On Reactionaries

Intellectual history, at its core, measures the effect of thought on the larger affairs of humanity. It is a field in crisis. At best, the pursuit of ideological causes in history is seen as endearing. At worst the historicist outlook is portrayed as dangerously naïve, a debutante wandering about in a room full of materialist realities. Economics, demographics, geology, climatology: in functionalism they form the wave of the phenomenological world. The wave is widely regarded as the sole source of dynamism in human events. In this weltanschauung there is no action but reaction; there are no crises but circumstance. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that intellectual history has likewise declined in importance. The mind has been discarded in favor of the wave.

This assumes that our ability to comprehend the world around us has remained unchanged for fifty thousand years. This assumption is false. Humans do not interpret the environment objectively; they do so through a complex filter that defines as it records. If our surfer - our historical actor- judges his course by the shape of the wave, the shape of the wave is in turn described by the net experience of countless minds. This is why ideas are so important when gauging the rise and fall of complex societies. Intellectual history is the measure of this comprehensive power, the capability of ideas to shape the destinies of peoples and nations.

Myriad power groups in human history have consciously tried to seize this power so as to improve their lot. Controlling ideas is an extraordinarily efficient way to control resources, as the distribution cost of information is always lower than capital. For this reason it is also unpredictable, as anyone with a new information distribution technology can overthrow the existing order. Unsurprisingly, this leads to the pitting of one group of intelligentsia against the other. Visionaries on both sides fall to cynicism and violence with increasing frequency. Progressives become militant, and the authorities turn into reactionaries.

The Hobbesian establishment of a reactionary force signals the end of culture. True believers split away, the established struggle to maintain the status quo; the young polarize and begin arming themselves. Old friends turn on each other with an easy viciousness born from decades of association and unconscious rivalry. The lives of such men are often at the crux of history. The Kangxi in China, Tlaxcalan in Mexico, Cosimo II in Venice- each has tried to change his or her culture at the very pivot of history. Their counterparts- Confucian, Aztec, or Catholic- were no less impressive in their defense of tradition and what they saw as right. They maintained the old world in the face of the new, and tore their universes apart.

This must not happen here.