By Damian in noteworthies No Comments
• A brief history of life online.
• Franklin Einspruch, “Identity and Decline: Some Thoughts on the Schumacher Report on Visual Arts Journalism”
• Damon Linker, “The ‘Free Speech’ Debate Isn’t About Free Speech”
• Samuel Kronen, “The Evolution of Heterodox Black Thought”
• Jeroen Bouterse, “Philosophy: A Dialogue”
• Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Inventing the Future“
By Damian in obiter scripta, waiting for the barbarians, writing No Comments
It will be very long before political subjects will be reduced to geometric certitude. At present the reasoning on them is a kind of arithmetic of infinity, when the best information, the coolest head, and clearest mind can only approach the truth. A cautious man should therefore give only sibylline predictions, if, indeed, he should hazard any. But I am not a cautious man. I therefore give it as my opinion that they will issue the paper currency, and substitute thereby depreciation in the place of bankruptcy, or, rather, suspension. Apropos of this currency, this papier terré, now mort et enterré, the Assembly have committed many blunders which are not to be wondered at. They have taken genius instead of reason for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer lightning to light.
— Gouverneur Morris, letter to William Short, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, Vol. 1
Oh, that concluding sentence! Those old-time poet-statesmen make me swoon like a teenage girl. They weren’t just lawyers and they weren’t MBA’s: they had literary educations that included a knowledge of Greek and Latin. They knew poetry not as gut-spilling splotches of formless free verse but as a craft with a prosody that included rhyme and meter. They were taught to read it and write it, in English and the Classical languages. They didn’t have TV and the Internet so they had nothing to do with their spare time but read Shakespeare, Gibbon and Thucydides. Three cheers for progress! We have cable news and Twitter.
By Damian in foolosophy, nietzsche 2 Comments
If you’re not paying attention to what is happening in India, my friends, you should. Secular democracy is under threat from ethnonationalist extremists in the world’s second largest country & largest democracy, housing 1/5th of humanity. https://t.co/K9D9PwE7eA
— Iona Italia (@IonaItalia) March 17, 2019
A counter-proposal: the most important things in life are those you neglect in your attempts to appear superficially informed on issues about which you can meaningfully do nothing.
“And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you.”
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science
By Damian in nietzsche, obiter scripta No Comments
The born aristocrats of the spirit are not overeager; their creations blossom and fall from the trees on a quiet autumn evening, being neither rashly desired, not hastened on, nor supplanted by new things. The wish to create incessantly is vulgar, betraying jealousy, envy, and ambition. If one is something, one does not actually need to do anything—and nevertheless does a great deal. There is a type higher than the “productive” man.
— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Ironically, I re-encountered this aphorism while flipping through books, looking for inspiration to spark some writing after what seems like an endless string of days filled with work and the usual dispiriting effluvia of pop culture and current events. A reminder of wu wei by way of 19th-century Germany. Speaking of Taoism, Po Chu-i famously tweaked Lao-tzu for telling us that “those who speak know nothing; those who know are silent,” before proceeding to elaborate with five thousand more words. Likewise, how dare a man who published eleven books in one decade suggest I’m vulgar and ambitious for wanting to scribble a few times a week? I suppose I’m just a born bourgeois of the spirit.
By Damian in bread and circuses, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit No Comments
The nerds have taken over Hollywood, America and the world. It wasn’t just superheroes either. Zombies, androids, vampires, wizards, aliens, werewolves, intergalactic sagas, Lego, H.P. Lovecraft, Tolkien, board games based on TV shows – though these things were never unpopular per se, they always belonged to children, or to people at the lonelier fringes of the culture. Now they are the culture.
It’s true that a lot of pop culture seems perpetually juvenile. It’s also true that a phase of extended adolescence seems to be the new normal — not just in the case of entertainment choices, but also concerning the delayed onset of careers and families, the traditional markers of settled adulthood. How much of this is a sign of cultural enfeeblement and decadence? Alternatively, how much of it is attributable to the new “problem of abundance” created by technology, which allows individuals an increasing plethora of options with which to customize their lives, even as it disrupts the stability of many career options? In other words, is the end nigh, or is this all just the latest sound and fury in the open-ended evolution of a species with no inherent telos? There are many interesting angles that could be explored regarding this topic. Unfortunately, since we inhabit a deeply-stupid media ecosystem, all slippery slopes must lead to you-know-who:
If many people in a society feel like outsiders and the major mass culture tells them loudly and constantly that this is a noble thing to be, then what kind of politics will you have? There are battalions of pollsters, number-crunchers and political scientists who could explain what happened in 2016 – but a Trump presidency became possible first with the popularity of characters like Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne.
