Modernity and the Three-Axes Model

Michael Aaron writes,

Modernists are those who believe in human progress within a classical Western tradition. They believe that the world can continuously be improved through science, technology, and rationality. Unlike traditionalists, they seek progress rather than reversal, but what they share in common is an interest in preserving the basic structures of Western society. Most modernists could be classified as centrists (either left or right-leaning), classical liberals and libertarians.

Postmodernists, on the other hand, eschew any notion of objectivity, perceiving knowledge as a construct of power differentials rather than anything that could possibly be mutually agreed upon. Informed by such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, science therefore becomes an instrument of Western oppression; indeed, all discourse is a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed.

The reader who pointed me to this essay suggested that it fits the three-axes model. I am not sure that it does. It would fit the model if put traditionalists on the civilization vs. barbarism axis, modernists on the liberty vs. coercion axis, and progressives on the oppressor vs. oppressed axis. But when Aaron writes,

modernists perceive an influx of Islam, and particularly conservative strains of Islam, in the form of unbridled mass migration, to pose a threat to Western culture due to its authoritarian, sexist and homophobic views

the phrases “influx of Islam” and “threat to Western culture” strikes me as appealing to the civilization vs. barbarism axis.

19 thoughts on “Modernity and the Three-Axes Model

  1. In the last paragraph he mentions that people wanting to “end” and “reverse” oppression are on the same side by coincidence, because of course there is a ton of oppression today. Everyone, including cucks, starts everything with “of course there is terrible oppression today.” However, there is no evidence of oppression. Only evidence of people with inferior genes not achieving socioeconomic equiviliance. Can’t say that though, even HBD aware cucks won’t just say load and proud that there is no statistically significant oppression in society.

    It also causes misdiagnosis. You can ask some Arab trash refugee for his belief on Islam and he might tell you “whiskey, America, sexy” and you think he’s your brother is hedonistic modern westernim. Then later he becomes a welfare leech, petty thug, and drives a truck into a crowd. Let’s not admit it’s his low IQ and clannish genetics and the fact that multi culturalism doesn’t work. No it’s whether some lumpen “believes” is some Muslim doctrines that westerners don’t like on a given day.

    People who want to have one foot in truth lose to those who go full relativism because they concede all the main points. Special exceptions to the logical outgrowths of lies can’t hold.

    • I’ve a question for you – who is the hypothetical reader that you expect to be persuaded more by this comment using this jargon than a similar comment that doesn’t use jargon like cucks and HBD?

      I’ve been trying to figure it out, but my genetics come from my clannish and multiculturalist ancestors (the Romans), so I must be at a loss.

      • I think I can guess how asdf might respond, which is to say that most people will never allow themselves to be persuaded of socially discouraged ugly truths no matter what. And so what’s the point of avoiding ugly jargon – evocative precisely because it gets to the heart of an ugly matter – since entirely respectable language wouldn’t make any difference anyway, except to water down or obscure the message and avoid the crux of the issue by means of over-generality with inadequate, abstract euphemisms or code words?

        I happen to disagree and think conforming ones public writing to a high and civil standard is good for its own sake, even if it won’t win you any friends. But that doesn’t mean that people who publicly admit to modern heresies and steadfastly hew to highest principles of civility and decorum are winning any of the right kind of converts. Instead they just suffer defamation, professional ruination, social ostracization, suppression, and so forth.

        Your comment raises the larger question of whether things have gotten so bad that there’s no longer any benefit to be gained from adhering to the values and norms of proper deportment which are customary for a respectable public intellectual, where even flawlessly civil conduct and consistent propriety over an entire career are met with dismissive derision if ones ideas are outside fashionable bounds. It seems to me that there isn’t, but that there is still some benefit for those stay just within the edge of the moving boundary, and maybe only deviate a little on one topic.

        In this particular case, the question is how to politely describe the situation in which one side of a game seems to be under some kind of pressure which is causing it to restrict itself to the set of moves which have a negative expected long term outcome. This side isn’t throwing the fight, and instead it is clearly behaving strategically within the the confines of that set, trying to pick the least worst moves and delaying the inevitable as long as possible, but still, it’s leaving any positive moves off the table, and so inescapably working for the benefit of the other side with every move.

        Perhaps one can offer another inadequate euphemism and say these are ‘quicksand players’?

      • Handle does a fine enough job below.

        My hope is to persuade people in much the same manner I was persuaded. I used to believe a mainstream libertarian view of things. Then I came to believe that certain facts I had seen as true weren’t true. So I changed my belief.

