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One of the tendencies on the Online Right with which I often find myself in conflict is the insistence that good art ought to be didactic. The idea being that the purpose of art is to model and reinforce traditional virtues. Under this framework, of course Martin’s work is degenerate and poisonous: it provides a very persuasive, entertaining critique of the overly simplistic nature of those virtues, as well as the clearly disastrous historical consequences of a single-minded commitment to them. (Particularly, as you note, when those virtues are worn as a skin-suit by powerful men who need thousands of less-powerful men to die horribly on their behalf.) I’ve mentioned before how when I read about something like the Wars of the Roses — a barbaric affair unworthy of a virtuous civilization — I feel the instinctive pull of the liberals (and later Marxists) who grasped the profoundly predatory core which underlay the supposedly chivalrous institutions of feudalism.
I love Lord of the Rings for what it is - an escapist fantasy and an elaborate ersatz mythology for the ancient peoples of Britain - but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world. Its story is contrived to contain purely-evil villains, allowing it to sidestep complicated questions of conflicting virtues and the possibility of non-violent resolution of conflicts. (Tolkien himself would have recognized how little the real war in which he participated — a pointless bloodbath which devoured the lives of the men who served under him — resembled the chivalric heroism which his novels depict.) Personally, I don’t want to have my legs blown off on some foreign shore because the men who have power over me decided that the real world can be modeled as a conflict between blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. I can recognize the so-called Classical Virtues as an interesting thought experiment and as something to aspire to, but when it comes to applying them to the modern globalized world, I think I’d much rather that the powerful people keep in mind the critical voices of writers like Martin.
Using it as tech manual is not going to be effective. But for example some dose of stories about heroism, with part of them about openly fictional one, seems a good part of information diet.
And world built by Tolkien has enough complexity and thought put into it to be useful as a toy model. See for example https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ as a small example of that.
This was also present in books...
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I've heard it said that it offers a surprisingly realistic description of what it's like to be a regular soldier in an extended war. Not the big fantasy battles with Gondor and Rohan, but the endless march of Frodo and Sam. Every day they're cold, hungry, and tired. They very rarely fight, mostly they just try to avoid the enemy. They are of course terrified of the enemy, which has magical powers that could kill them at any moment, but their more immediate concern from day to day is just getting enough food and finding the strength to keep marching. "All Quiet on the Western Front" had a similar feel to it.
and these were also quite good representations (before someone will complain about Nazgûl" morale is actually important in real world).
https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ is the best that ACOUP produced and has quite good analysis of that
I'm also a fan of ACOUP, but I feel like he's talking about something very different there. The siege of gondor is written from the perspective of high-level commanders, with a god's eye view of the battlefield and full intel. Even today, there's very few generals who would have that level of intelligence and control over an active battle. The "fog of war" is very real, and Tolkien would have known that since he was just a regular lieutenant in the trenches leading enlisted men. Admittedly he didn't last there long before getting disabled by trench fever.
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I agree with you but it's not confined to the online right, at least in a different context than literature. Moralism has infected horror movies with fervor lately. All logic and/or narrative is thrown out the window in favor of making sure the point of the movie is stamped onto the screen in big bold letters.
Take "The Substance" there are massive leaps of logic and narrative flaws that abound but, because the movie has a message, it's acceptable and celebrated. It often reminds me of Yud's Universal Fire. "Who cares if it doesn't make sense this story has magic and monsters." Whether it's laziness or a lower bar horror has just become mostly this now. There was a horror movie that I quite liked a few years ago called Relic that essentially just gave up at the end and had a sequence that made no sense so they could spell out what the meaning of the movie was and it almost ruined the entire thing for me because the narrative itself completely collapsed at the very least so they could stamp the message of the movie on the screen for idiots.
I feel bad saying that this is kind of a sexes thing but it kind of is and I don't mean to say that women are bad at making horror movies, they usually make 2/3 of a great horror movie and then the last third is a muddled mess that could probably be saved but because people aren't willing to criticize them about this and the breadth and depth of horror movies sucking beyond this is unimaginable to people who don't follow the genre, then the movies keep spiraling into deeper and deeper into "no plot, only message" until we get something like the Substance where it's filmed and presented like a David Lynch movie except where every single metaphor/motivation/symbolic thing is cudgeled into your brain rather than being mysterious or even hiding the story.
I think it started in earnest with how well the Babadook was received and even though it's a woman writer/director I don't put it on that movie, the fact that the story can be a metaphor is one thing, the problem arises when it's literally the only thing it can be because every other possibility has been burned to the ground with sequences that make no sense. But it's an increasing trend that I hate because it ruins the narrative at least every single time because no one bothers to just weave it into the film they just give up near the end and say, "here's the moral" and then because it's horror most people just clap.
