The Dark Enlightenment

[MacCruiskeen]

[Wombaticus Rex]

Eugene Thacker writes about how the horror genre as we think of it today, that reached its apotheosis with Lovecraft, arose in tandem with The Enlightenment, Age of Reason. So are we looking at the Jekyll-Hyde polarity on a global scale?

Would you recommend Thacker? If so, what?

[bks]

Eugene Thacker writes about how the horror genre as we think of it today, that reached its apotheosis with Lovecraft, arose in tandem with The Enlightenment, Age of Reason. So are we looking at the Jekyll-Hyde polarity on a global scale?

Would you recommend Thacker? If so, what?

This, with Alexander Galloway:

The Exploit: A Theory of Networks,

[American Dream]

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/black-sun-rising/

Black Sun Rising

By A.M. GITTLITZ



Today’s New Right and techno-futurist circles are echoing the unorthodox beliefs of Nazi cosmologists.

Shortly after the National Socialist party consolidated their power, a writer named Peter Bender convinced some Nazi brass to attempt an experiment that, if successful, would send a rocket from Magdenburg to New Zealand. The intercontinental ballistic missile was still decades away from completion, but Bender believed he had figured out how to attack the other side of the Earth—by firing directly into the sky.

He had come under the influence of an American occult group that believed in a particularly bizarre variation on the Hollow Earth theory. While the concept of habitable layers beneath the Earth’s crust had been popular for centuries amongst occultists, Bender’s Hohlwelt-theorie argued that the Earth was a vault within an endless field of matter. The sun was somewhere in the middle of this vault, and the stars in the sky were the lights of cities from the other side.

“An infinite universe is a Jewish abstraction,” wrote Bender. “A finite, rounded universe is a thoroughly Aryan conception.” The anti-Semitic aspect of the theory attracted the attention of Herman Göring but was quickly dismissed in favor of Hanns Hörbiger’s slightly less fanciful World Ice Theory. The idea nonetheless remained compelling to some, and the German Navy attempted to locate British fleets using astronomical instruments.

Hollow Earth and World Ice theories were only two particularly laughable examples of a Nazi cultural regression that included radical alterations in the fields of mathematics, psychology, and physics. It is arguable that the rejection of Einstein’s theory of relativity in place of Deutsche Physiks prevented the Nazis from developing nuclear technology and many other weapons. Some historians similarly argue that the eugenic fervor of the Master Race ideology, which paved the way to the Final Solution, diverted resources to an extent that helped cost Hitler the war.

Better known than their cosmology was the mystical underpinnings of the Nazis’ firm belief in racial superiority. SS leaders Rudolph Hess, Wilhelm Landig, and Karl Maria Miligut developed a cult based on the Nordic pantheon, esoteric rituals, and psuedo-anthropology. Landig, already a major influence on the occultist Thule Society that influenced National Socialist theology in its earliest days, developed the Black Sun as the cult’s symbol. The circular symbol was composed of three interlocking swastikas radiating out from a center point like the sun’s rays. Our yellow sun, he believed, was like a “shadow” of the spiritual Black Sun whose dark solar power could provide enough voltage for rebirth of the Aryan Nation.

The inversion of spirit and material, lightness and darkness, and the particular and universal were dramatic here as in the Hohlwelt, and in the end, just as much a failure. The fascist experiment delegitimized itself, but its anti-modern pretenses remains appealing to today’s radicals. Astrology and astronomy became separate categories in the modern era, as did faith and reason, religion and law, science and pseudoscience. Nationalists, Radical Traditionalists, and the futurist “neoreactionaries” deploy the myth that inverting these divisions, instead of abolishing them altogether, help us conceive of an idealized bygone time. The internationalist, anticapitalist, and egalitarian aspects of the last half-decade of struggle have only furthered modernity’s march away from these simpler times, they argue, and should be disregarded as agents of degradation.

Elements of capitalist totality, such as money, finance, industry, or globalization are singled out and demonized. Some group is inevitability equated with the degenerative nature of these “abstractions” and becomes undesirable. Moishe Postone argues in his essay National-Socialism and Anti-Semitism that Jews were targeted by the Nazis because their stereotypical character of the unassimilated merchant or banker was a perfect stand-in for the commodity-form. Today, European Muslims fulfill a similar role as symbols of “multi­culturalism”’s blight on traditional European values. The expansion of legal rights and visibility for homosexuals, as well as the widespread appeal of feminism, become symbols of attacks on the myth of traditional family.

