As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

In my last few Hedge letters, I set myself up to draft a letter on the subject of fascism as it matters to me as a contemporary. Near the end of that draft, I noticed a problem: one of the points I was making near the conclusion to set up a next letter in the arc rang false. It was a somewhat arcane point that I thought would be tractable to correct without serious delay, at first – something I could easily split out from the draft by delaying a few days to find out how to step around the flaw, then something to properly fix in my thinking in the week or two I would be drafting the planned follow-up letter. That was incorrect, and that is now several months ago.

That’s a bit annoying and embarrassing, insofar as it’s definitely not a good way to maintain oneself as a pundit or as someone in a milieu of pundits; professional newsletter writers would find something else to say and keep talking, and I admire that in them. However, given the kind of amateur and researcher that I am, I’m not a pundit and I’m here to learn slowly if that’s what it takes. Often the best scientific experiments in retrospect are the most frustrating ones in the moment the first results come back: an issue that delays your PhD thesis by a year might also win your advisor a Nobel Prize, if it turns out that the reason for the delay was something genuinely new, unexpected, and important.

In this case, I’m not close to Nobel territory but I’m glad I took the time to wait and to dig. What rang false was a point I intended to make about mutual imitation between Russian, German, and British Empire internal security apparatuses 1890–1920 and revolutionary movements opposing them, particularly Lenin’s, the anarchists, and the Zionists, and then the implications for contemporary right wing anticommunism with its paranoia about “Feds”1 and its “gay race communism” sloganeering. What I ended up uncovering was that I had been missing a crucial mechanism of authoritarian political charisma because of its continuity with academic charisma. My unthinking support of and habituation into the academic charisma patterns obscured my understanding of the political charisma patterns.

Once again, I thank Pierre Bourdieu in particular for the background disposition to accept the problem and follow it through: without disciplines I credit him with teaching me, disciplines for recognizing and resisting the intoxication of one’s own authority, I would not have noticed the problem and untangled it. In the same vein, I thank Pierre Hadot: his conception of “philosophical exercise” in “philosophy as a way of life” was a prerequisite for that appreciation of Bourdieu. (And they were not isolated influences by any means, but they are two I find most salient to highlight now. If I were speaking more broadly, I’d quickly reach Augustine’s Confessions and then the Gospels and Cicero. Developing ever-more-honest ideas of honesty is one of the central problems of intellectual tradition.)

With that background in place, I eventually noticed that the way I was making the point about revolutionary imitation of imperial internal security involved a tacit echo of the terrorizing tactics that all sides have used against one another – or more to the point, the tactics they used to spur the masses that they sought to put into motion against one another. The ring of falsity then came from a typical, habitual temptation to academic hypocrisy: the use of intellectual terror tactics under a pretense that “knowledge will set you free” even though the content is rhetoric that compels rather than knowledge that frees.2

My rhetoric on this planned point would have had more of an edge of compulsion than properly fit the rest of the letter. It would have accidentally engaged in and inflamed the competition-to-compel at the boundaries of mutually destructive solidarity groups that I had been intending to block and hedge in order to establish constructive competition-to-complement: it would have been perfectly counter to purpose.

The details of why that would have happened have to do with how, exactly, these group boundaries are constituted through internal interaction ritual chains that constantly, freshly reaffirm the insiders’ terror of their outside enemies – and not necessarily unwisely, given the real risks at play in revolutionary and imperial ideological competition. There are gates worth keeping in this world; there are quarantines worth enforcing against “mind viruses” even if that metaphor gets a little tortured.

It took a long time and some hard work to concretely understand the terror dynamics at play here during this spell of unanticipated self-quarantine, and now I have an overhang of new material to share via the Hedge. That can’t wait for Arc 5, so as I get back to writing soon, you’ll see some things I definitely had not initially planned to include in Arc 3 (on fascism and communism, cash, violence, drugs, and AI) and Arc 4 (on sex, gender, family, and ethnicity). I think it will be much better for the wait – less tentative, and less reliant on your help and feedback as I try to muddle my way back into public writing here in fits and starts.

I’ll have much more to say in the coming letters, but let me close by thanking again for strongly recommending Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies, for the “officer class” series and its pointers, for de Certeau and del Noce, for Rancière, and the Hedge commenter whose name I’d love to recall but I can’t find via search who recommended Isaac’s Working Knowledge. I’ve kept thinking of many of you while I’ve been away.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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“Perfect awareness of everything on Earth” is an abstract fantasy that poses immediate problems. Awareness of every loud bang? Every screech of nails on chalkboards, specifically? Is a perfect awareness of a loud bang an awareness with perfect equanimity and easy conceptual categorization, a sort of abstract perfection, or would it be awareness with perfect reflexive fluidity and immediate practical response?

That’s not an idle question in military settings. Pick wrong and you would be jittering and jumping like a clown in your command headquarters or spacey like an idiot under gunfire in the field.

These are the settings in which the most advanced, most ambitious contemporary surveillance technologies are developed first, and so the question has been posed early and often in their development. It is less widely recognized that the same problem has shaped human social awareness from its earliest days, but it’s no less true, and no less obvious once you see it. Here the sense to start with might be smell: imagine sudden awareness of all of everyone’s smells, what would you learn? After you finished throwing up? Or after calming down from lust? Humans have noses just as sensitive as other mammals’, and our smells, particularly the private ones, can be just as pungent. Given the kinds of reactive beings we are – and generally we’re adaptively reactive, not just weak and manipulable – we also have matching limits to awareness.

This principle acts even at the single-organ level, within the eye itself: the sensitive retina is kept in the shade of the eyeball, a tiny camera obscura; we do not see light with our whole bodies like darker-dwelling sea urchins do.

Becoming more aware of more at once is long process of maturation that requires embodied practice. For the self-directed philosophical angle to that, I’ve previously recommended Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life and on attention. From an abstract technician’s angle, I’ve written “Visible and Forgotten Order.”

However, in today’s letter I intend to approach it from another angle: the social concessions we make to one another’s reactivities, limits to awareness, and immaturities. We make them even in utopian dreams, since there will (hopefully!) always be babies and children among us.

I have opened here with a relatively benevolent sense of “shadow,” more like the shade of a café awning or a healthy old oak tree than some Dark Lord’s evil spilling out of Mordor, though I know that the latter sense will also be a common interpretation among those who read my title. In fact I don’t want to disavow the latter sense: in fact, I want you to remember now that for new saplings, an oak’s shade could feel oppressive and fatally threatening, too. The trees that shelter and feed our favorite animals also strangle, poison, and exclude competing plants.1

There is a dissonance here, one that can strike the heart deep and that has been breaking farmers’ and poets’ hearts for centuries, as people try to do justice to a natural world that can alternately seem like the ultimate example of harmony, “nature white in milk and flower,” or an ultimate example of brutality, “nature red in tooth and claw.” In fact it’s both; it’s the whole range of colors and grays, and not just in a pretty rainbow (though yes, also in pretty rainbows).

These are my own words for simple truths that have nonetheless taken me a long time to integrate in embodied emotional maturity. As a boy, I’d jump unselfconsciously between sadness at one animal’s death and amusement at another’s, peace with superficial harmonies and anger at revealed brutalities. I was naively reactive and often unjust. Accordingly, I was often sheltered from things that would have brought out the worst in me.

Social screens were placed between me and the things I couldn’t handle, from bureaucratic PG-13 ratings and Mature Content warnings to adults’ informal polite avoidances of death, sex, and swearing. Different social screens blocked different social stimuli, just like in nature familiar optical shadows form behind opaque screens, X-ray shadows behind lead plates, sound shadows behind acoustic barriers, wind shadows behind windbreaks, and rain shadows behind mountain ranges.

The culture I grew up in wisely challenged me to integrate the different reactivities in age-appropriate ways in school, like giving me Lord of the Flies as a high school freshman when we were in the thick of forming gangs and fighting each other. The teachers, who I came to respect deeply, understood the differences between students of different ages and how they would perennially misunderstand each other, teaching the young ones patience with the older ones and vice versa, and in the process earning patience for themselves.

They also understood better than parents how childhood social screening would stop working – how boys going through puberty would do everything they could to see a glimpse of a naked woman, for instance, which wasn’t as trivially easy in the 2000s as it is now. Their role was to guard and soften the edges of the protective shade of childhood, letting us get closer to direct exposure to things by stages and gradients, in small overwhelms and recoveries, rather than all at once in a single irreparable catastrophe.

Every shadow cast from an extended light source, from a lamp to an LED strip to the Sun, can be divided into the portions where all light from the source is blocked, an umbra, and the portions where some but not all of the light is blocked, a penumbra. An eye looking at a source from a penumbra gets a glimpse of the light, but doesn’t see all of it; an eye looking from the umbra sees none; this is the difference between a partial terrestrial solar eclipse (when the viewpoint on Earth goes into the Moon’s penumbra) and a total solar eclipse (when the viewpoint goes into the Moon’s umbra).

The penumbra is the soft edge of a shadow, if it has one, where there are stages and gradients between different levels of exposure. At dawn, as the sun rises, our viewpoints are passing from Earth’s umbra through its penumbra; at twilight we pass the other way. One of the deep correspondences that resonates in the metaphor of human life as a single day with its own extended dawn and dusk is this social pattern in which children and the elderly are gradually raised into and then retired from exposure to the brightest lights of collective social life.

In the shadow of a bright light, smaller ones can stand out: the stars emerge at night. In the shadow of a strong wind, a gentler flow of breath can travel as a steady cloud on a cold night. Intimate conversation thrives in quiet booths of loud clubs. Just as morning stars and evening stars fade or brighten as the sun rises or sets, childhood and retirement have their own special social interests that fade and brighten with age. I’m still not sure exactly the moment that girls became more interesting to me than stuffed animals, but those childhood toys were definitely washed out of my inner sky like morning stars sometime during puberty.

The Sun, stars, and sky make one good starting analogy for social shadow, but the social world is certainly far more complex, with much more than just one dominant Sun and a corresponding day/night cycle. If I were to continue pursuing the “inner sky” metaphor, I’d end up with some wild sci-fi or fantasy construction where many different bright stars rise and fall with simultaneous visibility and frequent eclipse alignments.

In fact, arguably this is exactly how astrology functioned as an elite training tradition in pre-modern societies, though we now tend to disdain it: whatever the predictive or mechanistic validity of the theories, simply becoming fluent with the principles of astrology created shared language and analytical understanding for complex interplays of social influence that were relevant to political leadership.

Regardless of the power of the stars and planets themselves, it was useful to be able to train young would-be leaders to consider complex transient combinations of different social factors like prosperity, vanity, hunger, religious fervor, and so on, factors that the planets and their positions were taken to represent. Those factors were truly predictably seasonal, as well, especially in older societies with calendars, festivals, and other customs more tied to the sky and the seasons than they are today. The factors also truly had nonlinear screening and modulating effects on one another, like astrology models: they act in qualitative combination rather than simple addition, as when hunger eclipses vanity or when fervor and prosperity blend together into an imperial expansion like Mars red and Jupiter blue could mix into an imperial purple.

At the very least, the traditions enriched poetry and art: astrological themes are ubiquitous in ancient myths and classics even when they are unrecognized today.

Today the complex astrological figures aren’t in wide currency and they’re not in common contemporary shared language. They’re both washed out and screened off by the modern sciences: washed out insofar as the modern sciences are genuinely brighter lights than the astrological traditions, screened off insofar as modern scientific commitments block them from conversation.

Penumbra and umbra are old concepts that are comfortably shared by both astronomy and astrology. Astrology offers a few figures and concepts for social shadow that modern sciences lack, but on net those sciences have a far richer set of references.

With the gas light or the electric bulb (and especially with modern mirrors, too), the plays of lights and shadows on theatrical stages can easily be made more complex than any astrological analogy. In a pinch, you can hang a brightly center-lit solar system model over the stage directly. These days, you can also simulate complex light and shade patterns in silico using geometrical optics and efficient ray tracing algorithms. You can do it quickly enough to send it in real time to someone in a VR headset for an immersive illusion – you can simulate a flight through a moving solar system, if you’d like.

The language for modern optics includes an extensive, well-developed technical vocabulary that can all be transferred to social thought as well. There are sources, reflectors, and absorbers. Each can have different color properties defined by a spectrum: the emission spectrum, the reflectance spectrum, the absorption spectrum. Between the sources, reflectors, and absorbers, there are transport media, from air to glass to mist, and the media have their own spectral properties, too: the sky is blue because the air scatters blue light. When a screen absorbs all but one color and is transparent to that one, behind it forms a shadow of that color. For the same reason the sky is blue (air scatters blue light), lunar eclipses are red (air lets the red pass through).

Social surfaces and social media behave analogously to optical surfaces and optical media. Certain qualities of messages and stimuli pass through them well, whereas others are lost. Certain social surfaces are reflective, and sometimes they flip what they reflect. I’ve written once before about how based-woke social surfaces were places where accusations of “gay” would be reflected back as accusations of “racist” and vice versa.

The sciences also struggle for visibility, however. They’re not often entertaining, they’re not politically charismatic, and they easily become inhumane. Socially, the sciences are compartmentalized. Only a very thin selection of scientific messages manages to beam visibly through the general public sphere – the Artemis II mission orbiting the moon was a recent triumph, but I probably encounter more pop astrology than undergrad-senior-level science in public conversation on a normal day.

In talking about the public sphere, I’m referring to a strange medium. One of the more influential theorists of the medium, Jürgen Habermas, defines it this way:

The public sphere is a phenomenon just as elementary as actor, association, or collectivity, but it eludes the conventional sociological concepts of “social order.” The public sphere cannot be conceived as an institution and certainly not as an organization. It is not even a framework of norms with differentiated competences and roles, membership regulations, and so on. Just as little does it represent a system; although it permits one to draw internal boundaries, outwardly it is characterized by open, permeable, and shifting horizons. The public sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view; the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions… [T]he public sphere is reproduced through communicative action, for which mastery of a natural language suffices; it is tailored to the general comprehensibility of everyday communicative practice. (Between Facts and Norms, MIT Press paperback 1998, translated by William Rehg, p. 360)

Plainly, his own heavy German was not directly “tailored to general comprehensibility,” and accordingly public opinion on his ideas bears only a strangely filtered and synthetic resemblance to his original writing. I would have much less patience today for writing like this, writing that is not tailored to general comprehensibility, if it weren’t for my background in hard sciences.

I’ve taught quantum mechanics, and there simply is no way to make that subject generally comprehensible for now. There are ways to entertain and flatter an audience and give them a feeling that they understand the gist of what they’ve heard. There are also ways to fool oneself into underestimating the unsettling philosophical implications and requirements of the science. There is no way to properly digest and ground just how weird quantum really is without multiple years of pragmatic practice of things like diagramming out quantum computation circuits, deriving the shapes of molecular orbitals from Schrödinger’s equation, and calculating absorption and emission spectra using Heisenberg representations for Hamiltonian perturbation theory. These aren’t everyday practices to say the least, and even basics like “wavefunction,” “fermion,” and “boson” are hardly natural language.

Quantum mechanics shines a bright light in physics and chemistry departments, but it stays in a technical shadow for the general public sphere. The technical shadows have complexly-shaded penumbras spanning subcultural spaces like hard science fiction fandoms and STEM-centric social movements.

People initially drawn into that shaded light often reconsider as they see more of the brighter, more unfiltered signal through the convenient, entertaining simplifications. Not too many space opera fans end up with astronavigation degrees… and it might be for the best. In my later adolescence I knew a disturbing number of peers who did not turn back, but who should have – who instead went insane, burned out, or even killed themselves when overexposed to the radiative hearts of these technical disciplines. Arguably I was one who went insane, too – depends on exactly who you ask and when they knew me!

I am getting back to the dangerous, negative connotations of shadow, here, but before I go into them fully, let me stop to note a place the metaphor just slipped. It made a half-turn when I said “quantum mechanics lies in a technical shadow of the public sphere.” 

Informally, in ordinary language, when a light goes behind some blocking object we do sometimes say the light is in the shadow of the blocker rather than that we are now in the light’s shadow cast by the block. “The sun has passed into the shadow of the moon” during a solar eclipse, for instance. That isn’t correct astronomically, but it would make sense if thinking our eyes were the sources of visibility rays, as in some premodern theory of vision or in a practical ray-traced graphics algorithm. There are truly “visibility shadows” in this sense, with effectively identical geometrical laws to optical shadows, so the ordinary language is sensible and persists despite its “backwards” character.2

Quantum mechanics lies in a technical “visibility shadow” of the public sphere. Even if I wanted to write extensively about quantum, I wouldn’t be understood by more than a few. Even when I tutor the subject intensively, the transmitted information can be meager. Everyday assumptions and instincts block simple, literal descriptions. It’s too alien and too disorienting. Even though, technically, contemporary physics now derives all classical mechanics from quantum, with classical behavior just an emergent appearance of quantum systems, the classical behavior remains more intuitive and in many ways more appealing. Arguably Einstein never accepted it, with his famous “God does not play dice with the universe,” even while playing a founding role in the field.

I have been working my way carefully to another kind of shadow that I’ve referred to before in passing many times, the Jungian Shadow, because I’d like to make a couple of careful points here – and to offer some advice that might save a student who’s going a little insane studying a deep technical subject in a social shadow (and in the process rethinking much more about the universe than they first expected to).

An element of the Jungian Shadow is an unconscious element of oneself that one resists, represses, denies, and projects. It doesn’t match the ego’s ideal for itself; it is “ego-dystonic” to use some surprisingly handy jargon. It could be a hatred, an anger, an insecurity, or an entitlement. It could be a lust for sex or for power. Jung refers to it as a blind spot of the psyche, meaning that it is a visibility shadow of the inner eye; Jungians also refer to it as “a shadow of the light of consciousness” just like premodern vision theory spoke of shadows of “the light of the eye.”

Jung loved old alchemy and other premodern science and would have had no trouble keeping this functionally ordered in his own mind (at least consistently bent, if not straight), but it does trip up many contemporary readers of Jung who get the metaphor backwards by implicitly thinking in terms of light shadows rather than visibility shadows. Especially importantly, the elements of the Shadow are not necessarily hidden from anyone else, no more than a solar eclipse blocks sunlight from the Sun itself. In fact some elements of the Shadow will usually be the most obvious things about a person, just as obvious as the Sun remains all day for anyone outside of the narrow path of a solar eclipse.

This might seem like a catastrophe, given that the Jungian Shadow is exactly what we don’t want to see about ourselves. However, here I’ll draw on the twilight of childhood again: sometimes, what we don’t want to see is fair not to see. For instance, sometimes the only thing to do for an unhealthy, reactive hatred in the short term, say right after an insult, is to put it out of mind and try to live in a way that doesn’t remind you of it. Later when the time is right, you can bring it to mind again and find a sensible, mature response. Maybe you delete your Twitter account; you do what you need to do. Everyone else knows you’re still angry but you don’t want to be reminded. Same with lust for an ex – sometimes it’s still just better not to think of them, even if everyone can tell you’re not over them. You can wait on it.3

The Jungian Shadow deserves its negative valence, but it’s only doom for the ego ideal, not for the world, and not even doom for the ego proper. Much of the Shadow is composed of elements that our friends and neighbors will happily and naturally have our backs on, while we look away, just like we happily support the social shadows for children. As long as one stays humble and grateful for the support, the pattern of having a Shadow itself can be as healthy and normal as many of the other things one too-hastily represses into the Shadow and then later learns to accept about oneself.

However, a dangerous situation arises when the Jungian Shadow and the social shadow coincide. Then friends and neighbors cannot help cover one’s blind spots, because they share them. Even more dangerous is the case that a group’s Shadows are all the same and are also a social shadow – then all may be in common denial and common resistance.

This was a key part of Jung’s analysis of the mass psychology of Nazism: the Nazis, particularly Hitler and Goebbels, deliberately formed and manipulated collectivized social Shadows. The pattern is strikingly apparent in Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism or Wyllie’s Nazi Wives, and it’s also clear at the individual level and town level in more narrowly focused studies like Holmes’s Searching for Lord Haw-Haw or Sheridan’s The Nazi Seizure of Power. The party sought brittle insecurity in its recruits, exacerbated it with sexual temptation and provocation, aligned the brittle insecurities around opaque irrational symbolism, and then deployed the symbols to trigger and direct aggression on command. The result was a powerful propaganda apparatus pointlessly tuned to demoralizing enemies while hastening towards suicide. There was never a this-worldly victory condition for Nazi Germany.

However, coincidence of social shadow and Jungian Shadow is hardly a Nazi or even fascist monopoly. Chauncey’s Gay New York gives an especially striking example in 20th century American collective memory – a sudden, repressive mid-century change in collective attitudes to sexual minorities that actually established “homosexuality” as the focal social category among sexual minorities so thoroughly that we took it and “the closet” for granted by the end of the century even though it had very limited importance at the beginning. Other elegant and precisely-outlined studies of the general phenomenon can be found in Said’s Orientalism, on the motivated ignorances of imperialists concerning their subjects and territories.

However, it’s also not just a monopoly of “the bad guys,” whether those are fascists, homophobes, or racists. The tempting but immature illusion that it is “just the bad guys” is in fact an example of the pattern in itself, and that’s a difficult illusion for even good guys to grow out of completely. There are other merely tragic and more sympathetic examples, as for instance in ancient civilizations that faced ecological collapse for reasons that they could not admit or understand – and perhaps the same in our own, too, though I won’t insist on it here.

The greatest psychological risk facing those students and researchers who go deep into technical social shadows, spoken of above, is that they will accidentally begin to stir up either collectively shared Jungian Shadows or, often even more dangerously, their personal Jungian Shadows that had previously been socially protected.

In my own specialty of statistical mechanics, there was a particularly vivid history of high profile suicides, beginning with the founder of the field, Boltzmann, and as far as I can tell the main reason is simple: statistical mechanics teaches more rigorously and inflexibly than any other subject I know how deterministic collective behavior arises over and above spontaneous individual behavior. I might call it the most disenchanting of all the sciences: it is the science closest to fully explaining biological motion without any vital principle and to explaining social behavior without any transcendent self-awareness.

If you want to see into statistical mechanics clearly, you either have to compartmentalize the research completely from your philosophy and sense of life, or you have to face difficult questions about will and meaning. Very similar issues plague quantum mechanics: problems of physical indeterminism and temporal relativity can be destabilizing. No different for evolutionary biology or quantitative sociology.4 The highest performers in each of these fields often end up with fairly original personal philosophies, and that’s not just a matter of abusing their privilege to speak from authority; it’s even more a matter of necessary ancillary work on the path to the authority in the first place.

AI research rests exactly at an uncomfortable intersection of statistical mechanics, evolutionary biology, and quantitative sociology, and I’ve certainly seen it stir up terrible insecurities and drive people insane. Even users are deranged by the frontier technology, not just developers: I’ve been horrified though not surprised as I watch “LLM psychosis” become an entirely common term, now one of the everyday nontechnical words that flows easily in a public sphere “tailored to general comprehensibility.”

It may now be clear how I’ve been talking about AI in every section of this letter – though I’ve been talking about a lot of things, to be fair.

Whether “AI” is really the right label I have my doubts about, and I think it will look silly a few centuries from now (whether there is a takeoff or a collapse or neither), but there is no doubt in my mind that it is a deep revolution in communications technology and that, as a deep revolution in communications technology, it will restructure the entire social medium and not just the public sphere. That means that many social shadows will be shifting as well: new themes, topics, and forms will be rising to prominence and others will be entirely washed out. The new medium will absorb, scatter, and transmit messages in new patterns. It will sharpen some shadows and broaden others. This happened for writing; it happened for printing; it happened for radio, telephone, and TV.5

However, it hasn’t been happening all at once, and I think it’s also not happening too fast for these Hedge letters to add up. Things take time.

Now one last section that ties this to prior letters and my larger project – something anyone should feel welcome to skip unless they’re especially interested in the Hedge as a whole.

When I mean that the letters add up, I mean that they each support each other from different angles. This letter, for instance, has quite a lot of natural crossover with the “Overton Window; Overton Archipelago” insofar as “what is totally outside the Overton Window” is also “in the social umbra” and as the edges of the Windows (what I refigured as the shores of Islands) are threshold levels of social penumbras. I considered making this a much more mathematical piece, too, going into qualitative patterns in ray tracing and advection-diffusion transport equations, but it wouldn’t have been the best use of the letter.

This also had extensive overlaps with “Common Sense Against Mind Viruses” insofar as that discussed exposure and spread of ideas and the Jungian Shadow, and with “The Internet as a Hive Mind,” “From Swarm to Solidarity,” and “Varieties of Solidarity” at the same time insofar as these four all discussed the textures of the social medium as shaped by collective dispositions to communicate in stereotyped, filtered ways. I would like to write another letter soon going into more depth on that swarm/shadow crosslink, especially on what I called the collectivization of Jungian Shadow in this letter, by reference to Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and Bourdieu. I’ve stated explicitly more than once that one of my reasons for starting with bugs and swarms in those letters was their role in political Shadow, as for the “bugman” of the online right.

In all this, to make three last connections, what I am aiming to do is gradually establish a “food grade” language for these topics for myself and other specialist colleagues to be able to talk warmly and fluidly with public audiences. “Lab grade” talk is important and has its place in public speech as well, no question, but it cannot ground broad popular solidarities or be “tailored to general comprehensibility” in the same ways. This food grade/lab grade distinction was the theme of “Etics, Emics, and Emetics.” In jargon that I don’t want to make a habit of using here too often, but that I did introduce explicitly in my early introduction to the Hedge project “Motte and Bailey; Hedge and Field,” I am trying to anchor my specialist concerns in the “shared lifeworld,” what anthropologists would call “emic understanding.”

I am concerned about the popular legitimation crises that AI technologies are bringing on, and I don’t think elitist technocratic separatism has a bright future ahead of it. Splitting up the shared lifeworld is a dangerous game. I want an alternative to the enclave-building tendencies in the subcultures of LessWrong Rationalism, Thielism, Muskism, and Effective Altruism;6 I’d like a better kind of integration for technologists and humanists where the inevitable shadows that each side casts on each other can nonetheless feel more like verdant forest shade rather than the vile smog-darknesses of Mordor. (Or of old LA or Manchester – but that’s the last I stir the social shadows for now.)

Thank you for reading. I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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The Platonic realm of Ideas, if it exists, is eternal. Our patterns for talking about it, however, certainly are not. Whether there really is an unchanging, eternal space of true concepts and categories and principles or not, in practice we write for the changing, transient realm of Present Ideas, even just Popular Ideas, not Platonic ones.

The challenge of this contrast has brought out some of the most ambitious and most impressive thinking humans have done, at least in my opinion, from ancient astronomy grappling with how to remember and record the slowest perceptible movements of the stars, to Platonic philosophy of truth and appearance itself, to the present humanities’ deep investigations into the histories, “genealogies”, and “social constructions” of styles and ideas.

The transience of language and symbolism is not at all a uniquely postmodern concern. It is premodern and even prehistoric. In the earliest Mesopotamian written languages we have deciphered, we have found fragments of prior lost language which the contemporaries knew was lost. Myths of “the confusion of tongues” suggest the theme was already a commonplace of oral history before writing: whenever tribes would separate for long enough, their speech would become strange to each other.

It is also a Renaissance theme and an Enlightenment theme. Reading The Making of the English Working Class near the turn of the year, I was reminded to read the classic Enlightenment liberal-ideological historical tract The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires by Constantin-François Volney in 1791, which excoriated priestly power and boldly suggested Jesus Christ was no more than a myth. It was nearly fully translated into English by Thomas Jefferson, except that he became busy with the American presidency partway through; it was a powerful influence on the early English radicals including those first Effective Altruists, the Benthamites.

To transition into chapter 22, “Origin and Filiation of Religious Ideas,” Volney concisely expresses an Enlightenment project of religious disenchantment by historical analysis that today would likely be packaged and marketed under the brand name of “Foucault”:1

When you [rival priests] endeavored to explain your doctrines to each other, they appeared confused and foreign, even to their adherents; they were founded on ideas inaccessible to your senses; you consequently had no means of judging of them, and you confessed yourselves in this respect to be only the echoes of your fathers. Hence follows this other question: how came they to the knowledge of your fathers, who themselves had no other means than you to conceive them? So that, on the one hand, the succession of these ideas being unknown, and on the other, their origin and existence being a mystery, all the edifice of your religious opinions becomes a complicated problem of metaphysics and history.

Since, however, these opinions, extraordinary as they may be, must have had some origin; since even the most abstract and fantastical ideas have some physical model, it may be useful to recur to this origin, and discover this model—in a word, to find out from what source the human understanding has drawn these ideas, at present so obscure, of God, of the soul, of all immaterial beings, which make the basis of so many systems; to unfold the filiation which they have followed, and the alterations which they have undergone in their transmissions and ramifications. (The Ruins, end of chapter 21)

Once again, as in “Postmodern Positioning,” I have to ask – is this woke classical liberalism? Were the Founding Fathers woke? I know some anti-woke thinkers are happy to debate the question seriously and I enjoy their conversation, but thinkers who reject all critical theory while uncritically admiring Thomas Jefferson – those mystify me.

Just a few generations before Volney, first publishing his own major work in 1725, the Italian Giambattista Vico was one of the most important of the early Enlightenment era thinkers on the history of ideas and their origins and filiations, famous for his claim that “truth is itself something made.” He is arguably the father of modern philosophy of history – though he’s often classed in the Counter-Enlightenment rather than the Enlightenment, and he was certainly an opponent of rationalism.2 He’s had a remarkable range of admirers in 20th C politics, from Communist Marx to Fascist inspiration Georges Sorel to the Cold War Liberal Isaiah Berlin, as well as in the arts, for instance James Joyce’s infamously obscure Finnegans Wake.

If I knew his work better, Vico would probably be one of my central ideological touchstones. However, his prose is famously difficult to parse; Finnegans Wake is apparently a good comparison. I don’t trust available translations from the spot-checks I’ve made, so unless I learn old-dialect Italian or find a new and better translation, I may never confidently understand his work on its own terms. Part of how he influenced such a wide range of heirs is exactly that his different readers could take very different things from his books: they made their own truths of whatever it was he wrote (or of whatever his translators wrote).

Regardless, I do collect secondhand accounts of Vico’s work and I use pieces drawn from those accounts often in my own thinking and conversation. One in particular is his (alleged) cyclical theory of the history of nations: that each nation begins in barbarism of one kind and ends in barbarism of another, passing through civilization in the middle. The first barbarism is rude, naive, passionate, and concrete in thought: his interpreters call it the “barbarism of sense.” The last barbarism is decadent, ironic, calculated, and abstracted: the “barbarism of reflection.”

In the first phase, the people are unreasonable with no pretense of reason; in the second they are reasonable personally and collectively; in the last they are collectively unreasonable but under a pretense of self-interested reason. In contemporary colloquial expression, “unreason but under a pretense of reason” is “schmeason.” Vico’s cycle begins with an age of unreason, then proceeds to an age of reason, and ends in an age of schmeason. The pretense of reason fades or cracks, and schmeason returns to simple unreason.

Volney’s story of the decay of religious belief above, this alleged way that religious ideas lost their connections to the senses and thus lost their coherence and practical application, is a perfect example of an age of schmeason in religion. It shouldn’t be hard to think of more. When people say “words don’t work anymore” or “the oracles have gone silent” or they cry “Pharisee” or call for “rectification of names,” they express the basic idea.

There’s extensive debate about exactly what Vico meant by this cyclical theory. Is this an abstract likelihood, a thought-organizing ideal, or a straight factual claim? I won’t resolve it here. My favorite approachable introduction to the theory that I recommend most often is “The Course the Nations Run” from contemporary druid John Michael Greer.3 Greer frames Vico’s model as a distillation drawn from the study of the history of legal codes, with the different nations defined by their different court systems.

At first, a nation’s courts are anarchic barbarian assemblies at which particular concrete judgments prevail or not based on strength and collective passion. Charismatic kings make judgments that become examples that others imitate: this price for this wrong, that punishment for that one. The nation’s legal code is a list of past judgments. This is the barbarism of sense.

Next, as the examples multiply and the assemblies become more orderly and deliberative, charismatic past judgments are compared and developed into more abstract principles: this is how to reckon the price of instances of one common-sense kind of wrong, this is how to determine the just punishment for instances of another common-sense kind. The legal code becomes a body of laws. This is the phase of civilization.

Third, as principles abstract and multiply, they conflict in ways that invite manipulation, and the assemblies become targets of refined strategic command and control: knowing how to categorize the kinds of wrongs becomes a domain of private conflict rather than public common sense. The legal code becomes a tangle of procedural rules and technical precedents, and juries are increasingly bought. This is the barbarism of reflection.

This is very simple, and as I’ve said, it’s not clear how literally to take it. Nonetheless, it’s an evocative pattern and, properly adapted, it does seem to describe some histories well.

One of the weaknesses of that simplest model – not necessarily a weakness of Vico’s use of it or of his thought – is that it doesn’t incorporate cycles of progressive reform, which are common in national histories. Successive periods of decadence and renaissance are not rare. A tangle of procedural rules may be literally burned and replaced by a new body of laws, for instance, or the court of a legalistic tyrant manipulating abstract elitist rules may be overthrown by a more democratic coalition that governs using common sense.

One more flexible way to apply the model is to think of it as a tendency of a nation’s political regimes and their legal apparatuses rather than the nation as a whole. So for instance, one could argue the French monarchist regime before the Revolution had entered a decadent period of elitist legal procedural manipulation, but the revolutionaries formed a parallel preparatory regime and apparatus with their own new plans for courts and a new common sense. In the course of the Revolution, sans-culottes unreason prevailed over aristocratic schmeason, then the revolutionaries’ regime of reason prevailed over the crowd and they replaced the old legal apparatus to create a short-lived new period of reason. However, very quickly if not immediately, this apparatus sank into Robespierre’s procedural tyranny, a merely schmeasonable barbarism of reflection again. And then that apparatus was broken by Napoleon’s regime of charismatic executive fiat, an unreasonable but effective barbarism of sense that could settle out into another return to reason and a more stably civilized period of French history.

I don’t want to claim that story would hold up to critical scrutiny! I sketch it as an example of applying the simple model more flexibly to a national history with more complex ups and downs in its development.

After applying the cyclical model narrowly to specific regimes and specific legal apparatus, I’ve also found it fruitful to apply to other types of target, for instance to philosophical movements and artistic movements.

In these cases, the generalized model posits an early period of the movement characterized by simple enthusiasm for concrete exemplars, then recognition of the abstract principles connecting the exemplars and relating them to one another, and finally some manner of the abstraction of the movement overtaking the sense of the movement: perhaps some combination of excessively persnickety gatekeeping of the movement, exploitation of the idea of the movement at the expense of the life of the movement, or awkward overextension of principles of the movement past their fitting domain of application. It doesn’t apply every time to every movement, but when it does fit, it can yield insight.

In fast-lived movements, a single life can easily pass through the full cycle: David Foster Wallace was an early exemplary genius of a literary style that soon became a principled category “the new sincerity” yet before long the principles degraded into the tropes of a clunky hipster pose. In Lenin’s lifetime, he went from being one of the early exemplary figures of revolutionary Marxism by uniting Chernyshevsky and Marx, to institutionalizing common understanding of Marxist-Leninist principles in his Bolshevik Party as it took and then solidified power, to watching as his successors betrayed his legacy by turning those principles into formulas that he no longer believed connected to the sense he had first been inspired by.

Repeated indefinitely, the exemplar-principle-formula cycle makes for a continuous dialectic of sorts. It might even be a form of Hegelian dialectic! However, I wouldn’t feel confident saying so because Hegel’s dialectic has itself been aggressively oversold and obscured to me via schmeasonable misuses – I have rarely been able to sort the wheat from the chaff in interpretations of Hegel, and no compelling original sense of Hegel’s works has yet leapt out to me. As I’ve said once before, I have the sense my spirit just has a different phenomenology than Hegel’s did. Perhaps ’s recommendation of Yirmiyahu Yovel will clear it up, or perhaps simply following up further on Shlomo Avineri will, but I’m not betting my life on either. I see a lot of schmeason in Hegel scholarship, and I also suspect it in Hegel’s work itself.

Given any cyclical pattern of history, the idea can become a temptation to fatalism. With one that goes from barbarism to barbarism, the fatalism is likely to veer into doomerism. It has happened with the Viconian cycle.

One of the most strikingly coherent and genuine cases is radical critic Norman O. Brown, known for instance for his work Life Against Death on Freud, alongside Herbert Marcuse and against Philip Rieff. In the early 1970s Brown had decided Vico was right, and Western society had gone deep into the barbarism of reflection, and so he would stop writing books and instead focus on spoken word poetry recordings for the sake of the illiterate barbarians who could hear the gods of sense and thus who would truly hold the future in their hands.4 In his own words:

Vico is never tired of pointing out that language began with the poets; that the word poet means maker; that poets are makers and creators through being makers of language and thus of culture and humanity. I think we must turn from the philosophers to the poets—or at least turn philosophy, in the manner of the late Heidegger, to listen to the poets, as Heidegger listens to Hölderlin, waiting for the return of the gods. In this spirit I’m releasing not a book but a set of tapes—it’s possible that the spoken or rather the singing word is closer to the language of the gods than the written—tapes entitled To Greet the Return of the Gods. They will appear simultaneously with my book Closing Time. The presiding presences are not so far away. The spirit stalks us. Inspiration lies waiting for us. We need a new language, to greet the return of the gods. (“Rieff’s ‘Fellow Teachers’”, Salmagundi Issue 24, Fall 1973, p. 45)

This is from the same Salmagundi that Susan Sontag once called her favorite of the little magazines, and to me this back and forth between Brown and Rieff had very satisfying resonances with the whole Substack scene around , , and ; I highly recommend checking out the early-70s Salmagundi if you have access and interest: it’s an instructive “just past peak 60s student activism,” “Nixon re-elected” comparison to today. Today, instead of making tapes, I expect Brown would be branching from Substack to TikTok and Instagram.

