Ideas

Motte-Buster

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Mottes and Mottes and Mottes

The skillful traveller leaves no traces of his wheels or footsteps; the skillful speaker says nothing that can be found fault with or blamed; the skilful reckoner uses no tallies; the skillful closer needs no bolts or bars, while to open what he has shut will be impossible; the skillful binder uses no strings or knots, while to unloose what he has bound will be impossible. In the same way the sage is always skillful at saving men, and so he does not cast away any man; he is always skillful at saving things, and so he does not cast away anything. This is called ‘Hiding the light of his procedure.‘

-Tao teh Ching, 27

In a very interesting and thoroughly harmless essay, Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex introduces what is to us, a very important concept. That is, the Motte-and-Bailey doctrine. Rhetoric has many tactics, some deceptive, some forthright, some effective, and some foolhardy. Properly speaking, Motte-and-Bailey is itself based on a rhetorical technique, like ‘shoot the moon’ (where you ask for something you know you won’t get in order to retreat to a position more favorable than you could ask for outright) or most forms of strategic retreat. Motte-and-Bailey however takes this idea to another level by repeatedly strategically advancing whenever it can.

To imagine this in other terms, imagine the MPAA really did want to be able to charge whenever a song anywhere was played, no matter how long, no matter the medium.

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The conflict of individual against community

Andrew Sullivan, acting a bit more of a spin doctor than usual after reading Mark Lilla’s sobering piece on the modern political context we live in, declared an empathic victory in the name of individual freedom earlier this week, calling modern America a nation of libertarians in an acid-laced bit of wankery the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Windsor decision – or his recent compensatory tirades on manliness, depending on your view of wankery. Money shot (because he’s too much a coward to say it himself):

The core idea of this post-ideological new age was simply expanding the freedom of the individual – and it was embraced economically by the right, socially by the left, and completely by the next generation of pragmatic liberaltarians.

The blather on display here is incredibly detached, and fails to seriously take into consideration that individual freedom has not been triumphant, but in fact contracting more than it has been expanding thanks to government and corporate interests.  But to discuss that at length would be a hindrance, and any response would likely be apathetic.

Instead, let us focus on the core problem Sullivan attempts to address in the post: The matter of foreign policy in response to this development, as well as the loss of hegemony following the quixotic crusades that were Iraq and Afghanistan. In fairness, Brooks’ calls for a return to worshiping the American Dream and the glory that is the nation’s “exceptionalism” (a word which people tend to forget was coined by Stalin as an insult) comes off as dense and paranoiac. It shows him clinging to the old parameters of which the world existed, a time that barely has meaning now. But to call Sullivan’s own response nonsense would be a bit of an understatement:

But there is another, saner response to this, and Lilla points the way. It is to re-exercize the intellectual muscles that created and then defended the idea of democratic capitalism – and to use them, first of all, to address the democratic deficits in our own too-often bought-and-paid-for republic, to build and defend intermediate institutions that check individualism’s acidic power – families, churches, neighborhoods, school-boards, sports leagues, AA meetings. And so we match gay freedom with gay marriage and military service, embracing libertarianism but hitching it to institutions that also connect it to the community as a whole.

To start with, where does Lilla even mention this, other than in a vague hint about the potential of reactionary right with the parable of the golem? Even then, he was more making a point than suggesting a solution. Also, what that has to do with foreign policy is beyond anyone’s imagination.

Sullivan’s extrapolation seems more a desire to display his Thatcherite paternalism than anything functional, for many of his suggestions are institutions designed to strangulate individuality. The military are specialists in this line of business: Nothing strips away individual freedom more than being trained against nature into becoming an efficient killing machine. Yet families, churches, any community-style organization are also capable of undermining the independence of the individual.

But then, that’s the point of a community, and therein lies the modern conflict that Sullivan fails to appreciate.
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There is no such thing as capitalism

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Before it is an ideological option, capitalism is a being, with an individual history (and fate). It is not necessary to like it — but it is an it.

Nick Land, Outside In

What is Capitalism? Where do we even begin to define it? When we find Adam Smith describing Capital (as ‘stock’) it already exists. Or does it? Capitalism is believed to be simply the system “in which trade, industry, and the means of production are controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits.” from this we develop a contrary theory ‘socialism‘ – in which they are controlled by public ownership. However, at no point in time does this ideal situation arise; in Smith’s discussion in Wealth of Nations, he documents the effect of tariff changes on wheat prices. That is to say, he documents what is ostensibly a public control on trade. Never do we have a system in which all three of these come completely into the hands of private owners – but who are private owners, anyway? Is a man who serves as an alderman for a time and then goes back to his business a ‘private owner’? Is a King a private owner, or a public owner? Are men like Dick Cheney, who switch between high office politics and high corporate governance private owners? Are they actually public owners?

We can, for some situations, attempt to make a clear delineation. A tariff is a public control over trade, provided it is the government – by which we mean the sovereign and its delegates – that determines the tariff and sees that it is enforced. If the sovereign is a king, we still regard it as a public control in this system; as the king embodies the people or state. But this embodiment, even with democratic sovereigns, is problematic. Granted, in theory it makes sense, but in practice we find regulations pushed by private actors through government to benefit them. Trust busting is notoriously taken on behalf of a monopoly’s potential or real competitors. This is not new – even before there were official incorporated entities like we have, there were private actors using public office and law to benefit themselves. There doesn’t seem to be a non-technical distinction between private and public; or it may be that private and public are not, as we might have assumed, contradictory at all.

