THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

EGO? ME? I'M TOO PERFECT | 2006-01-18

On taking things for granted, Derek says,

"I think that ego makes you take things for granted. One of my friends is very intelligent and people tell him that all the time. I think that it goes to his head so much that no one else can offer any other valid viewpoint unless it compliments his own. "

"Perhaps this was your problem Bob. You are too smart. Or at least someone tells you are."

Comment by Derek —

Two of the most popular books ever written started out by emphasizing the word "I."

Montesquie started out his Essays by saying that they were all about him because he was the only person he really knew.

Ben Frnaklin began his Autobiographyby saying it was largely a matter of ego.

But these two eighteenth-century books still sell like hotcakes while endless numbers of volumes dedicated to "objectivity" are inteh garbage bin where they belong.

If those writings were only about Franklin and Montesquie they would have died with their authors.

But both those books began on a very healthy note. Both men reminded you that what was being written was being put down by a fallible human being whom you, as anohter fallible human being, would have to judge on your own.

In fact, this sort of writing was almost an invention of the eighteenth century. It was a historical breakthrough. Writings prior to that time had always tried to set down pure objectivity. No one said, "This is my belief, but that is just me talking."

One of the most fascinating and unnoticed phenomena in history was the way egery relgious group imposed its script on everybody in that religious group. We see this in the way that Yiddish, which is old German, was originally written entirely in Hebrew script.

Christian literature was in Greek and roman script only. That is why heiroglyphics disappeared with the advent of Christianity in Egypt. When Islam conquered the Middle East, all the Moslem areas had Arabic script, in which the Koran had been written, imposed on them, including what had been the Byzantine Empire.

The ancient Persian script was burned and Iran began to use only Arabic script.

The point here is that writing was supposed to represent something wholly different from mere talk. Anything addressed to the public ceased to be a personal opinion.

As with Political Correctness today, each religion and each philosophy and each history did not use phrases like, "I have concluded that ..." or "the concensus is..."

Te very idea that one had a right to have a particular point of view was simply not part of pre-eighteenth century thinking.

I have said that I take things for granted that others who have not been along for as long as I have find surpising. One of htese things is that the novel use of "my opinion" in the eighteenth century represented the pppoiste of ego.

On the contrary, it marked the time when the writer took it for granted that his was NOT the only opinion.

It was a giant historical step AWAY from the worship of writing for its own sake when authors began to use phrases like, "I tend to come down onthe side of ..."

I would be fascinated if you could find me a single example of that sort of phrase in any writing before 1700.

This does degenerate into ego. I don't always practice what I preach.

But my invitation is the one that Peter has made use of. I tell you I have a bellyache or a prejudice, and I expect you to do the same thing.

I state my own opinions as objective truth because, for me, they are the truth as I see it. But the last three words are the difference between thought and Wordism.

As Elizabeth ssays, she has been reading my stuff since before WOL was founded in 1998, and she hasnoticed that there isone person I have disagreed with more than I have with anybody else.

That person's name is Bob Whitaker.

I have said many times that in order to be a writer you have to have an ego that makes Mount Everest look like a bump. I take my opinions very seriously, and when I am wrong, I say so.

On the other hand, a writer who admits that what he says is just his opinion must depend on a massive ego.

Someone commenting on the Bible or the Koran has no doubt that his every word is precious. He is telling the truth, and it is God's Truth, not his own.

But once you write down your OWN pint of view, you must have a tall ego to say that a person should take time out to read what YOU say.

In real terms, the Wordist honestly believes he is the soul of modesty. He is merely telling you the Revealed Truth.

I PRESUME to tell you MY opinions, My conclusions, My observations.

So who is really the more self-righteous, the person who presumes that his own ideas are worth reading, or the person who is convinced that his every word is Objective Truth?

ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAWS AND WHY IS THERE A FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT? | 2007-07-16

On the whole subject of antimiscegenation law, I read practically nothing that is accurate, as I explained below about wikipedia's "The Future District of Columbia."

The following explains the status of blacks, including in the Quaker State, which someone said abandoned its anti-intermarriage law in 1790. In 1856 blacks were not allowed on trolleys in Philadelphia:

http://www.primaryresearch.org/bh/research/lauranzano/index.php

When I lived in Massachusetts, I read a book written in 1867 called "The History of Slavery in Massachusetts." Pasted on the inside of the cover was an 1867 book review, written in 1867, bemoaning the fact that someone would dredge all this up JUST when they had the South by the throat to punish for slavery.

In that volume I had a living witness to the abolition of the MA anti-intermarriage law in ****1863****.

It was SCHOOL SEGREGATION that the abolitionists fought and THAT was abolished in 1843, the date given for the 1963 act abolishing antimiscegenation law. I read the argument for integration in 1842 in the 1960s in a book called "Documents of American History." This was the 1960s, and every document relating to American history was, as the author stated, there to prove that abolitionists were1960s integrationists. Trivia like the Constitution was left out.

In the 1960s, we said that integration would lead to intermarriage. Modern Opinion in 1960 said that integration had NOTHING TO DO WITH INTERMARRIAGE. In 1967 the Supreme Court abolished all laws against intermarriage.

This is such a continuum today that everybody who talks about intermarriage laws ALWAYS confuses them with antislavery laws, integration, as in the case of our commenter, and so forth.

We have the same problem with the very EXISTENCE of the Fifteenth Amendment, giving blacks the right to vote. According to present interpretation, the "right" to vote, LIKE THE RIGHT TO INTERMARRY, WAS already included in the fourteenth amendment.

Why IS there a fifteenth amendment? Not only was it assumed that the fourteenth did not give blacks the vote, much less marry whites, but it was harder to cheat through the fifteenth amendment than it was the fourteenth, even with all the congressmen from the Old Confederacy denied their seats and votes.