Liberal democracy, the guarantor of such tolerance, becomes the target of right-wing terrorists and militias. In Ukraine, the Black Sun has risen again. The symbol appears on the uniforms of the Asov Battalion, a military detachment of Right Sector commanded by neo-Nazi Andriy Biletski. In speeches, Biletski echoes Hitler, urging to overthrow liberalism to turn Ukraine into a nation of “Supermen.” Similar paramilitary groups such as Greece’s Golden Dawn and Hungary’s Jobbik continue to train, recruit, and attack immigrants and leftists throughout Europe.

Whether it’s fascist militias or experimental rockets, what goes up must come down, and such open neo-­Nazism has seemingly little hope of broader success. As long as movements place themselves fully within the historical fascist legacy, their trajectory ends where memories of the Nazi takeover begins. After their paramilitary murder of anti­fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, ministers from Golden Dawn were arrested and the party was outlawed. Fear of a fascist coup in Ukraine ended with the assassination of Right Sector leader Sasho Muzychko only days after the fall of Yanukovych, while the Azov Battallion has mostly served as cannon fodder buffering the Ukrainian army in the most dangerous battlefields of the Donetsk. Any significant neo-Nazi party in Europe has so far been kept on a short leash by the institutional Right, like an attack dog that must be someday put down.

More concerning is the chameleon New Rightest who takes up autonomist elements of the New Left to revive the potential for conservative revolution. Alain de Benoist is the intellectual figurehead of this position, and although he is no Nazi, his arguments for pre-modern mysticism helps elucidate the appeal of the ridiculous pseudosciences at the dawn of the Nazi regime. “We want to substitute faith for law,” he writes, “mythos for logos … will for pure reason, the image for the concept, and home for exile.”

His Nouvelle Droite vision of Europe distributes power as locally as possible, but the abolition of ancient caste systems that have evolved into capitalist social relations is not as important as maintaining the traditionalist structure of these communities; the master-slave dialectic does not fit into de Benoist’s system of inversions.

In a 2013 interview with the racialist think tank American Renaissance, de Benoist says, “Europe, race, culture, and identity all have roles … I am very interested in the future and destiny of my own nation, race, and culture, but I am also interested in the future of every other group.” The egalitarian pretenses of the European Union, he goes on to argue, is part of a modern process of erasing the essential differences of race and culture. Using similar rhetoric, the Front National in France, Swedish Democrats, the United Kingdom Independence Party, and the Danish People’s Party have surged in the polls on a platform of ­euroscepticism—the populist rejection of the EU. The openness of the EU’s borders is allowing the free movement of millions of refugees and immigrants into an economically floundering European Union from its wartorn periphery, they argue, and the inability to economically absorb or culturally assimilate outsiders becomes a technocratic rationale for detention and deportation.

The eurosceptic Left, drawing on the councils and square protests of 2011 and the Blockupy movement, critiques the EU as an economic and nationalist fortress. In the words of the Commune of Europe: “We reject the institutional borders of the European Union: The EU border regime is a violent and deadly means of controlling and disciplining living labor, mobilizing and reinstating sickly racist imaginaries that form an integral part of the historical and cultural construct of Europe.”

The two sides diverge on the issue of sovereignty, territory, and borders. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is the most strident in this sentiment as he attempts to push a series of reforms to turn Hungary into a “National Democracy” with the ability to expel foreign interests and segregate ethnic groups without intervention. This is old Right thinking for Benoist, who sees racial communities, not the Nation, as the site of political power. The EU is an appendage of enlightenment ideology that ultimately dooms racial autonomy.

In modernity, “mankind is Unitary,” he argues. “All peoples must go through the same stages, and reach the same level of development.” Based on the faith of Occidentalist mythos, some must be therefore shut out from Europe’s peace and prosperity in order to preserve “difference.” The radical dissolution of identity that was begun in the international solidarity between different square movements in 2011 does not fit into a worldview where race and “traditional” cultures must be the basis for politics. In an argument reminiscent of Bender’s ontological anti-Semitism, de Benoist says this modern ideology “comes from Christianity and Judaism, which posit that there is an absolute beginning and an absolute end to history.”