Even though this does sound like it could be fun – if you have to be a doomer, being a poetry-for-coming-barbarians doomer also has other fun precedents like French fin de siècle Sâr Péladan who inspired Oscar Wilde – I am not myself a fatalist and I don’t mean to spread fatalism. Ideally, I want to domesticate kelp forests off the California coast, revive the American Northeast’s river ecologies, and use lessons learned to set up sustainable industry on Venus.

I do like the imagery of the “barbarism of reflection,” but its origins and connotations are often much more heavyweight than I need or want in a phrase. “Age of schmeason” is a lighter, more colloquial alternative. It typically works in conversation without any of the background; a joking contrast of an “age of reason” to an “age of schmeason” is clear enough to get the spirit across.

“Schmeason,” however, is still definitely a pejorative label, and sometimes there’s no need to be negative. Sometimes people and organizations do need to work with high level abstractions without solid contact with the original sense that motivated them: they need to run an import/export business for commodities they’ll never use, say, or sell poetry that they’ll never read, or manage a team with skills they can’t themselves perform, or get along as tourists in a foreign country.

For this type of thing, one good neutral alternative is “pluriculture,” from phenomenological philosopher of technology Don Ihde, introduced as a thinner alternative to “multiculture.” As a typical example of the pluricultural mode, anyone in globalized society can eat curry or tacos without worrying about any histories or traditions of curry or tacos; a thin sense of the dishes rather than a thicker sense is still perfectly adequate to enjoy them. Whether Taco Bell tacos specifically cross the line from defensible pluriculture into indefensible barbarism of reflection is a matter for Baudrillard meme fights.

For another less-pejorative, more neutral alternative, among people with some familiarity with the philosophy of science I also use “post-paradigmatic.” The “barbarism of sense” is analogous to pre-paradigmatic science, “civilization” to normal science in a stable paradigm, and “barbarism of reflection” to the situation in which a scientific paradigm has become decrepit or lost its integrity (as phlogiston chemistry and geocentric astronomy once did, and as many now worry string theory has). If the instruments for key experiments are lost, say, or a foundational conceptual problem has emerged that makes it impossible to agree on how to interpret core experiments, then scientists may keep using the words and figures of an old paradigm but it no longer functions, and the field can be said to be “post-paradigmatic.”

There are certainly other ways to point to problematic mismatches between collective thought and sense, as well, from “Pharisaism” to “rectification of names,” but I do find “barbarism of reflection” and “age of schmeason” particularly fitting for some things.

For instance, I think it’s exactly the right conceptual complex for the crisis of liberalism between World War I and World War II. In that interwar period, the formal pattern of liberalism had been imposed in many places with little substance. Social life did not have a sense corresponding to the liberal governments’ and newspapers’ narratives in Italy, Germany, or Spain, where fascism would soon rise. The victors of World War I imposed their forms of government on the defeated without understanding the sense of those forms sufficiently to inspire the defeated with the corresponding principles. Without the principles, the forms were thin and easily corrupted, amounting to the direct imposition of a short age of schmeason on the defeated – the same lesson that has been evident from many other attempts at American “nation building” before and since.

As a second example, I think it’s also perfectly suited to the state of contemporary universities. Grades are inflated to the point of nonsense, employers report new graduates are ever more unprepared for work, and many faculty are deeply cynical about how much they deform their research programs to match administrative and funding requirements. Replication crises put a sharp point on the research problems. Though the universities are ideally supposed to be beacons of reason, in practice they’re also heavily derided as mires of schmeason: you go for the network and the credentials, to learn to manipulate systems and procedures. No evidence makes this clearer than the immediate ubiquity of LLM-enabled cheating on campus.

In the abstract, AI is often conceived of as a kind of “reason engine.” Critics who have dismissed LLMs as “stochastic parrots” were also implicitly dismissing them as “schmeason engines.” “They have no world model” is a common complaint. However, as anyone who has engaged in public political debate comes to learn, most people don’t speak from true world models either: they often speak like “stochastic parrots” just as badly as LLMs, particularly when they’re in the grip of affectively polarized propaganda. For better and for worse, average frontier model LLMs can easily feel more human to interact with than average online trolls.

The underlying dynamic of Vico’s cycle, in market terms, is that institutionalized reason creates demand for schmeason. Interwar fascist propaganda leaned into an already-established demand for schmeason; it played an imposed game. Similarly, students cheating with LLMs and online trolls optimizing themselves into triggermaxxing stochastic parrots are also responding to clear local incentives. In the short-term, in their own immediate judgment, they feel rewarded more for schmeason more than for reason. And the effect cascades: more schmeason often demands more schmeason in response.

However, the cascades have limits, and I look forward to talking about those limits in future letters.

Thank you for reading. I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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Things go wrong, and there are people to blame for it. Someone has messed up the birthday cake on MY BIRTHDAY. Someone has let the cat out and now who knows if it’ll come home. Someone didn’t fill the tank and now the car is out of gas. Someone’s argument on the Internet is incorrect. Someone has been killing civilians under cover of war again. But how should they be blamed? Should they be blamed as if they meant to do wrong? Should they be blamed as if it was an honest mistake?

The dichotomy here, between honest failure and intentional harm, is too simple. And that has become a problem.

There are some things that are best explained by malice, and there are other things that are best explained by stupidity. Sometimes they do split. And if you’re a repairman or technician, the adage “never explain by malice what could be explained by stupidity,” called “Hanlon’s Razor,” can make sense. People really can be surprisingly stupid about taking care of their homes, cars, computers, plumbing, etc. It can also make sense if you’re training green employees, rookie colleagues: new people do honestly find mind-boggling numbers of ways to mess up new tasks before they have the hang of them.

In the general case, however, both the split and Hanlon’s Razor are absurd. First off, there are the categories of malicious stupidity and stupid malice. Malicious stupidity should be familiar to anyone from grade school – acting dumb to get a rise out of a teacher is something we’ve all seen. Stupid malice comes up just as early: cartoons and kids’ stories are full of dumb bullies who are intent on harming others but instead harm themselves.

You need both malice and stupidity to explain either. And you can keep nesting: there’s stupid malicious stupidity when a kid plays dumb to bait the teacher but the teacher outplays the kid; there’s maliciously stupid malice when an underling thug deliberately screws up his orders to hurt someone from a boss he likes even less than the intended victim.

Nesting is only one of the combinations of malice and stupidity. Another common mixture is simple redundancy: a person acts with both malice and stupidity at the same time. Both contribute to harm at the same time. More complex mixtures form historically: being asked to do things you can’t over and over, made to fail again and again, breeds resentment; that creates malice. Thereby simple incompetence develops an admixture of malice. Similarly, when people shun an adolescent’s company for acting maliciously, the shunned person loses opportunities to develop social skills, so they can fall behind and become socially incompetent, seeming stupid ever after.

The most famous philosopher of the West, in fact, argued that there was no malice at all without stupidity within it: “there is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” Against Hanlon’s Razor, “never attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity,” we could set Socrates’s Solvent: “attribute every malice to stupidity.”

At first this might seem to be an even more extreme way of denying malice: “nothing is truly malicious, just ignorant of what’s good.” That’s not implied, though: there might still be true malice, just formed from ignorance, just like there are truly rocks formed of atoms. Malice would not be fundamental, but it would still be real. This would ruin Hanlon’s Razor: since all malice can be explained by incompetence but malice still has an explanatory role, the adage would be nonsense. It’d be like a sophomoric “the rock I threw didn’t hit your head, a collection of atoms shaped like a rock I threw hit atoms shaped like your head.”

Socrates’s Solvent dissolves all malice into its simpler constituent ignorances like a geologist’s reference acids dissolve rocks into atoms. The geologist is not proving that rocks don’t exist. It can be a fun game to play a few times, pretending that only parts “really” exist and not composites, but it’s not more than a game.1

In fact some pedants do maliciously abuse Hanlon’s Razor in exactly this manner – they find ways to explain their malices by their ignorances of the good as if that eliminated the malice rather than just confirming it. “I didn’t mean to neglect our anniversary, I just genuinely forgot” misses the point that the forgetting is the neglect in itself and “not meaning to” compounds the first neglect with another layer of neglect of intention rather than excusing the first neglect of memory.

Nevertheless, in social settings where moral thought is shallow, people can often get away with the trick.

“We didn’t know our drug would have so many side effects, we just couldn’t delay sales to test it” would never fly with the Food and Drug Administration,2 but its equivalents for political projects and tech companies are pervasive. For the social media companies, at least, it’s good to see internal emails coming out in public to show there were definitely-malicious cover-ups of harms on top of the probably-malicious neglect of testing or monitoring for harms. The more public knowledge, the better people can protect themselves.

One of the ways that they’ll try to protect themselves is by federal regulation. Activist projects are organizing support for various social media legal reform programs and their competition as I write, and some have my support. Unfortunately, a lot of that is going to look like malice to tech libertarians, who will find in any new regulations both (a) do-gooder idealism that’s naive to the point of malicious neglect and (b) cynical self-enrichments of bureaucrats at the cost of economic progress that benefits all. In what these anti-regulatory libertarians will see as good faith but many pro-regulatory activists will see as a malicious naïveté of its own kind, they’ll campaign against the new regulation.

It’ll be a mess, and that’s typical. One of the main appeals of Hanlon’s Razor is not that it’s true, not even that it’s a good guide – it’s said as a joke – but simply that it’s a quick way to cut oneself free from thinking about the messes. Taking true inventory of all the complicated back and forth of mixed malice, ignorance, and incompetence gets exhausting. Is it malice to retaliate honorably against malice? Well, what if they’re stupid enough at recognizing malice that what they think is retaliation is actually an unprovoked first strike based on nothing more than a projection of malice? And when is that projection of malice itself malicious (e.g., in anti-semitism) versus simply dumb (e.g., in an espionage farce)?

Not only is processing these messes exhausting, it’s also often corrupting. For various different and distinctive reasons, people who spend their time thinking about malice often become more malicious themselves. Some become convinced that malice is simply the way of the world and they must adapt. Some become convinced that malice is the way of everyone but themselves and they must purify the others with fire or sword. Most often, thinking of specific acts of malice inspires specific malicious responses – the effect doesn’t happen on the level of “thinking about malice in general,” but rather on a specific level of some immediate retaliatory logic; the person newly drawn to new malice may not even realize how badly they’re acting until well after the deeds are done (another typical case of how malice and ignorance mix).

Processing the mess of public interaction into clean understanding is a dangerous challenge. It often requires long rumination, a word and metaphor I’ve written about in my prior Hedge letter “Digesting Tradition.” For many animals, the answer to the problem of “grass being difficult to digest” is “don’t bother eating it” – be a wolf or a fox or an eagle; let others deal with the hard stuff in its original forms and then prey on their finished work. Similarly, for many people, the obvious answer to the difficulty of digesting the mess of malice and incompetence is simply to avoid doing it! Leave it to the courts, leave it to preachers, leave it to journalists, leave it to artists.

This isn’t unreasonable or malicious in itself, though it does depend on those complements as completely as the carnivores depend on herbivores. Leaving it to journalists and artists but then refusing to pay for journalism or art, for instance, won’t work for long. Still, not everyone needs to be processing these messes directly and Hanlon’s Razor has become a convenient way to signal solidarity with the groups that don’t. If you use that Razor, you mark your place in the social system effectively.

In criticizing Hanlon’s Razor, I mark my place as well – not that it was ever unclear that I’d be among the ruminants, in that metaphor above! I don’t use the Razor, I often oppose its use, and I often avoid social settings where it is common.3 Instead, I use an exactly opposite heuristic: “never explain by pure malice or pure stupidity what can be explained by an incoherent mixture of both.”

In part, this is based on my own experience in tech support, supposedly an ideal setting for Hanlon’s Razor, as a teenage summer job. Yes, users wouldn’t intentionally infect their work laptops with viruses just to make my life harder, that was never pure malice at me, but it was the case they’d most often infect them by looking for pornography that they were unmistakeably warned not to browse, and thus an indirect malice played a role. Similarly, if a computer came in soaked with tea, it wasn’t likely their own malice that spilled the tea, but it often was their cat’s! Or, actually more often, they’d have spilled it while frazzled because an angry superior or an inconsiderate deadline was putting more stress on them than they could handle.

In larger part, my heuristic is based on my experience as a chemist. If someone gives you some random powder or some pond water and they ask you what’s in it, the answer is “I don’t know, probably a lot of things.” If someone asked “is it made of negative ions or positive ions” you’d laugh because any ordinary substance would need either both or neither. The idea that pure types would be more natural and more common than mixtures makes little sense chemically, and that’s also been my experience morally and psychologically.

There’s an appropriate and well-known quote from a grave Russian regarding the moral mixture of good and evil,

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us it oscillates with the years. And even within the hearts overwhelmed with evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an un-uprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions on the world. They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Part IV, Chapter 1, via WikiQuote)

and personally, I find this rings true. It’s a good expression of a long Christian moral tradition that I seek out and admire. The problem of differentiating malice and stupidity is a problem of the finer structure of this line between good and evil, and my heuristic could be re-expressed to parallel Solzhenitsyn’s:

the line separating malice and stupidity passes not through acts, nor between thoughts, nor between plans either – but right through every human intention – and through all human intentions. This line shifts. Inside us it oscillates with the minutes.

I do think it moves much more quickly, on the scale of minutes (sometimes even seconds) rather than years; intentions change much more rapidly than the core of character symbolized by the heart. Malice can be very frivolous and flighty, even campy.

A canonical depiction of these sometimes-rapid changes of ignorance, malice, and failure is the pre-Medieval autobiographical classic Confessions by St. Augustine of Hippo, and his The City of God further provides a deeply influential philosophical discussion of how incapacity accounts for malice and vice versa.

In his Christian understanding, ignorance and sin are inseparably bound to each other, as in this passage which I’m sure will strike many contemporary readers as alien, and which they should feel welcome to skim lightly, but which is typical of past expression:

Let no one, therefore, look for an efficient cause of the evil will; for it is not efficient, but deficient, as the will itself is not an effecting of something, but a defect. For defection from that which supremely is, to that which has less of being—this is to begin to have an evil will. Now, to seek to discover the causes of these defections—causes, as I have said, not efficient, but deficient—is as if someone sought to see darkness, or hear silence. Yet, both of these are known by us, and the former by means of the eye, the latter only by the ear; but not by their positive actuality, but by their want of it. Let no one, then, seek to know from me what I know that I do not know; unless he perhaps wishes to learn to be ignorant of that of which all we know is, that it cannot be known.4 (Augustine, City of God, translated by Marcus Dods in the Modern Library series (1950), Book 12, Chapter 7)

In some sense, for Augustine all ill will is lack of will to know or love God, all lack of will to know or love God is or is due to lack of knowledge of God, and all lack of knowledge of God is or is due to lack of will to know and love God. They’re inseparable deficiencies: after applying Socrates’s Solvent to any foreground malice to dissolve it into fundamental harmful ignorances, he finds every fundamental harmful ignorance also still implying a fundamental ill will, i.e., another malice, and vice versa.

This inseparability and inscrutability (“that of which all we know is, that it cannot be known”) are the essential features of my “never explain by pure malice or pure stupidity what can be explained by an incoherent mixture of both,” and so I call the heuristic Augustine’s Glue: it keeps ignorance, other incompetence, and malice stuck together where Hanlon’s Razor would claim to slice them apart. It does not depend on God directly, just a morality in which lacking and neglecting knowledge of the highest good implies some form of ill will.

It’s a funny heuristic to live with. It doesn’t allow for self-satisfaction as a totally good-hearted person without any malice or a fully intelligent and knowing person, and it doesn’t allow for the shortcut of treating others’ malice as fully self-aware, deliberate, and intentional and thus deserving of no mercy. It can grow demoralizing without compatible camaraderie or faith. Nonetheless, I think it’s actually true, not just “directionally useful in context” like so many popular heuristics, and I think that’s worth it.

With that, I’ve made my points and will set this down for later reference. I hope that it has been interesting as a stand-alone, and I hope that readers who have been keeping up with prior arcs were seeing how this fits in and builds on prior themes. I’ll close with a couple of points about why I prioritized this letter now.

First, one of the key near-term reasons this is important to me is that I think these simple common-sense, jokey-but-serious heuristics like Hanlon’s Razor are often surprisingly crucial for AI alignment debates, AI regulation debates, and also for personal safety using current-generation machine learning. For instance there is also a dark mirror of Hanlon’s razor, the mastermind fallacy, in which people frustrated or demoralized into thinking that goodness is weak begin to conflate evil with competence and intelligence – and then choose evil. This has been a central preoccupation of LessWrong and Effective Altruist conversation, for instance a primary theme of Yudkowsky’s epic movement recruitment fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. This is a step towards participating in those conversations at the level of the actually effective rhetoric.

Second, in this arc of letters I’m planning to write more about fascism, and talk on that topic tends to get badly tangled on simple misconceptions about the separability of ignorance and intent if they’re not prepared for ahead of time. Many political allies of fascism do not know that is what they are until too late, for instance – and same with tyrannical pseudocommunism. Politics is often cutthroat and opaque, so this is hardly a unique property, but it’s especially salient and unavoidable in discussions of fascism. It takes full advantage of stupidity for the sake of its malice; its leaders deliberately cultivate weakly and equivocally malicious stupidity to increase the reach of their own determined, unequivocal malice. I’ll want this as a link to send people wondering about my deeper beliefs on these points when they read those upcoming letters.

Finally, this fact of pervasive and forgivable malice is, for me, a key piece of the background for why and how to understand Jürgen Habermas’s peculiarly exact claims about communicative action and deliberative politics. His jargon like “collective opinion and will formation” often throws people, and I think one reason it does is that he’s trying very hard not to poke the public in one of its blind eyes. Before I’m ready to explain exactly what I mean there, I’ll write another letter on blind public eyes using the metaphor of “social shadow,” which is not exactly either Jungian Shadow or the unintelligible deficient evil that Augustine could not know, like darkness, in the quote above, but it is a close relative to both.

Thank you for reading. As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement. If you find yourself using Socrates’s Solvent or Augustine’s Glue when thinking or speaking, I’ll be curious how they work for you!

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As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

Of the last 23 letters I’ve sent, all but the most recent one were sent in the intended about-two-and-a-half-month season from mid-August through early November. In these letters I did many of the things I intended to do: I wrote three more letters on solidarity and two on tradition; I wrote several letters on applications of that work on solidarity and tradition, such as applications to “woke” and to fashion; and I wrote all but one of five letters on my “ideological touchstones” from my publication about page. I also ran three Sunday experiments: a glossary, an open thread, and a “twelve rules for” advice letter.

However, at the same time I also hit a personal wall and decided to take an indefinite break while I sorted through what to do next.

One of the causes was the planning thread from last recap letter that I delivered on the least: the plan to write more letters about books relevant to contemporary intellectual politics as I read them. I wrote just one of these, on Frank Ruda’s Hegel’s Rabble. I did not write a letter on Perry Anderson’s A Zone of Engagement or Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies or others I had thought I might. I didn’t stop reading these books, and in fact I stepped up my pace, but I did not write about them.

As two immediate follow-ups to Hegel’s Rabble that I could have written about but chose not to, I read the Judith Butler–Slavoj Zizek–Ernesto Laclau epistolary debate Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (cited as crucial by Ruda) and Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (another rec from John Ganz). Following up on A Zone of Engagement, I made time for Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism and Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity. In that reading, and from the response on Substack to my letters of this type so far (mostly invisible, but interesting DMs), I got a decisive sense that this discourse on the left was not what I had thought it was and that I needed to check some things more deeply on my own than I had planned. I no longer expected to be able to find guidance, community, or standing simply by writing about where I was and what I thought I needed to know.

This became especially clear as the Epstein files came out, ICE action and protest heated up, and the US military started the new year off with several unmistakeable bangs. These vulcanized and cracked what had been more flexible public discussion. At the same time, a national news magazine piece that had been set to come out about one of my former employers was quietly drowning in its queue as higher-profile scandals multiplied and grabbed priority, reducing one of the primary reasons for my urgency in mid-2025 that was motivating my brisk publishing pace here in the first arc. Until recently, I was under voluntary embargo for discussing certain current events directly; I remain under warnings not to talk about others.

With those factors alongside a few more personal things like the common difficulties of having a new baby, I decided to step back to test and rethink my plans for Arc 3 rather than forcing my way straight through the wall.

The first four “ideological touchstone” letters were quite interesting to write, and I was happy with their reception. “Touchstone” is often used as a worn cliché, but the underlying metaphor is useful when it’s grounded: touchstones were stones used to determine the composition of other substances by contact against their surfaces. You’d take a piece of metal, say a coin, and make a streak on a piece of slate to see what type of metal it was. Gold and silver of different purities and different alloy admixtures would leave distinct streaks. I wrote about using an analogous mechanism to judge other thinkers by their contacts with these four reference figures: sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, economist Albert O. Hirschman, and historian of science Lorraine Daston.

These are four very different writers. In subject matter, writing style, working style, and social presence, they each differ from the others as complementary opposites. Politically and temperamentally, they represent critical left (Bourdieu), reactionary right (MacIntyre), and liberal center (Hirschman and Daston), but all are able to read and engage their complements more broadly than one might expect.

One sad shock as I was writing these was to find Hirschman’s Wikipedia page had been badly neglected – to the point he was listed as a German economist rather than an American! – and this usefully provoked me to reflect again on the value of spending my time on Substack.1 I wrote a fresh biography for him on WP, and it has already registered 16,000 pageviews in the couple of months since; that’s already more than half of how many times my entire Substack has been visited and it’s over 50x the views of my letter on Hirschman. Writing or reading a personal letter is a very different thing, no doubt, and they’ll never be fungible substitutes, but since I do care about Hirschman’s legacy and reputation and not just my own recognition and relationships (I count him in my “community in eternity”, in MacIntyre’s phrase), I found this an unsettling surprise. I plan to revisit Wikipedia as a topic again in Arc 3, and to try to find collaborators here on Substack for some more small-scale work worth doing. If it goes well, I’ll also think about larger scales.

A more positive surprise was the fun response to my “anti-touchstone” letter on Nietzsche – “Warnings Against Reading Nietzsche.” This was not in fact a negative letter: I read a book of Nietzsche’s every year and I’m on my way to acquiring his entire Stanford University Press collected work! Sometimes a warning is also a kind of recommendation, as Nietzsche would be happy to tell you. This piece drew enough conversation and attention that I realized I was probably at a critical growth threshold for the Hedge, giving me another good reason to cool off and make sure I was ready to go past the next line irreversibly. Like with catching a wave when surfing, with writing there are some early choices you can’t unmake: if your weight is placed wrong, you’re in for a nose dive.

If my caution seems unwarranted, keep in mind I haven’t told much of the story of my pre-Trump-I writing for the neoreactionaries – I have first hand experience of how early writing successes can fling you into a crash! The time for that story won’t be early in Arc 3, but perhaps I’ll summarize it by the end.

The core letters on solidarity and tradition for this arc completed sets of 4 and 5, respectively. Now that they’ve hit a certain coherence threshold, I’ll add them as tags and as navigation columns on the Blackthorn Hedge site.

The four letters on solidarity now fill out a classical pattern I hadn’t yet made explicit. The first, “From Swarm to Solidarity,” was focused on the form of solidarity; the second, “Varieties of Solidarity,” focused on its functions; the third, “Substrates for Solidarity,” focused on the matter; and the fourth, “Criticality and Solidarity,” discussed its efficient causes. In all, then, they covered Aristotle’s four causes: formal, final, material, and efficient. None are as complete or systematic as one would want for a reference or tutorial, but I hope they’ve given a good outline for the essentials of a common idea that I find important to take seriously.

The five letters on tradition are now “Differentiating Traditions,” “Common Sense Against Mind Viruses,” “The Tissues of Tradition,” “Digesting Tradition,” and “Grounding Tradition.” This followed an evolutionary biology scheme: the first was on the evolutionary morphology of tradition, the second on its evolutionary ecology, the third on its anatomy, the fourth on its metabolism, and the fifth on its physiology. In every one of them I explained another aspect of my caution around contemporary ideas of “genealogy” of institutions and traditions, Nietzsche or Foucault-style, and my mislike of prevalent memetic theories of cultural evolution, Dawkins or Blackmore-style.

I then paused these two series to see how these might be digested over a few months: I now focus on applying them in letters and discussing them with individuals and small groups privately. Once I understand better how they’re working in private, I’ll be ready to resume these series again.

One of the primary themes of Arc 3 will be public/private distinctions and complementarities for solidarity and tradition, using the ideas already covered in these sequences and treating this pause as a productive absence (explored in “Productivity and Cleaning; Exhaustion and Fouling”). This will build off of my Arc 1 letters on Habermas (“Legitimation Crises and Deliberative Democracy”), conspiracy theory (“Five Kinds of Conspiracy Theory”), Overton Windows (“Overton Window; Overton Archipelago”), and online swarm dynamics (“The Internet as a Hive Mind”), and also build off the Arc 2 letters on visibility and camouflage and modularity and controllability (“Visible and Forgotten Order”) and some of the practical limits of social calculation (“How I Use Utilitarianism”).

In the meantime, I’ve appreciated the respectful and excited engagement with my application letters like “Three Basic Thoughts on “Woke”,” “Postmodern Positioning,” and “Fashionable Obsession.” I’ll keep writing more like them!

Arc 3 was frequently on my mind while writing Arc 2, and I mentioned how more than once. In “Notes on Substack Pest Ecology,” for instance, I described choosing to leave deeper engagement with gender issues for later, rather than preparing to tackle them seriously in Arc 3. As Arc 2 developed, I settled into a definite idea for Arc 3 centered on public trust: trust of individual figures, trust in institutions, trust in experience, the indefinite and informal trust in crowds and scenes, and so on.

From the beginning of Arc 1 I had decided not to engage machine learning, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence immediately. These are important to me, but the narratives about them and social dynamics around them are bizarre and dangerous. I’ve mentioned before that I was only one degree of separation from the Ziz cult in the Bay Area; one of my single-degree connections falsely told them I was anti-trans and fascist in order to put me on their hate list, and that’s one of the reasons that I left the Bay Area during the pandemic lockdowns and never moved back.

There were many funny cult and gang dynamics; there aren’t drive-bys but instead there are hacks, defamation campaigns, sexual stings, date rapes, and daylight drug dosings. It’s not hard to avoid this cult and gang stuff if you keep your eyes off the shadows and clothespin your nose, but if you are honest and observant, you know Epstein was not a particularly unusual or isolated case. There have been many relatively passive people playing soft and naive in order to thrive by proximity to more aggressive actors who need cover. There are many more ignoring the smells from further off to evade long-neglected responsibilities for justice and social maintenance.

In many historical eras that’s simply the social equilibrium, but it’s rarely stable and today’s version is not even an equilibrium. If it were in balance, prestigious Ivy League professors Larry Summers and David Gelernter wouldn’t have their emails about students to Epstein in public and Warren Buffett wouldn’t be distancing himself from Bill Gates.

With Arc 3 of the Hedge, I aim to begin talking about this background to current technological changes by way of the themes of civility, politeness, and nonviolence in communication. These are euphemisms, as they always are. The heart behind the euphemisms is social trust in some kinds of normal, stable behavioral boundaries. To be blunt, current social boundaries aren’t trustworthy or stable. Things are weird and dangerous.

Without taking the state of contemporary civility euphemisms into account, any talk about the economic impacts of new technology is farcical: it’s wishy-washy nonsense. It’s important that the author of the influential early AI book Mirror Worlds, targeted by the Unabomber as a key technocratic innovator and then become a leading conservative voice in tech, was in fact obviously creeping on his female students and protected by self-consciously cynical and enabling social networks. Similarly, you will never understand the political influence of Curtis Yarvin unless you take into account the effective institutionalization of psychedelic LSD and Ecstasy group bonding among venture capitalists: the most decisive ideas are not spreading in sober, public debate; they are spreading in private, generally while intoxicated by sex or narcotics (inclusive or).

People’s deliberative opinions are forming while they are horny and high as fuck and if you’ve ever lived with a user, you know those opinions don’t necessarily change again once the highs have worn off. Too commonly the peak experiences become oracles to them; conversation without intoxication becomes relatively unpersuasive and hollow-feeling.

I don’t want to be needlessly sensationalist about any of this, and I won’t be. I have no interest in specifically demonizing either occultist acid trans separatism, Ecstasy-cuddle-puddle deliberative solidarity, or raunchy, coked-up private straight sex talk. Criticizing, sure; describing bluntly, sure; demonizing to the point of punitive elimination, no. “It’s a free country,” as we say, albeit awkwardly. All the same, though I don’t want to be sensationalist, I also can’t stand any more of the AI thinkpieces that ignore these cultural factors that are very obviously important if you spend even a single unguarded minute around the scenes where the tech is developed.

This isn’t new and it’s not unprecedented. You’d have seen it in the 50s–60s, as bohemians and the CIA experimented extensively with LSD: the lead of MKUltra Sidney Gottlieb apparently dosed his team with acid on a work retreat without consent, and CIA chief and brother to the Secretary of State Allen Dulles began doing acid with at least one of his mistresses, the Republican kingmaker and TIME/LIFE mogul Henry Luce’s adventurous wife Clare.

You’d also have seen it in the 20s, especially in Weimar Berlin where the private experimentation and intoxicated nightlife has been elegantly and aptly called a “voluptuous panic.” And it indirectly brings me back to the matter of “fascism” today: one of the characteristic patterns of both the fascist regimes and the eras of their rise was a similar curious, culpable failure of middle-class public awareness to form around new-tech-enabled political norm disruptions like the railroad gangs and tabloid newspapers (both Communist and Fascist parties organized around illegal railroad activity and distributed yellow papers) or cocaine and amphetamine-fueled self-fulfilling delusions of grandeur (from Hitler to Freud).

These patterns rise and fall, pass and return.

I clarified how I understand and relate to major contemporary intellectual social trends and Substack neighbors in “Postmodern Positioning,” “How I Use Utilitarianism,” “Notes on Substack Pest Ecology,” and “Three Basic Thoughts on “Woke”.” “Fashionable Obsession,” “Halloween Science Fiction and Fantasy,” and “Twelve Rules for Madness” shared more of my personal background. I’m writing all of this still in the spirit of my first letter here, focusing on that ad hominem respect level of “How to Assert.”

In this recap, I can add some description of my reading then and during my break. I did read Neumann’s Behemoth, for instance, and I found it eerily matching the prior reading I’ve done on the nature of the US state: in some ways the US Congress was intended to be a Behemoth, an anarchic, anti-centralist Indefinitely Long Parliament, in the pattern Thomas Hobbes criticized in the original Behemoth; or, the Long Parliament from which Neumann took his title. This brought me back to what I had thought about mob rule and democracy in “Shadows of Deliberative Democracy” when reflecting on ’s The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe. At roughly the same time, a recommendation of philosopher Jacques Rancière by in the comments to my Bourdieu letter, a philosopher I’d never read, led me to start with the short On the Shores of Politics. There Rancière also writes of the political contrast of ochlos (mob) and demos (people). This did not seem to be a coincidence, but rather an indicator I was finally finding harmony with certain traditions of the left that had previously felt closed to me.

Another that had opened was Hegelian philosophy of politics, via Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, as I wrote in “Detachment and Deliberation.” Surprisingly I also learned that my touchstone Albert Hirschman had found Avineri’s work a useful way into the Hegelian tradition as well, before writing his The Passions and the Interests (found while I was rereading his biography for the WP work I mentioned above).

At the same time, reading Perry Anderson was an opposite sort of revelation. His cutting, dismissive articles on his friend Carlo Ginzburg’s use of Carl Jung and on the late-career patriotic project of my touchstone Fernand Braudel in A Zone of Engagement were a wake-up call: this was someone I would not put faith in; his The Origins of Postmodernity was a confirmation: “this slanders what I love.” His other close fellows like Jameson I read happily, but for whatever reason Anderson, though certainly intelligent and difficult to simply “disprove”, apparently represented exactly what had closed the left to me. I don’t trust this mislike: it’s too hot, and so I suspect my own Jungian Shadow in it. Nonetheless, the heat would not simply dissipate on its own and so I couldn’t plan a near-term letter on A Zone of Engagement after all.

Also around the same time (again, last fall) a huge tide of insipid conversation about analytical vs. continental philosophy swept over Substack, adding further salt, and I decided that rather than get drawn into the rage dynamic, I would take a break and read a good chunk of ’s recommended reading on fascism. I read Griffin’s Fascism, Payne’s A History of Fascism 1914–1945 up to 1939, Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, Antliff’s Avant Garde Fascism and Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, Tooze’s Wages of Destruction up to 1939, and Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power; I’d already read a few of the others. Then at the edges I added Tooze’s The Deluge, Pipes’s The Russian Revolution as recommended by Payne, the Sebestyen biography of Lenin (with a grain of salt), and the first sections of Davidson’s How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?.

I read five more books of Rancière’s, too, since they kept proving compact and excellent. Then I decided to read some more industrial working class history: The Making of the English Working Class, Forging Global Fordism, and The Fall of the House of Labor, among others. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America is high on my priority list now, too, thanks to . But after all that I also just decided to cut to the chase and read all of Capital front to back alongside Harvey’s Companion, Heinrich’s How to, and Althusser and Rancière et al.’s Reading Capital. So I did, though it took me a while, though I balanced it with ideologically complementary reading as well,2 and though I couldn’t make time to write letters here simultaneously.

I think it’ll prove to be the right choice. One thing that keeps coming clear is that these debates involve much more complex and tangled bad faith and slander than I had appreciated. I had some idea, but I needed a better one. Another consequence was also clear: trying to do this particular deep political reorientation by navigating the debates live in public wouldn’t work.

As if to put a point on it, right as I was appreciating Ganz’s detailed fascism thesis work most – appreciating it even though I’m someone who has previously been smeared as a fascist3 and as someone who has previously despairingly and cynically believed fascist was essentially only a smear (perhaps 2012–2018) – right then, Damage magazine published an article that seemed to indict Ganz as a main exemplar of “fascism as a mere smear.” By contrast, I’d have credited him as one of the very few leading writers I’ve seen engage in debate about the term clearly enough for me to follow along and understand the arguments as genuine reasoning rather than browbeating or empty jargon! However, if you’re reading the history, you recognize this as par for the course.

Given all this about bad faith, slander, and even violence, it’s probably surprising to those who know Jürgen Habermas’s reputation that I’m still saying I find him essential in my notes and in this letter. He’s often dismissed as someone too focused on rationality and nonviolence to have any useful guidance on real politics. Even so, my interpretation has been the opposite. I think his theories of communicative action and deliberative democracy are remarkably clean, clear, and applicable to real world politics, particularly to Behemoth politics. Ever more so as more writing and more violence is automated. They’re only counterintuitive insofar as they are very carefully polite and euphemistic.

I don’t intend to break that politeness and euphemism for the sake of intuition. Instead I intend to rationalize it and provide new ramps up to the level. Some of what I write will be blunt and vulgar, in part because I don’t always know how to be polite myself – my manners are strange and broken in many ways, like many of us hodgepodge-Americans. Being stiffly conformant to a unique hash of half-codes no one else shares is far more impolite than being easy and common! So I’ll be trying to bring myself up, in some ways. And that is something I do think I can and should do in public. That seems like it can function even where the developmental debates on positions cannot.

Not coincidentally, politeness is also at the heart of my models of what social order will be disrupted by LLM technology and why, and politeness is also central to what I understand to be Rancière’s philosophical approach to the identification and critique of tyranny in divisions of labor. “Manners make the man” will be my opening theme for Arc 3, with the anachronism painfully apparent both for better and for worse.

From that, I’ll move into the coupling of technological changes to changes in manners, which will bring me directly to fascism and “the fascism thesis” for contemporary American politics. I’ll write a supporting letter on the history and philosophy of social scientific research programs, traditions, and revolutions first, with special attention to implications for para-academic research and independent researchers. That will also naturally bring in The Sociology of Philosophies, another monster read of my Arc 2/Arc 3 break that is worth at least a few letters though I won’t try to explain how it fits in just yet.

I expect all this to be very timely for a small audience who have understood why a slow “brake and border” Hedge project makes sense today, though I also understand that others will find it too obscure and too longwinded to pay sustained attention to while they have short timelines for other current social and political change.

There is, no question, a lot of pressure to move fast right now. There is a lot of pressure to go all in on something. However, rereading Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy now that I’ve recently finished Capital reminded me of this nice little analogy he makes between two minor paradoxes: companies can move faster given insurance hedges just like cars can move faster given brakes. The Blackthorn Hedge is one of my hedges, and I hope by the end of Arc 3 I’ll also be in a position to start sharing other, faster projects with more of you.

In the meantime, if you’re maybe wondering how any of this is still supposed to be on a track towards the Wet Route to the Stars: think of manners as a social analog of hydrodynamic streamlining, and compare the elegance of the best writers’ and leaders’ self-presentations to the elegance of an otter’s play or a whale’s huge glides. I’ll connect that poetic metaphor to properly mechanistic claims and from there to goals and principles for social and professional LLM integration – yet another way we’ll be pulled back around to Habermas, via the theme of intelligent systems vs. intuitive lifeworlds.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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Her books, lectures, and articles are touchstones for the interplay of reason and rationality, humanities and sciences. I find them admirably approachable, with minimal overhead in terms of systems or jargons. With graceful reasoning grounded in extensive concrete history, they pose clear tests of others’ openness to the history of ideas.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

Of the five ideological touchstones listed on my current “About” page for the Blackthorn Hedge, Pierre Bourdieu, Fernand Braudel, Lorraine Daston, Albert O. Hirschman, and Alasdair Macintyre, Daston likely has the lowest name recognition outside of academia.

