A Blind Carpenter Picked Up His Hammer and Saw

By in jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

Jason Zinoman:

One appealing aspect of dad jokes is how they can be self-mocking and teasing simultaneously. An ironic distance is baked into them. No wonder they’re popular among Generation X parents.

But they have deeper roots. Dad jokes tend to be clean, generic and short, requiring no context or explanation. In many ways, they are throwbacks to the days when comics leaned on bits that started with a trio of religious figures walking into a bar, or evergreen one-liners that began with, “Did you hear the one about … ?”

Professional comics once trafficked in these jokes, but they went out of fashion as stand-up became more ambitious, and also more personal, putting a premium on original material that reflected a specific point of view.

Dad jokes may not work within the context of stand-up anymore, but given that stand-up appears to be progressing toward its nadir, that’s probably not a bad thing. Political/therapy comedy is probably best suited to this histrionic age of sturm und drang self-expression, but for a placid and mature sensibility, the rococo flourishes of linguistic cleverness are good enough.

Talkin’ Real Loud, Talkin’ All About the New Crowd. Tryin’ to Sell Me On an Old Dream, A New Version of the Old Scene.

By in ohferfucksake, political philosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

A couple years ago, I read an absurd blog post by Nathan Robinson, who is inexplicably considered one of the brightest young stars in the leftist firmament, in which he argued that the solution to the notorious material deprivation under communism was simply to…share goods more widely under the new “luxurious leftism.” No, really:

Consider this a call, then, for a truly luxurious leftism. One that does not deprive itself of the good things in life, but which shares them abundantly with all. When we say let them eat cake, we are serious: there must be cake, it must be good cake, and it must be had by all. The reason Marie Antoinette needed beheading was not that she wished cake on the poor, but that she never actually gave them any.

Indeed, ’tis a wonder no one ever thought of that before. At any rate, it was easy enough to sigh, roll eyes, and move on. Now, it seems the New York Times sees even dumber versions of that same idea as fit to print:

We can see the contours of something new, a society as distinct from our own as that of the 20th century from feudalism, or urban civilization from the life of the hunter-gatherer. It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades and that only now are set to undermine the key features of what we had previously taken for granted as the natural order of things.

To grasp it, however, will require a new politics. One where technological change serves people, not profit. Where the pursuit of tangible policies — rapid decarbonization, full automation and socialized care — are preferred to present fantasies. This politics, which is utopian in horizon and everyday in application, has a name: Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

It’s impressive that all one has to do is place the word “luxury” in front of “communism” to be given a respectful hearing. I look forward to the Times likewise granting op-ed space to someone promoting a new book on “humanitarian fascism.” I mean, what are you having trouble with? It says “humanitarian” right there in the name! Why are you so hung up on the past? Real fascism has never been tried.

Nothing makes one feel more conservative than the realization that there is no such thing as an idea too stupid or destructive to be resurrected by people who should know better but refuse to.

He Shows the Nails

By in books, environment, foolosophy 2 Comments

The drying in of the house went so fast that I remember clearly only two parts; one was the dull repetition of hammering nails into the plywood sheathing of the floor and roof. One nail every six inches on the edges, every eight inches where the plywood lay over a floor joist or roof rafter. The average small house requires over 50,000 nails. If the average nail takes five seconds to be placed and hammered in, a builder using a hammer spends seventy hours, or a week and a half, banging nails. (The pneumatic nail gun would soon do for house building what the sewing machine gun had done for sewing.) Whenever I regret that I have not personally changed the world or the nation or even my state, I think of nails in a house. No single nail does anything very important, but they must all be there. The vast masses of human beings contribute to the building of civilization as the pounders of nails contribute to the building of a house. We are necessary but unnoticed. A few people are noticed because, instead of building, they destroy. Only the very rare person changes the world with individual acts.

— Wallace Kaufman, Coming Out Of The Woods: The Solitary Life Of A Maverick Naturalist

