I think conservatism can be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology.
The liberals see the aspects of behaviour that come with human nature as baggage; they are above all that and form themselves into exclusive tribes, to prove it.
Heuristics are useful and often work. Tit for tat with forgiveness is a winning strategy over blind forgiveness and over tit for tat without forgiveness. And not showing in-group preference when other groups show in group preference is a losing strategy (except for a small group of traitors who ride their group into the ground and profit for a while)
Other readers have commented that the language in this essay is too abstract, and thus confusing and hard to follow. I don't think that's the problem though.
I think the main issue is that this essay tries to cram too many different ideas into a single essay. Even though the title is "In Defence of Prejudice", most of the paper isn't about prejudice, aside from the "Wisdom of prejudice" section. That section is also too short to adequately defend prejudice.
The best thing that could be done to improve this work would probably be to separate it into a few essays, and expand each of them.
I think the missing piece here is that the argument defends “prejudice” and “tradition” as valuable in themselves, but never actually defines what is being conserved or why it’s worth conserving. Without that, it risks sounding like we’re defending a vague sentiment rather than a clear, concrete good.
From a biopolitical perspective, the answer is straightforward:
What’s being conserved is the biological continuity of the people who built Western civilization — the genetically coherent European-descended population.
Why it’s valuable is not just “because it’s ours,” but because this population’s unique combination of high average intelligence, low time preference, high trust/cooperation, and other heritable behavioral traits is what has historically allowed our culture, institutions, and technology to emerge and function. These traits are measurable, evolutionarily advantageous, and rare in combination.
Why it matters is that traditions, political systems, and cultural norms are emergent properties of those traits. You can replace governments and laws and still keep a society functional if the people remain; replace the people, and the systems will fail no matter how well-designed.
That’s the part the liberal-rational “procedural” worldview can’t answer without denying science. Our case is actually stronger on empirical grounds than theirs — grounded in evolutionary biology, behavioral genetics, and anthropological universals, not just in aesthetic preference.
By clarifying what we’re conserving and grounding it in objective reality, we can defend it without having to rely solely on abstract appeals to “prejudice” or “the sacred” that can be too easily dismissed as irrational nostalgia.
I feel I would have been very receptive to this author's argument if it hadn't been couched in such awkard language. The older I get, the more convinced I become that we only really understand things we can visualise and here I could visualise precisely nothing. There were just too many strings of long, difficult words that jiggled around in my brain, refusing to coalesce into a proper thought. I still have no idea what 'the symbolic order', 'symbolic cowardice' or 'symbolic energy' are. In the end I gave up just before The Wisdom of Prejudice, though I may have another run at it once my overtaxed brain has had a breather.
Given that this piece was written in defense of a world view that often can't play the pompous language games of the rational liberal elite it's ironic that the author chose to write in precisely that style, as though he had accepted the enemy's choice of weapons, weapons which he can clearly wield with dexterity but the rest of us foot soldiers can't.
I teach basic Conversation English to Japanese university students and at the end of term they have to give a 5-minute presentation in English on a subject I choose. Some of them pitch the presentation at me rather than at their classmates, despite me telling them that the rest of the class has to understand the presentation or there is no point. They therefore know should avoid any hi fallutin' language and expressions that only the teacher and ChatGPT will understand. That, I felt, was the problem here.
That's a bit too much pure abstraction for me. Can you give concrete examples or even hypotheticals that would demonstrate the normative claim being made here?
Quote: "Liberals and leftists often take satisfaction in portraying conservatism as less intellectually rigorous than systems like liberalism or Marxism. But the “sophistication” of these ideologies largely reflects their construction from abstract principles designed for systematization. Conservatism, by contrast, is more like a disposition than a system. It involves instinctive attachments to custom, tradition and inherited ways of life."
I would disagree with that somewhat. If I am a conservative it is because I want to conserve liberal institutions, which is the way it was with Edmund Burke too, if I remember correctly. And the thing is, these institutions have been largely abandoned by the very people who used to call themselves liberals (or more often by their children I suppose). Check out the American Civil Liberties Union for example.
My point is that the way is now open to defend these liberal institutions on the basis of the same "abstract principles" that were used to establish them in the first place. Most of them are still mighty fine principles, at least in my opinion.
