Via Splitsider. He also recently described it as a reality show for thoughts, which is pretty good too.
July 2012
Putting the Zen In Zeno
Sartre’s point is “we must act without hope”. What he means by this is that we must act without making any assumption that what we are working for will be achieved. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. We don’t know and never can know, but it doesn’t matter: “One need not hope in order to undertake one’s work.” What matters is action, not a mere idea of what one hopes that action will lead to: “It is only reality that counts, not dreams, expectations or hopes.” Sartre’s ambiguity therefore seems to rest on an embrace of a kind of hope without hope: hope without any illusions that we will prevail.
…Indeed, Sam Harris suggested to me that without hope we might be more at peace. “Hope and fear are completely natural responses to uncertainty. But they are two sides of the same coin: if we would be free of fear, we must let go of hope. Easier said than done, of course. But it is possible. And being without hope is by no means synonymous with despair. Rather, it is tranquility.”
Harris is clearly ripping me off, but he presents it more like a Stoic insight than a Zen one. This will not do.
This Is Just the Tip of the Goldberg
The German court ruling “is an attack on one of the fundamental principles of Judaism,” wrote Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, founder and dean and associate dean of the Center in a letter to Merkel.
“For 3,500 years, every male child has entered the Jewish people through the rite of circumcision. We are not talking about a mere custom, but a biblical principle that has defined the Jewish people from time immemorial.”
My mom has been a longtime reader of Zecharia Sitchin’s books; you know, about how the deities of Mesopotamian mythology were actually astronauts from another planet, the Annunaki, who came here for minerals and created humans through genetic experiments on apes, etc. Anyway, that theory sounds a lot more plausible when you think about it in this context. I could imagine some drunk extraterrestrials coming up with this: “Oh, wait! I know! Tell them—giggle, snort—tell them to cut the ends of their dongs off! Tell them the Lord demands it, and if they don’t, they’ll be—mmph!— cut off from their people! Pun intended! Bwahahahaha!”
“Hahaha, no way, man! No one’s gonna be that stupid!”
Thank You for Not Engaging Me In Meaningless Conversation
“Do you tweet?”
“No,” I demurred to my new acquaintance at dinner. “But I do chirp. Sometimes I warble. And once in a while, if in extremely high spirits, I have even been known to trill.”
We resumed chewing. I didn’t mention that I have a blog. We did not order dessert.
They Know Who Is Righteous, What Is Bold, So I’m Told
Predictably, Twitter was outraged. “Dear @CERN,” wrote one science buff with a taste for typography. “Every time you use Comic Sans on a powerpoint, God kills the Schrödinger’s cat. Please think of the cat.” Another groaned: “They used Comic Sans on the Higgs boson powerpoint presentation … Nope there is no hope for mankind.”
Ah, Twitter and ironic status-seeking. They go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
I recently read something Chuck Klosterman wrote in Killing Yourself to Live:
People behave this way all the time; we all sign a social contract that requires us to universally ridicule certain sentiments on principle, even though no such principle exists. When I was in sixth grade, there was a kid in fifth grade whom everyone called Ippy… Ippy was precocious and clever and popular, inasmuch as any fifth grader can be popular. He could draw exceptionally and was well known for his pencil sketches of military aircraft.
But then Ippy became a sixth grader. And then—all of a sudden and for no valid reason—everyone decided they hated him.
For the next two years, Ippy was mercilessly attacked on a daily basis. Almost nobody talked to him, unless they were trying to trick him into drinking a can of Mountain Dew that was half filled with piss. I remember two kids stealing his gym shoes and dropping them into the locker room whirlpool. People would throw half-chewed food at the back of his head while he worked on math problems. This was real horror-show, Welcome to the Dollhouse shit, and it emerged out of nowhere. He had done nothing to warrant this. Moreover, the torture ended as capriciously as it began: Halfway through his eighth-grade year, Ippy was completely reabsorbed into the junior high coolness coven.
…But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you’re sharing a reality that doesn’t exist. Every summer, Hollywood movie studios convince millions of people to see blockbuster movies they know they’re going to hate… But it’s still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they’re worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something that they’re missing. This is what they’re afraid of, and this is how they deduce societal truth.
I find it difficult to believe that, were it not for the fishbowl environment of social media exacerbating natural attention-seeking tendencies, anyone but a handful of specialists would give the faintest fuck about arguing the virtues of fonts. But almost everyone cares deeply about being part of what appears to be a discerning conversation, and about being accepted by those having it. Everyone’s gotta have a strong opinion, even on ludicrously insignificant things, and everyone’s gotta express it in a more over-the-top fashion than the last person.