Without the myth of a historically white homeland, the American Right has been typically less eccentric. The anonymously written essay, “The Undying Appeal of White Supremacy,” discusses the few American counterparts to the maneuvers of Europe’s Radical Traditionalists and includes a section on the American phenomenon of radical-­conservative futurists. These “bizarre fascisms,” as the essay refers to them, have emerged online, in an odd collusion of far-right bloggers, men’s rights advocates, former Occupy Wall Street figureheads Micah White and Justine Tunney, and Silicon Valley millionaires.

The essay traces the influence to the “neoreactionary movement” and the “Dark Enlightenment” of Nick Land, which advocates a proliferation of monarchical city-states, a techno-feudalism of the genetically and intellectually superior. In his manifesto, Land sees Dark Enlightenment as a solution to the “exit” strategy of libertarians, white separatists, and National-Anarchists who seek to establish their own Galt’s Gulch or “Little Europe” in lieu of a democratically viable fascist order. Rather than overthrow the existing order or build parliamentary parties, the neo-reactionaries advocate seceding from the (immanently collapsing) democratic capitalist regime, with an eye toward building new techno-­aristocratic city-states on the model of Singapore or Dubai.

This (for now) purely online movement seeks to establish what Baffler columnist Corey Pein calls a “Silicon Reich.” In a petition to WhiteHouse.org, Tunney called for Google chairman Eric Schmidt to be made CEO of America and for the “administrative authority” of the United States to be turned over to the tech industry. Instead of the pseudoscientific eugenics of the Nazis, central neo-reactionary figure Curtis Yarvin calls for pseudoscientific IQ-like tests to determine members of the ruling class. Not shying away from the racist implications of the argument, he calls South African apartheid a useful parallel. But while a white ruling class is hardly a novel solution, Land claims it is as scientifically reasonable as “the heliocentric model.”

Unlike the revolution of the Earth around the sun, the New Right revolutions are not seeking to return to a prior location. For neo-reactionaries, modernity is a dark age characterized by the rule of the weak over the strong: Technological rationality allows for an “objective” method of return to the “proper” structures of power that precede modernity’s enfeebling democracy (e.g: monarchy, aristocracy) without any material turn away from capitalist science and industry. Though seemingly opposed to the avowed myth-making and heroic irrationalism of Nazi philosophy, we see in both the neo-reactionaries’ techno-fetishism and Hollow Earth anti-Semitic cosmology a claim toward the “one true science” that has been perverted or silenced by the masses. Aryan or technological, “scientific truth” proves equally helpful in revealing the motions of heavenly bodies as appointing their deserving masters.

These ideas are not exclusive to certain corners of the Internet but have a broad enough appeal to be the central logic behind a Hollywood blockbuster. On a quest to save humanity from an Earth consumed with “blight,” Interstellar’s Carhartt-wearing übermensch Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) flies through a mysterious wormhole to a solar system with a black hole at its center. In suicidal sacrifice, he flies into the heart of that black sun, allowing his instruments to gather data essential to the development of quantum physics. He wakes up in a hospital bed and hears the crack of a baseball bat. Looking out the window, he sees children playing baseball in an American suburb recreated in a space station. He reunites with his daughter, now over a hundred years old, who tells him his sacrifice has saved humanity.

Interstellar’s paligentic Lazarus Project seems to argue that science will save humanity from itself, but the project only succeeds through a revelation of ultimate truth, achieved through faith, suicidal heroism, and the primacy of filial love. The home-exile dialectic is overcome, but domination remains. The issues of class, race, and patriarchy are clearly outside of Christopher Nolan’s abilities to portray. The reactionary project similarly burrows into the nationalist dirt: The U.S. flag flies proudly beside the flag of the scientific future above a new suburb, same as the old suburb but with no actual urban core: a perfect white outpost built in the cold darkness of space.

