A Gentle Introduction to Mencius Moldbug Part 6: "Ants and Grasshoppers"
Still, the entropic explanation of the phenomenon is vague. It's all well and good, as Moldbug does, to associate the left with degeneration. But what exactly is being degenerated? What is wasting away?
Dissolution and chaos, from analogy to religion and physics, tends to have a negative emotional connotation. If you were to ask me whether I want my society to be degenerated, I would probably say “no” simply out of emotional association. Still we haven't specified what is being degenerated. What if it's something bad? What if the object slowly melting away is oppression,
In that case, the entropic model of left would be correct, but the left would still be a good thing, at least under most people's views.
So exactly what is degenerated over time?
It can't be living standards. Ease of life has gotten better, for the most part. We might be more progressive than those old fogies in the early 18th century and perhaps this means we are more “chaotic” in the Jordan Peterson sense of the word. But in terms of wealth and technology we are by far their superiors. We may be in the process of degeneration, but if technology and wealth increases then we will be degenerating all the way to the bank.
So living standards aren't degenerating, sp what is the subject of the left’s entropy?
Well, as Moldbug puts it in a word, or a Greek word, “nomos”: rules, laws, customs, and the promises and commitments that stem from those rules and customs.
Here we mean “rules and laws” in the most general sense. Saying “all men should take their head off before the king” is part of nomos but so is saying “little boys should wash their hands before supper”. Saying “all good churchmen should observe the Holy Days of obligation” is nomos, and so is the military draft
And here we have a simple explanation for what is left ,and what is right. The left is antinomian, and the right is pronomian.
If we look at human organization through history and human organizations generally, we see that each in turn are made up of promises and rules. One person, usually an authority, promises something to those who are lower and in exchange he is raised up in the hierarchy and is able to make the rules for the rest of the community.
This is a very basic model, but you will see it again and again in everything from the establishment of ancient civilizations and kings to corporate boardrooms. You even see it in the case of religions and gods. It is no accident that the first religious testament we have in the Bible concerns the development of a covenant, a promise made by God, and subsequently the rules set out to govern his people in order that God can fulfill that promise. This is the core cultural feature that binds a society together on a political and pre-political level.
Alright, so this might be an observation concerning how society is formed. But how does this play into our of institutional reformation and possibly the deformation? Well, as we might expect with promises and rules, the order of a society can't remain static. Norms need to be modified to accommodate change, there needs to be some flexibility and modification. Some rules need to be renegotiated or possibly even reneged on as circumstances change. But here comes the problem.
When we make a rule or a promise, we limit possibilities, the potential of human action is constrained. By breaking a rule, we become liberated. We are free to make new commitments and to enjoy life and in unconstrained fashion. However, as we disregard promises and break faith with the rules, the authority loses credibility, the system is weakened, and potentially the entire justification for the system collapses. At some point, if we break too many rules, nothing works and there is a collapse.
For an immediate analogy in the modern world, we could look at the monetary systems and the printing of promissory notes on paper. Governments issue the initial currency as a fixed promise, just like an initial covenant between people and their rulers. Subsequently, the government prints bills and people borrow those bills to buy what they need and what they think they can pay back in the future. However, as the people and the government go into debt, it becomes necessary to break or bend promises by printing more and more paper money, inflating the currency, and therefore making it easier to pay debts and to borrow and spend worry free. However, print too many promissory notes and people will lose faith with the currency, there will be hyper-inflation, an accelerating metastasizing collapse of the system and its capacity to use money to negotiate for things that people need.
For perhaps a simpler example, we might imagine the trade-off between pronomian and antinomian perspectives being like the ants and the grasshopper from the famous Aesop's Fables. The rule says “work every day hard, to store for the winter”. Break the rule for a single day and you get a nice day-off, a break from the ordinary pattern of existence and a chance to enjoy life. But break the rules every day, as does the grasshopper in the title of the fable, and you will starve come winter.
And so it goes with societies. The rules can be bent, but if they're broken, all hell breaks loose. Things Fall Apart, order breaks down, trust evaporates, and men cannot rely on their fellow men.
And there and we can imagine, again a balance, a pattern that takes place in most societies, the antinomian bleeding-heart grasshoppers telling society to make exceptions, to ease up, to let loose, to take a break from the promises and rules of society. The pronomian fuddy-duddy ants sticking to order and the old ways, cautioning society that if it does ease up, that if it does slack from its duties, that if it does show too much mercy, society will starve come winter and the barbarian hordes will be at the gates.
But, after everything, does this explain the progressive direction in history over the long term?
Well, not entirely. If there was a trade-off like this, we would expect that our world will be simpler the equilibrium would be reached and that history itself would involve small cycles between these forces rather than a single direction. And this type of cyclical equilibrium might be the case if nothing changed. But of course, things do change. In particular, technology changes.