Exploring the "Anti-TESCREAL" Ideology and the Roots of (Anti-)Progress

By this point, I imagine that most people here have already encountered Torres and Gebru's infamous "TESCREAL bundle". However, the discourse about this accusation so far has mostly revolved whether it is fair to connect the different elements of the bundle, including EA, together, or to attribute the sort of techno-millenarian eschatological aspirations that they speak of to everyone involved in these movements. What has gone mostly unnoticed is that their rhetoric about millenarianism is actually itself rooted in a specific religious and philosophical perspective which is much narrower than most labels that the pair attach to themselves; almost everything that they say about "TESCREAL" is actually an echo of early-to-mid-20th-century theological and ideological discourse about determinism and Christian postmillenialism which has become an important-but-largely-unnoticed influence on the thinking of a lot of those who claim to be on the political "left". I think that this genealogy is worth a lot more attention than it has received so far--critiques of the "idea of progress" are a dime a dozen in academia, but almost never will you find someone attempting the same of its reverse.

This linked post is what I plan to be the start of a series exploring the history and component values of this ideological bundle, which I have named R9PRESENTATIONALism--it stands for the following:

• Relational
• 9P
  • Postcritical
  • Personalist
  • Praxeological
  • Psychoanalytic
  • Participatory
  • Performative
  • Particularist
  • Processional
  • Positive/Affirmationist
• Reparative
• Existentialist
• Standpoint-theorist
• Embodied
• Narrativistic
• Therapeutic
• Anthropological
• Traditionalist
• Intersectional
• Orate
• Natalist
• Activist
• Localist

This bundle originated out of anti-Calvinist polemics written by Catholic and royalist Anglican writers during the early modern period, was picked up by 19th century romantic reactionaries to build the foundation of the emerging Counter-Enlightenment, got carried into the 20th century by various counter-modern literary movements seeking a third way against both capitalism and socialism which could justify the continuing relevance of the traditional humanistic disciplines against the new challenge of the social and psychological sciences, transitioned from being primarily of the political right to the political left due to the ideological aftermaths of WW2 and 1968, and took on its modern form in environmental and anti-globalization activism in the 90s. It is the actual source of the post-60s ideological transformation against the ideas of rationality, science, objectivity, and progress on the left which most people erroneously attribute to "postmodernism" or "critical theory" or the "New Left" or so forth, and it is the often-unspoken foundation behind essentially all ideological challenges against EA, AI safety, YIMBYism, and technological progress from the left and the academic establishment.

I plan on working through this intellectual history over the next few months to unpack exactly what this bundle entails, the motivations behind it, and the reasons why it has become so pervasive in the last half-century. My hope is that having a clear name for this phenomenon will clean up a lot of the confused current discourse about what things are and are not "anti-progress" or so forth; in reality, I think what we will find is that this stream of thought is both much wider and much narrower than most people believe, in that it actually has surprisingly little to do with any of the intellectual lineages that its proponents claim to subscribe to (Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, conflict studies, etc.) but is a shockingly pervasive influence across modern culture to a greater degree than even most people who complain about it realize. Left-wing humanities academia, often thought of as the source of a lot of this influence, is actually really only a secondary reflection of it, when it's even involved at all. What is really going on here is a four-centuries-long counterrevolution within the arts to defend the validity of charismatic authority--one that I hope you will explore with me.