Whither Liberalism?

By in political philosophy 3 Comments

It is possible to envision a stoical and realist liberalism that would accept that freedom and toleration must survive in a hostile or indifferent world. Liberalism would be recognised to be a particular form of life, like the others that humans have fashioned and then destroyed, but still worth defending as a civilised way in which humans can live together.

In practice a stance of this kind is hardly possible. Liberals cannot do without the faith that they form the vanguard of an advancing way of life. The appeal of John Stuart Mill is that he allows them to preserve this self-image, while the liberal world continues to evaporate around them.

— John Gray, “Deluded Liberals Can’t Keep Clinging to a Dead Idea”

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No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom. The reason liberals like laws is because they give us more time for everything in life that isn’t law-like. When we aren’t fighting every minute for minimal rights, or reasserting our territory, or worrying about the next clan’s claims, we can look at the stars and taste new cheeses and make love, sometimes with the wrong person. The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

…If there is any comfort in its possible extinction, it’s that the practice of telling false likenesses from true ones, good coin from bad—frequently in the company of people we can’t stand—is fundamental to living in the real world at any moment. Empathy and argument are foundational to existence. That’s why the prehistory of liberalism is mostly the history of commonplace civilization, of bazaars and agoras and trading ports—all those enforced and opportunistic acts of empathy, where you had to make bargains and share selling space and find workable commonalities with people fundamentally unlike yourself in order to live at all. That’s the work of liberalism, and even if the worst happens, as it may, it is work that won’t stop, can’t stop, because it is also the real work of being human.

— Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

Reversion to the Mean

By in antisocial networking, books, education, the statusphere No Comments

Peter Murphy:

The third-hand dealing in ideas occurs within a tiny social bubble. Twenty-two per cent of American adults use Twitter. Ten per cent of those produce 80 per cent of tweets. Eight per cent say that what they post is related to politics. In short the class of third-hand dealers is 2 per cent of the adult population. The rest of the people on Twitter and other social media follow celebrities and repost cat videos. Little more than 1.5 per cent of adults comment on politics. Outwardly that tiny figure is almost unchanged from the first stirrings of democracy in the nineteenth century. Then 2 per cent of the population defined the reading public. These were persons with a high degree of literacy who read books. A century ago that group substantially overlapped with the opinion class.

The Public Education Acts of the nineteenth century had the rationale of making the whole population literate and numerate. This justified the expansion of the democratic franchise. The reading of newspapers and then books did expand through to the 1940s. Then began a steady decline. We still have 2 per cent of dedicated readers today. But the project of expanding serious reading not just to the entire population but even to the 15 per cent of persons who make up today’s professional-managerial and technical-administrative classes has died. As this occurred, a gulf opened up between the opinion class and the reading class. The opinion class no longer reads. It emotes.

As Susan Jacoby once wrote, “what has been lost is the culture of effort.” Through a unique confluence of historical circumstances, there was a time when the middlebrow ideal of striving to improve oneself through self-education, especially reading, was widespread and generally respected. That ideal is now generally an object of mockery. Most people don’t care about achievement per se so much as achievement relative to others. Literacy is far too common to be high-status anymore. When garbage collectors and truck drivers can join the Book of the Month Club and be exposed to the same classic literature as university students, well, how are the latter supposed to feel special now? Like a village in Vietnam, they had to destroy the ideal of aspirational reading in order to save it. Now that the garbage collectors and truck drivers are safely occupied with thumbing their phones and reading Facebook memes, books can regain their earlier prestige as a mark of distinction between the screened and the unscreened.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Oct. 21, 2012.]

Geraldine Brooks:

For most couples, this would be thin gruel for a contretemps. But my sister is a bibliophile and married a man of similar passions. They had just completed a house renovation, a feature of which was a magnificent bookshelf that spanned two floors. All had gone well as they placed their novels, histories, memoirs. But schism had arisen over the biographies. She wanted to shelve them alpha by subject, on the grounds that she wouldn’t necessarily be able to recall the author’s name. (Since she is, herself, a biographer, this view seemed both pragmatic and un-self-aggrandising.) But that notion was anathema to her husband, who wanted to follow proper library practice. Heated words had been exchanged.

