Prosperity Does Not Cause Progressivism
In what RationalWiki, with characteristic progressive smugness, calls "the definitive takedown," Scott Alexander at slatestarcodex.com has written a long-form criticism of the Neoreaction movement. Here I'd like to respond to one of its main arguments.
The nature of the continual leftward shifting of the Overton window over the last several hundred years is a major preoccupation of reactionary politics. Normie progressives and intellectuals alike tend to see this leftward shift as the result of the application of reason - the freeing of man from his intellectual "self-incurred immaturity", as Kant would call it. This gives it a character of inevitability - once man opens his eyes, he cannot shut them again, and the march towards an increasingly more rational ordering of society must go on. If, somehow, this process were stopped, it would continue in much the same way once we learned to use our rational faculties again. Reactionaries tend to see leftist and progressive ideas as essentially arbitrary and pseudo-religious in nature - not to mention deleterious. Alexander comes down on the progressive side of the argument, but gives his own reasoning for the dominance of progressive thinking in the developed world today. Essentially, it is that it is driven by prosperity, peace, and urbanization. It is a more or less natural phenomenon or set of adaptations to modern life. What the World Values Survey calls "traditional" and "survival" values - what we usually think of as "right-wing" - are adaptations to a poor, hungry, and rural existence. What it calls "secular-rational" and "self-expression" values - what we usually think of as "left-wing" are adaptations to urbanization, prosperity, stability, and so on.
More urbanized, prosperous, and peaceful places tend to be left-wing: for example, Sweden and Germany. More rural, poor, and war-torn areas tend to be more traditional: for example, Bangladesh and Iraq. The effect can be observed within a single country, too: it's hardly a novel observation to point out that the red-state blue-state divide in the USA splits almost perfectly along the lines of poor rural states and rich urban states. Alexander argues that there is a direct and causal relationship here. Allow me to quote him:
The header for section 3.3.1 of his post is: (emphasis mine)
What I'd like you to notice is that this is just a restatement of the idea that progressive values are (a) inevitable and (b) better than right-wing values (at least for People Like Us - right wing values might still be better for those stinky brown people.) Alexander also gives a not-so-subtle nod to the familiar idea that progressive ideas are the result of pure reason with his statement that prosperity allows us to focus on "abstract principles." His only real contribution is the idea that the leftward shift occurs and continues to occur because of essentially economic and material factors - that they are a natural consequence of prosperity and urbanization. I must admit that there is a very strong correlation here, which on the surface makes his argument compelling. But this is a mirage. There is no causal relationship here. Progressive values are a natural consequence of prosperity no more than Islam is a natural consequence of hot weather and camels.
I'll begin.
1. The Gulf States
It's kind of a weird coincidence that every graphic Alexander uses neglects to include Saudia Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. Don't you find that weird? Saudi Arabia has a population of around 30 million and is one of the most geopolitically significant and influential states in the world. Qatar and the UAE are much smaller, but still hardly trifling. Yet the creator of these graphs did see his way to include Iceland - population 330,000 and no armed forces - and El Salvador. What gives?
What gives is that these states strike a serious blow to the thesis. These are some of the wealthiest states in the world. They usually top worldwide ranking of GNP/capita, Alexander's own metric for prosperity. They have obesity rates which rival or exceed the USA. People pretty much spend their entire lives indoors (where the A/C is). So why are they among the most reactionary places in the world? I'll use Alexander's own words again, this time from section 2.7:
Saudi Arabia, you see, is culturally and politically deeply reactionary. It is able to do this because it is extremely rich, and as we've shown, rich states tend to become progres- wait, what?
The quote above comes from a section in which Alexander argues that Saudi Arabia has been able to maintain its reactionary system using oil wealth - essentially bribing the populace into supporting its institutions. Surely whoever dissents, then - whoever cannot be bought by oil money - ought to be a progressive, someone with a "postscarcity existence with surplus resources available to devote to more abstract principles". The same principles which caused educated European urbanites to turn progressive ought to turn educated Saudi Arabian urbanites progressive too. Some of them must be progressive enough to go and do something about it. Right?