I remember listening to Joss Whedon's commentary on Serenity and through it he kept saying things about the plot to the effect of, "if this were a movie then this bad thing wouldn't happen but it's not a movie." Essentially, the world has to exist in shades of grey and darkness to reflect the reality of the situation, until there is a reflective point and things become black and white, the moral highground is taken and the good guys can win because it is now a "movie." Thinking of this it just made me think of Tarantino's take on how he must write a plot in a meme format compared to that take and him just saying something like, "The plot is this way because it's cool."
I know most people would consider them on par and plebian but the messaging, academics, morals of a piece of art becoming louder than the rest of it just serves to make it worse in my opinion but every time it's done its celebrated and used as a shield in the same way you can't complain about a plot of a fantasy novel because there's dragons, you can't complain about the plot of these movies because it's a metaphor or even a better refrain being that you just don't get it.
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I think honestly there is a lost art of didactic fiction aimed at adult readers. The current fashion of grey morality and grim dark gets a bit tiresome simply because you have so much of it made. Even when a character is supposed to be the hero, he’s almost never earnest about believing anything. It’s all cynical. I don’t think heroes need to be goody-goods all the time, but I want to read about worlds in which people actually believe in being good as possible and trying to do the right thing. They can (and frankly should, at times) fail. They should wonder how to be good, or have to choose between two good or two bad choices.
I don't think it's quite that, at least to me. It's more that there seems to be this strange idea that every work absolutely must have the protagonists - and by extension the reader - suffer losses by having characters the reader cares about suffer or be outright killed. This ends up killing any real optimism and the best you get is "Yay, they mostly won in the end... I guess?" This would be fine if they were skillfully written into the story from the beginning to drive the plot but that of course is rarely the case and instead they end up feeling as if the editor told the author "This is otherwise good, but you need to kill characters A and B near the end". An example that comes to mind is Harry Potter where Fred Weasley's deathin the final battle adds absolutely nothing to the story - besides of course driving home that you, the reader, must be made to lose characters you liked.
Martin's writing doesn't have this problem as it's established already in the first book that anyone can die, most protagonists are more or less villainy and the reader really shouldn't hang onto any of them. It does however need balance from more optimistic stories, only that balance has been lost due to this trend.
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You're right, and that is just a bizarre desire when you think about it. Probably the most right-wing fantasy novel you could ask for, Lord of the Rings, is from an author who explicitly hated allegory and trying to make art into a lesson. It seems like some people need to learn from the good professor about allegory vs applicability.
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I think it's interesting you relate this to chivalry and feudalism given Liberalism and Marxism joined forces on the most destructive war in human history, ostensibly over Danzig, and retconned it to a fantasy between the lines of blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. Not that you agree with the framing, but I question the relation of that behavior to chivalry and feudalism.
Martin's critique of classical virtues fails because he has not and it seems cannot finish the story. So people who find Martin's critique cogent should also realize he was unable to finish the story, likely because he is unable to do so without leaning heavily on the values and archetypes he has deconstructed.
Martin is not saying that classical virtues don't exist. He very obviously believes they do exist. He just doesn't think it's as simple as Lord of the Rings makes it out to be. It's hard to walk in the Shadow to Mount Doom, but it's also extremely hard to make a decision between two things you value and love when they are at odds. It's not enough to just do what the church, or Plato, or Aristotle tells you because in the end you will be the one who has to choose.
The first (and second) world wars are great examples of this. People choose governments and institutions that claimed that they stood for these high-minded ideals, which were in reality just neo-feudal skinsuits for individuals/nations that wanted wealth/territory/power. Those ideals were why we could not back down. You get similar, although more personal, conflicts like this in the Middle Ages like the Wars of the Roses, Castillian Civil Wars, Thirty Years War, etc. People are so steeped in ideology, either personal or abstract, that they can't live up to the ideals that they want to. At least that's my reading of Martin.
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Those wars were only as destructive as they were because of the level of technology available to the combatants at the time. Had the Holy Roman Empire and its enemies had access to machine guns and mustard gas during the Thirty Years’ War, we can be certain that the casualty figures in that war would have been even worse than the over 50% fatality rate suffered by many of the affected areas.
I think it’s very difficult to argue that the world is not more peaceful now — less wars per year, and less wanton destruction and predation toward civilians during the wars that do take place — than it was under feudalism. The nations of Europe were in a state of near-constant military conflict with each other for over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (Which was itself a massively violent expansionist military power engaged in constant wars.)
