I think I could call myself a neoreactionary if the meta-principles were applied without the object-level principles.
The meta-principles apply to the object-level principles, but I don’t think it’s possible to figure that out from Moldbug alone. I’ll try to provide the details if anyone wants them, but the general idea is that your tribe’s values have been shaped by institutional constraints—your predecessors had the goal of capturing power and the spoils thereof, and made whatever arguments were useful toward that goal, and now you actually believe all of those things.
I don’t think this is a complete picture. I haven’t had the time to investigate this as much as I would like, but I suspect that there’s also some ideological inheritance from the self-justifications of the later stages of the British Empire. (Macaulay. Idea of Progress.) It’s possible to come up with an explanation of your tribe’s imperialistic tendencies without drawing on this, but I doubt that omission can be genealogically justified.
our homogenized monoculture
...and yes, your tribe does have imperialistic tendencies. What homogenized monoculture? There are many reasons I don’t and can’t call myself a neoreactionary, but I completely agree with them here: your people should not live under the same government as mine. You have never had a homogenized monoculture, and you never will until New England is no longer part of the United States.
I keep encountering mindsets like this among your tribe: my people don’t exist as long as you don’t have to remember us, and when you do, we’re aberrations who need to be wiped from the face of the earth. (I have in fact heard Yankees advocate the genocide of my people. Yes, I do mean genocide. In the most literal possible sense.)
I also agree with neoreactionaries about Woodrow Wilson and FDR—if German hadn’t been wiped out in this country, we’d be behind a language barrier from you. (For certain values of ‘we’ that include me and exclude most of ‘us’—there’s not that much kraut blood in the South. But my grandmother spoke it fluently, and I think natively, and the other side of my family is from what used to be a German-speaking area. Oh well.)
In that specific sentence, I was actually referring to Lesswrong as it was before neoreactionaries became a Big Thing. Pretty much everyone agreed on everything back, and all disagreements were highly productive disagreements in which people changed their mind.
After the NRx came in we’ve had useless arguments, downvote stalkers, and so on really hurting the signal to noise ratio.
(By the way, that sentence is not an attack on NRx, but a proof of one of its principles—that homogeneity is useful. I’m also harking back to a golden age. My entire attitude right now feels a lot like the Shield of Conservatism, only it’s not protecting the conservatives.)
By the way, that sentence is not an attack on NRx, but a proof of one of its principles—that homogeneity is useful.
Well, yes, I’ve been saying this from the beginning—the word “neoreaction” fucked everything up. If you don’t have a word for the whole cluster, each point can be argued; if you do, pro- and anti- become two factions, and you get the usual factional conflicts.
In particular, the strategy I suspect Nick Land was playing by was a mistake. Trying to create a faction and make it as loud as possible works in academia; not so much anywhere else.
Perhaps LW is vulnerable to getting sidetracked into futile discussions of NRx in particular because a lot of the LW memeset is shared with a lot of the NRxrz. Indeed, the NRxrz pride themselves on their clear-sighted rationality. From within, the participants think they’re having a rational discussion, while from without it resembles no such thing, it’s just politics as usual.
Yup. Foretold many times, actually. We even talked about Walled Gardens and such. I’d place a fairly high probability that many of the founding members would view LW as a lot less interesting now—not because of Reaction, but because of the net total politics.
LW doesn’t downvote to indicate disagreement. They upvote whenever an argument is phrased in an interesting way even if they disagree entirely. NRx is interesting. In short, LW are the “open minded progressives” to NRx’s Open Letter.
All of which would have been fine, actually, if it didn’t increase the total amount of time in useless arguments. The main thing of value that was lost was Total Amount of Homogeneity (and well, I suppose the acquisition of a bunch of people who really like talking about politics doesn’t help).
I suppose liking to talk about politics is the core of the problem here. Merely giving a name to a political faction is a package fallacy already.
For example, why are we debating “neoreaction”, instead of tabooing the world, replacing the symbol with a set of specific statements, and debating each statement separately? By debating “neoreaction” we have already failed as rationalists, and what we do then is just digging the hole deeper.
useless arguments, downvote stalkers, and so on really hurting the signal to noise ratio
You are actually wrong on the timeline, the genderwars and the Social Justice movement, came here and produced these symptoms first.
One can plausibly credit the formation of Neoreaction as a direct result of a feeling of persecution and tightening of the acceptable domain of rational investigation on this site, it caused many to leave and seed a whole new blogosphere where once there was just Moldbug.
I suppose it could be so. It doesn’t matter really, since the end result is the same. Still, I doubt it because Lesswrong is overwhelmingly left wing (and continues to be according to the polls—the right wing and NRx voices belong to just a few very prolific accounts.) And pretty much all the founding members of Lesswrong and, going back further, transhumanism in general, were of a certain sort which I hesitate to call “left” or “liberal” but… - socialists, libertarians, anarchists, all those were represented, and certainly many early users were hostile to social justice’s extremeties, which is to be expected among smart people who are exposed to leftie stupidity much more often than other kinds of stupidity… but those were differences in implementation. We all essentially agreed on the core principles of egalitarianism and not hurting people, and agreed that prejudice against race and gender expression is bad (which was an entirely separate topic from whether they’re equal in aptitude), and that conservatives, nationalists, and those sort of people were fundamentally wrongheaded in some way. It wasn’t controversial, just taken for granted that anyone who had penetrated this far into the dialogue believed that these things to be true.… in the same sense that we continue to take for granted that no one here believes in a literal theist God. (And right now, I know many former users have retreated into other more obscure spin off forums, and everything I said here pretty much remains true in those forums and blogs.)
