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There appears to have been a mild resurgence of Hlynkaism on the forum. This is concerning, because I believe that the core tenets of Hlynkaism are deeply confused.
@hydroacetylene said:
It's not entirely clear what's supposed to be the determining criteria of identity here. Are wokeism and the DR the same because they're both revolutionary, or are they the same because they only differ on who gets the cushy sinecures? At any rate, I'll address both points.
Revolution (defined in the most general sense as rapid dramatic change, as opposed to slow and gradual change) is a tactic, not an ideological principle. You can have adherents of two different ideologies who both agree on the necessity of revolution, and you can have two adherents of the same ideology who disagree on the viability of revolution as a tactic. Although Marxism is typically (and correctly) seen as a revolutionary ideology, there have been notable Marxists who denied the necessity of revolution for Marxism. They instead wanted to achieve communism through a series of gradual reforms using the existing democratic state apparatus. But does that suddenly make them into conservatives? Their tactics are different from typical Marxists, but their core underlying Marxist ideological principles are the same. I doubt that any of the Hlynkaists on this forum would look at the reformist-Marxists and say "ah, a fellow conservative-gradualist! Truly these are my people; they too are lovers of slow, cautious change".
"Tradition above all" is an empty formalism at best, and incoherent at worst. If tradition is your sole overriding source of moral truth, then we just wind up with the old Euthyphro dilemma: what happens when the tradition that you happened to be born into isn't worth defending? What if it's actively malicious? "Support tradition" is a formal principle because it makes no mention of the actual content of that tradition. If you are living in a Nazi or communist (or whatever your own personal avatar of evil is) regime whose roots extend back further than living memory, are conservatives obligated to support the existing "traditional" regime? Perhaps they're allowed to oppose it, but only if they do so in a slow and gradual manner. You can understand why this response might not be appealing to those who are being crushed under the boot of the regime. And at any rate, you can only arrive at the position of opposing the regime in the first place if you have an alternative source of substantive ethical principles that go beyond the formal principles of "support tradition" and "don't change things too fast".
As for the assertion that wokeism and the DR only differ on "who gets the cushy sinecures"; this is simply incorrect. They have multiple substantive policy disagreements on LGBT rights, traditional gender roles, immigration, foreign policy, etc.
Hlynkaism to me represents a concerning abdication of reflection and nuance, in favor of a self-assured "I know what's what, these radical Marxist-Islamo-fascists can't pull a fast one on me" attitude. This is emblematic of much that is wrong with contemporary (and historical as well) political discourse. The principle goal of philosophical reflection is to undermine the foundation of this self-assuredness. Actually, you don't know what's what. Your enemies might know things that you don't; their positions might be more complicated and nuanced than you originally thought. Undoubtedly the realm of political discourse would become more productive, or at least more pleasant, if this attitude of epistemic humility were to become more widespread.
A traditional criticism of Conservativism has been that it is the "Coalition of the Comfortable." Conservatives are those doing well in the current system. So in addition to your distinction that:
Revolution, and advocacy for Revolution, is also a tell. It's outing yourself as someone who is uncomfortable.
Assuming that one finds the current stratification sufficiently justified, whether it purports to be a meritocracy of talent or effort or blood, then you equally assume that those seeking to overthrow the current regime are losers, whether by effort or by talent or by blood.
So when
I don't really care. The tradition I was born into is worth defending for me. The point at which enough human capital, in numbers and in quality, is uncomfortable, then they won't be conservative.
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Sorry, I mostly missed this conversation, so I have nothing to add beyond what FC, and Dean already said, I just want to say that:
Good. I've been mumbling about the utter failure of the Rationalist movement for a while, and as the others I'm pretty sure it extends to the entirety of the Enlightenment, including it's right-wing parts. Between @FCfromSSC's heroic efforts, @hydroacetylene, @Dean, and @ControlsFreak doing their part, it only warms my hear that more and more people are picking up the mantle of Hlynkaism, and that it's getting big enough to concern you.
My brother in $deity:
You believe that the Rationalist movement is an "utter failure", when it has spawned the corporations busy making God out of silicon. Even if they fail at their ultimate goal, they've proven you can get staggering intelligence out of stirring text into a pot and applying heaps of linear algebra to it. The modern Rat movement was talking about this well before you could get a neural net to reliably classify a dog or a cat. Half the founders of the major labs went at their work with the ado and gumption of wanting to ensure that what many considered the nigh-inevitable ascension of the Machine God came out favorably. Some might argue, including many Rationalists (Yudkowsky, for example) that they're bringing about the doom they seek to avert. I remain on the fence, the sharp pointy bits poking my ass.
It is beyond my ability to convince you to take this claim seriously, but as Yudkowsky said, there's no argument that can convince a rock. You'll see, and so will I, as this pans out.
It's impossible for me to express the true extent of my disdain for Hlynkaism, as practised by Hlynka, without violating the rules of this forum. Suffice it to say that if anyone found anything useful, from my perspective they achieved a borderline-heroic feat in finding utility from his rambling, often incoherent screeds. Every time he won an AAQC, I found myself scratching my head.
I will grant that my very low opinion on the matter is colored by my distaste for that gentleman, who I found obtuse and pugnacious on a good day. Racist and confused on his bad ones.
At any rate, he achieved the rather remarkable feat of getting his own friends on the mod team sufficiently fed up with his antics to perma-ban him. That's impressive, and I doff my cap at him, while rejoicing in the subsequent reduction in my average blood pressure when using this site.
I'm not seeing the connection here. How did the rationalist movement spawn any of that? They're just garden variety tech industry dudes as far as I am aware.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/313915?context=8#context
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I don't follow the AI developments terribly closely, and I'm probably missing a few IQ points to be able to read all the latest papers on the subjects like Dase does, so I could be misremembering / misunderstanding something, but from what I heard capital 'R' Rationalism has had very little to do with it, beyond maybe inspiring some of the actual researchers and business leaders.
Yud had a whole institute devoted to studying AI, and he came up with nothing practical. From what I heard, the way the current batch of AIs work has nothing to do it with what he was predicting, he just went "ah yes, this is exactly what I've been talking about all these years" after the fact.
As for building god, I think I heard that story before, and I believe it's proper ending involves striking the GPU cluster with a warhammer, followed by several strikes with a shortsword. Memes aside, it's a horrible idea, and if it's successful it will inevitably be used to enslave us.
In any case when I bring up rationalism's failure, I usually mean it's broader promises of transcending tribalism, systematized winning, raising the sanity waterline, and making sense of the world. In all of these, it has failed utterly.
It makes sense, because my feelings toward rationalism and transhumanism are quite similar. Irreconcilable value differences are irreconcilable, though funnily enough mist transhumanists, yourself included, seem like decent blokes.
Yeah, that ban was pretty much at his own request. Wish it wasn't permanent though.
Yudkowsky himself? He's best described as an educator and popularizer. He's hasn't done much in terms of practical applications, beyond founding MIRI, which is a bit player. But right now, leaders of AI labs use rationalist shibboleths, and some high ranking researchers like Neel Nanda, Paul Christiano and Jan Leke (and Ryan Moulton too, he's got an account here to boot) are all active users on LessWrong.
The gist of it is that the founders and early joiners of the big AI labs were strongly motivated by their beliefs in the feasibility of creating superhuman AGI, and also their concern that there would be a far worse outcome if someone else, who wasn't as keyed into concerns about misalignment was the first to go through.
You'll find that members of the Rationalist community are more likely to share said beliefs than the average population.
Yudkowsky is still more correct than 99.9999% of the global population. He did better than most computer scientists and the few ML researchers around then. He correctly pointed out that you couldn't just expect that a machine intelligence would come out following human values (he also said that it would understand them very well, it just wouldn't care, it's not a malicious or naive genie). Was he right about the specifics, such as neural networks and the Transformer architecture that blew this wide open? He didn't even consider them, but almost nobody really did, until they began to unexpectedly show promise.
I repeat, just predicting that AI would reach near-human intelligence (not that they're not already superintelligent in narrow domains) before modern ML is a big deal. He's on track when it comes to being right that they won't stop there, human parity is not some impossible barrier to breach. Even things like recursive self-improvement are borne out by things like synthetic data and teacher-student distillation actually working well.
Anyone who does really well in a consistent manner is being rational in a way that matters. There are plenty of superforecasters and Quant nerds who make bank on being smarter and more rational given available information than the rest of us. They just don't write as many blog posts. They're still applying the same principles.
Making sense of the world? The world makes pretty good sense all considered.
Goes both ways. I'm sure you're someone I can talk to over a beer, even if we vehemently disagree on values.
(The precise phrase "irreconcilable values difference" is a Rationalist one, it's in the very air we breathe, we've adopted their lingo)
Others already pointed out how none of the insights you credit Rationalists with are unique to them, nor were they the first ones, so I'll skip over that.
This is only true to the extent that their primary goal is not letting anyone else have the AI-god. Their preferred outcome is still for AI to exist, they just want it to be 100% under control of people with Rationalist values. So while there exists a set of circumstances where I might end up allying with them, their actual goals are one of my nightmare scenarios, and I'm much more aligned with the average population on this issue.
But they're not (necessarily) being Rationalist, or following Enlightenment principles.
I'm pretty sure that the first time I heard it, I was but wee little lad playing with my toys in the living room, overhearing what my parents were watching on the TV, and some talking heads dropping the phrase in the context of divorce. I doubt they got it from Rationalists.
They were directly responsible for the promulgation of those concepts and popularizing them, first in the tech sphere, and then just about globally.
The man who caused a flash of light when he accidentally shorted a primitive battery isn't credited with the invention of the lightbulb, the person who made them commercially viable is.
Religious people seem to believe that a God exists (and the major strains think that this entity is somehow omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent). Those who don't, think that something even approaching those values is a Good Thing.
The majority of Rats don't think an aligned ASI is strictly necessary for eudaimonia, but it sure as hell helps.