Obviously I’m not in favor of the World Wars. I was tearing up just a few hours ago listening to the famous anti-war WWI ballad “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. The worst thing about those wars is that they were (in the minds of the powerful men who engineered them) fought for the same reasons as feudal wars were: competition over territory and resources, imperial competition, grievances between powerful individuals, etc. But they were sold to the public as being fought for liberal, messianic reasons — every bit as moralized and totalizing as the “traditional chivalric virtues” which those liberal values had originally hoped to supplant. And clearly to some extent this is still happening (the Iraq Wars and the current Ukraine conflict come to mind), but the fact that there hasn’t been a war of anywhere remotely near the destructiveness of the World Wars in 80 years is, I think, instructive of the fact that globalist liberalism is, overall, more conducive to peace than feudalism was.
I see no reason to believe that this should be the case.
My understanding is that the 30 Years War was as lethal as it was because the fatality rate is measured by the population in the area the war was being fought in, not by the population of the belligerent states involved.
Technology shapes conflicts decisively. Had the Holy Roman Empire had machine guns and mustard gas, and presumably also telegraphs and railways and steam ships and modern farming, I see no reason to believe that the war would have played out the way it did only with increased lethality. It seems to me that what would actually happen is, essentially, something like World War 1 on the tactical level, higher lethality for the military forces and much, much lower mortality for the general population of non-combatants. You might even get significantly lower mortality for the soldiers; the Christmas Truce didn't emerge due to Materialist Rationality, after all.
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The demand for unconditional surrender was justified on liberal precepts and was very much unlike all those feudal wars throughout history in which it was SOP to sue for peace and come to a political arrangement. In WWI this outcome was disrupted by American intervention, and in WWII this outcome was enforced on the altar of liberal values. So the liberal/Marxist demand for unconditional surrender, directly related to their own fantasy-crafting about the "good vs evil" nature of the conflict, has to be related to the massive destruction of that war in addition to the technological improvements. And likewise the technology has to account for the 80 years of relative military peace due to the threat of MAD from not just nukes but conventional warfare.
But if we are going to do an account of "80 years of peace" under liberalism, you also have to account for demographic replacement in the US and Europe. Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.
Edit: January 1943, that's when Roosevelt and Churchill publicly and officially made the war aim "unconditional surrender." How does that not make you rage with anger? That is justified with liberal platitudes, show me a feudal conflict like that, as bloody as they were...
The allies demanded unconditional surrender citing the "barbarian leaders" of the enemy and then proceeded to firebomb and nuke hundreds of thousands of civilians while declaring themselves the blameless heroes. You can't let liberalism off the hook for this or even compare it to feudal conflicts which do not at all appear to have been motivated by this distinctly modern "good vs evil" narrative-crafting.
Let's not redefine words. If things are peaceful, they're peaceful. They still might have other undesirable features, like demographic collapse, or things like natural disasters, disease, famine, etc.
The shakers died out completely peacefully. Nobody forced them not to reproduce, they made the choice themselves.
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80 years of peace is actually bull. Look at the history and there are lots of wars. The reason they’re not happening to you isn’t “liberal democracy’s boon” it’s geography. If you’re American, you basically live in a fortress — friendly governments on our two land borders and two entire oceans between America and the rest of the world.
And there have been wars. They’ve just happening in Africa, MENA, or South America. We’ve blown up lots of real estate during the Great Liberal Peace. Further, I have long suspected that the intervention of international organizations has made wars worse rather than better. In the bad old days, you’d fight until victory or defeat. Once the other side knuckles under, the thing is done, and you accept whatever the results were. If you fought beyond the point of futility, that’s on you. Now wars are more common because nobody is decisively defeated. The international community sees to it by putting in peace keepers or demanding ceasefires when they decide that the weaker side is losing too badly. This not only delays surrender, but because the weaker side never loses badly enough, the war flares up again as soon as the losing side can rearm.
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I think demographic replacement is fundamentally different from the low level of violence that permeated the middle ages at all times. Yes it absolutely sucks to see your culture be flushed down the toilet, but it's absolutely not the same as having your farm burned down, your daughters raped, and winter food stores plundered every 10-20 years.
Is accute disease worse than chronic? If I'm healthy for one to two decades between bouts I may choose accute episodes.
