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Mine is culture, and the sense that culture shapes everything.  The sorcery-tech is easy to introduce, by comparison.

Even Vole will be impressed.

Thank you.

Hey, I think I was the first to mention it here.

Interesting.  A day or two ago I was mulling Haidt and Moral Foundations Theory.

Now, I've got a pair of dots to introduce, and then to connect.

A brief summary, backwards:  Haidt is a modern, social sciences academic who pulled the rug out from under himself.  To verify his ideas, he and his students devised a questionnaire.  Its most famous question is (paraphrased) "Your beloved dog has been hit by a car.  One of your children suggests eating it.  Do you think this is a good idea?"  But wait, there's more ...

Haidt and his students gave the questionnaire to a large number of people, asking also if they were liberal or conservative.  After they filled it out, they were given a second, identical copy, with the instructions that if they were liberal, they should fill it out as they believed a conservative would, and if they were conservative, they should fill it out as though a liberal would.

So ... how did liberals and conservatives do in answering in each others' shoes?  The liberals did poorly, with answer ranges all over the map.  The conservatives did well--not perfectly, but well.

Haidt was testing an idea with this: That there is a set of moral principles more or less common to human nature, and that conservatives care about one subset, and liberals care about another.  But here's the kicker, and Haidt has the numbers to back it: Conservatives care about all six of the categories that Haidt identified, and modern liberals only care about two--and cannot recognize the other four, so that any balancing of interests between their two and the other four looks to them like moral abdication.

The six foundations are

• Caring vs. Harm

• Fairness vs. Cheating

• Liberty vs. Oppression

• Loyalty vs. Betrayal

• Authority vs. Subversion

• Sanctity vs. Degradation

This is a capsule summary, and omits detail.  For example, Haidt links kindness with caring, and respect with authority.  (Haidt's work, and conclusions, are described in his book The Righteous Mind.)

Here's dot one: The Wikipedia article lists the last three of these as 'group-forming'.

Dot two is 'virtue signalling', which is succinctly captured here.  The idea is that many of the things the Left calls for are not based on moral analysis, but on the need to prove that they are Left-pure of heart.  Yesterday's Oppressed is today's Oppressor, and yesterday's Victim is today's Victimizer.  Celebrities charter wide-body aircraft to take their entourages to global warming conferences.  Concerts are given to help the poor when the real fix is fixing laws that prevent people from earning a living.

Dot connection:  Here's the kicker--virtue signalling is a loyalty mechanism.  It's an instinctive (or, as Haidt would say, intuitive) reaction, stemming from the way human nature works.

Even as they reject the virtues they don't understand, they are adhering to them.

Most of what I know of Harris is the World_Historical Gamble analysis.  It, and especially the Fantasy Ideology component of it, seem to me to address things not addressed elsewhere.  Whether they are correct or not is, of course, a different question.

It's true that Harris draws on an observation by Marx to illuminate part of the analysis.  But that component is small enough that it can be true even if Marx's larger analyses are false, even grossly false.

So, is Harris right, or near right, or right-as-far-as-he-goes, in his claims on the points of Fantasy Ideology and non-Clausewitean actors?   These seem to me to be his major contributions.

Fascinating essay by Lee Harris.  It's not the first place he's used this idea--the first place I saw it, years ago, was in the World-Historical Gamble essay.  But the idea that there is a force that cannot be bent to reason, driving non-Clausewitzean conflicts, is important enough that if it is true, there is no way to face the problem without acknowledging the idea.

Sounds like you're better off with the warped space bubbles.

That goes after one part of the chain.  The start of the chain is the ideal of violent jihad.  Discredit the idea and the problem fades away.

I watched Ryan Mauro, principal of the Clarion Project, try to speak to a town council not far from where I live.  A mosque was requesting variances to expand.  Mauro wanted to speak--on the record--with the information that the mosque's principal was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 9/11 atrocity.  The schedule was manipulated to ensure that Mauro's statement could only be given on a 'to-be-continued' date when, with his full schedule, he could not attend.

Note that adults, with formed and secure world-views, are rarely indoctrinated.  The targets and victims are young people.  There are a lot of angles on this, including the idea that self-destruction expiates the sin of having enjoyed the forbidden pleasure being destroyed.

If we would regard ISIS and its sister organizations as states, even nascent and usurping states, we could take Newt Gingrich's recent suggestion that anyone who swears allegiance to such an entity has, by giving allegiance to a foreign power, forsaken his American citizenship.  (Note that Grant never addressed officers of the Confederacy by that name, because it would recognize that entity in law.  Letters demanding surrender were addressed to Commander of the Army now .....)

How would that have prevented the Orlando shooting?

Then a villian escaped into the real world, a villian strong enough to destroy reality itself.

In fairness, there are Muslim groups speaking out against the warrior readings of their sacred texts.  The Clarion Project has a page with a list.  Given how firmly tCP and its principal speak out against the aggressors, I think the list is reliable.  There's an interview by tCP with the principal of the Center for Islamic Pluralism which does not go in depth into why he (a Sufi) and others believe that the warrior reading of those texts is wrong.