Here’s one of the best essays Moldbug has published in a long time: The Cathedral or the Bizarre. In it he revisits the foundations of what, way back in Chapter 4 of his Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives (2008), he first called “the Cathedral”: the curiously coordinated institutions of journalism and academia that seem to control nearly all of public communication, policy, and ideology. (If you’ve never read Moldbug, the Open Letter , starting here, or the Gentle Introduction, here — in which he introduces the metaphor of the “red pill” in it’s now-common political sense — are good places to begin.)
Moldbug’s theme hasn’t changed since he began writing: a call for unitary sovereignty, i.e. monarchy. Never in my lifetime has the idea seemed so attractive, or the fatal liabilities of “democracy” so self-evident.
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If the current US were to pick a monarch, who would it be? Probably Michelle Obama.
Why pick her, when we have Kamala?
But yes, your point is taken – all this is fine in the abstract, but even if we wanted to make this transition, how on earth would we get there?
I’d be just as happy with (among other things) a clean “factory settings” reboot of the entire US government, limited suffrage, the utter demolition of Washington DC, and a centrifugal return of most local sovereignty to the states. But that isn’t happening either, anytime soon.
Pretty soon, in desperation, people will begin to demand “State’s Rights” or more accurately State’s Powers. The dysfunctional mash pit that is DC will soon seize up. Maybe time to resurrect the 9th and 10th Amendments in our Bill of Rights to learn why they were written.
Link to Gentle Introduction is missing in the original post.
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/
Thanks, Peter, I have fixed the link.
(Thanks for catching that – I turned 66 last week, and I understand that link-insertion is one of the first things to go as the faculties decline.)
Malcolm, and it gains speed from there
I hope we can still be monarchists, but I don’t know. I think a monarch needs the Mandate of Heaven and I’m not sure we really believe in the Divine anymore.
Can you imagine a non-religious crowning of a monarch? Secular ceremony is the most tooth-grindingly boring, empty tedium imaginable. (E.g., high school graduations).
I don’t think a Protestant Christian coronation would cut if for me either.
I wonder if modernity (technology, secularism, hubris) has erected an “Iron Dome” over us such that we are no longer capable of perceiving the transcendent. And it’s too long to discuss here, but I really don’t consider Protestant Christianity to be authentic Christian praxis and creed. It’s a pale shadow of the Christianity of Imperial Rome and Byzantium and the Medieval period. And frankly, even in the modern iterations of the Apostolic faith–the Catholic and Orthodox Churches–a lot of internal contradictions are piling up. Long story short, the Church has done a lot of craven things in servility to the secular State and has done nothing to care for her flock other than exhort them to individual pieties.
And so, at the age of 58, I find myself something I haven’t been in over 30 years: irreligious. I’m still baptized; I could start attending Church again and get out the prayer books and icons and keep the fasts and follow the praxis again, but I really don’t care to these days. I’ve got no answers.
It seems that Curtis Yarvin is one of those people whose influence grows with time. He was interviewed by Tucker Carlson recently.
AG,
The same critique applies to the American system, which is a point I’ve hammered at for a while now: without a transcendent origin for natural law and natural rights, the whole theory of the Founding falls down.
I agree also, and have also been saying for years, that our rejection of the transcendent is a catastrophe for Western civilization.
But why should the failings of the culture, or even the Church, make you irreligious?
Hey Malcolm. Thanks for the comment. Good point about the Founding.
But why should the failings of the culture, or even the Church, make you irreligious?
This is more properly the subject of a long essay with a number of personal details and we may want to correspond by e-mail. Cursory, conclusory version: Christianity, which is the only religious faith I’ve ever practiced, has stumbled in my opinion very badly, to the point that I question its self-proclaimed universality. But I don’t know another way to do religious praxis. Maybe I make one up. Never thought I’d be in this position at my age.
Honestly, I really don’t get the guy’s appeal. To me he comes off as flippant and shallow, the typical contrarian who like all of his breed constantly ignores the obvious in his limitless zeal to bulldoze others intellectually. And my goodness, how verbose! Jacques Barzun, the late great cultural historian, would be ripping into him. “Just be simple and direct, for God’s sake!” But then you’re one of the sharpest minds I know Malcolm and you appreciate him greatly, so perhaps it’s my limitation.
Anyway, to his essay. Dubious in my mind – although like any theoretical it cannot be irrevocably refuted – is Yarvin’s assumption in his peroration that monarchy is inherently superior to democracy because the former has been much more constant in history. Well, so what? The same could be said for grinding poverty or any other number of evil perennials that we’ve managed to largely transcend in the West. It’s harder to be free than to be unfree, no question, but then does that mean we should prefer the latter? Quick question for the Yarvin acolytes, the neo-integralists, the reactionaries, and other such fellow travelers, who so often dwell in abstractions. Be honest please: Would you rather live in (fill in the blank: St. Louis France, Francoist Spain, etc.) or in the admittedly flawed Western democracies of today? Choose! Since 95 percent in real life would prefer modern times without blinking (to the other five, well, good for you) it demonstrates how so much of this type of conversation strays towards the unreachable, gnostic ideal rather than the concrete.