The fact of the matter is that none of the smartest people writing about policy today are on the left, even moderately so. Or on the right either, at least not necessarily. In my own case at least, I strive to play it right down the middle. A liberal conservative, a conservative liberal, call me what you will. However narrow the path, it's the best way to go.
All forms of political collectivism will fail as scale and diversity increase. And collectivism, whether material or intellectual, is the realm of 20th-21st century progressivism.
Once I thought that collectivism cannot work, ever. A system in which those who produce in abundance willingly and freely share with those less capable of producing the means to life--in short, voluntary redistribution of resources. But I was wrong. Examples exist.
Collectivism is a natural result of evolved familial bonds that most species of mammals evolved as a means of survival and successful reproduction. At its narrowest scope, it is the mother/child model of nurturing and protecting. As species evolve larger social structures, collectivism is applied, voluntarily and without external coercion to not only the nuclear family, but to extended blood/mating relationships as well. This can scale up naturally to clan and tribe. It reaches its limits at ethnicity, diffusing as it scales up, so that amongst ethnicly differing groups, very little desire to share resources remains.
Now, if this is in any sense accurate, we might expect that a monocultural polity--a nation whose vast majority is of the same ethnic background, *might*--just maybe--be able to adopt a collectivist political/economic system that requires minimal external coercion for an extended period. But it will be fairly fragile and the free redistribution of resources will always tend to self-limit to the scope of blood relations and mating bonds. Beyond that, such "sharing" requires forcible confiscation and redistribution--which is itself subject to corruption and sharing amongst blood or ethnic relatives.
So that said, any modern western multicultural system is extremely poorly suited to non-coercive collectivism, and you know where that leaves us, right?
Increasing levels of enforced redistribution, rife with cheating on the part of those will surplus resources, and suspicion of hoarding/withholding by those who tend to receive redistributed resources.
Very abstract, metaphysical, mythical. Riding the tiger, are we?
I'm not much for mysticism and metaphysics, so why not just say it out in the open?
The current tilt to the Left is dysfunctional and unless we course-correct, the Western civilization will end or be irreparably damaged.
The arguments and empirical data are clear:
1. Whites are being replaced in their homelands. Intent or no intent.
2. Without Whites, the West ceases to exist. Immigrants don't assimilate, they reacreate their mini-homelands.
3. Therefore, we HAVE to become healthily ethnocentric.
I agree with Cofnas on this, we simply have to demolish the noble lie of egalitarian thesis. Or as Camus puts it, the denial of race.
I don't think we have to sacrifice modernity, i.e. science, procedure, rationality. Prejudice is proto-rationality. If prejudice, loyalty, tradition and nation WORK, you can make a rational argument for them. And an intuitive one as well. That will appeal to many people as well.
I think we can take our balls out of the freezer after 80 years of telling noble lies.
Cofnas acknowledges the problem, acknowledges that we have to destroy the equalitarian position, but he rejects ethnonationalism. He understands part of the problem but hates the actual real solutions. He still thinks we'll live in multiracial utopia if we just about that we're not equal. It’s like communism level detachment from human nature.
I don’t believe that colorblindness is the solution. My vision is a society in which communities are granted more freedom to organize themselves according to different values. Divisions won’t necessarily be made along racial lines, although when people organize themselves spontaneously, there is often a degree of homogeneity. A society that has absorbed the truth of hereditarianism should be open to this alternative.
Discussing the superfluous differences between liberals and conservatives under the current deleterious conditions in the West is a useless endeavor. We live in a plutocratic oligarchy...the super-rich vs the not super-rich. The manufactured contention between political parties is one of the methods used by the Deep State to foment societal disruption.
"The manufactured contention between political parties is one of the methods used by the Deep State to foment societal disruption."
This is interesting and it aligns with my own belief--based on years of simply living thru multiple US administrations--that the left/right division of political parties in the US is an illusion. They are simply pre-packaged strategies to sell a set of marketable beliefs to the voting public, and the belief that is the most satisfying or best sold wins the election--which equals power, which the winners then sell to the small minority of the super-rich/rich who actually can pay for favored intervention by the empowered winner of the election.
There have been two basic ways to attempt to live and succeed in this system for all the rest. One way is for an individual to join with other like-minded individuals to attempt to overhaul the system, but based on *what*, exactly?
