Introduction: The Story Addicts
Human beings are story addicts.
You can prove this for yourself by considering the popularity of any major entertainment franchise—Lord of the Rings (the books and the movies), Dune (read the book), Star Wars (seriously, just read Dune instead), those Marvel movies, Game of Thrones before that last season, etc.
But if you think about it, this principle also applies to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and for that matter every religion practiced by anyone anywhere.
Human beings are story addicts, because stories provide a basis for meaning, purpose, and identity.
When a group of humans can agree on a shared story that describes them as a group, a shared story that gives them meaning, purpose, and identity, then you have a clan, or tribe, perhaps even a nation or a religion (or both, if you’re North Korea).
Or, you know, maybe just a D&D club.
It’s not hard to see why the shared story matters: it provides a foundation for trust and cooperation.
Gods as Trust Mechanisms
To give an example from the history of Western civilization, the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans were very concerned with personal honor, particularly the integrity of oaths sworn in their name.
Why does this matter? Simple: it meant that people who swore oaths by the gods were giving an honest signal of trustworthiness.
As Joseph Henrich explains in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous:
“The centrality of the gods to Mediterranean commerce and trade is illustrated on the Aegean island of Delos, an epicenter for Roman maritime trade during the second century BCE. As a religious center and trading hub, the ancient marketplace was filled with altars and idols for various gods, but both Mercury and Hercules were central. In this sacred place, merchants swore oaths to these deities to establish trading fraternities and solidify contractual bonds that effectively networked the Mediterranean. Pausanias, a famous Greek traveler, observed that ‘the presence of the god made it safe to do business there.’”
Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World (p. 145). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
But someone could always swear an oath and break their word, right?
Not if they took the powers of the gods seriously—and it’s probably safe to say most people did, most of the time, or the system wouldn’t work. For that matter, premodern peoples generally took religion much more seriously than do we moderns, with our post-industrial lifestyles and cynicism.
After the Classical Greco-Roman pantheon lost out to Christianity in Late Antiquity, the foundations were laid for a new Western civilization.
As a mechanism for generating trust, Christianity had a rather large and very obvious advantage over the Classical pantheons: a vision of a supremely moral God who was supremely concerned with the moral status and afterlives of humanity.
Christianity was the dominant narrative during the period in which Western civilization might be described as Western Christendom.
One could periodize this in a variety of ways, but I’ll simplify with the argument that the Enlightenment and rising secularism in the 18th century marked the birth pangs of a new liberal civilization, which came into flower in the 19th century:
“The nineteenth century was marked by (1) belief in the innate goodness of man; (2) secularism; (3) belief in progress; (4) liberalism; (5) capitalism; (6) faith in science; (7) democracy; (8) nationalism. In general, these eight factors went along together in the nineteenth century. They were generally regarded as being compatible with one another; the friends of one were generally the friends of the others; and the enemies of one were generally the enemies of the rest. Metternich and De Maistre were generally opposed to all eight; Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill were generally in favor of all eight.”
Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World In Our Time (Kindle Locations 680-684). Dauphin Publications Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Many of those 8 items continue to enjoy some degree of sustained popularity in the modern world. I’ll grant you nationalism, at least in the Western context, has become something of a dirty word in the circles of correct-opinion-making, as has capitalism—though both of these have their champions on the political Right.
The other 7 all have their fan clubs, and it’s common enough for there to be overlap.
In fact, I’ll argue that the narrative of progress is particularly popular.
Progress: Promise or Peril?
What in the world is “progress,” and why, in America in the 2020s, does it seem to be synonymous with toppling statues and rioting?
Maybe you, like me, grew up with the science fiction of yesteryear. The promise of 2001: A Space Odyssey was that “progress” meant colonies on Jupiter’s moons and mysterious alien monoliths.
Instead, we have emotionally incontinent people on Twitter, “cancel culture,” and waves of rioting inspired by moral panics.
One answer to this question is that “progress” is actually what it purports to be, progress… and if you unpack the layer-caked assumptions for a bit, those broken eggs are making for one heck of an omelet.
[From this point of view, do stop whining about your burned cities and businesses. The whole thing is yet another Bonfire of the Vanities, and every shrill, finger-wagging pundit at HuffPo or Salon is presiding over it like a veritable mini-Savonarola].