Through cult ritual, black suns, or wormholes these fascists expect to find shortcuts around the chaos of humans acting freely together. But even in the autonomous council such ideologies recur, seeking always to restore some “natural” hierarchy. Today it’s clear that the future order of society is in the grassroots, but the soil and sunlight are still up for grabs.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I've really enjoyed & learned from New Inquiry pieces in the past so I was quite disappointed in the stream-of-consciousness tone poem immortalized in RI amber above. What an odd little riff.

It starts off interesting but after mustering two paragraphs addressing the stated subject of the essay, it derails into what appears to be leftover copy from a previous Vox-style "explainer" connecting EU fascist currents with the Alt-Right here in my United States. The Ukrainian connection is cogent but never gets fleshed out, since limning the "mystical underpinnings" would require research and thought; often simultaneously.

Since there is no prior work in English for pillage about the Asov Battalion, the author sources quotes from a Frenchman 2000 miles away. Post-modernism is always so bracing.

From there, the author recaps an anonymous survey and a Baffler article to further cement their expert credentials. Just when thinks start to feel like a rambling book report, we find ourselves waist-deep in film criticism -- withering stuff, too: faulting Christopher Nolan's space opera Interstellar for failing to address contemporary identity politics in a manner that Cultural Studies majors would approve of. At least the revolution will always have Star Wars.

Such inane shit: it always boils down to fuckin' movies.

At least we die entertained.

[American Dream]

This section puts a lot of the most egregious shit that we are somehow supposed to accept here at R.I. in better perspective:

Elements of capitalist totality, such as money, finance, industry, or globalization are singled out and demonized. Some group is inevitability equated with the degenerative nature of these “abstractions” and becomes undesirable. Moishe Postone argues in his essay National-Socialism and Anti-Semitism that Jews were targeted by the Nazis because their stereotypical character of the unassimilated merchant or banker was a perfect stand-in for the commodity-form. Today, European Muslims fulfill a similar role as symbols of “multi­culturalism”’s blight on traditional European values. The expansion of legal rights and visibility for homosexuals, as well as the widespread appeal of feminism, become symbols of attacks on the myth of traditional family.

[82_28]

Mr. Rex wrote:

Such inane shit: it always boils down to fuckin' movies.

I think if you watch the news at any length during the day you will have a 100% chance of hearing an eyewitness to something saying "it was like I was in a movie" or some close variation.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I think if you watch the news at any length during the day you will have a 100% chance of hearing an eyewitness to something saying "it was like I was in a movie" or some close variation.

Absolutely so! Had few conversations on politics that didn't resort to cinema references.

Still, it could be far worse and I am at least grateful, and genuinely so, that cinema is such a fertile and subversive medium for the human scream.

[American Dream]

“The Undying Appeal of White Nationalism”

Left-Right Collusion and The Technocratic Future

Bizarre fascisms are starting to appear everywhere. Two of the three members of the board of directors of the Occupy Solidarity Network (Occupy Wall Street’s nonprofit wing) have at times publicly expressed vaguely fascist sentiments. Micah White, former Adbusters editor and cofounder of Occupy Wall Street, has traveled across the country promoting a populist left-right alliance, recently going so far as to advocate working alongside the violent Greek neo-nazi party Golden Dawn.

While it would be comforting to attribute this prospective collusion to naivete, it is clear that White is by no means unfamiliar with the dynamic nature of fascism. He has studied political movements for years and even authored an article exposing Pentti Linkola and other fascist influences in the ecological movements in 2010.

On August 12, 2011, a month before the start of Occupy Wall Street, White was interviewed by Nathan Schneider, author of “Thank You, Anarchy”:

The worst outcome would be to get there and they just fumble it by doing this whole lefty game we always play, which is self-defeatist. We go there, make some unreasonable demand, like, we want to abolish capitalism and we won’t leave until we do. And well, that’s like the war on terrorism; that’s an impossible dream. Or they just squander it by being some hipster, anarchist insurrection like, we’re gonna smash some stores and make a spectacle. And everyone’s like, ‘Why?’

Because we have something beautiful going here. So we’re trying to rise above the sectarian clashings of whether or not US Day of Rage is tweeting too much or whether or not the libertarians are – you know? And reach out to the Tea Party too. This is a moment for all of America.

I don’t see why this has to be a lefty moment or a righty moment, because this is a moment for us to reinvent democracy in America, because it’s getting to be too late. If we don’t do it now, we are reaching the end [24].

