The claim that modern Sunni ‘fundamentalism’ (Salafism, Wahhabism) is the Islamic Reformation is well-established (this blog has grazed upon the background here). The persistence of this proposition attests to its significance, and is at least suggestive of credibility. It can reasonably be placed alongside the Moldbug Ultra-Calvinism Thesis (on the cladistic identity of ‘secular’ democratic progressivism) as a central religious-historical argument, of profound relevance to the cultural tendencies of our time.

A fairly recent post at Patheos by Philip Jenkins (via Henry Dampier) presents this proposition with remarkable force. Mustering its case in terms of iconoclasm, it integrates the phenomenon helpfully, in particular by emphasizing the essential unity of militant anti-idolatry and mass violence. Smashing idols is no mere intellectual or doctrinal position. Iconoclastic militancy is a social operation, which is not only instantiated within the history of revolutionary turmoil, but occupies a privileged position within it. The revolutionary — or ideologically-mobilized — mob is epitomized by iconoclastic irruption, which foreshadows its potential for violent abstraction. Doctrinally-motivated vandalism, from the European Reformation, through the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to the ravages of our contemporary radical Islam, is the archetypal form of modern revolutionary (com)motion.

Philips remarks:

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Ideological categorization is the astrology of politics, in the sense that it panders to insatiable identity hunger. This post still holds the daily traffic record here, which is probably not entirely due to people looking for their political star signs, but neither is it mostly for other reasons. New approaches to the Left-Right spectrum — the Prime Political Dimension — promise master-keys to the secrets of identity-core opinion.

Given the quite absurdly competitive nature of the terrain, there is something truly remarkable about the simplicity and persuasiveness of this PPD-model, based upon the biological distinction between r/K selection strategies. The application of this distinction to humans is — I confidently assume — radioactively controversial. Its usage as a conceptual tool to collapse ideology into an axis of Human Biological Diversity is therefore undoubtedly disreputable. (This trigger-warning isn’t likely to act as much of a deterrent here.)

The ‘Anonymous Conservative’ theory does the most important things expected of a PPD-model. In particular, it provides an explanation for the polarized clusters of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ traits, which have often proved highly resistant to reflective integration. Why should anti-capitalism, pacifism, and sexual laxity belong together? When grouped together as expressions of an r-type strategy, this bundle of seemingly unconnected ideological predispositions tightens into an intuitively coherent whole.

Worth special mention is the mapping of ideological difference onto environmental conditions. The (‘liberal’) r-type strategy is a response top conditions of resource abundance, versus (‘conservative’) K-type adaptation to scarcity. When augmented by some modest assumptions about the effects of r-type prevalence upon the persistence of Civilization, the r/K PPD-model automatically generates a cyclical history of social ascent and decline (through a biorealist abundance-decadence mechanism). The hope-crushing tragic structure is sure to appeal to reactionary sensibilities.

The Outside in prediction: This is a theory (and book) that will go far. You can read the first chapter here.

A wave of excellent posts at Nydwracu’s place recently. At the crest is this, a critique of the capitalist thing as an Unfriendly Institutional Intelligence (UFII). I’d been meaning to run something off the article initially cited, which is fascinating. As Nydwracu shows, its implications extend much further than its foregrounded argument.

As already briefly tweet-sparred, I’m skeptical about the description of Capitalism as an institution (or set of institutions), since any sociological category is inadequate to its mechanism in profundity. Capital, like fire, is something humans do, but that does not make it reducible to the ways humans do it. In its ultimate cybernetic diagram, Capitalism is a cosmic occurrence, and only very derivatively an anthropological fact. (This is not, of course, to deny that capitalism is destined to have been by far the most important anthropological fact). As a cause, human thedes can be interesting. As a cognitive horizon, they are simply weakness. It isn’t always — or even very often — about us.

Like Capitalism, the Cathedral is a self-organizing, distributed intelligence with emergent post-anthropomorphic features. Unlike Capitalism, it has no intrinsic competence at self-resourcing, and thus relapses continually into to compromise, contradiction, and exhortation. The Cathedral has a complex spiritual message it is inextricably bound to, but Capitalism has only one terminal law: anything that can feed itself gets to live. The pre-adaptation to rough times that comes with this goes without saying (and is usually left unsaid). Unlike the Cathedral, Capitalism doesn’t chat to us much at all. It’s message channels, meaning those communication circuits not dedicated to machine code, consist of tradable ad space. To devote them to preaching would look bad on a balance sheet somewhere.

(Much more on this as the war heats up.)

