This puts me in mind of an interesting discussion nearly twenty years ago when "Mencius Moldbug" - i.e. Curtis Yarvin - argued that there the only good was lawful good, and that "chaotic good" was not actually good.
These terms derived from the early (but not earliest) versions of Dungeons and Dragons; which have orientation categories of good and evil, chaotic and lawful.
(There is also a "neutral" - neither good nor evil - orientation, which I cannot make any coherent sense of! In practice it seems to mean a short-termist, self-gratifying form of evil.)
As I understood him; Moldbug went on (in further essays) to argue that a good society must aim to be lawful, as much as possible, and without compromise...
Consequently - and having got close-to, but decisively rejecting, Trad Roman Catholic Christianity - Moldbug went-on to follow his own logic, and become the technocrat totalitarian-servant of evil that he is today.
Well, here Laeth argues that good Christians ought to become "chaotic" - because the lawful (in The West, implicitly) is now inverted, hence evil: i.e. the laws, regulations, officialdom, mainstream propaganda etc will, if obeyed, serve the agenda of demonic evil.
From his other writings I infer that Laeth is not really advocating chaotic behaviour as a goal (if such a thing is even possible!) - since creativity is, for him (as for me), a primary value - and creativity is not chaotic.
Law and chaos are not, for a Christian, the only two and exclusive alternatives; and neither is the ideal a half-way compromise between law and chaos, nor an alternation between them.
However, I think the sharp-point of this aphorism is to shock us into recognizing that good behaviour will nowadays, in The West, be regarded as at best chaotic; because the coherence of good is not recognizable to the "lawful" mind.
In other words; anyone whose behaviour is genuinely good, here-and-now and in 2024 - will be regarded as exemplifying and advocating chaos.
When totalitarian evil gets to define "lawful" then anyone good will be, whether they like it or not, regarded as outwith the law - for which Their only word is chaotic... at best; that is when Christian-good is not being regarded as simple evil.
In truth, the Good Man in 2024 is pursuing good as best he may in the context of a value-inverted world-order - therefore necessarily un-systematically (i.e. un-lawfully), in a spirit of loving creativity. From a mainstream perspective; this will look chaotic, but it ain't!
(From the long and wordy nature of my unpacking of one sentence, even if I've inferred correctly what Laeth is saying, can be seen the advantages of writing aphoristically!)
10 comments:
this is exactly what i meant, Bruce. thank you very much for teasing it out :)
I like this D&D analogy but I think if you look at it close enough then even chaotic evil is better called creative evil, since it takes creativity and love of wickedness (i.e. hearty opposition to God's creation) to cause the maximum mayhem. Chaos is merely the result.
The way I see it is that creativity consists of being open to doing something differently, not out of idle curiosity but because it really matters to the creator. What others might call a mistake turns out better than what came before, including better by the lights of what came before (which the creator is honouring, not rejecting).
If it is aligned with Creation (i.e. creative good) then it produces more order not less and so can't be dismissed as a mistake or mere novelty. Not the monolithic and relatively sterile order resulting from imperfect top-down laws imposed on everyone. Rather it has the potential to form part of a more intricate order and beauty, something akin to the Mandelbrot Set.
@Laeth - I'm pleased, and somewhat relieved, to hear it!
@Ron - I'm afraid I disagree. It's not just about how much one affects reality by one's actions.
One must distinguish creation and destruction - otherwise, because destruction is So Much easier than creation, that we will all soon become net destroyers (as happened - fatally - with fine arts, classical music, poetry etc).
Consider how much effort, ability and creativity is needed to write and perform a great symphony; and how little effort, intelligence or ingenuity is needed to destroy that performance (repeatedly banging together two metal bars, operating a chain saw in the vicinity, flooding the concert hall, spraying the orchestra with bullets... innumerable possibilities).
You could say that it is just a matter of nomenclature, but I regard creativity (i.e. in harmony with divine creation) as too important to meddle with, indeed it is fundamentally/ primarily/ necessarily important - we simply can't do without the concept.
What got me thinking about it was *The Wizard of Oz* where the dying words of the Witch are 'Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness!' Only fictional but it did make me wonder whether people can love wickedness. Since sustained love causes creation, that would imply the wicked are creative.
However, no, I think you're probably right. Because what we call wickedness they call virtue.
In terms of action it is as you say easy to destroy the orchestral performance or throw sand into a piece of machinery but evil consists more in the evil-doer fooling himself about his motivations at a deep level, which is hard.
Thus evil would consist of getting people to sabotage works of art or destroy machinery and thinking it virtuous and being so convinced that they encourage others to follow suit. Which we're seeing with the paint being thrown in art galleries by environmentalists. Or perhaps the luddite movement for the sand example I don't know (not a historian).
Or what about the case you mentioned previously in this blog where Billy Graham had a stadium appearance cancelled because of the alphabet crowd. The movement against Christ did not attack Christianity directly but via many links in a chain entailed the downstream cancellation of preachers. This level of modern Western evil *looks* ingenious, complicated and clearly was a long time in the making.
But perhaps it really comprised many acts of deliberate self-deception. Sort of like a little girl sticking her fingers in her ears, closing her eyes and blowing a raspberry. Thousands of times. Mechanically.
Although self-knowledge requires creativity, self-ignorance requires none!
@Ron - I don't recall the specific Billy Graham incident. But you are right that totalitarianism does require intelligence and hard work and a kind of honesty about what works, even as it squeezes-out all creativity - which is why totalitarianism is now failing so fast.
