Status and Women

High-status women will have high status.

Is this a tautology? Almost, but a sufficient number of right-wingers hope to find an alternative that I think it can be broken down a bit further.

There’s a trope on the right that women ruin everything. I am averse to repeating at length what others have written about very extensively, so I will only give the abstract version of the case here, rather than fleshing out all 1,001 real-life versions:

• Guys have some activity/group/institution that functions well
• Women don’t participate originally because it appeals to some specifically masculine interest or requires some specifically masculine ability
• Then, either (a) a few girls who are outliers along the interest/ability axes get involved in the activity or (b) a few girls, who are dating/otherwise interested in guys who participate, start following the activity out of admiration for their crush
• The peripheral female participants in a previously all-male activity receive attention from the other participants, which they enjoy:
  • The peripheral females call attention to this fact, out of vanity and to get the thirsters to recognize that they need to outcompete each other.
  • They begin to figure out that their participation in or opinions about the activity gets disproportionate attention/acceptance, compared to how the original participants treat each other.
• More girls who are almost-outliers on the relevant traits for participation notice how much attention the peripheral female participants get, and decide to join as well.
• The distortions introduced by the newly-arrived girls start to change the original arrangement of the activity/group/institution; the new arrangements (which encompass the novel female behavior, or male behavior which caters to novel female standards of approval) are no longer optimal for the original function.
• The distorted arrangements now affect the internal incentive structure of the activity, which opens up two possibilities:
  • Where the distortion of incentives is dominated by actual romantic successes of the original male participants, recruitment of new participants becomes permanently skewed towards guys who are more oriented towards sex and social status.
  • Where the distortion of incentive is dominated by lower standards that enable female participation, new recruitment of becomes permanently skewed towards girls.
  • (As a second-order dynamic, if the volume of participation swells, it also attracts still other types of guys whose priorities can be summarized as power, money or, more rarely, honor; these priorities can only be satisfied with access to larger groups.)
• As the constitution of the activity changes, the sizes of the various blocs of participants change, giving newcomers an increasing ability to eliminate conventions that are holdovers from the original form of the activity and don’t match their own strengths or incentives.

The elements of this story aren’t truly unique to bros-before-hos dynamics, by the way. If you’re sharp you’ve already noticed that with a few tweaks this can be an account of immigration, or entryism, or any other type of breakdown of a homogenous community.

This breakdown is sort of sucky when it happens to some dumb nerd-thing you do with your nerdy friends, like playing Pokèmon or sending astronauts to the moon. But the big-picture worry about feminization of male activities is that feminization goes hand in hand with subversion. Whether we are talking about religion, literary circles, academia, or anything else, the subversion of the institution (and the consequent damage to society) typically has feminine fingerprints all over it.

Christianity is not only the truth and the light, but also, our God being filled with charity, a eucivic faith. Provided that you don’t let women talk in church. It actually says it right there in the “directions for assembly” when you open up the box: bitches should shut up in church.

Quibblers might ask whether, if you try to assemble your Church without reading the how-to instructions, the result is actually Christianity; but I’m content to observe that the faith is eucivic when women listen silently during the service. (Remember folks: a God of peace, not a God of disorder.) If you try it the other way and let the girls have a say in what’s holy or unholy, blessed or cursed, then you’re screwed.

To what extent the same logic extends to all other questions of social participation (public affairs? voting? education? art and literature?) I will let the reader decide. But the most doggedly consistent reactionary position is just to say: kids and kitchen, end of story.

The problem is that this reductio fundamentally misunderstands the logic of female infiltration. I suspect this is partly because, in articulating the women-ruin-everything theme, reactionaries typically model every institution on the small-scale groups with which they are most intimately familiar, and model the psychologies of all participants on the drives and attitudes they care most about in that familiar situation.

To make a long story short: the reality is that female infiltration is about social status (popularity, esteem, perceived power). In small groups, this status is mediated through personal relationships and typically evolves towards some sort of flirting or fooling around. This leads casual observers to get the impression that the relevant interaction between the new arrivals and the original male participants are romantic interactions and the motives of the girls are primarily sexual.

