Postmodernism for neoreactionaries: the deconstruction of the West

The writing on the wall is beginning to make itself visible. ISIS continues to operate in Iraq, requiring some kind of military intervention, but America knows Iraq, and we do not want to go there again. There may be wars fought by volunteers and mercenaries, but there will never be another draft. The history book has already been written, and its reflection back onto internal American politics is on its way, as Adam Curtis suggests in Bitter Lake.

To understand what comes next, though, we must first reflect on the general pattern that has brought us here. It seems that many on the Internet who are close to the correct persuasion are still convinced of a conspiracy led by a "cathedral" or this kind of mental construct. In fact, what we are witnessing is not a conspiracy, but a deconstruction.

This is Jacques Derrida's adaption of Heidegger's use of the word Destruktion. It does not mean the denial that language has meaning, but rather the (uncertain) denial that meaning has certainty. Where Heidegger desired to root out our false sense of certainty, Derrida declared that there need not be any writer to do the destroying; as his pomo buddies declare, "the text deconstructs itself." To dumb it down to everyday language, deconstruction tells us that text never tells us the "whole truth"; but more correctly, text is never whole but always implies an absence. If that sounds terrifying, it's because it is. Even the children of poststructuralism desire an escape from Derrida. They imagine they can "use" analysis as a weapon against "Eurocentric authority". They are possessed by the illusion that they are not being used themselves.

For example, the Norwegian academic Thomas Hylland Eriksen was cited as a conspirator by neoreactionary sources, because of this comment he made:

Our most important task ahead is to deconstruct the majority, and we must deconstruct them so thoroughly that they will never be able to call themselves the majority again.

Please remember your philosophy when you read quotes like this. Eriksen wants to say that we need to destroy, or dismantle, the majority; the second half of the sentence makes this obvious. But he says "deconstruct" instead, because it sounds nicer. Why does it sound nicer? Because it means something different, and in fact its real meaning contradicts the sense he uses it in. "We" do not do deconstruction. The text deconstructs itself; the role of a writer in a deconstruction is to observe and mourn with a bit of melancholy, not to cheer on. If "we" have an intellectual "task" then we are still doing Thomist heresy-hunting, and we still believe (really?) that philosophers lead the masses around by the nose. So Eriksen is abusing language. He has not truly seen the world-changing consequences of Heidegger's voluntarism, let alone Derrida's removal of agency from the equation. He's really just making "deconstruct" into a euphemism for the most banal sense of "destroy."

And of course people see what he's saying, and even though Eriksen really has no say in it, you get reactionaries who don't want to be destroyed--sometimes exceedingly violent ones. But Eriksen is not a conspirator, he's just incompetent. Those kids on Utøya were not conspirators either, because there is no conspiracy. The West is being deconstructed, regardless of what anyone wants to happen. Meaning remains, but not certainty. When terrorists are in control of Syria, it is still meaningful that we are bombing them, but we do not need analysts to tell us that bombing provides no certainty that peace can be restored, and as we listen to the platitudes of Obama, Cameron, and Hollande, we can watch a grand narrative automatically deconstructing itself.

A mini-deconstruction. In 2008 we elected Obama on a platform of "change", because we were hungry for the change that we believed to offer unambiguous new possibilities for happiness. (At the time, if it can be believed, people denied that there was a racial element in this.) And we elected him on a platform of "hope," because we were already uncertain. The common phrase is "hope against all odds," not "hope in accordance with the odds." And that was eight years ago. How's that hopey-changey stuff working out for ya? Are you feeling more hopeful about the state of the world after 2015? Poor whites aren't. Do you have hope when Obama talks about "red lines," and feel confident about what happens when they're crossed? And that change, too! Are you delighted by the changes Obama has wrought in the Levant and the resulting enormous displacement of families and loss of livelihood? Change!

