Agency and scale are common themes in the past few posts. Given attentional and logistical constraints, decentralization is necessary for a sense of agency. This requires smaller-scale intermediating institutions (e.g. in no particular oder - families, churches, clubs, private group chats, offsite retreats...) As Arnold's post yesterday indicated, hierarchy and authority are strategies for coordinating at scale - strategies not conducive to individual agency.
Lack of agency seems like one of the problems affecting the younger generation. I guess materialism is a response - maybe Thiel sees materialism as more prosocial than seeking agency through controlling others via technocratic busybodyism or gossip (crabs in a bucket). But both approaches seem like empty distractions rather than real agency. We can do better.
As I guide high school students through the college admissions process and ask them about their aspirations, they almost always mention having “fast cars, luxury houses, wealth;" almost never do they mention making a difference. Almost all of my students are unabashed about telling me they want to become doctors or lawyers (or go into business or finance) to make a great deal of money. I have had one(!) two years ago who wanted to be a labor attorney. She is now at Princeton.
In the book The Privileged Poor, a rural student at an Ivy League university [Renowned], stated: "The biggest challenge [of being at Renowned] is the pressure to become one of them. When you come here, you become one of the elite. Like, “Oh yes, Renowned education, you’re going to have so much money when you grow up.” They just expect the goal of all this is to have money and be part of the upper class. People forget where they come from. They live here for four months and they’re not living at home and they forget what it means. Then, after four years, they don’t go back home. They go to New York. They’re just consumed! 40% of people go into consulting after graduation. 40% of people don’t come into Renowned thinking of consulting. People are transformed. It is just expected that one social class is inherently better than the other, more desirable.”
Great essay on Peter Thiel at the link, which plays up the influence of Leo Strauss. Strauss is nothing more than Nietzsche cagily repackaged to soften the image for a post-WWII audience (who saw Nietzsche in the Nazis). BAP (more modern Straussian) is Nietzsche unapologetic. Thiel has previously been cagey about his Nietzsche (as in “The Straussian Moment”) but now seems to be reading the culture and determining that it’s becoming ok to drop the caginess. That’s not a good sign.
This quote: “baby boomers and Gen Xers were the last generations that could unabashedly want things” sounds exactly like Straussian Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind. Thiel seems to be a fully-immersed Straussian.
I get the impression that "Nietzschean" is getting thrown around, um, "really loosely" is an understatement.
I think what people are getting at is that you can't fight the cancer of the leftist losers-centric ideology with nothing. Mere negation (the annihilation of nihilism) is insufficient, one needs a positive substitute. One requires an alternative vision, goal, telos, whatever. One obvious alternative, one that manifested from time to time in historical cultures, was, well, winners-centric. Sometimes the winning was not really "aristocratic" in terms of "rule by the best" because often unrelated to anything but inheriting an elite position. But internal competition and external threats made it hard in the long run for mediocre types to stay on top of an even elites-glorifying culture unless they were 'better' than the average bear where it counted. In other cultures there was more explicit focus on merit, worthiness, excellence, achievement, accomplishments, demonstration of virtues and character, service to the community, a track record of success in difficult endeavors, and so forth.
Now, sure, Nietzsche was very much advocating for winners-centrism as superior to losers-centrism, but in terms of focus on effective social aristocracy led by champions of human excellence and "the best", well, Aristotle would have recognized all that. IIRC, even Strauss pointed this out, but, given what was him the "recent unpleasantness" there was some concern about ways to temper the various ways that perspective could go off the rails, just like leftism has done so and is currently doing so again, to us. Strauss recognized, however, there was no intellectually coherent way to explain the difference between being anti-populist and anti-democratic, so if you are in a situation where being anti-democratic in that way is akin to being anti-Christ, then one is compelled to lie about it in certain clever ways.
But I think it's easy to see why there is all this grasping by smart champions winner-achiever types to replace loser-centrism, which is quickly destroying us from within, with winner-ism, which will reorient elite and public opinion away from knee-jerk envy, resentment, skepticism, antagonism, and crushing regulation, to one at least of passive tolerance, benign indifference, and salutary neglect on the low end, and at the high end, going Full Fanboy with Hero Worship, maybe with the traditionally chauvinistic manifestation of "OUR champion!"
