I’ve read the last one, it’s extremely typical of Moldbug IMO. He rather distinctly perceives what sort of thing is going on (yes, “diversity” is a political weapon, not so much “towards” political power as to undermine the influence of the New Left’s perceived enemies; personally I am lukewarm on it) - but he engages in a lot of empty rhetoric and faux-cynical views of human psychology (it’s silly and unfalsifiable—not to say invidious—to say that most ideals of the Left are merely well-internalized means to get the thrill of wielding influence!).
Meanwhile, he details nothing about how it is used as a political weapon, why it could have been picked by the post-60s Left over other kinds of weapons (the Old Left didn’t care much for it), does it really further the New Left’s other unspoken goals well, whether the New Left is aware of the openings this strategy provides to the Right, and so on.
I think I have acquired a pretty clear—and uncommon—understanding of those why’s and how’s of “diversity” and “anti-racism” (as it’s commonly used, not all opposition to racism). I’ve been reading a lot about the Western Left throughout the 20th century over the last months. So I’m trying to write a comment about it right now—but it’s necessarily a damn long one, with some background about the general left-of-center/Universalist view on means and ends of political change and how it fundamentally shifted around the 1960s (what the Old Left/New Left divide is all about!). And although a general picture is now rather easy to envision for me, it’s a LOT to explain, with fairly large inferential distances to both the Alt-Right view and the politically-aware-LW-mainstream view. And it’ll take me a concentrated effort.
So I’ll try to write it throughout an all-nighter I’m pulling tonight, and even then I’m not promising anything. :) (and damn, I have so many other things to write for LW that no-one else is likely to post, I feel rather guilty for procrastinating)
BONUS! Something I should’ve linked to a lot earlier. A great article by Linda Gottfriedson, an illustrious old lady who does ev-psych like Razib Khan but gets more status for it. What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis is True? - on how there are better, more fair ways to reduce racial achievement gaps than Affirmative Action in the oft-dreaded case that group genetic differences determine individual IQ a lot. Everybody please read it.
P.S. On Lev Navrozov: definitely worth reading, but I’m still munching over it. That is, don’t get caught up in the halo effect—most Soviet dissidents were indeed heroic people with uncommon clarity of vision towards their own system of repression in their own time, but that doesn’t mean you would find their “general” judgment of things at all acceptable. Take Solzhenitsyn—both a mystic hostile to material concerns and a fascist of sorts. Moldbug would take issue with the former, a Universalist like me with the latter—yet he’s likely among Moldbug’s primary sources on the pre-war USSR.
Or—a better example—take Alexandr Zinovyev, I’ve read him. Emigrated to Germany, yet attacked Western individualism and was aghast at the dissolution of the USSR, saying that the Soviet regime had many good aspects like the abolition of private property, etc, and that it at least gave a proper place to old good Russian collectivist values. I hardly agree with any of his points at all, much less the way in which he makes them, but his stuff would bounce right off Moldbug’s black-and-white brain!
I’ve read the last one, it’s extremely typical of Moldbug IMO
I recommend you read the prerequisite posts he cites since they really set the frame for these kinds of claims.
(yes, “diversity” is a political weapon, not so much “towards” political power as to undermine the influence of the New Left’s perceived enemies; personally I am lukewarm on it)
...
Meanwhile, he details nothing about how it is used as a political weapon, why it could have been picked by the post-60s Left over other kinds of weapons (the Old Left didn’t care much for it), does it really further the New Left’s other unspoken goals well, whether the New Left is aware of the openings this strategy provides to the Right, and so on.
He sees “diversity” happening because it is an effective political weapon not because some group found it the optimal tool for their goals. If I understand his models right he thinks that even if the “New Left” didn’t exist some other political or apolitical force would employ a “diversity”-like model of gaining power simply because it works so well in circumstances broadly similar to our own.
This is the difference between saying sheep are tasty so wolves will eat them and saying wolves evolved to like the taste of sheep because those who didn’t starved more often.
some other political or apolitical force would employ a “diversity”-like model of gaining power simply because it works so well in circumstances broadly similar to our own
But the Right the world over can’t do it very well! It’s not that complicated a game—why, then, can’t they play it? Because it’s a game of breaking down traditional hierarchies, and that’s the Left’s line of work. The ways of the authentic Right and the authentic Left are not homogenous. It isn’t all the same shit. The Left is simply pursuing this game ineffectively and without much useful resonance effect in other areas, it has itself been pwned, that’s what I’m going to argue.
