The Aesthetic Reactionary

A Privationist Parable

jordan peterson had a severe and traumatic aesthetic reaction to something a while back and seems to have never quite recovered. the lost 13th rule of life is that your apparel should sacrilegiously resemble an iconostasis.

Your reaction to the problem is usually the biggest problem you have. The problem today isn´t merely that there is evil, or even unparalleled evil, but that the good people are apparently incapable of confronting it profitably or even avoiding it well. Instead, the limpid “warriors” of our time tend to attach themselves to the problem and serve it in their manner of opposition. If privationism is a way of looking at political liberalism or theological modernism or even capitalism itself as a process of emptying the practical normative content of life in the name of avoiding evil, its spiritual strength lies in the fact privationism also takes hold of those opposing this process and gets them to oppose it poorly. Privationism controls the opposition by getting them to try to make an evil world less bad rather than good. There is a difference, and the following parable tries to eludicate it.

As I was recently trying to explain privationism to a highly intelligent but relatively unlearned friend of mine, I found myself wanting to come up with some sort of parable to convey the idea most succinctly. After explaining my theory, I felt the best way to see if the person understood was to ask: how would a privationist approach “developing” the game of soccer? what would they suggest to alter and change and with what sort of reasoning? What follows is my own answer to this prompt. I share it because it also helps clarify the identity of perhaps the most regrettable personality of this present age, a person I´m going to call the Aesthetic Reactionary, an autobiographical self-description of sorts. I ask for your prayers.

The Soccer Parable

So here is a soccer parable in response to this question. I say a privationist would find something evil to use to begin to subtract from the form of soccer. By form I mean, the rules of the game, the boundaries, the way in which the rules are enforced. And by changing these a privationist changes the way the game is played altogether. So perhaps the first line of attack is a simple rule: say, offsides. They´d compile a highlight reel of all the games lost because of this rule, of all the beautiful goals invalidated, of players crying in disappointment due to offsides violations, of red cards issued to those prostesting their innocence of violating this rule. Also a privationist might make the argument that in some cases its too hard to judge whether a player was offsides or not, so its better just do away with the rule altogether. But they would find a number of evil consequences of this rule, and say the game would be improved by the removal of the rule to avoid these negative consequences.

But next would be the boundaries, the playing field itself. They question if it was really necessary that a team lose possession in crucial moments where the ball just barely went out of bounds, perhaps with ample footage of children crying as a consequence, all with the purpose of doing away with the boundaries. “Is it really worth children crying to be such a stickler about the boundaries? would it really change the game so much if they weren´t so strictly enforced?” A privationist works incrementally, so perhaps they start with the referees relaxing how they judge a ball going out of bounds, then slowly they move toward doing away with the boundaries themselves. Obviously, slowly the game would begin to change in response. Without offsides there is poaching, without boundaries, the play becomes sloppy. If people said the game was better with offsides violations or when there was a clearly defined playing field, or referees that judged strictly on this basis, they have to justify the changes in terms of evil. They invent an entire narrative about how bad the game was before, how hard hearted the referees were, and how children didn´t want to play a game so strictly enforced, etc. Basically the changes are always justified in terms of avoiding evil, and the good that is sacrificed by the changes isn´t calibrated.

But the teams still show up to play, now with no offsides, no boundaries, and increasingly useless referees. What might be the next step? Well one extereme step would be to simply turn the goals 180 degrees, or to forbid goals or keeping score. Or maybe just to forbid winning and losing. “The game is about playing itself,” they say, “not scoring goals or winning or losing.” The privationist always comes for the end eventually, as the final end is where all the power comes from. So without goals or keeping score, its now just two teams, both with 11 men , who play around with a ball on an undefined field. This is what is now called soccer after the privationist reforms. Players are of course liberated from the confines of the old game to experience the joy and creativity of the formless new game.

Obviously removing the end in particular would have an extreme effect on the form and intensity of the game, of course this step would also be necessary because of the evils of keeping score. “A few professionals have killed themselves after own goals” a privationist would say, “this needs to be the focus, that no one kills themselves due to an own goal or poor play, and the best way to ensure this is to forbid keeping score at all.” So again, the rationale is a clearly defined evil to be avoided. Those who criticized the changes or said the game was less entertaining than before will be reminded of how evil the past was. Legends will grow around how unhappy the players were in this era, how greedy they were and how they couldn´t really enjoy playing the game as they were only focused on winning and scoring goals. “How superficial!” says the privationist, the deepest meaning of soccer is “the spirit of playing itself.” And this becomes the positive slogan, that now soccer has recovered its primitive “spirit of playing,” which is practically negatively defined as only possible when one doesn´t keep score.