My first exposure to her work was an old used copy of The Probabilistic Revolution that came to my attention by chance. It’s a two volume, 900-page compilation of 35 essays on the history of probability and the question of whether there was a true probabilistic revolution in the sciences or not. The first essay is by Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The first volume is co-edited and introduced by Daston and the second volume by her husband, the psychologist of heuristic, bounded rationality Gerd Gigerenzer. It’s a wide-ranging collection put together by an academic collaboration that called itself “the Bielefeld collective” after a university in Germany, Bielefeld, where the collaborators spent a year together 1982–1983; this is where Daston and Gigerenzer met.

Daston was early in her career when she visited Bielefeld, working at Harvard in her first professorial position after a postdoc with Columbia University’s Society of Fellows. The connections she made then would shape her life forever after, personally and professionally, through many moves back and forth between the US and Germany.

It was a warm, erudite group. This is the way she talked about one of her old colleagues from that time, historian of statistics and “founder of the sociology of quantification” Ted Porter, many years later at his retirement:

The first time I heard Ted’s voice was in mind’s ear, but I immediately registered its distinctive timbre, pitch, and tone. I had been asked to serve as an external reader of Ted’s Princeton dissertation on the history of nineteenth-century statistics, a sign of how sparsely that field was populated back in the early 1980s. I had finished my own dissertation on probability and statistics in the Enlightenment only a few years before and was hardly an authority in the field. The dissertation, which would become The Rise of Statistical Thinking (1986), richly repaid the reading. Quite aside from the impressive research across numerous disciplines and intellectual traditions and the originality of the analyses, the dissertation was written with élan and esprit. I often found myself rereading certain sentences, simply for the pleasure of the cadences and the delicate irony. There was something distinctly Victorian about the diction—the symmetry of the syntax, the self-assurance of the judgments, but also the sharp eye for the droll and the odd: imagine a history of statistics written by Trollope. It was unique among all the dissertations I have read before and since in lending itself to being read aloud.

So I was delighted to learn that Ted would be joining the research group Lorenz Krüger, Ian Hacking, and Nancy Cartwright had organized on ‘The Probabilistic Revolution’ at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung [Center for Interdisciplinary Research] in Bielefeld during the academic year 1982-83. The project kicked off with a conference at which we all presented our projects, and I can still recall how Ted’s voice—this time in person—reverberated in the ZiF lecture room. It was a voice made for the lectern, the pulpit, or the stage: deep and resonant enough to reach the last row without a microphone. Many years afterwards in 2014, when Ted spent a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin [Berlin Institute for Advanced Study], Ted and I gave a brief reading of science-related texts (as I recall, excerpts from Mark Twain, William James, Thomas Carlyle, and Mary Shelley) at the English Theater of Berlin, and when I ran into the theater’s director a few years later, he was still enthusing about Ted’s excellent stage projection. (Ted’s Numbers, 2023: “The Voice of Ted,” Daston).

I’ll confirm that Porter’s books are a true pleasure to read; this isn’t just one friend overselling another. However, I share this quote to make an impression of Daston, rather than Porter: in her praise of him, I think she shows herself. There is respect for rhetoric and style and person, there is a deeply integrated background of literary classics, and there is concise, concrete detail about years and dates and what specifically was done, read, and written. She brought these virtues to her friendships and communities as well as to her history.

The Probabilistic Revolution is not a starting place I can recommend to many others for getting to know Daston’s work. Her essay in volume 1, “The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance 1650–1830” is as specialized as it sounds, and it’s fairly redundant with Chapter 3 of the more-developed Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), which also provides a nicer lead-up to the material for a (somewhat) broader audience. However, that is still not a book I could recommend widely! It’s limited to those who have prior familiarity with probability and to those who can look without despair into the abyss of the 300-year-old origins of today’s arguments between undergrads as they try to get a handle on the differences between frequentist statistics and Bayesian statistics.

I won’t get into that further here. If you’re already interested in the history of “subjective probability” and “objective probability,” then it’s probably a must-read. If you’re interested in the first emergence of probability, then while it has some intelligent ideas and suggestions in Chapter 2, those were followed up well in Franklin’s The Science of Conjecture and that’s now become a better starting place. (Daston has recommended Franklin in this way – that’s no knock on her work.) However, though I won’t recommend the text over-widely, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment was recently republished in a new edition with a new preface that I think is worth quoting to give a sense of Daston’s general pattern:

This is a book about how reason and rationality can sometimes diverge. When the book was first published in 1988, I could not have formulated this short summary because I lacked the conceptual distinction between these two terms, which were then (and still are) used almost universally as synonyms in English.1 Yet this is a book about the power of just such conceptual distinctions: between objective and subjective probabilities; between mathematics and mathematical models; between normative and descriptive uses of the calculus of probabilities. Even more, it is about how historical circumstances can obscure or reveal such distinctions, and why the efforts of the best and brightest of one epoch can appear absurd or downright benighted to their successors only a few generations later. (Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, 2023 edition, p. ix)

It might seem odd that “when the book was first published in 1988, I could not have formulated this short summary,” but it’s her honest reflexive attention to the history of her own ideas, and it’s worth reflection from a reader. The historical circumstances at issue in the book are hardly abstract: they are insurance markets, state lotteries, and legal courts. Changes to these circumstances over generations changed the naturality of different conceptual distinctions over generations, leading to mutual misunderstandings that continue to confuse each new generation to this day.

Though I don’t recommend it generally, I do recommend the book to people interested in technical history of practical ideas, and I know we’re not rare on Substack: this is an audience well-served by and , for instance. It’s one of the first interests that brought me here. However, it hasn’t been the same niche I’ve been writing for primarily. For my own audience I’d most often recommend a different starting point: Daston’s 2002 Tanner Lectures, which would not be too out of place as Substack long reads.

These were two lectures: “The Morality of Natural Orders” and “Nature’s Customs versus Nature’s Laws.” They’re built around classic “great books” allusions: the first is subtitled “The Power of Medea” and examines how the legends of the child-killing, spurned and vengeful sorceress Medea changed over time from Euripides (5th C BCE) to Corneille (17th C CE) as prevailing ideas of the unnatural and immoral changed; the second is based on classic political geography literature from Herodotus to Montesquieu and changing ideas of law, custom, people, race, and blood. The first focuses on temporal variation and the second also adds in spatial variation. The themes are all close to my heart, both philosophically and politically, as someone who was once attracted to the moral naturalism and “Nature or Nature’s God”2 rhetoric of the mid-2010s neoreactionaries.

Daston states her purpose in these lectures explicitly, early in the first one:

My aim in these two lectures is not to rehabilitate Enlightenment appeals to the moral authority of nature, nor to review current projects, ranging from environmental to evolutionary ethics, that attempt to revive that authority in new guise. Instead, I wish to explore how nature could ever have been endowed with moral authority and why that authority still exerts such a powerful, if covert, pull upon our modern sensibilities, despite innumerable critiques and cautions against conflating “is” and “ought,” against “naturalizing” judgments that are really social and political, and against anthropomorphizing “Nature,” designated with a capital N and often with a feminine pronoun. Indeed, the very frequency with which philosophers, political theorists, and cultural critics of all stripes must admonish us about committing the naturalistic fallacy of smuggling moral prescriptions into natural descriptions is cause for raised-eyebrow remark. No amount of trenchant criticism of this or that instance of the naturalistic fallacy seems sufficient to root it out. To discover allegedly “natural” motives for a crime mitigates its severity (and often the severity of punishment); conversely, the reproach of the “unnatural” has not lost its sting, whether it is applied to a cruel mother or to cloning. Nor does the abundant evidence drawn from the annals of natural history concerning behaviors no one would want to emulate—consider the mating habits of the praying mantis or the massacre of drones by worker bees—apparently diminish the charm of other cases trotted out to legitimate some other human practice by analogy with, for example, ducks or ants. Why, one wonders further, do so many cultures cast moral precepts for humans in the form of stories about animals, as in the case not only of Aesop’s fables and medieval bestiaries but also of hundreds of recent children’s books?

This resilience in the face of protracted criticism and a mountain of empirical counterexamples is prima facie evidence that we are in the grip of metaphysical demons. Certain categories of thought and sensibility—and the two are intimately and significantly intertwined—shape the way in which experience is parsed, evidence is weighed, and judgments are formed. As a mere historian, I am under no illusions as to my power to exorcise these demons. Unlike psychoanalysis, history does not claim that tracing the genesis of a neurosis or a pattern of thought and sensibility will ipso facto liberate one from either. At best, historical analysis can show the contingency of such subterranean patterns and drag them into the light of conscious scrutiny. It can neither refute nor replace them. The former is largely futile in the case of metaphysics, notoriously resistant to argument and evidence; the latter is properly the work of creative metaphysicians, who are even rarer than great poets or scientists, perhaps because they must combine the talents of both in making up a new world that holds together. What history can do is to excavate deeply held intuitions, in the sense of both revealing their origins and uncovering them to view. This exercise might be described as a kind of history of the self-evident: the sources and multiplicity of our most deeply held assumptions and irrefragable intuitions, their coming into being and passing away. (Tanner Lectures vol. 24, p. 374–375)

These are not entirely easy reads, but on the other hand they do not require much prior familiarity with an intricate conceptual system and its jargon, as with my earlier example Pierre Bourdieu, nor prior familiarity with heavy and controversial moral tradition taken for unspoken background, as with earlier example Alasdair MacIntyre.

Once read, I find Daston’s insights in these lectures are widely applicable. These common differences in judgment about the fundamental moral status of natural patterns seem to be at the root of several crucial intractable contemporary debates, from whether and how capitalism is natural or good, to whether and how gender roles are natural or good, to whether and how pleasure itself is natural or good. If a friend reads these lectures well, my conversations with them can become more interesting and less frustrating.

If, on the other hand, the conversations do not change, I can often tell what they have missed – and whether or not it was missed in good faith or in bad faith. This makes the work an ideal touchstone: a reference to test the substances brought into contact with it.

With Bourdieu, his systematicity is daunting and provides many good faith reasons to miss his points. With MacIntyre, his gravity is daunting and provides many good faith reasons not to put in the often-extensive background work needed to digest his heavy claims. Daston writes more simply and more approachably than Bourdieu or MacIntyre. This can make her less useful as a touchstone for understanding professional scholars, but more useful as a touchstone for understanding common readers. She excites less controversy, but not less thought.

If you do read these two Tanner Lectures and enjoy them, I’ll also recommend following up with the pamphlet-short book Against Nature (2019), not coincidentally given the same name as the Huysmans French Decadent fin de siècle classic À Rebours (1884) that inspired Houllebecq’s controversial contemporary Submission (2015). Despite its title, it is a defense of drawing moral inspiration from nature, with this characteristic key passage in the next to last chapter:

Perhaps other sorts of intelligences, with different bodies and senses, or no bodies at all, would not need to figure anything. For Martians and angels, order might just be, requiring no representation. But for our species, with our sensorium, orders must be grasped and imagined, both literally and figuratively. Nature is abundantly available, opulently diverse, and orderly in every possible sense of the word. It is therefore not so surprising that nature should be queried for the figures of order, any and all orders. The human impulse to make nature meaningful is rooted in a double insight about order: normativity demands order; and nature supplies exemplars of all conceivable orders. (Against Nature, p. 59–60)

This is sharply qualified in the next paragraph, however, which I’ll copy with elisions here:

But natural order alone cannot dictate which specific norms to follow, if only because there are so many orders in nature… The strategy of naturalization to combat relativism is doomed… Opponents can always retort “Which nature?” and counter with examples of another order, equally natural, to support the opposite position. (Against Nature, p. 60)

Whether this argument is plausible depends on some questionable premises, for instance about whether imagination is natural or is productive of novel order (very relevant to any German Idealists in the audience) or whether evident evolutionary fitness differences can determine a hierarchy of moral goodness among natural orders (relevant to the New Atheists and neo-Spencerians), but these premises aren’t lodged in some forbidding technical system or alien ancient tradition. It’s broadly engaging, and this makes it a good touchstone for common readers.

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment on one hand and the Tanner Lectures or Against Nature on the other represent two poles of Daston’s work: the more technical and scientifically-focused as against the broader and more literary. For those seeking something in the middle, instead (or after), I recommend Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022).

Rules is a full book, but not a long one and not a difficult one. It is exactly what the subtitle promises in under 280 pages, no math required, and I expect it will be perennially relevant since there are no human cultures without many, many rules. Whether they are tribal taboos or national etiquettes, scientific laws or legal codes, written or unwritten, of all the things that neofascist or neocommunist politics or LLM technology might disrupt, the ubiquity of rules isn’t likely one of them (short of human extinction).

As interesting and useful as Rules can be for a reader directly, I also find it interesting and useful to observe others reading it. Above all, it helps me gauge how readers think about freedom and authority. Do they assume authority is rigid, or do they allow for flexible authority? Do they think freedom is a matter of choosing their own immediate actions freely or choosing their own codes and principles freely? How do they think of heroes, saints, and other moral models as authorities or as liberators?

There is often a lot of unthought, unselfconscious political ideology at work in how people think about rules, and Daston’s book is a short, effective way to bring it out without forcefully challenging it. It demonstrates historical facts of variations in these implicit ideologies generously, presenting the different variants in their best lights. It sets up a relatively comfortable growing experience for a reader who could otherwise find discomfort in new self-consciousness of the contingency of their assumptions about how and why others do and don’t follow the rules that are most important to them.

It is not a book that attacks the reader or reader’s background in an adversarial way, trying to self-righteously undercut their defaults or shock away some assumed and hated “complacency” on their part. It does not pummel like MacIntyre, dissect like Bourdieu, or tease like Hirschman. It simply does not compromise on stating the historical facts of the matter.

And then there is one more work I should mention before I conclude, given my neighborhood of Substack’s current interest in romance and wonder: Daston wrote a history of wonder leading up to the age of the romantics! Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750 (1998), written with Katharine Park.

It’s a bright and fun book, rich with pictorial examples of old exhibits of the odd, bizarre, and extreme, yet it was nonetheless serious and substantive enough to win a History of Science Society Pfizer Award (which is as impressive as the Booker, the Pulitzer, or the Nobel for me; I dream of reading all of the winners by the time my daughter turns 14, but we’ll see).3

To be clear, I don’t use this one as a touchstone well, if at all: I just like it. I’d like to share two excerpts from the beginning. First, on what “wonder” means to Daston and Park:

As theorized by medieval and early modern intellectuals, wonder was a cognitive passion, as much about knowing as feeling. To register wonder was to register a breached boundary, a classification subverted. The making and breaking of categories – sacred and profane; natural and artificial; animal, vegetable, and mineral; sublunar and celestial – is the Ur-act of cognition, underpinning all pursuit of regularities and discovery of causes. The passion of wonder had a mixed reception among late medieval and Renaissance natural inquirers, scorned by some as a token of ignorance and praised by others, following Aristotle, as “the beginning of philosophy.” All, however, agreed wonder was not simply a private emotional experience but rather, depending on context, a prelude to divine contemplation, a shaming admission of ignorance, a cowardly flight into fear of the unknown, or a plunge into energetic investigation. (Wonders and the Order of Nature, p. 14)

These cognitive passions interest me immensely. They’re central to problems of sociological mana, the virulences of mind viruses, stimulus-response dispositions, the senses in which symbols have force, and the fair limits of free speech. I’ve already had a lot to say about them in my letters, and I will have more to come. One more excerpt, on why “1150–1750” was the natural timespan for the study:

Our study is in some ways unusually broad – contextually, chronologically, and geographically – but we have set limits as to who and when. Our book focuses on wonder and wonders as an elite tradition, engaging the attention of princes, clerical administrators, preachers, teachers, court artists and storytellers, naturalists, and theologians. We have begun with the mid-twelfth century for two related reasons. First, the dramatic increase in the number of ancient sources available provided the base for a rich ramification and elaboration of the ancient tradition of writing on wonders. Second, the coeval rise of cities and of royal and imperial bureaucracies, the creation of courts as centers of literary, artistic, and philosophical culture, the emergence of schools and, later, universities as centers of formal learning – all combined to create literate, wealthy, and powerful audiences for wonder and wonders. At the other terminus, we have taken our study well into the eighteenth century in order to trace and analyze the process by which wonder and wonders faded from prominence in elite circles as favored objects of contemplation and appreciation. How marvels fell from grace in European high culture has less to do with some triumph of rationality – whether celebrated as enlightenment or decried as disenchantment – than with a profound mutation in the self-definition of intellectuals. For them wonder and wonders became simply vulgar, the very antithesis of what it meant to be an homme de lumières, or for that matter a member of any elite.

This marks the end of the long history of wonder and wonders as cherished elements of European elite culture, and therefore also the one sharp rupture in our narrative… When marvels themselves became vulgar, an epoch had closed. (Wonders and the Order of Nature, p. 18–19)

Those of you who have been reading the Hedge for a while will likely recognize the theme of the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” as well as the echo of my frequent chat and comment recommendations of Hunter’s The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (2020). I don’t have more to say about this at the moment, but I am sure I will in letters ahead.

In this case, perhaps you can have your turn using Daston as a touchstone for me – given how this is interesting and exciting to me, given these selections I’ve chosen and the little I said about why, what did you learn?

If you’d like more on wonder but aren’t sure about a full book, consider this London Review of Books piece: “How to Make a Greek God Smile.”

This has been the fourth in a series of five planned letters on my ideological touchstones for the Hedge, beginning with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and economist Albert O. Hirschman. It’s the first on a dedicated historian and the first of these where I did not emphasize political factional standing in my discussion. The last of the five, on Fernand Braudel, will be similar. He was an economic and political historian rather than a historian of science, and a different kind of leader in his field, but I’ll take a similar approach.

Daston does engage in some politics, of course, and I am interested in it. One of her projects has been a historical characterization of Cold War rationality, for instance, which is impossible for me to ignore, given my interests. One of her most recent books, one that I have not read, is on the international governance of science: Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (2023). Nonetheless, it’s not as natural to engage, to pin, or to judge her politics as it was for class-critical Bourdieu, traditionalist MacIntyre, or antifascist liberal Hirschman.

She is a historian, above all. She will make broad judgments and suggest unifying principles, sometimes boldly, but they are always in service of the project of organizing historical evidence. Instead of seeing how people react to her as a known (or at least allegedly known) quantity in known conflicts, I enjoy seeing people engage the history first – all this tricky history of the ideas of reason and rationality, of natural and unnatural order, of cognitive passion, and of what it means to follow a rule.

Thank you for reading The Blackthorn Hedge. As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement with these letters. I’m currently especially interested in experimenting more with direct messages – if you’d like to say hello, please do!

My first letter here was a riff on one of Nietzsche’s themes: gratitude for one’s complementary social opposites. Nietzsche enjoyed fire-and-brimstone Christian writing not just despite his opposition to Christian morals but because of it. In the days since the first letter, I’ve continued to refer to Nietzsche often. I also enjoy seeing what others write about him.

However, I don’t think of him as a personal touchstone. He’s too weird. Somewhere he refers to his books as “caves that people cast their own thoughts into, to hear the echoes come back strangely distorted.” He’s cryptic. He writes often about masks and deceit and openly endorses using both. He writes that he intentionally conceals his sources, and especially those he most admires.

When you read Nietzsche, you hear yourself. Nietzsche was a Ralph Waldo Emerson reader, though he doesn’t make that explicit where it’s implicitly most important. Emerson wrote that “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty,”1 and Nietzsche, as was his habit, seems to have reversed this descriptive insight into a prescriptive formula for genius itself: he wrote so as to return a reader’s thoughts with alienated majesty. However, he did it with devious twists.

Majesty is powerfully intoxicating, and Nietzsche distrusted it. “Often it is mud that sits on the throne – and often the throne also sits on mud.”2 He wrote viciously against democracy, but he was also direct that his purpose was not reactionary: “not to go back, but to go away—” and “taking a step back from the abyss… just like anyone who wants to take a leap.” He would sometimes be astonishingly grandiose; he literally titled three chapters of Ecce Homo, a book about himself, “Why I am so wise,” “Why I am so clever,” and “Why I write such good books.” Yet he’s also constantly making fun of himself, and a fair amount of those “whys” are deflationary observations about eating carefully, being racially impure, and getting lucky enough to be in the right places at the right times… just to stand, unpopularly, against those lucky places and times.

None of this is to say that Nietzsche has no valid arguments, no coherent worldview, or no sharp, apt observations to share – it is just to say that there is always more to the story, another angle and another trick to the argument or perspective or observation.

He called himself a philosopher of Dionysus and often wrote about the Classical myths, but given what he has said about concealing his key sources and some of the peculiarities of his avoidance of Germanic mythology after his time in Richard Wagner’s circle, I have long suspected that “Dionysus” was a mask for another, darker figure known exactly for the sort of bed-bound, gruesome suffering that plagued Nietzsche in his most productive and earth-shaking years. His “Dionysus” is a mask for Loki – whether Nietzsche realized it or admitted it or neither – and that orphaned then adopted frost giant who both fathered and gave birth to monsters was always destined to bring about the twilight of the gods by suicidal combat against the all-seeing and all-bridging power in Asgard.

But enough of this mythic mode! I’ve said enough for anyone who knows how to take it seriously, and I’ve already written elsewhere about the challenges of digesting writing in traditional mythological modes. Let me write the rest of this for the broader audience. First, I’ll take one single well-known line and use it to exhibit a few of the tricks I have in mind.

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

It’s painted in eight foot letters on the walls of gyms and boomed with baritone gravity over inspiring music in TV and radio ads. It can be a revelatory truth for guys who feel oppressed by “feminization,” in more colorful contemporary terms “the Longhouse”: it gives permission to embrace pain for the sake of strength. Instead of fussing over suffering and fearing it, like overbearing mother stereotypes would have us do, suffering becomes an ally.

Given this change in ethos, a calculus of strengths quickly becomes more charismatic for these men than any utilitarian calculus of pain and pleasure. And Nietzsche will ask: isn’t the feeling of strength a higher pleasure than whatever those utilitarians had been calling pleasure? Weakness a lower suffering than pain? The utilitarians are not unaware of these issues, and Nietzsche’s two-generations-elder near-contemporary J. S. Mill, in particular, engaged these questions of the ordering of pleasures and pains seriously. Yet Nietzsche’s purpose isn’t to engage that English debate directly – instead, he is using it as a ploy to shift the conversation to the plane of ad hominem attack on the English as such! Among other uses.

This ad hominem attack has multiple prongs. First, where it appears in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” occurs in the “Maxims and Arrows” section prefaced with “From life’s school of war.” The full epigram is “From life’s school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger.”

One chain of implications that many readers follow when seeing this is that those who disagree are not from the school of war, and since the school of war is strong and good, those who disagree are bad. I think Nietzsche intends this reading, but not because he agrees with it; rather, he intends it as rhetorical manipulation: it turns coarse vitalist strength-worshippers against the dreary utilitarians (and others), directing one enemy against another in Byzantine fashion. Nietzsche is, in part, a philosopher of the morally effective soundbite, the clip that can go viral among people who will never watch the full movie.

However, there are subtler implications to draw from “from the school of war” as well. One of my favorites is to consider the selection effect: if you are winning wars, perhaps it is that you have not suffered defeat in any of the ways that would have left you weaker. Read this way, “what does not kill me makes me stronger” is an expression of the good-humored hubris of the healthy and well-adapted fighter who hasn’t yet experienced truly crippling losses. Or there is another selected case: you have experienced what others would call crippling losses, but then you turned them to your own advantage – exactly how Nietzsche describes his own strengths in “Why I am so wise.”

Both of those types of selection effect support prongs on his ad hominem attacks on the English utilitarians. The first sets up the question of what kind of person could actually believe in the English utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain naturally – and if you read Jeremy Bentham’s writing, there are some strong grounds for ad hominem attacks on his moral intuition! Some were made by his own heir Mill in a work I’d highly recommend to anyone who wants to understand Nietzsche or my own project here, his essays on Bentham and Coleridge. The second sets up the question of what it means to be the kind of person who could creatively adapt a calculus of pleasure and pain to fit what others would hardly agree are pains and pleasures at all – and there, we’re back to Mill himself.

Another prong of the attack is only apparent to someone who has the presence of mind to maintain cold clarity in the midst of exhortations and charismatic posturing. This starts from the fact that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is a statement of a single, simple implication, not even a syllogism; it is a logical entailment of the form “if x then y,” and so it is logically equivalent to its contrapositive, “if not y then not x”: “what does not make me stronger kills me.”

Would one “from life’s school of war” say “what does not make me stronger kills me”? This seems unlikely. I would sooner preface that with “from life’s school of evasion” – perhaps “from life’s school of cowardice.” Yet there is, technically, a logical equivalence. And this is a much deeper prong of Nietzsche’s attack on the idea of moral calculus: he delights in these paradoxical examples demonstrating that even simple logic does not seem to apply to moral propositions. (This has now been followed up extensively in Anglophone analytic philosophy, particularly through Nietzsche’s influence on Wittgenstein.) Given that, how much less plausible is any more complex combinatory value calculus? Yet again, he turns this valid criticism of the logic to ad hominem attack on the thinkers themselves – he critiques their naivety, their clumsiness, their “trust in grammar that is really a trust in the faith of governesses.”3

Why all this ad hominem? Nietzsche denies that any philosopher should be judged by their dogmas, but rather by their persons: the work of philosophy is work of the spirit and soul; it’s Philosophy as a Way of Life to refer to Pierre Hadot’s excellent formulation and research program. “Belief” is beside the point; character is where the action is. Your character, in fact. You the reader.

Nietzsche is mocking Enlightenment pretenses of reader autonomy. Especially Kant. He’s chosen his words to act on your spirit and soul whether you understand it or not. If you pick up his book, you’re taking his ride. You’ll hear your own thoughts echoed back to you, but with layered distortions and alienated majesties that Nietzsche designed. Each book changes its readers for better and worse… like every other book and essay and quote does, too, whether it’s more or less honest about how and why it does what it does. Whether it’s more or less “benevolent.”

“Something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fate.”

So who is Nietzsche? Is his a character to admire? What should one make of Nietzsche on his own ad hominem terms?

The answer is that he’s only so-so. He was a recluse, often sick, and not very good with women – which is crucial on his own terms: he thought it was so important for philosophers to be good with women that he opened Beyond Good and Evil with exactly that topic. The opening lines are

Supposing that truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won (Beyond Good and Evil, Kaufmann translation, Preface)

In the autobiographical Ecce Homo, he makes a strong case that he made something good of the hand he was dealt, but he’s also explicit that he writes for philosophers of the future rather than presenting himself as already one of the philosophers of the future. In the solar metaphor of the prologue of his Zarathustra, I see his own writing as a way of “going under the horizon for the sake of the overman,” of allowing his sun to set so that the next day can dawn.

He has protagonist-preacher Zarathustra say in that book “this is my way, where is yours? ‘The’ way – that does not exist.” Whether to admire Nietzsche or follow his example, his “way,” depends on your other goals. He is rigorously consistent about this form of type-relativism according to which something good for one type of person may be bad for another type and vice versa. Others should only follow Nietzsche’s example if they can embrace the “going under” or “sunsetting” of their own type, as well, which is one of the terrible ironies of the dissident right’s first-Trump-presidency embrace of Bronze Age Pervert Nietzscheanism. It’s a dangerous and entirely inappropriate example to follow if you’re a genuine conservative or a reactionary – he never aimed at preservation or return.

What he aimed at, instead, was to be a good friend to new rising types as he sank. His work is full of loneliness and longing for the company of types that don’t exist yet, future types exemplified by Zarathustra, who is not simply Nietzsche himself and who he invented as a hopeful model for himself in the depths of despair.

This despair and resignation to going under are rooted in part in his realization that he would never be very good with women. By his standards, he’s quite explicit about this. Consider this,

Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely “preserve”—as physiologists know. But, at the bottom of us, really “deep down,” there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable “this is I”; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn but only finish learning—only discover how this is “settled in him.” At times we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong faith in us; some call them henceforth their “convictions.” Later—we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem we are—rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very “deep down.”

After this abundant civility that I have just evidenced in relation to myself I shall perhaps be permitted more readily to state a few truths about “woman as such”—assuming that it is now known from the outset how very much these are after all only—my truths. (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 231)

Paraphrasing, this says “every man has some great stupidity about women: I’m about to tell you mine.” And he hits that mark! The next several aphorisms are some of the most infamous in Nietzsche’s corpus for their clumsiness; stuff like

she does not want truth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty. (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 232)

What were those “dull, truth-obsessed governesses faithful to grammar” doing then? Implicitly, they are not “woman” to Nietzsche when he thinks about woman. Or try

Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook: the gruesome thoughtlessness to which the feeding of the family and of the master of the house is abandoned! Woman does not understand what food means—and wants to be cook. If woman were a thinking creature, she, as cook for millennia, would surely have to discover the greatest physiological facts, and she would have had to gain possession of the art of healing. (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 234)

Well, yes; one of those arts was traditional herbalism. It worked fairly well and grounded modern pharmaceutical science! That and a few other related healing arts had been discovered but then rather violently suppressed as witchcraft.

These are stupid claims, but Nietzsche’s point here isn’t to be smart, it’s to be an honest fool. Never mistake Nietzsche for “a debate bro who thinks he’s very cool and has everything figured out.” He’s definitely clever and he knows that and likes it, but he also makes fun of himself because he’s not all clever, not all quicksilver. He also has that “unteachable stupidity” and it disqualifies him from being his own ideal of a philosopher. His philosophy is partly stupid, and he knows it.

If you try to follow him and understand him, prepare to face very ugly, stupid, unteachable parts of yourself as well, and prepare for that to inspire your own despair as well – as you realize you can’t achieve your own highest ideals, either. But hey! What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?

“All this, too – was still youth.”

Given the way Nietzsche layers implications of his sentences, even those as simple as “what does not kill me makes me stronger,” he’s not a philosopher to read once and quickly. He dislikes “galloping readers” who “read only a few words on each page,” and he describes laying traps for them. “Leading them up onto high mountain passes, and then giving them a shove into the abyss.”

A passage I highly recommend contemplating at length, for any new reader who intends to read these books despite their open hostility, is Beyond Good and Evil aphorism 31:

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk even what is artificial—as the real artists of life do.

The wrathful and reverent attitudes characteristic of youth do not seem to permit themselves any rest until they have forged men and things in such a way that these attitudes may be vented on them—after all, youth in itself has something of forgery and deception. Later, when the young soul, tortured by all kinds of disappointments, finally turns suspiciously against itself, still hot and wild, even in its suspicions and pangs of conscience—how wroth it is with itself now! how it tears itself to pieces, impatiently! how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, just as if it had been a deliberate blindness! In this transition one punishes oneself with mistrust against one’s own feelings; one tortures one’s own enthusiasm with doubts; indeed, one experiences even good conscience as a danger, as if it were a way of wrapping oneself in veils and the exhaustion of subtler honesty—and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against “youth.”—Ten years later one comprehends that all this, too—was still youth. (Beyond Good and Evil, Kaufmann translation, aphorism 31)

Nietzsche’s work is itself arranged to cruelly fool and abuse those who “venerate and despise without that art of nuance.” So he is a philosopher to read carefully and to reread more than once – but not immediately. Only after having new experiences to bring to the new readings, after making time to work through the sometimes slow, always necessary developmental arcs each new level in the “art of nuance” requires.

And so in this final section of these warnings, I’ll write about some of what I’ve found about those high mountain passes, having been pushed off and then climbed back up again more than once.

First off, don’t underestimate the directness of the mountain pass metaphor. He wrote his books from thoughts conceived on walks through breathtakingly beautiful valleys and slope trails. Actually go climb some mountains and swim some cold high valley streams if you want to understand Nietzsche’s symbolism. Spend a night in a high cave and wake up at dawn to greet the sun. Ideally, go do it from the trails behind his house in Switzerland, in Sils Maria! I’ve been a few times, now, since I used to do scientific work just a short train ride away. The Appalachians were my first proper mountains and the Rockies next, and both helped me understand his work, but if you can, go see the Alps. Watch the birds. The “Epigrams and Interludes” of Beyond Good and Evil are a field of alpine scree, and I’m not sure I can explain it: just try walking up or across one.

But second, don’t let Nietzsche’s taste in metaphors overwhelm your own. I’m not a mountain mystic. I grew up around swamps and bays, and wet lowlands remain my own most favored landscapes. I proposed to my wife on a picnic in a salt marsh and we were married and honeymooned on low bay islands. Call it inner Celticism or whatever you like; I simply have as much aesthetic passion for otters and osprey as Nietzsche had for chamois and eagles. However, at times I tried to ape Nietzsche’s love of high vantages: I overstretched myself to agree with him, and the strains then led me to despise him. I had tried to make his way into my own way unwisely, and so I came to hate his way when I should have simply respected it from further off.

So: touch grass, touch gravel, touch reeds, touch cacti if desert’s your thing. Do what you have to do to ground Nietzsche’s tradition of naturalistic symbolism in your own life on your own terms. If you don’t ground, you’ll be zapped and overwhelmed: same as walking through a storm on a high open field or a long beach.

Next, if you intend to get the “spirit” of the texts, then you must read and write poetry. You can’t read Nietzsche’s trickier rhetoric well without reading Goethe, Hölderlin, Wagner, and some Greek poetry, especially dithyrambs, first. Nietzsche was a student of rhetorical traditions that were deeply tied into poetry and his prose patterns will not always make sense without the poetic background.

The way that he layers implications in philosophical argument is sometimes patterned after the way poets layer interpretations of their verses. He uses frequent changes of rhythm and voice in his prose that are best understood through practice reading and writing poetry. Some of his philosophical arguments hinge on the feasibility or infeasibility of unusually precisely specified kinds of verbal and tonal expression of emotion4 that will simply sound like airy mysticism unless you get some practice with them yourself. But most saliently for the purposes of this letter, these poetic techniques are how he echoes his readers’ thoughts and creates intoxicating senses of alienated majesty for them. (Don’t neglect that Ralph Waldo Emerson was also a poet, or that Hölderlin and Nietzsche spent time insane.)

On the other hand, you can also get some relative safety by reading him more neutrally and analytically, as a moral naturalist alongside scientific texts, instead of going into his charged poetic, literary side. Again, Goethe is a key figure, but more for his interests rather than his specific claims: you’d read about plant evolution and morphology and about the psychology and neuroscience of color perception.

However, here there may be no need to read much of Nietzsche at all. You could trust Brian Leiter’s work on Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism, for instance. Or just study mainstream analytic philosophy! Go into the hard problems of empiricism that are now too often overshadowed by questions of statistical methodology – problems of symbol grounding, problems of judging the soundness of surrogative reasoning, and so on. Nietzsche was enormously influential on more normal scientists and philosophers working on these issues, for instance through Wittgenstein; certain problems about truth and representation he posed have been extremely productive in setting agendas for mainstream philosophy of science, no matter how unorthodox, rhetorical, and artistic his own presentations of the problems were.

But finally, if you are touching scree, reading and writing poetry, and determined to persist with Nietzsche’s passionate literary side despite the all-too-common failure modes, you’ll have to find your way to live a life in which you get actual exposure to real-world cases of the political and psychological problems that Nietzsche introduces. That or simply miss the point for a lack of experience… and missing the point can go very wrong, on these crucial issues. Not a few readers have missed his points and then begun advocating nihilism, fascism, and terrorism.

Here, there’s a common misconception that Nietzsche is an abstract and negative thinker because he doesn’t solve many of the concrete problems he poses. Many readers of Nietzsche do become abstract and negative in this way. However, in fact he’s posing concrete problems he couldn’t solve not for the sake of abstraction but rather to inspire others to become better concrete problem solvers than he himself could be. (He checked, and he proved incapable of his ideal.) His problems are often phrased in terms of particular historical figures’ psychologies: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Heinrich Heine, and Goethe, for instance, or above all, Wagner. Often they’re even more specific: problems of particular decisive developmental events in these particular psychologies. Sometimes he names them directly, but more often he alludes to them indirectly.

If you do intend to read Nietzsche as he most hoped to be read – as the sort of friend who would surpass him, and in surpassing him honor his “going under” or “sunsetting” – then to stay on track you will need to find your own access to concrete, individual people that you yourself care about as much as Nietzsche cared about Wagner. Wagner was not just a stranger; that was not just a parasocial relationship; Nietzsche may have fallen in love with Wagner’s wife over the course of repeated visits to their home! Similarly, the others that Nietzsche most respected as psychologists were also deeply attentive to particular other creative people in their lives. Dostoevsky really knew his Russian radicals; Emerson really knew his American individuals; Goethe’s literary models were also real, potent, interesting friends.

Making close friends as living and creative as those figures’ may be daunting – it’s very hard to find a match to Thoreau or Alexander von Humboldt – but that is the challenge that Nietzsche is posing. Your lack of those friends will be a loneliness that correct readings of his work will constantly reinforce and intensify unless you find a way to make them in real life – and if you don’t keep your eye on that concrete problem, his influence is all too likely to lead you to instead content yourself with some parasocial mass relationship to a pretentious higher leader figure, characteristic of fascist or terrorist radicalism.

All Said

This has been a lot of cautions, but I’m not hiding that I have a lot of fun with this reading. I enjoy it. I read or reread at least one book of Nietzsche’s every year.

If one really wanted to avoid all danger, it would be better not to have been born. I’m glad to be alive and I’ve always chosen more danger than is strictly necessary; most of us do, one way or another. Growing up, I was a surfer, though not especially talented. I still loved red flag days. To my type, they said “Warning: the waves are good today!” and I’m sure that’s how this letter about Nietzsche would have read to me as a teenager: “Warning: this author isn’t boring!”

