Gibson now using the ‘N-‘ word:
“I’ve been making fun of the singularity since I first encountered the idea,” he says. “What you get in The Peripheral is a really fucked-up singularity. It’s like a half-assed singularity coupled with that kind of neoreactionary, dark enlightenment shit. …”
(Open thread, links …)
Some reactosphere highlights: Questioning secession, basedness and other values, racial double-binds, doomed boomers, a call to order, warfare in the progressive-style, Dugin on IR, deconstruction in the mosh-pit. Why capitalism really sucks (a response, in part, to this lamentable development?) — highly related. Propertarianism versus NRx (hard to distinguish from a tech-comm ‘correction’ of NRx). Bonfire of the sanities. The return of Satan (see also these). Thoughts on torture. Narrative games (link mania). “This ends the third cycle …” Fragmentation continues. Mega-meta.
A gateway to Silicon Valley Cyber-Apocalypticism. “In five years, an estimated 5.9 billion people will own smartphones. Anyone who can code, or who has something to sell, can be a free agent on the global marketplace. You can work from anywhere on your laptop and talk to anyone in the world; you can receive goods anywhere via drone and pay for them with bitcoins — that is, if you can’t 3-D print them at home. As software eats everything, prices will plunge. You won’t need much money to live like a king; it won’t be a big deal if your job is made obsolete by code or a robot. The rich will enjoy bespoke luxury goods and be first in line for new experiences, but otherwise there will be no differences among people; inequality will increase but cease to matter. Politics as we know it will lose relevance. Large, gridlocked states will be disrupted like any monopoly. Customer-citizens, armed with information, will demand transparency, accountability, choice. They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up. There might be some civil wars, there might be many new nations, but the stabilizing force will be corporations, which will become even more like parts of a global government than they are today. Google and Facebook, for in-stance, will be bigger and better than ever: highly functional, monopolistic technocracies that will build out the world’s infrastructure. Facebook will be the new home of the public sphere; Google will automate everything.”
Take my eye off Anathema, and this happens:
It’s pulpy and narrative-driven, of course, but that surely has its place. Even within its limitations it helps to hold open the question — from which I’m far too easily distracted — what would an NRx aesthetic be? The thematic reflexivity is a part of that.
To be brutally frank, I’ve basically given up on the West as a source of continuing visual aesthetic achievement (symptom). Its global influence strikes me as radically toxic, promoting worthless pomo garbage wherever it gets its foot in the door, and whenever it tries to pull-out of its death spiral — to become neo-traditional — it sticks Roman columns everywhere and looks simply ridiculous. The last person who could get away with anything like that was de Chirico. Probably fascism wrecked it, as it did so many other things. Grumpiness aside, the importance of the discussion is undeniable. The consolidation which matters most takes place on the aesthetic plane.
ADDED: Huge twitter agitation about this, so I’m tacking it on, even though the connection is tenuous at best.
This surely counts as a (Friday) fright night topic. Appropriately, it’s an undertow NRx theme already, although typically only casually invoked — almost allusively — as the necessary complement of the public state’s naked superficiality. Rod Dreher focuses upon it more determinedly than any NRx source I was able to rapidly pull up. (This would be an easy point for people to educate me upon.)
Dreher’s post is seriously interesting. One immediate hook:
Steve Sailer says that the Shallow State is a complement to the Deep State. The Shallow State is, I think, another name for what the Neoreactionaries call “The Cathedral” …
As a State Church, the Cathedral is essentially bound to publicity. Its principal organs — media and education — are directed towards the promulgation of faith. It tends towards an identification with its own propaganda, and therefore — in Mike Lofgren’s words — to the full manifestation of visible government. Perfect coincidence of government with the transparent public sphere approaches a definition of the progressive telos. Since Neoreaction is particularly inclined to emphasize the radical dysfunctionality of this ideal, it naturally presupposes that real government lies elsewhere. In this respect, NRx is inherently destined to formulate a model of hidden or occult government — that which the Cathedral runs upon — which inevitably coincides, in all fundamentals, with the deep state.
The heated controversy running through biology right now — pronounced, at least, in its zone of intersection with the wider public sphere — seems like something that should be inciting fission within the NRx. The collision between Hamiltonian kin selection (defended most prominently in this case by Richard Dawkins) and group selection (E. O. Wilson) drives a wedge between the baseline biorealism accepted by all tendencies within the Neoreactionary Trike and the much stronger version of racial identitarianism that flourishes within the ethno-nationalist faction. Until recent times, proto-Hamiltonian hereditarianism has been strongly aligned with classical liberalism, while ideological racial collectivism represents a later — and very different — political tradition. Not so much as a chirp yet, though. Are people unpersuaded about this argument’s relevance?
On a slight tangent (but ultimately, only a slight one) Nick Szabo’s epically brilliant essay ‘Shelling Out’ is remarkable — among other things — for its profound biorealist foundations. It makes an excellent theoretical preparation for Jim’s paper on ‘Natural Law and Natural Rights’, which also draws productively upon John Maynard Smith’s game-theoretic model of the ‘evolutionary stable strategy’ as the natural substrate of psychological and cultural deep-structure.
This is an important opportunity to put down some discriminatory markers. Can we turf group selectionist ideas out of NRx entirely, or do we have to fight about it?
