This section is dedicated to my own personal edification in humanities and Christianity. Up to now, all the thinking, reading and conversations I have had around these fields have been loose and ad hoc, albeit guided by beliefs in individual freedom and admiration for Western European Christian civilization. As I structure and crystallize my thoughts and learnings, I hope to create a foundation for further acquisition and transfer of knowledge to my son.

Political philosophy

I come from a country which was part of the Soviet Union. I was 15 years old when USSR collapsed, hence I still vividly remember its ugliness. I start my self-edification journey in political philosohy, holding sertain points self-evident:

  • Marxism / socialism, in any shape or form, is evil and degrading at individual and social levels, not to mention that it also almost inevitably leads to despotic utopias and wholesale repression and terror. Marxism seemed like a thing of the past in the 1990s and early 2000s but now it's clearly back. It's horrifying to see how the US Democratic party is increasingly dominated by real Marxist. Conversely, it is inspiring to see that as of the time of this writing in January 2020, in the UK, Boris Johnson has triumphantly delivered on his long-time pledge to "sweep out the Marxist cabal". His government should now go on and completely finish it off. Their initiative to stop forcing UK citizens to pay for the left-wing BBC (through TV licence fees) is a good first step.
  • Individual freedom and strict restriction of the government's scope to a bare minimum is good. Big government is bad.
  • Nation-state is the single sane, lasting unit of political organization. National identity and national sovereignty are important (although clearly not sufficient) constituents of individual freedom.
  • Different nations were born with different degrees of love or rejection of individual freedom. This is a major determinant of the trajectory of the political and societal processes in any given country. This may be far from self-evident, but I will try to make a case for this belief later on.

Progressivism, Conservatism, Liberalism, Libertarianism


I think it's a good starting point for me to formalize the understanding of these key ideologies, as so much political and social battle and discourse revolves around them currently in the free world and the countries that aspire to be part of the free world. As the next step, I want to understand where I stand in this spectrum.

As I started my exploration, I fairly quickly concluded that the idea of progressivism is alien to me and that I find the current progressive movement, for example, in the USA, outright revolting. I tend to regard human condition as something independent of historical and social contexts, almost metaphysical. Therefore, the progressive belief that advancements in science, technology, economic development and social organization can fundamentally alter (improve) human condition, is very suspicious for me. Also, going beyond pure ideas and looking at the contingent of Marxists (Sanders, AOC, et al), who are also considered to be progressives, I'm completely put off. So, writing off progressivism has been an easy intellectual and moral exercise. I found R.J. Pestritto's brief overview of American progressivism and his follow-up article on the same topic very helpful.

Navigating among the remaining three belief systems, Conservatism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, has proven significantly more challenging. Luckily, Jonathan Haidt came to help. I came across his talk, which presented me with a solid framework for starting to build my understanding of the distinction between conservatism and liberalism from first principles - moral foundations.

Heidt starts by asserting that the human being's morality is not a blank slate upon birth but rather, one is born with a "first draft" of moral mind which is malleable and can be altered to a certain extent through life experiences. In this assertion, he refers to researchers such as Steven Pinker and Gary Marcus. Heidt then cites his own research which spanned various cultures and was meant to establish common patterns of this "first draft" moral mind. He claims he and his fellow researchers found five common "moral foundations":

  1. Harm / care - I understand this has to do with the sense of compassion and care
  2. Fairness / reciprocity - "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
  3. Ingroup / loyalty - the degree to which one values one's beloning and loyalto to a group and to what extent to which one may be prepared to compromise on on other moral considerations for the sake of such belonging and loyalty.
  4. Authority / respect - the degree of recognition of and respect to authority; I don't think this necessarily also means excessive deference and obedience to such.
  5. Purity / sanctity - the degree of beleif of attaining virtue by controlling body.

Heidt and his colleagues carried out surveys which reveals where liberals and conservatives are positioned on the above five "channels" of morality. The following pattern is for the US but Heidt has demonstrated through the relevant surveys that similar pattern holds in Canada, Latin America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, etc.

5 channels of morality US
I took the same survey, which you can see at this link and selecte Moral Foundations Questionnaire from the list. My results are below. It shows that I diverge from liberals greatly on 4 out of the 5 moral foundations. At the same time, I diverge from conservatives and appear to be aligned with liberals in terms of disregard for "purity". It has been enlightening for me to see these results, as it makes clearer for me where I stand in the spectrum and provides a frame of reference for further self-understanding.
My survey results

Ipsum



Christian theology

Theologians, Thinkers

Alister McGrath's work is amazing both for introductory and in-depth study of Christian Theology.

Books, writings & other media


The Constitution of Liberty

This allusion to Hayek

Conservatism

Thinkers

Organizations, websites

Books, writings & other media

Art