I strongly disagree with many of Nietzsche’s claims, as you’ve seen above regarding women and “Dionysus”, but I still think of him as a kind of friend. A sort of “neighbor in eternity” as I said in my letter on Alasdair MacIntyre. I think the reading hasn’t killed me and has made me stronger, though there have definitely been rough patches. I was sometimes very annoying about enjoying it in my teens and early twenties, and I was sometimes very annoying about despairing of it as well. Despite the rough patches, I don’t think I would have been better off ignoring it or skipping it. Yet I also don’t consider myself “done with it,” because each time I reread I find new angles I missed. Instead, I’m still wrestling with it, much like I wrestle with religious faith and with other important relationships in my life.

Nietzsche will no doubt continue to appear as a reference here at the Hedge. He’s been too much of an inspiration to me, both for what to do and what not to do, to leave him out of what I write. At the same time, I’ll try to make sure I never rely too heavily on any technical understanding of his work, because I don’t want to recommend that reading widely any more than I want to recommend swimming on red flag days widely. I hope a minority of my readers shares the hobby responsibly and that the rest of my readers can appreciate it as an admittedly dangerous but manageable activity that they don’t have to participate in – just like my parents once felt about the surfing.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

1. “Woke” is a word that is often and often intentionally used lazily.

“Woke” is a word that inspires strong responses just by itself, some of them loud and obvious but many of them more subtle. We could say that “a lot of ink has been spilled” over exactly what it means, what it should mean, how it should be used, and so on, but that cliché is getting out of date. A lot of bits have been flipped, a lot of gigahertz waves have been emanated, a lot of larynges and cochleae have vibrated, and a lot of neurons have spiked.

I want to open my letter with this sharp refusal of a common, inoffensive, yet lazy expression because the endless and too-often-embarrassing arguments about “woke” depend on a lot of half-thinking clichés to persist and recur. Normally a cliché like “a lot of ink has been spilled” seems harmless. It may irritate literary aesthetes with high standards, and they’re well-represented on Substack; more harm is done by lulling complacent readers into sleepwalking through a false dreamworld where they still live in a print-dominated media regime.

Clichés have a hypnotic abstract obviousness that inhibits attention to concrete reality. They seem “given,” but they aren’t, in exactly the sense that Sellars critiqued sharply in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind via “the myth of the given” and exactly the sense that Nietzsche meant when he called dogmatic truths “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins” (from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense).

The concrete realities are present, however, and the metaphors can be refreshed with new sensuous power; the “coins” can be re-stamped and the “illusions” can be reinterpreted back into genuine phenomena. Though nothing is simply “given” in experience, there is plenty worth taking from it. We can “wake from our dogmatic slumbers,” as Kant once described his own path to taking a leading role in Enlightenment critical philosophy. We can use reason to resolve the confusion of common opinions to acquire knowledge: what Aristotle called nous, endoxa, and episteme. Not exactly a new problem.

“Woke” is itself, first and foremost, a family of living traditions of application of this perennial metaphor: the metaphor of waking up from a shared dream or nightmare as a figure for breaking complacent assumptions and mental habits. Yet these living traditions, though first and most important, are often eclipsed, overshadowed, and talked over by contrary uses of the word.

Like unchecked counterfeit coinage will drive out genuine coins from a market (Gresham’s Law), shallower uses of a metaphor as a cliché will drive out deeper social uses of the metaphor. It’s common sense to be in the habit of quick, shallow interpretation – if you overthink these things you’ll seem plodding and stupid. Clever people want to see lightning wit and facility with social form regardless of substance.

So though I’m doing plodding work here, don’t think I’m advocating going out and eagerly “correcting” everyone else’s use of “woke” or “rectifying names.” There’s rarely any status or honor to win there. This is a case, like academic professors’ tardinesses and contemporary men’s fashion, where ostentatious laziness is typically the high status move. The people using “woke” lazily are benefitting by it. There is only a thin pretense that there are norms against that sort of laziness, and so it’s easy to intransigently ignore appeals to those norms.

Don’t bother with the appeals unless you’re in a special case. Bad faith about “woke” is endemic. Contra Hanlon’s razor, “never attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity,” use Augustine’s glue: “malice and ignorance are always inseparable.”

2. “Woke” has stood for several African-American traditions of vigilance.

Genealogies of “wokeness” often stay narrowly Anglophone and American. They point to African-American dialect as a source of “woke” for “awake” and then to movements like the pro-Lincoln Wide Awake movement of 1860 for the prior American political application of “awake.”

That genealogy of “woke” holds up to simple questions. However, just above, I’ve said that Kant was using “waking from dogmatic slumber” as a description for late-1700s Enlightenment and I recall that Nietzsche, a continent away from the Wide Awakes, had opened his 1886 Beyond Good and Evil with a preface declaring “we, whose task is wakefulness itself.” What, classical liberal Kant and based vitalist Nietzsche both using this metaphor? A woke right and a woke Enlightenment? In German, the words “wach” for awake, “Wachsamkeit” for wakefulness, and “aufgewacht” for woke might be interesting to trace as precursors and correlates.1

The picture becomes clearer if we go to Latin roots, where “wakefulness” is “vigilance.” Keeping vigil is staying awake, staying woke. Maybe all the Harry Potter Millennials “went woke” because they took Mad-Eye Moody’s advice, “constant vigilance!”, too seriously?

The fact is that wakefulness, memory, truth, and life have been symbolically tied together for millennia just like sleep, forgetting, falsehood, and death. They are bound by long-appreciated, transcendent analogies that can sustain many hours of meditation; they are found at the heart of religions from primordial shamanism’s mystic vigils and rebirths to the LessWrong Zizian cult with its bizarre ideas about putting half the brain sleep so the other half could be free.

African Americans have had special memories to keep alive, memories of history that was suppressed in white society, and a special vigilance to practice, wariness against racial antagonism. It’s only natural they would create their own distinctive traditions of using the metaphor of wakefulness for these memories and vigilances. Given the distinctive practices, they deserved a distinctive name: staying woke. This use is attested already in a radio broadcast from 1938, used by the bluesman Lead Belly.

Traditions of special vigilance are not always welcome to their neighbors, and Black vigilance could be particularly provocative. Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X were certainly polarizing leaders, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warnings about white moderates also remain polarizing.

In the United States, marginal traditions of vigilance are typically discouraged using accusations of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking. Never mind that the Ku Klux Klan existed as a network of anti-Black conspiracies; never mind that the FBI conspired to surveil, discredit and humiliate Black leaders; never mind that at the same time the FBI and KKK were conspiring against one another as well! The American establishment discourages conspiracy theory as an irrational, ungrounded expression of paranoia. The “woke” traditions resisted this discouragement and kept memories of genuine threats alive. In resisting the external discouragement and maintaining internal transparency to “passing the word” about persecutions, they practiced distinctive solidarity.

The “woke” label has since spread widely and found many other uses. Some in the Black traditions of vigilance have seen this as a dangerous development. From the best book on the subject of “woke” that I’ve read, Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke,2 is this well-grounded expression of a wariness inconvenient for some of his academic neighbors:

This book takes part in a tradition of Black critique—running from W.E.B. Du Bois to the present—highlighting how liberals exploit social justice advocacy to make themselves feel good, but ultimately offer up little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry (and often exacerbate). Up to now, this corpus of social analysis has been largely disconnected from research on the sociology of elites, the rise of the knowledge economy, or science, knowledge, and technology studies. Moreover, its critiques of symbolic politics have generally been nonreflexive: white liberals are subject to intense scrutiny while nonwhites of any persuasion are largely excluded from analysis. For our purposes, this is a problem because an ever-growing share of contemporary symbolic capitalists identify as something other than cisgender heterosexual able-bodied neurotypical white men. And symbolic capitalists are constantly inventing new forms of marginalization and novel ways to lay claim to existing minoritized identities. (Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, p. 14)

“Symbolic capitalist” more or less means “managerial class” here, though I recommend reading the book for the exact description.

These traditions are deeper than the “woke” label, are richer than generic “wokeness,” and will persist whatever happens to those labels. They’ll persist as long as being Black in America motivates special vigilance.

3. “Woke” is a word used to make and mark group boundaries.

“Woke” can provoke a strong response for many reasons today, but one of the simplest is just its grammar: it’s immediately recognizable as African-American dialect. It sounds wrong in other American dialects: it sounds grating and false.

For some number of listeners and readers, it literally hurts to hear or read grating dialect. People’s senses of grammatical correctness are not just a matter of cerebral persnicketiness, but also embodied habit. Just like Italians talk with their hands, most people listen and read with facial tensions and neck tensions. Parsing too many “wrongly constructed” sentences leads to literal headaches; teachers and editors are not joking when they say that correcting bad writing gives them headaches. Same with people complaining about headaches when parsing good writing in unfamiliar dialect, like in Faulkner or Joyce.

These pains aren’t universal or inevitable, but they’re common enough, and they’re part of why distinct dialect speakers often stay socially separated from one another rather than integrating. Once they’ve begun separating, they sometimes lean into it. One way to lean into it is to intentionally amp up the incompatibilities between the dialects, trying to make one’s dialect maximally opaque and off-putting to outsiders, like old London thieves’ slang or like whatever the Zoomers and Alphas have moved onto since “6 7.” Another is to become more and more sensitive to the existing differences, becoming irritable and intolerant of even minor “errors,” as in some of the old Anglo aristocracy.

Until recently, “woke” was a word that would usually have been embarrassing to say as a white person. Occasionally Beats and Hippies would use it, as transgressive exceptions proving the rule. It was a symbol specially for African Americans and their closest allies until a specific group of activists, Black Lives Matter, chose to build a bigger movement and broadly expand the use of “woke” 2013–2014. As part of the larger Social Justice movement, BLM had a favorable cultural and economic environment and new patterns of solidarity to encourage non-Black allies to use their language, including “woke,” and to spurn prior pieties, such as standard grammar, as prejudices.

This was deliberately provocative, and it tied into many other active campaigns of cultural provocation that the Social Justice movement (pejoratively the Social Justice Warriors) was pursuing at the time. The striking changes in language now commonly referred to as the “Great Awokening” began in 2011, well before “woke” itself became a focal term.

The changes in speech patterns were extensive. There were many changed norms for referring to gender as well, not just the past tense, and there were changes in tone as well as diction and grammar. One detail that often surprised me was a sharp increase in vocal fry and snarky twang in professional settings, tied to the normalization of gay camp culture. Many of the changes were provocative and received pushback in various outrage cycles, but “woke” became the focal marker of the movement for a couple of ugly reasons.

First, BLM had not spoken for all Black Americans, and many were in fact quite angry at BLM’s “defund the police” activism. As we’ve already seen with al-Gharbi, not all of the members of the traditions of Black vigilance felt well-represented by the Social Justice movement, and so BLM’s use of “woke” was in some ways an overextension or usurpation of the charisma of those traditions. More of those figures than just al-Gharbi have spoken up against the Social Justice movement, and more importantly, more have worked quietly to deny the Social Justice movement the charisma of the older vigilance movements.

Crucially, given their long practice, some of these vigilance movements knew how to signal to the public and to some private allies that they considered the new “woke” a hollow appropriation of their traditions. They gave others sharp, needling rhetoric to puncture what they thought of as the pretenses of the Social Justice movement – clever little ways of tricking Social Justice people into appearing like they weren’t really listening or understanding when they tried to stand for Black Americans.

Once those secrets were out, the right had a field day baiting white Social Justice “allies” into acting embarrassing in the name of “wokeness.” The Social Justice movement could have in principle headed this off by recognizing the problem and better representing the Blacks who opposed their activism, but they didn’t. Instead, it became apparent to the public3 that they stood only for a particular activist minority, and not even the savviest and most vigilant minority. Instead, the right made it look like the queerest and most narcissistic minority. It’s ugly to say it so flatly, but this is the fact: they succeeded in popularizing a counter-narrative that Social Justice was “woke” and that that meant a bunch of conformist liberal white women and rich perverts fetishizing queer Blacks, without any substantive commitment to understanding poverty or the working class.4

Because of this dynamic, calling Social Justice “woke” as an attack became an important marker of group belonging on the right. Being “anti-woke” was important, and using “woke” to mean all of Social Justice rather than the specific Black vigilance traditions was also important. It seemed to force the Social Justice movement onto its weakest ground – its apparent failures to concretely improve living conditions for typical African Americans, apparent failures that appear responsible for a small but meaningful swing of their votes to Donald Trump.

In principle, it might be possible to contest the right’s use of “woke” this way as a lazy, false usage. In some Social Justice groups, making that contest is itself an important sign of belonging – this creates yet more meanings of “woke,” each one associated with a new defensive line.

However, I don’t make these contests, and that’s why I began with #1: “Woke” is a word that is often and often intentionally used lazily. In practice, I find these contests are hopeless because that sort of laziness is too normal. People need their slack. I choose not to belong to those Social Justice groups on those grounds. I do support certain Black vigilance traditions, but “woke” seems cooked to me. At least in public talk, it’s gotten too fouled up through conflicting usages. I’m not going to describe myself as “woke” or defend any generic “woke,” and I’ll accept the social sortings that implies.

All said

I’ve written all the above straight through without direct links to my prior letters, hoping it is interesting and clear without that background. Nonetheless, regular readers will have picked up on common themes and references. In this conclusion I’ll make several explicit, and I hope it shows how I’ve been “putting down roots” for the Hedge here, as I put it in “Motte and Bailey; Hedge and Field.”

I’ll be particularly explicit for the opening. Here is the first section, paragraph by paragraph.

• First, this stimulus-response thinking was the subject of “The Internet as a Hive Mind.”

• The ways technologically-specific ideologies permeate common expression was the subject of “Fracking the Collective Unconscious.”

• The problems of quasi-hypnotic entrainment into bad mental habits was “Common Sense Against Mind Viruses.”

• Refreshing worn out metaphors via concrete referents was a subject of both “Digesting Tradition” and “Grounding Tradition.”

• The “living traditions” that “woke” stands for first and foremost are phyletic traditions in the sense of “Differentiating Traditions.”

• The way some communities prioritize shallow, fast communication was in “Varieties of Solidarity.”

• The next to last paragraph was an application of “How to Assert.”

• Only the last paragraph of this section felt like it was an original idea for the Hedge, and it will probably be a future letter: “Hanlon’s Razor; Augustine’s Glue.”

I didn’t plan it out in this form, but in retrospect it’s a clean sequence. In the second section, I was drawing most on “Differentiating Traditions,” “From Swarm to Solidarity,” and “Five Kinds of Conspiracy Theory.” In the third section, “Etics, Emics, and Emetics,” “Substrates for Solidarity,” and “Overton Window; Overton Archipelago.”

I don’t intend all my readers to read every one of these and get every linkage! That would be a vain nightmare. I’m not writing my mundane prose answer to Ezra Pound’s Cantos here. Instead, what I’m aiming to do is make sure that the letters support one another sufficiently that it becomes easier and easier for me to write each next one and easier and easier for each of you to read each next one.

There is a lot of conceptual reclamation work to do in the craters of the last rounds of the culture war. There’s been a lot of struggle and a lot of vigilance that has left damage and exhaustion in its wake. What I’ve become focused on personally, now, is how to sleep well at night between work shifts – how to become comfortable among the many traditions, solidarities, and deliberative systems currently active in defining our global political situation – how to relax into them at least in between rounds of work to improve them and my relations to them.

This Hedge project is one way I’m establishing some new comfort for myself in public, and I hope it can provide you readers some comfort as well.

Please treat this as an opportunity to ask a question, make a comment, or just bring up any topic you’d like to discuss in the comments, particularly anything related to a prior letter or note that I’ve written, but not necessarily. Anything in philosophy, political or economic history, natural science, or mathematics might work.

I usually say “I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement” at the end of my letter preambles and I’ll say it again now, but a few extra words might help. First, if you’d like to assert a position, please keep in mind my Assertion Hierarchy, and second, if you’d like to disagree with someone else’s position in a reply, please mind Paul Graham’s Disagreement Hierarchy. Please stick to words and phrases that the broad audience of readers here can understand without outrage or provocation, i.e., please minimize emetic speech, and please don’t feed pests.

I’ll feel free to delete comments that seem disrespectful of others or of the space; I’ll explain my decision after deletion for each of the first twenty deletions and for each individual’s first deletion. I might or might not give warnings and I may also block freely, though I don’t expect it to be an issue this time.

All that policy said, I’ve been very happy with the comments I’ve been getting on the last several letters! I hope an open thread is timely and that we’ll see some good discussion. The Notes side of Substack may make it redundant, but let’s run the experiment.

End of experiment update:

The experiment’s run its course, with an interesting result: this generated few comments, but a good number of personal messages. It looks like Notes doesn’t just replace these sorts of posts for my readers, but it also actively discourages them, like Something Awful once discouraged basic blog commenting for a lot of people it harassed 20 years ago. The discovery and availability of comments to Notes is “too good,” and people do not want to engage it. I’m glad to have learned that.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

Writing about some of the things I find frustrating on Substack last week, in “Notes on Substack Pest Ecology,” I was wallowing in some mud, cooling off after overheating while wrangling my Notes feed back into shape after a couple weeks of neglect and algorithmic weather damage. Having gotten that out of my system and having finished the next article in my series on my ideological touchstones, I thought I would write about one of the parts that’s been particularly pleasant, instead – the broad speculative fiction writing here. It’s a good time for it, on Halloween.

I’ll highlight three top-of-mind examples up front.

First, , for both ghost stories and sci-fi reviews; here is her latest set of “weird capsule reviews” and here is my current favorite of her monthly ghost stories for this year.

Second, , for sci-fi stories and reviews; here is a funny, suggestive review of Philip K. Dick and here is a recent gross-out story of a space station janitor caught in a solar storm.

And finally, from , a highlight of an ongoing series of fun reviews of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.

Having shared those, I’ll also add something to the pool. To keep it in tune with my focus at this Hedge on gradual growth, grounding, tradition, and so on, I’ll set my reflections in terms of some stories about different (overlapping) phases of my life and how I was reading sf/f in each of them. For the sake of the holiday, I’ll frame those phases in terms of the Halloween costumes I wore – here goes.

Dinos & Dragons

In the earliest Halloweens I remember, I wanted to be a dinosaur or a dragon. I was lucky to have a mom who was game. I got to go out in a Mom-sewn, loose, full-body felt lizard costume, bright green felt for the most part with a yellow, black-lined belly and a darker green back ridge of small triangles. Or so I half-remember! I hated pictures and I would avoid them whenever possible, so I can’t check, and it’s possible my mother will text me a correction as soon as she reads this.

I’m not sure exactly why so many young boys wanted to play at being large reptiles. Maybe it’s just that it’s a role where biting and screeching are essential rather than penalized. Dream job for a toddler. In any case, there was a definite archetype at work here, and I see no way to explain it with an Oedipus complex – among many reasons I was destined to prefer Jung to Freud.

In this phase of childhood, I just wanted adventure with archetypal excitement and I got it from classics: Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Mysterious Island; H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and War of the Worlds; ’s Dinotopia.1 The Great Illustrated Classics versions of Wells and Verne were the perfect level of fantasy for an early elementary schooler, and Dinotopia was a perfect bridge from the Great Illustrated Classics to the unabridged originals.

In retrospect, these stories’ worlds don’t hang together very tightly. The stories are series of encounter scenes that cut sharply from one to the next. Each scene’s setting is compelling, but the way those settings could fit together in a persistent world is left to mystery. The mystery of time travel, in one of Wells’s particularly direct solutions to this problem.

This suited me as a child just fine! I also liked this about Boxcar Children and Hardy Boys mysteries. My own memory and self-control worked this way, too: every time I went into the forest it was a wildly new adventure. Since I didn’t understand seasons or weather yet, I just let the forest surprise me. Maybe today there would be a new fungus or spider, a dead mole, an anthill, a fallen tree, a giant puddle. I wouldn’t anticipate it, and I was just beginning to connect the different events together.

I was an appetitive little monster who acted on context rather than thinking about it. I can still feel an affinity for that sort of serial, dream-like cutting from one scene to another in genres like romance or weird fiction, where appetites are high or the coherence of the narrative world really is low, but not for more typical science fiction or fantasy. I have to imagine myself reading like someone else to enjoy these first loves, now, which is one of the things I enjoy about reading to kids.

Hobbits & Mice

First overlapping with that big reptile phase, then outlasting it, I went through a few years of wanting to be some variety of small hero: a hobbit, a swordsmouse, a boy pirate. These were easy, classic costumes; generally the hardest part was finding something sword-like enough to satisfy me without endangering my younger brothers. Hard plastic would become a tragedy and even stiff foam was a risk.

In this phase, I had shifted from wanting to do satisfying things like roar and smash to wanting to be a satisfying thing, something other people would want to be, too. Yes, technically other boys did want to be tyrannosaurs, but that wasn’t the same. I wanted to be a person now, rather than a living rampage.

The Hobbit was one of the classics here, naturally, and I was proud of myself when I first got to read it and The Lord of the Rings for myself rather than relying an adult to read them to me. I don’t recall being so proud about any of the adventure books. My parents might have been proud, and I was definitely self-satisfied after reading those, but there was a difference between pride and self-satisfaction. Pride was less “I am strong” or “I am doing cool things” and more “I am good” or “I am admirable.”

Between the adventure books and the classic fantasy, I read a lot of the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, a series of fantasy adventures by various talking animal warriors who know how to cook great food and would sing in many dialects. It was good preparation for later American dialect literature, like Twain and Faulkner. When I first tried painting and drawing, one of my favorite subjects was the badgers’ volcano fortress, Salamandastron. The volcano fortress never eclipsed Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine for cool base aesthetics in my mind, but in either case I was on my way to wanting to be a Bond villain someday.

I also read the Christian Narnia books and the Welsh-inspired Prydain Chronicles, but the series I remember having the greatest impact after Redwall and Lord of the Rings was the The Dark Is Rising series, especially Greenwitch with its eerie Celtic seaside symbolism, foreshadowing a later love of Yeats and of rocky coasts.

The fantasy in all of these was that there was a clear and timely role ready to be filled by someone brave enough and good enough to fill it. There would be clear calls and clear routes through a diversely populated world that would change in a lasting way through special effort. It would make Mom happy and Dad proud.

Aliens & Astronauts

As I grew older and grew self-conscious about being little or cute or goody-goody, I began dreaming of more “adult” adventure, and my childish idea of “adult” was “space tech.” Obviously that’s what adults really cared about and spent their time on! Wasn’t something like 20% of the economy going to NASA and another 20% to weapons scientists? I had a lot to learn about the realities of federal budgets.

In any case, I wanted to be a robot for Halloween – or to wear the big yellow mech suit from Alien. I wanted to be an alien from Alien, too, but that wasn’t in Mom’s craft repertoire. This phase lasted a while. I recall one self-deprecating high school Halloween spent in no costume at all, just introducing myself as an alien robot regardless. I had been called alien and robot plenty of times as an insult by then; that was before “autistic” became the common label.

The final one of these I remember was a late recurrence in early grad school, crossing over a bit to the later “system horror” phase: I coated wire in putty, painted black; I latched it around my body under my clothes to snake out of my normal work clothes’ sleeves and collar like tentacles, wrapping my hands and head (one tendril going up my nose); I played at being infested with some alien parasite. It was a biology department party, and I think I met a girl who worked with octopi and liked the look.

In this phase I was reading a lot of forgettable Star Wars novels but also gradually working my way up to more memorable experiences with Foundation, Dune, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain.

Foundation did not help me understand the actual world economy or science’s place in it very well – the politics, the trade models, and the energy strategy were all insane, not to mention the galaxy-scale mind control conspiracies – and I may have had to unlearn more from Asimov than any other writer. Still, Foundation got me interested to play Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, a sort of “Civilization in space,” and that was a much better education.

In some ways, this phase represented a synthesis of the two prior phases. Appetite and self-image were integrating. It was also an inversion. Instead of positive clues that led directly to mysteries or positive heroic calls that directly led to adventure, now negative frustrations and lacks began to drive searches for opportunities that would have been available to anyone who looked. The coherence of the fictional worlds began to matter more as I started wanting to be a more proactive agent with better foresight.

Once I got to it, Dune became my favorite by far. I tried walking without rhythm on the beaches near home, I studied the ecology of the seagrass and its effects on erosion, I gave myself pain endurance tests to be sure I was human, I read about nuclear war and trade war, and I became fairly obsessed with the paradoxes of free will and seeing the future. I quickly moved on to the later Dune books, which were not as positive in their influence – bringing me to the next phase.

Gender Horror

My next idea of “adult,” as an adolescent, was predictably sex-obsessed. It took a few years after puberty before I developed the confidence to try to express it. For some of those years, I have trouble remembering what was a Halloween costume and what was just some other party costume. There were some number of goth & industrial nights in there.

I remember two that were definitely Halloween costumes and were definitely meant to be truly frightening. One was an a violent stepfather who was himself on a short leash held by his wife: tatty blue plaid bathrobe, bad scotch in a cheap cup, leather belt doubled over in my hand to thwack with a glare, accomplice girl holding a rope looped around my neck; I got traded around between a few witches and dominatrixes who wanted shifts. A later one, one year I’d been lifting weights and gained enough mass to play a STEM library version of a himbo: I dressed up as a “domesticated man,” a knight in shining preppy with ironing board shield, Swiffer sword, lint roller and toilet brush like a pair of daggers at the waist. These did both genuinely scare me.

If I look for when this started, I can find one clear point where it developed from the hobbits and mice phase: I picked up a Forgotten Realms fantasy book by R. A. Salvatore, Exile, about a lone warrior dark elf living in vast caves underground. I was hooked by the descriptions of running through dangerous tunnels and by his inner battles with the mind control of telepathic, tentacle-faced “mind flayers.” I read the prequel, Homeland, and I was entirely sold. The story of escaping a society of matriarchal Machiavellian spider priestesses running brutal revenge plots somehow spoke to me. (I might not have enjoyed school or trusted my teachers (mind flayers) and girl classmates and their moms (spider priestesses) very much.)

The new phase also evolved out of the aliens and astronauts phase as the later Dune books went into lurid, bizarre sexual territory. The fifth Dune book, especially, gave Homeland a competitor with its matriarchal sexual mind control cult of “Honored Matres.”

In retrospect, it didn’t help that I was holding some buried trauma that made these nasty mind control plots feel much realer than they should have to a regular kid. Still, I wasn’t alone with that, and I found a group that shared the affinity for whatever reasons of their own.

In the middle of this phase, I was reading some well-known stuff like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Neverwhere,2 but I was also going off the then-respectable track. I wanted to know what girls really liked, and among these friends, that was romantasy and fanfiction. I recall the Black Jewels series most vividly in the romantasy category, and to this day I keep up with romantasy here and there; I’ve read the first of the Sarah J. Maas “A Court of” books and I’ll probably read Fourth Wing before long, too. But the fanfiction was really the heart of it in the mid-2000s, and I wasn’t afraid of the deep end. In the name of “what girls like” I read a longer Harry/Draco slashfic than Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, though at this point the only Harry/Draco titles I recall are from Cassandra Clare’s old Draco Trilogy. I wouldn’t have read it for myself, but I got fairly good at seeing what the girls liked in these things, and I even wrote a couple of my own het stories for them – on paper that has been shredded and disposed.

In this phase I now recognize that I was synthesizing the positive and the negative calls to action, the heroic calls and the strategic frustrations of the prior phases. I was learning how the frustrations of loneliness and the stimulus of a beautiful stranger worked together at once to motivate action in the imagination. Multiple layerings of attraction and repulsion and desire and restraint are generally what the romantasy genre portrays best, and it doesn’t have to be overly complex to be satisfying. It just needs to keep up the right tensions for a reader, release them, and rebuild them.

For myself, in this phase, I was also reading grittier high fantasy. A Game of Thrones was one of my favorites up until the plot fell apart in book three, retroactively revealing gaps in the set up that apparently still block George R. R. Martin from finishing the series. There was another series I loved best, though it’s been hard to share because of just how ugly it can get: The Prince of Nothing trilogy by R. S. Bakker. “Biblically accurate misogyny” is one part of the ugliness, ultra-rationalist misogynist eugenics turning women into incubators is another (yes, in a fantasy setting), utility monsters bred for abuse are another, and there’s more at that level of awful but I’d be worried about spoiling the plot. It’s a portrayal of sex and gender evolving in a terribly inhumane setting, corrupted and weaponized in multiple differently brutal ways. I read it as a stark warning of what relationships in a world without true spirituality and deep humanities would become – a warning to stay faithful to those things at all costs.

Tiptree’s sci-fi would also have been a highlight here, but I encountered those stories late.

System Horror

In this last phase, since which I’ve been a homebody most Halloweens, I was still looking for costumes I found genuinely scary though I’d grown out of gender anxiety as a prime source of horror. There had been glimmers of this phase earlier, as in high school when I carved one jack-o-lantern of a collapsing stock price chart and another of a hypodermic needle.

The one I remember best was for a costume contest party just a month after I landed in the Bay Area, having left academia. It’s a bit involved. I came in a fairly tame outer layer: I wore a lab coat and a snorkel and I called myself a “scientist out of water.” Hidden under the coat were neoreactionary props that I could pull out for the contest: “hah! I’m really a political nightmare, here’s my Pocket Annotated Moldbug!” That was phase two. I gave it a beat and then wailed that I knew I was just trying too hard to be interesting, but what I was really terrified of was just being normal. Phase three. One more beat. I roared, tore off my shirt, “what do I mean normal, this is the jungle and it’s never been anything else!,” revealed dark red and black whorls and symbols I’d painted all over my body, ranted and raved about appetite and Nietzsche and who knows what. Phase four. I stopped. “I’m sorry. Let me. Hold on.” I tried to reach in my mouth and turn out my cheeks. I got quiet. “I’m worried there’s no end to the layers.” That was a genuine fear. I felt fairly certain about that one.

I don’t remember if I won the contest or placed. There was another guy who had a full gas mask and survival kit and a prepared speech about AI-powered biological war with dramatic light effects. It was a fun party.

Glimmers of my reading for this phase also began in high school. When I was disgusted with Foundation and the later Dune books’ ever-less-believable forays through longer and longer timescales, I stumbled on H.P. Lovecraft and immediately read every story I could find free online, beginning with At the Mountains of Madness and returning to it several times. Here was a properly weird imagination for the depths of deep time! But in some ways that was more of a throwback to the dinos and dragons phase rather than an advance to the new phase just yet.

One of the highlights of the transition period proper was Stross’s Accelerando, which I found in undergrad; it’s a great aliens and astronauts book in one sense but also a true system horror book if you keep your eye on what happens to the people of Earth rather than the protagonists of the story. His Glasshouse also mixed in gender horror in a fairly satisfying way for me in the same setting, and his Laundry Files books connected back to Lovecraft nicely. Bakker’s later Aspect Emperor books, sequels to The Prince of Nothing, probably also belong in this mixed transitional category for me; the last book of The Prince of Nothing might already as well.

Two of the best books that were certainly in the new phase, after transition, were Peter Watts’s Blindsight and Echopraxia. Here it’s not clear if the aliens even think as they encounter humanity – they build and they act, but there is nothing like human agency and subjectivity to them. It’s as unsettling as Lovecraft but much better grounded in contemporary physics and neurobiology, in a world that coheres much more naturalistically than the dream-like Cthulhu mythos.

In this phase, I was looking for stories in which the universe itself is an active participant – not just the characters – where the universe is not just a reservoir of opportunity or a great system of balance or a tableau for presenting adventures. If the former phase was about synthesizing positive and negative motivations, this phase added in the “movements of the neutral medium,” motions that never clarify into positive or negative but just move without active judgment, classification, or value. A sort of synthesis of the ambivalent and the null.

This hasn’t been all the sci-fi and fantasy I read, or even all my favorites, but just the favorites that felt relevant to the costumes that I’ve worn. It’s been several years since I’ve dressed up for Halloween, and I’m probably not going to repeat any of these phases again. I’m still happy to read good books fitting any of the phases, so long as I have the right context and energy.

Given that I have a small child, I’m probably going to start dressing up for Halloween again, soon. It’ll take a different sort of spirit, and I’d appreciate any ideas for how to approach it! I like letting things marinate over several years, as you can see here; I will revisit and remember suggestions made now for next year and the years after.

What have been some of your own favorite sci-fi and fantasy sources for costume ideas? What were some of the best costumes you saw this year, and which do you think would suit a new dad?

(My wife has just suggested dressing up as microplastics! Please help us.)

As with Bourdieu and MacIntyre, “touchstone” here does not imply “unquestioned authority” or “did no wrong.” I consistently respect Hirschman but not without some wariness and some disagreement.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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In my writing here at The Blackthorn Hedge, I have not known exactly what I’m doing. I have some goals and a plan in a broad sense, but I expect to be surprised by what works and what doesn’t and to follow new opportunities as they arise in the course of the work. I’m happy that my articles on my ideological touchstones have been well-received so far, for instance, but I wasn’t counting on it! If they had been hated or ripped apart, I would have found another way forward.

I keep an open mind about what could happen next. I worry more to have a sharp qualitative sense of possibility than an exact quantitative sense of probability. I choose what to write with a general, fallible sense of how each letter could open up opportunities to discuss other topics next. I rarely want the letters to depend strictly on one another, since that would make it difficult for new readers to get started: I’ll need almost every letter to appeal to some new readers in the early stages of growth. Still, I want them to complement one another and to build up into a coherent archive so that the value of the collected work as a whole steadily compounds. Each letter should make the others more interesting.

This is not unlike anything I’ve said before in my prior letters, for instance the older “Motte and Bailey; Hedge and Field” on my guiding metaphors for the project or the recent “Criticality and Solidarity” on some of the abstract patterns of social growth that I look for. I’m repeating my usual statements.

However, given the context clue of “Albert O. Hirschman,” any reader already familiar with his work could also see immediately that I’m applying his conceptual work in development economics. I began with a statement of “possibilism” in the first paragraph, and by the end of the second paragraph I was talking about what Hirschman called “linkages.”

I have been thinking like this since well before reading Hirschman for the first time in 2016, near the end of my Ph.D. work. It was how I was raised, thinking about family business investments in the then-underdeveloped Florida panhandle. I don’t think my father or mother ever read Hirschman, but this pattern of local, optimistic economic thinking was present in everything we did.

If I wanted a book, say the Dinotopia I mentioned in my last letter, I needed to both earn it (so I got good grades and I won a small spelling bee) and make a case to Mom that it would help me grow (so I highlighted its likeness to the already-approved-as-educational National Geographic). If I wanted to play a game, say Age of Empires II or Civilization III, I needed to make the case I was learning about history and strategy. It wasn’t an idle requirement: if I didn’t show I had become more strategic or historically literate after playing, I could lose the privilege.

This sort of liberal, economizing ideology was the air I breathed. Its formative influence has been deep, and I haven’t repudiated it. I do criticize it, sometimes forcefully (and sometimes even disrespectfully in some readers’ opinions), but I haven’t been convinced to abandon it for any existing alternative. I’m happy to support searches for possible alternatives, but I’m not convinced any searches have yet been successful.

The first two ideological touchstones I discussed in this series, Pierre Bourdieu and Alasdair MacIntyre, were both sharp critics of liberalism. I appreciate good criticism of this kind and I led with those two touchstones because I wanted to be clear about that from the start: I listen to criticism of liberalism. Whether it’s from the French avant garde in Bourdieu’s case or from Catholic traditionalism in MacIntyre’s, I listen sincerely. I will go through thousands of pages of source material and spend years to pursue a debate if I find it well-motivated. This does “take a lot of evenings,” to adapt Oscar Wilde’s phrase, but they’re evenings well-spent.

I believed this was important to do first thing because I believe that liberal ideologies are currently experiencing a crisis of legitimacy brought on, in main part, by doing an inadequate job of deliberating through difficult critiques. There are many good, live arguments that supposedly fair past political deliberations were in fact rigged, using concealed or indirect violence, to make fair debate impossible. Reform of that rigging is necessary (barring collapse), and the reform requires better, more credible deliberation. The Blackthorn Hedge is one of my bids to participate in these deliberative processes (in whatever small or peripheral way) and to help bring them up to a more legitimate level of quality.

Hirschman, by contrast to Bourdieu and MacIntyre, was an established liberal insider and a champion of liberal ideologies. He has many marks that could disqualify him, from a radical’s perspective: he worked for American intelligence as a translator and an economic analyst; he was a Rockefeller Foundation network favorite; he was good friends with Rothschilds; his closest professional colleagues were arguably nuclear war strategist Thomas Schelling and CIA-funded anthropologist Clifford Geertz. The dissident right would say he “glows” pretty bright.

However, he wrote many clear essays about his views and he was the subject of an extensive biography that makes ad hominem attacks on him unusually difficult and revealing. Insofar as they’re revealing, they make Hirschman an effective touchstone: people reveal important values and patterns of judgment when their conversations touch on him.

If you want to dismiss Hirschman ad hominem as merely a typical capitalist, for instance, you can point to his education at the London School of Economics (LSE) during Friedrich Hayek’s tenure, his later participation in the Marshall Plan, or his peace and comfort at Yale and at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. However, there’s much more to his story – and I always learn from seeing how people balance the additional complicating evidence, when they do try to judge him ad hominem.

First, there is the fact that his biographer, Jeremy Adelman, states that his first enthusiasm for economics began after watching a Communist speak at a socialist club that he participated in as a young man!1 It’s also true that the biographer says Hirschman said he “really discover[ed] what economics actually is” later in England, at Hayek’s LSE,2 but there are years in between in which Hirschman maintained an avid interest in economics on the basis of an initially socialist, Marxist inspiration. And there’s the fact that at the LSE, he remembered one of his most impactful experiences was conversation with Piero Sraffa, an unorthodox economist who is best known among analytic philosophers for providing key inspiration for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations but who also literally supplied the pens and paper for Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks3 and later secured the notebooks from Italy for publication.

Hirschman didn’t ignore Marx, at the very least, and in my reading I never see him stoop to the usual anticommunist smears of Marx either. He doesn’t make lame attempts to dismiss Marx as merely a charlatan pseudo-prophet or conspiracy theorist. In one essay, “A Generalized Linkage Approach to Development, with Special Reference to Staples,” one that has been very important to me personally because of how it discusses staple crops and the theories of Harold Innis, Hirschman goes so far as to suggest that he be called a “micro-Marxist”:

There is obviously something here [in Hirschman’s own ideas] that has a considerable affinity with Marxism and historical materialism, but the difference is also striking. Marxist thought has traditionally focused on a very few constellations of productive forces—such as the feudal or capitalist modes of production—that are dominant over wide geographical areas and persist over long periods of time; social and political configurations are seen as deriving from these macromodes. The linkage approach [Hirschman’s approach] also takes the characteristic features of technology and production processes as points of understanding for social events, but it does so on a smaller scale, in much more minute detail, and for a more limited time frame. Hence, “micro-Marxism” might be a good term for this attempt to show how the shape of economic development, including its social and political components, can be traced to the specific economic activities a country takes up. (The Essential Hirschman (2013), p. 181)

My inner Marxist critic, lately a voice of Fredric Jameson, immediately begins to argue that the focus on a total system is essential to Marxism, so that this “micro-Marxism” is no Marxism at all, just another case showing how the Marxists and the neoliberals seem to have in common “virtually everything—save the essentials!”4 This may be true, but at least Hirschman doesn’t make it trivially easy to respond in this way. In his next paragraph in the essay, he goes on:

Marx and the more perceptive Marxists moved themselves in the micro direction when they were dealing with specific events and country experiences. Marx in particular oscillated between the grand generalization with which to characterize an entire epoch or process and the discriminating analysis of events which made differences between countries and subperiods stand out in richly textured detail. An example that is relevant for present purposes is in the preface of Capital, where at first we meet with the frequently cited phrase, “the industrially most developed country does nothing but hold up to those who follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future.” Here Marx seems to suggest that capitalist industrial development is bound to exhibit uniform features and stages in all countries no matter how late they will step on the “ladder.” But one only needs to read on in order to realize that Marx had a very acute sense of small and critical differences. For in his very next paragraph (which is apparently never read by those who quote the above sentence), Marx predicts a very different path for Germany and continental Europe in relation to England because of the absence of factory laws and in general because of a variety of social and political residues from feudalism that did not exist in England. (The Essential Hirschman (2013), p. 181–182)

This doesn’t address the importance of “totality” completely, and I think there are versions of that criticism of Hirschman that do land. However, it does address the least interesting criticisms on that basis, and that makes the discussion an interesting ideological assay.

As usual, if any detail of these long quotes or my comments on them is going over your head, please don’t worry – for this series on “touchstones,” I’m never trying to resolve the ideological arguments here myself, but rather just trying to give samples of the tone and character of the back and forth. The important points I want to showcase here are things like (1) Hirschman read Capital and drew his own conclusions from it (2) he defended Marx from the common smear that he was only a big-picture blowhard (3) he still smeared other Marxists as big-picture blowhards… who don’t even read the Marx that they cite. Whether or not that was all correct or fair to do, it’s what he did.

There are other places in the same essay collection where he has complimentary things to say about Lenin’s ability to judge and act in a particular moment, as well,5 and Louis Althusser’s analyses of that,6 and when skimming the essays over again for this letter I was struck by how well he seemed to anticipate arguments I had recently been reading in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

Given an academic liberal critic of anticapitalism who has done at least some of the reading, there’s another common shortcut to dismissing them in an uninteresting way: point out that they don’t act. Call them cowards, call them quietists, call them impractical. Argue they are complacently empowering evil.

Sometimes this is entirely apt, and fair. However, it doesn’t work well on Hirschman: he was a vigorously active antifascist for his entire life, as far as I can tell, in every role from militant fighter to underground courier to retired old sage. I’ll survey an early part of that now, drawing from Adelman’s biography, Worldly Philosopher (2013), and using parentheses for page references to keep the footnotes from getting out of hand.

Albert O. Hirschman was born Otto Albert Hirschmann in Berlin during Word War I in Germany. He grew up a German Jew in the Weimar Republic, where he would regularly debate Nazi peers in grade school.(WP p. 64) He snuck out of the house as a teenager to participate in marches and rallies against the Nazis before they rose to power. He had joined a socialist action group, the Workers Socialist Youth (Sozialistiche Arbeiterjugend, SAJ),(WP p. 66) and his sister later became a Communist.(WP p. 87) He began studying economics via inspiration from that group.(WP p. 66) He “fell under the spell” of Erich Schmidt, later co-founder of a “Leninist vanguard within the socialist party” known as Neu Beginnen.(WP pp. 67–69)

When Hitler took power and made it impossible for Hirschman to continue his education in Berlin, he and his sister moved to Paris.(WP p. 88) He was a refugee, but with good enough connections to continue his economics education – albeit at a business school.(WP p. 89) His sister had joined the Communists, but began to cut ties when they asked her to spy on their family friends.(WP pp. 101–102) Lonely and frustrated, she reached out to the Italian antifascist Eugenio Colorni who they had met in Berlin before Paris – he cancelled his prior engagement to be married and soon married her.(WP p. 108) Colorni brought Hirschman into the underground and got him started as a smuggler, particularly of papers and people.(WP p. 112)

“Over the course of the next three years [1935–1938], Hirschmann shuffled between four countries, enlisted to fight in a civil war, joined an underground resistance, and got a doctoral degree,” writes Adelman.(WP p. 119) The civil war was the Spanish: Hirschman was among the first to fight for the Republicans in 1936, most likely at the Battle of Monte Pelado, and he left the POUM just as George Orwell was joining.(WP pp. 132–134)

He left in order to work in economic intelligence in Trieste, doing “detective work” that “revealed patterns that the fascist authorities tried to hide,” especially patterns in rearmament, colonial economics, and hidden trade debts.(WP p. 142) Soon he also became a clandestine courier between Trieste and Paris.(WP p. 147) He was forced to leave Trieste when it was purged for a visit by Mussolini in 1938; Colorni was imprisoned.(WP pp. 151–152) However, his skill in economic intelligence work brought him to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation and a new mentor, Robert Marjolin.(WP p. 159)

As the French readied themselves for war with Germany, Hirschman supported the war effort by joining a military work gang maintaining a rail line to a munitions factory.(WP pp. 166–167) He was at this work as France fell abruptly to the Nazis, but he and his group convinced their commanding officer to give them new false passes to give them a shot at escape.(WP p. 169) He became Albert Hermant, “an interpreter by profession, a Frenchman born in Philadelphia,” and turned his efforts to helping others escape the Nazis with the American Varian Fry, working through the Emergency Rescue Committee organization.(WP pp. 170–171)

Together, Varian Fry and Albert Hermant [Hirschman] spent the summer, fall, and bitterly cold winter of 1940 laying the foundations for an escape operation for fascism’s enemies.. The list of saved reads like a who’s who: Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Siegfried Kracauer, Wilfredo Lam, Jacques Lipschitz, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (the serial wife of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and novelist Franz Werfel), Heinrich Mann, Walter Mehring… it goes on. In all, over 2,000 refugees got out of France through the Emergency Rescue Committee’s network.

After he finally took a boat out himself at the very end of 1940(WP p. 187) and had some time for scholarship in California, he joined the US Army promptly after Pearl Harbor.(WP p. 219) This brought him into the OSS in 1943, where he expected to work as an economist stateside but was instead assigned to be a translator overseas.(WP p. 223) He served as translator for an early high-profile trial of a Nazi general after the war, which put his picture in American national newspapers.

I’ll let that conclude this section. Perhaps someone with different politics might have done some things better, perhaps more could have been done, but Hirschman was no coward and hardly a quietist. He was a liberal fully in the mix when it counted, countering fascist control and propaganda, saving other refugees at significant risk to himself. This is how his Rockefeller Foundation connections and his American intelligence connections began – saving Hannah Arendt, among other things – and this makes his life story an excellent touchstone for testing people’s willingness to engage in good faith with the mixed records of those organizations and the people who have worked with them.

Given all that background of antifascist activity and early socialist enthusiasm, it might not be surprising to learn that Hirschman had some trouble with the FBI during the Red Scare! A third common ad hominem dismissal of Hirschman is that he was merely a typical rootless, cosmopolitan, socialist Jew: his liberalism was insufficiently American and his economics was insufficiently capitalist. At the height of the Red Scare in 1951, Hirschman was unable to find an appealing position in America or Paris due to “security reviews” and instead he found himself in something of an exile in Colombia, now working on economic development for the World Bank.

He did not last long in the position and switched to economic consulting. The reason he didn’t last was not incompetence, but rather ideological disagreement: contrary to the prejudices of those who would like to dismiss him as a socialist, his problem was that he would not support enough top-down central planning!

Hirschman did in fact appreciate Hayek, and in particular The Road to Serfdom, and while he was not a laissez faire ideologue, he was also strongly doubtful of rigid central planning – largely because of Colorni’s ideological influence and his own prior experience analyzing the economic follies of the fascist governments. Instead, he preferred to advocate work at the project level and work that encouraged local innovation.

When Edward Banfield was writing influential pessimistic works on economic development like The Moral Basis of a Backwards Society (1955) and Government Project (1951) to attack optimism about government intervention, laying groundwork for future neoconservative opposition to government interventions and current Silicon Valley opposition to the same, Hirschman enabled and catalogued successful small-to-medium-scale projects (see Development Projects Observed (1967)) and wrote influential essays about how to escape traps like the ones Banfield portrayed. His own most famous book to the general public, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), grew directly out of that work, and it includes a simple refutation of some of Banfield’s key ideas in its chapter on “Voice.” (p. 39 in my 1970 first paperback edition)

As the big top-down international development efforts of the immediate postwar era lost steam one after another, left-liberals who were willing to change their minds often turned to Hirschman’s approach for new hope rather than giving up on state assistance altogether. In more recent years, he appears to have been an important inspiration for the trend of “state capacity libertarianism,” a state-friendlier form of libertarian ideology initially suggested by contemporary economist Tyler Cowen, who has called Hirschman “one of the deepest and most underrated economic thinkers” in his own course on development economics.

Hirschman was not an arrogant planner who believed he would figure everything out. His book The Strategy of Economic Development (1958) was entirely clear, there. He was, instead, a tactician interested in making the most of each possibility arising at each scale of practical judgment. It may still be that he recommends too much state intervention for many libertarians’ taste – but at least his recommendations will not be coming spoken with the voice of celestial state authority, but rather the voice of a former business consultant hustling work in the hotel lobbies of Bogotá.

Hirschman’s FBI troubles, begun quietly in 1943 and at their worst in 1951, only finally cleared up in late 1966.

I think about that long, 23-year shadow of FBI suspicion now when I think about coming back from my questionable time with ugly elements of the reactionary right. There are false accusations about me from that time circling in private networks, now, accusations that could easily last twenty years and that have certainly already cost me business and social opportunities. I do expect them to clear away someday, but it might not be soon.

I feel the resonance particularly keenly because Hirschman was one of the few orienting stars I kept in sight as I passed the buoys on my way out into deeper political water, on the way to leaving academia for Silicon Valley. My first Hirschman was Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which I read while finishing my Ph.D. dissertation in order to catch up on background for neoreactionary writings from Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and Nick Land. I was impressed with Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, though its content didn’t support many prior neoreactionary uses of it, and I decided I wanted to write an article for a neoreactionary outlet on Hirschman’s thinking. I quickly went on to read The Passions and the Interests, The Essential Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, and Worldly Philosopher.

It wouldn’t be my first article. That had been a short manifesto for my own particular take on a “civilizationist right wing” movement differentiated from both technocratic commercialism and ethnonationalist populism. Nor would it be my second. It was fourth or fifth of about ten published over the course of a little over a year: I was never as invested in writing for that movement as I am in writing for this current Hedge project now. 

Someday, I hope, I’ll be able to republish them all with some appropriate reframing for each and “lessons learned” for each, either here on The Blackthorn Hedge or on a linked sister site. There were some edgy lines in each, made worse by an editor who I should never have trusted an inch, but on the whole I think the primary theses deserve to be republished. They briefly played an interesting role in a small and strange but functionally important corner of the public sphere.7 I’d like them to lose any aura of mystery and power they gain from anonymity and suppression.

One of the things that was most impressive about Hirschman to me, and to the others in this “civilizationist” movement who I felt closest to, was that Hirschman was a deep reader of old books. He was not a liberal who took liberalism for granted, but rather studied its roots in Machiavelli and Montaigne, in Montesquieu and Locke and Steuart, and in a huge range of further references. And not just the political books, but also the pure literature! Worldly Philosopher is amusingly peppered with the fiction he was reading alongside everything else in his busy life: he was reading The Brothers Karamazov when finishing his business economics degree in Paris,(WP p. 93) and he was reading recent Substack favorite Middlemarch when writing his last major book, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), on a summer vacation in Switzerland.(WP p. 642)

This depth of background comes across most clearly in Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, which surveys and reconstructs a variety of arguments for capitalism in the centuries prior to its modern ascent and then poses sharp questions about how and why these arguments changed as they did – why in one time and place capitalism would be justified in terms of how it harnessed and domesticated the irrational passions, and in another it would be justified in terms of how it satisfies rational interests – and also why ideas of passion and ideas of interest changed as well.

Yarvin repeatedly advised his readers to “read old books” in his work as “Mencius Moldbug,” but few of us did, and he himself read them shallowly. From the early days of my involvement, before anyone in the movement knew more than a pseudonym for me, The Passions and the Interests became one of my touchstones for recognizing others in the movement who really did read the old things… and just as importantly, others who knew the difference between gleaning colorful quotes to parrot theatrically later and mastering a text.

Very few people in the early neoreactionary movement ever “joined the Froude Society,” in the old jargon, which meant reading three old books, The Bow of Ulysses by Froude, Popular Government by Maine, and Latter-Day Pamphlets by Carlyle, but those of us who did generally realized that Yarvin’s uses of Froude, Carlyle, and Maine had been bogus. He talked a good game about “restoring alien intellectual traditions from the past” when making a case for the Froude Society, but he didn’t deliver.

This is one of the behind-the-scenes reasons that the movement didn’t take off earlier and that Yarvin has had to pivot his rhetoric so dramatically since the early years: the works he first proposed as touchstones for his movement were ones he misunderstood; people who began following his early advice soon sought different leadership.

I did have different leadership. I’d never have joined the movement if Yarvin had been the only option. At first, Hirschman seemed to help me test them. I thought I was able to get a few to actually read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and understand that they needed to encourage Voice within the movement in order to build Loyalty (the book was full of clear, grounded warnings about the limits of Exit-focused systems). I suggested “analyzing linkages” and “reactionary possibilism” and I thought that the top organizers were taking them seriously. I was right that these would have been good tests, but I was wrong that the leaders were passing them.

In fact, they had decided that my concerns meant I would be disloyal, so they lied to me about their intentions to buy time while one set up a sexual entrapment sting to blackmail me for compliance instead of loyalty. The sting didn’t catch me, but it did make a mess that was so screwed up I ended up feeling unable to talk about the situation regardless. Many academic friends had been waiting on me to email them after I moved to the Bay, and I effectively ghosted them. I disappeared into “Thiel world” (or “the Thielosphere”) with a sudden, bizarre, and rude silence.

On my end, behind that silence, I was holding fast to a deluded hope. Each of the first few months, I hoped that the next month I would figure out how to tell the story and reconnect. I thought I’d be late, but not gone. Instead, every month got weirder and weirder. By six months, I had given up and realized I would be lucky to ever tell the story, but I had also become convinced I shouldn’t risk entangling anyone else in the mess.8 I do think the story can be told to friends now. I’m telling people in private, in any case, and I’ve talked to journalists. I’m not ready to write it publicly myself yet, but I’m working on the prerequisites, possibilities, and linkages. Like this current hedge project.

For better and worse, spending a period being overwhelmed and put on the back foot by coercive political maneuvering is a common rite of passage in the liberal tradition. Machiavelli had his experiences with the Borgias and Pandolfo Petrucci. Locke had his flight to the Netherlands under suspicion of the Rye House Plot. Hirschman had his adventures in the 1930s and his later problems with the FBI.

Some conspiracies are normal, as I’ve written here before. Such things happen, and I like to keep my case in perspective. I also prefer to make friends who can also keep it in perspective – and I can get an initial sense of who can keep what in perspective by seeing how they respond to an adventurous and eventful life like Hirschman’s.

Personally, I find Hirschman’s creativity infectious and I find new ways I have already used his writings and his life story as a touchstone each time I consider more. If I tried to be exhaustive, I’d never finish this letter.

I haven’t discussed his friendship and collaboration with game theorist and strategist Thomas Schelling, for instance, though Schelling is another important influence for me. I haven’t tried to do justice to any of the thorny questions about his specific actions and recommendations for specific developing economies, though that can be very interesting. I haven’t discussed his close relationships with Amartya Sen and Emma Rothschild or his friendships with Latin American leaders like Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

As for my prior letters on MacIntyre and Bourdieu, I’m not aiming to be comprehensive here, and I’m certainly not presenting myself as a master of Hirschman’s work and life. Also as for MacIntyre and Bourdieu, I don’t look for simple agreement or disagreement with Hirschman as a sign of character – I look for engagement. MacIntyre is a particularly interesting religious traditionalist to discuss; Bourdieu is a particularly interesting critical sociologist; Hirschman is a particularly interesting liberal economist. I find there are many respectable grounds for agreement and disagreement with each of the three, and I find that those grounds are consistently informative.

I personally began reading Hirschman with Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and that’s a good, classic starting place for the broadest audience. For humanists and writers, The Passions and the Interests or the biography Worldly Philosopher are usually better choices for beginning. For those with a fair economics background, I’ll also recommend starting directly with the collection The Essential Hirschman: Hirschman was an essayist above all, and this collection is full of great work. My own next read of him will be his first book, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945), for insights into fascist and imperialist economics that I expect to complement Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942/4).

I hope that I will hear from some of you about your own experiences with Hirschman, soon, and I hope that you have learned something about me from how I’ve described mine.

Thank you for reading. As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

Prior experiments have included “12 Rules for Madness,” “Books to Break Discourse Addiction,” and a how-to for independent scholars to get free, full JSTOR access.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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I have always been someone who loves factual reference works, whether it’s a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a tech catalog, or an atlas. The form appealed to me as much as the facts themselves: I would read Dungeons & Dragons manuals and back-of-the-book fantasy novel reference appendices with the same excitement.

The factual interest had begun with dictionaries, encyclopedias, and especially magazines with infoboxes like National Geographic, while the fictional interest took off with Dinotopia’s beautiful National Geographic-style illustrated books, especially the weird trilobite machines of The World Beneath. I cut back on the fantasy half of the interest during puberty, under social pressure, but I returned to it once I was more secure.

I kept reading real-world reference works on my own time consistently. I won’t say “for fun,” exactly, just “on my own time,” because we’re talking about books like the Physician’s Desk Reference or German dictionaries. I made a point of knowing the chemistry of almost everything I saw for sale, from food to plastics to medicine, and of knowing the etymologies of my words.

I have no plans to make that kind of material a major part of The Blackthorn Hedge’s letters. It’s a separate class. Yet for a single Sunday post I thought it might be fun to see who else in the audience also likes this kind of thing – who else would enjoy reading a straight-up reference glossary, if I were to send one out?

I have a few I’ve written, and the one I’ve decided to share today is about social imitation, all phrased in terms of “mimesis”: the process of copying a concrete referent. Mimesis is a key word in certain intellectual circles on the right, especially the tech right around Peter Thiel, and this was written for streamlining private conversations in and around those circles. The glossary doesn’t name René Girard, Thiel’s most famous intellectual influence, and it doesn’t list the Girard keywords “scapegoating” or “antichrist,” but it does include “scandal” and “mimetic crisis.”

The glossary was meant to structure practical discussions of who is imitating whom how. It was intended to be a sort of shared exoteric compromise language for people who might be deeply invested in more esoteric conflicts between specific claims about how mimesis shapes human culture due to Erich Auerbach, Girard, Roberto Calasso, Axel Honneth, Eric Gans, or others.

I’m sharing this half as something that I expect to be interesting for its own sake and half as a novelty for starting conversation. Please feel free to skim, and feel no need to read the whole thing thoroughly to comment on any part that strikes you while skimming. Please feel free to comment with any sort of question about the purposes or applications of the terms below.

The fun of encountering a detached reference work out of context, like an Elvish dictionary for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or a sixteenth century Italian etiquette manual, is that it suggests interesting puzzles. Who are the people who actually need this? How would they have to live to care about these things and present them this way? Please take this glossary in that spirit, and ask anything you’d like.

Mimetics Glossary

Base Terms

Mimesis: any process of concrete behavioral imitation of any concrete aspect of a concrete reference example

Mimetic medium: in mimesis, a medium through which the concrete aspect of the concrete reference example is made available as an example to the imitator

Examples: natural setting, social setting, technological apparatus

Mimetic grounding: in mimesis, the underlying causes and contexts of imitated behavior and imitation

Examples: natural domains rewarding skilled behavior, social domains rewarding perceived qualities, economic modes of production

Mimetic amplifier: a mimetic medium that enhances the availability of aspects of concrete reference examples relative to a counterfactual baseline

Examples: social memory, social attention concentration via fashion, technological recording, broadcast, or advertising

Mimetic filter: a mimetic medium that reduces the availability of aspects of concrete reference examples relative to a counterfactual baseline

Examples: social taboo, social erasure, censorship apparatus, literal fog and figurative fog of war

Selective mimesis: any process of concrete behavioral imitation of one concrete aspect of a concrete reference example while attempting not to imitate another aspect

Examples: trying to learn from copying a older mentor’s technical skills without picking up their fuddy taste, trying to imitate admirable skills of an opposite gender person without performing the opposite gender, imitating the desires of a rival while despising their conduct

Customary Mimesis

Medium of social custom: collectively shared habits of interpretation and action in a social group that serve as mimetic amplifiers and filters relative to the base physical media of mimesis for the group, thus constituting a new effective medium, to collectively enable and moderate one another’s selective mimesis

Examples: “don’t dwell on such things,” “he’s just looking for attention,” “a man’s shoes can tell you a lot about his character”, “women must always ask such questions”

Social persona: social example that is intentionally amplified by custom, usually kept conscious, and generally believed good if addressed

Social shadow: social example that is intentionally filtered by custom, usually kept unconscious, and generally believed bad if addressed

Persona mimesis: mimesis that is conscious, intentional, and generally believed good if addressed

Examples: acting like a hero, aspiring to a mentor’s virtues

Shadow mimesis: mimesis that is unconscious, unintentional, and generally believed bad if addressed

Examples: becoming brutal to fight brutality, picking up a mentor’s vices

Shadow medium: the part of a mimetic medium that is kept unconscious, unintentional, or at least impolite to discuss as if it were not unconscious or unintentional

Examples: the persistent presence of sexual attention in officially nonsexual contexts, clear appearances of mistakes that nonetheless no one will call attention to (as if they were not seeing them at all), deniable implicit threats of violence in a formally pacifist social order

Persona grounding: the part of a mimetic grounding that is conscious, intentional, or at least polite to discuss as if it were conscious and intentional

Examples: professional motives for professional admiration, claims of self-sacrificing altruistic compromises for the sake of social good, direct practical and ideological justifications for uses of political force

Shadow grounding: the part of a mimetic grounding that is unconscious, unintentional, or at least impolite to discuss as if it were not unconscious or unintentional

Examples: sexual motives for professional admiration, unspoken criminal compromises undergirding social equilibrium, hidden residues of political force underlying ideological conformity patterns

Scandal: an example or process that exposes social shadow

Examples: sexual behavior in officially nonsexual contexts, overt criminality erupting from a place where only covert criminality was expected, expressions of disbelief in founding myths of society

Social mythos: narrative representation of the medium of social custom, itself presentable in social persona but usually rich with implicit clues regarding social shadow

Examples: role-defining myths and epics in classical society, sitcoms and popular history in contemporary society

Differentiated mimesis: selective mimesis enabled by social custom that provides differentiated roles for imitators and for exemplars

Examples: student-mentor mimesis enabled by social custom that guides and helps the students to imitate specific virtues of the mentor rather than the whole person of the mentor, patterns of dignity helping admirers to look up to a business hero without directly envying the hero’s specific wealth

Stratified mimesis: differentiated mimesis in which the roles are collective class roles with implied power asymmetries

Examples: mimesis according to social customs that guide rich and poor to notice different things about each other as examples and thus imitate each other differently, mimesis according to social customs that separate priests and shamans from the main part of society so that their examples can have proper separation from the everyday and proper authority over the unusual or ceremonial

Gendered stratification: any social stratification based on classes separated by performances of gender

Examples: separation of “boys’ toys” from “girls’ toys,” social separation of virgin girls, wives, and “other women” into three distinct classes

Elect and preterite stratification: a binary social stratification based on classes separated according to social narrative centrality and social privilege

Examples: separation of citizens from subordinate non-citizen artisan and slave classes as in Classical societies, separation of true believers and all others as in many societies with a dominant religion

Insider and outsider stratification: a binary social stratification based on classes separated according to social narrative centrality but not necessarily social privilege

Examples: separation of representatives of Congress or Parliament from those they represent as in contemporary societies, separation of the active hierarchy of a religion from the greater mass of believers in a society with a centralized religion

Elect social mythos: narrative representation of the medium of social custom compatible with the social persona in an elect class of an elect and preterite stratified society

Examples: the myths of the official religion, heroic epics of aristocratic cultural founders

Preterite social mythos: narrative representation of the medium of social custom compatible with the social persona in a preterite class of an elect and preterite stratified society

Examples: myths of the falsity of the official religion, folk songs of working-class heroism, traditions of grievance and memory maintained against elect-class censorship efforts

Mimetic crisis: a situation in which a scandal threatens or causes the breakdown of a functional system of differentiated mimesis, whether within or across social strata

Examples: a preterite seeking entry to the elect missteps and reveals to the elect some preterite mythos that undermines the mythos of the elect, a woman pretends to be a man professionally and succeeds thus setting off a cascade of insecurity among the professional men who now require new grounds to convincingly assert their masculinity, an event thought to be only possible as the work of evil occurs in a society that thought itself good and thus sparks a crisis of uncovering hidden evil

Mimetic Ecology and Economy

Mimetic health: of a social group, the property that mimesis within the group largely feels good, changes reasonably, and conduces to flourishing

Mimetic toxin: an example that, when presented to a healthy social group, compromises the mimetic health of that group

Examples: confusing strangers, seductive defectors, people who are indiscreet about shadow mimesis

Mimetic remedy: an example that, when presented to an unhealthy social group, improves the mimetic health of that group

Examples: scandalizing prophets, saints, great judges

Mimetic fuel: examples that, when provided to a social group, inspire increased function and energy in that social group

Examples: vindicating victories, visions of opportunity

Mimetic waste: examples that a social group creates as a byproduct of its activity that tend to demoralize or weaken the social group

Examples: cringe, demoralizing missteps

Mimetic constipation: the property, of a social group, that by pressure to prematurely suppress expression of mimetic waste rather than providing examples of how to handle the waste, the group becomes overwhelmed with both waste and the struggle not to express it (and the signs of that struggle may become a second order mimetic waste)

Mimetic resource: examples or sources of examples that, when provided to a social group, support valued functions in that social group

Examples: libraries of videos of skills, teachers, mystery rituals

Mimetic exhaustion: any process of reducing the availability of mimetic resources

Examples: “using up” a canon of techniques applied to a problem, running out of positive role models for a profession, tiring out a mentor to the point they refuse to go on, overdoing an inappropriate ritual

Mimetic fouling: any process of compromising mimetic resources by adding to them, especially by mimetic wastes

Examples: imitating a mimetic resource in cringey ways that start making the resource itself seem like a bad one, spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to make mimetic resources stop seeming good to imitate, profaning a ritual

Replenishing: any process of increasing the availability of exhausted resources

Unfouling; also Cleaning: any process of increasing the availability of fouled resources by removal of undesired additions, especially removal of wastes

Mimetic wealth: of a social group, the property that the group is rich in mimetic resources, i.e., valuable examples to imitate (whether latent or manifest examples)

Mimetic trade: any process by which mimetic resources are voluntarily and reciprocally transferred

Mimetic work: work to manage and produce mimetic resources

Mimetic industry: systematically coordinated and economically regulated work to produce mimetic resources

Mimetic work resource: the resources for work to produce mimetic resources (not necessarily in themselves examples or sources of examples)

Mimetic Flow

Mimetic source: a generative process, typically a creative agent, for a salient class of reference examples

Examples: heroic and villainous leaders, scientific experiment designers, saints and heretics, beautiful natural ecosystems

Mimetic sink: a disruptive process for a salient class of reference examples

Examples: loss of memories by forgetfulness and doubt, loss of life by murder and war, loss of visibility by accidental or deliberate concealment, marring of apparent value by contempt and disrespect

Mimetic current: a flow of a salient class of reference examples from sources to sinks

Examples: a founding hero inspiring early imitators into glorious but forgettable deaths, stories of early cultural glory maintained by tradition until eventually lost as the culture fades, naively inspired startups crushed by the market and relegated to archives

Mimetic transformer: a disruptive and generative process, typically a social process, that changes examples of one salient class into another class

Examples: revealing a twist in a narrative that transforms the apparent values of an example, reinterpreting past examples in new light, acting gloriously thus turning one’s lived example of practice into examples of admiration for that practice

Transforming current: a sequence of currents linked by transformers (which is also a current: the class of the linked-sequence current is a combined class of the individual linked currents’ classes)

Examples: a founding hero inspires early imitators to glorious deeds which spawn a current of admiring storytelling that lasts, as an often-imitated style, well past the time the particular stories and even the founding hero are forgotten; a scientific tradition with roots in apprenticeship-based alchemy becomes modern classroom chemistry via the deliberate effort of Andreas Libavius

Mimetic engine: a system of mimetic sources and sinks that organize currents to accomplish some higher-order process

Examples: in a tech market, VCs inspire startups (and inspire them to inspire each other) and then cull them selectively on the way to market while making money from the flow; in a deliberative system, competing political parties with higher shared values encourage one another to source new exemplars of those values while also debating to discern among the different exemplars and then antagonizing and discouraging the examples that seem to bode ill for their own interests

I’m curious to see how this experiment goes. Which of these terms or definitions, if any, catch people’s interests or imaginations?

If none have caught yours, please don’t worry that this is where I’m planning to go with The Blackthorn Hedge. On the other hand, if several have, or if you wish you saw more of this sort of thing in general, we could talk about my other projects.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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My initial plan for today’s letter had been to write up an application of lessons from David Gilmore’s Manhood in the Making to computer games – thoughts on how and why those games are important proving grounds for young men (and where and when). recommended the book a few months ago and ever since finishing, I’ve been looking for a proper time to review it and recommend it here. I didn’t intend “Trump as an Anomaly of Feminist ‘Patriarchy’ Paradigms” to stand so long as my main letter on gender politics!

I immediately recommended Manhood in the Making in private Signal chats. I think one of my old lifting friends has already started reading it. I move more comfortably in those chats than on Notes here; I don’t have the hang of Substack.

The longer I tried to work on that draft, the more I recognized a familiar feeling. One like I was leaving crumbs… one like I had spilled a few drops of soup. A feeling like I was going to start drawing ants any minute.

I don’t often talk like it, but I was born a Florida Man, and I have some odd Florida habits. One is that you never, ever risk food dirt around the house unless you want ants. You also wipe up any water immediately unless you want mildew. In the swampy panhandle where I grew up, things stay clean and stay dry or they start growing legs or blooming. I feel the same way about writing online.

Whenever I mention a controversial name, or whenever I put a hint of authority or sexuality into a note or letter, I expect some unwelcome attention. Not exactly trolls, just unpleasant people; many are helplessly and fecklessly sincere. They typically believe they’re doing the right thing, and sometimes they are doing the right thing – in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

This is a commonplace of conversation about the Internet in any group I’ve been in. Everyone agrees there’s a lot of rude garbage, although they disagree about what to do about it. Learn to love it, maybe. Become one with the rude garbage, even. Or learn to crush it. Learn to take out the trash and suffer no fools. Not that they all agree on who the fools or the trash are… and one group’s “taking out the trash” is another’s “being rude garbage.”

Technically, ants are in fact cleaning up your crumbs when you leave them sitting out. The spiders in your house really are just there to eat some of the other bugs they think you’ve already been making room for. When people jump on things I say online for sounding like they might encourage “the woke” or might encourage “the fascists,” I can’t really deny that they’re doing what they consider legitimate cleaning work.

There’s an overwhelming amount happening online, and there are a lot of genuinely slippery slopes when it comes to social resources and social norms. People do need to be actively managing their online social spaces at all times if they want to keep them as they are or to get more of what they want. It’s half of why it’s so compelling and fun; it’s a major part of how we manage to spend our six hours a day on our phones.

Recently, I’ve been making do on Substack by mostly staying quiet on Notes and writing long, abstract letters that don’t invite rude interaction.

In part, I’m killing time. From other public Internet experience, I’ve seen that just giving your account a few more months of seniority or a couple hundred more posts or followers can get people to treat you very differently. It might not be the pests that treat you differently. They don’t pay so much attention to broader social cues… that’s their problem. It’s more often that an established account, one well-positioned to deal with the pests, will take more notice when they’re bothering a long-time subscriber or commenter than when they’re bothering someone who just showed up.

Becoming a known quantity matters, and there aren’t good shortcuts. I could use my real name instead of a pseudonym, but that would tie me to my offline social networks and one of my goals here is to put down new roots that are independent of prior networks. I could spend more time posting pest-bait and then dealing with the pests forcefully to create a reputation, but that risks alienating people I probably shouldn’t and it would require time that I think is better spent on the letters. I could sign on with some community with sharply enforced standards that recruits newbies by protecting them, but that would also probably alienate people I shouldn’t by committing me to an exclusive group.

So for now, I’m mostly keeping my head down and avoiding some social spaces that I know are especially dangerous for me.

The biggest danger, with ants, is that you’ll get angry enough at them to go kick over one of their anthills. They can make your kitchen or bathroom disgusting without posing any real danger. If you hit their kitchens and bathrooms, it’s war. And they do sometimes (ok, very rarely) kill people, down in Florida.

For me, the places where I’m tempted to kick the anthills most are in utilitarian philosophy, Bayesian probability, and machine learning. It’s worst when they’re all together. If it hasn’t seemed to make sense why I don’t engage more with LessWrong-style Rationalists here on Substack, despite my scientific background, this is a big part of why.

My experience has been that they’re just not nice to talk to, as a group, unless you’re ready to become one of them or you already have a few thousand subscribers and a long sequence of publicly-available prior writings to explain yourself. They may act polite and curious at first, but they also expect conformity: they’re used to making arguments they believe have normative force, and if you don’t respect the normative forces of their arguments then you don’t belong in their spaces. At best, you’re written off as an academic or a continental philosopher or some other kind of person “who trusts books no one else here will read.”

I do like many of them individually, and some are close friends! Still, I don’t like some pests among them, and when I’m pestered, I’ve learned better than to fight – that just kicks the hill. If I don’t want to be pestered, for now I need to avoid engaging. Later on I’ll devote some time to making myself more legible to them and become a decent online neighbor.

The Substack algorithm has been making it feel surprisingly difficult to be a good neighbor. I’m not sure any other platform’s algorithm wouldn’t, but Substack’s discovery focus seems to put a particularly high priority on bridging between certain groups that would themselves prefer to keep separate. When one person in a community forms a bridging link to another community, the algorithm seeks to make more bridges.

This can turn building bridges into being a bad neighbor. That’s also common offline, of course – if you “invite dangerous people into your neighborhood” then you’ll be considered a bad neighbor – but on Substack there aren’t more options than “inviting people into your neighborhood” if you want to be linked to them. There’s no equivalent of a less-intimate “meet at a pub or park” option, something like a “soft follow” or “discreetly subscribe” option.

You have one level of intimacy here, one kind of space. You can choose for it to be suburb level, park level, or pub row level, but that’s your choice. You don’t get to separate your residential community from your other social communities. If you try to be a member of both a pub row and a suburban neighborhood, your other suburb-style neighbors will also have to hear the music blasting from pub row.

This is something I don’t know how to solve, and I’d appreciate any insights or suggestions on how to deal with it. In the private groupchats I’m used to, each space is automatically insulated. There are no automatic transfers of material between the feeds.

For now, my temporary compromise here is to skip “likes” and “subscribes” for stuff that I expect to be too rowdy for my broader intended audience and to encourage others not to subscribe to me or “like” my stuff if my own likes and follows are still too rowdy for them. That seems to be the simplest way to work around the algorithm, but I’m not actually sure it’s working. I’m not sure that the separation is effective.

Another issue I’m unsure how to handle is interaction across the internal stratification of communities. If I connect myself to some ironic account with genuine wit, say, the algorithm can’t tell between their clever humor and their epigones’ clumsy imitations. Neither can the epigones, and it would be rude to call anyone an unworthy imitator to their face to discourage them… if that would even discourage them, rather than driving them to redouble their ambitions.

Maybe I’ll get a ton of subscribers in a year and take the safety off, tell you all what I really think about all the third-rate Traylen imitators here. That’s not really what I think, though; I’m not in fact holding that back. That carnival looks fun for everyone involved. It has not been a place for me, but that’s just because I play around in different ways. The stratification is much more genuinely a problem for me in the analytic philosophy area and in political areas.

