Stardate 20040110.1551

(Captain's log): Sorry for the lack of postings the last couple of days. I'm working on further installments in the series about the three-way war, but it isn't happening serially.

I've already posted two articles about that. The first one reviewed the basic outlines of the three factions and looked backward for some of the cultural roots of the two which I've since come to call empiricism and p-idealism (philosophical idealism, which is only loosely related to the way that idealism is normally used). The second one concentrated on the way that p-idealism has manifested in the US right now, including some speculation about the reason it appeals so strongly to certain groups.

I've actually done a lot of writing since, but what I now have is one article about half written, one article about three quarters planned, and the basic concept of yet another and a lot of ideas about what it should discuss that are as yet not organized or well analyzed. Unfortunately, none of them are in shape to finish and post. And to make sense they need to be written in a particular order.

The next article is going to be about the development of the empiricist faction in Europe, and about its strong influence on the leaders of the American Revolution and on those who helped to establish the form of the new government in the US. It then discusses the way that the basic empiricist point of view strongly influenced America as it developed, and in turn was influenced by it, and how that process was affected strongly by a confluence of coincidences and fortuitous events which are unique in human history. It discusses the three most important influences which during the first hundred years of America's history affected the development of American culture and political thought: immigration, geographic isolation, and the frontier. (And it may also examine a few of the reasons why such a thing didn't happen anywhere else in the New World.)

The first half of that article is pretty much written now. I had actually intended the second article in the series to be about the recent history and modern manifestations of both p-idealism and empiricism in America, and I had started to write the part about empiricism when I realized that the resulting article would be far too long. It also became clear that it didn't really work to have both in the same article. So I cut that long section out and stored it, and instead went into much greater depth on p-idealism. Since then I've written more on that article but it isn't finished.

I think there will be another article beyond that that which will talk about the way that each of the factions as they now exist are extremely heterogenous, and how each contains paradoxes and inconsistencies. (For instance, how empiricism is most strongly humanist and populist and also most comfortable with strong hierarchization in corporations and governments. At the same time, p-idealism is fundamentally elitist and yet often tries to implement totally flat decision-making structures.) I hope to examine the existence of pathological elements in each, and how each is riven by internal disagreements. That article will talk about how the locus of attitudes and philosophies and political positions associated with each is to a great extent the result of historical contingency rather than being historically inevitable, and thus how there isn't necessarily any single philosophical theme to those positions. I've been making notes about the way that there are positive and negative aspects of both p-idealism and empiricism, and how both have made positive contributions in many places. I've also noted some ways in which certain short term successes of the p-idealist movement actually strengthened empiricism. In particular, I've identified a case where American Marxists helped create something which ultimately strengthened capitalism. (In case you're curious, it is the rise of labor unions in the 19th century, which led to a rising standard of living for blue collar workers, making them a big new market which the capitalists could sell into, resulting in an economic explosion. The paradox is that in the long run, raising worker wages ended up making the capitalists even more rich, and also prevented any revolution by the proletariat despite Marx's claim that such a revolution was historically inevitable.)

I'm going to be looking to see if I can identify any equivalent cases the other way. (I don't think there are any quite that big, but there are almost certainly some lesser ones.) I've also been thinking about the general influence of Christianity (both Protestant and Catholic) on both factions, as well as the way that atheism (of various kinds) manifests in each, and the love-hate relationship large parts of both have with modern science.

In that article I may visit some of the letters I've received, especially from people who have pointed out variously that Thomas Sowell, Virginia Postrel, and a couple of other writers have identified the difference between the two factions, and how I think each of them has indentified one of the differences between some parts of each. (I also intend to discuss Fonte's description of Transnational Progressivism.) But there have been enough letters that I might end up deferring most of that to a separate p