I was going to do a post about this essay, but you beat me to it! I agree with most of the other posters here in thinking that Scott fell off significantly after his doxxing and especially after his abandonment of the SlateStarCodex brand; however, it swells my heart to see that he still has the occasional total banger left in him.
When I started getting interested in right-wing/anti-liberal political ideas, it was largely due to my major disillusionment from the progressive mainstream around a handful of issues: race, policing, the gross excesses of feminism, the humorless sanctimony, and the general sense of ugly resentment and spirit of destructive envy I was witnessing.
As I got deeper down the right-wing online rabbit hole, it was only natural to start developing sympathies and framings regarding various other hobbyhorses considered important by the commentators to whom I was constantly exposed; while some of those sympathies stuck and I still endorse them, others are sufficiently divorced from (or even directly at odds with) the reasons I got into this scene in the first place that I’ve had to consciously resist the pressure to toe the line on those issues: pro-Confederate sympathies; rural populist aesthetics and a focus on the issues most salient to downscale heartland whites; hardline anti-abortion sentiments, etc. These are not things that were remotely salient to me initially, and I have no direct skin in any of those games. But when all of the commentary one imbibes about those topics comes from the same catastrophizing perspective, it’s easy to find oneself subconsciously adopting the priorities of others within one’s coalition.
For example, during the recent kerfuffle about the Olympic opening ceremony, I saw the deluge of posts about how it mocked The Last Supper before I even watched the ceremony itself, so I was already primed to be hyper-aware of that interpretation and to be offended/scandalized by the scene in question. I even briefly thought, “You know, this is the kind of thing that makes you sort of believe in demonic forces.” It wasn’t until I really took a step back, sought out some alternate interpretations of the situation, and reflected on what my younger self would have believed, that I had to remind myself, “Wait a minute… I’m not even a Christian. Why would it bother me so much that they’re parodying a centuries-old painting depicting a scene from the life of a man whose central message and ethos I don’t believe in or care about? How have I absorbed the superstitions of people with whom I don’t even agree?”
As the online right continues to polarize and coalesce around two warring poles - Christian theocrats and Nietzchean Vitalists - I find myself increasingly alienated from both factions. I do think the extreme slave morality Nietzche criticizes in Christianity is just plainly present at every level of both the textual basis for the faith and in the behavior and values of the early church and the various saints and martyrs it venerated. The fact that over the course of the next thousand and a half years Christian culture sanded off the most unwieldy and counter-productive aspects of the religion doesn’t change the fact that such a substrate exists within the religion; hence why movements have periodically emerged within Christian and post-Christian societies which have sought to take seriously, and enact in reality, the slave morality core of the faith.
However, Scott is correct that the Vitalists are simply a repellent lot with mostly execrable values. Glorifying pirates and barbarian warlords is just a total moral and spiritual dead end. If you sympathize more with the Viking savages who looted Lindisfarne Abbey than you do with the monks whom they massacred, I don’t think you and I are on the same team. I have no desire to live amongst Nietzchean übermenschen, nor to compete with them, nor to be ruled by them. Achilles is not an admirable man, and I don’t want my children to be like him when they grow up.
It brings me joy to see Scott defend the ideology that brought us the World’s Fair and the moonshot. When I read writers like Dave Greene indict the Enlightenment - and to attempt to establish this stance as a non-negotiable element of what it means to be “truly right-wing”, I have to wonder why I’m still wasting my time taking some of these people seriously at all. The Enlightenment did not, in fact, inherently contain the seeds of its own inevitable destruction. Like Christianity, the Enlightenment has meant many different things to many different people, and had contained many competing strains with mutually-incompatible goals. The men who organized the World’s Fair were, at least nominally, Christian; however, there’s a very good reason why they so gleefully incorporated so much explicitly Hellenistic/Greco-Roman imagery as well. (A syncretic synthesis of Hellenism and pseudo-Christianity, shaving off all of the obsolete cruft, dangerous extremes, and degenerate strains of both traditions describes the strain of the Enlightenment I’d like to RETVRN to.)