This is only in part a forward problem: that if I interact with someone I may be pestered by those in their audience. It’s also a reverse problem: that others following those I interact with may feel pestered by me. The angriest comments I’ve gotten here so far have come from third parties to my interactions with Dan Williams and John Ganz. In those cases, I had come off as an annoying pest; more than once as a lazy postmodernist and more than once as an apologist for quasi-Stalinist authoritarianism.

This one is more urgent to me insofar as it’s also been becoming a problem in some of my private communities. Some of the groupchats need to split and/or add some new explicit level structure.

At the beginning of this letter, I said authority and sexuality were particularly tricky topics to introduce.

I’ve bitten the bullet on talking about authority, even though it draws fire. Even when what I say gets me alternately mislabeled as a neoliberal, postmodernist, fascist, or Stalinist, it’s worth it to me: it makes gradual progress in forming a fair public reputation. I was writing about that in my very first letter here, “How to Assert,” flipping Paul Graham’s “How to Disagree” on its head: I respect ad hominem attacks and the people who make them.

I don’t dismiss it all as “tribalism.” I try to interpret it as solidarity instead. People want to know who belongs in their conversations and they have legitimate interests in labeling other people to limit the effects of their harmful speech. Legal “free speech” means defamation and protected threats must be handled informally with social pressure rather than state pressure. Solidarity labels are entirely appropriate instruments for directing social pressure.

That said, I haven’t found a way to handle the heat and the mislabeling that comes from talking about sexuality yet. There, reputations don’t seem to form fairly on any short timescale. And it doesn’t seem to be a partisan problem. It seems that on all sides, at every level, there’s simply been too much public and private dishonesty around sex for any good nation-spanning webs of trust about sex to survive the decades after the 1960s Sexual Revolution. (I talk about this often with .)

I had been considering writing extensively about men and women and relationships in the next (the third) 24-letter arc of The Blackthorn Hedge, but I’ve decided against it. I’ll probably write two or three pieces on the topic in that arc – a Manhood in the Making letter is still in the queue – but no more than that. Instead, I’ll focus on trust issues more generally. If that works, it may build a pest-repellent base for talking about sex and gender in the fourth arc.

Florida was truly a swamp and filled with pests, where I grew up. Social media platforms aren’t as bad. No one here has literally bitten me or stung me… but that is about how low my bar is. We had a fair amount of gang violence and some creepy local cult activity, and those are not hard to see online as well.

There are plenty of utopian online social projects that intend to wipe out all bad behavior of certain kinds, say “irrationalities” or “tribalisms,” and which are no more realistic than fully paving the Everglades. I’m not aiming to do any of that here and never have been. I’ve seen the flood insurance rates. I’d rather be a seller of mosquito nets and good swamp boots, metaphorically.

My father still is in Florida, but he worries constantly about sea level rise for future generations, and he’s glad I’ve left. I think I felt almost the same way he does about sea level rise about the early years of Facebook, when I first went offline and started betting my life against early-generation social media. Whether it was disinformation, harassment, simple vulgarity, or screen or validation addiction, I saw something dangerous rising and I wanted out. Substack is social media, too, and sometimes swampy, but it seems deliberately designed for resilience against the floods.

What I’m worried about here isn’t those floods, then, but just whether I can find a good way to live and fit in. Today, I’ve been thinking about pests: how to attract fewer and how to be less of one myself.

Welcome to The Blackthorn Hedge. This fourth letter in my series on “solidarity” as a substantive idea since beginning with the first, “From Swarm to Solidarity.” This is another focused on the physical science analogies I use to think about the idea, approaching from a different side that does not require the technical material of the first letter. As with prior entries in this series, I’m attempting to share how I ground the important but too-often-obscure abstraction “solidarity” in principle, in practice, and in context, as described in “Grounding Tradition.”

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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I’ve just returned to writing here from a three-week break that I took to make time for a low-pressure academic conference and two weddings of good friends.1 While mingling on the road, I was pleasantly surprised to see people were happy to talk about these letters I’ve been writing. And not lightly! One of the grooms shared that when he picked his rings for his ceremony, he thought of “Gold as a Proof of Stake in Violence” and its two lines about the symbolism of the gold wedding band: he chose thicker rings of purer gold to emphasize his commitment to his wife’s physical protection. That was one surprising example, and there were more.

One pattern persisted: the letters I hear the most about in personal communication aren’t the ones that get the most likes or visible shares. The most personal “thank you”s I get come via “First Reflections on Reactionary Modernism” and “12 Rules for Madness.” Though this is sometimes frustrating from a personal metrics point of view – I’m not above the coup counting – it’s also natural. On one hand, more specialized audiences are often more grateful for attention, and on another, what makes a piece resonate personally may be exactly the sensitive content that makes it awkward to endorse publicly.

What was most interesting for me was getting to see people talk to each other about the writing, especially when they compared impressions. Maybe there’s an initial bid for mutual interest: “I loved the odor metaphor in the swarm piece”; then a reciprocal match: “I did too, I liked ‘vibes as smells’”; then a new personal element: “yeah I’ve been noticing my dog’s smelling and vibing differently and I think we’ve gotten closer”; then they’re talking about dogs and their companionship and how they sniff things.

In this way I learned that somehow now there are dogs in the indirect audience for this writing. I hadn’t thought of that! I had been too busy thinking about people. Now I’ll be thinking about the impact of each letter on dog-human relations, too, and I should probably include the cats as well.

Mostly, though, I was interested to see whether and how there were any signs of new community developing among these readers. Online, this feedback is sparse, especially when it comes to all the small body language gestures of respect, trust, comfort, and mutual anticipation that give the cleanest proofs of community; in person, feedback is much richer. I didn’t expect anything definitive this early, but just like water starts to glisten and flow differently just before it boils, I wanted to see if there were analogous early signs of phase transition in conversation about this project. Sometimes projects like this hedge grow quickly and smoothly off the bat, but more often they have a slow growth phase before “something clicks,” and then the growth curve changes qualitatively into a new phase.

Criticality

Boiling is an example of a special type of physical phase transition, a continuous, all-at-once “spinodal decomposition,” which “goes through a criticality.” That word “criticality” is one of those highly-charged pieces of scientific jargon that can draw either excitement or groans from audiences across a wide range.

There are physicists who hate it, assuming it’s an excuse to talk mystically about impractical abstractions, and others who love it, thinking that it’s been one of the most productive unifying concepts for recent progress in the field. There are humanists who find it exciting and beautiful, say those who were excited by Prigogine and Stengers, and there are others who find it dull and oversold. For some pop audiences, “criticality” is an exciting term for Cold War thrillers and Mission: Impossible movies, while for others it’s goofy science-kitsch.

For me, it’s a sign for a specific, practical conceptual toolbox that is definitely powerful although also sometimes oversold. It cleanly unifies phenomena from nuclear chain reactions to ordinary boiling to wild animal population fluctuations to blood coagulation, and it applies truly beautiful fractal mathematics to do it. It also hasn’t unified some of the patterns it has been claimed to (I won’t name names), and some of the mathematics can be sloppy and ugly.2

The simplest way to get into this toolbox is probably to begin with chain reactions; that was the historical inspiration for the first breakthroughs in the field and it remains a paradigmatic application. A chain reaction is just any series of simpler reactions in which each simpler reaction may cause further reactions. These can be finite chain reactions, when the series stops, or infinite chain reactions, when the series never terminates. The study of criticality in chain reactions is the study of the boundary between finite and infinite chain reactions. That boundary is called criticality.

Historically, nuclear chain reactions were the crucial inspiration here. One unstable atom that splits releases particles that can cause other unstable atoms to split – get that chain reaction to go big, and this is the principle behind a fission bomb. “Infinite” was close enough to “big” for theoretical design purposes; the number of atoms involved is well over billions of billions. However, once applied there, the principle was obviously transferable to chemical reactions – such as conventional explosives, also gelations – and to biological reactions – such as epidemic chains of infection – and more controversially, to social reactions – such as panic reactions to threats or propaganda, or mass enthusiasms for new trends.

On Substack or any other contemporary social media, many writers are concerned with a close cousin of criticality, virality. They want to write things that readers react to by sharing them on, so that others read and share. Infinity isn’t actually on the table there, nor billions of billions, but audiences of thousands or millions are still big enough for some theories of criticality to apply decently well. People know there are different qualitative levels of popularity for different posts – a post from a small account that gets thousands of shares gets those differently than a post from the same account that gets ten shares. It does it by “jumping up a level” on the network, maybe just by getting a single big account’s attention or perhaps by connecting several normally-separated audience groups in appreciation of some shared interest.

That level-jumping often happens unpredictably. It’s a commonplace that the lowest-effort posts ironically go viral the most, whether that’s true or not. Some think this is because lower-effort can mean closer-to-lowest-common-denominator, and that improves shareability. Others reason that lower-effort often means more unbalanced, and more unbalanced takes generate stronger reactions. This drives many online writers to “shitposting,” minimizing complexity and maximizing provocation to maximize virality, to the point that it’s a commonly assumed default literary style for writing on social media.

The shitposters are stigmatized by some, but they stick up for each other and reinforce one another’s legitimacy as writers against contrary stylistic standards, refusing to be controlled on others’ terms, forming strong and distinctive solidarity groups. These solidaristic groups, each with its own preferred styles of posting, split the social networks into territories where different things go viral. What goes viral in one subnetwork may be exactly what is rejected for any sharing at all in another subnetwork. Or what goes viral for positive reasons in one group may go viral as a mocked, negative example in another.

This is one way groups with distinctive styles form online: via spontaneous response to new platform incentives. Something similar happens for every significant new communication medium – even going back to when the first human languages emerged from the prior background of animal communications, when humans learned how to safely tell stories of animals without using the animals’ own sounds to name them, if David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous is to be believed. The printed Bibles of the 16th century Reformation, written in vulgar tongues rather than in Church Latin, were once more scandalously improper than yesterday’s Zoomer hyper-online skibidi streamtalk.

Critical Branching Factors

The theory of criticality developed by the nuclear scientists was novel for its quantitative and mechanistic clarity. Intuitive theories of social criticality had already existed prior, for instance in theories of how to achieve political revolution, and they remain popular today in both those dramatic forms and more mundane forms like Malcolm Gladwell’s “tipping points.” The new theory, however, could make sharper claims about how to recognize a possible tipping point or judge the risk of a revolution – not necessarily more accurate claims, but certainly more precise and more quantitative claims.

For the early bomb designs, the most iconic new quantity was the “critical mass,” and it quickly became a commonplace of social talk. Behind the barriers of secrecy, the scientists were developing a more extensive vocabulary. The true key quantity in the simplest theories of chain reaction criticality was the “branching factor”: the average number of immediate follow-up reactions to each elementary reaction.

If the branching factor is below one, then the chains end. If the branching factor is above one, then the chains go on infinitely and grow in number infinitely. If the branching factor is exactly one, that’s exact criticality. The chains go on infinitely but without growing (on average) as they go. There are always reactions occurring and sometimes there are bursts of several more reactions at once; however, these bursts always die back down to an even level of steady ongoing reaction rather than compounding. It’s a precarious balance: the slightest deviation to either side ensures a qualitative change of the pattern to dud (below one) or explosion (above one).

This extreme sensitivity to the branching factor is what creates the “different levels” effect in online virality. If each person who initially received a post shared it on with 1.1 people, on average, indefinitely, then it would be seen infinitely many times; if they shared it on with only 0.9 others, it would only reach ten views per initial viewer, on average. At 0.95 shares per view, 20 views per initial viewer; at 0.99 shares per view, 100 views per initial viewer; at .999, 1000.

However, it’s obvious the branching factor isn’t uniform over the life of a post. Shares per viewer usually start high then decline, though they may peak in the middle. They have to be timely and fresh, even if that freshness is the rancid freshness of steaming feces or newly rotting fish heads. The chains may also have interference: if someone shares the post with someone else who already saw it, that person is not likely to share it again.3 Proximity also matters: the first people who see it may have self-selected to see “this kind of thing” and thus may be more likely to share it; at some point sharing with more distant new people will require translating the post into foreign languages or sending it to alien planets via interstellar laser.

Similar patterns have held true for the spread of religious movements, fashion trends, and literary innovations.

If you try to draw a regularly branching chain, say a chain reaction in which each elementary reaction causes two new follow-up elementary reactions, then you get a tree structure that grows exponentially. This tree is called a “Bethe lattice” after the physicist Hans Bethe, a key leader of the Manhattan Project who was among Richard Feynman’s mentors.

The tree grows so quickly that it can’t be drawn with finite sized node circles and edge lines in two dimensions without overlapping the nodes and edges, and in fact it grows so quickly that it couldn’t be modeled with sticks and balls in three dimensions either – or trajectory lines and event hyperballs in four – or higher hyperpaths and hyperballs in any finite number of dimensions. It is formally “infinite dimensional.”

This means that a simple chain reaction of identical elementary reactions with an average branching factor greater than one is impossible in the real world. It wouldn’t fit in spacetime. Actual chain reactions can never match that simple idealized model. In nuclear weapons, the mismatch becomes impossible to ignore when the exponential chain reaction gives way to a polynomial blast wave. With diseases, it happens after initial spread makes the disease epidemic in a single well-connected community and further spread now depends on slower, rarer travel from each such community to the next. These points of transition are known as “scaling limits.”

Exponential growth in the real world always hits scaling limits and switches over to a slower growth regime – when it continues at all, rather than stopping or reversing. Vaclav Smil’s Growth does an excellent job debunking various claims that there have been exceptions in biology or in human industry.

And again, similar patterns have held for the spread of religious movements, fashion trends, and literary innovations. All different “mind viruses,” if we don’t like them and choose to stigmatize them, or “traditions” if we do like them and keep passing them down. Communities differentiate from one another via contrasting choices of what to stigmatize and what to celebrate and via the practical patterns they develop to embody those different choices.

Steady Reactors

For many of us who write here, we’re not focused on hypergrowth or going viral but rather steady influence or maintenance of communities that we already like. Similarly, nuclear scientists were not only interested in making bombs, but also steady power plants.

There, the scientists’ focus would be on maintaining activity while avoiding criticality. The branching factors remained crucial, but now the task was to keep the branching factor at some steady value below one. New reactions should continually start, but never grow into explosions.

To control the rate of nuclear fission, reactor engineers would have mechanisms to inhibit the chain reactions, the famous “control rods” seen in so many action thrillers. Nuclear fission chain reactions branch via neutron particles, and the control rods absorb neutrons before they can trigger new fission events, reducing the branching, interrupting and slowing the chain reaction. Putting more control rods deeper into the reactor inhibits the chain reaction and causes it to cool down, while removing them restores the chain reactions and causes it to heat up.

If the control rods are insufficient to prevent supercriticality, the reactor overheats to the point of catastrophe. In the Windscale accident, it caught fire; the Chernobyl reactor melted down then exploded.

Socially, in recent years I’ve seen far too many groups remove their control rods and then overheat to catastrophe. In the name of greater virality and greater hype, they’ve removed all internal naysayers and spent millions – when it’s not billions – on paper-thin business plans. In the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, was there a real business plan at all? What was Sequoia really funding, there? Or what about their ideological neighbors at Leverage Research? And how much should we extrapolate from examples like those to the current AI boom? Will it bust, too?

I don’t have an answer there, and I think there are intelligent arguments for several likely outcomes. Out of caution I’ve steered clear of the hype so far. From outside, I’ve watched several former friends lose their minds and several others make fortunes.

One thing I am certain of is that any new communication technology that increases individual reach also increases the potential for runaway chain reactions: the branching factors for communicative interactions rise given more efficient transmission media. Some of these runaway chain reactions prove positive, like literary tradition and scientific progress and others of David Deutsch’s “beginnings of infinity.” Perhaps they’re all to the good in the end, due to the Will of God, the Cunning of Reason, the Invisible Hand, or some other inherent goodness of evolution itself. However, many appear highly negative in the near term: market bubbles, bizarre and evil ideologies, civil and religious wars. Community disruptions, in various forms, both for better and for worse.

People can adapt to become less reactive to media to compensate, reducing the branching factors again and inhibiting the unwanted criticalities, so there’s not necessarily a constant rise in community disruption, but the adaptations take time and insight. They require changes in ways of life, and not just at the individual level.

For most people, becoming differently reactive to communication requires permission and cooperation. It requires norms and solidarity. Unilaterally ignoring media fashions doesn’t work except for total loners; even highly independent trend setters need to have a sense of collective possibilities to pioneer new patterns successfully.

At the same time old, formerly-stable communities are disrupted, then, new stable communities form around new norms and exemplars of new patterns that prevent disruption. These norms and exemplars function as social control rods, inhibiting otherwise-disruptive social chain reactions through the communities they organize.

In my experience this was one of the most underappreciated functions of Millennial irony. Speaking as an unusually earnest Millennial who didn’t adopt that irony, I could still see that it was a powerful means for insulating one’s life from online social influence. I just stayed offline and stayed earnest, but that came with serious tradeoffs. I didn’t experience many typical forms of solidarity with my own generation, and I haven’t fit in to the normal social scenes that relied on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram for regular interaction. In those interactions I skipped, irony was crucial armor – though it came at a high price. GenX cynicism played a comparable role as an armor against radio and TV influences in the 1980s–90s era of major media mergers.

Spinodal Phase Transitions

Following the early successes of nuclear scientists in the 1930s–40s, analyses of criticality for chain reactions branching over time could also quickly apply to chain molecules branching through space – to polymer gels: to slimes, rubbers, and coagulations. It could also apply to other branching structures in real space or abstract space: to networks in general, from networks of cracks in porous filters to the networks of electronic communications and abstract computer address spaces across the US that would soon become the Internet.

Once again, simple branching factors were crucial up to a point, after which scaling limits would come into play. Polymers shaped locally like Bethe lattices, called dendrimers, can’t grow very many rounds before the different branches crash into each other and prevent each other’s further growth. After that, a highly branched polymer would have to grow more slowly. The number of branches per generation shrinks to “whatever there’s room left for,” and corresponding scaling transitions became a special study of polymer physicists such as Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes.

However, regardless of this extra complexity, the question of whether the polymer grew into a space-filling gel at all still depended on the early critical branching factor. If it didn’t branch enough, it would never grow to fill space and crowd itself. The study of these critical network parameters defining the thresholds between whether a network stays locally bounded or becomes globally extensive became known as “percolation theory.”

A more surprising application of these theories arose from considering not just networks of permanent chemical bonds, permanent cracks, or permanent telephone lines, but networks of weaker interactions in general – especially transient connections that could rapidly arise and pass away, like the physical bond between two water molecules colliding and briefly sticking to one another in the course of collision.

Here, physicists realized that they could unify a prior workhorse theory of thermodynamic phase transitions like freezing, condensation, or permanent magnetization, the “self-consistent field theory” I outlined in my first letter on solidarity, with the theories of criticality for chain reactions. The key would be to look at the percolations of the transient interaction networks characteristic of different phases.

Could sticky collisions agglomerate into droplets to condense? That would depend on the percolation of the stickiness through typical collisional clusters. Could neighboring liquid molecules align into rigid solid order and freeze? That would depend on the percolation of rigid orientational correlations through the dense but randomly oriented liquid. Correspondingly, whether a field theory showed a phase transition would depend on whether neighboring local fluctuations of the fields (say, greater or lesser magnetism) could reinforce one another in some way that would percolate across the whole field.

The thresholds of decisive percolations are the “spinodals,” to again recall that jargon I passed over when first introducing criticality in terms of boiling in this letter.4 Boiling is, roughly speaking, a percolation of spontaneous bubbling through liquid water.

This is a rough explanation, and it oversimplifies some things. For one, unless you already knew exactly how the phase transition worked, there would usually be multiple kinds of candidate interaction to drive it. Each could percolate independently, or all could percolate together in harmony, or each could interfere with the others’ percolation. For condensation, sometimes you could have two types of stickiness that reinforce one another to drive agglomeration of droplets, or other times there could be two types that undermine one another to prevent agglomeration.

The social application of these ideas is probably easier to explain than the thermodynamic application, at this point! It’s not hard to think of groups that are torn between bonding over one shared interest or another, for instance, when the shared interests are mutually exclusive. Even if everyone wants to organize a game night, if half want to play bridge and half want to play Dungeons & Dragons, the whole plan may fall through.

In fact, my physics teachers often taught me the physical concepts with social metaphors like these. The benefit of the physical theory isn’t in providing the coarse qualitative insights, but rather in the way it allows for refining those common intuitions precisely – to the point of quantification if necessary. There are often several competing coarse intuitive hypotheses for how a phase transition occurs, and scientific consensus on the correct model only settles when fine-grained comparisons of the hypotheses allow for precise resolutions of the intuitive differences to percolate through the scientific community.

“Settling science” is itself a minor solidarity transition in a scientific community. After each transition, the scientists have a new common understanding of some phenomenon (a new local order), can speak a new common language about the phenomenon (a new internal transparency), and can newly refute others’ attempts to make contrary mechanistic models of their interactions with the phenomenon (a new boundary exclusion). Solidarities can be differentiated at a much finer grain than standard physical phase transitions, which is only natural: living organisms are more complex than single molecules.

One of the more interesting surprises that the physical theory has been able to settle here is that liquid condensation does not depend on attractive interactions between particles at all. In fact, particles with purely repulsive interactions can spontaneously phase separate into liquid and gas phases; no molecular “stickiness” is needed because the particles will develop an emergent effective attraction to one another – whenever they are already close – based solely on repulsions from the others farther away. This has been on my mind since some recent political reading over my trip, On the Shores of Politics by Jacques Ranciere, following a recommendation of Rancière by on my “Bourdieu as a Touchstone.” Rancière argues exactly this point in human politics – that unities of hatred are as historically fundamental as unities of affinity. Moreover, it’s phrased in terms of oppositions between the people, demos, and the mob, ochlos, that I have also been drawn to think more deeply about since reading The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe.

Critical Nucleation and Growth

At this point I’m ready to go back to “critical mass,” which I’ve otherwise neglected in favor of “branching factors” here. For the chain reaction in a nuclear fission bomb, the elementary reactions are atomic fissions that release multiple neutrons; the average number of atomic fissions that those neutrons go on to trigger is the branching factor. Whether or not a neutron does trigger another atomic fission depends on whether and how it hits another fissile atom. Whether it hits another depends on how many more there are around it – so it depends on how much fissile material is put together at a time and how rich that material is with fissile atoms.

The more material and the more enriched it is, the higher the branching. Criticality just requires a branching factor of one. The more enriched your uranium fuel, the less of it you need to reach criticality. The more of it you can bring together, the lower the critical enrichment.

Uranium ore doesn’t even have to be enriched to go critical, if there’s enough of it! There has been a massive natural nuclear fission reactor of unenriched uranium on Earth in an African cave system, the Oklo reactor, that occasionally rose above criticality and then fell again based on water levels in the caves.5 Practical bombs need enriched uranium so that they can be small enough to load onto airplanes and missiles. However much you need given the level of enrichment, that’s the critical mass.

In the theory of phase transitions there are corresponding ideas of critical size as well, corresponding to the strengths of the interaction chain networks in the last section. For condensation, it may be the smallest size of a water droplet that has enough sticky interactions that it will stay together better rather than falling apart the more further water vapor it absorbs; alternatively, it is the smallest size beyond which separating repulsive interactions won’t spontaneously cut through it and evaporate it. For freezing, it’s the smallest size of a crystal beyond which new molecules will stabilize the crystalline order more rather than destabilizing it; alternatively, it’s the smallest size of crystal beyond which spontaneous vibrations and rotations won’t break the network of alignments of the molecules in the crystal. In either case, these are called “critical nuclei.”

These critical nuclei stabilize because there are network effects favoring the new phase, but only after the network is large enough. They are fundamentally distinct from spinodal transitions: at an exact spinodal, equally favorable interaction networks will spontaneously percolate for both phases regardless of size. At a spinodal, the network effects are exactly balanced at the microscopic level and so the size of critical nuclei is zero. Critical nuclei stabilize at what are called “binodal” points. These are points where the two networks of two different phases can coexist and spontaneously trade material back and forth evenly, but neither network will spontaneously turn into the other phase en masse: they only change marginally on their borders with each other. The network effects are exactly balanced at the macroscopic level.

Whereas spinodal transition looks like boiling criticality, binodal transition looks like slow, steady evaporation. Spinodal melting is rare and looks like a whole solid suddenly turning into water, like in some horror movies6 a person will spontaneously and gruesomely deliquesce; binodal melting is perfectly familiar. Socially, a spinodal solidarity transition could be a sudden conversion of an entire population or Tuckman-style “storming.” A binodal solidarity transition could be a gradual growth of one religion at the expense of another.

Still, the exact moment that the critical nucleus forms is a genuine moment of criticality even if the later binodal phase coexistence is not. There are often uncanny fractal fluctuations of the whole critical nucleus as it grows into its stable shape. The social analogs of this pattern aren’t so unfamiliar in, say, the early days of a new political movement before responsibility has settled in. Movement founders often act quite bizarre and flicker between seemingly contrary personalities; yet-uncommitted future ideologues flirt with multiple incompatible loyalties. Many early members may have been told conflicting stories about what the movement is for, with the leader waiting to choose how to resolve the conflicts based on who prove to be the better followers.

This isn’t simply because the leaders are opportunists or dishonest, though they may be. It’s also that their incentives and feedback are strange. There’s not a lot of either, yet, and they’re not consistent. Even dishonest opportunists become steadier and more predictable when their incentives and feedback environments become more full and more stable.

The patterns are also apparent in the nucleation of new literary and scientific traditions. At the birth of a genre or a new field, there is often a bottleneck where the form emerges out of something much more strangely and specifically ambiguous than just arbitrary chaos. I thought ’s recent experiment with “Lonely Island Adventures” captured the odd feeling of the birth of a literary genre well. The history of early modern probability is fairly different from what it is generally thought to be, with more legalism and less gambling, which I’ll plan to talk about in my upcoming letter on Lorraine Daston as an ideological touchstone.

An especially characteristic social feature here is a strange narrative hole or falsification around the critical beginning of a movement, field, or genre. The dynamics at the critical moments are unique, and they are not easy to describe – whether or not there is one of René Girard’s famous “founding murders” at play or not.

All Said

This introduction to how theories of physical criticality can ground ideas of social solidarity has not been meant to convey the exact patterns I was looking for on my recent trips to gauge how The Blackthorn Hedge is going. I’m not sure I could put them into words or equations if I wanted to! I would mutter something about “multi-point affect correlation functions” and hope to stall follow-up questions for a few months if I were asked.

Nonetheless, I hope it’s been interesting food for thought and I hope it will serve well as a future reference. In this second arc of laying this hedge, I’m putting down slower-growing roots that I’d like to be able to reference for some time to come. In later arcs, I will no doubt write more shorter, timelier, and punchier letters, but for now I am focused on making a nucleus with certain internal network effects.

Once those feel like they’re in a stable binodal coexistence with the broader Substack ecosystem, I hope this project can become simpler and more legible.

Thank you to everyone who read and enjoyed my last letter on Alasdair MacIntyre! I was happily surprised at the general warmth of the response, and I’m astonished I’ve already seen someone share a picture of a newly-bought copy of Dependent Rational Animals:

I’ll return with further hedge-laying in two weeks, and I’ll make up the skipped ‘first Sunday of October’ letter after I do.

Edit after three weeks: I needed an extra week to properly manage these trips. I apologize for the mistake; I was overly optimistic about travel recovery with our baby.

As with Bourdieu, “touchstone” here does not imply “unquestioned authority figure” – I consistently respect Bourdieu and MacIntyre but not without disagreements.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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In my letters here at The Blackthorn Hedge, no topic has been more important to me in these early days than “tradition,” understood broadly as “what is handed down.“

I’ve had five letters directly titled or subtitled by some theme on tradition: “Differentiating Traditions,” “Ecology of Tradition,” “The Tissues of Tradition,” “Digesting Tradition,” and most recently “Grounding Tradition.” In the others, I’ve also often been concerned with matters of tradition, as in the three letters so far on background to John Ganz’s contemporary fascism thesis: these depended most on Weberian and Frankfurt School tradition, Gramscian tradition, and Hegelian tradition, respectively; in reflecting on each of those, I also brought in other intellectual traditions by contrast, such as Galbraithian economics, Polybius’s political anacyclosis, and Smithian ethics.

The specific reason for this is that I am trying to put down roots for a hedge, to create a distinctive sense of a defensible intellectual place and, eventually, a community with a distinctive solidarity. I intend “tradition” to be a central organizing concept for persuasive communication within this space and community, as it emerges, and I intend to hold ground against alternatives like “memes” and “beliefs.” “Tradition” implicitly sets the standards for community diversity and commonality deep, whereas “memes” and “beliefs” lend themselves to organizing shallower differences and similarities.

Of all of my references for thinking about tradition, from the secular, progressive materialistic “scientific research traditions” of Larry Laudan’s Progress and Its Problems to the esoteric, mystical Christian and Hermetic traditions of Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot through the conservative, established artistic tradition of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the most consistent center of gravity for me has been Alasdair MacIntyre’s work in moral philosophy.

This is not because I have simply agreed with MacIntyre more than the other authors. It is instead because he is most consistently focused on what I think are the heaviest, most fundamental problems of tradition: issues of life and death dependence on trust in others, issues of subjectivity and objectivity in the grips of strong emotion and collective enthusiasm, and issues of how communities with shared practices serve as grounds of rational deliberation, for instance.

In my last touchstone letter, I admired Pierre Bourdieu as an intricate thinker, certainly capable of depth and weight but most notable for his precision. MacIntyre I admire most as a weighty thinker, with his own intricacy and precision to be sure but most notable for his gravity.

Accordingly, MacIntyre is much less of an enigma than Bourdieu. Whereas Bourdieu “has been authoritatively placed in all the major theoretical traditions” from Marxian to Weberian to Nietzschean to Structuralist,1 MacIntyre is unambiguous. He’s a former Marxist, Catholic Christian, and an Aristotelian virtue ethicist: a champion of St. Thomas Aquinas. His loyalties were clear: he was a traditionalist critic of liberalism willing to work with non-liberal leftists. This makes him an entirely different challenge to write about than Bourdieu. The challenges in reading them are as different as the challenges in gymnastics and deadlifting.

Since MacIntyre was not embroiled in the same sort of intricate, many-front intellectual battles of identity that Bourdieu was, there’s less of a need to discuss all the ways his work has been received. It’s more feasible to simply start reading him, and I highly recommend it! I recommend beginning with Dependent Rational Animals, and I’ll begin the next section with its opening paragraphs.

If anyone reading this would like to read that book and write something about it, I’m sure to subscribe to your Substack and become interested in your goals if and when you do. Please ping me to be sure I see it.

MacIntyre made his name with After Virtue in 1981 and it has remained the primary basis for his fame as a moral philosopher, but 1999’s Dependent Rational Animals is a softer and more approachable introduction to his thinking. It is an adaptation of a series of invited lectures. This is how it begins:

We human beings are vulnerable to many kinds of affliction and most of us are at some time afflicted by serious ills. How we cope is only in small part up to us. It is most often to others that we owe our survival, let alone our flourishing, as we encounter bodily illness and injury, inadequate nutrition, mental defect and disturbance, and human aggression and neglect. This dependence on particular others for protection and sustenance is most obvious in early childhood and old age. But between these first and last stages our lives are characteristically marked by longer or shorter periods of injury, illness, or other disablement and some among us are disabled for their entire lives.

These two related sets of facts, those concerning our vulnerabilities and afflictions and those concerning the extent of our dependence on particular others are so evidently of singular importance that it might seem no account of the human condition whose authors hoped to achieve credibility could avoid giving them a central place. Yet the history of Western moral philosophy suggests otherwise. From Plato to Moore and since there are usually, with some rare exceptions, only passing references to human vulnerability and affliction and to the connections between them and our dependence on others. Some of the facts of human limitation and our consequent need of cooperation with others are more generally acknowledged, but for the most part only then put on one side. And when the ill, the injured and the otherwise disabled are presented in the pages of moral philosophy books, it is almost always exclusively as possible subjects of benevolence by moral agents who are themselves presented as though they were continuously rational, healthy and untroubled. So we are invited, when we do think of disability, to think of “the disabled” as “them,” as other than “us,” as a separate class, not as ourselves as we have been, sometimes are now and may well be in the future. (Dependent Rational Animals (1999), pp. 1–2)

The first thing to note is how dated this is! 25 years have changed moral philosophy, and the discussions of disability have changed more than most. Academic and popular discussions are both different from what they were in the late 90s, especially since the 2010s. MacIntyre helped make that happen. One could argue this is an early example of the “woke right,” a category I find silly, but it’s certainly a good example of both left and right identifying similar weaknesses in the ideology of the establishment center.

The second is that it’s sweeping and contentious. That’s MacIntyre’s style. The style is a challenge for many readers, and it’s part of what makes him a good touchstone – people’s opinions of him quickly reveal a lot about how they think about historical judgment and where they accept rhetorical simplification or not. Is it enough for a reader that he often says “almost always” or otherwise hedges the sweeping statements? Or does it come across as just abuse of technicalities to get away with sweeping over his own ignorance?

For me, the expressions of uncertainty matter. My background in physics was strongest in statistical mechanics, and so I’m very confident with statistical language like “on average,” “almost always,” “typically,” and “characteristically.” As long as a writer uses them consistently, I’ll figure out the technical details and evaluate the arguments accordingly. It might be tricky to figure out if they use “often” to mean “enough that it’s not surprising” or “most of the time” or something else, but it’s rarely impossible.

What matters more is whether I can go back and check the history myself. This is difficult with MacIntyre because he makes precise, original claims about wide-sweep history without (1) sharing his background sources for the sweep or (2) sharing the exact criteria for his precise claims. This is one of the things that makes reading him a difficult proposition. Whereas Bourdieu is difficult at the sentence-parsing level, he’s more transparent than MacIntyre about his data and sourcing. With MacIntyre, following the arguments requires long immersion in the philosophical tradition. If there’s some claim you don’t understand, you may need a year to check that claim properly. It’s heavy lifting.

The next two paragraphs make a case in point:

Adam Smith provides us with an example. While discussing what it is that makes the “pleasures of wealth and greatness… strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful,” he remarks that “in the languor of disease and the weariness of old age” we cease to be so impressed, for we then take note of the fact that the acquisition of wealth and greatness leaves the possessors “always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear and sorrow, to diseases, to danger and to death” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments IV, chapter I). But to allow our attention to dwell on this is, on Smith’s view, misguided.

To do so is to embrace a “splenetic philosophy,” the effect of “sickness or low spirits” upon an imagination “which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined,” so that we are no longer “charmed with the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and economy of the great…” The imagination of those “in better health or in better humor” fosters what may, Smith concedes, be no more than seductive illusions about the pleasures of wealth and greatness, but they are economically beneficial illusions. “It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” So even one as perceptive as Smith, when he does pause to recognize the perspectives of ill health and old age, finds reason to put them on one side. And in so doing Smith speaks for moral philosophy in general. (Dependent Rational Animals (1999), p. 2)

This puts a heavy finger on a painful vulnerability. I’ve read the full Theory of Moral Sentiments and come to my own conclusions about whether this is fair, and my conclusion was a horrible, reluctant, technical… yes. Smith is not simply endorsing these illusions on economic grounds here, that would be an unfair oversimplification of his more nuanced, nearly-esoteric critique of the aristocracy and their control of demand through mimesis in the pre-industrial economy – but it is still fair to say that he is “putting the perspectives of ill health and old age to one side.”

This is a perfect example of what frustrates liberal philosophers about MacIntyre. He has made a technical point here that is correct, but with terrible, incorrect implications for someone less familiar with the background: Smith comes off as a man who simply sacrifices truth for economic growth at the expense of the ill and aged!

And yet to explain exactly why that implication is incorrect without contradicting the technically correct point requires going into the specific claims Smith is indeed making – claims about how economic activity is mechanistically driven by systematic elite deception that relies on the social erasure of the ill, aged, and “splenetic.” Few liberals of the 90s liked to teach this “woke Adam Smith,” or if they did they liked to keep it discreet.

In implication, the liberal ideologists of the 90s were the ones sacrificing truth for economic growth at the expense of the ill and aged by misrepresenting Smith in their own rhetoric. They couldn’t save Smith without giving themselves up. Happily, times have now changed and I see much more of this truer Adam Smith in liberal teaching, to their credit.2

This is heavy lifting, as I said. There are high stakes and high emotions and it might take a few hundred pages of reading to check a key sentence. Unless you trust me or an LLM to do it for you, I suppose… but then we’re back to those thorny issues of dependence again, right where MacIntyre wants us.

In any case, you don’t have to check every one of these historical claims as you read Dependent Rational Animals. You can read it impressionistically and just take away whichever arguments seem clean and transparent given the background that you have. It’s a book that rewards multiple readings, and the first can skim the surface.

It might come as no surprise to learn that MacIntyre made his first impression on me at a low point in my life. I was recommended After Virtue in graduate school by a Christian historian friend after a bad breakup in which I was at fault. Terrible fault. I won’t get into it now, but suffice to say I needed a moral wake up call.

I’d been raised with a mishmash of secular ideologies, mostly Florida libertarian, 19th century European liberal, and Californian technocratic. Atlas Shrugged was often lying around at home and I read it young; I even won some money in one of the Objectivist essay contests as a teenager – I immediately spent it on my own literary prize for the best criticism of my high school and the winner was an amazing Inferno parody with the correct rhyme and meter. The best word for me would have been “cynical.” Cynical but still judgmental, especially about honesty.

The cynicism tended to compound itself. I discovered Nietzsche from Rand and then had new ways to find fault with everything around me. A high school girlfriend was deeply into Cruel Intentions and Dangerous Liaisons and, terrifyingly and brutally, not just as theory but also as her practice. I felt my first classes in undergrad philosophy to be uninspiring social conformity games and chose to pursue science instead. I found the sciences were made political and dishonest by grants gamesmanship. For most of this time I was ideologically rebellious but I became disillusioned with the rebels as well.