At present, the main thing that maintains the system is the self-brainwashing of the media-addicted masses - including their dogmatic materialism - some aspects of which are also wearing-off.
This does not lead to good unless motives are good; but it does end totalitarianism (for worse, as well as better - if chaos supervenes).
Despite his essay's rhetorical flourishes, Moldbug's fundamental thesis that law is just good and evil is just chaos is just wrong. He writes "In our planarist society, every kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called “ethics,” which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question." Okay, fine, there's different philosophies of ethics and you have to be specific about what you mean. (But everybody has known that for centuries, it's not really a profound insight to point that out.)
But one can say the same about law and chaos. There are different philosophies of how to organize a society and they bring about different systems of laws. Likewise, chaos can mean total anarchy, or it can mean mayhem and savagery, or it can just mean outside of normal human social rules, like a mountain man. Neutral also seems to be used in different ways and you have to be specific about that as well.
Furthermore, the 20th century was the century that birthed totalitarianism, so that should finish the idea that lawful is just inherently good.
Though in a game, using the terms lawful, neutral, and chaotic in an impressionistic manner works because the players can decide how they want to interpret them and can find a way that suits them.
This explication of chaotic good in the current situation we find ourselves in is spot on.
I would, however, make a few additional points regarding how Moldbug viewed law and chaos, since I think his outlook was not as antagonistic to some allowance for "creative chaos" as I think is here being implied.
The essay cited -- "What if there's no chaotic good?" -- was something of an artificial exercise for Moldbug in that he explored the question entirely from within the vocabulary and paradigm provided by D&D. But in fact, Moldbug's preferred method of presenting these concepts was not primarily based on "law", but upon the terms Order and Disorder, which he derived from his reading of Carlyle.
Interestingly, if you Ctl+F for "order" in the Chaotic Good essay, you get zero results. But if you do the same search in "Why Carlyle Matters" -- one of the most foundational and representative Moldbug essays -- you get 38 results, while "law" only yields 12, of which three are "law of God" (which is, I believe, compatible with the idea of "creative chaos").
Moldbug argues that there can never be too much Order, and that the forces of Disorder are invariably "Leftist". This view point is compatible with a dichotomy of (true, good) Creativity vs. (Sorathic) Chaos. This is not to try to force an equivalence between what Bruce is presenting and what Moldbug argued, but to show that there is less of a difference than may appear by just looking at the "No such thing as chaotic good" essay.
In other essays, Moldbug clearly does argue that law under a tyrannical or wicked regime is preferable to dis-civilizational chaos, but his points of reference were usually situations like the decolonization of Africa, where liberation from the "oppression of colonial law" often ended up in a degree of such total chaos and violence that was unthinkable even to (some) pro-decolonizers. I think there was a sort of precautionary principle at play in MM's thought in that he recognized that any argument advocating some kind of "lawlessness" was usually based either upon ignorance (e.g. African decolonization) or cynical disingenuousness (e.g. Alinskiism).
Just to close out the thought: I think a ca. 2007-9 MM would have acknowledged that there is a role within the concept of Carlylean Order for unstructured, natural creativity that would ultimately contribute to and be a part of that Order, and would not be the sort of “bad” Disorder and Chaos that he was criticizing. But, again, this is not to say that his ideas and what Bruce is saying are equivalent. His vision was ultimately of Monarchy based upon top-down (i.e. law-based) order, while also leaving some room for a more laissez-faire, Daoistic hands off approach that gave leeway for individual creative expression (that would be subject to swift top-down punishment if it was seen to threaten Order in some fundamental way).
A few relevant quotes from MM’s “Carlyle” essay below.
“What we see instead, from both the Carlylean and Alinskyist perspectives, is a monotonic slope. This is the slope of order. Order slopes up to the right: true right, which is reactionary, is always the direction of increasing order, and true left the direction of increasing disorder.”
“Indeed the Carlylean theory of order might just as well be stated as truth. Or justice. For Carlyle, truth, justice and order are all inseparable and perfectly desirable. There is no such thing as too much truth, too much justice, or too much order; the ideal society is one in which all these qualities are seen to their maximum extent. In the society that is Cosmos, truth, justice and order all pertain. In its opposite, Chaos, we see lies and injustice and disorder.”
[While those of us in this segment of the blogosphere no longer see things in terms of Right vs. Left , but mainly of (true) Christianity vs. Everything Else (including the so-called Right, yet I think in the context of MM's project in the mid-2000s, his use of those terms in the essay quoted above was still understandable.]
@Daniel F - My recollection of MM is the same as yours.
""creative chaos" as I think is here being implied." - Not exactly. What I am implying is that creative is bound-up with "the good" - and Good is that which aligns with God's creation. Naturally, MM could not conceptualize this understanding, since he did not acknowledge the reality of God - although I think (at that time, not now) he probably had an unconscious and spontaneous "feel" for the reality of God and creation.
If one would analyze the term "lawful" in this day and age, I would say that it would describe those that "accept the science". What is actually prepared and presented as legislation nowadays is mostly based on "the science", meaning theories on climate models, institutional injustice, sexual identities etc. As we live in a totalitarian society, if one accepts "the science" as a lawful person would, there is no space in thought and actions to be or do good. Those that reject these theories seem to be advocates for chaos, because if peer-review is rejected, there is no method of attaining a common ground and chaos would seem to be the only other option.
Post a Comment