FSTDT

darreact #wingnut #dunning-kruger #elitist darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com

am going to try to write a few shorter posts over the next couple of weeks instead of my usual long, multi-part epics. Today’s subject is traditionalism. The point of this post is merely tactical, a way to get around the negative connotations of the word “tradition.” As soon as someone says they are a traditionalist they open themselves up to some immediate objections. You can already hear howls that slavery was a tradition, or invocations of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Either that or you will invoke images of silly harmless holidays like Groundhog’s Day. This is because the word “tradition” has a connotation of rote repetition for no other reason than that is how things have always been done.

However, this is not what a self-described traditionalist is trying to convey. When someone claims they are a traditionalist they are making the point that things have been done a certain way for good reasons, and that there isn’t really a better word for this in English than “tradition.” What is missing from the word “tradition” is the crucial point that traditions are teleofunctional. Take Chesterton’s fence. Chesterton’s point is that the fence serves a purpose; it has a function (to keep the horses in or whatever). A fence is a designed artifact with a function, and in claiming that tradition is like a fence the analogy is that traditions are designed to prevent problems, that traditions are teleofunctional.

Just because something has a function of course doesn’t mean it was good. Slavery had a function, providing the slave owners with a life of comfort. It is a separate argument to show that a social structure is needed or good. The ultimate weapon of reaction/neoreaction is that claim that anti-liberal structures are inevitable given the workings of nature (gnon) and human nature; that liberal values are deathwish values.

Plus, saying you’re a traditionalist sounds so musty and fuddy-duddy; saying you’re a teleofunctionalist sounds modern and sexy. So my proposal is to stop calling ourselves traditionalists and start calling ourselves teleofunctionalists. If you really want to sex it up call it bio-social teleofunctionalism, which encapsulates the Dark Enlightenment in a nutshell.

darreact #wingnut #dunning-kruger #elitist #racist darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com

Cultural Marxism is genocidal in that it attacks and prevents the working of these forces that allow ethnic and other genocide-susceptible kinds to persist.

The crux of my argument is this: ethnic and other genocide-susceptible kinds require the working of these forces in order to persist. The prevention of the working of these forces by individuals, society, or the state through laws, sanctions, violence, or social pressure, would result in the destruction, in whole or in part, of the genocide-susceptible kind, i.e., would be genocide. Cultural Marxism advocates and facilitates the prevention of the working of these forces. Therefore, Cultural Marxism advocates genocide.

Thus, the forces I discussed in parts 2 – 5 must be allowed to do their job of sustaining ethnic and other genocide-susceptible kinds. Specifically, from part 2, ethnic groups can not be prevented or censored from the reproduction of their distinctive traditions, or from advocating the creation of new members of the kind, i.e, advocating against miscegenation is not in any way morally objectionable.
From part 3: members of an ethnic group can not be hindered or censured for seeking to live among members of their own kind, i.e., “white flight” or any other kind of ethnic clustering is not immoral or objectionable, although introducing the factors that cause it is.
From part 4: an ethnic group has a right to reserve its territory to itself, i.e, borders, immigration controls, or housing discrimination are in no way morally objectionable.
From part 5: an ethnic group has the right to inculcate affection for the group in its members in order to urge them to perpetuate the kind and defend its territory, i.e., patriotic celebrations and displays of ethnic pride, ethnocentrism, or attempts to inculcate group affection among a people, are in no way morally objectionable.

In short, it is perfectly acceptable and unobjectionable, and in no way unjust discrimination, to favor members of your own kind when it comes to a whole host of behaviors and social functions. On the contrary, efforts to weaken and destroy these forces, known as Cultural Marxism, are immoral and unjust and may or must be resisted.

darreact #wingnut #dunning-kruger #elitist #racist darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com

Third, loyalty is not a case of manipulation or false consciousness. If genocide is one of the greatest crimes of which humanity is capable, then people must justifiably be able to resist it when it is imposed upon their kind. Extinction is the worst of evils that can befall a kind, and those that sacrifice some present self-interest out of loyalty should receive the highest moral praise for their efforts at avoiding this greatest of evils. In fact, altruistic self-sacrifice is often considered the essence of morality. Again, if a member of an ethnic group stays in a neighborhood, state, or country out of loyalty, when moving might be better from self-interest, this is a moral act of the highest order. Instead, there is a natural existential imperative demanding loyalty to ones kind when loyalty is necessary for any kind to persist. When threatened with genocide those groups whose members do not demonstrate loyalty go extinct, and so the prevention is genocidal.

There are three kinds of loyalty that correspond to the factors discussed in parts 2 – 4: loyalty to ones people, loyalty to ones ethnic, religious, and cultural traditions, and loyalty to place. There may be other important kinds of loyalty, such as institutional loyalty–loyalty to ones teammates, partners, family, leader, military commander, and so on—but it is these three types that are genocide-resistant.

