“He thought I was criticising the cathedral when I was doing the contrary. I was criticising the Modernists or upholders of relativity in religion, who say that our faith about fundamental things must always be expanding and evolving and changing. And I said that, if we adopted that principle, there was really no reason why we should build permanent religious buildings at all.”—G.K. Chesterton, 1925
I’m not disturbed when I see a stupid argument on the Internet. I’m disturbed when I see a lot of assent to it, and no one pointing out how stupid it is.
For many years Mencius Moldbug maintained a blog devoted to proving progressives wrong. But he never actually put it that way. Instead of saying progressives were wrong, he more often said that they were “religious” people pretending to be secular, minions of a worldview that he dubbed “the Cathedral.” In other words, he had before him a vast array of choices for criticizing the enemy, any number of terms from the extensive reading he seems to have done, and he went out of his way to choose the most incomprehensible and self-contradictory language possible.
Many other groups have applied religious terminology to secular society, persuasively arguing that the secular is merely an extension of the religious. We have all heard of “the patriarchy,” a term chosen because secular oppressors, like religious patriarchs, are men. We all use the term “the Establishment,” so chosen because secular powers, like the old established churches, were handed their institutional authority and power before we got here and are therefore possibly illegitimate. You may notice already that this is a somewhat ill company to be keeping.
Although Moldbug refers briefly to the bad guys as “our 20th-century version of the established church” at one point, in fact the word “establishment” would become jarring if he used it more often, because he believes that an ideal nation-state is stable and avoids being reconstructed by each generation. Obviously, calling leftists the “patriarchy” would not work either.
But why “cathedral”? In the feminist utopia, there would be no literal patriarchs, and in the hippie utopia (which steadily slouches towards realization) there would be no more established churches—so in Moldbug’s utopia, will we be knocking down all the actual cathedrals? I assume not, as he writes that “all buildings from the 18th century are treasures.” Well, then, if he likes the architecture, what exactly makes cathedrals so objectionable? Wouldn’t he be happier if there were more, not fewer, people who stood in awe in front of cathedrals? Is it possible that this guy who harps on so long about being more accurate than everyone else doesn’t care about the language he’s using to describe his political opponents?
Moldbug’s sole attempt at taking the Cathedral metaphor seriously, in a post that he earnestly refers to as “a gentle introduction” to his blog, ratchets up the laughs. Here we learn that unlike an actual cathedral, “the Cathedral … has no central administrator,” although it does have an overload of clergy: “to the bishops of the Cathedral, anything that strengthens their influence is a good thing.” Well, actually, a cathedral only has one bishop, and indeed this bishop is its central administrator. The world’s bishops as a collective, and the regulatory system that they create, are generally known as the Catholic Church. Furthermore, although bishops leave their cathedrals once every few decades to hold a conclave in the Sistine Chapel, Moldbug imagines his Cathedral as a “conclave of bishops”; it seems to have become something of a multi-use space.
Having stretched his metaphor in an impressive number of unexpected directions, Moldbug proceeds to forget about it entirely, and when he returns to religion he has suddenly acquired an interest in Puritanism instead. Those who have read extensively from Moldbug's blog are probably familiar with his tendency to start working on a thought and suddenly set it aside, or to offer two mutually exclusive metaphors in the same post, bringing him closer to the style of Thomas Friedman than George Orwell.
Moldbug has already offered a definition of “church” which is too good not to quote: “an organization or movement which tells people how to think.” How it is that a “movement” manages to tell someone something is never explained, although it would seem quite crucial; historically, that was a fairly major problem for the actual Church. He moves along, defining the “Cathedral” as a type of “theocracy,” by which he means “rule by a movement which tells people how to think.” After starting to argue that Massachusetts Puritanism is responsible for all this somehow, he drifts away from that subject in order to talk more about “churches” in general. He eventually does return to the “Cathedral” idea, but now it is evidently no longer a mere “conclave of bishops,” for it is said to encompass a much grander “informal union of church and state” (“church” still being used to mean “a talking movement”). This post really does serve as a good introduction to Mencius Moldbug, but only unintentionally.
Out of Moldbug’s hundreds of spur-of-the-moment coinages and definitions, this is by far his most catchy and best-known, but it doesn’t make any sense. And this never comes up. Every page on Moldbug’s blog had an extensive letters column. That’s years and years of posts, thousands of chances for his readers to be redeemed. And what you see are rows of independent thinkers nodding their heads in assent. Yes, all academia and mainstream media are controlled, not by the Catholic Church—that would be silly—but by one of its regional authorities. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop and judges regional affairs, just like how the news media is leaderless and lacks any juridicial system. Amazing! It assumes for itself more authority than small village churches, so it needs to be destroyed, just like how the Puritans, who caused all the problems, destroyed the church hierarchy. At last we’ve figured out the perfect metaphor, why has no one struck on it before?
I assume some Christian neoreactionaries have called for a better term than “cathedral” at some point, but the people who actually use the term are almost never asked to explain why they have chosen that specific word for the phenomena they encounter in the world. It’s as if a group of radical leftists suddenly started referring to right-wing talk radio as the “Fourth International,” they never even discussed with each other why they were doing this, and no one felt bothered by this at all. From this we can see the quality independent thought that arises when you free yourself from the “churches” that “tell you how to think”.
Again, stupid rhetoric is not a problem, but stupid rhetoric that gets no criticism worries me. Referring to a leaderless body of people who disagree with you as a “cathedral” is not a rhetorical masterstroke—on the contrary, it reveals your argument to be an incoherent whine, and that you don’t care what language you use as long as it makes you sound like an underdog fighting the bad guys. Together we can crush the establishment, or the patriarchy, or the Christians or the Jews or whatever. And of course, you can argue about who is included in the “Cathedral,” but not about whether “Cathedral” is an appropriate term. As long as you don’t know the form your enemy is really taking, you will not be able to fight. Which is precisely what your enemy wants most.
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