Of course, there’s another class of pundit who thinks all of this progress is actually barbarism. This class of pundit is correct, in this author’s view, but unfortunately few of them go far enough.
Their basic failure is a failure of vision. They can see the problem with the Visigoths who are now insistently knocking on the gates of Rome, and they know they’d very much like to go back to their Roman way of life.
Here’s a thought: perhaps we could make the Roman Empire strong enough to deal with the Visigoths, and all the other barbarians knocking about in Gaul and Hispania?
You know, bring back the Roman martial virtues from the Second Punic War, six hundred years ago, when the Roman Republic spent a generation fighting the Carthaginian general Hannibal?
No? Well, perhaps we could simply try bribing the Visigoths to deal with all those pesky Alans, Sueves, and Vandals for us.
Sure, it’s not as ideal as getting the Romans of the 5th century CE to revive the martial virtue of (some of their) ancestors from six centuries ago, but then the Romans of the 5th century CE are made of much less stern stuff.
(A parable for our own time, perhaps?)
History may well offer any number of lessons for our situation. I’d say that one of those lessons is that mass movements and moral panics have a tendency to exhaust themselves, and sometimes they even provoke reactions.
The bad news is, they tend to do a lot of damage before superior leaders can emerge to invalidate them.
Progress and Its Discontents
So, what are we to make of progress?
The truth, of course, is that progress is the new religion of America and the rest of the modern West. Since the Industrial Revolution, the West has undergone a sweeping series of economic, social, and political transformations that have broken down the old pre-industrial agrarian order and replaced it with a society governed by institutions that have strong incentives to promote continued social change and transformation.
From this, we might well conclude that the teleology of history proceeds from Australopithecus to the Agricultural Revolution to the American Revolution… and from there to Antifa anarchists toppling the statues of American Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln.
After all, if the changes in social attitudes that are called progress are an inevitable response to changes in technology, economic organization, etc., then the outcome of the Culture War is as inevitable as the Christianization of Europe in the Middle Ages, right?
Gotta take the child drag queens with the AI sex robots and nanotechnology, right?
What we are concerned with here is the narratives that civilizations run on. Based on the past 10, 20, 100, even 200 or more years, the narratives that govern the West have all apparently migrated ever farther to the Left—and they’ve generally taken the institutions and the societies of the West with them.
How can we explain this pattern, and what if anything can be done about it? Should we do anything about it?
I have recently had the pleasure of reading two articles that proffer their own very different responses to these questions, and both have to do with the so-called New Right.
Fighting the Folkways: Scholar’s Stage on the New Right
Scholar’s Stage by Tanner Greer is the kind of blog I dream of finding: every post animated by some big-picture, high-concept thesis, dripping in historical and cultural observations as juicy as an overnight marinade.
To put it mildly, I’m a fan.
My acquaintance with this blog is quite recent, and I owe it entirely to a Facebook friend who saw fit to share “The Problem of the New Right.”
As someone who has been more or less affiliated with the broader currents of the New Right since about 2017, I was intrigued.
Greer starts by observing that the New Right articulates a vision of the Right that it sees as more authentic and organic, a vision opposed to the strong free-market, libertarian, and classically liberal currents that have long characterized the postwar American Right.
“There is no New Right catechism. Each man of the New Right has his unique obsessions. Yet there is a broad set of shared attitudes and policy prescriptions that draw New Righters in. The New Right likes to think of itself as a band of class warriors. Of tariffs and industrial policy, they are unequivocally in favor. Government economic intervention is to be lauded, if such intervention revitalizes the heartland and secures the dignity of the working-class man. Both tech companies and high finance are viewed with suspicion. New Right figures are the conservatives most likely to be calling for Section 230 reform and least likely to care about corporate tax rates. The New Right distrusts capital.
“This is partly because capital has become woke, but there are deeper concerns: the New Right is a response to the loss of a way of life (or an imagined way of life, for the New Right’s younger legions have never experienced personally what they yearn for), and when they survey the causes of heartland malaise (the horrors of the opioid crisis, the despondency of the deindustrialized boomtown, and so forth) everywhere they find the wicked hand of avarice. They believe that America’s corporate class has subverted American culture and betrayed the American people. The problem with financiers, they say, is that they have no roots. The financier is a flighty being who cares for nothing but lucre. He will follow the gold-laced trail wherever on the globe it might take him.”
