I Believe I’ll Trust My Broom

By in collectanea No Comments

Eleven inches of snow yesterday. Sixty yards of driveway needing to be cleared for delivery trucks. I whistled for my trusty steed —

— and away we went.

Yes, the snow was light and powdery enough that I was able to sweep the driveway with an old broom that has lived at this house longer than I have. Three or four swinging arcs was all it took to get down to ground. My neighbor, a Good Samaritan who goes down the road on his tractor after heavy snowstorms, clearing everyone’s driveway for them, hailed me as he approached. “You want me to hit it?” he asked. “You about got it already, ain’tcha!” I’d already had a good hour-and-a-quarter workout, so I gratefully let him finish it off for me. It’s amazing to me how easily — and willfully — we forget this, but a little vigorous exercise first thing in the morning always makes the day feel more productive, in addition to the usual health benefits.

It’s rare that we get any significant snow before the new year. Usually, it’s February or, lately, even March before we get the serious storms. Our financial planning consultant was telling us a few weeks ago that they were supposedly predicting a much snowier winter for us than usual, but I usually chalk such things up to Farmer’s Almanac rumors. I guess we’ll see. Ironically, we had been down in North Carolina on Friday and Saturday, but had to jettison our original plan to stay through Sunday due to the storm. They apparently got it worse than we did, with ice mixed in to bring down trees and power lines. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever had to head north to escape a winter storm.

Still, it sure does look pretty along with the neighborhood Christmas lights. And I enjoy snow much more now that I no longer have to drive in it for work.

At Sixes and Sevens

By in books, editorial vigilantism, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

As the author of a recent book on snobbery, one of Fleming’s new deadly sins, and as of the moment the country’s, perhaps the world’s, leading snobographer, I cannot resist listing the seven deadly sins of snobbery. These are — trumpets please — serving veal and/or iceberg lettuce to company; sending one’s children to land-grant colleges; admitting to having voted for George Bush, the father or the son; owning a Cadillac SUV; mocking denim in public; and openly acknowledging one’s pleasure in slightly overweight women, sweet wine, and Tchaikovsky.

— Joseph Epstein, Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins

Obiter Scripta, no. 55

By in books, foolosophy, obiter scripta No Comments

Cosima had committed herself to marriage with von Bülow when she was still in her teens and had been swept away by a concert in Berlin conducted by him. The concert program had included the first Berlin performance of Wagner’s Venusberg music from Tannhaüser. Von Bülow had proposed to her on the same night. Both of them were in love with Wagner and completely transported by his glorious music; one wonders who he was wooing and who she was accepting.

— Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Albertine’s professed undying love for the Narrator and his intellect is explained as a result of those mornings when he had just shaved; it was his smooth skin she really loved, though she instinctively rationalized it as something more profound. How many times do these mischievous ghosts hover over our shoulders, redirecting our thoughts, diverting our feelings? How often do we focus on the figure rather than the background as the source of our happiness, only to feel disappointed or betrayed when that surrounding context changes? And yet, how many great things are nonetheless born of those humble parents Inattention and Error?

The Red and the Black

By in books, foolosophy No Comments

I remember it well: mid-December 2003. After 3 ½ years of increasing decrepitude, I was a couple of weeks away from finally being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (and treated, thank God). I also had the flu that weekend. But at 3:15 a.m. on Sunday morning, I got the call saying that one of the new carriers was too scared to do her route in the snowstorm. I was needed. Duty called. Out I went to drive around for six or so hours in great physical pain, in a medicated state, in hazardous conditions, making deliveries. My friend Arthur commiserated with my suffering later. I replied that seeing as how the book I was then reading was Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, I didn’t feel like I had it so bad. “I swear, you’ve got to stop wasting your time on these bodice-busters,” he said.

I picked these up last month. A volunteer was restocking the history section, and I saw the Black Book near the top of the banker box when she removed the lid. My face was an impassive mask, but anyone who looked closely might have seen the blaze of avarice behind my eyes lighting up my skull like a jack-o’-lantern. I’d never seen a copy at a sale before, and even used copies typically sell for around fifty bucks online. The rules are that no one can touch any of the new books coming out until the volunteer is completely done and has moved away; we don’t want elbows and books landing on anyone’s head during the scrum. A few fellow vultures had gathered around, attracted by the scent of fresh arrivals. We subtly angled for position, watching each other out of the corners of our eyes, trying not to betray our intentions while planning what to grab first. Finally, she finished and left. Quicker than a striking cobra, my hand flashed out and grabbed the Black Book. Kenny, who had been reaching for it as well, but from a less advantageous position, with a grunt and an index finger gesture signaled his grudging admiration for my having bested him in battle. However, he countered by grabbing the nearby Red Flag before I could. Curses! Am I too proud to beg? Of course not. As the proverb says, all is fair in book-buying. “Aw, c’mon, man, I’ve gotta have the whole set!” I relied on my chutzpah to carry the day; he could have easily noted that the exact same logic applied in his case. Thankfully, he decided that the sales rank/profit ratio wasn’t compelling enough, and he handed it over to me. Frankly, that was just a bonus; I already had my prize, and it only cost me two dollars.