And of course the greatest project of the Progressive era - the great unrealized dream, the one whose untimely abandonment and subsequent repudiation by every extant political coalition in the Western world - could still be the one that truly rescues humanity and wholly redeems the Enlightenment: I’m talking, of course, about eugenics. Any right-winger who hates and fears eugenics is no ally of mine. Nor, though, is any right-winger who idolizes the rapacious animal morality of the warlord and the mafioso - the sacker of cities and the enemy of peace. One day we will have Hellenistic-inspired Art Deco megacities on other planets, and it will be thanks to the Promethean spirit of industry and science, directed toward the glorification of humanity - not to the self-fulfilling doomsaying of the collapsitarian online right, nor to the pathologically weakness-worshiping left, nor to the amoral scumbags of the Walt Right.
Why would it bother me so much that they’re parodying a centuries-old painting depicting a scene from the life of a man whose central message and ethos I don’t believe in or care about? How have I absorbed the superstitions of people with whom I don’t even agree?
"I shouldn't assist in the defense of those people who aren't 100% on my team" has been a popular philosophy throughout history. Usually briefly.
We call the tactic that exploits that philosophy "Divide and Conquer", but if you drill down into the details it's amazing how many instances could have been better described as "Watch Them Divide Themselves, and Conquer".
The trouble is identifying when a group is N% on your team and choosing a reasonable threshold of N, of course. There are groups of Christians who would shun you socially and economically for your differences if they had enough power (at which point their most zealous kids would start pushing the Overton Window back into "arrest the blasphemer" territory), and there are diametrically opposed groups of Christians who would literally turn the other cheek if you hit them (which sounds like a friendly group of neighbors to have, until you realize they won't assist in your forceful defense when a threat starts hitting you), but there are still other groups of Christians who can actually play Tit For Tat correctly when it's called for. At one point the third group was so numerous as to be able to build modern civilization; it might be reasonable to decry the mockery of any who remain, for old times' sake, even if you can't find reason to decry it on general principles.
the extreme slave morality Nietzche criticizes in Christianity is just plainly present
Do elucidate, because it seems like at least one of the following is true:
People making this criticism just have moral intuitions that I find alien and abhorrent.
People criticizing what they call "slave morality" can't keep track of what the thing they are trying to criticize even is.
People claiming that Christianity exemplifies "slave morality" have a ludicrous caricature of Christianity in their head, and hate that rather than the real thing.
I'd previously assumed that it was just a matter of (1), but from Scott's post and some of the commentary on it I suspect that the others are at play here.
Christianity praises (and frequently venerates as Saints) radical ascetics (even if they don't do anything, and just hold out their asceticism as an example to others, like the Stylites), passive victims of persecution (Crusaders who die in battle are not considered martyrs, randos picked up in Roman persecutions of Christians are), and people who make great sacrifices in order to support ineffective charity (like Mother Theresa). From a vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers.
Christianity doesn't condemn Will to Power per se, but it tends to reserve its strongest condemnation for the vices which are correlated with it like pride, avarice, and wrath.
I think the core Nietzschean claim that Christianity embodies slave morality is obviously correct. Given the problems with societies that tell every man (or even just every aristocrat) he ought to be a master, I don't see why this is a problem. Even if we take on master morality religion at its own game, the military conflict between Christian civilisation and Islamic "civilisation" had been back-and-forth with no sign of an ultimate winner for over 1000 years by the time we invented the machine gun and settled the issue.
If the only thesis here is that Christianity has different values than pagan warrior types, this is indeed obvious and not a penetrating insight. In that case I have no idea why any of this is worth discussing at all, and the language about "master morality" and "slave morality" is nothing more than vacuous rhetorical dressing invented out of sophistry and a dislike of the Christian values. Maybe that's what it is; I don't have a very high opinion of Nietzsche or his sycophants.
