The Great Idolatry: What is R9PRESENTATIONALism?

Reflections on the Counterrevolution in the Arts

The acronym “TESCREAL” has become trendy among a certain subset of technology skeptics, particularly those who oppose the AI ecosystem. Invented by Timnit Gebru to describe what she considered to be a common underlying ideology unifying the ostensibly-opposed poles of AI Safetyists (who are concerned with the risks that AI poses to humanity and wish to regulate or restrict the technology to counteract them) and techno-accelerationists (who support unrestricted AI development as an unambiguous positive regardless of any possible risks), the term stands for the following bundle of beliefs¹:

Transhumanism — the belief that we should develop and use “human enhancement” technologies that would give people everything from indefinitely long lives and new senses like echolocation to math skills that rival John von Neumann’s.

Extropianism — the belief that we should settle outer space and create or become innumerable kinds of “posthuman” minds very different from present humanity.

Singularitarianism — the belief that humans are going to create a superhuman intelligence in the medium-term future.

Cosmism — a near-synonym to extropianism.

Rationalism — a community founded by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, which focuses on figuring out how to improve people’s ability to make good decisions and come to true beliefs.

Effective altruism — a community focused on using reason and evidence to improve the world as much as possible.

Longtermism — the belief that one of the most important considerations in ethics is the effects of our actions on the long-term future. ¹

One of the critiques of “TESCREALism” offered by many of its opponents is that the whole bundle has a quasi-religious character; beliefs such as singularitarianism and cosmicism purport to abolish death and suffering in a way that seems essentially eschatological in nature. Some, drawing primarily on ecofeminists (note: not the same thing as either ecology or feminism) like Carolyn Merchant, go even further and assert that the entire bundle is just a secularized form of Christianity via the bridge of Baconian technoscience². I don’t wish to relitigate how accurate this accusation is—others such as Ozy Brennan¹, IEET³, and Bentham's Bulldog⁴ have already done so better than I ever could—but I do want to point out that it seems to prove too much. Because if TESCREALism really is a secularized religion, then… so what?

Very few of the people making this argument are militant atheists who consider religion bad in of itself. In fact, most of them consider such atheism to have been a negative phenomenon⁵ or even itself a reflection of TESCREALism⁶; many are themselves religious or spiritual, and believe that one of the problems with TESCREALism is that it leaves too little room for the religious and spiritual perspectives of underprivileged minorities⁷⁸. Almost all are avowedly committed to the ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and diversity in faith; if you were to say that a belief system should be dismissed simply because it is essentially religious in nature in essentially any other context, they would be some of the loudest voices speaking out against you. So why should TESCREAL be any different? Why is it that religion as a whole is fine, but not this religion?

The answer, I would suggest, is much akin to why Muslims might tolerate dhimmi, but not shirkers: the label of TESCREAL is itself religious in nature, a hamartiological canard with a role similar to the idea of Satan in the Abrahamic faiths. It forms a key part of an underlying bundle of beliefs uniting most opponents of TESCREALism which is itself just as quasi-religious as they accuse TESCREAL of being. There is, in fact, nothing non-religious in this entire discourse; the skirmishes about TESCREAL are only the latest manifestation of a long intellectual conflict that has taken place over the last millennia, and the lineage of that conflict is ultimately religious in origin. Anti-TESCREALism is the Scotus story is the Merchant thesis is the Weberian disenchantment narrative is Westoxification is Heidegger is Cold War Liberalism; all of these things are united around a common political theology centered on the concept of idolatry.

To briefly summarize my core thesis: the broader anti-progress ideology, of which opposition to TESCREAL is a subset, directly traces its lineage back to Catholic polemics against Calvinism and Jansenism⁹ during the Reformation. Jesuits (and later Anglican Laudians) from this period developed a critique of those two schools which emphasized a.) opposition to determinism and b.) the value of aesthetics, performance, and social institutions as means of reconciling finite human existence with God and allowing human beings to participate in the divine. Despite literally being formulated in defense of throne and altar, this ideology claimed to in fact be defending real freedom and the common people with the now-familiar canard that enthusiastic religious utopianism would in fact cause far more harm and tyranny than traditional monarchy ever could, because its totalizing confidence in textual fundamentalism to the exclusion of the natural caution and the sense of rootedness and orientation in the world introduced by respect for things such as church tradition, folk practices, liturgy, and (necessarily aristocratic) humanistic refinement could in fact justify any manner of inhumane atrocity that traditional authorities would never stoop to.

