[lbo-talk] 'The Reactionary Mind': An Exchange

// ravi ravi at platosbeard.org
Fri Feb 3 21:36:00 PST 2012


On Feb 3, 2012, at 10:05 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> At 12:14 PM 2/3/2012, // ravi wrote:
>> On Feb 3, 2012, at 11:52 AM, Shane Mage wrote:
>> > On Feb 3, 2012, at 11:44 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>> >> what are you two talking about?
>> >
>> > The phenomenon of reactionary mass political engagement by the "lower orders."
>>
>>
>> So, Shane, do you think that's because there is a "conservative/reactionary mind" in quest of a "taste of lordly power"?
>>
>> Please don't tell me to read the book. That's a cop out. I am not asking about Robin's ultimate opinions. I am asking about yours in response to something that just happens to be something Robin wrote in the NYRB, but has been brought up before as a question: how does one explain "reactionary mass political engagement by the 'lower orders'"? I don't have a good explanation. But I do have a suspicion that it cannot just be all explained by pointing to white supremacy and such.
>
> what's inadequate about white supremacy as an explanation. (i'm not even sure what it means, actually)
>

Robin writes this right after the section I quoted:


> Race, as John C. Calhoun discovered, turns all whites into a ruling class:
>
> With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class.

Hence my reference.


>> Better I think an EP style argument that human "minds" are adapted to pressures dating millenia where loyalty, group cohesion, etc, matter more significantly than it does today;
>
> but if robin is right that people are constantly pushing up against relations of superordaintion/subordination - or at least have been doing it a lot with the emergence of modernity - aren't the very people rebelling against that system also exhibiting loyalty, group cohesion. it is my experience that they do. even as we argue on the list, within the people taking sides on issues, we form cohesive units of loyalty, etc. alignments shift, etc.
>
> i think cohesiveness has zero to do with loyalty and cohesiveness.
>
>> or that human "minds" are naturally conservative, preferring a well-known status quo/equilibrium, even if disadvantageous to new complexities.
>
> you should get out and ride the ducati more.
>

It’s not running. :-( Perhaps in summer.

The above are not my ideas for explaining the “conservative mind” of the “lower orders”. They are other explanations I have heard, which even though wrong (IMO), I find have more content than the speculation about psychological motivational states.

Perhaps I should mention that there is lot in what Robin writes — again, to be clear, in the NYRB, not in the book -- that I myself find uncontroversial, e.g:


> Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show, shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von Mises.

—ravi



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list