang, they’re not going to do anything, and then in the end we’ll all cave. Well, the difference, I think, in our approach this time is we’re going to test this assumption, and when the – when folks came in to review the situation with me, the assumption was that China has limited influence on the regime in Pyongyang, or they have a limited willingness to assert their influence. And so I told the President we’ve got to test that, and we’re going to test it by leaning hard into them, and this is a good place to start our engagement with China.

And so that’s what we’ve been doing, is leaning hard into China to test their willingness to use their influence, their engagement with the regime in North Korea. All of it backed up by very strong resolve on our part to have a denuclearized peninsula with a commitment to our security alliances on the peninsula and in the region to our important allies Japan and South Korea.

So it’s a pressure campaign that has a knob on it. I’d say we’re at about dial setting 5 or 6 right now, with a strong call of countries all over the world to fully implement the UN Security Council resolutions regarding sanctions, because no one has ever fully implemented those. So we’re going to lean into people to fully implement them. We’ve told them we’re watching what you’re doing. When we see you not implementing, we see companies or we see individuals that are violating these sanctions, we’re going to contact you and we’re going to ask you to take care of it. If you can’t take care of it or you simply don’t want to take care of it for your own internal political reasons, we will. We’ll sanction them through third-country sanctions.

So we are being very open and transparent about our intentions, and we’re asking our partners around the world to please take actions on your own. We want you to control how that happens. We’re not trying to control it for you, but we have an expectation of what you will do. So we’re putting that pressure on. We are preparing additional sanctions, if it turns out North Korea’s actions warrant additional sanctions. We’re hopeful that the regime in North Korea will think about this and come to a conclusion that there’s another way to the future. We know they have – they’re – they aspire to nuclear weapons because it’s the regime’s belief it’s the only way they can secure their future.

We are clear – we’ve been clear to them this is not about regime change, this is not about regime collapse, this is not about an accelerated reunification of the peninsula, this is not about us looking for an excuse to come north of the 38th Parallel. So we’re trying to be very, very clear and resolute in our message to them that your future security and economic prosperity can only be achieved through your following your commitments to denuclearize.

So this is where we are. We’re at – I would say we’re at about the 20 to 25 percent stage of this strategy. Thus far, our assessment is it is going like we had hoped for in terms of the response we’re getting from others, but we’ve got a lot of work left to do to keep that pressure on. And so that’s what the folks that are in the bureaus and out in the missions are doing to help us right now, is to continue this steady, resolute message and continue to talk out here to the North Koreans, but not here, yet, about what our intentions are and what we want. We are ready and prepared to engage in talks when conditions are right. But as you’ve heard me say, we are not going to negotiate our way to the negotiating table. That is what Pyongyang has done for the last 20 years, is cause us to have to negotiate to get them to sit down. We’ll sit down when they’re ready to sit down under the right terms. So that’s North Korea.

And then if I pivoted over to China, because it really took us directly to our China foreign policy, we really had to assess China’s situation, as I said, from the Nixon era up to where we find things today, and we saw a bit of an inflection point with the Sochi – with the Beijing Olympics. Those were enormously successful for China. They kind of put China on the map, and China really began to feel its oats about that time, and rightfully. They have achieved a lot. They moved 500 million Chinese people out of poverty into middle class status. They’ve still got a billion more they need to move.

So China has its own challenges, and we want to work with them and be mindful of what they’re dealing with in the context of our relationship. And our relationship has to be one of understanding that we have security interests throughout northeast Asia and security interests throughout the Pacific, and we need to work with them on how those are addressed. So that gets to the island building in the South China Sea, the militarization of those islands, and obviously, we have huge trading issues to talk with them about.

So we are using the entree of the visit in Mar-a-Lago, which was heavy on some issues with North Korea but also heavy on a broader range of issues. And what we’ve asked the Chinese to do is we’re – we want to take a fresh look at where’s this relationship going to be 50 years from now, because I think we have an opportunity to define that. And so I know there have been a lot of dialogue areas that have been underway for the last several years with China. We have asked China to narrow the dialogue areas and elevate the participants to the decision-making level.

So we outlined four major dialogue areas with China, and we’ve asked them to bring people who report directly to the decision-maker, which is President Xi. So for the first time, we are seeking and we – so far it appears we will get people at the politburo level and at much higher levels of the government within China to participate in these dialogues so we can reframe what we want the relationship to be and begin to deal with some of the problems and issues that have just been sitting out there kind of stuck in neutral for a while. So it is a – it’s a much narrower – as we make progress, those things will result in working groups where we can get after solving these things.

So we’re going to have the first meeting of the Diplomatic and Security Dialogue, which is chaired by myself and Secretary Mattis, with our counterparts here in Washington in June, and we’ve put it up as a kind of top priority. The second one is economic and trade, which is chaired by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Ross, and it’s well underway also.

So that’s kind of the new approach we’re taking with China, is elevate, let’s kind of revisit this relationship, and what is it going to be over the next half century. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity we have to define that, and there seems to be a great interest on the part of the Chinese leadership to do that as well. They feel we’re at a point of inflection also. So that’s China.

Obviously, throughout Asia we’ve got a lot of work do with ASEAN nations and re-solidifying our leadership with ASEAN on a number of security issues but also trade issues and the South China Sea, strengthen relations with Australia and New Zealand – really important partners with us on a number of counterterrorism fronts. And so throughout the region those engagements are underway. And the President has committed to make the trip to Vietnam and to the Philippines for those meetings this fall, and I think that’s going to be very important that he is going, and we’ll be going in advance, obviously, to prepare for all of that.

So if we walk around to the next hot spot that we worked on, pretty quickly it was the Middle East around the campaign to defeat ISIS and instability that that’s created in, obviously, Syria, Iraq, the issues in Afghanistan. And as those of you who work that region well know, you can just kind of draw the concentric circles out all the way into North Africa, parts of Africa, all of the Middle East, parts of Central Asia, and this is really a D-ISIS and a counterterrorism effort, is what it really boils down to. And so how do we develop policies and bring regional players together to address these threats of ISIS and counterterrorism?

And we hosted I think what was a very successful coalition to defeat ISIS ministerial here at the State Department. I think there is a real renewed sense of energy and commitment to win this war against ISIS. We will; we are defeating ISIS in their caliphate in Syria and Iraq, but we know that ISIS exists more broadly than that. And so, as we said in that coalition effort, we’ve got to move beyond the battlefield, we’ve got to move into the cyberspace, we’ve got to move into the social communications space, and get inside of the messaging that allows them to recruit people around the world to their terrorism efforts.

So there is a big effort underway with players in the region, most notably the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and working with other partners to get inside of this conversation that’s going on within the Muslim community around what this is doing to the way the Muslim faith is understood by others in the world. And I would say it’s a very open conversation we’re having and a renewed commitment on the part of leaders in the Muslim world that want to take this on. So we’re going to be leveraging on that as well.

So as you’re seeing this play out in the Middle East, still a lot of hard work to do to get coalition partners together around ceasefires and peace processes in Syria. How do we advance our interest in Afghanistan to a legitimate peace process is what we’re pursuing in Afghanistan, and then keeping this terrorism network confined as it wants to spread itself through North Africa and Central Africa. So a lot of work ahead of us, and many of you are directly engaged in it already; many more of you are going to become engaged in it, I think you can expect.

The next kind of area of priority is our re-engagement with Russia. Obviously, they are part of the engagement in Syria, but we have other issues with Russia, as you all well know, in Europe, and the situation in Ukraine. As I know many of you heard from my trip to Moscow, characterized to President Putin that the relationship between our two nations was the lowest it’s been since the Cold War. He did not disagree. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded in agreement. And I said it’s spiraling down, it’s getting worse. And my comment to him was you – we cannot have, the two greatest nuclear powers in the world cannot have this kind of relationship. We have to change it.