The other way is for the individual to attempt entry onto the bottom-most rungs of the rich class, such that you have enough in common economically that some of the gravy spills off of the gravy dish and you can blot up some, to your benefit. Leave it to your descendants to ratchet their way up onto the table, if they can.
The latter strategy requires no cooperation from fickle moral ideologues and is easier than many people think.
Not to be a wiseguy, but do you have any concrete proposals of how, exactly, to get this started?
I'll be honest with you. As a callow anti-war student I actually believed that The People--righteous dudes and chicks, all--would rise up and unify, and...and...and...
Start the Age of Aquarius, I guess.
I thought this all the way thru the 70s and half the 80s. Somewhere around Reagan's second term I started to wonder that if maybe if you can't beat 'em, maybe you should join 'em.
The very best I could manage was, as I said, the bottom-most rung (if that), but I knew that if what I was after in my lifespan was increased positive choices in all areas, from where I lived, to where my kid went to school, to what I ate, to a low-stress retirement, to personal safety, I was moving in the right direction. This is plainly demonstrable and has been for years.
So basically, until you can see clearly that the national public ethos will support mutual benefit (maybe I saw this in the 50s, but I was to young to really know one way or the other), I'd say that the practical and grounded individual in the US might want to think that it's been every man for himself for at least the last 40 or so years.
In fact, I'd venture to guess that only in times of real (not imagined) national threat--Great Depression, maybe, WWII, maybe--was it anything other than every man for himself in the urban areas. The frontier, maybe not.
You must be a real joy to work with because any well-adjusted person would realize there are better and worse bosses based upon your actions and choices
"You must be a real joy to work with because any well-adjusted person would realize there are better and worse bosses based upon your actions and choices."
Your reply is a non sequitur. We are not talking about the workplace and bosses; we are talking about those who control your life.
I think conservatism can be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology.
The liberals see the aspects of behaviour that come with human nature as baggage; they are above all that and form themselves into exclusive tribes, to prove it.
Heuristics are useful and often work. Tit for tat with forgiveness is a winning strategy over blind forgiveness and over tit for tat without forgiveness. And not showing in-group preference when other groups show in group preference is a losing strategy (except for a small group of traitors who ride their group into the ground and profit for a while)
Other readers have commented that the language in this essay is too abstract, and thus confusing and hard to follow. I don't think that's the problem though.
I think the main issue is that this essay tries to cram too many different ideas into a single essay. Even though the title is "In Defence of Prejudice", most of the paper isn't about prejudice, aside from the "Wisdom of prejudice" section. That section is also too short to adequately defend prejudice.
The best thing that could be done to improve this work would probably be to separate it into a few essays, and expand each of them.
I think the missing piece here is that the argument defends “prejudice” and “tradition” as valuable in themselves, but never actually defines what is being conserved or why it’s worth conserving. Without that, it risks sounding like we’re defending a vague sentiment rather than a clear, concrete good.
From a biopolitical perspective, the answer is straightforward:
What’s being conserved is the biological continuity of the people who built Western civilization — the genetically coherent European-descended population.
Why it’s valuable is not just “because it’s ours,” but because this population’s unique combination of high average intelligence, low time preference, high trust/cooperation, and other heritable behavioral traits is what has historically allowed our culture, institutions, and technology to emerge and function. These traits are measurable, evolutionarily advantageous, and rare in combination.
Why it matters is that traditions, political systems, and cultural norms are emergent properties of those traits. You can replace governments and laws and still keep a society functional if the people remain; replace the people, and the systems will fail no matter how well-designed.
That’s the part the liberal-rational “procedural” worldview can’t answer without denying science. Our case is actually stronger on empirical grounds than theirs — grounded in evolutionary biology, behavioral genetics, and anthropological universals, not just in aesthetic preference.
By clarifying what we’re conserving and grounding it in objective reality, we can defend it without having to rely solely on abstract appeals to “prejudice” or “the sacred” that can be too easily dismissed as irrational nostalgia.
I feel I would have been very receptive to this author's argument if it hadn't been couched in such awkard language. The older I get, the more convinced I become that we only really understand things we can visualise and here I could visualise precisely nothing. There were just too many strings of long, difficult words that jiggled around in my brain, refusing to coalesce into a proper thought. I still have no idea what 'the symbolic order', 'symbolic cowardice' or 'symbolic energy' are. In the end I gave up just before The Wisdom of Prejudice, though I may have another run at it once my overtaxed brain has had a breather.