Besides, the only actual universal trait required to be a rationalist is to highly value the art of rationality and to seek to apply. You don't have to be a Rat to be rational, anyone who has made a budget is trying to be rational.
Which is fine. I'm not contesting that. As I said, you don't have to be a card-carrying rationalist to be rational. They just think it's a topic worth formal analysis.
"Irreconcilable differences" is a phrase that's been around for a while, with the most obvious application being in a legal context. The values bit is a rationalist shibboleth.
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That the rationalist subculture is something that some people in the tech industry are also into by no means means that rationalists can take credit for AI companies.
(Though frankly why you would want to is beyond me - "is responsible for AI" is something that lowers my estimation of someone, rather than raises it.)
You presented a genetic or causal relationship:
But the fact that some people are both rationalists and work at AI companies does not show that rationalists are the reason those companies exist - "rationalists caused AI" is of the same order as "ice cream causes drowning".
LessWrong lead the charge on even considering the possibility of AI going badly, and that this was a concern to be taken seriously. The raison d'être for both OpenAI (initially founded as a non-profit to safely develop AGI) and especially Anthropic (founded by former OpenAI leaders explicitly concerned about the safety trajectory of large AI models). The idea that AGI is plausible, potentially near, and extremely dangerous was a core tenet that in those circles.
Anthropic in particular is basically Rats/EAs, the company. Dario himself, Chris Olah, a whole bunch of others.
OAI's initial foundation as a non-profit was using funds from Open Philanthropy, an EA/Rat charitable foundation. They received about $30 million, which meant something in the field of AI back in the ancient days of 2017. SBF, notorious as he is, was at the very least a self-proclaimed EA and invested a large sum in Anthropic. Dustin Moskovitz, the primary funder for Open Phil, lead initial investment into Anthropic. Anthropic President Daniela Amodei is married to former Open Philanthropy CEO Holden Karnofsky; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is her brother and was previously an advisor to Open Phil.
As for Open Phil itself, the best way to summarize is: Rationalist Community -> Influenced -> Effective Altruism Movement -> Directly Inspired/Created -> GiveWell & Good Ventures Partnership -> Became -> Open Philanthropy.
Note that I'm not claiming that Rationalists deserve all the credit for modern AI. Yet a claim that the link between them is as tenuous as that between ice cream and drowning is farcical. Any study of the aetiogenesis of the field that ignores Rat influence is fatally flawed.
I don't particularly see Less Wrong as having been important in popularising the idea that AI might be dangerous - come on, killer robot or killer AI stories have been prominent in popular culture for decades. Less Wrong launched in 2009. The film WarGames was from 1983, and it was hardly original at the time. The Terminator is from 1984. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is from 1967. 2001: A Space Odyssey is from 1968, based on stories from the 1950s. There are multiple Star Trek episodes about mad computers! It seems ridiculous to me to even suggest that Less Wrong led the charge on popularising the idea that AI could go badly. AI going badly is a cliché well over half a century old - it predates home computers!
Not that I think this even particularly matters, because as far as I can tell the AI safety movement has achieved very little, and perhaps more importantly, the goal of that movement is to slow down AI development, which seems like the opposite of what you gave the rationalists credit for.
More generally I am by no means surprised that lots of people in Silicon Valley are aware of rationalists, or even call themselves rationalists. What I'm questioning is whether there's a causal relationship between that and the development of AI or LLM technology. That may have been something that some of them believed, but so what? Perhaps being rationalist-inclined and developing AI are both downstream of some third factor (the summer, in the ice cream drowning example). They seem to me both plausibly downstream of being analytical computer-inclined nerds raised on a diet of science fiction, for instance. It's just all part of the same culture.
100%. I'd add that "AI going bad" arguably predates the computer as a trope, with Frankenstein unambiguously serving as a model for "humans create cool modern scientific innovation that thinks for itself and turns on them" and I am pretty sure that Frankenstein isn't even the oldest example of that trope, just a particularly notable one.
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I’m not a Yudkowskian Rationalist. I’m an enemy of utilitarianism. I am in fact sympathetic to some of the critiques of the Enlightenment that these posters have laid out.
This is just about recognizing the distinctions between different ideologies that are in fact distinct. It’s not about anything else.
I'd like to point out that Yudkowsky himself never said (to my knowledge, and I've read practically everything he's written) that utilitarianism is the correct moral system. He's on record saying multiple times that rationality is a means to an end and not an end in itself.
You can very much be a "Yudkowskian Rationalist" while holding none of his values, beyond valuing rationality because of the utility it provides in a wide spectrum of situations. Probably throw in thinking about meta-rationality,
If you don't believe me, then the first of the Sequences is What Do We Mean By "Rationality"?:
Emphasis added. Rationality is systematized winning, or getting what you personally want (as people can strongly disagree on what counts as victory).
I'm a Yudkowskian Rationalist, but I'm not a utilitarian. I'm a consequentialist with a complex value system that isn't trivially compressed. You could be a malevolent AGI trying to turn everyone into paperclips and be recognized by him, as long as you weren't doing it in a clearly suboptimal way.
Wait, how is this incompatible with utilitarianism? A large chunk of the Sequences was an attempt to convince people that, despite Von Neumann-Morganstern being a theorem about rational values being expressible as a utility function, human values still aren't easily compressed into a trivial utility function. It was a key lemma in service of the proposition "if you think you have a simple function representing human utility and you're going to activate ASI with it then You're Gonna Have A Bad Time".
As an aside, this is where I most differ from Yudkowsky on the current race to AGI: he seems to think we're now extra-doomed because we don't even fully understand the AIs we're creating; I think we're now fractionally-doomed for the same reason. The contrapositive of "a utility function simple enough to understand is unsafe" is "a safe utility function is something we won't fully understand". I don't know if stochastic descent + fine-tuning for consistency will actually derive a tolerably human value system starting from human text/audio/video corpuses, but it's at least possible.
When most people use the term "utilitarianism", they're talking about the Benthamian or Springer notion. This is a mistake I've made myself, having argued with some poor guy on the old Motte where I claimed that since I have a utility function, I'm therefore utilitarian. I've learned from that error.
My understanding is that most humans aren't VNM rational! They violate one or more of the different requirements, in the sense that their preferences can be contradictory. An example is the Allais Paradox. I don't know if any human is actually VNM rational, but I don't think that's necessarily impossible for someone who is good at meta-cognition and math.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with Yudkowsky here, I was aiming to demonstrate that @Primaprimaprima 's (implicit, by my understanding) claim that not being a utilitarian disqualified him from being a "Yudkowskian Rationalist".
I disagree with Yud on this myself. My p(doom) has gone down from a max of 70% to a far less concerning 20% these days. Our alignment techniques, while imperfect, produce LLMs which are remarkably in-sync with the goals and desires of their creators (and to a lesser extent, their users). Anthropic is doing excellent mechanical interpretability work, such as recent studies into how Claude actually thinks (it's not just predicting the next token, it backtracks and "thinks ahead). They're not entirely black boxes, as was feared to be the case before modern LLMs arrived.
It's also remarkable that RLHF works, and I'm confident that Yudkowsky was surprised by this, even if his priors didn't update that much (I recall a Twitter post along these lines). I was surprised, I remember thinking, holy shit, this works??
Note that just because a model is aligned with its creators/users, that doesn't mean that it's aligned with me. Consider the possibility that a Chinese AGI follows orders exactly understanding the CCP's intent, but said orders are to permanently disempower all non-Chinese and wrest control of the light cone (casualties are acceptable).
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If it makes it any better, I'll grant that the way Hlynka himself was phrasing his thesis wasn't quite bulletproof, but what Hlynkaists try to argue is that he's not crazy, and is pointing at something real. I get that the idea that the KKK is in thrall to Rousseau might be a bit of a tall order, but I think it's possible to argue (and that others have already made good arguments to that effect), that they and the Woke both an identifiable root cause pinnable to the Enlightenment or thereabouts.
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I’m not sure if I’m a hlynkaist or not, but my feeling on tradition that im looking at specifically what I would consider Classical Western European Christian culture. I think it has more right than our own era, and much more sane ideas about leadership and social norms and Justice than we do. I don’t think that means you can’t have a more lively form of music or art or have modern technology. Just that the bedrock ideas of the late medieval period seem more sane to me.
But in order to even get back to something approaching sanity you need to knock out a lot of rotten foundation, clear out a lot of rotten furniture, and you can’t do that by degrees. If you don’t fix it, it’s going to eventually fall down. Get the contractors in and get them busy shoring up the foundation and fixing the electrical and plumbing systems. Yes it means making big holes in the walls. But painting over foundation issues just doesn’t fix the real problems.
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I am not Hlynka, but I did debate with and eventually alongside him for years, and as I understood his arguments, I continue to believe he was simply correct in the large majority of them. As a vociferous proponent of what one might term Hlynkism, here is a compilation of discussions that seem to me to be good examples of the core idea that usually gets this label. It's a large chunk of quotes; I recommend collapsing it if it doesn't seem useful.
[...]
[...]
[...]
[The above is part of a longer conversation, which continued in the following thread:]
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
What do you think of the idea that I floated here? That the fundamental distinction for you and Hlynka, at the end of the day, is between Christians and non-Christians? Is there anything to that, or is it completely baseless?
Although not entirely central, references to religion do recur throughout posts made by you and Hlynka, such as the line I quoted from him, and your reference to "secular materialists" that you just quoted.
Reply posted here
Sorry, just mapping the labyrinth.
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I unironically say this (well, things to this effect) all the time. Despite having individually quite radical policy prescriptions, I still call myself a "centrist." Not because I am in the exact center of the overton window, but because I the people I affiliate myself with are more defined by their pragmatist actions rather than their ideological ends. I have much more in common with a fascist running on a platform of orderly public transit scheduling, and anarchists peacefully protesting for more bike lanes, than with conservatives and liberals that engage in performative hysteria online without actually making any attempt to change anything. It's a matter of ingroup/outgroup genetics. Everyone wants good things instead of bad things, but only a particular type of people want to perform iterated, gradual tests paired with introspective reflection to figure out if the actions they're taking are actually effective at moving them toward what they believe is good.
