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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32118 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Cthulhu always swims right.

A common argument that pops up from time to time is that history generally moves in one direction. One prominent example of this historically has been Whig history, which has a narrative of human society generally moving from a barbaric past to an enlightened present. People like MLK Jr. have implicitly endorsed this view with the quote "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice". It's a nice idea... but it's clearly wrong when you bother to think about it. People believe their current values are where true justice lies, and their current values are highly predicated on their environment whenever they grew up. Nobody can look into the future, so we look to the past instead, and it's a story of people gradually becoming closer and closer to our present selves. But if we had the capability to look into the future, there's a good chance that we'd be shocked or horrified about where we eventually end up. People in 2000 BCE would probably think our present world in 2024 CE is terrible in a number of ways. Neither side is correct or incorrect, it's just a difference in the baseline.

Given the negativity bias of the internet, more recent takes on "history generally moves in one direction" can mostly be summarized as "[thing] generally gets [worse]". One example is conservatives telling you how progressives always eventually win on basically everything. One popularization of this idea is "Cthulhu always swims left", which people have claimed on this site many times, example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, etc. If you’ve been on this site for long, then you’ve almost certainly encountered this idea at least once. This rebuttal is a better critique than I could ever give. The gist is that things only look like this if you gerrymander history in a pessimistically partisan way. Yes, progressives always win if you only include their wins and exclude all of their losses… duh? But that’s a goofy way to cut history. Conservatives might then try to come up with reasons to handwave away any progressive losses, either as trivial (“they lose the small things but win where it counts”) or as simply delayed (“they haven’t won… yet!”). But these are never particularly convincing to an unbiased observer. History really doesn’t move consistently in any direction but the most vague and basic ones, and trying to force it into this box or that serves as little more than a glimpse into that person’s pessimism.

Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.

There is one and only one political dynamic that matters in modern American politics, and it is the same dynamic that was in place when I was born in 1981: the Republican party is a right-wing party that works relentlessly to advance right-wing ends; the Democratic party is a centrist party that only sometimes tries to mildly slow the country’s drift to the right; the result is a country that moves right regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats win. People like to dismiss this with references to meaningless cultural politics, elite liberal language games and Pride flags flying outside of Raytheon and the like, but such symbols are just that, meaningless. In terms of policy we have two right-wing parties of varying extremity and so even modest center-left policy wins become impossible. And neither Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor Kevin Drum nor Ezra Klein nor Josh Marshall nor Joan Walsh nor any of the rest of them have ever been able to articulate a remotely convincing explanation of how this scenario can result in anything but a right-wing drift.

…

It’s worth saying that the Republicans are a more effective political party because this whole dynamic would simply never happen within the GOP. Ezra Klein would not have a big national interview with (say) Lincoln Chafee, treating him as a person of influence within the Republican party, because moderate guys like Chafee can’t become people of influence in the Republican party. If he did, that interview would not be treated as a big deal among conservatives in politics and media, and whoever the lefty analog of Bret Stephens might be would not then write a column extolling Chafee’s push to move the Republican party to the left. That column would not then spark tons of discussion within the Republican party about whether it’s time to head hard left. That wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen; the conservative movement have inoculated themselves against that. And the inevitable result of a Republican party that rigidly adheres to a right-wing ideology and a Democratic party that constantly shuns left-wing ideology is a profoundly right-wing country. This is, again, not complicated.

This is, I fear, a great misunderstanding.

First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.

Here we are talking about a few measly decades. Barely a century. It would have been similarly easy to say that right wing victory is inevitable during the Thermidorian Reaction. And yet Moldbug's point is that even that was ultimately advancing the leftist agenda. Napoleon the monarch did more to liquidate monarchy in Europe than anybody.

And yet, even this view is itself a narrow trend in the whole of history.

Spengler, Vico and all the theorists of cyclical history whom Moldbug is very obviously cribbing from, would instead argue that history repeats itself. That it has seasons. That right wing victories are the stuff of certain periods, whilst left wing victories are the stuff of others. Both causing each other.

And this brings me to my second point, which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.

The man has an explicit definition he goes by in this context: the left-right axis is that of nomos, of either increasing or decreasing the formalism and bondedness of a society.

