Innovation or Conservatism?

Yes, You Do Have to Choose

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I am an unrepentant Darwinist and also, I think, the most reactionary person on the planet. These are not at all contradictory. In fact, if you’re one but not the other, you haven’t really understood either. Darwin is often seen as the enemy of tradition, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was corrosive to the tradition of his time, but this is just because the tradition of his time was not a real tradition, but a hiccup.

I’ve been working on a book for a couple of years now, which isn’t really a secret anymore, so maybe this can serve as an announcement. It’s called the Cultured Thug Handbook and it explains dozens of “far-right” concepts in plain and direct language accessible to normies. Being a publisher—one who also does a podcast a week and an article a week for you fine people—leaves little time to write books, so it’s taken me a while. You’ll get it by the end of the year.

The Cultured Thug Handbook contains chapters both on “Chesterton’s Fence” and the “Lindy Rule”. For those not familiar, a quick overview. Chesterton’s Fence is a warning against utopianism. It says “you want to rip down that fence because you don’t see the point of it, but this is the worst reason of all—you shouldn’t be allowed to touch the fence until you can explain why it was put up in the first place.” The Lindy Rule is a little heuristic for figuring out what’s going to last and what’s not. The rule is simple: the best predictor of how long something will be around in the future, is how old it is.

These two ideas completely validate conservatism and tradition. They’re interesting in their own right, but even more interesting when considered in the light of Darwin’s natural selection. In fact, they validate conservatism and tradition because underneath them you will find, as a justificatory principle, natural selection. Natural selection is ur-conservatism. Tradition has taken its revenge on Darwin.