Actually, this specific phenomenon is what's currently china-pilling me. Seeing tourist videos about china, I'm more and more convinced that I'd actually like the chinese people a lot if I went there in person-- even if ideologically and geopolitically I'm never going to be anything but strongly opposed to them.
Can you explain what those radical policy prescriptions are? I feel that depending on how radical those prescriptions, the revolutionists might have a point when claiming that only revolution can bring them about.
Non-exhaustively...
I believe in some neoliberal stuff (Open borders, free trade, georgism) some libertarian stuff (end social security, repeal all intellectual property law except for trademarks, all drugs should be legal over-the-counter if you're 18+) some socdem stuff (a public option for healthcare, though I would also accept M4A), some paleoconservative stuff (the catholic church is exactly correct, and while I wouldn't want to end freedom of conscience I WOULD remove the separation between church and state if I thought it would go in my favor... Which, eventually, it will, because we are destined by God to succeed), and I'm fairly sympathetic to neoconservatives., though more in theory rather than in practice. (Some cultures ARE better than others, and as the country with one of the best cultures in the world, it's america's duty to spread that culture. Assimilating immigrants is the best way to do that, but I wouldn't strictly rule out conquest as a foreign policy tool. Though... most actually proposed conquests are just a terrible idea on humanitarian and practical grounds. We're not going to improve canada by invading it.)
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Would you enumerate the core tenants of Hlyknaism, confused as they are?
It was just a name for the position I quoted at the beginning of the post, nothing more. Sorry if there was any confusion.
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Well sure, that's a straw man that is easy to knock down. For one, I don't think "above all" adds much here -- it's a kind of still absolutism. Similarly "sole" and "overriding" are just adding fuel.
I'm not a hardhearted Burkean, but I think "respect tradition, afford it significant deference, do not lightly discard it" is a far steelier man than "tradition above all".
The reason I support the tradition of western civilization is that it has a long history of increasing good things and decreasing bad ones. This is an independent and alternate source of substantive ethical principles, yes, but it also informs a specific epistemic posture.
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Is there any particularly reason that your belief of the core tenets of Hlynkaism accurately reflect the core tenets of Hlynkaism?
I'm not exactly a fan of top-level posting denouncing the beliefs of someone who isn't permitted to clarify their position, but this is specifically an accuracy question. Hlynka wasn't exactly adverse to elaborating his position at length, even going so far as to do so in multiple top-level posts in his Inferential Distance series, and you've linked to none of them to allow a cross-reference of your claim of the position and the position as provided by the man whose views you raise to denounce.
Which itself wouldn't be a failure by any means if you accurately characterized his position. But Hlynka's narrative had some pretty clear and specific keywords that you've not even raised. Some of Hlynka's tropes included raising the divided nature of the Enlightenment, early Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, the concept of the loci of control and agency against different paradigms, and so on. These are relatively distinct keywords of Hlynkaism, the sort that are easy to CTRL-F to search for to see if one is even referencing related texts. You are not, which is indicative that you are not speaking from the same sheet, or even referring to the same base of reference, as the Hlynkaists.
Which, itself, is emblematic of one of Hlynka's major claims- that there is a major hole in the discourse of current politics from a spectrum of Enlightenment-derived groups that do not acknowledge / recognize / are unaware of the relevance and salience of certain major Enlightenment influences, i.e. the Hobbes-and-Burke shaped hole that he regularly referred to.
This was central Hlynka's reoccurring thesis because Hlynka claimed that this was a commonality amongst people who internalized the other spectrum/side of the enlightenment, a group which rejected the Hobbes-and-Burke premise. Call it whatever you want- left or right, whether humans are naturally good or evil, the nature of the locus of control as internal (individualist/person-centric) or external (you can change people and the world by taking and changing the institutions), but this was a cluster of concepts that served as a dividing premise in Hlynkaism.
These Englightenment-traced premise clusters were the grounds of what Hlynka viewed as bringing people who nominally despised each other on 'fundamental' or 'tactical' differences into an animosity of close-differences. The paradigm of comparison was the cluster of enlightenment principles they derived from. The adoption of those sorts of clusters vis-a-vis the Hobbes-and-Burke shaped hole that wasn't even considered a meaningful alternative was the grounds of claiming commonality. You raising reformation and revolutionary marxists tactical differences is demonstrating a fundamental confusion of the paradigm in question. Hlynkaism is far more interested in their enlightenment cluster paradigms they share (class-based analysis of society, external loci of control prioritizing institutional control) than the tactics.
This may be wrong by some internal contradiction, it may not be a correct reading of history, but an effective counter-argument to the a central tenet that there is a Hobbes-and-Burke hole in the discourse should probably not avoid mentioning Hobbes and Burke entirely. Nor is it countered by rejecting Hlynka's structure and imposing your own that rejects the former's categorical premise. That sort of rejection / non-recognition of the alternative enlightenment paradigms was / is one of the core tenets of Hlynkaism.
A critique of Hlynkaism that doesn't even mention the "Enlightenment" or "hole" even once is probably not a critique of Hlynkaism's core tenets. It may, however, lend credence to some of his arguments on the relevance of not recognizing or addressing very significant background contexts.
All the more reason he should be brought back to defend himself!
Taking one of Hlynka's positions and using it as a synecdoche for "Hlynkaism" in toto is, indeed, an example of the very behavior I was criticizing, and for that I apologize. (In my defense, it was supposed to just be a cute moniker rather than an assertion of a serious philosophical claim.)
But it did seem to be one of his most critical recurring positions, it's the position that I've encountered most frequently in other conversations with posters here who claim to be carrying his mantle, and, crucially, it's the position that was outlined in the post I quoted from hydroacetylene. So that's what I wanted to respond to in my post. My post was only intended to respond to that position and not any of Hlynka's other positions.
But this isn't actually a good way of dividing up different ideologies. It's essentially a non sequitur. It's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side, while he got to stay on the other side.
It also just misrepresents the basic facts about what different groups believe, particularly in the DR. As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions. Nor can their position be reduced to "white people inherently good, everyone else inherently bad"; they acknowledge that whites have a higher genetic disposition to violent crime than East Asians, for example, and that this would persist regardless of social arrangements.
I believe that I'm quite capable of considering all relevant alternatives, but please let me know if I'm missing something.
If HBD advocates believe this then they have not thought their position through.
In fact I think HBD postulates a much more flexible view of human nature than blank-slate theories. It seems to me the blank-slate worldview suggests that all humans are basically alike and we absorb what is in our environment and reflect it outwards, and thus changes in groups are the result of external material forces – in other words, humans are all the same. This unavoidably leads to messy questions about to what degree culture versus, uh, guns, germs and steel, I guess? is "the environment" but the point is that humans are basically biologically the same.
Whereas the HBD line is that there are genetic differences between groups that meaningfully affect outcomes. Interestingly HBD people also tend to kick the can back up a level by suggesting those differences are downstream of the environment, but they also point to culture, e.g. it is HBD people you see suggesting that things like "banning cousin marriage" or "executing violent offenders" have meaningful downstream genetic impacts on groups of people. Which means, pretty obviously, for both biological and logical reasons that anyone who believes in HBD believes that meaningful parts of human nature can be reshaped by social institutions, given sufficiently aggressive methods.
In fact I'd go further and suggest that believing in HBD or really that genes have any downstream effects on culture/people groups means it is inevitable that you believe that social institutions will reshape human nature, perhaps not the big parts of Human Nature that people make movies and write novels about, but meaningful parts of human nature that make it possible to divide people meaningfully into groups with different natures.
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Ever since I first read The Selfish Gene I have been fascinated by the idea of a "cognitive ecology". That is the concept of ideas themselves as organisms that breed/evolve. That ideas themselves could be described as "predatory" or "symbiotic". That different ideas might vary in their evolutionary fitness and be specially adapted to different information environments, or to fill an "ecological niche".
With this in mind, what Hlinkians such as @Dean and @FCfromSSC appear to be describing is a Taxonomical Ranking of ideologies with "International Socialist" (Communists), "National Socialist" (Nazis/Fascists), and "Intersectional Progressivism" all as Species within the Genus "Rousseauidae" which itself resides within the Family "Western Enlightenment".
While it may be reasonable to claim that this Taxonomical model isn't "a good way of dividing up different ideologies." or that "it's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side" I do not think that it is reasonable to call it "incoherent". Besides, it being "bad" is just like your opinion man.
I think that the issue a lot of people here had (have?) with Hlinka and his ideas is that he essentially presented an "outside context problem". His politics weren't incoherent as much as they were Alien.
I was actually just thinking about this in the context of @OliveTapenade's comment on @KulakRevolt in the Snow White thread last week. Where one extolls "rejecting modernity" "embracing violence" from a comfortable office the other talks about that time he surreptitiously pulled a gun on a police officer durring a traffic stop while praying to avoid violence. The two might as well have come from different planets.
Even though they are both describing the same general category of behaviour, the symbolic role that violence plays in their model of the world is radically different. There are many ways to cash out what that means in practice - for one, for Kulak, violence in itself represents a kind of success, a triumph over our sheepish instincts, whereas for the other, violence in itself is a failure, an undesired last resort that always carries a terrible cost. Either way, it means that the worldviews just don't translate into each other neatly. The whole world of moral assumptions around, say, Orestes choosing to engage in retributive violence to avenge his father is invisible and alien to the modern reactionary.
Violence is an extreme example, but I daresay there are similar clashing worldviews in other politics. Probably the one I've run into most often today is the concept of revolution, where even though two people may both be talking about the overthrow and replacement of a particular political establishment, the invisible worlds of assumptions around it are so divergent as to almost untranslatable.
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Taxonomical Ranking of Ideologies... I like that metaphor. Thank ye.
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And yet, he isn't, which you knew when you began to lambast it. I maintain it was in poor taste, as well as inaccurate.
