Yvain has also written on this (though I can’t find the post quickly): that bad ideas will tend to have better arguments for them than good ideas, because the bad ideas need good arguments more.
Could be that too. But it seems like we’re currently in the tail end of some 150 years of reactionary attitudes mostly being mainstream and mostly being argued for with poor and lazy ingroup flag-waving arguments, with the occasional clever argument for progressivism that the mainstream finds disagreeable popping up now and then and nudging things around. Then mainstream society started actually going progressive, and now we’ve started seeing the opposite pattern, even though the reactionary and progressive ideologies don’t seem to have changed significantly.
But it seems like we’re currently in the tail end of some 150 years of reactionary attitudes mostly being mainstream and mostly being argued for with poor and lazy ingroup flag-waving arguments,
Have you ever actually read any of the original argument from 150 years ago, or are you merely going by the progressive characterization of their opponents’ arguments?
Vindication of the Rights of Women was by Mary Wollstonecraft, and from well before Mill wrote The Subjection of Women. Still, Mill’s views were certainly, as you say, radical for his time (and also more radical than those in Wollstonecraft’s essay, if I recall it at all accurately).
Yes, and Mill’s position would be considered libertarian today. In other words, if his books were published today, a lot of the people in this thread would denounce them as “reactionary”, and probably far worse names.
Which of Mill’s views do you think would be regarded as reactionary? I admit some of his views would be regarded as weird in light of more recent experience (e.g. his views on education in On Liberty are based on a very different baseline than the modern situation), but I’m having a hard time thinking of clear cases of overlap between Mill’s views and those commonly denounced as reactionary these days.
Funny thing, I was also thinking about Mill’s “On liberty” when reading this thread. I believe the issue is deeper:
In politics you often have a winning side and a losing side. The winning side can use various techniques to silence the losing side. People sympathetic to the losing side will move to meta arguments about why it is wrong to silence your opponents. -- The unfortunate, but logical, consequence is that arguing about why it is wrong to silence your opponents becomes an evidence for belonging to the losing side. An automatic status hit.
Therefore, it was easy to interpret Mill as an advocate for losing side of his days; and it is also easy to believe that he would support the losing side of today (at least indirectly by his meta arguments) if he were alive today… if what you know about him is that he argued that it is wrong to silence your opponents instead of debating them (which is a part that impressed me strongly).
If Mill advocated that even people guilty of the horrible crime of atheism should be able to publish their opinions, even if just to increase the quality of the theist arguments against them… it seems logical that today he could say the same thing about people guilty of believing in differences between people, or similar stuff. (Of course this assumes that he would be consistent in his beliefs and willing to bite the bullet.)
The problem would not be with Mills beliefs per se, but with inferences people would make from his meta arguments. And he would not even have to support the low-status people to create this association; the low-status people would create the association by quoting him often. -- And then he would have to choose between implicitly denying his support to them, or being considered a silent supporter.
I was thinking that the random person’s opinions about how the mainstream moral climate is the right and proper thing haven’t been preserved for me to read, and whatever did get preserved has probably been heavily filtered for being well-argued and interesting, but that’s not quite right. They did have newspapers, which would be archived somewhere no matter what the content, and all sorts of weird random pamphlets probably are as well. Still a lot more editorial control than Reddit, but editorial control by the contemporary people, not by present-day scholars composing the Collection of Olden Time Moral Arguments Affirming The Great Historical Narrative For Moral And Intellectual Progress.
I was analogizing the current blogs and reddits thing with people ranting to each other at bars or something, with most of the arguments being at the quality of a random people ranting at you, but on second thought that’s not really a good analogy. Face to face socializing has pretty different dynamics than media culture, and the media culture was editorialized newspapers and books and the odd self-published pamphlet by someone with enough money for that.
A third thing, which would be relevant and would be hard to go back and assess now was how community level social persuasion got done. What kind of arguments did priests use trying to convince the congregation that women’s right to vote would lead to the apocalypse, what kind of arguments did the scruffy guy on the soapbox use trying to convince factory workers to start hanging fat people with top hats and monocles from the lampposts and so on.
So I could figure out what was a popular newspaper and go read through its archives, or try to figure out which books where bestsellers and see if I can somehow find a copy and read that, and I might actually learn something more interesting about the common quality of argumentation used than by just picking up filtered-by-present-day recommended books that might be systematic outliers. I haven’t done this because it sounds like a lot of work.
EDIT: Adam Cadre’s reviews of oldpostapocalypticbooks are informing my expectations about what sort of stuff I might find if I skipped the present-day list of exemplary books the people of a past era read and went digging into the piles of half-forgotten stuff they actually read.
with the occasional clever argument for progressivism that the mainstream finds disagreeable popping up now and then and nudging things around.
So why aren’t those arguments being used to defend progressivism today? The answer, which isn’t hard to notice if you actually look at old progressive arguments, is that those arguments tend to have premisses that modern progressives no longer believe and their conclusions are also very different from modern progressive positions.
even though the reactionary and progressive ideologies don’t seem to have changed significantly.
Has there been significant change in the underlying trends where reactionaries are pessimistic about inherent human nature, consider it basically impossible to change significantly, and consider the problem of developing social mechanisms to control it something vital to social stability that takes generations and centuries to solve and is likely to end up with constraining and unintuitive solutions which will nevertheless be the best bet available, while progressives are optimistic that human nature is either benign or malleable enough that it’s possible to enact large and fast social changes and eventually educate people to make the new system work across the board, without messy, nasty and basically impossible to change facets of human nature ending up causing persistent problems?
