There is a legitimate fear that Enlightenment-progressive-libertarian-feminist-liberal-universalism is self-undermining in the face of people who would build tribalist-reactionary-patriarchal-tyranny in its midst
Nationalist Reactionary Rightie has that fear because they just don’t like immigrants coming in and messing things up. Enlightenment Rightie has that fear and sees themselves as the dogs that protect Enlightenment Leftie sheep from the evil wolves. NRx-rightie disagrees with both of them, and thinks there is no way anyone is gonna ever topple the Lovecraftian horror that is Enlightenment Leftie, and we’re all doomed to experience constant violent revolutions and ever more ridiculous post-modernist nonsense if we don’t do something. (I’m still not clear on what exactly Doom looks like, but I’m pretty sure civilization collapses at some point and we start over)
Primitive Rx Leftie definitely thinks that there’s absolutely no way the Muslims can realistically take over the government by force, and the only biggest threat they pose to Enlightenment society is petty violence and the risk of inflaming the nationalist sentiment, who can take over the government, without force. Crush the shitlords before they get out of hand so we can get back to the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment Leftie says that when people are happy and healthy in life, they don’t do bad stuff or turn to extremism in large numbers. We just need to stick to our values of openness and honesty. Trust the Cathedral and technological advance to help people along the path of moral progress, and don’t crush anyone. Free speech and tolerance for all, Left, Right, and even those extremest terrorist types.
NRx Leftie agrees mostly with Rx lefty, partly with Enlightenment Righty, and thinks Enlightenment Leftie is naive, but it’s not going to be a problem because if things go as planned NRx Leftie has become dictator so now the schools are extremely well funded machines teaching the fundamentals of critical thinking, and they’ve also had a team of social scientists actively research the most effective religious deconversion techniques and implement them. Hopefully this involves an open and honest dialogue involving asking priests and imams certain pointed questions in front of small children, but they’re open to underhand methods like social pressure rhetoric or ridicule if that turns out to work better. Alternatively, it might be more effective to let them keep the religion in an abstract sense (that will unfortunately keep them in the underclass, but whatever,the smarties will figure it out) but research ways to make them shed most of the objectionable values it carries.
The research itself is ideally designed to be an “open secret”—the work is publicly available in the literature and the people who matter get explicit explanations, but otherwise phrased obtusely such that populations who would object to it would find it inoffensive or incomprehensible if they saw it, similar to the treaties given to Native Americans… or phrased such that those who successfully understand end up agreeing, or just a plainly published technique effective regardless of whether one is savvy to it. Or it can be a secret—secrets are allowed, but Enlightenment Leftie things they are dangerous so NRx Leftie tries to avoid them where possible.
Yesterdays Muslims quickly become today’s progressive libertarian feminist universalists. A few of them go on rampages and blow up buildings, and the damage is sad but otherwise no one gets angry or cares any more than we’d care if a tribally-neutral sociopath did it. There’s no “Muslims are bad” vs. “Let’s tolerate them” argument—everyone within the society agrees that religion is just ridiculous fairly quickly and it’s kind of laughable if you follow one but it’s a cognitive bias most normal humans are prey too, and people divert their attention to outside threats rather than to immigrants. Not that their are that many outside threats, because NRx-Lefties government had no qualms about imperialism and goes ahead and conquers the savages and converts them as described above whenever it’s militarily viable and economically expedient, and because NRx-leftie isn’t as mean as Leopold it won’t take long before the conquered people consider themselves better off and don’t even want independence..as far as they’re concerned, they’ve kept their language and cultural knowledge intact, gained technology, are materially better off, and have shed the superstitious beliefs of their grandparents despite still remembering and preserving the beliefs—NRx leftie still “multicultural” in a superficial sense, but is unabashedly particularist when it comes to beliefs about morality and reality. So “outside threats” are people with actual military power...3rd world nations with the potential to become primitive terrorists were either left totally unmolested so that no enmity could develop, or conquered in the least socially disruptive possible way with the help of anthropologists and stuff, educated, and made materially better off than they were before ASAP and then traded with or exploited for resources in the nicest possible way the anthropologists can think of. None of that half-half economic-pressure / puppet ruler / CIA manipulation routine that we do now when our economic interests call for imperialism but our society won’t let us.
Enlightenment Leftie is still pretty sure NRx Leftie’s government is going to end up evil, corrupt from its original values, ineffective, or collapsing on itself, just like every other attempt to do this sort of thing. But it’s a lot like the disagreement between left-socialists and left-libertarian economists—a productive intra-tribal disagreement where “winning” means achieving the common goal, not ending the argument with points for your side. The final consensus isn’t necessarily world domination, but it might justify a little bit more elitism and political bias, less tolerance in the University, the Internet, and other places currently left-dominated. It might mean the left lets up on all the self-flagellation and guilty naval gazing whenever power is exerted… or not. I mean, I consider myself pretty tolerant of the Right by “average Leftie” standards and I don’t think I’d actually support the Left to move away from my viewpoint in that respect more than it already is.