I wasn’t saying the “authentic traditionalist Right” could play this game, though the “populist right” obviously can, I was saying that different predators would have evolved in the absence of current ones and that the features of current ones are mostly the result of such pressures rather than being engineered.
You focus too much on the specific and narrow political context. For example the implicit assumptions that this only works in breaking down traditional hierarchies must result in progress for something like the left that has at the very least egalitarian pretences if not perhaps real preferences. To the contrary, I think one of its most adaptive feature is setting up new hierarchies, which may or may not be more egalitarian than the old ones.
I would for example argue the model works quite well if applied to the task mass conversions to different religions or pacification of conquered peoples.
For example the implicit assumptions that this only works in breaking down traditional hierarchies must result in progress for something like the left that has at the very least egalitarian pretences if not perhaps real preferences. To the contrary, I think one of its most adaptive feature is setting up new hierarchies, which may or may not be more egalitarian than the old ones.
Right; it often does. In particular—not a very PC thing to say? - the more generally intelligent and educated a group is, the more the chance that it’ll move towards rather than away from left-wing ideals after traditional hierarchies within it are seriously weakened for some reason.
The sort of group currently most capable of living up to “liberty, equality and fraternity” is probably the intellectual class itself :) - and that’s why nearly every radical left project with some serious theoretical background, like Leninism—for all the confused rhetoric about the innate decency of the proletariat—showed some awareness that it needs its massive indoctrination efforts to be accompanied by a plain ol’ public education program, introducing patterns of thinking that are appropriate to modernity rather than a pre-industrial community, massively improving literacy to the point where the common man would enjoy just reading stuff (this actually kinda-half-succeeded in Russia, eventually, despite post-Soviet regress, and this is part of why it’s so hard for me to condemn the Revolution)…
Of course, there wasn’t nearly enough of such enlightenment, not least because of endemic corruption and fear of practical egalitarianism within the communist elites themselves.
However, what I meant here was not that the Left was playing this game properly or very wisely, but that it had many political and selfish reasons to try it while the established elites that the Left challenged had many political and selfish reasons to stay away from it.
P.S. here you need to taboo such use of the phrase “populist right”: Napoleon was the “populist right” to the French Revolution and the Directory, yet he sustained the attack on traditional hierarchies, although in a more cautious way—while Sarah Palin is also described as being of the “populist right”, yet uses her standing up for traditional hierarchies as a major selling point.
the more generally intelligent and educated a group is, the more the chance that it’ll move towards rather than away from left-wing ideals after traditional hierarchies within it are seriously weakened for some reason.
What are your examples for this assertion? Why do you reject the idea of motivated historical revisionism? There are multiple pressures on any modern group to try to find a common core for fundamentally distinct historical movements that (1) won their conflicts and (2) the moderns like.
Huh? Can’t parse your comment at all, sorry. (Oh, and I’m mostly just toying with ideas that look plausible and coherent but under-discussed on the left. Not trying to sum up all the balance of evidence.)
But as for a suggestive comparison, look at the un-conservative dating, sex and relationship patterns discussed on LW as advice and personal anecdotes (polyamory, the ethics of seduction and signaling, etc) versus the un-conservative dating, sex and relationship patterns commonly observed in American lower classes (including young white men not born into poverty but socially alienated and marginalized, like the “stereotypical unpleasant anti-feminist dude”).
Both are very different from the “traditional” system and would be viewed dimly by a traditionalist conservative, yet one is a promising experiment while the other is a horrible fucking mess.
He sees “diversity” happening because it is a effective political weapon not because some group found it the optimal tool for their goals.
I claim that there are certainly other effective political weapons that use identity politics and that the Left effectively used other weapons over “diversity” or “multiculturalism” up to the 1950s—class-warfare framing chief among them. “Diversity” works as a weapon because it can force people to associate with groups (like most African-Americans, etc) which are almost certain not to associate with the elites in competition with the Left. It breaks up the homogenity of the enemy elite’s power base; the enemy either has to put up with it or be ruined in its reputation.
