A Gentle Introduction to Mencius Moldbug Part 2: "A Strange Tendency"
Political labels can be revealing. It might be one thing for each side of the political spectrum to claim a directional label, as in “left” versus “right”. Indeed, to extend a physical analogy, there might be a legitimate debate over the direction to steer our civilization just like there might be a legitimate debate over the direction to steer a car. “To the left or the right?”
However, the same can not be said for labels such as “forward in time” or “backward in time” .
How can there be a legitimate debate between the future and the past? I can turn the steering wheel of a car in any direction I like, but it's pointless to argue whether I can drive into the future or the past. I'm obviously going into the future. There can't be a contest between yesterday and tomorrow. Tomorrow always wins.
And this distinction was further underlined by the increasingly common progressive bromide, that they were “on the right side of history”. The phrase had the standard overconfidence of any political bromide, but at the same time it was very clear talking progressives in the late 2000s, that they really believed it. They really believed that there was a force in history that would grant their ideas ultimate victory, and vindication.
Being one of the few people in my social circles who had a fair number of right-wing friends, I remember bringing the phrase “the right side of history” to conservatives and discussing their opinions on the matter. As I suspected they dismissed it. “History doesn't have a direction!” they would day, or alternatively “This is just a leftover Hegellian-Marxist notion that human nature is moving to an ultimate culmination”. But always the conservative would finish his dismissal of the “right side of history” with an assurance that “it is nothing but progressive overconfidence! Just watch history will prove them wrong!”
But would history prove them wrong? Was there a direction in history?
The question was strange. There really shouldn't be a direction to history. I had no reason to expect there would be. But looking backwards across the time, I could see a different story unfold.
Suppose for instance, we took a standard conservative political commentator, such as Ben Shapiro for instance, and sent him back in time in 100 year increments. First, we could send Shapiro back to the year 1918 and introduce him to the right-wingers of the time. Would the conservatives of that era consider him right-wing? Almost certainly not. His views would undoubtedly fall on the left wing of the political spectrum during the early 20th century. Moreover, if we were to take Ben Shapiro and the 1918 right-winger, and sent them back another 100 years, a similar pattern would follow. The right winger of 1818 would be to the right of the right winger in 1918, and the rightinger of 1918, would be to the right of Ben Shapiro. And on and on this pattern would repeat; throughout the period of enlightenment, throughout the period of the reformation. The figure we observe from the past is always to the right, and the figure taken from the future is always to the left.
The pattern would persist even before the French Revolution. Even before the terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” were developed as part of the National Assembly. We have an intuitive understanding of what “right” and “left” mean in the real world; and in every single comparison, the right is more primitive, and the left is more futuristic.
This consistent leftward tendency is an interesting pattern in history, and one that has not been unremarked upon by academics. In our present age alone, thinkers ranging Richard Dawkins to Barack Obama have commented on the trend. Good explanations of the phenomenon are hard to come by, however names for the trend were plentiful from Martin Luther King’s “moral arc of history” to George Washington’s “Providence”.
The most evocative, and for my money, most useful formulation of the general leftward tendency in history was stated by the historian and poet Robert Conquest and his very famous three laws of politics. The “Laws” as stated, can be summarized:
Conquest’s Three Laws
Everyone is conservative about what one knows best
Any organization which is not explicitly right-wing will sooner or later becomes left-wing
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
I like this formulation because of its added specificity. No longer talking about general trends in between the centuries, with Conquest’s Laws we can see clearly that not only history, but institutions in general, have a left wing tilt over the course of their development.
The formulation of Conquest’s Three Laws even have a strange paradoxical nature. With the first law saying that we are all conservative about the things we know best, it is hard then to explain why institutions, and subsequently history itself, always seems to go to the left.
For sometime, Conquest’s Laws were a chief point of interest from myself. I brought them up in conversations with both conservatives and progressives alike. And here I found another strange asymmetry.