Given that this piece was written in defense of a world view that often can't play the pompous language games of the rational liberal elite it's ironic that the author chose to write in precisely that style, as though he had accepted the enemy's choice of weapons, weapons which he can clearly wield with dexterity but the rest of us foot soldiers can't.
I teach basic Conversation English to Japanese university students and at the end of term they have to give a 5-minute presentation in English on a subject I choose. Some of them pitch the presentation at me rather than at their classmates, despite me telling them that the rest of the class has to understand the presentation or there is no point. They therefore know should avoid any hi fallutin' language and expressions that only the teacher and ChatGPT will understand. That, I felt, was the problem here.
That's why I just rejected the article as mostly useless and wrote this instead:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/in-defence-of-prejudice/comment/144469406?r=5i54qo
That's a bit too much pure abstraction for me. Can you give concrete examples or even hypotheticals that would demonstrate the normative claim being made here?
That prompted me to respond to move it from vague philosophical handwaving to solid objectively defensible positions and claims.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/in-defence-of-prejudice/comment/144469406?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5i54qo
Quote: "Liberals and leftists often take satisfaction in portraying conservatism as less intellectually rigorous than systems like liberalism or Marxism. But the “sophistication” of these ideologies largely reflects their construction from abstract principles designed for systematization. Conservatism, by contrast, is more like a disposition than a system. It involves instinctive attachments to custom, tradition and inherited ways of life."
I would disagree with that somewhat. If I am a conservative it is because I want to conserve liberal institutions, which is the way it was with Edmund Burke too, if I remember correctly. And the thing is, these institutions have been largely abandoned by the very people who used to call themselves liberals (or more often by their children I suppose). Check out the American Civil Liberties Union for example.
My point is that the way is now open to defend these liberal institutions on the basis of the same "abstract principles" that were used to establish them in the first place. Most of them are still mighty fine principles, at least in my opinion.
The fact of the matter is that none of the smartest people writing about policy today are on the left, even moderately so. Or on the right either, at least not necessarily. In my own case at least, I strive to play it right down the middle. A liberal conservative, a conservative liberal, call me what you will. However narrow the path, it's the best way to go.
All forms of political collectivism will fail as scale and diversity increase. And collectivism, whether material or intellectual, is the realm of 20th-21st century progressivism.
Once I thought that collectivism cannot work, ever. A system in which those who produce in abundance willingly and freely share with those less capable of producing the means to life--in short, voluntary redistribution of resources. But I was wrong. Examples exist.
Collectivism is a natural result of evolved familial bonds that most species of mammals evolved as a means of survival and successful reproduction. At its narrowest scope, it is the mother/child model of nurturing and protecting. As species evolve larger social structures, collectivism is applied, voluntarily and without external coercion to not only the nuclear family, but to extended blood/mating relationships as well. This can scale up naturally to clan and tribe. It reaches its limits at ethnicity, diffusing as it scales up, so that amongst ethnicly differing groups, very little desire to share resources remains.
Now, if this is in any sense accurate, we might expect that a monocultural polity--a nation whose vast majority is of the same ethnic background, *might*--just maybe--be able to adopt a collectivist political/economic system that requires minimal external coercion for an extended period. But it will be fairly fragile and the free redistribution of resources will always tend to self-limit to the scope of blood relations and mating bonds. Beyond that, such "sharing" requires forcible confiscation and redistribution--which is itself subject to corruption and sharing amongst blood or ethnic relatives.
So that said, any modern western multicultural system is extremely poorly suited to non-coercive collectivism, and you know where that leaves us, right?
Increasing levels of enforced redistribution, rife with cheating on the part of those will surplus resources, and suspicion of hoarding/withholding by those who tend to receive redistributed resources.
Very abstract, metaphysical, mythical. Riding the tiger, are we?
I'm not much for mysticism and metaphysics, so why not just say it out in the open?
The current tilt to the Left is dysfunctional and unless we course-correct, the Western civilization will end or be irreparably damaged.
