How To Be A Reactionary Today
Don Colacho, the Last Man, and Social Media
Do different genres of writing code in particular political directions? Probably not, but I have heard it suggested – by conservatives – that narrative fiction skews conservative. The argument runs that in novels, characters’ choices have consequences and are bound by the institutions and conventions of the world they inhabit. A very Burkean type of conservative argument, and a pretty self-congratulatory one at that.
There are obvious exceptions – satirical novels (Sinclair Lewis) or social ones (Upton Sinclair). But it’s an interesting proposition. If true, do other types of writing have similar political undertones? Are short stories implicitly progressive? Manifestoes revolutionary? What are the implicit politics of epistolary novels? Sci-fi? Fantasy?
Obviously we’re playing a parlor game rather than doing serious analysis. (Jeremiads are the quintessential conservative genre anyway.) So it is interesting that at least one self-professed reactionary alighted on aphorisms as the mode most suited to authentic reaction.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila is niche. A right-wing intellectual’s intellectual. Compact’s Matthew Schmitz has cited him as an influence and inspiration. He occasionally gets shout outs in the American Conservative, but even these dwell on his obscurity. My sense is that Gómez Dávila is better recognized in the Spanish speaking world – he wrote entirely in Spanish – and perhaps in Europe, where Ernst Jünger and Martin Mosebach and others supposedly discovered him. To be honest, I am not sure. But in English, Gómez Dávila is largely relegated to hardcore enthusiasts – often the type who post online with some reactionary figure or allusion as their handle or avatar.
Gómez Dávila (1913-94) earned his obscurity: he published only privately, rejected a university position, and turned down political roles. He was born in Bogotá into a family in Colombia’s manufacturing sector. Educated partly in at the University of Paris and largely privately (due to illness), Gómez Dávila returned to Colombia as a young man to enter Bogotá’s upper crust. Relieved of the necessity of business duties by his father (and later his son), Gómez Dávila led the sort of life that certain reactionary dreams are made of. He played polo actively as a member of the Bogotá Jockey Club until he injured himself lighting a cigar while riding. The polo injury led the polyglot Gómez Dávila to spend more time in his library of 30,000 books. While he helped co-found the University of the Andes in 1948, he declined a professorship there.
Self-imposed inner exile was clearly a choice. Perhaps Gómez Dávila preferred it, but at the very least it chimes with his ideology. “Whoever does not turn his back on the contemporary world dishonors himself.” Reactionaries are, he argued, prisoners of the present. “That the reactionary protests against progressive society, judges it, and condemns it, and yet is resigned to its current monopoly of history, seems an eccentric position,” he wrote toward the end of his life. It was certainly his position.
From 1954 until his death in 1994, Gómez Dávila published sporadically, although not commercially. Most of what he wrote were aphorisms. Or, as he put it, “Scholia on the Margin of an Implicit Text.” Gómez Dávila’s aphorisms represented his marginalia on the metatext of his reading. Combined in several volumes, they are the reactionary tip of a literary iceberg. Gómez Dávila obviously relished epigrams and, like Borges, probably didn’t have the temperament for longer form writing. Part of the charm of reading him is trying to reconstruct through the aphorisms what he was reading or thinking about at the time, like looking through cut gems.
As with his desire not to engage in intellectual society there are philosophical reasons for aphorisms. By refusing to work systematically, Gómez Dávila’s writing suggests an alive system of thoughts in tension. Also like Borges, Gómez Dávila relished in paradox and in implication.
— “My brief sentences are the dots of color in a pointillist painting.”
— “The authenticity of the sentiment depends on the clarity of the idea.”
More than this, though, Gómez Dávila thought reactionaries could not count on an audience of moderns to share their assumptions.
— “To engage in dialogue with those who do not share our postulates is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.”
As a result, it is necessary not to argue but lay the groundwork – entice and generate those presuppositions through suggestion, claim, critique, ridicule, and so on. In self-justification, one scholia reads: “The traditional commonplace scandalizes modern man. The most subversive book in our time would be a compendium of old proverbs.”
Gómez Dávila’s compendium of new proverbs is a lively insight into the intellectual world of a Latin American aristocrat. He sees himself as religious (“Our last hope lies in the injustice of God”); an existentialist (“A gesture, just one gesture, is enough at times to justify the existence of the world”); but also a sensualist, which manifests in his elevation of aesthetics (“What reason considers impossible is the only thing that can make our heart overflow”).
His world is populated by stock characters proletarians, bourgeoisie, plebeians, intelligent men and fools, democrats, revolutionaries, Marxists, civilized men and barbarians, prophets, egoists, modern men, and others who largely beclown themselves and threaten others. He hates masses, and sees man as depraved, but there is a humanist element to the scholia as well. This is especially the case when Gómez Dávila thinks things are in their right place in the hierarchy. In his political scholia, he tended toward the monarchic-libertarianism of, say, Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn.
