Arcs, Not Systems, for Chronologically Grand Thinkers

Many people into alternative political philosophies will find themselves struggling to get specific in reference to what their long-term vision. It may sound counterintuitive, but this is because their vision of politics is chronologically grand, as opposed to chronologically shallow. It is actually people with shallow vision that may feel comfortable latching onto a particular -ism that fits the time exactly, but it has been my experience that with maturity and bigger picture thought, one becomes more inclined to a broader range of possibilities (especially during times of uncertainty), and one also finds themselves falling out of the side of every political dialog, completely incapable of being limited to the small ring of thought that has become the fleeting focal point for the short-term.

The chronologically grand thinkers imagine politics in the context of history, and see the future as having deep roots. They do their best to think beyond the epoch and the <current year>. The chronologically shallow throw themselves into the political flavors of the day, and bring everything back to a series of simple questions and answers about the real and the immediate. Their frame of reference is small, and it is hard to even seriously consider them in a grand context because their views are not serious enough to be thought of as immutable. They are the definition of ephemeral. We can imagine them getting on another bandwagon before the end of the decade.

The chronologically grand thinkers cannot name a specific system or ideology with precision if they still have doubts. This is a weakness, but also a strength, because it allows them to be open to potentialities. While being specific and calling your short is admirable, one of the more impressive political books I read, Dugin's Fourth Political Theory, is joyfully open to the future, and many of the other thinkers of the New Right have also been greatly open to the future. 

Moreover, it's also a humble gesture, viewing the future as something that they do not get to forge themselves, but as something that is still in the process of being born. 

Thus the chronologically grand dissident thinkers (1a) are just plain open to the future, and we tend to look at the rising head of a powerful movement which is reflective of our views as (1b) providential. Whether it is the restoration of a monarch, a military coup, a democratic victory, or an outright revolution, we can see ourselves adjusting our tastes to the zeitgeist, instead of making the times and reality be adjusted to our views. The spirit of the times, of course, should not necessarily be understood as the end of history or even a temporary end goal for a generation... It might not even be correct at all. But because it might be correct, at least for this time, we have to throw our muscles into it in order to try to create any kind of alternative. For the fact of the matter is that any movement which opens the door to change is more dynamic than the status quo which is by its very nature closed to change. 

Eye of Providence, by Anastasia Voynovska (available here)

Our individual preferences must be ready to change when anything that is remotely reflective of our alternative view comes along, and, moreover, those of us who believe in God may believe that the first major opportunity for change that we see is something that has been ordained by God. Of course, all things are ordained by God, the question is whether we are to benefit from it in terms of achieving a better reality through its success, or being punished by the bad idea, and achieving a better spiritual reality as a result of its failure. 

The chronologically grand thinker has to have the humility to accept that a great myriad of systems have been practiced, many of them with good results (at least for a time), and that the future can hold for a return of one of these systems, or a fusion of two or more of them. 

(2) Another major reason that we dislike labels is because everything that is dissident that becomes systemized seems unnecessary, potentially contentious, pretentious, and cringe. People without any political power or influence coming up with detailed visions are ultimately contributing only to their own sadness, and they come off as people who are not in touch with reality. Nobody wants to be led by someone who sounds far away from his goal, and nobody wants to follow someone that comes off only as a dreamer. 

Thus, it is actually be better to conceive of dissident political philosophies as having an 'Arc,' not necessarily a particular system. They have goals, and visions, and some may be surprisingly particular, butt even when they are, they should be open to change. 

This practice could even be a useful explanation for people trying to negatively characterize their opposition. E.g., 

• the Social Democrat has Marxist arc
• the Republican has a Fascist arc
• the Libertarian has an Anarchist arc 

Explaining your opponent's arc in negative terms and accusing them of secretly aiming for the marginalization or destruction of something that most people generally value is already one of the most common forms of political critique.It is also one of the most dangerous forms, because it dislodges people from their own frame of reference and imposes upon them a set of accusations that they now have to defend against. 

