My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly what an e-girl is in general: it often seems to involve having an anime-based appearance or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, but the girls in question here don’t look very anime to me.

Specifically, the leading Hegelian e-girls appear to be two young New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing particularly startling about two people combining a feminine online aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their own; the Internet is full of people who make a niche by combining one thing with another thing. What’s more striking is their apparent popularity: it appears that these two held a Hegelian e-girl event and 700 people RSVPed.

I don’t think that any of this is a joke. On the internet it is always so hard to tell who is being ironic or trolling. But as far as I can tell, anna and Nikki are serious about being Hegelian philosophers and are not making up the popularity of their event. If so, it feels to me like a really pleasant surprise. I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.

anna kw helpfully posted a “mini-manifesto” of Hegelian e-girls. The manifesto takes off from the real problem of political polarization in the present age, noting that that polarization is not limited to “governmental power as such” but even into “the most mundane interactions.” She then notes:

It seems the one thing that almost everyone can agree on is a desperation for radical change to the status quo. It is this status quo which has given rise to these radically contradictory demands for change in the first place; they are symptoms of the paradigm that birthed them, a paradigm of entitlement to expressing one’s voice politically for little more than the purpose of demanding immediate gratification according to one’s most antisocial impulses. This is the self-interested nihilism of bourgeois democracy.

I believe the Hegelian e-girls are intellectually serious because this does indeed seem to me like a profoundly Hegelian thing to say. At one level, Hegel’s philosophy is all about seeking truth in everything, noting that everyone is right in some respect. The problem is that when people seek truth in everything too quickly, it often leads them too quickly to a simple middle position, which often looks like an unquestioned centrist status quo. And that is not where Hegel actually takes you. Nic Thorne’s quietly Hegelian study of Thucydides and Plato is, at some level, all about how an unquestioned status quo needs to change: violent and nihilistic antagonists like (Plato’s) Thrasymachus and Callicles clearly see the contradictions that others were scared to speak.

Contrast here the works of Ken Wilber, whose “integral” philosophy starts from the Hegelian premise that philosophies should transcend and include competing perspectives. Wilber is not wrong about that. The problem is that he transcends and includes those philosophies at a very shallow level, one that sorts philosophies into stages without providing convincing reasons why one stage is actually higher than the other, taking up an empiricism that doesn’t really put the underlying reasons in dialogue.

We can see what’s wrong with Wilber’s approach in the way he applied it to politics twenty years ago. Wilber spoke admiringly of Tony Blair being “an authentic pioneer in “third way” politics (cf. A Theory of Everything), which is one of the first serious moves toward an integral politics that unites the best of liberal and conservative…” Of course, that “third way”, which Blair shared with Bill Clinton, was a combination of social and cultural liberalism with the brutal capitalist economics of their predecessors Reagan and Thatcher. All of which might seem like “the best of liberal and conservative” if you’re one of the rich people benefitting from Reagan’s and Thatcher’s massive tax cuts, but seems a lot more like a vicious mean if you’re one of the many people Reagan and Thatcher put out on the street.

Worse, the particular context for Wilber’s praise of Blair, written in 2003, was the war in Iraq, which George W. Bush’s US government initiated and continental European governments opposed:

As for world leaders—are any taking something resembling an integral view? The only world leader who comes close, in my opinion, is Tony Blair. Blair—virtually alone, it seems to me—holds the multifarious sides fairly in awareness and draws conclusions (and courses of action) based on a bigger picture…. Blair, almost single-handedly, is sitting between America and Europe and screaming at both of them: you cannot start competing and fighting with each other-that road leads to more nightmares than you can imagine. Like the colossus at Rhodes, Blair has one foot in America and one foot in Europe, and heroically seems the only world leader attempting to keep that integration in existence.

How’d that heroism work out for Blair? The Iraq war, which Blair championed, turned out to be made up on the false premises that Iraq had nuclear or biological weapons – and on those false premises led to at least 100 000 violent deaths, most of them civilian. It turned out that Blair’s attempted middle position on Iraq was the wrong position: the European governments had been right and the American government was wrong, and Blair ultimately sided with the latter. The issue for which Wilber most praised Blair was Blair’s undoing, leading to his resignation. Ten years later, his unpopularity remained such that he admitted he would be a liability in the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union. Blair’s attempted middle ground was a fuckup – and, therefore, so was Wilber’s.

The Hegelian e-girls are probably too young to remember the Iraq war. Yet I think they nevertheless get the lesson that Wilber had not learned: an ultimate dialectical synthesis, the one that preserves truth from both sides, is not necessarily found on a middle ground. Or at least it’s not on just any middle ground: some means can be worse than the extremes.

By contrast, a report from the Hegelian e-girl party indicates it was attended by radicals of all stripes: “An unusual mix of platypus socialists, maga communists, jreg, Joshua Citarella, Jamie Peck, theorycels, guy who officiated Curtis Yarvin’s wedding who is homosexual but not gay, tech bros, and a pro-gamer named Rod who hated the party.” This is a mixing of different extremes that does not end up in the middle. It does seem like the kind of event that can help push the world’s conversation forward, in a way that the Reaganite stagnation of Clinton and Blair did not.

Such an event is, at some level, supposed to be dangerous – as it appears this event indeed was. The party was first postponed, and anna kw claimed that this was due to threats of violence. Some dispute that the violent threats actually happened, but they are something that you would certainly expect to happen at an event bringing together a group like the one just subscribed. These are not the sort of people that you would expect to get along peacefully.

But that, in turn, is one thing that can be said in defence of status-quo centrism. While in the end it can’t last – its internal contradictions will come out – a status-quo centrism can at least keep some peace. If you weren’t one of the ones tossed into the street by government cuts or murdered in Iraq, the Clinton-Blair era could feel cozy, in a way the current one cannot. Perhaps that leads us to a different sort of Hegelian synthesis: while a nihilistic Thrasymachus is needed to push the dialectic forward, there is also something to be said for the complacent Cephalus who delays that movement as long as possible.