Note-1: ‘Feeding itself’ includes funding its self-protection. This is a cost-point that is almost certain to grow.
Note-2: Capitalist message channels are, of course, open to preaching that pays. The essential point is that, in contradistinction to the Cathedral, such second-party messaging or first-party PR is irreducibly cynical. When an emergent AI talks to you about morality, you’d be a dupe to weep.

… William S. Lind asks in this recent panel discussion (third speaker, just after 43 minutes in). “The foreign policy establishment, or the country?” The relevant thread of his argument: The aggressive foreign policy posture of the United States is counter-productively promoting global disorder, which eventually threatens domestic calamity. When the US fights a foreign state, Lind argues, it advances the chaotic “forces of the fourth generation” — a more formidable opponent than even the most obdurately non-compliant state is able to be. America’s “offensive grand strategy” — tied to a high-level of concern for the internal political arrangements of foreign countries — is sowing dragon’s teeth.

TNIO has been coaxing NRx onto a path of broadened geopolitical scope. There is an unavoidable irony here. The Old Right tends naturally to a preoccupation with hearth-and-home, so that its preferred policy posture (non-interventionism) is often accompanied by — or even buried within — a retraction of mental energy from distant questions. The Neoconservative synthesis of foreign policy activism and cosmopolitan fascination with foreign affairs is far more psychologically consistent, regardless of its errors. For anti-globalists to sustain a panoramic perspective takes work.

This work is important, if realistic analysis is the goal, because distant eventualities hugely impinge. The existence and fate of Neoreaction depends far more upon the great churning machinery of world history than upon the local decisions of its favored ‘little platoons’. To misquote Lenin: Even if you are not interested in the system of the world, it is interested in you.

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In the wake of the latest Eurasianism excitement (of which there will be much more), comes a wide-ranging piece at Mitrailleuse.  It made me wonder whether Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) is still in any kind of cultural circulation. It‘s short — and odd.  The date and cultural lineage place it decisively within Dugin’s framework of the rising new Atlantean power — English-speaking, protestant, maritime, philosemitic, technophilic, and (piously) materially acquisitive. There’s even a clear seam of Sinophilia running through it, although one might suspect that — for reasons of geopolitical pragmatism — this is not a feature Eurasianism would want to emphasize.

For a taste, here’s a sample from the New Atlantis tour:

“We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions. There we imitate and practise to make swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have; and to make them and multiply them more easily and with small force, by wheels and other means, and to make them stronger and more violent than yours are, exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks. We represent also ordnance and instruments of war and engines of all kinds; and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gunpowder, wild-fires burning in water and unquenchable, also fire-works of all variety, both for pleasure and use. We imitate also flights of birds; we have some degrees of flying in the air. We have ships and boats for going under water and brooking of seas, also swimming-girdles and supporters. We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents; we have also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty.

“We have also a mathematical-house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as astronomy, exquisitely made.

“We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and illusions, and their fallacies. And surely you will easily believe that we, that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of particulars deceive the senses if we would disguise those things, and labor to make them more miraculous. But we do hate all impostures and lies, insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing adorned or swelling, but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness. …”

Scrupulous scientific realism combined with a precocious Virtual Reality industry. This is indeed an enemy, very naturally, to be feared.

Note: There’s also a post on Eurasianism, probing gently into the China angle, over at Urban Future.

I’ll assume everyone has read and digested Scott Alexander’s description of Motte and Bailey arguments. It’s extremely useful. (So much so, it’s probably fated to undergo compression to ‘M&B positions’ at some stage.)

The NRx versions of these are extremely trying. Most grating, from the perspective of this blog, are the Feudalism (Monarchism) examples. These have a strong motte, roughly of the form “by ‘feudalism’ we mean structures of decentralized hierarchical tradition, antedating state bureaucratization (and by ‘monarchism’ we mean a CEO with undivided powers)”. In predictable M&B style, these then dilate into a ramshackle set of formless nostalgias, bizarre dreams for a universal return to rural life, with ‘the Olde Kinges will return’ fantasies substituted for a realistic engagement with modernity, plus much arm-wrestling and ale. My strong temptation is to burn out the motte and forget the whole thing. There’s certainly far more to be lost from the latter associations, than to be gained from the former.

Listen to this interview with Marc Andreessen if you get a chance. There’s a lot of fascinating material there. Perhaps most crucial to this ‘point’ — he understands that the combination of peripheral economic development, advanced mobile telephony, and precipitously falling prices, is basically putting the equivalent of a 1970s supercomputer into everyone‘s hands in the very near future. You can already buy a smartphone for $35, and denizens of developing countries express a preference for these gizmos over indoor plumbing. It’s not so much a prediction then, more an acknowledgement of final-phase installed fact. This is the world that realistic socio-political analysis has to address.

