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Being eaten by wolves. Having your head bashed in by a rival war party. Pretty much any given day in the life of a pre-modern man. On feast days Russian peasants used to get drunk and beat each other senseless for fun, and then go home and beat their wives. This is just "words are violence" but right-wing.
Actually none of what you describes strikes me as a fraction as unpleasant as the life of the average person a few centuries ago, which is probably why humanity collectively abandoned that lifestyle as soon as it was materially feasible. "A job you hate" is not fun but it's probably more fun than starving to death because there was a bad frost and the crops all died.
As for "everything slowly but surely getting worse in every regard" idk what specifically you have in mind but most right-wing complaints about everything getting worse are just tautological complaints that everything is getting less right-wing which naturally isn't convincing to anyone who doesn't already buy into all right-wing premises.
It hasn't. Cyclical theories of history were always bullshit, though they may have been facially plausible in 1800 . Humanity is in entirely uncharted territory. The past offers no lessons, because it actually is different this time. Modern people aren't 16th century peasants. They aren't even 20th century proletarians.
All of the "weak men strong times" stuff, the idea that the stultifying atmosphere of modernity will ultimately lead to some great revolt for the restoration of meaning, virtue, whatever, none of it has any contact with reality. Angsting about meaning is itself a luxury available to the excessively wealthy, as everyone is in modern developed countries by western standards. Approximately nobody is going to forsake material comfort to embark on some great vitalist crusade, because material comfort is what most people actually care about first and foremost. Even people who are "struggling" today live like kings compared to the average person 100 years ago, let alone 200.
It would take a total collapse of industrial civilization to produce the global warlordism that you dream of, and that's possible, though I don't think it's very likely.
I don't even know what "we can totally be post-industrial and back to virility and violence" would actually even look like in practice. Like a based fascist party takes over the US tomorrow and then, what, invades Mexico for fun? Resurrects gladiatorial combat? Nukes China?
I remember when right-wing twitter personality Alaric the Barbarian made a post about how young men need GREATNESS and ADVENTURE and should not settle for the drudgery of living in suburban Indianopolis and someone reasonably said yeah posting photos of Greek statues and larping as a Germanic warlord is cool and everything but what actually are you concretely suggesting people do and he replied uhhh run for dogcatcher.
Not to get deeply entangled in this discussion, but I suppose the steelman to IGI is that the material improvements that we live under are far from permanent, and could well disappear before we realize it, and suddenly we find ourselves back to the brutal state of affairs known to the past.
Consider Mad Max, a media franchise that remains fairly popular today despite the original film being more obviously inspired by the Oil Crisis (a temporary shock that helped spur us into changing our ways), and the sequel defining the post-apocalypse tropes that made it so influential, despite it coming out at a time when the Oil Crisis was likely abating, if not already ended.
The Curse of Plenty, the thing that gives rise to the narrative of "good times create weak men," is a trope we see in fiction and in real life. We go from rags to riches and back again, just as ancient religions had ways of saying that we come from nothing and eventually return to nothing.
I do personally feel that we had a peak of "goodness" in recent decades that may well have been an anomaly, and that the "dreamtime"/whalefall (to borrow from Scott) is well coming to an end. We can only hope that things don't snap and break apart once all the slack is gone.
Well I don't disagree with that proposition. Does anybody? What is supposed to be drawn from that? Yes if we were reduced to the material level of the 15th century we would probably live similarily to 15th century people. But so what? What is the use of pointing out such a banal fact?
Perhaps to point out that we don't actually have that much logistical distance from the 15th Century? Our technology and our logistics support each other in an interlocking balance, and certain things cannot be sustained without other things.
ETA: That being said, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to answer where I think we'd end up in the event of a global collapse, I think our tech level might be dropped down to possibly 18th-century levels, assuming that electricity somehow becomes unreliable or scarce alongside fossil fuel.
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And there are places where they mostly disappeared, for one reason or another.
And actually we are not so far away from crucial infrastructure being disrupted (one way or another - regulations, armed sabotage, outright war) and ending with no cheap electronics, power shortage, major famine.
To take extreme but possible example - nuclear war will not kill everyone (far from it) but would wreak things for survivors. Full scale exchange would have death toll in billions and would decisively disrupt pretty much anything.
Serious pandemics are possible and after COVID it seems clear that more lethal pathogen would be a massive problem.
And so on.
