Kernel Liberalism

A Necromantic Project

Overdue For An Autopsy

Yes, I’m still alive and haven’t forgotten this place. Just had some personal turbulence to work through.

Something curious happened very recently. In a speech addressed to the Masonic Great Lodge of France, president Emmanuel Macron pointed out the “Dark Enlightenment” (les «Lumières Noires») as enemies of the universalist project of the Enlightenment. This was already a French term of derision for certain reactionaries, but in case you’re not familiar with it, it’s also, more recently, an alternative moniker for the neoreactionary (NRx) political tendency, initially elaborated by Curtis Yarvin and then given further depth by a series of essays by Nick Land (see https://github.com/KeithAnyan/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub).

I doubt that he even wrote the speech, but it predictably relies on a by now ragged tactic of leveraging general philosophical illiteracy to conflate Enlightenment with liberal democracy to pass the latter off as the sum of “Enlightenment values”.

The thing is, the Illuminist—Illuminism being another name for Enlightenment that I prefer, though not to be confused with another similar movement around the same time, of that name—commitment to empiricism, rationality, and objectivity chafes against liberal dogma, which liberals—at least the ones still bearing some genuine resemblance to this very prostituted word—are loathe to acknowledge as such.

Their hope was that science and reason would soon validate liberal principles and ideals. It didn’t quite turn out that way, and consequently we have the DE, but also the liberal split between militant or post-modern progressivism and “market of ideas”, “Enlightenment values” pseudo-neutrality, with both shielding aspects of liberalism most dear to them from attack through forms of «political correctness», militant progressives favoring a more overt approach of forceful censure, ostracism, censorship, and career destruction, while illuminist liberals choose the subterfuge of carefully corralling discourse away from any thought-crimes.

Illuminist liberals have worn their mask well, but every now and then, when push looks like it’s about to become shove, the mask slips a bit. Consider Daniel Dennett:

if I encountered people conveying a message I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. I’d want to make up some good epithets, such as genetic determinist or reductionist or Darwinian Fundamentalist, and then flail those straw men as hard as I could. As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it

Dennett, “Freedom Evolves”, 2003, pp. 19-20.

Or Steven Klein:

Today, we’ve conflated a right to speak with a right to be taken seriously and debated. But while the former is a right, the latter is a privilege, and one that should be reserved for ideas that do not fundamentally threaten the foundations of our free and democratic society

Steven Klein. (2017, 6 November). “Right-wing extremists have a right to speak, not a right to be listened to”. The Washington Post.

Steven Pinker:

In response to my query, Stephens-Davidowitz confirmed that bigoted searches tended to come from regions with older and less-educated populations. Compared with the country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as likely to search for “nigger jokes” and thirty times as likely to search for “fag jokes.

[…]

But aside from these transgressive youths (and there have always been transgressive youths), private prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth, which means that we can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage to less prejudiced cohorts.

[…]

Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as “political correctness.”

Steven Pinker. “Enlightenment Now”, 2018.

They claim a strong conviction that rationality will never offer support for illiberal ideas. But then why such anxiety over allowing such the public demolition that is allegedly so inevitable?

A hesitant pause in the smirk they give is reason enough to doubt.

In any case, my aim is not to inflame the neuroses of illuminist liberals through a well-deserved excoriation. Quite the contrary. Though I count myself as firmly illiberal, that doesn’t mean I see nothing of value in classical liberalism. Whatever it may have evolved into, and whatever the term may even mean now, liberalism deserves at least a non-sympathetic account of its dominance. The neoreactionary angle has been so far mainly one of critique or tentative recuperative speculation, but while there has been plenty of digital ink spilled and now mostly lost, on things that rationality may in fact disagree with liberalism on, there hasn’t been as much said on the anatomy and metabolism of liberal democracy with an aim towards explaining its successes. The closest thing is probably, in my view, Spandrell’s theory of “Biological Leninism” (see https://archive.org/details/spandrell-biological-lenninism/mode/2up), which I roughly agree with, but I think it still leaves much to be desired.

And that’s what this little, likely merely coincidental, episode with Macron brought to mind for me. What the hell happened to liberalism, and what even is it exactly? Is there some fragment of this walking undead giant that may be resuscitated and put to good use?

Kernel Liberalism

Hence Kernel Liberalism. Kernel both in the figurative sense of a nucleus, the sense of the consumable portion of a seed or stone of a fruit, and the computational sense.

Lengthy litigations of whether liberalism was destined to evolve as it did or whether it simply succumbed to enemy action are, to me, a complete waste of time, serving more to assuage the egos of detractors or defendants. What is much less equivocal is that, were you to bring the original coteries of liberals into our time, they would not be much pleased with the state of things. Internal cancer borne of insecure DNA, or hostile takeover, either way it got pwned something fierce.

