My recent fascination with the work of Mencius Moldbug has drawn me into the world of right-wing intellectuals. Not the shameless neoconservative Bush shills, but people with actual ideas, albeit scary ones. Dark thinkers, who are not afraid to dig up and poke at the weak foundations of the Enlightenment. Where they want to go with this, I'm not sure. They seem to have a fondness for The Old Days, including colonialism (much more well-ordered than the current third-world mess), monarchy, and empire. They verge close to racism and the dark proto-facism of de Maistre.
Still, it's a fascinating world. I've learned about interesting people like Australian philosopher David Stove, who wrote a great piece demolishing most of philosophy but doesn't believe in evolution. I suppose he exemplifies, in a somewhat different way, the mixture of deep insight and utter wrongheadedness of this new world. Then the right-wing blogs of course have a way of finding and publicizing the worst of the "left", including the wonderful Stalin Society.
I'm in heaven, because at my age I don't find anything new to interest me very often.
2 comments:
Bravo for writing this. It's sad that the most prominent people on the right (using the term very broadly) are not often the most thoughtful (the same goes for the left, as you've mentioned).
Mencius is smart, genial, and original to the point of bewildering. Blogging about him won't make him as prominent as Dan Savage, but we do what we can! (My link is to an essay on the Vietnam wars that was inspired by his characterization of Universalism.)
No doubt, studying Soviet totalitarism experience is a proper thing to realize human's mind distortion. Perhaps, it's primitive to think this way but I could hardly admire a person for his cruelty and madness.
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