These sorts of books are one version of “memento mori.” Like Gulag, or Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, reading these is a salutary way to be grateful for comfort, grateful for stability, and grateful for abundance. There’s plenty of evil in the world, but there’s something especially horrific about evil utterly convinced of its own rectitude. It’s not that I feel like I need to learn anything more about the theory and practice of communism, but as the resurgent affection for Marxish sentiment among the chattering class shows us, much of life is about remembering things we already know but have dismissed as boring, uncool or outdated.

There Are No Barbarians Any Longer

By in books, music No Comments

I read Jack Weatherford’s book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World some years ago and learned that, despite popular legend, Genghis was practically an Enlightenment liberal. (Weatherford has since written a couple more books on the same revisionist theme, though I haven’t read either.) Not being a scholar, my impression was that, while certainly interesting, it seemed too neatly counterintuitive — sort of like a book-length exposition of one of those “Everything you thought you knew about X is wrong!” articles you see all the time. But from what little I read of the critical reception, which seemed generally positive, it seemed there might have been substance to the thesis after all. If anyone took ferocious exception to Weatherford’s work, I’m unaware of it.

Anyway, now it appears that modern-day Mongolians, rather than wanting to sack and pillage Europe, just want to rock. I suppose this merging of cultures represents commodification of indigenous music, Coca-Cola colonialism, etc., but I do like the songs:

Amazon Giveth and Amazon Taketh Away

By in books No Comments

I had been looking forward all year to the September release of Theodore Dalrymple’s book Nothing But Wickedness: The Origins of the Decline of Our Culture, but it was not to be. My pre-order remained unconsummated. I now see that the book won’t be published until next August. But what to my wondering eyes should appear this morning but a new book, co-authored with Kenneth Francis, due to be released on the tenth of this month! It looks fascinating:

The cultural death of God has created a conundrum for intellectuals. How could a life stripped of ultimate meaning be anything but absurd? How was man to live? How could he find direction in a world of no direction? What would he tell his children that could make their lives worthwhile? What is the ground of morality?

Existentialism is the literary cri de coeur resulting from the realization that without God, everything good, true and beautiful in human life is destined to be destroyed in a pitiless material cosmos. Theodore Dalrymple and Kenneth Francis examine the main existentialist works, from Ecclesiastes to the Theatre of the Absurd, each man coming from a different perspective. Francis is a believer, Dalrymple is not, but both empathize with the struggle to find meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe.

Part literary criticism, part philosophical exploration, this book holds many surprising gems of insight from two of the most interesting minds of our time.

I know what the first item in my shopping cart will be on Christmas Day.

Revolutionary Phrasemongering

By in political philosophy No Comments

I don’t have any investment in whether or not the term “cultural Marxism” usefully describes anything, but I don’t find Alan Jacobs’ rejoinder to Zubatov convincing. Too many academic arguments like this strike me as little more than an opportunity to show off one’s command of arcane scripture for its own sake. But, as Paul Johnson said about Marx in Intellectuals, “Virtually all his work, indeed, has the hallmark of Talmudic study: it is essentially a commentary on, a critique of the work of others in his field.” As Marxism increasingly loses its ability to say anything useful or meaningful about the world, any discussion that invokes the prophet’s name will likewise quickly disappear into the doctrinal weeds.

At any rate, after attempting to clarify the definition of “Marxism” according to the earliest writings of the patriarch, Jacobs says, “So, if we grant that Marx and Engels are Marxists…” Well, as long as we’re being pedantic, Marx himself said to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist,” so…? Besides, if “Marxist” can be used to describe something useful about twentieth-century political regimes, which, strictly speaking, all deviated from original principles and predictions, why couldn’t it be similarly adapted to say something useful about modern-day disciples of Gramsci and Lukács?

