CCCLXXXVII – Reactionary Meta-Analysis

Editors Note: I have a backlog of posts written during the hiatus. I will post one per day until I run out—at the time of this writing it takes us deep into December. It’s good to be back!

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I want to approach a basic question from two different angles. The basic question is “What does it mean to be reactionary“. The one angle is “Who becomes reactionary, and why”, the other angle is “Why am I reactionary”.

I can speak for myself so I will answer this part first. I am reactionary for the same reason I am Catholic: it makes the world make sense. I can sense the instability of democracy, and I spent a lot of my college years trying to define why right-liberals were right in an absolute sense. I couldn’t answer the question to my satisfaction. I found relativism and whataboutism at the root of most arguments, and there was nothing I could hang my hat on that says that this or that political point of view is concrete. A short way of saying this is that I was looking for the moral high ground, an unassailable position from which I could rhetorically devastate my political foes. Reactionary politics scratches this itch because it is rooted not in political philosophy but in moral philosophy. I can say I would prefer a Monarchy because when they say “the buck stops here” they actually mean it–there is no one to whom they can pass the buck for anything pertaining to the custodial care of their subjects. They must take direct and personal moral responsibility. Direct and personal moral responsibility means that they have a spiritual stake in the corporeal well being of their subjects. This has the advantage of being both true in an unassailable sense, but also helps make sense of the current reality, where we have a diffusion of responsibility across grand and grotesque bureaucracies. As I said at the beginning of this graf: this reality filter strikes me as being true, and it helps make sense of other parts of reality than just the one that I am focused on.

“Who becomes reactionary” is a trickier question. I think it’s not as simple as looking out ones window and observing who is indeed a reactionary, because then you might surmise that reactionaries are uniformly curmudgeonly academic types and/or arrogant young men. But I am more interested in what unifies the curmudgeonly academics and the arrogant young men. Why have these two groups found a common home under the reactionary banner? A pragmatic view might say that the Curmudgeonly academics know enough and are established enough in their careers that they can call it like it is and put up with any nattering they get as a consequence. Likewise a pragmatic view might say that the arrogant young men are, well, arrogant and found the reactionary worldview in search of the unassailable argument-winning political theory.

But again–I feel like this misses the point. The unifying theme, I think, is that reactionary politics is both new and old. It is old in that it has its philosophical roots in ancient western history, and it is this deep history that satisfies the academics, who are discerning about their worldviews because they are intelligent enough to know a mature and reasoned worldview from an immature and impulsive one. It is new in that it is uncommon and countercultural, it is “punk rock”, it is underground–and arrogant young men are comfortable being unpopular if they are satisfied that they are right. While the academics don’t need to care about popularity, the young men don’t want to care about popularity, and prefer being right to being nice. The arrogant young men can borrow credibility from the deep history which satisfies the academics, while being comfortable not being in the in-crowd. Young arrogant men are comfortable in the out-crowd because it is smaller, feels more tribal, more like a brotherhood. Crowds are for the cows, tribes are for hunters.

So given this, what does it mean to be reactionary?

It means you don’t care about being popular. It means you love tradition. It means you are aggravated by the plastic clichés of modernity. It means you want your world view to be grounded on something more rational than mere gamesmanship.

Taking this one step further: How do you find reactionaries–or make them?

• Look for people interested in history or old things.
• Look for people who are uncomfortable in modernity’s many procrustean demographic boxes.
• Look for people who are struggling to make sense of the world.

If you stumbled on this blog, and any of these categories speak to you–welcome! I hope you take a look around.

AMDG