NO ONE ever thinks about WHY, if the fourteenth amendment gave "equal rights" to blacks, the fifteenth amendment EXISTS,

These were critical distinctions to earlier generations, even to the Radical Republicans. When THEY ruled the South during Reconstruction, THEY enforced antimiscegenation laws. It never occurred to ANYBODY then that integration and, God knows, intermarriage, could not be outlawed by a STATE.

The bottom line is that Vermont almost certainly DID have an anti-intermarriage law, though they had almost no blacks. It is amazing that they FOUND a black slave for the state court to free in 1775, but slavery was on the books until then.

This was a lot of WORK. I get TIRED every time someone decides to go into this. No one knows ANY of the real history.

SACRIFICE | 2005-09-05

Not a year has passed since my teens that at least one Northerner has not asked me, "Bob, when you Southerners were fighting integration, did you REALIZE it was about the very survival of the white race?"

These Northerners were the ones who, tiny group by tiny group, began to realize what integration was all about as it progressed from tokenism to racial balance to open borders.

To put it in plain language, they simply could not believe that a bunch of ignorant, bigoted Southerners knew very well what they themselves were slowly and with great effort realizing: integration was always about getting rid of the white race.

To make this perfectly clear, let me give you an instance. In 1954 a Methodist bishop in the South was demanding that Methodists integrate immediately.

He led off by saying that integation DID mean the end of the white race. He said that, like Jacob who was willing to sacrifice his only son Esau, Christians should be willing to sacrifice their race for God.

Unfortunately, Bible Belt Methodists had READ their Bible. When Jehovah stayed Jacob's hand from sacrificing his only son to him, it was a milestone in religious history.

In the time those words were written down it was a standard practice, when a city or country was in mortal danger, for the ruler to sacrifice his favorite son or daughter to the gods. When Jehovah stopped Esau, it was the end of human sacrifice in the Jewish religion.

No, they didn't invent it. Other faiths had abandoned human sacrifice long before. But a major point of the story was that this was something Jehovah would not ask.

In his obsession with Social Progress, the bishop set religion back morally some three thousand years.

But I will give the Human Sacrifice bishop this much: he was cutting straight to the heart of the

whole question.

In the 1950s everybody did.

Robert Heinlein was a Northern promilitary conservative science fiction writer. He wrote story after story about how wonderful it would be when all Americans ranged from brown to black.

I remember listening to a Jewish spokesman from the NAACP on our black-and-white television back then using every synonym he could think of, "assimilation, intermarriage, total mixing, racial mixing,.." and on and on and on, to make it perectly clear what integration was about.

Which is why, in the 1960s, "integration" became "desegregation."

When I was on Capitol Hill, one othe staffers under me was a hard-core conservative. He

had been pro-white, but when he converted to Orthodoxy, he became totally dedicated to the idea that the ultimate sacrifice he could make was that of the white race.

In my version of Christianity, there was only one sacrifice that mattered, and it was a human sacrifice, and it has been made.

Any obsession with any other sacrifice takes one's mind off of that one as much as an obsession with sex or food does.

So everybody understood what was at stake before code words like desegregation or Hate or anti-racism or anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews came along. The code words came along to cover up the nasty reality as itgs implications began to sink in.

You may keep your image of those ignorant yokels down in the 1950s Bible Belt. But we were never ignorant of the Bible, and we were never ignorant of racial reality.

BAPTIZING FETUSES | 2010-11-23

The whole question of when life begins revolves around baptism. Originally the Church accepted I think Aristotle's idea that a fetus was a plant, and that during pregnancy it evolved through each level of being until the end, when it was human.

Yes, fetal evolution!

I even remember a horror movie in the 50s that talked about this theory and the story line was about a duke who had been born a frog.

Later the Church adopted a Middle Ages philosopher's idea that the embryo is as human as the baby.

This was critical, because the official dogma of the Catholic Church was then and is now that an unbaptized baby carries Original Sin to Judgment. The doctrine of Limbo was created to blunt the brutality of this, but few people know that official Church doctrine says that after the Day of Judgment there are only two destinations for the human soul, Heaven and Hell.

And, with apologies to Dante, Hell is not fair.

In the Middle Ages there was a device that looked like a grease can, with a long snout, which was used to baptize babies who were dying in the womb. It is still true that the Church considers babies who die in the womb to be damned, but it is beneath the dignity of a modern priest to do that and the law wouldn't let them if they wanted to.

In Mexico many babies die unbaptized because they can't pay the fee to the priest. They think their babies are damned. Actually, a parent or anybody else, male or female, Catholic or atheist, can baptize a child.

According to Church doctrine, every aborted fetus goes to Hell eventually.

In Calvinist doctrine the chosen few live a life that shows they are among the Chosen. All babies, regardless of baptism, go to Hell.

Today's Pro-Life Movement takes none of this into account. For all its shrieks about religion, it is entirely secular. Catholic pro-Life forces, and they are by no means the entire movement, never mention baptism, because it would be beneath their dignity to admit they believe in things Mommy Professor would laugh at.

In Screwtape, CS Lewis did say the Devil was a liar. But the examples Screwtape gave, of a man who avoided evil company because he liked to eat rotting fish and went to Heaven, sound like the purely serendipitous way Judgment is decided.

There is simply no way for a person to say that he believes in Heaven and Hell and impress his suburban neighbor that he is logical, reasonable and beyond all respectable.

If you believe, there is no place for Pride, which is now called Respectability. It is a deadly sin, to the baby and to you, if you believe in the doctrine of the Church.

I do not believe the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Satan cannot build with something he does not have. But he has plenty of Pride.