I posted an explicit statement of a moral system I’m willing to call my current view waaaaay up in the thread. Go use that algorithm, and then explain to me how neoreaction isn’t bad ethics.
It appears to me that neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general, as it founds itself on a strong ethical antirealism that doesn’t allow for ordinary-realist nor constructivist ethics, instead considering all available concepts of right and wrong to be mere cultural and material contingencies, thus yielding a fundamental imperative to preserve one’s existing cultural “values” at all costs. Add the (frankly bizarre, given the circumstances: if nothing is true and everything is permitted, what’s so bad about Cthulhu?) view of “progressivism” as corrupting, and then add the normal human impulse to consider Purity-Poison as a moral axis, and you’ve got the basics of neoreaction.
The problem being, it all only hangs together if you assume both the normative relevance of the Purity-Poison axis to attack “progressivism” (scare-quotes because today’s conservatives get tarred as “progressives”), and the view of all morals and values as culturally relative.
Of course, I think I might be mixing Caroline Glick with neoreaction here, but she’s practically a neoreactionary who evolved outside the San Francisco futurist community anyway.
So before you can really make this point you want to make, you have to conclusively prove not merely that some political party or another fails to represent “real” ethics (for the record, I’m a pragmatist-socialist politically, and thus consider myself at home in none of the mainstream parties in any country where I can vote), but that realist ethics are in the general case impossible.
This is a bizarre and uncharitable misreading, and it ought to be clear that this is so from not only the contradiction you point out, but also the number of Christians in neoreaction.
First of all, ought-statements can’t be grounded completely in is-statements, but they also can’t be grounded completely in other ought-statements. Many disagreements that will appear to the progressive as normative in character are actually descriptive. (I wonder if this is related to progressivism’s retreat into deontological rights-talk, which does make it a moral argument—but deontology, while useful for some things, is hopelessly absurd as an actual grounding for ethics.) Is Roissy a deontologist, a utilitarian, or what? Who knows? -- his disagreements are generally descriptive ones, and, since the ethical systems that humans in similar cultures and circumstances(1) actually use generally give similar outputs to the same inputs(2) (except for unrealistic edge cases like the trolley problem), it doesn’t really matter.
Second, go look at the Hestia Society’s motto. The groundwork for one of the neoreactionary positions (though there isn’t only one, and this particular one isn’t limited to neoreaction) follows easily from a rejection of both Whig history and anarcho-primitivism: if civilization is vastly preferable to savagery, but the continued existence and advance of civilization is not guaranteed by the World-Spirit, present-morality maximizers pose a serious threat of unwittingly making tradeoffs that will be disastrous later, by weakening the foundations of civilization and contributing to collapse. Even if progressivism is a present-morality maximizer, it has not established—and (because Whig history) is incapable of establishing—that it is not making these tradeoffs. To even ask that question is to leave progressivism.
(Yes, this is one of those permanent states of emergency that leftists sometimes rail against—but it’s not as if they don’t have their own.)
Roissy is an educated Western urbanite, and IIRC Jewish.
Similar enough for moral discourse to be possible without immediately collapsing into philosophy.
… What are you talking about? Who’s Roissy? You appear to have responded to the wrong comment, written an irrelevant rant, and dragged in your voting brigade to receive +6 points.
What? It’s a perfectly valid response to your claim that neoreaction is filled with moral anti-realists who are obsessed with arbitrary value preservation. Also, Roissy is Heartiste.
It doesn’t seem a valid response to me, since it doesn’t explain why neoreactionaries actually think, why they think it, and how they justify realism about their own views (that is, why they think neoreaction is true for all rational humans and not just plausible to a small clique). It mostly just attacks “progressives”.
If it helps, I think maybe you are thinking of “neo-reactionaries” and “progressives” as being a local modern phenomena, perhaps even just happening in the comments of this article.
If you post a PDF in the thread with your own idiosyncratic ideals, that serves for you to describe what you mean and stand for and think is good, and functions as the “ground” of a debate that you’re willing to defend.
On the other hand, nydrwacu is coming at this from the perspective of a deeply-read aspiring expert in the practicalities of political semiotics. I think, for example, that his reference to a capitalized “World Spirit” is a reference to Hegel’s concept of a Weltgeist which was widely known in the past, and explicitly used as a concept under which to organize actual historically existing political factions. If you were “against the Weltgeist” it had a simultaneously factional and practical meaning that was necessarily related both to meta-ethical doctrines and to propaganda processes that bound factions into social machines with many real world consequences that can themselves be judged.