And so we have a number of efforts underway to first stabilize the relationship. And Deputy Secretary – acting Deputy Secretary Shannon is leading a working group effort to see if we can address some of the things that are just irritating the relationship, that make it hard for us to talk to one another even in civil tones. So we’re working hard on that and we’re hoping to begin to solve some of that, while Foreign Minister Lavrov and I, under the direction of President Putin and now President Trump, coming out of the call yesterday are going to continue to see if we can work together on the first big area of cooperation, which would be Syria, and can we achieve a ceasefire that will hold long enough for us to get a peace process underway.

I don’t want to say we’re off to a great start on this, because it’s very early stages. I don’t know where it will go. So I’ve got a bilateral with Foreign Minister Lavrov in Alaska next week on the margins of the Arctic Council. Both our presidents have charged us to take this further and see where we can go with it. So obviously, close coordination with the Department of Defense, with our intelligence agencies, and importantly our allies in the region, because we want them to always know what we’re doing, because we’re going to need their support as well.

So a lot of work ahead of us on the Russia engagement – work some small things, can we work one big thing together. If we can find space for something we feel we can begin to rebuild some level of trust, because today there is almost no trust between us. Can we build some level of trust? We’ve got a long list of things to work on from our arms agreements and issues we have with our nuclear arms agreements, to obviously, getting to Ukraine, Crimea, and other places where Russia is not being particularly helpful today.

So that’s what we’re hoping, is that we can begin to build a way in which we can learn how to work with one another. I don’t know whether we can or not. We’ll – we’re going to find out.

So quickly to other parts of the world that are really important to us as well – the continent of Africa is so important from the standpoint that first, from a national security view, we cannot let Africa become the next breeding ground for a re-emergence of a caliphate for ISIS. We also cannot allow the terrorist networks that weave their way through Africa to continue unabated. You can connect the dots between countries throughout the central part of Africa and northern part of Africa where the terrorist networks are connected. We’ve got to get into the middle of that and disrupt that to save those countries.

But Africa is also a continent of enormous opportunity, and needs and will get and will continue to receive our attention to support stabilizing governments as they are emerging and continuing to develop their own institutional capacity, but also looking at Africa for potential economic and trading opportunities. It’s a huge, I think, potential sitting out there, waiting for us to capture it, and then, obviously, a big focus of our health initiatives, because Africa still struggles with huge health challenges. And those are important to us and they’re going to continue to get our attention.

So we’re going to – we’re working – today we have some things we’re working in North Africa relative to its relationship to the Middle East challenges and our ISIS challenges. We’ve got to step back and take a more comprehensive look at our approach to the entire continent, and that’s out in front of us as well.

And then lastly, I want to go to the Western Hemisphere. And in the Western Hemisphere, obviously, our neighbors are vitally important to us, Canada and Mexico. It’s not as rocky as it looks sometimes, and I think, in fact, the relationships are quite good. Both of our neighbors understand we have to refresh some of the agreements that have governed our relationship, particularly in the areas of trade, and both countries are ready to engage in a good-faith effort with us as well.

In particular, we’re investing a lot of effort into Mexico because of the transmigration issues and organized crime. And so we have an initiative underway where the senior members of the Mexican Government will be coming up here on May the 18th to participate in an interagency process with us to see if we can get at transnational organized crime and begin to break these organized crime units up. Not only are they a threat to us and to Mexico’s stability and the scourge of drugs that just flow into this country, they also are part of the integrated terrorist financing networks as well. So this is vital to us for a number of reasons and we look forward to making some progress there.

South of Mexico, we’ve got some initiatives underway to work with the Latin American countries, which are where a lot of the people are trying to leave to come up to the U.S., to continue economic development, security investments in Latin America, and working with the Department of Homeland Security. We’re actually hosting an event in Miami to bring those leaders up so we can talk with them about how we get better organized to address these issues and how we can bring more private capital into investment opportunities in Central and Latin America.

Southern cone, we have a lot of opportunity and some challenges down there. What we want to do is step back and develop a Western Hemisphere strategy that thinks about South America in its entirety and its relationship to Central America, but Cuba and the Caribbean as well. There are terrorist financing issues. There are terrorist networks that are beginning to emerge in parts of South America that have our attention. There are governance issues in certain countries – certainly all of you are following the situation in Venezuela; a real tragedy, but we’re hopeful that working with others, including interventions by others in Europe, that we may be able to gain some traction in Venezuela. So we have a number of things in front of us yet to develop clear policies on how we want to go forward.

So my view is that we want to look at these regions almost in their entirety first, because everything is interconnected. We can take a country and develop something, but if we don’t have the perspective regionally, we’re probably not going to be as effective. So we’re trying to start out here, and then we’ll bring it down to a country-by-country level so we can execute. So that’s just to give you a little perspective on how we’re approaching these things in policy planning, and then we try to get a big-picture view and then we bring the bureau people in, the experts in, and help us start developing, now, how do you execute something like this? How do you implement it?

So for those of you that have participated in these early efforts, thank you. I feel quite good about the one – the pieces that have been completed and are in execution, I feel good about those. I can tell you the White House feels good about it. The National Security Council really values the work that we provide in the interagency process. And I would share with you I hear that from them all the time, that the stuff that comes over from the State Department, we’ve done our homework. It’s a complete piece of work, it’s useful, we can use it, and that’s not always the case from all of the other agencies. So thank you for the efforts you’re putting into that in that regard.

So let me turn now quickly to the last thing I wanted to talk about, which is the future and where we’re going. And I alluded to this a little bit when I was commenting about the post-Cold War era. And during the Cold War – and I’ve had this conversation with some of you in this room before in our interactions – in many respects the Cold War was a lot easier. Things were pretty clear, the Soviet Union had a lot of things contained, and I had a conversation with Secretary-General Guterres at the UN. He described it as during the Cold War, we froze history. History just stopped in its tracks because so many of the dynamics that existed for centuries were contained. They were contained with heavy authoritarianism. And when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union broke up, we took all of that off and history regained its march. And the world got a whole lot more complicated. And I think that’s what we see. It has become much more complicated in terms of old conflicts have renewed themselves because they’re not contained now. So that’s the world as it is and that’s the world we have to engage with.

And so I’m going to – I’m saying this as a preface to as we get into thinking about how we should deliver on mission is to be thinking about how the way we have been delivering was in many ways shaped and as a residual of the Cold War era. And in many respects, we’ve not yet transitioned ourselves to this new reality either. And I don’t say that just about the State Department, I say that about institutions globally. In fact, this is the – this – I had this same conversation with Secretary Guterres about the United Nations, that there are many institutions – and you can see when we have our conversations with NATO, another example, but there are many institutions around the world that were created during a different era. And so they were set up to deal with certain conditions and their processes and their organizations were set up, and as things have changed, we’ve not really fully adapted those. It’s not that we’ve not recognized, but we’ve not fully adapted how we deliver on mission.

So one of the things, as we get into this opportunity to look at how we get our work done, is to think about the world as it is today and to leave behind – we’ve been – well, we do it this way because we’ve been doing it this way for the last 30 years or 40 years or 50 years, because all of that was created in a different environment. And so I think – I guess what I’m inviting all of you to do is to approach this effort that we’re going to undertake with no constraints to your thinking – with none.

One of the great honors for me serving in this department, the Department of State, and all of you know, the Department of State, first cabinet created and chartered under the Constitution. Secretary of State, first cabinet position chartered and created under the Constitution. So we are part of a living history and we’re going to get to carve our little piece of it, our increment, in that clock of time. We’re going to carve our piece into that history.