But I’m less interested in who broke the walled garden / started eternal september / whatever you want to call it (after all, I’m not mad that they came here, I got to learn about an interesting philosophy) and more interested in the meta-level principle: per my understanding of Neoreactionary philosophy, when one finds oneself in the powerful majority, one aught to just go ahead and exert that power and not worry about the underdog (which I still don’t agree with but I’m not sure why). And, homogeneity is often more valuable than diversity in many cases, that’s something I’ve actually kind of accepted.
And pretty much all the founding members of Lesswrong and, going back further, transhumanism in general, were of a certain sort which I hesitate to call “left” or “liberal” but… - socialists, libertarians, anarchists, all those were represented, and certainly many early users were hostile to social justice’s extremeties, which is to be expected among smart people who are exposed to leftie stupidity much more often than other kinds of stupidity… but those were differences in implementation.
That’s not exactly right.
Moldbug did comment on OvercomingBias in the days before there was LW. This community came into contact with neoreactionary thought before LW existed.
Michael Anissimov who funded MoreRight was MIRI’s media director.
I mean, I still value diversity by default. Valuing homogeneity is something I’ve kind of come around to slowly and suspiciously (whereas before I just assumed it was bad by default.)
The early OB/LW community didn’t have a leftwing vibe, it had a strong Libertarian vibe. Also at the end of the day leftie radicals like to point out that liberal =/= leftist.
Yudkowsky has written articles for Cato, a site considered unbearably right wing libertarian by some.
On questions like Feminism there were quite protracted comment wars long before Neoreaction, for a while early in its history there were more people sympathetic to PUA than Feminism. Even now the consensus seems to have settled on feminist ok-ed PUA not being bad, which is not the mainstream consensus. See gentle silent rape for an early example of rational dating advice for a late example.
I recommend you also check out my early commenting history. I interacted with many core, very right wing, rationalist like Vladimir_M and so on who left later in the history of the site.
Those examples of departing from left-canon (libertarian, “feminism-isn’t-perfect”, and “pua is often questionable in practice but not fundamentally bad from first principles”) are okay by me. I depart from the left-canon on those points myself and find the leftie moral outrage tactics on some of those fronts pretty annoying. All those things are still fundamentally egalitarian in values, just different in implementation. The homogeneity I was referring to was in egalitarianism and a certain type of emotional stance, a certain agreement concerning which first principles are valid and which goals are worthy, despite diversity in implementation.
(But, as ChristainKI pointed out, Moldbug himself was a commentator, and that predates me, so it’s true that the seed has always been there.)
1) People who think a lot and generally care about logical consistency, trending towards high IQ
2) who also have sufficiently understanding of parsimony that God, etc, is just totally out of the question
3) and who generally adapt well to technological advance, often being the people whose intellects are drive it forward
4) who don’t base moral judgements off of strong emotional response to things that are “weird”, like odd sexualities or profanity, or “threatening”, like enemy combatants or opposing ideologies.
5) who have a degree of detachment from their particular situations, and wouldn’t vastly put the importance of themselves, their family, or their nation above others. It’s okay if they do so in small ways in personal life, but they should be cognizant of the whole universal brotherhood of mankind thing and generally see morality and kindness as something that should be applied to people relatively equally.
So a NRx-Lefty of this tribe believes these things, but also thinks an authoritarian, heirarchical society is the best way to achieve these values. So, people who fall into the tribe and are members of the cognitive elite will sort of rule over everyone else, using military force and propaganda and all that other stuff to achieve these values. They still care about outsiders, but they care in a very paternalistic sense and won’t hesitate to override people’s stated preferences in favor of what the NRx-Lefty extrapolates their preferences to actually be, since savages don’t really know what they want or understand anything.
The bulk of the actual NRx movement would be considered enemies, savages, or subversives within this empire, because they tend to fail steps 4 and 5. Within the empire, it’s “okay” to be a human-biodiversity-advocate in the same sense that it’s okay to think that people with myopia are smarter and consider that a largely irrelevant fact because we have actual IQ tests that we can use to separate people with with much greater accuracy, but it’s not okay in a moral sense to be a particularist who thinks your race should be defended. (Ideological particularism, is, of course, encouraged if it’s generally in the Cathedral’s favor.)
Oh, that was directed at nydwracu, I misread the comment nesting loops.
The plurality of American blood comes from Germany, and the descendents of that immigrant wave tend to be Evangelicals, Lutherans, Catholics...I don’t know whether this bloodline is actually more likely to follow Guns and God style conservatism, but that seems to be the notion here.
I think if I was going to label nydwracu’s comment in one word I’d call it Völkisch.
Who counts as ‘Evangelical’? Colin Woodard’s ‘Midlands’ nation is generally plurality-Methodist. I lived out in Western Maryland for a while, where you can see some Constitution Party signs when election years roll around, and they’re Methodists out there, not Southern Baptists.
I’m not sure how trustworthy the census ethnicity data is, since I don’t think the Anglos were genocided; I’d trust Woodard before the census data, with the caveat that everything out past Michigan (and possibly including Michigan) had enough non-Anglo Germanic immigrants that it’s not really Yankeedom anymore. (Woodard’s map is in general not a good guide to current cultural distinctions, but it’s not trying to be. The Tidewater region doesn’t really exist anymore; in its place, there’s the Eastern Corridor, which runs up from northern Virginia (maybe even Richmond) through DC, Baltimore, and Philadelpha to NYC and Boston. Some people call this general region the Mid-Atlantic, but that obscures the difference between the DC/Baltimore area and everywhere else in Maryland.)
And in case I wasn’t clear, I do think the “NRx-lefty” attitude is common among progressives.