He continues quibbling with Zubatov:

It is equally clear that one can believe that an advocate “for the persecuted and oppressed must attack forms of culture that reinscribe the values of the ruling class, and disseminate culture and ideas that support ‘oppressed’ groups and ‘progressive’ causes,” without endorsing any of the core principles of Marx’s system. (There are forms of conservatism and Christianity that are as fiercely critical of the ruling class as any Marxist, while having no time for dialectical materialism or communism.)

True enough, but if you accept the widespread idea that Marxism is itself a Christian heresy dressed up in pseudoscientific 19th-century terminology, those particular differences seem unremarkable. My own impression, as I’ve said, is that Marx’s “single-minded, fanatical devotion to an abstract ideal of a transformed world strikes me as more akin, in today’s world, to that of radical Islamists than members of a political sect.” It probably does grant too much gravitas to our contemporary glib, self-styled revolutionaries to call them any type of Marxist; it seems the modern revolutionary struggle is mainly focused on highly-educated knowledge workers seizing the memes of production for the mundane purpose of distinguishing themselves from their peers. I think that shows the essential benevolence of capitalism, don’t you? Instead of sticking the severed heads of our ideological enemies on the city gates as a warning to others, we turn them into harmless accessories for disaffected youth to posture with.

Joking aside, I do want to note that the article by Samuel Moyn, which kicked this whole kerfuffle off to begin with, made the argument that the term “cultural Marxism” was mostly an anti-Semitic slur. For all the endless sensationalism in our media here about the supposed resurgence of fascism, it’s ironically amusing that the most anti-Semitic political movement with an actual chance of attaining state power is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which, you’ll never guess, happens to contain an impressive number of unreconstructed Marxists. As a common Marxist phrase went, it is no accident, comrade.

Give a Book a Face and It Will Gaze Back Into You

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

L. M. Sacasas:

But by whatever combination of factors, Facebook has, for now, achieved an unprecedented level of influence in societies across the globe, as Vaidhyanathan documents so well. Could it have been otherwise? Certainly. But that is irrelevant. If we live our lives through Facebook, our lives will be shaped by Facebook. If Facebook mediates our public discourse, then that discourse will be shaped by the formal properties of the platform. The critical point to register is that we will be worked over by the medium, as McLuhan has put it. We will conform to its image. And this will happen regardless of how judiciously and responsibly we post.

As some doggerelist once said of Nietzsche, He might say, were he here today, of media old and new: Give a book a face and it will gaze back into you. The moral of the story here, in a review of a new book, amounts to “count the costs and pay the price,” though without the concision. If you feel that social media is detrimental to your personal happiness and to civic health, then delete your account and walk away. Learn from the example of the Amish, Sacasas says. Earlier, though, he sounds a deterministic note in suggesting that Facebook’s engineers have learned too well from casinos and junk food how to make their product “addictive,” which, as far as I can tell, is just a more concise way of saying “Lord, grant me analog contentment, but not yet.” He criticizes Vaidhyanathan for urging us to strengthen our social institutions and firm up our moral norms in response to the deleterious effects of social media, preferring to emphasize the need for creating new, robust practices in a post-SocMed age rather than seeking to recover older ones, which strikes me as a distinction with only a 4,000-word academic difference. But then what makes the Amish immune to the supposed “addictiveness” of modern technology? How are we supposed to take inspiration from them if the superstructure and the demiurge and our own traitorous nucleus accumbens are all conspiring against us to eliminate whatever free will the philosophers and neuroscientists still allow us to cling to?

I don’t mean to be harsh. I just feel like I’ve read this article a hundred times already, though thank God for small favors, this one didn’t cite Nicholas Carr. Invoking Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes in a discussion of why we say one thing about Facebook and do another is just the rustling of academic plumage, when the salient point is, as always, that human beings frequently desire mutually exclusive things. Our reasoning processes, such as they are, are frequently too weak and easily exhausted to resolve those contradictions. We often experience agency and responsibility as a burden and seek to give it away cheaply, only to complain of all these cumbersome restraints preventing us from being our best selves. Like the guy who’s brave and anxious for the fight so long as some strong men are holding him back, we talk a good game about all the refined pursuits we so wish we had time for, but when the opportunity repeatedly presents itself, we find ourselves keeping up with the Kardashians while living shallowly and sucking the marrow out of a KFC bucket meal. That vacillation, that incoherence, that popular dance known as the bad-faith shuffle — that’s not an anomaly in need of explanation. That’s the human condition.

