Surfing Against the Tide of History

On Power, Ideology & History

Academic Agent has written a response to my recent essay which was critical of him. Here are the three essays in order:

The James Lindsay Debate Club Theory of History

Academic Agent Is Still Wrong About Ideology

Reply to Keith Woods on Power, Ideology and History

We are treading familiar ground here, so I will try and get to the heart of the disagreement and make my view on this question clear. But for starters, let’s look at some of the details of his rejoinder. Predictably, Parvini starts by undermining my argument with the claim that I am blinded to reality in a way he is not:

Woods is a theorycel and therefore he does not like my argument that all political formulas boil down ultimately to ‘BS BS BS BS, therefore I rule’.

I suppose he has me there. Academic Agent is definitely not a theorycel. Ignore that he calls himself the Academic Agent, a “mere scholar”, just look at his output. He is the author of many very practical works, such as Shakespeare and Cognition, Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory, Shakespeare’s Moral Compass, Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory, and The Defenders of Liberty: Human Nature, Individualism, and Property Rights.

He prefers a vision of history driven by men pursuing high ideals which then shape and change society.

Since AA claims all reasoning is post-hoc rationalisation, there is nothing for us to do but speculate on the motives that are really behind our arguments. Returning the favour, I could forgo trying to disprove anything he says and instead speculate that he is drawn to this kind of theory because he likes to feel more intelligent and above it all than the masses who do not and cannot understand the deeper mechanisms producing their beliefs, and that he enjoys playing the role of the hardened cynic surrounded by younger, more naive idealists falling into the traps set by more powerful men. Maybe it’s a good way to sell books and courses, or maybe it’s just a post-hoc justification for his own political inaction, I don’t know. AA then says his theory

is a value-free description of what happens, it does not pretend it can see inside the hearts of men, it is an objective description of the process of power.

Part of AA’s argument is that we are incapable of value-free judgements, that all our reasoning is post-hoc rationalisation of unconscious desires. Yet when it comes to his own theories, AA claims a privileged position of accessing objective reality in a value-free way. He never explains how he alone is capable of attaining this, or why he repeats the contradictory statement that his value-free analysis has proved that value-free analysis is impossible. This is as incoherent as it sounds, and it only gets worse later in his essay:

I appreciate this may be difficult for Woods and many of you to understand, but it is a much closer approximation of the psychological process that takes place rather than the one you imagine takes place. Even those reading this article will be motivated chiefly by non-logical, non-rational factors as to who they find more convincing: namely, do you like me more or do you like Woods more? In other words, you’re relying on an emotion and character judgement – what Aristotle would have called ethos – rather than the merits of either argument. But that is not what you’ll tell yourself, you’ll tell yourself that you have come to your conclusions through reasoning, and – here’s the kicker – you’ll sincerely believe that. So, in other words, you emotionally felt something (e.g. ‘I like Woods, I trust him more, not sure about Parvini’), then almost automatically, your own internal BS-generating lawyer gave you justifications for that feeling, and then, through an (again almost automatic) process of Orwellian double-think you formed the belief that you preferred Woods’s argument because of this or that reason. This is how people think.

As I stated in my last essay, this argument is self-refuting. If all reasoning is a just so story for a conclusion already made, with no possibility of attaining an objective truth, then so is his argument. If we take Parvini at his word, then all the arguments he has made for his theory of power are meaningless. They are simply the result of his internal BS-generating lawyer giving him justifications for a theory he likes.

Now, I could go through AA’s response line by line, but it is mostly just a series of truisms. For example, he claims to be offering some kind of insight when he writes this in his conclusion:

power does have its own logic, and its own disciplining mechanisms for those who hold it. For example, Power cannot stand rival castles and seeks to eliminate them. Let us take the example of Khomeini once more. Had he, for example, studied his Quran and concluded it would have been ‘un-Islamic’ to massacre the leaders of the other revolutionary groups after 1979, then there is a very good chance that one of those other groups would have seized power in the long-run. Strangely enough though, his studies of the Quran didn’t render that answer, they managed to give him the exact course dictated by the logic of power. Strangely, when Lenin and later Stalin studied Karl Marx, the course they chose to follow in the end rendered similar answers. So too Maximilien Robespierre. So too Hitler. How is it that the Quran, Marxism, French Liberalism and Nazism all led to the same answers? A Machiavellian analysis might simply say that Power tends to select those who come to such conclusions, while those who come to different ones are sidelined or eliminated.

So the great insight offered by Parvini’s deep study of history coupled with elite theory is that power selects for people who seek power, and that being principled to the degree that it stops you doing what is necessary to attain power will indeed stop you attaining power. Amazing. How many pages of Mosca and Pareto do I need to read to be able to produce insight like this?

I realise a lot of people read my criticisms of the AA theory and conclude I must be denying some basic truths of realism or offering an equally reductive theory in the other direction, namely, claiming people are only motivated by abstract political ideologies or carefully reasoned truths. Ignoring the obvious inconsistencies of Parvini’s argument, let me present his kind of case charitably and offer my view on the relationship between power and ideology.

I think this case could be neatly summarised in a quote from the movie Starship Troopers, "force, my friends, is violence, the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived." As demonstrated in the film, this can be a difficult position to argue against. In the book, the example is Carthage rather than Hiroshima, which makes more sense given that Carthage was truly erased while Hiroshima bounced back to become a thriving metropolis shortly after getting nuked. Either way, the point stands: ideas without power are impotent.

You could say breathing air is more important to me than all of my political ideals. If somebody were to place their boot on my neck for hard enough and long enough, I would give a thumbs up to gay race communism in order to be able to breathe again. It can be inferred from this that power, force, and violence trump all of my ideological convictions. And even if I heroically managed to refrain from giving a thumbs up, the frosty logic of violence would be that I would die of asphyxiation and the gay race communist boot would prevail.

