Fortune-Teller Favors the Bold

By in ohferfucksake No Comments

Andrew Sullivan:

If the definition of political courage is making big calls crisply and effectively, despite obvious risks and unknowable consequences, then it seems to me that President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson qualify right now. They’ve made calls recently that go beyond the usual mush of compromise and calculation and might even merit being called bold.

Biden braved the Blob and got out of Afghanistan. We will debate how he did so, and with what consequences, for quite some time. But he still did it. Obama tried and failed. Trump made a big song and dance and signed a surrender deal. But Biden actually got us out.

This wasn’t inevitable. The defense and foreign policy establishments had plenty of their usual arguments — threats of terror attacks, pabulum about recent “progress,” the avoidance of humiliation — to slow-walk presidents into inaction, but they didn’t succeed this time. Biden had sufficient experience to see through their bluff, and the fortitude to fight back when they raged against the withdrawal. Yes, it was horribly messy; tragic in the ways wars always are. But it had that mystical quality of an actual decision: doneness.

Kevin D. Williamson:

American presidencies do not run on policy — they run on magic.

They run on the superstitious (and, indeed, idolatrous) belief that there is something magical about the person of the president, that he enjoys the powers of at least a demigod, and that the nation’s prosperity and security are mystically connected with his person and his ritual performances in the democratic agon. That is how the 9/11 attacks came to be, in a very strange but true sense, about George W. Bush. They became something more than an event.

When the nation is insulted or attacked, then the president must respond in some symbolically satisfying way or risk losing the Mandate of Heaven.

…After the airport attack — the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a decade — President Biden was politically compelled to do something, lest his Big Man Mojo be seen to wane and the Mandate of Heaven slip from his quavering grasp. That compulsion surely was felt all the way down the chain of command. And it resulted in taking the first opportunity to make a theatrical show of force — in this case, against a car with seven children in it.

…The prevalence of symbolism over all else means that presidents are compelled to act — even when the action is pointless or destructive. Sometimes, that is an ill-considered tariff or a ridiculous promise about Mexico paying us to build a border wall. Sometimes, it is showing up at a disaster scene as though the presidential presence brought with it mystical healing powers rather than resource-consuming distraction. Sometimes, it is the mystical laying of presidential hands upon a Skutnik during the State of the Union address.

Sometimes, it’s a carload of kids being burnt on the altar of muscular executive action.

As I’ve said, Sullivan is excellent sometimes, but at other times, like here, he makes me gasp in disbelief that anyone could proudly hit “publish” on something so eye-wateringly stupid. “Boldness” divorced from skill and practical results is nothing to be proud of, certainly not a freestanding virtue. Like a typical intellectual, Sullivan has once again allowed himself to be awed by empty symbolism. This isn’t surprising. Symbolism requires critics and interpreters to make the counterintuitive seem plausible, a job perfectly suited for those like him. The plain truth of a halfway-senile executive and a humiliated superpower lashing out in weakness to disastrous effect is evident to anyone who isn’t lost in clouds of abstraction. Williamson is working on a new book about the very theme he addresses here, our idolatrous worship of the presidency. One can only hope that the ostensibly-conservative Sullivan reads it and learns something. But who am I kidding? He’ll probably just find himself fascinated by the next book by some idiot Marxist who wants to abolish the whole idea of meritocracy and higher learning.

The Necessary Beating

By in books, gender, the geist of the zeit, tribalism No Comments

George Orwell famously excoriated W.H. Auden for the line, “The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder,” in his poem “Spain.” Orwell took him to be a typical example of an intellectual for whom the murder of human beings was just another abstraction on the road to utopia, “the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” (Auden, for his part, insisted this was a misinterpretation, and that he was not excusing totalitarian crimes.) The stakes are a bit lower in our day, at least for now. Progressives, in their omnipresent desire to appear morally superior and more sophisticated than conservatives, are currently required to accept the absurdity of a man beating up a woman for sport and call it progress. The right hook of history is strong, and it lands flush on the jaw of injustice, or something like that. Many, if not most, would admit privately that this sort of thing is grotesque, but publicly, well, there are tribal considerations. As Orwell also said in an introduction to Animal Farm, “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid‐Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.” Likewise, it is “not done” to state the obvious here for fear that removing the trans block would cause the whole progressive Jenga tower to collapse.

In his excellent book The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope, Roger Scruton devotes a chapter to examining each of seven different fallacies he identifies with “unscrupulous optimism.” In a later chapter, “Our Tribal Past,” he offers a more realistic “state of nature” myth to replace the more well-known, but far less-plausible, versions by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, showing how all of these fallacious ways of thinking are most likely the unfortunate but understandable products of life in our ancestral environment, where most of human experience has occurred. Tribalism is the default state of our species. The fact that we have managed to create the cultural space for the “prophet” to appear and attempt to hold us to a higher standard than tribalism is a cause for joy, but this arrangement is fragile and always under threat. Prophets often become scapegoats, the ones who can be sacrificed without guilt for disturbing tribal unity.

