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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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The right wants to preserve and the left wants to improve. At least, that's the high level framework that I and I think a lot of other people were taught. There is clearly something to this, but it is equally clear that it isn't the whole picture. In particular, there is no room in this paradigm for an important third category that, while an exotic species in most of our political culture, is quite common in this particular discursive wildlife preserve: the reactionary. Just like progressives on the left, reactionaries don't just want to preserve the existing culture, they want to improve it. The keep difference is that rather than innovation, they want to roll things back to the way they were.

Reactionaries are of the right. No only do they oppose Progress, they actively want to roll it back! Since the long arc of history bending towards justice (or Cthulhu swimming left) is linear, anyone wanting to roll things back must stand in opposition to Progress. This expansion of the basic left-right paradigm is pretty well understood by the people who have become, in their own conception, regime-aware, and by their ideological enemies interested enough to notice. (Marxists have long railed against reactionaries, but my sense is that they just call anyone opposed to the eternal science of dialectical materialism a reactionary be they a conservative or a reactionary proper).

This was my view until recently, when I listened to the recent Political Orphanage podcast with Guy Standing as a guest. Guy Standing very much reads as a man of the left, but all his ideas are callbacks to medieval institutions. I think this is most clear in his view of the commons, but his latest book about labor (that great old saw of the Classic Left) is still a callback to roll things back to the past.

Once I realized that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary, a category that I had previously not thought possible, I realized that large chunks of the left are reactionary in nature. One good example can be seen in the tension between the Marxists and the Bakuninite SRs in the Russion underground leading up to the Russian revolution. Marxists are all about Progress, to a degree that hardly anyone dares to envision these days, but by understanding of Russian anarchism at the time was that it was all about the traditional Russian peasant village. It's true that they wanted to throw of the Tsarist yoke, but the fundamental institution they wanted to center life around was ancient. They wanted to roll things back to before city states really got going.

I think there is also a strong strain of left-reaction in environmentalists. The core of environmentalism is about rolling back processes that everyone conceived of as progress when they got started (how do Marxists feel about industrialization?). Environmentalism is about rolling things back to a simpler and purer time.

We also see left-reaction in the fetishization of indigenous peoples. When people go on about listening to indigenous ways of knowing, they are talking about returning to an ancient epistemological framework, actively rolling back Progress. This also helps explain why Anglos in Britain don't count as indigenous to these people. What's to return to?

I know it's not exactly a novel observation that the linear political spectrum fails to capture important nuance, but this has really driven home to me the idea that what counts as left or right is mostly about vibes and historical coalitions. We can still anchor of Burke as being on the right, but everything else is up for grabs. Liberals are the original leftists, but by this point they straddle the center, with some on the right and some on the left. Because Progress must always march on, no one set of ideas can ever be guaranteed to be on the left, though originality seems like it helps a lot. Patriarchy has reigned though most of history, so feminism seems light it ought to have been pretty well dug in on the left, only now Progress calls for the reinforcement of gender roles and radfems are in coalition with social conservatives. Nothing matters, it's all just vibes, coalition building, and branding.

One big caveat to this is that it doesn't seem like you necessarily get to choose the branding for your own ideas. Your left-right branding is assigned to you by the zeitgeist, and there is some real connection to the historical left and right.

It's also the case that, at least for now, I think this mostly applies to mapping out the range of possible political position space. There are not that many mainstream right-reactionary positions. The biggest and most effective I can think of is originalism, and arguable the pro-life movement is another, but for the most part, the right that is allowed in the Overton window is one big rearguard action. In practice, if someone is trying to change things, they are still usually attempting Progress.

"Progress" is very much not a linear spectrum. It is more like a tree of decisions which society navigates. Was the criminalization of drugs progress? Is their decriminalization progress? Who should get locked up for which sex acts? How do we balance fundamental rights against each other? In what ways should developing countries become more like Western societies? Should the US intervene to prevent atrocities or not? How do we balance rights between children/youths and their parents? Should adults be required to wear seat belts? Fossil fuels drove the engine that abolished serfdom, industrialization seems a requirement for any non-terrible society. How do we balance that against not exacerbating climate change? How much should we care about biodiversity?