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Monarchists and libertarians

There is an odd development in some certain libertarian circles, an embrace of monarchy. The standard argument is that monarchies are more likely to have libertarian policies because the country is closer to private than in a democracy. The monarch has a long time horizon, wanting to maximize the value of his country for his children (first male child?), while the politicians in a democracy have a time horizon of just the next election. While the argument is plausible on its face, it contains many implicit assumptions which, once shown, demonstrate the silliness of the idea.

The piece that provoked my ire is by the Mad Monarchist, writing on libertarian monarchy. He begins with a misreading of history, or at the very least, very misplaced values:

In the past, I have touched on how the very monarchial Middle Ages was perhaps the closest the world has ever come to the totally privatized society that many libertarians dream of.

He does not name any of these libertarian monarchical societies, so I am forced to speculate on what they are. Nevertheless, it shows a very bad misreading of history. The most important event since the neolithic revolution was the industrial revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution man lived in the world of Malthus. Sustained per capita economic growth was unheard of. Any increase in production meant an increase in population, not the standard of living. This changed with England.

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Orwell identifies ‘neo-reactionaries’ in 1943

A big h/t to Brad Birzer on Facebook, for pointing out this column Orwell wrote for Tribune in 1943:

Reading Michael Roberts’s book on T. E. Hulme, I was reminded once again of the dangerous mistake that the Socialist movement makes in ignoring what one might call the neo-reactionary school of writers. There is a considerable number of these writers: they are intellectually distinguished, they are influential in a quiet way and their criticisms of the Left are much more damaging than anything that issues from the Individualist League or the Conservative Central Office.

T. E. Hulme was killed in the last war and left little completed work behind him, but the ideas that he had roughly formulated had great influence, especially on the numerous writers who were grouped round the Criterion in the twenties and thirties. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene all probably owe something to him. But more important than the extent of his personal influence is the general intellectual movement to which he belonged, a movement which could fairly be described as the revival of pessimism. Perhaps its best-known living exponent is Marshal Pétain. But the new pessimism has queerer affiliations than that. It links up not only with Catholicism, Conservatism and Fascism, but also with Pacifism (California brand especially), and Anarchism. It is worth noting that T. E. Hulme, the upper-middle-class English Conservative in a bowler hat, was an admirer and to some extent a follower of the Anarcho-Syndicalist, Georges Sorel.

The thing that is common to all these people, whether it is Pétain mournfully preaching ‘the discipline of defeat’, or Sorel denouncing liberalism, or Berdyaev shaking his head over the Russian Revolution, or ‘Beachcomber’ delivering side-kicks at Beveridge in the Express, or Huxley advocating non-resistance behind the guns of the American Fleet, is their refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved. Man is non-perfectible, merely political changes can effect nothing, progress is an illusion. The connexion between this belief and political reaction is, of course, obvious. Other-worldliness is the best alibi a rich man can have. ‘Men cannot be made better by act of Parliament; therefore I may as well go on drawing my dividends.’ No one puts it quite so coarsely as that, but the thought of all these people is along those lines: even of those who, like Michael Roberts and Hulme himself, admit that a little, just a little, improvement in earthly society may be thinkable.

The danger of ignoring the neo-pessimists lies in the fact that up to a point they are right.

Birzer has written a fair bit about Hulme.

The Egregore, an introduction

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egregores1

UF makes the subtle point that one cannot engender a positive egregore, or collective mind parasite. This is related to the principle that the mind parasite is an effect of “congealed” or “coagulated” psychic energy. As a result, it always “enfolds,” whereas the good radiates. The former is an inward, contracting movement, whereas the latter is an expansive, radiant movement.

— Robert Godwin, One Cosmos

In the Hugo award winning comic Digger, there is a god called ‘The Black Mother.’ The Black Mother is not an actual god per se, that is to say, she is not part of that world’s mythos which predates history and whose mysterious ministrations call forth the dedication and belief of pious souls. Rather, she is the imaginary perversion of the mother of a god (who in the story seems to have been a real person) called ‘The Good Man,’ a Christ-figure in that world.

Suffering children who prayed for deliverance and did not receive it created an explanation for this in their devotion and fear of this Black Mother, who through their fear and hatred actually took root somehow in the souls of these children, one of whom is an integral part of the story.

In the world where we are made to operate we desire the good; therefore we try to understand our well-intentioned mistakes in terms of the good, if not because we are afraid of condemnation at least because we have no knowledge of how to seek the good outside of our own feelings. The soul asks per Nietzsche, if what I do is not good, then who is left to correct me? If the world will not correct me, and I am pleased with what I do, and there is no longer a god to correct me, and I no longer feel shame about it, then what I do must be good.

The concept of the ‘radiation’ of the good is essential to understanding what an egregore is and how it could be in any way real at all. (And why this phenomenon is seemingly asymmetrical) There are some among us that believe, as the Gnostics did from time to time, that through thoughts they could change the world directly. A lot of quasi-science is based on these concepts, where it is thought that good thoughts attract the good and evil thoughts, the evil. Extrapolation on this idea comes to concepts such as using breathing techniques to become a god, to use mantras to bring good fortune, and so forth. Underlying it is an assumption about the universe, namely: that it is in reality nothing more than pure thought, and strong thought makes reality, while weak thought is made by reality.

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