But basically everything that gives form to soccer will slowly and gradually be undermined by a privationist, and once the end is removed then movement itself grinds to a screeching halt. Again, this is all done in the name of avoiding various evils they point out. These may truely be unfortunate things, like someone committing suicide after scoring an own goal. But there is a certain blindness to the relation between the form of the game and the positive fruits of this form. For a privationist, they can only see evil and seek to avoid it. A privationist is insensible to the good they destroy in this quest to eliminate what they see to be evil.

So what happens to the game? Well, slowly the game becomes less interesting to the fans, people stop coming to the stadium to watch a game where no one keeps score. Players stop training as they did before and children stop desiring to play and learn the game. From an economic point of view, the privationist soccer league then needs to find other ways to get people playing and to fill the stadium. Very attractive, scantily clad cheerleaders are welcomed into the stadium to perform erotic dances. Perhaps the stadium also hires an excellent rock band or dj to play during the match, it offers ample cheap alcohol, recreational drugs and perhaps even replaces the box seats with brothels and adds a casino adjacent to the stadium. Basically as the intellectual enjoyment of watching the game and playing the game is diminished, the satisfaction of base sensible pleasures are the only way to continue the business of the game, so these are indulged. Yet they still insist that he game be called “soccer,” and the debauchery that takes place at such a venue “a soccer match.” Players are chosen on the basis of their celebrity status on social media and or their attractive phyiscal appearance. Once attendance starts to drop, players are then allowed and even encouraged to get in fights, each team starts a reality tv show about the various lives of the stars on the team to generate interest. In order to keep peoples attention, the game has to be come more about personal drama, sex, and violence. But the people start coming to the “games“ to party, to witness violence, and see celebrity players who have stoped playing the game entirely really. The reforms started out of concern for one soccer player who killed himself, now it´s not unusual for there to be multiple casualties during a “game.“ Slowly the players start wearing their own clothes and playing for themselves, no longer seeing the point of even wearing the team uniform. They simply show up, kick a ball around, and perhaps beat players on the other or their own team should they feel like it, all while people come to the stadium for a wild party and spectacle of violence.

The point of the parable is that its a metaphor for life and the development of society. The rules of any language, society or profession or craft can be profitably understood as a sort of game that people play, or so thought Wittgenstein. And the shift from form to the absence of form and the concomittant shift from intellectual enjoyment to sensible enjoyment is made clear from the parable: this is what the western world has experienced over the past one hundred years. This is why we are more or less cursed to living in what Charles Taylor defined as the “immanent frame,“ basically a lebenswelt, where only immediate sensible pleasures come into view, a world where the deeper, more refined, transcendent realities are incomprehensible. Enjoying intellectual transcendental things like law, duty, virtue are really not live options for people living in this moral universe. I say cursed as this culture, this lebenswelt, influences everyone in western society, even the people trying to avoid it and pass on what they percieve to be our true cultural or religious inheritance. We are a culture of consumers of experience on a sensible aesthetic level, and its very easy to try to consume the appearance of a better past, to enjoy the cheap appearance of signaling for ethical goodness without fessing up to the costly reality of virtue and its absence.

The Aesthetic Reactionary

This parable, therefore, helps make clear how we can go wrong in opposing this spirit of anti-Christ, this ideology of privationism. Basically, the old game, the game focused on winning and losing, is a metaphor for the ethical life, where there are winners and losers, where there is a heaven and a hell, where every actions can be good and evil and each action has precious consequences on the soul carrying out the action and also has almost infinite consequences on the lives of others when considered from the long view. Professional soccer players are intense, they train like maniacs. The fans are equally intense, they are obsessed with winning and losing, nothing else matters. The new game is a transition to a sensible enjoyment, also a more aesthetic enjoyment. The game takes on a new superficiality as the goals are turned round backwards. It has to.

And after a generation of playing the new game of soccer and indulging in the party, of course some fans and players will say enough is enough, the old game was better. But here is the catch: after two generations growing up under the new game, the players don´t know how to play the old game anymore. They wouldnt stand a chance even playing pick up soccer with the older generation of players in a park. The fans don´t know how to enjoy watching the old game, they dont know the strategies, the rules, etc. They are also drug addicts and perverts, so it really feels empty to return to the sobreity of the old sort of soccer hooligan. Niether player nor fan can practically enjoy the old form of the game in practice in an instant. It´s simply not ready to hand, instead its going to take some effort and breaking bad habits at the very least. They can only make an aesthetic judgment that the older game seemed aesthetically more pleasing. The older players looked stronger, the the game was in some sense more beautiful with the old uniforms, with various formations and strategies, etc.

