On Illusions and Reactionaries
My fascination with reactionary essays
Ihave a thin strip of lime-green paper that I rolled up into the shape of a 9. When I look at it with one eye closed, I can make a little optical illusion out of it. Sometimes I look at the 9 and I see it correctly. And sometimes I look at the 9 and it appears inverted so that the edge facing me looks like the edge furthest away, and vice versa. When this happens, I’m thrilled. The 9 appears semi-transparent and luminescent; when I turn it with my fingers it moves in the opposite direction that it should. I’m mesmerized. And then suddenly the shape snaps back to how it is: I see it correctly.
Lately I’ve been reading essays by reactionaries. Because I don’t read them often, I find them mesmerizing. I read Mencius Moldbug’s An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives. Moldbug is a writer associated with a political tendency called Neo-Reaction. I tried to read Open Letter a few years ago and failed. I was too deep in my leftist dogma to not be annoyed by everything he wrote. But now, I realize that Moldbug is a good writer. He can sweep you along in a narrative. He can make you interested in dusty historical memoirs. He has an intellectual force and a strong ironic voice that keeps you guessing. His skepticism of everything is contagious. Reading Moldbug is like reading Chomsky for the first time: you become overawed by the monumental critique and revision of absolutely everything. You’re staring at the 9, and its luminescent and moving in strange ways.
Moldbug’s skepticism is the most convincing thing in his Open Letter. When I got through the first three parts I was deeply impressed by the way he made me, an already cynical person, more cynical about mainstream politics. It was this subtle and ironic wave of cynicism that carried me through his first three chapters. But then the trouble begins: he starts giving his own opinions. Where before it felt like he was asking you to question things you’ve taken for granted, now he tries to answer those questions. This doesn’t work. This is much less subtle than what he was doing at the beginning, and I feel the enchantment wearing off.
The worst example of this is when Moldbug talks about race and intelligence. He believes that some races are more intelligent than others. I won’t say anymore because you know where I’m going with this. But the short of it is: Moldbug claims there is a scientific consensus on race and intelligence that directly contradicts progressive dogma. And because science is, in his view, controlled by the progressive ruling class, a progressive must take this paradox seriously.
Well, I’m taking this essay seriously, so I try to verify his claims. I did a little research. It turns out that there never was a consensus on race and intelligence. It turns out that “science” never decided that one race was, by heredity, more intelligent than another. It’s now hard for me to take Moldbug seriously because he’s either pushing his own creepy dogma, or he’s scientifically illiterate. The 9 snaps back. I continue reading Open Letter for a few more chapters, though the illusion is over and I’m no longer having fun. But it’s alright, I can give still give credit where credit is due. And like a raccoon, I’ve scavenged what I needed from Moldbug, and I’m already on my way back to the woods.
I follow Nick Land on Twitter. He’s consistently the most interesting person on my Twitter feed. He wrote an important follow-up to Moldbug’s Open Letter. It’s called Dark Enlightenment, and I haven’t read it. A few years ago, my roommate and I read some of his old essays, collected in the superbly titled Fanged Noumena. I was surprised to read the first essay, which was written in a classic leftist tradition. It ended with a call to “foster new Amazons in our midst,” meaning we need women waging armed revolt. These days, Nick Land, from what I hear, shares Moldbug’s creepy type of racism.
Land tweeted a link to a reactionary essay, which was trending at that moment. The article is called Unprecedented, and it was written by Michael Anton for The New Criterion. The essay is about all the reasons America is bad today. His list includes trans people, immigration, and George Floyd. He makes a few too many allusions to Roman politics. You know the spiel. I, a scavenger, find an interesting idea: Anton writes that, in the U.S., white people are being taught that their demographic decline is a good thing. That is, white people are being taught to applaud the fact that the percentage of the white population is dropping in the U.S. Well, demographic decline is dubious. But it’s still an interesting idea, isn’t it? At least, I think so.
Why would white people clap when they, as a group, lose political power? Anton gives a few reasons. One is that the progressive elite may be so stupid that they are eroding traditional U.S. society for no political gain. (Moldbug says something far more interesting: that the actual function of progressive politics is to erode traditional society so that with each generation the hungry young politicians may build their political niches and ride them to power.) Reason two is that the whites have been infected by this leftist notion: that the U.S. is a racist, patriarchal, colonial, and imperial state that is drenched in the blood of slavery, and so must be torn down and rebuilt.
But I want to explore a third explanation. What if progressive white people clap for their (ostensibly) declining political power because they see themselves as a Universal Race? Mainstream liberal politics are cosmopolitan. Either sincerely or cynically, the liberal whites don’t want to see themselves as an ethnic group, but as citizens of a larger human village. The opposite of this, that they might be an ethnic group, sounds uncool to them, and a little racisty. Anyway, that’s exactly what the uncool conservative whites think. The conservatives have their family values and their pickup trucks and country music. The conservatives are the ethnic whites. They are tied to the older ideas, to traditions. They feel attached to the land. But the progressives: they are the true future of humanity, a shining beacon of light for the post-racial world.
Maybe this is a little crazy, but what if these are two ethnicities of U.S. white people? We have the Progressive super-ethnicity and the Conservative super-ethnicity. The Progressive super-ethnicity is defined by their rejection of ethnic markers; in fact, by their rejection of potentially anything that becomes uncool. The Conservative super-ethnicity, in the eyes of the Progressives, is practically a tribe of savages, like something King Leopold’s men might find while penetrating the Congo for rubber. Savage and backwards people that won’t change with the times. The quickest way with the Conservatives, I think, would be to put them in re-education camps, since they won’t willingly give up their backwards ways. And if they won’t willingly be educated, perhaps they can be put to work. Nothing before has stood in the way of progress, and nothing will now. Always forward, never back!
