Hitler ate sugar
I am not arguing that everything backward-looking is bad because Hitler was bad. (Though, actually, most of us would do well to eat less sugar.)
For that matter, in this thread I haven't been arguing even that Nazism is bad, though as it happens I'm not a fan. Merely observing that there's a considerable overlap between the backward-looking things neoreactionaries advocate and the backward-looking things the Nazis were keen on.
And, as it happens, I am quite comfortable saying that in many respects "nearly everyone before the 19th century" had views and attitudes that I dislike and disapprove of; if I make a list of Things I Dislike About Nazism and it turns out that they're mostly also things I dislike about the fifteenth century, my conclusion will be "so much the worse for the fifteenth century". I already know I wouldn't want to live there; I already know that "nearly everyone" in the past was wrong about huge swathes of how-the-world-works stuff that we've discovered since; why should I be discomfited to find their values also meeting with my disapproval?
(One possible reason: "That would imply that almost everyone until recently was a Bad Person, but that lots of people now are not Bad People, which would mean a bigger faster change in human nature than is plausible." But people's values aren't in fact mere manifestations of their genes, they also come from the surrounding society, and societies can change quickly. It could be that most people would be (what I would consider) Bad if brought up in one society and (what I would consider) Not So Bad if brought up in a different one.)
it makes no sense to consider political philosophies and societies as extrinsic to our model.
My apologies for being dim, but I'm not sure what it is you think I'm doing that I shouldn't. What model am I treating what as extrinsic to?
My apologies for being dim, but I'm not sure what it is you think I'm doing that I shouldn't. What model am I treating what as extrinsic to?
You may want to look at how this thread started.
Here's my op-ed that uses long-term orientation, probabilistic thinking, numeracy, consider the alternative, reaching our actual goals, avoiding intuitive emotional reactions and attention bias, and other rationality techniques to suggest more rational responses to the Paris attacks and the ISIS threat. It's published in the Sunday edition of The Plain Dealer, a major newspaper (16th in the US). This is part of my broader project, Intentional Insights, of conveying rational thinking, including about politics, to a broad audience to raise the sanity waterline.