        For instance, I used to believe more in human reason and the ability of free debate to move minds. I don’t assign as high a value to that anymore. I think its only useful in that function under specific circumstances, and outside that specific circumstances you can’t expect it to influence society much. I see those on the right who do assign such high expectations to those concepts as having lost a lot of important battles over the last few decades, with every indication that continuation of such a method losing even greater battles.

        I’m especially scared of what will happen when America becomes majority non-white, as I think the “cuck” belief that such people can be persuaded by argument, rather then they will vote based on other less benign criteria as a kind of materialist law of human nature, is mistaken. I think once the left can do whatever it wants without risk of electoral backlash by a white majority its game over. It scares me that my children would have to grow up in such a country.

        I admit that some people are either so ingrained in the system, have such an emotional attachment to their philosophies, feel themselves sufficiently insulated from decay, or are just old enough they figure they don’t care about the long term, that persuading them would be impossible. However, I figure there are a lot of middle class professionals trying to understand the world they live in and build a better life for their children that they might be persuaded. Especially before its too late.

        Looking at the current demographics, if every person that doesn’t want to live in a third world country decided to work toward that end we could stop it. It’s a narrow window in which we can do so, and it will require methods that aren’t polite. I wish to dispel people of the notion that politeness can in any way be effective for achieving the kind of long term outcomes one might actually desire, based on its current track record of failures and the logic of why it failed being applied to future trends. I look on politeness and declare it guilty of being ineffective.

      • Having spent some time investigating the alt-right with a mind to joining them, I can say that they’re not worth it. Most of the invective is designed not to persuade, but to spew forth the writer’s frustrations on the page. I tried to convince them to behave like the Left and lie about what it is they want, but they just called me a Jew. They make the same mistake as their National Socialist forebears: making too many enemies and trying to fight them all at once. It doesn’t work, but they don’t care about losing.

    • So Col. Hassan went on the shooting rampage in Texas because he was a low-IQ trash refugee?

  2. I view the “influx of Islam” is an imperfect proxy for the influx of socialism or statism. It’s sloppy to compare political and cultural traditions as apples-to-apples, but (political) Islam offers many of the same “everyman” political promises that statism does: justice, redistribution, and moral and social cohesion. The tradeoff includes the elevated status of religious leaders/institutions and their shared ownership of coercive authority with the “secular” bureaucracy. There is decidedly no separation between church and state — which (classical) liberals strongly object to, not because religion is bad, but because coercion is bad (no matter how well-intentioned). Many current practitioners of Islam, particularly from the MENA region, simply disagree — as do many Western progressives and “paleo-Conservatives”.

    You previously speculated that a compromise between the bobos and anti-bobos would look a lot like national socialism. I agree and I think it’s not that hard to imagine what that looks like given that national socialism already describes the dominant political model in the MENA region (with some exceptions, e.g. Israel and the Emirates). These are highly regulated, ethnocentric and fiercely nationalist states. That compromise was made years ago and it continuously evolves, but political Islam (and I recommend reading Khomeini (Shia) and Sayyid Qutb (MB)) makes many of the same cultural and economic promises of national socialism: a robust combination of ethnic-national solidarity and economic “justice.” The former representing the more secular, ethnocentric contingent (“nationalists”) and the latter representing the more devout and universalist contingent (“SJWs”).

    In other words, there are very liberal reasons to be concerned about the “influx of Islam” just as there are very liberal reasons to be concerned about the “influx of marxism and/or national socialism.”

  3. Once upon a time when people still read Aesop’ s fables to their children, we would all have recognized wariness of the influx of Islam as mere prudence. A child would have been able to recount the fable of the snakes and the porcupine and its moral “give a finger, lose a hand.” But today the object of education is to fill the cosmopolitan’ s post-modern emptiness with an all-consuming hatred of authentic life. Hence the campaign to Islamify the US starting with small town America. Obama’s transfer of unsustainable numbers of immigrants to small towns was an act of hate directed against a culture that he would never understand and had nothing but contempt for. There, go stick that on an axis and smoke it.

    • Trying to understand: what was the mechanism whereby Obama transferred an unsustainable number of immigrants to small towns? Which towns are these? Who are the immigrants and how did Obama transfer them there?

      • The quick answer is through the de facto State Department grant programs to NGO ‘contractors’ (including many religious groups heavy on staff but mysteriously lacking in congregations). These gradually developed after Carter signed The Refugee Act of 1980, but which no other administration used as aggressively as the previous one, especially with regard to the ‘strategic political capitalization’ of the resettlement site selection process. There was a whole Senate hearing about this particular issue back in 2015.

        The real explanation is a longer story because, like a lot of government grant programs, it involves the tacit cooperation of many entities in a whole ecosystem of participants with different and deniable reasons for being interested in the same outcomes.

