Youth Culture I: Desire

What was traditional about traditional Western culture, and is it gone forever? Within the framework of this depressing question, I’ll be defending two narrower theses:

• Youth culture is the culture of the motherless
• Pop culture is the eclipse of meaning by triviality

My thoughts about youth culture emerged while planning the essay on marriage, For some people the problem marriage poses is about conflict resolution and for others, about romance, but for a community, marriage is an intergenerational agency problem. If you don’t know what an agency problem is, let me put it this way: marital institutions are about how parents control their children and how children react to influence their parents and preserve their autonomy. (And in turn communities control how parents control their children, as well as how the parents react to influence the community — but I think you get the idea.)

The upshot is that it is hard to think about marriage without thinking about the broader question of how parents come to have any control over their brats at all. The title of that series is Marriage, not Who She Baby Daddy Be. In the long run, if the ability of families to influence their children declines to nil we will continue to have “marital institutions” only in the very loose sense that insane asylums are said to be “mental institutions”. In the traditional sense, institutions embody a collection of roles, expectations, and relations; but progressivism normalizes the abnormal situation where an institution only manages deviants (deviants who refuse to recognize any obligation to play roles or meet expectations) and the chaos they create.

Pop Culture and Desire

Last week EvoX asked why musicians rank with actors (charismatic!) and athletes (fit!) as targets of “excessive female interest” — notably, romantic interest. Beware reverse causation: music executives groom (in all senses of the word) proto-stars who seem to have the natural charisma and physique to inspire lust, setting the stage for a massively profitable test-tube-perfect pop-music sensation.

(Have you noticed that everyone has started to refer to these celebrities as “performers” or — better yet — “artists”, rather than singers, guitarists, or (generic) musicians? The rebranding is appropriate: pop stars give dramatic and athletic performances for their adoring fans, the sound team pipes in some muzak over the spectacle, and everyone is happy.)

But! The phenomenon EvoX mentions is real and predates the convergence of the different modes of mass-media celebrity by millennia. So what explains the mystery — what trait are musicians’ admirers chasing after, that put a love of music under selection in our ancestral environment? The comments to the post did a pretty good job kicking around different hypotheses:

[Among] people in the normal intelligence range, say from about the bottom 25% to the top 75%, I bet musical ability, broadly speaking, correlates decently well with intelligence–smarter people can probably memorize more songs, are better at performing them, can come up with their own songs, etc.

More than that – if you hypothesize that good health, facial symmetry, general intelligence, reflex-arc speed, and physical fitness covary around an underlying factor that corresponds to something like “lack of deleterious mutations”, then musical ability is a very good match for the desirable factor: you need intelligence (to process the acoustic waves, and react/improvise/compose appropriately), stamina (to dance/play/practice) and reflexes in almost equal proportion.

Any one of those traits is subject to decreasing returns to scale. Athleticism is sexy, but is running for three hours 50% sexier than running for two? In large part, these traits are attractive not because they are so valuable for organisms in themselves, but because they are correlated to so many other valuable traits. Any particular correlate, however, may be a misleading guide to the “underlying factor,” especially if it is an outlier; worse, if sexual competition puts the trait under pressure it can quickly develop in directions that are not only unrelated to the whole complex of valuable traits, but are actually harmful in themselves.

This would explain how an apparently frivolous ability which depends on many different intercorrelated traits could be more attractive as a sign of genetic fitness than any one trait (or any one of the many useful abilities that depend on only one of the traits). And if musical talent confirms the apparent absence of any underlying deleterious mutations, that would be consistent with how it interacts with other traits. Musical virtuosity can make very “average” (normal-but-not-gorgeous) women enchanting but abnormal appearance ruins the effect, and I assume it’s roughly similar for how women perceive musical men.

We could stop here, and treat the mystery as resolved: for an organism looking for a fit mate, a little riff on the guitar could well be more informative than intelligence, size, or any of the other traits that could individually be subject to runaway selection and lose their correlation to the underlying good health of the mate. But I suggest we go further and layer two more considerations on top of the first:

1. Why do girls fall for serial killers? Obviously there is some kind of feminine heuristic which uses celebrity (specifically: widespread recognition of face and name) as an index of power/status. This is a decent heuristic in small nomadic bands, and works surprisingly well even in our societies but falls apart at one end (see: serial killers).
2. As EvoX observes, music makes a great shibboleth. It’s perfectly predictable that hominids would become highly attuned to differences in musical style and taste for the purposes of assigning political loyalties and other social meanings, just as we become highly attuned to accents. Seeking groups that are similar to you also serves what Darwinian Reactionary calls a stabilizing function; e.g. you need to be speaking the same language to know if he just said “Let’s go to the movies”, and you need to listen to the same music to know whether he’s playing a really sad song, or they all sound like that.

When you dissolve local communities, authority figures, local leaders and other luminaries fade into obscurity — leaving entertainers, the only celebrities left standing, to shine into the void.

When you stigmatize traditional identities, attempts to identify people of similar ethnê, class, education, language, and religion become low-status (and soon: impossible, as the members of each group lose the ability to find each other), so musical taste is one of the few remaining cultural kinds still permitted, and thus one of the few “stabilizing functions” people can rely on.

These two processes play off each other: as musical genres become increasingly salient cultural kinds, musical entertainment and musical subcultures become more important to making friends and bonding with them. This provides practical functions for musical talent, which in turn makes musical talent an entrée to rising status in a growing scene. This status and its perks draw ambitious young men into musical hobbies and, ultimately, into the music world, further solidifying the relevance of celebrity entertainers at the expense of all others and the significance of pop culture at the expense of all other identities.

(Tune in on Tuesday for youth culture and socialization.)

Restoration: A Modest Proposal

I’m not saying I’m doing this, but if you wanted to engineer a restoration this is what you’d do. It would only take thirty to forty years.

I.

Start by looking for families which have high average levels of the kind of traits you would want in a leader. (Or a king.) Intelligence, energy, drive, discipline, focus.  No personality disorders, no history of psychiatric illness. Healthy, tall, good facial symmetry — fine, let’s just say it, ideally they would be hot — and charismatic.

Whatever national virtues or values your nation has, these families should share. (So the Anglo-Saxon love of liberty, for example is not objectively speaking a trait these families need to have, unless you happen to be American, Canadian, or British, in which case it becomes desirable.)

If the adult members of these families were already fairly accomplished, that would be a good sign; if they already have wealth, status, or some other form of power, so much the better. But the fundamental traits matter more than the accomplishments.

Make a long (long) list of suitable families. Compare notes with collaborators. Befriend the families you’ve identified (why wouldn’t you?). Monitor them. Wait.

Oh, did I mention these families should also have sons?

II.

Some of these outlier families will have sons. Some of these sons will, themselves, be outliers. These are the ones you are looking for.

It is exceptionally unlikely that any one boy will be an outlier along all of the desirable traits. So you must emphasize some traits over others. For example: in a family of astrophysicists, a son who is slightly below the average familial intelligence but far exceeds his parents in drive and discipline would probably be preferable to someone with the reverse traits. Broadly speaking, it’s for the best if these boys are more testosterone-fueled than the rest of their families.

Some traits that are undesirable in families may be acceptable (in low levels) in a son. Families with high average levels of “dark triad” personality traits, for example, are unsuitable: but if a kind-hearted family has an otherwise-promising son who is a bit of an outlier in this area, that should be fine. Likewise, you would want to screen out families where there is a pattern of megalomania, but it’s not a huge problem if the son shows a hint of it. Likewise for risk-seeking.

These young men are the raw material for a Männerbund. Now it is just a matter of watching them as they grow, weeding out the marginal candidates and focusing on those who excel. Over time, provide philosophical guidance. Don’t bother trying to red-pill them, but prepare the way for a red-pilling that will come later.

If it’s in your power, you would like to encourage their maturation. Find ways to get them the resources they need to explore their talents and interests, and reward them for pouring effort into them. Encourage healthy routines and habits. Guide them into activities where they will learn the nature of discipline.

But you’re a reactionary, not a freakin’ Shaolin monk. The training montage is optional: broadly speaking, if they need your encouragement they’re probably not suitable. Most of what you need to do is put them in touch with one another. It would be wonderful if you had real resources at your disposal by this stage in the project and could send them off to a private island to plot world domination, in the style of James Bond villains: but that is entirely unnecessary. Most likely you will only need to befriend them individually, and then introduce them to one another over lunch, or even by e-mail.

These young men will be quite unusual along a number of dimensions. Few of their peers in their hometowns will see the world they way they do. They will find it refreshing to meet one another and challenging to have a realistic rival. They will admire the accomplishments of the boys you introduce them to, and this will inspire them to pursue their own ambitions with great passion.

Not all of the candidates will befriend each after a single superficial introduction; some actual ingenuity may be required on your part! And even once they start to form lasting acquaintances, some will dislike others for idiosyncratic personal reasons. Some will find the whole experience of encountering peers with similar unusual abilities unpleasant, and will voluntarily withdraw from the experiment. Others will be drawn towards some but strongly repelled by so many others that they are eventually, as the network of friendship-dyads congeals into a whole, pushed out of the nascent Mânnerbund entirely.

Over time these ties will act as attractors: schoolmates, roommates, colleagues, co-founders, co-authors, or simply co-located best friends who play tennis twice a week and hang out on the weekends. Ultimately their mutual admiration will draw them to one another and as they start to accustom themselves to thinking together and acting together, this mutual admiration will mature into cohesion.

They now begin to function together as a powerful group — not because of the talents or resources of any one of the young men (although they are all talented and can probably amass resources steadily if they need to), but because they are beginning to act as one.

III.

Now comes the hard part. (The next part may not be easy, but if they will accept your guidance here, their acquiescence in the follow-up is implicit.) Of all of the magical and stupendous and awe-inspiring things that this group of unusually talented young men could be doing (many of which you or I would not even understand, I imagine), you will convince them to apply their mutual power to finding each other wives.

What wives, you ask? Well, you might start by handing them over that long (long) dossier of families you collected over the previous two decades. You want the wives to come from families with similar qualities. They do not need to be exceptionally bright stars among their siblings; even if they are only “average”, they may well be too smart for their own good. Hold back your misgivings about whether such wives as these will make these young men happy: probably not, but oh well. In TCY, a woman from a talented family probably does not aspire to be the wife of a talented man and mother to five talented children. She will probably have attended (or still be enrolled in) college, for example; it simply cannot be helped. So long as the girls are not human rights lawyers or “community organizers” everything will probably turn out all right, and if you catch them young enough you (or more accurately, your budding Männerbund) may be able convince them that pretty girls don’t need to go to med school or apply for internships at Goldman.

Of course, each man should actually like the young woman his fellows have ensnared for him. So she should have some loving, wifely qualities, she should be pretty, and all those nice things. But she should be pretty mainly because she comes from a family of attractive people, not because she comes from a family of feminine women and effeminate men; that would vitiate the next stage in the process.

Oh, and don’t choose sisters of the young men. In some sense these matches would be easiest to arrange, but it would create headaches down the road. Mumble mumble human leukocyte antigens mumble mumble founder effects…

IV.

So those crazy kids all get hitched and you’re invited to all the weddings, each one more rollicking than the last. Ten months later the babies start rolling out.

Your young friends will now have their hands full, between ascending to the pinnacle of human accomplishment during the day and crying infants at night. Maybe you can recommend a reliable au pair? Or maybe it is time for you to slip into the background before they remember who recommended they propose to all these women who know more about calculus and Middlemarch than baking cakes.

Slip deep into the background. Fast-forward ten or fifteen years. Now re-emerge for the second-hardest part: remind them that the whole point of making sure they all had top-notch wives was to make sure they would all have equally excellent children. Now the children are here, and it is time to marry them off to each other.

Not all at once, of course. You can let them mingle.

Then after the mingling is done it would be wise to take the path of least resistance and marry off the pairs of boys and girls who simply adore each other first. That will make the policy of arranged marriage easier to swallow, at any rate, and then when the time comes to pair off the adolescents who don’t click (yet!) there will be less kicking and screaming.

But of course, even when the Männerbund’s genius for matchmaking leads it to match a young man and young woman who have never seen eye to eye, there will not be much kicking and screaming, because these will be unusually lovely children, and their parents are planning to send them to Oahu for a week with no chaperone; so the young couple will probably be able to swallow the indignity of having to get married first. This easy submission on the part of the children to the wisdom of their elders is your reward for having so carefully limited your search to attractive families, when you started the project three or four decades ago.

The ’bund’s main concern, other than making sure their children are at least moderately likely to like their spouses, should be to make the graph of intermarriages among the ’bund’s children as close to radially-symmetric as feasible. The purpose of this is avoid clusters of men whose children are all married to each other, but not to the children of the men in the other cluster(s).

V.

When first grandkids start to arrive, it’s time to seize power.

“Oh, uh, how will they seize power?”

How would I know?

“Okay, but didn’t you say this was a plan for how to carry out a restoration?”

No.

“I’m pretty sure you did, actually.”

No, read carefully. I said this was plan for how to engineer a restoration, which is really something completely different.

“But… what’s the difference between engineering a restoration and carrying out a restoration?”

What’s the difference between setting up one of your friends with a girl and taking her out on a date yourself? When you engineer a restoration you set up the conditions under which a restoration would be possible, or even likely. It doesn’t mean you’re going to rule yourself, or even that you would know how to.

“Okay, I guess that’s… less ridiculous than I thought. But how can you know anything about the conditions under which a restoration would be possible unless you know how a restoration would be carried out?”

I’m not sure I follow. I don’t mean for you to take the going-on-a-date analogy too literally, but surely you see how I can know that going out to dinner is a good chance for my friend to get to know the girl better even if I have no idea what he’s going to say to her?

“I see what you mean, but of course we know that people can start to fall for each other after spending an hour together eating a meal, or going for a walk — or doing nearly anything, really. It happens all the time. But restorations are rare, right?”

Rarer than dates, at least.

“So how can you know that the conditions you’re describing are conditions under which a restoration would be possible, unless you can describe how the men in question would actually carry out the restoration from that point?”

Ah, I see what you mean. Well, let me see if I can frame this a bit differently. By the way: are you a formalist?

“Of course! Would you let me appear as an interlocutor on your blog if I weren’t?”

Good, that’s what I thought. The formal power/informal power distinction is a good one for these kinds of discussions. Now, if you were trying to carry out a restoration yourself, would you try to start with some sort of demand that the future sovereign, whoever he might be, must not be cruel to his subjects?

“No, of course not.”

Or that he not pass any law which does not agree with natural law, and that any unnatural law would be null and void? Or that he must in all of his actions respect the inherent dignity of man?

“No, I already told you — I’m a formalist!”

Good, I’m glad to hear it. But why not? What’s so terrible about not being cruel, or adhering to the natural law? Are you saying you’re against the natural law? Is formalism a violation of the natural law!?!

“It’s not that it’s terrible, it’s that demands like that are either superfluous (if Don’t be cruel means nothing other than: Don’t do things your subjects will hate for no reason) or tendentious (if it means Don’t cause your subjects to suffer in ways I don’t like). And if the so-called demand is implemented so that one formally designated man or body has the authority to veto cruel policies and the power to enforce its veto, that body is actually sovereign, not the body it prevents from being cruel.”

And if the demand that cruelty be abolished is not implemented with a meta-sovereign, then what?