He’s also missing the evolution of the human story, of change – new realities and developments in the modern (post-modern) age of nations, which are quite distinct from the ancient period, certainly republican/imperial Rome. It seems to me if we want to look at the track record of monarchy, or perhaps better put benign despotism, we should look to more recent epochs, say the 20th/21st century. The picking are rather meager here, I’d say, of dishes that are really appealing or even edible, although to be sure they are there for those seeking them. At the top of my head I suppose one could point to a few mainly interwar regimes in Europe (and postwar ones in Asia) that not coincidentally were relatively small and mostly homogenous, indeed often Hapsburg where you can find a salutary synthesis of liberalism and authoritarianism-Pilsudski in Poland maybe or Schuschnigg in Austria-or if you really want to be daring Horthy of Hungary or Salazar of Portugal (Note how the current darling of the Right, Orban, also presides over a former Habsburg possession. Actually, I’ll readily admit that a restoration of someone like this guy in a federated Visegrad 4 wouldn’t be a bad thing and could do some good. But then such a proposal is historical, realistic, modest, rather than building castles in the sky.)
Beside this small sample are the endless forms of tyrannies and totalitarianisms we all know from our history books, not to mention from a click of the mouse on the Internet. Want to adopt some technocracy? China shows a great example right now of how that can go really, really wrong in Shanghai. And needlessly to say, most leaders are going to be less like Augustus and more like a certain Russian SOB currently pummeling Ukraine.
None of this is to take away from Yarvin’s more sensible observation, that classical liberalism is in a bad way right now (although he’s away to sanguine about democracy’s achievements: the post World War II years in the West were especially grand times to live in). Yet some dramatic use of techne, or the other oft-discussed scenario of revolution and ethnic cleansing, are not the ways to go. The drawbacks are just too great. The only way out is through, of resisting the Cathedral through laborious, perseverant, democratic means. And it can be done, after all: pace Yarvin, ideas actually do challenge structures. A lone Florida judge was able to end mask mandates on planes; governors in the same state and Virginia are facing down the more extreme forms of wokeness.
In the reference about interwar regimes in Europe, I should have written “formerly” Hapsburg of course.
Jason,
I’m not sure if I have standing to answer your question to the (neo) reactionaries and fellow travelers. I found Moldbug’s writing interesting, and often hilarious and insightful, but sometimes full of contradictions and fallacies of ambiguity. I am a member of a Unitarian Universalist church, so I sometimes call myself a “cuckreactionary”.
As Spandrell says, neoreaction is an analysis movement, not an activist movement. Everything is on the table, including monarchy. Where/when would I like to live? I don’t know enough about the countries and times in question to answer that specifically, and I expect there are a thousand confounding variables that would make these comparisons very difficult, but…. I know I wouldn’t want to live in Atlanta during Sherman’s march, or in antebellum “Bloody Kansas”. I wouldn’t want to live in Haiti during the Haitian genocide, which American race hustlers seem intent on reproducing here. I wouldn’t want to live in France during the French Revolution, or anywhere in Europe during the Napoleonic wars. Klemens von Metternich said, “Every time I hear the word, ‘democracy’, I know a bloodbath is coming.”
What I really want is the American polity of my childhood back. If you asked for permission to do something, people would often reply, “It’s a free country.” Nobody talks like that anymore. Like Malcolm, looking at the modern US, I find myself asking, “Where did this all go wrong?” Moldbug usually traces his root causes back to the English Civil War, which I think is somewhat arbitrary, but not a particularly bad answer.
There was an ancient Greek writer, Polybius, whom I haven’t read, but who supposedly wrote that civilizations tend to cycle through four systems of government, spending a couple of centuries with each before switching to the next. There are apparently several different kinds of moral capital that different systems of government consume and regenerate at different rates. As with medieval agriculture, you have to rotate your crops or the soil will be depleted of some critical resource or another. From that standpoint, maybe democracy was fine at first, but maybe American democracy has now reached its sell-by date.
Another thing that Spandrell says is that we need a new religion. If the US is a democracy, I want to know what religion the median voter adheres to. If the US is going to be a monarchy, I want to know what religion the king adheres to. There was a T. S. Elliot snippet that is sometimes used as a rebuke to libertarians and other systematizers like Moldbug:
“They constantly try to escape / from the darkness outside and within / by dreaming of systems so perfect / that no one will need to be good.”