This is what leads him to state the aphorism about the w-force. That definition of the axis and the oft remarked upon shape of history as short periods of creation followed by long periods of decay. To Moldbug, the "left" is simply the party of decay. You'll notice that when he means "democrat" he usually uses the word "blue" instead.

This leads to unintuitive conclusions that blow up direct comparison between this contemporary lament and his broader historical point.

For instance, FDR, which is very obviously left wing (or rather, blue), is viewed by Moldbug in this context as a right wing figure. He is after all, a monarch, who reshaped and reconstituted the US government after a period of decay. An American Napoleon.

Moldbug's point here is really better stated formally by Nick Land and the Deleuzian concept of reterritorialization: that the forces of history (capital) work through destructive transformation cycles that will take a concept and its connections (territory) and destroy those connections (deterritorialization) and then take that now meaningless disconnected concept and reconnect and recontextualize it in a way that makes it mean something entirely different (reterritorialization).

Cthulhu swims left means that the process of recontextualization actually helps to destroy the original meaning of the concept. That Reaction in the simple sense or a want to return to a past state of things is a vain process because doing so only helps to destroy the past.

First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.

First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.

And second, while MM may want to relitigate enlightenment ideas broadly, in this case he uses examples that are a few decades apart:

But no. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?

In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.

which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.

On this part I agree. MM does that obnoxious thing SJW's did by redefining commonly used words to suit his political purposes. Like the left redefining "racism", MM redefines "left" to be basically "everything bad":

First, we need to define left and right. In my opinion, obviously a controversial one, the explanation for this mysterious asymmetric dimension is easy: it is political entropy. Right represents peace, order and security; left represents war, anarchy and crime. Because values are inherently subjective, it is possible to argue that left can be good and right can be bad. For example, you can say that the Civil War was good — the North needed to conquer the South and free the slaves. On the other hand, it is also quite easy to construct a very clean value system in which order is simply good, and chaos is simply evil. I have chosen this path. It leaves quite a capacious cavity in the back of my skull, and allows me to call myself a reactionary. To you, perhaps, it is the dark side. But this is only because the treatment is not yet complete.

It's a big sneer at the outgroup. MM dislikes where society has headed, so he puts everything he hates in a big bucket, calls it the "left" and says it always wins. It's pure gerrymandering.

I'm more generous about redefining words because any serious attempt at philosophy has to do this and in this particular case, he is actually using the historical meaning from the French Revolution rather than the colloquial one. Arguably his definition has more historical legs than the economic ideology classification from the cold war.

In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions that I find it hard to argue that it is, in fact, malicious. A malicious actor wouldn't hold to using red and blue as alternatives.

Philosophy can be done well enough by using existing words as they currently are. If that's unfashionable, pompous philosophers usually invent new words rather than redefine old ones. Hijacking existing words is almost always a bad idea if the point is clear communication. It's outright deceitful in many cases by seeking to harness the pre-existing emotional valence of words for different ends, e.g. "racism = power + privilege". Alternatively, it's used to wobble between the real definition and the made-up definition at will to confuse people and claim "you just don't get it". I'm not sure if MM himself does this, but people who quote his work certainly do!

In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions

You could say the same thing about leftists redefining "racism". They were quite open about their definitions, often giving them to you unprompted!

I notice you don't address the historical precedence argument. Anybody who uses the term "right" to mean anything but loyalty to the King is guilty by your standard are they not?

Terms do shift meaning, and that change can be used as a political tactic. I don't think that condemns any such change or attempt by nature. And in fact I find that organically promoting memes is a lot more faithful of a technique than prescriptivism.

The word didn't change vis-a-vis monarchism so much as the underlying conditions did. Monarchism became functionally irrelevant.

It's like how "living animals" once included dodos, until dodos went extinct, and then it didn't. The definition of "living animal" didn't change, yet one morning dodos were no longer included.

I don't disagree that words can change, but change usually happens gradually and organically.

And pray tell, what is the mechanism for this gradual and organic change, if not intellectual discourse and its fashions?

Why do people use "gender" to mean something else than category? Why do people use "democracy" to mean something else than mob rule? Why do people use "well regulated" to mean something else than in good working order?

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