So, what’s the problem? The problem, Greer says, is that the libertarian/classically liberal/free-market impulses are natural to American folkways, or at least to a certain strain of American folkways.
He draws on the fascinating work of David Hackett Fisher, who argues that the American colonies represent four distinct “folkways” derived from different groups of settlers who came from different parts of Britain.
“One of these four founding cultures were the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay. As my editor friend intuited, the "politics of the common good" that the New Right strives for aligns warmly with the Puritan’s communitarian conceptions of ordered liberty. I will return to these Puritan ideas in a moment, but to understand the challenge that faces the New Right we need to turn to one of America’s other founding nations.
“The “backcountry” of the British colonies were settled by Scots-Irish immigrants from the borderlands of England and Scotland. The men and women who survived these war-torn marches did so through cultivating a reputation for savagery. The backcountryman put clan over community. Not for him was the New England township or the small groups of farmsteads that dotted the Delaware River Valley. Instead, backcountrymen spread their farms across the mountainsides, careful to build their cabins miles apart from those closest to them. The backcountryman honored strength and charisma, but had no respect for rank or hierarchy. Authority was weak in his world, and that is how he liked it. He rejected outsiders. He rejected the learning of the university men.[10] The backcounty wrapped its patriotism in the imagery of rattlesnakes, hornet nests, and alligators; they did not invent the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me” but nowhere was it more popular than among America’s Scots-Irish migrants.[11]
“The New Right critique of the American tradition assumes that liberalism and libertarianism are rationalist abstractions foisted by ideologues onto an unsuspecting people. Fischer, with his eye towards Captain Preston, would argue the counter case: America’s libertarian tracts were foisted on no one. Rather, they are simply an attempt to articulate in the language of philosophy the common-sense attitudes and practices long embedded in the customs of the people themselves.”
Greer concludes that the New Right are “Puritan heretics,” since the Puritans “were the most communitarian of Fischer’s four founding nations,” and, in essence, their problem is that their natural constituency is to be found among the “butternut” descendants of the backcountry Scots-Irish settlers.
The New Right want conservative voters to embrace their heretical Puritan vision and reject the siren song of classically liberal and libertarian thinking… but for Greer, they are kicking against the goads.
There’s a principle in copywriting that states: “People don’t buy from you because they understand what you’re selling. They buy from you because they feel understood.”
Greer does an excellent job of pointing us toward historical realities that complicate New Right narratives about what the problem is and whether anything can be done about it. Let’s turn now to the second essay, Gray Mirror’s “The Frivolity of the Pundit Right.”
Pied Piper Pundits: Gray Mirror’s “The Frivolity of the Pundit Right”
Back in 2017, I came across references to a cursed blog full of forbidden ideas that only Very Bad People would take seriously. Since I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, you might say I have a certain fatal attraction to forbidden fruit.
As the blog that first “red-pilled” me on democracy, Unqualified Reservations will always hold a very special place in my heart and my browser bookmarks (critics and detractors may well speculate on its proximity to a copy of the Necronomicon).
Curtis Yarvin, the mastermind behind Unqualified Reservations, is now blogging at Gray Mirror on Substack. His recent article “The Frivolity of the Pundit Right” is a masterful response to Greer and to two other “pundits.”
Yarvin begins his essay by comparing and contrasting “three kinds of dissidents: (a) anons, (b) pundits who still care what people think, and (c) outsiders who DGAF.”
To summarize, Yarvin says the problem with being a pundit is twofold: first, one has to be selective about what one talks about and what one shuts up about, and second, one is selling false hope to one’s followers.
Yarvin’s criticism of Greer’s “Pity the Whig who wishes to lead the Jackson masses!” is worth quoting:
“Uh, yeah, dude, that would be called ‘Abraham Lincoln.’
“But the point stands. Not just the ‘New Right’ with its new statist ideology, but the whole postwar American Right, is a weird army with a general staff of philosophers and a fighting infantry of ignorant yokels. How can this stay together? How can the philosophers bring forth a mythology that creates passionate intensity in the yokels?”