In the case of the dissident right, the accusations are predominant and so toxic that there's really no way to escape it other than denial, which has you chasing your tail like a dog, or through fully accepting the narrative with as little spin as possible, which basically just has you looking insane for you have accepted a conclusion that the rest o the country views as absurd. 

In conclusion, it is best to think of any set of political philosophies or values as potentially just a large arc toward a distant goal. Maybe not even an arc, but rather it functions just as an explanatory arc, in which there is no goal, but simply an observation about reality that you believe repeats or holds steady.

The arcs allow us to relate back to contemporary realities while maintaining contact with the bigger vision. For instance, if we say that we have an 'authoritarian right' arc, it could easily indicate that the local political party or candidate X will tend to get our vote, but the overall vision can be far more long-term and aimed at greater ends. We can participate and talk about chronologically soon politics in a way that makes sense to others without abandoning the grander vision that we may have. 

It also helps us understand how politicians actually compare standing next to each other, and how they may even have very exceedingly different arcs in spite of their short-term similarities. And it is also through this system that we can also have the benefit of being detached from overly rigid systems which would honestly only harm us -- being hyperfocused on a future that might not happen, and missing all of the potential benefits of the real future that is truly providential. 

There Is No Moral Progress

Introduction

The far social left, which have come to dominate a lot of public discourse and who we often refer to as "SJWs" and "wokescolds" and enjoy reaching for the word "bigot" and "Nazi" when anyone disagrees with them, often come off as the primary opponents of the Dissident Right, just like how the scientifically illiterate fundamentalist Christians and heartless robber baron capitalists and their corrupt political sprog are the primary opponents of the far left. But it's actually a bad habit for us to spend so much time with them. While some of the material we have of them is useful for trying to push people who straddle the center further right & galvanize our movement, the actual ideas we always have to deal with come from the progressive left humanists like Steven Pinker who are nuanced and can actually have a very tight argument. They aren't bad, either, and the arguments are perfectly reasonable, intelligently written, and have slick appeal.  

One of the issues with them, however, is that in a godless universe sans metaphysics, everything comes down to utilitarianism, which Fr. Seraphim Rose refers to as being ultimately nihilistic. Nihilistic in the literal sense that there is no acknowledgment of a greater moral authority, and everything hinges around forming some public consensus of how to give the greatest good to the greatest number. Because no good can be pointed to beyond what is the most obvious, and the second we begin talking about what the good is everyone begins to disagree because our visions are so radically different, the arguments generally focus on reducing the bad, which is usually more obvious. 

After all, many things feel good which are not good, and many people debate how good things really are, whether we are talking about a strict work life-to-work balance or eggs, but we can all agree that someone throwing acid in the face of a stranger is bad -- an example I remember Sam Harris using when questioned by a sharp philosophy student in the UK. Atheist ethical systems are ultimately constructed from what is most obviously evil, and hopes to branch off of this until we can come up with some public concept of good. 

Sam Harris is famous for making really basic arguments to large audiences. It's a mystery how he has become a spokesperson for secular humanism. 

So, all of morality is reduced to avoidance of what is agreed upon as bad, and moral progress is the trend in history of the world to generally improve. 

Their vision of moral progress generally all comes down to the following:

Moral progress is the reduction of pain and suffering. 

• There is less pain and suffering because of progressive policies which focus on reducing this.
• Premodern governments were ignorant (at best) and morally reprehensible (at worst) were illiberal and based on superstitions.
• We must have progressive secular humanist governments that focus on reducing pain and suffering, thus are decidedly intersectional, secular, and socialist.

In addition to these arguments, there is also one smuggled in assumption that never gets talked about: the universal moral equality of all individuals, and the general disregard for groups. Individuals have rights, and groups are artificial constructs. 

There's a lot of shying away of what this could ever mean for groups. Even the primal human inclination is to look out for one's family first and foremost, then one's tribe and broader community, we have to take away this kind of thinking because the bottom immediately falls out from this concept of the moral. When we can question where it is important to primarily reduce pain and suffering and become specific, we start taking the globalist-humanist basis of this out of the framework it has to be understood in & open up a different box of questions and ideas. The whole plot is lost because we all are now thinking in terms of our own benefit and our own group before others, and we begin to see the world as a competition of groups with differing systems to acquire the means to reduce suffering, and we think in terms of hierarchy and competition. This idea could be expanded upon, but that would be another essay. 