Of course, there are some big milestones of progress which can be put in something like a linear order. Slavery bad. State discrimination by gender or skin color bad. Rape bad (even when in marriage). Locking up adults for consensual sex acts generally bad (but views differ in case of prostitution). Hurting kids bad (in most cases). Hurting non-human animals bad.

But this is not something you can fit a straight line through and extrapolate: "In 2200, people will think we were monsters because we killed plants" does not sound right.

I mostly agree. Progress is only linear in retrospect and in the minds of the people pushing for it. There is not actually some great moral lodestar that history inevitably pushes us closer to, what counts as progress is mostly about what the powerful say it is. As you point out it is not possible to provide a total ordering of policies according to progress, but I do think that the general direction of progress is fairly clear from within any given political reference frame (except those reference frames that don't even have the notion).

I would not say that the Left is reactionary or conservative, it is more that it accepts certain broadly French liberal thinking as described by Rousseau, specifically in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men, where he claimed that a man in his natural state was free and that society enslaves him. That is the core idea behind leftist concept of liberation - to return to this mythical state of things where hierarchies were supposedly flat and there was material equality - but in modern society. I will just add that all these assumptions regarding noble savage is proven as unscientific, but nevertheless it is still at the core of even modern leftism. So much for science. Marx added the dialectical process behind it and added concepts such as alienation. For him what makes human is his ability to produce his own vision, not to work for anybody else such as capitalists. In his analysis of stages of history the very first stage is called primitive communism, the later stages are just a historical process until the true communism is achieved - again something like primitive communism but inside modern industrial society.

So I would not necessarily say that leftism is reactionary or that they want to return to some actual scientifically grounded previous state of history. Rather leftists created an idea of their utopia, and put it into historical and materialistic context - either in the past or in the future or both - which gives this ideology veneer of science and evidence. But it is as imaginary, false and spiritual as any religious thinking, my closest comparison would be something like Scientology which talks about extraterrestrial alien race called Xenu and tries to marry materialism with spiritualism.

For a decade, people on the left have called me a fascist because I believe people can be better, learn more, accomplish anything. To me, that path is straight forward: Learn the systems which govern the world and make good decisions. If you want to read, learn how the alphabet works, if you want to maintain industrial society, learn economics, physics and chemistry, then keep supply lines up. And yet, people who believe in progress believe phonics is bad, that children should spontaneously understand how to read...

There are some leftist progressives: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0i4ZETgfNuM or the 17th century levers, but it tends towards a negative correlation, sadly.

really driven home to me the idea that what counts as left or right is mostly about vibes and historical coalitions

Even less than that, really. Even people who agree entirely with each other and work for the same political program tend to be there by inertia, understanding different things etc. (unless they are so thoroughly indoctrinated to stop thinking.)

Conserve and progress are meaningless without starting and (intended) end positions, details about methodologies and purpose. You can desire to progress entropy, or progress matter's longevity etc. etc. What aspects do the conservatives want to progress, which do they ignore? Which do the "liberals" want to ignore and which seek they to progress? What if I want to progress the nuclear family into a multigenerational thing, is that reactionary, progressive or?

There are some leftist progressives: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0i4ZETgfNuM

I don't know how sincere this is. I guess it being made in 1990 makes it possibly sincere. But I can't help but point to it's spiritual follow-up.

I just meant the Communist space narrative; I like the song, but assumed it was quite modern.

Well I do think that fascists are right-progressives in the same way that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary. They were all about building a better and more efficient society. They thought their system would triumph by virtue of transcending the squabbling that held democracies back. The Nazi vision is definitely one of Progress, even if it is an alien and twisted sort of Progress. The Japanese thought they were ushering in a new and better age for Asia (or at least that's what their propaganda said).

There were elements of reaction, like the Italian dream of a neo-Roman empire or the German dusting off of old folk religions, but I think that was mostly in service of creating a newly invigorated national spirit.