If the Venn diagram overlap between Comic-Con attendees and MAGA-hat wearers didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. It’s like a more mainstream version of intersectionality — all bad things are interconnected. The popcorn entertainment I disapprove of is basically the same thing as the worst political trends in the world. It’s convenient how that’s always the case. Ironically, just a few paragraphs earlier, he claimed that Marvel movies “reflect Americans [sic] paranoia right back at them to pack out theaters.” Apparently they also serve as a foundation to allow critics to make specious, not to say paranoid, connections in order to pack out a word count.
By Damian in books, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit, writing 2 Comments
But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now.
Oh, no. Surely not. No, please don’t…!
Our current era is marked by cynicism and nihilism—it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that we managed to elect the worst person in the world as president, a con artist and pathological liar who will say anything to stay in the public consciousness and keep the inverted pyramid of his shabby criminal empire from toppling down onto his empty head. Trump is an avatar of everything impermanent, incompetent, and insincere about this era, and I believe there’s a great inchoate hunger for the opposite, for someone who thinks that words and ideas matter.
Sigh. He did it. Yes, of course, if a literary style guide becomes a surprise bestseller, it must have something to do with Donald Trump, the star at the center of the bien-pensant solar system. A moment’s reflection would remind us that Steven Pinker, to name one example, also wrote a bestselling style guide in 2014, suggesting that there may just be a sizable audience with a perennial interest in the craft of writing regardless of political trends, an audience that, shockingly, might not spend every conscious moment obsessing over Donald Trump. Frankly, this kind of “praise” is a philistine insult. It reduces a thoughtful consideration of language and writing to just another emoticon in the frivolous chatter of the news cycle. A book on stylish writing, grown women wearing ridiculous pussy hats — they’re just interchangeable symbols of self-indulgent #resistance. I’m afraid the barbarians are already inside the gates of the literary imagination.
By Damian in art, free speech, the great awokening 3 Comments
When I was a teenager, I joined the political left because I understood it, in that era of the religious right’s now-almost-forgotten hegemony, to be the side that stood for freedom of thought and speech. I was warned by several older people that this was not the case, but with the certitude that can only come from youthful inexperience, I did not listen. 15 years ago, depressed and afraid, I wrote all day on Livejournal (remember that?) about how George W. Bush was going to put us in prison camps and had done 9/11 and would start a nuclear war, about how both climate change and peak oil (remember that?) would end the world within the decade, and about how only proletarian and Third-World revolution would save us.
It only took a year or two, and professional acquaintance with some fellow travelers of this creed, to show me how wrong I was about its reliability as a guide to both facts and ethics. Apocalypticism is always a racket; dystopia is an abuse of the speculative intellect, a genre fit for children, and perhaps not even for them. And if the world ends, you can’t do anything about it anyway. Chekhov said that artists should only participate in politics only enough to keep themselves safe from politics. We need to cultivate our gardens, after we secure our right to them in the first place. The autonomy of art is not incidental to secular freedom but its bedrock. It is logically, because politically, prior to almost every other right. The enslaved were not permitted to read; freedom of speech, thought, and art grounds and founds every other freedom.
…Anyone who speaks of morality while controlling or harming others does the devil’s work. It might even be true, sometimes I suspect it is, that anyone who speaks of morality ever, at all, instead of silently doing all the good that can be managed in this crooked world, is the devil’s assistant.
It was much easier to consider oneself a liberal in those days. As we entered adulthood, we were able to get away with defining ourselves negatively — against bigotry, against organized religion, against greed and war and pollution and other bad things. Against censorship too, of course. Religious conservatives were the self-righteous hypocrites who wanted to bowdlerize books and music and prevent the kids in Footloose from dancing; we were all about the liberation of individuals from intellectual and social restraints. Within a couple decades, though, in one of those twists of fate that make a mockery out of Whiggish notions of linear progression in history, everything went topsy-turvy. Racial segregation, political censorship of art and popular culture, and moral panics over sexuality came back into favor as cutting-edge progressive positions. A liberal Rip Van Winkle closed his eyes in 1995 and awakened in 2015 to find that he was now a conservative, if not a Nazi, which was basically the same thing. In a paradox of political physics, it turns out that you can traverse the spectrum from left to right by simply standing firm on certain principles.
Thomas Jefferson famously thought that the tree of liberty needed to be refreshed every twenty years or so with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Chekhov’s delicate balancing act isn’t quite as romantically stirring, but it’s more necessary. There may not be actual wars every generation, but the same stupid ideas and impulses will have to be repulsed again and again. Taoists warned us centuries ago that people who seek power ought not be trusted with it, but we’re still willing to envision career politicians as secular saviors. Scripture reminds us that true morality never seeks to call attention to itself, but our cultural discourse is dominated by transparent virtue-signaling. Out of ignorance, resentment, or simple boredom, people forget that a society in which politics has the power to tap you on the shoulder or knock on your door is not one any sane person should want to live in, and they redouble their efforts to fuse the personal with the political. The cosmetic details will keep cycling in and out of fashion, but the true resistance will always be waged by the devotees of art’s deeper truths against the political monomaniacs. To the extent that we must temporarily participate in politics for self-defense, we can only hope that the spirit of Cincinnatus watches over and protects us from the temptations and delusions of power.