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You undervalue the past. True, we stand on untrodden ground. Never before has even this conversation across who knows how many miles been possible, for one. And yet, I do not think it is utterly uninformative. The world will not repeat itself, but you may see some pattern here or there crop up again.
I think you also undervalue whatever is not material comfort and progress. Our social relations make up a huge portion of our lives, and that is not so unambiguously better. Further, it is just not the case that everyone, everywhere, at all times, really cares only about material comfort. Your tacit assumption as much is, I think, part of our milieu. The continued existence and growth of the Amish are a living monument, I think, that people do not all value a comfortable life.
What would a society that cared about these sorts of things (social goods) do? Encourage marriage and children. Encourage general integration with society, especially in person. To the extent possible, reduce welfare and dependency. Reduce profligacy; promote austerity, at least in regard to economic activity devoted to comfort. As to government action, reduce spending, especially on welfare; seriously consider taking an economic hit to start to work on the debt. Make people responsible for things, instead of hiding it behind bureaucracies. Ideally somehow figure out how to stop being so wasteful in military spending, while also being more prepared to handle powerful actors. Actually put a stop to the Houthis messing up global shipping.
I think your final paragraph, from a brief glance, might have misunderstood what he is doing. He seemed less to be setting out an ideal of "this is the life to which we must retvrn" so much as saying that the right does not encourage certain sorts of ambition enough, and so large classes of society have been ceded to the left. This is correct, and has been noted by left-leaning commentators. He prescribes not settling.
That said, you have a point—no one really has a vision of what things should be like. I think the desire for some sort of action and striving that you point to and question has something to it—Aristotle was gesturing at something real when he characterized eudaimonia as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue—but it must be to some end, some purpose. This, I think, is where a lot of people see value. In the struggle, in their achievements that they have toiled over and after—that, they can be pleased with. People value being relied upon, necessary, to be making a difference. We are often happier in the breathless pursuit of a thing than in the possession of it. But the solution is not toil for toil's sake, as you rightly seem to gesture at. We do not value pointless work. And there hardly seems to be any terminal value that people are content with. Science fiction, I suppose, will often seek endless exploration of the universe. But why? To what end? Because we couldn't think of anything better to do? What is the chief end of man?
Ecclesiastes is a good book.
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You have no experience of the life of the average person a few centuries ago. You don't even have stories of that life. You have a small, curated selection of those stories provided by a small collection of people, almost all of which likewise had no experience of that life. Biasing that sample for personal or tribal ends provides obvious utility, and it is trivial to observe that such biasing efforts are endemic.
We have actual histories, songs and stories from people a few centuries ago, and even from many centuries ago. They do not demonstrate a life-experience of unending hell-misery, but rather an existence very like our own. Their concerns were similar to ours. Their joy and suffering was similar to ours. Nothing fundamental about human nature or the human experience has changed in any way since at least the invention of writing.
This is largely because "man is a creature than can get used to anything". Even today, Guatemalans are only 0.44 points out of 10 less happy than Americans (yes, you can quibble about the exact measures, but the phenomenon is robust to the choice of measure). I'd sure as hell prefer to live in America than in Guatemala, even though if I lived in Guatemala all my life I probably wouldn't mind it too much.
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An argument which applies equally well to IGI’s catastrophizing. The songs and stories of 50 or 500 years ago were relatable; shouldn’t we expect the same in another 50 or 500?
We should. How is that incompatible with the following?
Compare that to this comment:
The difference seems pretty clear to me.
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The conditions of life in say, tsarist Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries to give one example are pretty well recorded, and they were not vastly changed from those in the 18th or 17th centuries. The vanishing of the traditional agricultural lifestyle is quite recent in historical terms, and it still persists to some extent today in certain countries. So we actually do have a pretty good picture of what pre-industrial life was like.
Naturally, they didn't know anything else. If you lock a kid in the basement from infancy and beat him five times every day of the week and only once on Saturday and Sunday, the weekend is gonna look pretty awesome to him, but most people who weren't raised in a basement wouldn't find being locked in a basement and being beaten once a day on weekends very fun.