The fact that left-Progressives usually try to do things that will actively made the world worse is somewhat beside the point in my view. They think their policies will make the world better, and they want to do so by innovating in how society is arranged. Maybe it wasn't obvious in my original post, but I intended there to be a note of irony in the way I was capitalizing Progress.

I don't think these people are genuine reactionaries because genuine reaction doesn't consist in activism. It consists in being reactionary. De Maistre had a saying about this- something like la contre-revolucion est le contraire de la revolucion n'est pas la revolucion contraire(I am aware my French sounds like illiterate drunken ebonics to a European and I'm covering the meaning, not googling it to copy-paste).

Lefty de-growth advocates are mostly not the opposite of the revolution. Like maybe a hippy commune growing organic vegetables is, but the apartment dweller who does lots of yoga and worries constantly sure isn't. To be a reactionary consists first in living according to older mores, not first in pushing for change.

Defining reaction that way would seem to produce some pretty strange results. It would mean that none of the prominent writers and internet microcelebrities one normally thinks of as reactionary get any credit for their writing or public persona (they may be reactionary in their private lives, but Moldbug's writings wouldn't count one way or another). You would also have to conclude that lots of people with progressive liberal politics are more reactionary than certain conservatives (90% of Boston Brahmans would count as more reactionary than Milo Yanopolis). This is also the first time I've heard this requirement put forward for being a reactionary. To be honest it seems like it is the result of cope. Reaction is so far out of the Overton window that its proponents know they can never make headway, and saying, "a real reaction just goes his own Sigma Male way instead of trying to make change in the world," is a good way to feel better about it. It also rhymes with all the "politics is personal" stuff you get from progressives, which is pretty interesting (though I'm not quite sure what relevance it has to the position, just something I noticed).

Well yes, the essence of counter-revolution is to live the opposite of the revolution and to spread itself by living it. It's not to provide flowery justifications for it. I don't think of moldbug or milo as particularly reactionary, right wing though they might- my grandpa worrying about how my generation is screwed 'because there's going to be too many blacks to deal with' is an actual racial reactionary, not Steve Sailor talking about 13/52.

And the self described reactionary DR doesn't seem to have much contact with these people. There are communities- and I belong to more than one of them- where right of the American overton window ideas are the norm. Keyword- communities. Le contraire de la revolucion is not an individualist sigma grindset, whatever that means. It's a community, and communities triumph by growing.

Would I like the bible to be the most important book in our public school curricula, the repeal of the 19th amendment and women's lib, and criminalization of homosexuality? Yes. But that in isolation doesn't make me a reactionary. Reaction is a totalizing identity and without commitment to the bit it's just a revolution from the right. Maybe something fascist adjacent, if anyone could ever define that word.

If that was how most people thought of the term, we would hear the Amish and Mennonites and Hasidim laid out as the primary examples of reaction in our society, but we don't. Instead reactionary writers are much more likely to be referred to as reactionary. I think you have a way of using the term which doesn't match up with how everyone else uses it. If you want a term for what you are talking about, I think "trad" fits much better.

Anabaptists and ultra-orthodox Jews aren’t reacting to anything, they’re just like that.

The most relevant group of reactionaries in the modern US are evangelical Christians, who are in fact reacting to secular society by living according to the values it conflicts with. That’s not to say they’re necessarily doing a great job, but they’re a much better example of a reactionary than someone like Moldbug or some other long winded writer.

Good post. I think you're right. The left/right cannot be split cleanly on the axis of progress vs. conservation.

So how do we split them?

I think that the right represents master morality and the left slave morality. The right is the masculine Yang principle who believes "good things are good" and celebrates victors. The left is the feminine Yin who subverts the Yang and gives comfort to the vanquished. The right is Caesar. The left is Christ.

And of course, neither right nor left is "correct", only correct in certain contexts.

We spurn ideological classification and 6D compasses and instead accept that politics is about alliances long before it is about ideology.

The right is quite literally those who caucus with other right wingers, while the left is those who caucus with the left.

"Which evil would you pick, commies or fascists?" is the dividing line.

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