And I think the question is how we will do that and how effectively we will do that. And history is moving around us as we just spoke. And how do we adapt to that? And so I want to ask all of you to be very free in your thinking. So the process going forward, as you know we’ve just kicked off this listening exercise and I really encourage all of you to please go online and participate in the survey online. This is vital to how we understand where we want to go and I think we have about 300 individuals that we’ve selected to sit down face-to-face and do some interviews so we have a more fulsome understanding. We want to collect all of these – all this input and your thoughts and ideas, both here and at USAID, and that is going to guide how we approach both our organizational structure, but more importantly, our work process design: How do we actually deliver on mission? That’s the real key. How do you deliver on mission?

And really, the way I have found these things to be the most successful is I understand how to deliver on mission first, I understand how the work processes work, and then I’ll put the boxes around it to make all that work. Most people like to start with the boxes and then try to design it. I’m – I do it the other way around. How do we get the work done? We’ll then put the organization structure in place to support that. So we need a lot of creative thinking. We need to hear from you. This is going to inform how this turns out. I want to emphasize to you we have no preconceived notions on the outcome. I didn’t come with a solution in a box when I showed up. I came with a commitment to look at it and see if we can’t improve it.

And I know change like this is really stressful for a lot of people. There’s nothing easy about it, and I don’t want to diminish in any way the challenges I know this presents for individuals, it presents to families, it presents to organizations. I’m very well aware of all of that. All I can offer you on the other side of that equation is an opportunity to shape the future way in which we will deliver on mission, and I can almost promise you – because I have never been through one of these exercises where it wasn’t true – that I can promise you that when this is all done, you’re going to have a much more satisfying, fulfilling career, because you’re going to feel better about what you’re doing because of the impact of what you are doing. You will know exactly how what you do every day contributes to our delivery on mission, and that is when I find people are most satisfied with their professional careers. And you’re going to have clear line of sight about what do you want for yourself in the future.

So this is a – it’s a big undertaking. This is a big department, between this and USAID, and we are including all of our missions, all of our embassies, all of our consular offices, because we all are part of how we deliver on mission. So we want to look at it in its entirety as to how we do that. So I appreciate your participating openly in this listening exercise, but importantly, I want to condition you to be ready to participate in the next phase, because that’s when it’ll become more challenging. But we’re all on this boat, on this voyage – I’m not going to call it a cruise; it’s not – may not be that much fun. (Laughter.) But we’re on all this ship, on this voyage together. And so we’re going to get on the ship and we’re going to take this voyage, and when we get there, we’re all going to get off the ship at wherever we arrive. But we’re all going to get on and we’re going to get off together. We don’t intend to leave anybody out.

So I appreciate your participation. I hope you will approach this with a level of excitement as to what it may hold for this State Department first and then for you as an individual and what it means for you. So we’re asking all of you to do that.

Let me lastly say that I do appreciate all of the work that you do. Believe it or not, I do read all these memos that come to me from – all the way from missions to the various bureaus. I appreciate those of you that get them on one page, because I’m not a fast reader. But they’re extraordinarily helpful to me, and so keep sending me insights as to what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and in particular the perspective on how we got to where we are. It is very valuable to me.

I had the opportunity to address a group of young people yesterday – about 700 middle school, high school people – that were here participating in the model UN conference. We were hosting it here at the State Department. One of the – there’s a few fun things you get to do in this job, and talking to young people is one of them. So I had a Q&A time, and a young lady – I think she was in middle school – asked a question. She said, “What inspires you as Secretary of State when you come to work every day?” And I told her it’s quite easy. I said the men and women of the State Department inspire me, my colleagues – their professionalism, their commitment, their patriotism. And I said, then our partners over at the Department of Defense, the men and women in uniform, because it’s really the State Department and the Defense Department that deliver our national security. I’m inspired by you, and I thank you for that, and I’m honored to serve alongside of you.

We’ll be talking again. Thank you. (Applause.)

PROGRESS

I want to talk about the concept of progress. This is one of those concepts which is complex, and has a complex history in many fields, history, philosophy, politics, religion, social and exact sciences. I am not an expert, but that has never prevented me from expostulating on such things regardless.

 

It is connected with notions of Enlightenment, scientific knowledge, Western civilization, and liberalism, in such a way that it has to be addressed somehow.

RE LUTHER AS THE WHIG HISTORIAN FONT ET ORIGIN OF SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

"If the Middle Ages had an inhibition against the control of spiritual matters by secular princes, Luther himself, at bottom, shared that inhibition to the utmost." P 47

HISTORY AND JUDGMENTS OF VALUE

The last few pages of this chapter of The Whig Interpretation are especially well done, from say "The Reformation which is so often regarded...", to the end of the chapter.

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ONE MIGHT SAY MOST EVERYTHING WRITTEN ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR WHIG HISTORIAN HYPOCRISY

The Whig Civil War History.

Tearing down Confederate monuments, one might call it radical whiggism, rising again, in New Orleans and elsewhere, etc., will not get the history right. They get it wrong.

 

Defending founding father federal slaveholder monuments against destruction, while standing silent or condoning Confederate monuments being torn down, let's just call it 

 

The Whig Historian Hypocrisy...The Whig Fallacy.

If racism is the whig criterion here, one might as well start tearing down the Lincoln Monument next:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,-- that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifyling them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." Abraham Lincoln, 4th Debate.  See also 1st Debate, p 63.

THE VITAL CENTER

E J Dionne, and Professor Kaiser, Brooks perhaps, among many others, decry the loss of what they call the so called vital center.

I just wondered whether anyone else, besides myself, sees anything wrong with such a concept in the first place?

GATED COMMUNITIES

It is easy to predict how things will shake out now, in the future, across the globe.

 

Disgruntled radical starving young plebs will eventually attack their aristocracies, faux aristocracies mind you, wherever they find them.

 

One could see the beginnings of a social trend, here, decades ago, with the rise of merely middle upper class people moving into gated communities, enclaves protected physically from what then were considered merely rift raft and petty criminals.

 

In the coming time, that rift raft and criminal element will develop a radical edge. Following Brooks, let's just call them illiberals.....

 

They won't know much real intellectual ideology either way; freedom fighters, or so called insurgents, or zealots, seldom do.

 

It may be left radical or right radical, so long as they are illiberal, but probably a bit of both. They won't much care about the so called political views of their super wealthy targets, whether Democrats or Republicans, so long as they are super wealthy patrons of the Party of Davos.

RE TRUMP CONSIDERING NEW GLASS-STEAGALL STYLE BANK RULES UPHOLDING MAGNA CARTA

If one looks back at the high tide of early Whiggism, it was even claimed that monopolies were outlawed by Magna Carta as violating the liberties of the common man, a view certainly never envisioned by the drafters of that document. This was the position, however, of Coke in opposition, and apparently of Trump right now.

THE MENU BLEU CHEESE CAESAR IMPROV

I make a high quality Caesar dressing, but I skip the egg yolk and parmesan.

 

I then throw in a blend of bleu cheese mushed into sour cream, whatever proportions of any of these you like. I suggest more sour cream than bleu cheese, maybe twice as much, to start.

 

It might be good to start with say two thirds Caesar dressing and one third bleu cheese blend...

This post is for Boop, who always could use a few more ounces, here or there, fill out a dress, etc.