On the bright side, if I ever had to deal with unwanted popularity, especially from idiots like that, I could just redo the blog in Comic Sans to scare them off. Sort of a “Break Glass In Case of Emergency” option.
Privacy Is Bourgeois
Cooper has been harassed to come out for years. By Gawker, by Out magazine and by Twitter – to name some of the worst offenders. (Gawker’s founder and proprietor, Nick Denton, still found fault in Cooper’s declaration: “The choreographed publication of a private letter from Anderson to Andrew Sullivan has so much in common with Obama’s mealy-mouthed statement of personal belief on afternoon TV: both are missed opportunities,” he wrote.)
But, as Cooper says in his email to Sullivan, he was actually never “in”: “I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues.” He never tried to hide his sexual orientation, as he has been accused of. He just didn’t think it was the public’s business.
And why should it be? Why did Cooper have to be so bullied? He never pretended to be straight. He just chose not to address the issue. Why did that enrage people? Shouldn’t the increasing acceptance of gay lifestyles, the growing legalization of gay marriage, the realization that 21st century families come in all shapes and sizes, mean that Cooper should have been left alone? Of course it does. Why should anyone care about this? What’s it got to do with you or me?
There’s a subtle type of self-aggrandizement in devoting oneself to a glorious cause, especially in positioning oneself as the mouthpiece of Progress. (At least the Pythia at the Delphic temple were possibly unwitting agents of hallucinogenic gases when they thought they were speaking for Apollo; the smug hipster shitstains that populate Gawker Media must be inhaling the pungent fumes of a mixture of cultural effluvia and self-righteousness.) For people like that, your puny individual preferences are insignificant compared to the greater good, of which they, conveniently enough, have appointed themselves arbiters.
…Exhibit A. There’s so much wrong with this, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
By the Numbers
Speaking of people who value statistical abstractions over particular experience, I think the pattern-recognition software in Jesse Bering’s brain has gone a bit haywire. In his newest post, which reminded me of an equally strange one last year, face-value expressions of piety and their statistical significance are somehow paramount when choosing a cab driver (or hypothetical mate). Leaving aside his apparent conviction that fear of punishment seems to be the driving force in ethical choices, he seems to think that trust and love are sentiments we feel for social groups rather than individuals.
The Reign of Spain Sustained In Ukraine
Thanks to the use of social media among the more engaged football fans, the argument is being prosecuted with the fervour of the inquisitions that took place in 15th‑century Spain. Today’s believers and heretics are hurling their accusations on message boards and Twitter feeds, one side claiming that we are watching the most creatively exalted team in the history of football while the other accuses them of denying the game the oxygen of dynamism and balanced competition.
Maybe the heretics are just bored by Spain’s long sequence of unbroken success. That would be no more than human nature at work, exaggerated by the shortened attention spans of life in the 21st century. But it is odd to see football fans anxious to hasten the end of an era of success that, once it is over, will come to be seen as a golden age.
Seriously. I’m all for seeing new teams rise up and win glory, but for the time being, the other serious contenders in Europe are perennial winners like Germany and Italy, with Brazil and Argentina still the teams to beat in South America. Until Russia, Portugal, Uruguay, Chile and some of the other not-quites find that little extra je ne sais quoi to raise their game, why don’t you kids take some Ritalin, shut up and just enjoy that exquisite passing.
Speaking of ADHD and senseless babbling, I heard this exchange near the end of the game, once the result was beyond all doubt:
Ian Darke: “I wonder if they’re gonna make it a four-timer…in the World Cup in two years’ time. It’s quite a thought, isn’t it?”
Steve McManaman: “It’ll be difficult in Brazil, won’t it…”
“Yeah…European teams…”
“Yeah.”
“…don’t win World Cups in South America…”
“Yep.”
“…says history…”
“Correct.”
Face in hands. Dear gods, it’s starting already…
You Know What the Sun’s All About When the Lights Go Out
Just spent 24 hours without power in a wretched heatwave. First priority: thanking Willis Carrier, the Promethean genius who stole air conditioning from the gods. It may be hastening our demise, but fuck it, I’ll accept the Faustian bargain. As a spokesman for humanity, I’d rather have a couple generations of comfortable living than an extra few million years of this sweltering misery.