Reactionary Lafferty

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. — Henry Reed, "Naming of Parts" (1942)

An opinion. It is unhelpful critically, as a matter of Lafferty-talk, to call him reactionary, and I mean to make a case for that. No one needs to be told that the word reactionary is a political insult. That is beside the point. The problem is that it fails to touch on what is interesting about Lafferty, even when he is wrong, because Lafferty is what might be called a Catholic accelerationist.

Consider that Lafferty opposed much that besets us: mass surveillance, media dystopia, artificial intelligence, corporate financialization, monopolistic capital, and cultural flattening. These are concerns shared by progressives and conservatives alike. He was also sharp and unsparing in his assessment of how technology threatens the human person by turning us into commodities. At the same time, he was wildly optimistic about leaps forward, leaps into a future that might perfect humanity. That optimism looks like a religiously inflected posthumanism or transhumanism. Leaps forward are Lafferty’s hope and his signature theme.

Is the idea of a posthumanist Lafferty really so absurd? I overstate the claim to make a point, but it is fair to say that Lafferty was so thoroughly counter-humanist that his imagination overlaps, at specific points, with that of posthumanists. The convergence works like this on his side. Because mankind is fallen, man’s sense of the human is violently distorted and amnestic. Man, therefore, possesses an incomplete and misleading picture of his own teleology. As a result, human history has either immanentized human purpose as mere biological function or evaporated it altogether through appeals to biological selection. In both cases, the human is misdescribed.

The human comes to appear autonomous, self-grounding, and sufficient unto itself, while at the same time being reduced to a physicalist network node; and Lafferty's reaction to this cutdown leads to his peculiar form of counter-humanism. It shares conceptual ground with posthumanist thought, which also begins from the claim that humanity has a false understanding of its own species identity. Alongside posthumanism, alien to him in many ways, Lafferty writes as if specific ideas rooted in a mistaken intellectual history must be detonated. They are so one-sided that they constrict human possibility and extinguish what we actually are. What, after all, is Freddy Foley if not a transhumanist experiment crossed with providence?

As in much posthumanist thought, this peculiar Laffertian counter-humanist optimism rejects the Cartesian inheritance that treats the human as a self-transparent rational subject. Lafferty is an individualist, but he is suspicious of human self-sufficiency. He distrusts biological reductionism as an account of what human animals are, and he decenters the human without abolishing meaning. Persons appear in his work alongside powers, machines, animals, myths, split selves, and other intelligences, without humanity being treated as metaphysically exhaustive. At the same time, he honors animals and the earth and is repelled by what we now call the Anthropocene. That position is not reactionary.

Following Lafferty, I have called this strand of his work the procession-of-the-creatures-and-adornment-of-the-world theme. It rejects much of what the -humanism in posthumanism also rejects, namely the post-Cartesian narrowing of ontology and the cramped picture of what counts as real. Being Lafferty, however, there is an important intellectual wrinkle. His Aristotelian commitments are baked into the cake in ways posthumanists would likely resist. At the same time, Lafferty is so thoroughly Augustinian about the Fall that he unsettles the usual Thomistic domestication of Augustine.

This becomes clear when he opens the dual floodgates of gnosticism and early patrology, letting their waters wash through science fiction, as he repeatedly does. One example will make the point. Aristotle and Thomas are largely uninterested in the demiurgic. Plato and Augustine are not. Plato gives us the divided line. Augustine gives us the Fall. That demiurgic line passes from Plato through Augustine and detonates in Lafferty’s story worlds. Aristotle and Thomas trusted the eye and the literal sense of theoria. Plato and Augustine did not.

If one wishes to criticize Lafferty as a reactionary, one ought to be very careful, given how deeply unusual Lafferty is, and given how relevant all his unusual affinities are. But really, why bother? Why call him a reactionary at all? One good reason not to call him one is, again, that the word is polemical, not thick description. It is hardly analytical. One could call Lafferty out on specific stances as shown in what he wrote and said. Make it concrete.

My choice is to set aside the language of reaction for several reasons. Neither has to do with making Lafferty's ugly side more palatable. I believe the ugly side is essential.

Reason one: Lafferty is not a classical reactionary, which is what I will try to explain.

Reason two: Lafferty does not fit the far looser, contemporary sense of the term, which is where I will end.