But what would you put in place of Obama, my radical friends? Communism? The deconstruction of that idea is already done. We have seen how it relies on the concepts of bourgeoise and proletariat, and how it becomes incoherent in the face of the uncertainty over who is who in the real world. Noninterventionist libertarianism? Sure, let's see how that goes when the economy starts shrinking. Neoreactionary monarchism? And who will be king? But what else is there? Well, there's Trump.

Not necessarily Trump himself, but someone like him. Regardless of who wins this year's election, political operatives must have already taken note of Trump's popularity, and kept it in mind for future elections. A pattern is being established, and it will take hold. Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, volume 2:

In the form of democracy, money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming — the Caesar men. Before them the money collapses. The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race” springs forth, pure and irresistible — the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now on, new destinies in the style of the pre-Culture time are possible afresh, and visible to the consciousness without cloaks of causality. . . .
The liberal bourgeois mind is proud of the abolition of censorship . . . but it is precisely this that smooths the path for the coming Caesars of the world press. Those who have learned to read succumb to their power, and the visionary self-determination of Late democracy issues in a thoroughgoing determination of the people by the powers whom the printed word obeys.

Look, dear readers! Here he is, standing before us sunburned as the polls open in Iowa, taking no money but his own, his every word a goldmine for the press, a true Caesar after Spengler's heart. We hope against hope that he is just a passing entertainment, the idol of elderly and dying whities. But he won't go away. He will win votes and remain at the podiums in March, making us ever more uncomfortable. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush cower against our critiques, but our words hold no power over him, and he will not go away. The year goes on, Hillary wins, but uncertainty reigns. And the passing of years, and the deconstruction. Bombs drop somewhere in the global South; Europe weakens; urgent press conferences are held; we listen, and we want to believe, we really do, but the words ring hollow, and we try and try but the center cannot hold. And come the Bonapartes and Caesars. They can't come fast enough. The writing, as I have said, is on the wall.

Next week: The Californian ideology

Mencius Moldbug’s Little Army of Independent Thinkers

“He thought I was criticising the cathedral when I was doing the contrary. I was criticising the Modernists or upholders of relativity in religion, who say that our faith about fundamental things must always be expanding and evolving and changing. And I said that, if we adopted that principle, there was really no reason why we should build permanent religious buildings at all.”

—G.K. Chesterton, 1925

I’m not disturbed when I see a stupid argument on the Internet. I’m disturbed when I see a lot of assent to it, and no one pointing out how stupid it is.

For many years Mencius Moldbug maintained a blog devoted to proving progressives wrong. But he never actually put it that way. Instead of saying progressives were wrong, he more often said that they were “religious” people pretending to be secular, minions of a worldview that he dubbed “the Cathedral.” In other words, he had before him a vast array of choices for criticizing the enemy, any number of terms from the extensive reading he seems to have done, and he went out of his way to choose the most incomprehensible and self-contradictory language possible.

Many other groups have applied religious terminology to secular society, persuasively arguing that the secular is merely an extension of the religious. We have all heard of “the patriarchy,” a term chosen because secular oppressors, like religious patriarchs, are men. We all use the term “the Establishment,” so chosen because secular powers, like the old established churches, were handed their institutional authority and power before we got here and are therefore possibly illegitimate. You may notice already that this is a somewhat ill company to be keeping.

Although Moldbug refers briefly to the bad guys as “our 20th-century version of the established church” at one point, in fact the word “establishment” would become jarring if he used it more often, because he believes that an ideal nation-state is stable and avoids being reconstructed by each generation. Obviously, calling leftists the “patriarchy” would not work either.

But why “cathedral”? In the feminist utopia, there would be no literal patriarchs, and in the hippie utopia (which steadily slouches towards realization) there would be no more established churches—so in Moldbug’s utopia, will we be knocking down all the actual cathedrals? I assume not, as he writes that “all buildings from the 18th century are treasures.” Well, then, if he likes the architecture, what exactly makes cathedrals so objectionable? Wouldn’t he be happier if there were more, not fewer, people who stood in awe in front of cathedrals? Is it possible that this guy who harps on so long about being more accurate than everyone else doesn’t care about the language he’s using to describe his political opponents?