Thus the temptation is to start a new league, and simply bring back some of the aesthetics of the old game. No whorehouse in the stadium, bring back the old uniforms, no mushrooms or hallucinogens handed out at the concession stand. One can even enjoy the absence of these bad things with a sort of ethical enjoyment, but the game is only less worse, its still not good at all. And this is the temptation for the aesthetic reactionary, to mistake evil for good, to treat what is truely the absence of evil—i.e. soccer without LSD and whorehouses and with boundaries, referees, and retro uniforms, but no goals—as if it were good. To enjoy the superficial signal of the less bad as if it were good, this is the temptation of the aesthetic reactionary, to bring back the aesthetics without bringing back the ethics, without bringing back the game, without keeping score. The new reformed league only tries to bring back the appearance of the old game without allowing for goals and winners and losers.

Why? Well there might be some team somewhere that never stopped playing the old game, and they´d absolutely get rocked by any such team. They would get rocked because they don´t know how to play the game well, basically all the cultural knowledge of the game that had been passed on from fathers to sons was lost. And it would take at least two or three generations for it to return. All the drills, all the refined knowledge of how to dribble properly, kick, etc. All the small tricks and tips that were once given from one generation to the next to ensure excellence of form, these are gone and cannot return without generations of playing. As an American this rings true as we aren´t good at soccer as a nation. And it´s not because we aren´t physically athletic enough. It´s because the culture is lacking: soccer was never very important and american fathers don´t know how to shape their sons as soccer players like german fathers or french or italian fathers, at least on average, places where soccer is culturally the most important sport or a civic religion even.

Thus the temptation is for those who are trying to escape the new game to remain in the privationist framework, i.e. to simply try to avoid the evil of the new game by bringing back some of the decorative aspects of the old game and to enjoy the difference, to enjoy the absence of evil as if it were good. A real ethical reformer, in contrast to an aesthetic reactionary, would desire the old game and try to find someone to play the old game with, and this would be terrifically humiliating for those with this righteous desire. They will learn they are totally unprepared to play the old game, untrained, unlearned, out of shape, weak, and slothful. They´ve been shaped by a game without an end, and without the end, the game lost the form. And the only way to realize the catastrophic consequences of the absence of the end is to desire the end anew, to return to playing the game, a game where goals are counted and teams win and lose. The great disincentive to do this is that the players of the new reformed game will get thrashed if they return to the old game, if they simply measure their goodness from the abuses of the new game, they can remain sensibly self-satisfied as before, enjoying an entirely delusional sense of ethical superiority based in the aesthetics of their reformed new game. They define soccer as “a non-violent game involving two 11 man teams with each identical uniforms playing against eachother over possession of a ball” to signal their derision of the violence and chaos of the new game, but also with verbiage about possession to cloak the fact that practically they aren´t playing soccer at all according to the old standard, where scoring and not possession was paramount.

In this way, purveyors of the new reformed game, the aesthetic reactionaries, remain in the privationist spirit, they remain beholden to the spirit of anti-Christ, where the moral project is avoiding apparent evil rather than pursuing actual good. They can only offer an aesthetic sense of ethical superiority rooted in the absence of the evils of the new game, and in this essential charateristic it shows itself as not being different in kind from the new game itself, which destroyed soccer in the exact same spirit and thought process. The fans coming to this game, deprived of enjoying a win or loss, will be able to enjoy both the false fantasy that they are enjoying the old game and the truth that they are avoiding some of the evils of the new game. But any fan or player acquainted with the old game would recognize the difference. With out the proper end of scoring goals and winning the game, the form is missing, the intensity, the beauty of the game, the seriousness of the players and their level of training is absent.

Thus some people committed to the new reformed game start to clamour, “why don´t we start keeping score like before? its the only thing thats missing?” From all directions they are greeted with glaring recalcitrant eyes ”what do you want players to start commiting suicide again?” The founding myth greets them, of course a myth that reveals the evil of the past to be avoided by the present reform. Combined with this, they are also greeted with a negative justification: “just think of all the evils we are avoiding, no whorehouses, casinos, drugs, violence, you should be content to have the beauty of soccer restored without these abuses. If we kept score maybe the authorities would come and they´d shut the whole league down. Are you nuts?” Thus, the aesthetic reformed game ultimately finds its justificiation on the crucial points as to why it doesn´t keep score to the avoidance of evil, either (1) the original reason of the reformers to avoid suicide of players or (2) the reason of the reformers to avoid the evils of the new game. I should add (3) the privational good offered as justification so here “the liberty of playing soccer” where “liberty of playing” is negatively defined by the new game as soccer with the absence of certain essentail aspects of the old game.

