February 2011

Take Your Low Heels Off and Put Your Whore Heels On

By in fresh hell

Brad Warner:

The connection between The Secret and Buddhism may not be altogether clear, but it’s there. I have a fiend who works a large Buddhist bookshop in Los Angeles. A couple years ago she told me that The Secret basically kept the store afloat. The store’s impressive stock of just about every Buddhist book currently in print wasn’t selling for sour beans, but copies of The Secret were flying out the doors so fast they could barely keep it in stock.
The authors of The Secret draw upon the general public’s vague understanding of the Hindu/Buddhist concept of karma, couple that with a few mystical sounding pseudo-spiritual superstitions and latch it all on to that perennial best-seller greed. The result is a vaguely Eastern sounding philosophy that says just wish for something real hard and it’ll come to you. If you want that BMW bad enough, picture it in your mind’s eye and you’ll get it.
In the Family Guy episode Brian watches as his novel tanks while books about this kind of soft-soap spirituality sell by the truckload. So he cynically puts together his own version of the same thing and it’s a big hit. Sadly, this is not so far removed from what’s really happening.
My friend Brucekowski (thus dubbed because his name is Bruce and his writing showed the influence of Bukowski) and I hatched a similar scheme many years ago, as we sat there watching hippie burnouts and self-absorbed yuppies attempt to save the Earth by throwing all their recyclables in the wrong bins. Being within driving distance of presidential estates like Monticello (Jefferson), Ash Lawn (Monroe), Montpelier (Madison), and even Mount Vernon (Washington) at a stretch, our idea was to gather rocks, dirt, sticks and moss (and maybe even gravestone chippings) from the grounds and sell them in little baggies, which would be placed under pillows or dangled from rearview mirrors, where they would emanate that Founding Father aura to… I dunno, make you smarter, more eloquent, virile, you name it. We didn’t really get that far with the plan. But of course we immediately saw the potential for workbooks, $4.99/min. phone lines, and other additional merchandising tie-ins. Smooth operators are standing by…
So, what do you say? I mean, here I am blathering on a blog for my own amusement, and obviously you all don’t have anything better to do if you’re reading this. And we could all use some extra money, yes? So are we going to put our heads together and bring this idea to fruition or what? If it sounds unscrupulous to you, think of it this way: at least we’d be preventing people from spending that money on The Secret. We would use our newfound wealth for good, not evil!

Death Will Seem Surreal Soon in the Sunshine Afternoon

By in philosophy, the big sleep

I’ve mentioned before how I’m sort of lukewarm on Stoicism as a philosophy, but I always liked Epictetus’ advice that “In the very act of kissing a child, we should silently reflect on the possibility that she will die tomorrow.” Not because it will somehow make it easier when death finally comes, but because living with that acute awareness of how fragile and unpredictable life can be makes it easier to truly appreciate what you have when you have it.

I was at the doctor’s for my yearly checkup today. As I was leaving, the receptionist asked when he wanted to see me back.
“Next year.”
“Okay, would you like to go ahead and make that appointment now?”
“Uhh… um, yeah, sure.”
I hesitated for a moment because I suddenly had the odd thought that it seemed awfully cocksure to make an appointment that far in advance. Who knows whether we’ll all still be alive by then? Car accidents, aneurysms, defective heart valves, suicide, various terminal illnesses, a meteor strike — there’s an awful lot of ways for even the youngest and healthiest of us to go when you stop to think about it. If you ask me, prognostications should be limited to a week ahead, maybe two if you’re feeling brave. After that, they should be appended by, “…assuming we’re still alive then, that is.” It would only be honest.
I didn’t share my musings with her. She didn’t look like someone who would appreciate a disquisition on ancient philosophies. Besides, the phone was ringing.
Yeah, that’s the thing Epictetus forgot to mention — cultivating such a fey sensibility can turn even routine small talk into a ripe opportunity for awkward embarrassment.