Perhaps the spoiled, bored LARPers of both the right and left will get their wish, and we’ll return to political violence, where loyalty to the tribe replaces doubt and ennui. Until then, though, while we have little to fear in the way of threats to life and limb, perhaps we could stop accepting obvious lies as “necessary” gambits in a game of multi-dimensional chess.

Obiter Scripta, no. 117

By in obiter scripta No Comments

Resentment and self-righteousness: the two emotions that can last a lifetime and that never disappoint.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Midnight Maxims

I got vaccinated back in the spring. I have not experienced any “lasting effects,” other than steadily improving my lifts at the gym, which I suppose I can live with. I know of several people who are unvaccinated, for various reasons. I understand that we’re all supposed to be angry with them now, for reasons that have yet to be explained clearly to me. I don’t want to see any of these people get sick and die, but I also recognize that the freedom to decide how and why to risk your life is an important one. So, I’m indifferent. Mainly, I’m more concerned about a more perennial threat to societal well-being: the burning desire to hate some outgroup who “deserve” it. I imagine this is an especially heady thrill for progressives, who spend most of their time denying themselves any opportunity for harboring inequitable thoughts. To finally have the chance to let go of all that resentment and self-righteousness without guilt must be an ecstatic release.

And This Gives You Power Over Me?

By in non compos mentis, waiting for the barbarians 4 Comments

If you spend any time sloshing around in the giant colostomy bag for thoughts known as Twitter, you’ll sometimes encounter a phrase, “tweeting through it.” It refers to amusing instances in which an individual, having beclowned hizzorherself, studiously ignores all the mockery and continues tweeting about other topics, hoping for the jeering crowd to lose interest and go away. This seems like a real-world equivalent. Do Western governments seriously believe they can just keep repeating the same mindless bromides about diversity and inclusion to avoid facing up to their humiliating defeat, as if these stupid notions have any purchase outside of the affluent bubble they’ve created for themselves, as if they have any leverage to dictate terms to anyone here? Yes, I’m sure the Taliban’s HR department will get right on that. They certainly wouldn’t want us to invade them again!

What genuinely puzzles me is this: who is the audience for these performative statements? Surely the State Department can’t believe the Taliban cares about Western obsessions with inclusivity and gender-equity. But then, who is supposed to be impressed by this? American citizens? After the sublime display of incompetence, ineptitude, and wishful thinking over the last few weeks, what sort of simpleton listens to this feeble rhetoric issuing forth from an administration with a desiccated, dementia-addled figurehead and feels anything other than mortification? Why do they even bother saying this? Could they actually…believe their own bullshit?

The White Prog’s Burden

By in identity, race, the cult of multi No Comments

Heather Mac Donald:

The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.

Another day, another step closer to reality melding with the Onion and/or a Chappelle’s Show skit.

One of the contractors at work is a white supremacist. He drives a Chevy HD dually truck with “Farm Use” license plates, listens to country music while working, and wears shirts that say “Black Votes Matter: Trump 2020.” Yes, he’s also a black guy, and his father runs a home for troubled youths, but he is still a white supremacist, because obviously, as a progressive philosopher once mused, it all depends on the meaning of “is.” Some of you no doubt think something as trivial as his race can acquit him of charges of white supremacy. What you fail to understand is that the definition of the term no longer depends on such real-world referents as skin color, heritage, or even objective reality. Everything is interior now; haven’t you heard? Kant’s basic idea, that our experience of the world primarily takes place inside our heads rather than “out there,” escaped from the dense thickets of his impenetrable prose into the hands of callow undergraduates, with predictable results. Whether you’re a man or woman depends on your mood in that moment; our progressive political class has come to hold this “truth” as self-evident. In a similar way, the updated definition of “racism” is “anything that offends the capricious racial sensibilities of white progs.” PoCs who refuse to acknowledge their place in the Great Chain of Political Being as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic party are top of that list. Of course Larry Elder offends white progs, who, when you think about it, are the real victims here, as they usually are. Thankfully, their selfless dedication to making the world a better place outweighs the justifiable sense of grievance they carry due to how often the ungrateful subjects of their magnanimity keep disappointing them.