I had also been in a lot of pain and had a lot of nightmares. I was often ill. Doctors usually didn’t find anything wrong with me and called it “idiopathic” or sometimes they did but there was nothing to do about it – I kept getting strep even though that wasn’t supposed to happen, for instance. In high school I began to get debilitating headaches, and in my first years of undergrad they were often bad enough I wouldn’t leave my room or talk to anyone for full days. In retrospect they were cluster headaches.

In the middle of undergrad, I closed off from people and focused more and more on work and a long term relationship. I became focused on health and regular habits; I read Camus and “imagined Sisyphus happy.” I tried to depend on people less and less and mechanical systems more and more. My pain receded, but my fears, disillusionment, and self-isolation did not. I tried to get some help from therapists but there wasn’t apparently much to do.

Today, the therapists in the same school offices would probably recognize the underlying trauma and have better tools for handling it than they did fifteen years ago, but I wasn’t going to get that part of the story for many years yet. Instead, I got lonelier and worse as a person and made that terrible botched breakup in grad school. In the pathetic aftermath, I was lucky a kind Christian recognized the misery of my misanthropic, self-judgmental cynicism and gave me After Virtue as an antidote.

This isn’t too unusual as a story for someone who deeply appreciates MacIntyre, I’ve found. A lot of us are men who can power through pain most days but also understand illness from the inside at length, or who cared immensely about truth but couldn’t find any bottom for cynicism in secular ideology. A fair number of us have awful shames and regrets from those periods of our lives. The friend who recommended it to me certainly had the shames and regrets, the pain, and the former cynicism.

This is another aspect of the gravity of MacIntyre’s work. I’m not sure what pain he experienced himself, but when he makes his sweeping statements about pain and shame, it rings true to many men with heavy firsthand experiences. When he discusses the risks of seductive illusions, he seems to know very well what he’s talking about. He’s one of very few writers who I find can consistently meet Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on these levels, and who can speak with comparable insight and apparent experience.

As with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, then, MacIntyre is a good weight reference as well as a good touchstone. From how a friend reads him, I can often get a fair sense of what moral difficulties they’ve been through.

There are dangers to reading After Virtue. It can be strong medicine. It begins with a vivid thought experiment to convey just how different MacIntyre’s perspective on moral philosophy is compared to most of his contemporaries:

Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nonetheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry, and biology. Adults argue with each other about the respective merits of relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and phlogiston theory, although they possess only a very partial knowledge of each. Children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid. Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all. For everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably. (After Virtue, 3rd ed. (2007), p. 1)

The thought experiment builds further, and then MacIntyre explains:

What is the point of constructing this imaginary world inhabited by fictitious pseudo-scientists and real, genuine philosophy? The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. (After Virtue, 3rd ed. (2007), p. 2)

In my opinion, the book delivered on substantiating that hypothesis. Ever since, I have lived as if a catastrophe of the magnitude of that speculative thought experiment had in fact occurred in recent history. It’s been impossible to listen to most everyday use of moral language without noticing the incoherences MacIntyre highlights.

I have also found reasons to believe that similar catastrophe has in fact happened in the sciences at least once before, via Lucio Russo’s often dry but excellent The Forgotten Revolution. MacIntyre’s description of the aftermath in this early section is eerily accurate to Russo’s description of post-Hellenistic history.

The possibility that modern moral language has lost its coherence has clear reactionary implications, and after reading MacIntyre I did spend some time growing more reactionary, to the point of joining in reactionary politics that brought me to Silicon Valley. However, it’s not necessarily or simply reactionary, and MacIntyre closes the opening chapter with a message to radical readers as well:

the modern radical is as confident in the moral expression of his stances and consequently in the assertive uses of the rhetoric of morality as any conservative has ever been. Whatever else he denounces in our culture he is certain that it still possesses the moral resources which he requires in order to denounce it. Everything else may be, in his eyes, in disorder; but the language of morality is in order, just as it is. That he too may be being betrayed by the very language he uses is not a thought available to him. It is the aim of this book to make that thought available to radicals, liberals, and conservatives alike. I cannot however expect to make it palatable; for if it is true, we are all already in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it.

Do not however suppose that the the conclusion to be drawn will turn out to be one of despair… [] if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times. (After Virtue, 3rd ed. (2007), pp. 4–5)

Since 1981, when this was published, this thought that a radical may be “betrayed by the very language he uses” has become widely available to the point of becoming commonplace. It’s often attributed to Lacan-influenced and Foucault-influenced critical theorists instead, today.

Something all of these theorists have in common is an attention to the embodiment of language, a preoccupation also shared by Bourdieu. MacIntyre is particularly attentive to the role of cooperative collectivity and community in this embodiment, but without driving out the place for religion.

in much of the ancient and medieval worlds, as in many other premodern societies, the individual is identified and constituted in and through certain of his or her roles, those roles which bind the individual to the communities in and through which alone specifically human goals are to be attained; I confront the world as a member of this family, this household, this clan, this tribe, this city, this nation, this kingdom. There is no ‘I’ apart from these. To this it may be replied: what about my immortal soul? Surely in the eyes of God I am an individual, prior to and apart from my roles. This rejoinder embodies a misconception, which in part arises from confusion between the Platonic notion of the soul and that of Catholic Christianity. For the Platonist, as later for the Cartesian, the soul, preceding all bodily and social existence, must indeed possess an identity prior to all social roles; but for the Catholic Christian, as earlier for the Aristotelian, the body and the soul are not two linked substances. I am my body and my body is social, born to those parents in this community with a specific social identity. What does make a difference for the Catholic Christian is that I, whatever earthly community I may belong to, am also held to be a member of a heavenly, eternal community in which I also have a role, a community represented on earth by the church. (After Virtue, 3rd ed. (2007), pp. 172)

I can’t do justice to the entire philosophy with short excerpts, but I hope this gives a sense of the revealing debates and conversations this book can start.

On the particular issue of “betrayal by moral language” and on the moral dignity of the disabled and on several others, MacIntyre makes an excellent test case for seeing if a reactionary can listen to and appreciate radical thought or a radical can appreciate reactionary thought.

Within After Virtue itself (and not only in After Virtue), MacIntyre mixes what are usually thought of as radical and reactionary claims close to one another. For example, he can be quite complimentary to Marx and Nietzsche at the same time he is sharply critical.

On Marx, the prologue to the third edition of After Virtue states clearly that

although After Virtue was written in part out of a recognition of those moral inadequacies of Marxism which its twentieth-century history had disclosed, I was and remain deeply indebted to Marx’s critique of the economic, social, and cultural order of capitalism and to the development of that critique by later Marxists. (After Virtue, 3rd ed. (2007), p. xvi)

This is simply complimentary, and that challenges many conservative or reactionary readers immediately. His final word on Marxism in the last chapter of the original book is this:

I [] not only take it that Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition, a claim borne out by the almost indefinitely numerous and conflicting range of political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners – this does not at all imply that Marxism is not still one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society – but I believe this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture. (After Virtue, 3rd ed. (2007), p. 262)

This combines decisive criticism and high respect in one line. It spoke especially clearly for me because I had already been listening to the Marxist Platypus society discuss the exhaustion of Marxism as a political tradition among one another and with other Marxists for some time before reading this line. They showed me many Marxists were capable of hearing this sort of blunt criticism and that some would go so far as to agree. Being willing to hear it has become an important test of good faith for me, and I use a handful of other criticisms of Marxism from MacIntyre similarly.

My personal background had been much more Nietzschean radical than Marxist radical before reading MacIntyre, so I was personally sensitive to his choices of criticism and admiration for Nietzsche. I still think of Nietzsche as a member of my “heavenly community”3 in some sense to this day, though he’s an odd neighbor to have in eternity.

This is a fairly representative example of what MacIntyre has to say on Nietzsche:

For it was Nietzsche’s historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher – certainly more clearly than his counterparts in Anglo-Saxon emotivism and continental existentialism – not only that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for moral philosophy. It is true that Nietzsche, as I shall later argue, illegitimately generalized from the condition of moral judgment in his own day to the nature of morality as such; and I have already said justifiably harsh words about Nietzsche’s construction of that at once absurd and dangerous fantasy, the Übermensch. But it is worth noting how even that construction began from a genuine insight. (After Virtue, 3rd ed. (2007), p. 113)

This should be extremely easy for a Nietzschean to hear and engage with, in my opinion, regardless of agreement. It’s less inflammatory than most of what Nietzsche wrote without being so milquetoast to be offensive. It’s also likely to be something a reactionary can hear and engage with. Giving Nietzsche credit for accurate critical insight into something else that deserves criticism should be possible even for Nietzsche’s fierce opponents.

This nearby quote is another interesting test:

In another way, too, Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. For I have already argued that the present age is in its presentation of itself to itself dominantly Weberian; and I have also noticed that Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism – irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unsolved and his solutions defy reason – remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture. Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely context of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. (After Virtue, 3rd ed. (2007), p. 114)

On the one hand, it’s superficially very high praise to be called “the moral philosopher of the present age”; on the other, it’s meant as a criticism of the age. It’s like being credited with the world’s most important lab leak.

There are other good candidates for touchstones like MacIntyre here. I’ve sometimes used Edmund Burke, though since reading about his contemporary history and reading critiques like John Thelwall’s I’ve become too personally confused about what to make of Burke as a politician to continue that. I’ve also sometimes used Isaiah Berlin, though since reading Hiruta’s Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin I’ve decided not to do that again in public until conflicts over Zionism cool down again (if they do). For now, MacIntyre is my favorite choice.

None of this goes to say that I take admiration of MacIntyre as a necessarily good sign or distaste as a necessarily bad sign.

There’s the infamous case of the conservative Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option, which was inspired by After Virtue’s final line – “we are waiting not for Godot but for a another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.” MacIntyre wanted nothing to do with it and considered Dreher to have missed the point, even as Dreher seemed to appreciate After Virtue. I’m happy to make similar judgments.

On the other hand, there are acid critics of MacIntyre’s work who I respect even when I think they’re missing some of the points. Particularly among liberals, I expect some of MacIntyre’s sweeping statements about English moral traditions to cross lines they won’t accept; among left radicals, I consider his austerity4 and his direct advocacies of authority to be respectable grounds for dismissing him. For an excellent example of a liberal making acid criticisms, see Martha Nussbaum’s review of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. That’s a book that I personally learned a lot from. It’s MacIntyre’s closest to what I’ve been writing about tradition and solidarity here at The Blackthorn Hedge. Nonetheless, I respect her criticism there and I respect her other philosophical work; I think of her The Cosmopolitan Tradition often when writing my letters, as well.

Alasdair MacIntyre passed away only recently, on May 21 of this year. By that time I had decided to start this Substack, but I still worried that I was choosing unwisely and I was unsure of some of my plans for beginning.

One factor that confirmed for me that I should go ahead was the many warm remembrances and tributes to MacIntyre here after he passed. A few:

The most unexpected to me was from John Ganz,

This past week saw the death of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue (1981), one of the great works of 20th-century moral philosophy. MacIntyre began as a Marxist but converted to Catholicism and dedicated himself to the recovery of the tradition of virtue ethics that began in the classical world, was first articulated by Aristotle, and then developed by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. I’ve always been fascinated with MacIntyre and have read After Virtue a few times (although, perhaps, never quite cover-to-cover—the ideas are breathtaking, the writing you have to wade through to parse them, somewhat less so.) When I told a philosophy major friend how much I admired MacIntyre, he replied, “Well, that makes sense since you are both cranky Aristotelians,” which I took as a great compliment. ( “Ehud Olmert on Gaza; reading After Virtue after bureaucracy; A Postscript”)

Seeing that was welcome, and was crucial for my decision to spend serious time on his thinking about contemporary fascism. Being critical of the prose makes perfect sense if one’s standards are set by Trilling and Hazlitt, like Ganz’s are. Taking “cranky Aristotelian” as a compliment fit other character details into place and gave me confidence that starting into Reactionary Modernism would be well worth my time. I haven’t regretted the choice.

I look forward to learning more about others through their engagements with MacIntyre here. I hope some one or two of you do take up Dependent Rational Animals and read the whole thing. I’ll continue to draw on his work in the letters I write, directly and indirectly.

Thank you for reading. As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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My point with all the letters of this series is to establish this hedge as a place where even a conversation as heated as the one about contemporary fascism can happen gradually, at the actual pace of reading and digesting background sources, for the sake of deliberative clarity about what is at stake. I’m not going to treat “Trumpism is a fascism” as a mere smear campaign, mere rhetoric, even though it hasn’t been my own opinion that “fascism” is the most fitting word to describe the majority of the contemporary American right.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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I am not currently a conscious partisan of the left, of the right, or of the center between them. I leave it to my readers to judge if I’m an unknowing partisan or a useful idiot of any one side or another.

At the same time, I am a partisan of deliberative democracy. I’ve begun writing here at The Blackthorn Hedge to engage in public deliberation as well as I can. I am particularly concerned to establish a brake for online stampede dynamics, a place where even despite immense collective momentum online to simplify issues and overrun one’s opponents with hasty rushed judgments, it’s possible to confidently refuse the rush with the support of other readers.

This doesn’t mean attacking the stampedes, nor fleeing from them: it means directly meeting their momentum on its own terms and answering it with grounded counterforce. It requires support on the same ground the stampede drives its hooves into. The forces at work are the forces of emotion, of social respect and status, of “affect,” and of what an older school of sociology called mana.

In private conversations with the right in recent years, I’ve seen how emotionally inflammatory accusations of “fascism” have been. I’ve seen many awful rushes to judgment driven by right and left both over the issue of what is fascist and what is not. While antifascists have believed themselves to be obviously fighting the good fight, others have viewed them as unhinged, violent ideologues just looking for excuses to break and humiliate anyone with a belief system that they don’t approve of.

It’s hard to overstate how serious the right wing meme of “do not forget that these people want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed, and they think it’s funny” has become for young men, especially.

I’ve left that background unstated in my prior letters, but in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination I think it’s the right time to be explicit. This is what I’ve seen, and it’s why I think participating in the debates over fascism is crucial for my deliberative politics today. Centrists who try to put it out of mind or otherwise leave it to the fringes are ignoring a primary factor in current political polarization and violence.

There are very good reasons to be worried about fascism and to oppose it with violence, in my opinion. However, there are also serious dangers to misjudging others as fascist when they are not. Both Type I errors and Type II errors, false positives and false negatives, are very costly in matters with such high stakes. I’ve made both kinds of error. I have unknowingly and unwisely supported live contemporary fascism in the recent past, and I have also unwisely smeared non-fascists as fascists in the more distant past. In each case I was moving with a crowd, trusting the momentum of a herd led by leaders who had cut corners in their own judgments or simply lied.

Now, therefore, I’m taking more responsibility. I’ve decided to take a bet that, specifically, ’s case that contemporary right wing politics is fascist is an unusually clean one that deserves serious consideration and engagement. I’ve been gradually working my way through his sources and reflecting on my points of agreement and disagreement. Two prior letters here covered Reactionary Modernism and The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe.

Like those, this will be an inconclusive series of reflections that represents work in progress.

Ganz’s model centers on a simple-looking and plausible claim about contemporary American politics: that (0) “what we are observing is a superabundance or overdevelopment of civil society that overwhelms the integrative functions of the state” (“Behemoth or Leviathan?”, final sentence).

“Civil society” is the composition of the competitive, individualistic social dynamics within society proper, and the state’s “integrative functions” are dynamics that ensure that the individualistic competition does not tear the society apart. For instance, the state enforces fair play so that cooperative collective effects consistently arise out of the competitive individual motivations – prohibitions on murder and false advertising, for instance – state functions that even most Libertarians can love.

For most people, granting that plausible claim would leave the further connection to fascism entirely obscure. Ganz draws that connection through (1) a claim that the individualistic competition of civil society is prone to break down into lawless gangster competition when it overwhelms the integrative functions of the state, and (2) another that the essence of fascism is this lawless gangster competition, so (3) this kind of breakdown is essentially fascist.

It’s a shockingly coarse model, to me, but in some ways that’s a good sign. The most successful scientific models are often shockingly simple – consider Keplerian heliocentrism compared to the epicycles of Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy, or consider the claim that biological heredity is overwhelmingly mediated through a simple four-symbol linear code, DNA’s ATGC. The simplicity may come as a shock, but sometimes the truth is very simple.

Ganz derives the first simple plausible claim (marked (0) above), from Dylan Riley’s model of interwar European fascism in The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe, but Riley did not agree that contemporary American right wing politics followed this form. In his preface to the second edition of the book he explicitly states “Trumpism paradoxically shares much more with nineteenth-century Bonapartism—in which a charismatic figure emerges in the context of a fragmented and weak civil society—than it does with twentieth-century fascism” (Civic Foundations 2nd ed., Verso 2019, p. xxiii), and then he goes on to substantiate the claim at greater length in the next several pages (xxiii–xxx).

Ganz represents that disagreement straightforwardly and (in what I have read) generously, and also often compares Trumpism to nineteenth century Bonapartism. However, he disagrees that we see a weak civil society today, for instance with this interesting observation in “The Last Days of Discourse” from February:

Now, we are accustomed to thinking that the Internet and social media platforms are atomizing people and dissolving civic ties, but it’s also binding and associating people in new ways. What if instead of a civic decline we understood the social media world as the rapid development of new forms of civil association, a development so rapid and explosive that the political elite has trouble adapting? This would explain a great deal of empirical facts of the present situation: From the fractured media environment to businessmen ascending to political leadership. It would also fit in with the conception I wrote about yesterday of civil society attacking the state, which is literally what is happening: a private businessman—the biggest private businessman in the world—is taking a hatchet to the state apparatus.

This rings true to me, but I couldn’t initially judge whether it was a fair conceptual move in the tradition he’s working with or not. Therefore, after reading Riley’s book myself, next I went into the background that Ganz recommends for following his thinking about “civil society” and how “gangsterism” and “mob rule” arise within it: Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State and Frank Ruda’s Hegel’s Rabble.

Here, I should immediately inform any readers that I have minimal taste or talent for Hegelian philosophy. When I’ve tried to read the Phenomenology of Spirit, I’ve never finished it. My conclusion has been that my spirit just has a different phenomenology than Hegel’s did. None of the descriptions of thought rang true.

At the same time, I respect those who do have the talent for it. Somehow, people grasp Hegelian logic and do incredible things with it. Not necessarily things I’d want to do myself, when it’s Stalin or Kojève, but nonetheless, it’s hard to deny there’s something to it. The pioneering category theorist William Lawvere was into it, and so are some of the contemporary pioneers of homotopy type theory.

Therefore I was very happy to find that Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State was accessible to me and provided a compelling summary for Hegel’s political thinking. It was entirely sufficient to make Ruda’s more demanding book accessible to me, as well. Avineri gave me some excellent clues as to why I’ve frequently bounced off of Hegel’s assertions in the past, and I may be ready to re-attempt the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic next year once other priorities are taken care of.

This isn’t to say that I now agree with Hegel. Instead, Avineri has shown me how I have had incommensurably different ideas of the “organic,” the “actual,” “understanding,” and the “universal” than Hegel, all stemming from a very different set of default intuitions of nature and science.

A somewhat superficial example of what I mean is Hegel’s famous “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” This is a beautifully expressed sentiment in context:

One word more about giving instructions as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is history’s inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over and against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk. (Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, p. 128)

It’s romantic and sweepingly elegant, but there’s a problem: that’s just not how owls work! Owls also fly pre-dawn (though I understand that many intellectuals never wake up early enough to hear or see that). And of all the goddesses to invoke while getting a flat naturalistic fact wrong… Minerva might be your worst possible choice.

As a matter of fact, some philosophers are up working before dawn, raising ideals and giving instructions before anyone else understands how or why. The owls of Minerva fly at any twilight, dawn or dusk, whenever their keen senses are decisive.1

This is a small thing in itself, but it’s a symptom of more extensive and more substantive issues as well, some of which are crucial for the idea of the rabble.

Detachment from organic unity

The rabble can be defined in a few complementary ways, but a central definition for Ruda and for Ganz is that they are those people who become detached from the organic unity of the state. They are the poor or the rich who cease to participate in the organically unified “general will” of the society. Stereotypically, the poor are cut out of the life of the state by their poverty while the rich exempt themselves from their responsibilities to the state by their property.

Now from outside of the Hegelian tradition, “organic unity” is a notoriously flexible phrase. It can stand for any number of specific intuitive forms of organic order. Socially, it’s often used to express simple prejudice, especially antisemitic prejudice where the Jew is an “inorganic adulterant” of the “organic racial unity” of a nation. Organic and inorganic unity there respectively indicate the essential unity of an organism with itself by contrast to its accidental unity with a parasite or poison. Hegel was using these biological analogies at the dawn of a massive explosion of new applications which were also used by Goethe, Humboldt, Darwin, Haeckel, Spencer, Durkheim, and Freud. Those other possible applications now obscure Hegel’s meaning for readers today, since in retrospect the natural meaning of “organic unity” was not as unique and clear as it might have seemed.

Wisely, then, Ruda gives the explicit paradigm of organic unity and detachment from it for Hegel: the hand and the body (Hegel’s Rabble, p. 82–83). When the hand is attached to a person’s body, it has organic unity with it and expresses the person’s will; when it is cut off, it cannot express any will of the whole but merely putrefies. The poor rabble is a man cut off from society by his poverty2 who then “putrefies” by becoming indignant against others with property and resentful of the state.

Curiously for me, Ruda also argues in these pages that the body that the hand is cut off from does not putrefy and analogizes this to the state as well:

If the detached organ negates its own concept, which is necessarily implied in the organism, then the crippled, faulty organism by no means negates the concept. [I.e., “detached organ” negates the concept of organ but “crippled organism” does not negate the concept of organism.] Thus it becomes again clear that only the inadequacy of reality to its concept describes a negation. [It did not become clear to me.] The state does not start to putrefy when organs detached from it begin to putrefy. For decomposition and putrefaction name processes of transition, inaugurated by an inadequate relationship between reality and concept, at whose end stands the dissolution of the conceptless reality. [The conceptless reality would be, for instance, the cut-off hand which is no longer an organ (so conceptless) because its being an organ (its concept) was negated by it being detached (its inadequacy).] (Hegel’s Rabble, p. 85)

Forgive me if that reads as gobbledegook to you. Naturalistically, I understand it looks like sheer nonsense: thousands of years of battlefield surgery would have looked very different if bodies were not prone to also putrefy when their detached organs putrefied. Modern surgery would look entirely different if sterilization and refrigeration did not prevent the putrefaction of detached organs.

Naturalistically, putrefaction is inaugurated by bacteria and “inadequate relationship between reality and concept” has nothing to do with it. However, there still is a powerful point here that I want to pull out, because it’s an ideal example of both why Hegelian logic works in intellectual solidarity and also why it doesn’t work better. Even if this seemed naturalistically absurd, one could in fact complicate the Hegelian logic to get it to fit the naturalistic facts.

First, we can revise the logic to say that in the context of sterile refrigeration, it turns out that detachment of an organ does not negate the concept of the organ. It persists indefinitely, so its concept is apparently adequate to its reality. The concept of an organ is actually only negated by detachment in the presence of heat and bacteria, and we can charitably grant that Hegel and Ruda didn’t feel it was important to complicate their example because they took heat and bacteria for granted. They’re philosophers, they’re not working in sterile medical bays.

Similarly, we can revise the logic to say that crippling injury may negate the concept of an organism if the injury is of a kind that putrefies. Whether it is or not is another medical question – perhaps the blood vessels need to be carefully cut and cauterized ensure the wound does not negate a concept of the circulatory system or immune system that is necessary for the concept of the organism.

This sort of refinement dispels the superficial absurdity of the simple example, but it also introduces new problems for the philosophical applications of the paradigm. Hegel and Ruda lean hard on the simplicity of this paradigm to draw their philosophical conclusions.

Mummies, plants, zombies, and fungi

First, let’s go further into the varieties of detached organs.3 There is the refrigerated hand, just covered. There are also mummified fossil hands. There are also organs that are designed to detach and persist briefly – the placenta is one important one for mammals, and there are detachable penises that some animals use in sex, but the examples here are far richer among the plants and fungi. Often, a detached organ of a plant is sufficient to grow a whole new plant; often, an organ of one plant can be grafted onto the trunk or roots of another plant; the leaves of deciduous plants are designed to wither, die, and then detach after withering rather than before.

Ruda argues as if Hegel’s poor rabble are organs of the state detached by poverty that will therefore, according to Hegel, putrefy into nothings, but in history, we often see the poor gather together and form bands that become brigands that rise to become new nobles of new states! Investigations of the popular “stationary bandit theory” in the academic study of state formation have organized many such examples; the work of Charles Tilly is a great starting place.

That suggests that a more plant-shoot-like organ concept is more appropriate for the poor in a society than a more hand-like organ concept. That would then have cascading implications through the rest of Ruda’s arguments and Hegel’s about the relationships of the poor to the organic unity of the state. It would make the “putrefaction” of the poor into a rabble not just necessarily a loss of concept, but potentially a transformation of concept instead. We could say: exclusion from the state induces the poor to form counter-states.

At that point we would have a clean connection to Dylan Riley’s work, which investigated the conflicts between failing states losing hegemony and their fragmented counterhegemonic oppositions, both of which gave way before newly organizing fascist hegemonies.

None of this exactly contradicts Ruda’s criticism of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. He also points out that the poor and the rabble remain existent, despite an apparently inadequate concept, and also argues that this is a problem for Hegel’s theory of the state. He doesn’t suggest transforming the idea of organic unity from hand-like to shoot-like, but instead introduces an idea of an “un-dead” rabble.

This is unnecessary since plant-life rather than un-dead would also fit, but it’s highly-charged to motivate readers to take this hole in Hegel’s political philosophy seriously, and terminology like it caught on. The language of political undeath became fashionable and has since connected to natural fungal symbolism in the imagery clustered around the memetic phrase “you cannot kill me in a way that matters.” Fungi have organic unities that are even more alien to animal biology intuitions than plants do, also compatible with Ruda’s “un-death,” and these unities have had an important place in the political traditions downstream of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus with its well-known advocacy of nonhierarchical “rhizomatic” political organization.

Partial detachment, specialist capital

Another dimension of variation worth considering is in the kinds of detachment that are possible. “Cutting off the hand” is an extreme type of detachment – are the poor really cut out of society like a hand is cut off a body? What if it’s more like just the blood flow to the hand has stopped, so it’s falling asleep? Or the tendons have been cut? Or the nerves are blocked?

These do each interfere with organic unity in one of the key senses Hegel cares about: they each destroy the capacity of the hand to carry out the will of the person whose hand it is. However, that capacity is not simple; it has parts. A hand with cut tendons cannot work, but might still feel quite a lot. A hand that is asleep may not be movable or feelable now, but it is revivable. Different nerve blocks can compromise specific functions of a hand quite selectively and modularly.

In some cases this might lead to putrefaction – if blood flow to the hand stops for much too long, the blood may pool and the hand may turn gangrenous, for instance – or cut tendons might make it impossible to move the hand with the dexterity needed to prevent scrapes and cuts that become infected.

In Hegel’s Rabble, what connects people to the state is their rights, privileges, and responsibilities especially their rights to and ownership of property. Any set of denied rights or responsibilities could constitute a partial detachment of a person from the state, and though a focus on material poverty and material riches is well-motivated and natural, I also found it interesting to consider other focuses.

One close to my own heart as a Bourdieu reader is cultural capital, and I found it immediately easy to conceptualize an “avant-garde rabble” and “philistine rabble” as analogs of the “rich rabble” and “poor rabble.” The avant-garde rabble would be those successful artists who deny their responsibility to artistic tradition once they’ve made it: they ridicule the techniques they mastered and play selfish fashion games at the expense of collective cultural vitality. The philistine rabble hardly need explanation: having been given little cultural capital early, they decide to refuse collective standards of taste later and instead indignantly embrace lowbrow anti-art entertainment.

Alternatively, looking at “human capital” and one of its usual vulgarizations into “smarties” and “stupids,” it’s also quite natural to look at the “smart rabble” and the “stupid rabble.” The smart rabble use their intelligence to dominate others technocratically and game state systems for their own benefit, while the stupid rabble would “putrefy” by learning to reject the whole system of expertise and “informed” public opinion. It wouldn’t be hard to see a lot of selfish tech workers or influencer thought leaders as a “smart rabble” today.

These make immediate sense, but I think they also begin to reveal a dangerous flexibility and broadening potential in the idea of “rabble.” Hegel’s idea gets some of its simplicity from considering all property as a single type, but people care about multiple incommensurate forms of capital and they can become strongly resentful or entitled on the basis of deficits or excesses of several of them.

Any of these forms of capital can be grounds for different kinds of detachment from the state, and some clearly putrefy. Yet if I started going around calling a large fraction of my political opponents “stupid rabble,” I suspect I’d be doing something very wrong even if the idea fits!

And here I’d like to bring in an odd feature of Hegel’s model: that for Hegel, the poor rabble is a specifically modern problem (his modern) because of a transformation of Christianity at the time of the Reformation that changed the relationship of the state to poverty.

The lymph of the Leviathan?

The entire first chapter of Hegel’s Rabble is about this transformation and Hegel’s idea of it. “Luther profanes poverty,” it begins:

The reformation ousts poverty from its holy throne and destroys in this way the privilege of a class that imagines itself to be the sole possessor of truth. Luther thereby shatters the medieval economy of salvation that had become dilapidated and that had previously been able to assign a seemingly fixed place to poverty. Before Luther, voluntary rejection of property and refusal of worldly possessions is integrated into an economy of salvation by the fact that the beggar is promised “spiritual support” in return. (Hegel’s Rabble, p. 6)

The alleged breakdown is a confusion of indulgences and alms, monks and beggars. Before Luther, per Hegel, when poverty was considered holy and supported, it was not a detachment from the state.

Ruda’s project in the book is to show that Hegel’s great accomplishment was making this crucial problem of the modern, post-Lutheran state clear for Marx, who was then inspired to re-conceive the problem of poor rabble by envisioning a new class, the proletariat, and a new approach to political philosophy. The project is framed using a quote from Avineri:

Shlomo Avineri has remarked that Hegel leaves one problem peculiarly unresolved in his Philosophy of Right—in this work which one assigns to his ‘political philosophy’:

Though his theory of the state is aimed at integrating the contending interests of civil society under a common bond, on the problem of poverty he ultimately has nothing more to say than that it is one of “the most disturbing problems which agitate modern societies”. On no other occasion Hegel leaves a problem at that. (Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, p. 154)

In Hegel’s theory of the state, which proposes to expound the necessary deployment and rational structure of an ethical polity, Hegel is, according to Avineri, confronted with a problem that fundamentally runs contrary to his own claim. In what follows I want to take up Avineri’s remark but also to alter it… It will have to be shown that the ‘appearance’ of the rabble in Hegel’s philosophy is a problem of philosophy and within philosophy but a problem with something other than philosophy: a problem with politics… The present book aims to show that one can observe in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that the philosophical description of the constitution of politics—under the aegis of the state—fails, and in such a way that its failure offers a perspective on the peculiarly singular logic of politics… Finally, I will show that, with the failure linked to the rabble, a different transition from Hegel to Marx becomes thinkable. (Hegel’s Rabble, p. 4)

Given my understanding of the Marxist tradition, this seemed like an interesting and well-founded project within that tradition. I was glad to read it for that sake, and I felt that it earned its conclusions as well as I could verify with my limited talent for Hegelianism.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel there was something narrow and idiosyncratic about all of this. For instance, in English politics of the 18th century, various rabbles played a major positive role in the state as well-documented by Charles Tilly in his Contentious Performances. In my reading, the book made a good argument that the “nonviolent popular movement” as a political form emerged in England in the 18th century exactly as a form of political participation of rabbles. The “nonviolence” was often questionable, sometimes more of a polite fiction than an exact truth, but it was an effective fiction insofar as it channeled rabble indignation into more-or-less democratic participation. In England, then, the poor rabble seem to have been less perniciously detached from the state by their poverty.

My concern grew when I saw Ruda cite Adam Smith in the following dismissive way:

This is precisely why Hegel does not rely on automatism of the _invisible hand_ for the deduction of ethicality and its attitude… Here Hegel goes beyond Adam Smith. One can say that Smith’s thought devotes itself exclusively to considering individual interests and is unable to attain the level of universality. It precisely cannot be interest which drives out ethicality and its attitude. (Hegel’s Rabble, p. 110)

This claim may be correct in some highly technical sense, but to my more common sense it looks like a flat mistake based on a common caricature. It’s very hard for me to think of the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a man solely concerned with individual interests; sympathy, instead, is a constant theme, and the later project The Wealth of Nations appears to be motivated by a specific theory of how an optimistic representation of the diversity of individual interests could increase universal sympathy.4

The English seem to have been following a different political form than the Hegelian model: they included the resentful poor as an organ of the state. They also whipped them, hanged them, imprisoned them, starved them, and shipped them off to America and Australia, but they weren’t simply detached. Sometimes the whipped and shipped off could end up returning as highly honored members of the British state.

If one’s paradigm for organic unity is the hand, this may be indefinitely mysterious. However, it’s more natural if one instead takes the lymphatic system as a paradigm. The lymph is an animal body’s dedicated internal system for shunting fluid wastes from interstitial spaces back into blood for disposal, and the lymph nodes are responsible for filtering and destroying many bacteria and other pathogens. The lymphatic fluid is in organic unity with the rest of the body, even though it’s an unequal unity, and even though it is presumed to need filtering and segregation.

There are organs like hands and organs like the veins, lymphatic network, or skin as a whole. After reading Avineri and Ruda, I am not convinced that the hands make a better paradigm for the organic unity of political estates within the state than the tissues would. And I am not convinced that the problem of the rabble would be as central in a political philosophy centering organic unities like those of tissues rather than those of hands.

There are further possibilities here as well, for instance the organic unities of ecologies instead of single-organism unities. I don’t think that type of unity will be appealing as a paradigm for the unity of the state for Hegelians, but it has been appealing for many neoliberals and I’d like to think more about the exact reasons why on each side. It’s not always “nature red in tooth and claw” type ideology for the neoliberals; sometimes it’s the opposite ideology of a pre-established harmony of nature. It now strikes me that I should start paying more attention to that detail and use it as a clue to understand the mutual misunderstandings between leftists and centrists.

If tissues are a more fitting paradigm for organic unity, then this suggests a transformation of the question of the “strength” of civil society in Riley’s models and in Ganz’s. Repeating again,

What if instead of a civic decline we understood the social media world as the rapid development of new forms of civil association, a development so rapid and explosive that the political elite has trouble adapting? (John Ganz, “The Last Days of Discourse”, last paragraph)

A particularly striking pattern of how the new forms of civil association change in the social media world is they change the contact surfaces between the different political estates: they change the contact geometry of the tissues. If the state’s integrative functions are integrating different estates at their interfaces with one another, then major changes in the contact surfaces would obsolete the prior state integrative functions and demand major innovation in short order. This would be a reason for state failure regardless of relative strength of civil society and state.

However, exploring those ideas further could go far beyond the first reflections on this reading. I’d like to attempt that in the future, but for now I’ll wrap here. Both Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State and Hegel’s Rabble have helped me understand Ganz’s models better and, I hope, the wider left as well. If I do get over the hump of reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic properly in the next year, I’ll have Ruda and Avineri to thank for making that possible, and Ganz to thank for suggesting them.

Thank you for reading, and as always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

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Last week, I accidentally picked a crucial time for a break from Substack. I decided to commit to focusing on friends while traveling, but just as I began my trip three major political events impacted my social groups on and off Substack in quick succession: first, the bombing of negotiations in Doha; next, the murder of Iryna Zaruska; next, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I was sent the video of Kirk’s shooting even before official confirmation of his death, in a reactionary-leaning groupchat actively discussing Zaruska at the time. I would later inform them of the Doha bombing. Conversation about all three recurred throughout my trip. I was happy to have some good, measured writing from Substack to recommend to people in those offline conversations, and overall that offline talk felt like effective deliberative work. For better and worse this is how democratic participation works: you have to take the opportunity to talk when and where people want to talk.

At the same time, these opportunities do not arise without groundwork laid beforehand. Before the shocks, before the time is right for these direct conversations in the immediate wake of an encounter with these tragic events, there are other conversations that build up the preconditions for them. Conversations to build trust, conversations to prove that political disagreements aren’t going to destroy a relationship, conversations to create shared understanding of patterns that could be important to reference in the moment of shock. These are the stuff of solidarity, at least as I use the word.

A long time ago I was a Red Cross certified lifeguard and a regular rock climber, and in both hobbies there were many lessons to learn about how to take responsibility for dangerous crises before they occur so as to be ready for responsibility when they occur. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found many ways to translate those lessons to emotional and intellectual work. It can be fairly boring and it doesn’t dramatize well – it would only show up on TV in a montage with some dramatic soundtrack overlaid to bring it all together – but on the other hand it builds up momentum and sets the stages for the more satisfying dramatics. Just like I’d never have made a daring leap from one high rock ledge to another without the careful climb up to the ledge using carefully-knotted ropes and a well-checked harness, I’d never have made the high-personal-stakes political confrontations I have without more quiet and deliberate preparation.1

Generally, I was happy with my conversations over the last week. I was also happy with the preparation I’d done for them here.

For instance, I felt good about having taken an open stand here for starting a few months ago to be able to share his writing effectively in private, across the political aisle. That wouldn’t have been possible to do in the last week without personally accepting some of the heat he’s raised by using “fascist” fairly freely. I think that his choice to raise the heat has been justified insofar as his fascist model isn’t just an excuse to smear opponents, but I wouldn’t have been able to make that case that it’s more than a smear for my friends who felt smeared without doing prior work like reading Reactionary Modernism or The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe and thus demonstrating the actual, substantial meat of the model beyond its shallowest rhetorical surfaces.

