Academic Agent Is Still Wrong About Ideology

Academic Agent recently published an essay called “The James Lindsay Debate Club Theory of History”, where he repeats arguments he has been making for the last couple of years about the impotence of ideology and ideas in shaping history. I previously critiqued this same thesis, in video form, on my YouTube channel:

After offering this disagreement, AA claimed it was a personal affront to him, despite not having watched it, and so began a thorough effort to blacklist me and anyone who interacts with me. He then launched a long campaign of bad-jacketing myself and others in an attempt to isolate anyone he considered critical of him. I say this to make it clear at the outset I think Neema Parvini, or the Academic Agent, is a dishonourable man with little intellectual integrity. Despite his bizarre personal attacks on me, I will endeavour to treat his argument on its merits for the purpose of this essay.

Parvini remains critical of people who think ideas shape the course of history as naive idealists, “theorycels” who want to believe that the real actors on the stage of history bow before the conclusions of their college debate club.

Against this I posit, The Academic Agent Power Theory of History, which goes like this: people get into power, whether by force or fraud, and then tell people what they should think which nearly always coincides with actions they have already taken.

What drives people when they get into power? What drives them to seek power in the first place? Presumably, Parvini’s answer is self-interest, power for the sake of personal benefit. But history is littered with the graves of failed would-be kings who were willing to die to advance their ideas. If the masses are driven by fraudulent ideologies handed down from on high, has there never been one of them who ascends to power himself and implements them as a true believer? If we were consistent with this, we would have to affirm that all the kings and queens of the Middle Ages were paying lip service to Christianity as a means of sociological control, making them all extreme outliers of rationally self-interested atheists in a world of religion.

That reasoning is a post-hoc justification for decisions and actions already taken is also suggested strongly by Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (2012), two books that have influenced my work for a long time.

People being disposed to different values and ways of thinking does not support this strong thesis of Parvini. If he really believes all reasoning is a post-hoc justification for decisions already taken, then this argument is self-refuting. Parvini has told us in advance there is no sincere attempt at truth to be found herein, and in the words of Roger Scruton: “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”

Parvini gets to the meat of his thesis:

I see most of this discourse on competing ideologies and philosophies as being just noise. I prefer to make discrete and easily measurable claims. Let me share some greatest hits along with my key sources for each of these claims:

• ‘Laissez-faire free trade’ was a post-hoc rationalisation of control methods which sought to keep the economies of colonies imbalanced and dependent under the British Empire (see Pierre van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon, 1981).

• Margaret Thatcher’s waving about of F.A. Hayek’s books was a post-hoc rationalisation for the final Americanisation of Britain which required the elimination of intermediary institutions that stood between Power and the People and served to accelerate ‘modernisation’ and destroy cultural conservatism (see John Gray, False Dawn, 1998).

• Climate change alarmism is a corporate scam which manufactures deindustrialisation and artificial scarcity to generate easy pay days (see James Heartfield, Green Capitalism, 2008).

• ‘Woke’ is the post-hoc rationalisation of the Civil Rights Regime (see Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement, 2020).

None of these are especially convincing. Does Parvini believe Thatcher wasn’t an earnest believer in libertarian economic theory? That her ideas were used to the benefit of other elites doesn’t support the strong claim he is making. His example of wokeism is even worse. Caldwell, and more recently Hanania, do a good job of showing how Civil Rights law empowered wokeism, as companies expanded HR departments and were incentivised to embrace all manner of political correctness and diversity training to protect against potential legal attacks. But as I explained in a previous essay responding to Hanania on this:

This already fails to account for hedge fund managers like Larry Fink and Bill Ackman who have shown a commitment to actively promoting DEI and affirmative action regardless of a potential decline in efficiency.

…

Western European countries went just as woke as the United States on a similar timeline, informed not by overreaching civil rights legislation, but by the same egalitarian ideals that became dominant in the US after the Second World War. In the 1950s, UNESCO published their statements on race, drafted by a committee of mostly Boasian cultural anthropologists, and these were broadcast in publications like the New York Times as a definitive proclamation of racial egalitarianism.