However NRx gets sub-divided, can I please not be in the part that foregrounds the return of jousting as a pressing cultural issue. The challenges and opportunities of planetary-saturation Cyberspace is the topic that matters.

Heartiste (finally) discovers Weiss.

Of Heartiste’s six proposed policy responses, #2 (introduce counter-dysgenic incentives) is the only one this blog endorse without reservation. High-IQ immigration, assortative mating, and open markets all make a positive contribution to general social competitiveness, although due theoretical deference to IQ-Shredder problems is required. His point #6 is valuable if it is inverted, to make socio-political fragmentation a primary objective, rather than a consequence, or subordinate instrumental goal. Point #5 (“Eliminate all female-friendly public policies”) is unobjectionable because all ‘X-friendly’ public policies are objectionable, and its specific emphasis is material for consideration within a disintegrated oecumenon, where polities could experiment with all kinds of things. Talented people will tend to flee a heavy-handed authoritarian state, even if it’s social policies have impressive traditional validation. Consequently, as a response to local dysgenics, the outcome of any attempt to socially engineer a restored patriarchy from the top-down is likely to be counter-productive.

Social Darwinism, seriously understood, is the theoretical default that every attempt to neutralize spontaneous selection processes (entropy dissipation) will be subverted by predictable perverse effects. It’s no more possible to suppress Social Darwinism than it is to annul the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and social philosophies which teach that this can be achieved are the strict equivalent of plans for perpetual motion machines. That’s what Weiss is explaining, as Outside in understands it. Subsumption into an effective competitive environment is the only possible response that could work to reverse dysgenic trends, and this will eventually occur, whether human politics cooperates or not. Patchwork is the gentlest way this could be realized, since it enables a multitude of societies to decide on their own levels of entropy-accumulation tolerance. (That is not, of course, to suggest that a Patchworked-world is gentle in any sense we have grown accustomed to.)

Couldn’t resist sharing this:

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When the winter comes, life becomes hard. Do the nice thing, too often, or too indiscriminately, and “Gnon will destroy you.”

Only the most extreme sociopath is oblivious to the comforts of moral squeamishness. It almost counts as the basic scaffolding of sanity to believe, or to immersively pretend, that our deepest qualms are shared by the commanding principles of being. At the highest level of hegemonic global culture, such scruples — projected ever more wantonly into the nature of things — are represented by Francis Fukuyama’s teleo-zenith “liberal democracy” which, as Daniel McCarthy accurately points out, “turns out to be a synonym for ‘the attitudes and institutions of a world in which Anglo-American power is dominant.’” Hobbesian realities have receded from Western public consciousness in direct proportion to the rise of a titanic ‘Atlantean‘ power. To confuse the gentle webs of civility with fundamental structures of reality is decadence, a path that Western sensibilities have been traveling for decades, if not centuries. Nothing deep within the fabric of the world gets upset about the same things, and in the same ways, that we would want it to.

‘Children’. That single word, alone, says everything that is necessary here. Lost, abandoned, exploited, sick and neglected, crippled, starved, and slaughtered, they saturate the media-scape of the harshening Western winter. Their real features are hard to discern beneath the thick coating of symbolism they bear, as every scale of the media, from brainwashed micro-blogger to massive news conglomerate, orchestrates the pathetic cry: how can this possibly be allowed to be? There should be something, profoundly rooted-down into the nature of the world, that cares about tormented and massacred children, shouldn’t there? Something other, and more, than the fragile machinery of a civilization that now tilts and groans ominously in the rising winter wind? When these media-blitzed fate-damned children scrape our moral sensitivities down to the raw, bloody quick, there has to be something basic concerned to protect them, surely?

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There’s a wave of change coming. If we want to be realistic, we need to be ready for it — at least, as far as we are able to be. Anyone making plans for a future that won’t be there by the time it arrives is simply wasting everybody’s time, and first of all their own.

Under even remotely capitalist conditions, technology reliably over-performs in the medium term, as long as you’re looking in the right direction. Sure, flying cars, jetpacks, and nuclear fusion have gone missing, but instead we got mass-consumer computing, Cyberspace, and mobile telephony. What actually turned up has switched the world far more than the technologies that got lost would have done. It climbed into our brains far more deeply, established far more intense social-cybernetic circuitry, adjusted us more comprehensively, and opened gates we hadn’t foreseen. (You’re on a computer of some kind right now, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

Because technological innovation rolls in on hype cycles, it messes with our expectations, systematically. There’s always a prompt for fashionable disillusionment, shortly before the storm-front hits. Dupes always fall for it. It’s hard not to.

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