If we need a formula, let it be that Lafferty is too imaginative and too complicated an intellectual outlier to fit the label of reaction.

Some background helps here, though I am half reluctant to give it, knowing how easily it can sound like well-actually internet pedantry. Still, I think it matters because Lafferty’s interest in history leads him to think in centuries rather than decades. Where does this whole reaction thing come from?

The term entered European political vocabularies through French (réaction) and Medieval Latin (reactio). It is built from the Latin re, meaning “back,” and agere, meaning “to act.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaction was a scientific and mechanical term. It referred to reciprocal forces in physics or countervailing processes in chemistry. At that stage, neither reaction nor reactionary had any political meaning at all. They named responses within natural systems. As often happens, a term from the sciences was later taken up by social discourse.

The political sense emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution. During the years following 1789, French writers began using réaction to describe efforts to reverse revolutionary change and restore elements of the old order. These efforts included recalling the monarchy, reinstating aristocratic privilege, or restoring clerical authority. From this usage came the noun réactionnaire, referring to those who opposed the revolution not by resisting further change, but by attempting to undo reforms already made. That is the crucial point. This usage entered English political discourse in the early nineteenth century.

In its original English sense, reactionary therefore had a specific and limited meaning. It referred to those who sought to reverse historical developments and return to an earlier political or social arrangement. This is what distinguished reactionaries from conservatives. Conservatives aimed to preserve the existing order. Reactionaries aimed to roll history back. Lafferty was not a man who wanted to go backward in time, however much he disliked the direction of cultural change. I challenge anyone to find a non-fictional statement in which he advocates anything like that. On this point, he was a political realist.

That distinction once mattered. In nineteenth-century debates over monarchy, constitutionalism, and popular sovereignty, it carried real analytical weight. Today, it largely does not, because the term now circulates in a political environment where both mainstream left and right operate within the same neoliberal horizon.

As the nineteenth century wore on, reactionary hardened into a slur. Liberals and reformers used it to paint opponents as backward-looking and hostile to social progress. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term often implied more than opposition to reform. A reactionary was taken to favor authoritarianism, resistance to democracy, and the use of repression to maintain or restore hierarchy. That description does not fit Lafferty. He was anti-authoritarian and anti-political repression, even if he was pro-hierarchical in the church. That is obvious: the Catholic Church is a hierarchical institution.

In the twentieth century, especially in Marxist and socialist discourse, the term 'reactionary' became a routine ideological label. It becomes political mud to lob at someone who disagrees with your rejection of his reform. It was common coin in the 1960s (see the ngram at the end of this post), so much so that it began to die off, since the people most wont to use it were rampant ideologues. At this point, the term had lost most of its analytical usefulness. It just described individuals, classes, or movements thought to obstruct what Marxists regarded as the inevitable progress of history toward socialism. During the Cold War, it became a stock denunciation. Its negative connotations hardened further, and its use became largely rhetorical. And it is still mostly rhetorical.

That brings us to the present. Today, reactionary is a critical label. It is applied to positions or attitudes perceived as regressive or hostile to equality, pluralism, or democratic norms. I see no evidence that Lafferty supported policies of that kind. He was not a Jim Crow advocate. He was hostile to the logic of reparations, but if that makes one reactionary, then most people are reactionaries, which is fair enough: it has been how many vanguardists view the people. More specifically, Lafferty was a soft ethno-essentialist, but one who delighted in ethnic plurality, even when that delight comes across as crude or four-colored in his fiction. That, too, doesn't really make him reactionary. It makes him of his time and someone who uses ethnic types as a lever for humor and for social simplification, the latter because Lafferty wasn't writing in a realist mode but was interested in peoples.

The core meaning of the term reactionary, opposition to progressive change aimed at restoring a past order, has become fuzzy over the last half-century. Nowadays, it works mainly as in-group signaling, an evaluative judgment embedded in a political stance, usable by like-minded people without much need for specificity. It is used within a pre-set discourse of agreement, not a site of contested thought. That is the point of this particular bee in my bonnet. Used without clarification, the term ends up saying more about the person who deploys it than about R. A. Lafferty himself. It isn’t the fault of the person who uses it. It is the phatic function of the word. If the word is to be used at all, the burden lies with the reader to say precisely what is meant.

What, specifically, is reactionary about Lafferty? Here are some candidates, along with the necessary qualifications.