The arguments and empirical data are clear:
1. Whites are being replaced in their homelands. Intent or no intent.
2. Without Whites, the West ceases to exist. Immigrants don't assimilate, they reacreate their mini-homelands.
3. Therefore, we HAVE to become healthily ethnocentric.
I agree with Cofnas on this, we simply have to demolish the noble lie of egalitarian thesis. Or as Camus puts it, the denial of race.
I don't think we have to sacrifice modernity, i.e. science, procedure, rationality. Prejudice is proto-rationality. If prejudice, loyalty, tradition and nation WORK, you can make a rational argument for them. And an intuitive one as well. That will appeal to many people as well.
I think we can take our balls out of the freezer after 80 years of telling noble lies.
Cofnas acknowledges the problem, acknowledges that we have to destroy the equalitarian position, but he rejects ethnonationalism. He understands part of the problem but hates the actual real solutions. He still thinks we'll live in multiracial utopia if we just about that we're not equal. It’s like communism level detachment from human nature.
Cofnas' position seem to be free association:
I don’t believe that colorblindness is the solution. My vision is a society in which communities are granted more freedom to organize themselves according to different values. Divisions won’t necessarily be made along racial lines, although when people organize themselves spontaneously, there is often a degree of homogeneity. A society that has absorbed the truth of hereditarianism should be open to this alternative.
https://ncofnas.com/p/victory-without-a-hereditarian-revolution
Discussing the superfluous differences between liberals and conservatives under the current deleterious conditions in the West is a useless endeavor. We live in a plutocratic oligarchy...the super-rich vs the not super-rich. The manufactured contention between political parties is one of the methods used by the Deep State to foment societal disruption.
"The manufactured contention between political parties is one of the methods used by the Deep State to foment societal disruption."
This is interesting and it aligns with my own belief--based on years of simply living thru multiple US administrations--that the left/right division of political parties in the US is an illusion. They are simply pre-packaged strategies to sell a set of marketable beliefs to the voting public, and the belief that is the most satisfying or best sold wins the election--which equals power, which the winners then sell to the small minority of the super-rich/rich who actually can pay for favored intervention by the empowered winner of the election.
There have been two basic ways to attempt to live and succeed in this system for all the rest. One way is for an individual to join with other like-minded individuals to attempt to overhaul the system, but based on *what*, exactly?
The other way is for the individual to attempt entry onto the bottom-most rungs of the rich class, such that you have enough in common economically that some of the gravy spills off of the gravy dish and you can blot up some, to your benefit. Leave it to your descendants to ratchet their way up onto the table, if they can.
The latter strategy requires no cooperation from fickle moral ideologues and is easier than many people think.
The Deep State only accepts capitulation. They will not accept defeat. The West's only hope is destroying the Deep State.
Not to be a wiseguy, but do you have any concrete proposals of how, exactly, to get this started?
I'll be honest with you. As a callow anti-war student I actually believed that The People--righteous dudes and chicks, all--would rise up and unify, and...and...and...
Start the Age of Aquarius, I guess.
I thought this all the way thru the 70s and half the 80s. Somewhere around Reagan's second term I started to wonder that if maybe if you can't beat 'em, maybe you should join 'em.
The very best I could manage was, as I said, the bottom-most rung (if that), but I knew that if what I was after in my lifespan was increased positive choices in all areas, from where I lived, to where my kid went to school, to what I ate, to a low-stress retirement, to personal safety, I was moving in the right direction. This is plainly demonstrable and has been for years.
So basically, until you can see clearly that the national public ethos will support mutual benefit (maybe I saw this in the 50s, but I was to young to really know one way or the other), I'd say that the practical and grounded individual in the US might want to think that it's been every man for himself for at least the last 40 or so years.
In fact, I'd venture to guess that only in times of real (not imagined) national threat--Great Depression, maybe, WWII, maybe--was it anything other than every man for himself in the urban areas. The frontier, maybe not.
If you were a realist, you would realize that there will always be a bureaucratic deep State, just like there will always be an elite
"If you were a realist, you would realize that there will always be a bureaucratic deep State, just like there will always be an elite."
Your capitulation will ensure that you are always subjugated...enjoy.
You must be a real joy to work with because any well-adjusted person would realize there are better and worse bosses based upon your actions and choices
"You must be a real joy to work with because any well-adjusted person would realize there are better and worse bosses based upon your actions and choices."
Your reply is a non sequitur. We are not talking about the workplace and bosses; we are talking about those who control your life.