After the failure of the Puritan revolution in England and the suppression of Jansenism in France, many followers of these movements became alienated from traditional Christianity altogether¹⁰ and turned towards emerging Enlightenment belief systems such as Unitarianism and Deism grounded in the Baconian scientific revolution and mechanistic Newtonianism. The exact nature and extent of the continuity between traditional Calvinistic beliefs and Enlightenment rationalism is a controversial and extensively well-litigated topic that I do not feel the need to discuss here; what matters for us is only that conservative Catholic and Anglicans who opposed both of these two things certainly perceived continuity between them, and emphasized as much in the developing ideology of the Counter-Enlightenment after the French Revolution¹¹. Opposition to predestination became opposition to determinism, iconodulia became the “decent drapery of life”, and anti-cessationism anti-positivism.

Three additional planks of opposition would later be added to this complex during the early-to-mid 19th century: emerging capitalist market society, the Hegelian dialectic and its Marxist offspring, and the early Utopian Socialists, none of which the aristocratic landowning class which formed the base of the Counter-Enlightenment’s support were particularly fond of. And while this ideology, for obvious reasons, did not attract much popular political support, it became a very prominent tendency in the arts¹², which still largely remained the cultural playground of the elite. This artistic anti-capitalism was then absorbed by later generations of disillusioned humanists at a time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the counterrevolutionary absolutism to which it was originally attached had largely become a thing of the past; without the anchor of that context, it became a very convenient belief system for justifying the continuing importance and necessity of the traditional artistic and humanistic disciplines and their practitioners as defenders of humaneness, refinement, and free will in the face of the emerging challenge of the human sciences.

At this point, this belief system was still overwhelmingly reactionary in character, and for all its occasional pretensions of radicalism mostly remained aligned with the interests of the aristocratic elite. One of the consequences of said alignment was that it was drawn into a complicated and sometimes antagonistic relationship with the other ideology of the radical right which became important in 20th-century Germany—National Socialism—and produced a lot of writing about differentiating itself from the Nazis while still remaining opposed to liberalism and communism¹³. And it just so happened that after the end of WW2, there was suddenly a tremendous market for opponents of all four of laissez-faire capitalism, corporatist social democracy/New Deal liberalism, communism, and fascism; all the better if their writing could also speak to emerging discomfort with the sheer scale of technological destruction caused by WW2 and anxiety about the atomic bomb, to the sense of alienation and dissatisfaction even in prosperity that prevailed in the postwar world, and to academic desires to defend the sanctity and independence of their own craft in reaction to fascist, Stalinist, and red scare persecution.

The final piece of this puzzle is, of course, the 60s, but not necessarily for the reasons one might think. There were some elements of this ideology which were directly legitimized through the Civil Rights Movement via the influence of one of its offshoots, Christian Personalism, on important leaders such as Martin Luther King; and others by the general ideological ferment of ‘68 and the prevailing dissatisfaction with both capitalism and communism. But perhaps even more important here were the sociological consequences of the emergence of the activist-industrial complex; a class of people whose political relevance and economic livelihood were all dependent their purported ability to effect political change through raising social consciousness in a way that fundamentally mixed politics and performance art to best operate in the communications environment of new media. This class brought a new set of values and interests to left-wing political thinking, one which sat poorly with classical Marxism but very well with this ideological bundle centered on an artistically cultivated literati class living up to a responsibility to defend the people and the world from the inhuman cruelty of modernity; and, with it, a new set of intellectual priorities, oriented around making activism happen as effectively as possible. From here, the anti-progress ideological bundle begins to take its most well-known modern shape; ostensibly left-wing, radical, anti-capitalist, socially progressive, etc. and claiming continuity with that tradition, but opposed to the idea of progress that used to be central to all of these things.

This is, of course, a hugely oversimplified summary, and should not be taken as comprehensive. And there is a deeper story behind all this as well—one which will take us everywhere from Classical Greek concepts of theatricality, to the printing press, to the brain’s oxytocin neurotransmitters—which cannot be summarized succinctly here; but we’ll get to that eventually...

