Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Political Impacts of Ivy League Grade Inflation

This came up as a topic during the recording of an upcoming episode of Ascending the Tower, when we were discussing the recent flailing in American foreign policy compared to other eras.

We have to consider that, while declining standards in American universities have been a major issue for more than a century, that they declined at a far faster rate to accommodate the flood of female and multi-racial students. For modern students, the international makeup of the student body also can’t be ignored — especially at elite schools, foreign born Chinese are often prized for high test scores and paying full freight tuition.

A common experience you’ll see recounted among female baby boomers is that they saw themselves as “challenging the glass ceiling” and needing to show that they were the intellectual equals of men.

In subsequent generations, we tend to see many descriptions of young men as being disengaged from their studies, and shunning the mixed-gender university in ever increasing numbers. Increasing diversity is coincident with declining objective academic standards, despite the pretenses towards meritocracy. In the popular press, men tend to be denigrated as stupid and lazy for, by and large, disliking bureaucratic education.

These students of diminishing knowledge get funneled into the commanding heights of the American bureaucracy and its political machinery. While bureaucracy has some structural defects that tend to make the institutions struggle to reach their goals (and grade inflation is a symptom of bureaucratic decay).

The Ivies and Ivy-like institutions like Georgetown are supposed to be providing gold-quality stamps, with some idiosyncratic quirks for each school. The stamp means less each year, especially with humiliating events like “mattress girl” resulting in hoaxes which reflect poorly on the educational and social standards at these institutions.

What this just means for states and state-like institutions that want to compete with America is that all you have to do is to be more politically effective than the incoming generation of majority-female-and-feminine-presenting American leaders. By and large, we know that they are:

  • Indifferent to classical learning
  • Are of low moral caliber (in loco parentis was abandoned decades ago)
  • Are mostly secular
  • Are profoundly ethnically fragmented, sometimes into groups that don’t even speak the same native language
  • Have no common culture
  • Are attracted to academic fads that tend to be limited to the US

Like anyone in charge of any elite institution will tell you, everything that the institution does flows down from the quality of the people which you admit into that institution. While these schools are picky about who they admit, and many of them tend to be on the higher end of the IQ scale, a high innate intelligence will often go to waste without proper cultivation of character or the enforcement of high standards in terms of academics and moral conduct.

This isn’t a terribly high bar to jump over, despite the enormous endowments which rival the treasuries of many significant nation-states.

So, to trump the US as it exists today, you just need to follow the traditional path to success, which is to raise overall social standards (it helps to start with the leadership) until it’s obviously much better than in the rival countries.

It’s much better to focus on reforming the leadership class than on the lower people (despite Charles Murray’s insistence on prole-shaming), because there are real problems at the top, and there are far fewer of them to convince. Loss aversion is also a powerful motivator, and certainly, America’s contemporary polyglot leadership class has much to lose, and many of them are destined to lose a lot from the developing implosion of America’s international influence — especially in war and finance.

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Common Genes Don’t Forge a Nation

There has never been a nation created based on the supposition that common genes are sufficient to build a government around. Most nations throughout history under all systems of government have ruled over regions which are mostly consanguineous, not just owing to the relatively low level of transportation technology available in the past. It’s also because people who are genetically similar tend to prefer the company of their fellows.

Knowing this, and knowing the errors of multiculturalism, it’s easy to proceed with just trying to argue one’s way back to an ethnic nationalism based mostly on common genetics. The most vulgar versions would be the American ideologies of black and white nationalism, which are both arguably rooted in prison culture. Prisoners separate themselves into ethnic factions because it’s a common denominator that can’t be faked.

When average Americans think of a ‘white nationalist,’ they think of a prison convert with swastika tattoos. They don’t think of the genteel, heroic Klansmen praised by Woodrow Wilson from Birth of a Nation — they think of the character played by Edward Norton in American History X.

In history, nationalism coincided with the decline of aristocracy and the rise of the nation-state. It was in opposition, often strongly so, even up to this day in nations like Spain, with governing ideologies related to ethnicity. Spain suppresses the Basques because the Basques assert their ethnic, regional identity against the national identity pushed down from Madrid.

France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia are all patchworks of different ethnic groups with differing traditions and language dialects. Part of what made nationalism an unusual historical development was that it often involved the bulldozing of local ethnic cultures and their supplanting with new, national cultures.

That meant out with the local folk-story-teller and in with the national-great-novelist and national-composer and national-playwright and national-poet. You can’t just dispense with those people when you’re trying to ‘do the whole nationalism thing.’

It also coincided with a fair amount of ethno-religious in major and minor countries as the absolute monarchs struggled to consolidate their authority.

In the modern context, ethnic nationalism emerges amid ethnic conflict, driven by the state, in its attempts to further consolidate its own concept of nationalism. In France and the United States (along with other nations which mimic those countries), the nation-idea consists of a nationalism of the spirit, rather than one of the blood. People who affirm the national creeds of the French revolutionary state or the American revolutionary state as understood today, and go through the legal hoops, become labeled citizens, regardless of who they are and where they come from.