But class, sex, religion, etc would work just as well, because the enemy elites are not just (almost completely) white, they’re also almost completely upper-class (sometimes industrialists, often financists, occasionally from academic or military clans), they’re almost completely male, almost never (in the US) outspoken atheists, Muslims, Confucians, Unitarians (would’ve been a beautiful gambit! although it’d need a little astroturfing) - in short, there are many potential angles of attack in this way, and before the 60s, race was practically never used for it, while class and wealth often were.
Therefore, there must have been a reason to pick “ethnicity” instead of other characteristics for crippling enemy freedom of maneuver in such a way—just think for a moment, why is our “diversity” an ethnic “diversity”, rather than a religious “diversity” or a class-background “diversity” (you only have people raised in rich suburbs at your organization? you’re an enemy of the People!) or “diversity” among some other such line? I claim that this was because the American Left had at that point already turned to using race politics for other ends. I’m planning to explain what those other ends were, in my analysis.
So I’ll try to write it throughout an all-nighter I’m pulling tonight, and even then I’m not promising anything. :)
I think that would be a rather cool text, so please do!
BONUS! Something I should’ve linked to a lot earlier. A great article by Linda Gottfriedson, an illustrious old lady who does ev-psych like Razib Khan but gets more status for it. What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis is True? - on how there are better, more fair ways to reduce racial achievement gaps than Affirmative Action in the oft-dreaded case that group genetic differences determine individual IQ a lot. Everybody please read it.
I’ve read some of her work before but not that particular paper, I’ve downloaded it for later reading.
That is, don’t get caught up in the halo effect—most Soviet dissidents were indeed heroic people with uncommon clarity of vision towards their own system of repression in their own time, but that doesn’t mean you would find their “general” judgment of things at all acceptable.
Just out of curiosity which works from Soviet dissidents would you recommend I read?
but his stuff would bounce right off Moldbug’s black-and-white brain!
This is unfair to him no? While Moldbug clearly dislikes universalism, his brain is far less black-and-white than that of the regular modern intellectual. If the past is a foreign country, he is its premier explorer. He may have gone a bit native, but it takes one of those to humble us into occasionally looking past our biases and taking those weird savages seriously.
I would argue the fact that Moldbug can stand reading all these interesting and ideologically widely disparate sources is evidence he is if anything too open to any shiny new idea he encounters.
Just out of curiosity which works from Soviet dissidents would you recommend I read?
Varlam Shalamov. Bleak, great and terrible. Also fairly apolitical, beyond a confirmation that tyranny is tyranny and it fucks people bad. He’s certainly beyond the notions of individualism and collectivism that a “civilized” life allows; it’s all about mere survival in an order of pure hatred and malice.
This is unfair to him no? While Moldbug clearly dislikes universalism, his brain is far less black-and-white than that of the regular modern intellectual.
Yes, but I meant a different thing by “black-and-white”. “Grayscale” would be a better word, and it’s more epistemic rather than directly about sacredness/purity. One might say that he doesn’t quite appreciate in which ways and on how many levels people might value things, although of course he has a better understanding of the simple breadth of possible values than the “regular modern intellectual” (wanted to say how those might not be evidence that society is more conformist, but damn I need a rest).
I’ve read the last one, it’s extremely typical of Moldbug IMO. He rather distinctly perceives what sort of thing is going on (yes, “diversity” is a political weapon, not so much “towards” political power as to undermine the influence of the New Left’s perceived enemies; personally I am lukewarm on it) - but he engages in a lot of empty rhetoric and faux-cynical views of human psychology (it’s silly and unfalsifiable—not to say invidious—to say that most ideals of the Left are merely well-internalized means to get the thrill of wielding influence!).
Meanwhile, he details nothing about how it is used as a political weapon, why it could have been picked by the post-60s Left over other kinds of weapons (the Old Left didn’t care much for it), does it really further the New Left’s other unspoken goals well, whether the New Left is aware of the openings this strategy provides to the Right, and so on.
I think I have acquired a pretty clear—and uncommon—understanding of those why’s and how’s of “diversity” and “anti-racism” (as it’s commonly used, not all opposition to racism). I’ve been reading a lot about the Western Left throughout the 20th century over the last months. So I’m trying to write a comment about it right now—but it’s necessarily a damn long one, with some background about the general left-of-center/Universalist view on means and ends of political change and how it fundamentally shifted around the 1960s (what the Old Left/New Left divide is all about!). And although a general picture is now rather easy to envision for me, it’s a LOT to explain, with fairly large inferential distances to both the Alt-Right view and the politically-aware-LW-mainstream view. And it’ll take me a concentrated effort.