(Or at least, that’s what it would look like if there was a sizable contingent on the left who looked at NRx and thought, “hmm, okay, there are some truths here, I can work with this”)
NRx-Lefties government had no qualms about imperialism and goes ahead and conquers the savages and converts them as described above whenever it’s militarily viable and economically expedient, and because NRx-leftie isn’t as mean as Leopold it won’t take long before the conquered people consider themselves better off and don’t even want independence.
What, like the British Empire? How did that work out?
NRx Leftie says it’s different this time, because the British Empire were fairly savage themselves, because they actually didn’t value the people who they considered savages as human beings. NRx Leftie said that the British Empire actually worked out fairly well, by some standards. and the bad bits were because the Brits themselves had a savage culture.
Enlightenment Leftie calls bullshit why should it be different this time, and that’s pretty much why I don’t really buy NRx.
(My inner Conservative-Churchill thinks the British empire was actually a net good and my inner NRx-Right adds that the independence movements triggered by liberalism are what really fucked us over.)
The British Empire may have been materially a net good, but (as Benedict Anderson points out) it was doomed the day it embraced Macaulay’s plan of cultural exterminationism through education.
“Independence movements triggered by liberalism” is a better way to put it than “independence movements”, but it’s not as accurate as “independence movements triggered by the combination of something involving the creation of an elite class educated in European things, often actually in Europe (or America), and later the Cold War scramble for puppet states between the two superpowers, hence their agreement on the issue of decolonization and probably Washington’s shafting of Britain in Suez.” Where do you think Pol Pot got his Marxism from? Certainly not Cambodia, and not even the USSR (the Khmer Rouge was a Western ally for a while) -- he got it in Paris, the center of the relevant empire.
(To take the Benedict Anderson hypothesis further, onto very speculative and shaky ground: could it be that decolonization arose out of the same impulse as Italy’s misadventures in colonialism? In Italy’s time, any serious nation had an empire; after WW2, any serious nation had its own state, except ‘nation-states’ couldn’t exist because of pre-existing attachment to administrative boundaries among the elite, those boundaries having shaped their life far more in practical terms than native culture or ethnic identification. Also legibility reasons that Anderson doesn’t mention AFAIK: precisely named and delineated boundaries that aren’t accurate will be preferred over accurate boundaries that have yet to be drawn, because 1) the former is much more practically knowable and able to be acted upon by an organization than the latter, 2) the former are available and the latter aren’t. Compare the use of states in America.)
Nationalist Reactionary Rightie has that fear because they just don’t like immigrants coming in and messing things up. Enlightenment Rightie has that fear and sees themselves as the dogs that protect Enlightenment Leftie sheep from the evil wolves. NRx-rightie disagrees with both of them, and thinks there is no way anyone is gonna ever topple the Lovecraftian horror that is Enlightenment Leftie, and we’re all doomed to experience constant violent revolutions and ever more ridiculous post-modernist nonsense if we don’t do something. (I’m still not clear on what exactly Doom looks like, but I’m pretty sure civilization collapses at some point and we start over)
Primitive Rx Leftie definitely thinks that there’s absolutely no way the Muslims can realistically take over the government by force, and the only biggest threat they pose to Enlightenment society is petty violence and the risk of inflaming the nationalist sentiment, who can take over the government, without force. Crush the shitlords before they get out of hand so we can get back to the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment Leftie says that when people are happy and healthy in life, they don’t do bad stuff or turn to extremism in large numbers. We just need to stick to our values of openness and honesty. Trust the Cathedral and technological advance to help people along the path of moral progress, and don’t crush anyone. Free speech and tolerance for all, Left, Right, and even those extremest terrorist types.
NRx Leftie agrees mostly with Rx lefty, partly with Enlightenment Righty, and thinks Enlightenment Leftie is naive, but it’s not going to be a problem because if things go as planned NRx Leftie has become dictator so now the schools are extremely well funded machines teaching the fundamentals of critical thinking, and they’ve also had a team of social scientists actively research the most effective religious deconversion techniques and implement them. Hopefully this involves an open and honest dialogue involving asking priests and imams certain pointed questions in front of small children, but they’re open to underhand methods like social pressure rhetoric or ridicule if that turns out to work better. Alternatively, it might be more effective to let them keep the religion in an abstract sense (that will unfortunately keep them in the underclass, but whatever,the smarties will figure it out) but research ways to make them shed most of the objectionable values it carries.
The research itself is ideally designed to be an “open secret”—the work is publicly available in the literature and the people who matter get explicit explanations, but otherwise phrased obtusely such that populations who would object to it would find it inoffensive or incomprehensible if they saw it, similar to the treaties given to Native Americans… or phrased such that those who successfully understand end up agreeing, or just a plainly published technique effective regardless of whether one is savvy to it. Or it can be a secret—secrets are allowed, but Enlightenment Leftie things they are dangerous so NRx Leftie tries to avoid them where possible.
