Brahmin quotes from "The Metaphysical Club"

I just finished reading The Metaphysical Club, which traces the intellectual history of the middle third of American history. It begins with Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who coined the term "Boston Brahmin" in 1860 to describe the New England intellectual elite. A doctor, writer, and Harvard graduate, Holmes belonged to that class:

[Holmes] was unabashedly provincial. His chief ambition was to represent the Boston view in all things.[...] On the other hand, he regarded the Boston point of view as pretty much the only point of view worth representing. He considered Boston "the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet." [...] He was an enemy of Calvinism (which had been his father's region) and a rationalist, but his faith in good breeding was nearly atavistic, and he saw no reason to challenge the premises of a social dispensation that had, over the course of two centuries, contrived to produce a man as genial and accomplished as himself. (p. 7)

The book is fascinating in its own right, the first third especially so for those interested in the crypto-Protestant explanation of progressivism. Some more choice quotes:

Unitarianism, to which Harvard College essentially converted following the appointment of Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805, was a creed founded on a belief in the innate moral goodness of the individual (in reaction to Calvinism, which was a creed founded on a belief in the innate moral depravity of the individual). It was in many ways a religion that led its followers naturally to oppose slavery.[...] But many Harvard professors were Unitarians of a different stripe. They were social conservatives. They believed in law and order and the sanctity of property. (p.8)

On Henry James Sr., theologian best known as the father of William James:

[Henry James] considered Catholicism a superstition, and the Catholic church "a mere scabies upon the life of the nations." He equated true spirituality with Protestants, which he regarded as fundamentally a movement for the democratizing of religion. He regarded democracy, by the same token, as the political equivalent of Protestantism. (p. 87)

AIAcC? More like HIAcC (Harvard is a christian college):

One of the things that had held back scientific education in American colleges [...] was the dominance of theology in the curriculum, which obliged scholars in every field to align their work with Christian orthodoxy. Theology was the academic trump card. Agassiz insisted on the independence of scientific inquiry from religious beliefs--and for that matter, from political and economic beliefs as well. He did not attend church himself, but he was an outspoken deist, and that was evidence enough of religious commitment for a Unitarian institution like Harvard. It allowed Agassiz to secularize scientific research without completely alienating the ministers. (p. 100)

On race:

It was a distinctly Bostonian view of race--revulsion at the racism of others (p. 134)

On English individualism and English exceptionalism:

Buckle called Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations "probably the most important book that has ever been written," and announced the burden of all his researches to be that "the great enemy of civilization, is the protective spirit; by which I mean the notion that society cannot prosper, unless the affairs of life are watched over and protected at nearly every turn by the state and the church." (The failure of the French and Germans to grasp this truth, he explained, was a reason for the superiority of British civilization) (p. 194, emphasis mine)

Some more quotes on Brahmins from the web. The first, on intra-white competition. (I plan to really play up the fratricide trope on this blog)

In Boston, the Brahmins fought fiercely to close immigrants out. While they may have prided themselves on being the champions of abolitionism, they did not actually want black Americans, or any other non-Brahmin group, encroaching on their power or society.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/murder/peopleevents/p_brahmins.html



On moral responsibility:

"There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste—not in any odious sense—but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy...." This series of articles collectively became the novel Elsie Venner, published in 1861. 

The object of Elsie Venner was, "an attempt to illustrate the doctrine of inherited moral responsibility for other people's misbehavior. (emphasis mine)" In broad terms, this was an intentional contradiction of certain theological (Calvinist) beliefs such as pre-destination. An unintended consequence of describing a New England Caste of strict progeny, educational, religious, and business practices, was to later make the Brahmin families appear quite elitist.

http://www.celebrateboston.com/culture/brahmin-origin.htm

Scope

After criticizing the existence of /r/DarkEnlightenment, I convinced myself to start a blog. I still haven't settled on what topics to focus on. Consider this post a first order approximation. I would be pressed to call myself a neoreactionary in terms of values, although my interest certainly overlap with it. Knowledge tends to converge; values less so. If you accept HBD, especially so because I'm not White.