The heart of this second part of the parable is what I have myself experienced: if you try to return to the old game, if you try to return to ethical life, to winning and losing, to a world where souls are lost and won every day, you are going to get crushed. Not just from your friends and family who will oppose you, not simply from the denizens of the new game who hate you or the denizens of the new reformed game who despise you more, but moreso by the game itself, by an enemy who never stopped playing and doesn´t sleep. You are going to get your ass beat, time and again. And if you love the game you have to learn to enjoy this. But few can and fewer will. It´s not pretty. And the temptation after failing and failing again with no applause, with no victory to point to and none in sight, is to return with your tail between your legs to the new reformed game, the aesthetic game that looks like the old game but isn´t, because they don´t keep score.

Application: Our End is God´s Justice and Mercy

The analogy with keeping score is simply accepting what the Bible or the Catholic tradition teaches about the way to heaven. It says our end is a place where strict justice is meted out. This is the highest aim of the privationist, to remove this end or empty it of all practical meaning. Any cursory review of the beliefs of the highly developed ancient cultures, they all had this belief, which one finds at the end of Plato´s republic: that the world one discovers after death is one where good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds are punished a thousand fold. These cultures were terrified of this place, and Jesus offered them escape from it. But not because he softened the moral universe they believed in, no, only that he took the punishment they knew they had coming. It was on this fertile ground that the Gospel found traction throughout the roman empire and in the ancient world, offering liberation from the horrible justice people had come to fear.

Its no surprise that as we have totally lost touch with this picture, with this conviction that the universe is ordered by justice, the Gospel has lost its true liberating meaning to late-capitalist culture, where just punishment for sin is almost entirely inconcievable. Jesus could be our therapist but not the Lamb of God. But the orginal Gospel was that Christ´s Salvic Work of Mercy doesn´t abrogate justice, but embraces it, suffers it, perfects it, compliments it, and extends it. Thus its a very narrow way, and many are mislead, and few find it. On account of one mortal sin not covered in His Blood, you could be damned.

This was and is the game, and these boudaries and rules make great players. St Francis wept endlessly over his sins, he literally went blind because of this, but he loved the game, he capitalized on the possibility of losing by becoming a Saint, by attending to and weeping over each sin. He, despite the wonderful signs of a great calling and blessing on his life and order, knew one single sin could separate him from God for eternity, and he acted accordingly, as one who loves God for God´s sake and wanted to make sure he didn´t cause God any displeasure by having to damn him. But Saints love the game, they know the threat of punishment is for their sanctity and edification and love God´s strict justice, just like an athlete loves the rules of the game and loves playing within them.

Its only today we think God´s mercy means fudging the lines, a relaxation of rule. Is this what we see in the Sermon on the Mount? Of course not. The rules are now harder and more imposing with Jesus. But my experience in churches of various stripes is that no one today loves this game, a game where the Incarnation means more not less is expected of believers, where the Incarnation raises the standard of piety, rather than lowers it from the old testament law. People today want to believe in a game they could never lose, and thus they don´t train for the real game, and without training they can´t want to play it or battle against the enemy. These people won´t be saved, everyone in heaven will have played at least. What will Jesus tell them when they plea in judgment? “Lord, Lord, I know I was out of bounds, I know I went offsides but I thought you were merciful? Must I really lose possession? Are you really going to scratch the goal, are you so ungenerous?” Wouldn´t he simply say “Depart from me, evildoers, into everlasting fire, for the boundary I gave you was my mercy, the game was my generosity! And you didn´t want that.“ To treat the absence of the game as His Goodness is to hate the game. It´s also to hate Him. It´s privationism, because it worships the real absence of good under the guise of the apparent absence of evil.

If its noteworthy in its production of spiritual lethargy and architectural ugliness, the religious indifferentism and false mercy that reigns in our day is really a revolt against the True and the Good respectively. Its a rebellion against God. Its a hatred of the rule and the referee. It´s a derision of the form of the game in exchange for a new formless game where basically everyone “wins,” where the boundaries lose the significance they once had. And without the boundaries and the rules of the old game, without the same referees and the fans, we cannot become the caliber of player as was before. And I hope this parable makes it clear: the problem in the church and world today aren´t those who play the new game. There have always been those in open revolt. Instead, the people most responsible for the evil of our times are those playing the new reformed game. It´s the people who know the new game is bad but are also unwilling to desire the old game in itself. It´s the aesthetic reactionaries who are comfortable with decorating themselves in various superficial ways with the trappings and garmets of the old game, without loving this game and embracing it wholesale. These are men who should and do know better but don´t want to get rocked.

Read more about Privationism—» Part 1: The Metaphysics of Privationism

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