https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
Scott Alexander’s attempt to pass an Ideological Turing test on the views of Reactionism. See also The Anti-Reactionary FAQ, also on Slate Star Codex. My summary of this summary (n.b. generally not my views):
How do we know we live in the best possible society? Historically, citizens of Rome thought they were the pinnacle of civilization. We should always be seeking improvement.
That’s part of why totalitarian states are so bad: you can’t criticize Stalinist Russia, so it can’t improve. But maybe modern societies have some similar mechanisms. If you try to criticize any moves to the left a society has made, you’ll probably get ostracized and fired. Probably not every single one of those moves has been 100% correct, so this should cause some concern.
Scott’s examples:
And this is true despite enormous technological advances and the Flynn Effect.
The progressive explanation (“externalism”) for the poorer outcomes of many minority groups is oppression: white people don’t have better outcomes because of anything inherent in their culture or bodies, but rather because they brutally take advantage of others. One alternative explanation (“culturalism”) is that outcomes are the consequences of differing norms, practices, beliefs, etc across different societies.
In the late twentieth century, the black–white income gap in the US didn’t close meaningfully at all, despite enormous decreases in oppression during that period. Simultaneously, in the same period, women (of all races) experienced decreasing oppression, and they meaningfully closed much of their income gap with men.
Scott notes that some races (e.g. Jews and Chinese) experience substantial oppression, but their outcomes don’t seem to have been damaged in the same way, and changes in their outcomes can’t be explained by changes in the degree of their oppression.
Another issue with externalism is that globally, various demographics’ outcomes are highly correlated based on their origin cultures, even though different countries treat these groups quite differently internationally.
Some between-group differences can’t readily be explained by oppression. For example, Chinese-Americans families earning $60k year have substantially higher school attendance rates than African-American families earning $60k.
Cultural factors, on the other hand, can explain why some minority groups are so successful (even despite oppression) and why these patterns hold across international populations.
Many immigrant groups to the US early in its history were vilified (the Irish, the Italians, the Jews), but have now thoroughly assimilated into US society and now experience roughly the same outcomes as the majority demographics. Reactionists argue that this hasn’t happened for other minority groups because of the progressive urge to resist “cultural imperialism.” That is: Hispanic students should be allowed to speak Spanish in school; Black culture should be celebrated and encouraged to exist apart; etc. But if the majority culture contains beliefs and practices which produce better outcomes, anti-assimilation will prevent minority cultures from picking up those memes.
If the culturalist explanation is correct, it implies that a society with a successful set of memes can only tolerate a finite amount of immigration from societies with less successful sets of memes, lest the dominant culture’s practices end up lost as well.
Today, post-colonialization, the colonized African countries are safer, happier places in almost all respects than Ethiopia, which was never colonized. Likewise Israel relative to much of the rest of the Middle East. It’s not clear how the counterfactual would have played out, of course, but it appears that colonization did actually transfer some successful memes. Contemporary analogues might look more like international investment (which China is doing extensively in Africa, to apparently positive effect), but US progressives oppose this kind of involvement on the grounds that it represents neocolonialism.
Palestine would obviously prefer to be independent. But Israel isn’t going to let that happen. So unfortunately, they live in an oppressed, but not-totalitarian situation in which they’re responsible for their own destinies but under impossible constraints. Scott suggests that absent independence, they would be better off simply annexed as part of Israeli territory, but this is impossible because progressivism has made it a cultural norm to vigorously protest this type of annexation.
Relatedly, the carceral state also falls in this valley. Norway gives prisoners significant liberty. We’re not likely to do that. Reactionists propose that even fairly light corporal punishment would be a better deterrent than our current in-between situation, which is neither effective deterrent nor an effective rehabilitation program (but which very expensive and damaging to society). But corporal punishment (say, 50 strokes of the lash) is impossible because of progressivism.
Also, war:
Nuking Hiroshima killed about 150,000 people. The Vietnam War killed about 3 million. The latter also had a much greater range of non-death effects, from people being raped and tortured and starved to tens of thousands ending up with post-traumatic stress disorder and countless lives being disrupted. If nuking Hanoi would have been an alternative to the Vietnam War, it would have been a really really good alternative.
In the ‘50s, women reported higher happiness than men; today it’s inverted. Progressive marriages with split housework are much more likely to end in divorce; ditto marriages in which both partners work. Those latter points may be problems with dual-worker households, rather than anything inherent to sex: traditional marriages happen to ensure that someone’s available to focus on family full-time. Reactionists argue that feminists pressure the media to depict valorous women as working, rather than as homemakers, so we end up with this worse outcome.
There’s a saying I’ve heard in a lot of groups, which is something along the lines of “diversity is what unites us”. This is nice and memorable, but there are other groups where unity is what unites them, and they seem to be more, well, united.
Our culture focuses on subverting itself and pointing out how awful it is and how much better other cultures are. This is in contrast to “God save the Queen” style sentiment in Victorian Britain.
Progressivism advocates individual freedom and autonomy, which means that people end up behaving according to their incentives. But sometimes you need an “unincentivized incentivizer”—e.g. to dictatorially fix the healthcare system, end corporate welfare, close tax loopholes, etc. Progressivism combats this type of tsar. And in a democracy, the society will always shift more progressive over time because progressivism is an appeal to the masses. So we end up with no one with the authority to untangle knots.
I haven’t dug into any of the actual evidence presented here or read enough of the literature to know how representative it is, so I take all those observations with many grains of salt. On an abstract philosophical level, the part I find most compelling is the argument that a tendency towards progressivism makes some kinds of error-correction difficult. That rings true, and it’s concerning. I don’t think the solution is probably “therefore return to Victorian England!” but it’s worth forming a theory of what we should do about it in the present context.