Could be that too. But it seems like we’re currently in the tail end of some 150 years of reactionary attitudes mostly being mainstream and mostly being argued for with poor and lazy ingroup flag-waving arguments, with the occasional clever argument for progressivism that the mainstream finds disagreeable popping up now and then and nudging things around. Then mainstream society started actually going progressive, and now we’ve started seeing the opposite pattern, even though the reactionary and progressive ideologies don’t seem to have changed significantly.
Have you ever actually read any of the original argument from 150 years ago, or are you merely going by the progressive characterization of their opponents’ arguments?
Mill’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” and “On liberty” are good examples of arguing for those positions before they were mainstream.
Vindication of the Rights of Women was by Mary Wollstonecraft, and from well before Mill wrote The Subjection of Women. Still, Mill’s views were certainly, as you say, radical for his time (and also more radical than those in Wollstonecraft’s essay, if I recall it at all accurately).
Yes, and Mill’s position would be considered libertarian today. In other words, if his books were published today, a lot of the people in this thread would denounce them as “reactionary”, and probably far worse names.
Which of Mill’s views do you think would be regarded as reactionary? I admit some of his views would be regarded as weird in light of more recent experience (e.g. his views on education in On Liberty are based on a very different baseline than the modern situation), but I’m having a hard time thinking of clear cases of overlap between Mill’s views and those commonly denounced as reactionary these days.
Funny thing, I was also thinking about Mill’s “On liberty” when reading this thread. I believe the issue is deeper:
In politics you often have a winning side and a losing side. The winning side can use various techniques to silence the losing side. People sympathetic to the losing side will move to meta arguments about why it is wrong to silence your opponents. -- The unfortunate, but logical, consequence is that arguing about why it is wrong to silence your opponents becomes an evidence for belonging to the losing side. An automatic status hit.
Therefore, it was easy to interpret Mill as an advocate for losing side of his days; and it is also easy to believe that he would support the losing side of today (at least indirectly by his meta arguments) if he were alive today… if what you know about him is that he argued that it is wrong to silence your opponents instead of debating them (which is a part that impressed me strongly).
If Mill advocated that even people guilty of the horrible crime of atheism should be able to publish their opinions, even if just to increase the quality of the theist arguments against them… it seems logical that today he could say the same thing about people guilty of believing in differences between people, or similar stuff. (Of course this assumes that he would be consistent in his beliefs and willing to bite the bullet.)
The problem would not be with Mills beliefs per se, but with inferences people would make from his meta arguments. And he would not even have to support the low-status people to create this association; the low-status people would create the association by quoting him often. -- And then he would have to choose between implicitly denying his support to them, or being considered a silent supporter.
For example, his views on economics, what we would today call libertarian, have been denounced by several people in this thread.
I was thinking that the random person’s opinions about how the mainstream moral climate is the right and proper thing haven’t been preserved for me to read, and whatever did get preserved has probably been heavily filtered for being well-argued and interesting, but that’s not quite right. They did have newspapers, which would be archived somewhere no matter what the content, and all sorts of weird random pamphlets probably are as well. Still a lot more editorial control than Reddit, but editorial control by the contemporary people, not by present-day scholars composing the Collection of Olden Time Moral Arguments Affirming The Great Historical Narrative For Moral And Intellectual Progress.
I was analogizing the current blogs and reddits thing with people ranting to each other at bars or something, with most of the arguments being at the quality of a random people ranting at you, but on second thought that’s not really a good analogy. Face to face socializing has pretty different dynamics than media culture, and the media culture was editorialized newspapers and books and the odd self-published pamphlet by someone with enough money for that.
A third thing, which would be relevant and would be hard to go back and assess now was how community level social persuasion got done. What kind of arguments did priests use trying to convince the congregation that women’s right to vote would lead to the apocalypse, what kind of arguments did the scruffy guy on the soapbox use trying to convince factory workers to start hanging fat people with top hats and monocles from the lampposts and so on.
So I could figure out what was a popular newspaper and go read through its archives, or try to figure out which books where bestsellers and see if I can somehow find a copy and read that, and I might actually learn something more interesting about the common quality of argumentation used than by just picking up filtered-by-present-day recommended books that might be systematic outliers. I haven’t done this because it sounds like a lot of work.
EDIT: Adam Cadre’s reviews of old post apocalyptic books are informing my expectations about what sort of stuff I might find if I skipped the present-day list of exemplary books the people of a past era read and went digging into the piles of half-forgotten stuff they actually read.
So why aren’t those arguments being used to defend progressivism today? The answer, which isn’t hard to notice if you actually look at old progressive arguments, is that those arguments tend to have premisses that modern progressives no longer believe and their conclusions are also very different from modern progressive positions.
This is not the case as I mentioned above.
Has there been significant change in the underlying trends where reactionaries are pessimistic about inherent human nature, consider it basically impossible to change significantly, and consider the problem of developing social mechanisms to control it something vital to social stability that takes generations and centuries to solve and is likely to end up with constraining and unintuitive solutions which will nevertheless be the best bet available, while progressives are optimistic that human nature is either benign or malleable enough that it’s possible to enact large and fast social changes and eventually educate people to make the new system work across the board, without messy, nasty and basically impossible to change facets of human nature ending up causing persistent problems?
Well, if you abstract things all the way up to that level.