I hope to use this series of articles to give this bundle of ideologies a name—R9PRESENTATIONALism—and to explore its beliefs, causes, supporters, and development throughout history. This… will probably take a while. There’s a lot of ground to cover here, and I am not an expert; I’m writing this series as much to aid my own learning as to share it with others, and want to manage expectations accordingly. As a result, both this series in general and especially this introductory post in particular will probably be heavily changed over time as I learn more.

I also want to make it clear from the outset a few of the things that this series is NOT. It is NOT attacking the left, “wokeism”, social progressivism, etc.; I consider myself all three of these things, and in fact as I’ll discuss throughout this series I think they and the bundle of ideologies that Gebru and Torres call TESCREAL are in fact closely intertwined, while the opposite bundle animating Gebru and Torres themselves primarily originates from reactionary counter-enlightenment thinkers. To the extent that I am mostly discussing the left-wing political manifestations of R9PRESENTATIONALism here, it is only because they are where the “TESCREAL” canard originates from. It is also NOT a critique of “postmodernism”, “poststructuralism”, “critical theory” the “Frankfurt School”, the “New Left”, etc. in general within left-wing politics either, or for that matter on any of the other snarl words that are usually associated complaints that the left has degenerated from Enlightenment universalism and scientific objectivity into relativism, subjectivism, irrationalism, and opposition to progress. What I hope to show, in fact, is that to the extent that this is true of “the left” at all, it actually has very little to do with any of those things in of themselves, none of which universally promoted the things that they are being accused of here. Finally, it is NOT discussing luddism, primitivism, or any other belief systems opposed to technology, progress, or modernity in of themselves; I do not agree with these, but maintain a great deal of intellectual respect for the sort of people who are willing to bite the bullet and commit to their propositions explicitly (Colin Drumm of the Mimbres School, in particular, comes to mind). The thing I am discussing here is much more specific; in fact, it has very little to do with “technology” or “progress” at all.

With that out of the way, let us begin…

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Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres identify the following five shared properties as the primary basis for their claim of a family resemblance between the various ideologies that they have bundled together under “TESCREAL”¹⁴:

• Historical roots: All 7 ideologies share a common genealogy which, in their view, ultimately traces back to the first wave of eugenics.

• Contemporary communities: There is a substantial degree of overlap among the personalities within these 7 movements; in particular, prominent figures within them such as Nick Bostom or Elon Musk occupy important roles across several of these groups at once.

• Eschatology: The TESCREAL ideologies all believe in the utopian abolition of human suffering and finitude through the advancement of science and technology, even while also believing that said advancement creates new risks for humanity which, while potentially catastrophic, are also ultimately worth it in the pursuit of their utopian vision.

• Influence and variants: The TESCREAL bundle shares a common set of intellectual and ideological influences rooted in the aforementioned first wave of eugenics

• Discriminatory attitudes: TESCREALists purportedly share a common set of prejudices which valorize IQ to the exclusion and dehumanization of perceived less-intelligent groups, frequently conflated with women or persons of color.¹⁵

Of these five, the central element must certainly be the eschatological affinities; without it, the entire “TESCREAL” bundle is built entirely on a fairly uninspiring genealogical critique, in which Francis Bacon and William Godwin do not feature in the discussion of transhumanism and Peter Singer is mentioned only once (and only to accuse him of advocating infanticide) in that of Effective Altruism, alongside two observations which can essentially be boiled down to “tech people are interested in tech things” and “some tech people are racist”. But once we have invoked eschatology, there is no particular reason to limit that analysis to the sort of postmillenial utopianism which characterizes TESCREAL; opposition to eschatological and soteriological thinking in favor of attention to the here-and-now and the spiritual truth that can be found within it is itself a major religious tradition. What is the family group defined by this eschatological orientation towards technology?