“Okay, so if, on the other hand, the demand is implemented so that no one in particular decides what’s cruel but everyone expects that what’s cruel will be vetoed, then some informal network of people who collectively shape what the actors at the relevant veto-points think is cruel or not cruel will have informal power that undermines the sovereignty of the state.”

And what’s wrong with that?

“Well, it creates uncertainty, which leads to violence. If cruel acts will be vetoed but no one really knows for sure which acts will be called cruel and no one knows who decides which acts are called cruel, then no one really knows what the state will do, which…”

Good, good, you can stop there. I understand what you’re saying. But what about this: what if we just detailed our demand very, very carefully? Like: Don’t force your subjects to eat brussel sprouts unless they don’t have enough veggies in their diet. Don’t draw and quarter traitors unless hanging doesn’t seem to be deterring them. Don’t broadcast spoilers to new mass-market young adult paperbacks over the emergency broadcast system.

“You would just be creating an infinite regress, wouldn’t you? The sovereign would have to decide when each rule applied, in which case the only reason he would follow it is that it’s a sensible rule he would be likely to respect anyway; but making it a formal limit on his sovereign powers can do nothing but sow uncertainty.”

So in other words, you have to trust that the sovereign would use his power wisely? Or at least, not idiotically?

“Precisely.”

But government official do use their powers idiotically all the time, correct? This is why we want a restoration, after all. Too many idiots at the helm. We need to curtail their powers, don’t we?

“No, that’s not quite right. Our current officials don’t have any power. They are just part of the kabuki show. Half of what they do is stupid because the they can’t accomplish anything anyway, and the other half is evil because the anarchy they create calls for violence and deception to resolve the uncertainty of demotism.”

So let me get this straight: if the situation I have described could lead to a restoration, and those young men could one day establish a sovereign order, and have equal shares in sovereignty or appoint one of their member as king, you would say (after they are sovereign, I mean) that I should trust their authority? That I shouldn’t second-guess their decisions?

“Right, agreed.”

So, for example, I shouldn’t give them a long list of instructions that they should follow on how not to be cruel, or how to respect the inherent dignity of mankind, or how to follow the natural law?

“No, you shouldn’t. Or… if you did, it would have to be as advice, not as some kind of formal instructions with official status.”

Because I don’t need them to follow the instructions I devise, correct? I have to trust that, given that their formal power is adequate to rule the state, they have no reason to behave like idiots, certainly no need to promote violence and uncertainty; they will be perfectly able to make kind, respectful, prudent decisions without any input from me?

“Yes.”

And conversely I, with no responsibility and no power and no special talents deserving of either, am actually not especially qualified even to come up with mediocre advice about how to rule?

“Yes, I guess that follows as well.”

And the same goes for everything else they will do if they become sovereign? They do not need my instructions, either as constitutional law or as private counsel, on how to balance a budget, staff a police force, put down a rebellion, repel an invasion, or any thing else like that? They will be able to maintain order just fine without my meddling?

“Naturally, yes.”

In fact, such meddling would be meaningless, because we are entirely ill-equipped, we have said, to offer this kind of practical advice to a sovereign?

“Sure, that goes along with everything else.”

So then, look back at the moment immediately before these men become sovereign — when they have the power to rule, but have not yet demanded and defended and won public recognition of their power — should I give them instructions on how to assume power? How to announce their supremacy?

“Ah, now I see where you’re going with this. No, I don’t think there would be an substantial difference between telling them how to announce their intention to rule, or how to defend it after they’ve announced it, and telling them how to defend their sovereignty after it is already firmly established.”

Good. Because of course, it’s vitally important that a sovereign maintain order; but we don’t need to instruct him on how to do so, because he knows he needs to and is better positioned to find the ways and means than we are. And likewise it’s vitally important that an incipient sovereign assume power, isn’t it?

“Yes, but… he knows this too, he knows how to do it better than we possibly could…”

Wonderful! So are we agreed that engineering a restoration is quite a different thing than showing how to carry one out?

“Wait, wait. We’re not quite agreed yet! I think what you’ve shown is that it’s logically inconsistent for a formalist to say he knows how to carry out a restoration of political order. (Unless maybe he plans to carry it out himself? That part of it confuses me, but never mind.) But I still think my original point stands. If it’s impossible (or at least senseless) for you to predict how a restoration might be carried out, how can you say that you’ve engineered the conditions for the restoration?”

Oh, well: that’s simple enough. Let’s say instead of following my plan you approached a bunch of colonels in the country you planned to restore and tried to sell them on formalism. What would happen? Let’s say that between them, the colonels control enough tanks and helicopters to manage whatever crappy little country you’re operating in.

“Well… I’m not sure what you’re getting at. There’s no way to know what would happen! They might get bored halfway through Part I of the Gentle Introduction and never embrace formalism at all. Or some might embrace it but not others. Or even if they all embraced it, some might think they didn’t have any chance of success and refuse to go along with the restoration attempt, or others might be willing to stand behind restoration but only if some of the other colonels were purged first… really, anything could happen! Who can say?”

You have perceived exactly what I was getting at. Good job. That is precisely the point: there is no reason to think ‘the colonels’ would all be of one mind, and even if they were there is no reason to think they could all work together effectively. But it’s even worse than that. Let’s say they did manage to work together and they did try to carry out a restoration and they did  manage to start rolling back whatever monstrosity Foggy Bottom had installed in their presidential palace? What would happen next?

“Well… to the victor go the spoils, right? I imagine even if they were united before they started, they would start feuding once victory was a real possibility. Because if the endpoint of the restoration is to restore sovereignty, then each colonel is going to want to be sovereign himself, or have the largest share possible if they are handing out shares in a sovcorp.”

Bingo. And then what happens with the siege of El Presidente‘s palace, once the colonels conducting the siege start feuding?

“Oh, I mean… I guess it would fall apart. At the very least El Presidente, or his international sponsors, could find some colonel who thought he was getting a raw deal, bribe him to switch sides, and then draw out the fighting.”

Right. That is the problem… lack of cohesion at the beginning when the project seems sure to fail, and lack of loyalty at the end when success is within reach.

“And the reason it seems sure to fail at the beginning is that it seems sure to fall apart at the end.”

Precisely so. One of the reasons, at least. Hard to cohere around a project which is sure to have many losers, even on the winning side. And worse: the likeliest person to win this kind of competition is exactly the kind of person who is deceptive, underhanded, treacherous…

“The kind of person all of his previous comrades would hate for having succeeded where they failed.”

The would hate him, wouldn’t they? They’d probably hate him enough to kill him, if they could find a way.

“And if he knew how much they must hate and resent the way he clawed his way to the top during the restoration, he would surely exile them. Or murder them.”

Now, now — we’re formalists, remember? If he becomes sovereign and then kills someone he suspects of lèse-majesté, that’s not murder, it’s a well-deserved execution. But the problem is that the potential targets of this particular well-deserved execution might see the writing on the wall before the restoration, and (quite reasonably) execute him before he has a chance to execute them. Well, I don’t exactly mean reasonably; because there are lots of people who might be the treacherous, deceptive rat who might execute you later, but the deceptive rat would be quite good at deception, wouldn’t he?

“He might look like he’s just some innocent reactionary colonel who wants to preemptively execute the deceptive rat who will execute all his old comrades after the restoration succeeds…”

Exactly so.

“The whole thing sounds like a mess, to be frank.”

Wouldn’t it be convenient if the colonels — or whoever you were trying to convince to carry out the restoration — didn’t actually care at all which of them was going to rule after the restoration? If they would be perfectly willing to pick a name out of a hat, and make that colonel king and the rest of them his ministers?

“Well, it would be convenient but it doesn’t sound very likely.”

Not likely, no — but is it possible? For example: what if by some bizarre coincidence, every colonel had a child married to every other colonel, so that no matter which of them became king, every colonel would have a child married into the royal family. Would that make them feel a little bit better about a royal lottery?