I Need a Scratch from the Hand of the Ass that Sold Me the Itch

By in art, bread and circuses, the wire

We are currently living in a new golden age of television, a medium that has been liberated by cable broadcasting to explore both fantasy and reality with greater frankness and originality than ever before: as witness shows as different as the now-iconic crime dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci-fi hit Battlestar Galactica, a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid; and the perennially underappreciated small-town drama Friday Night Lights, which offers, among other things, the finest representation of middle-class marriage in popular culture of which I’m aware.
With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.
Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.
That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and concepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them; as with many fads that take the form of infatuations with certain moments in the past, the Mad Men craze tells us far more about today than it does about yesterday.
I don’t have any critical talent or deep insight when it comes to art; I’m just a dude who knows what he likes. After seeing so many people in the blogosphere wanking themselves silly over Mad Men for so long, and after kicking myself for waiting so long to see what all the fuss over The Wire was about, I finally decided a couple months ago to get the first season through Netflix in case it really was worth all the hype.
No. It was not. This dude did not like it. I didn’t even finish half of the season. You can either take my unsophisticated word for it, or you can read the rest of the article by Daniel Mendelsohn to get a more nuanced analysis.

The Personality Is the Political

By in fresh hell

Looks like somebody needs to put one of those breathalyzer ignition interlocks on their Blogger dashboard:

I was in rush hour the other observing some self-centered dude blocking four lanes and snarling traffic for blocks to spare himself a minor inconvenience and it occurred to me that the logical result of our recent embrace of vulgar libertarianism is a total breakdown of social order. Even in rush hour traffic where it’s vital to everyone’s survival that we observe certain norms, there always seems to be some entitled, selfish ass in an expensive car making it worse for everyone else these days.

No, if vulgar libertarians ran society, every road would be privately owned and require a toll at both ends, so I doubt you’d see many scenarios like the one above, because the exorbitant cost would prevent most of us from driving anyway.
But that’s neither here nor there. Hey, y’all! Would you like to see what happens if we all were to filter our everyday experiences through a stunted, warped mentality that insists on framing absolutely everything as a partisan political issue? Well, gather ’round and let me spin you a tale! When I was a teenager, I used to do volunteer work at a recycling center in a university town. You can imagine a lot of the typical patrons: ponytailed liberal academics, idealistic students, affluent suburban bobos. The kind of people who shopped at the organic grocery up the street and probably had at least one bumper sticker or t-shirt from Northern Sun. Now, one would think, wouldn’t one, that a person who has invested the time and energy into keeping their trash and recyclables separate and driving to town on their own time to dispose of the latter would care enough to do it right. But bitter experience speaks through me to you and swears that it is not so.
I could not have kept count of how many patrons (we called them “inmates” of the “psycho center”), having brought themselves all this way, refused to walk the additional thirty yards to the other end of the parking lot to dispose of whatever they were holding. You could tell them at a glance. “Excuse me, where does the brown glass go? Oh. Down there? In that bin? Oh…” They would look at their destination, back at the bag of imported microbrew empties, back at the other end of the lot…and sure enough, you’d find that bag sitting on the steps of the newspaper trailer a few minutes later, right behind where they had been standing. Half of our day was spent just removing all the material that some illiterate, lazy bastard had insisted on dumping in the wrong bin while we were otherwise occupied. These were the same types of entitled, oblivious twats who would hand their bags and containers to anyone nearby with dark skin or a working-class appearance; my friend Brucekowski once had to mollify an angry black academic who was on the receiving end of that treatment from some clueless yuppie woman, despite his expensive suit and Mercedes. And since we started this conversation speaking of vehicles, I saw a few accidents in the parking lot, where nothing more complicated than a three-point turn and a 10 MPH speed limit was involved.
Just one more anecdote, you say? All right, then! A school friend of mine who worked at Whole Foods once thanked me for bringing my cart back to the store before ranting about how many customers left theirs out in the parking lot—initially, the store must have figured that their save-the-earth clientele would be conscientious enough to walk the carts back themselves out of a spirit of hippie camaraderie. They soon learned better, and put cart returns in the lot so that people could save time and a few steps and get to the gym faster, where their expensive membership allowed them to run in place on a treadmill.
What does it all mean? I ask myself as I sit here in reflection on my mountaintop, running my fingers through my long white hair. Just this: a significant number of human beings are short-sighted, selfish, and thunderfuckingly stupid. They act that way on foot and behind the wheel of a car. Are they the majority? I don’t know, but there are certainly enough of them out there to ruin your day if given half a chance.

She Just Loves Me for My Big Dictionary

By in atheism, language

Huh. I don’t know that I care too terribly much about choosing sides in this new war over Dictionary Atheism. Fucking splitters.