On the other hand, all the talk of "slave morality" being based on resentment and cutting down tall poppies and exalting incapacity to do things seems to suggest some additional substance to the characterization; the problem is that this additional substance does not describe Christianity at all! If you read what people actually said about ascetics, you will find that they are frequently described as disciplined athletes (this is literally what the word means), or as fighting battles against demons; they are lauded not for sitting around doing nothing, but for successfully pursuing explicit, positive values; the physical deprivations of the ascetic are not ends to themselves, nor suffered because they must be, but are deliberately and with great difficulty enacted in service of spiritual goals. And similarly the martyrs are held up as examples not for their bad luck in becoming victims, but for their willingness to endure torture or death rather than give up and renounce their faith. "From a Vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers" is just another way of saying that they have radically different values; it's not a point in favor of the Christian values being different in the way that is being claimed.
If the only thesis here is that Christianity has different values than pagan warrior types, this is indeed obvious and not a penetrating insight. In that case I have no idea why any of this is worth discussing at all, and the language about "master morality" and "slave morality" is nothing more than vacuous rhetorical dressing invented out of sophistry and a dislike of the Christian values. Maybe that's what it is; I don't have a very high opinion of Nietzsche or his sycophants.
FWIW, I agree with you on this point - Nietzsche (like a lot of right-wing edgelords) found civilisation enervating and was trying to make an emotional appeal for barbarism by using the loaded terms "master morality" and "slave morality". But I read your previous post as arguing that Nietzsche was wrong to tie Christianity to what he calls "slave morality" and I call "civilised behaviour". Whereas I think Nietzsche was right that Jesus killed Superman (or more strictly outcompeted him memetically rendering him irrelevant), but wrong about this being a bad thing.
War is who we are, who we have always been. War is to men what motherhood is to women. You may not like it, you certainly wouldn't enjoy war..but nevertheless your brain would keep telling you 'this is it'.
I don't like violent lunatics, but there's undeniable glory in defeating such.
Vitalism of that type depicted in Homer is v completely obsolete.
Modern war requires entirely different philosophical/moral approaches.
And war is now way too expensive to be anything but a last resort.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No_one 1mo ago
War is to men what motherhood is to women.
The vast majority of soldiers who are able to speak on the issue have said that war is hell. The vast majority of mothers have said the opposite about motherhood.
I think this is partly because modern warfare is a lot less like a fistfight and a lot more like crawling through the landscape for weeks knowing you might die any second. It's also because the anti-war soldiers are very strongly signal-boosted. Everyone has Sassoon and that gas poem shoved down their throat at school, nobody gives you Storm of Steel or George MacDonald Fraser.
A high-ranking officer once told me privately that you have to keep a close lid on soldiers because young men very much enjoy killing things and blowing stuff up and you can lose control of them very easily.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I was going to do a post about this essay, but you beat me to it! I agree with most of the other posters here in thinking that Scott fell off significantly after his doxxing and especially after his abandonment of the SlateStarCodex brand; however, it swells my heart to see that he still has the occasional total banger left in him.
When I started getting interested in right-wing/anti-liberal political ideas, it was largely due to my major disillusionment from the progressive mainstream around a handful of issues: race, policing, the gross excesses of feminism, the humorless sanctimony, and the general sense of ugly resentment and spirit of destructive envy I was witnessing.
As I got deeper down the right-wing online rabbit hole, it was only natural to start developing sympathies and framings regarding various other hobbyhorses considered important by the commentators to whom I was constantly exposed; while some of those sympathies stuck and I still endorse them, others are sufficiently divorced from (or even directly at odds with) the reasons I got into this scene in the first place that I’ve had to consciously resist the pressure to toe the line on those issues: pro-Confederate sympathies; rural populist aesthetics and a focus on the issues most salient to downscale heartland whites; hardline anti-abortion sentiments, etc. These are not things that were remotely salient to me initially, and I have no direct skin in any of those games. But when all of the commentary one imbibes about those topics comes from the same catastrophizing perspective, it’s easy to find oneself subconsciously adopting the priorities of others within one’s coalition.
