5
Assuming that I am right and Moldbug and his crew are simply erecting
new idols, where does this leave us regarding the Alt-Right’s
indictment of democracy? Is it true, as they say, that democracy is a
kind of “chaos,” a kind of “entropic decay,” a “fall from
grace” that is less and less gradually wearing down the moral
fabric of our society?
First,
is our moral fabric disintegrating? I think it is. Respect for
tradition, classic literature, and ancient religions is at an
all-time low. If you’re on the liberal end of the political
spectrum, this might all sound like a good thing. But in Allan
Bloom’s The
Closing of the American Mind,
he gives us some reasons to think it is bad. Bloom had been teaching
philosophy for decades to very bright Ivy-League types. Over the
years, he noticed that their ability to engage with classic
literature had markedly declined. They tended to dismiss almost every
philosophical or political discussion at the outset with statements
like, “Well isn’t that subjective?” or “Isn’t it all
relative anyway?” He couldn’t get the discussions off the ground.
Students seemed to believe that our right to Free Speech was based on
the “fact” that there is no moral truth, that everything is
permitted. Bloom was forced to return to the Constitution and the
Founding Fathers and demonstrate that, in fact, all the rights they
put forward were supposed to have been based on everlasting truths:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident ...” None of this should
have been in question, but our modern-day high school graduates are
simply not taught to think. The best way to learn thinking—reading
the greatest thinkers of all time—is now demeaned as too white and
male to be PC.
This
may sound serious enough by itself, but it’s only one of several
ways in which our culture is decaying, according to conservative
thinkers. Single parenthood is ever rising. The quality of public
education, overall, is declining. Psycho-therapy is at an all-time
high. Every year there is measurably more violence and sex in
entertainment. Ask anyone who likes old movies. The growth of the
Alt-Right itself is a sign of decay. If the movement is right that
our culture is decaying, then it’s right, and if it’s wrong,
well, then it’s still right because we have such growing movements
of apocalyptic prophets on our hands. Dissatisfaction with the
government is at an all-time high. Average
working vocabulary is declining.
Ask anyone who likes 19th-century
literature.
It makes sense that our culture is decaying, at least theoretically.
How is culture passed down? Books, music, movies, religion,
education. Books, music, and movies are now created almost solely
with the thought of entertainment, of being “new” and “original”
and most importantly “popular.” As a result they cater to our
guilty pleasures—sensationalism, darkness, disrespect, and so on.
We’re talking entropy here. Standards are not firm; they will
decay. Entertainment is becoming more and more influential while
religion becomes less and less so. And education is not breaking the
cycle because moral teachings have been banished from it. Worse,
education contributes to the decline of religion because our most
vocal and influential professors tend to be more anti-religious than
average.
Many,
including Bloom, are pointing out that our obsession with equality is
leading to relativism. No culture or idea or writer is being taught
as intrinsically better than any other. By withholding judgment in
this way, we have lost contact with the great thinkers of the past.
We can’t even call them “great” anymore. It’s grade
inflation, retroactively. What has been the basis of education for
millennia, reading the classics: tossed. We needed to beat the
Soviets in science. So we’ve now had three generations of students
that know almost nothing about the history of Western thought
stretching back to Plato, what used to be
Western culture. Western culture is all but dead. It self-destructed
in its mania for material success over tradition, it’s mania for
science over humanities, it’s mania for whatever over the best.
Granting
that our culture is in decline, this raises two important questions.
(1) How do we account for this? Why are we suddenly mutating so much,
when we’d been nearly static for centuries? (2) What can we do
about this? Is there anything we can
do?
The
answer to (1) is relatively simple. We are a civilization that has
grown incredibly rich due to cheap energy from fossil fuels. The
industrial revolution was driven by coal, and the 20th century added
oil and natural gas as major sources of energy. This is 80% of all
the energy we use and it’s been estimated that without fossil fuels
for fertilizer and transportation we could only support about a
billion people on earth. When you've got a filthy rich empire like
ours and life gets easy, the result is pretty obvious: you get
spoiled. People like to say that this fossil fuel thing is only
temporary until we can get solar or wind or maybe fusion power to
take the reigns. Even if you could, do you really want to deal with
that many more decades or even centuries
of cultural decay? It strains the imagination to picture the
weirdness of the result.
