Social Matter

I’ve sat in a dark room and asked myself this question many times: where are the intellectual conservatives—and in particular, where are the conservative political philosophers? The answer for the latter is that they simply don’t exist. Is there a single one? When referencing the 20th century, why does T.S. Elliot count as a serious conservative thinker? He was a poet—a wonderful poet, but still a poet. C. S. Lewis was an apologist and had very little to say about meta-politics, except for some great remarks in the Abolition of Man that with minimal effort could be ported over to […]

Western society, by far, is the most tolerant society that exists today.  I define “Western society” as the system of norms and values generated in the Old World and transferred to the Anglophone New World. Tolerance is an immanent feature of a civilized society. It furnishes respect for the individual, which in turn allows pluralism to flourish.  However, this pluralism is subject to the reasonable constraints of inviolable individual rights. At times, the tolerance of Westerners seems to exceed all reasonable limits. Here are a few concrete examples. Instances of truculent behavior on the subway abound. A drunk and disheveled man will […]

Part of what makes post-war culture unusual is the emergence of the widespread taboo against death. The development of antibiotics, vaccines, prenatal care, and advanced obstetrics has greatly reduced infant mortality. The regular occurrence of the death of an infant or child in the family has been all but eliminated, in part thanks to antibiotics but also because of increased sanitation, more reliable transportation, heating, and cooling technology. Over time, as people have become less directly familiar with death, risks that might result in death have become more morally suspect than they were in the past. Even wars with relatively tiny […]

You don’t pass your beliefs down to the next generation of youngsters by dressing those beliefs up as whatever cause du jour is currently netting the most retweets on Twitter. That was the takeaway of my stroll down memory lane in last week’s post. And it doesn’t matter whether the traditional beliefs in question are a religion or just a commitment to sober, conservative governance, either. The point still stands. The very substance of tradition, in fact, consists of the upcoming generation learning to adopt the precepts, attitudes, worldviews of the generations that preceded it—not in the tailoring and retailoring […]

Technological progress masks societal decline. For neoreactionaries, the principal question is not: Who will build the roads? but rather: Who will design and implement the social technology? Material conditions change. Social technology is slow to catch up, and even slower as creative destruction increases churn. Entrepreneurs in the traditional, commonplace sense exist in order to instigate changes in material conditions, but the absence of social entrepreneurs developing social technology to bring into equilibrium material conditions with social tech is ubiquitous—so ubiquitous we don’t even think about it. “We need more marriage, we need more marriage?” Saying it won’t do it. […]

I wrote this down to forget it But it was that which could not be forgot Did this book cause me to admit it To admit that which I could not? A father is known by his children And his children by him just as well For whoever just might behold them Could then this parable tell; If our father was Wisdom And his children were the Virtues of all How is it that we have missed them That they do not come if we call? Perhaps we are just in our sentence And maybe are true in our lies […]

Since the institution of the all-volunteer military in 1973, young American men have been under far less pressure to be prepared for military service than they had ever been before. Whereas before, the state needed manpower to be militarily ready, after, it ceased to become important within its own view. At the same time, with the left gaining more effective authority, ‘aggression’ — particularly male aggression — became seen to be a sort of pathology, except among racial minorities, in which it is seen as an unfortunate result of History. Whereas before, men were seen as domestic, local, national, and […]

Every once in a while, you hear from some (probably well-intentioned) conservative strategist that we on the Right need to have ourselves a reality check. You hear that we’re in denial, that the ship has sailed on some particular issue—drug use, multiculturalism, homosexual marriage, immigration, pick one—and that the upcoming generation has already accepted it wholesale. The only thing to do, they’ll assure you, is to accept this uncomfortable truth and move on to more important issues, to battles that we can actually win. These would-be thought leaders of the Right don’t want us to seem out of touch. They’re […]

The real problem with capital-P progress arguments is that they’re less a matter of serious philosophy and more of over-indulgence in a trumped up, empirically suspect notion of winning that most of the time is non-falsifiable, due to ad hoc conditions postulated. That’s a little complicated. What I mean is that they’ll first stipulate that Progress has won completely and totally, and then for every counterexample brought to bear in response, they’ll find some cockeyed way to sweep it under the table. “We’re just not advanced enough, yet,” “They just haven’t been educated enough, yet,” “They’re defective,” “They’re mentally ill,” […]