When you said “neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general” (presuming pointing with the word “neoreaction” to speakers in this thread as “neoreaction”) nydrwacu responded by pointing to actual “neoreactionaries” (not “I’m not a neoreactionary but I read them sometimes” but full fledged ones) who are not LWers and not in this thread (like Roissy and the Hestia Society) who appear to have some grounding in “naturalistic ethics”. However their naturalistic ethics are grounded in things other than something with historical continuity with the faction that used the Weltgeist in their rallying cries…
(Or at least that’s what they claim… For myself, I think neoreactionaries are in some sense just “super-ultra-progressives” if their own theories are applied to them in ways they might object to.)
A deeper issue here might be that neo-reactionaires have explicit theories about political categorization processes themselves (how they work, when they disgree, how to use them, etc), and one of their categorization techniques is socio-political cladistics.
Thus, if you use a Weltgeist-like justification, and are clearly influenced by previous Weltgeist-using political thinkers, neoreactionaries will sometimes lump you cladistically as all being part of the same unfurling memetic-political process that they can read about in history books and try to do bayesian updates thereby.
This is itself a somewhat controversial orientation. It is politically essentializing and can cause people to feel insulted when the descriptive process is applied to them with results they don’t like based on history and people they don’t even know about… if they didn’t put the word “Weltgeist” in their personal statement of beliefs how can they be held responsible for the actions and consequences of people who did?!
However, despite the shortcomings of cladistic analysis, you can see that operating at this level of abstraction might be appealing to a certain kind of smarty-pants. Also, it has at least the virtue of creating a pre-stated data-based solution to some games of reference class tennis that might otherwise happen in political debates.
That’s nice, but it seems to support the preconception I held, not refute it: neoreaction is all one elaborate game of “kill that faction/clade we don’t like!” and, when called to offer positive evidence in favor of their own particular set of truth-claims… they don’t even seem to make particular truth-claims, let alone offer positive evidence to justify those claims.
I don’t particularly give a damn about the factional games. Just offer a set of truth claims and their justification, and then we can talk.
I posted an explicit statement of a moral system I’m willing to call my current view waaaaay up in the thread. Go use that algorithm, and then explain to me how neoreaction isn’t bad ethics.
It appears to me that neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general, as it founds itself on a strong ethical antirealism that doesn’t allow for ordinary-realist nor constructivist ethics, instead considering all available concepts of right and wrong to be mere cultural and material contingencies, thus yielding a fundamental imperative to preserve one’s existing cultural “values” at all costs. Add the (frankly bizarre, given the circumstances: if nothing is true and everything is permitted, what’s so bad about Cthulhu?) view of “progressivism” as corrupting, and then add the normal human impulse to consider Purity-Poison as a moral axis, and you’ve got the basics of neoreaction.
The problem being, it all only hangs together if you assume both the normative relevance of the Purity-Poison axis to attack “progressivism” (scare-quotes because today’s conservatives get tarred as “progressives”), and the view of all morals and values as culturally relative.
Of course, I think I might be mixing Caroline Glick with neoreaction here, but she’s practically a neoreactionary who evolved outside the San Francisco futurist community anyway.
So before you can really make this point you want to make, you have to conclusively prove not merely that some political party or another fails to represent “real” ethics (for the record, I’m a pragmatist-socialist politically, and thus consider myself at home in none of the mainstream parties in any country where I can vote), but that realist ethics are in the general case impossible.
This is a bizarre and uncharitable misreading, and it ought to be clear that this is so from not only the contradiction you point out, but also the number of Christians in neoreaction.
First of all, ought-statements can’t be grounded completely in is-statements, but they also can’t be grounded completely in other ought-statements. Many disagreements that will appear to the progressive as normative in character are actually descriptive. (I wonder if this is related to progressivism’s retreat into deontological rights-talk, which does make it a moral argument—but deontology, while useful for some things, is hopelessly absurd as an actual grounding for ethics.) Is Roissy a deontologist, a utilitarian, or what? Who knows? -- his disagreements are generally descriptive ones, and, since the ethical systems that humans in similar cultures and circumstances(1) actually use generally give similar outputs to the same inputs(2) (except for unrealistic edge cases like the trolley problem), it doesn’t really matter.
