Motus Mentis

Growing older has its consolations. Among them are a blessed respite from the tumultuous urgencies of youth, and the time and perspective for contemplation and deeper understanding.

That perspective and understanding can, however, leave the contemplative geezer feeling at times downright disconsolate, when he looks around himself and sees how much there is in our Brave New World that is simply, and self-evidently, wrong.

Here’s an exhibit for the prosecution: an essay on the dehumanizing monstrosities of modern architecture.

Ross Douthat published a wistful column at the New York Times the other day, lamenting the death in academia of the Western canon of literature. At the heart of the problem — and the problem itself is, as Chiang Kai-shek once said in an analogous context, a “disease of the heart” — is the death of our civilization’s belief in objective truth and beauty, in God, and ultimately in its own value.

We read:

[I]f there’s any lesson that the decline of Christianity holds for the painful death of the English department, it’s that if you aspire to keep your faith alive even in a reduced, non-hegemonic form, you need more than attenuated belief and socially-useful applications.

A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation and recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.

This is the late, perhaps terminal, stage in the progression of the European Enlightenment. The radical skepticism introduced in that era has revealed itself to a universal acid that dissolves, sooner or later, anything that tries to contain it. Into that vessel first went Christian faith — but faith was followed in due course by truth, beauty, and at last the idea of any worthwhile distinctions and discriminations at all, or belief in an objectively existing reality.

It is the triumph of entropy: of rust, of decomposition, of the tireless disintegration that reduces mountains to rubble and great civilizations to roofless churches and forgotten graves. The West has built its great tower of modernity with the stones it has pulled from its foundations.

Women and demographic minorities living in the modern West inhabit the least racist, least sexist society that has ever existed. They have greater liberty, and a broader scope of opportunity, than they have ever had anywhere on earth. Yet to listen to public discourse, or to look over any university’s curriculum, would give a newcomer the impression that bigotry and oppression have never been worse.

A new research paper from USC describes a phenomenon the authors call “prevalence-induced concept change”. Here’s the abstract:

Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.

That’s not all there is to our problem, of course; much of it is a game of power that the blogger Spandrell has called “Bioleninism” (for more on that important insight, read Spandrell’s series of posts beginning here.) But the idea the USC authors put forward certainly fits neatly with, for example, the appearance in recent years of the concept of “microaggressions”: as actual macroagressions became rarer and rarer the concept of “aggression” expanded to include things that people of my generation wouldn’t even have noticed happening. (One gets the feeling that any act of genuine old-school aggression against our thoroughly coddled and hypersensitized youngsters would probably be fatal; Lord help them when things start falling apart for real.)

This idea ties in nicely, too, with what I’ve been saying for years now: that grievance is fractal. The supply is inexhaustible, because we simply zoom in to smaller and smaller scales.

You can have a look at the USC paper here.

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.

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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.