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Global liberalism is still very young! Feudalism lasted for more than a millennium, and both its forms and its ideological underpinnings evolved substantially over the course of that time. Global liberalism was birthed in the slaughter of the World Wars, but it still has a long time to internalize the lessons from that transition. And the same is certainly true for mass immigration! The signs are all around us that the nations of Europe are beginning to wake up and prepare for course-correction on that issue. Keir Starmer of all people is out here openly admitting that mass immigration to the U.K. was both disastrous and intentionally engineered over the objections of the public! We are at only one early stage in the development of what will eventually be the flowering of the Globalist Age; the kinks are still being worked out! Who knows what fresh Renaissance will arise in response to the mistakes and overcorrections of our era?
Oh I agree we are in a Globalist Age, and many others on the Online Right are wrong to deny this or think it's even avoidable. But is clinging to Liberalism really the best path forward given this reality? Pax Americana is not even close to a worthy justification for clinging to the noble lies of Liberalism. It's actually a reason to jettison it.
I think Liberalism can be tweaked and refined significantly. For example, its claims of universal human equality made more sense in the context under which they were developed. However, now that we have a much larger exposure to the full breadth of global humanity, we can observe conclusively that this supposed equality is not the reality on the ground. So, we can refine liberalism to take that into account - either by limiting its universalist commitments, or by using the technologies we have available — and the even better ones yet to be developed! — to actually make that equality a reality through eugenics.
Liberalism is built for 130-IQ Anglos — so, let’s make the rest of the world more like 130-IQ Anglos! I also think we can syncretize liberalism with the more communitarian aspects of Asian societies, strengthening both traditions through fusion. There’s a lot of room for intellectual and political developments to obviate some of the worst and most deluded/obsolete aspects of Classical Liberalism.
Liberalism was built by and for 130-IQ Anglos, which leaves me wondering why you think the rest of the world will be as passionate about muh Social Contract. It was created as a post-hoc rationalization for their own political and imperial and separatist ambitions. Muh Social Contract and "inalienable rights" are nothing except noble lies they made to justify their own expansion of power. It's not suitable for the Globalist Age foremost because it's not true, and secondly, like you said, it was made by and for them, not for a Globalist Age.
Liberal values are the greatest opponent to eugenics, this should be obvious.
Can you explain? It is not obvious to me. Though that might be due to me confusing "Liberal Values" for "Values that are Liberal" such as morphological freedom.
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So, my model for this is post-war Japan. The American military occupied the country, wrote a constitution for it based on liberalism (but adapted somewhat to meet the local culture where it was) and then said, “You might hate this now and see it as a foreign imposition, but wait and see what results it will produce for your country.” And what do you know, Japan became one of the leading lights of the world. They had the legal and political forms of liberal democracy, undergirded by a cultural and religious substrate of traditionalist communitarianism. It seems like they really got the best of both worlds. This couldn’t have happened without them being defeated and subjugated by liberal powers. And it allowed them to develop a relationship with America wherein, while they are undeniably a junior partner, they can compete on a genuine peer basis with America in many respects.
This seems like the model that can be productively imposed on many of the other countries of the world. They will hate it at first, their citizens will rebel, they will be manifestly unprepared for and unworthy of liberalism. But in time, when it turns out that their governments actually work and aren’t just rapacious machines designed to rape and exploit their citizens, their descendants will grow to appreciate it.
Now, of course, I see the weaknesses of the model. Sure, it worked in Japan, but it worked because the Japanese are themselves an extremely industrious and high-IQ population, and also because they basically did not have a choice but to accept their subjugation. We’ve seen more recent examples of what happens when countries resist their vassalage by America, and it doesn’t seem like America has the stomach to see the process through to the end anymore. The imperial/colonial powers of the Age of Exploration had a massive surplus of ambitious and restless young men who could be mobilized toward the subjugation of the world; the countries of the modern West have declining and demoralized populations. We can’t stomach the casualties or the optics of what real Muscular Liberalism would look like in practice; this is why the Neocons have been so soundly repudiated.
What would be needed, then, is both a new animating ideology/spirit, and an acceleration of the automation and de-personalization of war. A form of military and economic dominance that doesn’t reward a country for having a surplus of militant young men, and which doesn’t require the mass spilling of the blood of First Worlders. I believe that the new animating spirit will necessarily be based on some form of liberalism. We don’t have any other realistic options. It can be a revitalized, syncretized liberalism, in the same way that post-Renaissance Christianity was strengthened by its reconciliation with Hellenism, but it’s not going to be based on a repudiation of Globalist Liberal principles. We have to make the best of that.
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Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I totally agree about feudalism. I find it quite amusing how many people on the right stan monarchy when it is quite obvious from the historical record that good rulership, peace, and stability were the exception rather than the rule. While I'm often frustrated with how democracy works in practice, at least we don't have civil wars every twenty years when we change administrations.
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