Recommended Reading & Viewing
Chicago Boyz –Daniel Hannan’s new book: Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World
The National Interest – Interpreting the new Iran Deal
Shloky.com – Announcing the Origins of the Lean Start Up
The National Interest – Interpreting the new Iran Deal
Recommended Viewing:
J.M. Berger being interviewed on his book Jihad Joe:
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T. Greer:
November 25th, 2013 at 8:01 am
The Neoreactionaries are an interesting bunch. I am sometimes surprised by how many of my readers (an almost embarrassingly large amount) hail from the Neoreactionary fold.
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If one delves deeply into the Neoreactionary milieu you find a community obsessed with minor distinctions, fond of speaking in codes, extremely defensive when faced with criticism, and generally misanthropic, insular, abrasive, dogmatic, and shrill. But they are hardly alone in this: the description holds equally well for peak-oil doomsters, Austrian economists, radical leftists, the permaculture folks, anarchists, survivalists, Objectivists, or almost any other ‘ist’ niche community composed of ideologues that are both 1) much more intelligent than the average population 2) utterly convinced they alone posses truths the rest of society will not accept (to its ruin). The echo chamber communities of Web 2.0 only intensify these attributes.
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They are not too bad to have around though. They provide constant – and occasionally very powerful – critique of modern shibboleths. For this alone they are very useful. But you have to be careful. Spend too much time down in the rabbit hole and i becomes hard to distangle fantasy from reality.
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P.S. Probably the best introduction to the movement was written by Scott Alexander. He also wrote the movement’s most compelling refutation. Reader beware: both of these articles are insanely long. To the rabbit hole we go…
Madhu:
November 25th, 2013 at 3:52 pm
Interesting insights on “neoreactionaries.” This bit:
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“….Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms” made me think of the Rod Dreher post on TAC called “The Shantytowns of Silicon Valley”:
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“From the Right, I wonder if the Standard would have published a similar takedown of the habitats of Wall Street executives. After all, the Hamptons, the tony resort towns on Long Island that cater to wealthy Manhattanites, are notorious for having become too expensive for their own year-round residents to live in. They’re not all Wall Streeters out in the summer Hamptons, of course, but the point is simply that it’s probably not hard to find a similar story on the East Coast. Silicon Valley is a tempting target for right-of-center writers because it’s the Bay Area, and because behind the casual, eco-friendly, lifestyle-left façade is the same old class dynamic — and that’s what Allen identifies so very well in this piece. ”
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I’m not interested in the R vs L angle but in notions of aristocracy and class behavior, something I sort of never thought I would be interested in. And yet, my most formative years were spent parsing this sort of behavior as an immigrant, the class codes of the upper middle class so different from the more exuberant tastes of those of my own immigrant background until sometimes the overlapped, as when Bollywood went from embarrasing and ethnic, to cool and ethnic, to just now a bit mainstream and overplayed and we are all into Tollywood and Nollywood now (well, that is sort of 2007 but you know what I mean).
Madhu:
November 25th, 2013 at 4:00 pm
Oh, haha, I totally misread the neoreactionary piece. Forget my comment, it belongs more to your oligarchy series, zen.
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As for neoreactionaries….those are the guys you think are onto something until you really start digging and then you realize they made a mistake in their math or whatever. And then you politely leave a comment that, uh, did you consider this?
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But, no, your point is ridiculous, doesn’t matter, I didn’t make a mistake because I could never make a mistake.
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T. Greer’s point is a good one. But the danger of neoreactionaries is that their errors are at a VERY high level so that unless you understand what they are talking about in incredible depth, you can get fooled.
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The funniest run in I had was in one who kept saying that the US should follow the British in Afghanistan, meaning we should be like the British Raj. They had it right.
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Of course, COIN dogma that we followed did just that, sort had a hard on for the British Raj and Kipling and all that.
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It was a hysterical error to make and yet they made it because it never occurred to them that their neoreactionary idea was exactly what we were doing.
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Hahahahahahahahahah!!!!
Madhu:
November 25th, 2013 at 4:04 pm
Okay, to be more clear:
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Mencious Moldbug or Derbyshire or someone like that was all, “the British really knew what they were doing in India and colonialism had it’s points and we should do that in Afghanistan, rubble don’t make trouble.”