This passage is fairly representative of what I loved about this book — the matter-of-fact, methodical, detailed descriptions of what is actually entailed by attempting to live romantic fantasies of the “simple” life, shading into broader stoic reflections by the time the paragraph finishes. This was another of those serendipitous discoveries I picked up with no expectations (or rather, one that the Lady of the House found and handed to me), but Kaufman is a fine writer, with a graduate degree from Oxford (though, as he amusingly relates early on, that did nothing to prevent him from getting “pinhooked” by a local yokel with a grade-school education when buying his land). The humor is frequent but understated. The steady loss of his romantic innocence isn’t played for cheap laughs, nor does he engage in the performative self-loathing of other “privileged” back-to-the-land types. He loves his small slice of the wilderness, but he has no sentimental illusions about the wild, as evidenced by his description of a raid by one bee colony on another (a pillage “as savage as a Viking raid or a Mongol invasion”), or his reflections on “wild” humans like Dahmer, Manson and the twentieth-century totalitarian leaders. I lost count of how many times his rhetorical ambles brought him around to deliver another deserved kick to Thoreau’s rump. But if humans are all too guilty of projecting their naive fantasies about universal harmony and easy living onto the natural world, we are also “the animal who cares about other animals,” the one “who is curious about other animals for the sake of knowledge.” We put out food and housing for them out of pleasure in their company and genuine desire to know their lives. “If there is ever a Judgment Day in which the lives of all species are judged, let this outreach count in our favor.” In a relentlessly cruel and bloodstained natural world, the emergence of such humble efforts might be the closest thing to a miracle we’ll ever know.

Desperate and Displeased With Whoever You Are

By in foolosophy, technology No Comments

Taylor Fayle:

It’s a moment that has resonated with me for over a decade, crisply illustrating our modern malaise. We want the clarity of a decision that can cut through the noise. We want some semblance of meaning that can steer the rudder of our lives. We want to hack through the commercial and technological maximalism that defines our time. In short, we want what Merton described as an ascent to the active passivity of understanding and love and the more urgent relationship that Heidegger sought with Being.

It is unclear whether we can find our way toward these lofty goals. But if we are to make this journey, then surely the first step is to clear out the invasive overgrowth of our digital lives.

“In short” and Heidegger typically do not inhabit the same sentence. Amusing paradoxes aside, when I moved out of my parents’ house at nineteen, I spent the next ten years without TV. We had a VCR for watching the occasional video, which we didn’t do often. I didn’t get a personal computer until 2003 (though a friend had actually given us a WebTV a few years earlier). Naturally, leisure mostly involved reading, though I honestly read more voraciously now, even though I’m far busier overall. Life wasn’t better or worse in my youthful Luddite phase; it was just a little different.

My then-girlfriend was (and is) a permanently dissatisfied, miserable person. Wherever she went, there she was, and she was always unhappy in her own skin. She was the type to become a proselytizing vegan, only to backslide in a big way once the initial surge of moral superiority began to fade. She was forever coming up with some radical new idea to change habits or circumstances, and forever re-discovering that none of them could make her happy. As far as I know, she still blames everyone and everything but herself for her congenital inability to be content. I would not be at all surprised to hear that she had embraced the digital minimalism trend.

She was an extreme example. I don’t dispute that many people are unbalanced and could use some strong discipline in their digital practices. But we were often inattentive and superficial long before we had smartphones to blame. “In short,” what we want is to always be somewhere else doing something else. We’re always scenting purer water not here but anywhere. Our digital dilemma is not unique, but pretending it is allows us another opportunity to stimulate our egos. Sort of like developing an addiction to likes and retweets, in fact.

You Wasted Life, Why Wouldn’t You Waste Death?

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Apart from other considerations, language makes a marvellously comfortable nest for the mind, far downier than anything the rude empirical world can provide. In a famous passage, Montaigne speaks feelingly of ignorance as a soft and pleasant pillow on which to rest a prudent head, but he had never seen a Marxist cradled in the arms of what he pleased to call the dialectic.

…In our own day, it’s a particular function of language to shield us as best it can from the intolerable glare of Nothing and Nonbeing…As atmospheric gasses soften the otherwise intolerable rays of the sun, so the gasses of language protect the psyche from what it can’t bear to contemplate steadily. The threat of naked vision is a fearful one.

— Robert Adams, Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side

It may be a distinction with only a slight difference, but I don’t think our incessant chattering provides a distraction from death per se. I think it’s probably more painful to consider how frivolously we use the time we know we have.

Obiter Scripta, no. 67

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Doctor Johnson, being rowed down the Thames by a sculler, was assailed from the shore (as custom then was) by a foulmouthed fellow with a very generous flow of invective. Having endured as much as a man decently could, he turned on the scurrilist and said loudly and deliberately, “Sir, your mother, under pretext of keeping a bawdy house, was a receiver of stolen goods.” The subordinate clause provides at once the balance and the dynamic of this insult. “Under pretext of” gives evidence of judicious discrimination between appearance and reality; yet it implies that the man’s mother, casting about for the most decent front she could find for her fencing operations, could imagine nothing better than running a bawdy house. There is no way to make pretext or pretense of running a bawdy house except by running one, so that implication stands too. It is an extraordinarily opulent sentence; yet balanced, objective, and perfectly simple. One would like to think the recipient took it home and thought about it for several weeks.

