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Notes -
On Inferential Distance
There's a pair complaints that get made here on a semi-regular basis to the effect of how "The right" lacks a positive vision/will to power, and more generally the how the whole Left/Right spectrum is incoherent. These complaints are often deployed in tandem with the old Bryan Caplan take about the left is defined by being anti-market and the right is defined by being anti-left. I disagree, and given how I've been accused by multiple users of "torturing the meaning of words" and "doubling down on obvious falsehoods" over the last couple months, and I feel kind of obligated to elaborate.
Entering college life as I did (as Freshman on the GI-Bill Student after 12 years as combat medic), I found it difficult to discount the degree to which certain cultural assumptions dominated the school's culture. I often found myself feeling a bit like Captain Picard in that one TNG Episode where the alien-of-the-week's individual words are readily translatable but their meaning is not. When I first read Yudkowski's post on "expecting short inferential distances" it crystalized something that I had already grasped intuitively but had been struggling to put into words. The concept of "inferential distance" subsequently became something of a bugbear of mine. In 1984 Orwell posits that the key to controlling discourse was to first control the language and I think he was on to something with that. As I've previously observed, for all the talk of theMotte being "right wing" it's userbase is overwhelmingly progressive in background. Being college educated is the default here. Atheism is the default here. A belief in identity politics and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics is the default here. These assumption (and yes I am calling them assumptions) get baked into the discourse and people who don't already buy into them end up facing an uphill battle if they wish to participate in the discussion. Often times I'll find myself choosing to not bother but I can't help but notice that this amplifies the problem, "evaporative cooling" and all that.
While I recognize that language is more performative than it is prescriptive what I am endeavoring to do here is something like a rectification of names. A lot of what I am about to say is going to be a rehash of things that some of you will have already read before on Lesswrong, SSC, or on theMotte prior our departure from Reddit. But in the interests of engaging with people we disagree with I will attempt to restate my case for the record...
What do I mean when I say "Western Civilization"? I refer to the intellectual tradition that is essentially a marriage of middle eastern mysticism and classical Greek/Roman formalism. This tradition rose to prominance in the first century BC and spread rapidly along the mediterrainian coast ultimately conquering most of Europe and eventually spreading to the new world. One of the core elements that sets this tradition apart from both it's contempraries and predecessors is a belief in "sanctity through service" which in turn translates into requiring a woman's consent for marriage, viewing dogs as high status animals, and regarding slavery with something of a jaundiced eye. There is a debate to be had about to what degree early Christianity created these conditions or was simply a reaction to them but I don't think they matter all that much. It looks to me like a chicken and egg type question as regardless of on which side you fall in the debate the two are inextricably linked. The venn diagram of cultures considered "western" and cultures "heavily influenced by Christainity" (as opposed to other faiths Abrahamic or otherwise) is practically a circle with Jesus himself quoting Homer and Aeschylus in his sermons.
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other. The core points of disagreement being internal vs exterenal loci of control and the "default" state of man. While this model may have fallen out of favor in acedemia over the last few decades I still believe that it holds value in that it "cleaves reality at the joints" by pointing to real differences in how diffrenet classes within the west approach questions of legal authority/legitimacy while still accurately reflecting to the original etymology, IE which side would one be expected to take in the French revolution.
Users here will often argue that the existance (or non-existance) of "an imaginary sky-friend" or individual loci of control are not relevant to whatever issue is being discussed but I disagree. I believe that these base level assumptions end up becoming the core of what positions we hold.
I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for "no true scotsmaning" by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place. That is an underlying assumption on both sides that if only all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down, utopia would be achievable. This is a fundamentally Rousseauean viewpoint where in violence, inequity, and injustice are all products of living in a society. Meanwhile I find myself barrowing pages from Hobbes and Burke, grand ideas are nice and all, but social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up, and that supermarket shelves get stocked and that I would argue what makes a civilization.
Edit: Fixed link, spelling
When in history has a civilization ever referred to an intellectual tradition? Egypt? Rome? Greece? India? China? They all have had intellectual traditions that defined their consciousness, and those traditions were very different from ours such that we probably could not relate much to their way of thinking of the world.
But Civilization refers to a peoples, and that people's essence and continuity, prestige and hegemony.
Your notion that your own civilization was created and is defined by an idea and not a people is extremely particular and it doesn't generalize anywhere else in history. Is Chinese civilization "an idea?" Chinese intellectual tradition has been highly dynamic, and this serves to contrast the alt-right view with your own.
The alt-right view is essentially that Civilization is how I described it- it's built and maintained by a people, and if you replace those people with other people then you are a complete fool if you expect continuity in the spiritual essence of that civilization. History shows that never, ever happens.