I’ve had a frank exchange of views on this topic with my own girlfriend, although tempers and conversational temperature remained in check and unheated, respectively. Apparently she considers my method a benevolent sort of madness, though she finds it cruelly amusing to occasionally threaten to organize my shelves by alphabetical order when I’m not around.

You see, I combine a certain aesthetic rigidity with its polar opposite, a full-blown touchy-feely mysticism. On any given shelf, a certain pattern will be unerringly followed: tallest books on the ends, sloping gently down to the shortest books in the middle. All other schematics, such as author’s name, book title, or subject matter, are absolutely subordinate to this rule. Occasionally, I’ll attempt to group a single author’s works together, but if doing so would disrupt the even, proportional harmony of tall-to-short, then they’ll just have to settle for sharing the same shelf.

Over the years, I got new bookcases as the need presented itself, and proceeded to fill them chronologically; i.e., books went on the shelf in order of purchase. Glancing over a shelf could trigger a strong memory of, say, the winter of 2002, seeing all the associated reading material of that time period arranged together (and if I were a frustrated lit major, this would be the place to insert a Pretentious Proust Reference). Most of my bookcases were either mismatched secondhand-shop orphans, or affordable big-box particle-board types.

But several years ago, I inherited two beautiful handmade walnut cases as a housewarming gift. Their superior quality and irresistible symmetry dovetailed perfectly with their placement in the great room, and so I did something uncharacteristically bold and radical — I rearranged my books in order to house all my favorites within them. I imagined these shelves as conversation pieces — leaving aside the fact that I rarely have visitors, let alone visitors who share my reading taste, but never mind all that, just humor me here — and thought: which books best combine aesthetic appeal with substance? Which arrangement would both catch the eye and stimulate the brain of any casual browser?

And so I began the laborious process of choosing sentimental favorites and arranging them together in new tall-to-short relationships, seeking to feel some sort of poetic feng shui as I casually ran my eye over them. Once things were arranged to my liking, I committed them to my intermittent eidetic memory, only making the occasional changes after rigorous consideration. Really, I consider this discipline to be akin to bonsai sculpture; I’m just using tree byproducts rather than actual trees.

Yesterday, when I wanted to quote the epigraph to Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, I went to the spot where it had always been — in the middle of the second shelf down, on the white bookcase beside my bed. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t on any of the shelves in that case. A couple of her books were in that spot, in fact. I finally found it in one of the bookcases out in the great room. It was arranged by size, in the middle along with other mass-market paperbacks, but still… “Do you remember moving it there?” she asked, the picture of innocence. “No,” I replied, though now I’m not as sure.

I’ve got my eye on her now. I suspect gaslighting.

What You Oughtn’t to Do, But You Do Anyway

By in antisocial networking, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy No Comments

Abby Manzella:

As I watch the words build without the distracting shot of adrenaline from the phone’s vibration and the laptop’s beep, I think of Pavlov, and how well we’ve been trained like dogs to retreat to our treats. I long for the blue light that sometimes flashes on my phone. Our phones have trained us to receive a dopamine burst even through a signal light. Many of our senses are covered: sound, sight, and touch. If programmers could only figure out how to deliver taste and smell, our food-centered selves would do nothing but tweet.

As I complain, though, I watch the words accumulating and do not open another desktop window.

Brad Warner:

Normally, when you desire something, that desire is hooked to a thought that says, “If I satisfy this desire, my life will improve,” or “I must satisfy this desire or else I will not be happy.” So you chase after whatever you desire in the hope that you can catch that thing and thereby either improve your life or avoid misery.