Well, no. Not really. I looked up political prisoners and dissidents in Saudi Arabia, and it turns out that most of them are even more reactionary than the government itself. Google a few of the names in this article. Some of them were agitating for "civil and political rights" and so on. Most of them are salafists or even affiliated with Al-Qaeda. (I don't know what exactly the political affiliation of this website is, but they somehow managed to turn Sulaiman Al-Alwan, a salafist and, according to Wikipedia, a "theoretician of militant Jihad", into a "reformist".) Sure, I know the Arab Spring affected Saudi Arabia. They also had the Grand Mosque seizure, led by people "advocating a return to the original ways of Islam, among other things: a repudiation of the West; abolition of television and expulsion of non-Muslims".
Alexander's model simply and flatly doesn't work on these states. It's theoretically possible that he is basically right, and there's simply a confounding factor at play in these states, but I can't think of one. Devotion to Islam? If I recall correctly, Europe used to be pretty devout too. The ability of the state to silence dissent through overwhelming force and cold hard cash? Then why is so much of the dissent being silenced reactionary and Islamist, instead of progressive? Didn't they get the memo from the World Values Survey?
2. The Rise of Progressivism in Times of Hardship
It's a commonplace in semi-educated circles (I'm basically referring to /r/worldnews comments and 1st year history course class discussions) to blame the rise of Hitler on the Treaty of Versailles and generalized economic hardship. People were poor, hungry, and humiliated. They needed a scapegoat. They needed a leader. Thus they backslid towards (ostensibly) traditional/survival values, as personified by the racist sexist bigoted xenophobe baddie, Hitler himself. A comparison is often drawn with Donald Trump. Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, struggling to support their families in this stagnating economy. They need a scapegoat, and they need a leader, so Trump's idea of blaming China and illegal immigration catches on. They backslide into traditional/survival values and vote for the racist sexist bigoted xenophobe. The idea that hardship causes people to become conservative and biased towards the ingroup - "clinging to guns and religion" - is a very common progressive trope and ties in neatly with Alexander's argument.
But what if there were a counterexample? What if that counterexample were actually pretty damn famous? So famous, in fact, that you wonder why nobody ever notices the obvious, bald-faced contradiction at work?
I'm talking about the French Revolution. I'm hardly knowledgeable enough to go in depth on the ultimate causes of the Revolution. But as far as I can tell, it's pretty much universally accepted that the most important proximate cause was that the unwashed masses were poorer and hungrier than ever before. I'll let La Wik do the talking:
Why is it that in Weimar Germany, the scapegoat was The Jews, and in Revolutionary France, the scapegoat was The Nobles? Why is it that hardship caused values to swing towards traditional and survival values in one case, but secular-rational and self-expressive values in another?
My answer as a reactionary is easy. When living standards rapidly drop, the people naturally desire change. But "the people" are Aristotelian matter without form, and need direction from above. The change they desire will not necessarily be left-wing or right-wing; it depends on who is able to earn their support and direct them towards a goal. In other words, the manner in which discontent is directed is contingent - not necessarily in a single predetermined direction.
Since Alexander argues that progressivism is a natural set of adaptations to prosperous and urban life, it certainly seems strange that it would arise out of privation and want. But the French Revolution is not the only example. There's also the Revolutions of 1848, the Communist Revolutions of the 20th Century, and most recently, the Arab Spring. Food shortages and economic decline are the common theme. In fact, when you line up all these events in a row, it kind of starts to look like progressivism isn't a side effect of prosperity, but something which is imposed through bloodshed.
Which brings me to my final point.
3. Germany and Japan
The beliefs of the average Japanese person in 1930 and the beliefs of the average German person in 1930 have absolutely no relation to the beliefs of the same in 2017. None. Japanese no longer identify the legitimacy of their government with the favour of the transcendental realm channeled through the Emperor. Germans no longer believe that Jewish lies and greed are responsible for economic downturns.
But before the war as after, Japan and Germany were prosperous and urbanized nations. Sure, they suffered economic hardship in the run-up to the war, but so did America and France. Japan and Germany were solidly in the ranks of the urbanized, industrialized, literate first-world nations, and the same progressivizing forces that worked on France throughout the 1800s ought to have worked on them. But they didn't. Japan in 1930 was - spiritually, if not politically - perhaps the most right-wing society of the modern era, bearing real similarities to the system Julius Evola described in "Revolt Against the Modern World." Have a look at Yukio Mishima's short novella "Patriotism". Its assumptions and values could have come from 800 BC. But Japanese people then lived in cities and read books and had science and worked white collar jobs just like they do today. What changed?
