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skeptical_lurker 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)
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!)