I used to see people elsewhere post a lot of (intentional?) wordsalad describing detailed complex "neoreactionary" views which they admitted was purposely verbose (using more words than necessary to filter out "pseuds" or dumber people).
This seems to have filtered out in favor of a general MAGA populism (?), maybe just because it's the biggest alternative movement that's closest nearby to those views (?).
Anyway is anyone in to NRx views or is it a stale or dead meme at this point or what should we think of it?
Example of Neo-reaction written briefly: http://alan.sdf-eu.org/rotating-triple-crown.html
Example of Dark Enlightenment thought written briefly: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/baw4uq/open_borders_the_science_and_ethics_of/ekf15el/
What is wrong with the 18th Century Enlightenment? That is a big question. I want to highlight two points.
First, the 18th Century Enlightenment preceded Darwinism. Kant makes a big thing of the synthetic a priori. But he is basically talking about instinct, except that without natural selection he has no idea why instinctive knowledge should be true, so it all gets vague and muddled.
Without Darwinism, the Utopianism of Enlightenment thinking is self-defeating. A society that lasts needs to embody an evolutionary stable strategy. If you want the lights to stay on and the potholes filled, long term, then the women had better be choosing the kind of men who fill the potholes and engineer the electricity as the fathers of the next generation.
Second, the 18th Century Enlightenment preceded von Neumann and Game Theory. So Enlightenment thinkers knew that self-interest would lead to a wretched world, but talked of *enlightened* self-interest. Stick in a treasure word, and hope that nobody notices that the problem is still there, unsolved.
Perhaps the most important text is Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. To oversimplify, an action can be in the best interest of a large group of people, but end up not getting taken because every-one is waiting for some-one else to go first (planning to free ride and not have to bother themselves). Olson realizes that making society happen requires violent coercion at certain key points.
18th Century Enlightenment ideas need to be rethought in the light of Darwinism and Game Theory. Does that lead to Enlightenment-2.0 ? No.
Look at my two examples. Both are suffused by the spirit of mechanism design. People cannot be closely supervised (who would do it? who would supervise them?). The best you can hope for is rules that rig the incentives. People do what is best for themselves individually (which includes sticking to the rules, provided that there are sufficiently few rules that they can actually be enforced) and cunningly contrived incentives may, perhaps lead to good outcomes, (think "Adam Smith's invisible hand").
Rethinking the Enlightenment in the light of Darwinism and Game Theory is rather dispiriting. Ordinary people don't really understand the notion of designing social mechanisms. Introduce universal suffrage and the ordinary people will change the laws, break the mechanisms and doom themselves. Clever people don't understand any better. What about Very Clever People? Put them in charge of social mechanisms and they will rig things in their own favor. Neither clever people nor ordinary people will understand the details of how they are being cheated, but they can still get really angry and kill all the Very Clever People.
The bleakness of the analysis blows out the light; hence Dark Enlightenment.
To sum up briefly: The 18th Century Enlightenment was rather utopian. It shared the flaw of all utopian thinking, that it was under-theorized. How would it work? In detail? Nobody knew. But the Enlightenment was intellectual. Various strands of thought aimed to fill in the missing details of the theory. Marx, Keynes, Hayek,...
Along come Darwin and von Neumann. We start to see the full difficulty of the challenge. Utopia must be evolutionary stable and incentive compatible. People are not clever enough to engineer that. Whoops!
> If you want the lights to stay on and the potholes filled, long term, then the women had better be choosing the kind of men who fill the potholes and engineer the electricity as the fathers of the next generation.
Perhaps the bio-realism could have been phrased more brutally. Society needs people to be intelligent, so intelligent women should be at home having intelligent children, not having careers. When I say 'Darwinism' I intend that biologically, genetics, inheritance, pleiotropy, polygenic inheritance, heterosis, etc.
> Applying it in practice to conservatism
is metaphorical. The bad kind of metaphorical, that paints with too broad a brush.
In the past, monarchy was advocated by priests who preached the divine right of kings. In the future monarchy will be advocated by historians who document the failure of democracy. I don't see neoreaction as being religious in the purely pious sense of the word.
Some people see religion as a good thing because humans need a code to live by and they point to a particular religious code as working well in practice.
Pious folk condemn the previous paragraph as atheistic in spirit. God is God. Treating God as a tree, to be judged by its fruit, denies God his divinity.
Psychologically minded folk notice that you cannot *believe* just because the moral code works.
At the intersection of neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment is the observation that a moral code for humans that actually works out well and lasts, is something truly precious. Precious enough to inspire religious veneration. I don't see religion in this Deistic sense as requiring a rejection of Darwinism. It could even require it; if society is to last for dozens of generations we have to be realistic about breeding, and we have seen too much to unsee it.