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And COIN is more of an airy fairy reading of colonial history but the thing is, they are both based on a kind on an intellectual hard on for a certain type of adventurer.
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Eh, what am I doing? What I learned with neoreactionaries is to ignore their analysis while taking an interest in their reading lists.
Madhu:
November 25th, 2013 at 4:05 pm
Even more clear is T. Greet:
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But you have to be careful. Spend too much time down in the rabbit hole and i becomes hard to distangle fantasy from reality.
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Yeah, don’t do that. Walk away slowly….
Lynn C. Rees:
November 25th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
There’s this odd romantic and even sacral gloss that monarchy consistently acquires in the eyes of some of the inhabitants of this country. When the House of Stuart Hannover Saxe-Coberg-Gotha Windsor inevitably acquires its latest shiny new charismatic, many Americans reflexively kow-tow in the direction of the blood descendants of that silly little clown their forebears firmly booted out. Young Americans are raised drinking the wrong fairy tales, those ones where kings, queens, princes, or princesses live happily ever after instead of losing their heads. Men like Chuck Stuart, Louie Capet, and Nicky Romanoff, if the Lord had willed them to some other slot, strike me as decent family men who’d be solid backbenchers in the town hall meetings and congregations of some small American town. But, given too much power and subject to too much expectation of what one frail being can do, they failed even when well-intended. And so they and their families, unnaturally elevated over their peers, innocent or not, reaped the whirlwind.
I’m even more “reactionary” than these young boys with more Google Books than sense. I’m a theocrat: my King is Christ, my ideal government is one where my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ reigns in person, an actual resurrected and glorified personage, nail prints in His hands and feet, spear wound in His side, here upon this earth. Before that great and dreadful day though, I see lifting up one man as a false idol in place of the One True King as anathema. I’m even suspicious of the office of president of the United States as sketched out in a few lines of ink on parchment and two centuries of mixed results. Calls for “presidential leadership”, as if appeal to such debris constituted some sort of magical pixie dust that cured all ills, make me wince: this is America, why do we need one lump made of perishable flesh and blood for guidance in government or any aspect of life? Führerprinzip is not the American way. If it has become so, the American people have sinned. The first and greatest commandment of classical republicanism is THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER KING BEFORE ME. As it says in one of the foundational republican tracts that worked their way into Western civilization:
Lexington Green:
November 26th, 2013 at 2:06 am
“He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
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Yes.
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But until then we have to make do with flimsy second-bests.
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The old parchment is better than most of the alternatives.
T. Greer:
November 26th, 2013 at 10:08 am
Of course, the neoreactionaries are not really about monarchism persaye. Their true causus belli is progressive ‘social justice’ thought. At their heart they are social conservatives whose project is obsessed with resurrecting the cultural mores, gender norms, and social hierarchies of the 18th century. Monarchism is just a tool – a way to build the kind of aristocratic order capable of dragging society back to a world where the masses and minorities are not meaningful political actors. If they believed flimsy parchments could do the job, they would support that too.
Grurray:
November 26th, 2013 at 3:10 pm
“Monarchism is just a tool”
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I think that’s a fair assessment
They are, in the only way they know how, reverse engineering history. Deconstructing and extracting what they think are the ingredients in order to reconstitute, like the modern Prometheus, a better mousetrap.
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It makes sense when you think about what they’ve been expecting and advocating lately – the utopian singularity. Only it’s not exactly following their plan. People aren’t getting smarter as more information becomes available. The government has gotten more diverse – we elected a black president for God’s sake in a campaign that a lot of their boys worked on – but the weight of a crushing bureaucracy is weighing down any progress.
We’re actually going to have cars that drive for us very soon, but for some odd reason their still shooting people in the inner city.
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They’re too used to their parabolas – smooth trajectories of unlimited abundance.
The whole equals the sum in the shelter of laboratories and accelerators and combinators, but in the real world it’s a lot messier.
The mess is where the beauty emerges from and where the real work gets done.
You get the feeling that they’re all due for a reality check soon to knock them back down to earth.