You severely underrate how alien these people were. There's pretty good evidence they were practically incapable of abstract thought or logical exercises that would be easy for a small child in the modern United States (this being in reference to the great mass of common people, obviously, not a very small educated elite). You may be familiar with A.M Luria's study of Uzbek peasants as late as the 1920s and 30s as it's made the rounds in rationalist and rationalist adjacent circles. This was not because of any genetic inferiority, but because their world was so founded in the immediate and concrete that a basic "if A then B" syllogism was beyond their grasp. They were also shockingly violent. Besides their regular wanton cruelty to animals for practical reasons as well as for amusement, they were basically always ready to fight and kill each other over the mildest of slights. Sicilian immigrants to the US as late as the 20s, coming from one of the most backwards and least industrialized regions in Europe, had an astronomical murder rate because stabbing somebody in the throat for cheating at cards or hitting on your sister was just totally normal to them.
Yes, our ancestors were "like us" insofar as they loved their friends and families, liked to tell and hear stories, enjoyed food and sex, and feared death, but that's a pretty sparse overlap in my opinion. Outside of a tiny handful of intellectuals and philosophers, you probably wouldn't be able to hold any kind of real or meaningful conversation with a 16th century German even if you could speak his language perfectly, and you wouldn't want to anyway because he might crush your skull.
I am, but would appreciate either elaboration or a link to what you consider the strongest version of the Luria argument. I remember it being profoundly unconvincing, but I'd like to read it again to be sure I'm not missing something. Specifically, I understand the general form of the "if A then B" that was supposedly beyond them, but I'd like some detail on exactly what consequences you expect to derive from this claim, such that you think the absence of this ability would make their thought alien to me. How were they actually different in their lived experience, in their life choices, in how they acted and what they did?
None of these features seem alien in any way. Widespread examples of all of these characteristics are available in the modern world, and in America even, not to mention many other examples of behavior I find equally deplorable or abhorrent in many other varieties. None of this is even close to as alien as, say, the Apache or Comanche, and I would not describe them as bizarrely alien.
To be a bit more specific, they were "like us" in that they had exactly the same vices and virtues as we have, in roughly equal proportions; only the detail of how these were expressed culturally seems to differ. Further, they had most of the same major life experiences, and those we do not share have close analogues. I see no way to couch this as "a sparse overlap". I can read their stories and immediately grok the ideas behind them, and find them familiar to me. I'm pretty sure they had bullying, crushes, sweethearts, rivals, hated enemies, ambition, jealousy, deceit... I am confident they had people essentially like me, and people essentially like you, in short.
I would love to do so. And I do not particularly doubt that I would be able to do so. As for crushing my skull, I suppose you are doubling down on the incomprehensibly violent nature of the 16th century German peasantry; the "astronomical murder rate", the stabbings, the honor killings and so on. Truly, how could anyone communicate with such alien savages?
Well, here's the first graph result for the search "murder rate 16th century germany".
By the 1600s, the Germans are down to around 10 murders per 100,000, and the dread Italians are around 35. At that point, the 1600s Guido Menace would have moderately less violent that American blacks in the 2000s, and moderately more violent than those same blacks in the 2010s. I'd guess the Vile Huns were somewhere roughly in the ballpark of Appalachian whites from the same era. American blacks, in any case, are likewise not entirely unfamiliar with domestic violence, or indeed with animal cruelty for sport. And they're like this in the modern world with all the blessings of modernity, not least of which is a system of truly remarkable trauma medicine to turn 1600s murders into mere 2000s woundings. I used to work with a lot of underclass Blacks in an underclass job. Was I likewise underestimating how "deeply alien" my black coworkers were, or are these feelings of alienation reserved only for the distant past?
The disparity between your claims and the immediately-available evidence is confusing to me, to the point that I worry I'm reading the charts wrong. Is there something I'm missing here?
In any case, humans do heinous shit, always have and always will. None of this is new, or indeed old and forgotten, but rather simply is. None of it is incomprehensible. I imagine German or Italian peasants would be horrified by a description of American abortion practices, or OnlyFans, or Pride Parades, or indeed any number of our other modern abominations, but in fact none of that is new in its fundamental essence either.
Nice hat... strikes again (the 'first graph result' link is borked)
thanks. replaced it with another source of the same chart, should be working now.
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I don't really know what I'd call the strongest version of the argument, as I don't think Luria really was making an argument (well he was, but the argument was that socialist development was raising the mental level of the peasantry which is not really interesting) so much as just collecting data. But in any case here's a summary of the research. Here is Russell T. Warne describing a study in Africa which showed the same phenomenon.
That's a matter of taste. I would find it extremely frustrating and yes, alien, to hold a conversation with someone who was incapable of entertaining a hypothetical.
