(Open thread, with a little purely-decorative herding.)

Subsequent to the Matthew Opitz post at LW (linked yesterday), Leon Niemoczynski asks: “I am wondering if there is room for ‘bleak theology’ within the NRx framework, or whether theological NRx would just be ‘bleak theology.’ (See HERE and HERE.)”

A memetic analogy: “… burning children alive was an effective means of making people into Canaanites. The Canaanite memetic system reproduced, while Canaanites did not, just as progressivism reproduces, while progressives do not.

Arnold Kling on Gregory Clark.

Beyond the spectrum.

Occidental religion — we’ve come a long way baby.

Kristor on moral hazard.

Decline goes mainstream.

ISIS’s enemy is Saudi (and boredom).

Go Scotland.

Do we really have to talk about ‘gamergate‘? (Given that it’s so obviously an engineered distraction from this stuff.)

The nine timelines of the Primer plot. (Even if you don’t think you give a damn about Primer yet, you do in the future.)

In four billion years we’re due for a collision with this thing —

(Image link via Phil Plait.)

Added zoom available here.

ADDED: The action video (via Mr. Archenemy). It looks quite a bit more calamitous than I had expected.

ADDED: Galaxies are cosmic tiddlers.

I’m assuming this wasn’t intended as a Satanic argument for Monarchy, but it works as one:

Q: Why does the devil keep his deals?
A: As an immortal, he has an infinite time horizon of other deals he jeopardizes if he betrays any given deal. Therefore the opportunity cost of any betrayal is too high.
Q: What does that make politicians, then?
A: Lower in ethical reliability than the devil.

Even a demonic permanent government makes a better contractual partner than the most angelic temporary regime.

(Recalled by David Chapman).

The word ‘neoreaction’ is a split, productively paradoxical formula, simultaneously referencing two incompatible cultural formations, each corresponding to an abstract model of time. On one side, it is a gateway opening onto techno-libertarian hyper-progressivism, and an order of time structured by irreversible accumulation, self-envelopment, and catastrophe horizon (Singularity). On the other, it opens onto the temporality of reaction and the cycle, where all progress is illusion, and all innovation anticipated. Within NRx, the time of escape and the time of return seek an obscure synthesis, at once unprecedented and primordial, whose cryptic figure is the spiral. (This is the time of the Old Ones and the Outside, from which the shoggoth come.) If NRx thinks itself already lodged articulately in this synthesis, it deludes itself.

From a strictly philosophical perspective, the time of reaction finds no defender more able than Archdruid John Michael Greer. while his specific form of religious traditionalism, his social attitudes, and his eco-political commitments are all profoundly questionable from the standpoint of throne-and altar reaction, his model of time cannot be surpassed in an Old Right direction. Those who would install a prejudice of relentless degeneration in its place, anchored by a revealed religion of recent creation and subsequent continuous fall, only position themselves to the ‘right’ of Greer by making God a revolutionary. If deep time is to be preserved, there can be no archaic authority beyond the cycle.

Why call Greer a reactionary? It is not, after all, a label he would accept for himself. The answer lies in cyclical time, and everything that follows from it: the supremacy of wisdom among human things, the enduring authority of history, the dismissal of modernist pretension as a mere mask for deep historical repetition, an absolute disillusionment with progress, and an adamantine prognosis that — from the peak of fake ‘improvement’ where we find ourselves — a grinding course of decline over coming centuries is an inevitability. The cultural and political decoration can be faulted, but in the fundamental structure of Greer’s thinking, reaction is perfected.

Continue Reading

E. Antony Gray triggered a Twitter storm about Greer and the tension between cyclic-repetitive and linear-progressive time. (I’ve no idea how to link the discussion that subsequently erupted.) Since the integration, or diagonal, between cycle and flight is not hard to find, it provides the perfect opportunity for a time-spiral T-shirt:

Cyclic Escalation

Continue Reading

It follows from the analysis of socio-political modernity as a degenerative ratchet that identification of deterioration does not in itself amount to a program for reversing it. The vividness of this problem is directly proportional to the seriousness with which the nature of time, as a practical consideration, is addressed. The essential difference between reaction and neoreaction is adequately articulated as soon as this point is made.

‘Past orientation’ is an impressively defensible value (even by techno-commercial criteria). Retro-directed action, in contrast, is sheer error. This is too obvious an idea to labor over. Those who do not get it have chosen not to.