Yarvin goes on to criticize the use and abuse of mythic narratives:
“There is wisdom in this madness, of course—the problem is caused by aristocrats whose minds are wholly given over to narcissistic delusions. Doesn’t it take fire to fight fire? Doesn’t it take passionate intensity? Isn’t passionate intensity generated only by myths, dreams, poems and religions, not autistic formulas for tax policy? So the answer is clear: we need more and better narcissistic delusions. Ie, shams.
“After all, any ‘founding mythology’ is a narcissistic delusion. The flintlock farmers and mechanic mobs of the 1770s, and the Plymouth Puritans of the 1620s, have one thing in common: none of these people even remotely resembles the megachurch grill-and-minivan conservative of the 2020s. None of them even remotely resembles you.”
In essence, the Left is led by a cadre of self-appointed aristocrats-cum-priests whose specialty is narcissistic delusion; the New Right foolishly seeks to oppose these people with other myths that are also narcissistic delusions.
Why does Yarvin believe this strategy is doomed to failure? Simple: because conservatives are low-energy (they just want to be left alone to grill), but live in a political system designed to cater to people possessed of a passionate intensity.
Yarvin’s argument is difficult to contend with after 2020, but Eric Hoffer explained the psychology in The True Believer:
“People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose by identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements and prospects of the movement.”
Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer (Perennial Classics) (pp. 12-13). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.
Good grief, how are Joe and Jane Suburban Conservative supposed to compete with that? They don’t want to burn anything down, loot, or attack people. They just want to grill and watch the sportsball game.
This leaves two options: either conservatives become people who care more, or “make systems that let them matter more, without caring more.”
How to do this? The answer is to maximize power per vote… by electing a monarch.
“Indeed we have just reasoned our way to reinventing the oldest, most common, and most successful form of government: monarchy. And we are setting it against the second most common form, the institutional rule of power-obsessed elites: oligarchy. And to install our monarchy, we are using the collective action of a large number of people who each perform one small act: democracy.
“The alliance of monarchy and democracy (king and people) against oligarchy (church and/or nobles) is the oldest political strategy in the book. The suburban conservative, who just wants to grill, either has no idea this ancient and trivial solution exists, or regards it as the worst thing in the world—even worse, possibly, than his sixth-grader’s mandatory sex change.”
In an age in which the Deep State can install a dementia patient as a figurehead, raising important questions about who is actually running the show, it’s hard to dispute that Yarvin has a point: the current regime is not democracy, or rather the constitutional republic created by the Founding Fathers, but rather an oligarchy that caters to narcissistic would-be “priests” and corporate interests.
And that leads me back to narratives, and the question of progress and civilization.
From Agraria to Industria: Fossil Fuels and Modern Values
Why has everything in the West drifted leftward—or, as the case may be, why has everything been pulled leftward? I could ask this question for the last 10 years, the last 20, the entire post-1945 period, even back to 1900 or even 1800, and it would be apt.
Here’s the argument up front—or rather, now that you’ve made it this far:
Conservatives have failed to stop the leftward development of Western civilization because they lack a positive vision of sufficient strength to counteract the incentive structure of Industrial, post-Malthusian society.
The conservative may well have a positive vision of life, and for many on the Right this is strongly identified with religious faith. But even the churches have been going Woke, falling to the doctrines of intersectional progressivism much as the sacred trees once fell to Boniface’s ax.
Perhaps the position of the conservative bears some comparison to that of the traditional heathen in Europe, a historical pattern I referenced previously.
From the time of Constantine the Great of the Roman Empire to Jogaila/Władysław II Jagiełło, Christianity made inroads into one European society after another, despite pagan reactions and rebellions.
Christianity defined the West and its intellectual system to such an extent that we can quite fairly refer to the West as Christendom, more precisely Western Christendom, at least until the philosophical and political upheavals of the 18th century and their sequelae in the 19th century and so forth.
Since then, of course—roughly the late 18th-19th centuries—Christian Western civilization has progressively secularized and become Liberal Western civilization.
Let’s take a closer look at the history that underpins this transition, with an eye toward answering one vital question: are we stuck with Liberal Western civilization?
And if by some chance we aren’t stuck with Liberal Western civilization and its increasingly illiberal leftish descendants, what would we replace it with?
Solving the Malthusian Problem
In essence, then, the proper context for this question is the escape of Western civilization from the preindustrial Malthusian economies that characterized all human societies for about the first 300,000 years of Homo sapiens until the post-1800 period.
