If you don't think Western civilization is in trouble you've not been paying attention. Birthrates in America have been below replacement rate for some time now, youth suicide is up, mental health continues to drop, even with SSRIs... it ain't goin' well. Now, like all humanity has ever done, we're not really trying to fix the problem. It's much more fun to point fingers and blame each other for creating the mess. And I'll admit I do this as much as the next dude; pointing fingers is fun, especially with the flaming wreckage of civilization in the background! This post is about an episode of my life, ended not too long ago, where I did a hell of a lot of flirting with neo-reactionary thought.
It's also about why I am not a neo-reactionary.
My first encounter with neo-reactionary thought was The Distributist. Dave is a thoughtful individual, generally fair to his opponents, and filled with a Catholic hope that probably confounds him as much as it inspires me. The world will be a darker place when he quits YouTube. The Distributist, like all the reactionaries I've watched so far, has an unflinching approach to addressing what humanity's like. I have a particularly sharp sense of how brutish mankind really can be, so it's always comforting to hear that others acknowledge just how vile our race can get. But, again, there's a hope and an openness in Dave's work that I find therapeutic to experience. Hell, there's a video series he did on geekdom that inspired a lot of my approach to Crescendo, which I've talked about recently on this blog. To say that Dave the Distrubutist was an overwhelming influence on my design philosophy would be a criminal understatement. It borders on perjury.
I mean, c'mon, this video is perfection:
Yes, listen to the whole thing. I find it thoroughly worth it.
From The Distributist I found Curtis Yarvin, Mensius Moldbug. Having actually listened to the entirety of Unqualified Reservations and seen Yarvin in more than a few interviews I thought I'd hit jackpot; Yarvin has been more than a little slandered, and his poor communication style has not helped what is a very purposefully malicious popular misreading. Unless someone can bring me evidence otherwise that's my takeaway. Even with that caveat it's easy to see why an entire movement has sprung up around Yarvin: he's got a lot of good data that he tries to treat with respect. His work on the theory of The Cathedral has single-handedly helped me understand how our world actually works better than anything I learned before.
Oh, you don't know what The Cathedral is?
Buckle up.
Yarvin's theory is that all cultures have an instrument of consensus, which says what's okay to discuss. The one who can tell you what can be talked about is the one who holds power, real power. Sometimes this instrument is explicit and centralized, like the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Yarvin argues (and I agree) that an explicit Cathedral is much better than a hidden one; power gets nasty if you can't hold it accountable. Cultures need a Cathedral. Man will always make one, somehow. Our Cathedral is not explicit or centralized. It's spread across the top universities, who seed into the government bureaucracies and Hollywood. This particular arrangement, put explicitly into place by FDR and carrying on until the Korean War, just... carried on. It stopped being formal and no one is at its head, but Pandora opened the box and now we have a zombie remnant of a technocratic oligarchic organization. Combine this with the sudden rise of truly big money in American politics at the beginning of the 20th century and you have a shadow (and unconscious!!) oligarchy who can convince the American public that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are valid choices for an election. Oh, and who can then take the time to convince us that Sleepy Joe would be a better choice than Trump (an argument I found so repulsive I refused to vote). And all of this was accomplished without nearly as much planning as we would like to think. All these folks were part of the same cultural institutions, it's not something you can accuse them of masterminding.
There's no one at the wheel folks.
Which means it's gonna crash.
Auron Macintyre breaks it down really nicely here:
Once I saw it I just couldn't unsee it. What I've always felt to be progressive condescension became much easier to understand; you were either pushing the narrative as a part of the Cathedral or you had swallowed the lead and followed like a sheep. It doesn't take more than a few minutes on Facebook and Twitter to notice this. I'd already left Facebook because I'd felt this manufactured consent, that people were not themselves and couldn't know they weren't. And now I have a concept for why.
This whole time an uneasiness had begun to build in the back of my mind. I agreed with these two on a lot of things, and still do! I've never seen such a frank willingness to work with humanity as it is, not as one wished it to be. That's a rare virtue these days; classical liberalism is a white-washed tomb on a good day, I know that far too well at this point. And wouldn't it be nice to have a tribe? It's such a tempting prospect. I could stop wandering. Maybe I could shelve the fact that, as a Christian, I am not to feel like I belong on this planet. Period. This world cares about power, and thus rebels against God. To belong is to betray.
I cannot do the same.
I must not.
....