More personally, I was glad to have written several of my prior letters. When discussing the weird messages on Kirk’s assassin’s bullet casings, which may have a meaning known to other subculture insiders but are also intentionally meant to confuse and provoke outsider “normies,” it was a perfect match for “Etics, Emics, and Emetics”: the bullet casing messages were emetic communication. The assassin’s politics are also a good case of right/left “Facehugger Theory.” When discussing allegations Kirk acted in bad faith as an “engagement farmer,” it was useful to refer to “Fracking the Collective Unconscious.” And in general, talking about the collective dynamics of response to the events as much as the events themselves, I have been returning again and again to “solidarity.” Solidarity for and against violence, solidarity for and against various types of speech, and so on.

In short, I don’t feel much need to change my approach here. My plans can stay steady, and my plan for today’s letter will be what it was before any of these recent events: to return to “solidarity” from another angle. Where the first article introduced it as a type of local order and the second surveyed several varieties of those local orders, this letter will focus on what gets ordered by solidarity. The last focused on the form of solidarity; this will focus on the matter.

“Matter” in this Aristotelian sense is not scientific physical matter, and it includes physical energy – part of why physical mass-energy equivalence is not entirely surprising in the long sweep of scientific history, and also why it was once so hard to determine whether heat was a fluid in itself. Social matter and social energy are both ordered by solidarities, and I’ve already been discussing examples.

The events of the last week were shocks because there was stored social energy to release: energies of righteousness to turn to outrage, energies of happiness to turn to horror, and yes, some energies of resentment to turn to glee. Some groups that were ordered around shared resentments did in fact celebrate Kirk’s death; others celebrated Israel’s bold escalation to bomb Doha. However, the interruptions of collective happiness into horror were by far the more powerful and broader response: horror especially from the many people investing their energy in the happiness of young families and the satisfactions of nonviolent free speech.

Nonviolent free speech norms are a crucial pattern of local order for American political solidarity. Acting violent in response to speech or acting repressive of speech have been frequent grounds for social exclusion and schism. That’s clear enough on the formal level, but the matter is also worth attention. Norms never just enforce themselves or motivate themselves, but rather always persist by satisfying prior motivations and channeling prior forces. If people didn’t have appropriate prior active attitudes to violence, they couldn’t accept or enforce norms of nonviolence, and in most centuries and civilizations they haven’t.

When looking at where nonviolence norms prevail and why, differences in the personal matter underlying the social form are crucial. For instance, nonviolence norms usually prevail only among the sane and the relatively well-fed. Getting “insane from hunger” or “hangry” makes norms of nonviolence both difficult to obey and difficult to enforce; losing self-control over aggressive impulses makes nonviolence flatly impossible as a choice, necessitating mechanical controls such as padded cells and straightjackets.

One of the perennial and justified grievances of radicals (both left and right) against the contemporary political center is that the contemporary center’s norms are unfit for the material conditions of the less well-off. This applies to hunger itself uncontroversially, one of the primary reasons for broad support of food welfare programs, but also, more controversially, to racial and sexual traumas.

It’s a very different thing to nonviolently respect free speech norms while resisting taunting about sexuality as a rape victim than as someone for whom rape is something that only theoretically happens to other people. Having been a rape victim is a material condition, and handling that condition peacefully and politely is difficult to do without precious, rare social supports such as understanding and protective friends or professional therapists. If this simply sounds left-coded, consider how having had one’s child raped is also difficult to endure peacefully and politely for parents. That issue, highlighted in arrests of outraged fathers of daughters alleging rape, has inflamed the English right against centrist British governments in recent years.

Sexual compulsions and repulsions are so powerful and prevalent and so important as determinants of social behavior that it has been fairly common since the early 20th century to try to use them to explain all psychology and sometimes all sociology and economics, too.

For Freudians, the usual term for this energy of sexual compulsion and repulsion was libido and all motivations amounted to various transformations of libido. Unreflective, unconscious libido was the “id,” libido made conscious motivation constituted the “ego,” and libido turned against itself by repressions and punishments constituted a “superego.” Whether or not any of that was correct, it became an important way of thinking for many powerful and creative people and has thereby grounded remarkable solidarity patterns in itself.

One of the strengths and weaknesses of libidinal theories has been their mechanistic simplicity: there is a single fluid-like energy, libido, that flows through “channels of desire” to drive behavior. The libido has either one aspect, a creative erotic potential seeking pleasure, or two, with the second a destructive “thanateric” potential seeking death or repetition. The channels are partly conscious and partly unconscious, such as attachments to personal relationships or desires for particular objects. If the channels are badly formed, then the flows of the libido lead to pathological behaviors such as neurotic obsessions or sadistic violence.

This simplicity made for fast, definite judgments of normalcy and pathology. Some channellings of libido are acceptable to some groups, while others are not. Freud wrote that there had been natural disagreements about which desires should be acceptable and which should be rejected, and that these disagreements explained a succession of different social orders in different epochs of history. Civilization depended on the collective repression of individual desire, but this would ensure perennial resentment and rebellion.

One of Freud’s radical students, Wilhelm Reich, sided with those rebels and initiated the Sexual Revolution, a phrase he coined. He went so far as to publicly teach sex ed and Marxism to workers in Berlin just at the time of the establishment of the Nazi regime, before being pressured out of Germany – and then out of Norway – eventually finding his way to the US – later to die in prison for defying the FDA. He championed an erotic-only libido theory and developed methods for quickly judging a person’s major repressions of libido from physical postural habits he called “character armors.”

Tied to this theory was a corresponding theory of fascism, so that certain repressions were theoretically linked to fascist character. These repressions, moreover, were believed to be contagious – an “emotional plague” – so his groups could vigorously quarantine or exclude anyone showing symptoms. He became infamous for later believing that libidinal flows could be sensed externally and moved directly as a form of subtle energy he called “orgone.”

Whether because of or in spite of this infamy, his writings and practices became important elements of the later solidarity of the 1960s New Left. “During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police,” records the second paragraph of his Wikipedia page. The Frankfurt school theorist Herbert Marcuse had been particularly influential in popularizing his own similar union of Marxism and Freudianism in the US, particularly via 1955’s Eros and Civilization, while in France Jacques Lacan created a radical school of language-focused Freudianism that was taken up into Marxist theory via Louis Althusser, marked by 1964’s “Freud and Lacan,” making a different influential path to combining Marxism and Freudianism for the French student movements.

Whatever their theoretical details, these hybrid Communist-psychoanalytic movements of the 60s became known for their collective energy and their unanswerable and impatient collective criticisms of others’ subconscious fascism, authoritarianism, repression, squareness, and so on. They proved that at least they themselves were powerfully driven and organized by their own sexual instincts and libidos, and they simultaneously became some of the boldest advocates and opponents of free speech and the boldest proponents and antagonists of prevailing norms of political nonviolence.

In the meantime, while these radicals sought solidarity in revolution against repression, others developed the potentials of Freud’s theories more conservatively. Instead of focusing on coarse structure of repression, they focused on details of the channels for expressing libido. They were especially successful in entertainment and advertising.

The advertisers, such as Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, were not alone in this interest and they were hardly the first to explore it. In the Renaissance, for instance, the infamous heretic to the church and hero to secularists Giordano Bruno had written on the use of erotic imagery as a means of crowd control, describing how to “enchain” a group to a magician’s will by means of erotic suggestions in ways some academics now recognize as forerunners to today’s advertising techniques.2

These techniques do not just apply to advertising, but also to symbol formation generally: to the image of a national flag, for instance, or Lady Liberty, or Santa Claus as a holiday symbol as much as a symbol of Coca-Cola. These patterns are hardly monopolized by psychoanalysts, and are much better credited to Freud’s own research inspirations: experts in “primitive religion,” hypnosis, and dream imagery.

Some symbols unconsciously and automatically provoke deep embodied responses, for whatever evolutionary or spiritual reasons, and while the strangeness of this is easiest to recognize where they’re most unfamiliar, they’re evident everywhere in everyday life. Some are hardly mysterious at all – a gunshot is a clear, grounded reason to take cover – while others make only an obsolete or just-so kind of sense – why be so afraid of a common nonvenomous spider?

We don’t know how to explain all of these, but we do know that these responses have complex personal and cultural variations. They’re not simply universal, broadly cultural, or specifically personal, but rather something at least as complicated as a mix of all three. It’s plausible that there are universal “language instincts” and culture-bound traditional archetypes of masculine and feminine. We know that some entertainers and artists are better than others at putting symbols together to produce intended effects, and we know that they often disagree with one another about how they do it.

For whatever reasons, these symbols are also common objects of social solidarity. Sharing compatible deep reactions to the same symbols is obviously a convenient thing for life in common, but the solidarities seem to go further than obvious instrumental value. Why does it mean so much to some of us when others like the same music and art that we do? Why does it mean so much, sometimes, that the art we love be created by artists who also believe in the same meanings we feel in their art?

If I wanted to take this back in the direction of psychotherapy, I could link it to Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious.” If I wanted to go back in the direction of cultural politics, I could discuss Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of an artwork. If I wanted to go off the rails, I could go into contemporary magick from Crowley to Spare to Moore and Morrison.

Where I will actually go is to one of the founders of sociology and a major figure in cultural ethnography: Émile Durkheim again, and especially his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. This is a rich book with quite a lot of insight, despite its hostile-summary reputation of “making Society into God” and despite the ways that Durkheim’s patterns for talking about compelling “moral forces” may now seem obsoleted (at best eclipsed) by other styles of talking about automatic dispositions and unconscious compulsions. I’ll focus on just two of its more famous and simpler takeaway concepts, mana and collective effervescence.

I’ve mentioned mana once before in the context of conspiracy theory: it’s the mysterious kind of force or energy apparent in symbols and persons with seemingly magical effects or importance. A good placebo has mana, and a business leader with a “reality distortion field” has mana. Perceptions of mana are highly suggestible, and people who join a new group usually begin to see mana in whatever the group sees mana in, from sports teams to clothing brands. If they don’t, they’re likely to leave the group before long, saying something like “we just didn’t gel” or “I guess we never clicked.”

The effects of mana are certainly real, but that doesn’t mean mana itself is. “Caloric fluid” was not really how heat flowed in matter and “phlogiston” did not really exist in combustible materials, even if either of these false substances could be usefully correlated to real experimental effects. A better description of reality is that mana is an externalization of internal dispositions.

It is not that a leader actually has a reality distortion field, but rather that their followers have unconscious compulsions to allow the leader to change their perceptions of reality via whichever social levers that leader has learned to pull. A totem itself does not force a viewer into a sacred vision by its own power, but rather a habit of trance makes the totem into an effective inspiration for sacred visions the viewer generates themselves unconsciously in trance.

There is still room for genuine religious experience here insofar as the viewer’s internal generation process may still depend on genuine spiritual influences. Those spiritual influences might also have a true connection to the inspiring image with mana. The mana itself is an externalized model of the internal dispositions, but those dispositions might themselves depend on subtle but real external patterns.3 Subtle forms of presence and absence are often tricky to distinguish carefully.

The dispositions at play in mana are especially tied to the feelings and emotions that contemporary psychologists and neuroscientists call “affects,” such as fear, joy, disgust, arousal, and shame, which also played a central role in Nietzsche’s psychology.

When a person does “gel” or “click” with a new group and come to share the sense of mana that they see in things, there’s often a powerful sense of celebration and excitement that follows. Both they and their new friends in the group may be overjoyed! They’ve entered into a new solidarity with the group, and just like an atom releases energy when it bonds to a crystal, people find themselves releasing energy when they bond to new groups.

Conversely, the new member may also need to be given energy in order to get them to unbond from their prior solidarities. Traditions like having a celebratory community meal after any new baptism in a Christian church play a dual role of providing opportunities to release energies freed by newly-formed bonds and to provide energies to break other prior bonds. These energies that flow actively around the times of changes to solidarities are Durkheim’s “collective effervescence.”

It’s frequently joyful and celebratory, but it can also turn violent and disgusting! Any of the strong affects can come out depending on the nature of the community and the new bonding.

Not all major changes to solidarity involve the gain and loss of members. Often it’s enough for a member to change their relationship to the group significantly. In adolescent rites of passage like bar mitzvahs where “now the boy is a man” there are celebratory feasts for the same reasons as for new baptisms, and in newer contemporary traditions “coming out” as queer can be just as energetically celebrated as coming of age. Alternatively, sometimes a community will change its internal bonding without any particular person being most responsible – when an external change reveals some new social necessity or possibility to the group, for instance, the event often becomes an occasion for gatherings where effervescent energy flows and where new relationships take shape. That’s what it felt like was happening on Substack last week, in the aftermath of Doha, Zaruska, and Kirk.

What it means for these bonds to change here is, like mana, substantially a matter of the embodied affects and dispositions of community members. Joining a good social group, we become prepared to smile more to each other, to expect good things, perhaps to put down weapons and armor we normally don’t dare drop. A new Christian prepares to feel the Holy Spirit and listen to God more often. A new man resolves to be ready for different responsibilities and different respect. A newly out queer prepares to flirt and show love differently.

These new resolutions and preparations aren’t small things, and while they do usually occur unconsciously that doesn’t mean they happen instantly and infallibly or invisibly. Visibly, there’s often strong emotion and expression; temporally, there’s usually a period of adjustment in which mistakes are common.

While I do want to emphasize the internal, dispositional nature of mana, I don’t want to give the mistaken impression that the objects, symbols, and persons given mana are irrelevant or arbitrary. They are crucial.

Solidarities exist for the sake of creative collective action in the physical world. The action occurs through a group’s embedding in the collectively shared environment. If the embedding corresponding to the sense of mana is ill-fit to practical purposes, the solidarity will be ineffective at best and more likely harmful. This is clear enough on the single-object level, as in embarrassing fables like “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and it’s all the more important at a system level.

Given systems of symbols and objects, like the ant swarms of the first letter in this series with their different pheromone signals for different collective foraging tasks, effective coordination depends on coherence between the dispositions and the environment as mediated through the signals. Given systems of linguistic symbols, as for the examples of descriptive and ostensive solidarities in the second letter in this series, many points of coherence between listeners and speakers are needed for the language to function.

Even for Hegelians committed to his Philosophy of Right, who try to ensure that all of their solidarities are based on the rational cooperation of essentially free wills with no arbitrary commitments, the realization of those free wills depends on the availability of objective property to the will, and property requires the existence of a state.

When a solidaristic group acquires new property, some new object to bring into its domain of apparent control, that can be just as impactful in generating changes to the group as bringing in a new member – if the object inspires the group to give it as much mana as a new member. Not all of the relevant objects are simple inert bodies like tools or foods. Some are living objects, and some are open territories. When a group acquires substantial new territory, that’s almost always an occasion for celebration and collective effervescence.

Even just the symbolic promise of major new territory will often inspire reorganizations of solidarity. A new technology that looks like it will open up a new frontier, a shift in a balance of power, even just an implausible new artistic movement. Here, there could be many things to discuss about new media, new expressive forms, and new utopian visions. There could also be many things to discuss about how groups process new grievances, new betrayals, and new terrors.

The last week has seen many shifting solidarities. Given the shocks, some people are finding themselves aligned with new groups on new principles. Things that had been latent and unconscious have roared from caves and stepped out into daylight. Quiet mutual distrusts have escalated to loud hostilities.

My own loyalties, plans, and principles aren’t shifting. I’ve had a clear idea that events like these would be happening soon when I began this project here. Political violence has been a longstanding concern of mine, and I’ve had unhappy firsthand experiences of certain hidden violences currently structuring public debate without widespread public knowledge.

The Blackthorn Hedge will continue to develop towards what I first described in “Motte and Bailey; Hedge and Field” and later fleshed out further in “Laying the Hedge.” Whether it’s immediately clear here or not, I’m making myself the space to untangle some terrible knots about “tribalism” and nonviolence. Having more, clearer background for discussing the passionate, only-half-reasoned, and rapid sort of thinking-in-common that characterizes so much of real online debate is another step.

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

As always, all respectful comments, messages, and other engagements are welcome.

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I am not a utilitarian, and yet I do use utilitarian morality instrumentally. I’m marginally willing to read Derek Parfit and Peter Singer. I actively enjoy putting numbers to utilitarian models from Bill Gates’s recommended reading, such as Vaclav Smil or Hans Rosling.

I use utilitarianism heuristically in personal deliberation, I use it constitutively in the formation of social conventions, and I use it persuasively among friends and acquaintances. It’s an apt instrument for all three. Utilitarianism has a special place in moral philosophy and its politics today in part because of its claims to systematicity and composability that appeal to technicians of common good services. It’s genuinely an excellent tool for systematizing certain kinds of political decisions, to the point that it can even make those decisions look nonpolitical.

Here, I will write some notes on utilitarianism to explain why I am not a utilitarian and why I nonetheless use it and expect it to remain important. My focus will be on three features of utilitarian reasoning: commensurability of values, transparency of choices, and separability of choices. These three are all closely related and intertwined, so I will develop these three threads together. I will do that by considering gradually more subtle and sophisticated versions of utilitarianism, introducing and answering objections to the moral framework as I go.

One of my primary goals here will be to make the daunting technical foundations of utilitarianism a little less intimidating or mystical-seeming. I’ll be frank: the technical issues are unsolved philosophical and political problems, not math problems, but they’re not solvable without mathematical skill. If it sounds odd to talk about political problems that are unsolvable without math skill, just think about the power of good engineering models for informing difficult budget discussions: without good models, the budget discussions may be fruitless; with good models, the budget discussions may become fairly simple (and even routine or automatic).

Naive direct maximization

The simplest slogan encapsulating popular utilitarianism is that what is moral is whatever does the greatest good for the greatest number.

Explicitly, this is a doubly-extremal case of some underlying notion of “the good of a number.” Implicitly, for the extrema to exist then “goods of numbers” must be comparable in at least two ways: one can ask (a) if one good of one number is greater than another good of the same number and (b) if one number is greater than another number. There is no necessary implicit assumption that all “goods of numbers” or even all “numbers” are in a complete order, but there is implicitly a requirement that a greatest of the “numbers” and greatest of the “goods” should be identifiable.

In a universe with unbounded numbers of moral agents or unbounded possible good, these requirements are impossible. Utilitarians are divided about how to address this. One set of utilitarians explicitly or implicitly rely on assumptions of a finite universe with finite possible good. A second set rely on methods of transfinite mathematics to handle the issue, generally by adding actual infinities as definite bounds. A third set marginalize the rule via choice-separability: for every choice between alternatives, the choice among those alternatives that leads to the greatest good for the greatest number relative to the other choices is the moral choice. As long as the impact of each choice is finite, then the problem is taken care of.

Choice-separation is most common of these three but it is also more complex than the prior two, so for now I’ll focus on the other two, gradually argue for the practical necessity of the choice-separation approach regardless, and then proceed to address that choice-separated utilitarianism in time once it is thoroughly introduced.

For utilitarians who do accept a finite universe with finite possible good, it’s fairly simple, next, to step from those assumptions to assuming the existence of a utility function with a maximum. Given any moral choice at all is possible, there are multiple possible choices, and given that any moral choice could make a moral difference, these possible choices must not all result in identical “good for the greatest number.”

If there is a maximum “good for the greatest number,” the choices that result in that maximum are morally good. It’s usually plausible to utilitarians that, if the maximum won’t be chosen, there is also a set of next-best “goods for the greatest number”, and so on, implying overall a complete partial ordering of possible “goods for the greatest number.” Utilitarians who adopt transfinite utilities can also follow these steps more or less the same way except with more sophisticated nuances and caveats around the word “maximum”. In either case, finite or transfinite, any such partial orders can be identified with an equivalence class of utility functions over possible choices, and any representative of the equivalence class makes an adequate utility function for moral reasoning.

However, in looking at this detail, there’s another significant implicit tangle of assumptions to address: the issue of how to match the possible choices to the resulting “goods of greatest numbers.”

It does seem very natural to assume there are possible choices that could make moral differences, and it does seem very natural to utilitarians to assume that there are such things as goods for greatest numbers. However, the problem of getting choices to correspond to goods for greatest numbers is widely agreed to be a terrible mess: it is a problem no less complicated than the problem of the correspondence between conscious mind and physical matter, since that is one of its sub-problems.1

Probably the most common approach to this problem is to link goods for greatest numbers to states of affairs of the world, and then to link choices to sets of states of affairs. Of course, states of affairs cannot be completely known by any individual, so this has the immediate implication that either (a) the goods for greatest numbers are unknown by moral agents or (b) the way that goods for greatest numbers depend on what is unknown still allows moral agents to correctly infer goods for greatest numbers from the knowable parts of states of affairs.

The latter, (b), is generally untenable because it would imply that falling for a lie could not result in a difference in the good for the greatest number. Some lies and deceptions by lies do seem to affect the good of the greatest number. Given that it is untenable, the implication is that the goods for the greatest number are not generally and definitely knowable by moral agents. (This is all the more likely if the numbers and their goods are unbounded rather than bounded.)

In fact this premise that the good of the greatest number cannot be known exactly by human moral agents is generally accepted, and so in every practical utilitarianism, the capsule slogan “the greatest good for the greatest number” is implicitly standing for something more like “the best guess at the greatest good for the greatest number.” Others will choose “the greatest expected good for the greatest number.”

These are still strong, intuitively appealing moral slogans. However, with the problems of guessing or expecting, we now have some new issues to address, issues of the epistemology and morality of guesses and expectations. For instance: what is a “best guess”? What if “the best guess” isn’t “your own best guess”?

Fallible indirect maximization

In practice, no credible utilitarians argue that they know how to measure the good of a greatest number exactly or even how to compare moderately-sized sets of goods of several thousands exactly and exhaustively. They use simplifying approximations and heuristic proxies such as per capita incomes, life expectancies, responses to social surveys, and direct deference to institutional authority.

The “greatest good for the greatest number” is always approached through deliberate simplifications and approximations. Usually there is also a fair amount of sophistication about leaving choice open in every present decision for choosing again later, expecting later updates to these simplifications and approximations, and thereby putting a premium on “option value” for moral choices.

For this reason, many of the supposedly necessary absurdities of rigorous utilitarianism, such Sam Bankman-Fried’s real but peculiar example of a ludicrous expectation-maximizing risk appetite, are easily avoided by most utilitarians in practice. A utilitarian is as free to hedge against risks as they are to gobble down risk wholesale: all depends on their own personal reasoning about what will be best for the greatest number. Take the utility monster thought experiment – that one person’s good could be so intensely good as to outweigh all others’ goods – the repugnance of the thought experiment alone is enough to practically forbid any appearance of plausibility of the scenario in real life, since the intense repugnance itself already constitutes evidence that the others’ goods will not be outweighed by a monster’s good.2

In any case, it is evident that in practice, utilitarianism thrives on estimations, expectations, and approximations of the greatest goods for the greatest numbers.

This brings up an ordinary kind of origin or foundation problem: how do you choose a best guess unless you have some best guess about what makes a best guess? The foundation problem is easily solved here, though: people have judgment that they use to make these guesses from a very early age, and they iteratively change their guesses in a messily-bootstrapped and messily-socially-facilitated way… often but not always in ways they intend, much less that they intend to be improvements: drinking or being made to drink is in many ways just as effective at changing patterns of judgment as reasoned reflection.

This isn’t a rational foundation, then, just an existential and historical foundation, but that doesn’t imply it’s necessarily a poor foundation! That requires some strong additional assumptions about the moral contents of existence and of history. I’ll wait to consider important open issues there, issues like the moral weights and implications of evolution and cultural tradition, for another letter; I’ll consider only simpler issues here.

First among these simpler issues is that these guesses people make are almost always based on some kind of local marginal reasoning with an implicit averaging built in: the guesses are rarely about the absolute total goods of each individual possible state of affairs, but rather about the relative goods of ensembles of more-and-less-possible states of affairs selected according to specific differences. Reasoning in terms of relative goods implicitly means looking at differences of the utility function rather than the utility function itself, which introduces subtle issues that will be better to cover in the next section.

Before that, I’ll focus on some of the issues related to the ensembles. These ensemble issues will further motivate concern with differences of the utility function as opposed to values of the utility function, whereas the reverse is less true, so this order helps keep the essay more naturally sequential and less branching.

In practice, as I have just been saying, it is not always possible to identify specific resulting possible future states of affairs that correspond to specific choices. Instead, people typically leave open room for several representative possibilities to correspond to each choice. When reasoning about a health intervention against an incompletely understood pathogen, for instance, the properties of the pathogen may match any of several different possibilities. Different intervention choices may correspond to different outcomes depending on the actual properties of the pathogen. The “greatest good of the greatest number”, therefore, cannot be a function of single states of affairs or single world-trajectories but rather must be a function of ensembles of world-states or world-trajectories, which I’ll just call ensembles of states of affairs for simplicity (and for the honesty of not pretending to have myself discerned a clear normative mathematical type signature for “states of affairs” in these matters).

Three polar-opposite kinds of function of ensembles of states of affairs tend to pattern utilitarian discursive intuition here.

In the first, the ensembles are purely random with probabilities, and an ensemble’s “number” and “good of a number” are then a probability-weighted sum (or integral) of the “numbers” and “goods of numbers” of the individual possible states of affairs. This is a simple additive aggregate: it corresponds to choosing coolly in the face of ignorance.

In the second, optimally chosen ensembles are the grounds for later choices that will also be optimal, and an ensemble’s “number” and “good of a number” are then the maxima of the “numbers” and “goods of numbers” of the individual states of affairs in the ensemble: this corresponds to choosing ambitiously so as to enable the best later choices possible.

In a third, chosen ensembles are the grounds for later surprises that could be as bad as possible, and an ensemble’s “number” and “good of a number” are then the minima of the “numbers” and “goods of numbers” of the individual states of affairs: this corresponds to choosing defensively so as to ensure a decent outcome even if everything else but this choice itself were to go completely wrong.

These three patterns are hardly the only options, and the mathematical study of averaging has explored many more. Actual intuitive decisionmaking (as opposed to intuitive reflection on decisionmaking in philosophical discussion), rarely follows any of these three precisely. Nonetheless, these play important roles in utilitarian rhetoric and in the social structure of utilitarian coalition-building and collective decisionmaking, so they have special second-order practical significance despite being atypical of first-order moral practice.

While in fact future uncertainty does not resolve according to pure “optimal next-choice”, pure “randomness without further choice”, or pure “pessimal surprise”, in philosophical discussions about particular domains one or another of these further evolution processes may seem reasonably natural to others in the discussion. Optimistic business development, stoic investment realism, and existential risk minimization are typical domains for the three respective patterns. In practice, utilitarian reasoners can and do switch between these different ensemble aggregation patterns as they switch between domains.

Insofar as they do, relying on domain-specific intuition to enable evaluations of alternatives brings us back to the deferred issue of reasoning locally about particular, separable choices.

Single-choice maximization

When considering the moral effects of specific, local choices, we’re finally considering how Jeremy Bentham actually applied this slogan of “the greatest good for the greatest number”: he meant “the greatest good for the greatest number among those affected by a choice.”

Implicitly, in common utilitarian ideologies, most choices have limited effects and there is some intuitively sound way to reason about the relative effects of different choices without knowing the full universe’s utility function for all possible states of affairs that would result from the choice. Morally, it often seems enough to know how certain local distributions of properties, such as pleasure or happiness among direct recipients of gifts or subsidies, would be different in the different ensembles of states of affairs corresponding to different choices, such as different gifts or subsidies. There may be others affected – other children jealous of a great Christmas present might suffer for the direct recipient’s joy, for instance, or other children could be victims of the direct recipient’s use of a gift weapon – and if so, these additional effects can also be brought into the consideration.

Exactly which direct and indirect effects to consider in each moral choice is an important and genuinely philosophical problem, though it’s a problem that is also just as political and ideological as it is purely philosophical. The ideological aspects tend to complicate the philosophy significantly, for instance in questions about the moral importance of effects of human choices on animal happinesses, or in questions about whether to give weight to possibly immoral or irrational negative homophobic reactions when deciding whether homosexuality is moral.

The first of these examples, about animal welfare in utilitarian calculation, is a good example of one type of effect-extension problem: it hinges on whether a difference in states of affairs should be considered a moral difference at all. The second is an opposite, complementary type: it hinges on whether a difference between states of affairs is morally connected to the difference in choice. Both of these have many more instances.

To give another subtype of the first type of example, in practice we often ignore very small differences in happiness in different states of affairs when making utilitarian calculations. Kicking up a little dust while making home repairs is something we often ignore even when it’s a nuisance, at small scales, but at larger scales we may stop ignoring it, for instance in contemporary German urban politics where dust ordinances have become important constraints on remodeling. Scaling up further, some utilitarians infamously argue that at some point the harm of enough dust getting in enough different eyes would be bad enough to outweigh the harm of a death.

To give another subtype of the second type, in practice there is vigorous disagreement about when people should be considered to have caused unforeseen or indirect consequences of their actions. For instance, how much due diligence must people do before introducing new technology to society: how hard should they try to anticipate the risks and second-order indirect effects of the technology? The “direct maximization” approach from earlier implicitly requires anticipating every risk and indirect effect. A “fallible maximization” approach allows for working confidently at any specific level of ignorance. However, in practice, people fault each other differently for different types of ignorance about different choices. They disagree vigorously about which kinds of ignorance are morally culpable and not, and there’s not just one answer for every kind of choice.

All of these issues can be considered separately on the surface, but they’re also all connected at deep levels through the mathematics of aggregation and differentiation. For any consequentialism, implicitly, when a choice induces a change in the distribution of possible states of affairs, that change in distribution is a difference between distributions. For utilitarianism, the change in distributions is also supposed to correspond to a difference between distributions of possible utilities, and the difference of distribution between possible utilities corresponds to choiceworthiness through some rule for assigning different present utilities to different distributions of possible utilities.

The prior section already introduced the last of these, which one could call the problem of “aggregating utilities over possible states of affairs,” but it did not discuss the further problem of reasoning about differences of aggregates of utilities over possible states of affairs. These are not necessarily the same as aggregates of differences of utilities over possible states of affairs! Taking a pessimal-outcome rule, for instance, a difference between aggregate utilities only depends on the difference in utility between the lowest-utility outcomes in the different ensembles of possibilities. As long as the worst possibility gets better, the difference between the aggregates is positive even if every other possibility was worse.

In general, the distribution of possible future states of affairs depends on the current possible states of affairs and how they could change. The difference in distribution of possible future states of affairs as a result of a current choice will depend on how the choice changes how the current possible states of affairs could change. Each possible current state of affairs can be thought of as the base of a single branching “fiber” of possible future states of affairs, and the difference between the distribution of future states of affairs can be understood in terms of how these fibers change shape due to choice. For instance, a disease could be bacterial or viral and a doctor’s choice of treatment would have different effects in each case.

In the most common way of looking at it, the fibers join with one another where different starting states of affairs lead to identical future states of affairs. Maybe “return to health” in the doctor example: whether it was a bacteria or a virus, it’s gone. Choices can change which fibers join together this way and which do not (and when), changing which differences in initial conditions seem morally relevant. An apparent “return to health” might later prove to be a “suppression of symptoms”: the virus might just have gone dormant, not disappeared. Insofar as choices can change these branchings and joinings, they can thereby change which states of affairs seem identical retroactively – making the whole idea of tracing fibers (or otherwise reasoning possibility-by-possibility) a much trickier proposition than it might have initially seemed.

In general, these problems bring in all the complexity of the mathematics of causal inference, recently well-grounded by Judea Pearl and colleagues. Quite a few open mathematical problems with philosophical implications for causal attribution of outcomes to choices can be found in stochastic calculus, especially where it also touches chaos theory.

However, now that I’ve discussed how choices can complicate their own apparent implications retroactively, and given all the complexity of handling fallibility in the prior section, the time is ripe to introduce the next issue: how do any apparent choices arise in the first place? Is it even moral to “take choices as they come” or is there also a higher responsibility to become someone who sees the right choices at the right times?

Choice-choice maximization

In between whole-future maximization and single-choice maximization, there are many thorny issues of the nature of moral agency. It’s clear that whole future maximization is necessarily fallible and that practical approaches to the approximate problem always lead to some sort of localization and other simplification. However, it’s also clear that with every single choice, there are implications for one’s whole future.

Some of these implications are simply external, but another important fraction are reflexive: there are implications of a choice now for choices later.

First, most human actions are skilled and habitual. Making a choice to perform an action often hones the skills involved in the action and entrenches the habits involved in the action. Honing the skill generally increases the future utility of making the same choice again; entrenching the habit generally increases the future likelihood of performing the same act without any calculated choice.

Oftentimes, especially among children, the moral utilities of skill growth and habit formation are far more important than the moral utilities of the immediate external outcomes of a choice! I suspect this is true for my own writing at The Blackthorn Hedge so far: no matter how much I am proud of some of what I’ve written already, in the long term the practice is probably much more important than what I’m producing in the moment.

Second, moral actions are typically embedded in social structures that also emphasize repetition and reliability. Always doing the same bedtime ritual for a child becomes a powerful comfort to them; always treating every customer with the same professionalism can ground a strong reputation in business. Always driving on the same side of the road as everyone else is highly recommended.

Frequently, then, one choice has such strong implications for future choices that it’s best to think of choosing whole series of future actions together. One way to think of this is as a natural emergence of rule utilitarianism from act utilitarianism: since a choice of act predictably implies a future rule, a choice of act is also a choice of rule. Another way to think of it is that it shows that act utilitarianism instead emerges from rule utilitarianism: each apparently isolated choice of act is a choice according to habits and precedents that constitute prior-chosen rules for a new choice of future rules, and the next act is just a special occasion for changing the rules rather than something chosen by itself without rules.

Each of these perspectives appeals to different philosophers, and I won’t pretend to resolve the disagreements between them here. In fact I don’t choose between them myself. I see rule and act utilitarianism as different representations of the utilitarianism like wave mechanics and matrix mechanics are different representations of quantum mechanics or like a function’s position representation and its Fourier transform are different representations in functional analysis. Wherever I see a spikes-or-waves Fourier pair, I also look for spike-wave hybrid wavelets. In this case, local rules and heuristics fit that hybrid shape, and “heuristic utilitarianism” is not strange to me.

However, the implications of one choice for future choices are not always constraining and rule-like. In the earlier examples, choices to build capacities, for instance skills, were just as important. These are an opposite of choosing to commit to a rule: they are choices to create future options.

One of the most important skills to build is that of recognizing that there are choices at all, and this is something that utilitarianism can sometimes do an excellent job with. Utilitarianism is generally taught with heuristics of how to recognize when actions have important moral implications; it is also taught with inner disciplines to make deliberate, considered choice more feasible. One of the primary moral effects of the many infamous trolley problems is to give students opportunities to demonstrate and develop abilities to maintain emotional equanimity while thinking and talking about choices of life and death, for instance.

These skills and capacities amount to virtues, and so in addition to act, rule, and heuristic utilitarianisms, there is also room for “virtue utilitarianism.” Virtue utilitarianism focuses on present choices to develop whichever virtues will be best for handling future challenges and opportunities, as judged by the “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Any particular choices of future acts for the greatest good will follow from those virtues.

Virtuous utilitarianism

At this point, I’ve shown how I make room within utilitarian debate for strict rules, local heuristics, and virtues in addition to single trolley-problem-lever-like acts. I’ve also shown how I ensure space for discussing several important kinds of fallibility in the utilitarian calculations. Those fallibilities are inseparable from the reasons for focusing on rules, acts, or virtues in each given case.

Utilitarianism does make room for all these possibilities, both in principle and in practice, but it should still be clear that I’m not using it like its genuine believers do.

I’m using utilitarianism as a convention for organizing discussions of consequences. It’s a convention that I think offers benefits to people with certain skills, particularly technical math skills. In principle I could be making an unusual “virtue utilitarian” argument for this practice of using utilitarianism, but I think it’s much more apt to simply say that I’m a virtue ethicist who believes that skill in utilitarian conversation is an important contemporary virtue.

Specifically, I believe that the capacity to participate well in utilitarian deliberation is an important part of contemporary expressions of prudence and charity. Prudence has always been the virtue most closely tied to consequentialism; today tough utilitarian calculations are good practice for developing discerning prudence. Charity motivates using common conventions without complaint, especially those conventions that have the best claims to expressing collective altruism.

At the same time, I’m also sometimes highly critical of utilitarianism, particularly at the social level where I see people try to use specific forms of utilitarianism to railroad conversations toward preferred outcomes. A focus on direct local consequences of clear choices can obscure systemic consequences or the problem of how apparent choices ever arise in the first place. Both of those are core concerns of today’s political left, and so I recognize the left’s reasons for often stereotyping utilitarian ideology as implicitly right wing or otherwise technocratic or anti-democratic.

On the other hand, I don’t think this is in fact an inherent commitment of the utilitarian conventions, and I aimed to demonstrate exactly how to bring those concerns into utilitarian conversation here. I’ll admit immediately that it doesn’t always work: plenty of people promoting utilitarian conversation will shut down attempts to raise this kind of technical detail. They’re not arguing in good faith; they’re bullies using the technical apparatus as a cudgel rather than a true communicative scaffold.

That’s part of political life in common, unfortunately: people opportunistically try to repurpose authoritative technical forms for authoritarian technocratic control all too often, from utilitarianism to scientism to ancient irrigation priesthoods. Nonetheless, though it’s normal, the fights against it are also normal – and worthwhile!

I hope that this letter will help some of my readers in the fights over the usages of utilitarianism for good and for ill, and I hope that The Blackthorn Hedge can more generally become a solid protection against overreaching technical authoritarianism in many other guises – without leaning too far into anti-technical primitivism, either.