This would be part of the fundamental flaw in your critique, and further bolstering the validity of Hlynka's critique. Hlynka's positions were relatively closely interconnected, much as the various influences of the Enlightenment were interconnected, and attempting to take and argue over one element in isolation of the underlying substructure leaves a substantial hole in the discourse.
The more you talk around the premise of the hole or substructure argument, the more relevant that premises becomes. An argument of substructure doesn't get disproven by surface-level variances when the substructure argument already predicts and allows for surface-level variations.
You are continuing to demonstrate the point of Hobbes-shaped hole in political discourse. The hole exists because the avoiders of the hole reject the underlying premise even when they are aware of it, if they are aware of it in the first place. It is simply another expression of rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as an invalid basis of discussing/analyzing politics.
It really doesn't matter if you feel that underlying framework analysis is a bad way of dividing up different ideologies, any more than the narcissism of small differences discredits outside analysis noting relative commonalities. A characterization of you does not need your consent to be accurate or insightful. The same also applies to groups at scale. The premise that it does- that self-identification of most relevant attributes is what matters most- is simply another element of the common-cluster.
It is also a part of the cluster that creates the hole in social understanding when it fails to acknowledge / recognize the relevance of the hole-clusters, or their basis of analysis.
Put another way- you are demonstrating an analytic failure mode equivalent to those who criticized islamic extremists like ISIS of not knowing their own religion and being irrational. This was quite often false. ISIS did have an Islamic cluster-structure which informed their world view. It may have been different from what observerses believed an Islamic cluster-structure should be, but it was quite real, and quite relevant. It was real and relevant regardless of how little someone from another perspective disagreed or dismissed it, because enough people did share in the cluster that ISIS was able to be a major threat rather than an irrelevant marginal movement.
Hlynka's point on the hole in Enlightenment discourse is that various modern political elements that can be traced back to / self-identify with Enlightenment discourse have a similar cluster dismissal / divide. They do not recognize / acknowledge that their cluster-commonalities are not actually the scope of Enlightenment clusters. In turn, they make assumptions that divisions within their subcluster are major divisions in Enlightenment premise, rather than subdivisions of a sub-section.
You are continuing to conflate what Hlynka's regular arguments on the commonality between groups was. It was not an argument of shared surface-level beliefs and conclusions. It was an argument of shared underlying paradigm-assumptions, the common clusters, that undergird and shape the political discourse that reach diverging surface-level beliefs and conclusions but share underlying logic.
Can you explain what the Hobbesian premise is that's being rejected/forgotten?
Earlier you said:
Is this it?
Sure. You not mentioning Hobbes at all, let alone Hlynka's position on Hobbes, is the Hobbesian premise that is being rejected / forgotten.
How I would characterize Hobbes doesn't matter. My position is that you can't properly characterize Hlynka's position if you don't address such a significant part of the position. Which is rather hard to do without mentioning them, which is generally a precondition to accurately characterizing. If you aren't accurately characterizing Hlynka's arguments, there's reason to doubt the validity of your argument.
The lack of mention in your rebuttal-argument is itself the hole.
I of course want to represent Hlynka's arguments as clearly and accurately as possible. I just reread the three "Inferential Distance" posts. The most relevant section seems to be this from the first post:
But this ignores the diversity of views about human nature you find on both the far right and the far left. The dissident right already has an essentially Hobbesian view of human nature, as far as I understand it. And even on the far left, things are not so clear. Followers of the more psychoanalytically-inflected strains of Marxism stress that there can be no final end to history, no ultimate reconciliation of the individual with the collective.
Further quoting Hlynka:
This is straightforwardly false. The dissident right does not believe this.
And finally:
I suspect that what he wanted to say, but shied away from, is that there are ultimately two camps: those who believe in the Christian God, and those who don't. This is undoubtedly the conclusion that one should draw if one starts from Christian priors. But since I reject Christian priors, I unsurprisingly reject the conclusion as well.
As @FCfromSSC explains masterfully, this isn't it. I also agree with him that Hlynkism is compatible with Christianity, but I would like to expand on how the Christian position is in a sense prior to and in a sense more specific. That is, the Christian position goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden; it goes back to man choosing to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Before man could decide "We know how to solve all our problems,", he had to claim the right to determine "Our Problems". Claim the right to determine what is good and evil for himself, thus defining the problems to be solved. Of course, the Christian does not think that the Enlightenment is unique in doing this, and the not-necessarily-Christian claim can be that the Enlightenment is the first time that the entire formulation took hold in widespread fashion.
I would be remiss if I didn't remark that the rationalist perspective is still somewhat reeling from utter failure to conceptualize Our Problems or The Good in a philosophically-coherent way. It's resulted in all sorts of fallbacks, but most commonly, a sort of naive anti-realism. Even this vein still possesses the Enlightenment spirit, though. They hold a moral chauvanism, often paired with a bare appeal to game theory1, as though the only impediment to We being Able To Solve All Our Problems is simply a matter of Strategic Mechanism Design, that if done 'properly' (often involving simply eliminating the Bad Guys (TM)), will vaguely result in Solving All Our Problems. This is, of course, where the Hlynka "multi-agent environment" critique sort of lives, in that you do not get to be the omniscient, omnipotent Mechanism Designer.
1 - As @FCfromSSC puts it:
What I have reiterated over and over in these discussions for a year at this point is that believing in a "master plan" is not a necessary criteria of any of the political ideologies under discussion. You can be a Marxist and still believe that there is no plan, we are not in control of the world, etc. This is basically Zizek's whole schtick, if you listen to his lectures. It basically goes: "Yeah, Marxist revolutionaries at one point did believe that they were impersonal agents of history, simply carrying out what was rationally required, etc. We know now that was a mistake, a failure mode. That's how you get Stalinism. So that's been discredited. But we're still communists, we still believe in the communist project."
But does that make Zizek and his fellow travelers into allies of traditionalists? I don't think the traditionalists would agree. Which means that your belief in a master plan is not what fundamentally determines your political orientation.
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Consolidating responses to a couple comments here.
From your post above:
I would strongly disagree with all three of these statements. I think we can agree that "left" or "right" are essentially meaningless, but whether human beings are naturally good or evil and the locus of control seem to me to be extremely important questions. Likewise, where you see Hlynka latching on to something to put all his enemies onto one side, if his method allows him to sort friends from enemies in a consistent fashion, that is straightforwardly and obviously useful to him and to anyone who shares his values. I use similar logic to sort friend and enemy, and to make predictions about where current ideology will lead people, and this seems like an obviously useful and relatively uncontroversial method of reasoning.
At a minimum, you should consider that a categorization system that you don't find useful for your purposes and values might still be useful to people with different purposes and values.
Would you concede that, under the framing you're employing here, Eugenics was straightforwardly an attempt to reshape "human nature" through the mechanism of social institutions? Do the DR types believe that Eugenics was a bad idea or doomed to failure? Like, there's obviously a serious miscommunication happening here, because you are conflating "bad genes will always produce bad people" with "regardless of nature, regardless of nurture, the line between good and evil will always run through every human heart." These are not remotely equivalent statements.
I have and will argue that intelligence is orthogonal to morality, and that there is no reason at all to believe that even highly intelligent people are in any way more moral than dullards. Arguments to the contrary, from what I have seen, rely on a model of "morality" that rounds off to crime statistics, as though a person who never commits a crime, much less never gets caught committing a crime, is therefore morally perfect. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that those who commit crimes are necessarily less moral than those who do not, and that is even ignoring the part where immoral people can give their immorality the force and imprimatur of law. The logic that would argue otherwise is absurd for a whole host of reasons, but near as I can tell it is actually what a number of HBD enthusiasts I've encountered seem to be explicitly arguing.
Likewise, is Walt Bismark a reasonably representative example of a DR thinker? When he says:
...what part of that passage would you describe as a recognition that human nature is immutable and immune to manipulation by social institutions? Would you argue that subjugating people wholesale is not a form of manipulation by social institutions? Do you understand that, completely separate from any charged keywords or references to specific identity groups, the core logic evident in that passage marks the author, to me, as the most mortal sort of ideological enemy? Someone with whom no cooperation is or likely ever will be possible?
And Yarvin's Hobbits and Dark Elves essay is much the same, though he maintains a far more diplomatic approach; his core logic marks him firmly as an enemy.
You might as easily quote Bismark above, who clearly argues that not all whites make the cut. But as I understand it, the core objection isn't that the DR believes "white people inherintly good, everyone else inherintly bad", even though I have seen plenty of examples of exactly that sort of logic from what I thought were adherents to the DR here. It seems to me that one of the actual core objection is that they believe they can sort people into the good and bad bins by population-level metrics, when in fact they absolutely cannot do that.
Diversity is infinitely fractal. Focusing on specific commonalities that seem of primary relevance to one's own model is not "ignoring diversity". Relevance to the model at hand is the whole question.
As above, I think of Bismark and Yarvin as examples of Dissident Right thinkers. Both seem to share a view of human nature that fits much better with Progressive ideology than with my own. Likewise, when we've discussed psychoanalytically-inflected strains of marxism, it seemed that the examples you offered argued for no final end in the sense that an asymptote has no final end.
I do not think Bismark, Yarvin, or the the psychoanalytically-inflected marxists could engage with the fundamental truth of "the poor you will always have with you."
How would you characterize Bismark's call for a "thousand year Reich", aiming for "divine creation"? But let's say you're correct, and the DR doesn't argue that Utopia will be achieved if all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down. Would it be fair to say that they believe things will get a whole lot better, if they can simply remove most of the silly barriers keeping them from exercising unrestrained power to reshape and organize society?
Maybe they don't. Yarvin seems to, and Bismark definately seems to. Maybe they're not representative?