— “Wise politics is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.”
— “In the incoherence of a political constitution resides the only authentic guarantee of liberty.”
— “The people does not elect someone who will cure it, but someone who will drug it.”
You get it.
And although curmudgeonly to the point of absurdity…
— “There are two groups of men: those who believe in original sin and idiots.”
— “Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists.”
— “Science’s greatest triumph appears to lie in the increasing speed with which an idiot can transport his idiocy from one place to another.”
…reading him can still be amusing. For instance:
— “The bourgeoisie is any group of individuals dissatisfied with what they have and satisfied with what they are.”
— “It is easy to believe that we partake of certain virtues when we share in the defects they imply.”
— “Those who are partially wrong irritate us; those who are totally wrong amuse us.”
It’s probably best to read the scholia one by one to best consider Gómez Dávila’s individual thoughts and their implications. Reading them in succession stifles that, and Gómez Dávila’s repetitions and preoccupations and limits become more obvious. If his aphoristic allure wears off, they become banalities.
When I read the scholia, I can’t help thinking of a specific type of online figure in contemporary political discourse. The culture critic guy, the old architecture guy, the guys who have marble busts as avatars, the BAPists, the post-liberals. The aphorisms have – to put it vulgarly – a tweet-like quality. This comparison is probably unfair. Compared to his 21st century American admirers, Gómez Dávila’s reaction is honestly earned. For example, when he writes about revolutionaries, they are ones with a real history of violence. He was vestigial and, while probably mannered, had this “authentic reactionary” probably had least some authenticity.
By contrast, the denizens of the online illiberal right are inescapably modern. They’re online, for goodness sake. By and large they live in world of relative plenty and liberal-democratic stability. Francis Fukuyama called those who live in modernity the Last Men. Understanding history and science, they have the burden of knowing that their values exist among rival claimants, including secular skepticism. “This is why modern man is the last man: he has been jaded by the experience of history, and disabused of the possibility of direct experience of values,” Fukuyama wrote in 1994. (I explored this concept and some of its implications here, for the Illiberalism Studies Program.)
One result of this inescapable modernity is that the identities and outlooks our 21st century reactionaries – at least those from the Anglophone West – adopt will to a greater or lesser extent be necessarily arbitrary. Their conceptions of whatever past they have glommed on to – whether it is the antebellum South, pre-Reformation Europe, mid-century America, or something much more primordial – are inevitably distorted. The distortion comes in part because the past is simply inaccessible, but more because modern reactionaries raid it to specifically to construct their identities. The approach is mediated by art, film, literature, even other social media. It’s fragmentary, selective and idealized, dwelling on elite art, life, or culture and wilfully ignorant of the historical structures and realities that produced them.
Like half-real fictional worlds, reactionary utopias can never even be imagined the same way by two people. I feel confident in saying that truly restorationist reactionary political projects are not realistic. In fact, I think it’s why they are usually so unrealistic in the first place: we cannot even really imagine a serious alternative to liberal democracy. So online reactionary worldviews end up intensely individualized. Each would-be reactionary mocks progressives for their layers of identity, but their own identity is bound up with ornate ideologies mixed and matched from the past and decontextualized as critiques of the present. (Ideology in bio.)
Modern reactionaries’ choices about what they idealize are obviously conditioned by their modern selves and desires. They engage as moderns, because they are moderns. This robs them of their sense of live reality and authenticity. This is truest, I think, in the socio-political space where very online reactionaries craft their own political identities, but the critiques apply to some extent to religio-spiritual traditionalists too.
It is hard to distinguish modern reactionary thought from aesthetics. Because we can’t fully escape modern patterns of thinking, ideas become aestheticized along with the rest of it. The visual incentives of social media compound this tendency. To charitably read this on its own terms, I think the aestheticization of reaction online mirrors Gómez Dávila’s use of aphorism. If you cannot argue someone out of modernity, perhaps you can attract, sloganeer, meme, and poast them free?
Idealized golden eras mean declension narratives. Faith in decline is, of course, the inverse trap to the faith in progress. It leads to frustration, resentment and despair. Consciously setting yourself against modernity is intensely alienating. At the same time, it is powerfully self-dramatizing, which I think is the point. Modern online reaction is the product of ennui and isolation. It does not come out of a deep tradition. It seeks meaning in the historic religious and political identities of the past, where they remain tantalizing out of reach.
While Gómez Dávila was content to hide and bide, modern reactionaries are inherently performative. The performance becomes an end in itself, even to the performer. This is especially true when the performance is primarily online: the gulf between performance and lived experience is greater again. Social media simulates the feeling of recognition and heightens all the individualized identity creation and ersatz community-building. Through “likes” and “followers,” social media turns political identity creation into entertainment and gratification. Yet, as Gómez Dávila warned, “Technology does not fulfill man’s perennial dreams, but craftily mimics them.”