— Robert Adams, Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side

In the course of my two minutes of Googling rigorous research, I learned that it was apparently considered good sport for boaters on the Thames to insult each other as they passed, but Adams suggests here that bystanders on the bank also took part. I find it much more amusing to imagine that some random weirdo just decided to verbally assault Johnson, whether he recognized him or not, just like I find it amusing to imagine a time-travelling Johnson taking part in a modern “Yo mama” fight. “Sir, it is a fact that your mother is so corpulent…”

For Him Was Reserved the Empire of the World

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Then he subdued the Pisidians who made head against him, and conquered the Phrygians, at whose chief city, Gordium, which is said to be the seat of the ancient Midas, he saw the famous chariot fastened with cords made of the rind of the cornel-tree, which whosoever should untie, the inhabitants had a tradition, that for him was reserved the empire of the world. Most authors tell the story that Alexander finding himself unable to untie the knot, the ends of which were secretly twisted round and folded up within it, cut it asunder with his sword. But Aristobulus tells us it was easy for him to undo it, by only pulling the pin out of the pole, to which the yoke was tied, and afterwards drawing off the yoke itself from below.

— Plutarch, Life of Alexander

He’s apparently not a fan of the slow feed dog bowl.

Walk for the Cure

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche, walking No Comments

For walking is monotonous by itself. It isn’t ‘interesting’, and children know it. Basically, walking is always the same, putting one foot in front of the other. But the secret of that monotony is that it constitutes a remedy for boredom. Boredom is immobility of the body confronted with emptiness of mind. The repetitiveness of walking eliminates boredom, for, with the body active, the mind is no longer affected by its lassitude, no longer draws from its inertia the vague vertigo of an endless spiral. In a state of boredom one is always seeking something to do despite the obvious futility of any activity. When walking, there is always something to do: walk. Or rather, no, there’s nothing more to do because one is just walking, and when one is going to a place or covering a route, one has only to keep moving. That is boringly obvious. The body’s monotonous duty liberates thought. While walking, one is not obliged to think, to think this or that or like this or like that. During the continuous but automatic effort of the body, the mind is placed at one’s disposal. It is then that thoughts can arise, surface or take shape.

…We mentioned earlier the need to distinguish between monotony and boredom. Boredom is an absence of plans, of prospects. You circle around yourself, at a loose end. Waiting, but not for anything specific: not expecting anything, but indefinitely suspended in empty time. The bored body reclines, gets up restlessly, jerks its arms about, steps out in one direction then another, stops suddenly, starts again, fidgets. It is trying desperately to fill each second. Boredom is an empty rebellion against immobility; nothing to do, not even looking for something to do. You despair of yourself when bored. You tire of everything straight away, because it is on your own initiative. That faces you with the immense, unbearable ordeal of recognizing the poverty of your desires. Boredom is dissatisfaction repeated every second, disgust with beginnings: everything is wearisome from the start, because it’s you who starts it.

Walking isn’t tiresome in that way. It’s simply monotonous. When you walk you are going somewhere, in motion, with a uniform tread. There is far too much regularity and rhythmic movement in walking to cause boredom, which is fed by vacuous agitation (mind rotating aimlessly in a stationary body). That is what led monks to suggest walking as a remedy for acedia, that insidious illness that gnaws at the soul.

— Fréderic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

Patrick Kurp mentions the tedium of exercising on a recumbent bike, which can only be alleviated by the right sort of book. The Lady of the House loves walking on forest hikes or urban strolls, but thinks me slightly mad for doing my cardio exercise on a treadmill. There are practical reasons for my choice. I don’t live in a particularly walkable neighborhood. I’d rather exercise at home than go to a gym. But I enjoy my treadmill walks, probably because music keeps my mind occupied while going nowhere. Put in my earbuds, cue up a playlist, and off I go. I am disciplined enough to complete boring-but-necessary tasks, but I don’t seem to struggle with the sense of futility that afflicts so many others during stationary exercise.

