Ideas

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‘You should have listened’: Ayn Rand, Left Behind, Doom Paul, and the politics of futility

Hunter Baker wants Christians to get over their “deep ambivalence” about Ayn Rand and stop being so mean to her:

Ayn Rand deserves some of the opposition she has received from Christians and many others. But she also deserves better.

Personally, I’m not ambivalent at all about her, if anything she deserves the Cromwell treatment. But that’s just me.

Perhaps it’s fair for Baker to regret that the most prominent politician to publicly embrace Rand at one time now has to disavow it nearly every time he gives an extended interview. “I completely reject the philosophy of objectivism” is what Paul Ryan said to Jim Rutenberg recently. Is there any comparable ideology that prompts this kind of categorical condemnation from public figures? You get the sense that a politician would have an easier time if it came out that they had dabbled in Scientology or Thelema.

But this isn’t true:

Rand did have disdain for some people, but her lack of respect was not based on physical weakness, class, or color so much as it was aimed at those she thought lacked virtue. Contempt may have its place if it aims at a form of evil.

Characterizing the people of Palestine as “almost totally primitive savages” is disdain based on something other than virtue. I suppose that’s a matter of interpretation. But her war ethics, such as they were, are extremely troubling, and clearly leave the door open to genocide.

In Roy Childs’ letter trying to convert her to anarchism, he links some of these conclusions with the claim that she misunderstands the Constitution and the Cold War. Rand may have been anti-government but she was not an anarchist. Most colorfully, she supported state violence in the sense of being opposed to rules of engagement to mitigate civilian casualties during wartime. She also saw abortion as a “moral right,” which seems to me a lack of respect based on physical weakness.

So, Ayn Rand had pretty destructive views about war, the state, and human solidarity. That’s more than enough to turn me off, but maybe I don’t make enough money. More to the point, should we take it as a sign of defective character when a public figure professes admiration for a person that espouses these views? Perhaps Paul Ryan should not make us as nervous as he seems to make liberal reporters, but it’s not unreasonable, generally speaking, to think so.

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How benign is the pink police state?

The University Bookman has published two responses to James Poulos’ pink police state series over at the Federalist, one from Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry and one from myself, in which I make a few points already covered here, and talk about lighting a friend on fire, but not in the pentecostal sense:

One thing that came to mind reading James Poulos’ series on the pink police state is an incident, in eighth grade I believe, in which a friend, with his permission, was dressed up in several layers of old sweatshirts, a smiley face painted in kerosene on his back, and lit on fire. We took pictures, of course, but this being the days before YouTube, we weren’t aiming for a viral video. Call it youthful nihilism, or the establishment of what Poulos calls a “zone of transgression,” at any rate he is fine now and has gone on to a promising career in multimedia. But he damn well could have died.

Poulos has gotten very close to a diagnosis most of us can agree on, and that’s a fine thing. The Tocquevillian notion that things are getting better and worse is something that much of the right could probably do with hearing more often. But it’s hard to read Poulos’s essays and not conclude that the worseness is accelerating. Moreover, despite the distributed nature of the new regime, it is possible to observe a certain logic to it. …

Towards a Neoreactionary Aesthetic

‘Neath an eyeless sky, the inkblack sea
Moves softly, utters not save a quiet sound
A lapping-sound, not saying what may be
The reach of its voice a furthest bound;
And beyond it, nothing, nothing known
Though the wind the boat has gently blown
Unsteady on shifting and traceless ground
And quickly away from it has flown.

Allow us a map, and a lamp electric
That by instrument we may probe the dark
Unheard sounds and an unseen metric
Keep alive in us that unknown spark
To burn bright and not consume or mar
Has the unbounded one come yet so far
For night over night the days to mark
His journey — adrift, without a star?

Adrift Without a Star

Generally, most cultural studies are done post facto, that is, to analyze that which has already taken place and is, because it is no longer taking place, a motionless body subject to dissection. We imagine that we understand culture that has passed from us because we can examine its ephemera from a safe distance; we inherently grasp the paradox of Heisenberg. For to say something about a living human culture is to alter that living human culture (provided that culture is aware of what was said.) To describe a person living is either to insult or flatter them; we may attempt zero proscription, but vanity comes not from an opinionated mirror but a neutral mirror and an opinionated gazer.

It is worth beginning a tradition of cultural self-examination, if such a thing did not exist, a way of describing what is ongoing and thus a way of describing that entails knowledge of something as living, and not a detailed examination of its husks and fossils. When I use the term ‘towards’ I do not mean to imply this is something that does not exist; rather, that it is something extant but nascent; something which, once it is named, will be recognized.

When I started following neoreactionary writers and blogs a while ago (at first, unintentionally, since there was no formal label to it) I began to collect impressions — informally — of the way in which neoreaction expresses itself. While some thrived on the notion of the different parts of neoreaction as being different, I looked instead for the reason why they were somehow able to cling together.