Nigel once referred to sociobiology as “the Freudianism of the right”. Bzzz, wrong! You can’t understand the human soul or the human city without understanding the evolution of the human species. But there is a half-truth lurking in Nigel’s bad take: pop-Darwinism dethroned pop-Freudianism without doing a thorough purge of the palace.

Find an average person, of any political affiliation, and start talking about psychology, and you’re going to start to hear some half-digested Freudian views. Originally these were simply naive Freudian views, back when the New York Times and NPR were peddling pop-Freudianism. When Freud became an embarrassment to most educated people, the overarching framework tying Freud’s claims together disappeared. But the average citizen who accepted those claims without ever looking into the underlying theory did not replace all of his old opinions with new ones overnight; he simply stopped thinking of them as Freudian.

This comes out from time to time in evolutionary psychology. An explanation of the (evolutionary) functions of someone’s psyche is not an explanation of the content of his psyche. Most of us can probably think of one or two bloggers who obstinately stick to a single explanation for female misbehavior: they’re always trying to get fucked. Bzzz, wrong. Nine times out of ten, the misbehavior in question evolved because it got their ancestors laid. But it didn’t evolve by making the descendant desire to get fucked.

You can see how this misunderstanding arises. Half-cup familiarity with a small social scene where friendships and dating get messed up, half-cup “unconscious drives” straight out of The Ego and the Id, stir in a tablespoon of personal obsessions, and voilà. A set of desires and attitudes which tends to lead to X (and has the evolutionary function of leading you to X) is glossed as “an unconscious desire for X”, i.e. it feels exactly like a normal desire for X but the desirer doesn’t recognize it or won’t openly admit it.

I’m not saying this sort of self-deception is impossible. The escalation of anger works a lot like that. The function of your anger is to help you destroy obstacles (be they things or people), and if you get sufficiently angry you’re going to get to the point where you think, Wow, I’d really like to kick that door in. But whenever anyone starts getting angry about anything, inevitably the others will notice that he’s raising his voice or getting agitated before he does. (“I’m perfectly calm!” It’s okay buddy, we’ve all been there before.) Yet even with destruction-goals, lots of drives which are offensive in nature are not “unconscious hostility”, but rather non-anger drives which lead to the same end-point. (E.g. if you are cheerfully teasing someone in a way that is likely to start a fight, chances are you really are cheerful, not secretly-angry; contempt is simply a type of cheerfulness whose functions overlap with anger.)

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of getting to the point that while the function of status-consciousness is probably to nab high-quality gametes (and this is especially true of the pursuit of high status, as opposed to the avoidance of low status, whose function is to avoid lynching/exile), the status-drive itself isn’t sexual and if you think it is you’re going to have screwy ideas about social institutions. Patriarchy can beat promiscuity and whoring back into the box they came in, and thereby avoid a lot of social chaos. But that still doesn’t solve status.

Women will always scheme to raise their status. Planning a “restoration” where women become magically indifferent to status because they “know their their place” is as crazy as de-kulakization. Young girls take popularity every bit as seriously as young boys take athletics, and as they mature they transfer that focus onto their place in a social hierarchy which is vast and complicated.

Now, it is quite likely that there is population diversity (or even antagonistic selection) along status-seeking traits, and that some women care much less about status (and in particular about high status) than others. But which women will end up with high-status husbands, the ones who care about high status or the ones who don’t?

And those high-status couples: are they going to have the daughters who care a lot about status, or humble daughters who don’t?

And high-status families looking for a marital alliance with a family of similar background; is it more likely the prospective brides they consider for their sons will be of the status-conscious variety, or not?

I don’t know that it’s a bad thing that high-status women are invariably ambitious to raise their status even further. It’s a good thing, at least, that they don’t have meek, otherworldly sons. Conceivably there are some other family/community benefits too. Where the problem arises is with the tautology we started with: high-status women will have high status.