Moldbug’s sole attempt at taking the Cathedral metaphor seriously, in a post that he earnestly refers to as “a gentle introduction” to his blog, ratchets up the laughs. Here we learn that unlike an actual cathedral, “the Cathedral … has no central administrator,” although it does have an overload of clergy: “to the bishops of the Cathedral, anything that strengthens their influence is a good thing.” Well, actually, a cathedral only has one bishop, and indeed this bishop is its central administrator. The world’s bishops as a collective, and the regulatory system that they create, are generally known as the Catholic Church. Furthermore, although bishops leave their cathedrals once every few decades to hold a conclave in the Sistine Chapel, Moldbug imagines his Cathedral as a “conclave of bishops”; it seems to have become something of a multi-use space.

Having stretched his metaphor in an impressive number of unexpected directions, Moldbug proceeds to forget about it entirely, and when he returns to religion he has suddenly acquired an interest in Puritanism instead. Those who have read extensively from Moldbug's blog are probably familiar with his tendency to start working on a thought and suddenly set it aside, or to offer two mutually exclusive metaphors in the same post, bringing him closer to the style of Thomas Friedman than George Orwell.

Moldbug has already offered a definition of “church” which is too good not to quote: “an organization or movement which tells people how to think.” How it is that a “movement” manages to tell someone something is never explained, although it would seem quite crucial; historically, that was a fairly major problem for the actual Church. He moves along, defining the “Cathedral” as a type of “theocracy,” by which he means “rule by a movement which tells people how to think.” After starting to argue that Massachusetts Puritanism is responsible for all this somehow, he drifts away from that subject in order to talk more about “churches” in general. He eventually does return to the “Cathedral” idea, but now it is evidently no longer a mere “conclave of bishops,” for it is said to encompass a much grander “informal union of church and state” (“church” still being used to mean “a talking movement”). This post really does serve as a good introduction to Mencius Moldbug, but only unintentionally.

Out of Moldbug’s hundreds of spur-of-the-moment coinages and definitions, this is by far his most catchy and best-known, but it doesn’t make any sense. And this never comes up. Every page on Moldbug’s blog had an extensive letters column. That’s years and years of posts, thousands of chances for his readers to be redeemed. And what you see are rows of independent thinkers nodding their heads in assent. Yes, all academia and mainstream media are controlled, not by the Catholic Church—that would be silly—but by one of its regional authorities. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop and judges regional affairs, just like how the news media is leaderless and lacks any juridicial system. Amazing! It assumes for itself more authority than small village churches, so it needs to be destroyed, just like how the Puritans, who caused all the problems, destroyed the church hierarchy. At last we’ve figured out the perfect metaphor, why has no one struck on it before?

I assume some Christian neoreactionaries have called for a better term than “cathedral” at some point, but the people who actually use the term are almost never asked to explain why they have chosen that specific word for the phenomena they encounter in the world. It’s as if a group of radical leftists suddenly started referring to right-wing talk radio as the “Fourth International,” they never even discussed with each other why they were doing this, and no one felt bothered by this at all. From this we can see the quality independent thought that arises when you free yourself from the “churches” that “tell you how to think”.

Again, stupid rhetoric is not a problem, but stupid rhetoric that gets no criticism worries me. Referring to a leaderless body of people who disagree with you as a “cathedral” is not a rhetorical masterstroke—on the contrary, it reveals your argument to be an incoherent whine, and that you don’t care what language you use as long as it makes you sound like an underdog fighting the bad guys. Together we can crush the establishment, or the patriarchy, or the Christians or the Jews or whatever. And of course, you can argue about who is included in the “Cathedral,” but not about whether “Cathedral” is an appropriate term. As long as you don’t know the form your enemy is really taking, you will not be able to fight. Which is precisely what your enemy wants most.