= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Azathoth123 comments on "NRx" vs. "Prog" Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1) - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (340)
Thinking about it, one way to describe the difference between Progressives and NRx is how much they trust human reason versus other optimization processes.
Progressives tend to elevate human reason above all else. Notice how Yvain's reaction to Moloch is to flinch in horror and attempt to defeat it by the power of human reason.
NRx (and reactionaries and conservatives) believe that Gnon is frequently better than human reason. Notice that Nyan's reaction is attempt to capture Gnon by analyzing it. Notice also that of the four components of Gnon, the one neoreactionaries most distrust, Cthulhu, is the one that relies on human reason alone for its ability to optimize for truth.
A problem I'm seeing with that view (which may be a good summary of NRx, I'm not sure), is that modern societies have broken tradition. Trying to a modern society resemble a traditional society will be just another example of imposing top-down theory.
Gnon, the forces of nature, can't be a substitute for reason. Gnon doesn't tell you what to do. Gnon just kills you if you get it wrong. NRxs can't use reason to infer gnons wishes, because that's what progs do. (Its the progs who want to placate Gnon for putting too much CO2 into His atmosphere). NRxs can't use Burkean wisdom-of-the-ages, because of rapid technological change. Perhaps you need a special priesthood to interpret Gnon wishes. That was popular in the past.
Hence why Nyan talks of capturing Gnon, not worshiping him.
Maybe LW progressives do. In general, isn't it libertarians who tend to be the coldly calculating ones?
Libertarians trust the free market, what Nyan called Mammon, over the reasoning abilities of individual humans. At least that's the traditional libertarian position.
When libertarians started focusing on non-economic issues and de-emphasizing the importance of the free market, the group that would become neoreaction broke with them.
Compared to neoreaction, libertarianism and liberalism are virtually twins, as children of the Enlightenment.
I've heard it said that neoreaction is libertarianism meeting reality. This seems paradoxical, but under certain monarchys the state actually was smaller and interfered with people's lives less.
Well, that's the Moldbug's explanation for his evolution from libertarianism to neoreaction.
Got a link on hand? (I don't disbelieve you, I was wondering how he worded it.)
This is his explanation at its most explicit:
www.unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey.html
As I understand their position, Neoreactionaries view the classical liberalism which evolved into modern libertarianism as just an earlier stage of leftism. Advocates of classical liberalism made the case for breaking down traditional, hierarchical societies into collections of atomistic individuals who interact mainly through the market, and not through traditional social relationships like that between a serf and his feudal lord. Socialists came along later to push this idea to its reductio ad absurdum by promoting the idea of complete human fungibility.
Ironically, while the socialist view of "equality" treats humans like commodities, in their private lives I notice that progressives in the U.S. like eating differentiated foods produced locally and organically, and sold in farmers' markets. Apparently they feel that they have the right to Notice differences in the characteristics of the organisms which go into the foods they eat that they deny in their interactions with members of their own species.
This fails to distinguish British from French liberalism, as usual. Burke and, later, Chesterton were able to make the distinction between the defense of individual rights and the notion that society could be rewritten into utopia through the application of the reason of clever statesmen and the obedience of the masses to their ideology.
For a current (and perhaps less bloody) analogy to the French Revolution, see Munroe.
Burke and Chesterton also based their notion of liberty on British traditions. The problem is that modern liberalism is a lot closer to the utopian French than the traditionalist British approach.
Oddly enough, it proceeds more like the traditional British approach (polemic, lawsuits, and the occasional street protest) and less like the utopian French approach (mass beheadings of defeated leaders; storming of prisons; literal backstabbing of opposing faction members).
But the way they decide on their goals is a lot closer to the French method.
The American Civil War being a dramatic exception. (They deserved it!)
Yvain does believe in reason but if you look at contemporary left thought do you think it elevates human reason above all else?
I said human reason not human rationality. (And maybe even "reason" wasn't the right work.) A lot of contemporary progressivism is a theme park version of this position, namely the alief that one can change oneself and reality through sheer force of will.
Who do you mean with "contemporary progressivism"? Libertarians? A lot of people on the left don't think that the poor can change themselves through force of will and therefore need help from the government.
No, but they believe that the poor can be changed through force of will, or by using the latest progressive educational theories or the latest anti-poverty initiative (never mind that the previous ~100 progressive education theories or anti-poverty initiatives didn't accomplish anything and arguably make things worse).
Oh for fucks sake, The world can be, has been, and continuously is made better by political action and policy. This is obvious because the west exists. . There is many, many ways to govern badly, but that does not mean good governance does not exist.
Obvious current events example: Police brutality can be addressed by building life-logs into police uniforms. This has been established by pilot programs with results way, way past the .05 sigma treshhold, and this will become common policy very shortly because the arguments against are just bloody well embarrassing in a world where minimum wage cashiers have to put up with being recorded on the job.
Far to many people confuse cynicism and pessimism with understanding. Is there a name for that fallacy?
Firstly, that's a technological solution not a political one. Also it's interesting that the example of "police brutality" currently in the headlines consists of a police officer shooting a black thug who had just robbed a convenience store and was charging the officer and grabbing for his pistol when he was shot.
To put it mildly, what led up to the shooting is disputed. It would be good to have a visual record rather than deductions.
That it would, but the distinction between political and technological solutions can't be ignored within the context of neoreaction, which says that technological advances have masked political decline.
Also, comparable past experiences have to be taken into account here. Benjamin Crump, the Brown family's lawyer, was also the lawyer for Trayvon Martin's family -- and he was involved with the media narrative around the Marco McMillian case. The McMillian case (gay black mayoral candidate got murdered) was a hilarious misfire since the real murderer (who was black and probably gay) had already been caught and had already confessed when media outlets started declaring it a probable hate crime, but the Martin case was a lot like the Brown case, and the entire narrative turned out to be false. That's not a promising record.
Which is the point - The pilot programs are recording rather mind-boggling decreases in the number of complaints against the police. It's of course unknowable which fraction of that is "bullshit complaints becoming impossible" and which "Police who are on camera behave better" but it doesn't matter. As a social and political problem, it goes away. That should have positive long term social impacts, especially in neighborhoods where the police are currently little trusted, but that is speculative. The direct effect is certain. And will spread. As other very-high efficiency social/political innovations have before.
Thats how it works - Most social reforms proposed don't do anything and never get off the ground or are repealed. The ones that do become a part of the background of existence. Like having a police force to begin with. Labor laws preventing employers from taking absurd risks with the health and lives of their employees, wages that do more than just barely keep body and soul together and so on and so forth.
Virtually all political solutions have an aspect of technology to them. The doctors in a single-payer health care system don't heal via the laying on of hands and prayer. It doesn't mean making use of that technology in a particular way is not a political decision.
What do you mean? The technology to do that already exist and has existed for a while; the reasons why we aren't doing that yet are political AFAICT.
That's in a first-world country; there presumably are places in the world where worse examples of police brutality are so common that they don't even make it into the headlines.
The poor have been changed. They have gone from 0% literacy to 90%+ literacy.
Interestingly that happened before progressives started seriously meddling in education.
I think that's very far from removed from the current political discourse. When looking at an issue such as black people getting payed less, then the modern leftist doesn't think about how to change black people.
He thinks about how to change society in a way so that black people are payed more by passing anti-discrimination laws and instituting quotas.
The whole notion that the black person is to be changed just isn't there.
In other words they want to fix things by a combination of force of will and legislative fiat. While pretending that the underlying cause, racial differences in ability, doesn't exist.
It's still a very different philosophy than the one you spoke about above. When you treat all kind of different philosophies the as being the same you can't meaningful talk about them.