It's the people that create the intellectual tradition, mostly a subset of highly influential intellectual and cultural leaders. In turn, the intellectual tradition over time directs the people towards a common end. It even forms them genetically over larger time horizons. This is the interaction between Civilization and intellectual tradition, but they are not equivalent.
In contrast, you seem to view civilization as a dogged commitment to an idea. The alt-right world view is clearly superior to the conservative worldview on this front.
The Progressivism we know today is only the newest mutation of that synthesis of semitic mysticism and Greek/Roman formalism. The alt-right is correct to view that intellectual tradition as something that should be rejected or moved beyond in order to save civilization or build a better one.
Replace in what sense? If I take all Ethiopians and transplant them in Egypt, I have no doubt the Egyptian civilization would be fundamentally different. In a sense, it died when it was populated by people who were not raised in it at all.
But you seem to be arguing that it is fundamentally impossible to continue a civilization w/o its founders. The go-to counter-example would be assimilating foreigners into your culture. Or would you argue that foreigners are by definition people not interested in taking on your culture?
Civilization is such a massive ship that of course it's going to continue in some form and on some trajectory without its founders. Likewise, civilizational decline is so huge that it can't really be turned on a dime. I am speaking more to the self-defeating ethos of conservatism: people don't matter in their essence, or they are at least interchangeable, only ideas matter and that's what should be conserved.
You can't conserve an idea if you don't conserve a people, that's my argument. Civilization is not an idea, it's a people.
But in the sense of say, American civilization, there are no people. America is a country but it isn't a nation. It was diverse at its founding, both ethnically and religiously, and it's hard to point to one group as having had an outsized influence on the development of American civilization, both in the founding era and going forward. Which is why the American alt-right nationalism never made intellectual sense, because it's argument is essentially ahistorical.
All civilization has a level of ethnic diversity. That doesn't at all undermine my point, that changing the people would change the civilization. Russia is diverse, but if it became majority Hispanic in 100 years, you wouldn't say "well that doesn't matter because Russia was already diverse." It would obviously change the nature and trajectory of Russian civilization.
To say that it's hard to point at a closely-related subset of groups that have had an "outsized influence" on the development of Western, and American, civilization is just exceedingly obtuse. It was obviously founded and developed as a European civilization with European population groups that colonized the nation.
American alt-right concerns over race are far more aligned with the historical concerns of the founders and public opinion all the way through the end of the second world war and beyond. The idea that "America is an idea and race doesn't matter" is a post-war retcon that is ahistorical with respect to the establishment of American civilization.
The reason alt-right nationalism doesn't make sense is because the ship has sailed, and demographic change is baked into the cake and there's no realistic future in which it does not happen. It's not something that can any more be opposed, it just has to be considered a premise to political and cultural thinking moving forward. But unlike Hlynka, who would maintain optimism that the people don't matter as long as we cling to the same ideas, it's the alt-right that is aware of the revolutionary consequences of demographic change and the incoherence of a conservative mindset in the face of such changes.
But it also presents an opportunity to jettison the toxic "intellectual traditions" and advocate for ones that are better.
Well, no. It wasn't founded as a European civilization, it was founded first as an extension of the British Empire and later as an explicit rejection of traditional European civilization. Enlightenment ideals were certainly European in origin, but they were specifically northern, Protestant European in origin at the very widest definition, and for all practical purposes were English and Scottish in origin. The Italians, Hungarians, Poles, etc. had little to nothing to do with Enlightenment thought. And in practice most of Europe was living under a system much more illiberal than that which the colonists were rebelling against.
So to say that the American civilization was founded by Europeans may be a true statement, but if the founders had any nationalist tendencies at the time, they would have been limited to those of English and maybe Scottish or Dutch descent. Those who were wont to deny various outsider groups status as "real Americans" set their sights first on Swedes and German Protestants in the 18th century, then on Irish and German Catholics in the 19th, then on Poles, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, Rusyns, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes in the early 20th. Is that the argument you're making now, that the only true inheritors of the American civilization are Anglo-Saxons? If not, why not?
Assuming that Cesare Beccaria ("... widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment... well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology... considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice") does not cut it as Italian contribution to the Enlightenment, doesn't your definition of Enlightenment as "specifically northern, Protestant European" leave out a massive hole by the name of France? Descartes and Pascal, Diderot and d'Alembert, Condorcet, Buffon, Turgot, Montesquieu, Voltaire? (And Rousseau, if we count French-speaking Switzerland EDIT: although admittedly, he was protestant) And there's much more if you also consider scientific and technological contributions, though I suppose this was specifically about intellectual/ideological developments.
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