BUTTERFIELD TUDOR WHIG MAGNA CARTA RUMPOLE BROOKS AND US

"There is little sign of the importance of Magna Carta until the parliament of 1610, and the document had hardly saved Englishmen from the dangers of despotism in the time of the Tudors.  Since this was the case we must not imagine that the Charter itself was for all time an all-sufficient guarantee for our liberties, or that it ratified and sealed them for ever.  The history of England after the Tudors turned Magna Carta once again into the effective cornerstone of our liberties; but the discovery of its importance, the revival of the popular memory of it, comes late, comes like an after-thought, and attains great significance in the 17th Century.  The Tudor Age would never have relished the idea that the king should be limited by feudal law--they remembered too well the over-mighty subject, the danger of private rights that menaced the state.  The glory of the Tudor age lay in the opposite movement in fact--the victory that the monarch had achieved over feudal limitations and over the whole realm of privilege."

 

One might say that there are few protections here, now, in this new feudal age, none from a crown, virtually none from a mere president, none from a Congress on the leash of enormous private rights patronage, from the immensely accrued private rights power and privilege of the top .1%, a faux aristocracy only of wealth, which now holds sway over everything here, behind the scenes.

 

Magna Carta, around 1600, by a Whig miracle of interpretation, became the founding document of what lately has become this top .1%.

 

The freedoms of the age of the democratic revolution, beginning in the 18th Century, have lately been appropriated by the top .1%, now, mainly for itself. It has been systematically impoverishing the lower income people of the West, joining in common cause with upper elites elsewhere. 

 

The only power now that can rise up against, or in alliance with, this power has been a gaggle of strong men, as Brooks now calls them, faux monarchs and barons, in an evil dark medieval world of rival civilizations, collapsed class systems.

BROOKS WESTERN CIV CRISIS CONTD III WHIG AND FAUX TORIES

Whiggish Brooks implies a cause: suddenly unnamed enemies here and abroad of Western civ values of limitless liberty and democracy have emerged, and nobody has stepped up to defend them.

 

The implication of course is that this march in triumph of Western civ toward world civ has been interrupted by both internal and external forces indifferent or antagonistic to its call.

 

Brooks says: rise of illiberals.

How did they arise in the first place, if Whig liberalism had been lifting all boats?

 

Are they new rival Tory civilizations, spawn of Western liberalism, biting the hand that fed their rising boats?

He says we have entered the age of strong men. He does not want to get into a clash of civilizations account. Too much truth in it for him. The strong men story helps him stay away from that clash of civilizations tar baby.

Let's just call it Brooks' The Rise of the Tories account. Actually, now, all we have are faux tories. We got rid of almost all our aristocracies and monarchs in the flurry of Globalist Whiggism.

How about, The Rise of the New Napoleons? After all, the new whiggism of The age of the Democratic Revolution gave Napoleon his opening.

Napoleon has been the faux tory icon, par excellence, for 200 years now!

 

SEE RANDALL COLLINS' OTHER BLOG CREATIVITY VIA SOCIOLOGY

THE GLOBALIZATION TRAP SOME RECENT POSTS

COMBINE ENLIGHTENED GLOBALISM WITH ENLIGHTENMENT SKEPTICISM (HUME)

THE IMPLICATIONS FOR RELIGION ETHNICITY GENDER CIVILIZATION

LET ME EXPLAIN THIS FURTHER RACE RELIGION CIVILIZATION

RE MARKETS CIVILIZATIONS RACES MINDS PERCEPTIONS EXPERTS PICKING WINNERS

GLOBALIST POLICIES HAVE BASICALLY SLOWLY BLOWN YOUR COUNTRY UP

RE BROOKS' EXODUS THEME IMMIGRATION REFUGEES TRANSHUMANCE SLAVERY JEWS GUEST WORKERS ISRAEL

THE GLOBALIZATION TRAP

OLD 2014 POST RE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES SOMEONE SAW SO HERE IT IS AGAIN

RUFUS FEARS THE MIDDLE EAST THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES RUPERT CHAPMAN COMMENT

"Stimulating and thought provoking as per usual! I have only one comment, which is on the Middle East, which is my own specialization. The situation today in the Middle East is precisely the same as it has been for the last 5,000 years. I have, for many years, referred to it as either 'the 5,000 year war', or as 'stable instability'. To explain what I mean, some 5,000 years ago the Stela of the Vultures is the earliest record of a war - between the Sumerians, in what is today southern Iraq, and the Elamites, in what is today southern Iran. In Iraq itself, for the last 5,000 years there has been tension, and frequently open warfare, between the south, Sumer/Babylonia, and the north, Assyria. The mountains of the northeast have always been a separate culture area, as they are with the Kurds (known there since at least the 4th century A.D.) today, at war with the powers in the plains. The second great enemy of the Assyrians, after the Elamites and the Persians, was the kingdom of Urartu in what is now eastern Turkey, later the independent kingdom of Armenia. In the heyday of Sumerian culture, between 3500 and 2000 B.C., the Sumerians had colonies along the Middle Euphrates in what is today Syria. The Syrians and the Mesopotamians traded and intermittently fought wars against each other. Syria itself has been a single culture, east of the mountains which mark the northern extension of the Great Rift Valley along the Mediterranean Coast, but never a unified country until the French created one. War between the Syrian city-states was endemic throughout all periods of antiquity when they were not under the control of some external power. The Mediterranean Coastal Region was always culturally separate from Inland Syria, and always an economic trading culture between the great powers which surrounded it. Further south, what is today Israel and the West Bank was always either at war with Transjordan, or in an uneasy peace, and likewise in relation to Syria and what is now Lebanon, and to Egypt, the nearest great power, and the dominant culture. What keeps all of these relations of conflict and limited co-operation in place is, to me, one of the most interesting unasked, and, therefore, unanswered questions of historical studies."

MISHRA FROM EXCEPTIONALISM TO NIHILISM THE LIBERAL GLOBALIZATION TRAP

Our roots were always there, really.

The Age of the Democratic Revolution really set the ball rolling.

If you believe in the liberal unification of everything, you believe in nothing.

Don't kid yourself.

COMBINE ENLIGHTENED GLOBALISM WITH ENLIGHTENMENT SKEPTICISM (HUME)

THE IMPLICATIONS FOR RELIGION ETHNICITY GENDER CIVILIZATION

LET ME EXPLAIN THIS FURTHER RACE RELIGION CIVILIZATION

RE MARKETS CIVILIZATIONS RACES MINDS PERCEPTIONS EXPERTS PICKING WINNERS

GLOBALIST POLICIES HAVE BASICALLY SLOWLY BLOWN YOUR COUNTRY UP

RE BROOKS' EXODUS THEME IMMIGRATION REFUGEES TRANSHUMANCE SLAVERY JEWS GUEST WORKERS ISRAEL

THE GLOBALIZATION TRAP

TRUMP SEAN SPICER SNL CARTOON

Sean Spicer comes out only in flesh colored underwear.

 

The conference proceeds as usual.

 

Other jokes are told, fake news, climate change hoax.

 

The news conference proceeds as usual to the end.

 

Then the question: "Sir, are you wearing clothes or not?'

 

Spicer's response will deny the accusation, one way or another...and accuse the questioner of being an idiot.

 

He may, then, order the interrogator to strip, to confirm that he/ she, too, is wearing something.

WHY THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LAW IS NOT WRITTEN MAITLAND'S INAUGURAL LECTURE

One can think of this as an example of 'problems in the philosophy of the social science', perhaps a dead subspecialty, really.

"...That process by which old principles and old phrases are charged with a new content, is from the lawyer's point of view an evolution of the true intent and meaning of the old law; from the historian's point of view it is almost of necessity a process of perversion and misunderstanding...." Maitland

I think of the founding fathers, certainly of the lawyers among them...did we even have any historians here, back then?