I would like to propose that this group in fact encompasses a pervasive set of tendencies across the modern arts. It is defined by opposing the domination of life by technology, numbers, and instrumental rationality, which it believes causes psychic harm, repression, and nihilism among those who live it; encourages a cold, inhumane, sadistic mentality and a self-centeredness and inability to connect with others or the world; and denies human freedom and agency which is rooted in our power to create and imagine; these in turn are what cause or maintain systemic injustices such as capitalism and environmental damage, the harms of which fall most severely on the marginalized and those not able to speak for themselves. This techno-modernity is considered an epochal catastrophe which is immeasurably worse than any previously-existing systems, and quite likely to cause human extinction or mass death if not imminently confronted with radical political change. It is thought that said change will be brought about by raising consciousness and building community and empathy within society, which will in some way or another gradually build into a mass democratic movement for emancipation. This will be accomplished primarily through the efforts of an activist and organizer class that which has developed its empathy, attunement, ability to bring people together and foster solidarity through sharing stories and perspectives, revolutionary optimism and appreciation of the world and of others, connection to their own body and emotions, etc. through artistic and humanistic training.

This view opposes techno-solutionism because the suggestion that problems can be fixed by technology draws attention away from their essentially social and moral nature as reflections of a fundamentally ill society which demands wholesale moral renovation and a repudiation of our present relationship towards the world in general. More often than not, it believes that our entire desire to seek technological progress and utopia is a consequence of our failure to accept our own finitude and the inevitability of limits and suffering. It believes that both of those things are in fact moral imperatives, because it is through accepting these things that we are able to learn to find meaning in the world and connect with others; rather than a fantasy of escaping from death and pain, which can only ever cause more suffering, it suggests that we must instead learn to seek comfort for hardships in participation in society and the care of others, which will reconcile us to the world.

This bundle of beliefs is, in fact, so pervasive across the arts that can be difficult to speak of different “ideologies” underlying it, because the general disposition is present within even wildly different ostensible belief systems, including those which are theoretically directly opposed to precisely this style of thinking. Alongside ideologies, then, it is perhaps also useful to speak of common qualities; shared words, concepts, and methodologies which are common across this bundle. Many of these central qualities can be combined together under the acronym R9PRESENTATIONAL, which breaks down as follows:

• Relational: R9PRESENTATIONALism considers human beings to be defined by our capacity to have fulfilling social relationships between ourselves and the Other, which paradoxically transcend both individualism and collectivism through the felt experience of human connection and care. This idea originates from a handful of “relational” approaches to theological anthropology in early 20th century Christian and Jewish philosophy—Neoorthodoxy within Christianity and Martin Buber within Judaism—which identified human relationality with the imago dei; subsequently, however, it has also frequently been secularized and/or de-anthropomorphized in forms such as political communitarianism, care ethics, and deep ecology.

• 9P

  • Postcritical: R9PRESENTATIONALism acknowledges and draws from the intellectual project of critique—both in the narrow sense of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the broad sense of the whole projects of the Enlightenment and biblical higher criticism—but believes that they are ultimately made incomplete by their emphasis on rational skepticism, and must be transcended with will to imagine, open oneself to affect and feeling, and embrace the positive of the world through aesthetic and sensuous joy. Postcritique has three related manifestations in different academic fields: one in religion, encompassing Paul Ricouer and Hans-Georg Gadamer and focusing on the repudiation of religious doubt through a “hermeneutics of faith”; one in epistemology, encompassing Wittgenstein, Michael Polanyi, Richard Rorty, and Bruno Latour, and focusing on asserting the validity of personal satisfaction and affection as a criterion of truth; and one in literary theory, encompassing Susan Sontag, Eve Sedgewick, Rita Felski and focusing on the restoration of a belletristic love for literature through conscious refusal of context in favor of aesthetic experience in interpreting the meaning of texts.

  • Personalist: R9PRESENTATIONALism emerged in part from the thought of early 20th century philosophical personalists such as Henri Bergson, Emmanuel Mounier, Nikolai Berdyaev, and various Catholic social thinkers. This school, broadly, asserted that human personal experience was holistic and irreducible, and must form the basis for all philosophy and political thought; this contra both collectivists, who sought to subordinate human beings towards larger social phenomena, and individualists, who sought to reduce human beings to rationality and/or psychology.

  • Praxeological: R9PRESENTATIONALism is associated with the sudden and dramatic emergence of the word “praxis” in political thinking, especially on the political left, and a wide-ranging ideological shift in left-wing theories of change encompassing many other parts of this acronym. One of the consequences of this was the reconceptualization of political-economic theory as a site for praxis, making the persuasive ability of a given theory to raise consciousness and support for emancipatory political goals among its readers itself an measure of the theory’s validity.