In this way, Barack Obama is a radical American nationalist, according to the tale told by the American nation-state which defines what it means to be such a nationalist. All of the propaganda published by the American state affirms that it is a multicultural nation which takes great pains to create a super-diverse state tolerant of all races and creeds.

It wasn’t always precisely so, but that’s the way that it is now.

Part of what’s generally positive among dissenting blood-and-genes nationalists of today is in recognizing that a nation formed on ever-mutating ideals is not a stable one, and a citizenship available to anyone with no standards (as Aristotle understood) is not a citizenship that is worth holding. No polis that refuses to maintain standards for citizenship can maintain cohesion for long.

So, while some measure of consanguinity is necessary to use nationalism as a political tool, it’s far from the only thing which is necessary.

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Why Write?

One of the reasons why I became motivated to begin writing again was this long debate on Foseti’s now-mothballed blog.

To simplify, the arguments were split between:

  • those who wanted neoreaction to remain a small community of amateur scholarly correspondents uninterested in general influence
  • people who were interested in forming an influential political sect, which would require propaganda
  • those who saw merit in both approaches

The discussion was partly sparked by the style of Radish and the retirement of Moldbug from active blogging.

Going back to the comments on Foseti’s post, I was more persuaded by the arguments that Contemplationist, Spandrell, Surviving Babel, and Jim put forth than the others.

My general take on writing is that it is best used to provide information, to entertain, and to persuade other people. Writing for the public, which is what a blog does, necessarily means influencing members of that public.

There’s an alternative to writing for the public called “writing e-mails and letters,” which is more private and more effective at persuading people one-by-one besides.

Contemplationist wrote:

Lets also remember that Moldbug’s mission was to convert the Brahmin young, which is absolutely possible with a hipster intellectual attitude (I’ve done it myself).
The 60s counterculture was not supported by the old progressives. We can certainly create a reactionary counterculture. Culture is supreme.
What would be a simple example? Formal Fridays for one. Dress old school. Behave old school. Don’t take shit from women. Be the aristocrat if you can.
Also, as AnomalyUK has noted, we just need some threshold of intelligent common people to be aware that they know someone who holds the opinion for example that “the Queen would rule better than the Parliament.”
I see all of this as very doable.

Neovictorian recently wrote an article about how this sort of thing has impacted his attention span (with some direct reference to my work) along with some reference to the broader mass media, of which I’m a small part.

He and Bruce Charlton absolutely have a point in that. To the extent that you already agree with most of what’s being said, you should refocus your attention on bringing your real life in line with your changed beliefs rather than expending too much of your attention reading entertaining neoreactionary propaganda.

If you need to taper off your addiction, just skim headlines, read weekly round-ups like the ones published by Nick B. Steves or Free Northerner, or use an RSS reader to decrease the amount of time that you waste keeping up with the volume of production.

I’m a propagandist. I don’t really try to dress myself up as anything else. I do get repetitious sometimes, because repetition is necessary to get the desired effect. My writing is often derivative and makes no attempt to conceal that.

Part of the motivation that I have to write is also just to share what I’m reading with other people so that it doesn’t stay locked up in my head, which it otherwise would. No one is obligated to read what I write. Thousands of people do find it useful and interesting.

A lot of the writers who churn out of the reactosphere burn out because:

  • their work responsibilities become too heavy
  • they need to earn more money, which requires more of their attention
  • they stop enjoying it
  • they dislike the new people coming in to the space
  • they dislike the additional effort needed to grab reader attention
  • they become frightened of the risk involved in participating

All of these are valid reasons to stop writing.

My general goal is to support the growth of that reactionary counterculture which was napkin-sketched some years ago. I can’t guarantee that it will succeed or that I will succeed. I’m not a prophet. It might turn out to be really mediocre, and it may very well be my fault if it does.

And when I produce bad work, or make a bad argument, or include a factual error, I expect to be criticized for it.

Achieving those goals (which some people have judged to be impossible) requires developing staying power and uneven competitive advantages compared to the dominant progressive culture. One-off efforts achieve little because sustained effort is what keeps a culture alive and growing.

A lot of people who could contribute more instead prefer to invent countless reasons about why they shouldn’t contribute at length, sometimes over a period of months, or spend time explaining why what’s being contributed deserves endless scorn from critics who are themselves too frightened to contribute much of anything themselves.

I’ve called this tendency the negative pose, and it’s common on the internet in which it’s easy and pleasurable to construct that kind of entertaining-but-mostly-useless persona.

Not to be too self-help-y, but the only way to make sure that a difficult task actually is impossible is to declare it to be impossible before it’s even attempted. I don’t really put much stock in declarations like that, because it’s usually just an excuse to avoid discomfort or danger, unless there’s an accurate theoretical reason why something is impossible.

Creating a counter-culture is doable. It’s just difficult.

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