Reactionary Lafferty

So there is a bee in my bonnet, and insomnia besides. Hence this post.

It seems to me unhelpful, as a matter of Lafferty talk, to call him reactionary. The term is one of political pejoration, and it misses what is interesting about him. Lafferty was opposed to many of the problems that beset us now, including mass surveillance, media dystopia, corporate financialization, and monopolistic capital, all of which overlap substantially with progressive concerns. He was smart about how technology threatened the human person, and he was bold in his optimism about cultural and spiritual leaps, something that looks a lot like a religiously inflected posthumanism.

Because man is fallen, his sense of what it means to be human is distorted by an incomplete picture of human teleology. That produces an odd version of posthumanism, but it rejects much of what the “humanism” in posthumanism usually refers to, namely, post-Cartesian small-mindedness. If one wishes to criticize him, it is far better to be specific. My recommendation is to set aside the language of reaction for several reasons. First, Lafferty is not a classical reactionary. Second, he does not fit the far looser, contemporary sense of the term, largely because of his qualified egalitarianism.

Some background helps here. The word reaction 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 was coined to denote reciprocal forces in physics or countervailing processes in chemistry. At that stage, neither reaction nor reactionary had any political meaning at all. They referred simply to responses within natural systems.

The political sense developed in the aftermath of the French Revolution. During the turbulent years following 1789, French writers began using réaction to describe efforts to reverse revolutionary changes and restore elements of the old order. These efforts ranged from recalling monarchy to reinstating aristocratic privilege or clerical authority. From this came the noun réactionnaire, the person who opposed the revolution not by rejecting further change, but by seeking to undo reforms already made. That is the rub. This usage crossed into English political discourse in the early nineteenth century.

In its original English sense, reactionary had a precise political meaning. It referred to those who wanted a return to an earlier social or political system rather than maintaining the status quo. This distinguished reactionaries from conservatives. Conservatives sought to preserve existing institutions. Reactionaries sought to reverse historical developments and restore prior arrangements. Lafferty was not a man who wanted to go backwards in time, as much as he disliked how the culture was changing. I challenge you to find one non-fictional statement that advocates for anything like it. He was a political realist on this front. In nineteenth-century debates over monarchy, constitutionalism, and popular sovereignty, this distinction carried real analytical weight. Now it doesn't matter because most of the mainstream left and the right are neoliberal footsoldiers.

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 simplication, 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 remained stable over the last half-century. Nowadays, it works mainly as an in-group word, an evaluative judgment embedded in a political stance, usable by like-minded people without much need for specificity. 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. If the word is to be used at all, the burden lies with the reader to say exactly what is meant.

What, specifically, is reactionary about Lafferty? He was a conservative. He was anti-gay in the sense of thinking that homosexuality is disordered, a position that is still the official position of the Catholic Church with its 1.4 billion communicants. That position isn't reactionary because the church hasn't changed substantively on this point. He was, for much of his life, a virtuous antisemite in the technical sense, until he began flirting with Institute for Historical Review materials. Even there, he wasn't a hard old-school anti-Semite like Cecil Chesterton but a virtuous one like Cecil's brother, Gilbert Keith. Again, virtuous in the technical sense explored elsewhere on this blog. None of that by itself establishes reactionary politics. The word has a meaning: a desire to go backwards.

Until someone can point to a concrete policy that Lafferty wanted to be restored anti-democratically, the term is pretty unhelpful. His position on how people ought to govern themselves was old-fashioned. Consider birth control. Despite his frustration with shifts in sexual morality, I have not found in his writing anything stating that something like birth control should be outlawed, though I doubt he would have been far from opposed to such a measure had the electorate chosen it. He was certainly unhappy with how the democratic process played out with FDR and afterward, but he wasn't opposed to democracy itself or to what he took to be its mistakes. Nor was he authoritarian. Authoritarians in his work get what is coming to them, even if that means being exposed for being anti-human.

The same people who will call Lafferty a reactionary will also say (correctly) that Lafferty repeatedly told people the opposite about going backwards. This is talking out of both sides of one's mouth while mouthing a contradiction. In no uncertain terms, Lafferty said that people had to make new worlds. He said it repeatedly. He wrote dozens of stories and novels about it, making it his literary project, not because he liked it but because people had smashed the hell out of the old world and then forgotten about it. There was no going back to live in its ruins. Reactionaries just aren't like this. Reactionaries fantasize about going backwards. They are not just nostalgic: they turn their nostalgia into political action that expresses itself as reversion. And, frankly, Lafferty is remarkably non-nostalgic and unsentimental. For nostalgia, one is better served by reading Ray Bradbury or Clifford Simak.

Because it is so important, I will say it again: Lafferty wanted to plunge forward. He was a highly eccentric eschatological conservative with views about sexuality that were unpopular on the left then and unpopular on the left now. On the issues of Jews and political policy, both people on the left and right are critical of Israel, so his anti-Zionism is not reactionary as a position in itself.

That is complicated immeasurably by the Holocaust denial. It might seem preposterous to say that Holocaust denial is not necessarily reactionary. Yet there is Mahmoud Abbas, and there is the tradition of communist Holocaust denial. Lafferty's was an extremely fringe position whose political use often overlaps with reactionary movements, but overlap is not identity. Lafferty did not adopt his views in the service of restoring a prior political order, enforcing authoritarian rule, or re-entrenching state hierarchy. He despised coordination and centralization, cornerstones of both fascism and communism. At the same time, he would probably have been somewhat sympathetic to the left's decentralized ideas to the extent they favored decentralization, if not much beyond this. Here, I think of positions such as Murray Bookchin's libertarian municipalism, which looks a little like distributism, even if its position on private property would have rankled him. In consequence, the overlap with reactionary ideology is real, but it does not suffice to classify him straightforwardly as a reactionary.

If one wants to be maximally precise, reactionary in contemporary usage no longer denotes an attempt to reverse specific historical reforms. It now tends to be shorthand for positions that are anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal, and hostile to egalitarian modernity in general. Used in this broadened sense, the word describes a family resemblance rather than a determinate political program. Does this fit Lafferty? Whether it ought to be argued with articulated premises, not asserted without much specification. I read as being fiercely anti-Enlightenment and anti-liberal, but also, in ways that reactionaries would reject, egalitarian. This comes through in his treatment of female characters, such as Dotty, and his take on how children often get the worst of dumb authority structures. Think of the Dulanty kids and the oppressiveness of Lost Haven. It is one reason he appeals to so many left-leaning, secular readers. Unless the word reactionary is used to advance a concrete argument, it is little more than a phatic distraction.