Looking out over the rubble of our political system today, I’m reminded of a post from 2015, in which I argued that the political struggle of Right versus Left is not a contest of different policy preferences, but something far more basic, and more universal, even than human existence itself: the struggle against entropy, against things “running down”.
Take, for just one example, the current battle of nationalism vs. globalism — or, as David Goodheart framed it, of “Somewheres” vs. “Anywheres”.
A classic example of entropy is to put a drop of ink in a glass of water. For a little while, the ink sits there as a tiny dark spot in clear water — but come back the next day, and thermal diffusion has scattered the ink, and all that remains is a glass of slightly blue water. The original configuration is highly specific — the ink is here, and not there — while the end state is simply a random distribution. The important thing about this is that out of the uncountable trillions of possible states of ink-in-water, nearly all of them are indistinguishable random states. The initial, highly ordered condition of a bright blue drop in a glass of clear water is infinitesimally rare — and the inexorable tendency of every system in the Universe is to randomize, to decay, to “run down”. And so it is with everything interesting, valuable, or productive in the world.
The initial condition of the world in the modern era was like the drop of ink in the glass of water: distinct cultures, like drops of differently colored ink, in homelands scattered around the globe. In a bigger, slower, cooler world, such distinctness could persist, and until recent historical times it made the world a blooming garden of genuine diversity. It should be easy to see that ease of travel and instantaneous communication would naturally have a diffusing, entropic effect — but the current fetish for open borders and mass migration is entropy on methamphetamine. And who supports it? The Left, and militantly so. Who stands against it? The Right.
So I’m reposting, just below, a four-year-old item about all of this, entitled What Is The Right?. (It refers in turn to some earlier posts, but it stands up well enough without editing, I think.)
The point for today, as we survey the battlefield on the morrow of this astonishing presidential impeachment, is that there can be no compromise with decay.
* * * * * * *
In our last Open Thread, our resident liberal gadfly Peter, a.k.a. ‘The One Eyed Man’, left a comment citing the late Richard Hofstadter to the effect that the political Right (in particular, the “dissident” Right whose views are often summarized in these pages), exhibits a “paranoid style”.
Several of us responded in the ensuing discussion. But each time I read the original comment, and the Hofstadter passages it quotes, the more perfectly paradigmatic it all seems of the unreflective perceptual biases of the Left.
In particular, where the analysis goes off the rails is in the way that it mischaracterizes the traditionalist Right’s view of the Left in this conflict of ideologies:
“The enemy [i.e., as cited here, the influential man of the Left] is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed, he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way.”
But this is not how those of us on the dissident Right see this at all. Correctly understood, the core features of modern Leftism are not an exogenous historical anomaly, brought about by the individual will of aberrant masterminds to “deflect the normal course of history”, but are instead an entirely predictable social and historical force, perfectly consistent with a coherent understanding of human nature and the pitfalls of democracy. A movement toward the Left, and ultimately toward despotism and collapse, is the “normal course” of history, in exactly the same way that the “normal course” of a river is to run downhill.
Indeed, the phenomenon is even more general than either history or human nature: in conformance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is in fact a manifestation of entropy — of the wearing down of complex and specific structures, the destruction of the particular in favor of the general, and the relentless erosion of all of the gradients, distinctions, and disequilibria that are the only possible source of usable energy, and therefore useful work, in any system.
The ‘One Eyed Man’ quotes, as an example of right-wing “paranoia”, our commenter Whitewall’s likening of the Left to “termites, roaches, bed bugs, ticks, mold, radon’. But these comparisons are more than an expression of simple revulsion: all of these things are agents of decay, of disorder (in radon’s case, the actual decay of atoms themselves). In this way, Whitewall’s remark reveals an implicit understanding of the Left as, above all, an entropic historical force.
So: if the Right seems Manichaean, it is because the Right correctly perceives its role not as one side in a contest between two equally contingent, and arbitrarily chosen, approaches to government, but rather as a bulwark against entropy itself: against disorder, decay, and the “heat death” of the civilization it seeks to defend. Hofstadter’s emphasis (like Peter’s) is on political compromise, and to this he owes his reputation as a level-headed centrist. But the historically literate Right understands that any compromise with entropy is ultimately futile, because all such compromises are necessarily a unidirectional movement toward greater disorder. (We understand also, to our sorrow, that disorder always wins in the end — but to preserve what we can, for as long as we can, clearly requires nothing less than our best efforts.)
None of this is to say, of course, that there aren’t clever, charismatic, and extremely dangerous people on the Left, with resentful or self-serving motives and destructive intentions. But they are specific, particular, contingent phenomena — opportunistic infections. The focus of the reactionary Right, on the other hand, is on a universal, natural process, by which order yields to disorder; the political Left is merely its aspect in human societies.
9 Comments
I think its very important to separate Conservatism (which is a temperamental disposition) from Rightism which is particular ontology.
Conservatism is a temperamental approach to life strongly linked to traits associated with anxiety and its avoidance.
Rightism is ontology which asserts there is a reality which must be taken into account with. The reason why conservatism is now more accepting of transgenderism is because it’s not novel anymore and has gradually been institutionalised. Rightists can’t accept transgenderism because the sexes ARE polar, no matter how “established” it is.
Rightism insists on a calibration with reality, conservatism aims at a slow and gradual change to avoid provoking anxiety.
slumlord,
We could say that modern-day conservatism is just the little man at the back of the parade, sweeping up after the animals.
And yes, as Michael Oakeshott so clearly explained, conservatism is certainly a temperamental disposition; a favoring of tried and familiar things because they are tried and familiar (and because, as Burke told us at length, because the tried and familiar and traditional embody distilled wisdom that no man could deduce on his own). But I do think that traditional conservatism does also entail belief in some sort of ontological bedrock – what Russell Kirk described as “Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.”