  • Psychoanalytic: R9PRESENTATIONALism frequently makes use of Freudian psychoanalysis, and in particular an interpretation of Freudianism inflected by the New Left of the 1960s which implicates repression by the superego as the root cause of various ills of modernity, including but not limited to: Nazism, patriarchy, homophobia, bureaucracy, and sadism. There are, broadly, two variants of this interpretation that are relevant here; a Freudo-Marxist one derived from the Frankfurt School and Lacan, which focuses on the centrality of repressed desire in maintaining capitalism and/or causing fascism, and a post-leftist one drawing from figures such as Bataille and Norman O. Brown, which focuses on the death drive and on overcoming materialism and the fear of death through making life a work of art.

  • Participatory: “Participation” is a central motif in the language of R9PRESENTATIONALism, which recurs in several distinct but related contexts. The most prominent of these are “participatory” economics and politics, primarily left-libertarian schools which demand that just systems must involve not only democracy but active consequential participation in decisionmaking on the part of all people through social engagement, and the theological concept of “participation”, which holds that human beings can paradoxically partake in the divine, despite their finite nature, through active participation in some sort of spiritually transcendent experience in the physical world.

  • Performative: R9PRESENTATIONALism draws heavily from process theories of anthropology and performance theories of identity, which identify theatricality and play as key parts of human consciousness. Additionally, it usually does not merely affirm this descriptively, but considers it a positive good which should be encouraged; to the extent that it criticizes certain performed identities, such as toxic masculinity, as wrong, it is only because these should be replaced with what it considers better types of performance, not because it denies the legitimacy of the performance itself. Performed roles are considered to have a truth value that must be balanced against, or even exceeds, that of rational sociology; “anti-theatricality”, the denial of this, is considered inhumane and life-denying.

  • Particularist: R9PRESENTATIONALism opposes political and philosophical universalism, believing that different cultures and communities can have different ontological realities and that denying these is an act of aggression and injustice. This is not necessarily the same thing as “relativism”, though it sometimes can be; R9PRESENTATIONALists do not necessarily affirm that all perspectives are valid, only that those which express rooted organic cultural traditions are, and they do not necessarily believe that different realities are incommensurate, instead often saying that they are only so through rational means but can be transcended through art, storytelling, spirituality, etc., making practitioners of these things the foundation of any just international political order.

  • Processional: R9PRESENTATIONALism celebrates “process”, which can have diverse meanings but which generally centers on the capability of human beings to gradually grow and transform over time. This is made into a value in its own right, often independent of what is being transformed towards, and is used to repudiate deterministic and systemic theories which posit an “end of history” on the basis that such an end would be contrary to change itself, which is the essence of humanness. An emphasis on process also implies an emphasis on continuity; as a result, it also rejects the desirability of any worldview that purports to bring about a totalizing transformation of life which shatters or invalidates one’s previous sense of existence.

  • Positive/Affirmationist: R9PRESENTATIONALism is related to a general trend in social theory towards the “positive” (note: the use of “positive” here has nothing to do with “positivism”) associated on one hand with Deleuze and New Left neo-Nietzscheanism and on the other with a revival of pantheistic Spinozism¹⁶. It celebrates an affirming, welcoming disposition towards the world as embodied in Nietzsche’s “eternal yea”, and considers the “negative”—associated with both Kantian critique and the Hegelian dialectic of negation—to be intrinsically connected to sadism, cruelty, domination, and authoritarianism. It promotes a normative commitment to optimism, and suggests that internal skepticism, negativity, or doubt is not only incorrect but actively aggressive and immoral.

• Reparative: The political vision of R9PRESENTATIONALism is usually centered on repairing the damage done to the world and/or to humanity by an epochal change in socioeconomic organization originating out of 16th-19th century Europe which is variously referred to as “capitalism”, “modernity”, “the megamachine”, “Baconian technoscience”, etc. The latter is considered an unprecedented and incomparable harm to essentially every aspect of human or biological existence, and the essence of “radicalism” is found in reversing it.

• Existentialist: R9PRESENTATIONALism’s immediate intellectual lineage draws mainly from existentialist philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger emphasizing the centrality of the human freedom to choose to find meaning as prior to any understanding of the natural world. In particular, it is heavily—even fundamentally—based on Heidegger’s philosophy of finitude, which holds that death is what gives meaning to life and makes humans what we are, and should be embraced rather than rejected; most R9PRESENTATIONAList critiques of TESCREAL are essentially repackaged versions of Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology.