That escape is called the Industrial Revolution, and it is an inflection point of such profound, world-historic significance that it is somewhat difficult to be hyperbolic in description.
Before the Industrial Revolution, all human societies were governed by the same connection between numbers and resources that governs all other animals—indeed, all other life on earth.
If you put a small sample of bacteria in a petri dish filled with a favorable nutrient broth at an appropriate temperature, they will multiply until they exhaust the nutrients.
Something quite similar happened on St. Matthew Island, Alaska, where 29 reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) were introduced in 1944. With abundant food resources and no natural predators, the reindeer population mushroomed to more than 6,000 by 1963.
By 1966 they were back down to 42, after 99% of the herd died of starvation.
Of course, nature is generally more complex: there are predators that eat prey, and pathogens and parasites that winnow the numbers of both, and so on.
Humans are apex predators as well as spectacularly versatile omnivores. In the Malthusian world, our numbers were limited by a combination of disease, war and massacre, restrictions on fertility, and infanticide.
The particular mixture varied by geography and over time, but every human society had to contend with the problem of the trade-off between living standards and numbers.
Although every society pre-1800 had to navigate the Malthusian problem, that doesn’t mean all societies in all places and times were equally miserable.
For example, Europe in 1300 was quite densely populated. But after the Black Death wiped out perhaps half the population in the mid-14th century, the survivors enjoyed better living standards, particularly the commoners and peasants—after all, farm labor was scarcer and thus more expensive.
On the other hand, Tahiti and other Polynesian islands enjoyed a fortuitous combination of mild climates and far fewer diseases than in Eurasia and Africa. In particular, the islands lacked malaria and mosquitoes until the Europeans introduced them.
“The Tahitians of the 1760s, still in the stone age, seem to have been as tall, or taller, than their English visitors with all their marvelous European technology.”
Clark, Gregory. A Farewell to Alms (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (p. 60). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
“Fertility was also probably high among the precontact Polynesians. Sexual activity among women was early and universal. Why then was Tahiti such an apparent paradise to the visiting English sailors, rather than a society driven to the very subsistence margin of material income, as in Japan? The answer seems to be that infanticide was widely practiced before European Christian missionaries, who first arrived in 1797, changed local practices.25 Unfortunately since our sources on this practice are the missionaries themselves, who had every incentive to portray pre-Christian practices as abhorrent, we will never be certain of these reports.26”
Clark, Gregory. A Farewell to Alms (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (p. 109). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
In fact, there’s every reason to think that all the millennia of development represented by the history of the great agricultural civilizations of Eurasia and North Africa actually resulted in worse living standards for the average person than was the norm in hunter-gatherer cultures.
“Consideration of early forager societies through skeletons, and of contemporary remnant forager societies, suggests that material living conditions were if anything better for these societies than for the settled agrarian societies on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.
“But another dimension of living conditions was how long people had to labor to earn their daily bread, and the types of labor they performed. Here the advent of settled agrarian societies probably reduced human welfare. A world of leisure for the original foragers had given way to a world of continuous labor by the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Not only was this labor continuous, it was also much more monotonous than the tasks of the foragers. But this change in the quantity and quality of work long preceded the arrival of modern technology.”
Clark, Gregory. A Farewell to Alms (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (p. 62). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
The story of the Industrial Revolution is a complex one, but we are concerned with the effects. The modern West innovated the phenomenon of continuous economic growth, coupled with an explosion in technological proficiency fueled by the literal burning of fossil fuels.
Industrial civilization had more energy, and the consequences of this for the political, social, and economic order were staggering. As Ian Morris explains in Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve:
“By making wage labor attractive enough to draw in millions of free workers, higher wages made forced labor less necessary, and because impoverished serfs and slaves—unlike the increasingly prosperous wage laborers—could rarely buy the manufactured goods being churned out by factories, forced labor increasingly struck business interests as an obstacle to growth (especially when it was competitors who were using it). The more a society moved toward fossil fuels, the more political support swung behind abolition and emancipation. Between the 1780s and 1848, most of continental Europe abolished serfdom, with even Russia following suit in 1861. Britain banned slave trading in its empire in 1807 and banned slaveholding altogether in 1833.
…
“Forced labor had been indispensable to farming societies for thousands of years, but fossil fuels swept it away in less than a century; and no sooner had free wage labor triumphed than fossil fuels also began dissolving another ancient and indispensable blockage in farming societies’ labor markets, the gendered division of labor. As in the case of forced labor, both supply and demand contributed to the changes. On the demand side, machines powered by fossil fuels steadily reduced the economy’s need for muscle power as the nineteenth century went on, but increased its need for organization; and since women could provide brainpower and services just as well as men, female workers potentially offered a way to double the size of the labor market. White collars turned pink.”
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: 41 (The University Center for Human Values Series) (pp. 101-103). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
More energy = better living standards = more ability and possible incentives to care about moral niceties like abolishing slavery.
There’s another permutation in our causal loop connecting the Industrial Revolution with modern values, and it has to do with the late 19th-early 20th-century “revolution of mass and scale,” in Sam Francis’s memorable turn of phrase.
In essence, the burgeoning industrial economies of the 19th century generated incentives that led to the replacement of one type of capitalism, that of the entrepreneurial 19th-century bourgeois firm, with the massive managerial corporations that cast such a large shadow over the late 19th and early 20th centuries—and over the world since.
This revolution of mass and scale similarly led to the transformation of the relatively small 19th-century bourgeois governments to the much larger and more managerial 20th-century regimes—with a rather obvious boost in the World War I era, to say nothing of a much larger boost in the New Deal and World War II.
A similar process also played out with the organizations of culture and communication—i.e., the media.
What I find particularly fascinating about Francis’s book is the way he connects organizational structures to incentives to adopt certain ideologies. As he explains:
“Liberalism in the 20th century has functioned as a species of managerial humanism and in one version or another is the dominant and most common managerial ideology in the United States and in the other soft managerial regimes of the Western world. It has successfully performed most of the functions associated with the ideologies of elites. It has rationalized the interests of the managerial elite in terms of ideals (progress, scientific truth, social justice, liberation, equality) that effectively disguise the interests that are protected. It has also identified these interests in the form of an ideological code that accepts the enlargement of mass organizations and the fulfillment of their functional imperatives in state, economy, and culture as inevitable or desirable for social progress, and it communicates these interests by means of its codes to members of the elites that manage these organizations and therebytends to unify them by imparting a common consciousness of their shared interests. Finally, liberalism seeks to legitimize the regime and integrate mass society within it by providing moral and emotional values, images, symbols, rhetoric, martyrs, and heroes that attempt to manipulate the sentiments of the subordinate mass population outside the elite and to wed them to the regime.”
Francis, Samuel. Leviathan and Its Enemies (p. 240). Radix. Kindle Edition.
With an appropriate grounding in history, it becomes quite obvious why the West has gone consistently leftward: massive technological, economic, social, and political changes have torn down established structures.
In the world of advanced preindustrial agrarian societies—Agraria, to use Ian Morris’s terminology—hierarchies of caste, class, ethnicity/race, and division of labor based on gender all made a certain sense: with a fixed economic pie and a lack of labor-saving technology, it was important to establish who owned what (and who owned whom).
Escaping the Malthusian world changed the incentives by rewriting the rules of the game—i.e., sweeping away social and political arrangements of long standing.
In the brave new world of Industria, it has become increasingly important to figure out who gets what rights, and which “systemic barriers” might still be lingering as unquiet ghosts, specters of the reviled Agraria, the Jahiliyyah that existed before the Great Awokening ca. 2013.
Yarvin has the perfect metaphor for the 20th century: he likens it to a “crown fire of history, destroying all old-growth regimes, leaving a global monoculture of saplings and weeds.”
We’ve taken the measure of the problem from a satellite’s-eye view, but are we any closer to a solution?
After all, if impersonal technological, economic, and social forces shape attitudes, aren’t we stuck with the secularized version of Western civilization that took shape in the 18th and 19th centuries—or rather, its debased descendant?
We may not have flying cars and colonies on the moon, but Amazon Prime can ship me all kinds of goodies in a day or two and I can use a powerful computer that fits in my pocket to argue with strangers on Facebook.
Time to shut up and date the AI sex robot (bigot)?
Or could it be that Liberal Western civilization has itself become a decadent, exhausted paradigm, one that is increasingly vulnerable to competing paradigms? And what might those paradigms be?
A topic for another time, perhaps.
This was a great read!
I eagerly anticipate your presentation of Paradigms.