Because I Am Attached to You

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy No Comments

Freddie deBoer:

Here’s my essential point: the purpose of lifting weights is to look better for the vast majority of people doing it, and if this is true of you then you should admit that to yourself and structure your program accordingly. I lift for one reason and for one reason only, and that’s vanity. I don’t lift for functional strength because I simply don’t need functional strength in my life very often. If I did, my priorities would change. Right now, in the life I’m actually living, I don’t work for a moving company, play defensive end, or regularly have to fight off sabretooth tigers. Instead, I’m your typical human being who feels pretty good about himself but still sometimes likes external validation and would like to appear attractive to other human beings even though I’m happily in a relationship, for all kinds of evolutionary and enculturated reasons. For looking good lifting weights has vastly better returns for a given amount of work than cardio. (For me!) So I lift. I suspect many other people lift for the same reasons, even if they won’t admit it.

At Friday’s training session, I leaned back against the wall to catch my breath while my trainer adjusted the weight on the bar for the next set of deadlifts. My shirt clung to my torso with sweat. My muscles practically hummed from exertion as I waited for oxygen to replenish my energy. Undeniably tired, I was also at a peak of focus and alertness. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed sports or exercise knows what it’s like: you feel purified, perfectly tuned, purged of all superfluity. Nothing mattered right then beyond getting my lats set, my hips back over my heels, and my breath timed correctly. Every Friday morning, I feel a slight trepidation when anticipating the afternoon session. Squats today? Oh, man, my legs feel tight. I wonder if I’m going to have to do chain squats, or whether we’ll finish with hack squats, Bulgarian squats, or one-legged machine presses. I don’t know if I’m fully up for it… And each time, all that distracting chatter fades away with the first lift. You know it’s something you should do, you know you’ll feel better once you’re through it, but inertia’s counsel speaks up and tries to offer a defense of his client anyway. Isn’t this just life itself in miniature? The good that I would I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do. Paul sounds like he knew the shame of skipping leg day and eating junk food instead.

In his book Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, Sam Fussell mentioned, in the course of explaining why so many young bodybuilders start using steroids, that it takes around three-to-five years of serious training to develop the deep muscle striations that really make one look impressively shredded. For adolescents or young men, this can seem like an unbearable eternity. For a middle-aged man who identifies with the slow-and-steady philosophy of the tortoise, this is encouraging. Why, I’m halfway there already! But while, all other things being equal, I’d prefer to look fit rather than schlubby, it’s more about taking quiet pride in the effort it took to attain that level of fitness. I don’t go to the beach or walk around shirtless or even have social media accounts where I post flattering selfies. It may not be the most intuitive connection, but this all makes me think of something Michael Oakeshott wrote about the “conservative disposition”:

The general characteristics of this disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile dock, du hist so schon, but, Stay with me because I am attached to you.

A twenty-year-old kid who works for us on weekends asked once, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” He was surprised by the Lady of the House’s response: “Wherever my loved ones are.” If I could have any physique I wanted, which would I choose? The one I grew into, the one I worked for. For me, getting stronger and fitter isn’t a strategy to attract hot babes. It isn’t about competing with other guys to see who has the biggest biceps or the heaviest one-rep personal record on the bench press. When I take that quiet pride in seeing my measurements and numbers progress, I’m not esteeming my resemblance to ancient Greek ideals of beauty, and I’m not pretending that I’m more admirable than any possible alternative. My muscles and I have a shared history together, from arthritic lows to new personal bests in deadlifting. I built that. It’s the affection of familiarity, the memory of time spent working together toward a common purpose, the satisfaction of getting close to your best possible self. If that sounds too precisely narcissistic, imagine books instead of muscles. Would you feel insulted to hear someone dismiss your bookshelves as merely a way for you to impress others with your intellect and erudition? Doesn’t it trivialize the enjoyment of reading to reduce it to a means to an end? So too with a “mere” physical activity like weightlifting. It may not be anything special by objective standards, but it’s mine and that makes all the difference.

Obiter Scripta, no. 116

By in atheism, books, obiter scripta, religion No Comments

Despite our image of medieval people living in a world of superstition, abject terror, and haunting Gregorian chants, there was also a surprising amount of nonbelief. Peter of Cornwall, prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, complained in 1200: ‘There are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they think that the human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now and is ruled by chance rather than providence.’

— Ed West, 1215 and All That: Magna Carta and King John

Asides like this make me smile. Not because, to use the empty-headed cant term, I’m looking for “representation” of my Epicurean perspective in historical works. I just like it when the abstraction of historical narrative gives way enough for us to catch a glimpse of the singular people who populated the past, unaware and unconcerned with how difficult they might be making things for future historians.

A Quiet Vineyard

By in juxtapositions, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

As I have remarked here in the past, the feeling that the world is going to Hell in a hand-basket is a timeless feature of human nature. The world has always been, and will always be, going to Hell in a hand-basket. Still, one pauses: after all, there was someone living an ordinary life in Rome when it was sacked by the barbarians. It’s a matter of timing. You never know what you’re in for.

— Stephen Pentz, “Presence”

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