“Religion” is what tells us what we need to do in order to be “good”. Sometimes Moldbug writes about Progressivism as a religion, and quotes Carlylse as saying, “Government cannot be conducted by steam.” But other times he gets autistic and tries to invent a system that will function well independently of religion. This is one of his contradictions, and is a major weakness of his writing, in my view. Instead of talking about democracy vs. monarchy, maybe we should be re-thinking the relationship between politics and religion. If we define “religion” broadly enough to be a useful concept, is separation of church and state even possible?
I’m looking to Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke to reboot Christianity.
By the way, you write of “flawed Western democracies”. Is the modern US a democracy? Yarvin says it is a “theocratic oligarchy”. Moldbug’s writings were inconsistent. Sometimes he said that what’s wrong with the US is democracy, and sometimes he said the US isn’t a democracy. We desperately need some “rectification of names” here.
Thanks for these thoughtful comments.
First of all, let me say this about Moldbug; some seem to think he’s an infallible oracle, but that’s asking too much of anyone. I see him as a highly intelligent and curious person, with a knack for writing, who started out with a sense that things were going badly, wanted to understand why, and what the possible alternatives might be, went very deeply down some big and important rabbit-holes, and came back to describe what he’d found. Most importantly, he had something rare: a willingness to take seriously the possibility that everything he’d been told was true might be wrong, that the current moment in history might not be its moral and social pinnacle, and that the axioms of other eras, with other ways of understanding human order and human flourishing, should be taken every bit as seriously as those we stand on in our enlightened — but obviously tottering — modern world.
Does Moldbug contradict himself? Very well, he contradicts himself! He tries things on to see what he says, and much of the time he’s just playing around with ideas that readers, hanging on his words, mistakenly take far too seriously. I think, for example, that his idea of “neocameralist” state, operating in the same way as a joint-stock company, and securing its sovereignty by giving itself the ability to electronically disable privately owned weapons, is a wild fantasy. But the idea that underlies it, namely the importance of hierarchy and conserved sovereign power, is an essential insight. He very clearly understands, for example, that how, or by whom, one is governed, pales to insignificance compared to the importance of being governed well. (It is impossible to overstate the importance of that idea, especially at a time when all public discourse sacralizes Democracy — which, after all, is just one possible system of government among many — with a thinly concealed religiosity.) He correctly sees government as, first and foremost, an engineering problem, which will have different solutions under different circumstances, and for different human groups (this is, essentially, the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter).
I discovered Moldbug in the early 2000s, at a time when I was grappling with all of these things myself, and his accounts of his explorations of them were a big help to me, as were all the primary sources he recommended. For all of this I owe him a lot, I think, and I’m perfectly happy to forgive him for wandering off a bit, both in terms of his expansive prose and some of his more farfetched ideas. Some of his ideas have sunk in so deeply now on the Right that we forget that it was he who first brought them forward (the use of “red pill” as a political metaphor is a trivial example).
Am I a monarchist myself? I really can’t say, but I’m certainly not allergic to the idea. (How we would safely get there from here is an important problem in itself, and I have no idea how it would be done.)
As Peter said, I’d be happy enough just to have the American polity of my childhood back, but that isn’t going to happen, any more than you can take the salt back out of a pot of stew. Our long obeisance to the false god of Diversity has done irreversible damage to the underlying commonality necessary for the cohesion of a nation, especially one so vast as the United States. (The Founders warned us that airy abstractions are insufficient to bind a nation, especially in the absence of transcendent religion, but we thought we knew better.)
I think that Jason’s question about where we’d prefer to be oversimplifies things: can I have, for example, Rome’s Five Good Emperors, but with modern dentistry? Elizabeth I with indoor plumbing? Modern technology now makes possible a level of surveillance and control that has never existed in history; do we really know what sort of ruling class (because no matter what your system, you will always be ruled by some small elite) is least likely to make onerous use of it?
I think the most realistic hope at the moment is for a gradual coming-apart of the centralized power of Washington. As Jason points out, we already see some reawakening of the fundamental, subsidiarian American principle of states’ rights, and with luck that centrifugal impulse will gather energy. I also think that the current crisis of meaning in America is unsustainable, and that we may soon see a resurgence of religion — the real, transcendent kind, as opposed to the truncated, earthly, crusading Protestantism that has dominated American life since at least the late 1800s, and took over absolutely everything beginning with the First World War, with God slowly leaching away after the Second.
So: what is the way forward? Do we just keep buggering on, trying to salvage what we can within the existing American system, despite the necessary conditions for its providing good government having permanently broken down decades ago? Or will we face an accelerating collapse that turns the great wheel of Polybius? Your guess is as good as mine.
I blocked a comment just now, something I almost never do.
If you have an argument to make, you should be able to make it persuasively and coherently, in clear, careful, and civil language. Otherwise, please make it somewhere else. (I am an absolute despot in here, and I’m under no obligation to publish anything I don’t feel like publishing.)