For example, during the recent kerfuffle about the Olympic opening ceremony, I saw the deluge of posts about how it mocked The Last Supper before I even watched the ceremony itself, so I was already primed to be hyper-aware of that interpretation and to be offended/scandalized by the scene in question. I even briefly thought, “You know, this is the kind of thing that makes you sort of believe in demonic forces.” It wasn’t until I really took a step back, sought out some alternate interpretations of the situation, and reflected on what my younger self would have believed, that I had to remind myself, “Wait a minute… I’m not even a Christian. Why would it bother me so much that they’re parodying a centuries-old painting depicting a scene from the life of a man whose central message and ethos I don’t believe in or care about? How have I absorbed the superstitions of people with whom I don’t even agree?”
As the online right continues to polarize and coalesce around two warring poles - Christian theocrats and Nietzchean Vitalists - I find myself increasingly alienated from both factions. I do think the extreme slave morality Nietzche criticizes in Christianity is just plainly present at every level of both the textual basis for the faith and in the behavior and values of the early church and the various saints and martyrs it venerated. The fact that over the course of the next thousand and a half years Christian culture sanded off the most unwieldy and counter-productive aspects of the religion doesn’t change the fact that such a substrate exists within the religion; hence why movements have periodically emerged within Christian and post-Christian societies which have sought to take seriously, and enact in reality, the slave morality core of the faith.
However, Scott is correct that the Vitalists are simply a repellent lot with mostly execrable values. Glorifying pirates and barbarian warlords is just a total moral and spiritual dead end. If you sympathize more with the Viking savages who looted Lindisfarne Abbey than you do with the monks whom they massacred, I don’t think you and I are on the same team. I have no desire to live amongst Nietzchean übermenschen, nor to compete with them, nor to be ruled by them. Achilles is not an admirable man, and I don’t want my children to be like him when they grow up.
It brings me joy to see Scott defend the ideology that brought us the World’s Fair and the moonshot. When I read writers like Dave Greene indict the Enlightenment - and to attempt to establish this stance as a non-negotiable element of what it means to be “truly right-wing”, I have to wonder why I’m still wasting my time taking some of these people seriously at all. The Enlightenment did not, in fact, inherently contain the seeds of its own inevitable destruction. Like Christianity, the Enlightenment has meant many different things to many different people, and had contained many competing strains with mutually-incompatible goals. The men who organized the World’s Fair were, at least nominally, Christian; however, there’s a very good reason why they so gleefully incorporated so much explicitly Hellenistic/Greco-Roman imagery as well. (A syncretic synthesis of Hellenism and pseudo-Christianity, shaving off all of the obsolete cruft, dangerous extremes, and degenerate strains of both traditions describes the strain of the Enlightenment I’d like to RETVRN to.)
And of course the greatest project of the Progressive era - the great unrealized dream, the one whose untimely abandonment and subsequent repudiation by every extant political coalition in the Western world - could still be the one that truly rescues humanity and wholly redeems the Enlightenment: I’m talking, of course, about eugenics. Any right-winger who hates and fears eugenics is no ally of mine. Nor, though, is any right-winger who idolizes the rapacious animal morality of the warlord and the mafioso - the sacker of cities and the enemy of peace. One day we will have Hellenistic-inspired Art Deco megacities on other planets, and it will be thanks to the Promethean spirit of industry and science, directed toward the glorification of humanity - not to the self-fulfilling doomsaying of the collapsitarian online right, nor to the pathologically weakness-worshiping left, nor to the amoral scumbags of the Walt Right.
"I shouldn't assist in the defense of those people who aren't 100% on my team" has been a popular philosophy throughout history. Usually briefly.
We call the tactic that exploits that philosophy "Divide and Conquer", but if you drill down into the details it's amazing how many instances could have been better described as "Watch Them Divide Themselves, and Conquer".
The trouble is identifying when a group is N% on your team and choosing a reasonable threshold of N, of course. There are groups of Christians who would shun you socially and economically for your differences if they had enough power (at which point their most zealous kids would start pushing the Overton Window back into "arrest the blasphemer" territory), and there are diametrically opposed groups of Christians who would literally turn the other cheek if you hit them (which sounds like a friendly group of neighbors to have, until you realize they won't assist in your forceful defense when a threat starts hitting you), but there are still other groups of Christians who can actually play Tit For Tat correctly when it's called for. At one point the third group was so numerous as to be able to build modern civilization; it might be reasonable to decry the mockery of any who remain, for old times' sake, even if you can't find reason to decry it on general principles.
