NAB notes: Sandifer’s negative evaluations as wards against horror
This is turning into a series, so for reference: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
While reading Neoreaction A Basilisk, I kept wondering how much it was meant as a takedown of the trio, and how much it was meant as a creative, conceptual riff which simply used the trio for some raw material.
Of course, the answer is “it’s both.” But that isn’t quite right, either. As a takedown, it’s scattered and not especially useful for someone who just wants to know what’s wrong with the trio. I’ve seen a few posts from people saying they wanted it to be some sort of primer for fighting neoreaction, and it clearly isn’t that – saying “Moldbug’s use of Satanic negation reveals his unacknowledged sympathy for Satan as represented in Paradise Lost” is not the kind of idea that will help you out in direct political scuffles with Moldbug fans.
As a conceptual riff, though, it’s continually limited by the invasion of takedown-related material. The book presents itself as an examination of strange internet (psuedo-)philosophers who – like classic horror story protagonists – are confronted with the unintended, disturbing, mind-searing implications of their own work. This sounds like a good story, and it seems as though Sandifer wants to tell it. But whenever the story starts to get interesting, whenever a bit of real narrative develops, whenever Sandifer starts tying the literary resonances here to his own literary interests like Milton or Blake … it all quickly runs aground, usually within a page, because Sandifer switches back to an evaluative mode.
Any attempt to build a mood, to dim the lights and get the audience spooked, is quickly interrupted as the lights flip back on and the storyteller starts haranguing you about how our mad philosopher protagonist made a totally shit point in this one blog post, oh my god, how are people so wrong on the internet.
It’s clear that Sandifer does not see Yudkowsky or Moldbug as intellectuals worth taking seriously (Land is a bit more complicated). So it would be easy for him to just say at the outset: “look, I don’t think these people’s actual ideas are worth the virtual paper they’re printed on. I do find them interesting as characters, and I’m going to tell a story about their journeys that I find potent in itself, like so many other good stories about awful or risible people.”
Indeed, this is sort of what he does, in the early parts of the book. As @psybersecurity writes:
One problem is that Sandifer can’t help but continue to use Moldbug and Yudkowsky as punching bags. It’s a bit of an issue - after presenting legitimately good, concise criticisms of the two in the book’s introductory segment, he seemingly feels justified in adopting a smug attitude towards them as easily ignorable figures that no respectable intellectual would take seriously. And yet he can’t help but bring up qualms with them again and again, as if he’s not quite as secure in his dismissal as he wishes he was.
This is not just some little infelicity, I think. It’s a major problem which holds the book back a great deal in its ambitions to do something creative and legitimately chilling. The “story” is so stop-and-go that it’s barely there: the book is so wedded to the takedown format that any flights of fancy Sandifer wants to attempt must be weighed down with great ponderous loads of potshots.
Why is the book like this?
My bet is that the conceptual/narrative riff, not the takedown, was Sandifer’s driving motivation. His descriptions of the book are heavily slanted in that direction, after all. Take this paragraph from the Kickstarter:
Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe. It is a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment. A savage journey to the heart of the present eschaton. A Dear John letter to western civilization written from the garden of madman philosophers. A textual labyrinth winding towards a monster that I promise will not turn out to be ourselves all along or any crap like that.
IMO, this is a great pitch. It also sounds far more interesting and fun than the actual book. The description suggests literary game-playing, genuine induction of unease in the reader, a work of creative writing by someone who, incidentally, doesn’t think much of the people who served as its inspirations.
Why couldn’t Sandifer have just written that book? I suspect – and I could be wrong – that Sandifer has realized that his intended audience won’t look kindly at any book about neoreaction and Less Wrong unless it’s a takedown. Sandifer is not aiming this book at fans of these ideas, and his target audience is either already hostile to the ideas or likely to become hostile when made aware of them.