I don’t know who counts as what—it’s pretty confusing, and that’s why I just went with Völkisch, since I’m guessing your defining criteria is not really religion or genetics but some mix of culture, ideology, and physical appearance and you know it when you see it and it’s loosely German-American.
The thing is, I don’t think believe members of the populations you outline actually consider themselves as a tribe, at least not in the ethno-nationalist light that you’re using (If they did, there would exist a simple word to describe them). Would you agree that their is a certain artificiality inherent in constructing an ethno-national identity around this group?
It’s totally artificial and metapolitically hopeless, just like everything else available to white people in this country, unless they’re Episcopalian or something. And the Episcopalians have bigger problems.
As far as I can tell, there is no possible way to solve the problems of identity in this country. Most of the white population is deeply psychologically damaged in a way that is rarely even noticed, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it other than maybe join a frat.
Most of the white population is deeply psychologically damaged in a way that is rarely even noticed, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it other than maybe join a frat.
Our civilization contains an absence of a nigh-universal trait that has historically proven itself to be compatible with civilization (and perhaps even beneficial to civilization; certainly the Roman emperors thought it was); that’s at least a sign that something else is going on. There are obvious historical reasons for this that don’t involve any abstract, instrumental-rationality-seeking processes: the quest to create a totalizing Christianity purified of any ‘pagan’ influences. (How many of our current rites are German or Irish in origin? Christmas is mostly German—trees, stockings, etc. -- and… hm, apparently jack-o’-lanterns may actually be English.)
The Pledge of Allegiance was a Progressive Era reform; I wonder if this was part of a general program to try to introduce a civil religion similar to Roman emperor-worship. Mount Rushmore was carved at around this same time, and its main supporter was Peter Norbeck, a Progressive. (And what of the folk musicians?) But I don’t think there’s very much to work with there; the Roman emperor-cult failed in the end.
Anyway… I don’t want to phrase it in the Alain de Botton-style language of pure instrumental rationality; while perhaps the best way to communicate the general points (especially around here), it’s likely to backfire. Doing something for the conscious purpose of acquiring whatever instrumental gains are believed to follow from it may undermine the instrumental value of the thing. So perhaps it will be impossible for me to change anyone’s mind on this without employing the Mencius-style strategy of reasoning by bringing up shared intuitions/experiences, and that requires a degree of targeting that is difficult to pull off on the internet.
But consider subcultures: why do people join them? What is it about raves, or Dan Deacon’s concerts (I’ve never been to one, but I’ve heard about them, and read about what he’s trying to do with them), or any of that—and what is it about subcultural identity itself? There may be some degree of psychological sortation going on (though even this would result in a closer approximation to the ancestral environment, where, due to a deeply shared context—there was an excellent SSC comment on cultural context a few days ago, but I can’t find it—and genetic similarity, most people would probably be more psychologically similar to most people they encounter than is the case today), but it’s also about having a sense of identity, which very few things but subcultures and frats can provide.
Frats are an even better example. Most people who join a frat identify strongly with it and see it as a beneficial thing in their lives. Why? (Note that this is despite the hazing process—i.e. the initiation ritual—that the consensus frowns upon today. But initiation rituals are cross-culturally common, no?)
just like everything else available to white people in this country
Wouldn’t go that far. I mean, they could just look at what they actually are, and construct an identity around that. What they actually are has little to do with Germanic heritage, and race is only one of many possible ways to create a tribal affiliation anyhow. I’m pretty culturally removed from most members of both racial group in my family tree, but I don’t feel psychologically adrift or anything. (Granted, I might just not know what I’m missing—I do feel pretty good when I meet people who are similar to me in real life.)
Obviously, i’s hard for ethno-nationalists, since they are basically contrarians in this society and can only reach “tribe” level numbers via the internet. But it’s not hard for most white people. White Americans are a lot more culturally homogeneous than say, Hindus. (Or any large non-Western grouping. Technology homogenizes.)
What are we actually, then, that we can construct an identity out of?
The feeling of missing something only kicks in, I suspect, after the thing that is missed is experienced. A good example is dance: it doesn’t really exist in our society outside subcultures, but I thought that didn’t matter until I took up contra. (Which I really ought to get back into now that I’m in NYC—do they even have it up here? It’s been something like five years, too...)
Similarly, I first noticed the importance of thedish identity, ritual, and traditions when I went to a very interesting summer camp that had a strong local identity backed up by its own rituals and traditions. Most of what I understand about these things now comes from there.
It had several sites; I attended four. One site was shut down for lack of attendance shortly after the rituals and traditions failed to be passed down, and the strongest site was the one with the strongest traditions. I talked to some other people who, like me, jumped ship from a site with weakening traditions to the site with the strongest traditions, and I got the very strong impression that it was causal: weakened traditions made the site worse at the de facto functions it performed for its attendees.
(One unique sociological factor that existed at the site with the strongest traditions was a semiformal aristocracy dedicated to preserving and teaching the traditions.)
Then again, from what I’ve heard of Alain de Benoist, he only understands what he writes about on an intellectual level.
In my mind, the tribe aught to be constructed out of people who 1) care about you, which is accomplished through shared experience 2) who understand you—that is, they are similar enough that when you say something, they hear what you meant. There’s no vast gulf of un-shared ideas and thoughts and notions that separates you, and inferential distance is short.
I definitely see the importance of having one, but in my experience race is a pretty poor proxy for what I talk about above. Shared culture is better, shared experience is best, and optimally those co-occur. (Genetic) family is a decent method, since you’re likely to match in personality as well as culture, but even that is a proxy.
I suspect you are somewhat overestimating the degree to which people in other racial groups identify with each other. Two random Indians in India don’t care about each other more than two random whites in America. That’s because the “white” category (or the “Indian” category) is too large for tribal affiliations to build up. Granted, they’ll understand each other better than they will, say, a Japanese person, but baseline friendliness levels are pretty much set at “stranger”. Minority cultures tend to have a different situation, since there is a very limited number of people who belong to their group, so it becomes an easy schelling point for a community to cluster.
Essentially, your tribe should be a group of <200 people, in close proximity, who share a large number of things in common with you in terms of psychology and knowledge. To the extent that people within Western culture are “damaged” by modern life creating a situation where very few people consistently come into contact with more than 1-3 other people (the same people each time), I agree, but I don’t see a racial identity as a workable solution at all. Humans really don’t form tribes that large in nature, although you can get sort of a hollow illusion of identification by aligning yourself with some sort of abstract concept.
So my answer to “what are we” is basically, [insert church here] [insert small rural home-town here] [insert college here][insert secret-club here], or whatever it is that your social hub is primarily based around. Ideally you can assume people in those groups share a certain understanding with you… and if you don’t have that, it’s probably because modern life has forced you to trade off that stuff in exchange for mobility, and you should try to find ways to acquire it.
You’re right—race is a poor proxy. The “white race” stuff is regarded by many European ethnats as a bizarre Americanism and a total misunderstanding of the situation in Europe—and they’re right, though some other ethnats try to play it up in order to forge Europe-wide alliances against threats from outside.
As I say in my linked post, the negative effects can be significant—up to and including total collapse. Here’s Glubb:
Another remarkable and unexpected symptom of national decline is the intensification of internal political hatreds. One would have expected that, when the survival of the nation became precarious, political factions would drop their rivalry and stand shoulder-to-shoulder to save their country. In the fourteenth century, the weakening empire of Byzantium was threatened, and indeed dominated, by the Ottoman Turks. The situation was so serious that one would have expected every subject of Byzantium to abandon his personal interests and to stand with his compatriots in a last desperate attempt to save the country. The reverse occurred. The Byzantines spent the last fifty years of their history in fighting one another in repeated civil wars, until the Ottomans moved in and administered the coup de grâce.
One mentioned-but-unnoticed point of the intellectually-serious Right is that some of the political pathologies of the States are caused by similar civil wars. Brecht’s Die Lösung applied to democracy: the Blue Tribe fights the Red Tribe by bringing in immigrants who will vote (i.e. participate in a civil war at a remove) for the Blue side. (This probably goes unnoticed because of their support of secession, but that’s just not politically realistic in this country, and a return to federalism is unlikely.)
The evopsych ideal is a group of <200 people in close proximity who share a common context, sure. But one can notice that social technologies for super-Dunbar coordination keep getting developed and keep winning—from subcultures and religions that can provide social capital in a new area (I’ve heard that this is particularly strong with the Mormons) to nationalism in the New World and the Old to the unification of the Mongols around Genghis Khan.
(If you want a particularly shock-value-optimizing example, consider that it took a combination of immense military stupidity on their part (especially from one country that went and made a journalist into their supreme leader) and the USSR cannon-foddering an entire generation of their population to stop a few incredibly coordinated countries in Central Europe and their one ally in Asia from winning a war against pretty much the rest of the world.)
...Actually, there are three things going on, at least for modern Westerners, though the boundaries (especially between the second and the third) are often blurred.
1) Immediate social context absent mobility. Sub-Dunbar tribe with shared experiences and context.
2) Larger (usually regional or religious) identity that provides overarching cultural context, ritual, and a sense of continuity and meaning, of tradition and the transcendent.
3) Nation-scale identity that operates mostly on the metapolitical plane, allowing for internal unity, coordination, and action on the geopolitical scale.
Where this gets interesting is that the first, ‘tribal’ form of identity may not be a thede in the usual sense—I haven’t thought very much about this form of identity (which need not rest on anything even approaching explicit identification—does it?) since I’ve never seen it either personally or from a distance. But that’s not the scale I’m talking about anyway; groups of friends don’t fulfill the second form (outside having the possibility for providing small-scale rites), which is what I’m saying is missing.
The third form is also missing, of course, but that’s entirely a societal/political problem; individuals can get on fine with only the first two forms, I suspect, with the only consequences being those that arise societally from lack of coordination. (Not that those consequences are in any way minor.)
I keep encountering mindsets like this among your tribe: my people don’t exist as long as you don’t have to remember us, and when you do, we’re aberrations who need to be wiped from the face of the earth.
Hey now, I’m not actually condoning that attitude. I’m saying that’s the attitude I would have, with the NRx-Lefty hat on. In real life I am still Enlightenment-Leftie, half my friends are religious patriotic folk and I’ve been quite open to interacting with them and hearing their ideas and even dating them. Enlightenment-Leftie and Enlightenment-Rightie co-exist just fine, because of the tolerance thing… the critique of NRx here is that the Enlightenment framework always favors Leftie, which does seem true but I find it hard to complain about that. But NRx-Rightie is not the solution that finally balances things back in the Right’s favor, because.… here comes NRx-Leftie, they can use all Cthulhu’s leftward pull tricks and they’re not nearly as tolerant of Rightie, in any format, and they’re not tolerant of those Red, Purple, or Yellow tribes either. (In theory. In practice I’m not sure NRx wouldn’t just collapse in all cases.) Tolerance was an Enlightenment value.