• Standpoint-theorist: R9PRESENTATIONALism believes that certain people possess perspectives drawn from life experiences which better orient them towards values such as consciousness, care, and understanding and therefore make them more able to understand certain facts about the world. This is most often associated with progressive social beliefs which aim to elevate the perspectives of underprivileged minorities, but it is not inherently so; in fact, the aforementioned is a less central tendency for R9PRESENTATIONALism than its also-common belief that those with experiences of, and positive affections towards, various spiritual and aesthetic phenomena are better-qualified to comment on them than those without. This belief is not politically valenced; in particular, it often features in right-wing Catholic R9PRESENTATIONAList apologia.

• Embodied: R9PRESENTATIONALism emphasizes the value of the human body. It believes that body and mind are irreducibly connected and that “rational” thinking separate from bodily experience neither can exist nor would be desirable even if it could; consequently, it also accuses modernity of having neglected the physical, the sensuous, and the experiential in favor of the abstract and the rational, which it believes has caused psychological harm and social injustice.

• Narrative: R9PRESENTATIONALism usually embraces the narrative paradigm¹⁷, which considers storytelling rather than rational thought to be the basis of human cognition and communication, and seeks to elevate rhetoric above dialectic as the primary language of the public sphere.

• Therapeutic: R9PRESENTATIONALism draws from countercultural visions of philosophy which suggest that it should be “therapeutic” (Wittgenstein), “edifying” (Rorty), “phronetic” (MacIntyre), etc. in purpose; that is, rather than seeking to analyze and understand the world, it should provide people with the beliefs that will best help them live happy and meaningful lives, and should be valued for its ability to inspire rather than its truth value.

• Anthropological: R9PRESENTATIONALism is connected to a broad movement within anthropology which opposes “utilitarianism” not just in the narrow moral sense but also in the broader sense of calculating, economistic, instrumental rationality as a whole. This draws on several currents of thought such as Romanticism and constructivism, but in the present day is mostly closely associated with a strain of radical anthropology derived primarily from the works of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polyani, which challenges economic conceptions of value and exchange in favor of an anthropological conception of these things centering gift, performance, and cultural contingency.

• Traditionalist: R9PRESENTATIONALism represents in large part an attempt to rehabilitate the value of “tradition”, in a broad sense, on the ostensible political left by synthesizing the thought of 18th and 19th-century reactionary traditionalists with the emerging currents of technoskepticism and third-worldism. “Tradition” is counterposed to “modernity” in a way that ultimately centers the concept of time; tradition is said to allow one to feel “at home” in time and therefore in the world, whereas modernity leads to restlessness and a sense of dislocation by encouraging people to pursue the future instead of the here-and-now.

• Intersectional: R9PRESENTATIONALism promotes intersectionality; as with the previous discussion of standpoint theory, is should be noted that this is neither limited to its most prominent manifestation in modern politics, nor intrinsically left-wing in character, but rather means that it promotes a holistic, omnicausal perspective in which all bad things in the world on both the personal and the social levels are considered to be intrinsically and irreducibly connected, in such a way that it is incorrect and/or unjust to discuss one problem in isolation from the others, and analogical reasoning from one cause area to another is considered a necessary form of insight.

• Orate: R9PRESENTATIONALism has absorbed heavy—though often subterranean—influence from a handful of mid-century media theorists including Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Jack Goody. In particular, it is heavily influenced by Innis’ theories about “space-binding” and “time-binding” forms of media and Ong’s about the distinction between orality and literacy, which form the foundation of much of R9PRESENTATIONAList thinking about “ways of knowing” (Innis, in particular, seems to have been at least partially responsible for popularizing that turn of phrase); it seeks to defend knowledge drawn from older and less technologized perspectives such as oral tradition, classical literacy (e.g. Great Books, etc.), and the traditional university, and of those closer to immediate, sensuous experience such as myth, art, and performance, against challenges from new media and detached rationality.