…But when I say I want a milkshake, I mean it. I honestly do want a milkshake. But I also know that drinking a milkshake won’t really fix anything. It might make me happy for a few minutes. But then it’ll be over and I’ll just have a bunch of useless calories inside me, making me fat. I’ll probably also feel kind of bloated and gross because that’s how I usually feel after drinking a milkshake. I want the milkshake. But, even though I want it — and I mean like I really, really want it — I don’t have that corresponding sense that getting what I want is the best thing that could happen.

Too often, we try to repress or deny desires, which only encourages them. It’s better to look at them directly and recognize, with whatever wisdom we’ve acquired through experience, that whether we satisfy those desires or not, very little will change. This tends to lessen their compulsive hold on us. Still, I don’t know about you, but when I’m truly interested or absorbed in something, I can easily ignore all those little temptations. If I’m easily distracted, it’s probably a sign that I’m conflicted about paying attention to whatever I’m engaged with. I know I’m of a minority opinion here, but whenever I hear the trendy complaint about how Silicon Valley has hijacked our attention spans, I think, well, it seems to me the reality of how you choose to spend your time is being laid bare before you, and the difference between how you act and how you think you should act offends your pride, so you retreat behind the bad-faith claim that your agency has been compromised by forces beyond your control. Sartre may have been an execrable little toad of a man who was wrong about damn near everything, but at least he managed to be right about one important thing. We constantly lie like this to ourselves to protect our self-image, when it would be far more dignified to accept responsibility for our actions (or the lack thereof).

You Are Just Spare Parts, Aren’t Ya, Bud?

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, race, the cult of multi No Comments

Elisabeth Donnelly:

Those slang examples betray some of the show’s bad habits: Like a lot of dirtbag comedies, Letterkenny can too often over-rely on immature jokes about sexuality, particularly with pastor Glen (who’s played by the show’s director, Jacob Tierney, and I’m not sure what that says).

It also has something of an inconsistent track record on gender stereotypes: While much of the show’s comedy is rooted in finding the softness in overblown masculinity, it tends to draw women broadly, especially as sexpots. Gail, the local bartender and one of Letterkenny’s few characters of color, basically has only one characteristic — that she’s horny. To the show’s credit, later seasons make a point to calm down some of the yowling caricatures, showing the live-and-let-live tolerance that exists in this small town.

Oh, boy. It seems the brain trust at Vox has discovered the Canadian indie comedy series Letterkenny and decided to issue one of their customary explainers. I would say the point escapes her, but that would imply it was at risk of being captured in the first place, and I fear that notion won’t bear scrutiny. Let me interrupt with a little ‘splaining of my own: The show is set in rural Ontario, in the fictional town of Letterkenny, population 5,000. We here at the hermitage enjoy it for its absurd, rapid-fire dialogue, and, as one of us also hails from rural Canuckistan, we appreciate the little details for being a true-to-life representation of small-town life there. It’s not what I would call hilarious, but it’s clever and notably quotable.

Now, to be fair (to be faihrrr) to Ms. Donnelly, the show’s often-raunchy humor is largely by, and for, twenty-somethings. Lots of drinking, fighting, swearing and fornicating. Gail is indeed the most tedious character. But experienced Voxspotters could have probably already guessed the source of this excerpt because of that telltale tic—there. Did you catch it? It’s as predictable as a knee jerking under a doctor’s reflex hammer. Progressives just can’t let their gaze rest on any scene populated by more than three people without doing a quick diversity head-count and pronouncing something to be problematic. I find it especially amusing to see her fume about Glen, the barely-closeted gay pastor (and probably my favorite character). She knows he’s somehow problematic, even if she can’t quite prove it, but oh, when she does, you better believe charges will be brought. Yuk it up while you can, Glen. You can only hide behind the writer/director shield for so long.