I guess the reason I object to characterizing what the Thiel et al folks are advocating as "Nietzschen" is that my impression is that Nietzsche did not have much trouble with the tendency of ideas like this to go to bad extremes unless balanced and tempered by other considerations, and indeed one interpretation of him is that he is saying onev should just bite that bullet and embrace the extremes.
I don't think that's what the Theil crowd is getting at. They would probably be in favor of such non-Nietzschean temperance, though I honestly have no idea what their ideas or suggestions regarding that might be. Still, maybe we can worry about that 300-meter target later, the 50-meter target of an 800 pound homicidal leftist gorilla coming right at us at full speed.
I’m using Nietzschean to mean those that want to roll back Christian religion, Christian values, and institutions derived from Christian intuitions (at risk of giving way to sentimentality, this basically means the fundamental idea of liberalism and the United States of America) and replace that structure with something like a non-gods-worshipping version of Ancient Greece. Yes, Straussianism has tried to temper the extremist tendencies of Nietzsche that you mention, but this experiment still won’t end well.
You are right that the nihilist attack on liberalism is advancing full speed. But I would prefer for classical liberals to rally around the cause. Instead, the Right is quickly retreating from liberalism for this new Nietzschean philosophy advocated by Strauss, BAP, Peter Thiel, etc. Maybe this new position is more defensible in the ideological war. And that would be fine if tribal opposition to the Left were the only goal. But for those of us with positive principles to defend - liberalism and Western Civilization - it means admitting defeat.
Even fragile and unstable alliance for the purpose of tribal opposition to the left is like the fragile and unstable alliance between central and eastern European princes in their (successful) tribal opposition to the Mongol Invasion (see: "The Mongols and the West", and also some background on Wenceslaus'* "victorious defense".) I.e., it's better than the alternative!
*My favorite part of the Wenceslaus biography is how he played one Frederick II against the other contemporary Frederick II, as opposed to the yet other Fredrick II, the Great one, who came 500 years later.
Robert Frost said, "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."
That hits home, so, in an effort to reclaim (and redefine) the word, Cass Sunstein recently felt the need to claim, "Though liberals are able to take their own side in a quarrel, they do not like tribalism." Not only is this not convincing, even Sunstein does not seem all that convinced (especially with all the other "sometimes they do, sometimes they don't" language) so now we have a liberal unable to take his own side even regarding his side of the meta* question of whether liberals can take sides!
But Frost was right, liberals couldn't take their own side. What you, and Sunstein and the rest, really want is "A Liberalism That Can Take Its Own Side".
But that raises the question of why it didn't defend itself in the first place. The answer is because it can't so long as people conceive of its dictates as "conceptual-reference-level-invariant"**
That is, so long as the reigning conception of liberalism requires you to be liberal even on the meta-level question of whether liberalism itself ought to dominate even if that would require illiberal interventions, then it stands no chance against less self-restricting competitors. It is like ecological primary succession. The pioneer species work so hard in pedogenesis to turn a harsh and lifeless wasteland into the bare minimum of healthy soil able to sustain life. But the pioneers were adapted to the wasteland, whereas other plants who couldn't live a day in the wasteland are even better adapted than then the pioneers to the conditions the pioneers created, and thus, "succession", they colonize and take over the land and replace all the pioneers. Nature red in tooth and claw; no gratitude it shows at all!
This is what CRLI liberalism does too. Instead of defending itself, it defends the conditions that nurture its enemies and to which they are better adapted than liberalism itself.
So if what is needed is a Liberalism that can take its own side even if that means being illiberal in the minimally necessary ways, then those tweaks are always going to get accused of abandonment or betrayal of liberal principles. But I did come to destroy liberal principles, but to save them.
*Every generation the Devil changes his name to suit the times and now Satan identifies at "Meta-Kafka".
**That's probably already a name for a concept in mathematical logic, but I'm calling dibs on the trademark for its application to political philosophy.