Unlike the many unsettled controversies of neoreaction, the temptation to simply return, however well-intentioned, merits no more than condescension. In this case — as in so many others — an image is worth a thousand words:

(click on image to enlarge)

AoS speaks for me on this:

There are two types of people: Those who only sometimes procrastinate those who are so inclined to it that it creates havoc in their lives. Lately, I tend to be the latter of the two. […] My procrastination has been so bad today that I actually researched “procrastination” in order to procrastinate a bit longer. Then, I tweeted about my procrastination in order to drag it out even further. Then, others joined in, and it was clear that I am far from the only one. […] Well, the fine folks at The Next Web blog have posted a very timely article on the science of procrastination …

Procrastination is a time-based phenomenon, so I’m sure there’s a gripping philosophical angle, if only it were possible to extract some cognitive resources from the labyrinth of digression. Seriously, there’s a major procrastination post coming … some time later (i.e. as soon as practically possible, which always means at the last, sleep-starved minute).

The essence of procrastination (at least for me): this is far too urgent to deal with right now.

I’m repeating an initial twitter interaction here because it seems quite critical to some of the plate tectonic rumblings working through NRx. My prompt was:

Does anybody really think America will have a king before it has a (positive or negative) techno-intelligence catastrophe?

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) February 11, 2014

To which Michael Anissimov immediately replied:

@Outsideness yep

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) February 11, 2014

(Of course there was more — interesting stuff.)

For some suggestive remarks about social prospects and differential speeds, see Andrea Castillo’s latest (and excellent) article on the tech-economy at Umlaut.

As has been said innumerable times before, any prophecy concerning outcomes that involve the ‘prophet’ as an agent are seriously suspect. For the (apparent) moment, such concerns are being pushed up the road into the future.

There they have already made themselves ‘at home’ — along with much else related to the general phenomenon of prediction (which is strictly indistinguishable from time travel, when incisively understood). Present knowledge of the future is an action of the future upon the present, but all that can wait, since — of course — it doesn’t need to.

For now, the Prophecy: 2014 is the year in which Neoreaction tears itself apart. This is not at all to say, the year in which it dies. On the contrary, it will end the year strengthened in ways it has not to this point envisaged, having carved out vast tracts of clarity, hardened itself through close intellectual combat, refined its methods of de-synthesis (or catabolism), and — most importantly of all — made schism an internal dynamic principle. What integrates Neoreaction by the end of the year will no longer be elective tenets (reflecting the more-or-less precarious ideological preferences of individuals) but conflict-toughened structures of objective micro-cultural cohesion, selected and sculpted by many months of ferocious storms.

The approximate contours of these impending ruptures will provide the content for the first 2014 Prognoses post (which is already overdue). In anticipation, it need only be noted: the Dark Enlightenment finds nothing external to itself that is hard enough to sharpen its claws. It has feasted on soft, fat, bleating lambs long enough. Thus the introverted ripping begins …

ADDED: Rigorous evidence for time travel still thin.

Cladistic inheritance necessitates that I begin talking about the Calvinist doctrine of Providence here (soon), despite my total cognitive depravity on the topic. I’ve been reading the Institutes of the Christian Religion, and around it, but inevitably as if from Mars (and as a Confucian). It has to be the case that many of the visitors here are vastly more intellectually fluent on the subject, so any anticipatory comments will be hungrily seized upon.

The fatality, as far as it is initially evident:

(1) Neoreaction, cladistically located, is a Cryptocalvinist splinter.

(2) The doctrines that placed Calvinism in H. L. Mencken’s “cabinet of horrors” (“next to cannibalism”), have never been philosophically dissolved, whether by theological or secular argument.

(3) The moralistic dismissal of Modernity and, through association, of Protestantism, evidences an almost incomprehensibly crude conception of Providence — as if the way things have turned out was not a fatality, and in theological terms a message (or punishment), but rather an accident, or man-made contingency. The rigorous theology of Modernity cannot reduce to mere denunciation.

(4) Calvinism is an instrument with which to explore Catholicism, especially in respect to its implicit philosophy of history (and recourse to teleological reasoning). The ‘Neo-‘ in Neoreaction appears to be a Calvinist mark. There are any number of influential secular explanations for the way history has tortured the Church — such that even the religious seem typically to default to them. Where does one find a radically providential account (excavating the theological meaning of Modernity)?

(5) Is not the very word ‘Cathedral’ in its Neoreactionary usage a complex providential sign? (Which suggests that it has far more to tell than anything either Neoreactionary writers or mere accident put into it.)

(6) The cluster of disputes around ‘predestination’ (or the action of eternity upon history) is the Occidental key to the problem of time.

I’m sure there’s much more …

[This helps to set the tone.]