Yesterdays Muslims quickly become today’s progressive libertarian feminist universalists. A few of them go on rampages and blow up buildings, and the damage is sad but otherwise no one gets angry or cares any more than we’d care if a tribally-neutral sociopath did it. There’s no “Muslims are bad” vs. “Let’s tolerate them” argument—everyone within the society agrees that religion is just ridiculous fairly quickly and it’s kind of laughable if you follow one but it’s a cognitive bias most normal humans are prey too, and people divert their attention to outside threats rather than to immigrants. Not that their are that many outside threats, because NRx-Lefties government had no qualms about imperialism and goes ahead and conquers the savages and converts them as described above whenever it’s militarily viable and economically expedient, and because NRx-leftie isn’t as mean as Leopold it won’t take long before the conquered people consider themselves better off and don’t even want independence..as far as they’re concerned, they’ve kept their language and cultural knowledge intact, gained technology, are materially better off, and have shed the superstitious beliefs of their grandparents despite still remembering and preserving the beliefs—NRx leftie still “multicultural” in a superficial sense, but is unabashedly particularist when it comes to beliefs about morality and reality. So “outside threats” are people with actual military power...3rd world nations with the potential to become primitive terrorists were either left totally unmolested so that no enmity could develop, or conquered in the least socially disruptive possible way with the help of anthropologists and stuff, educated, and made materially better off than they were before ASAP and then traded with or exploited for resources in the nicest possible way the anthropologists can think of. None of that half-half economic-pressure / puppet ruler / CIA manipulation routine that we do now when our economic interests call for imperialism but our society won’t let us.
Enlightenment Leftie is still pretty sure NRx Leftie’s government is going to end up evil, corrupt from its original values, ineffective, or collapsing on itself, just like every other attempt to do this sort of thing. But it’s a lot like the disagreement between left-socialists and left-libertarian economists—a productive intra-tribal disagreement where “winning” means achieving the common goal, not ending the argument with points for your side. The final consensus isn’t necessarily world domination, but it might justify a little bit more elitism and political bias, less tolerance in the University, the Internet, and other places currently left-dominated. It might mean the left lets up on all the self-flagellation and guilty naval gazing whenever power is exerted… or not. I mean, I consider myself pretty tolerant of the Right by “average Leftie” standards and I don’t think I’d actually support the Left to move away from my viewpoint in that respect more than it already is.
(Or at least, that’s what it would look like if there was a sizable contingent on the left who looked at NRx and thought, “hmm, okay, there are some truths here, I can work with this”)
I don’t mean this as critisism, but ‘NRx Left’ sounds like an excellent opportunity for meta-meta-meta-contrarianism.
what have i done
What, like the British Empire? How did that work out?
That’s actually precisely Enlightenment Leftie’s qualm.
NRx Leftie says it’s different this time, because the British Empire were fairly savage themselves, because they actually didn’t value the people who they considered savages as human beings. NRx Leftie said that the British Empire actually worked out fairly well, by some standards. and the bad bits were because the Brits themselves had a savage culture.
Enlightenment Leftie calls bullshit why should it be different this time, and that’s pretty much why I don’t really buy NRx.
(My inner Conservative-Churchill thinks the British empire was actually a net good and my inner NRx-Right adds that the independence movements triggered by liberalism are what really fucked us over.)
The British Empire may have been materially a net good, but (as Benedict Anderson points out) it was doomed the day it embraced Macaulay’s plan of cultural exterminationism through education.
“Independence movements triggered by liberalism” is a better way to put it than “independence movements”, but it’s not as accurate as “independence movements triggered by the combination of something involving the creation of an elite class educated in European things, often actually in Europe (or America), and later the Cold War scramble for puppet states between the two superpowers, hence their agreement on the issue of decolonization and probably Washington’s shafting of Britain in Suez.” Where do you think Pol Pot got his Marxism from? Certainly not Cambodia, and not even the USSR (the Khmer Rouge was a Western ally for a while) -- he got it in Paris, the center of the relevant empire.
(To take the Benedict Anderson hypothesis further, onto very speculative and shaky ground: could it be that decolonization arose out of the same impulse as Italy’s misadventures in colonialism? In Italy’s time, any serious nation had an empire; after WW2, any serious nation had its own state, except ‘nation-states’ couldn’t exist because of pre-existing attachment to administrative boundaries among the elite, those boundaries having shaped their life far more in practical terms than native culture or ethnic identification. Also legibility reasons that Anderson doesn’t mention AFAIK: precisely named and delineated boundaries that aren’t accurate will be preferred over accurate boundaries that have yet to be drawn, because 1) the former is much more practically knowable and able to be acted upon by an organization than the latter, 2) the former are available and the latter aren’t. Compare the use of states in America.)
Pretty well until the British lost faith in their own culture.
Assuming for a moment that’s what actually happened, when in history do you locate that event?