I think I’ve already suggested reasons to doubt high-status women are indifferent to status. So they pursue high status. That is the end: but do they have the means? Well, generally, they must, because in questions of status high and low are signs of power, and so anyone who has a reputation based on status-signals which are signs of power but consistently shows weakness/impotence in pursuit of his own ends will eventually lose that reputation. So in equilibrium, people with higher status have more means than people with lower status; and thus high-status women have the means, as well. Right?

The relationship between status and power is complicated by the many domains within which status can be earned. A ski-champion may be highly respected by ski enthusiasts, but while his status within that world is based on his skiing abilities, his status relative to a banker or a football player is not. So I have cheated, but only a little bit. If we needed a general theory of status, then “in equilibrium, higher status implies more power” would be false, because it doesn’t take into account all the spheres where virtuosity is admired for its own sake.

Note the passive voice: is admired. Admired by whom? Typically it is the men in an activity/group/institution who respect virtuosity, if virtuosity entails accomplishing the activity’s function perfectly regardless of whether or not a virtuoso performance is well-rewarded in an absolute sense. And the general problem with female infiltration is that they come into an area where male virtuosi have started to acquire fame, wealth, or influence, and they destroy the internal status-dynamics of respect for virtue and shift them towards pursuit of external goods.

So we can correct that phrase to: …all the spheres where men admire virtuosity for its own sake, and now it is clear that our simplification of the status-power relationship is appropriate. High-status women are generally high-status in domains where they or their families acquired power in the general sense; the problem is that they use that endowment to try to win even more status in new domains where the excellent functioning of a group/institution has attracted the attention and admiration even of outsiders.

At the high end, this means that billionaire heiresses compete with merely multi-millionaire heiresses for status in the art world, in literature, or in other charitable endowments. She throws parties, spreads around a little patronage, writes a few checks, and soon even the visiting soloist from Moscow knows her name. If she’s really wasteful, the music director might even listen to her suggestions for next year’s programming, and then her friends will really seethe with resentment.

But at the lower end it takes more modest forms. There are lots of middle class women out there who work as schoolteachers or something similar their whole lives. You probably know a few. They only make a fraction of what their husbands make, but they still invest their most fertile years in getting the degrees and certifications and then they more or less need to work their whole lives to recoup the investment. Most likely, they only have two kids.

But if that woman’s father had said to her, back when she was a teenager, “College? For you? To be a teacher? That’s a terrible idea,” — what then? Would she, docile, nod “Yes, papa” and go work as a secretary or cashier while waiting to get married and have kids?

The problem is that if she’s middle class, and all her middle-class friends are going to college to get useless qualifications for dubious careers, then her father has effectively stripped away her social status. She is de-classed. Suddenly loss of perceived social status often causes either depression or erratic, risk-taking behavior (i.e., gambles to regain status). A sufficiently strict father might be able to prevent misbehavior. But the more effectively he forbids any status-seeking behavior, the more firmly he cements his daughter’s low status in the eyes of her peers, creating the impression that obedience to one’s father is, itself, a low-status disposition.

This isn’t to say that over-educated women in careers that make them unhappy and squeeze their families is some sort of law of nature. Of course not. It’s just a way that girls happen to pursue status in The Current Year. My point is that you can’t think systematically about how to solve this class of problem if you assume the solution will involve high-status women not having a high status.

If you make that assumption, you’ll start looking for different ways to prevent status-seeking behavior… and you’ll find them, for sure. No matter how many kulaks you whack, you’ll always be able to able to find one more to kill; that’s just how de-kulakization is.

If high-status women will always be high status, then the solution will have to involve high-status women continuing to scheme after social status. And so the difficulty is not to prevent any one specific type of status-seeking behavior, but to figure out what types of status-seeking behavior women can be channeled into. Bonus points for disequilibrium solutions wherein actual, status-seeking TCY women will start to envy the proposed eucivic feminine status-symbols after a reactionary avant-garde starts to acquire them. (Please show your work.)

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Happy New Year!