I’m not saying regular lefties never advocate these ideas—ultimately, liberals have amygdalas and love in-groups and hate out-groups just like everyone else. But my idealized Rational Humanist Egalitarian who I’m calling Enlightenment-Lefty for the purpose of this conversation doesn’t agree with those lefties. Within this conversational framework, those are just Rx-lefties, lacking the self-aware component of NRx. Even within the NRx-Lefty empire, those sorts of people are kind of the proles of the world, understanding the Cathedral doctrine but not really getting the spirit of it all. The NRx-Lefty empire doesn’t go so far as to want genocide (eugenics, maybe)… but yeah, they will go ahead and be paternalistic and superior and intolerant.
The meta-principles apply to the object-level principles, but I don’t think it’s possible to figure that out from Moldbug alone. I’ll try to provide the details if anyone wants them, but the general idea is that your tribe’s values have been shaped by institutional constraints—your predecessors had the goal of capturing power and the spoils thereof, and made whatever arguments were useful toward that goal, and now you actually believe all of those things.
I don’t think this is a complete picture. I haven’t had the time to investigate this as much as I would like, but I suspect that there’s also some ideological inheritance from the self-justifications of the later stages of the British Empire. (Macaulay. Idea of Progress.) It’s possible to come up with an explanation of your tribe’s imperialistic tendencies without drawing on this, but I doubt that omission can be genealogically justified.
...and yes, your tribe does have imperialistic tendencies. What homogenized monoculture? There are many reasons I don’t and can’t call myself a neoreactionary, but I completely agree with them here: your people should not live under the same government as mine. You have never had a homogenized monoculture, and you never will until New England is no longer part of the United States.
I keep encountering mindsets like this among your tribe: my people don’t exist as long as you don’t have to remember us, and when you do, we’re aberrations who need to be wiped from the face of the earth. (I have in fact heard Yankees advocate the genocide of my people. Yes, I do mean genocide. In the most literal possible sense.)
I also agree with neoreactionaries about Woodrow Wilson and FDR—if German hadn’t been wiped out in this country, we’d be behind a language barrier from you. (For certain values of ‘we’ that include me and exclude most of ‘us’—there’s not that much kraut blood in the South. But my grandmother spoke it fluently, and I think natively, and the other side of my family is from what used to be a German-speaking area. Oh well.)
In that specific sentence, I was actually referring to Lesswrong as it was before neoreactionaries became a Big Thing. Pretty much everyone agreed on everything back, and all disagreements were highly productive disagreements in which people changed their mind.
After the NRx came in we’ve had useless arguments, downvote stalkers, and so on really hurting the signal to noise ratio.
(By the way, that sentence is not an attack on NRx, but a proof of one of its principles—that homogeneity is useful. I’m also harking back to a golden age. My entire attitude right now feels a lot like the Shield of Conservatism, only it’s not protecting the conservatives.)
Well, yes, I’ve been saying this from the beginning—the word “neoreaction” fucked everything up. If you don’t have a word for the whole cluster, each point can be argued; if you do, pro- and anti- become two factions, and you get the usual factional conflicts.
In particular, the strategy I suspect Nick Land was playing by was a mistake. Trying to create a faction and make it as loud as possible works in academia; not so much anywhere else.
It’s the SOP for politics. “When bad men combine, the good must associate.” (Edmund Burke, 1770)
How many successful political factions have gone out and given themselves names, and how many were only named by their enemies?
What, for example, do the ‘cultural Marxists’ call themselves?
As it was foretold of old.
Perhaps LW is vulnerable to getting sidetracked into futile discussions of NRx in particular because a lot of the LW memeset is shared with a lot of the NRxrz. Indeed, the NRxrz pride themselves on their clear-sighted rationality. From within, the participants think they’re having a rational discussion, while from without it resembles no such thing, it’s just politics as usual.
Yup. Foretold many times, actually. We even talked about Walled Gardens and such. I’d place a fairly high probability that many of the founding members would view LW as a lot less interesting now—not because of Reaction, but because of the net total politics.
LW doesn’t downvote to indicate disagreement. They upvote whenever an argument is phrased in an interesting way even if they disagree entirely. NRx is interesting. In short, LW are the “open minded progressives” to NRx’s Open Letter.
All of which would have been fine, actually, if it didn’t increase the total amount of time in useless arguments. The main thing of value that was lost was Total Amount of Homogeneity (and well, I suppose the acquisition of a bunch of people who really like talking about politics doesn’t help).
I suppose liking to talk about politics is the core of the problem here. Merely giving a name to a political faction is a package fallacy already.
For example, why are we debating “neoreaction”, instead of tabooing the world, replacing the symbol with a set of specific statements, and debating each statement separately? By debating “neoreaction” we have already failed as rationalists, and what we do then is just digging the hole deeper.
Or you could call it a win in diversity.
You are actually wrong on the timeline, the genderwars and the Social Justice movement, came here and produced these symptoms first.
One can plausibly credit the formation of Neoreaction as a direct result of a feeling of persecution and tightening of the acceptable domain of rational investigation on this site, it caused many to leave and seed a whole new blogosphere where once there was just Moldbug.
I suppose it could be so. It doesn’t matter really, since the end result is the same. Still, I doubt it because Lesswrong is overwhelmingly left wing (and continues to be according to the polls—the right wing and NRx voices belong to just a few very prolific accounts.) And pretty much all the founding members of Lesswrong and, going back further, transhumanism in general, were of a certain sort which I hesitate to call “left” or “liberal” but… - socialists, libertarians, anarchists, all those were represented, and certainly many early users were hostile to social justice’s extremeties, which is to be expected among smart people who are exposed to leftie stupidity much more often than other kinds of stupidity… but those were differences in implementation. We all essentially agreed on the core principles of egalitarianism and not hurting people, and agreed that prejudice against race and gender expression is bad (which was an entirely separate topic from whether they’re equal in aptitude), and that conservatives, nationalists, and those sort of people were fundamentally wrongheaded in some way. It wasn’t controversial, just taken for granted that anyone who had penetrated this far into the dialogue believed that these things to be true.… in the same sense that we continue to take for granted that no one here believes in a literal theist God. (And right now, I know many former users have retreated into other more obscure spin off forums, and everything I said here pretty much remains true in those forums and blogs.)
