The Western War On Fact Continues

Which is to say, the war on reality. The war to substitute a reality of our own preferences for the hard world of reality that we live in. The roots of this war stretch back to the late Middle Ages, but it appears that humanity is reaching a critical stage in this war—a war that has landed us on a slippery slope.

Yesterday Douglas Macgregor chronicled the latest in the war on facts on the Ukraine front. Denial of facts inevitably leads to failure, in war or peace or in any other human endeavor:

Reinforcing Failure in Ukraine

The longer the war with Russia lasts the more likely it becomes that the damage to Ukraine will be irreparable.

Macgregor’s money quote, the real theme of the article, comes at the end:

John Adams, second president of the United States, observed, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Adams is still right.

Adams is still right, but the great chess master Emanuel Lasker is also still right: Men prefer not to know the truth. In any event, I highly recommend Macgregor’s article, which is full of interesting observations. For example:

American military and civilian leaders routinely ignore the historical record and its lessons. Most importantly, they ignored the criticality of human capital in uniform that frequently constitutes the margin of victory in war. 

Keep that in mind: human capital. What Macgregor is saying is that ignoring the criticality of human capital ultimately derives from ignoring the realities of human nature—a stubborn fact of reality. Let me paraphrase what follows, and see if I’m right about what’s behind Macgregor’s reasoning. Macgregor is saying—or, certainly, implying—that Nazi Germany’s war on Russia was bound to fail, despite the excellence and professionalism of the German military. A reality based evaluation of the Russian Red Army would have led to the conclusion that the Wehrmacht would inevitably suffer severe and irremediable losses in material and, perhaps more crucially, in human capital.

On June 22, 1941, the German Wehrmacht launched its invasion of Russia with more horses than tanks. For the most part, the German ground forces were composed of Great War-style infantry divisions dependent on horse-draw logistics and artillery. The German soldiers were indisputably excellent, but only a minority were equipped with the firepower, mobility, and armored protection needed for warfare in Eastern Europe.

Of the millions of German soldiers who marched into Russia, roughly 450,000 to 500,000 were assigned to Germany’s mobile armored force, the offensive striking power that rapidly crushed its Polish, British, Dutch, Belgian, and French opponents. These soldiers were the best of the best with the lion’s share of the modern equipment. 

It took four years, from 1939 to 1943, to wear down this core element to the point where large-scale German offensives were no longer possible. The critical data point to remember is that 55,000 German officers had been killed in action by October.

These German officers were among the best and most experienced officers in the army. They performed the brilliant maneuvers that brought the ill-equipped Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow in a war on three fronts—Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. They led it through the offensives that culminated in the battles of Kursk and El Alamein.

A similar problem plagued the Luftwaffe. German industry could provide modern jet fighters, but the Luftwaffe could no more replace the losses of its best pilots than the German Army could replace its best officers.

Meanwhile, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto understood the importance of human capital in uniform better than anyone. Yamamoto not only wanted to strike and annihilate the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor but also wanted to seize the Hawaiian Islands, declaring, “To defeat the U.S. Navy we must kill its officers.” Yamamoto understood how long it took to train and prepare officers for the Navy. Ultimately, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor allowed U.S. forces to kill off the best the Imperial Japanese armed forces had in the air and at sea.

Point made? Now Macgregor drives that point home. America’s military—but, in reality, America as a world leader—is cruising for a major bruising by ignoring basic human nature. We will pay a severe price for our delusional ideology that rejects the reality of human nature on principle. Let me emphasize that: on principle we in American delusionally assert and act as if human nature can be changed to suit our ideological preferences, and that we will suffer no consequences. Adams is still right, as we will ultimately learn:

In war and peace, human capital is everything. Sadly, Washington places almost no value on it, eagerly lowering standards of admission for soldiers and officers. If this attitude persists, and it probably will, relaxed standards will catch up with America’s military when our forces finally confront a capable opposing force in battle.

Of course, Macgregor’s major point is that, just as the German invasion of Russia was misguided and ignored basic realities, so too is our support of a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. If you’re interested in who the people are who are behind this delusional effort, Macgregor cites “an open letter entitled “U.S. must arm Ukraine now, before it’s too late” [by] 20 notable American advocates for the war against Russia.” Macgregor begs to differ:

It is time to end it. [I.e., the American Empire’s war against Russia] Instead, the authors of the letter seek to reinforce failure. They are demanding a deeply flawed strategy for Ukraine ... These are results of misguided policies originating in the 1990s under the Clinton administration, which drove Russia into political isolation from Europe and forged Moscow’s alliance with Beijing.

Expanding NATO to Russia’s borders was never necessary and has become disastrous for Europe. 

Rod Dreher had an interesting piece yesterday in which he, also, stresses—in effect—the issue of human capital, and they way in which our classical liberal culture systematically ignores the reality of human nature. Dreher approaches this topic largely through an interview between Wesley Yang and Leor Sapir. The title of Dreher’s article points toward the theme of that interview:

Weaponized Compassion & The Culture War

The advance of AIDS and the advance of ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria) follow a similar paths

I don’t want to jump ahead of Sapir, who is the one I’ll be quoting, leaving Yang’s questioning aside. However …

Sapir points to the primacy of “compassion” or empathy in American and most modern Western culture—a primacy over fact and reality based analysis. As Sapir notes, the progress of this tendency has even been enshrined in SCOTUS rulings—although, thankfully, the current Court is attempting to redress some of this. My argument is that once Classical Liberalism replaced on principle the objective knowledge of human nature with an appeal to the essentially empty concept of “tolerance”, the primacy of compassion was basically inevitable. It’s like the wage of sin—intellecutal sin. I’ll repeat that: Classical Liberalism bans the notion of an objective human nature from the public square. We are all left to invent our own version of reality. The result is, as Sapir will maintain (although I don’t believe he fully “gets” this), that much of what we term “social policy” is drive—again, on principle—by emotion rather than reality based evidence. Because the reality of an objective human nature has been banned from our policy making discourse.