Of course, you know what changed. America beat them up and took their lunch money, and - here is the key part - installed a new elite. They forcibly turned Japan into a progressive democratic society. They did the same to Germany, even more forcibly. Remember when I said that "the people" are Aristotelian matter? That they need an elite to give them form? This is what I mean. The key variable that turned your average German man from a racist with four kids to an effete oikophobic ponce with a little dog isn't "more prosperity." It's that his racist, volkisch elite was replaced with an elite which encourages him, via the media, the education apparatuses, and so on, to be an effete ponce with a little dog.
If the Axis had won WWII, Germany could be just as prosperous and urbanized as it is today, and be just as racist and traditionalist as it was in 1930. To suggest a causal relationship between the outward manifestations of modernity, like urbanization and prosperity, and progressive ideology, is spurious. Progressivism is dominant in rich countries because rich countries have progressive elites. The fact that they have progressive elites is coincidental and contingent.
The nature of the continual leftward shifting of the Overton window over the last several hundred years is a major preoccupation of reactionary politics. Normie progressives and intellectuals alike tend to see this leftward shift as the result of the application of reason - the freeing of man from his intellectual "self-incurred immaturity", as Kant would call it. This gives it a character of inevitability - once man opens his eyes, he cannot shut them again, and the march towards an increasingly more rational ordering of society must go on. If, somehow, this process were stopped, it would continue in much the same way once we learned to use our rational faculties again. Reactionaries tend to see leftist and progressive ideas as essentially arbitrary and pseudo-religious in nature - not to mention deleterious. Alexander comes down on the progressive side of the argument, but gives his own reasoning for the dominance of progressive thinking in the developed world today. Essentially, it is that it is driven by prosperity, peace, and urbanization. It is a more or less natural phenomenon or set of adaptations to modern life. What the World Values Survey calls "traditional" and "survival" values - what we usually think of as "right-wing" - are adaptations to a poor, hungry, and rural existence. What it calls "secular-rational" and "self-expression" values - what we usually think of as "left-wing" are adaptations to urbanization, prosperity, stability, and so on.
More urbanized, prosperous, and peaceful places tend to be left-wing: for example, Sweden and Germany. More rural, poor, and war-torn areas tend to be more traditional: for example, Bangladesh and Iraq. The effect can be observed within a single country, too: it's hardly a novel observation to point out that the red-state blue-state divide in the USA splits almost perfectly along the lines of poor rural states and rich urban states. Alexander argues that there is a direct and causal relationship here. Allow me to quote him:
This progressivism/economics link is so obvious that anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes can reach the same conclusion. I wrote “A Thrive/Surive Theory Of The Political Spectrum long before I was familiar with the World Values Survey, but its conclusions match the survey’s in pretty much every respect: rightist values are those most suited for hardscrabble existence where everyone must band together to survive a dangerous frontier; leftist values are those most suited for a secure postscarcity or near postscarcity existence with surplus resources available to devote to more abstract principles.
The header for section 3.3.1 of his post is: (emphasis mine)
Can you give a more detailed explanation of why increasing wealth, technology, and urbanization would lead to the values we call Progressive?He goes on to give a series of what he admits are "just-so stories" which explain the specific ways in which prosperity and urbanization lead to progressive values. He also gives a series of graphs which show just how strong the correlation is. I'll reproduce one of them here.
What I'd like you to notice is that this is just a restatement of the idea that progressive values are (a) inevitable and (b) better than right-wing values (at least for People Like Us - right wing values might still be better for those stinky brown people.) Alexander also gives a not-so-subtle nod to the familiar idea that progressive ideas are the result of pure reason with his statement that prosperity allows us to focus on "abstract principles." His only real contribution is the idea that the leftward shift occurs and continues to occur because of essentially economic and material factors - that they are a natural consequence of prosperity and urbanization. I must admit that there is a very strong correlation here, which on the surface makes his argument compelling. But this is a mirage. There is no causal relationship here. Progressive values are a natural consequence of prosperity no more than Islam is a natural consequence of hot weather and camels.
I'll begin.
1. The Gulf States
It's kind of a weird coincidence that every graphic Alexander uses neglects to include Saudia Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. Don't you find that weird? Saudi Arabia has a population of around 30 million and is one of the most geopolitically significant and influential states in the world. Qatar and the UAE are much smaller, but still hardly trifling. Yet the creator of these graphs did see his way to include Iceland - population 330,000 and no armed forces - and El Salvador. What gives?
What gives is that these states strike a serious blow to the thesis. These are some of the wealthiest states in the world. They usually top worldwide ranking of GNP/capita, Alexander's own metric for prosperity. They have obesity rates which rival or exceed the USA. People pretty much spend their entire lives indoors (where the A/C is). So why are they among the most reactionary places in the world? I'll use Alexander's own words again, this time from section 2.7:
Saudi Arabia also gets brought up as a modern Reactionary state. It certainly has the absolute monarchy, the reliance on religious tradition, the monoethnic makeup, the intolerance for feminist ideals, and the cultural censorship. How does it do? Well, it’s nice and stable and relatively well-off. But a cynic (or just a person with an IQ > 10) might point out that a lot of this has to do with it controlling a fifth of the world’s oil supply. It’s pretty easy to have a good economy when the entire world is paying you bazillions of dollars to sit there and let them extract liquid from the ground. And it’s pretty easy to be stable when you can bribe the population to do what you want with your bazillions of dollars in oil money – in fact, Saudi Arabia is probably that rarest of birds – a Reactionary welfare state.
(Actually, this point requires further remark. Reactionary states tend to be quite rich.
Saudi Arabia, you see, is culturally and politically deeply reactionary. It is able to do this because it is extremely rich, and as we've shown, rich states tend to become progres- wait, what?
The quote above comes from a section in which Alexander argues that Saudi Arabia has been able to maintain its reactionary system using oil wealth - essentially bribing the populace into supporting its institutions. Surely whoever dissents, then - whoever cannot be bought by oil money - ought to be a progressive, someone with a "postscarcity existence with surplus resources available to devote to more abstract principles". The same principles which caused educated European urbanites to turn progressive ought to turn educated Saudi Arabian urbanites progressive too. Some of them must be progressive enough to go and do something about it. Right?
Well, no. Not really. I looked up political prisoners and dissidents in Saudi Arabia, and it turns out that most of them are even more reactionary than the government itself. Google a few of the names in this article. Some of them were agitating for "civil and political rights" and so on. Most of them are salafists or even affiliated with Al-Qaeda. (I don't know what exactly the political affiliation of this website is, but they somehow managed to turn Sulaiman Al-Alwan, a salafist and, according to Wikipedia, a "theoretician of militant Jihad", into a "reformist".) Sure, I know the Arab Spring affected Saudi Arabia. They also had the Grand Mosque seizure, led by people "advocating a return to the original ways of Islam, among other things: a repudiation of the West; abolition of television and expulsion of non-Muslims".
Alexander's model simply and flatly doesn't work on these states. It's theoretically possible that he is basically right, and there's simply a confounding factor at play in these states, but I can't think of one. Devotion to Islam? If I recall correctly, Europe used to be pretty devout too. The ability of the state to silence dissent through overwhelming force and cold hard cash? Then why is so much of the dissent being silenced reactionary and Islamist, instead of progressive? Didn't they get the memo from the World Values Survey?
2. The Rise of Progressivism in Times of Hardship
It's a commonplace in semi-educated circles (I'm basically referring to /r/worldnews comments and 1st year history course class discussions) to blame the rise of Hitler on the Treaty of Versailles and generalized economic hardship. People were poor, hungry, and humiliated. They needed a scapegoat. They needed a leader. Thus they backslid towards (ostensibly) traditional/survival values, as personified by the racist sexist bigoted xenophobe baddie, Hitler himself. A comparison is often drawn with Donald Trump. Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, struggling to support their families in this stagnating economy. They need a scapegoat, and they need a leader, so Trump's idea of blaming China and illegal immigration catches on. They backslide into traditional/survival values and vote for the racist sexist bigoted xenophobe. The idea that hardship causes people to become conservative and biased towards the ingroup - "clinging to guns and religion" - is a very common progressive trope and ties in neatly with Alexander's argument.
But what if there were a counterexample? What if that counterexample were actually pretty damn famous? So famous, in fact, that you wonder why nobody ever notices the obvious, bald-faced contradiction at work?