BROOKS WESTERN CIV CONTINUED II

Brooks opines that a prevailing wind 'powering all ships' suddenly ceased to blow...

 

Was that wind laissez faire, LIEO?

The underlying question, which Brooks' account begs, is really whether Western civ is reducible to laissez faire, LIEO, as his account really implies? He doesn't want to get into all that.

Laissez faire has been going on since the 18th Century, (actually since the beginning of time in the forms of smuggling and piracy, under what was called mercantilism), gathered strength in the early 19th, and has dominated Western intellectual thinking and the international political and economic landscape ever since. 

But no 'prevailing wind' ever powered all ships, certainly not a political military cultural civilizational or diplomatic wind.

 

That is only one huge problem with his account. If such a wind had long been made to blow, then why, now, should it ever have ceased? Has it really ceased?

 

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TRUMP'S SAD FACE NOW HE MISSES HIS OLD LIFE

See Randall Collins' site, the post referred to here, a while back.

Randall Collins called it, really.

I have no objection to Trump resigning. No problem. A monarch can do it, why not Trump?

BROOKS WESTERN CIV CRISIS CONTINUED

Brooks points out that many academicians began teaching, only a few short decades ago, that Western civ is really a history of oppression.

 

I would augment the account he criticizes as follows: the West started out oppressing Western lower classes, then eventually, with the age of discovery and colonization on into the 20th Century, oppressing all of mankind, a story of ever gathering oppression which the US, as the heir of Western straight white male hegemony, perpetuates to the present day.

 

It is the opposite of  the history of progressive improvement for all mankind to which the Whiggish Brooks, and most of his readers, including perhaps Professor Kaiser, subscribe.

The Whiggish interpretation sees Protestantism as the progressive Reformation movement, the only proper heir to the Renaissance, that threw off the regressive medieval Catholic yoke, followed by the Enlightenment as a protestant inspired movement that then finally threw off Monarchic despotic Popish and aristocratic yokes in the 16th and 17th Centuries, and then by the Democratic Revolution of the 18th, but was thrown back somewhat in the 19th when a retrograde restoration temporarily permitted the imperialism and slavery run by white men since the Renaissance to continue, but then ultimately triumphed in the wars of the 20th Century, making the world finally safe for a colorless, antireligious, and race blind single democratic market capitalist world civilization.

 

Let's put it this way, then: the story of Western civ as an oppressive political civilization, either way, goes much farther back than a few decades of American academic history ago. 

 

DAVID BROOKS THE CRISIS OF WESTERN CIV ARTICLE APRIL 21

Why not just go almost line by line?

 

His first few lines, Will and Ariel Durant...

I read parts of it when a kid. This is a classic of the Whig Interpretation of History, which I have discussed recently here, the theory of confident and progressive Western history which Brooks likes, and which he laments is dying in America and elsewhere in the West. More on that issue later.

 

Next, he says this story of civilization came with certain values, such as reasoned discourse...

 Well, what does reasoned discourse really mean; presumably a multitude of diverse and inconsistent things and disciplines, notoriously difficult to get a handle on, bleeds over into ethics, logic, mathematics, history, politics, you name it.

Well, what else did reasoned discourse itself also come with, one might ask? I will tell you: it came with a gnawing sense of skepticism about the powers of reason and perception themselves to see or understand reality in itself.

In other words it reiterated an ancient tradition from the Greek Fifth Century Enlightenment about the elusiveness of knowledge asserted the relativity of all values, traditions, factual truths, and religions. 

 

He claims Western Civ set a standard for great statesmanship.

What can he mean? Moral statesmanship, whatever that means? Does he mean ancient Greek and Roman statesmen, Pericles, Alcibiades, Cicero, the Gracchi, Caesar, the ones he likes; good practitioners of raison d'etat; balance of power expertise; Machiavelli, perhaps Bismarck, Richelieu, Hitler? He doesn't say. Wouldn't it also however have correspondingly set a standard for terrible statesmanship? Otherwise, how would one know what great was? So, let's just say that maybe the West set both kinds of standards and all degrees in between.

 

He next mentions a town square, and religion, in passing.

Under Brooks' whig interpretation, the Reformation and Counter Reformation were milestones in this Whig narrative of the confident march toward the progress of today. Butterfield described it very well.  

 

Next, he mentions giving diverse people a sense of shared mission, common vocabulary, common goals.

This started out as an aspiration only intended within and among diverse peoples of only the West itself. Even other countries within the West were viewed by each as in a sense barbarians, even into the 19th Century; how much more so, denizens of other civilizations. but this sense of shared mission, common vocabulary and goals, eventually became, by the force of Western ideology itself sua sponte, the dream of some Western liberals in the 18th and 19th centuries to include all people of the world.

 

It had seldom been part of the Western civ concept before that time, except perhaps in terms of early Christianity being spread as a Jewish mission to the gentiles, presumably ultimately to all the gentiles in the world regardless of race religion or civilization. The idea of course had become popular among all religions which sought to convert infidels in conquered lands rather than to kill, enslave, or exile them.

Brooks then explains how this crisis of Western Civ began. It only began several decades ago he says.

I may come back to that point directly at some point below in discussing other points here.

He blames this relatively sudden civilizational crisis on academia, an institution conveniently other than journalism.

He can't very well blame journalism, too, can he?

Journalism's mission, apparently, after all, is presumably not to try to weigh in on such issues with scholarly authority in the first place anyway. Although, isn't that rather what Brooks does here himself in blaming academia, or am I missing something?

Remember that Brooks himself assured us a while back that we had finally, for several decades now (coincidentally, the ostensible length of the evolving civilizational crisis he decries), reached the stage of a meritocracy here in America.

Presumably, however, the emerging meritocracy here would also have some things to do, at some points, with academic excellence and standards, and be somehow connected with a concept of Western civ as itself a meritocratic concept, no?

So, how according to Brooks, are we both finally a meritocracy founded on mainly academic excellence and expertise, and also in a sudden crisis of Western civ brought on by academic waywardness and incompetence? How?

Maybe that is enough for one post, call it chapter one of my remarks on Brooks The Crisis of Western civ.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JAMES GRANT SEVERAL MONTHS AGO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7dlXD-oISk

IVORY TOWER ATHEISTIC GLOBALIST RADICAL LEFT

against an anti intellectual and anarchist religious radical right.

 

As my father in law once well put it, we have normally resembled Germany before Bismarck.

 

I would just add, lately it looks increasingly also like Weimar now, here, all over again...

 

The radical European socialist intellectuals were mostly all internationalists, deplored the capitalist imperialist nation states of Europe.

 

The conservative religious often rural peasant agrarian right, the conservative and aristocratic right, and the urban anarchist right, also detested the nation state for their own quite different reasons as well.

RE FACEBOOK KILLINGS MAYBE ACLU SHOULD STEP IN PROTECT FREEDOM SPEECH PRESS ETC

Take an example: What if filmed by a reporter?

Does it make a difference? How much?

What if the person claims whistleblowing of some type connected with the scene? Make a difference? Ridenour issue?

What about by a prominent journalist? Does it matter?

Is then a decision not to publish mainly an editorial one?

What if it is filtered for adults only like porn sites? Make a difference?
 
What other criteria could there be? Decency? That is long gone.

Privacy? Waived.

Think of others.

Public killings usually were once used to set a good exam;le for others.

Why not private illegal killings be used as bad examples, abhorent examples for the average person to see and learn from?

Not a good idea? Then maybe you don't trust the average person to be deterred thereby? Why not? Food for thought.

Pulling such material is certainly inconsistent with Facebook stockholders' vested interests.

Giving up voluntarily, for no return, such wildly profitable viral material surely must nag many of the holders of the stock...Zuckerberg, and his stockholders, stand to make killings on material like this! 

Maybe they can start a stockholder rebellion against Zuckerberg's rule if this kind of shenanigans continues.

RE NYT DAVID LEONHARDT FAILURE OF THE LEFT IN THE WEST

Why do you suppose this state of affairs exists, only a couple of hundred years after the Age of the Democratic Revolutions, the small American one, a rebellion really,  and then the big French Revolution?

 

How did these liberal initiatives, with their strong inclinations toward leftist populistic goals, and universalist ideals, end up at this sad impotent impasse, in Western Civilization, up against the wall of rightist populist initiatives everywhere?

Because liberal middle class scalawag carpetbagger elites, defined strictly by wealth, found it possible to screw both erstwhile upper and lower class power elites, king, aristocracy, the old European Order, and also rising leftist leaders, of all stripes, from nationalist leftists to internationalist leftists, and finally to screw their own liberal middle class itself, everywhere, better than the upper and lower class elites had ever been able, in history, to screw the other classes before them.

The liberal, but now disenfranchised, middle classes in Western states thought that the democratic revolution was their ticket to permanent (at least middle class) prosperity.

How sadly, and quickly, that assumption has been undermined from within by the inherent workings of their own system.

Middle class liberalism's back is now to the wall in the West, against its own erstwhile middle class elites, who, eventually, when they got powerful enough, did not hesitate to bite the very middle class hand that had fed them, and now make the naked appeal to their domestic, miserable, disenfranchised, disorganized, and bewildered, lower class, rightist, mobs to maintain their fragile, culturally baseless, corrupt, and degenerate, hold on power.

Meanwhile, they still in fact cater to their actual economic power base, the global marketplace (hardly a rightist oriented concept) in which these money elites must breathe to live.

In this sense, the President is a quite special marionette, a man not chosen, but who both knows the real score and can pander to the rabble.

THE MENU CURRY IMPROV

I ordered another copy of a book I once had in London in the 70s, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, Jaffrey.

 

Yesterday, I made curried leftover sauerbraten slop and wild rice. Delicious. For something like this, there really is no recipe as such...

 

I did saute onions, added curry powder and cumin, a little tomato sauce or crushed tomato, leftover wild rice, garlic powder this time, a crushed sweet pickled cherry pepper...

 

I let it rest for a day or so, it gets better... You can top this with additional tomato sauce and or yogurt, or even sour cream! Of course if you have chutneys (pickles) you can do that too.

This is organic produce coop day, downstairs, back yard. My wife manages it... Every fortnight, a lorry pulls up in the alley...

RE EASY PICKINGS

Ed Boyle says it all in his way. I especially liked his conclusion:

"I believe it is termed cultural maxism. Leading feminists here in Germany are becoming right wingers while others support islam and the right of women to wear full body chador/burkga, etc. The left, in its pursuit of fredom, is suppressing free speech(facebook) and using antifa mobs to attack politically opposing groups. This has come full circle. 'Normal' has become oppressed. In the 50s one told ethnic jokes to relieve emotional pressure betwen immigrant groups(italian, irish, etc.). This became in bad taste, then tabu. Dumb blonde jokes were normal, nowadays male pupils are heavily disadvantaged academically and professionally. Things are coming full circle. Oppressed groups are becoming oppressors. Ideology of logic (greek invention) is being replaced by group identity politics. As Greek society dissolved it became a chaotic fight between interest groups, city states and fell prey to foreign powers. Eventually the same occurred to Roman republic. In effect this is the leading wedge of a civil war which will leave The West open to conquest by whoever wishes. A black female lesbian jewish or muslim disabled president is a sort of joke of the average white guy. Assimilation, not integration is the only long term solution. I saw a film a couple days ago where a main character got married. He was obviously jewish and ceremony was so. Girl was not. 71% of non orthodox jews marry non jews in USA. Blacks also increasingly where they are more in contact with whites(effective segregation in older urban centres of east, midwest prevent contact for example except when they go to colege, facilitating cultural marxist theory.) My wife and I each have two ethnic, religious backgrounds which were traditionally enemies, my kids have four with 3 languages fluency(irish died out). I work now, since the economic crisis, in janitorial, mostly with foreign, muslim, black, asian people and have become much more practical, flexible, open to non european, non christian peoples. Contact, friendship between individuals, not ghettoization, confrontation is the only way forward. However we see in France for example a similarity in living condtions of blacks/muslims to USA ghettoization of blacks. This can only lead, in economic crisis times to lines of extremist opinion and civil war, genocide, ethnic cleansing. USA has divided itself voluntarily ideologically, sorted out. This enables civil war as well. The West will be easy pickings for unified Chinese or Russian nationalist cultures." EB

EMPIRES AND THEIR WAKES

The Mongol Empire, the largest by far ever in the world (China was a conquered vassal territory), left behind Russia, the largest state ever, except for the Mongol Empire, in its wake.

The Mongols were virtually illiterate, having only a spoken language apparently. Their written languages, such as the scant evidence is, came from the Middle East, and from Buddhist sources originally from India.

 

The Roman Empire left the Eastern Empire, ultimately the Eastern Orthodox Empire, until 1453, I believe, in its wake.  The Holy Roman Empire, also as it emerged, was not very large, by contrast.

 

Russia, throwing off the Mongol yoke, adopted Orthodoxy, but that was not, after all, why it was large. 

PACE IN CINEMA A NEW TOPIC

http://www.scriptmag.com/features/pacing-your-script

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2233986

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/2x34hv/what_do_you_define_as_good_or_bad_pacing_in_a_film/

SKIMMED THE LAST OF THE UNDOING PROJECT

I liked his other books better...

 

It seems he is gradually groping his way toward philosophy....

 

It has been a torturous journey, through art history, literature, finance investment banking and trading, sports theory, statistics, psychology, economics, and history.

Enjoyed the quote from Max Black. Amen.

The same sorts of mathematico psychologistic logico linguistic thinking had, of course, infested philosophy too, for decades, by then, especially after WWI.

Kripke came over and did a talk, when I was at Kings, in the 70s. Ugh. American philosophy has long been besotted with the stuff...

At least someone like Ryle, The Concept of Mind, put some of this nonsense into a broader historical perspective and context.

What is logic really? Inference? Whose? A branch of statistics? Why? Mathematics itself? Not really. Then what? Pictorial representation? Grammar? Syntax? Kind of a joke. Intuition? Well...
 

BBC SCIENCE WARS TURN VIRAL

Wish I could say, surprised by this. But no, not at all.

 

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." Neil DeGrasse Tyson

 

Nice idea. That is not, however, how knowledge or belief have evolved, even in the West, unfortunately. I wish it had been otherwise. Just think about what it is like elsewhere.

 

For Anna

Terms search: physics.

COUNCIL OF PHILOSOPHICAL ADVISORS

If have a Council of Psychological Advisors, why not go for the gold?

(Addendum: Of course, one would not select a group from the contributors to, say, The Stone! Eg: "What Snow Flakes Get Right about Free Speech")

 

Say, what about a Council of Historical Advisors?

 

Why not have dueling Councils, with a meta council officiating?

 

That might actually move, some day, in the distant future, toward a way to do public and strategic policy in a useful way, for a change, rather than the nonsense going on now on campuses, pitting blind left and right radical thugs against all fragmented and warring academic and political authority.

Why abandon to, say, a serving for life Supreme Court, or a newly elected President and his meagerly informed new Cabinet, (never mind Congress, and the 50 governments of the several states) de facto authority over decisions of that scope and complexity, as we do under our present system?

THE UNDOING PROJECT ECONOMICS PSYCHOLOGY DOOMSDAY CONJUNCTION

p 340 their work ... awakened economists and policy makers to the importance of psychology....

 

Rather like two rival gangs, thrown into prison, each learning the other's modus operandi...

 

One can see what an unmitigated disaster expected utility theory was, for example, for Western society at large.

UNDOING WESTERN CIVILIZATION ONE THEORY AT A TIME

Expected utility theory...Amos (Tversky) made it clear that it had been accepted as psychologically true... the entire economics profession accepted it as how ordinary people made risky choices...that leap of faith had at least one obvious implication...

 

..the advice economists gave politicians it tilted everything in the direction of giving people the freedom to choose and leaving markets alone... after all, if people could be counted on to be basically rational, markets could, too. p 255

QUESTION END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT POLITICS

Who was the big winner, or were the big winners, of the Napoleonic Wars, at what seemed to be the end of the long aftermath, so to speak, of the French Revolution?

THE UNDOING PROJECT BLUNDER THREE CATEGORY ERROR TRUISM

"Human judgments are distorted by the memorable."

 

This is supposed to be a big experimental conclusion...

 

Any idiot can tell you something like this, without even knowing what the experimental method is supposed to be.

It is something like what an old Jewish wife might call, all dolled up, a truism.

Of course one can do an experiment to 'confirm' it, so to speak, but then why bother?

THE UNDOING PROJECT NEXT ASSUMPTION BLUNDER FAILS SMELL TEST

"When people make judgments, they compare whatever they are judging to some model in their minds."

 

There are a lot of things I could say about this assumption, or hypothesis, and it would bore you more than me (a conclusion I doubt based on their hypothesis, say, modelling relative boredom, relative interest, etc.) to go over it. But let's just leave it at this: it, also, fails to pass the smell test.

Same test, in its way, as that used by a chimp, bonobo, dog, cat, or blind squirrel!

S KOREA SUDDENLY TURNED HUGE LAST DAY OR SO PAGE VIEWS

Entry	Pageviews
South Korea	25
United States	12
Portugal	6
France	5
Spain	4
Germany	2
Brazil	1
United Kingdom	1
Italy	1

RE SUBJECTIVE PROBABILITY THE UNDOING PROJECT

"The decisions we make, the conclusions we reach, and the explanations we offer are usually based on our judgments of the likelihood of uncertain events..."

 

This assumption, being generous call it even a hypothesis, going in, is, of course, utterly untrue of the decisions, conclusions, or explanations of most people. (Who knows or cares how many "most' is, either real numbers or statistics, in the real world: it's a really big number.)

The assumption itself fails to pass my smell test...

AUDIENCE TODAY SNAPSHOT

Entry	Pageviews
United States	67
France	23
Spain	8
Russia	5
Germany	2
Brazil	1
United Kingdom	1
Ireland	1
Ukraine	1

RE THE UNDOING PROJECT DANNY WOODY ALLEN THOMAS FRIEDMAN

"...He was like Woody Allen without the humor...."

 

From my perspective, being without Woody's humor would, itself, be a very good thing.

For me, Woody's jokes are as flat as Thomas Friedman's world!

(Or Carole King's singing voice. At least Gigi can carry a tune.)

RE THE UNDOING PROJECT ETC THE BLIND SIDE

What has been striking, for me, for about the past 30 years, is to have seen that the liberal globalist West, with only a few notable exceptions, failed to see the clash of civilizations and its own relative decline coming at all, and has steadfastly refused to believe it even now.

 

The decline of the West and the clash of civilizations have been on the West's blind side. The whitewashing of the outcome of WWII remains a locus classicus of the 20th Century. The 'fall' of the Soviet Union, ditto.

Re psychologists and psychoanalists, 'what interested him was their inability to face the evidence of their own folly'. p 148

One can generalize this, as I am sure Lewis will to continue to do, to, for example, economists (a biggie), political leaders and scientists, pundits, pollsters, sociologists, exact scientists, and many other fields, in fact all.

THE PATTON SOLUTION FOR THE MIDDLE EAST NOT MINE BUT RATHER AMUSING

https://youtu.be/INfZPrVFky4

RE MARKETS CIVILIZATIONS RACES MINDS PERCEPTIONS EXPERTS PICKING WINNERS

Re p 51, The Undoing Project

 

So, what is it, about the transformation, as he says, re how to see or not to see, pick or not pick, Lin, Gasol, O'Neal?

 

Is it racial bias, sexual or aesthetic aversion, aea civilizationalism, culture, what?

 

Lewis says it is about the human mind and uncertainty. There may also be an element of truth in that, but how far do you go with bad choices, which also happen to be racialist, culturalist, civilizationalist, being features of individual minds, or even of individuals' unreflective perceptions themselves?

THE UNDOING PROJECT

"Why has so much conventional wisdom been bullshit?" Michael Lewis p 51

Good question.

HUMANS DO NOT HAVE A MORE WORKABLE FUNDAMENTAL UNIT THAN THAT OF A NATION STATE

At least for the foreseeable future.

 

Nation states, in turn, are based, for better or for worse, on their underlying civilizations.

 

These civilizations, in turn, have racial, ethnic, political, economic, geographic, and religious features which endure over relatively long periods of time.

FEW HISTORIANS OR PUNDITS HAVE TOUCHED THE REAL STORY OF WWII HOW IT WASN'T REALLY WON AFTER ALL

because for anyone here, either in a public position, or one requiring establishment patronage of any kind, it's rather like a tar baby!

Time Magazine:
"Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is taking flak this week for his use of the term "tar baby" while addressing a group of Iowa Republicans on July 29 in a reference to Boston's troubled Big Dig highway project. Was he offensive in doing so? The head of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon, believes the governor "made a bad choice" in using such a term, the civil-rights leader told the Boston Herald. But Romney has his defenders as well, among them a minister in the Nation of Islam. Romney's spokesman apologized on his behalf, saying the governor simply meant to refer to "a sticky situation."
In wandering into that territory, Romney has plenty of company. In May, rookie White House spokesman Tony Snow was asked about the government covertly collecting phone records. "I don't want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program...," Snow replied, which brought him an instant round of static. Two years ago, TIME used the phrase, reporting that John Kerry's presidential advisers were telling him to get away from "the Iraq tar baby." Is tar baby a racist term? Like most elements of language, that depends on context. Calling the Big Dig a tar baby is a lot different than calling a person one. But sensitivity is not unwarranted. Among etymologists, a slur's validity hangs heavily on history. The concept of tar baby goes way back, according to Words@Random from Random House: "The tar baby is a form of a character widespread in African folklore. In various folktales, gum, wax or other sticky material is used to trap a person." The term itself was popularized by the 19th-century Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, in which the character Br'er Fox makes a doll out of tar to ensnare his nemesis Br'er Rabbit. The Oxford American Dictionary defines tar baby much like Romney used it, "a difficult problem, that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it." But the term also has had racial implications. In his book Coup, John Updike says of a white woman who prefers the company of black men, "some questing chromosome within holds her sexually fast to the tar baby." The Oxford English Dictionary (but not the print version of its American counterpart) says that tar baby is a derogatory term used for "a black or a Maori." So, is use of the term today a case of insensitivity? Or is the controversy caused by political correctness gone amok? The dictionary writers point out that a word's origins and its popular perception can be divergent. Current examples include the detoxification of the words suck and slut, both of which have slipped into mainstream usage. "All words have life cycles," says Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of the Oxford American Dictionary "What's really important is not etymologically what it means, but the effect it has." And that is a constantly evolving standard. Witness the debate over who can and can't use the N-word. McKean says that the next print version of the Oxford American Dictionary will note that tar baby can have derogatory connotations. Which may help public figures avoid becoming ensnared by Br'er Fox more than a century after he set his little trap."
 