But yes, Gail is one of the show’s few “characters of color,” though I expect Donnelly to soon be seen in public with a placard around her neck denouncing her for the wokecrime of “erasing” the substantial native population who feature in the show, led by Wayne’s sometime-girlfriend Tanis. But again, to be fair (to be faihrrr) to our intersectionality inspectors, they might not have recognized the actors as natives (or First Nations inhabitants, as they say up there), since the closest they’ve ever gotten to one is that time they scribbled Racist!!! on a Washington Redskins decal on the bumper of a truck in the parking garage. But I digress. My point is, as an American of pallor who just so happens to have spent several days in rural Canada just a couple weeks ago, I can say that one of the first things you notice when out in public is, well, the lack of black people. It’s like suddenly becoming aware of a background hum that isn’t there anymore. You walk through a big-box store and think, what seems so different here? Oh, right, it’s very, very white. There are no African-Americans, or, I suppose, African-Canadians. The ones you do meet are mostly medical students directly from Africa. What are the writers supposed to do about this? Is the show supposed to be “representative” of rural Ontario or Brooklyn? How typically Ameri-centric for our Voxling to project her country’s myopic obsession with perfectly-proportioned racial pie charts onto foreign communities, irrespective of their unique histories! Shall we add colonialism to the epithets on her placard?

Actually, wait, hold on a minute. We’ve already seen how racial separatism has become acceptable again under a progressive aegis — segregated university graduation ceremonies, “cultural appropriation” (separatism rebranded under a new name), etc. Is it time for forced resettlement to make a comeback? No, no, hear me out. If progressives march people out of the inner cities in order to repopulate and diversify rural communities, would that be for the greater good? We could call it “reverse gentrification,” which would actually make it doubleplusgood. As we know, when you change the word (or the branding), you change the reality. (I can’t believe I give away such good advice for free.)

Anyway, enough of that foolishness. Back to chorin’.

That Vacuity of Soul

By in foolosophy, identity, psychology 2 Comments

In societies such as modern Britain we have means and comforts that our forebears could never have dreamed of. But having achieved them, we don’t know what to do with them, and some people are bored. Bored with their jobs, bored with the lack of struggle, bored with the lack of heroism and purpose that security brings.

So, unsure what to build next, or how else to gain purpose, a certain number of people are finding meaning in self-denial and self-blame. They’re finding ultimate meaning in the call to repent before the imminent, partly longed for, apocalypse.

— Douglas Murray, “The Empty Lives of Extinction Rebellion Fanatics”

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The most general survey shows us that the two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom. We may go further, and say that in the degree in which we are fortunate enough to get away from the one, we approach the other. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between the two. The reason of this is that each of these two poles stands in a double antagonism to the other, external or objective, and inner or subjective. Needy surroundings and poverty produce pain; while, if a man is more than well off, he is bored. Accordingly, while the lower classes are engaged in a ceaseless struggle with need, in other words, with pain, the upper carry on a constant and often desperate battle with boredom… Now, intellectual dullness is at the bottom of that vacuity of soul which is stamped on so many faces, a state of mind which betrays itself by a constant and lively attention to all the trivial circumstances in the external world. This is the true source of boredom—a continual panting after excitement, in order to have a pretext for giving the mind and spirits something to occupy them. The kind of things people choose for this purpose shows that they are not very particular, as witness the miserable pastimes they have recourse to, and their ideas of social pleasure and conversation: or again, the number of people who gossip on the doorstep or gape out of the window. It is mainly because of this inner vacuity of soul that people go in quest of society, diversion, amusement, luxury of every sort, which lead many to extravagance and misery.

— Schopenhauer, “The Wisdom of Life”

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Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

— George Orwell, “Review of Mein Kampf”

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published May 17, 2013.]

Jessica Grose:

Which is all to say, it’s seen as socially admirable and masculine for a man to be on diaper duty or to sous-vide a steak, but there are no closet organizing tips in the pages of Esquire, no dishwasher detergent ads in the pages of GQ. Considering the strides that have been made in getting men to share the labor in other traditionally female domestic areas, why has cleaning remained the final frontier?