So, now Sapir:

[Sapir:] ... And, you know, let me end by making a point that in some circles it’s controversial and other circles it’s treated as well, yeah, of course, that's obvious. You know, women have more empathy than men, more natural empathy than men. On average, of course, you're gonna find holdouts on both sides, but on average, they do. And one thing that I've discovered in my research and talking to parents, especially to mothers, believe it or not, to teachers on the ground, is that if you look at the foot soldiers of the transgender revolution–now, I'm not talking about the high-level donors behind the scenes and stuff like that, I'm talking about the people on the ground, the teachers, the therapists–almost all of them are female. Interestingly enough, those fighting back against transitioning kids are also female. Not all of them, but a lot of them–Abigail Schreier, people like that, right. So you have women on both sides of the issue, but if you look at the pro-affirming side, it's very female. It's always couched in compassion and the language of empathy. You do find some men, but to the extent that men get involved in this debate, they usually tend to get involved on the opposite side of it. Again, these are generalizations, I don't mean that they apply to 100% of cases, but it's important from just a kind of a sociological perspective, because I think it underscores the extent to which empathy unmoored from any kind of rational assessment of the evidence is driving so much of this stuff. And until we understand that, and come to terms with that, it's going to be really difficult to turn the clock back.

Wesley Yang: …

Leor Sapir: So that's true, but just to push back a little bit, talk to these kids, Wesley. Talk to them. I have, when I used to have office hours when I taught in college, and I have spoken to students, I've spoken to colleagues, to friends, family members on the left–you talk to them, you spend five minutes investigating their ideas about, you know, we all have this internal sense of gender, all the, kind of, these bizarre, kooky metaphysics, and within a nanosecond that gives way to therapeutic cliches. They don't–they have no philosophical defense of these ideas, it just immediately gives way to, kind of, this full relativism of–everybody should do what they feel makes sense, makes them feel good about themselves, and who am I to judge? And if we don't agree with them, that they're going to experience subjective distress, and they're gonna want to kill themselves. 

So, you know, again, it's not that gender ideology doesn't play an important role here, it really does. But when you scratch below the surface, when you push back a little bit, it's incredible how quickly all of this gives way to this unhinged compassion, and empathy, and concern for feelings of suffering. And so I think that's important because it also gives us a plan of action for how to push back against it, which is, no, the compassionate thing to do is to look at studies about suicidality, to see that there is in fact no connection between affirming and reducing suicidality. And there's actually one new study that shows weak evidence–I want to emphasize, it's evidence, but it's weak evidence–that affirming with puberty blockers may actually increase suicidality. That social transition–meaning using a person's preferred pronouns and names–is not just the nice, kind, compassionate thing to do, but it may actually lock in a temporary state of distress that would have relieved itself over time if you just leave it alone. So again, recognizing what's driving this thing, that it really is compassion, empathy, unhinged from any form of rational introspection and assessment of the evidence, is really key to unlocking how we can move in the direction of other countries here.

Wesley Yang: ...

Leor Sapir: Yeah, I think that's right. And this is a problem, I think, inherent in the American style of relativism, that we wanted to say, you know, to use Justice Kennedy, in that Planned Parenthood v. Casey case–we all have the right to define our meaning of existence. But of course, the existence that we want to define is not just purely our own subjective understanding of the world, we want it to be objectively true. We all want our belief to be grounded in something more than just a spurious feeling. We want the confidence that our feelings are grounded in something more real, more permanent. And so it's important to us that others recognize our subjective understanding, to meet our own meaning of existence. And that's where subjectivism slides easily into a kind of a totalitarianism, where we recognize no limits to our will, no limits to our desires.

…

Dreher continues, and I’ll quote him in excerpt:

Similarly, the transgender explosion is a disease made possible ideologically by the radical individualism of American culture (think Anthony Kennedy's "sweet mystery of life" passage cited above). It is made possible technologically by the Internet and social media, which work to fragment the personality and remove it from the guardrails of reality. And it is made possible socially by the total valorization of compassion as an emotion unmoored from any external standards.

As Dreher will point out later, the ideological component is actually the most important. That’s because Classical Liberal ideology has intellectually disarmed us, placing us at the top of the slippery slide, and giving us a push.

To render society immobile in fighting AIDS by stigmatizing gay male promiscuity, the culture-makers had to render promiscuous gay men as holy innocents victimized by villains like Ronald Reagan. To render society immobile in fighting ROGD by stigmatizing transgenderism, the culture-makers have to render children and minors with gender dysphoria as holy innocents who need to be protected from bigoted ogres.

We have had our defenses compromised by ideology.

And so we end up with the remarkable phenomenon—one supposes it’s one of theose “only in America” kinda things—ideologically privileged diseases:

CNN Tells Viewers Monkeypox Is Not Sexually-Transmitted