Ideas without power are indeed vulnerable, if not impotent. There’s an important truth that Parvini is getting at, but there is another truth that this truism about power exists in a complex and contingent relationship with. Political ideas and ideals matter more than the power process because they dictate how power is wielded once it is wielded. All one must do to step over Parvini’s sophistry is to affirm that your pursuit of ideals will be in alignment with the Machiavellian realities of political contention. I am a “realist” in the banal sense in which AA uses the term. I recognise that ideals aren’t much good without the means to implement them, and I would consider all manner of pragmatic compromises to get nearer to my ideal world.

Of course, some of the strawmen Parvini is hacking away at do exist, and even thrive. The Amish are pacifist, as are other individuals, organisations, and denominations. There are millions of people in the world who are ideologically pacifist, and most of them get along just fine. Curiously, the set of ideas most directly in contradiction with Parvini’s model are becoming some of the most successful in modern America, with the Anabaptist fellowships doubling in population every twenty years and taking more land and resources than any other population, per capita. In theory, they could be instantly crushed, right? How can you win a fight if you are opposed on principle to winning fights? Parvini’s neat little pseudo-intellectual truisms crumble on impact with a comprehensive analysis of the power process, in this and most other real world applications. Power is about so much more than force, and the interplay between force and ideas is incredibly dynamic.

As I pointed out in my previous essay, Parvini’s angle amounts to an unfalsifiable game. Even the absurdly idealistic and explicitly non-resistant Amish are powerful in some real sense and could therefore be argued to be exercising power. Something being “unfalsifiable” doesn’t mean it’s not false, only that it’s internally consistent with itself. It’s an intellectual game. And as he says in the video where he first outlined this, it can be very fun to choose your own historical examples and overlay his “BS, BS, therefore I rule” shtick to explain it.

In this particular essay, Parvini goes to the example of the Iranian Revolution, which I mentioned first as an example of a major political upheaval which could not be predicted by the desires of “power”. Parvini points out that Ayatollah Khomeini

didn’t win a debate in the free marketplace of ideas; he seized power at the barrel of a gun.

…

The Mullahs, led by Khomeini, were the most organised minority, so it was they who seized power and got to execute their rivals and so it was their BS justifications that won the day, while the ideas of the liberals, leftists, democrats and so on who made up the revolutionary coalition were never realised as ideology

As with fascism, and as with the Bolsheviks, AA is skipping a lot of important steps. He says, for example, that the Italian fascists had no program except wanting to rule. This is wrong, and if it wasn’t for the “positive vision” of developmental nationalism, militarism and corporatism put forward by early fascist intellectuals, there would have been nothing for revolutionary nationalist vanguardists to unite around.

The same goes for the Islamic Revolution: there were a lot of groups opposing the Shah, but if Khomeini’s followers were not true believers in his brand of Islam and the necessity of it ruling Iran, he would not have had an organised minority to wield against the failing regime. On the level of organising a regime change in a modern mass-society, wanting to reward your friends and punish your enemies isn’t a strong enough organising principle to win out, except when that friend/enemy distinction is broadened beyond the personal, uniting men in their commitment to ideals. There is nothing starry eyed or idealistic about acknowledging this. If you want a contemporary example of how a powerful moral challenge to the powers that be can propel an organic movement for change, check out this excellent analysis of the #BanTheADL movement.

By analogy, let’s imagine that history is the ocean. Historical processes are the tides, oscillations, and currents occurring beneath the waves. The waves themselves are specific historical events. Your ideology is what the surfer is attempting to do on the ocean, and you, the ideologue, are the surfer. Parvini is arguing, echoing King Cnut, that you are powerless to move the ocean with your intentions. You can, however, by learning how to surf, sail, or ride a jet ski, master the waves to a great degree and exercise your will relative to the ocean. While no man can turn back the tide, mankind’s will has prevailed against the awesome power of the open ocean.

The Dutch have drained the ocean. Americans tied two oceans together. We have trans-oceanic cables permitting us to speak across the vast ocean as if we were right next to each other. We can travel from one end to another in mere hours, while sleeping. And barring an unfortunate recent exception, we can safely explore the farthest and lowest reaches of the ocean.

If one wanted to return to the AA method of reducing someone’s arguments to a supposed personal motive, one might say the output of Parvini is a fundamentally oriental rejection of the western spirit, one where it’s seen as foolish to attempt to conquer the sea. But it’s that spirit that led to Europeans actually conquering the sea. And while even I remain skeptical that Elon Musk will conquer Mars or the stars, we did put a man on the moon, and Musk’s ambition is driving innovations in rocket science and energy technology that are dramatically transforming the world we live in. This spirit has a good deal to do with the mess we find ourselves in now, more than many nationalists would like to admit, but I believe if there’s a solution it will also be one that appeals to that powerful sense of idealism in the European spirit.

By imploring us to reject ideals, principles, and moral arguments as useless in the face of power, the fancy cigar smoking academic guy is inviting the Dissident Right back into the familiar swamp inhabited by “Might Makes Right” goons and vulgar skinheads (that might be unfair to vulgar skinheads, as many of them are more idealistic and morally centered than the Academic Agent.) We absolutely should be mindful of the Machiavellian realities of power, and act according to them in pursuit of our abstract ideals, as surely as Columbus was mindful of the waves crashing against his ships. He dramatically transformed the world in the image of his ideals by the force of his will. You can, too! The only thing in your way is falling for the terrible idea that your ideas aren’t themselves an invincible power awaiting manifestation.