Dialectic of Progression and Reaction

The term dialectic above is used in the Hegelian sense of “repeating pattern in history or life.”

So, this article will briefly sketch a repeating pattern in history or life:

First:

Motivated, perhaps, to respond to some wrongdoing, progressives introduce valid criticisms in a bad spirit. The content of their critique is good, inasmuch as it is true, but the form it is presented in is bad.

For example: canceling, hectoring, deplatforming… the criticisms of the people involved in each instance are generally valid, but the strategy of attack, of excluding from discussion, of using speech as an instrument of power… once you sell your soul by your willingness to play this game, you will eventually be overcome by less scrupulous people who play the game better, because they act with less restraint.

Many progressive interventions or discussions happen in a spirit of bad faith—that is, they represent instances of arguing, rather than attempts at a genuine conversation. This is an important "Socratic" distinction: argument is the attempt to impose opinions on others—the use of speech for the sake of control—while conversation, properly speaking, is the cooperative pursuit of truth.

One might reply to this criticism by saying that it’s “tone policing.”

But if you engage with an argument like this—one that is already hostile—at face value, you're already losing.

One might also argue that these harmful strategies are not representative of progressivism as a whole, or that they are aberrations, out of step with true progressivism.¹

But progressives, so familiar with the various instruments and strategies of critique, ought to accept a critique that focuses on the worst excesses of left-wing movements, in the same way that capitalism, for example, is judged by its worst faults—not by its rhetoric, by an imaginary ideal, or its performance in the best of cases (and so too with patriarchal social orders, historical racial dynamics, power structures, etc.).

Moreover, as the philosopher Del Noce has argued, there is something intrinsic to these systems of thought that will systematically produce this result: excluding others from conversation, privileging power over persuasion.

The critique that sees persons as the condensation of social forces, power structures, relations of dominations—though these critiques all emerge from a spirit of rational discourse, they must ultimately lose themselves in the dehumanization that they first impose on others.

Del Noce identified two elements in Marx’s thought: historical materialism and dialectic materialism. Marx rejected traditional metaphysics. He famously said that the purpose of philosophy was not to understand the world but to change the world. Traditional metaphysics according to Marx was an artifact of bourgeois, capitalist culture. Religious faith, truth claims, ethics, aesthetics were the product of particular historical and cultural moments and served as the ideology for the ruling class. The historical materialism of Marx relativized and marginalized all philosophical truth claims save for Marx’s own claims about the dialectical materialism of history. Dialectical materialism expressed the romantic and revolutionary side of Marxism. There was even a religious quality to dialectical materialism which was recognizably the immanentization of the biblical kingdom of God. The secret dynamic of history which was revealed by Marx would be fulfilled by the revolution of the proletariat which would be the birth pangs of the utopia of communism.

Del Noce perceived that this combination of destructive skepticism and romantic optimism was unstable, and that skepticism and relativism were bound to defeat and consume the romantic and optimistic revolutionary side of Marxism.

Hardly anyone today believes that the Marxist rapture is nigh, but we all live immersed in an intellectual atmosphere where Marxist-style arguments and opinions are routinely deployed in this way, relativizing arguments by claiming that they are no more than the effect of privilege, power, identity dynamics, or class.

Now, in response to this general tendency—good criticisms made in bad faith—reactionaries extend the bad spirit to the content itself (bad content, bad form).

So reactionaries use the form of the critique of patriarchy/colonialism/power—good, that is, truthful, as pertains to its content, but de facto, in its form, bad—and invert it at the level of content, deriving it of any truth.

So, for the Nazis, the vagaries of capitalism or social injustice more generally speaking were to be attributed to the imaginary machinations of the Jews, who in Nazi ideology became responsible for all social injustice.

And for some neo-reactionaries, 'the cathedral' is the force that has been pushing everything leftwards for the past few centuries.

As Scott Alexander wrote, the idea of the cathedral the right wing equivalent of the patriarchy, only emptied out of any truthful content:

“Reaction isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s not suggesting there’s a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it’s positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn’t have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It’s just that when lots of people share some really strong cultural norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas. And Western society just happens to have a really strong progressivist immune system ready to gobble you up if you say anything insufficiently progressive.”

This dialectic among the intelligentsia (between progression and reaction) recurs on a much larger scale with "wokeness," the vulgar expression of intersectional ideology.

So, for example, we have our semi-recent frenzy of iconoclasm. One could of course defend the removal of statues that commemorate people whose values we no longer adhere to. But consider the general form, rather than the content of these protests: mob violence and collective hysteria.

And in response to this, the “woke right” (the vulgar equivalent of the neo-reactionaries) discard the valid critiques of wokeness and instead—embracing the general “bad spirit“ of paranoid censorship and hostility—replace the patriarchy, or empire, or power, with the “deep state,” elite collusion, or whatever overheated fantasy is most politically or psychologically convenient, and then censor accordingly—this time, without even the slim academic pretext.

So: that is the dialectic. This hostility enters the world—under the guise of truth—and provokes everybody until some even less scrupulous people have the bright idea of abandoning the burdensome truth content, instead filling out their critiques with whichever fantasies allow collective hostility to run most smoothly.

This is a long series of broad generalizations, but I think it reflects the general tendencies of these movements accurately.

Addendum:

Another word in defense of some elements of the progressive critique:

The libido dominandi, the will to power in human beings, has carved deep grooves into history, and continues to do so to this day.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with patiently tracing the scars it has left in the earth, provided that this is done for the sake of building a better system.

But such a system can only come to being by way of good faith, through argument—cooperative pursuit of truth.

The critique of Foucault, for example, goes from an analysis of power to a monomaniacal fixation on the idea, to the point that human beings are, in thought, obliterated, reduced to emanations of social forces.

In spite of their best efforts, I believe that all such people and their followers, whatever their claims pertaining to justice, are only working diligently to temper and sharpen the sword that, someday, will be used to spill their own blood.

1. And admittedly, the word “progressivism” is here under heavy strain, having to bear the explanatory weight of a great deal of phenomena. I only chose the word because it is the counterpart to “reaction,” and this essay was provoked by the quote a little further down: the enlightening comparison between the concepts of “the cathedral” and the patriarchy.