The official dictionary definition of reactionary is resistance to political change, but I don’t think that’s an accurate description of how the term is used, and it’s not what I had in mind when naming this blog. For me progressives are those who think that the present is bad in some way and we should stop doing things the way we do and instead do something new. A conservative attitude, on the other hand, thinks the present is good as is and we shouldn’t change the status quo. A reactionary agrees with the progressive in thinking the present is bad in some way but that we should go back to doing things the way we did in the past. Usually a reactionary thinks yesterday’s progressives destroyed something good and wish to revive or restore it. Reaction is born of the perception that things are bad in some way that they didn’t used to be. That is how I intend the term.
For example, if you think baseball was better before the designated hitter and wish to go back to the way baseball was played before, you have a reactionary attitude towards the designated hitter rule. Punk rock, strangely enough, was very reactionary. It felt rock music in the 1970s had become bloated, pretentious, and boring and thought it should go back when rock was fast, short, catchy, fun, and exciting. But, importantly, punk rock wasn’t Sha Na Na; it wasn’t an oldies act. As critics of reactionaries always say, you can’t go back to the past. True enough but you can take the good from the past that had been discarded and express it in new ways.
There is no reason one can’t be reactionary towards some things, and conservative or progressive towards others. For example, I think technological advancement is in general a good thing. I am certainly not conservative as I don’t think there is anything of value left to conserve in American society, the left has destroyed, or is in the process of destroying, everything of value. So what things do I think were better in the past? You can find the details in the individual posts on this blog, but here are a few examples.
Virtue Ethics: Virtue ethics was the reigning moral theory for the entirely of Western civilization from Plato down to the 19/20th century where it was discarded and replaced by the Frankenstein monster of Freudianism, existentialism, post-structuralism, and nihilism we have today. I think virtue ethics were a superior ethical system to the reigning liberal order. See “Restoring a Virtue Based Ethics for the 21st Century” for a primer on how virtue ethics should be understood and lived today.
Family and sexual relations: I think the relations between the sexes are worse today than in the past. The main reason I see for this is that feminism has foisted a defect/defect norm upon intersexual relationships instead of a cooperate/cooperate. It was traditionally understood that men and women should strive to be good for one another, to put in effort on each others behalf. It somehow came to be that expecting men and women to put in effort on each other’s behalf became a violation of ones autonomy, or a crime against their sacred individuality. This ended up a defect/defect situation resulting in mutual dissatisfaction. Of course this doesn’t hold for everyone, and I’ve been lucky enough to find a wonderful woman, and I make sure to put in effort on her behalf, but that is the sense I get from seeing the dissatisfaction I see throughout the culture, especially in the high divorce rate. Note to self: this paragraph is too mild and could have been much stronger. OK. The Tinder hook up culture is a state of barbaric depravity where far from mutual cooperation it is a state of mutual parasitism as though the sexes seek to feed on each other and the goal is to exploit the other to the greatest extent before discarding the husk and moving on. The past was better and ought to be restored.
Furthermore, the family has been badly, even fatally, wounded by decades of liberalism as seen in the high divorce rate, late-or-non-married rate, the children born out of wedlock rate, and low fertility rate. My series of articles “A Darwinian Look at Marriage” and “Bioformalism and the Human Good” touches on this.
Nihilism: There is a reigning ethos in the culture descended from existentialism that human life is meaningless and so all we can do is create our own meaning. This sense of the meaninglessness of existence has had awful consequences, especially among the many young people who either drift through life feeling it is all pointless, or that fame and fortune are the only marks of success (and lacking such come to feel that their life is a failure), or try to fill the void with sex and drugs. My posts “Bioformalism and the Human Good” and “Bioformalism vs. Liberalism and Stupid Freedom” are responses to this.
Other examples of problems in the present that were nor present in the past is the nightmare of modernist architecture, fashion, and suburban sprawl. I don’t have a specific post on these topics so I will just throw it out here. Somewhere along the line the art elites turned against beauty, probably as a way to signal their elite status (if you possess the views of the common people, such as what constitutes beauty, you are not elite, you are thereby common. Thus the elites of every age must evolve to have outlandish tastes to signal their elite status). This marriage of status-seeking architects and penny-pinching corporations decimated our built environment and created the horrifying dystopia of suburban sprawl and urban dehumanization.
Another issue is that there is, for a lack of a better term, a kind of corruption of the soul I see everywhere. In book I of The Republic Plato considers several theories of justice. One is that justice is harming your enemies and helping your friends, the other is that justice is interest of the stronger. Civilization is based on the rejection of these two theses and requires every citizen to commit to a higher conception of justice. Using the state to harm your enemies and help your friends is not justice but politics, and politics has seeped into the soul of every citizen and corrupted every decision and feeling. What car you drive, what you eat, where you live, who your friends are, you tastes in the arts, all of it has become politicized, all of it is in the service of helping the party and harming your enemies.
“The personal is political” quickly added that the personal is psychological and a political war was launched to manufacture the psychology to support political platforms. The parties, instead of looking to represent the people’s wishes, instead felt it their purpose through their propaganda and educational arms to create the people that had the wishes their politics demanded.
Everything is now in service of the party’s political goals. Every day people sign on to their social media accounts and their favored political sites seeking out what propaganda they ought to believe in order to further their political goals. Please, they beg, tell me what I am supposed to believe about current events so that I can further my party’s political power. Tell me how I may believe my political enemies are actually the bad guys in every instance, no matter the actual evidence, and how my side is always innocent of all wrongdoing. Tell me even what I should believe is the meaning of words so as to not have to accept the enemy’s arguments. Yes, the evil of deceiving oneself into believing you possess high political ideals, not merely disguised self-interest, is present in all ages, but not to this extent. Nothing is ever 100% but in the recent past there was a commitment to fair play and not win at all costs, even at the cost of molding what one must think and perceive. There is no sense of the honorable or dishonorable; the acquisition of power by any means is the only standard of right. Post-modernism, in seeing everything as structured by power relations, welcomed back in the twin anti-civilizational views of justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies, and justice as the rule of the stronger.
Religion: it is not a coincidence that the retreat of religion coincides with the advance of degenerate horror we see everywhere in the culture.
Diversity is not a strength: I don’t think anyone who evaluates the sentence “diversity is a strength” in good faith can believe it is true. Chanting diversity is our strength is like having to believe in fairies in order to keep Tinkerbell alive; it’s what we say to ourselves as a mantra to get by and keep the deception going. But it’s not literally true. Diversity produces alienation, mutual suspicion, destruction of social capital, and is a source of constant internal conflict that is not present in homogeneous countries. See “Alienation and Diversity,” and “Why Diversity Destroys Social Capital.”
All of these factors come together to form an oppressively ugly, alienating, meaningless society where all too many people turn to drugs and antidepressants to fill it up the void, or just endure it in quiet desperation or in a search for mindless distraction until the end. It works great for the rich deracinated globe-trotting elites who have had fulfilled their fondest wish where all limits of material wealth, loyalty, or restraint could be lifted. But many unsatisfied people look around and say “it stinks and it didn’t used to be like this.”
In conclusion, the Georgian era was a time of debauchery and indulgence which was followed by the restrained Victorian age. Our present Elizabethan era surpasses all others in the arts of vice and decadence. My hope is that as the Elizabethan age comes to its end it will be followed by, for lack of a better word, a more civilized age where the pursuit of the higher things is once again the standard of public mores. If you want a society that aims at virtue, family, meaning, beauty, justice, truth, honor, and community you have to be a reactionary. It is the purpose of this blog to lay the foundations of how such an age may come about.
Darwinian Reactionary 