Right and Left¶
Endless conversational stimulation is to be found in the fact that the most basic distinction of modern politics is profoundly incomprehensible, and at the same time almost universally invested. Almost everybody thinks they understand the difference between the Right and the Left, until they think about it. Then they realize that this distinction commands no solid consensus, and exists primarily as a substitute for thought. Perhaps the same is true of all widely-invoked political labels. Perhaps that is what politics is.
Spandrell directs a winding, intermittently brilliant post to the topic, which is enriched by a comments thread of outstanding quality. Like the Right/Left distinction itself, the argument becomes increasingly confusing, the closer it is examined. The ‘rightist singularity’ of the title is introduced as a real political alternative to the Left Singularity modeled by James Donald, driven by analogous self-reinforcing feedback dynamics, but into nationalistic rather than egalitarian catastrophe. For societies menaced by the prospect of Left Singularity, it offers an alternative path. China is taking it, Spandrell suggests.
Notably, in passing, Spandrell’s gloss on Donald’s Left Singularity is a gem:
The leftist singularity is based on claiming higher status by being more egalitarian than anyone else. So you get a status arms race in which everyone tries to be more egalitarian than the others. That works because people (and monkeys) take equality to be a good thing.
(To continue, we have to bracket the ‘old’ Right Singularity: the Technocommercial Singularity that Donald’s formula for Left Singularity distinguished itself from. Nobody even mentions it in this discussion. It’s a problem for some other time.)
To backtrack from these digressions: If ‘rightist singularity’ is nationalistic, that aligns the Right with nationalism, doesn’t it? But nothing remotely this crude is sustainable (not when time is involved), Spandrell notes: “the Right isn’t nationalist any more.” He expands, convincingly, in his own comment thread:
What historically has been called Right was about law and order, i.e. leaving things as they are. Tribalism qua nationalism isn’t inherently “Rightist”, in fact originally it was a Leftist subversive meme against the Ancient Regime, but when mass media was invented nationalism was the status quo, i.e. the Right, and political labels have become fossilized since.
As Vladimir (May 25, 22:10) articulates the point:
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn would have a ready answer for you: nationalism is leftism. It is basically another name for Jacobinism. These paradoxes of right-wing nationalism are just another manifestation of the fundamental problem of modern rightism — namely, that a large part of its content is just yesterday’s leftism that the left has in the meantime abandoned for a more extreme left position.
So, I’d say this is nothing but just another mode of leftist singularity.
Or, Spandrell again (May 26, 02:34): “Historical evidence is that nationalism was leftist before socialism appeared further left, making it rightist.”
The Right is yesterday’s Left, or at least, it is soon exposed as such when it appears in its historical and populist guise. When the masses turn Right, they are defending a dated Left, frozen in place by modernist mass media memory, stuck in a black-and-white newsreel, like an insect in amber.
The squirming is over, unless it changes dimensions. Then chaos yawns, despite heroic efforts to restore order (Baker, May 25 17:29; Handle May 25 18:33; Den Beste linked by Peter Taylor May 27 17:47), with Moldbug’s preferred Order and Chaos spectrum sucked — among innumerable others — into the vortex. Tradition and revolution, authority and liberty, hierarchy and equality, greed and envy, independence and solidarity, capitalism and socialism … there’s not even a remote prospect of closure, coherence, or consistency. Every attempted definition intensifies fragmentation. Right and Left disagree (we all agree), but exactly how they disagree — on that there’s no agreement.
Peter A. Taylor (May 29, 06:15):
The left-right spectrum, in so far as it is an honest attempt to make sense of the world rather than mere propaganda, looks to me like an attempt to fit chaos into Procrustes’ bed. … Moldbug loves Carlyle. Carlyle admired Cromwell. Moldbug hates Cromwell. Chaos.
Spandrell (May 26, 08:28), twists it back to the Trichotomy:
Both the Western Right and the Chinese Right are a loose combination of traditionalists, nationalists and capitalists. Which mostly hate each other and never get along when they get any amount of power.
By this point, however, trichotomous diversity starts to look like a mirage of integrity. Right and Left are every difference that has ever been conceived, if not yet, then in the near future. If these signs mean anything more than the war continues, like the black-and-white distinction between chess pieces, no one has yet convincingly shown us why.
Yet perhaps, if Right and Left, apprehended together, mean the basic modern antagonism, the conflict itself, as an irreducible thing, will prove to be the source of whatever sense can be found.
[To be continued …]
ADDED: Whatever you do, don’t miss Handle’s systematic analysis of the question (May 31, 10:09pm below).