(Open thread + links (I’ve been in Hangzhou over the weekend so some symptoms of partial disconnection are probable))
Jim’s ‘Death of Christianity’ post is the latest installment in a series defending Restoration England. It seems to me that people are being unusually cagey about arguing this out — perhaps a little scared? The religious topic, in particular, tends to draw a high level of interest, which is significant in itself. This might the place to stir the hornets nest with the latest from Pope Francis: The Koran is a prophetic book of peace. It’s not so much the appeasement, moral equivalence, or other red-rags to the right issues that intrigue me most about this — and not even the accommodation of ‘prophecy’ to an outcome that brings it close to sarcasm — but the sheer oddity of the theology behind the remark. To be trolled by the Pope is really something (but what?). (Patheos places the quote in context — which suggests the quality of the trolling is even higher than initially evident.)
Sensible strategic advice. Law and violence. Paleo-humanism. Don’t count on the robocops. 4GW lessons. Anissimov on Brin. Supplementing this link assortment, there’s a whole bunch more from ‘|||||’ here.
(Open thread, links …)
In and around the NRx (highlights): Steel anarchism (and response). This opaque but intriguing stuff is also, probably, relevant. An epic delve into global complexity. The Gutenberg shock. A Watsoned world (background), further comment. The propertarian alternative (more, and more). Democracy on display (plus a reminder).
Race war round-up: between two worlds (more tightrope walking). Integration from the left: “It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism,” Malcolm said in a 1964 discussion. “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” — which simplifies things. Cut the riot shaming. Blame the cops, or Obama, or leftist race politics, or black family breakdown, or befuddlement, or idiots. “The real message of Ferguson: we are [seeing multiculturalism itself] go up in flames. A polity where the Chief Executive has to address the people over a local law enforcement matter is fatally unstable.” Let it burn. The unsaid. The anti-MLK.
America’s half-hidden welfare state. Bubbelology.
(Open thread, links …)
It has been difficult to keep up with Henry Dampier recently, on feminist predictions, discount slaves, incoherent elites, brittanus americanus, globalization and war … and more, and more, and more (plus some genuinely useful advice). This blog is not among those immediately assuming the explanation lies in methamphetamine. Category theorizing. Yuray is digging up some authoritative support for the restoration of Latin. Meta-fragmentation. Hawk politics. No enemies to the left. Greetings! Unity (I don’t get it) — this seems to be related. The basic dissymmetry. Reliable nets.
Paleao-reaction goes mainstream.
Casual Marxism. Curricular Satanism. General Gruberism.
Malthusian mechanics (in pre-industrial England). Escaping the Malthusian trap. Evolution of culture, chain-letters, dark nets, and the (ancient) Egyptian state. Predation games. Killer apes. Genetic ontology. Shrinking brains. Social media hooks. Hmmmm.
Amerika on The Peripheral. Troll points. Auto-cannibalization watch (1, 2, 3). Sound convictions.
British decay in context. East Asia does it better, Japan notably excepted. Hold the fix. Peak delusions. McCloskey on Piketty.
Uses of racism. Race in your face. Villains of Ferguson. Last gasps. Amnesty and disillusionment.
(Open thread, links)
Burning in the brains of the reactosphere this week: Complexities of caste, media hysteria, where reaction begins, ambiguities of narrativization, Google on the slide, the American era comes apart. The language of recovery. The meaning of property (previously linked). Rituals of disintegration. The masters of meta. The Mitrailleuse secession round-up is always worth catching.
Some comet thing happened, but far more importantly: Did you see that guy‘s shirt?
The Internet’s SJW cannibal holocaust continues. Meanwhile, in the UK (Brendan O’Neill has been doing Miltonic work). Some additional notable commentary. Oh, and Obama wants to reclassify the Internet as a ‘utility’ (always comforting rhetoric from a communist). It’s a global trend.
The post is pitched like this because it’s Friday night, but it works. A more dutiful post might have been entitled simply ‘Malthus’ and involved a lot of work. That’s going to be needed at some point. (Here‘s the 6th edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, for anyone who wants to get started now.) A more thoroughly technical approach would have been flagged ‘Neo-Malthusianism’. While sympathizing with groans about another ‘neo-‘ prefix, in this case it would have been solidly justified. It’s only through expansion of the Malthusian insight in accordance of a more general conservation law that its full current relevance can be appreciated. Classic Malthus still does far more work than it is credited with, but it contains a principle of far more penetrating application.
‘Neo-‘ at its most frivolous is merely a mark of fashion. When employed more seriously, it notes an element of innovation. Its most significant sense includes not only novelty, but also abstraction. Something is carried forwards in such a way that its conceptual core is distilled through extraction from a specific context, achieving a higher generality, and more exact formality. Malthus partially anticipates this in a phrase that points beyond any excessively constrictive concreteness:
The qualification “in some shape or other” might have been drawn from abstract horror, and “premature death” only loosely binds it. Even so, this formulation remains too narrow, since it tends to exclude the dysgenic outcome, which we have since learnt is a dimension of Malthusian expression scarcely less imposing than resource crisis. A Neo-Malthusian account of the “X” which in some shape or other makes a grim perversity of all humanity’s efforts to improve its condition grasps it as a mathematically conserved, plastic, or abstract destiny, working as remorselessly through reductions of mortality (Malthusian ‘relaxations’) as through increases (Malthusian ‘pressures’). Both would count equally as “checks on population” — each convertible, through a complex calculus, into the terms of the other. A population dysgenically deteriorated through ‘enlightened’ Malthusian relaxation learns, once again, how to starve.