At its most basic, a reason why a lot of men don’t want to clean is obvious: it’s not fun. The rewards of the other two traditionally female household tasks—childcare and cooking—are palpable. Your kid’s smile, a delicious meal. But not so with cleaning. Drew Magary, a Deadspin columnist and the author of the forthcoming parenting memoir Someone Could Get Hurt, says that men will never take the initiative and clean without being asked “because it sucks.”

…With all these obstacles to real gender parity of chores, what’s a working woman to do? Philosophy professor Alexandra Bradner suggests on the Atlantic’s website that couples sit down with a list of questions like, “Do I do half of the laundry and half of the dishes every day?” to figure out where they’re slacking off in comparison to their mate. This sounds exhausting and impractical. If I do one load of laundry, it’s easier for me to do the second rather than wait for my husband to mosey over. (Bradner also says that when men do traditionally female chores, they’re enacting “‘small instances of gender heroism,’ or ‘SIGH’s”—which, barf.)

Cooking meals and taking care of the crotchfruit are necessities; mopping and scrubbing are more like bonus options. Eating out all the time would be expensive, and society tends to frown on child neglect, but it’ll take a while for the accumulation of filth and vermin to actually become hazardous, and my experience suggests that most people, regardless of gender, lean more toward being lazy slobs than neat freaks.

I had to share a room with my brother until I was twelve. My parents used to jokingly call us Felix and Oscar over our diametrically opposed personalities. Once I finally convinced my mom that he was capable of having his own room without needing supervision (she’s always been an overprotective worrier), I started doing my own vacuuming, laundry, dusting, etc. and never looked back, while he turned every living space he inhabited into a landfill.

Honestly, I enjoy doing chores. It’s very satisfying to make messy things clean. Clutter affects my soul like being forced to listen to the strumming of a hundred guitars, each out of tune in a unique way. I can accept that life itself is chaotic and unruly and prone to make a mockery of all our best-laid plans, but I nonetheless have a deep-rooted psychological need to create simple, streamlined tidiness out of disorder within my living space. Without the opportunity to channel it like this, who knows how that control-freakishness might otherwise express itself?

This led to an amusing culture-shock moment with my girlfriend, who comes from a family where resentfully-performed chores serve as passive-aggressive pawns to be skillfully deployed for Machiavellian advantage on a psychological chessboard. In short, it took some convincing for her to accept that things here were exactly what they appeared to be, that I washed dishes, scrubbed toilets, emptied trashcans and hauled firewood because I had long ago accepted them as basic, inevitable aspects of my routine, aspects that I didn’t particularly feel strongly about one way or another. As I’ve said before, I consider myself mostly honest, not because of any burning devotion to abstract moral principles, but because I simply don’t have the patience or love of intrigue to bother weaving tangled webs of deceit. Way too much trouble. Same principle applies here. I’m a simple fellow, baby, I said. I see something that needs doing, and I do it. It’ll just gnaw at me if I try to ignore it. Besides, I did all this for years when I lived by myself, I’m in the habit of it, why should that change now? But why not ask or demand that the other members of the household do it? she asked. I stared at her like she was a madwoman.

Because, one, I’m a firm believer in the adage about doing things yourself if you want them done right. And two, I get far, far more satisfaction from getting something done when and how I want it done than I would from asking someone else to do it, waiting impatiently for them to get to it, which would no doubt be too late for my liking, and then being forced to restrain the urge to kibitz their efforts or brush them aside and do it my own damned self. A perfectly-divided pie chart of chore distribution doesn’t mean shit to me. I laugh at your weak, puny notions of dialogue and parity. I am the motherfucking tyrant of my domicile, the love-child of Alexander the Great and Mr. Clean, and the linoleum will run with the blood of any who dare oppose or hinder me (not for long, though, because that stuff’s hard to get up once it’s dried).

Gender heroism? What a laugh. Could that previous paragraph sound any more patriarchal?