I see from my archives that it’s been almost ten years (!) since I read a wonderful book by Bruce Ellis Benson, Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. In that post, I excerpted numerous passages from the book about how thoroughly music informed Nietzsche’s entire life. Ellis’s thoughts on “de-cadence” have often come to mind since then:

Although Nietzsche never explicitly speaks of decadence in terms of “de-cadence” (falling out of rhythm), that way of thinking about decadence actually fits quite well with what Nietzsche says about it…But one can also interpret decadence musically, as a “de-cadence”, in the sense of a loss of rhythm. On that read, decadence is the loss of life’s rhythm in which we are out of step both with our true selves and with the earth.

I’m not sure how I could ever satisfactorily put into words how much this notion of a “rhythm” to life itself resonates with me. It’s true that my brain is always playing one melody or another on a feedback loop. I’m always keeping the rhythm to my mental soundtrack through various subtle tics — lightly clicking my teeth, lips or tongue, or tapping fingers and toes. I’m always in sync with one time signature or another. It seems to give some kind of important structure to my activities. But on the physical side of things, what Gros says is also true. There are many times when both physical and mental dissatisfaction is relieved by simply getting up and moving in a regular rhythm. Something about the actual cadence of activity, especially walking, seems to produce solutions to whatever is bothering you. Like most people, when I’m feeling out of sorts, the last thing I want to do is exercise. Luckily, I know enough from experience that’s it’s probably the best thing I could do. Sync your body, and your mind will follow.

I Don’t Need Your Civil War

By in political philosophy, the geist of the zeit 2 Comments

Alan Jacobs:

If you believe that there is a “crisis facing religious conservatives” arising from the dominance of a tyrannical liberalism, and you want to defeat those enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentations of their (trans) women, how, exactly, do you further that goal by attacking … David French? What precisely is the strategic benefit of that? If you’re Ahmari, don’t you need people like French on your side? Or do you think you’re such a massive movement that you can do without people like French? Or do you think that French will be abashed by the incisiveness of your attack, your mockery of “Pastor French,” and will come over to your side, ultimately meekly submitting to the claims of the Catholic Magisterium? Or do you think that other people will read your attack and think “Wow, just look at how Ahmari dealt with that pathetic loser French, I want to be on his side”? Seriously: How’s this supposed to work?

He’s talking about the recent declaration of intellectual hostilities between two different wings of contemporary conservatism, with Sohrab Ahmari launching an attack on David French. The post-2016 battle lines are becoming more entrenched, with Ahmari and others around First Things representing a mostly-Catholic, social conservative, pro-Trump (♫ one of these things is not like the others ♫) coalition, opposed to the more classically-liberal, free-market, Never-Trumpers around National Review. That’s always the way of it, I suppose — there’s none so blind as them that don’t agree. Apostates are more offensive to us than infidels. My sympathies are entirely with the Frenchies, and even if they weren’t, I think the Ahmarian vision and strategy is delusional. But, whatever, none of that’s very interesting. No, Jacobs’s rhetorical questions here reminded me of a recent column by Christopher DeGroot, who I assume is very much on the Ahmari side of the barricades (he also recently attacked French as a “phony conservative par excellence”):

It is partly by struggling with and against others, in order to actualize our values, that we can find meaning today. Nor is this so different from how people achieved meaning in the past. Like other right-wing writers, I spend a fair amount of time criticizing liberalism, but I realize that the regimes which preceded it also were necessarily fleeting, and had serious problems of their own, which indeed gave rise to liberalism itself. And just as people in the past found meaning through struggles that eventually produced liberalism, so in our time people can struggle to produce something that, in some respects, may be greater than liberalism. Nobody knows what that might be, and that, too, is a good thing, because that very uncertainty is what makes the meaning possible.

“Life never was a May day for men,” said Thomas Carlyle. And yet our struggles are intrinsically meaningful, and perhaps more important than our goals. Speaking for myself, anyway, I generally find that the satisfaction I get from an accomplishment—whether it’s a good piece of writing or winning a basketball game—is relatively brief and somewhat anticlimactic. The process, the striving, the struggle—that is the main thing, for that is what fills up our days and gives them a forward drive, something to live, to fight, and even to die for.

So, if I were to offer an answer to Jacobs, I might say: considerations of “strategic value” are beside the point here. In fact, maybe those considerations are too proceduralist to be of interest. Strategy? Allies? How boring! The point is to fight for a glorious, even doomed cause, to exult in the thrill of combat. In the meantime, we can have skirmishes with our ideological neighbors stemming from the narcissism of small differences. It all just goes to reinforce the bedrock conservative insight: there is no cumulative moral progress. People just invent new rationalizations for indulging in the same old actions.

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