Curtis Yarvin tries to save Harvard

The only debate of ideas happening in America just now is at Harvard—I’m pleased & even a little proud to say that the man who made it happen is my friend Lomez, i.e. Jonathan Keeperman. (There are other political debates, such as Trump v. mad judges who think they can come up with new nationwide injunctions everyday as though they were demigods, but those are not debates of ideas.)

Why aren’t there debates of ideas in America, given the confusion of the times & the collapse of trust in so many institutions? Well, the debaters would have to have audiences, some respect for each other, & then in a way they’d have to be free to debate & in another way compelled to do so. The compulsion is, strange as it may seem, the easier thing to explain: We all have some opinion about who is wise & who has our best interests at heart—of those people we demand answers. Their reputation, their wealth, & our hopes for the future provide the compulsion to speak publicly & defend a plausible principle of action. The freedom is a very difficult thing to describe, indeed. Maybe the only plausible answer is this—we are compelled to debate to come to reasonable political decisions in fear of the catastrophic alternative.

But even so, there remain the two other conditions, the audience & the mutual respect. How can we fail at these moral demands? Well, concerning mutual respect, one answer is ideology, the other sociology. Wokies call everyone racist; liberals call everyone but wokies racist; so there’s no debating anything but, among wokies & liberals, how racist are most Americans? Sociologically, elites cannot allow the arrival of major thinkers or politicians out of envy. Concerning the audience, however, we have a more worrisome thing to handle, which is beyond the scope of this report—how can the American people be so undecided, divided, inert? As the audience of major politicians, it has never behaved so.

Now, here’s my summary of the debate. The two related questions taken up were, what is the best regime & what role does scientific education play in that regime? Or, these are the questions adumbrated, but they are not treated directly because theory has no place at Harvard; the first striking thing is that both debaters are activists—Prof. Danielle Allen is an activist for democracy & a political candidate, of course Democrat, & Yarvin is an activist for a new anti-democratic rationalist elite.¹ Of the two, Yarvin at least has a chance of success. There is much to admire in the demeanor of Prof. Allen, as well as in her dedication to learning, but she’s a democracy advocate who can neither act to save democracy nor yet persuade her fellow elitists to do it, so her knowledge of politics is either missing or useless.

The only theoretical proposition concerned human nature. Prof. Allen affirmed—without involving herself in the indignity of giving an argument for what everyone in some sense already believes—the equal dignity of all human beings due to their equality in politics &, perhaps, in sharing the fate of human beings, as one might put it. Yarvin asked, what makes all human beings equal? How about the hominids Harvard must believe in & somehow account for, given paleontological finds & evolutionary theory: Are those your equal? How about the undiscovered tribes in the Amazon or Andaman Islands of whom we are aware now—are they your equals when you have no community with them whatsoever? The decent Prof. Allen refused to entertain these questions. It goes without saying that the Harvard audience does not believe in equality with those other people; but that they somehow can envy the freedom of the forest.

The four practical questions were, first, how can you run a gov't that pursues the common good? There was agreement that America is corrupt, but Allen & Yarvin disagreed about the character of the corruption & its solution. Yarvin said, democracy is really ochlocracy, & really only a monarch can now rule—oligarchies are now irresponsible messes of mediocrities chasing after incentives leading to systemic crises like COVID, really, there is no gov't! Allen would like democracy instead, but did not say how it might happen, except to get rid of primaries, which would seem to return selection power to the oligarchs themselves…

Then, how can you organize a complex society that can staff such a gov't & take direction from it? Yarvin quoted his authorities—or muses—as being Burnham (Machiavellians) & the Italian school (I assume he means Pareto, Mosca, Michels). Allen cited the Founders. They disagreed over Yarvin's modern reinterpretation of Aristotle's typology of regimes—monarchy, oligarchy, democracy—versus Allen's preference for the moral distinctions Aristotle makes, such as between oligarchy & aristocracy. Yarvin countered that morality doesn't enter into it, it's rule by elites & that's why Harvard even exists, but elites have been ruining society for a century with a mad ideology of egalitarianism behind which they have reduced America to bureaucracies that increasingly fail even to work. They're as incompetent about the Ukraine war as about COVID. Yarvin offers the Machiavellian teaching that the libido dominandi is the thing that makes rule possible in the first place; since most people, on the other hand, just want not to be oppressed, there’s a possible agreement—an efficient techno-monarchy.

Also, how can you deal with major crises at elite level? What if the disagreement between nature & authoritative opinions grows too great & the country is falling apart? The agreement was: Public debate, freedom of speech. Yarvin pointed out that within two generations of Harvard's founding, long before there was an America, Harvard was very involved in the religious hysteria of the witch trials, & one of the major figures involved being the greatest boy genius in Harvard history, Cotton Mather. Puritans self-destructed then, as are the wokies doing now; elite institutions can correct themselves, but only through outsiders becoming truth-tellers in the world of commerce. This seems to be Yarvin's self-refutation: Liberalism wins on rationalist free speech grounds in a commercial society where some moral concern is shared, grounded in ideological agreement about human nature.

Finally, Yarvin grabbed the mic & serenaded Allen & Harvard with the old Tom Lehrer number, Fight fiercely Harvard, link below, there were people crying in the room! Yarvin won, even against himself, Allen was very decent & uninteresting.

1. Notice that Yarvin tries to talk about Dante’s De Monarchia & quickly gives up, since he neither cares about the history nor about reading Dante. Wisdom is not what counts with him. But does Prof. Allen know anything about Dante? Does anyone in that room? Education simply doesn’t count in affairs any more.

Similarly, Yarvin would be much better served to give up Aristotle’s Politics & turn to Herodotus’ Histories & read the “Persian debate” that gives the victory to monarch. But that would also require education.

Finally, the worthwhile question: How many students & faculty at Harvard are as well-read & as clever & as driven as Yarvin? How many even care about wisdom?