Killing somebody over a card game or killing a cat for fun are pretty alien to me. If someone did either of these things I would stay far away from them and consider them dangerous and anti-social, as would everybody else I know. Some people do do these things even today in the modern USA and they are generally considered to be acting in an extremely aberrant and objectionable way.
I would. The Comanche used to teach their children how to torture prisoners of war to death. That is bizarrely alien to my experience and I think it probably is to yours as well.
That's burying the lede pretty hard. The details of how base emotions, most of which are shared even by non-human animals, are expressed, are very important.
Wild animals above the level of insects have all these too. Maybe not jealousy.
You're the only one using the word "savage." They were different from us, which doesn't necessarily make them worse or better. I'm not even passing judgment. I wouldn't wanna live like they did, but that's just my personal preference, being as much a product of my environment as they were.
Compared to Germany's rate of 1 per 100,000 today, I would call that shockingly high.
I can't speak to that specifically, but yes there are pockets of life in modern society which are extremely alien to me. I have also interacted fairly extensively with "underclass" people, or at least people from a different social class than me, mostly whites and Mexicans (including some who have spent time in prison for violent crimes). Yes I have found their experiences and backgrounds very alien to my own, to the point where it was often difficult to find the common ground necessary for any kind of fruitful conversation. The feeling was mutual, and I imagine it would be even more the case with a 17th century peasant commune.
No doubt.
I live in a modern-ish suburb. My parents come from flatland hillbilly/swampbilly backgrounds with extended family members who have committed what would be felonies(mostly kidnapping) if they happened outside of deep deep rural areas to enforce family honor in the 21st century, seriously expect us to respect their disownments over religious issues, and other such clannish behavior. I'm not underclass but I've lived among them and seen the way they behave.
People underestimate the cultural gaps among a single ethnicity in the same part of the country in a single year, let alone across centuries and continents.
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You're a 21st century aristocrat expounding on the idea that you wouldn't get on with 16th century outlaw bikers. This is not the argument you think it is.
Being a middle class-ish American doesn't make me an aristocrat. And if I am then so is everybody else on this forum.
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Hmm, my grand dad was basically a subsistence farmer, and while it wasn't universally miserable of course, it was certainly a lot more stressful and worrisome than his kids becoming trades people. He had to spend more time tending the farm to get by than he would have in a normal job by a long long way. And that was with fertilizer and a tractor.
The further you go back, the more labor was required to do any basic task. Certainly they still took joy in what they could, but they did so with aching joints and bowed backs.
There is a reason in the rust belt than when you ask many miners do they want their sons to become miners they say no. Because they know it is a crippling, dangerous job. They want to send their kids to college so they can work in an office and not have crippling lung diseases and missing fingers.
In other words we don't have to look back hundreds of years to see that things are better now. We can see it in one or two generations back. Or you can go to see subsistence farmers in China. Humans haven't changed, but the amount of work and danger it takes to live is significantly less than it was. Technology has made material differences to people.
Now perhaps there is an argument we waste that saved time and energy in frivolous ways. But we have it to waste. They might not have had unending hell-misery, but they certainly had more hell misery in a very material way than almost any modern Westerner.
By the end of his life, my grandad in his 60's couldn't walk, was blind in one eye and the massive strong hands that could pull a calf from a cow or wrangle a sheep were gnarled and twisted with arthritis. He was in constant pain. He refused to let his kids take over the farm, because he wanted better for them. His kids are older than he was when he died and they are all much healthier than he was at the end. The human experience really has changed. Our bodies can only take a certain amount of wear, and certainly many technologies since writing have reduced the amount of wear we need to put them through.
Just because lives weren't unending hell misery and that people made do with what they could, does not mean that the very real and material benefits of human endeavour have not improved the human experience.
And we do so with mental illness, narcotics abuse, depression and loneliness. They were happy in different ways and miserable in different ways, but I'm not convinced they were actually fundamentally more miserable than we are in any meaningful sense, or happier either for that matter. Which is better: to lose some of your children, or to never have children at all? The former seems much superior to me, and claims to the contrary seem naïve.
I'm pretty sure those miners thought that their sons could have all the good things of their own life and none of the bad things, with the idea being that the bad things wouldn't simply be replaced by other bad things. But it seems to me that, in fact, they were. Less aching joints and bowed backs. More meth zombies and fentanyl corpses, suicide, mental illness, deep alienation and so on. I am not convinced that the former outweighs the latter.
