Do Not Look at the Palace

By in augean stables, fresh hell, gender, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Fall is here! Let’s check out the new intellectual hemlines:

Although Mandelzis’s exact experience may seem rare, it exemplifies the way many people still view sports as a perfectly reasonable venue in which to enforce exclusion on the basis of sex. School sports are typically sex-segregated, and in America some of them have even come to be seen as either traditionally for boys or traditionally for girls: Think football, wrestling, field hockey, volleyball. However, it’s becoming more common for these lines to blur, especially as Gen Zers are more likely than members of previous generations to reject a strict gender binary altogether. Maintaining this binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting—a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.

Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.

Oooh, how risqué! See, this is what I mean when I say I want to know all about the new enthusiasms and infectious doctrines. Isn’t this glorious? We live in an age when many people publicly indulge in historical-fantasy role-playing. They’re sure that they would have been abolitionists in the Deep South; they would have fearlessly protected Jews in 1930s Germany. And yet, when historical circumstances present them with the equivalent of a slow softball pitch right over the plate, they watch it float past them without moving a muscle. How can you not be amused? One of the nation’s oldest general-interest periodicals publishes this kind of gender-Lysenkoism, and all the midwit invertebrates who take their intellectual cues from such outlets will gulp and perspire and affirm it nonetheless. “Cancel culture is a right-wing myth,” bleat the same people who wouldn’t dare scoff out loud at the idea that the only thing preventing a 200-lb. woman from becoming an NFL linebacker is the patriarchy’s lack of encouraging words.

Nobody believes this, of course. Mertens doesn’t believe it. The herd of independent minds who read the Atlantic don’t believe it. No one who has watched a team of 15-year-old boys trounce the U.S. women’s World Cup-winning soccer team believes it. This is a statement of faith, an extreme version of the progressive belief in the blank slate, the undying hope that life’s intractable unfairness can be ironed out by an enlightened vanguard of the correctly-educated. The Ironing Board of Procrustes, perhaps. But this is also a modern version of the same thing that the Marquis de Custine observed in Russia almost two centuries ago:

A Russian nobleman, Prince Peter Koslovsky, had warned Custine before his arrival in Russia that in his country “despotism not only counts ideas and sentiments for nothing, but remakes facts. It wages war on evidence and triumphs in the battle. . . . [The Emperor’s] power is more far-reaching than God’s, for God makes only the future, while the Czar remakes the past.” Custine’s experience repeatedly proved this insight true. No previous czar was ever mentioned in conversation, he learned, to avoid the suggestion that the present czar was not immortal. For this same reason, Custine noted that Russians did not dare look at the palace in which the czar’s father, the emperor Paul, was murdered: for “it is forbidden to recount, in the schools or elsewhere, the story of the death of the Emperor Paul.”

Custine appreciated only too well the violence that this remaking of history did to the minds of men, and the consequences it had for their character and behavior. In order not to look at the palace in which the emperor Paul was murdered, a person had to know that he was killed there; but his whole purpose in not looking at the palace was to demonstrate in public his ignorance of the murder. He thus had not only to assert a lie but also to deny that he knew it was a lie. And all officials—the emperor included—had likewise to pretend that they did not know they were being lied to, or else the whole edifice of falsehood would have come tumbling down.

An article like this serves as a similar test for progressives. It asserts a lie to the readers, and forces them to deny that they know they’re being lied to, lest they end up being treated the way they and their comrades have treated so many other apostates. They lash out at you for laughing because they hate themselves for their own cowardice. And when this particular type of lunacy becomes unfashionable, as it inevitably will, they’ll all slink away silently, pretending that they had always been outspoken against it.

Mental Microbes

By in foolosophy, socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

But how is one to keep free from those mental microbes that worm-eat people’s brains—those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms and infectious Doctrines that we catch from what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with germs; they breathe creeds and convictions on you as soon as they open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with them—the monthly Reviews seem to have room for little else. Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; how shall he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel schemes of Salvation? Can he ever be sure that he won’t be suddenly struck down by the fever of Funeral or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with a new Sex Theory?