But I’m less interested in who broke the walled garden / started eternal september / whatever you want to call it (after all, I’m not mad that they came here, I got to learn about an interesting philosophy) and more interested in the meta-level principle: per my understanding of Neoreactionary philosophy, when one finds oneself in the powerful majority, one aught to just go ahead and exert that power and not worry about the underdog (which I still don’t agree with but I’m not sure why). And, homogeneity is often more valuable than diversity in many cases, that’s something I’ve actually kind of accepted.
That’s not exactly right. Moldbug did comment on OvercomingBias in the days before there was LW. This community came into contact with neoreactionary thought before LW existed. Michael Anissimov who funded MoreRight was MIRI’s media director.
Huh. Oh right. I knew about the Moldbug thing, and I still said that.
I’m wrong. Mind changed. Good catch.
I have actually strongly argued for the benefits of ideological diversity in a rationalist site several times.
I mean, I still value diversity by default. Valuing homogeneity is something I’ve kind of come around to slowly and suspiciously (whereas before I just assumed it was bad by default.)
The early OB/LW community didn’t have a leftwing vibe, it had a strong Libertarian vibe. Also at the end of the day leftie radicals like to point out that liberal =/= leftist.
Yudkowsky has written articles for Cato, a site considered unbearably right wing libertarian by some.
On questions like Feminism there were quite protracted comment wars long before Neoreaction, for a while early in its history there were more people sympathetic to PUA than Feminism. Even now the consensus seems to have settled on feminist ok-ed PUA not being bad, which is not the mainstream consensus. See gentle silent rape for an early example of rational dating advice for a late example.
I recommend you also check out my early commenting history. I interacted with many core, very right wing, rationalist like Vladimir_M and so on who left later in the history of the site.
Those examples of departing from left-canon (libertarian, “feminism-isn’t-perfect”, and “pua is often questionable in practice but not fundamentally bad from first principles”) are okay by me. I depart from the left-canon on those points myself and find the leftie moral outrage tactics on some of those fronts pretty annoying. All those things are still fundamentally egalitarian in values, just different in implementation. The homogeneity I was referring to was in egalitarianism and a certain type of emotional stance, a certain agreement concerning which first principles are valid and which goals are worthy, despite diversity in implementation.
(But, as ChristainKI pointed out, Moldbug himself was a commentator, and that predates me, so it’s true that the seed has always been there.)
Wait, what is your tribe?
1) People who think a lot and generally care about logical consistency, trending towards high IQ
2) who also have sufficiently understanding of parsimony that God, etc, is just totally out of the question
3) and who generally adapt well to technological advance, often being the people whose intellects are drive it forward
4) who don’t base moral judgements off of strong emotional response to things that are “weird”, like odd sexualities or profanity, or “threatening”, like enemy combatants or opposing ideologies.
5) who have a degree of detachment from their particular situations, and wouldn’t vastly put the importance of themselves, their family, or their nation above others. It’s okay if they do so in small ways in personal life, but they should be cognizant of the whole universal brotherhood of mankind thing and generally see morality and kindness as something that should be applied to people relatively equally.
So a NRx-Lefty of this tribe believes these things, but also thinks an authoritarian, heirarchical society is the best way to achieve these values. So, people who fall into the tribe and are members of the cognitive elite will sort of rule over everyone else, using military force and propaganda and all that other stuff to achieve these values. They still care about outsiders, but they care in a very paternalistic sense and won’t hesitate to override people’s stated preferences in favor of what the NRx-Lefty extrapolates their preferences to actually be, since savages don’t really know what they want or understand anything.
The bulk of the actual NRx movement would be considered enemies, savages, or subversives within this empire, because they tend to fail steps 4 and 5. Within the empire, it’s “okay” to be a human-biodiversity-advocate in the same sense that it’s okay to think that people with myopia are smarter and consider that a largely irrelevant fact because we have actual IQ tests that we can use to separate people with with much greater accuracy, but it’s not okay in a moral sense to be a particularist who thinks your race should be defended. (Ideological particularism, is, of course, encouraged if it’s generally in the Cathedral’s favor.)
(Once again, describing, not condoning, an idea.)
Sounds like the mid-late stage British Empire to me.
more on that further down the thread
Oh, that was directed at nydwracu, I misread the comment nesting loops.
The plurality of American blood comes from Germany, and the descendents of that immigrant wave tend to be Evangelicals, Lutherans, Catholics...I don’t know whether this bloodline is actually more likely to follow Guns and God style conservatism, but that seems to be the notion here.
I think if I was going to label nydwracu’s comment in one word I’d call it Völkisch.
Who counts as ‘Evangelical’? Colin Woodard’s ‘Midlands’ nation is generally plurality-Methodist. I lived out in Western Maryland for a while, where you can see some Constitution Party signs when election years roll around, and they’re Methodists out there, not Southern Baptists.
I’m not sure how trustworthy the census ethnicity data is, since I don’t think the Anglos were genocided; I’d trust Woodard before the census data, with the caveat that everything out past Michigan (and possibly including Michigan) had enough non-Anglo Germanic immigrants that it’s not really Yankeedom anymore. (Woodard’s map is in general not a good guide to current cultural distinctions, but it’s not trying to be. The Tidewater region doesn’t really exist anymore; in its place, there’s the Eastern Corridor, which runs up from northern Virginia (maybe even Richmond) through DC, Baltimore, and Philadelpha to NYC and Boston. Some people call this general region the Mid-Atlantic, but that obscures the difference between the DC/Baltimore area and everywhere else in Maryland.)