He was a conservative. He was anti-gay in the sense of believing that homosexuality is disordered, a position that remains the official teaching of the Catholic Church, with its 1.4 billion communicants. That position is not reactionary, because the Church has not substantively changed on this point. There is nothing to revert to, which is precisely the conundrum of calling it reactionary. For much of his life, Lafferty was also a virtuous antisemite in the technical sense, until he later flirted with materials from the Institute for Historical Review. Even there, he was not an old-school, hard-line antisemite like Cecil Chesterton, but closer to the virtuous type exemplified by Cecil’s brother, Gilbert Keith. “Virtuous” here is used in the technical sense explored elsewhere on this blog. None of this, by itself, establishes reactionary politics. The word has a meaning: a desire to go backward. One can be an antisemite without having that desire.

Until someone can point to a concrete policy that Lafferty sought to restore in an anti-democratic way, the term remains unhelpful. His views on governance were old-fashioned, but not reactionary. Take birth control. Despite his frustration with changes in sexual morality, I have not found anything in his writing that argues birth control should be outlawed, though I doubt he would have been far from opposing such a measure had the electorate chosen it. He was anti-abortion. He was unhappy with how the democratic process played out under FDR and afterward. But he was not opposed to democracy as such, nor did he reject democracy because of what he took to be mistakes in its outcomes. That is simply being part of an electorate and losing.

Nor was he authoritarian. Authoritarian figures in his work receive their rewards only in the sense that they are exposed as anti-human and satirized mercilessly. Can you name an authoritarian in Lafferty whom Lafferty himself endorses? There is only one: God, and God is offstage. God does not appear in Lafferty the way He does in Paradise Lost or South Park. God does not appear as a character at all. Not even in Easterwine.

The same people who tend to call Lafferty a reactionary will also say, quite correctly, that Lafferty repeatedly told people the opposite of reaction, namely that there was no going backward. This amounts to talking out of both sides of one’s mouth while maintaining a contradiction. In no uncertain terms, Lafferty insisted that people had to make new worlds. He said it repeatedly. He wrote dozens of stories and novels about it, making it his central literary project, not because he enjoyed political novelty or experiment, but because he thought people had smashed the old world beyond repair and then forgotten that they had done so. There was no returning to live among its ruins.

Reactionaries are not like this. Going backward is precisely what reactionary artists traffic in. They do not merely feel nostalgia; they turn it into political imagination and advocacy for a return. A genuinely reactionary artist such as Ezra Pound does precisely this in The Cantos, which is, among other things, a time-travel poem. Lafferty is the opposite. He is remarkably non-nostalgic and unsentimental. For nostalgia, one is better served by Ray Bradbury or Clifford Simak. For reaction, one might read Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker books. Lafferty despised them.

Because this point matters, I will say it again. Lafferty wanted to plunge us forward. He was a highly eccentric, eschatological conservative with views on sexuality that were unpopular on the left then and remain unpopular on the left now. On questions involving Jews and political policy, both the left and the right contain strong critics of Israel, so anti-Zionism as such is not reactionary. That position alone does not establish a desire to restore a prior political order.

The matter is complicated immeasurably by Holocaust denial. It may sound preposterous to say that Holocaust denial is not necessarily reactionary, but there are examples, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the tradition of communist Holocaust denial, that show the category does not map cleanly. Lafferty’s position was extremely fringe, and its political use often overlaps with reactionary movements. But overlap is not identity. Lafferty did not adopt these views in the service of restoring an earlier political order, enforcing authoritarian rule, or re-entrenching state hierarchy. He despised coordination and centralization, the shared cornerstones of both fascism and communism.

This next point needs to be handled delicately, since it can sound like lawyering or emotional hollowness. In most cases, that would be a fair objection for someone making the case I advance for an author who said what he did. In Lafferty’s case, however, I think he himself was lawyering and being emotionally hollow on precisely this issue. The aim here is not special pleading for Lafferty, but to point to something genuinely complex and unresolved in his mental composition.

At the same time, there is a further complication. As far as I can tell, Lafferty would likely have been marginally sympathetic to specific strands of the left, but only to the extent that they genuinely favored decentralization, and probably not much beyond that. Here I am thinking of positions such as Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, which resembles a left-wing variant of distributism, even if its hostility to private property would have troubled Lafferty. In that sense, the overlap with what is often labeled reactionary ideology is real. Because of overlaps with counter-cultural progressives, the overlap does not suffice to classify him straightforwardly as a reactionary. He will often agree with progressives about the truly politically reactionary on the topic of the concentration of top-down political power.