I can say that I personally am very confident that this formulation is incorrect; belief in the Christian God is not required in any way. What is required is an understanding that we are not in control, that we are inside the box looking out, not standing in the lab looking in at the world in a box. Such a worldview is compatible with Christianity, in the sense that cooperation and productive coexistence between the two are possible, and the opposite worldview is incompatible with Christianity. That's the connection I think you are twigging to. The hubris required to assume that one is fundamentally in control is the same hubris necessary to believe that "rational Christian" is an oxymoron, and so the two correlate strongly; there is a reason Bismark claims that building his hoped-for society is a spiritual, even divine act of creation. Further, I find that one can argue persuasively against this hubris from entirely within a rational, materialist framework, provided one is sufficiently rigorous in their materialism.
Noted atheist Sargon of Akaad just put out a video more or less on this subject. For fictional/vibes examples, I thought Glen Cook's The Silver Spike and Shadowline were interesting attempts within the bounds of genre fiction. Kipling himself seems most of the way there.
I'd like to thank you for this post, because it very much sums up neatly a lot of my own disagreements with the sort of "Dissident Right" thinkers you mention. (I also thought of that same Sargon video you linked when I was reading it.)
(It also helped clarify, by showing points of agreement, where both of my differences with you, and those with Hlynka, lie.)
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I want to try to achieve an understanding of what the root of this disagreement is, on a deeper level. The Christianity hypothesis was one attempt at that. If you have an alternative read on the situation that's fine. I encourage you to share your own interpretation. Although I would point out that Hlynka said, directly, that belief or non-belief in God is part of "the core of what positions we hold".
If it's ultimately just about distinguishing "my friends" from "my enemies", then that's fine. I would have nothing further to add. But you should just say that, instead of arguing that vastly heterogeneous groups of people are committed to a complex web of philosophical assertions that they are not, in fact, committed to.
Well, through technology and biology. Not social institutions.
Unsurprisingly, materialists believe that human nature is grounded in some combination of biological/physical properties and environmental factors, because that's all there is. Humans are what they are because of what their made of. If you change what they're made of then you could (potentially) change what they're like. If this fundamental metaphysical commitment makes all materialists ideologically "the same" in some sense, then that lends further credence to the assertion that the fundamental divide for you is really about materialists vs non-materialists.
It should be noted though that materialists are not necessarily committed to the idea of an infinitely malleable human nature. There could be logical/physical constraints on the "space of all possible minds". The psychoanalysts believe that the necessary preconditions of subjectivity itself put certain constraints on any conscious mind that look a bit like the fall of man and original sin if you squint at it (Lacan, despite being an atheist, had a complex relationship with Christianity).
At any rate, there are non-materialist Christians among both the communists and the dissident right, rendering the whole line of questioning somewhat moot.
I will ask directly: are all your enemies "the same" in some sense, just because they are your enemies? If not, then why is it relevant that Bismark sees you as an enemy? Why did you bring it up?
Is this the assertion of a new criteria for determining identity among ideologies? How is it related to the other proposed criteria ("humans as naturally good vs evil", "knowing how to solve all our problems vs not knowing", etc). Are they all equivalent formulations of each other? Is one of the formulations at the root, and the others are derived from it?
Is there any set of circumstances that's better than any other set of circumstances for anyone, ever? Or is everything just all the same?
You have expressed a great deal of anger on this forum previously about what you see as Blue Tribe overreach and abuse of power. Would your life be better, in any way, even a little bit, if Blue Tribe had less power over you and the things you care about?
Because if you can imagine specific changes to society that would make your life even a little better, then we're just haggling over numbers at that point. Your proposed changes would only improve life by a modest 50 utils, so you're on the Red Tribe side, traditionalist, anti-Enlightenment, etc. But Yarvin thinks he can improve life by 300 utils, which is over the cutoff of 250, so he's on the Enlightenment side with all the Nazis and communists etc.
This is not tenable.
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But the distinction between those who believe in God and those who don't, and the consequences of those beliefs, are trivial to make. I think its axiomatic to say that non-belief in God fundamentally shapes the ideology and worldview that you adopt, and the inverse if you do believe in God; whether you specify if the God is Christian or not is irrelevant. You don't believe in God, so that puts in the non-God-believing camp, which is currently, as described, going though a civil war.
The diversity of views about human nature is reflected in the utter and complete factionalism that we see in the culture war today. That's why Hlynka's specifies "core". I'd even argue that even if people don't see or acknowledge similarities in belief between themselves and their ideological opponents, those similarities still exist. Even in your example Marxists, they still focus on the irreconcilability of the self and the collective, which is an external loci of control.
To use an example, fascism and communism are as opposite as they can be, but they are still, fundamentally, illiberal; both in practice and ideologically. Likewise, while the modern culture war might be filled with people who hold seemingly contradictorily views, they might still have common ground ideologically and in practice.
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I always thought that take was largely a response to a very specific 'moment' when a lot of pro-HBD people were making the claim (when asked, what policy outcomes they'd want to see if HBD was finally inside the Overton window) that what they wanted to achieve by getting HBD taken seriously was the removal of affirmative action that was preventing whites (and Asians) from getting all the top spots at top universities, all the top jobs, and so on.
Of course now you can just HBD post all you want on Twitter and so it feels like the question is no longer being asked.
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What is this sentence supposed to mean? There are a few sentences in your post which have unclear meaning due to (in my opinion) garbled writing, but this one in particular stood out as presumably the result of a typo.
There was indeed some (a lot of) garbling. I posted before giving it the reread it needed, and made changes.
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I believe his conflation of people to his left and to his right can be separated from his claim that Hobbes is the ghost that haunts Liberalism. Mainly because I believe in the latter and not the former.
OP seems an attempt to address the former.
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There's problems with Perrenialism (namely that it sort of decays into Platonism if you look at it formally) but its general content refutes your claim here.
When people like Evola or Guénon talk of Tradition, they're not talking about a specific instantiation of custom (like wearing a particular kind of hat), neither are they talking about conservatism and the tactics of slowing down change.
Traditionalists believe that there are eternal truths about human nature and the human condition that are instantiated in culture and that these truths are important and necessary to guide morality and politics, and moreover that any legitimate political regime should recognize and respect the ancient customs derived from these principles. Hence they support Marriage, Religion, Family, Hierarchy and so on.
Traditionalism isn't against change, nor is it against revolutionary change, nor is its relativism total. It is very much possible to identify regimes that are more or less traditional in the absolute, and traditionalist politics are downstream from such evaluations, and espouse varied tactics.
It really feels like we need a better name for this strain of thought.
Especially for those that endorse part of it (I'm firmly anti-blank-slate) and challenge part of it (that specific cultural practices invariably embody those truths).
Oh that's easy, it's called "post-liberalism".
Even has a Wikipedia page with both Heinlein, Blue Labour and JD Vance on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postliberalism
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And as a tactical choice it is itself a ideological commitment. It’s not merely ‘rapid change’- it requires an acceptance of top down impositions, rationalism, the idea of de novo societal shifts implemented by a vanguard party. I reject all of that ideologically. Western trads should seek to weaken state capacity where possible, capture institutions available for capture, and in other situations focus on building parallel institutions and weakening those institutions which cannot be captured. In so doing it is possible to build a functional society which envelopes and digests the rotting hulk of modernism.
I admit this is an exaggeration. However, there is a kernel of truth- a mere commitment to political incorrectness does not a social conservative make. I agree with much of the DR that gays are perverts who shouldn’t be allowed near kids, that women shouldn’t vote, etc. But my reasoning and therefore implementation of these ideas is very different.
You are right to point out that the distinction between tactics and principles is not as clean as I made it out to be. But I'm skeptical that recourse to revolution is always indicative of the deep ideological commitments that you portray it as having. Whatever it may entail ideologically, I don't think it's a good criteria for cleaving the global ideological space at the joints.
The American Revolution was, by most accounts, based on the principles of classical liberalism; principles that I imagine Hlynka and his fellow travelers would endorse wholeheartedly. Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution? Does it have to be denounced? Were the founding fathers necessarily committed to a certain "top down rationalist" view of human nature that true Red Tribers would have to reject?
Or consider the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which instituted an Islamic theocracy. They certainly claim to be following a conservative tradition of some kind; it might not be your preferred tradition, but it's a tradition. Are they too committed to an Enlightenment rationalist view of human nature? Does Islamic theocracy share a deep philosophical affinity with Marxist communism that has hitherto gone unnoticed? And the American Revolution too?
The most reasonable conclusion, on my view, is not that revolutions are a result of people having a deep ideological commitment to the idea of a top down rationally organized society. Revolutions are a result of people wanting power, and having the means and opportunity to seize it. This is universal to left and right, old and new.
Would you be willing to elaborate on this? I'm just curious.
I claim that 1) revolution is a bad tactic for conservatives because it structurally pushes towards a totalizing state and top down change according to rationalist principles, and would point to Spain as an example 2) the vanguard party commitment is itself anti-conservative because it depends on thought experiments rather than iterative development for the design of the envisioned society 3) top down institutions for structural reasons tend towards anti-conservatism 4) only organic development can build institutions which push in a conservative direction.
Hlynka posting is technically a misnomer; I’m more influenced by de Maistre.
The Islamic revolution in Iran is a case of long term failure of top down revolution at creating the envisioned society, just like Franco was; its export through Hezbollah(bottom up even if astroturfed) is considerably more successful. Hezbollah’s control of Lebanon is an example of a conservative force building a parallel society which overtakes the secular modern government of the country in which it dwells by just being better at doing, well, anything people belong to a society for. It’s not an example I like very much- and the retardedly going to war with Israel over and over again will be its downfall- but it is an example. So is the taliban in Afghanistan. The Reagan revolution, driven by moral majority support due to evangelical Christianity(which in turn boomed largely due to the promise of healing the by-now embarrassing racial divisions in certain quarters) can be seen as a partial example but suffered from a lack of structural building.