And in case I wasn’t clear, I do think the “NRx-lefty” attitude is common among progressives.
I don’t know who counts as what—it’s pretty confusing, and that’s why I just went with Völkisch, since I’m guessing your defining criteria is not really religion or genetics but some mix of culture, ideology, and physical appearance and you know it when you see it and it’s loosely German-American.
The thing is, I don’t think believe members of the populations you outline actually consider themselves as a tribe, at least not in the ethno-nationalist light that you’re using (If they did, there would exist a simple word to describe them). Would you agree that their is a certain artificiality inherent in constructing an ethno-national identity around this group?
It’s totally artificial and metapolitically hopeless, just like everything else available to white people in this country, unless they’re Episcopalian or something. And the Episcopalians have bigger problems.
As far as I can tell, there is no possible way to solve the problems of identity in this country. Most of the white population is deeply psychologically damaged in a way that is rarely even noticed, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it other than maybe join a frat.
Would you care to expand on that?
See here.
Our civilization contains an absence of a nigh-universal trait that has historically proven itself to be compatible with civilization (and perhaps even beneficial to civilization; certainly the Roman emperors thought it was); that’s at least a sign that something else is going on. There are obvious historical reasons for this that don’t involve any abstract, instrumental-rationality-seeking processes: the quest to create a totalizing Christianity purified of any ‘pagan’ influences. (How many of our current rites are German or Irish in origin? Christmas is mostly German—trees, stockings, etc. -- and… hm, apparently jack-o’-lanterns may actually be English.)
The Pledge of Allegiance was a Progressive Era reform; I wonder if this was part of a general program to try to introduce a civil religion similar to Roman emperor-worship. Mount Rushmore was carved at around this same time, and its main supporter was Peter Norbeck, a Progressive. (And what of the folk musicians?) But I don’t think there’s very much to work with there; the Roman emperor-cult failed in the end.
Anyway… I don’t want to phrase it in the Alain de Botton-style language of pure instrumental rationality; while perhaps the best way to communicate the general points (especially around here), it’s likely to backfire. Doing something for the conscious purpose of acquiring whatever instrumental gains are believed to follow from it may undermine the instrumental value of the thing. So perhaps it will be impossible for me to change anyone’s mind on this without employing the Mencius-style strategy of reasoning by bringing up shared intuitions/experiences, and that requires a degree of targeting that is difficult to pull off on the internet.
But consider subcultures: why do people join them? What is it about raves, or Dan Deacon’s concerts (I’ve never been to one, but I’ve heard about them, and read about what he’s trying to do with them), or any of that—and what is it about subcultural identity itself? There may be some degree of psychological sortation going on (though even this would result in a closer approximation to the ancestral environment, where, due to a deeply shared context—there was an excellent SSC comment on cultural context a few days ago, but I can’t find it—and genetic similarity, most people would probably be more psychologically similar to most people they encounter than is the case today), but it’s also about having a sense of identity, which very few things but subcultures and frats can provide.
Frats are an even better example. Most people who join a frat identify strongly with it and see it as a beneficial thing in their lives. Why? (Note that this is despite the hazing process—i.e. the initiation ritual—that the consensus frowns upon today. But initiation rituals are cross-culturally common, no?)
Wouldn’t go that far. I mean, they could just look at what they actually are, and construct an identity around that. What they actually are has little to do with Germanic heritage, and race is only one of many possible ways to create a tribal affiliation anyhow. I’m pretty culturally removed from most members of both racial group in my family tree, but I don’t feel psychologically adrift or anything. (Granted, I might just not know what I’m missing—I do feel pretty good when I meet people who are similar to me in real life.)
Obviously, i’s hard for ethno-nationalists, since they are basically contrarians in this society and can only reach “tribe” level numbers via the internet. But it’s not hard for most white people. White Americans are a lot more culturally homogeneous than say, Hindus. (Or any large non-Western grouping. Technology homogenizes.)
What are we actually, then, that we can construct an identity out of?
The feeling of missing something only kicks in, I suspect, after the thing that is missed is experienced. A good example is dance: it doesn’t really exist in our society outside subcultures, but I thought that didn’t matter until I took up contra. (Which I really ought to get back into now that I’m in NYC—do they even have it up here? It’s been something like five years, too...)
Similarly, I first noticed the importance of thedish identity, ritual, and traditions when I went to a very interesting summer camp that had a strong local identity backed up by its own rituals and traditions. Most of what I understand about these things now comes from there.
It had several sites; I attended four. One site was shut down for lack of attendance shortly after the rituals and traditions failed to be passed down, and the strongest site was the one with the strongest traditions. I talked to some other people who, like me, jumped ship from a site with weakening traditions to the site with the strongest traditions, and I got the very strong impression that it was causal: weakened traditions made the site worse at the de facto functions it performed for its attendees.
(One unique sociological factor that existed at the site with the strongest traditions was a semiformal aristocracy dedicated to preserving and teaching the traditions.)
Then again, from what I’ve heard of Alain de Benoist, he only understands what he writes about on an intellectual level.
In my mind, the tribe aught to be constructed out of people who 1) care about you, which is accomplished through shared experience 2) who understand you—that is, they are similar enough that when you say something, they hear what you meant. There’s no vast gulf of un-shared ideas and thoughts and notions that separates you, and inferential distance is short.
I definitely see the importance of having one, but in my experience race is a pretty poor proxy for what I talk about above. Shared culture is better, shared experience is best, and optimally those co-occur. (Genetic) family is a decent method, since you’re likely to match in personality as well as culture, but even that is a proxy.