Is Moral Progress Really Just Less Pain & Suffering

The statement is rational in the sense that no person is going to say that I do not believe that the reduction of pain and suffering is moral.

However, this is simply not the right way to measure morality, because:

i. some virtue is acquired through elements of pain and suffering. To learn discipline, we sacrifice leisure and laxity.
ii. some pain and suffering is deserved. Men who commit murders that now feel the pain of isolation in jail are receiving a just desert.
iii. some pain and suffering is caused entirely by amoral agents and has no moral quality to it. Thus, some questions of pain and suffering are no longer in the scope of a discussion on morality.
iv. morality just generally transcends pleasure. The right thing is not measured ever by what feels good, but by what is in concordance with what is beneficial to the growth of people and provides the greatest cosmic outcome. Pleasure may be the just reward for moral action, but the joy from self-satisfaction at having done the right thing is a stark contrast with the hedonist's pleasure.
v. some reductions in pain and suffering flies in the face of moral progress. Indeed, there are papers that argue that even things like child smut can reduce the instances of actual victimization of children (Science Daily).

Less Pain & Suffering Is a General Improvement

The reduction of pain and suffering is not always even a moral concern, and sometimes the reduction of pain and suffering can come at the cost of morality, such as the example of smut potentially reducing sexual violence and assault. Surely, nobody would argue that increased consumption of that stuff is a moral good, at best it would be morally neutral (like everything should theoretically be treated in the atheist universe), but it would be hard to argue that a man who logs onto the internet to view women doing degrading things is involved in a moral act.

Less pain and suffering is nearly always desirable, and thus can be conceptualized as a general improvement. For instance, better technology and warnings that results in people being safer from hurricanes is a great improvement, but it does not really have that much in the way of "moral progress" in the sense that nobody killed by a hurricane is being killed by an evil agent. It is tragedy and pain in the same way that any other untimely death is that cannot be blamed on some agent acting nefariously.

I would hesitate to even refer to any of this as progress. Progress always implies a path toward something, and while many things can be imagined to have a desired end like less pain and suffering, morality is not something that we progress to because it is something which is not worked toward or progressively understood, but timeless and beyond man.

Morality Has No Dimension of Progress

What is right is always right. Obviously, different times produce different circumstances, and the good may not align exactly with the terms of those circumstances. For instance, the concepts of "serf," "slave," "sharecropper," "nobi," "Brahmin," "warrior," are not universal, nor do they necessarily extend across time. Yet, when the terms are even accounted for and we think about the principles of right and wrong, we can apply the general virtues to specific situations and come to conclusions.

Because we are not God, there will always be disagreements on the priorities of the virtues and sometimes even what these virtues are. However, it still remains generally agreeable that we can condemn a cruel slave master in the 1st century BC because their cruelty is universally abhorred. We can also condemn a kind slave master for maintaining someone as a slave, and yet, we can also see some people perhaps venture forth with the argument that a master who keeps his slave living in good conditions -- conditions relatively better to the majority of free citizens -- is even doing well by the same universal measure of what is good.

The good is not relative to us -- we are simply relative to the good. Moreover, our inability to precisely articulate or even know the good is not proof of its non-existence, just as how the inability of the Egyptians in the year 2,000 BC to construct airplanes is not evidence against airplanes. If man were to have been wiped out by an asteroid before we ever invented airplanes, it would not mean that heavier-than-air flying machines were ever impossible just because sentient life never developed them. It would merely mean that it remained unknown by man. The good is real whether or not we know it, and whether or not it is knowable. 

There's Less Pain & Suffering Because of Technology

People mistakenly believe that things like the liberation of women, of serfs, of slaves, etc., were all accomplished by men becoming moral giants and realizing some profound truth.

It's completely the opposite.