Much of what the DR calls ‘based’ is just retarded antisociality rooted in the idea of either machismo or offending as many people as possible. I don’t particularly care about ‘big muscles’ as a societal goal, have more conservative sexual ethics than most on the DR(which in its most mainstream form endorses male promiscuity), do care about the duties men owe towards their families which the DR can sometimes be hostile to in the breach. I support the existence of alimony and child support laws and think abolition of no fault divorce is the solution rather than offering a worse deal for women. Women shouldn’t be voting because they have the right to be shielded from the res publicae, the same argument the original anti-suffragettes made, and that women are worse at voting than men are in the present circumstances is perhaps true but only an incidental to the thrust of my argument. This is a duty which men owe to women- it’s on the same grounds that women have the natural right to prioritize motherhood and homemaking over their careers, or to be exempted from the draft- and not a punishment for women being… I don’t actually know what the DR is mad at them for, but it’s clearly something.
Ok, this may be at the root of some of the confusion around this topic. When I say "DR" I mean specifically the narrow white nationalist variant. These people by and large are quite conservative in terms of sexual ethics. Someone like Andrew Tate is not DR under this definition.
You can say that it's not fair to focus on such a relatively small group and ignore the diversity of alternative right-wing thought, which is a valid point, but the white nationalists are worth looking at in particular because they do provide a significant counterexample to Hlynka's arguments.
Tate doesn’t appear particularly popular on the dissident right(or anywhere else, really). But the BAP sphere(and if that’s not core to the dissident right then what is) has considerably laxer views on fornication than I do, and the broader white nationalist sphere seems to mostly be ok with things like (male)fornication and heterosexual sodomy.
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lol I enjoyed that bit.
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I've argued yes in the past, and would do so again. Likewise I've argued at some length that the "principles of classical liberalism" are fundamentally flawed, and they've failed in the ways we observe for clear, predictable reasons.
More or less. More precisely, it should not and probably cannot be repeated, and its problems were identified early on. The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
There was a strong element of this, yes. It was moderated by contrasting, competing worldviews that were absent in, say, the French Revolution, and I believe that these moderating influences explain why it worked as well as it did for as long as it did. The French Revolution provides excellent contrast, as I've argued previously.
I argued this point with Hlynka back in the day, and my recollection was that the dispute came down to semantics; IIRC we both agreed that it came down to Hobbes vs Rousseau, and what label you apply to each of them. Likewise the argument I just linked: The American and French revolutions were very, very different, such that if both were "Enlightenment" revolutions, we should be able to say which was the more "Enlightened" than the other. It doesn't really matter which a given person picks, because the point is that if the term covers both perfectly equally, the term is actually meaningless, and by choosing, one reveals one's own definition. The American Revolution did contain a heaping helping of "top-down, rationalist" thinking, and the structures that resulted have failed us badly, and failed us the worst when we approached them from a top-down rationalist mindset.
What do you think the missing "common knowledge" in question is? The first thing that would come to my mind is HBD, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to think that the Founding Fathers didn't think that cognition could vary between races, or even between individuals. I presume that's not it then.
The short, inadequate answer would be something like "What rules are and how they work" and "what values are and how they work". The Founding Fathers had no context for Postmodernism, for the fully-developed concept of a "Living Constitution", or for the reality that human values could be incoherent at scale. They mistook local values-homogeneity for universal features of human nature, and they assumed that legible rules could meaningfully constrain human Will. They lacked a deep understanding of "manipulation of procedural outcomes" and rules-fragility.
That's my understanding, anyhow.
I remembered that post fondly, but had forgotten the key-words or who it was from! Thank ye.
Separately / concurrently- given that the American Founding Fathers didn't predict the rise of political parties, and had to amend the constitution pretty early for the vice president kerfuffle, I think the 'did not necessarily understand the procedural implication of their own rules' is a fair critique.
In some respects they did- slowing the progress of government change in some respects- but that itself just locked in various self-catalyzing changes, like the New Deal coalition leading to the rise of the imperial presidency and administrative state that would compete with the chief executive.
If you think that Presidential democracy was a mistake (I do, and the Framers' writings make it clear that they would see it as a mistake in hindsight if they saw what a modern partisan Presidential election looks like) then there is an interesting question of how it happened.
Theory 1 as I see it is that the Presidency was designed knowing that Washington would be elected unopposed as the first President, and would almost certainly remain President as long as he wanted. So even if the Framers had anticipated the rise of political parties, they assumed that national treasures like Washington would generally be available, and that the machinery of the Electoral College would help them beat partisan candidates.
Theory 2 is that the main model for the relationship between the President and Congress available to the Framers was the relationship between King and Parliament in Great Britain, and in the late 18th century that relationship was in an unstable equilibrium - that either the Crown would re-consolidate power and turn Parliament into a rubber-stamp (as Louis XIV did with the French Parlements, and as has happened in most Presidential democracies established on the US model) or Parliament would consolidate power and force the King to appoint a Prime Minister acceptable to the Parliamentary majority (as actually happened).
In both theories the Constitution was no longer working as advertised by 1796 (Adams-Jefferson was a partisan election). Under theory 2 the reason why the US was able to stay in unstable equilibrium as long as it did was the lack of party discipline.
Do you think 5 is less than?
That's not a coherent question, right? You have to have two numbers to be able to talk about whether one is less than the other. 5 is less than 6. 5 is not less than 4.
But the same applies to any question of the form "Was X a mistake?" Was Presidential democracy a mistake compared to remaining part of the British empire? Probably not - the colonists did have some legitimate grievances. Was Presidential democracy a mistake compared to a Parliamentary democracy with a Prime Minister? Maybe, but not obviously so; we can see the cracks in parliamentary democracies too, today.
Was Presidential democracy with first-past-the-post voting a mistake compared to an approval-voting system? Here I'd opine the answer is clearly "yes", but when the Constitution was ratified Condorcet had just barely started publishing on voting theory, and Arrow and Duverger were a century away from being born, so I can hardly fault the Framers for lacking the benefit of hindsight here.
They did try to leave us with a mechanism for changing the Constitution to fix their later-identified mistakes, which has been very fruitful in the case of some other mistakes, and which you'd think would be sufficient in general... but the trouble with changing a mistake in the mechanisms by which people and parties gain power is that, almost by definition, the people and parties in power have strong incentives to want that change to not be made. If you're a partisan demagogue whose route to election has been "take advantage of your polarized base, plus a few moderates who can be convinced that the opposing partisan demagogue is more awful", why would you want to make it easier for challengers within your ideology to run against you and simultaneously make it likely that you'll face less-awful opponents from other ideologies?
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The founders mostly died expecting their experiment to fail in a big and obvious way, though, and while they wouldn’t recognize the modern US, this hasn’t happened.
I think that some cultural aspects of the modern US would shock and appall them but the big picture would look very familiar to them from a historical level. I imagine they would immediately start making familiar analogies to the Roman Republic and its transition to empire.
Not that I necessarily think that those analogies are 100% correct, but I suspect it would pattern-match for them quickly. I'm not sure they would think it was good but it probably would feel familiar.
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The Civil War seems like a pretty significant point of failure. Otherwise, there's a lot of ruin in a nation, and especially one as fortuitously positioned as the United States. Give it time.
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Although if Jefferson had survived to see the Civil War, he would totally be running around saying "I TOLD YOU SO!"
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The various mountains of skulls and famines in the name of technocratic progress and rationality.
At its most common denominator, the Enlightenment presumed that good thinking would lead to good results. The Hlynka-claimed divide is that this different upon whether changes mattered most from internal changes or external environmental changes, but they both shared a belief that if you thought through things better, progress would deliver better results as a matter of course, both in a moral and a practical sense.
WW1 was a major culture shock to this mentality, and discredited democracy-enlightenment-rationalists enough that 20th century totalitarianism became an intellectually viable alternative, precisely because the enlightened European states and cultures did incredibly stupid, senseless, and wasteful things to their own delegitimization... twice. And after WW2, the technocratic elements of the Enlightenment that took power in the form of the communist-socialists social engineers proceeded to build mountains of skulls and engineer famines as a result of, disputably, well-meant social reforms. On the other hand, the more individualist-leaning enlightenment descendants of the West otherwise discredited themselves in various Cold War abuses, ranging from the Imperial Presidency of the Americans, the imperial/post-imperial conflicts for influence over the third world, and so on. Plus, you know, that whole MAD thing of deliberate and purposeful preparation to destroy the world.
Had the American founding fathers had the 20th century as common knowledge of how badly enlightenment value evolution could mesh with state powers, it probably would have triggered some substantial shifts in not only the revolution, but the post-revolution American consolidation.
Have you seen the other piles of skulls? This argument always strikes me as curiously ahistorical. The notion that large scale human suffering began with the Enlightenment or its technocratic offspring ignores vast swathes of history. Pre Enlightenment societies were hardly bastions of peace and stability. Quite a few historical and pre Enlightenment massacres were constrained only by the fact that global and local populations were lower, and thus there were fewer people to kill. Caesar boasted of killing a million Gauls and enslaving another million, figures that were likely exaggerated but still indicative of the scale of brutality considered acceptable, even laudable. Genghis Khan's conquests resulted in demographic shifts so large they might have cooled the planet. The Thirty Years' War, fueled by religious certainty rather than technocratic rationalism, devastated Central Europe. The list goes on. Attributing mass death primarily to flawed Enlightenment ideals seems to give earlier modes of thought a pass they don't deserve. The tools got sharper and the potential victims more numerous in the 20th century, but the capacity for atrocity was always there.
The answer that seems entirely obvious to me is that if "good thoughts" lead to "bad outcomes," then it is probably worth interrogating what led you to think they were good in the first place. That is the only reasonable approach, as we lack a magical machine that can reason from first principles and guarantee that your ideas are sound in reality. Blaming the process of reason or the aspiration towards progress for the failures of specific, flawed ideologies seems like a fundamental error.
