Tradition as Emergent Optimization of Society

In Mark Citadel’s recent “Are we Social Engineers?” on Social Matter, we see a clever exposition of one of the key differences between Reactionary thought and ideas like Conservatism and Libertarianism (which are still essentially liberal). Most social-contract views of society ( just about everything that came out of the enlightenment or emerged since) are predicated on the idea that we are exchanging a state of nature for society, “a necessary vice for which we sacrifice some of our liberty.” This beautiful paragraph got me thinking:

This is a profoundly ignorant view of human nature. Human society is no less natural than the beehive or the anthill. How we construct our homes, our agricultural facilities, our industries, and our seats of government, are no less natural than the honeycomb and the labyrinthine network of chambers within a termite mound. It’s not something we build to compensate for a crippling deficit, but rather something we do because we are human.

Imagine an explorer from a distant world flies to earth and finds himself looking at a Mediterranean hillside village:

…or the Manhattan skyline, or a suburban subdivision for that matter. It’s hard to articulate what, if anything, would look qualitatively different between such a view and say, a coral reef or a lichen on a rock. Obviously the level of complexity is orders of magnitude greater, and there are more right angles in the human constructs, but if one was not human, would that register as a qualitative difference or a mere variation of degree and details? Humans would probably strike one as another life form doing what its nature encourages.

One thing that made me receptive to Reactionary thought when I discovered it were two books by British philosopher John Gray, Straw Dogs and The Silence of Animals. Gray is not a reactionary per se, and I reject many of his conclusions, but he does a great job placing humans back in the context of nature that we work so hard to insist we are above.

It is intuitively difficult for us to imagine behavior, especially our behavior, as coming from somewhere other than our will. Whenever I see my pet lab point like a bird-dog (despite never being trained as one) I have to wonder how any sequence of genes could possibly code for proteins that somehow result in raising one paw and extending the body toward something interesting. She certainly didn’t learn it from reading books. Is it possible that our far more complex behaviors also emerge from our nature? That villages, markets, and hierarchies are hardwired into us? It certain seems likely that we are built to at least acquire society the way we acquire language, and that, as Citadel argues, traditional civilization is a particularly suitable society to our nature.

What should we think, therefore, in terms of tradition as what is adaptive, both to our environment and our nature. Chestertonian ideas, like “The democracy of the dead” become even more powerful if we imagine tradition is the optimal world for our hard-wiring.  We should look at attempts at top-down social change like that undertaken by the Supreme Court last week in terms of this viewpoint. In nature, a species discovering a novel food source or moving to a new continent generally ends badly for either the species or the ecosystem. Not always, mind you, but more often than not. It is possible, not likely, but possible, that the consensus of traditional societies for millennia was just wrong about family, and that five justices on the supreme court have this solved. I’m inclined to doubt it.

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Social Science as the Shameless Pimping of Progressive Ideology

The strange world of social science research routinely gives us statistics about the nature of reality that are quite plainly wrong, and with the always-helpful assistance of the humanities, often posits explanations of real experience that are so convoluted as to be shockingly improbable. I increasingly recognize that social science is rarely science at all, in any meaningful sense, but an attempt to exploit scientific rhetoric to entrench the narratives promulgated in the humanities (and even less rigorous fields) in popular culture. It is unfortunately an extraordinarily effective attempt. Formerly fringy academic notions like “white privilege,” the concept of gender as a “construct,” and witch-trial propositions of the “only whites can be racist” variety are now quite common in popular discourse.

It has become commonplace to hear claims of “White Supremacy” or “Rape Culture” used to describe our society, and then see the ridiculous claim backed up with an absurd, doctored, or even refuted statistic. This is perhaps most obvious in the campus rape “debate.” If rape is in fact, ubiquitous on campus, as feminists and the majority of our news media desperately need us to believe, why can’t they ever find a case to trumpet that does not fall apart under even the most cursory examination? Two recent, high profile cases (Jackie of Rolling Stone fame and Emma Sulkowicz, Columbia Mattress Girl) were blatant frauds. Two frauds is hardly damning, but these were the two poster cases pushed into the spotlight by activists who presumably vetted them from all the millions of campus rapes that allegedly happened this year. In other words, their two best, carefully chosen, examples of an allegedly common phenomenon were fraudulent. Why do so many of these incidents turn out to be hoaxes, fabrications, or distortions and so many of the accusers turn out to lack credibility or consistency? The same problem is apparent in the notion that cops run around murdering young black men for no reason. None of these cases ever end up bearing out the original narrative.