Second, go look at the Hestia Society’s motto. The groundwork for one of the neoreactionary positions (though there isn’t only one, and this particular one isn’t limited to neoreaction) follows easily from a rejection of both Whig history and anarcho-primitivism: if civilization is vastly preferable to savagery, but the continued existence and advance of civilization is not guaranteed by the World-Spirit, present-morality maximizers pose a serious threat of unwittingly making tradeoffs that will be disastrous later, by weakening the foundations of civilization and contributing to collapse. Even if progressivism is a present-morality maximizer, it has not established—and (because Whig history) is incapable of establishing—that it is not making these tradeoffs. To even ask that question is to leave progressivism.
(Yes, this is one of those permanent states of emergency that leftists sometimes rail against—but it’s not as if they don’t have their own.)
Roissy is an educated Western urbanite, and IIRC Jewish.
Similar enough for moral discourse to be possible without immediately collapsing into philosophy.
… What are you talking about? Who’s Roissy? You appear to have responded to the wrong comment, written an irrelevant rant, and dragged in your voting brigade to receive +6 points.
What? It’s a perfectly valid response to your claim that neoreaction is filled with moral anti-realists who are obsessed with arbitrary value preservation. Also, Roissy is Heartiste.
It doesn’t seem a valid response to me, since it doesn’t explain why neoreactionaries actually think, why they think it, and how they justify realism about their own views (that is, why they think neoreaction is true for all rational humans and not just plausible to a small clique). It mostly just attacks “progressives”.
I have upvoted for asking good questions :-)
If it helps, I think maybe you are thinking of “neo-reactionaries” and “progressives” as being a local modern phenomena, perhaps even just happening in the comments of this article.
If you post a PDF in the thread with your own idiosyncratic ideals, that serves for you to describe what you mean and stand for and think is good, and functions as the “ground” of a debate that you’re willing to defend.
On the other hand, nydrwacu is coming at this from the perspective of a deeply-read aspiring expert in the practicalities of political semiotics. I think, for example, that his reference to a capitalized “World Spirit” is a reference to Hegel’s concept of a Weltgeist which was widely known in the past, and explicitly used as a concept under which to organize actual historically existing political factions. If you were “against the Weltgeist” it had a simultaneously factional and practical meaning that was necessarily related both to meta-ethical doctrines and to propaganda processes that bound factions into social machines with many real world consequences that can themselves be judged.
When you said “neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general” (presuming pointing with the word “neoreaction” to speakers in this thread as “neoreaction”) nydrwacu responded by pointing to actual “neoreactionaries” (not “I’m not a neoreactionary but I read them sometimes” but full fledged ones) who are not LWers and not in this thread (like Roissy and the Hestia Society) who appear to have some grounding in “naturalistic ethics”. However their naturalistic ethics are grounded in things other than something with historical continuity with the faction that used the Weltgeist in their rallying cries…
(Or at least that’s what they claim… For myself, I think neoreactionaries are in some sense just “super-ultra-progressives” if their own theories are applied to them in ways they might object to.)
A deeper issue here might be that neo-reactionaires have explicit theories about political categorization processes themselves (how they work, when they disgree, how to use them, etc), and one of their categorization techniques is socio-political cladistics.
Thus, if you use a Weltgeist-like justification, and are clearly influenced by previous Weltgeist-using political thinkers, neoreactionaries will sometimes lump you cladistically as all being part of the same unfurling memetic-political process that they can read about in history books and try to do bayesian updates thereby.
This is itself a somewhat controversial orientation. It is politically essentializing and can cause people to feel insulted when the descriptive process is applied to them with results they don’t like based on history and people they don’t even know about… if they didn’t put the word “Weltgeist” in their personal statement of beliefs how can they be held responsible for the actions and consequences of people who did?!
However, despite the shortcomings of cladistic analysis, you can see that operating at this level of abstraction might be appealing to a certain kind of smarty-pants. Also, it has at least the virtue of creating a pre-stated data-based solution to some games of reference class tennis that might otherwise happen in political debates.
That’s nice, but it seems to support the preconception I held, not refute it: neoreaction is all one elaborate game of “kill that faction/clade we don’t like!” and, when called to offer positive evidence in favor of their own particular set of truth-claims… they don’t even seem to make particular truth-claims, let alone offer positive evidence to justify those claims.
I don’t particularly give a damn about the factional games. Just offer a set of truth claims and their justification, and then we can talk.