Late-night thoughts.

This is an hour of many new, and “new,” intellectual movements. A time of ferment and change. In an absolute sense this is probably a good thing; anyone in a part of Twitter likely to be reading this has certainly had their say on the status quo by now.

The nature of such movements is fundamentally reactionary, in the sense that they react to the manifest flaws and problems of the current system. They grow into the gaps left them by the oversights of their predecessors, hermit crabs taking on the form of shells they discover.

This creates flaws. A movement which thrives on seeing what others do not is a movement which grows in the blank spaces where the public gaze does not fall. Thus unchecked and unanswered, many of their champions develop the same glass jaw that defines the blueblood bluecheck.

Over-theorized, under-realized, abstract and aesthetic to the root, they’re an intellectual match for those accounts which post pictures of empty, quaint villages and vacant cobblestone streets, all inviting, still, and sterile, and claim that to be a vision of the urban future.

If what you want is a flag to fly for the consolation of your ego, this is a fine state of affairs. You get to be right on the internet, forever being told by the same people in the same small niche how true it all is, how much farther you all see. It’s one way to find community.

But if you are in this seriously for change in the world and the success of your ideas, this pattern is ruin and death. You will fail. You cannot impose from above in whole a static and timeless vision of The Good Life on a heterogeneous population and a rapidly-changing culture.

One of the great oversights of new movement thinkers is an incurable addiction to a conspiratorial take on Whig history: everything was leading up to this- because of Them. In truth, much more of it than we ever really care to admit has been accident and happenstance.

So if new movements are to offer us anything of value beyond calls to raise the dead of forgotten culture wars, they are going to have to focus in a way our present culture does not on the capacity to recognize and respond to reality as it appears, and events as they occur.

Your timeless, unchanging, aesthetically perfect, abstract and inhuman system is largely worthless. Your judgment, your insight, your values, skills and knowledge are not. It is by those that you will be known and make your mark on the times in which you live, if ever you do.