The same phenomenon occurs with hate crimes and homophobic panics. The Oberlin race hoax, the bigoted restaurant non-tipper, and so many internet harassment claims (see Anita Sarkeesian, or any of her ilk) .
If we look at this in general, at an abstract level, there seems to be an entire world captured in social science statistics of which concrete examples are often lacking and occasionally fictional; an endless forest with a paucity of trees…

From this we must suppose the problem is with our statistics. Indeed, it is standard practice in the hard (i.e. actual) sciences to look at the allegiances, agenda, and financial interests of whoever is doing a given study. In the social sciences, this is far more necessary, but doesn’t seem to happen. Imagine if physicists were partisan about elementary particles. Imagine if one preferred electrons and neutrons to protons because a proton molested her as a little girl or failed to attend her piano recital. Would we take such a physicist seriously? Let her teach others? Participate in peer review? Trust her findings? This is precisely what we do when we let the militantly progressive cadre of academics do social science and let them wear the mantle of a discipline that strives for objectivity, or at least corrected subjectivity. When we pretend that social science is science we put “one in five women will be raped in college” on the same level as E=mc².

A thought experiment

Imagine that one starts with two groups of one hundred children (fifty boys, fifty girls) who have not been educated in any way. Group one will be dropped in the jungle to fend for themselves: to form their own language, culture, etc. Group two will be trained to live the most fulfilling, self-actualized life possible by leading experts in sociology, gender, and sexuality.  They will benefit from the latest research on transgenderism, the best paradigms for questioning their sexuality, and the newest, most rigorous theories of consent, privilege, and microaggression.

My prediction is that group one will figure out, all on their own, whether they are male or female and how they should behave sexually. They will also figure out soon after reaching puberty that this penis-shaped thing that males have looks like it’s supposed to go in this vagina-shaped thing that females have. I’m fairly certain that a few of them would also participate in acts of homosexual sex, though they wouldn’t respond by making an identity out of it, or inventing leather bars, or by rejecting their gendered behavior.  They will, most of the time, practice sex that we (those of us who are not militant feminists) would recognize as consensual and mutually pleasurable without needing a technical concept of consent or inventing tumblr.

Group two is, of course, the society we are building today.  Unfortunately, we will see how that plays out first hand.  Like in our world, there will be a few thought criminals among that hundred who figure out reality despite the best efforts of their educators. How many out of a hundred would it take to save them?  We will find out soon…  As for group one, imagine how much better they would fare in a real, grown-up civilization that reinforced good behavior and protected the many from the inevitable predatory few.

Toward a Theory of Ratchets:

“Cthulhu swims slowly, but he always swims left.”

-Mencius Moldbug

On a macro level, the above quote is undeniable. One need only look at the front page of any paper on any day to see pathology normalized (and the normal pathologized) as civilization gradually succumbs to degeneracy. We can feel Cthulhu swim by. We can see the waves he raises. We can even glimpse his tentacles from time to time, when someone defends some shockingly immoral practice by yelling “But it’s 2015! Isn’t it time!?” It is far more rare that we can actually examine one of his tendrils up close, while it is doing its dirty work, but I believe these opportunities should always be taken advantage of.

One area where we can glimpse the leftward ratcheting of discourse most often is the battle of the sexes. Women are enough like us (and pleasant enough to be close to) that we can study them in depth but alien enough to our understanding that we often miss the obvious. The other day, I found myself listening (quite unintentionally, for the record) to Katy Perry’s “Roar” as it was played over the speakers of a large department store. The song is an anthem of personal liberation, in which the speaker decides to no longer be silent and passive, but to “roar,” fight back, and finally be herself. The song begins with this stanza:

“I used to bite my tongue and hold my breath
Scared to rock the boat and make a mess
So I sat quietly, agree politely
I guess that I forgot I had a choice
I let you push me past the breaking point
I stood for nothing, so I fell for everything”