Neoreaction, being a particularly Anglophone phenomenon, is subject to the exceptional characteristics of that group. I would go as far as to call Moldbug's original project an English ideological civil war, attempting to rehabilitate one strand of Anglo-Saxon identity against another, while taking Anglo-Saxon-ness for granted. Its grievances against progressivism is a family affair. This is why he (rightly) singles out the White post-Protestant Brahmins, rather than the non-White Helots or Dalits. Rivalry is generated through the narcissism of small differences. It is also why his critique of America's role in WWII do not come with an exoneration of Nazi Germany.

Progressivism is a form of Americanism, and Americanism originates from WASPs*, who take the trend of Western European Whiteness (as described by HBDChick) to its furthest extent. Confronting this reality creates an uncomfortable mental tension, which in other reactionary spheres is often dissipated by Blaming the Jew. (The extent of Jewish participation in the Cathedral has been well covered, so I will not rehash it.) White Nationalism denies its own heritage. As Nick Land notes:

(2) White Nationalism finds itself stymied at every turn by universalism,
pathological altruism, ethno-masochism — all that yucky white stuff. If only you could do White Nationalism without white people, it would sweep the planet. (Try not to understand this, I know you don’t want to.) 

[...]

(3) All White people need is an identitarian religion. Is that not approximately the same as saying: a counter-factual history?

To formulate this irony on a more general level, linear history means that the present state of being is formed through a vector in time. The vector is more foundational than a point on the vector. Any identity formation that attempts to reverse or stop the vector that brought the subject into being is prima facie special pleading. The burden of proof is on the white tribalist, the primitivist, etc. to show that they are not merely providing an unprincipled exception against the arrow of time. I am basically offering a "reverse slippery slope" argument here.

The response of primitivists like accountt1234 is to reject the vector altogether, no exception needed (his participation in social media is acknowledged as a personal flaw). Neoreaction's response has generally been to distinguish between technological progress and social "progress". I am not so confident this can be done. Moldbug provides a weak antisingularity hypothesis 
and a strong antisingularity hypothesis, the latter of which deserves more attention:

Let's call this the "weak Antisingularity hypothesis" - the idea that technical progress and social progress are uncorrelated, and may even run in opposite directions.
The weak Antisingularity hypothesis doesn't mean the Singularity won't happen. What it means is that technical progress has overcome the declining trends in Western society. Perhaps in the absence of the Industrial Revolution, the experience of late Antiquity would have been revisited, and Uzbek horsemen would be cantering across the ruins of Paris. But we do have the steam engines, the SUVs and HDTVs, and we will have the Singularity. Exponential technical acceleration has broken the savage cycle of history.

Unfortunately, there's also a "strong Antisingularity hypothesis." The strong Antisingularity hypothesis suggests that the coincidence of technical progress and social decay is not, in fact, a coincidence. It's actually a case of cause and effect.

It's very easy for technical progress to cause social decay. Evolution designed humans to compete in a variety of brutally selective environments. When robots - or Helots - do all the work, why bother? We can just sit on the couch, play XBox 360, smoke green bud and masturbate frantically. Idiocracy beckons.

If technical progress actually causes social and political decay, Mike Judge is an optimist. What happens when the Singularity really approaches, but it's not quite here yet? When the curve of technology is almost vertical, but not yet infinite? "Damn, yo."

What the strong Antisingularity hypothesis suggests is that we haven't escaped the cyclical pattern at all. We are just in an unprecedentedly steep upcycle. The Uzbeks may yet water their horses in the Seine - if there are any Uzbeks left. Or horses, for that matter.

My current solution, not entirely thought out, is some sort of inhumanism which acknowledges that the scale of singularity outstrips humanity, and does not attempt to smuggle in our present human values to the possibilities of the future. Fleshing this idea out will probably involve reading Land's pre-Neoreactionary work, and related work. Starting right now with Reza Negarestani's The Labor of the Inhuman:

Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism. As a universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision. It relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances. At the same time, inhumanism registers itself as a demand for construction, to define what it means to be human by treating human as a constructible hypothesis, a space of navigation and intervention.

* I realize I am leaving out Catholics in this formulation of the conflict. While there are many Catholics in and around Neoreaction, their participation seems to me more like convergent evolution than shared origin.