The cold water hit when I bumped into Morgoth's Review, a neo-reactionary from Britain. Now, Morgoth's Review can be thoughtful in his own right, but he showed the flaw of the reactionaries I'd successfully blocked out up until this point: they weren't genuine enough. To me, a genuine person can approach people or art, or anything, as it is, and take it with a spirit of total openness. Like or dislike my views on The Last Jedi, Midnight Mass, or The Green Knight, those come right out of my soul, that's my honest interaction with them. I'm glad I watched them. They may not have impacted me the way they have others, but that is what I think, with all the messy contradictions (and thus powerlessness) of that level of honesty. The big difference between the reviews I've written and those espoused by The Distributist and Morgoth's Review was that they either frequently (in The Distributist's case) or excitedly (Morgoth's Review) approached the world through an ideological lens, losing an essential part of what it means to be human. And they didn't seem to have a problem with it.
But I do.
Oh sure, I have an ideology, of course! But I find it frequently gets in the way of truth, and am constantly trying to purge it. People are people. It is a people thing to look through ideology first. It's vile. I mourn it. And try not to do it. I fail, but there is a basic striving to just be open to truth, as much as I can. Ideology lets you put up a filter, which lends the illusion of power, and power is not for humanity to take. Like all things, it is a gift. You either accept truth as it is or you reach for power. The first leads to relationship, and thus suffering, but eventually peace. The second leads to isolation, and thus Hell.
Dem's your choices kids!
The ultimate moment of rejection was to be found in one of neo-reaction’s greatest sources of inspiration, Oswald Spengler. Spengler, a former German math teacher, published his landmark Decline of the West in 1918 (aka as Germany was losing WWI). In it Spengler argued that there is no “continuum of history” as we understand it today; humans are not progressing acrost time to a gentler and kinder time. On the contrary, each high culture (Greco-Roman, Middle Eastern, and modern Western) lived in its own cyclic evolution, with a culture wrapped around a single set of ideas, identifiable in its art, architecture, and math. Once this one idea played out (Spengler posits a thousand years) the society that was created by this idea would slowly divorce itself from its culture, and die out. Most modern reactionaries are charmed by Spengler’s predictions of the 20th and 21st centuries (which are eerily correct), but they seem to miss the basis of what gave Spengler such insight: his belief in primal life over morals. To Spengler there was no universal abstracted truth to be found, only what allowed us to live and propagate our species. The only truly universal truths were those that supported the primal and spiritual continuance of humanity; you're either helping humanity get along or you're not. Now, I’ve not finished Decline of the West, but Spengler’s refusal of all abstract systems that don’t directly lead to life and its preservation is blindingly obvious... and something I find the neo-reactionaries pay only the barest of lip services to.
And no, by life Spengler doesn’t mean “having your best life”, he means very directly having babies and preserving the culture to help that baby find goodness and truth and then to make more babies. There is absolutely nothing subtle in what Spengler means.
Spengler also points out that the will to impose your morals upon others, to make them think as you do, the drive to transform your culture, is inherently a part of our day and age, that of the Western (“Faustian”, yes that Faust) culture. The scale in which we have enacted this is specially Faustian. Not Christian. Not Muslim. Not American. We are inside of a much larger movement that is slowly dying out. The culture wars as we conceive of them today are just that: today. They cannot last.
All is well and good up until this last point, wherein Spengler says we cannot escape our modern culture. Spengler does not comment upon the central mystery of apostolic Christianity: theosis, the adoption of man by God. “God became man so man could become god” quoth St Athanasius. Spengler, for all his reading, does not seem to know or understand theosis. And who can blame him? The Cross is a stumbling block. It doesn’t make sense, it should not be. Christ promised the renewal of the nous, our spiritual organ of perceiving (which is stupidly translated as “mind” in English). To be Christian is to put on the spiritual perception of Christ, which leads to the forgiveness of sins, which are the failure to be like God.
Not winning a culture war.
Not engaging in the will to power that all of us are swept up in on a cultural level.
But the forgiveness of sins, and life everlasting.
Refusing to let myself be brainwashed by the Progressive Cathedral does not excuse me to go and be a neo-reactionary groupie. Christ is King, Christ is everything, Christ is supreme. In all senses of all those words, He is the Truth. Repentance means to let your perceptions be those of Christ's, not those of any political party or ideal or anything else. Nothing. Else.
But this jaunt wasn't for nothing. I’m certainly not done listening to neo-reactionary content for the same reason I’m not done listening to progressives: they all offer truth, somehow. I've got a better idea of power dynamics, of how much one can really be shaped by the culture around them, and a renewed determination to approach people as people first. And I will fail. Over and over. But someday I hope to be able to look at someone and just see them. Not my baggage around whatever tribe they're a part of. Not burdened with any history I may have with them.
Just them. Like Christ.
I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that is the way forward.
That's the real accomplishment. And failing in the attempt is an amazing experience. It's better than succeeding at just about anything else.
I hope. Man, that apple just looks so good! Seems good for the development of knowledge, doesn't it?
No comments:
Post a Comment