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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.
You're not alone in that, turns out some italian right wingers did as well and adapted Metzinger's style specifically. It's not really a right vs left thing.
But you're dodging the question, why do you like it? Aesthetics is specifically informative to this conversation.
Personally I see good art as a reflection and exploration of the human condition. So I'm not surprised that you would find art that explores your relationship to technology as more impactful when you live in a technological society. But what that exploration tells us is the whole question.
Pick up that can.
I disagree on the same grounds as Burroughs.
Let me answer with Ted's words here:
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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.
Nothing is important. Everything matters.
Gnon looks down upon those that leave fate to decide for them. Reason is part of our nature, we have to use it to the best of our abilities if we want to make the best of things. That still means whatever we build will not last, but falling to nihilism because you are not eternal is a moral fault. Humility is not renouncement.
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