        With grant programs, no matter how the rules are written, politicians can arrange for lots of tax money to be sent to their friends and allies in exchange for personal and political benefits, while the whole trade can be spun as mere cooperation in the performance of good works. This is a deeply subtle form of corruption, because the participants themselves usually conceive of their own motivations in the best possible light, and would be totally insulted if you suggested that these ‘incidental benefits’ are really driving the train.

        Let me reframe your question to try and illustrate the nature of the issue. By what mechanism did President Bush ensure that there were local offices of defense contractors in nearly every Congressional District, and a disproportionate amount of the new work from the new wars went into purple areas, even though it makes no sense in purely economic terms?

        Well, you obviously aren’t going to find a law that spells it out as an explicit goal, and you aren’t going to even find enough pork barrel defense appropriations to account for it. And no one even had to conspire in the back of those smoke filled rooms. In circumstances where those kinds of conversations are taboo, parties are nevertheless very good at calculating precisely what their counterparties want and would find valuable, just so long as they have the right socially acceptable rationalization as an alibi/cover story. And so everybody involved can flatter their own egos by thinking in their own minds that they are really motivated by the righteous goals of national security, supporting the troops, geographic economic fairness, and good jobs for the working man.

        In both of these examples, it’s equally easy for spectator supporters to choose to emphasize the positive spin narrative, or for critics to emphasize the tale of subtle corruption. It usually depends on which side one is on, and how much one respects the purportedly pursued values.

        For instance, in the example I gave above, Progressives don’t care very much for those values, only paying them lip service when expedient. That inclines them to believe that the participants in the trade are ‘faking it’ too, and thus the whole game is just standard issue corruption.

        Meanwhile they see some “Lutheran” organization getting paid by the State Department to resettle tropical latitude “refugees” in St Cloud, Minnesota (population 67K) or Rutland, Vermont (population 17K) and can see nothing but straightforward do-gooding.

  4. Regarding post-modernism, you might want to check out the new book by Roger Scruton, “Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: The Thinkers of the New Left.”

    Weinstein and Aaron could have referenced Herbert Marcuse. The USA welcomed Marcuse as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and he had a comfortable tenured position at UCSD with all the academic freedom he could ever want. He paid us back with neo-Nazism. His book “One Dimensional Man” coined the term “repressive tolerance.” That is when tolerating people expressing unprogressive views results in repression, so we have to repress those with wrong ideas in order to all tolerance. All people are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

    The New Left was big on college campuses in the late-1960s and early-1970s, but slipped from view for a while. What is new is that the radical kids of that era are the new tenured professors and administrators, who don’t see anything wrong with what is happening on modern campuses.

  5. Perhaps “modernists” could be seen as the centre point of the three-axes. They kind of side with all three (conservative, libertarian, and progressive) groups, but not to the extreme of any of the three groups.

  6. The article seems to engage in a particular kind of intellectual folly, which is to try to make sense of a set of what are political coalition identity badges which neither really originates in some kind of coherent, consistent ideology, nor has to remain true to those principles when an exception is more expedient. The ideologies and X-modernist philosophies tend to dictate extremes toward which political groups will try to move when feasible, but hand-wave away when not practical.

    So it’s no surprise that current political configuartions and positions they are trying to make sense of contain a lot of internal contradictions and tensions, and that it takes some Jesuitical contrivances and intellectual gymnastics to make straight boards out of crooked timbers.

    The relationship between Islam and Progressivism is jut the current best example of these internal tensions and contradictions which are completely obvious to anyone not actively try to reconcile incompatibilities. The Elfwick joke goes, “Still think May’s a feminist? Her new pals are anti-abortion, homophobic, fundamentalist bigots!” – “Hey! Leave Islam out of this!”

  7. “While modernists perceive an influx of Islam, and particularly conservative strains of Islam, in the form of unbridled mass migration, to pose a threat to Western culture due to its authoritarian, sexist and homophobic views,”

    Do we? I’m squarely in the modernist camp, and I don’t think unbridled mass migration is a particular problem. Dudes with guns or bombs that want to kill people in my country is a problem, but that’s a problem with direct physical violence, not authoritarian, sexist, and homophobic views.

    I mean, the Enlightenment sprung up in a pretty authoritarian, sexist, and homophobic time. The civil rights advanced in the US happened against a pretty authoritarian, sexist, and homophobic backdrop. I’m not too worried about my principals stacking up against regressive traditional values.

    I don’t think I’m alone on this, either.

  8. As I read the text, the author means “modernists” as roughly “people with a Silent Generation sensibility.”

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