“Oh… okay. This is all coming together. And if all of their children were married to each other in a radially-symmetric network, then it wouldn’t really matter too much if, in the actual restoration, each man lost a little power or gained a little power against his initial expectations, because all of their children collectively constitute the new royalty, and there is no way for one man’s children to fall to a lower status than he expected unless all of their fathers-in-law have also been shut out from the new regime.”

Yes, something like that. Not impossible, but statistically unlikely. And since none of their progeny are likely to be shut out from the new regime (even if each of the fathers individually might be), there is no life-or-death urgency behind the struggle for a share in the sovereignty in the new state, no need to risk betraying ones peers to get a slightly bigger slice of the pie. So in fact, it is quite likely that no one will be shut out in any way.

“Or if someone is shut out, it’s because they implement something wacky and idealistic like the royal lottery you suggested — because they are so confident that any of them would be a good king, and would reward the rest of them appropriately for their efforts.”

That’s possible too. They would have options. I’m not here to tell them how to rule. I’m just trying to play matchmaker.

 

Metablogging V: Metametablogging

For a while I was occasionally posting about which QL posts were nearing completion, which were postponed indefinitely, which were coming up in the queue behind other posts. The implicit assumption of the metablogging was that some of the people who read the blog are keeping track of series I’ve started, topics I’ve promised to write about, and that sort of thing. Realistically I don’t think anyone follows QL closely enough to be disappointed when a post I’ve promised fails to materialize, so I’ve stopped doing it: arcana imperii, and all that. But if anyone does want to know the status of a certain draft, let me know.

April 2017 Lightning Round: Reasonable Doubt

A. Interesting goings-on at Slatestarcodex:

6. New moderation policy: I am getting very paranoid after the various physical and reputational attacks…

At least now we know Scott Alexander was never paranoid before, right?

In order to protect myself and non-anonymous readers of this blog…

How thoughtful, to protect the readers of his blog… 

I am banning the terms “human biodiversity” and “hbd” –

Okay, at least this isn’t an attempt to hide ideas or stifle disc-…

I will also be deleting without notice any comments that I consider to have too high a heat-to-light ratio, especially when they’re the easily-visible first comment in the thread.

Oh

I anticipate only having to do this very rarely.

Well, you heard the man — very rarely. We’ll hardly ever see a comment thread that has been purged of any discussion of biology or heredity. I guess Scott Alexander has been finding his “rational pursuit of the truth” schtick a bit exhausting of late?

I kid, I kid. I never read the comments at SSC; I stopped reading the comments on liberal blogs nearly a decade ago, back when I was still a staunch leftist myself. The blogosphere was started by a bunch of technologically-inclined nerds of all ideological persuasions. Then lefties and libertarians thought they might have a slightly better chance of getting laid if they brought women into their blogs and their blogrolls; thus began the long pressure campaign to get this new caste of techno-beta-orbiters to disassociate from anyone they disagreed with, and replace the principle of free exchange of ideas with the joint principles of (a) carefully-curated ornamental comment gardens and (b) real-world retaliation against unpopular opinions expressed online.

The real tell was that the prog/feminist comment moderation policy was always, and quite explicitly, targeted carefully at proficient and interesting disagreement. It was fine to post unpopular opinions that seemed bizarre or ludicrous: but those who made a special effort to find common ground with their rivals and show overlapping areas of concern were dubbed concern trolls. It was fine to vomit out a difficult position and then disappear forever; but a commenter who thoughtfully stuck around to see what objections other commenters raised and reflect on them or reply to them was abusing his commenting privileges.

The more carefully-curated the comments sections became, the more a blogger’s pet-commenters ignore refutation in favor of Bulverism. The leftist, you see, has little interest in truth. Replying to the content of an opponent’s thesis interests him only as way to shut his opponent up. Once a vague set of speech codes promises to shut up any “troll” whose insidious motives the bolshevik can identify, he can rely on his true strengths: mean-spirited ressentiment and scurrilous accusations.

The bottom line is that progressive blogs have had spectacularly boring comment sections for a long, long time. Boring even (especially?) to those who are leftist themselves. The monotony of progressivism leaves the Right well-positioned to win the meme war; and the explicit speech-codes that progressive Gleichstaltung imposes on already-dull fora like SSC catalyzes opposition from the earnest young men who would otherwise have been liberalism most principled defenders.

B. Speaking of human biodiversity, I recently stumbled across Akinokure’s discussion of r/K theory. There is a folk-theory on the right that liberals are r-selected rabbits and conservatives are K-selected wolves. Akinokure’s summary of the folk-theory:

>[L]iberals show the hallmarks of a group adapted to an environment that is abundant in resources relative to the number of individuals competing for them, where life is cheap and time horizons are short, and where thoughtless rapaciousness is the norm. That contrasts with conservatives, who are alleged to show the hallmarks of the opposite end, where resources are stretched thin, where time horizons are long, and where stewardship is deliberate.

As appealing as the rhetorical frame “We’re powerful wolves, you’re pathetic rabbits!” might be, the folk-theory is low on logic. Whether you look at (a) the environments in which conservative and liberal populations have been shaped, (b) the environments to which conservatives and liberals are attracted when they decide to move, or (c) the environments they are trying to create, the charge just doesn’t fit. The fit is even worse when you look at the various contrasts which define r- and K-selected populations one at a time. For the details, RTWT.

Since Akinokure has done a good job covering the bases, I will probably abandon my plans to write on r/K myself and simply point people to his post. (I might very briefly sketch out a few supplementary points on Monday or Tuesday. We’ll see.) I reject the accusation that sociobiology is the Freudianism of the right (cf. my comments in Carlsbad’s thread), but no one could possibly deny that there is some danger it could become so, and so we must do whatever we can to deflate flabby sociobiological thinking and find ways to spread the basic insights that will give scientific structure to popular prejudices.

C. I hope you all had fun at the Science March! I mean — you did go to the Science March, didn’t you? It’s not like you hate science or anything…

To help mark this solemn occasion:

• Some reflections on the Great Soviet Encyclopedia;
• The win-win life of Stuart Nagel;
• Last month’s West Hunter open thread on Europe’s huge lead in science and technology;
• RadishMag masterpiece Come Back, Colonialism;
• An HBD oldie-but-goodie, The Facts That Need To Be Explained;
• Last year’s review article Top Ten Replicated Findings from Behavioral Genetics  [pdf], which you should know inside and out by now.

Enjoy the rest of the cruelest month, everybody!

Minor Note: Gramsci

Over the last few months a number of you had recommended Gramsci, so when the opportunity presented itself I read some Gramsci. You were right: Gramsci writes well. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Antonio Gramsci: the towering midget

I don’t know whether the passages I read will change my views substantially or lead to a more systematic attempt to read/study Gramsci, but what I find most striking about this “discovery” was how flimsy the rationale for my long aversion to Gramsci now seems in retrospect. I had said that Gramsci was overexposed, overused, and so (presumptively) overrated. I wasn’t imagining this; people talk about Gramsci all the time. Everyone talks about Gramsci. I didn’t need to read Gramsci in order to learn what people think about Gramsci; I know plenty about that.

Where I went wrong was in assuming that what people have said about Gramsci must be substantially related to what Gramsci has said. How often do I say this to people? To the texts, to the texts! What most people mean when they say “Platonic” or “Hobbesian” or “Nietzschean” has nothing to do with the writings of Plato, Hobbes, or Nietzsche. We read old books because what older writers wrote was better than what our contemporaries write: less subject to the whims of passing fads, less distorted by the demotist deception. This general principle also extends to new books about old books! I know it in principle, and I remind people of it often myself; but somehow I failed to apply the logic to Gramsci.

