Thiel on the Dangers of Progress

unherd.com

3 points·calebmontiveros··3 comments

> in our emerging post-liberal world of lords and princes

Kind of tells you where the article's author is coming from: sucking up to royalty. As an American, this attitude is repugnant.

I used to wonder what a conservative intellectual would look like, since there seem to be a dearth of them and Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson come pretty close.

The thing I can’t get my head around is one, the extremist thinking (Europe defending into Sharia law doesn’t seem like it’s in the top ten list of possible futures). And I just can’t get past the sort of chaotic anger. “Imperialism was good actually” is a bold take.

My understanding is that the “imperialism was good” take is less about the merits of whether imperialism itself and the treatment of the colonized is “GOOD” (they acknowledge it often is not throughout history) but that the spread of culture, norms, etc from the empire to the colonized was a Net Good for the colonized. It’s a glass half full take on the situation, otherwise we’re forced to think that nothing good having come from any imperial periods of history and that simply does not hold up to scrutiny.

It reminds me of when historians say “yes war is obviously bad, but war accelerated and progressed the infrastructure of X country by decades.”

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