QL is celebrating Christmas with a week of posts. Then the hiatus will continue until around Memorial Day.

et in summa corpus iacet omne quiete

QL is officially entering hibernation. Regularly-scheduled defenses of all that is just and holy will resume in mid-2018.

Observation: Tactics and Demonstrations

As many of you know, I do my absolute best to avoid learning about current events. (The gossip who tells tales cannot keep faith; shun therefore the society of blabber-mouths and busybodies.) But somehow it came to my notice that there was a “right-wing” (eh) protest in a Northeastern city last week. It seems that about twenty or thirty right-wing demonstrators showed up, whom the police vigilantly cordoned off from the rest of the population to protect them from ten thousand or more counter-protestors.

I don’t know what the reactionary consensus is, but I say this is excellent news. While in general I disapprove strongly of attrition, if it only takes twenty right-wingers who are willing to have their faces photographed for future harassment and disemployment to pin down ten thousand left-wingers, we should be encouraging appropriate allies to hold rallies is every city in the country, as frequently as possible. You can’t turn out ten thousand (let alone forty thousand or more) lazy leftists every single weekend for months at a time. They just get bored. The media audiences will get bored, so the journalists will get bored, so the attention-whores will get bored.

The only problem, of course, is that most cities prefer not to set up a heavily-defended 100-yard perimeter around “problematic” speakers. And that sets up an entirely different cost-benefit dynamic.

Oh, and speaking of current events: my wife tells me that Bannon is out. That seems like a bad sign, but the main thing I’ve learned about American politics in the last two years is that Donald Trump is much sharper than I am. When he replaced Lewandowski with Manafort, I was concerned that he was selling out his unconventional advisors in order to be received into the bosom of the GOP establishment. In retrospect, it seems that testing different lieutenants’ abilities and shuffling them around to maintain a maximally efficient organization is just what Trump does; he doesn’t see the world through the lens of Brahmin-kabuki so he doesn’t bundle personnel decisions with symbolic statements about his policy intentions.

I do fear that Trump, for all his excellent instincts, relies on his advisers for his ideals, and that he could eventually org-chart himself into a real dilemma. But he also seems far too aware of the value of branding (or, to put it in the vocabulary of a gentler age: the value of good faith and strong character) to abandon the electorate he has carved out for himself. I will continue to wait so that I may judge on the basis of results rather than relying on my own (inferior) political instincts. (By the way, all signs are that the purge of the regulatory bureaucracy is proceeding at lightning speed.)

Why does memetic history matter?

It may be helpful to clarify what we mean by the crypto-calvinist hypothesis in terms of what we stand to learn by verifying or falsifying it. Let me throw out a few examples.

The negative form of the crypto-calvinist hypothesis (i.e.: progressivism is not what it claims to be, an innocent set of entirely secular moral principles which reasonable people just naturally “intuit”) suggests certain important traits with respect to which progressivism remains the same as, differs from, or inverts its parent-tradition. (For example: at some point progressivism started claiming not to be a religion; the functional significance of this mutation is that it allow progressives greater access to the secular state; at this point it suppresses or transfigures its non-religious doctrines to make this claim plausible.) The only way to substantiate these suggestions is to verify the hypothesis, and it can only be verified in one of its positive forms.

Once the main mutation has taken place (i.e., one progressivism relabels itself as secular), what process governs the suppression of the other manifestly-religious themes? Why are some themes preserved fanatically and others forgotten entirely? This would not only shed light on the past and future doctrinal gyrations of different strains of progressivism, but would also deepen our understanding of the way progressivism distorts and perverts Christian ethical principles. (It’s one thing to recognize that it does pervert them, and another to understand how and why.)

If progressivism has weapons and defenses which are especially effective against Christians, because it has evolved to compete against other denominations of Christianity: which denominations? If the general origins of the ideology truly explain its special hostility to Christians, its precise origins should go further.

If progressivism is a mutant sect, is it a common mutation, or has it only arisen once? I.e., is there a large reservoir of non-progressive sects which can, with a critical change, go poz? (If so, is the reservoir Calvinist sects? All Christian sects?) If progressivism can spontaneously emerge out of indigenous ideologies without any previous proselytization by progs or any other “precursor form”, then clearly cladistic analysis doesn’t get to the root of what it is (much less how to contain it).

At its most ambitious, I would a historical vindication (or refutation) of the crypto-calvinist hypothesis to aim at bringing Moldbug’s historical speculations in line with the rest of the formalist analysis of contemporary politics. Very roughly (and unfairly; but not that unfairly, because if you can’t write concisely you everyone who tries to paraphrase you to butcher your views), Moldbug says that progs are crazy because they’re actually one of them crazy evangelical cults, and that progs are accelerating ever-leftward because progs are crazy. But the conception of “crazy” which fleshes out “Cthulhu always swims left” is very different from the conception of “crazy” which fleshes out “How Dawkins got pwned”. Not inconsistent, just different. The better we can align our understanding of the Left’s genesis with our understanding of its structure, the better we’ll understand that structure and its consequences (e.g., leftward-acceleration, anarcho-tyranny).

Ultimately, “The left did it” is just one of three basic explanatory frames the right uses. We’re realists in three ways:

• About ideology and political dynamics;
• About humanity (especially race and gender);
• About who rules.

Problem: each frame is so powerful in its primary domain of application that it is plausible to propose explanations outside that domain. Thus many troubling symptoms of social decay are triple-“explained” by leftism, genes, and you-know-who. The crypto-calvinist hypothesis is a working hypothesis within one theory about the nature of leftism. The best hope for a General Theory of Poz is to get that broader theory about the left so completely crisp, so clearly delineated that we can distinguish between where it works well, where it works poorly, and where it doesn’t work at all. (That’s when we can start to distinguish between cases where one explanatory frame explains what the other two can’t, cases where two or three together each explain part of the total outcome, and cases where two frames jointly cause one and the same outcome.)

I’ll discuss this last point (about causation and explanation) in greater depth some other time. Likely next year. I worked up a draft last winter but ultimately decided the point was a little prissy. If the prospects for moving forward with a comparative analysis of these three frameworks are dim (they are very dim), then what is there to do but nag at the idiots who overuse each of the frames? But I don’t want to nag, and not just for the sake of appearances.

(I love our idiots. I think they’re great people. Getting them to hide their simplified view of the world would serve no positive purpose. When there is no time-sensitive decision to be made, you typically want idiots to say whatever pops into their heads; that way everyone knows who the idiots are, and if they have any opinions that are genuinely counterproductive you know it well in advance. No human community is without idiots, and while you can teach them to keep silent on certain topics and train them to parrot the party line on others, there’s no cure for idiocy, just a trade-off between carefree idiocy and veiled idiocy. But try to make sure that you’re exposed to multiple varieties of idiot so that you don’t lose perspective.)

Anyway, I will most likely not be coming back to this broader sociological point until next year; but this has been excerpted from a longer discussion of what people mean (or, might possibly mean) by “Puritanism” when we talk about leftists. The point I would urge you to take away from this is not necessarily that we need to answer these questions, or even that it will ever be possible to answer them, but that when you’re making a claim about the origins of an enemy’s ideology (or an ally’s), unless the claim is entirely pejorative in nature your sense of why those origins matter should be tied to what you would understand better about the ideology if you could document its origins exhaustively.

Update: Erasmus’ Spawn

By a strange serendipity, I happened to be cleaning out a huge stack of papers I printed out several years ago (and had never read) shortly after writing the Puritans and Progs draft, and discovered one on the historical relationship of the Arian heterodoxies which Erasmus inspired. It was eerie to discover a paper on this exact subject, waiting for me in a stack I had forgotten. I read it as soon as I could, and I suppose now I should relay my findings.

I should start with the two details I feel a slight reluctance to discuss… reluctance, because each detail will appeal to one discrete audience which will never stop repeating it. But I can’t omit them, because they may be relevant to an odd little fact I touched on in the draft. A huge number of the Arians and Socians were of Spanish or Italian origins; and not only in Spain and Italy proper, but across Europe and especially in Eastern Europe. Why, you ask?

1. Conversos. Spain had an enormous number of half-digested Jews, many of whom sought refuge from the Spanish Inquisition by emigrating to other Mediterranean trading-posts, mostly in Italy. So Spain and Italy had unknown numbers of cryptos spreading subversive ideas in this period, plus thousands more who re-judaized after reaching Italy. Most of the Socinian theologians who emerged from Italy came from patrician families, but the heresiarch Michael Servetus was likely a converso, and the Spanish Erasmian Juan de Valdès certainly was. It was apparently Valdès’ Dialogue on Christian Doctrine that led his disciples Bernardino Ochino and Fausto Sozzini to reject the Trinity.
2. Thots. Isabella Sforza was left a widow when her husband’s uncle, the famous Ludovico Sforza, usurped the Duchy of Milan. She returned home and set about trying to collect a clique of glittering and impressive figures in her court, as any bored noblewomen would: her collection included Bernardino Ochino.
   • She gave her daughter Bona Sforza (a “well-educated” young woman… of course) in marriage to Sigismund (Jagiellon) of Poland. Naturally, Bona took an Erasmian confessor with her to Poland, the start of what was to become a pipeline of heresies and heretics from Italy to the Polish court of Bona Sforza.
   • Bona’s daughter Isabella Jagiellon married John Zápolya, Warden of Transylvania, Count of the Székelys, and King of Hungary. (Caveat: Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was pretender to the same crown.) John Zápolya died in 1540, leaving twenty-one year-old Isabella to act as regent for their infant son, John II Sigismund Zápolya. Bona Sforza immediately sent her daughter one of her Italian humanist heretics, Giorgio Biandrata, from Poland to Hungary to advise the young queen and tutor her son. Biandrata extended the pipeline from Poland to Transylvania; and it was Biandrata who ultimately invited the infamous Fausto Sozzini into the principality.

There you have it. The first factor seems to go a long way towards explaining the disproportionate interest among Italians in two niche topics: kabbala and denying the divinity of Christ. The second factor ensnares almost all of the most important Socian theologians, which makes it difficult for us to be certain that they would have gone to Eastern Europe in the first place had they not possessed such influence over the Sforza girls.

Now lets try a more abstract approach to the overarching question, which regions of Europe nurtured the strangest sects during the Reformation?

1. Areas of great religious diversity were already used to various forms of religious coexistence. Even if central authorities wished to police orthodoxy, they had greater difficulty policing insular minorities, and one minority would protect others to resist the principle of official interference. Authorities took conciliatory attitudes towards internal schisms among Christians to maintain public unity against hostile outsiders. Where they successfully suppressed disbelief, this meant taking supposedly-converted infidels into the Christian Church, with unpredictable effects on public order.

a. Spain had only finished the Reconquista in 1491. At that time the Iberian Peninsula had a large population of Jews and Muslims. Castile had adopted its policy of forced conversion exactly 100 years earlier, leading to predictable difficulties with (a) the obstinate minority which refused to convert and (b) the questionable orthodoxy of the conversos. The unification of the peninsula under Christian rule allowed for a fuller imposition of the forced-conversion policy and the expulsion of the remainder of the population. Suspicious neighbors also sporadically expelled conversos on a smaller, regional scale; and given these trying circumstances, many conversos emigrated on their own initiative. But pause and ask, expelled from Spain, emigrated from Spain, yes, but: from Spain to… where? Answer: anywhere Mediterranean commercial ties might lead them, i.e. all over Southern Europe, and especially to the great Italian seaports (but also to Navarre and Holland). When the Reformation arrived, there were thousands of conversos and marranos sprinkled strategically throughout Southern Europe.

b. Eastern Europe had long been the borderlands between the Western Church (including the Western Glagolitic Church), the Eastern Church (in its Greek, Bulgarian, and Slavonic varieties), and the Ottoman Empire. Besides these major populations, the region was strewn with pockets of Jews and even little patches of Muslims and Armenians. (And the adherents of the Western Church in Eastern Europe were a diverse lot themselves: Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, and various flavors of Slav, intricately mixed together.) Nor is that all! Bohemia and its neighbors had been the theater of the Hussite Wars, which had only barely been concluded when the Reformation proper broke out; and old memories die hard.

2. Wherever the temporal power of the Western Church was greatest, suspicion of its hierarchy was deepest.

a. Venice, for example, was traditionally on the front line of any attempt to expand the Papal States up the peninsula; so the Venetians were traditionally skeptical both of theoretical apologies for papal power and of specific demands for jurisdiction. And what do you know: in 1550 humanist theologians held a synod in Venice and issued the ruling that Jesus was a human being. Vincenza, a satellite of Venice, likewise hosted a heterodox group of “Brethren”.

b. Today we associate Prussia with Protestantism, but at the beginning of the Renaissance the Teutonic Knights were likely the single most significant temporal manifestation of the power of the Western Church, greater even than the frequently-humbled Papal States. The Polish nobility made it a habit to evade demands that would only empower their Teutonic enemies. — And since the Hussite wars, the emperor too seemed to become a political instrument of the pope; even entirely orthodox princes were reluctant to help defend a principle of papal supremacy whose enforcement seemed to amount to Hapsburg supremacy.

3. Corruption breeds contempt. The irreligion and hedonism of the popes and cardinals of the Renaissance is legendary; but flat-out corruption among the Western clergy was allegedly greatest in Eastern Europe.

Index to my Religion Posts

Since many readers following the recent crypto-calvinism discussion are likely new to QL, I thought that before writing anything new I would do well to introduce them to my older hypotheses on religion and cladistics.

1. On shifting factions in the English Civil War (skip to central section, Theology ≠ Ecclesiology); do not jump to assumptions about the constellation of positions a given tradition holds, as these positions likely have only a historical and political coherence rather than a logical coherence. On this point see also:
   • Gramsci on hegemony
   • §§D-F of On Conspiratorial Thinking, on ways that groups come to align their positions for the sake of conformity
   • For a non-theological example of these dynamics, see the discussion of defending one’s ideological allies here (final section, Last Stand of the Anglo-Saxons)
2. Phylogeny of the English Church, tendencies in the Anglican Church from Henry VIII to the Hanoverian Succession
3. The New England Puritans, who branched off from the motherland before the Royalist/Roundhead dispute acquired its characteristic form. I draw the lesson that the zealous should not design a society which will founder if future generations exhibit less zealotry than the founders.
   • Relevance to the cladistic analysis of Calvinism summarized in one paragraph here.
   • Addition: Originally I was under the impression that the main trend towards heterodox theology in New England was imposed on Boston as a London export only after it began to flourish among the English. Further research suggests migrations directly from Transylvania, Hungary, and Poland to New England during the Counter-Reformation are not as improbable as I had thought.
4. Healthy religions are integrated into communal life in a way that makes “toleration,” as a true alternative to capitulation to heresy, incoherent or question-begging.
   • Liturgy as memetic technology
   • Doctrinal rivalry + proximity = conflict
   • Compare the relationship between tribal identity and tribal disposition
5. Religion and Informal Power – with special attention to the use of doctrine as signals of confessional alignment, and the protection of allied confessions as credible signals of commitment.
   • This is a special, religious case of the accretion of informal powers begun here (and simplified earlier this week in Revolts and Riots)
   • The analysis of informal power as it pertains to liturgical functions, specifically, was the topic of the non-historical sections of the English Civil War post (and the follow-up); and I consider the same point from a more abstract point of view (i.e., the truth of publicly shared ideals) in Leeches, Lies, and Purity Spirals
6. Pre-Christian: the irritating conflation of Judaeans and Judaism. See also:
   • Baldwinian evolution of Rabbinical Judaism (section A)
   • The history of pariahs
7. Conceptual rather than historical points:
   • Faith is transitive, so you believe persons, not opinions
   • A sin is an act, not an explanation