• Natalist: R9PRESENTATIONALism centers the concept of “natality”, believing that the possibility of birth and creation is a miracle which gives insight into how we should understand and live our lives. This is not the same thing as natalism in the sense of wishing to increase the birth rate—and for a set of complicated reasons that we will explore later, is usually opposed to it as an immediate political suggestion—but it does share with most political “natalists” a hostility to artificial reproduction as contra the fundamental values of life.

• Activist: R9PRESENTATIONALism is connected to the emergence of the activist-industrialist complex from the 60s onwards—especially with regards to issues such as environmentalism, disability rights, and historical preservationism with involve promoting the interests of things that are not able to speak for themselves—and its rise to dominance on the political left in particular is essentially downstream of the latter.

• Localist: R9PRESENTATIONALism valorizes local political action oriented towards the immediate community; it believes that working locally is generally the best way to accomplish all political changes, no matter their scope (as exemplified in the phrase “think globally, act locally”), and that institutions that work at a larger scale are intrinsically at best inauthentic and at worst totalitarian because of their removal from the everyday lifeworld, personal socialization, etc.

Over the next posts of this series, I plan to break down these elements in more detail, going chronologically rather than by letter order to trace the genealogy of this bundle and show how exactly it is that all the elements here are in fact connected through common influences and lineage. As for shared discriminatory attitudes… we’ll get to that, but for now I just want to note: it’s weird that these people who make such a big deal out of humaneness are so fond of using dehumanizing language (“soulless”, “ghouls”, “inhuman”, etc.), right?

Well, it’s not exactly a coincidence. But for that, you’ll have to stick with me for a little bit…

1. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/the-tescreal-bungle

2. As an (admittedly weakmanning) example: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/4/532

3. https://medium.com/institute-for-ethics-and-emerging-technologies/conspiracy-theories-left-futurism-and-the-attack-on-tescreal-456972fe02aa

4. Against TESCREALISM

5. https://www.salon.com/2017/07/29/from-the-enlightenment-to-the-dark-ages-how-new-atheism-slid-into-the-alt-right/

6. https://voicesofvr.com/a-process-relational-philosophy-view-on-ai-intelligence-consciousness-with-matt-segall/

7. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.05030

8. https://techwontsave.us/episode/198_how_effective_accelerationism_divides_silicon_valley_w_emile_torres

9. A 17th-18th century movement which can, for our purposes here, essentially be thought of as a Catholic version of Calvinism; though note that the reality is much more complicated and nuanced than this.

10. This is not an endorsement of either the naive idea of a simple progression from Protestantism to liberalism through a shared commitment to religious liberty, which I would hope is fully discredited by now, nor the revisionist notion of liberalism emerging as a reaction against violence and chaos caused by Protestant intolerance as promoted by, say, Brad Gregory’s Accidental Reformation. The actual ideological evolution here is more complicated and has to do with these groups’ reaction to the experience of defeat and subsequent repression during the Restoration in England and the Ancien Regime in France; I will hopefully go into this in more depth later.

11. Edmund Burke is perhaps both the progenitor and the best exemplar of this tendency; see in particular his discussion of Hugh Peter in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which subsequently influenced figures such as Novalis, Hamann, and Jacobi.

12. I should note that while this involves Romanticism, I do not mean to implicate Romanticism as a whole—which was a much more complicated and multifaceted movement with genuinely progressive manifestations—here.

13. Though the degree to which some within this tendency actually opposed Nazism is frequently exaggerated, and the degree to which others within it were involved with the Nazis frequently underplayed; in particular, the continuing apologetics produced by some for Heidegger are risible in the extreme.

14. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636/11599

15. This, incidentally, is largely incorrect; “eugenics” in its original manifestation was not a hugely racialized movement, nor any less popular among PoC leaders than white ones—W.E.B. DuBois, in particular, is a prominent example here—and was not overly concerned with IQ in particular except insofar as it was a tool to identify congenial mental disabilities. The modern combination of eugenics apologism and IQ chauvinism was largely invented by the “race realist” synthesis formed in the 90s by scientific racists retreating from discredited theories of racial anthropology towards more statistically defensible propositions about IQ averages allying with right-wing economists aiming to criticize the welfare system and justify the fairness of continuing economic inequality between races after integration.

16. Though this is not to say that this is necessarily a correct interpretation of Spinoza himself; that I cannot speak to, having never studied him in depth myself.

17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_paradigm