So I’ll try to write it throughout an all-nighter I’m pulling tonight, and even then I’m not promising anything. :) (and damn, I have so many other things to write for LW that no-one else is likely to post, I feel rather guilty for procrastinating)
BONUS! Something I should’ve linked to a lot earlier. A great article by Linda Gottfriedson, an illustrious old lady who does ev-psych like Razib Khan but gets more status for it. What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis is True? - on how there are better, more fair ways to reduce racial achievement gaps than Affirmative Action in the oft-dreaded case that group genetic differences determine individual IQ a lot. Everybody please read it.
P.S. On Lev Navrozov: definitely worth reading, but I’m still munching over it. That is, don’t get caught up in the halo effect—most Soviet dissidents were indeed heroic people with uncommon clarity of vision towards their own system of repression in their own time, but that doesn’t mean you would find their “general” judgment of things at all acceptable. Take Solzhenitsyn—both a mystic hostile to material concerns and a fascist of sorts. Moldbug would take issue with the former, a Universalist like me with the latter—yet he’s likely among Moldbug’s primary sources on the pre-war USSR.
Or—a better example—take Alexandr Zinovyev, I’ve read him. Emigrated to Germany, yet attacked Western individualism and was aghast at the dissolution of the USSR, saying that the Soviet regime had many good aspects like the abolition of private property, etc, and that it at least gave a proper place to old good Russian collectivist values. I hardly agree with any of his points at all, much less the way in which he makes them, but his stuff would bounce right off Moldbug’s black-and-white brain!
I recommend you read the prerequisite posts he cites since they really set the frame for these kinds of claims.
He sees “diversity” happening because it is an effective political weapon not because some group found it the optimal tool for their goals. If I understand his models right he thinks that even if the “New Left” didn’t exist some other political or apolitical force would employ a “diversity”-like model of gaining power simply because it works so well in circumstances broadly similar to our own.
This is the difference between saying sheep are tasty so wolves will eat them and saying wolves evolved to like the taste of sheep because those who didn’t starved more often.
Also:
But the Right the world over can’t do it very well! It’s not that complicated a game—why, then, can’t they play it? Because it’s a game of breaking down traditional hierarchies, and that’s the Left’s line of work. The ways of the authentic Right and the authentic Left are not homogenous. It isn’t all the same shit. The Left is simply pursuing this game ineffectively and without much useful resonance effect in other areas, it has itself been pwned, that’s what I’m going to argue.
I wasn’t saying the “authentic traditionalist Right” could play this game, though the “populist right” obviously can, I was saying that different predators would have evolved in the absence of current ones and that the features of current ones are mostly the result of such pressures rather than being engineered.
You focus too much on the specific and narrow political context. For example the implicit assumptions that this only works in breaking down traditional hierarchies must result in progress for something like the left that has at the very least egalitarian pretences if not perhaps real preferences. To the contrary, I think one of its most adaptive feature is setting up new hierarchies, which may or may not be more egalitarian than the old ones.
I would for example argue the model works quite well if applied to the task mass conversions to different religions or pacification of conquered peoples.
Right; it often does. In particular—not a very PC thing to say? - the more generally intelligent and educated a group is, the more the chance that it’ll move towards rather than away from left-wing ideals after traditional hierarchies within it are seriously weakened for some reason.
The sort of group currently most capable of living up to “liberty, equality and fraternity” is probably the intellectual class itself :) - and that’s why nearly every radical left project with some serious theoretical background, like Leninism—for all the confused rhetoric about the innate decency of the proletariat—showed some awareness that it needs its massive indoctrination efforts to be accompanied by a plain ol’ public education program, introducing patterns of thinking that are appropriate to modernity rather than a pre-industrial community, massively improving literacy to the point where the common man would enjoy just reading stuff (this actually kinda-half-succeeded in Russia, eventually, despite post-Soviet regress, and this is part of why it’s so hard for me to condemn the Revolution)…
Of course, there wasn’t nearly enough of such enlightenment, not least because of endemic corruption and fear of practical egalitarianism within the communist elites themselves.