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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Twitter gives you a telephone version of the news, where people take facts reported by journalists, which then gets spun and argued about, and soon there are not only the facts, but they are interspersed with discussions about the narrative, then a narrative about the narrative, and a narrative about the narrative about the narrative. The search for information gets diluted by gossip, dunking, theory building with regards to the motivations of rival tribes, and petty feuds and arguments. The vast majority of “takes” on the news are lazy nonsense put together by people who would, if they actually had the focus and patience to have anything worth saying, communicate their views in a more substantive format.

…It’s amazing to me the extent to which my group chats center around what’s on Twitter, and how much we’re pretending to be sophisticated observers of current events as an excuse to act like little girls. In a typical discussion, someone will send the latest clueless Jason Stanley tweet, and we’ll all laugh about what a goofball he is. Then there will be a Yglesias one, and people will be like “oh he gets it but can only go so far. har har har.” Andrew Sullivan is a nice guy we all have fond memories of reading but too naïve to understand the need to ban Critical Race Theory. There will be the latest Rufo or LibsofTikTok outrage, although these are actually useful because it’s good to know how deranged major institutions are getting, and Rufo is the rare right-wing social media personality who translates his celebrity into policy action. And of course there’s always the black academic who has devoted her life to studying blackness and the texture of her hair crying about how someone looked at her funny and this is the new slavery. Someone has been banned from Twitter, and everyone cries about American conservatives and so-called “dissidents” being the most wronged and oppressed human beings who have ever walked the face of the earth.

None of this strikes me as healthy.

— Richard Hanania

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I really hate having to be a devil’s advocate for social media in general, or Twitter in particular, but so be it. Let’s be clear: the “Twitter” that most people complain like this about is pop culture/current events Twitter, which is heavily dominated by journalists and pundits, both professional and amateur. The complainers aren’t wrong, obviously. Journalists and pundits are generally unpleasant, stupid people. But it’s a big world out there, and there are lots of interesting people with interesting thoughts who just happen to communicate some of them on Twitter. If you don’t want to pay attention to the demented screamers and feces-flingers in the political zoo, there’s accounts that focus entirely on language. Or art and architecture. Or medieval manuscripts. Or Generation-X nostalgia. Or gardening. Or countless other niche interests. As with most things, you tend to get out of social media what you put in. How does that old joke go…?

Anyway, to answer Pearsall Smith’s question, I don’t think it’s healthy to avoid all contact with those “creeds and convictions.” You need to develop your immunity by mingling with the crowd to some extent. Oh, come on, get over yourself. How arrogant is it to think that your age is uniquely deranged and uncouth? “Nothing human is alien to me,” remember? I’m no delicate hypochondriac; I want to know all about the new enthusiasms and infectious doctrines!

Noteworthies (51)

By in noteworthies No Comments

• Ben Dreyfuss, “The Queen, She Is Dead”

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Truth! We must tell the truth! Even if it is uncomfortable! This is my answer to everything but that is only a coincidence! The truth is the queen is evil and anyone who is sad that this evil woman is dead must have their nose rubbed in the blood she spilt.

POLITE POLICE

Why?

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Because this is how we make a better world!

SUSAN

How will it make it a better world?

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Because we make clear to everyone that in this life there are two types of people: the good and the bad. And the queen was bad. And when bad people die we rejoice! We rejoice! We dance until the sun rises and we kiss and sing!

TOM

Why was she evil again?

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Because the monarchy is bad!

CLIVE

And colonialism!

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Oh right yes and colonialism.

RACHEL

But the queen wasn’t in charge of British foreign policy?

CLIVE

We’re tired of excuses! She could have done something!

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Something!

CLIVE

Anything!

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Anything!

CLIVE

She could have done some speeches!

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Speeches!

CLIVE

A tweet about how bad colonialism was!

LEAGUE OF RUDENESS

Tweets!

POLITE POLICE

I think we should all just stop saying these nasty words.

ALL OF THEM

Fuck you!

• Ian Leslie, “Being the Queen”

Queen Elizabeth II (I can only call her by her impersonal title, the formality acting as a reminder that the illusion of ‘knowing’ someone famous is just that) delivered some fine words over the years: “Grief is the price we pay for love”, she said in condolence to the families of those lost in the 9/11 bombings. In the early stage of the pandemic, she struck exactly the right note, harking back to an even bigger national crisis, one that she had lived through: “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.” But really, words were not her thing. One reason she was such an effective figurehead for so long is that she said so little. Unlike Charles, she didn’t communicate her thoughts very much (whether Charles will do less of that now he is King, we will see). In a world of endless jabbering, she just was.

