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advancedatheist comments on "NRx" vs. "Prog" Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (340)
I find Neoreaction interesting for several reasons. One, it has roots in the beginnings of Western philosophy, which makes it hard to dismiss as a novelty and fad for geeks who live in their parents' basements and read too much fantasy growing up. Plato and Aristotle differed on the details, but they both agreed that human nature finds its fulfillment in extended families (a condition of undiversity, in other words) who live in small city-states where the population sorts itself into local organic hierarchies and the natural, patriarchal aristocracy that emerges gets to run things.
This puts the modern liberal-progressive intelligentsia in an awkward spot, because educated leftists have to admit that Plato and Aristotle founded Western philosophy. If Plato and Aristotle anticipated today's Neoreactionaries, well, you can't exactly call Neoreaction an unhistorical, ungrounded, fringe view, can you?
Two, I've read a few books lately about the Enlightenment (if you have the attention span, try Jonathan Israel's), which doesn't make me an expert by any means. But I get the impression that the so-called radical branch of the Enlightenment, which historians can trace to a specific social network in 18th Century France, and centered around the Baron d'Holbach and his friend Denis Diderot, acted really recklessly by confounding their critique of traditional religion with their critique of traditional society.
Specifically, we can't observe our tribe's supernaturals, as anthropologists call them, despite what those foolish "ghost hunting" shows on cable claim. So the Radical Enlighteners, whom the French called the philosophes, had a good empirical case to make against traditional christian beliefs.
But we can observe human behavior in the here and now, just like we can observe rocks, the weather, plants, celestial objects and other phenomena we can form sciences regarding. Apparently it never occurred to the philosophes that social beliefs about natural hierarchies, inequality, tribalism, the need to restrain women's sexual freedom and so forth might have arisen from good but nonobvious empiricism. Instead they thought they could throw everything out and start over based on the non sequitur that if they couldn't rationally justify an old practice, it must have arisen from superstition. After running this experiment for over 200 years and seeing the growing, deferred costs from all of this jettisoning of evolved social controls, I find it plausible that the philosophes made some major mistakes.
Unless I haven't found where to look yet, the literature on this period seems to lack good expositions which lay out the case in defense of the traditional social system that the philosophes mocked and rejected. Jonathan Israel references now obscure books written by the philosophes' contemporaries which respond to the Enlightenment's propaganda with anti-philosophie, but because these men, mostly Catholic clergymen and theologians, allegedly lost the historical argument to the philosophes, lots of luck finding accessible versions of that literature now, and in English translation.
And three, lately I've thought a lot about the implications of living much longer than current human norms. (Contra what some transhumanist apparently believe, "living forever" doesn't mean "living to 2045.") Three hundred years seems conceptually tractable, so when I read about life in the 18th Century, I try to get a sense of how that world led to ours. Most transhumanists I know assume that the social ideology of the Enlightenment has gotten locked in as a permanent feature of the human condition; but I wouldn't assume anything of the sort. It wouldn't surprise me to see the restoration of some aspects of premodern society in the coming centuries, combined with the science-fictiony stuff that many LessWrongers tend to like. And we find this idea well articulated in the last century's science fiction, especially in Frank Herbert's Dune. If you don't mind linking to an Alt-Right website, look up Richard Spencer's Radix Journal website and listen to his podcast on Herbert's novel and the film adaptations, titled "Archeo-Futurist Messiah."
Your comment has brought up a possibility that had never occurred to me before: perhaps one of the weaknesses of the anti-philosophes is that they felt obliged to defend their particular brand of traditionalism (Christian traditionalism) and therefore didn't have the cognizance to give the best general defense for traditionalism as such. Basically, the Enlightenment thinkers got to strawman traditionalism as Christian traditionalism, whereas in the least convenient possible world they would have had to argue against the 18th century equivalents of our neoreactionaries—which, even if you don't totally buy into their arguments, you have to at least admit that they would have made for more formidable intellectual opponents than...a Church that was shot through with a recent history of internal divisions (Protestant Reformation, religious wars) and corruption (selling of indulgences, corrupt popes, etc.).
I'm not sure what "unhistorical" is supposed to mean, here, but you can definitely call it ungrounded and fringe. Fringe is obvious; look around at political philosophers of all stripes, and find as many Neoreactionaries as you can; it will be at most a tiny fraction of the population. Which is exactly what is meant by 'fringe view'.