Civil Rights law empowered wokeism, but Civil Rights law could only be passed by people already swayed by ideas of racial egalitarianism, or at least the moral good of pursuing greater racial equality. The woke graduates filling the HR departments are true believers in the dogmas of leftism; if you wish, you can say they believe it, but the power-brokers who empowered them don’t, but at this point the ideology has infected every elite institution.

On top of committing a performative contradiction, the examples Parvini draws on demonstrate how unfalsifiable his thesis is. The structure of most of his arguments is something like this:

1. make an overly general statement about a political tendency, then proclaim it is a universal law, e.g. “ideas need elite support to become sociologically dominant” becomes “all ideas are just chosen by power for its own ends”

2. Explain how individual examples could be explained if this law were true, then treat this as evidence that it is true.

It’s easy to play this game and give the impression you are actually proving something. Allow me to add some of my own examples:

• “Christianity” was a post-hoc rationalisation to better control the masses, Constantine empowered Christianity for use for his own divine legitimacy.

• “Darwinism” was a post-hoc rationalisation for the claims about human nature made by laissez faire economists, it was empowered by the British to give a “natural” mandate to their expansion and trade policies.

• “Spherical Earth” was a post-hoc rationalisation for undermining the authority of the bible and passing authority to the scientific establishment.

I could go on, and maybe there’s a section of readers who hate Christianity, Darwin and round-earthers nodding their head along to all these, but I think most will see the problem here. If Parvini is right, it would only take one example to prove him wrong, but one can look through history and find ample examples of elites being ousted for a variety of factors other than the real “power” choosing to switch them out.

The Bronze Age Collapse, the rise of Italian and German fascism in the 20th Century, and the Iranian Revolution were all momentous events that could not have been forecast by the desires of elites. To be fair, Parvini does deal with the rise of Italian fascism, but he claims it is an example that supports his theory, arguing it was only once Mussolini took power that “fascism” became a worked out ideology to justify his rule. Prior to that, Parvini claims the only basis for legitimacy of the fascist movement was that they were just the most fit men to rule. The historical record does not support this. Dr. Ricardo Duchesne writes:

There were deep ideological roots in the development of fascism long before 1922: in France and then Italy, going back to the late 1800s, to individuals like Maurice Barrès, and movements like Action Française, a "far-right monarchist political movement," and to the "ultra-nationalist" views of Gabriele D'Annunzio, known as "the First Duce", and to Italian proto-fascist revolutionary syndicalism.

If you look at the main theorists of fascist thought, profiled well in A. James Gregor’s Mussolini’s Intellectuals, all had been theorising a philosophy and program for fascism prior to Mussolini’s ascension to power. The fascist theorist Ugo Spirito was already formulating the corporatist economic theory of fascism in 1918, after becoming a believer in the Actual Idealism of fascism’s foremost theorist, Giovanni Gentile. Alfredo Rocco, who would become a minister in Mussolini’s government, used his position as newspaper editor to outline the need for a developmental nationalism and write critiques of liberal individualism prior to eventually joining the fascist party in 1925.

Parvini also invokes the Bolsheviks to make his case, claiming "the dictatorship of the proletariat" was a post-hoc justification for the power Lenin had acquired, framed in terms acceptable to Marxists. He is apparently unaware that Lenin had detailed the necessity of this in a book called The State and the Revolution published before the Bolshevik seizure of power. And who better disproves Parvini’s dismissal of the role of the intellectual in history, than Marx himself? Would “power” have just generated a communist vanguard in 1917 if it didn’t already exist?

Dissidents would do well to familiarise themselves with elite theory and internalise how much of what we take for granted has been the imposition of organised elites working against the will of the masses. But we should be skeptical of anyone offering a one-size-fits-all, magical theorem to explain all political developments. The historical record shows us that ideologues and fanatics often drive history. Humans are not entirely rational, but neither can their behaviour be entirely reduced by some rational calculation to discrete computations of self-interest or power maximisation. We are a species driven by narratives and big ideas, and in a time where obvious truths are aggressively suppressed by a system increasingly incapable of justifying itself, it would be a ludicrous act of self-sabotage to abandon our greatest weapon: the truth.