Of course, part of the problem was that Antonio Gramsci isn’t just distorted by deception: he’s distortion made flesh. I have wasted enough time already reading prestigious radicals, and I was loathe to waste more. But I failed to be properly chauvinist in my analysis. ML King and Malcolm X were blacks; Rosa Luxemburg was a jewess. To be an imprisoned radical is not, in itself, a ticket into the martyrology of Cultural Marxism; you need either the privileges of an Official Victim, a radical network of co-ethnics to lobby for your canonization, or preferably both.

Gramsci’s wife, Julia, with Delio and Giuliano

Antonio Gramsci was a Italian man with a pretty wife. He wasn’t even properly proletarian: his childhood poverty was the outcome of his father’s ugly career as an embezzler, and the books he ordered from his prison cell were charged directly to his friend Piero Sraffa.

Clearly I was too much of a glassy-eyed universalist to realize that the Left does not fetishize the prison letters and prison scribblings of every white, straight male who was imprisoned during Bolshevism’s openly-violent phase. Gramsci had to earn the right to be misinterpreted by cat-ladies with tenure. My aversion to writers connected with the phrase “prison notebooks” ought not to have extended to him.

As you will have gathered, my second-hand knowledge of Gramsci was a web of mistakes and misunderstandings. The funniest of these involved the concept of hegemony Gramsci proposed. In Cultural Marxist orthodoxy, “hegemony” refers to insidious, polymorphous, overwhelming voodoo-power which undermines all attempts to resist it. I have always disliked it, not because the concept is incoherent or dishonestly applied but because in Greek, hegemon does not denote awe-inspiring power or absolute control but rather primus inter pares, the leader of a coalition. But this is exactly what Gramsci has in mind: leadership within a coalition.

My vague sense that Gramsci played a role in the politicization of the banal and the banalization of academia was more accurate. But even here, Gramsci’s own position was more reasonable than what his successors’ became. When Gramsci talks about the significance of everyday life and folk-culture, his purpose is not to belittle the life of the mind but rather, by placing it in its proper context, to show its profound importance. In effect, he recreates Hobbes’ position: high-status intellectuals create and refine doctrines which medium-status intellectuals then teach to the low-status intellectual who indoctrinate the population. When the indoctrination is complete, men who could never read a book like Summa Theologica nonetheless have many of its doctrines embedded in their routines, their idioms, their rituals, and the standards to which they hold each other.

In other words, Hobbes emphasizes the political function of the lower clergy not in order to de-emphasize abstruse debates between berobed doctors, but in order to underline the ultimate political impact of the academic debate by outlining the transmission mechanism whereby academic theses become popular consensus. Gramsci’s argument is tailored to refute the Marxist dogma that metaphysics is irrelevant to politics rather than the Puritan dogma that metaphysics rises above politics, but is identical in its general shape.

So the “Gramscian” view that any piece of pop culture ephemera deserves the same level of study and analysis as the Republic is a parody of Antonio Gramsci’s view; but perhaps Gramsci deserves no better. The company you choose in life may bedevil you long after death…

You Can’t Get There From Here

I. Laying the Foundation

Metaphorically speaking, the aspiring architect of a new political order faces the same challenges as any other architect. The political architect will have established his new order when one (sovereign) faction has more power than all the others, and enough power to force them to submit to its laws. By the same token, an architect who works in stone and timber finishes a new building when he has put the roof in place above the top floor, the top floor above the second-to-top floor, and so on all the way down to the foundation.

In fact, can we not say that in the final analysis, the whole field of architecture (including the political subdivision) reduces to the art of elevation? Architects elevate things until they are in their proper positions. Political architects elevate sovereigns high above all their subjects and, more generally, superior above inferior. Other varieties of architect elevate spire above belfry, or pediment above architrave, and in any event upper above lower. We who are unlucky enough to find ourselves but feebly endowed with the gift of elevation can only gape at the virtuosity displayed by architects who lift brick, mortar and steel up to the dizzying heights their tall buildings require.

Or so it might seem.

Consider a simple case of architecture: a sandcastle, perhaps. And let us stipulate that we have in mind a really quite simple sandcastle, perhaps approximating a large mound of sand. An architectural amateur can hardly do better if he wants to practice his elevating. There is really nothing more to building a (simple) sandcastle than filling a bucket with wet sand, elevating that bucket to the top of the existing sandcastle-mound, and unloading your sand at the summit. If you have no bucket, your hands will do just fine. Architecture stripped down to the essential!

If you try this experiment, you will quickly discover something interesting about sand. Sand — especially wet sand — is easy to pour on top of the sandpile, but it doesn’t stay there easily. The weight of each bucketful of new sand dislodges what was there before, causing the sides of the pile to cascade down to the bottom, bringing most of what was just added with it. Sometimes an entire face of an apparently-stable sandcastle will slide off at once, causing a whole line of towers and spires to founder and vanish into the avalanche.

Other simple cases of architecture furnish parallel examples. Playing cards are light. One man can easily lift up a whole box filled with decks of playing cards above his head. But few can take those playing cards and build a card-tower that rises even a few feet off the ground. Elevating the cards is easy: the trick is to get them to stay elevated once they’re in place. A slight tap to the top of the tower causes the cards to tremble all the way down to the base, and just like that the tower collapses.

Slightly more ambitious architectural projects will suggest other failings of the Elevation Theory Of Architecture. Platforms that tip over; decks that detach; supports which crumple under the weight of the finished structure. After the structure itself is completed, of course, you also need to use it, which give it further opportunities to crumple, crack, or otherwise come apart under the weight of the furnishings and the occupants.

So: maybe architectures isn’t really all about lifting things up high after all. Maybe it’s about getting them to stay high after you lift them —and in particular, to prevent everything you’ve piled up from collapsing under its own weight.

II. Power and Ambiguity

Anarchy is the absence of power. To re-establish central authority, the authority-which-is-to-become-central must first have the power to overcome every anarchic faction that might resist it. It may be possible to pacify one rival with the aid of a different faction, but to pull off a trick like that you first would need the power to compel the second faction to ally with you against the third; not to mention the power to resist any far-sighted third party which intervenes to prevent you from subduing one faction for use against the second…

So whoever ends a prolonged period of anarchy will necessarily be powerful. A fortiori, at some point he will have had to pursue power, in order later to use it.

Amassing power seems like a great challenge because it is genuinely hard. Not everyone can be above average; not everyone can be a leader. Most people consider themselves lucky if they have the resources to prevail in a struggle against a landlord or an employer, never mind an entire rival faction in a national power struggle. To a fish, the whole world is a little pond — and to ordinary people like you or me, grave matters of statecraft are just extensions of a lifelong struggle against powerlessness and insignificance.

But the rarity or infrequency of a necessary condition does not, in itself, make that condition an obstacle. Great power is rare, but it will always be rare. The reason why the most influential factions, under circumstances of anarchy, do not make themselves sovereign — or, failing that, do not further augment and stabilize their power — is not that they are too stupid (or cowardly, or whatever else) to see the benefits of pacifying their rivals. Rather, they are ill-equipped to pursue supremacy because their powers, like the spires of a sandcastle, are heaped up high on an unstable foundation.

Sovereigns need to be able to mobilize resources. However, there are two ways to mobilize a resource: at will, or by influencing the consensus among all people with an interest in the resource and an ability to move/use/manipulate it. The latter is just influence, and requires a further question about how that consensus is generated and what one must give up to maintain that influence. To mobilize a resource at will, on the other hand, one must be able to intervene and determine its use regardless of whether other people like that use, or like you.

One way to express this distinction is to say that to mobilize a resource at will, one needs not just influence but formal power: the power that will be at your personal disposal in any conflict over the resource is so great that no ambiguity about who controls the resource can arise.

