Shots Across the Bow

The brilliant, prolific, and semi-pseudonymous Scott S. Alexander who blogs at Slate Star Codex and contributes, under the alternate handle, Yvain, at Less Wrong has delivered a 33,000+ word rebuttal (a book by most standards) to the reactionary theses as articulated by worthies Moldbug and Michael Anissimov.

Alexander (Yvain) calls his piece The Anti-Reactionary FAQ, in which he attempts to answer several key reactionary questions:

1. Is everything getting worse? No.
2. Are traditional monarchies better places to live? No.
3. What is progress? Natural force of history.
4. Could a country be ruled as a joint-stock corporation? Not well.
5. Are modern ideas about race and gender wrongheaded and dangerous?
   Almost certainly not.

Anissimov has posted a preliminary rebuttal here, but much heavy lifting remains yet to be done.

His point 5 (“We’re making darn good progress on race and gender”) really ought to be seen, from the reactionary perspective, as a proper subset of point 1 (“Things really are getting better”). For when you look into the reactionary claim, “Things are getting worse”, divorce and family dysfunction are usually near the top of the list. And the divorce statistics are undeniably bad and disproportionately affect those who can least afford dysfunction (the lower classes).

I think what is missing from the “Things are (or are not) getting worse” discussion is the metaphysical: things (cities, architecture, fine art) and culture (popular art, human interactions) are uglier, more banal, more crude—more sinful. Of course, these attributes are much harder to quantify for empirical study. (I’m not certain they cannot be, but I’m not certain they can either.) I suppose this is why both Anissimov and Alexander have tended to avoid them thus far in the debate.

But I think this is the lynch-pin to the form of reaction taken by most religious traditionalists. We know, in our souls, this world is fucked up. We may not have all the evidence together; we may not even be able to articulate the up-fuckedness very well; it could be that the time-constants, the half-life as it were, in the evolution of culture and social interaction are so long that by the time anyone thinks to measure them or figures out how, a society is already doomed. But we know man was not made for this <insert bad shit>, irrespective of what surveys and government provided data might say.

In part 2, Alexander conducts a thought experiment between Progressive (South Korea) and Reactionary (North Korea) ideals. It is literally a category error: there are no reactionary ideals. Period. It’s like comparing Progressive circles (round ones) to Reactionary circles (square ones). North Korea may have a plausibly reactionary scheme of succession, but only because it’s a strange (demonic) blend of radically egalitarian revolutionary fervor grafted onto a basically Confucian people. And hell, a society’s gotta run… even Somalia has government(s). Everything else about North Korea is revolutionary in the blackest of spades. South Korea is Progressive, to be sure, just like all well-behaved US provinces. But the reactionary would say the North is far more so. So much so, they no longer march in lock-step with the evolutionary path Progressivism has taken in the last 50 years.

Reactionary is to be against Revolution. That is all it means.

In his part 3, Alexander clearly doesn’t get the Cathedral concept nor the memetic nature of the religion of Progressivism. At first, Alexander seems to get that it’s not an active or conscious conspiracy, but then later falls into the trap of deriding reactionaries for believing in a conspiracy, involving academics or something. No. The meme complex adapts and propagates for its own occult ends, either killing off or (more often) neutering near competitors.

It’s likely that a religious skeptic of Alexander’s IQ simply cannot understand how religious views propagate at all among neurologically normal people. If you could show empirically that reactionary claims were more likely to be the truth, Scott Alexander would probably be on board, whereas a person of 115 IQ would likely be immune to such claims. Progressivism, like most religions, and certainly all Protestant ones, provide the biggest differential status gains to the midwitted, who are not likely to give them up in light of mere, and fundamentally tentative, evidence.

In his conclusion, he absolutely misfires in pegging reaction as just another utopian scheme. This completely ignores the post-libertarian roots of most of modern day reaction’s greatest thinkers. It is not as though we envision a better world to be any certain, i.e., “reactionary”, way, but only that it not be one way—specifically, not the one way that it is unmistakably going. Reactionaries contend for local customs for local peoples forming local particularities; the inalienable power of exit; the inherent limits of political voice; a patchwork of particularities not at risk from totalizing state intrusion.