Furthermore, focusing solely on the failures conveniently ignores the overwhelming net positive impact. Yes, the application of science and reason gave us more efficient ways to kill, culminating in the horror of nuclear weapons. But you cannot have the promise of clean nuclear power without first understanding the atom, which I'm told makes you wonder what happens when a whole bunch of them blow up. More significantly, the same drive for understanding and systematic improvement gave us unprecedented advances in medicine, sanitation, agriculture, and communication. The Green Revolution, a direct result of applied scientific research, averted predicted Malthusian catastrophes and saved vastly more lives, likely numbering in the billions, than were lost in all the 20th century's ideologically driven genocides and famines combined. Global poverty has plummeted, lifespans have doubled, and literacy is nearing universality, largely thanks to the diffusion of technologies and modes of thinking traceable back to the Enlightenment's core tenets. To lament the downsides without acknowledging the staggering upsides is to present a skewed and ungrateful picture of the last few centuries. Myopic is the least I could call it.
It is also worth noting that virtually every major ideology that gained traction after the 1800s, whether liberal, socialist, communist, nationalist, or even reactionary, has been profoundly influenced by Enlightenment concepts. They might reject specific conclusions, but they often argue using frameworks of reason, historical progress (or regress), systematic analysis, and the potential for deliberate societal change that are themselves Enlightenment inheritances. This pervasiveness suggests the real differentiator isn't whether one uses reason, but how well and toward what ends it is applied.
Regarding the idea that the American founders might have changed course had they foreseen the 20th century, it's relevant that they did witness the early, and then increasingly radical, stages of the French Revolution firsthand. While the US Constitution was largely framed before the Reign of Terror (1793-94), the escalating violence and chaos in France deeply affected American political discourse in the 1790s. It served as a potent, real time cautionary tale. For Federalists like Hamilton and Adams, it confirmed their fears about unchecked democracy and mob rule, reinforcing their commitment to the checks and balances, and stronger central authority, already built into the US system. While Democratic Republicans like Jefferson initially sympathized more with the French cause, even they grew wary of the excesses. The French example didn't lead to fundamental structural changes in the established American government, but it certainly fueled partisan divisions and underscored, for many Founders, the importance of the safeguards they had already put in place against the very kind of revolutionary fervor that consumed France. They didn't need to wait for the 20th century to see how "good ideas" about liberty could curdle into tyranny and bloodshed; they had a disturbing preview next door. If they magically acquired a time machine, there's plenty about modernity that they would seek to transplant post-haste.
If a supposedly rational, technocratic plan leads to famine, the failure isn't proof that rationality itself is bankrupt. It's far more likely proof that the plan was based on faulty premises, ignored crucial variables (like human incentives or ecological realities), relied on bad data, or was perhaps merely a convenient rationalization for achieving power or pursuing inhumane goals. The catastrophic failures of Soviet central planning, for instance, stemmed not from an excess of good thinking, but from dogma overriding empirical feedback, suppression of dissent, and a profound disregard for individual human lives and motivations.
The lesson from the 20th century, and indeed from the French Revolution itself, isn't that we should abandon reason, progress, or trying to improve the human condition through thoughtful intervention. The lesson is that reason must be coupled with humility, empiricism, a willingness to course correct based on real world results, and a strong ethical framework that respects individual rights and well being. Pointing to the failures of totalitarian regimes that merely claimed the mantle of rationality and progress doesn't invalidate the core Enlightenment project. It merely highlights the dangers of dogmatic, unchecked power and the absolute necessity of subjecting our "good ideas" to constant scrutiny and real world testing. Throwing out the entire toolkit of reason because some people used hammers to smash skulls seems profoundly counterproductive. You can use hammers to put up houses, and we do.
Great post! I want to focus on a minor point you made:
Unlike the other two, literacy is not an undisputed good. It is a difficult mode of communication that takes years to learn, and about 1/5th of adults in the developed world never learn to read for comprehension. We prize literacy because, for now, it's required to navigate our society. Will that still be the case ten years from now, when your phone can text-to-speech anything you point it to, and will not only read it to you but also answer your follow-up questions voice-to-voice? (I already do this with languages I don't know, except I prefer to read the translations myself.)
It's still significant that literacy is so widespread in the world, because it implies that most people have the resources and the leisure to have their kids spend several years pursuing challenging training. Is this the best use of those children's time? I honestly don't know. I have greatly benefited from my ability to read and write, and I continue to prefer to do so even when I have alternatives: I would rather read a blog than listen to a podcast, and I would much rather read a book myself than listen to an audio-book. But I also know many people who prefer it the other way.
So, is literacy (that is, ability to read for comprehension) truly superior to other forms of recorded communication (audio-visual), and does this superiority justify the years of training one needs to master the skill?
Literacy also seems to contribute to poor memory skills* at a cultural level and, if overindulged in, poor eyesight at the individual level.
*unfortunately I suspect that replacing literacy with TikTok will make the problem better, not worse
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Verbal comprehension is, if anything, easier with the written word than with spoken words. You do lose a little subtext when you don't have body language and intonation cues, but on the other hand it's harder to backtrack to reevaluate confusing parts of a video. And either way, the hard part of comprehension isn't the part where you can translate squiggles to sounds in your head. People who can't correctly answer basic reading comprehension questions aren't going to become able to answer them because a phone reads them out loud. In cases where they realize they're misunderstanding, they might be able to straighten themselves out by asking the phone AI, but too often people don't know what they don't know.
I think where literacy greatly wins out isn't reading for comprehension, though, it's reading for speed, which makes it easy to filter what you read. I naturally read about 3x faster than a natural speaking rate, and I can speed read or at least skim about 6x faster. At those speed differences, reading is just a more profitable use of time than listening ever could be - I can investigate an interesting Motte comment in seconds and decide whether to reread it thoroughly, whereas with something like a YouTube video I have to rely on trusted channels (or in desperation, The Algorithm) to decide what's worth my time. It's only the visual part of the audio-visual media that makes the tedious audio part tolerable; a photo or diagram or so on is often much more efficient than any verbal description of it would be.
Yeah, there's the thing. Doom-scrolling TikTok sounds insane to me, but people do it, even in our mostly-literate world. And the benefits of reading more quickly require you to be able to read quickly; that can be a virtuous cycle if you got into it as a child, or it can be a vicious cycle if you never decide it's worth the bother. It's not a fast cycle, so I wouldn't make any strong predictions about ten years from now ... but a hundred years from now, will reading to your kids so they grow up into the kind of people who enjoy reading to their kids still be an ongoing tradition, not an antiquated fad? I have no idea.
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Literacy is a foul tool of the bourgeoisie. The chidlren should be free to develop their muscles in the coal mines, if this is what is likely to bring added value to their benefactors.
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I'm a ardent transhumanist, but I still think it's rather premature to claim that literacy is of limited utility! We can have that conversation when we develop high-bandwidth BCIs.
There are mixed opinions on how fast humans can process speech versus text. I can tell you that I read ridiculously fast without consciously speed-reading (in that I retain the material instead of running my eyes over it). An old eReader app claimed 450 wpm.
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
Shows 757 WPM, but at the cost of getting one of the 4 reading comprehension questions incorrect.
Humans speak at about 150 WPM. We can process heard speech faster, like when people speed up audio books, but it probably doesn't go past 450 WPM despite training as it verges on becoming nigh incomprehensible.
At least in my case, I'm very confident that literacy is a handy skill to have. You can read silently, just about anywhere, skip ahead and behind in a stream of information with ease, without much in the way of technological assistance beyond the ability to write or read something written. Worst case, you scratch on stone or in the mud.
I strongly expect that past the early years of childhood, say ages 7 or 8, one's ability to read depends far more on internal proclivity and availability of material rather than intentionally didactic approaches. To be less verbose, they don't teach you shit once you're somewhere past your ABCs.
I wouldn't even call it particularly challenging, despite the failures of modern educational systems and the quasi-literacy many of the "literate" display. You have to go very low in terms of IQ to find humans who can't read at all, no matter how hard they try, without more targeted learning disabilities.
In light of this, I'd teach any kid I had today the ability to read and write right up till the day we had BCIs, and then, I'd expect that it would possible for that interface to inculcate the ability to read without its assistance (there might be a significant time gap, as it's probably easier to transfer sensory modalities versus skills).
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We have, they don't compare by orders of magnitude. You have to go to Genghis Khan to get anything that's in the leagues of Mao or Stalin. And if we start counting war deaths the XXth century just destroys any other period in history with extreme prejudice. Modernity has produced the most evil in all of humanity's history by its own quantitative metrics. There's no need to even grab the spiritual yardstick.
The real question is whether it's produced enough good to offset all that.
Ah yes, it wasn't real Scientific Government. The wrecker cows refused to be spherical. Pesky human beings got in the way of the New Atlantis. But the next time...
Well you see I happen to be a pesky human being, and so are you, not New Socialist Men, so I find it very easy to blame the tool for being ill suited to the task. If we can't reach Atlantis after this much suffering, I see no reason to continue.
Nobody's talking about ditching away reason altogether. What's being talked about is refusing to use reason to solely ground aesthetics, morality and politics, because the results of doing so have been consistently monstrous, while sentimentalism and tradition, despite their flaws, produced much better results.
Handily, you're replying to:
At least do me the courtesy of reading my argument, where I've already addressed your claims.
This mischaracterizes my point. I'm not going all "No True Scotsman" when I observe that regimes like the Soviet Union, while claiming the mantle of scientific rationality, frequently acted in profoundly anti rational ways, suppressing empirical evidence (Lysenkoism being a prime example) and ignoring basic human incentives when they conflicted with dogma. The failure wasn't that reason itself is unsuited to governing humans; the failure was that ideology, dogma, and the pursuit of absolute power overrode reason and any genuine attempt at empirical feedback.
(Besides, I've got a residency permit in Scotland, but I don't think I'd count as a Scotsman. There are True Scotsmen out there)
There's no bolt of lightning from clear skies when people grab concepts and slogans from a noble idea and then misappropriate them. Someone who claims that Christianity is the religion of peace has to account for all the crusades called in its name, that God didn't see fit to smite for sullying his good name.
Like I said, look at the alternatives. Even better, look at the world as it stands, where billions of people live lives that would be the envy of kings from the Ancien Régime. Atlantis is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Uh huh. I'm sure there are half a billion widows who dearly miss the practise of sati:
In that case, it's my tradition, one ennobled by hundreds of years of practice and general good effect, to advocate for a technological and rational approach. Works pretty well. Beats peer pressure from dead people.