I think we should add to that the fact that "liberal" does not mean now what it did. The split happened between the 'States and the EU around 1850 or a bit later. It became the case that the American left took the mantle of liberal and convinced Americans that it was their socialist/communist program that was liberal, despite Adam Smith himself describing his system of freedom as a "liberal program." As a result we have a complete muddle of people arguing for or against liberalism who don't even agree on what it is. Certainly the modern right fails to understand its history and has bought into the leftist assertion that they are liberals, and thus come to the conclusion that liberalism must be bad, because it gets you the American left.
By the way, crossing the streams between Nietzsche and all the recent discussion about AI limitations, I came across a title for a post with yet more chatbot crippling complaints, "Claude Is Dead."
Yes the New Right seems to be abandoning the idea of personal virtue, (as In fact discussed with Kling and Rachel Lu among others recently).The conscience you have to live with. The thing that matters even when no one is looking. What what matters now is social and worldly success. Hot women, fast cars and money. It's a kind of rebooted aquisitive individualism of the '80s shorn of any church-attending Moral Majority counterpart. Even being down on abortion is defended now more in terms of an assault on demographic success vis-a-vis other groups - and the necessity of raising TFR - than anything like the compromising of babies with unique souls.
Ah, so, by "abandoning the idea of personal virtue" you mean abandoning the idea that only people with a consistent track record of high moral character should be permitted to run for office as Republicans or get any support if they get on the ballot but fall short of that standard?
“On the other hand you have the fools, the sheeple, the so-called NPCs, or “non-playable characters” who can be controlled by those who know how to control their desire."
We have the woke, Trumpers, devout religious, both extremes on climate, etc., plus people who just try to fit in with their friends, neighbors, and coworkers, etc. I'm not really sure who's left. I'm open to the idea some of us are in the other camp more often than others but I'm skeptical there are more than a handful almost always in the other camp. Humans are a social creature who craves approval and acceptance. And if one is ALWAYS in the other camp, that tends to get just as foolish and sheeple-like.
Agency and scale are common themes in the past few posts. Given attentional and logistical constraints, decentralization is necessary for a sense of agency. This requires smaller-scale intermediating institutions (e.g. in no particular oder - families, churches, clubs, private group chats, offsite retreats...) As Arnold's post yesterday indicated, hierarchy and authority are strategies for coordinating at scale - strategies not conducive to individual agency.
Lack of agency seems like one of the problems affecting the younger generation. I guess materialism is a response - maybe Thiel sees materialism as more prosocial than seeking agency through controlling others via technocratic busybodyism or gossip (crabs in a bucket). But both approaches seem like empty distractions rather than real agency. We can do better.
As I guide high school students through the college admissions process and ask them about their aspirations, they almost always mention having “fast cars, luxury houses, wealth;" almost never do they mention making a difference. Almost all of my students are unabashed about telling me they want to become doctors or lawyers (or go into business or finance) to make a great deal of money. I have had one(!) two years ago who wanted to be a labor attorney. She is now at Princeton.
In the book The Privileged Poor, a rural student at an Ivy League university [Renowned], stated: "The biggest challenge [of being at Renowned] is the pressure to become one of them. When you come here, you become one of the elite. Like, “Oh yes, Renowned education, you’re going to have so much money when you grow up.” They just expect the goal of all this is to have money and be part of the upper class. People forget where they come from. They live here for four months and they’re not living at home and they forget what it means. Then, after four years, they don’t go back home. They go to New York. They’re just consumed! 40% of people go into consulting after graduation. 40% of people don’t come into Renowned thinking of consulting. People are transformed. It is just expected that one social class is inherently better than the other, more desirable.”
Great essay on Peter Thiel at the link, which plays up the influence of Leo Strauss. Strauss is nothing more than Nietzsche cagily repackaged to soften the image for a post-WWII audience (who saw Nietzsche in the Nazis). BAP (more modern Straussian) is Nietzsche unapologetic. Thiel has previously been cagey about his Nietzsche (as in “The Straussian Moment”) but now seems to be reading the culture and determining that it’s becoming ok to drop the caginess. That’s not a good sign.