If one wants to be maximally precise, reactionary in contemporary usage no longer denotes an effort to reverse specific historical reforms, at least not in most cases. It has come to function instead as shorthand for positions that are anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal, and broadly hostile to egalitarian modernity. Used in this expanded way, the term exhibits what is often called concept creep. It names a family resemblance rather than a determinate political program. Does this description fit Lafferty? That question ought to be argued from articulated premises, not asserted without specification.

I read Lafferty as fiercely anti-Enlightenment and anti-liberal, but also, in ways, genuine reactionaries would reject, egalitarian. This is evident in his treatment of female characters, such as Dotty, and in his handling of children, who in his work are often the first victims of stupid authority structures. Think of the Dulanty children and the oppressive regime of Lost Haven. This is one reason Lafferty appeals to so many left-leaning, secular readers. Children are rarely reactionary.

So what, then, does one do? One possible answer is to shift from classificatory labels to moral causation. Rather than asking whether Lafferty was “reactionary,” we might ask what intellectual habits made his moral errors likely; what sources reinforced those habits; and what checks failed. Which sources were treated as credible, and why? How did a warranted skepticism toward authority harden into a rejection of evidence? At what point did theological or metaphysical commitments displace empirical humility? These questions are more difficult than applying a political perjoration, but they are also more explanatory of the fiction.

Pursuing this approach also allows for comparative diagnosis. Where else do we see the same failure modes, particularly among thinkers who are anti-liberal allies and from very different points on the political spectrum?

This is, at least in part, what I have tried to do in thinking about Lafferty’s relation to Belloc and others: not to excuse the errors, but to locate the intellectual conditions that made them possible.

I will end by saying that I do not much care how people choose to use the word reactionary. It is not going anywhere. This is not an argument for semantic purism in culture, whatever that might mean, nor am I policing usage or arguing for linguistic prescriptivism. In fact, one way in which I am atypical of many on the right is that I agree with Nietzsche’s observation that nothing with a history can be strictly defined. The issue here is not the word itself, but how it can mislead us in our understanding of Lafferty.

Not least because, in The Coscusin Chronicles, Lafferty wrote a thousand-page masterwork on the problem of reaction and revolution, I am suspicious of the way reactionary arrives already packed with historical equivocation when not taking that work into account. Lafferty was not ignoring the problem. He was working it through in his fiction. As I have said, the word was politicized during the rise of the liberal order and later shifted in use, moving from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century liberals attacking the old aristocratic regime to radical anti-liberals on the left attacking complacent liberals and everything to their right over the course of the twentieth century.

Lafferty knew this history. He was annoyed by this history. He responded to this history by writing a historical fantasy about revolution and counter-revolution, meant to articulate a view of that history that deserves to be taken into account. If you have read the first two books about Coscuin, you know what he did. He said that his stance was not counter-revolutionary at all. It was not reaction. It was the Green Revolution. One might think that is bullshit, but he took the time to explore it deeply.

That is a reason to be cautious. Unless the word reactionary is used to advance a specific and concrete argument about Lafferty, it is likely to be a rhetorical shortcut, phatic communication, or a placeholder for arguments that are not being spelled out.

Lafferty is clever on this point:

The opposite of liberal is stingy. The opposite of radical is superficial. The opposite of conservative is destructive. So I declare that I am a radical conservative liberal. Beware of men who use words to mean their opposites.

Reactionary is the kind of backwards usage Lafferty warns against: a case of opposite-talk in which a word continues to condemn while ceasing to describe. A term that began in chemistry as a neutral account of reciprocal forces, and later named a historically specific attempt to reverse enacted reforms, has been ideologically captured so that stable positions are redescribed as “reactions” to changes elsewhere. As political discourse shifts the baseline of progress, motion is attributed to x rather than to the frame of reference itself, allowing the word to retain its condemnatory force while no longer reliably naming what it claims to describe.

How much easier it is to name the parts. The more valuable kinds of Lafferty readings, I think, will lie in that direction. They will find real pressure points. They will be less gentle than readings that reach for reactionary, but clearer about what is going on.