Life has obviously changed in many ways. There are fewer of old bad things, and more of new bad things. There are likewise fewer of old good things, and more of new good things. Your argument is that there's more units of good and fewer units of bad on net, and if that's your honest impression, fair enough, but it is certainly not mine. I've had a lot of changes in my own life, and a considerable amount of both pain and joy; I note that the sources of both were generally things that were not in any meaningful sense novel. The ways I've been miserable were ways that were, in all essential particulars, available to people five thousand years ago, and likewise for the ways I've found joy. Is it truly different for you?
While fent and meth were nonexistent in that era, suicide, mental illness, deep alienation, and so on were not. Nor was alcoholism, which wrecks you perhaps somewhat slower than fent or meth, but just as well.
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I would suggrst the main difference is that 5000 years ago, you had no choice but to endure the bad things. You couldn't avoid that your life and work and having kids was dangerous. They were inescapable. Today many people can still have the good, having kids and the like, but don't become fentanyl addicts or require mental health care..Many. many millions of people fall into the bracket and have the old joys, less of the old miseries and not much of the new.
Now at least we have that option. You've never taken joy in a truly great book, or video game or movie? Or learned some new thing about the world? Not only would those not exist 5000 years ago, you would not have had the time to enjoy them compared to today.
It seems to me that we have greatly expanded the access of good things, reduced the number of bad things..and yes we have created more bad things, but if my choice is being crippled or having to deal with the ennui of a pointless office job. One of those is worse than the other. And one can be fixed by switching jobs, or homesteading or becoming a lumberjack or whatever. You can do that and still benefit from the good things about modernity.
Thats the key diffetence to me. You can have kids and most of them won't die, nor is your wife at much risk in labour. You can live in a small close knit community. The old joys still exist. And you can not indulge in drugs, you can still worship your God or gods, you can still tell stories around a fire in the woods. Or take your kids fishing.You can just do it with a full belly instead of empty, where your life does not depend on it.
What joys of old have we truly lost? You right now can choose to do anything your forebears did. You just have a lot more options as well. You can farm, and find other like minded people. You can opt out of almost all of modern society if you wish and in varying degrees. Thats why today is better. You have that choice. 5000 years ago you did not have the option of choosing modern devices and medical care and knowledge. Today you can buy some land and a horse and choose your level of advancement. Amish? Or Mennonite? Kacyzynki or Musk? You can choose to have your family live without a washing machine or an oven or a TV. You can choose to be a farmer or to hunt for food, or pick up road kill. All of these things are possible right now today.
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Because you have a solely material understanding of what is good. This is the only charge against the Enlightenment that sticks, and yes it sticks just as well when Marx says it than when Evola says it. The life created by the unrestrained mercantile impulse is inhuman and torrents of blood have already been unleashed to tamper its excesses or realize its promises. All in vain so far.
If you refuse to see the problem and desire to place you head in the sand of "our system is the best to the exclusion of all others" I have nothing to say to you. Conservatism of this sort is the ideology of the damned. Change is an eternal constant that will sweep such views as it has any others.
This is a specious argument. Morality is necessarily partial.
I can give descriptive accounts of many things, but they don't cross the is-ought gap. And any crossing is going to engender such partiality. Good that it does, because that is how we can recognize good from evil.
When Ted complains that the world is crushing the freedom and actualization of the individual, you can decide to call this right wing and oppose this slander of the industrial system because it's not fair on abstract power structures. I choose to recognize that it is true and should inform the conduct of moral men who interact with industrial society, because I'm constitutionally biased in favor of individual human welfare and I think people who aren't so biased are morally deficient.
We can still discuss descriptivisms of course.
I'm still waiting on serious refutations of Spengler, Sorokin, Glubb or Toynbee. Hell, I'm waiting on anybody to even attempt refuting Vico with any real arguments.
All that the literature shows is sneers, sweeping under the rug of political convenience and displeasure at the reality of historical patterns in the favor of a biased form of relativism that changes its favor with the winds of power. Hard hitting philosophical criticism I have not come by yet.
Vico is right. And people who dismiss his insight are behaving like creationists who cling to specific dismissals, attempt to refute specifics individually without considering the whole or grasp at epistemological traps to refuse to acknowledge the plain truth because the big picture shatters their own personal intuitions. When they don't just lie that is.