This quote: “baby boomers and Gen Xers were the last generations that could unabashedly want things” sounds exactly like Straussian Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind. Thiel seems to be a fully-immersed Straussian.
I get the impression that "Nietzschean" is getting thrown around, um, "really loosely" is an understatement.
I think what people are getting at is that you can't fight the cancer of the leftist losers-centric ideology with nothing. Mere negation (the annihilation of nihilism) is insufficient, one needs a positive substitute. One requires an alternative vision, goal, telos, whatever. One obvious alternative, one that manifested from time to time in historical cultures, was, well, winners-centric. Sometimes the winning was not really "aristocratic" in terms of "rule by the best" because often unrelated to anything but inheriting an elite position. But internal competition and external threats made it hard in the long run for mediocre types to stay on top of an even elites-glorifying culture unless they were 'better' than the average bear where it counted. In other cultures there was more explicit focus on merit, worthiness, excellence, achievement, accomplishments, demonstration of virtues and character, service to the community, a track record of success in difficult endeavors, and so forth.
Now, sure, Nietzsche was very much advocating for winners-centrism as superior to losers-centrism, but in terms of focus on effective social aristocracy led by champions of human excellence and "the best", well, Aristotle would have recognized all that. IIRC, even Strauss pointed this out, but, given what was him the "recent unpleasantness" there was some concern about ways to temper the various ways that perspective could go off the rails, just like leftism has done so and is currently doing so again, to us. Strauss recognized, however, there was no intellectually coherent way to explain the difference between being anti-populist and anti-democratic, so if you are in a situation where being anti-democratic in that way is akin to being anti-Christ, then one is compelled to lie about it in certain clever ways.
But I think it's easy to see why there is all this grasping by smart champions winner-achiever types to replace loser-centrism, which is quickly destroying us from within, with winner-ism, which will reorient elite and public opinion away from knee-jerk envy, resentment, skepticism, antagonism, and crushing regulation, to one at least of passive tolerance, benign indifference, and salutary neglect on the low end, and at the high end, going Full Fanboy with Hero Worship, maybe with the traditionally chauvinistic manifestation of "OUR champion!"
I guess the reason I object to characterizing what the Thiel et al folks are advocating as "Nietzschen" is that my impression is that Nietzsche did not have much trouble with the tendency of ideas like this to go to bad extremes unless balanced and tempered by other considerations, and indeed one interpretation of him is that he is saying onev should just bite that bullet and embrace the extremes.
I don't think that's what the Theil crowd is getting at. They would probably be in favor of such non-Nietzschean temperance, though I honestly have no idea what their ideas or suggestions regarding that might be. Still, maybe we can worry about that 300-meter target later, the 50-meter target of an 800 pound homicidal leftist gorilla coming right at us at full speed.
I’m using Nietzschean to mean those that want to roll back Christian religion, Christian values, and institutions derived from Christian intuitions (at risk of giving way to sentimentality, this basically means the fundamental idea of liberalism and the United States of America) and replace that structure with something like a non-gods-worshipping version of Ancient Greece. Yes, Straussianism has tried to temper the extremist tendencies of Nietzsche that you mention, but this experiment still won’t end well.
You are right that the nihilist attack on liberalism is advancing full speed. But I would prefer for classical liberals to rally around the cause. Instead, the Right is quickly retreating from liberalism for this new Nietzschean philosophy advocated by Strauss, BAP, Peter Thiel, etc. Maybe this new position is more defensible in the ideological war. And that would be fine if tribal opposition to the Left were the only goal. But for those of us with positive principles to defend - liberalism and Western Civilization - it means admitting defeat.
Even fragile and unstable alliance for the purpose of tribal opposition to the left is like the fragile and unstable alliance between central and eastern European princes in their (successful) tribal opposition to the Mongol Invasion (see: "The Mongols and the West", and also some background on Wenceslaus'* "victorious defense".) I.e., it's better than the alternative!
*My favorite part of the Wenceslaus biography is how he played one Frederick II against the other contemporary Frederick II, as opposed to the yet other Fredrick II, the Great one, who came 500 years later.
Fair point. Good discussion. I just worry that what we are seeing is more an abandonment of the liberal position than a mere alliance.