What Is Made By Humans Now Must Be Undone

By in environment, moralizing, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds No Comments

Jonah Goldberg:

There are a lot of different views on climate change on the right. (I myself am mostly in the Matt Ridley “lukewarmer” camp.) But he ignores all of the competing views in favor of an argument that amounts to little more than fan service for liberal readers. One can believe that climate change is a real concern, with some legitimate science on its side, while also believing there is a range of available policy options that do not conform to the liberal party line and declining to act in a spirit of righteous panic. (Noah Rothman notes how the enlightened position on climate change must always be even more “hysteria.”)

I have dogmatic family members who typically take the talk-radio party line on the political issue du jour. You know the type — they greet every snow flurry with triumphant cackling and a hearty chorus of SCREW YOU AL GORE. It’s probably fair to call them “deniers,” since their positions are usually reflexively determined by whatever they perceive to be the official stance of liberal elites. But the Lady of the House has a cousin, a geologist, who visited us at the beginning of the month. While we were hiking, she succinctly summarized her view on climate change: “Is it happening? Yes. Is human activity contributing to it? Most likely. Is there anything we can realistically do about it? Probably not.” She’s not actually a conservative, but among the conservatives I read and talk to, I find that to be a fairly typical view. One of them had a useful rule of thumb for weeding out the cranks — if they’re opposed to fossil fuels but refuse to even countenance the idea of nuclear power, they’re not serious enough to bother with. It may well be that I’m just inclined to hear what I want to hear, but I find the stoic pragmatism and lack of hysteria refreshing. As Auden said, we are changed by what we change. We’ll adapt, or we won’t, but when has that ever not been the case?

The received left-wing wisdom, by contrast — well, it’s usually facile to compare various beliefs and behaviors to religion, but in the case of climate change, I’m not sure what else to call it. As I mentioned before, I check in with The Week as part of my daily bookmark routine, to keep tabs on what the somewhat-sane left is talking about, and I’ve been amused to see the resident fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist Ryan Cooper pounding the pulpit recently. “Climate change is going to fry your state,” he thundered toward a heretical Utah senator. “Wealth cannot save you from climate change,” he warned us in the prior week’s sermon. Sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia, indeed. But for the clearest, most painstaking demonstration of how so much green activism is nothing but a surrogate outlet for moral evangelism, you can’t do better than read Peter Dorman’s steamrolling of Naomi Klein’s recent spasm of righteousness posing as a book, This Changes Everything. If this were a boxing match, it would have been stopped after the first few paragraphs.

I don’t have any strong views on climate change, but what I find most interesting and amusing is the idea that I should, like it’s a dereliction of my duty as a citizen to avoid pronouncing on events that I can’t influence. I couldn’t be more ordinary and anonymous. What practical use could I possibly make of a doctrinaire opinion? Too many people seem convinced that a diploma and an advantageous upbringing qualify them to serve as volunteer policymakers and amateur heads of state. I think I’d like it better if they devoted that time and energy to church activities.

Let Us Go Down and There Confound Their Language

By in fresh hell, language No Comments

Kassidy Vavra:

Solomon emphasized how the dictionary wants the choice of “mis” over “dis” to be a call to action. The dictionary hopes selecting misinformation as the word of the year can teach people not to blame others, but to look at their own actions.

“Disinformation is a word that kind of looks externally to examine the behavior of others. It’s sort of like pointing at behavior and saying, ‘THIS is disinformation.’ With misinformation, there is still some of that pointing, but also it can look more internally to help us evaluate our own behavior, which is really, really important in the fight against misinformation,” Solomon said.

“It’s a word of self-reflection, and in that it can be a call to action. You can still be a good person with no nefarious agenda and still spread misinformation.”

That’s adorable. By contrast, their Word of the Year for 2016 was xenophobia, so perhaps this is a sign that they’ve moved into the “We’re not angry, just disappointed” stage of their post-Trump trauma. Like modern-day John Harvey Kelloggs, today’s progressives hope to cure political vice and improve intellectual hygiene through a strict diet of bland platitudes and peer-reviewed conclusions. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Voxplainer droning on into a human ear — forever. Unfortunately for them, human communication has always been a game of Telephone. The law of noospheric entropy states that ideas and concepts are forever decaying into clichés, slogans and buzzwords; likewise, even a conversation that begins with Just the Facts will degenerate into rumor, propaganda and fantasy by the time it reaches the end of the circle. Earnest proselytizing can only go so far among an audience without the ears to hear it.

1 2 3 4 5 >»