Bio-cons versus social cons

The biological reductionist who writes the blog In Mala Fide (in bad faith—nice) has a long entry called “Lawrence Auster: a social conservative who just doesn’t get it,” in which he critiques my denunciation of the “Game” approach to life being discussed in the big thread at Mangan’s. The article provides a disturbing glimpse into the hell of materialist consciousness that I’ve been writing about lately.

For example, the blogger rejects my idea that biocentrism would make civilization impossible. How does he know this? Because biocentrists have a biocentric theory of how civilization originated, that’s why! “The West was created and sustained on the terms of incentivizing beta males to work for the public good.” See? The West has been explained, biologically. Next subject. Bio-reductionists invent bio-narratives that “explain” why things are the way they are, then they present these myths as though they were hard, scientific truth which we less hard-headed, non-bio-centric types can’t handle. In reality these bio-centrist creation stories don’t even rise to the level of myth; they are mere empty placeholders that are assumed to be saying something but actually contain no informational content. They are on the order of the Darwinian “tiny changes” explanation for the evolution of new species, in which every objection to the Darwinian theory is answered by: “There were lots of tiny changes—lots and lots and lots of tiny changes!”

I realize that I have failed to convey the blogger’s world view and to show how desolating it is. You’ll have to read the article to see for yourself. Social and Christian conservatives who thought they understood the nihilism that results from Darwinian reductionism ain’t seen nothing. There’s a whole new world out there of aggressive confident purveyors of materialist nihilism.

However, while I’m appalled by his world view, it is refreshing to see a blogger and his commenters attacking me (there are a few dissenters from the attack), not for my thin-skinned, abusive, dictatorial, megalomaniacal, refusing-to-reply-to-criticism, not-fit-for-human-company personality, but for my ideas. Notwithstanding the blogger’s disdain for my ideas, there is not a single personal remark in the entire discussion. That is an unusual and welcome experience for me.

- end of initial entry -

Posec writes:

Greetings. I am the commenter Posec in the thread at In Mala Fide (and replicated them for the Mangan thread) concerning your apparently aberrant prescriptions to arrest societal decline. I, an avid reader of yours, was one who dissented from the thread’s thesis. In the interest of enlarging the discussion in your recent thread on the bio-cons, I would like to present to you my responses in general as well as a specific response to Novaseeker. For your convenience I have ingathered them here and would like to know if you deem them effective criticism.

I wrote:

While you [Ferdinand Bardamu] lambast Auster for not addressing topics relevant to Western decline—no-fault divorce, punitive alimony, the welfare state, female economic emancipation, and female hypergamy—the Roissysphere prognosis of societal problems does not account for their etiology. If the supplanting of the traditional West by leftism is to be accounted for by the hitherto unprecedented assurgence [?] of alphas and their feminist footstools—and not by an ideological shift—then what use is there in resisting this tide? How can an intellectual defense be mounted against the phenomenon of polyandry when the predilections of the Austers for “arguing how many angels can fit on the head of a pin” and subtle philosophical distinctions (all the more important for countering the pretensions of the left) is laughed to scorn by biocentrists? Biocons offer no prescriptions—save “coping mechanisms”—as a counterpoise to this descent into “African style savagery and sexual anarchy,” notwithstanding their abhorrence thereof. By peremptorily dismissing other conservative thought, biocons then become incapable of preserving what remains worthy in the West.

Novaseeker replied thus:

It’s not so much that, I think, but rather that the West may very well be, in reality, beyond being preserved. The philosophical conservatives have lost the debate, as a practical matter, as a casual look around us clearly indicates. That intellectual train has left the station, and there is no going back at this stage. All the conservatives can do at this point is slow the train down—they can’t stop it entirely or turn it around. Conservatives were prominent in U.S. government for almost 30 years from 1980-2008, and in that period feminism and the related social catastrophe proceeded apace, aided and abetted by conservatives themselves, and actually picked up steam. The Roisysphere and the biocentrists are merely people who are realists about the current situation, and ones who are offering men in particular usable coping mechanisms.