Unfortunately the extension of this formalist analysis to the conditions which define sovereignty itself would be improper. A distinction between “formal” and “informal” power implicitly assumes that “the power at one’s personal disposal in a conflict” includes power lent by legitimate authorities (the sovereign, or those the sovereign charters) to titleholders. By consistently defending the choices of formal titleholders, the sovereign deters malcontents from challenging titles, and thus indirectly from challenging the whole system of formal powers which the sovereign superintends. But while an ordinary person’s formal power can be defined as “his own personal power plus the power of the sovereign” to contrast it with his influence, applying the same formula to the sovereign yields an empty tautology.

Now, to execute his duties a sovereign must have at his disposal more power than any man could wield individually, in his own person. But he cannot rely on mere consensus among all the conscripts and policemen. In the former case there is no sovereign; in the latter, the sovereign is an assembly of henchmen. It is not that a king/chief/boss-man who leads an assembly of henchmen is an unimportant man. He matters, but he owes his status to his influence over the assembly and he serves at its pleasure. (He is in effect a demagogue in a very narrow sort of democracy.)

I have no intention here to unveil a formula or schema which adequately distinguishes between the sovereign’s ur-formal power, on the one hand, and his overall influence over consensus in the many different groups positioned to intervene in various conflicts in which he has a stake. I have drawn attention to this contrast only to highlight two ways of amassing power, and their very different implications for statecraft.

Doubling the number of people over whom one has influence increases one’s ability to resolve conflicts only within tight constraints, because one accumulates influence over an audience by appealing to its interests and preconceptions. By repeated doublings one could gain influence over an extraordinary number of people, but would simultaneously lose more and more freedom to maneuver without alienating one’s “followers”. The same logic extends to financing, to equipment, to talent; if you double the sum of money you can raise in a certain period, or the quantity of supplies you can stockpile, but these resources are provided courtesy of an audience on whose goodwill you depend, you are heaping more and more sand onto the sandpile. Their money and their supplies may be nice to have, but you will always be their employee — never their sovereign.

III. Transition

M. Tullius Cicero, at the conclusion of a discussion of the duties owed in war, states:

Though one may do injury in either of two ways — namely, by force or by fraud — both are entirely alien to a human being: fraud seems to belong to the cunning fox, force to the lion.

In the absence of a sovereign the law falls silent, and who then is to judge whether the harms men suffer rise to the level of iniuria? Nonetheless, we recognize force and fraud by the same general features whether at war or at peace. A judge is only necessary if there is a sentence to be passed and a legal title to be upheld; otherwise we can discern the violent or fraudulent character of an act without seeking to convict anyone of any crime.

We can admire particularly courageous applications of force, particularly cunning uses of fraud. Indeed, it is hard not to react to the sight of vicious comrades triumphing over an enemy with admiration (not to mention relief, and satisfaction). This goes to show that whether one can recognize the signs of force and fraud in an act is an entirely different question from whether one condemns the act as an injury, or even disapproves of it: how could anyone admire a master of deception without first observing his deceit?

Force and fraud not only appear in times of war and anarchy, but we can classify certain wartime acts as more forceful or fraudulent, others as less, and draw certain modest conclusions about belligerents who triumph without resorting to bestial tactics.

In the abstract, Group X overpowers Group Y if X has more manpower that Y and uses this advantage to physically prevent Y from opposing X’s plans. Conversely, X outwits Y if X contrives to prevent Y from opposing X’s plans by causing Y to believe (falsely) that this course of action serves Y’s interests.

It is generally understood that fraud is unsustainable. That is, it is entirely possible that X’s act of deception succeeds so completely that Y cannot recover from the damage; X’s position grows increasingly dominant, Y’s hopes evaporate and surrender looms. A ruse can work, and if it does work spectacularly, a victory is a victory. The problem is that it cannot work repeatedly. Whatever misleading evidence you offered originally your enemy will learn to interpret as random noise. So if X’s strengths in its conflict with Y have included, to date, successful use of fraud, you expect X’s advantage over Y to weaken as the conflict continues, and Y learns to disregard the misleading kinds of evidence it had originally fallen for.

Furthermore: even if X has triumphed, by fraud, in its war against Y, the power which X used to win the war will be little use in maintaining the peace. If Y remains independent, Y will not fall for the same trick again, and other rivals like Z will have learned from Y’s mistakes. If Y has been subjugated and absorbed, X does not need to deter a formal declaration of war, but does need some way to make the former members of the defeated group fall in line: the lies X told during the war will not work.

In a way, this suggests that fraud may be just a special version of the type of influence we encountered in the previous section. Influence gives you the ability to guide what a group does… provided you want them to do something that is in their interests. Fraud is really the exact same thing, but in the special case where you manage to make their beliefs about their interests conform to your plans, rather than conforming your plans to their interests. Accumulated influence is forfeit as soon as the “influencer” stops currying favor with the audience, in any case; fraud is simply the most drastic way to reveal to your audience that its goals are no longer compatible with your own.

Oddly enough the same sort of analysis applies, mutatis mutandis, to the scenario where X overpowers Y with superior manpower. Here, of course, there is no question of Y making a mistake or learning to correct it. If X has superior numbers at the beginning of a war it can very well maintain that advantage through to the end of the war, and all else equal X will still have superior numbers when the next war runs around. So the strategy of overpowering a rival is not “unsustainable” in the sense of self-undermining.

But a similar sort of regress arises all the same. Any group can be subdivided into smaller groups. For example, if X outnumbers Y, it is still the case that Y outnumbers a variety of possible subdivisions of X: let us in fact subdivide X into two halves, X’ and X”, either of which Y could easily overpower. The fact that (X’+X”) can overpower Y does not by itself imply that X will defeat Y (or any other rival) in future conflicts; to reach this conclusion we must also conclude that X’ and X” will continue to work side by side against “external” rivals.

Why would X’ and X” continue to cooperate? Maybe because X’ can overpower X”, or vice-versa; maybe because one has tricked the other. As a third option, maybe there is an incidental convergence of interests between X’ and X” which allows them them to influence each other to promote mutually appealing projects (like crushing Y). Such a convergence will last as long as it lasts, and when X’ and X” start to push for goals where their interests diverge, X as a whole will split up.

Of course, if X’ has tricked X” (or vice-versa), then one would expect the dupe will wake up and turn on the deceiver soon enough: such tactics are, we have noted, unsustainable. And if X’ preserves the X-alliance by overpowering X”, we have jumped straight from the frying pan to the fire: who keeps the subdivisions of X’ in line so that they can subdue X” (so that they can subdue Y)?

In interstate warfare, two (or more) sovereign states, each with (hopefully) some power base inside its own borders, face off over a disputed territory. Given that we already know each sovereign has the power to maintain internal order, we can infer that they use that same source of power (whatever form it may take!) to maintain military discipline. So even if a state does attempt to outwit or overpower its enemies, and even if these strategies suggest the state is exposed to certain risks (loss of trust, either from the enemy or within its own ranks), there is ultimately no worry about how the state maintains control at all: there is no worry that force and fraud are the only bonds holding the group together.

In anarchy, matters stand differently. There, no faction has any power beyond what it can use (and successfully defend) in its quarrels with its neighbors. If a faction gains power through a successful campaign of deception, it may have nothing left when the truth finally comes out (which it eventually will). More significantly: if a faction gains power through its superior numbers, it may have nothing left when its various internal cliques start to feud.

Thus in a very loose sense, the eventual “victor” who imposes order in an anarchic environment will be the one who reaches a no-force, no-fraud equilibrium. In anarchy, many factions will profit immensely from every sort of deception, lie, and breach of faith, but these same factions will crumble after they have no one left to lie to. Many factions will profit by ganging up on the small and weak, but they will crumble when they start to prey on each other. But a faction which derives its power neither (primarily) from its lies nor (primarily) from its numbers will not crumble and stands to continue consolidating its position into true political order.