He’s clearly interested in writing something that takes concepts like “Red Pills” and “democracy will destroy itself” seriously, and doing creative work within that framework. But that framework comes from people whose other views he abhors. Writing a book of riffs on the aesthetic potential of “the Red Pill” runs you the risk of looking like you’re sympathetic to “the Red Pill” as conceived of by Moldbug and PUAs. “Roko’s Basilisk” makes Less Wrong a readily dismissable laughingstock to various parts of the internet; it’s also “a really spectacular story,” as Sandifer puts it, but if you push that angle to the point of admitting the idea really is chilling, you risk looking like you’re no savvier than the folks who freaked out about it in the first place.
So Sandifer must continually reassure his readers: “it’s OK, I think these people are ludicrous, I’m not taking them seriously.” This explains why he keeps on taking potshots against Yudkowsky and Moldbug long after he’s fully dismissed them as serious thinkers. He knows that a book that treats these people even as serious literary characters is going to strike a lot of people as conceding too much to them. So he tries to treat them as serious literary characters, because that’s his fundamental project, but he still keeps worrying that he might be taking them too seriously for his audience’s tastes, and so he keeps interrupting the story with more disses, until the cancerous tissue of the disses occupies so much space that the story is a mere shadow of what it might have been.
This also explains why his disses are so half-hearted. That’s not to say he’s too nice: he’s perfectly willing to call these people idiots. If anything, though, he still pulls his punches. He’s willing to call the trio some nasty names – because that’s a cheap, easy way to convey antipathy – but he doesn’t delve into their work far enough to identify its true (and vast and deep) flaws, sometimes ignoring obvious and damning critiques in favor of much weaker ones. You can get a far more damning primer on Moldbug’s failings from the Anti-Reactionary FAQ (published Oct. 2013), and as sweet Yudkowsky dunks go, he has nothing on someone like @argumate.
I don’t think this is because Sandifer can’t write a takedown. I think it’s because his heart isn’t it in. He’d never countenance this kind of laziness when it comes to Milton and Blake, because he actually cares about Milton and Blake.
But nonetheless, the half-hearted dunks interrupt the action again and again, insistently, compulsively. Because if he went too long without them, he’d be writing an actual treatise on the serious literary potential, the horror and beauty, of “Red Pills” and “basilisks,” of silly and possibly evil internet ephemera.
I don’t want to go to far here, but I hope this way of going-too-far is in the spirit of all of this: it seems like his decision to send review copies to neoreactionaries and Less Wrong rationalists would fit naturally into this defense. Presumably these people will get bees in their bonnets and write some infuriated words, which will reinforce the impression that Sandifer’s book is a takedown, which will neutralize any remaining sense that he’s fraternizing with the enemy.
I should be clear. I’m not saying that Sandifer agrees with the trio’s substantial claims, any more than one has to endorse Humbert Humbert’s self-presentation to enjoy Lolita. But there are some people who, understandably, can’t enjoy Lolita anyway, because they simply and for good reason want nothing to do with people like H.H., and are emphatically opposed to exploring his emotional complexities, his pathos, what can be done with him from a playful ironic literary remove. They don’t want to explore his possibilities; they just want to say “fuck that guy” and be done with it. So, too, with some people and neoreaction. But Sandifer is not one of these. He’s interested in the pathos and the playful possibilities. He wants to write Lolita, not a manual on the prevention of child abuse.
And so, in the book itself, like one of the horror protagonists he discusses, Sandifer continually, compulsively – and less and less convincingly – says no, asserts that nothing is wrong, that he’s in control, that he’s not unhealthiy interested in his subjects, that he knows they’re wrong and evil (did you know he thinks they’re wrong and evil? let’s say it again to make sure), that he may be gazing into the abyss but – rest easy – it’s not gazing into him, that nothing is off here, dear reader, oh no, that the trio is just as dismissible as you thought when you began reading, let me just reiterate that once again for clarity, no there is not anything going on over there in the shadows –
He’s of the Devil’s party, but he doesn’t know it.