Thus society needs to gain new respect for loyalty and the loyal, and a new disdain for the traitorous as loyalty is the highest of virtues as it avoids the greatest of calamities. Disloyalty, as was traditionally claimed, is the worst of vices; Dante condemned the traitorous to the lowest level of hell. A full discussion of how the disloyal should be treated, and what, if any, the penalty should be for disloyalty, is beyond the scope of this post. But several general points could be made. How to produce loyalty is an ancient problem. Perhaps disloyalty should be illegal. But it seems grossly extreme to charge someone as a traitor who, say, chooses to not bring their child up in their traditional faith. On the other hand, being a traitor to ones country is generally considered a great offense and is punishable with the most severe penalty, even death. In between state enforcement and unfettered license lay social pressure and stigma, and this seems a far more reasonable way to treat certain kinds of disloyalty: the disloyal should be ostracized and shamed the way the Amish or Hasidim do.

darreact #wingnut #racist #dunning-kruger #elitist darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com

When I first heard the idea that race wasn’t real I, like I would imagine most people would, just rolled my eyes. It seemed like the kind of idiocy that only an academic could come up with in order to publish, not perish. Academia is constantly churning out ridiculous claims in a quest to have something new to say in a desperate attempt to get into the journals. For a while there was a cottage industry of papers claiming that every major historical figure was gay, but that fad seems to have died down. I figured the whole “social constructivism” fad was a consequence of post-modernism/post-structuralism which denies that anything is real and that ontology is socially constructed by power relations. I figured it would die off with the rest of the post-modern flash in the pan. But this idea hangs around, and it in fact gains in acceptance.

The debate about the reality of race is not a biological debate. People can agree about all the facts about the migrations of people around the world, and the results of modern genetic findings, and yet still disagree over whether race is real. That is because the debate today isn’t a debate about biology; it is a debate about metaphysics. The debate is about what it means to say something is real. Specifically, it is about what is it for a kind to be real; philosophy and science is still for the most part operating under the deeply entrenched “either essentialiasm or nominalism” dichotomy. I haven’t read Nicholas Wade’s book yet, but my sense is that he will not convince the unconvinced because he does not take on the abstract ontological issues upon which social constructivists rely, or provide competing realist ontology.

darreact #wingnut #dunning-kruger #elitist #racist darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com

To the Boomers it is always the 1960s and it turns out that the important issues today are exactly what was important to 1960s liberals. In fact, the book reads like a cry of “can’t we just keep debating the same things we did in the 60s?” The main threat is still those dastardly Christian conservative creationists who are always on the brink of becoming Nazis. The multicultural disasters of Rotterdam, South Africa, Malmo, and Paris are nowhere to be found. All we need is more education and some 1960s-style integration programs. (Remember how in the 60s we did integration, and it worked so well that there are now no racial issues in politics?) But equally, Pinker doesn’t like how the Left has moved on from the 60s: away from individualism to identity politics, away from free speech and towards banning unpopular views, away from modernism and towards post-modernism.

The stated argument of the book is that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism produced great improvements to human welfare, but those values and the benefits they bestow are under threat from both the Left and Right, and so we must rededicate ourselves to protecting these values and fighting against their foes. Other reviewers have provided terrific evaluations of Pinker’s arguments. For examples, see here and here for great reviews.

darreact #wingnut #dunning-kruger #elitist #racist darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com

So what is the Enlightenment view of human nature against which the Dark Enlightenment sets itself? Here we seem to have pretty strong agreement that it is the blank slate view of human nature that is not only wrong but disastrously so. (Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is required reading for anyone delving into these waters.) The blank slate was originally an entirely epistemological notion; it was the claim that knowledge came from the senses and that there were no innate ideas in Descartes’ sense. Restricted to this sphere it was relatively unproblematic and it is a view I share. But in the late 19th and 20th century the notion of the blank slate was extended way beyond its merely epistemological origins to encompass the entirety of human psychology. It is this expansion that the Dark Enlightenment sets itself against.

It is illuminating to understand how communism claimed it was the rational conclusion of the blank slate. Communism held that human nature is entirely malleable and that education and propaganda can shape people in any way desired. Communists held that people were so malleable that, say, parents’ affection for their children could be educated away and children could be happily abandoned to be brought up by the state, or that people’s self-interest could be overcome through education, and so people could work not for their own interests but for the benefit of the state, or that people could be educated out of their desire for material goods, and so on. The communist views were actually quite reasonable given blank slate equalism. For example, I seem remember reading somewhere that Trotsky claimed that there would be a Leonardo Da Vinci on every street corner after the revolution, and why not? If everyone is equal then inequality must be the result of social conditions. If there could be one Leonardo Da Vinci why can’t everyone be a Leonardo Da Vinci if we are all equal and society is perfected?

The official socially-approved lesson from the fall of communism is that it fell because it failed to see that people are naturally self-interested. Even uber-Lefty Peter Singer in his book Darwinian Left concedes that a political system can not require that people act against their self-interest. This is the view of the neo-liberalism that has reigned for the last 30 years: blank slate + self-interest. Neo-liberals of the right and left generally believe in the blank slate in all areas except that people are naturally materially self-interested.