So there really is a way in which an institution which is trying to reestablish order after a period of anarchy needs to be “small”, or at least “dense”. Institutions which are “big”, in the sense that they have power by virtue of containing/influencing many men and having many resources at their disposition, are ill-suited to the task in same way a Ponzi scheme is ill-suited long-term investment. An organization which achieves comparable power with less manpower is no better equipped than the “big” organization to accomplish a given goal or defeat a given rival (this is what it means to say they have “comparable power”), but is exponentially more likely to rule.

How does an institution with fewer men achieve better results than one with more men? It could recruit more talented applicants, of course (and it should!) but this only pushes the question back to a more general level: how does an institution with less manpower, fewer talents and human capital of all forms, fewer resources, less of everything, outperform one with more? Presumably it can only do this by being a better institution: better organization, more unity, such that the relationships among its few members form a network that induces the members to pursue the goals of the network and the network to pursue the goals of its members.

Conclusion: to have formal power (and thus potentially: sovereignty) rather than just a lot of influence (but: influence whose accumulation does nothing to end an anarchic state), an entity must be organized.

 

Early Modern Statecraft (and Statecruft)

Having defended monarchism in principle, I should move right into a previously-planned post on the problems actual monarchies face. As I mentioned in my previous post, calling someone “King” doesn’t guarantee he’ll rule over a kingdom any more than calling someone “General Secretary” guarantees that he’ll make you coffee. Constitutional monarchies are a thing; pretenders and usurpers are a thing; and of course, even an actual monarch can become less-than-actual if he allows certain crucial capacities to fall into the wrong hands.

Formalists suspect that formal regimes are better than informal regimes, and that most of the grave diseases that afflict modern societies can be traced back to poorly-designed institutions. But monarchy is not formal government and formal government is not monarchy. Rather, that there is nothing bad about royal government is merely one of the most unfashionable implications of formalism, and absolute monarchy is one of the clearest illustrations of a formal power structure. This makes pro-monarchist signaling — deeply unpopular in the broader population — uniquely well-suited for use as a reactionary counter-signal (an “exosemantic gang-sign”, in Nydwracu’s memorable phrase).

But still, an informal monarchy is just as informal as informal democracy. Doesn’t matter whether you call the guy who doesn’t-really-rule “President” or “Prince” if the priestly class continues to pull the strings. So we need to look quite seriously at what can go wrong in monarchies. This isn’t simply a matter of having the know-how to set up a sturdy monarchy, or deciding whether, on the whole, we prefer an absolute monarch or an oligarchy. These nasty totalitarianism-lite “democracies” we live in have failed spectacularly, but part of the spectacle is how quickly they failed. If you want to know what could go wrong in a formal state in general, you need to look at all of the failure-modes discovered during the many centuries of royal and imperial governments.

Failure modes like the French Revolution.

Formal sovereigns – monarchs or otherwise – don’t rule by metaphysical necessity. Their rule is contingent on other people who carry out the sovereign’s will. Consider an analogy: Michael Phelps swims fast, but not by metaphysical necessity. His speed is contingent on how much pressure his muscles can exert on the water, and things like that. If you amputated his limbs, I could swim a lap faster than him.

To say a monarch has formal power doesn’t mean he doesn’t need other people’s help, it means His Majesty’s government has a functioning institutional hierarchy. All the people in that hierarchy provide a valuable service, and they each need some reason to provide that service. The king, in turn, needs to provide the reason. But in a healthy institution, that incentive won’t be a voice in government — or at least, not on a regular basis. Kings do need advisors, and “vizier” is a pretty cool job, so the king may reward some of his servants with ministerial roles.

But there is only so much advising to go around. If you make some nobody your Financial Advisor, then you aren’t going to be able to reward someone who has actually straightened out your finances with the same role. If you multiply the ministerial roles endlessly, you created confusion and gridlock — particularly if you, as king, look to consensus among your advisors as a valuable source of information, or if you want to delegate minor tasks to them.

Kings often need to appoint men who will act as Justices of the Peace. JPs function much like the chief’s lieutenants in a tribal society. The king can’t be everywhere all at once, so he needs loyal allies who can command enough respect within a given region to communicate his orders there, make sure everyone knows what’s what, and knock heads together if there is any confusion.

Even when the Justices of the Peace perform this function beautifully, dependence on JPs and (more broadly) on the small class of men who have the wherewithal to fill the position can create problems. If someone who holds such an important role can’t be replaced easily, and if the pool of potential appointees is small to begin with, the “market value” of their services might be too high for the king to routinely pay them what they’re really worth. He may instead have to rely on overlap of interests. A king should not, unless he is a figurehead, ask his subjects to certify that his decrees are in their interests; but generally, they are in his subjects’ interest. (As a rule of thumb the king is the herdsman and his banker is the butcher.) The alignment of interests is even closer when you look at the sort of local squires and landowners who might serve as JP, since they are the ones who have the most to lose from insecurity of legal titles.

This deep overlap of interests frequently exists between a king and his subjects, and in particular between a king and his lieutenants. It means that a king can often call on some local squire to play a critical local role for little more than a symbolic reward, simply because the squire also wants the job to be done, and done well. But even if such an overlap exists, a king who becomes dependent on it is skirting disaster. His hold over his lieutenants is no stronger than a tribal chieftain’s, and he must always bear in mind how a new policy affects those whom he expects to enforce it. If it is bad for them, it will be enforced lightly or not at all; if it is very bad, the same men may hold their other duties hostage to increase their bargaining power.

In some metaphorical sense, perhaps all rebellions are rebellions of JPs. But the English Civil War especially deserves this description. In the escalation of his dispute with Parliament, Charles I had so heavily alienated the gentry class that county governments were largely outside his control. How he alienated them I will touch on in the next post, but the preexisting problem was that his government relied so heavily on its local lieutenants, and in particular on their own interest in promoting royal policy, that these lieutenants had something like a formal veto on any policies that went against their interests.

I do not mean to describe the use of JPs as “the cause” of the English Civil War. It may well be Charles I had no better option. He should at least have recognized that such a vulnerability existed, and also the importance, if it existed, of keeping tabs on the working consensus among potential rebels. Indeed, that is why parliaments exist. Parliaments build centrality into the lines of communication of the unreliable class. So long as Parliament seems satisfied, would-be rebels know they won’t be able to foment a rebellion, so they have no reason to risk royal wrath by trying.

Charles I called no Parliaments between 1629 and 1640. This period of personal rule was entirely consistent with his right as sovereign — but perhaps it was not wise.

Charles I ruled without consulting Parliament for 11 years. When Louis XVI convoked an Assembly of Notables in 1787, this body had not been consulted in 163 years. When the Estates-General assembled two years later, it had not met for 175 years, and could not even settle what seating arrangements it would use before veering off into Revolution.

What is best is not to have many important lieutenants whose enforcement of royal policy is contingent on their personal approval to begin with. (Ideally a king could limit such sensitive positions to men whose opinions he would solicit anyway, in their capacity as his advisors.) When reactionaries blame the fall of such-and-such a monarchy on “the decline of the aristocracy”, they most frequently mean that the kings were relying on community leaders to administer justice on a volunteer basis as a public service, rather than finding someone who would take charge in exchange for some reward. Rewards (whether seigneurial privileges or simple awards of cash and land) are expensive, and moreover the more rewards flow to the aristocracy, the more powerful aristocrats there are to interfere with dynastic succession.

But assuming you do have little choice but to rely on many independent lieutenants who serve at their own pleasure, it is wise to know what their pleasure is. Calling regular Parliaments is one way to do this — not a law of nature, but certainly a sensible approach to a serious problem. If you are regularly consulting some body to make sure they aren’t secretly getting pissed off at you, don’t forget the “regularly” part. A parliament isn’t like some girl you picked up at the club; it’s not going to think you’re hot stuff because you never return its calls. If you don’t want to use assemblies to keep tabs on the people you rely on, don’t call assemblies. But don’t call assemblies when you think they like you, and stop calling assemblies when you’re afraid maybe they don’t like you, and then start again when your affairs are in total chaos. The whole point of the assembly is to give you a sense of how much they don’t like you.