Epispurious

By in books, nietzsche, philosophy No Comments

James Romm:

A similar bid for relevance gives rise to contemporary discussions of policy or politics, in some of which Ms. Wilson inserts her own views or “reconstructs” what Epicurus might have said. In a chapter called “What Is Real?,” she adduces the idea of “racial inferiority” as an example of an “Unthing,” an illusion without atomic substance. This leads her into a critique of housing and zoning laws that, in her view, perpetuate urban poverty in nonwhite neighborhoods. Abortion, pollution and climate change are also addressed, in ways that feel opportunistic or forced. Ms. Wilson can be an insightful philosophic guide—and Epicurus is a thinker who deserves an insightful rediscovery—but her attempt to address a wide range of modern problems feels inauthentic. From many of these, Epicurus himself would have simply sought to escape.

I assume most authors don’t get to choose their titles, so I didn’t think this would be an actual how-to guide, but I have to agree — I came away from How to Be an Epicurean with the impression that Epicureanism was more or less indistinguishable from progressive liberalism. This would have come as a surprise to the very un-progressive Nietzsche, for one, who generally had only positive things to say about Epicurus — his aphorism from which this very site takes its name is presumed to be in reference to the Epicurean ideal (the “coarser brother” is presumably Stoicism). And my own Epicurean theories about the meaning of life and nonexistence after death certainly haven’t led me to progressive political conclusions. Not that I wanted to see Epicurus viewed through a “conservative” lens, of course, which would have been equally tendentious. I would have just preferred for him to be allowed more opportunity to speak for himself with Wilson providing additional clarifying context, rather than having him sit on her lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy, offering up “his” opinion on climate change.

But if Wilson overshares her personal political views, she under-delivers when it comes to making Epicurus sound insightful enough to read for oneself. Epicurean wisdom here sounds a lot like unhelpful platitudes and truisms. When faced with the intractable problems of the human condition, we apparently should review the evidence calmly and dispassionately. Well, thanks for that. “The answers to many such questions are available to anyone who makes a search for them,” she says after raising hypothetical questions about the costs and benefits of welfare-state programs. Good to know that’s settled! Neil deGrasse Tyson would no doubt agree. Unfortunately, this kind of relevance-seeking will only make Epicurus irrelevant once modern progressive doctrine morphs into its next phase, and he deserves better than that.

I Love Life’s Surprises So Much, I Don’t Want to Know What’s Ahead

By in free speech, fresh hell, moralizing, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Kevin Williamson:

The “x might plausibly encourage y” argument against free speech has been with us for a very long time. It was the basis for the persecution of heretics in the Christian world, the censorship that John Milton criticized in the 17th century, the suppression of war protesters in the United States (the legal justification of which is the origin of the ubiquitous “fire in a crowded theater” trope), and the effort to censor and marginalize rap music in the 1980s, a project that brought to public prominence a woman called Tipper Gore, at the time Mrs. Al. Mrs. Gore’s name became, for a generation, the national shorthand for prudish blue-rinsed tight-assery allied to scheming political opportunism. She was a figure of fun, loathed by all right-thinking people. But Tipper Gore–ism, like the poor, syphilis, and usury, we shall always have with us.

One of the genuine pleasures of middle-age is seeing stupid intellectual trends come around again. I mean that sincerely. I’m not one of those who wear a veneer of hard-bitten cynicism to cover a core of progressive idealism. I’m not crying inside as I watch former defenders of free speech turn into moralistic censors. I’m honestly chuckling at the absurdity of this cultural game of musical chairs. When I was an adolescent, it was Christian conservatives (and opportunistic liberals like the Gores) who wanted to bowdlerize popular culture and stop the lovable kids in Footloose from dancing at their prom. Now it’s po-faced progressives who find everything fun to be “problematic” and life-threatening. No one is immune to this conceit, and no one is “progressing” toward anything. Human souls may not reincarnate, but ideas and impulses surely do. Leaves will bud, flourish, blaze and fall; notions formerly dismissed as passé will be refurbished and reintroduced. It’s simultaneously amusing and reassuring to understand that there’s nothing to do but enjoy the spectacle in all its ridiculous glory. Mencken! Thou shouldst be living now. Your country has need of thee.

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