By Damian in extraordinary popular delusions, the geist of the zeit No Comments
While reading this article about the trendy socialism among New York City’s “creative underclass,” I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. Then I realized it wasn’t that I’d read the article before; it was that Eric Hoffer had already summed it up much more succinctly in his book The Ordeal of Change: “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”
By Damian in moralizing No Comments
Our world must have reeked of tobacco smoke: clothes, curtains, walls, upholstery, the air we breathed (a smoker today is instantly recognizable by the smell of his clothes, and a secondhand book formerly owned by a smoker is likewise recognizable). Smokers, in my experience, are reluctant to understand just how unpleasant or disturbing nonsmokers find their habit, though they claim, perhaps not without some justification, that conviviality has declined with the decline in smoking. Certainly, there are no more smoke-filled rooms.
My neighbor called out to me as I started walking back to the house after rolling the trash out for the next morning’s pickup. “Come on in where it’s warm,” he said as I walked up his steps. He wanted to talk to me about a potential job. Twenty minutes later, when I got home, my clothes didn’t pass the sniff test. Into the wash they went. He hadn’t even been smoking while I was there. The air in his living room was just permeated with the smog of thousands of previously-smoked cigarettes.
I was born a smoker, my mom having started several years earlier. My secondhand habit continued until I was ten, when she quit after receiving a health scare. She had blood in her urine, and after running a series of tests, her doctor came back into the room, looked at his clipboard, glanced up at her, and shook his head slowly. In that moment, she was sure he was going to tell her she had cancer, and she quickly prayed to the God she’d stopped officially worshiping, promising Him that she’d quit if only He let her live. As it happened, the doctor’s head-shake was one of puzzlement, because the tests were all clear. It eventually turned out that she’d been taking several aspirin per day for years to deal with the headaches that smoking caused her, which explained the blood from her stomach lining. Nevertheless, she did indeed quit cold turkey that day (reinforcing the fact that “addiction” is hardly the neurochemical determinism it’s typically made out to be). After that, she would perform her disgust when encountering smokers in public, conspicuously fanning the air and making exasperated noises of disapproval, thus replacing the buzz of nicotine with the rush of moral superiority.
Smoking has long since become an issue about many things besides itself. Conquerors often romanticize the conquered, and smoking has to some extent been repurposed as a defiant middle finger raised against the health-conscious liberal elite and its prissy quest for endless self-improvement. Few people might want to champion smoking as a practice, but they still see it as a useful tool of cultural criticism. Smoking has become something of a countercultural symbol of “real working folks” authenticity and nostalgia for a bygone ritual whereby people valued camaraderie more than the purity of their own lungs. Liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy logically extends to our personal airspace, which we defend as zealously as any nation-state against hostile invaders. Why should I have to suffer the costs of your choices? The logic is sound as far as it goes, but where it goes is to a world of social atomization, where obligations are contractual and easily enough dissolved when inconvenient. And as my mom could tell you, few things are as satisfying as being judgmental or cruel toward those who can be confidently said to have “deserved” their treatment. I shouldn’t have to wash the stale reek of cheap tobacco out of my clothes, or suffer an irritated throat for a couple hours, but sometimes it’s just more important to be neighborly than to be right.
By Damian in conspicuous crusading, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments
While the motivations of the movement for more diverse voices in young adult fiction is commendable—YA fiction, like many other areas of publishing, has its fair share of access problems with regard to class and race—the manifestation of this impulse on social media has been nothing short of cannibalistic. The Twitter community surrounding the genre, one in which authors, editors, agents, and adult readers and reviewers outnumber youthful readers, has become a cesspool of toxicity.
“Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons—sometimes before anybody’s even read them,” Vulture’s Kat Rosenfield wrote in the definitive must-read piece on this strange and angry internet community. The call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons almost always involve claims that books are insensitive with regard to their treatment of some marginalized group, and the specific charges, as Rosenfield showed convincingly, often don’t seem to warrant the blowups they spark—when they make any sense at all.
It often seems like the web consists of nothing but dispiriting stories like this. You could set your watch by the tumbrils as they trundle past each day, carrying a new batch of thought-criminals to the guillotine. On the bright side, though, it’s been years since I’ve seen one of those insipid articles claiming that reading literature makes one a better person and contributes to moral progress. (Speaking of fiction, it would be nice if critics like Singal could stop pretending that the motivations are “commendable” and somehow unrelated to their utterly predictable manifestations, but I suppose that’s just my undying optimism shining through.)