Illuminist liberal, to my mind, has a faulty kernel. It should be debrided into its minimal components which are then to be re-tooled, adapted to new information, and furnished with better fortifications against rogue or hostile teleology than rabid blindness or anxious subterfuge.

What’s faulty in that kernel? If you go back to older classical liberals, they are much less universalistic and evangelical about it, and many will readily admit that the whole thing is only viable under the auspices of particular types of person. But politically, there was no effort to secure these types, and soon enough the thing evolved into the belief that it’s simply a matter of education, of imparting right reasoning to the general populace.

This was allowed to be so mainly for three reasons, I believe.

The principal one is that it seemed to work well enough. People don’t question things when they’re rapidly gaining territory, and the ones who do aren’t paid attention to.

Then there is the fact that one of the main structural characteristics of modernity is that individual social networks experience a radical shift away from kin and towards strangers, and this is much more amenable to liberal individualism, it kicks off an autonomous ratchet whereby personal choice is leveraged to further disintegrate traditional networks, making personal choice even more attractive.

Finally, because peer networks are much more stranger-weighted, very different social games than the ones the original liberals were accustomed to become not only viable but much more prominent. Specially partner-choice games. If you can always fall back on the family farm or some other inherited business, you can more or less say or treat a stranger however you like. But in the age of careers and corporate ladders, acting that way is instead reputational suicide. On the one hand, the individual has to choose partners who will prove valuable to him and be chosen in turn by them. On the other hand, both sides are also trying to avoid being exploited. What kind of social norms will that engender? A nominal and very public but not too privately strong equity preference becomes quite an unsurprising equilibrium. It minimizes the amount of enemies one makes a priori, while keeping open a social norm that allows punishment of exploiters. And obviously, unless you’re a true believer of the present status quo (in which case I wonder how you even found your way around here), this turns out to be quite hackable.

Original liberals would have had to foresee a couple of centuries worth of social evolution and technical refinement (game theory, specially) to come up with some safeguard against this, so they can hardly be faulted for it. But contemporary liberals can and should be taken to task for failing to address vulnerable foundations.

Another failure that deserves much more in-depth attention is its stubborn disregard of coalition formation, which leads to neglecting the construction of a proper theory of internalization of feedback. Spontaneous order is a mechanical turk, for true liberalism to be viable it requires games and dynamics that naturally disarm pathological consequence, thus obviating the need for top-down control structure.

What’s valuable in it? Hardly anything that has been granted so much effort by so many talented people over so much time is completely lacking in good lessons to learn from. This will require a more in-depth examination but here I think we can use right-accelerationist ideas to evaluate. One idea I can give in advance here is that one interesting thing about liberalism is not that it’s kinder to the slave (although that makes for much better marketing and PR of course), but harsher on the master. Sufficiently healthy labor markets mean that employers are under permanent threat of a kind of fleet-in-being made up of the other employers. This intensifies conflict, instead of resolving it as the more self-praising perspective can lead one to assume.

What’s strong in it? Strength is more perishable than value, and can be used for good and ill. Appraisal of formidability should be of interest to both haters and lovers of liberalism. This is what has been most neglected, in my opinion. Haters are not disposed to make their own underdog status look even worse, while lovers, being more dominant, offer self-satisfied platitudes and wallow in blind-spots. The relationship between liberalism and democracy, be it fake democracy or otherwise, is of special interest. I think liberal democracy has certain social anabolic effects which are particularly acute in the administrative state, and that, ideological misgivings or panegyrics aside, is what it mainly draws its strength from. Personally, I think the administrative state as we know it has its days counted, so this question is of critical importance to the future of political philosophy in vivo.

A minimal program for kernel liberalism would address three matters:

1. Grow a backbone. I mean that mechanically. Forget universalism, forget the market of ideas, start thinking about game theory and mechanism design. Bitcoin is certainly an extraordinarily fortunate and interesting development in this direction.

2. Retreat to what counts. Re-evaluate liberal ideals in the light of contemporary information and figure out what to prioritize. Is “consent of the governed”, which gets bypassed and manipulated in myriad ways, really a more important battleground than the right to private property, or legal impartiality?

3. Negotiate. Cut the idiotic moralism out, think of what kind of deal you could and would actually like to offer to the unconverted. It has to be something better than just being a bagholder for “virtue” and “Enlightenment values”, everyone can see that the current crop of liberals don’t even put up a genuine fight for those. Otherwise, keep losing market share and wake up one day to find yourself in a bolshevik or fascist world.

Liberalism is both popular and interesting enough to make kernel liberalism more than an intellectual exercise, because there is demand for it even among very useful people. I’m curious if anyone else has thoughts to offer, before I go into more detail. Not being a liberal myself, I don’t want to assume too much in terms of desiderata or presume too much in terms of the history and characterization of liberalism. I simply think that things cannot carry on for it as they are, and that this raises a need for incisive and decisive re-evaluation.

Surely, at the very least, the cause of liberty deserves to go out not with a whimper, but a bang.