The virtue of excellence

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Mencius is simple?

So...I was walking to the train in lovely downtown Chicago...and I thought of Mencius Moldbug.  Menicus is best known for writing well thought out, thoroughly contrarian posts that are also so large they threaten to slow down the internet.

His primary unusual theses seems to be:
  1. the American revolution and the consequent proliferation of democracy was, net, a bad thing, 
  2. the modern liberal orthodoxy is not only a church, but simply the same historical church, evolved.
  3. Colonialism was net fabulous for the governed peoples.
  4. The solution is to reorganize nations as corporations.
Not all his theses are unusual, though.

  1. Civilization is better than other choices (tribalisms, native cultures) for human wellbeing
  2. Capitalism (not corporatism/fascism/corporate or crony capitalism) is better for human wellbeing
  3. Liberalism is necessarily increasing
  4. Libertarianism is 100% impracticable politically, though it would be nice.
I am sure the commentariat will correct me if I've misread either his focus or some of his details.

I ask now...how radical is this position?

4 is becoming a standard position among the public-choice aware libertarians.  1 is widely accepted by any member of civilization, east or west, who isn't a multiculturalist.  Fukuyama advocates this as well, basically.  2 is so simple as to brand the deniers ignorant.  C is hard to deny on merits, though there's huge literature attempting it.  And 3 isn't that far out there. 

So what really are Mencius's points of departure from the libertarian mainstream.  Points A,B, and D.  D is a solution to problems recognized in 3 and 4.  A is a value statement, which loudly acknowledges the costs of democracy, which are well known mostly as the insights of public choice economics.  And finally B.  B has two parts.  B1: liberalism acts just like a church, wiuth religion-like orthodoxy and crusades against the infidel.  Anyone who is not a liberal either thinks this already, or will on reflection find it not a surprising thesis.

This leaves Mencius's only unusual thesis as:  The church of liberalism is a direct, continuous, non-radical descendent of the early american church.

Cool, interesting.

Is it really this simple, or am I missing something?

UPDATE:  Corrected spellings on Mencius, as per a commenter's correction.

3 comments:

UK Houston said...

You mean "Mencius" Moldbug.
For a reference to the meaning of this name, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencius

Aretae said...

My error. Thanks, Houston.

Andrew said...

Now apply the same method to Ayn Rand!

(What was UNIQUE in her understandings?)

Especially for big-picture, all-over-the-place opiners like MM & AR, what most matters is often: the package, the presentation, the parallels drawn. A worldview, above and beyond scattered insights (insights that by themselves may or may not be unique...uniqueness as a property often depending crucially on HOW MUCH shared CONTEXT *waves talisman!* we require two insights to have in common before we judge them identical).

(heh, my word verification: eingat. gotayn?)