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So, do all the pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls just… not count for anything? The Great Famine of 1315-1322 so thoroughly devastated Western and Central Europe that some populations were even reduced to cannibalism and mass infanticide. And don’t even get me started on all the skulls from the medieval wars of religion, the Crusades, the Roman wars of Conquest, the wars against the Mongols and Huns, etc. (And, of course, that’s just in Europe; much of the pre-Enlightenment non-European world comes out looking even worse.)
You have reasons to oppose Enlightenment rationalism which are independent from any objective measure of famine prevalence, relative likelihood of starting massive wars and killing civilians, etc., and you’re pointing at the failures and shortcomings of certain ostensibly Enlightenment-derived regimes without actually proving that said regimes did worse on those metrics than the ones which came before them.
WWI and WWII were utter catastrophes, of course, but their high levels of devastation were largely a result of technological developments, not the fact that they were wars prosecuted by rationalist regimes. (Imperial Japan, for example, was nothing like a rationalist Enlightened state.) Communism killed a lot of people, yes, but it’s not the rationalist or “top-down” elements which are primarily responsible for this result.
Weather and disease did not cause Stalin's purges.
Surely you can only blamed in what you had a hand in creating.
There are indeed many reasons to dislike the products of the Enlightenment that aren't based on quantifiable suffering, I find Ted Kaczynski's reasons to be the most convincing myself, but it is perfectly sufficient to judge it as a failure on its own terms.
But if a direct result of the Enlightenment is that states developed the ability to far more easily counteract the ill effects of weather and disease, then shouldn’t pre-Enlightenment societies be held accountable for not developing those same capacities? Weather and disease kill an order of magnitude less people in modern times than they did in premodern times, and it’s not because weather has gotten any better, nor that diseases no longer exist. We’re simply able to deal with them far, far more effectively than we were before. Sure, in some sense technological and medical progress do not necessarily need to go hand-in-hand with liberal/individualist philosophical development. However, the fruits of technological and medical progress can only be broadly distributed by a state with the sort of top-down centralized capacity which the Enlightenment paradigm facilitates.
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Oh, they certain count... as support for Enlightenment paradigm when you lack an anchronistic (future-history) basis of comparison.
Pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls were demonstrative of a lack of Enlightenment. Failures in the early Enlightenment were proof of insufficient enlightenment. These are common knowledge that make Enlightenment paradigms look good- after all, no Enlightenment movement had ever done such a thing!
If you're hearing the echo of 'real Enlightenment governance has never been tried,' that's not a coincidence.
Only a common knowledge of the historically unprecedented size of the mountains of skulls that Enlightenment-states could reason themselves into would credibly counter-balance a belief that Enlightened people wouldn't create mountains of skulls like those un-Enlightened barbarians. That is the relevance of the WW1 and WW2 common knowledge. It was a forced entry of common knowledge that, yes, civilized enlightened Europeans absolutely would create mountains of skulls. Enlightened despots would make skull piles on par with or greater than the un-enlightened savages of history, and use Enlightenment themes and principles to lead the publics to slaughter.
But that common knowledge was impossible in the late 1700s when the Americans were forming a state. Because the downsides of the enlightenment, first demonstrated at scale in the French Revolution, hadn't occurred yet.
It would be common knowledge now, however. Which is why @FCfromSSC says
The common knowledge is how the Enlightenment can go off the rails. Had that been known at the time, the American experiment would have proceeded differently on the basis of that (impossible) knowledge.
The Enlightenment regimes don't have to be worse. Equivalence can be just as damning. Equivalence brings into question the value of adopting an explicitly enlightenment model/approach to government as an unproven experiment. The point of the experiment is to lead to different, not equivalent, results / acts of despotism.
If pre-Constitution common knowledge had included things like 'the Enlightenment-camp can rationalize class-based persecution as a necessity and morally justified means of social reform,' the merchant-class that was heavily involved in American government formation would probably not have agreed to as much Enlightenment influence at their own potential expense.
These may have been the dark side derivatives of the enlightenment, but there are pretty direct arguments for how each and every one of these historical arguments can tie into various themes and expectations of enlightenment thinkers. It may be in 'that's not what we meant / wanted' forms, but that's a matter of uncontrolled / unpredicted ideological evolution, not a dispute of descent.
The uncontrolled / unintended / unpredicted failure-mode evolutions of the Enlightenment are what are common knowledge today, but not in the past.
I’m not even sure that’s what they demonstrate. I’d argue that they’re more a result of lack of state capacity, and of a lack of alternate methods of adjudicating international disputes.
Sure, we now know that states ostensibly influenced by the Enlightenment are still capable of waging massively destructive wars, at least under certain circumstances. If that’s supposed to discredit the entire philosophical undertaking, then I’m not sure what it would take to rehabilitate it in your eyes. It is, though, a fact that since the end of WWII — a duration of 80 years — the world has enjoyed the most consistently peaceful, prosperous unbroken period in human history. How much longer would such a period need to persist before you’re willing to admit that the Enlightenment is working out well for us? You can always point to the World Wars as a failure mode or black mark on modernity, but surely you have to compare how things actually look over time, instead of hyper-focusing on one very bad, but historically very brief, period.
If it can be shown that, as @self_made_human points out, the Enlightenment has produced incredible flourishing of life-saving technology, peace-facilitating international institutions, prosperity via reliable trade, and general improvement of quality of life for rank-and-file individuals worldwide, then it seems extremely shortsighted to criticize the Enlightenment for failing to be perfect. It’s like people who criticize rationalists for falling short of perfect rationality; okay, fine at least we’re making an effort! Have you seen how much worse the rest of you are doing?!
I think a lot of criticism of the Enlightenment come down to a sort of Traditionalism of the Gaps. You take for granted all of the positive aspects of modernity which you’d be loath to give up, yet pile criticism onto the relatively small number of kinks which Enlightenment rationalists haven’t yet been able to solve.
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I would argue that the thing which we call the “American Revolution” was not in fact a revolution. In something like the French Revolution (ann actual revolution) the King of France was deposed and later killed. There was no more French monarchy; it no longer existed as an institution. Ditto for the Iranian Revolution, which completely removed the Iranian monarchy.
Contrast this with the state of the world after the American War of Independence. The British Monarchy was very much still intact and continue to be a powerful and geopolitically relevant institution for another century and a half. The American colonists were no longer under its power, and therefore they had to create new governing institutions for themselves from scratch; in that sense, the aftermath resembles the aftermath of a revolution. But the institution being rebelled against was never destroyed, nor even especially weakened.
The Revolutionary War was a separatist rebellion. It could also have been a revolution within the American colonies, but by and large wasn't - the major social/political developments in the colonies had already occurred and to a significant degree the cause of the rebellion was attempts by the British government to roll them back/redefine the relationship. The post-war social order wasn't identical to pre-independence, but it was pretty similar.
Contra your follow up remark, I would say that the Haitian Revolution was a real revolution, in that it totally upended the Haitian social order, in addition to being a separatist revolt against France.
Very much agreed. The American War of Independence made only minor incremental changes in the domestic institutions of the individual Colonies/States, and apart from a few Loyalists being exiled there was no change in the local elites running those institutions. The Haitian Revolution involved the (sometimes literal) dismemberment of the French local elites running Haiti and their replacement by a new Creole elite, as well as complete reboot of the institutions.
If there is a true American Revolution (and the Founding Fathers thought there was - hence Novo Ordo Saeculorum etc.), it is an ongoing process (similar to the analogous but slower development of Parliamentary Democracy in the UK) of forming new, unprecedentedly democratic and republican institutions which continues through and beyond the signing of the Constitution.
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I feel like this is a highly unusual definition of revolution, and not the primary criteria that most people use to judge that term.
There are dozens of examples, but what about the Haitian revolution? The Irish revolution/Independence movement? The Dutch Revolt, where the Netherlands seeded from Spanish control? Most post-colonial histories?
It's like defining surgery as the procedure by which someone cuts off a limb or an organ. If an organized group rebels against a dominant force, and either replaces them wholesale or at least forces them to concede defeat, that's the working definition. I see no reason to postulate anything else, at best it's a sub-category.
None of the things you named are revolutions, in my opinion. They are revolts, certainly, but not revolutions. An independence movement simply secedes from an existing institution, while a revolution dissolves that institution. After the Russian Revolution there were no more tsars, and almost certainly never will be. Mao’s revolution in China totally dissolved the traditional governing institutions of China. I think you absolutely need to have some way to distinguish that sort of process from the far more common secession of smaller units from a larger political whole.
You're making a perfectly reasonable distinction, but my objection is that this is a non-standard use of existing terminology and you'd be better served coming up with a new word. Maybe call them "replacement revolutions" versus "secessionist revolutions", or something catcher.
There are plenty of examples, what's the difference between a rebellion and a revolution? Largely whether the rebels were victorious (even temporarily) and thus had the opportunity to rebrand.
According to Wikipedia, some gentleman named Charles Tully already subdivided revolutions into:
He drew a line between a "revolt" and a "great revolution", a concept that matches your "revolution" but even then, he said that they were subtypes of revolution as a whole.
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The new governing institutions were mostly not created from scratch, though- they were assemblies and expansions of preexisting governing institutions. The American revolution largely left quite literally the same people in charge of the day to day running of America before and afterwards- assemblies elected by landowner suffrage were very much not new and most of the founding fathers had had positions in colonial government beforehand.
Yeah people forget that the original theoretical question of the American Revolution was if the British Parliament in England or the British Parliaments in America could govern the Englishmen in America.
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Even that isn't a consensus position in the DR. Fuentes and his ilk are populists who specifically do not believe this. And there's a whole school of trads that agree with you and want the Benedict option.
They're both wrong because Elitism is just true. That's how politics demonstrably works. And the last two US elections are a very clear example of that. But that doesn't really matter to this particular argument.
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