But don’t despair! I haven’t lost my taste for pedantic digressions. Having been reminded that the Greek word pneuma is often translated in a religious context as “soul”, I wonder if I finally have an answer to my question. Apneumic? Apneumatic? Let’s open up a new front in the assault on religious belief! If nothing of you survives your death, what difference does it make whether something called God exists or not?

Animae Magnae Prodigus

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

In his book Examined Lives, James Miller closed his chapter on Socrates with a quotation from Nietzsche I don’t recall ever seeing before:

I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and the impossible.

It reminded me of a passage from Five Faces of Modernity, by Matei Calinescu:

Even enthusiastic defenders of utopia like Ernst Bloch speak of the “melancholy of fulfillment” and stress the importance of the “not-yet” in the vision of the future. But to what extent is a consistent philosophy of the “not-yet” possible nowadays? Unfortunately, the modern utopist cannot afford to follow Lessing, who in his famous apologue imagined himself choosing, at God’s invitation, between all Truth and just the active search for Truth (with the condition of never finding it). It was not too difficult for Lessing to make up his mind, and without hesitating, take the active, though endless, search—for “absolute truth belongs to Thee alone,” he told God. Lessing’s way of putting the problem would hardly make sense in a world where God—even as an abstraction or working hypothesis—is dead and everybody knows it. The heroic optimism of infinite search justified by the sheer greatness of a transcendent goal has been lost by modernity. The goals of the modern utopist are supposedly immanent and within reach, and to postpone attaining them would be irresponsible, despite the “melancholy of fulfillment.”

But what if the search leads you to the realization that there is no singular, absolute Truth good for all people at all times, only a multiplicity of truths, recurring in different guises in a cycle of forgetting and rediscovery? What if our misguided notions of final resolutions in time are what cause the melancholy of fulfillment? What if our valuing of “consistency” is just another manifestation of our strange yearning for essence, for permanent, fixed identity?

The Word Made Grilled Flesh

By in humanitarian diet, religion, the feeling of absurdity

So, having just emerged from the shower, imagine my surprise as I walked across my bedroom toweling off, my Adonis-like physique exposed in all its glory, only to see a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses ambling right past my window on the way to the front door. I haven’t had any of them stop by here in probably three years! In a moment of inspiration, I seized upon the idea of inviting them in to deliver their spiel if they would in turn allow me to read them some selected passages from Nietzsche and Dawkins. I thought the exchange would make for an interesting blog post (the things I do for you people!) But alas, I was on my way to meet Arthur for lunch and had no time to spare! What a shame to waste such a rare opportunity!

So I killed them and took them with me. We had them sliced and served over fettuccine noodles in alfredo sauce, with a Caesar salad and garlic cheese toast on the side. I don’t drink alcohol, so I just had water. Arthur had a soda. Conversation was pleasant, centering on 19th-century authors, the state of writing in a digital age, and the nature of life as bohemian intellectuals in the twilight of the American Empire.
As I was cleaning up the bloodstains on the porch upon arriving home, I noticed where one of them had dropped a copy of The Watchtower, with this issue’s cover story, “The Garden of Eden: Myth or Fact?” The first few pages fluttered in the breeze, hoping to attract a reader. I put it in the recycling bin and came inside.

“It Isn’t Fair, It Isn’t Right,” He Screamed, and Then They Were Upon Him

By in books, montaigne, psychology, the madness of crowds

Montaigne wrote in his Essays about witnessing a killing during the salt-tax riots in 1548 in Bordeaux. In Sarah Bakewell’s telling:

A few tax collectors were killed. Their bodies were dragged through the streets and covered in heaps of salt to underline the point. In one of the worst incidents, Tristan de Moneins, the town’s lieutenant-general and governor—thus the king’s official representative—was lynched. He had shut himself up in the city’s massive royal citadel, the Château Trompette, but a crowd gathered outside and howled for him to come out. Perhaps thinking to earn their respect by facing up to them, he ventured forth, but it was a mistake. They beat him to death.
…In this case, Montaigne thought that Moneins had failed because he was not sure what he was trying to do. Having decided to face the crowd, he then lost his confidence and behaved with deference, sending mixed messages. He also underestimated the distorted psychology of a mob. Once worked up into a frenzy, it can only be either soothed or suppressed; it cannot be expected to show ordinary human sympathy. Moneins seemed not to know this. He expected the same fellow-feeling as he would from an individual.
I imagine most people who strive for authority and power over others, whether spiritual gurus or political leaders, instinctively know this lesson. A mass audience does not permit indecisive weakness. Make up your mind, plant your feet, and right or wrong, don’t allow yourself to be swayed. In most instances, though, the best and healthiest stance to take toward life is probably a lighthearted skepticism — “I’m not sure, but I guess we’ll find out.” Don’t get too attached to your conclusions, don’t develop tunnel vision, don’t let your impulses carry you away. But when it comes to our leaders, we demand and expect confident assertions followed by decisive actions, even (or especially) when the stakes are highest. No one respects Hamlet-style waffling here. He who hesitates in order to calmly reflect is lost. Don’t think, just act.
I just find it interesting to consider how often the most power accrues to those least given to introspection and judicious caution. Wait, did I say interesting? I meant terrifying.

Learn to Swim

By in fresh hell, music

Speaking of impoverished worldviews:

Indie band The White Stripes formally announced their breakup today. People in 2003 are very upset.

You know, I certainly don’t expect much from the kind of vacuous moron who writes at a site like Gawker. But reducing an artist’s entire identity to that fleeting moment in media consciousness when they achieved a perfect balance between indie credibility, mainstream success and novelty… I mean, it would be one thing if he said, “Ahh, they always sucked ass anyway; who cares.” But it’s so much more depressingly shallow to put it as, “Ahh, anything more than five minutes old is, like, so totally lame-o and not worth paying attention to. I mean, 2003?! Did they even have smartphones back then? Whatevs!”
Did hipsters exist back in Old Testament times? Because if so, the Great Flood suddenly seems eminently rational and defensible.

The Whole Goddamn World Is Riding on Words for Thousands of Years

By in alan watts, books, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, nietzsche, nihilism, religion

We get closer, therefore, to the true wickedness of Melville’s book, when we see this reversal. What Ahab hates most thoroughly is the idea that the universe might be inscrutable to the last; that ultimately there might be “naught beyond.” He therefore holds desperately and passionately to the idea that there is an ultimate, final, and universal truth about how things are; that there is, in other words, a traditional kind of monotheistic God. This misguided passion for monotheism, the book reveals, is the most dangerous and deadly kind there is. Melville’s genuine wickedness, in other words, consists in his portrayal of Ahab’s monomaniacal monotheism as itself the incarnation of what the universe most abhors.

…Since Karl Jaspers’s 1949 book The Origin and Goal of History, historians and sociologists have emphasized a cross-cultural turn in the first millennium BC that Jaspers called the Axial Revolution. This revolution introduced the idea— through Plato’s metaphysical philosophy, the Buddha’s conception of Nirvana, and various religious notions of Eternal Life—that there is a good beyond what we can find in the everyday conception of human flourishing; that there is a transcendent good that is the nature of the Divine. As Charles Taylor explains it:

The Axial Revolution tended to place the Divine on the side of the ultimate good; while at the same time redefining this as something which goes beyond what is understood as ordinary human flourishing: Nirvana, Eternal Life.

It is precisely this conception of “going beyond” that Melville’s faceless whale encourages us to resist. Rather than searching for some reasoning things behind the mask as Ahab insists on doing, Ishmael thinks we should nurture the moods of everyday existence—the mood of the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, and any others we can learn about or discover—for the meanings they already offer.
I’ve never read Moby Dick, but Dreyfus and Kelly’s book makes me want to.
What they’re saying is simple: our lives are full of meaning, just as they are. But to echo Alfred North Whitehead (“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”) and Nietzsche (“Christianity is Platonism for “the people”), we’ve been trained by two thousand years of history to see everything around us as inherently meaningless; only things that last forever without changing have any true substance or meaning. And since nothing actually does that…
The thing that really staggers me is thinking about how we really have no idea what we even mean by desiring that the things we love should last forever. I mean it quite literally: we’re not even capable of wrapping our minds around the concept of such an existence, yet we ruin our lives worrying about the possibility of not attaining it. What would it even mean to exist as human beings unbound by time? What need would there ever be to act? If you could get what you think you want, to have eternal life in something like your individual form, don’t you realize that the lack of temporal constraints would render your “life” utterly meaningless? You could take a twenty-trillion year nap in heaven, wake up, and still have the exact same neverendingness stretching out before you. As Alan Watts said, having “all the time you want” is one thing; having, literally, “time without end” is another. The latter would actually be much more like what we call hell, a nihilistic prison that would drive us mad. We couldn’t possibly exist in such a state with our identities as we understand them. We need the boundaries of time, loss and death to give our lives meaning. With no possibility of change, nothing flowing to break up the stagnation, life would lose everything worthwhile about it.
Earlier in the book, they talk about Dante’s Divine Comedy, where his impoverished vision of paradise is where you spend eternity “contemplating the radiance of God”, a radiance that obliterates your identity and former, earthly passions like so many moths in a giant flame. Again, this sounds like pure hell. If people weren’t so utterly ignorant about what they’re asking for, you’d have to conclude they’re utterly insane for wanting it. And for this, people have spent centuries denigrating the very things that make life worth living. What a tragedy.