The more difficult question is what we are supposed to do about this.
If you ask the Alt-Right, we need a benevolent monarch. Moldbug
claims that monarchy has proven itself to be the most stable form of
government. You don’t have to worry about “equality” taking the
reigns, because you don’t have to worry about getting elected. You
can just stick to tradition.
But
the obvious problem here is that monarchy has proven that it is isn’t
stable
in the modern world. The one thing we should have learned over the
past two centuries is that plentiful resources, population growth,
and mass media together tend to magically dissolve monarchies. It’s
mass media across a mass population that is causing tradition to
decay. And it’s mass media across a mass population that is causing
democracy, not the other way around. Moldbug’s indictment of
democracy fails to get at the root cause of the problem.
Do we need tighter controls over mass media? Fascism tried this and
failed. Communism tried this and lost the economic war. The problem
is not an uncontrolled mass media, but mass media period. We’d have
to destroy it. This seems unlikely to happen. While it has its
disadvantages, mass media has proven that it can spread new, better
ideas faster. It has proven itself a net benefit over the last two
centuries, despite its problems, and that is why the most powerful
nations today love their mass media. Or rather, those nations that
have loved mass media have become the most powerful. If we ban it we
lose our most powerful tool.
There
is no fountain of youth, whether for humans or nations. There is no
perfect political philosophy that will keep a state or culture
eternally young. Mortality is a fact of life for civilizations too.
Plato says as much in the Republic,
when he speaks of the selfish forces that work to break down every
system of government, even the most ideal. Democracy, he argues,
tends to spoil its citizens and gradually form them into violent
mobs. This is what he saw happening in Athens. It seems it is
happening to us.
Which leads us to the final question: where is this ride taking us?
6
Plato claims that democracy devolves into tyranny. We’ve seen this
sort of thing happen before, with the Nazi and Soviet revolutions. It
happened with the quasi-democratic Roman Republic. We don’t know if
it would have happened with Athens (Macedonia conquered it before it
had a chance to) but it must have happened frequently-enough with
Greek democracies for Plato to set it down as a law.
There are many reasons to think that a collapse of some kind is
coming. So the Alt-Right is likely correct on this point. But what
they are wrong about is thinking that this somehow means we have no
responsibilities toward the poor and disadvantaged. Economically, the
Alt-Right is libertarian. That means they do not believe in social
welfare. I suspect that they do not believe in personal charity at
all, because they tend to think this encourages the poor to breed.
I
disagree. They say they believe in Tradition. But to begrudge the
less privileged every last penny—is this the traditional notion of
chivalry? For the more privileged to rush ahead and greedily
snatch up every opportunity—is this not
the traditional notion of greed? Is it not traditionally Christian to
despise a scrooge who clings to riches despite the sufferings of the
poor? Do we no longer realize that wealth leads to decadence? Isn’t
that the whole point of critiquing the vices and uncontrolled
mutations of high civilization?
The more wealth we horde, the longer we forestall the cleansing day
of judgment, and the more severe we make it. The less generous we
are, the more we grind the faces of the poor in the brutality of
natural selection, and the more we glorify they day of their revolt.
This is why I am not and never will be a libertarian. It is the
greediest and least Christian doctrine there is. World Progress is
impossible. Social Engineering is futile. And for this reason basic
human love is king.
You can’t predict the future. We have no idea what political
systems are in store. Newspapers brought modern democracy. What will
Google bring?
Plagues are coming. Our vast new networks are virulent. Cultural
pestilence will spread unlike anything we’ve ever seen. We’ll
need strong immune systems. We’ll need Christlike love. We’ll
need incorruptible personal integrity.
Many desire to bring about the collapse of our society right now.
This is pure impatience. We must resist complacency—but never
embrace chaos. Many desire to set up our culture or race as an idol.
This is pure pride. We must resist decay without falling into
cultural incest.
Be not arrogant; be benevolent. Be not a parasite; be a symbiont.
Thank you for this. a most engaging read.
ReplyDelete