Man develops the technology to transition out of a previous organization of labor, and then he declares that the old organization of labor was bad, and he forgets the reason such an organization of labor existed in the first place but pretends it existed due to prejudice or hatred. In reality, these forms of labor existed like this because it was the most efficient division of labor, and just as the people then thought of themselves as the end point of history and could not imagine much beyond them, some of them took up the pen and wrote about how this may be the best that it can get.

Because we live in an era that looks like this, we have decided that we created the best institutions, and not that the technology created the institutions that are normal to us. We think our authorship over the current era to be greater than what it actually is.

The general improvement to all man's lots is the result of

- modern medicine
- electricity
- mass production
- mass surveillance resulting in greater accountability
- greater rates of education. 

Through these developments, we have reached a heightened state of material improvement that has reorganized a labor and daily life to be free of the deprivation and lack of surveillance that used to fill life with a lot of suffering we do not know now. Our morality has now matched these expectations. Less desperate people means less crime. Less extreme master/slave relationships make it so less sociopaths are able to have vast amounts of people at their whim. It also means that more sociopaths are observed, and more sociopaths are choosing rich fantasy lives over actual crimes or other various means to scratch their devilish itch because the chances of being caught are exponentially greater with modern technology. 

Because everything has been restructured to match where technology is, our sensitivity to certain things has changed. Because the state can be a father to a bastard, we no longer think particularly ill of the unwed mothers. Because of the anonymity of urban centers and how even rural people no longer really know their neighbors, the personal vices of man are not just things that we tolerate, but they are things that we are encouraged to completely and totally ignore. 

These things appear to be an advancement of morality because they match the living conditions which correlate with less pain and suffering to us. However, people who believe in God or virtue recognize that this is an incomplete view of morality. There is no moral progress for all of society because morality happens at a fundamentally individual level where our intentions are being measured. 

The closest thing to universal moral progress would be nothing more than providing a greater basis for education which happens to result in a greater amount of individuals attaining a higher moral state. However, one could say that the education of previous generations, which occurred in far more impoverished conditions, actually had another layer to them because of the poverty. If poverty and the threat of starvation, if close communities and large families, tend to produce greater sensitivity to the needs of others and, through humility and selflessness, make humans more inclined to prosocial moral behavior, it could even be the case that those who have access to all of the benefits of modern education but none of the above may actually morally regress. 

Still, we should ultimately never think of things in the framework of moral progress because morality is about the will and intention of individuals, and the second that we remove morality from this context it no longer makes as much sense. Thus, it is safe to say, moral progress does not exist, and the ingredients for moral progress might even be significantly different from what we would normally expect. 

Narrative Thinking

While listening to the Reformed Christian thinker James Whites (somewhere in the second half of this) he mentioned that there are two ways that people interact with ideas...

The first he called narrative thinking, which is characterized by people who just see an event happening -- such as the Coronavirus -- and now all of their thoughts on both things immediately connected to it and more abstract ideas are understood through this lens.

James White

The second he actually just called slow thinking (a blunder but he was perhaps coming up with this off the top of his head), but it really should just be understood as philosophy. We can simply call it philosophy because it focuses on finding the truth independent of the events that are happening and with the big picture in mind.

Narrative thinking is basically a mistake. It's playing with a deck that doesn't have enough cards because it is basically not considering the problem in its totality, but only as it stands in the present. A good example of this that many Westerners learn is the Treaty of Versailles, being regarded as far too damning and punishing to the Germans and thus immediately setting the grounds for another war.

Many politicians also think in terms of narratives -- everything is about the immediate problems that constituents face, and it is never good enough to have a long timeline for success in most circles. Few people want to wait months or years for a benefit, let alone decades, and so people look to the most immediate way to create change, even though these chances may fit poorly into metahistory. 

This is why, in one sense, a crisis is the very worst time for people to begin thinking about what has to be done. They are no longer thinking soberly, but thinking of this specific narrative and nothing else. In a sense, it is not unlike making a decision in a state of duress.

Anyone who thinks about politics or important events through the lens of what is immediately happening, not through the broader picture of what will happen in 100 years and what happened 100 years prior, is a menace to public discourse.