Saturday, November 23, 2013
Geeks for Monarchy
I don't endorse everything described herein,
but it's interesting to see that monarchist ideas are being entertained even in the technology world, showing that one can coherently admire
aspects of modernity like the internet (including Facebook)
and antibiotics while still believing that politically, Western Civilisation took a horribly wrong turn in the late 18th century, and
then another even worse one in the early 20th. It's odd that the
progressive opponent quoted uses the relative stability of Britain over
the past 300 years as his argument against reactionaries, when Britain
is one of the few countries that (since 1660) has kept its Monarchy, and
retained a largely hereditary upper house (politically powerful until
1911) of the legislature until 1999. Hardly proof that reactionaries are
wrong to oppose the French Revolution!
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2 comments:
There is a fundamental source of confusion here. Neoreactionaries are not so much as "pro-monarchy" as they are "anti-democracy." Even the latter label doesn't necessarily refer to elections or popular will per se, so much as a universal application of democracy and majority rule. However, the constitutional monarchies of the developed world, whether British, Low Country, Scandinavian, Japanese, etc., would likely be considered more democratic (and thus under suspicion or derision by these neoreactionaries), than a hypothetical return to, I don't know, the enlightened absolutism of Frederick the Great.
In other words, these people are not Orleanists. They are Legitimists. With a great deal of traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism (and being anti-"politically correct") thrown in.
Yeah... it's not to hard to see why geeks are drawn to to this sorts of thinking. We tend to be on the extremes and fringes of the political spectrum, because we like taking arguments to their conclusion (I went from neocon -> libertarian -> anarcho-capitalist -> distributist/monarchist, myself). We also like having abstract thoughts and conversations, often delving into what polite society deems either absurd or repugnant, so we're at least willing to plumb politically incorrect depths in thought-experiment land.
However, this being a startup/valley culture thing becoming entwined with Brogrammer and PUA and HBD culture is... troubling. Not surprising, but troubling. I don't want to be associated with those sorts. As a software engineer, I've been able to proudly state that I'm a monarchist in situations were stating I was a "conservative" or "liberal" or "Republican" or "Democrat" would have been distasteful to my employers, clients, etc. Monarchism sounds quirky, and I'm a nerd, so quirky comes with the territory. With this turn of events, I might need to add more qualifiers...
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