All Empires collapse. All Empires think they are eternal. You are not special.
I disagree, mainly because you are taking my words too literally and envisioning warlordism in a sense that you would historically recognize. Much like the people who are waiting in vain for a civil war complete with banners and uniforms will remain in wait forever. Things are not this way anymore. And yet they are eternally the same.
But even if we are to take such literal interpretation, it doesn't necessitate at all collapse of civilization. Not by a longshot. And you'd know this if you had lived in politically unstable countries as I have.
Lybia has electricity right now. It also has (marginal) slavery and no monopoly on violence. What would collapse in more violent circumstances is the current order of power. Institutions at large needn't be as radically affected as you seem to think.
Why shouldn't I? I don't believe honor, glory, virtue, or tradition exist as real transcendentals beyond the human mind, and I place no value on them. They are only fictions whose persistence is simply because they produce a pleasant (and ultimately, physiological and material) sensation in the bodies of those who cling to them, and because they are useful tools to organize society in a way that also produces pleasant (and again, physiological and material) sensations in those same people. This isn't really an argument against liking those fictions, there's no rational argument why someone shouldn't, but there's no rational argument why someone should either, unless they already do. I believe the same thing about fictions from the opposite side of the aisle like freedom, democracy, equality, and tolerance, but you probably agree with me on that.
I don't think Marx ever made that charge.
Inhuman meaning what? "The life" by which I imagine you mean the general state of society over the past several centuries was certainly created by humans, what exactly makes it inhuman? Is it just a personal distaste for it?
I oppose it because I think talk of freedom and actualization is mostly gobbledygook, like the aforementioned honor and equality and tolerance and glory. What Kaczynski is saying when you strip it all away is just "I don't like industrial society because it makes me upset" which is fine, but it doesn't make me upset, so we've reached an impasse, because I can't imagine any argument which would cause me to privilege what makes Ted Ted Kaczynski upset/not upset over what makes me upset/not upset.
Well I've never read Vico and didn't know who he was before you told me. The "Course of Nations" section of The New Science on internet archive is only about fifty pages; can I get away with reading that or do I have to read the whole thing? What specific insights did he have that have yet to be disproven?
Sure. But that's not the only perspective, and it doesn't have a serious claim to universalism or consensus.
I disagree. And I think this part of the modernist position robs people of something important that is an inherent part of the human condition. I don't really think we can convince each other on that point.
Marx's specific criticism of capital is that it blew up the old ways of being without placing any guardrails on Greed and immiserated the lower classes by turning them from peasants with a manner of dignity into the miserable cogs of the capitalist machine. His will is explicitly to craft a religious weapon to realize the promises of the liberal bourgeoisie against their will.
Communism does not see itself as reactionary because it embraces Hegelian dialectics, but it is originally and specifically motivated by the failures of the Enlightenment to realize the idealized vision of modernity that would liberate all.
Read Rousseau and then read Marx. It is clear as water.
Read the Autonomy and Surrogate Activities sections of ISAIF and you'll get a precise idea what I mean. Man wasn't meant for email jobs. To cater to your materialism I would say that man is not adapted to such things because they are too recent. Memetic evolution has outpaced biological evolution by too much and created too much tension in its vessel.
I do not take the suffering of humanity for millennia to adapt to the specific needs of society to be a reasonable course of action. Tradition holds that society should conform to us and our nature in its design. The precise opposite of progress politics which is always looking to create New Man.
Well then there is very little for us to agree on. I can't really convince you of a visceral feeling. Explaining freedom and actualization is like explaining a joke or an artistic experience, it's only ever indirect unless you've felt it.
Build a table from scratch until you get a result you like, and then tell me that the feeling you are getting isn't real and what really matters is what's in the spreadsheets with a straight face. I personally regard that faith in numbers and quantity to be the absurd superstition.
it would be best if you could read some of the scholarship around him, but ultimately if you draw out various theories of cyclical history (including the authors I've listed and others) you get overlaps that all fit into Vico's theory, which I would say is the most complete one. He doesn't go into some of the specifics other authors do (such as how collapse happen, or who founds civilizations or others minutiae), but his own broad theory is the matrix of all cyclical histories hence, and it is all very solidly supported by further scholarship on the topic. And unlike with Spengler, you don't need to read tomes of German poetic prose to get to the point. Italians really are underappreciated in their philosophical clarity.