Such decay does not occur in nature because the whip hand of natural selection keeps it in check, culling degraded organisms with the enthusiasm of New York muggers eliminating excessively liberal college co-eds.
The modern welfare state holds natural selection at bay, allowing genetic and memetic mutations to proliferate until society becomes too hobbled to maintain a welfare state. Then we arrive at full socialism, also known as a cannibal holocaust.
Customs and traditions do not arise ex nihlo. At one point there was a good reason for their origination. The problem with a temperamental conservatism is that it is unthinking and is intuited more than understood. When the conditions which originated these customs change there needs to be change, but it’s at this very moment that the temperamental conservative stops it. The problem here is that there is an unthinking acceptance of the practice instead of understanding the reason for the custom. There is no understanding only the familiarity of habit and the comfort of repetition.
Unless the change is slow, then this type of conservative gradually accepts it. This is why salami tactics are so successful with this type. Try to change things rapidly and they will resist, do it slowly and they will champion them. Gay Marriage is now a Traditional Value. The lack of understanding is THE feature of the conservative. They’re not called the stupid party for nothing.
This is why Chesterton’s Fence is so important. Change or removal of custom is permitted for a good reason. But the underlying principle is an understanding of the relationship of the custom to the situation.
An understanding of the transcendent is important but that is frequently of function of God’s grace and, in case you haven’t noticed, lots of of people are giving up on it. A more practical principle is the belief in the empirical. Truth is the underlying principle of the man of the Right. Habit, the conservative.
slumlord,
Forgive me, sir, but your model of all this is far too binary. Customs and traditions do not come from nowhere, but they don’t arise from some individual savant suddenly grasping Truth, either. They are distillations, over generations and centuries, of the experience of countless individual lives, and so they embody interlocking truths that are too subtle, obscure, and complex for any individual to explicate. To imagine that the only authentic man of the Right is one who has the brainpower to see and explicate all the “reasons” for an ancient tradition, and to adjudicate its truth, is to imagine a man that never lived, and never will.
The tendency of the Right is toward order. The temperamental tendency of the conservative is, as you say, to prefer the familiar, the tried and true, to innovation for its own sake, and so, yes, he is far more likely to accommodate gradual change — “salami tactics” — than sudden. But at the heart of this disposition is the understanding that, because the truths embodied in time-tested folkways and institutions are beyond what any of us can fully explicate, change of any kind will have complex and unpredictable effects, and so deserves a wary eye and a slow hand. There is a great deal of overlap between the two.
Malcolm
But at the heart of this disposition is the understanding that, because the truths embodied in time-tested folkways and institutions are beyond what any of us can fully explicate
Respectfully, that’s not conservatism that’s traditionalism. The whole idea that tradition is somehow beyond reason and yet embodying a truth makes tradition transcendent.
A man of the Right does not worship tradition he respects it, seeing it as a repository of knowledge that in some instances may have been contingent upon circumstances. He is a small “t” traditionalist. Understanding tradition he is able to change it while preserving its integrity, something a traditionalist cannot do since “Tradition” is beyond understanding. As Jaroslav Pelikan said:
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”
This is why a quest for the truth is so important, as it is THE predicate of tradition. Understand what the tradition is pointing at and you can understand why the tradition is there and what it points to. Fail to do so and you can misapply the tradition.
The German Army would train its officers to respect its military traditions(i.e. tactics) but expected them to break them if they would cost them victory. Simply applying the rules in circumstances which our ancestors could not have foreseen is a recipe for failure and goes a long way towards explaining the failure of conservatism.
I think we are getting rather to the point of hair-splitting over terminology here.
The conservative knows that traditions contain more truth and wisdom and experience than any one person can unpack and explicate, but this is not to say that they are “beyond reason” in the sense that none of what they contain can be reasonably explicated, or even that they contain any particular truth that couldn’t in principle be brought to light.
The whole point of an idea such as Chesterton’s Fence is that there are in traditions discoverable truths, and that if we are able to get at them for rational consideration, only then should we consider ourselves sufficiently informed to make prudent changes.
We can agree, I think, that a slavish devotion to all tradition, in the belief that all its wisdom is otherwise ungraspable and inaccessible, is foolish; but I would also say that to make such small-mindedness the hallmark of a “conservative”, as opposed to a properly “traditionalist” man of the Right, is off the mark, and serves nothing but a desire to make a pettifogging distinction where none is needed.
and serves nothing but a desire to make a pettifogging distinction where none is needed.
Well, I wish that were the case but unfortunately my own studies into the subject lead me to that conclusion, hair splitting IS important and glossing over the finer points IS the reason why the Right has been on a continual losing streak over the past century. Trads have effectively stopped the necessary innovations to combat the Left, and “conservatives” have co-opted the Right and pulled it toward the Left. National Socialism for example, is a prime example of a Left wing ideology that co-opts right wing people because people judge on appearances and not substance. They are unable to see the distinctions which put in the Left’s camp and sometimes it does come down to splitting hairs. The conceptual ambiguity of the Right is, in my opinion, its Achilles heel and placing its foundation in “conservatism” or “traditionalism” is wrong.
As for “order”, I’m not sure that that’s a foundational principle. North Korea is a pretty ordered society as was the Soviet Union but they were in no way “Right” societies. North Korea seems to be doing quite well from an Entropic view.
Truth, my friend is where the money’s at.
Peace.
slumlord,
The Right has been on a losing streak over the past century (and more) because entropy never sleeps, and the Right sometimes does. And for lots of other other reasons too.
But not for lack of hairsplitting about the words “conservative” and “traditionalist”. I realize everybody needs a hobby, but really, that’s the least of our problems.