While the far right Tea Party is not technically a fascist formation, White’s proposed nationalist left-right collusion is cause for concern, especially in the light of his statements about Golden Dawn. A proposed collaboration with the Tea Party is ridiculous, yet it must be mentioned that, in real terms, the Tea Party was the initial popular response to the economic crisis of 2008. This street-level conservatism spanned the nation with demonstrations against the bailout of Wall Street nearly three years before the left decided to occupy it.

While White’s dream of left-right collusion is disconcerting, it is important to note that he is not alone. Justine Tunney, creator of occupywallst.org and the Occupy Wall Street twitter account is also a member of the Occupy Solidarity Network board of directors. She currently works as a software engineer for Google. Recently, she used the official Occupy Wall Street twitter account to publicly advocate a corporatist political agenda:

Ending poverty isn’t a political problem- it’s an engineering problem [25]

I want to make clear that this is not an anti-corporate movement. This is an anti-wall street movement. [26]

In an interview with Business Insider about her role in Occupy Wall Street, she stated that “democracy never works [27]”. From her personal twitter account she attempted to bolster her image of Google as a revolutionary force by insisting that “Silicon Valley is firmly post-capitalist” because tech companies like Google “expropriate ad money from capitalists to build a superintelligence & don’t pay dividends” to “entitled shareholders”. In March, she posted a petition to the White House website demanding the termination of all 4.3 million government employees, the resignation of Barack Obama, and the appointing of Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as CEO of America [28].

Google, the largest collector of private personal information the world has ever known, acts as a giant data mine for advertisers and the state. The mere suggestion of granting the giant surveillance apparatus even deeper governing power is troubling.

Google’s rigid hierarchical structure has been (positively) likened to a monarchy by some reactionaries. Shareholders have virtually no voting power in the company as the company’s two founders control the vast majority of votes through the organization of shares. The workforce is organized into veritable castes delineated by colored badges. Most employees enjoy high pay (median salary $125,000), free gourmet meals, and a relaxed work environment. Lower-paid yellow-badge workers are confined to a separate building and excluded from the free food, limousine shuttles, or usage of company bikes. Their jobs consist entirely of tedious data-entry. These workers are not permitted to speak with the rest of the workforce. Filmmaker and former Google employee Andrew Norman Wilson stated that the yellow badge workers were mostly people of color [29].

According to its own numbers, Google’s overwhelmingly male American “tech” workforce is a mere one percent black and two percent latino [30].

Both Tunney and White have advocated raising funds to sustain a mercenary “non-violent militia” to take to the streets. Recently, Tunney suggested that her twitter followers “read Mencius Moldbug” referring to the pseudonym of computer programmer and aspiring writer Curtis Guy Yarvin. Yarvin, along with English philosopher Nick Land, is among the best known names in the “Dark Enlightenment” movement. This tendency, also referred to as the neoreactionary movement, promotes a pseudo-scientific notion of the racial superiority of whites under the guise of “human biodiversity”, opposes egalitarianism and democracy, and supports autocratic governance [31].

Human biodiversity [HBD] is the rejection of the ‘blank state’ of human nature. Creepily obsessed with statistics that demonstrate IQ differences between the races, the darkly enlightened see social hierarchies as determined not by culture or opportunity but by the cold, hard destiny embedded in DNA…

Cue the adherents of The Bell Curve, eugenics enthusiasts, believers in white supremacy and sympathizers of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the Dark Enlightenment, we seem to have stumbled across a place where pseudo-intellectually grounded racism is flourishing in a way it hasn’t since before World War II.

In our discussion, [Nick] Land was explicit in his view on this: ‘HBD, broadly conceived, is simply a fact. It is roughly as questionable, on intellectual grounds, as biological evolution or the heliocentric model of the solar system. No one who takes the trouble to educate themselves on the subject with even a minimum of intellectual integrity can doubt that’…

Is this fascism? Desire for genetically determined ruling classes, distrust of popular democratic reform, distaste for the aesthetic standards of mass culture, and nausea over the political correctness of modern life—the Dark Enlightenment does have all the markings of a true neo-fascist movement. It’s here that the dangers of the Dark Enlightenment are hard to dismiss [32].

