The Vanguardism Trap

A friend recently described to me a “stench of fascism” in rationalist discourse. “Any theory that makes ‘clear thinking’ a scarce, trainable, testable property generates a distinction between those who have it and those who don’t,” he wrote. “And that distinction is convertible into political authority no matter what the theory says about itself.”

He’s right about the mechanism. I’ve smelled it too. But there’s probably a more useful name for it.

What he and I have smelled, I suggest, may be more usefully characterized as vanguardism. This is an ideology commonly associated with Vladimir Lenin, who led the Bolsheviks that became the Russian Communist Party. His vanguard claimed superior revolutionary consciousness and organizational discipline. In a broader sense, vanguardism advocates a trained elite empowered to override the judgment of the untrained many, usually in the name of stakes that are too high for untrained deliberation.

Recognizing vanguardism matters because it guides our attention to focus differently, and probably more effectively. The risk of vanguardism probably isn’t so much that it would lead rationalists to ultranationalism or the particular kinds of violence historically associated with fascism. That seems orthogonal or at least less proximate to an imminent risk. The risk of vanguardism is that it would lead rationalists to advocate large-scale ceding of human agency to supposed clear thinkers who need not answer to anyone beyond themselves.

In function, vanguardism is not unique to any one ideology. Plato’s philosopher-kings, Gnostic special knowledge, Calvinist election, and even misused priesthood authority in the Mormon tradition all share the same risk. A claim of privileged access can convert into a claim of governance over those who lack it.

Vanguardism among rationalists may be relatively new. But the attendant risk is already being realized. Many advocate centralizing control of artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies in the name of safety. And some, in or adjacent to rationalist circles, have descended into the anti-democratic neoreactionism of “Dark Enlightenment.”

Some of these vanguardist rationalists, presumably a minority, may imagine superior ethics to be deducible from superior epistemics. Maybe we can dismiss them as marginal. But many other rationalists make the more subtle vanguardist mistake of supposing superior ethics to be correlated with superior epistemics. They reason that because they understand the facts, risks, and consequences most clearly, they should be empowered to adjudicate values for the rest of us.

In contrast, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey observed that democracy isn’t primarily about ascertaining facts. It doesn’t compete with expertise. Rather, democracy is primarily about forming and transforming values, and thereby deciding what we should do with facts. No expert can do that without us because, although facts constrain values, values also constrain facts.

In fact, values constrain not only discovery but also creation of facts. Values create more values, which are themselves a kind of fact. And values create other kinds of facts as a consequence of action on values. Moreover, the creation of facts is a consequence of plural action on values, creating realities that even the clearest thinkers, greatest experts, and superintelligent Gods cannot create without us.

Ethics, actually to be ethics, must be grounded in values. More fundamentally, ethics must be grounded in desire. Facts and rationality are certainly important, even utterly necessary, as we seek to fulfill and reconcile desire. But neither is sufficient without desire.

“Desire” that is asserted from the top down is not and cannot coherently be our desire. It would be our enslavement or annihilation. And the self-appointed clear thinkers who would centralize the power of our agency into their own, “for our good,” would be our enslavers or annihilators. Such is the risk of vanguardism.

Rationalists must vigorously resist vanguardism. The model of clear thinking that would justify it is epistemically incomplete, lacking that which cannot be coherently centralized. In its stead, we can formulate, embrace, and advocate strong arguments for the hard work of formal decentralization. And we can put those arguments into practical application, restructuring the world such that our common good persists as that which emerges among us, and resists that which asserts itself over us.

Decentralization, not vanguardism, is how we ensure a beautiful future for humanity, without coercion that would amount to no future at all.