This is the same Katy Perry, mind you, who became famous with her lesbian experimentation song “I Kissed a Girl” in 2008. A couple disclaimers: I recognize that there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between the singer and the character speaking in a song, but it’s hard to imagine a wider gap between 2008 Perry and this passive pushover. One can listen to “Blood on the Tracks” and come away with a pretty good idea of what kind of man Bob Dylan was (or at least, thought he was) at that time. One can listen to a Lady Gaga song and have a pretty good idea of what she stands for.  It’s also possible that one or both of the songs was someone else’s composition.  None of this is the point.  The thing that stands out is that these are both part of our society’s concept of who Katy Perry is, and that shouldn’t make sense.  It is hard to imagine these two tunes coming from the same person’s inner life. Katy Perry is (and seems to sometimes see herself as) a loud boisterous person. Neither have Perry’s public or private lives been examples of blushing chastity and quiet restraint. I had to ask myself though: Could this be how Katy Perry really experiences herself on some level?

I began to remember all the examples: public, and personal, fictional and real, of women who expressed the same seeming contradiction. The horrendous “Eat, Pray, Love,” is replete with examples of this theme: every self absorbed decision the main character makes, she says something along the lines of “I need to do something for myself” before abandoning selfish narcissistic project “n” for more selfish, more narcissistic “n+1.” To see what this moment is like, one can watch degeneration-porn like “Breaking Amish” with people coming from a life of relative innocence into the big city, and note the moment when they experience themselves as previously quiet and innocent and now active and seeking experiences. There are some women who can experience that moment again and again as they move further and further into dissolution while constantly seeing themselves as having just crossed the line from innocence. Indeed, there seem to be some women who have no other kind of moments.  They always remember how selfless and innocent they are.  It is always their first time.  They are always seeing the rule as the exception.  It is always just this once.  They are always the one who doesn’t do this kind of thing.  It is always year zero and the revolutionary rules always apply.  One can imagine Pandora or Eve thinking about”finally doing something for myself” as they reached out to unleash evil on the world.

“It’s time you started living. It’s time you let someone else do some giving.”

-Theme song “Mary Tyler Moore Show”

One can see the early adult life of a modern American woman through this lens, and it starts to make a little sense:

“My dad wants me to study something practical so I can pay off my loans and get a job when I graduate, but I’m sick of doing what they tell me. I worked hard through high-school and I’m here to learn so why shouldn’t I switch my major to Indignation Studies? Isn’t time I started living and did something for myself?”

“I know I promised Cory that I would wait for him while I was away at college, but Troy is here now, and I’m buzzed and he’s hot. Why shouldn’t I go back to his room? All I do is for everyone else. I go to classes all day, I do what everyone wants me to do. I should live a little. I deserve it. It’s about time I think about me for once.”

“I can’t believe Troy won’t call me back. I’m carrying his baby! I know I should do the right thing and tell my dad and put it up for adoption, but that’s 8 months of this! I’m so sick of living my life for everyone else. I want to have experiences and live my own life. Why shouldn’t I get an abortion? It’s my body. I need to do this for myself. I owe it to me.”

From there, we are two office affairs and one sad cooking class away from life as a cat and box-wine enthusiast who will continue to think of herself as quiet and long-suffering. She maintains this illusion as she drunkenly wonders why she isn’t happier, quickly ages, and puts on weight. As she votes, and thinks, and talks as a political being, she does so with the assumption that her experiences of sadness, alienation, and ultimate loneliness are the fate of all good, quiet, generous people like her, not the result of a decadent and self adsorbed life, and she votes accordingly. What other patterns like this are hidden in day-to-day life? What else are humans doing while they think they’re standing still?

Why you’re here…

I wanted to open this blog with some thoughts on what I’m trying to accomplish here. For the last year, I have found myself engaging with, agreeing with, and sometimes wrestling with various ideas I first encountered on the internet right. Ideas from traditionalism, Neoreaction, and the vaguely defined “Red Pill”/masculine reaction community seem to offer the most cogent rejection of a progressive orthodoxy which I have always known to wrong, but could not truly understand before now. For now, this will be a place for my thoughts and reflections as I flesh out my understanding of what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. This will also be a place where I discuss how these ideas work practically, in the life of a single 35-year-old man in these, the waning days of Babylon. I hope that I may, in some small way, encourage others to question and support those already questioning.