However, what I meant here was not that the Left was playing this game properly or very wisely, but that it had many political and selfish reasons to try it while the established elites that the Left challenged had many political and selfish reasons to stay away from it.
P.S. here you need to taboo such use of the phrase “populist right”: Napoleon was the “populist right” to the French Revolution and the Directory, yet he sustained the attack on traditional hierarchies, although in a more cautious way—while Sarah Palin is also described as being of the “populist right”, yet uses her standing up for traditional hierarchies as a major selling point.
What are your examples for this assertion? Why do you reject the idea of motivated historical revisionism? There are multiple pressures on any modern group to try to find a common core for fundamentally distinct historical movements that (1) won their conflicts and (2) the moderns like.
Huh? Can’t parse your comment at all, sorry. (Oh, and I’m mostly just toying with ideas that look plausible and coherent but under-discussed on the left. Not trying to sum up all the balance of evidence.)
But as for a suggestive comparison, look at the un-conservative dating, sex and relationship patterns discussed on LW as advice and personal anecdotes (polyamory, the ethics of seduction and signaling, etc) versus the un-conservative dating, sex and relationship patterns commonly observed in American lower classes (including young white men not born into poverty but socially alienated and marginalized, like the “stereotypical unpleasant anti-feminist dude”).
Both are very different from the “traditional” system and would be viewed dimly by a traditionalist conservative, yet one is a promising experiment while the other is a horrible fucking mess.
I claim that there are certainly other effective political weapons that use identity politics and that the Left effectively used other weapons over “diversity” or “multiculturalism” up to the 1950s—class-warfare framing chief among them. “Diversity” works as a weapon because it can force people to associate with groups (like most African-Americans, etc) which are almost certain not to associate with the elites in competition with the Left. It breaks up the homogenity of the enemy elite’s power base; the enemy either has to put up with it or be ruined in its reputation.
But class, sex, religion, etc would work just as well, because the enemy elites are not just (almost completely) white, they’re also almost completely upper-class (sometimes industrialists, often financists, occasionally from academic or military clans), they’re almost completely male, almost never (in the US) outspoken atheists, Muslims, Confucians, Unitarians (would’ve been a beautiful gambit! although it’d need a little astroturfing) - in short, there are many potential angles of attack in this way, and before the 60s, race was practically never used for it, while class and wealth often were.
Therefore, there must have been a reason to pick “ethnicity” instead of other characteristics for crippling enemy freedom of maneuver in such a way—just think for a moment, why is our “diversity” an ethnic “diversity”, rather than a religious “diversity” or a class-background “diversity” (you only have people raised in rich suburbs at your organization? you’re an enemy of the People!) or “diversity” among some other such line? I claim that this was because the American Left had at that point already turned to using race politics for other ends. I’m planning to explain what those other ends were, in my analysis.
I think that would be a rather cool text, so please do!
I’ve read some of her work before but not that particular paper, I’ve downloaded it for later reading.
Just out of curiosity which works from Soviet dissidents would you recommend I read?
This is unfair to him no? While Moldbug clearly dislikes universalism, his brain is far less black-and-white than that of the regular modern intellectual. If the past is a foreign country, he is its premier explorer. He may have gone a bit native, but it takes one of those to humble us into occasionally looking past our biases and taking those weird savages seriously.
I would argue the fact that Moldbug can stand reading all these interesting and ideologically widely disparate sources is evidence he is if anything too open to any shiny new idea he encounters.
Varlam Shalamov. Bleak, great and terrible. Also fairly apolitical, beyond a confirmation that tyranny is tyranny and it fucks people bad. He’s certainly beyond the notions of individualism and collectivism that a “civilized” life allows; it’s all about mere survival in an order of pure hatred and malice.
Yes, but I meant a different thing by “black-and-white”. “Grayscale” would be a better word, and it’s more epistemic rather than directly about sacredness/purity. One might say that he doesn’t quite appreciate in which ways and on how many levels people might value things, although of course he has a better understanding of the simple breadth of possible values than the “regular modern intellectual” (wanted to say how those might not be evidence that society is more conformist, but damn I need a rest).
I think that would be cool to read I think, so please do!