Reactionary Blogs and Articles Database

Aldarion · Dec 21, 2021

For a collection of writings from various reactionary blogs.

I'll start with a new article from Ortosphere:

Why all Wise Men are Sad: The Roots of Reactionary Pessimism

“Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about” Robert Conquest quoted in Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991) “Reflecting on what has been said, we see how quickly men’s …

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“Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about”

Robert Conquest quoted in Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991)

“Reflecting on what has been said, we see how quickly men’s eyes may be opened, if knowing that they deceive themselves in generalities, we can find a way to make them pass to particulars . . .”

Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy (1531)

My first epigraph is the first of Conquest’s three laws of conservatism, now perhaps better known in John Derbyshire’s paraphrase: “everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” What this means is that it requires ignorance to believe that ameliorative social “progress” is easy, efficacious, or even possibility. Making the world a better place appears simple only so long as one has very little idea how the world works. The more one knows about some thing, the more one understands why it is done the way it is, why alternative ways of doing it are not done, and why optimistic reformers do not, “generally speaking,” have any idea what they are talking about.

Kingsley Amis became a friend of Robert Conquest in the early 1950s, when Amis was still one of the “angry young men” of British letters and Conquest was a young historian beginning to buck the leftist tide with honest histories of the horrors of Soviet Russia. In addition to being an angry young man of letters (Lucky Jim was published in 1954), Amis paid his bills by teaching English at a redbrick university like the one he described in Lucky Jim. Of his friendship with Conquest Amis writes,

“In those days I was some sort of a man of the Left, and this brought us into mild conflict. Some time later he [Conquest] was to point out that, while very ‘progressive’ on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience.”*

On the connection between experience and reactionary pessimism, Paul Fussell has this to say about his friend Amis.

“Amis has taught at four universities, and his experience at each seems to have augmented his disillusion with that scene.”**

I realize that disillusion is not the only consequence of learning “how things work” and “why things are done the way they are,” and I am the first to insist that a reactionary is not simply a sour old grumbler who denounces everything as a swindle and a sham. But everybody is, generally speaking, reactionary on subjects he knows about because he knows they can seldom be improved. If they presently work well, “reform” and “improvement” will almost certainly make them worse; if they are swindles and shams, “reform” and “improvement” is very unlikely to make them better.

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Simonbob · Dec 22, 2021

That's only partialy true.

The fellow who knows how it works, can still be doing it inefficiently. They can also be unwilling to change something they know works, for something that might, or might not.

However, better ways almost always come from somebody who understands the basics, and see another way from there. The person who is a Master, almost never improves, for what technique they have is already perfected.

The biggest problem with trying to improve? There are far, far too many swindles and shams, as you put it.

We do need to improve, pretty much everything, I think. However, finding the gem in the dirt that is our society, that's pretty hard. Especially now, I think. Look at our Uni's!

Aldarion · Dec 22, 2021

Simonbob said:
That's only partialy true.

The fellow who knows how it works, can still be doing it inefficiently. They can also be unwilling to change something they know works, for something that might, or might not.

However, better ways almost always come from somebody who understands the basics, and see another way from there. The person who is a Master, almost never improves, for what technique they have is already perfected.

The biggest problem with trying to improve? There are far, far too many swindles and shams, as you put it.

We do need to improve, pretty much everything, I think. However, finding the gem in the dirt that is our society, that's pretty hard. Especially now, I think. Look at our Uni's!

True. But on the other hand, very often the improvements and fixes that we need are things that had been rejected as old and outmoded, sometimes decades, and sometimes centuries, ago. Consequences of new systems are often not seen for some generations, so innovation - especially social innovation - is always dangerous.

Simonbob · Dec 22, 2021

Aldarion said:
Consequences of new systems are often not seen for some generations, so innovation - especially social innovation - is always dangerous.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I think the biggest issue in social change, is making only a very minor change.

Once you start walking a path, just taking a few steps and waiting to see what happens for a few generations is near impossible.

The level of pressure required to start the change is too much to allow it to stop quickly. Thus, today.