Robert Frost said, "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."
That hits home, so, in an effort to reclaim (and redefine) the word, Cass Sunstein recently felt the need to claim, "Though liberals are able to take their own side in a quarrel, they do not like tribalism." Not only is this not convincing, even Sunstein does not seem all that convinced (especially with all the other "sometimes they do, sometimes they don't" language) so now we have a liberal unable to take his own side even regarding his side of the meta* question of whether liberals can take sides!
But Frost was right, liberals couldn't take their own side. What you, and Sunstein and the rest, really want is "A Liberalism That Can Take Its Own Side".
But that raises the question of why it didn't defend itself in the first place. The answer is because it can't so long as people conceive of its dictates as "conceptual-reference-level-invariant"**
That is, so long as the reigning conception of liberalism requires you to be liberal even on the meta-level question of whether liberalism itself ought to dominate even if that would require illiberal interventions, then it stands no chance against less self-restricting competitors. It is like ecological primary succession. The pioneer species work so hard in pedogenesis to turn a harsh and lifeless wasteland into the bare minimum of healthy soil able to sustain life. But the pioneers were adapted to the wasteland, whereas other plants who couldn't live a day in the wasteland are even better adapted than then the pioneers to the conditions the pioneers created, and thus, "succession", they colonize and take over the land and replace all the pioneers. Nature red in tooth and claw; no gratitude it shows at all!
This is what CRLI liberalism does too. Instead of defending itself, it defends the conditions that nurture its enemies and to which they are better adapted than liberalism itself.
So if what is needed is a Liberalism that can take its own side even if that means being illiberal in the minimally necessary ways, then those tweaks are always going to get accused of abandonment or betrayal of liberal principles. But I did come to destroy liberal principles, but to save them.
*Every generation the Devil changes his name to suit the times and now Satan identifies at "Meta-Kafka".
**That's probably already a name for a concept in mathematical logic, but I'm calling dibs on the trademark for its application to political philosophy.
I think we should add to that the fact that "liberal" does not mean now what it did. The split happened between the 'States and the EU around 1850 or a bit later. It became the case that the American left took the mantle of liberal and convinced Americans that it was their socialist/communist program that was liberal, despite Adam Smith himself describing his system of freedom as a "liberal program." As a result we have a complete muddle of people arguing for or against liberalism who don't even agree on what it is. Certainly the modern right fails to understand its history and has bought into the leftist assertion that they are liberals, and thus come to the conclusion that liberalism must be bad, because it gets you the American left.
By the way, crossing the streams between Nietzsche and all the recent discussion about AI limitations, I came across a title for a post with yet more chatbot crippling complaints, "Claude Is Dead."
Yes the New Right seems to be abandoning the idea of personal virtue, (as In fact discussed with Kling and Rachel Lu among others recently).The conscience you have to live with. The thing that matters even when no one is looking. What what matters now is social and worldly success. Hot women, fast cars and money. It's a kind of rebooted aquisitive individualism of the '80s shorn of any church-attending Moral Majority counterpart. Even being down on abortion is defended now more in terms of an assault on demographic success vis-a-vis other groups - and the necessity of raising TFR - than anything like the compromising of babies with unique souls.
Abandoning the idea of personal virtue? Can you give an example of some quote from a figure of the "New Right" illustrating this abandonment?
The lining up behind Trump is of course the central example
Ah, so, by "abandoning the idea of personal virtue" you mean abandoning the idea that only people with a consistent track record of high moral character should be permitted to run for office as Republicans or get any support if they get on the ballot but fall short of that standard?
“On the other hand you have the fools, the sheeple, the so-called NPCs, or “non-playable characters” who can be controlled by those who know how to control their desire."
We have the woke, Trumpers, devout religious, both extremes on climate, etc., plus people who just try to fit in with their friends, neighbors, and coworkers, etc. I'm not really sure who's left. I'm open to the idea some of us are in the other camp more often than others but I'm skeptical there are more than a handful almost always in the other camp. Humans are a social creature who craves approval and acceptance. And if one is ALWAYS in the other camp, that tends to get just as foolish and sheeple-like.