Mark Granza over at IM-1776 has published a debate between Chris Rufo, the most successful activist in conservatism, & Curtis Yarvin, who is a kind of intellectual celebrity who moved on from Silicon Valley rationalism to a kind of political theorizing which may be said to be implied in SaaS (software as a service), & who might be called libertarian if that term weren’t held in such contempt these days. Yarvin opens & Rufo concludes a series of six brief addresses that are expected to summarize their positions & at least clarify their disagreement. However, it’s really a series of attacks Yarvin mounts against Rufo, apparently in the hope of converting him through humiliation to a liberated position beyond good & evil.
I am not given to taking insult when people offer it, since it’s so rarely worth the effort. But if you are a decent person or just sensitive, you will find Yarvin’s seemingly endless stream of insults annoying; you might even become indignant—this seems to be what he wants & it’s not hard to see why. He alludes to the argument implied in his rhetoric when he reminds us that he introduced the Matrix “redpill” into the language of political dissent in America. Only when one feels humiliated because one has been been lied to will one abandon an ideology. Besides, political debate invariably involves anger & the threat of violence, without which there would be no politics. How can we not become aware that our wills are negated by the world? How could we be expected to love that? I suggest therefore making allowance for a lot of ugliness in our politics; but for a written debate, it is ugly in a rather inconvenient way—it is artless. Yarvin does not seem to know what style means; he seems to prefer a kind of trashy behavior to conceal the fact that he couldn’t rise to the heights demanded by his theory.
Now, Yarvin presents a kind of realism, that is, reasoning without pity or favor. He spits on love of country & love of God, since many religions & many peoples have been wiped out, according to our knowledge. This would seem to leave one thing left to love, truth itself by itself. This is why he claims his ground is history rather than philosophy, hard facts rather than beautiful logic; pretty much all modern philosophers have done likewise. Yarvin would then have to commit to philosophy, but he doesn’t seem to have either the necessary education or the flair. His claim to the power of truth over men is technology, which has brought about a radical change in political affairs. Hitherto, gentlemen have always mattered; nowadays, they don’t even exist; there are only slaves organized by rational administration & rational administrators. He’s very clever, but he seems unwilling to become something more than a celebrity with the requisite odor of the scandalous. The cancelation of political freedom is hard to prove, though self-styled rationalists find it easy to believe in; you probably don’t even have to press Yarvin to get him to admit that most rationalists are slaves & their weakness is the only thing they rationalize. Yarvin’s address to Rufo amounts to, don’t be stupid; Rufo’s to Yarvin, don’t be such a coward. I was reminded, reading, that Peter Thiel has recently said of our times that genius is easier to find than courage. That’s surely true… Since we are stuck judging the actions & characters of which we have experience & where our interests bind us, in our bodies, we cannot say what future history will be; so the question for all intelligent men now is, would you rather bet on techno-lords or on a new political movement? Would you obey the elites or rouse the people to fight?
The core question in the debate is the status of the noble. Rufo’s claim that a counterrevolution is both possible & necessary in America rests on a return to the Founding. If those men we call Founders had wisdom, their activity is proof of what men can do &, further, their teaching is a guide for other politicians in other circumstances. The attack on those men is an attack on the noble as delusion, rather than true history, which is, of course, ugly. Yarvin’s thinking & activity has more coherence than immediately appears, since he’s a celebrity promoting ugliness, indeed identifying truth with ugliness. One oddity is that Yarvin mentions Aristotle as perhaps the wisest of all men, & surely Aristotle, “il maestro di color che sanno” was noble. But it is not obvious that Yarvin is serious about Aristotle or that he has ever cared to study his philosophy. Consider also his historical account. He shares a certain weakness of our times, to prefer unimportant thinkers to the greatest thinkers, on the argument that greatness is really propaganda, it’s not how things really are; he calls this his “loser’s history,” admitting that intelligence is both the most important & the weakest claim to rule; he doesn’t seem to see that some great men have found ways to strengthen that weakness & to make that importance somewhat more obvious than it usually is.
The crucial difference between Rufo & Yarvin, of course, is religion. Rufo is Catholic, Yarvin is an atheist. They are accordingly spokesmen for the American people & the American elite.
Yarvin’s personal attacks will make you think he’s very womanish. Rufo’s dignified defense will make you think he’s the man in this quarrel, refusing to come down to that level of emotional incontinence. A kind of female realism, shrewd, incisive, & seemingly hopeless is indeed on display here. The most serious accusation Yarvin levels against Rufo, one which cannot properly be answered at this point, is that he’s setting himself up to become a tragic hero, to revive an ancient virtue which is either dead or never existed, depending on how you think about the importance of opinion or belief in human affairs. I’ve only seen Yarvin once & he struck me as a rather unpleasant guy; given his affectations, it may seem strange to say, but with him what you see is what you get. Rufo is both gentler & more fierce, I think; I judge as a friend & therefore I can say that he’s aware of the crisis in the midst of which our generation came to awareness of politics—he has a certain depth his American niceness conceals. But it will take a long time, I think, to tell whether he is the politician of his generation. To come to understand what is happening & what we are doing, you must begin by noticing that “conservative” & “Christian” now simply mean man.
Let me close with a hat tip to Yarvin, who keeps quoting movies. This debate was already enacted on stage by Batman & Joke in Nolan’s Dark Knight, still the defining work of art of this generation of “conservatives.”
Rufo is right: Yarvin is a sophist, combined with a juvenile rebel for rebellion's sake. Some other soul with Yarvin's talent for attending to certain summarily rejected takes on history could do something with them, but not him.