I suspect you are somewhat overestimating the degree to which people in other racial groups identify with each other. Two random Indians in India don’t care about each other more than two random whites in America. That’s because the “white” category (or the “Indian” category) is too large for tribal affiliations to build up. Granted, they’ll understand each other better than they will, say, a Japanese person, but baseline friendliness levels are pretty much set at “stranger”. Minority cultures tend to have a different situation, since there is a very limited number of people who belong to their group, so it becomes an easy schelling point for a community to cluster.
Essentially, your tribe should be a group of <200 people, in close proximity, who share a large number of things in common with you in terms of psychology and knowledge. To the extent that people within Western culture are “damaged” by modern life creating a situation where very few people consistently come into contact with more than 1-3 other people (the same people each time), I agree, but I don’t see a racial identity as a workable solution at all. Humans really don’t form tribes that large in nature, although you can get sort of a hollow illusion of identification by aligning yourself with some sort of abstract concept.
So my answer to “what are we” is basically, [insert church here] [insert small rural home-town here] [insert college here][insert secret-club here], or whatever it is that your social hub is primarily based around. Ideally you can assume people in those groups share a certain understanding with you… and if you don’t have that, it’s probably because modern life has forced you to trade off that stuff in exchange for mobility, and you should try to find ways to acquire it.
You’re right—race is a poor proxy. The “white race” stuff is regarded by many European ethnats as a bizarre Americanism and a total misunderstanding of the situation in Europe—and they’re right, though some other ethnats try to play it up in order to forge Europe-wide alliances against threats from outside.
That last sentence should make it clear that there are (at least) two different things going on within the concept of thedish identity: shared context/low inferential distance and fostering internal cohesion to avoid the negative effects of failure to coordinate.
As I say in my linked post, the negative effects can be significant—up to and including total collapse. Here’s Glubb:
One mentioned-but-unnoticed point of the intellectually-serious Right is that some of the political pathologies of the States are caused by similar civil wars. Brecht’s Die Lösung applied to democracy: the Blue Tribe fights the Red Tribe by bringing in immigrants who will vote (i.e. participate in a civil war at a remove) for the Blue side. (This probably goes unnoticed because of their support of secession, but that’s just not politically realistic in this country, and a return to federalism is unlikely.)
The evopsych ideal is a group of <200 people in close proximity who share a common context, sure. But one can notice that social technologies for super-Dunbar coordination keep getting developed and keep winning—from subcultures and religions that can provide social capital in a new area (I’ve heard that this is particularly strong with the Mormons) to nationalism in the New World and the Old to the unification of the Mongols around Genghis Khan.
(If you want a particularly shock-value-optimizing example, consider that it took a combination of immense military stupidity on their part (especially from one country that went and made a journalist into their supreme leader) and the USSR cannon-foddering an entire generation of their population to stop a few incredibly coordinated countries in Central Europe and their one ally in Asia from winning a war against pretty much the rest of the world.)
...Actually, there are three things going on, at least for modern Westerners, though the boundaries (especially between the second and the third) are often blurred.
1) Immediate social context absent mobility. Sub-Dunbar tribe with shared experiences and context.
2) Larger (usually regional or religious) identity that provides overarching cultural context, ritual, and a sense of continuity and meaning, of tradition and the transcendent.
3) Nation-scale identity that operates mostly on the metapolitical plane, allowing for internal unity, coordination, and action on the geopolitical scale.
Where this gets interesting is that the first, ‘tribal’ form of identity may not be a thede in the usual sense—I haven’t thought very much about this form of identity (which need not rest on anything even approaching explicit identification—does it?) since I’ve never seen it either personally or from a distance. But that’s not the scale I’m talking about anyway; groups of friends don’t fulfill the second form (outside having the possibility for providing small-scale rites), which is what I’m saying is missing.
The third form is also missing, of course, but that’s entirely a societal/political problem; individuals can get on fine with only the first two forms, I suspect, with the only consequences being those that arise societally from lack of coordination. (Not that those consequences are in any way minor.)
Hey now, I’m not actually condoning that attitude. I’m saying that’s the attitude I would have, with the NRx-Lefty hat on. In real life I am still Enlightenment-Leftie, half my friends are religious patriotic folk and I’ve been quite open to interacting with them and hearing their ideas and even dating them. Enlightenment-Leftie and Enlightenment-Rightie co-exist just fine, because of the tolerance thing… the critique of NRx here is that the Enlightenment framework always favors Leftie, which does seem true but I find it hard to complain about that. But NRx-Rightie is not the solution that finally balances things back in the Right’s favor, because.… here comes NRx-Leftie, they can use all Cthulhu’s leftward pull tricks and they’re not nearly as tolerant of Rightie, in any format, and they’re not tolerant of those Red, Purple, or Yellow tribes either. (In theory. In practice I’m not sure NRx wouldn’t just collapse in all cases.) Tolerance was an Enlightenment value.
I’m not saying regular lefties never advocate these ideas—ultimately, liberals have amygdalas and love in-groups and hate out-groups just like everyone else. But my idealized Rational Humanist Egalitarian who I’m calling Enlightenment-Lefty for the purpose of this conversation doesn’t agree with those lefties. Within this conversational framework, those are just Rx-lefties, lacking the self-aware component of NRx. Even within the NRx-Lefty empire, those sorts of people are kind of the proles of the world, understanding the Cathedral doctrine but not really getting the spirit of it all. The NRx-Lefty empire doesn’t go so far as to want genocide (eugenics, maybe)… but yeah, they will go ahead and be paternalistic and superior and intolerant.