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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.

I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations. (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)

Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here. In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds. And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence". This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow. Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.

Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).

This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:

GUIDE: Perhaps even space and everything spatial for their part first find a reception and a shelter in the nearing nearness and in the furthering farness, which are themselves not two, but rather a one, for which we lack the name.

SCHOLAR: To think this remains something awfully demanding.

GUIDE: A demand which, however, would come to us from the essence of nearness and farness, and which in no way would be rooted in my surmise.

SCIENTIST: Nearness and farness are then something enigmatic.

GUIDE: How beautiful it is for you to say this.

SCIENTIST: I find the enigmatic oppressive, not beautiful.

SCHOLAR: The beautiful has rather something freeing to it.

SCIENTIST: I experience the same thing when I come across a problem in my science. This inspires the scientist even when it at first appears to be unsolvable, because, for the scientist faced with a problem, there are always certain possibilities for preparing and carrying out pertinent investigations. There is always some direction in which research can knuckle down and go toward an object, and thus awaken the feeling of domination that fuels scientific work.

SCHOLAR: By contrast, before the enigma of nearness and farness we stand helplessly perplexed.

SCIENTIST: Most of all we stand idle.

GUIDE: And we do not ever attend to the fact that presumably this perplexity is demanded of us by the enigma itself.

If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.

(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)

This reminds me of my puzzlement at the reception of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. I imagined that English politics in 1651 had a right-wing that favoured monarchy and the divine right of kings, and a left-wing, that favoured Parliament, diggers and levelers, and if the diggers and levelers got too rambunctious, a Lord Protector. I further imagined that the right-wing would love Hobbes. Why? Because they would notice that a mystical faith in the divine right of kings wasn't persuading everybody. Some persons had a more mechanistic, materialist take on how politics worked, and Hobbes' reasoning, about needing a king to maintain order, would persuade them, perfecting social harmony as both the pious and the mechanistic/materialists agreed on the need for a king.

I was wrong. Quoting wikipedia "The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics" and "Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers." The divine right of kings was a mystical doctrine and one profaned it by offering worldly justification.

So yes, the rightist mind finds the enigmatic, such as monarchy, beautiful. The tiny minority of rightist (just me?) who distrust enigma and construct mechanistic/materialists accounts of why we should be right-wing are rejected by the right. And then there is the left, which offers mechanistic/materialist accounts of why we should be left-wing (that I find unconvincing due to neglecting the details of the mechanisms).