I'm talking about the French Revolution. I'm hardly knowledgeable enough to go in depth on the ultimate causes of the Revolution. But as far as I can tell, it's pretty much universally accepted that the most important proximate cause was that the unwashed masses were poorer and hungrier than ever before. I'll let La Wik do the talking:
The economy in the Ancien Régime during the years preceding the Revolution suffered from instability; poor harvests lasting several years and an inadequate transportation system both contributed to making food more expensive.[28][29] The sequence of events leading to the Revolution included the national government's fiscal troubles caused by an inefficient tax system and expenditure on numerous large wars.[16] The attempt to challenge British naval and commercial power in the Seven Years' War was a costly disaster, with the loss of France's colonial possessions in continental North America and the destruction of the French Navy.[30] French forces were rebuilt and feeling bitter about having lost many of France's overseas colonies to the British Empire during the 7 years war, Louis XVI was eager to give the American rebels financial and military support. After the British surrender at Saratoga, the French sent 10,000 troops and millions of dollars to the rebels and despite succeeding in gaining independence for the 13 colonies, France was severely indebted by the American Revolutionary War with no real gains for France except the knowledge that Britain had been humbled[citation needed]. France's inefficient and antiquated financial system could not finance this debt.[31] Faced with a financial crisis, the king called an Estates General, recommended by the Assembly of Notables in 1787 for the first time in over a century.[32]When the unwashed masses rose up, they didn't simply demand reforms. They didn't simply want lower taxes and better food security. They wanted a complete renewal of society - a left-wing idea if I've ever heard one. They started a new calendar from Year One. Many wanted to abolish Christianity and replace it with a Cult of Reason. What was traditional was bad, what was """"rationally derived"""" was good. In other words, in this case, poverty and hardship resulted in an abrupt shift away from traditional/survival values.
France was experiencing such a severe economic depression that there wasn't enough food to go around. As with most monarchies, the upper class was always insured a stable living so while the rich remained very wealthy, the majority of the French population was starving.
Why is it that in Weimar Germany, the scapegoat was The Jews, and in Revolutionary France, the scapegoat was The Nobles? Why is it that hardship caused values to swing towards traditional and survival values in one case, but secular-rational and self-expressive values in another?
My answer as a reactionary is easy. When living standards rapidly drop, the people naturally desire change. But "the people" are Aristotelian matter without form, and need direction from above. The change they desire will not necessarily be left-wing or right-wing; it depends on who is able to earn their support and direct them towards a goal. In other words, the manner in which discontent is directed is contingent - not necessarily in a single predetermined direction.
Since Alexander argues that progressivism is a natural set of adaptations to prosperous and urban life, it certainly seems strange that it would arise out of privation and want. But the French Revolution is not the only example. There's also the Revolutions of 1848, the Communist Revolutions of the 20th Century, and most recently, the Arab Spring. Food shortages and economic decline are the common theme. In fact, when you line up all these events in a row, it kind of starts to look like progressivism isn't a side effect of prosperity, but something which is imposed through bloodshed.
Which brings me to my final point.
3. Germany and Japan
The beliefs of the average Japanese person in 1930 and the beliefs of the average German person in 1930 have absolutely no relation to the beliefs of the same in 2017. None. Japanese no longer identify the legitimacy of their government with the favour of the transcendental realm channeled through the Emperor. Germans no longer believe that Jewish lies and greed are responsible for economic downturns.
But before the war as after, Japan and Germany were prosperous and urbanized nations. Sure, they suffered economic hardship in the run-up to the war, but so did America and France. Japan and Germany were solidly in the ranks of the urbanized, industrialized, literate first-world nations, and the same progressivizing forces that worked on France throughout the 1800s ought to have worked on them. But they didn't. Japan in 1930 was - spiritually, if not politically - perhaps the most right-wing society of the modern era, bearing real similarities to the system Julius Evola described in "Revolt Against the Modern World." Have a look at Yukio Mishima's short novella "Patriotism". Its assumptions and values could have come from 800 BC. But Japanese people then lived in cities and read books and had science and worked white collar jobs just like they do today. What changed?
Of course, you know what changed. America beat them up and took their lunch money, and - here is the key part - installed a new elite. They forcibly turned Japan into a progressive democratic society. They did the same to Germany, even more forcibly. Remember when I said that "the people" are Aristotelian matter? That they need an elite to give them form? This is what I mean. The key variable that turned your average German man from a racist with four kids to an effete oikophobic ponce with a little dog isn't "more prosperity." It's that his racist, volkisch elite was replaced with an elite which encourages him, via the media, the education apparatuses, and so on, to be an effete ponce with a little dog.
If the Axis had won WWII, Germany could be just as prosperous and urbanized as it is today, and be just as racist and traditionalist as it was in 1930. To suggest a causal relationship between the outward manifestations of modernity, like urbanization and prosperity, and progressive ideology, is spurious. Progressivism is dominant in rich countries because rich countries have progressive elites. The fact that they have progressive elites is coincidental and contingent.
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