The Gorgon Gaze of the Expectant Audience

By in foolosophy, prying eyes, psychology

Brad Warner:

As Mr. Choprah has learned, people will pay good money to be told by a religious authority figure that they will live forever. People have paid damn good money to hear that from religious authority figures for a very long time and in cultures across the globe. It is quite a reliable strategy for making a living.

…I don’t necessarily think that Mr. Choprah is cynically exploiting his readers by telling them lies. He says what he says in order to create a reassuring feedback loop from himself to his readership and back again that helps relieve his own fears of death. This is also a time-tested strategy and appears to work for some people.

The question of the exact ratio of witless fraud to manipulative liar that constitutes Deepak Chopra is an academic one, and not all that important. The results are the same in any case, no matter what he truly believes in his heart of hearts.

But “believe” is kind of a funny term when you really think about it. What does it mean to really believe something? Does it mean you are about as sure as you can be without having direct proof, as in believing that gravity will still be in effect and the sun still in the sky tomorrow? Or does it mean something more like hope? Either way, as with all abstract concepts, the term exists in contrast to its opposite, doubt. Claiming to believe something implicitly allows the possibility of doubt. And when we’re talking about such a momentous and emotionally charged issue as the possibility of life after death, you can bet your sweet bippy that the boundary between “things we know to be objectively true” and “things we desperately want to believe are true”, poorly demarcated at the best of times, becomes practically nonexistent.

What I find interesting is in the way Brad puts that: Chopra is just as much a prisoner to his audience as they are to their own perceived need for someone wiser than them to tell them all the answers. Yes, I know, the poor bastard, imprisoned in his several mansions. Forced to endure a retinue of underlings fanning him, popping grapes into his mouth, and throwing themselves across mud puddles for him. What I mean is: Deepak, being a confused shaved ape like the rest of us, though a fantastically rich one, is no different when it comes to falling prey to the fear of nonexistence. I’m willing to allow that he has genuinely wondered about all the big questions in life just like anyone else. But if there ever were a time when he felt free to do so, surely he doesn’t have that freedom now. Whether by happenstance or design, he’s been presented, or presented himself, as a guru. Does he truly believe he has all the answers? Well, the positive reinforcement from his devoted fans probably helps assuage any private doubts he might have. As the bank account keeps growing, and the adulation pours in; as his identity as a sage gets ever more firmly cemented in place by the feedback he gets from hundreds, thousands, millions of others, he had better believe it for the sake of his psychological well-being. There’s no way he can ever allow himself to say those simple words, “I don’t know.” No one has time for a wise man who qualifies his statements constantly with things like, “Of course, that’s just my opinion…I could be wrong…I’m no more of an expert on this than you are…I’ve never considered that before, actually…fucked if I know.” Well, if you don’t have any clear answers, then why should we listen to you? And if no one’s listening to me anymore, who am I?

Being able to freely admit ignorance is what keeps us mentally supple. It’s what keeps us from being too proud to learn anything new, too afraid of losing face to ask a question, too stubborn to change our mind when necessary. But few, if any, would have the courage to face an audience of people trained to hang on your every word and do just that. The more you come to see yourself as a person with a message, the less chance you’ll retain that flexibility. The worst thing that could happen to any sincere truth-seeker would be to look back over their shoulder and see an army of followers looking back at them.

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