Liberal When Listening, Fascist When Talking
How to Communicate And Why Lineage of Ideas Doesn't Matter
Online discourse is plagued by quarrels about definitions. Take this:
Clearly @PoastSellars has a more narrow definition of Nietzscheanism than @SunSeekingPlant. That’s lots of barren, fruitless disagreement about trifles. What to do about it?
tldr
The solution is to transplant the software principle of ‘robustness’. Accept many inputs - be liberal, produce only specific predefinied output formats - be fascist.
Let’s say you learn to read some langauge or write it. It surely makes more sense to read many languages and write a subset of those than reverse.
Ideally you’d both read and write, but it’s harder to write. The material cost of a more general write capability is higher than more general read capability.
Hence in your definitions you hear should accept many versions OR invite your interlocutor to use a subtype designator. For our example ‘High Modern Nietzscheanism’ must be different from ‘Postmodern Nietzscheanism’.
Yet in writing, or speaking use subtle distinctions, narrow down your meaning. It’s the same as what Schopenhauer recommends in Eristics.
Multidimensionality of ideas
‘Who is real Nietzschean’ is similar to the ‘is hot-dog a sandwich’. For the latter there is a clear-cut classification - the cube rule.
How to do a similar thing for Nietzscheanism? Or any other idea?
What we can do is imagine the broad concept of Nietzscheanism. The ‘abstract Nietzschean’, when a ahistorical individual comes up with similar set of ideas.
Broad Nietzscheanism is a manifold (region) in multidimensional timeless idea-space.
Narrow Nietzscheanism is a small region of the idea-space, limited in time and space dimensions.
The narrow variant is the scholarly one and cladistic - taking great care to concerns of memetic descent. In fact Mencius Moldbug wrote about that perspective in 2007 post, as one of the key ways to classify worldviews.
Note that these specific narrow and broad versions are ones among multitudes. We could even bisect the idea-space into life-embracing and life-denying regions. Then we’d call one Nietzschean and the other Schopenhauerian. I say that’d be true, even if that’d be a lossy conversion from the richness and detail-intensity of the narrow view.
In other words, the broad view can become a leftist meme, spanning walls of text.
There is more to be said about greebling, degreebling and the usefulness of complex vs simple structures, so that another day. For now let’s view some more examples of how descent is ignored in favour of abstract notions.
Integration
The foremost and the most funny example is how in the 90s a biologist independently invented integration. The subspace of idea-space that deals with mathematics is rarely a topic of descent-based discourse. We just assume that most of this stuff was invented independently (Pythagorean theorem from, Babylon, but also Egypt).
Of course how Leibniz and Newton convergently came up with this is a no brainer for another example. Inventions / discoveries like these are very common - there’s a whole wikipedia list for that.
I’ll skip the sciency-mathy examples then and go back to the philosophy sphere.
Three ages of Buddhism
Buddhism is not a revealed religion. It is a natural religion, reasoned out from the World by Man.
Its metadiscourse (equivalent to ecclesiology in Christianity) is firmly tied to its cosmology. Buddhist cosmology is on great terms with cyclical patterns, and the topic of Buddha and origin of Dharma (teachings) is no exception. Three ages of Buddhism are periods of decline of the teachings until all is forgotten. After that, a new Buddha is prophesized to arise and show the world the true doctrine.
From this story we know that Buddhism as a region of idea-space is independently discoverable. We may conjecture how many times it was invented and lost to time.
Let’s start in 4000 BCE, that gives us 6000 years of human history. Buddha lived in 7th century BC. All occurences of the Buddhist meme before that must have been independent. Since then the rate of independent discovery decreased until the memeplex of insitutional cladistic Buddhism reached maximum global penetration. At some point in globalization, all people with leisure time to think about such abstract stuff have already heard of Buddhism. (You could make a huge anti-globalist argument here, or a pro-globalist one).
Then for every idea in the world there are people who know it and those who don’t. Those who know are divided into those who came up with it and those who know it from the Big Name Originator lineage.
Are those who come up with it independently not true believers? Is descent or its abscence a sufficient condition for a difference? Is a Yellow Emperor’s scribe not using the Pythagorean theorem when calculating the hypotenuse?
I think Borges would agree on this one.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future - Jorge Luis Borges
Descent example
From wikipedia article about 21st century group, Boston Confucians:
Boston Confucianism belongs to the larger discussion of what it means to study and practice Confucianism in a context outside China and East Asia
That’s an explicit variant, and one using descent. Yet I imagine someone just taking the Analects and coming up with own interpretation, making effectively a direct descent from Confucius, skipping all the Traditional commentary on the way. (That’s literally what Luther did with the Bible).
Back to definitions
Where does that leave us? Discourse will benefit from being generous with naming conventions used by opponents, after all:
Also from the tldr higher up:
Accept many inputs - be liberal, produce only specific predefinied output formats - be fascist.
Appendix
Optimizing for security rather than ease in discourse is an exception for the Robustness principle.