I'm not sure his style will appeal to your materialist biases however, Sorokin's Social and Cultural Dynamics or other modernist instances of the idea may be more your speed.
Once upon a time, a man lived in a valley between two cliffs. The valley was carved by the river that flowed in that place for millenia. So taken was he by the beauty and glory of what nature wrought that he set off to carve another such pair of cliffs and dig another valley.
"You fool," said his fellow villagers, "you absolute buffoon. You can't replicate nature. Even if our entire village moved to the spot you picked and toiled for generations, it would take centuries to approximate it, and then, without the river there to keep carving the path, the cliffs would collapse and undo all our hubris anyway."
A few millenia later, another man in an entirely unrelated place invented dynamite.
A very modernist tale. It has all the features of that metanarrative. Ayn Rand, Thomas More or Karl Marx could have written this, and in a way they did.
I am, as a westerner, obligated to hold dear this Faustian impulse to reach for the infinite at any cost. But as with any impulse it becomes insane when it goes too far.
The XXth century should be informative enough to those who do not fear looking at it as to the limits of Faustianism. When you seek to change your own nature to perfect it and put yourself in the place of God, all you reap is horror. This is why Faustian civilization is only stable when it is under the dominion of its own religion in Christianity incidentally, because it nails down some sense of humility into western man.
Kill God, and as Nietzche prophetized, you will bathe in the blood of millions.
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I think this is mostly accurate but the main thing that separates Marx from the reactionaries is that he believed that fundamentally the liberal bourgeois revolutions and the transformation of the peasantry into industrial proletarians was ultimately a good thing.
What I believe Kaczynski misses here is that the humans of industrial society are not the humans of pre-industrial society. Even if we assume a pre-industrial hunter gatherer would give an "8" if asked "how fulfilled are you?" and a modern office worker would give a "5," that doesn't mean the office worker would report an "8" if made to live the life of the hunter gatherer.
I also don't buy that humanity at large is "suffering." In some ways, sure, but this suffering is not particularly greater than the suffering has ever been. How would this would even be measured in theory?
Spreadsheets are not enjoyable and there are other things I find enjoyable like reading, exercise, or wasting time on the internet. If you want to call that actualization you can, but there's nothing special or essential about this feeling. Probably some people do like spreadsheets. "People have to do unpleasant tasks" is not a unique flaw of modernity. I think I would feel much less actualized if I was an illiterate farmer who never got to read an interesting book in his life. The oppression of nature is not preferable to the oppression of industry and the modern state; it's much worse.
I don't really consider myself a strict materialist. There are obviously some immaterial entities that exist like numbers or logical laws and maybe even more, which is why I don't even consider myself an atheist, but I don't see any reason to include human ideological constructs like the ones I've mentioned in that category.
Notably, traditionalists mostly believe these revolutions, though massive tragedies, to also have been inevitable.
This is where linear and cyclical time meet. Change is the constant and all regimes are transitory. Hegel things we are synthesizing the perfect regime through these transitions, Calvin that we are descending to the depths of sin until redemption, and Aristotle that we are just playing out endless seasons.
Change is a good thing. It is good that winter follows autumn or summer would never happen. But winter is still harsh and terrible.
I don't think you can make a convincing argument that this is true. Evolution on the genetic level is not that fast, and we can see in all the pathologies of modern life precisely the maladies of people who have crafted en environment they are not suited to both psychologically and physiologically. This is what Ted denounces, that we made our bed of autism and tooth decay and are decided to invent and sell solutions to the problems we created that only make us less adapted to our environment. And Land may be right that really we are terraforming Earth for something else. But that something else is not humanity.
I don't like that. I think we can have technology without this problem. And that the way to do this is to reembrace what we have always done to moderate the excesses that have led us here and embrace a wholesome view of our nature.
I couldn't disagree more. You may as well say there is nothing special or essential about the feeling you get when you are interacting with a great piece of art.
So you are a Kantian of sorts. What is then your stance on Natural Law?
This is a common critique ("We are creating problems which we then have to solve") but I don't really see what the issue with that is. What's wrong with creating new problems and then solving them with new methods?
I doubt it. I think Marx was right at least that culture and society are largely a reflection of underlying material conditions. The customs and morals that developed in a pastoral society 3000 years ago cannot be freely transplanted onto the 21st century. If they could, it would not last very long. And I doubt there are new moral systems that could be developed to significantly ameliorate the problems of modernity. The only salvation is to hope humanity can technologize itself out of the novel problems it's created for itself by earlier technologizing, and I don't see any problem with that.