More options
Context Copy link
Do elucidate, because it seems like at least one of the following is true:
I'd previously assumed that it was just a matter of (1), but from Scott's post and some of the commentary on it I suspect that the others are at play here.
Christianity praises (and frequently venerates as Saints) radical ascetics (even if they don't do anything, and just hold out their asceticism as an example to others, like the Stylites), passive victims of persecution (Crusaders who die in battle are not considered martyrs, randos picked up in Roman persecutions of Christians are), and people who make great sacrifices in order to support ineffective charity (like Mother Theresa). From a vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers.
Christianity doesn't condemn Will to Power per se, but it tends to reserve its strongest condemnation for the vices which are correlated with it like pride, avarice, and wrath.
I think the core Nietzschean claim that Christianity embodies slave morality is obviously correct. Given the problems with societies that tell every man (or even just every aristocrat) he ought to be a master, I don't see why this is a problem. Even if we take on master morality religion at its own game, the military conflict between Christian civilisation and Islamic "civilisation" had been back-and-forth with no sign of an ultimate winner for over 1000 years by the time we invented the machine gun and settled the issue.
If the only thesis here is that Christianity has different values than pagan warrior types, this is indeed obvious and not a penetrating insight. In that case I have no idea why any of this is worth discussing at all, and the language about "master morality" and "slave morality" is nothing more than vacuous rhetorical dressing invented out of sophistry and a dislike of the Christian values. Maybe that's what it is; I don't have a very high opinion of Nietzsche or his sycophants.
On the other hand, all the talk of "slave morality" being based on resentment and cutting down tall poppies and exalting incapacity to do things seems to suggest some additional substance to the characterization; the problem is that this additional substance does not describe Christianity at all! If you read what people actually said about ascetics, you will find that they are frequently described as disciplined athletes (this is literally what the word means), or as fighting battles against demons; they are lauded not for sitting around doing nothing, but for successfully pursuing explicit, positive values; the physical deprivations of the ascetic are not ends to themselves, nor suffered because they must be, but are deliberately and with great difficulty enacted in service of spiritual goals. And similarly the martyrs are held up as examples not for their bad luck in becoming victims, but for their willingness to endure torture or death rather than give up and renounce their faith. "From a Vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers" is just another way of saying that they have radically different values; it's not a point in favor of the Christian values being different in the way that is being claimed.
FWIW, I agree with you on this point - Nietzsche (like a lot of right-wing edgelords) found civilisation enervating and was trying to make an emotional appeal for barbarism by using the loaded terms "master morality" and "slave morality". But I read your previous post as arguing that Nietzsche was wrong to tie Christianity to what he calls "slave morality" and I call "civilised behaviour". Whereas I think Nietzsche was right that Jesus killed Superman (or more strictly outcompeted him memetically rendering him irrelevant), but wrong about this being a bad thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I largely agree.
Points of disagreement: vitalism isn't repellent.
War is who we are, who we have always been. War is to men what motherhood is to women. You may not like it, you certainly wouldn't enjoy war..but nevertheless your brain would keep telling you 'this is it'.
I don't like violent lunatics, but there's undeniable glory in defeating such.
Vitalism of that type depicted in Homer is v completely obsolete.
Modern war requires entirely different philosophical/moral approaches.
And war is now way too expensive to be anything but a last resort.
The vast majority of soldiers who are able to speak on the issue have said that war is hell. The vast majority of mothers have said the opposite about motherhood.
I think this is partly because modern warfare is a lot less like a fistfight and a lot more like crawling through the landscape for weeks knowing you might die any second. It's also because the anti-war soldiers are very strongly signal-boosted. Everyone has Sassoon and that gas poem shoved down their throat at school, nobody gives you Storm of Steel or George MacDonald Fraser.
A high-ranking officer once told me privately that you have to keep a close lid on soldiers because young men very much enjoy killing things and blowing stuff up and you can lose control of them very easily.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link