They advocate a return to feudal city-states as a counter to democratic governance while maintaining an almost religious reverence for technology.

Yarvin advocates a form of total corporate domination of society he calls “neocameralism”:

To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state’s profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers [33].

While ridiculous, the ideas of the neoreactionary tendency have attained some degree of support in the world of Silicon Valley tech workers.

Balaji Srinivasan, Computer Science lecturer at Stanford University and current partner in Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm Andreesen Horowitz, promoted “dark enlightenment” inspired ideas during a speech to a crowd of tech entrepreneurs last fall. He encouraged the dawning of a Silicon Valley secessionist movement that would break away from the United States and establish authoritarian city-states run by technology firms:

“We want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like. That’s where ‘exit’ comes in .. . It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the [Silicon] Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years …[Google co-founder] Larry Page, for example, wants to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation [34].”

The contrast between this hyper-technological conservatism and the right-wing traditionalist ecological movements highlights the pluralistic essence of fascism. Throughout history fascism has been a movement that is at once rational and anti-rational, secular and spiritual, traditional and futuristic, capitalist and socialist, authoritarian and anti-statist, social and individualistic, luddite and technological, nationalistic and international. Fascism is a rigid paradox that does not fall in the face of contradiction. The Third Reich was at once the mystical and environmental perspective of Hess, Himmler, Rosenberg, and Darre and the hyper-rationalist and industrialist reality that flattened much of Europe. Mussolini was as influenced by Julius Evola’s esoteric traditionalism as by Filippo Marinetti’s rejection of of the past and advocation of a technological and artistic “futurism”.

The commonalities shared by these ideologically diverse reactionary movements are concerning: the belief in racial, ethnic, or cultural superiority, the revival of The Nation, the concept of a superhuman ubermensch at the individual or the racial level, fearsome disdain for groups considered “inferior”, an aversion to collective desire, and a reverence for force and brutality.

More at: https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2015/01 ... tionalism/

[Jerky]

I think you're being a bit tough on the New Inquiry piece, Wombat. It's got a lot of interesting points, and it's a fairly well written meditation on a serious issue. I haven't seen Interstellar, but if it is as presented, I can see why Gitlitz might have problems with its message (and considering the massive, multi-media push that film was given upon release, I wouldn't be surprised to find attempts at psychosocial engineering and memetic ideological tinkering lurking within). It's certainly on a par with, say, the kind of stuff Jeff Wells was writing, back when he was. You remember Jeff Wells, right? The guy whose blog - which used to jump willy nilly from deep paracultural tropes to popular music and back again, and whose writing we're all here because we liked so much?

Jerky

[Wombaticus Rex]

Jeff was also able to complete his thoughts.

24 hours hasn't changed my opinion much; the piece is too emblematic of the laziness that passes for content creation in 2016.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Good exposition here:
http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/03/11/ ... -on-tibet/

A smart friend whom I consider to be familiar with neoreaction recently asked, “What is the neoreactionary position on Tibet? Are you for or against Tibetan sovereignty?”

This baffled me, because neoreaction is just fundamentally not about that kind of thinking at all. We obviously need to clarify some things:

Neoreaction doesn’t care about Tibetan sovereignty, which is an internal political issue in someone else’s empire, on the other side of the world. There is no conceivable way in which taking a “position” on such an issue could affect it, nor could that issue affect us. We are not the CCP brass or the Dalai Lama or the Tibetan people, and Tibetan sovereignty is between them and no one else. Taking such a position would only be useful to signal how hip we are with some crowd or other – to build yet another nebulous coalition of fools role-playing as world leaders.

If neoreaction is for or against anything, it is against that entire paradigm of pseudopolitics.

Got picked up by the latest - lucid and cat meme-tastic - Vox explainer on the Alt-Right:
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/a ... -explained

The fault line between NRx snobs and Alt-Right trolls will be sharply visible for the rest of the week, I reckon.

[General Patton]

What's bizarre about NRx is that they view CEOs as being King material - this makes it look much more like late stage managerialism and technocracy than anything to do with the Divine right of kings. the Papal-Monarchy branch of NRx is delusional in that they are all functionally materialists. Actual Christian mystics would have nothing to do with them.