To which I responded:

Gone as the intellectual train may be, biocons have a marked inability to articulate the process that fueled it and sped it onwards, while they also have the temerity to denounce other conservatives for getting the remedy for the current malaise wrong. If philosophical conservatives lost the debate, why are so many in the steveosphere disposed towards conservatism? If conservatism’s philosophical integrity was battered and beaten beyond repair, how is it that so many hearken back to its precepts? If leftists and Neocons totally triumphed, would not these very blogs be non-existent since all would unabashedly subscribe to radicalism? I still think it is worthy to examine the ideologies, intellectual arguments, and cultures that set us on this course. Philosophical conservatives at least have recourse to this approach and can refute the left’s pretensions; biocons can only point at the decline with disgust, which is salutary but no cause for them to claim philosophical conservatism as vacuous.

Here is another observation by me:

There is no utility in correct diagnosis of the malady when what the rot is symptomatic of is left ignored and unexplained. Yes, hypergamy and misandrist laws are rampant—what of it? in terms of a resolution, what the problem is at present is insignificant compared to how it came to be. The “what” of it is of lesser importance than the “why.” I have yet to read a biocon blogger who has outlined the developmental process of the leftist politics to which they are hostile. In all fairness, this renders the biocons as inefficacious as those social conservatives who err in their eyes. They are as mere accumulators of data who do not—whether for lack of ability or inclination—point to a more pleasant political vista. Pointing at polyandry and feminism, writing reams about their pernicious characters, and then shrugging at the prospect of counteracting these insidious infestations leaves the West in no better condition. Auster and others are doubtless aware of this tendency among biocons to act in the manner of factual news reporters and not opinionated molders of policy and whose ambivalence might as well make them leftists when it comes to reversing radicalism. How does Auster not “get it” when all that biocons can do is diagnose but not cure?

Novaseeker answers:

Again, as I pointed out above, there is no ideological cure. You’ve lost. The train has left the station. All you can do now is slow it down. Sound like defeatism? Not in the least. It’s realism. The ugly truth is that ideological conservatives—who have had their “aye” in the government over the past 30 years—have done nothing but further the feminist agenda and the attendant social catastrophe. Why? Because they are powerless amidst the protean strength of what was unleashed in the 60s and 70s—nothing less than the pure, raw, unrestrained force of completely unregulated and (with the consequences unnaturally removed via abortion and contraception) female sexuality. That protean force is simply much, much more powerful than any ideology, including the feminist one which unleashed it. Many second wave feminists would be appalled at the current sexual culture, and many have written about how they are—but they, too, are powerless to stop it. They created a Frankenstein, and that Frankenstein is stronger than any political ideology.

Hopefully, all the above will make for a productive discussions. Chances are it will, for, in an unusual twist, the critics at In Male Fide criticize you from a stance of immense respect. I thank you very much for your time.—

LA replies:

Thanks you very much for this. It’s a stimulating exchange.

Novaseeker is hypostasizing conservatism and saying that the fact that conservatives did not grasp or oppose the spreading sexual anarchy from the 1980s to the present means that conservatism as such has failed or even ceased to exist. But the truth is that the Reagan era conservatism (as well as its successors such as Limbaugh conservatism and Gingrich conservatism) was simply inadequate, failing to address cultural issues, as Samuel Francis explained in classic form when he said that Reagan conservatives only assailed the outer, political ramparts of liberalism and had no notion of the vast area beyond the ramparts—the cultural, sexual area—that they were not attacking. So the fact that conservatism failed, the fact that conservatism up to this point has failed, does not mean that there cannot be a deeper conservatism which does grasp the problem and fights it. I have said many times since the mid 1990s—I said it in a phone conversation with Francis in 1995—that conservatism consists of a bunch of inadequate fragments, and that there is not in existence a real conservatism, that is, a conservatism that truly challenges liberalism, and that it remains to be created. (See my article, “Vision of a new conservatism, 1996.”)

In short, I share with Novaseeker the view that “actually existing” conservatism terribly failed; such insight is central to any serious conservatism. But that insight tells us nothing about whether a better and truer conservatism can arise. And such a conservatism is what I and other traditionalist conservatives, few and powerless though we may be at present, are attempting to articulate and bring into existence. For Novaseeker to mistake the catastrophically shallow establishment and mainstream “conservatism” for conservatism as such is fallacious. This is the way liberals argue who seek to make any conservatism disappear; and the bio-cons at In Mala Fide, by showing total contempt for social conservatism, show that they, too, want conservatism to disappear and thus they show what side they’re really on. The Roissy-ites accept the total rule of liberalism, including rampant female promiscuity, and seek to operate within it, rather than offer a countervision of man and society.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 18, 2009 01:03 PM | Send