Conservatives were very ready to accept Conquest’s first law, and while they sometimes grudgingly accepted Conquest’s second law, they nevertheless had no explanation for it. Similarly, progressives were quite fond of denying outright Conquest’s first law, but I found nevertheless, that the law was true about the very progressives who wanted to deny it (at least if you replaced “knew best” with “loved”). The feminist who denied Robert Conquest’s first law was always in the process of defending feminism from its critics, conserving the Women's Studies Department, and ensuring its own institutional power was secured. The anti-capitalist union organizer nevertheless wanted to conserve and enhance the power of labor. And what third world nationalist, fresh from talking about the hegemony of the United States wasn't dedicated to the goal of increasing the hegemony of his own people.
Again and again, Robert Conquest’s first law was demonstrated, even in the face of progressives’ attempt to deny it. But progressives had an easier time with Robert conquest second law, because the answer was so simple. “Weill of course, institutions and history always moved to the left”, a progoressive might say, ”the left is correct!”. I remember thinking about this argument and trying to take it seriously. How could the left just be correct again and again and again throughout history?
Certainly, the most believable explanation I could come up with was that this effect was the result of post hoc reasoning. We cast our gaze backwards throughout history and label all of the policy choices to be on the “leftwing” choices. Thus, retroactively of course, we create the appearance that the left is always right. We call the left “correct”, only because we changed the definition of what was “left” every time we knew what was “correct”. But while being somewhat parsimonious, this explanation ultimately didn't make very much sense for the simple fact that we already knew what “left” was before we determined who would win political conflicts.
For instance, in the 19th century, no one knew yet whether the royalists or the republican factions would win in their struggle for Europe, but everyone knew that the royalists, were on the right, and the republicans were on the left. Similarly as a contemporary American, I do not know who will be ultimately vindicated in the debate over abortion, whether or pro-choice or pro-life will win. But I do know that pro-life is right-wing, and pro-choice is left-wing. The category exists before the prediction.
Another way to explain the left-wing tendency in history is to identify left-wing ideas as themselves equivalent to the application of reason and evidence to human undertaking. Perhaps we are persistently moving left the same way that we are persistently getting better technology, the same way that we are persistently developing better and better scientific models. We move left because we improve our knowledge, because “left-wing” is another word for evidence-based methodologies applied to politics. Under this explanation, when we say the word “left” all we mean are policy ideas that are developed by an honest application of empiricism and rationality. But once more, this explanation falls short.
In addition to being emotionally dissonant (we would have to accept that even the most radical left wing issues from child transgenderism, to complete open borders, to immediate implementation of state run socialism as empirically derived), things don't add up with the direct association of left-wing with rational empiricism.
Leftwing ideas contain their own methodology, which we can clearly recognize before being implemented or tested. Any lay person can identify a left wing idea whether or not he knows that it has been demonstrated by science to be effective. And if “leftism” is the application of “empiricism”, this identification is very unusual, it would never occur in a scientific discipline or even an engineering one.
Any consumer can tell you they want a better iPhone. But it would be very odd if a random lay person could tell you how to make the iPhone better in a scientific fashion. If he could just say something like “add more zinc” and immediately have the recommendation result in a better iPhone before anyone tested or validated this recommendation. Similarly, we know certain ideas and methods are left-wing even before they've been tested. Will open borders policy work for the West? I don't know. But I sure as heck know that it's a left-wing idea.
One can even ideas ideas as left before they become part of the mainstream political discourse. I'm sure that at some point in the future people are going to move on from being transgender to being trans species and want extensive biological work to live as animals. This trans-speciesism is nowhere on our political spectrum in the current year (although you can see its foreshadowing on the internet), still, I'm pretty sure that the trans-species liberation movement will be a movement on the left, regardless of whether it's utility is vindicated by experimentation and honest research.
And so, with both of these easy explanations out of the way, we are left with a mystery. If the left is indeed “on the winning side of history”, if the course of human events has a “well known left wing bias”, what is its cause? How can we explain this bias in a methodological sense?
And here, we get to the heart of the matter.