It’s not that she didn’t have thoughts – you can tell that she did from the avidity with which she engaged the statesmen at the 1991 G7 summit. Prime Ministers have testified to the wisdom of her advice in private, and to her great curiosity about the world. But she knew her legitimacy rested on not having a view, on not becoming part of the argument. Not just her legitimacy, but her capacity to unite, comfort and console. Emotions are pre-verbal. For all that we are encouraged to talk about them, it remains true that sometimes the best way to cope with our feelings is through symbols and actions rather than words. That’s what rituals are for. The Queen intuitively understood the advantages of being and doing over saying, which is why she was the perfect person for the role.

• Richard Hanania, “How I Overcame Anxiety”

One overcomes social anxiety in the same way one overcomes a fear of flying. Understand that your fear is irrational, don’t make excuses for or indulge in it, and then just practice the thing that makes you nervous. Eventually, it gets through even the thickest skull that nothing bad is going to happen as a result of flying on an airplane. This is the idea behind “exposure therapy,” which the PUAs seem to have independently discovered on their own.

If we told people that fear of flying was something everyone struggles with, that it was the result of what others have done to them, or structural racism or whatever, I’m sure we’d get more of it. Imagine further if TV, music, and movies taught kids that fear of flying made them deep and interesting, and schools and universities had fear of flying awareness weeks. This is pretty much the modern approach to mental illness. Our tendency to discount the benefits of exposure as a natural way to reduce anxiety and naïve faith in the professional management of the human psyche help explain mistakes in how we have responded to covid. It’s been a massive experiment in which we have taken away people’s ability to socialize normally with others – and no, doing so while wearing a mask is not anywhere near normal – with predictably disastrous results.

A series of data points converge on the idea that navel-gazing and the medicalization of things like anxiety and depression are themselves major causes of the conditions they are meant to fight. I see nothing else that can explain why we see such skyrocketing rates of mental illness among young people today. If it’s all explained by the rise of the internet, one needs to explain why the mental health crisis hits liberals so much harder than conservatives.

• A. T. Roberts, “Screaming Match”

Enter the landscape of modern noise. It’s televised, digitized, and auto-tuned. It comes at you through speakers made to look like rocks in gardens. It barrages you from screens in every room of your home and in your pocket, and even gas pumps now have flatscreens. Commercials blare at decibels almost painfully louder than the mindless noise you’re already half-watching while scrolling through more noise on your smartphone. It’s even in text, the trash that passes for journalism and education today is no less noisy than an eighteenth century wagoner cracking his whip or the bimbo next door playing Nicki Minaj songs on repeat.

The ghost in the machine that drives this noise can be the focus of a separate examination. Whether it’s Guy Debord’s spectacle, Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model, a combination of the three, or something entirely different, the obvious outcome of the legions of pro-noise adherents are proof of its effectiveness. Babbage and Schopenhauer would have immediate heart attacks if they were alive today, but it’s important to emphasize that the concept already described by the world’s two most crotchety thinkers hasn’t changed: the noise is designed, from inception, to prevent you from thinking. Know this, but don’t dare acknowledge it. You’ll be hated for it.

• Jason Peters, “Reading in Unprecedented Times”

But it is important to remember that material circumstances alone no more made my eyes move across the page than they made Defoe’s and Poe’s quills move across the paper. It may be that “Men are as the time is,” as the bastard Edmund said in King Lear. But men and women nevertheless have agency. They can refuse to let their thinking be dominated by the news cycle or by these “unprecedented times.”

That is to say, all of us can make an effort not to be as the times are. If we cannot step outside the tyrannizing present, we can certainly resist the reach of its presumptive scepter. It is an ancient dictum attributable, I believe, to Cicero that a liberal education should help us do just this.

…One reason we can’t “rise to the occasion” is that there are no shortcuts to any such rising, and yet we are incorrigibly prone to take whatever shortcut the nearest cliché offers us: “It takes all of us.” “Together we’ll get through this.” “Science is real.”