THE RIDENOUR AWARDS

Tomorrow.

RE NYT CASEY WILLIAMS THE STONE WHAT HAS TRUMP STOLEN FROM PHILOSOPHY

Casey is a literature major...

RE LIBERTY FANATICISM ST PAUL LUTHER CHRISTIANITY

One might put it this way:

 

Liberalism is the late globalization of one of the Reformation's ultimate results, the separation of church and state in the West. It is a separation Luther would not have welcomed, a milestone on the way to the disintegration of the West, even before it had really been more fully integrated into a coherent civilization.

 

Luther stands at the opposite end, that of disintegration, from that other, Jewish, fanatic, Paul of Tarsus, the great integrator of gentiles into what became no longer Jewry, Christianity. 

 

 

LIBERTY FANATICISM LUTHER GANDHI WHIGGISM

One might say that our age is another age of Luther, or of many Luthers, around the world.

 

I have occasionally referred to the Reformation, as having been an unmitigated disaster for Western Civilization. I stand by that assessment. 

 

I recognize that I myself perhaps commit a sort of Whig fallacy by making such a statement. Fair enough. Call me a Contra Whig. In the old days, I would have been called a Tory.

 

Professor Kaiser is rather a Whig historian. He probably thinks the Reformation was a good thing, a natural result and continuation of the Renaissance, and led on to the Enlightenment, etc. This is classic Whiggish history. 

 

His Whiggism is modulated by the cyclicality of S & H, what one might call a generational boom and bust Whiggism, moving in generational crisis cycles, according to the theory, to ever higher ground, eventually, in the fullness of time.

 

Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans now, take a Whiggish view of one stripe or another.

 

Let's just call their view, generally, the Whig Interpretation of History.

 

I consider that I am in quite good, if relatively scarce, Contra Whig company, nonetheless.

 

Whiggism did not start out, moreover, in spite of what you read, in a liberal, tolerant, enlightened, reasoned refutation of oppressive ignorant despotic conservative intolerant Dark Ages Catholicism...

 

"One might say that the very action which precipitated the break with Rome was prompted by Luther's own intolerance of what he deemed wrong religion in other people. It might be argued that what Luther rebelled against was not the severity but the laxity of the Popes." The Whig Interpretation of History, pb, p 79

Rome had started out coddling Luther, in a way similar to how the British, 400 years later, coddled Gandhi, and then Hitler. Of course FDR coddled Stalin.... 

Both Rome, and the best in Britain, lived to deeply regret these things. So do I....
 

 

 

 

 

 

BEAUTIFUL UGLY PHILOSOPHERS SYMPOSIUM 5 THE UNDOING PROJECT

Callias now said, “Critobulus, are you going to refuse to enter the lists in the beauty contest with Socrates?”

“Undoubtedly!” said Socrates; “for probably he notices that the procurer stands high in the favour of the judges.” [2]

“But yet in spite of that,” retorted Critobulus, “I do not shun the contest. So make your plea, if you can produce any profound reason, and prove that you are more handsome than I. Only,” he added, “let some one bring the light close to him.”

“The first step, then, in my suit,” said Socrates, “is to summon you to the preliminary hearing; be so kind as to answer my questions.”

“And you proceed to put them.” [3]

“Do you hold, then, that beauty is to be found only in man, or is it also in other objects?”

Crit. “In faith, my opinion is that beauty is to be found quite as well in a horse or an ox or in any number of inanimate things. I know, at any rate, that a shield may be beautiful, or a sword, or a spear.” [4]

Soc. “How can it be that all these things are beautiful when they are entirely dissimilar?”

“Why, they are beautiful and fine,”¹ answered Critobulus, “if they are well made for the respective functions for which we obtain them, or if they are naturally well constituted to serve our needs.” [5]

Soc. “Do you know the reason why we need eyes?”

Crit. “Obviously to see with.”

“In that case, it would appear without further 9ado that my eyes are finer ones than yours.”

“How so?”

“Because, while yours see only straight ahead, mine, by bulging out as they do, see also to the sides.”

Crit. “Do you mean to say that a crab is better equipped visually than any other creature?”

Soc. “Absolutely; for its eyes are also better set to insure strength.” [6]

Crit. “Well, let that pass; but whose nose is finer, yours or mine?”

Soc. “Mine, I consider, granting that Providence made us noses to smell with. For your nostrils look down toward the ground, but mine are wide open and turned outward so that I can catch scents from all about.”

“But how do you make a snub nose handsomer than a straight one?”

Soc. “For the reason that it does not put a barricade between the eyes but allows them unobstructed vision of whatever they desire to see; whereas a high nose, as if in despite, has walled the eyes off one from the other.” [7]

“As for the mouth,” said Critobulus, “I concede that point. For if it is created for the purpose of biting off food, you could bite off a far bigger mouthful than I could. And don't you think that your kiss is also the more tender because you have thick lips?”

Soc. “According to your argument, it would seem that I have a mouth more ugly even than an ass's. But do you not reckon it a proof of my superior beauty that the River Nymphs, goddesses as they are, bear as their offspring the Seileni, who resemble me more closely than they do you?” [8]

“I cannot argue any longer with you,” answered Critobulus; “let them distribute the ballots, so that I may know without suspense what fine or punishment I must undergo. Only,” he continued, “let the balloting be secret, for I am afraid that the ‘wealth' you and Antisthenes possess will overmaster me.” [9]

So the maiden and the lad turned in the ballots secretly. While this was going on, Socrates saw to it that the light should be brought in front of Critobulus, so that the judges might not be misled, and stipulated that the prize given by the judges to crown the victor should be kisses and not ribbons. [10] When the ballots were turned out of the urn and proved to be a unanimous verdict in favour of Critobulus, “Faugh!” exclaimed Socrates; “your money, Critobulus, does not appear to resemble Callias's. For his makes people more honest, while yours is about the most potent to corrupt men, whether members of a jury or judges of a contest.” Symposium 5

You might want to glance at The Undoing Project 

AMERICAN ANARCHO INDIVIDUALISM

dovetails nicely with Protagorean moral and factual individualist relativism.

 

Protagoras cannot subscribe to a will of a majority, because it would override individual judgments of various kinds, not just a minority. The minority is subject, of course, to the same criticism.

RE ENLIGHTENMENT EXPERTS FAKE FACTS NEWS APPEARANCES REALITIES

ENLIGHTENMENT MORALS FACTS TRUTH BEAUTY

See the above summary of Protagoras' view.

 

Plato discussed one weakness, among others, in Protagoras' account, from a practical point of view: On the thesis so far propounded, no man can be wiser than another, and there could be no sense in Protagoras or anyone else setting himself up as a teacher (expert).

 

Theaet. 161 c ff.

 

 

 

ENLIGHTENMENT MORALS FACTS TRUTH BEAUTY

Protagoras said that man is the measure...what appears to each man assuredly also in...it follows that the same thing both is and is not, good and bad, or both right and wrong, since often a particular thing appears either the one or the other, also beautirul or ugly to some, and the opposite to others. See Aristotle, Metaph. 1062b 13.

CIVILIZATION MATTERS

Originally, it seems, the term race meant civilization, and culture, not color, and perhaps not so much even distinctive modern concepts of racial physical features.

The modern concept of race as color and physical features still matters a lot, but it matters less...

It is an important criterion, either whether you are an American, a Russian, an Arab, a Chinese, or a Hindu, or were an ancient Greek.