And that's without getting into the whole "just be worthy and then passively wait for power to be handed to you" thing. If anything it seems like a license to let the deep state run wild while China colonizes the west coast. They're as incoherent as one would expect for a made-up interest ideology.

[MacCruiskeen]

[Wombaticus Rex]

Huh.

Via: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opini ... .html?_r=1

The Reactionary Mind

Ross Douthat

OVER the last year, America’s professional intelligentsia has been placed under the microscope in several interesting ways.

First, a group of prominent social psychologists released a paper quantifying and criticizing their field’s overwhelming left-wing tilt. Then Jonathan Haidt, one of the paper’s co-authors, highlighted research showing that the entire American academy has become more left-wing since the 1990s. Then finally a new book by two conservative political scientists, “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University,” offered a portrait of how right-wing academics make their way in a left-wing milieu. (The answer: very carefully, and more carefully than in the past.)

Meanwhile, over the same period, there has been a spate of media attention for the online movement known as “neoreaction,” which in its highbrow form offers a monarchist critique of egalitarianism and mass democracy, and in its popular form is mostly racist pro-Trump Twitter accounts and anti-P.C. provocateurs.

I suspect these two phenomena are connected — the official intelligentsia’s permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the appeal of explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts.

For its opportunistic fans, neoreaction just offers a pretentious justification for white male chauvinism and Trump worship. But the void that it aspires to fill is real: In American intellectual life there isn’t a far-right answer to tenured radicalism, or a genuinely reactionary style.

Our intelligentsia obviously does have a conservative wing, mostly clustered in think tanks rather than on campuses. But little of this conservatism really deserves the name reaction. What liberals attack as “reactionary” on the American right is usually just a nostalgia for the proudly modern United States of the Eisenhower or Reagan eras — the effective equivalent of liberal nostalgia for the golden age of labor unions. A truly reactionary vision has to reject more than just the Great Society or Roe v. Wade; it has to cut deeper, to the very roots of the modern liberal order.

Such deep critiques of our society abound in academia; they’re just almost all on the left. A few true reactionaries haunt the political philosophy departments at Catholic universities and publish in paleoconservative journals. But mostly the academy has Marxists but not Falangists, Jacobins but not Jacobites, sexual and economic and ecological utopians but hardly ever a throne-and-altar Joseph de Maistre acolyte. And almost no academic who writes on, say, Thomas Carlyle or T. S. Eliot or Rudyard Kipling would admit to any sympathy for their politics.

Which is, in a sense, entirely understandable: Those politics were frequently racist and anti-Semitic, the reactionary style gave aid and comfort not only to fascism but to Hitler, and in the American context the closest thing to a reactionary order was the slave-owning aristocracy of the South. From the perspective of the mainstream left, much reactionary thought should be taboo; from the perspective of the sensible center, the absence of far-right equivalents of Michel Foucault or Slavoj Zizek probably seems like no great loss.

But while reactionary thought is prone to real wickedness, it also contains real insights. (As, for the record, does Slavoj Zizek — I think.) Reactionary assumptions about human nature — the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order, the evils that come in with capital-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the ease of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty of modern substitutes for family and patria and religion — are not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes, sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.

Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of these insights. But both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient truths. The liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade as a democracy; the conservative sees that liberals were foolish to imagine Europe remade as a post-national utopia with its borders open to the Muslim world. But only the reactionary sees both.

Is there a way to make room for the reactionary mind in our intellectual life, though, without making room for racialist obsessions and fantasies of enlightened despotism? So far the evidence from neoreaction is not exactly encouraging.

Yet its strange viral appeal is also evidence that ideas can’t be permanently repressed when something in them still seems true.

Maybe one answer is to avoid systemization, to welcome a reactionary style that’s artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting the idea of a reactionary blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and Kipling to Michel Houellebecq, there’s a reactionary canon waiting to be celebrated as such, rather than just read through a lens of grudging aesthetic respect but ideological disapproval.

A phrase from the right-wing Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila could serve as such a movement’s mission statement. His goal, he wrote, was not a comprehensive political schema but a “reactionary patchwork.” Which might be the best way for reaction to become something genuinely new: to offer itself, not as ideological rival to liberalism and conservatism, but as a vision as strange and motley as reality itself.