However, a whole class of very similar problems can arise in different circumstances where the JPs, or some similar group of lieutenants, are not doing their job — indeed, where there is no longer any job for them to do. To imagine how a situation like that might arise, let’s say that your great-great-great-great grandfather, the first king of your royal line, was always at war and so never stopped campaigning. He found it useful to use one of his men as a de facto second-in-command. He had to lead the army and have final say in decisions, of course, but he couldn’t do everything by himself — so he had a right-hand man who was always at his side to oversee logistics, manage access, double-check plans, deliver orders, and that kind of thing. And since he was always right there, he probably doubled as a bodyguard, a taster and even, if necessary, as a valet.

Sounds like an important, grueling job, right? If your quadruple-great grandpa’s new dynasty gets firmly established, his Right-Hand Man is getting a big, fat barony.

And maybe the following kings retained this “Official Right-Hand Man” position when they went off to war, and continued to appoint worthy men to the position… even as the position hemorrhaged duties over the generations. The original Right-Hand Man worked hard for his peerage. The first king’s son’s and grandson’s Right-Hand Men both still had a valuable role to play (and those two probably only earned that appointment after they had already performed invaluable services that merited a peerage in their own right). So they got peerages, too.

Fast forward: now you’re the seventh of your line (long may you reign). Times have changed. Now you have a General Staff. They manage military logistics. The tradition has devolved to the point that the guy you appoint as your Right-Hand Man, is basically just your equerry. He helps you mount. And dismount. Maybe he coordinates with the grooms, too, to make sure that the horses are looking shiny.

You’re not going to give someone a peerage for helping you get on a horse. And you’re probably not going to waste the talents of a servant who does deserve a peerage by “promoting” him to full-time equerry. So it would be really, really unfortunate if this whole “Right-Hand Man” tradition had descended down to your reign in an unbroken line, peerage and all.

No one wants the insult of being the first Right-Hand Man in the history of the kingdom to not get a peerage. If you despair of filling the official Right-Hand Man position and just get some dirty peasant to help you on and off your horse, your loyal servants might not be very happy with that, either: they way they think of it is, the gentlemen of the realm collectively have the privilege of helping Your Royal Highness mount and dismount, and you should reward whichever of them does the job with a peerage.

This may seem like a silly and unlikely example. Certainly I’ve sketched out a huge disproportion between the service rendered (equerry) and the reward (peerage). But this kind of thing really does happen! Consider a more prosaic starting point, where the lieutenants start out as JPs or sheriffs. Over time other parts of the local administration takes over the duties which originally required independent leadership. Eventually this guy’s duties devolve into standing in the town square on Sunday and publicly reading new edict, as a symbolic promulgation. Or maybe he doesn’t even need to do a public reading: maybe he just needs to sign the edict.

In the past, when he was responsible for enforcing the edict on his own authority, signing the edict was a big deal. If the local JP didn’t know about the edict, it wasn’t getting enforced anyway, so his neighbors knew to treat any alleged edict he hadn’t signed with extreme suspicion. If he found it ambiguous or poorly-framed for the local situation, he could request clarification from the king and delay enforcement until he knew how to apply his instructions. If he was only pretending not to understand the edict it still wasn’t getting enforced, which amounted to the same thing. And indeed, returning the edict to the king with more-or-less frivolous concerns could be the JP’s way of escalating towards open defiance.

But once the the edict gets carried out without the JP’s participation, this link disappears. The two responsibilities belong to two different people. The signer’s opinion of the edict no longer reflects the enforcer’s, so a failure or refusal to sign contains no  information about enforcement. All that remains of the link is the salience, in the memory of the population, of the rule “No one obeys the edict until after it has been signed”.

The end-point of the process I’m describing is a cartoon version of the powers of registration of the French parlements (local judicial bodies). I say “cartoon” because I know next to nothing about the judicial system of the ancien régime, and I don’t know how much of the day-to-day operation of the Bourbon legal system actually required the enthusiastic participation of the parlementaires. But what I want to stress is that these bodies simply refused to register royal proclamations they didn’t like, and then claimed that any attempts to enforce an edict without the ceremonial registration called for by tradition were illegal, and encouraged resistance.

Calling a legal activity illegal is bad. It creates ambiguity about what is and isn’t legal, and thus also about who does and doesn’t have authority to interpret the law. Legal ambiguity fuels violence. But calling laws illegal, for so trifling a reason as the accuser’s own refusal to go through with a celebration-ritual, calls for a noose.

But more to the point, no one should be in a position where his participation is strongly associated with a successful use of royal power, but his competence and powers are unnecessary to the success itself. Such a system has many of the problems of systems of semi-autonomous lieutenants like the Justices of the Peace, but none of advantages! Once the real authority of a position has disappeared, its residual symbolic authority must be blasted from the face of the Earth as quickly as possible.

So long as these symbols remain, they create ambiguity and coordinate subversion. But worse still, the continued existence of the symbol as symbol, without any of the earlier powers that originally justified it, gives the impression that the sovereign does indeed intend for this symbolic authority to have a formal status in the legal process. Such an impression cannot be binding on the sovereign, but it can create expectations. A sovereign can change the law at will, but he is stuck (at least for a time) with expectations he has created of his own free will, so he should avoid giving rise to such expectations in the first place.

The great advantage formalism offers is predictability: everyone knows who has title to X, and who will in fact control X when all is said and done. This removes any incentive to squabble and bluster over who actually controls X. If you are certain about the outcome, there is no reason to waste energy fighting over the result, and with no one fighting his decrees the sovereign doesn’t have a lot to worry about.

But insecurity of formal titles isn’t the only way to create uncertainty, and if you create enough uncertainty about something else, then people aren’t going to act as though they consider potential conflicts to have a certain outcome. One of the easiest way to stoke uncertainty is by creating pointless ambiguity about political structure. If people believe their consent (or their allies’) is formally necessary to legal procedure, this will drastically change their predictions about conflicts, leading them to pick dangerous fights. If you allow this expectation to become entrenched and then strip it away, not only will they be disappointed and angry, but — having suddenly “lost” one of the powers they were counting on for self-protection — they will now be worried about what they might lose next, and what means they have available to defend it.

The solution is to euthanize the rancid expectation as early as possible, when it is still weak; and in the case of symbolic authority in particular, when the symbol is still primarily a direct function of independent authority.

This may be the greatest difference between conservative traditionalism in its broadest sense and the reactionary traditionalism of the cult of Gnon. Point out an institution that has outlived its original purpose and faster than you can say “Chesterton’s Fence!” the TruCon will be explaining to you that we shouldn’t second-guess the wisdom of past generations as embodied in inherited tradition. Well, in purely social matters (food, dress, family life) maybe so, but when it comes to throne and altar, things stand differently. The men who have the right to say what is just and what is holy have a unique function in society that would allow them, if they used their positions unwisely, to turn all other traditions upside-down.

If the sovereign allows these positions with symbolic authority (or even positions which create an expectation of symbolic authority) to accumulate needlessly, he is putting his entire state in danger. Change for the sake of change is no good. Old offices do gather strength from their deep roots and the almost-supernatural awe that subjects feel for them. But that same sublime aura that commands respect for the sovereign’s loyal lieutenants also commands respects for disloyal lieutenants, or indeed for ceremonial office-holders the sovereign never considered his “lieutenants” to begin with.

A traditional function with residual symbolic authority is a prehensile appendage dangling off the body politic. The TruCon says “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” but Gnon’s rule is “If it’s not serving a function, saw it off quickly before necrosis sets in.” Then cauterize the stump, just to be sure.