Well, I agree with that too. I don't think there's anything qualitatively different between the enjoyment a person gets from watching Marvel slop #28493 and beholding the Reims Cathedral. And I say that as someone who doesn't like Marvel movies and would probably prefer visiting the Reims Cathedral.
I'm vaguely familiar with both the Lockean kind and the Aristotlean kind from readings in college and a few Catholic apologist books, but I don't recall being convinced by the idea that metaphysical rights or duties of any sort exist.
That it is impossible to live without the solutions in the world we have created, and that these solutions require an Empire to maintain, which means we are addicted to structures of control.
There are specific examples of technologies that do not have this problem and empower the individual instead of enslaving him to large organizations. Which of the "two kinds of technology" we decide to pursue is a choice.
Have you ever asked yourself seriously why you prefer one over the other instead of assuming without inquiry that they are equivalent?
How familiar are you with Kant and the categorical imperative?
I still don't see an issue with this. Controlling nature and human behavior are good things.
What are some good technologies and bad technologies, in your view?
In other cases my personal feeling goes the other way. A lot of right-wingers think people only pretend to like modern art for clout but I am an unironic modern art enjoyer. I think this is much cooler and more pleasant to look at that anything Da Vinci, or Caravaggio ever produced.
I know the wikipedia definition.
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I can understand being wary of technological solutions because they might cement an inhuman, soulless Empire forever and ever. But you don't believe in forever Empires, so why not give it a go? Worst case scenario, the Empire falls and we retvrn back to the way humans should be. And if there are skulls and suffering along the way, well, there's always been suffering and people were fine. At least that's what I gathered of your view.
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Except that every civilization that has fallen in the past believed exactly that about themselves. The Romans believed themselves civilized and different from the barbarians of the past and those current barbarians around them. The Greeks thought the same of themselves, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Turks, etc. if you’d have walked the streets of any of those cities, they would have been pretty sophisticated and full of well educated people with a good bit of division of labor, lavish entertainment systems, good roads and communication systems. We can do what they did with muscle power by using machines. We have electricity and computer and robots — which we use to do what the Romans did with slaves.
And I think honestly that no civilization, even one a million times more advanced than we are today is exempt from history. History doesn’t stop, and a civilization that ignores reality long enough will find itself again facing the iron laws of physics and mathematics and biological realities. And this is the fundamental problem that civilizations face— eventually you build up a system that doesn’t work when pushed up against reality.
The ancients had a pretty fatalistic view of history. They tended to view themselves as degraded versions of their ancestors, hence the stories of bygone golden ages. The idea of eternal progress is largely a Christian one. Furthermore the life of the average Roman was closer to the life of an Egyptian 1000 years earlier or a medieval 1000 years later than any of them are to the life of the average US citizen in 2024. It really is different this time.
Obviously modern civilization will not last forever, just because nothing does, whether it degrades into something resembling a past state or advances into something else. But that doesn't really make the fate of the Romans or the Turks instructive.
It is?
It's not unique to Christianity, but the Western form of linear history which seized the minds of Whigs and the like definitely sees its origins in Christian metaphysical views of time contained between Genesis and Judgement Day.
Though interestingly, in the mind of Christians that linear progression was very much not eternal or infinite, this world will exist for a finite amount of time until His return. The advent of secularism didn't destroy these metaphysics but judgement got replaced by apotheosis and the awesome power of the machine convinced many they were on a road to a heaven on Earth.
Saint Thomas More was not a Buddhist.
The western form of linear time does not solely see it in such things. If the point is merely the linearity (as opposed to cyclicality) of time, you see that in the sentence immediately prior to that I quoted before. If the point is that it's linear with a good ending, well, that is a little better of a match, but Christianity is decidedly unclear about whether things will be getting better or not prior to the return of Christ. On the other hand, you can see a sort of enlightenment-style linearity in Aeschylus' Oresteia, several hundred years before the coming of Christ, where the cyclical vengeance of the furies is tamed and put an end to by the enlightened and civilized gods of Athens.
Of course, I don't imagine Aeschylus was the direct precursor of modern progress—I think that's probably closer to being a result of technological growth and advances in scientific knowledge giving people the often accurate sense that they knew more and could do more than all who came before them.
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