I think the problem with Moldbug is that he’s so firmly wedded himself to fighting against the whiggish naratives that are so deeply embeded in our historical accounts that he falls into the very trap that Herbert Butterfield, the original critic of whiggish naratives, warned of:
Further, it cannot be said that all faults of bias may be balanced by work that is deliberately written with the opposite bias; for we do not gain true history by merely adding the speech of the prosecution to the speech for the defence; and though there have been Tory – as there have been many Catholic – partisan histories, it is still true that there is no corresponding tendency for the subject itself to lean in this direction; the dice cannot be secretly loaded by virtue of the same kind of original unconscious fallacy.
(On an unrelated note, I occasionally find myself falling into a different, more sublte trap that Butterfield also warned of:
The watershed is broken down if we place the Reformation in its historical context and if we adopt the point of view which regards Protestantism itself as the product of history. But here greater dangers lurk and we are bordering on heresy more blasphemous than that of the whigs, for we may fall into the opposite fallacy and say that the Reformation did nothing at all. If there is a deeper tide that rolls below the very growth of Protestantism nothing could be more shallow than the history which is mere philosophising upon such a movement, or even the history which discovers it too soon. And nothing could be more hasty than to regard it as a self-standing, self-determined agency behind history, working to its purpose irrespective of the actual drama of events. It might be used to show that the Reformation made no difference in the world, that Martin Luther did not matter, and that the course of the ages is unaffected by anything that may happen; but even if this were true the historian would not be competent to say so, and in any case such a doctrine would be the very negation of history. It would be the doctrine that the whole realm of historical events is of no significance whatever. It would be the converse of the whig over-dramatization. The deep movement that is in question does not explain everything, or anything at all. It does not exist apart from historical events and cannot be disentangled from them. Perhaps there is nothing the historian can do about it, except to know that it is there. One fallacy is to be avoided, and once again it is the converse of that of the whigs.
I think the problem with Moldbug is that he’s so firmly wedded himself to fighting against the whiggish naratives that are so deeply embeded in our historical accounts that he falls into the very trap that Herbert Butterfield, the original critic of whiggish naratives, warned of:
(On an unrelated note, I occasionally find myself falling into a different, more sublte trap that Butterfield also warned of: