This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The right wants to preserve and the left wants to improve. At least, that's the high level framework that I and I think a lot of other people were taught. There is clearly something to this, but it is equally clear that it isn't the whole picture. In particular, there is no room in this paradigm for an important third category that, while an exotic species in most of our political culture, is quite common in this particular discursive wildlife preserve: the reactionary. Just like progressives on the left, reactionaries don't just want to preserve the existing culture, they want to improve it. The keep difference is that rather than innovation, they want to roll things back to the way they were.
Reactionaries are of the right. No only do they oppose Progress, they actively want to roll it back! Since the long arc of history bending towards justice (or Cthulhu swimming left) is linear, anyone wanting to roll things back must stand in opposition to Progress. This expansion of the basic left-right paradigm is pretty well understood by the people who have become, in their own conception, regime-aware, and by their ideological enemies interested enough to notice. (Marxists have long railed against reactionaries, but my sense is that they just call anyone opposed to the eternal science of dialectical materialism a reactionary be they a conservative or a reactionary proper).
This was my view until recently, when I listened to the recent Political Orphanage podcast with Guy Standing as a guest. Guy Standing very much reads as a man of the left, but all his ideas are callbacks to medieval institutions. I think this is most clear in his view of the commons, but his latest book about labor (that great old saw of the Classic Left) is still a callback to roll things back to the past.
Once I realized that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary, a category that I had previously not thought possible, I realized that large chunks of the left are reactionary in nature. One good example can be seen in the tension between the Marxists and the Bakuninite SRs in the Russion underground leading up to the Russian revolution. Marxists are all about Progress, to a degree that hardly anyone dares to envision these days, but by understanding of Russian anarchism at the time was that it was all about the traditional Russian peasant village. It's true that they wanted to throw of the Tsarist yoke, but the fundamental institution they wanted to center life around was ancient. They wanted to roll things back to before city states really got going.
I think there is also a strong strain of left-reaction in environmentalists. The core of environmentalism is about rolling back processes that everyone conceived of as progress when they got started (how do Marxists feel about industrialization?). Environmentalism is about rolling things back to a simpler and purer time.
We also see left-reaction in the fetishization of indigenous peoples. When people go on about listening to indigenous ways of knowing, they are talking about returning to an ancient epistemological framework, actively rolling back Progress. This also helps explain why Anglos in Britain don't count as indigenous to these people. What's to return to?
I know it's not exactly a novel observation that the linear political spectrum fails to capture important nuance, but this has really driven home to me the idea that what counts as left or right is mostly about vibes and historical coalitions. We can still anchor of Burke as being on the right, but everything else is up for grabs. Liberals are the original leftists, but by this point they straddle the center, with some on the right and some on the left. Because Progress must always march on, no one set of ideas can ever be guaranteed to be on the left, though originality seems like it helps a lot. Patriarchy has reigned though most of history, so feminism seems light it ought to have been pretty well dug in on the left, only now Progress calls for the reinforcement of gender roles and radfems are in coalition with social conservatives. Nothing matters, it's all just vibes, coalition building, and branding.
One big caveat to this is that it doesn't seem like you necessarily get to choose the branding for your own ideas. Your left-right branding is assigned to you by the zeitgeist, and there is some real connection to the historical left and right.
It's also the case that, at least for now, I think this mostly applies to mapping out the range of possible political position space. There are not that many mainstream right-reactionary positions. The biggest and most effective I can think of is originalism, and arguable the pro-life movement is another, but for the most part, the right that is allowed in the Overton window is one big rearguard action. In practice, if someone is trying to change things, they are still usually attempting Progress.
I don't think these people are genuine reactionaries because genuine reaction doesn't consist in activism. It consists in being reactionary. De Maistre had a saying about this- something like la contre-revolucion est le contraire de la revolucion n'est pas la revolucion contraire(I am aware my French sounds like illiterate drunken ebonics to a European and I'm covering the meaning, not googling it to copy-paste).
Lefty de-growth advocates are mostly not the opposite of the revolution. Like maybe a hippy commune growing organic vegetables is, but the apartment dweller who does lots of yoga and worries constantly sure isn't. To be a reactionary consists first in living according to older mores, not first in pushing for change.
Defining reaction that way would seem to produce some pretty strange results. It would mean that none of the prominent writers and internet microcelebrities one normally thinks of as reactionary get any credit for their writing or public persona (they may be reactionary in their private lives, but Moldbug's writings wouldn't count one way or another). You would also have to conclude that lots of people with progressive liberal politics are more reactionary than certain conservatives (90% of Boston Brahmans would count as more reactionary than Milo Yanopolis). This is also the first time I've heard this requirement put forward for being a reactionary. To be honest it seems like it is the result of cope. Reaction is so far out of the Overton window that its proponents know they can never make headway, and saying, "a real reaction just goes his own Sigma Male way instead of trying to make change in the world," is a good way to feel better about it. It also rhymes with all the "politics is personal" stuff you get from progressives, which is pretty interesting (though I'm not quite sure what relevance it has to the position, just something I noticed).
Well yes, the essence of counter-revolution is to live the opposite of the revolution and to spread itself by living it. It's not to provide flowery justifications for it. I don't think of moldbug or milo as particularly reactionary, right wing though they might- my grandpa worrying about how my generation is screwed 'because there's going to be too many blacks to deal with' is an actual racial reactionary, not Steve Sailor talking about 13/52.
And the self described reactionary DR doesn't seem to have much contact with these people. There are communities- and I belong to more than one of them- where right of the American overton window ideas are the norm. Keyword- communities. Le contraire de la revolucion is not an individualist sigma grindset, whatever that means. It's a community, and communities triumph by growing.
Would I like the bible to be the most important book in our public school curricula, the repeal of the 19th amendment and women's lib, and criminalization of homosexuality? Yes. But that in isolation doesn't make me a reactionary. Reaction is a totalizing identity and without commitment to the bit it's just a revolution from the right. Maybe something fascist adjacent, if anyone could ever define that word.
If that was how most people thought of the term, we would hear the Amish and Mennonites and Hasidim laid out as the primary examples of reaction in our society, but we don't. Instead reactionary writers are much more likely to be referred to as reactionary. I think you have a way of using the term which doesn't match up with how everyone else uses it. If you want a term for what you are talking about, I think "trad" fits much better.
Anabaptists and ultra-orthodox Jews aren’t reacting to anything, they’re just like that.
The most relevant group of reactionaries in the modern US are evangelical Christians, who are in fact reacting to secular society by living according to the values it conflicts with. That’s not to say they’re necessarily doing a great job, but they’re a much better example of a reactionary than someone like Moldbug or some other long winded writer.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link