This is by no means exhaustive; these concepts are emergent and I have only included those that I have become certain of due to emphasis and repetition.

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Review of Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott

This summer I read what is now one of my favorite books, Rationalism in Politics, by Michael Oakeshott.  One of the premier conservative thinkers of the 20th century, his work is criminally underrated.

Rationalism in Politics is a collection of essays.  The best are in the beginning.  He makes arguments similar to Hayek in Law Legislation and Liberty: Rules and Order, attacking rationalism, the belief in the use of reason to re-organize society.  Instead, we should be aware of the limits of our knowledge, and not be too presumptuous in our ability to use reason to re-shape society.

Perhaps the best analogy to understand Oakeshott’s thought is to compare it to the Austrian idea of the market process.  Austrians dislike the economic focus on equilibrium, instead arguing that the market is a process by which knowledge is learned and society is organized.  Oakeshott makes similar points with regards to politics.  Rather than decry the messy reality, he embraces it.  People acting on imperfect and wrong information is inevitable in the political process.  It is only through such interactions does politics come to resemble the order that it does.

I highly recommend Rationalism in Politics to anyone interested in politics or economics.

Patrick Deneen discovers ultracalvinism

Uh oh:

… post-Protestant “religious” secularity is the established religion of, and increasingly indistinguishable from, liberalism as a political, cultural, and social form of human organization. It was once believed by many that liberalism was a neutral political order within which a variety of beliefs could flourish—among them, Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, etc. But what is clear both as an intellectual and theological matter as well as an observable fact from many current cultural battlefields is that what Smith describes more broadly as a “sacred project” is increasingly intolerant of competitor religions, and stridently seeks their effectual elimination by “liberal” means. It does so not in the name of some amorphous and tolerant “secularism,” but in the name of the new, and increasingly established, State religion of America. What we call “secularism” isn’t simply unbelief—it is a system of belief with distinctive “theology” without God and this-worldly eschatological hope, and it demands obeisance or the judgment of blasphemy and condemnation.

Where have we heard this before?

The “ultracalvinist hypothesis” is the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called “progressive,” “multiculturalist,” “universalist,” “liberal,” “politically correct,” etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.

Specifically, ultracalvinism (which I have also described here and here) is the primary surviving descendant of the American mainline Protestant tradition, which has been the dominant belief system of the United States since its founding. It should be no surprise that it continues in this role, or that since the US’s victory in the last planetary war it has spread worldwide.

Ultracalvinism is an ecumenical syncretism of the mainline, not traceable to any one sectarian label. But its historical roots are easy to track with the tag Unitarian. The meaning of this word has mutated considerably in the last 200 years, but at any point since the 1830s it is found attached to the most prestigious people and ideas in the US, and since 1945 in the world.

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An economist considers Burning Man

I spent last week at Burning Man. It was one of the best experiences of my life. However, as much ink has been spilled on the experience of Burning Man, I will direct my attention to where I have a comparative advantage, understanding the social organization of Burning Man.

Burning Man is a city which exists for a week. In 2014 the city had 70,000 inhabitants. Creating a social order of 70,000 people is hard enough. However, what makes Burning Man so interesting is that they not only create a city, but they also operate under social norms that are alien to the outside world.

The two most important norms are that of a gifting economy and removing all trash. Monetary transactions are unacceptable. All matter brought into Burning Man must be brought out. The difficulty in enforcing both norms is that Burning Man is big enough to be anonymous. If I wanted to dump my trash during the night I might be yelled at, but it is easy enough to disappear into the dark with no further social repercussions.

Economists have long distinguished between familiar and anonymous social interactions.  The rules we use when interacting with family and friends are different from the rules we use when interacting with strangers.  This is because social pressure is sufficient to ensure cooperation among individuals who have long term repeated interaction. However, one shot interaction with strangers requires different rules to ensure cooperation. These rules range from reputation used by Ebay and Uber to formal contracts used in the business world.

What make Burning Man so impressive is that they have been able to sustain rules that primarily exist in small groups in a city of 70,000 people. Burning Man proves social pressure is scalable far beyond what is normally assumed. Further, such social pressure works even though each year 40% of Burners are new residents. These new residents, by and large, successfully are integrated into the wider social order.

This is where the tension between new and old Burners come in. For almost every event, there are people who complain that it has changed for the worse as time progressed. The new attendees don’t understand the culture, and have morphed the event into something unrecognizable. The dynamic exists in Burning Man too, probably to a greater extent than other events. However, while I tired of hearing people complain about the good old days, it is clear that such conversation fulfills an important social function. It pressures new attendees, such as myself, to learn and conform to the norms that have made Burning Man what it is.

(Image credit Neil Girling)