In terms of claiming ancient views as demonstrating solid grounding for a belief: people long ago believed many things which we know now to be wrong and baseless (given adequate data). Plato and Aristotle themselves inherited from predecessors like Zeno, Thales, and Anaximenes, who all believed things we now know are indisputably wrong. (The paradoxes of impossibility of motion, everything being composed of forms of water, and everything being composed of air, respectively.)
The grounds that Plato and Aristotle had to believe those positions were that their society looked approximately like that, and, to their (probably biased) eyes, looked like it was doing much better than anyone else around. If we look around now, we don't see any society that has that form, and those historical societies that did didn't do well in the long term. The grounding has been lost, and claiming 'this used to be well-grounded' as grounding now doesn't obtain.
SF writers might perhaps just like feudalism because it's...yknow, colourful.
Feudalism has a lot of advantages in sf. It's familiar, but it's not what we're doing at the moment. Because it's familiar, the titles and such have emotional resonance. Most of us feel superior to it, but many of us are still kind of fond of it. And it's simpler than democracy, or at least can be presented as simpler, and it has fewer boring details.
Logically, societies with larger populations will be more complex, especially if they're dependent on complex infrastructure, but that's a lot of weight for fiction to carry.
Feudalism had a lot of boring details about rights and privileges
A different case could be made that Plato was the first progressive, i.e., in The Republic he attempted to design an ideal society from scratch based on the premise that the elites must continuously lie to the population.
What's progressive about that?
You need to read Moldbugg to find out what Progressives think. Querying your own mind won't work because PROGRESSIVES LIE TO THEMSELVES!!!
This should be an acceptable hypothesis to the LW population. c.f. "I'm considering getting my facial expressions analysed, so I'll know what I'm thinking".
Jokes aside, I think that's a great idea. I've often wished to have extra eyes and ears on my hands, in addition to the ones on my head, so I can perceive more things, in particular about myself.
Two behaviorists are having sex. When they are done, one of them turns to the other and says "well, that was good for you, how was it for me?"
Moldbug is a high verbal demagogue. He's not actually interested in truth-seeking (for instance by engaging with critics). He's too cool for critics. The problem with the mini-cults that this type of demagogue establishes is that occasionally they grow up and kill a lot of people.
I advocate a "conciseness/clarity" status marker for smarts, not obscurantism or demagoguery.
Um, do you even know what the word "demagogue" means?
Real argument is when you use "data." Real truth-seeking is when you engage with your critics. Real communication is when you try to be concise and clear. Does Moldbug do any of this? He tries to be persuasive, but not by any of these means.
Your attempt to be persuasive so far consisted of a status attack. Is that a trick you learned from Moldbug? Moldbug said of Scott Alexander:
"Again, the constant embarrassment of life in Pontus is that you wish for better critics than you have. I really ought to give this thing [anti-reactionary FAQ] the thorough reaming it deserves. But in general, it's not bad enough to be funny and not good enough to be interesting. I'm a busy guy and my motivation does flag."
Content-free status attack.
This post has served its purpose and is not needed any more.
Done, thanks.
The core of neoreaction is a different value system. There is no truth in values, so I'm not sure what kind of truth-seeking do you have in mind.
Voted up because even though this is outrageous if meant seriously, it's a very succinct statement of the point of view.
Idea from a very valuable essay-- the specific content is just ordinary good, but the idea that people generally believe everyone else is deluded is worth hanging on to.
Well, you should be sure to look at the failure of the Greek City-States (even before being conquered, several of them essentially tried to form empires) and the failure of traditional monarchies throughout the 19th century as pretty strong empirical evidence against them.
I wouldn't say that the world we live in is the progressive vision; more of a neoliberal one (which is roughly classical liberal + large hegemonic institutions [note the contradictions]). However, it's certainly not like the 18th century.
Republic of Venice is of interest.
Could you clarify what you mean?
We look to both negative and positive examples of what we want for information on how to obtain it. In this case we want positive examples of civilizations providing stability and meeting human needs well. Stability is a key parameter which is why we spend so much time looking at long lived civilizations. The Republic of Venice is notable for being extremely long lived, and relatively neglected by people studying history/using historical examples to support political theories. I agree that traditional monarchies don't have a very good base rate of success BTW.