Jolly good for science, but so are ghosts. Exactly what pressing issue does the schoolmarmish yard sign needlessly reminding everyone else of an obvious reality—or, what is worse, telling everyone else what to think—put to rest? Nothing that fits on a sign or a bumper sticker or the back of a power forward’s warm-up jersey absolves us from the unrelenting demands of careful deliberation.

Another and more important reason we cannot “rise to the occasion” is that, like Lear, we know ourselves only slenderly. We no longer have a serviceable doctrine of Man, an anthropology at hand capable of helping us know ourselves better than slenderly. So we set about to “end racism,” as the moral philosophy elaborated on the wide receiver’s football helmet instructs us to do.

Much More Than Happiness I Love My Habits

By in books, foolosophy 1 Comment

For in truth habit is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the foothold of her authority; but having by this mild and humble beginning settled and planted it with the help of time, she soon uncovers to us a furious and tyrannical face against which we no long have the liberty of even raising our eyes.

— Montaigne, “Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law”

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I live by the clock; all my activities, my exits and entrances, my times for smoking cigarettes and reading murder-stories, are synchronized and set in harmony with the earth’s motion and the sun’s. Much more than happiness I love my habits, the timely routine and oscillation of the hours which carry me on through months and seasons. Thus my life spins silent on its axle; but at the least dislocation or jar—if the Post is late, or the Morning Paper doesn’t turn up—I am giddy, I am undone; the ground rocks beneath my feet.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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Tomorrow I go in for a colonoscopy. This means I can’t eat any solid food today, something I normally do every three to four hours as part of my meal plan. It also means I can’t be at work, because even I know better than to try to do physical work on a completely empty stomach. (My stomach has reached the point, here in the early afternoon, of, “Haha, joke’s over, very funny, now give me the calories before I start devouring your pectorals.”) What am I supposed to do? Read all day? Who can concentrate through the hunger pangs and the disorientation? Later this evening, I have to drink half of that vile solution that, as Dave Barry described, will allow my bowels to time-travel into the future and start eliminating food I haven’t even eaten yet. Then I have to stay awake between two and four a.m to drink the other half. Between the sleep deprivation, explosive elimination, and general violence to my sense of established order, I might as well be marooned on an alien planet. Without my routine and rituals, do I even exist?

Why Not Both?

By in battling personal entropy No Comments

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn:

Though bodily and mental fitness are related in certain ways, we should guard against drawing too tight a causal connection between them. The relationship is complicated. Beethoven’s body gave out on precisely that capacity most closely associated with his aspirations for his mental work. His ninth symphony, composed when he had gone entirely deaf, is one of the greatest masterworks of all time.

Classicist David C. Young, who has written extensively on the Olympics and ancient views of sport, casts into question whether it was ever the Greek ideal to combine physical and intellectual excellence, arguing that ancient Greeks generally held both in high esteem but saw them as separate ideals to which different people could aspire, with significant daily time commitments.

Yes, well, that’s all fascinating, and by fascinating I mean tediously academic, but at tonight’s training session, we worked on my Olympic lifts (cleaned 175, snatched 105), and then had an impromptu discussion on the nature and purpose of art (music and painting in particular), the extent to which creativity is enhanced by discipline, and the good ol’ Golden Mean. Just another day of combining physical and mental excellence like it ain’t no thing.

Oh, dear. Weak, scrawny and resentful is no way to go through life, son.

As a Jester

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions No Comments

Pessimism is the philosophy that can never crown itself king. To be king, to be master of every circumstance — that is what pessimism teaches as unattainable. Whatever modesty they profess, whatever authority they disclaim, optimistic philosophies secretly find this impossible to accept, which is why pessimism has found it necessary to appear before them as a jester.

— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

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Another lesson from critics of the idea of progress is that one may dispense with optimism without succumbing to nihilism. Schopenhauer, Burckhardt, Henry Adams and Solzhenitsyn elaborated pessimistic visions of history without completely giving up on life. Schopenhauer, who taught that life was a curse, nevertheless had values, as evidenced my his moral and aesthetic philosophies. Burckhardt and Adams likewise had interests in the arts, and they shared with one another an interest in historical study. On top of these interests, Burckhardt found value in teaching, and Adams cherished his personal relationships. For his part, Solzhenitsyn turned to religious devotion. Their pessimistic visions of history led these authors to resist seductive calls for permanent and universal political solutions to the perennial problems of humankind, but critics of the idea of progress did not give up the search for personal mindsets and behaviors that would guide them through life.

— Matthew Slaboch, A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics

Chatter Deafens

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions No Comments

What is called ‘silence’ in walking is, in the first place, the abolishment of chatter, of that permanent noise that blanks and fogs everything, invading the vast prairies of our consciousness like couch-grass. Chatter deafens: it turns everything into nonsense, intoxicates you, makes you lose your head. It is always there on all sides, overflowing, running everywhere, in all directions.

— Fréderic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

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And of course what goes for presidents goes too, by a sort of hypostasis, for the culture in general. Take any public figure currently active in American “Discourse” and plug their name into the same Onion headline: “Matt Yglesias Regales Dinner Guests with Impromptu Oratory on Virgil’s Minor Works”; “Nikole Hannah Jones Regales Dinner Guests with…” It sounds just as implausible as with W., but it’s not nearly as funny, again, because no one even thinks to expect such an ability among what passes for the American intelligentsia today. Instead we see Yglesias and Noah Smith and Nathan J. Robinson and other people whose names I can never remember waging the great YIMBY-vs.-NIMBY debates of 2022, we see endless play-by-plays of the supreme court’s every move or of the Pennsylvania senate race or the Georgia board of elections, all of which seem entirely derivative of a style of engagement that evolved out of professional spectator sports. I mean, I suppose someone has to be thinking about housing policy and gerrymandering and so on, but when such topics exhaust our sense of the life of participatory discursive culture, it means that culture is in deep, deep crisis — and, most tragic of all, the discourse, such as it is, is too droningly loud to permit any of us a moment of calm in which we might hear, and regret, the disappearance of Latin bucolic poetry from our shared universe of things to know about and to value.

— Justin E.H. Smith

What?

By in alan watts, foolosophy, juxtapositions, poetry No Comments

Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united—What?

— John Wilmot, “Upon Nothing”

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The naîve idea that there is first of all empty space and then things filling it underlies the classical problem of how the world came out of nothing. Now the problem has to be rephrased, “How did something-and-nothing come out of…what?”

— Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

Doesn’t Pass the Smollet Test

By in fresh hell, media/propaganda, race, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Alan Jacobs:

After a fan spent an entire match calling a Duke volleyball player a n****r and threatening her, Brigham Young University released a statement saying, “We will not tolerate behavior of this kind. Specifically, the use of a racial slur at any of our athletic events is absolutely unacceptable and BYU Athletics holds a zero-tolerance approach to this behavior.” But here’s the thing: you did tolerate it, for an entire volleyball match. No one did anything, no one said anything to the abusive fan. Your fans and your officials, including police, silently tolerated it for hours. The offending fan was banned only after the match and after the Duke player who was the primary target of his abuse went public. Saying that “BYU Athletics holds a zero-tolerance approach to this behavior” is therefore a plain old lie.

That does beggar belief, doesn’t it? A crowded sporting event, filled with college students, and someone was able to yell The Slur of All Slurs repeatedly without being confronted, let alone recorded on a hundred smartphones? It almost makes one wonder…but no…surely not again…

Once again, it appears the supply of racism has failed to keep up with the insatiable demand. I mean, I suppose it is technically possible that the guilty party may have escaped undetected and hidden down a well alongside Jussie’s attackers, O.J.’s “real killers,” and the twelfth imam, but it’s looking increasingly improbable. Whenever we encounter one of these too-bad-to-be-true stories which just happen to confirm our priors, it would probably be a good idea to wait at least 48 hours before saying anything publicly. Incidentally, how about those young gumshoes at the student newspaper who somehow got it in their heads to go out and, you know, interview as many people in attendance as they could find rather than just pass along salacious rumors from journalist-infested social media? You’re never going to make it to an industrial narrative-laundromat like NPR with an attitude like that, kids!

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