April 2015

Searching, Seek and Destroy

By in revillaging, the madness of crowds, tribalism

Brad Warner:

The Huffington Post picked up on this and reported that the pizza place “publicly vow(ed)” to “reject gay weddings.” This entirely inaccurate description of what actually transpired was seized upon by countless folks all around the Interwebs. The pizza shop’s Yelp page was spammed with eight pages negative reviews, most of them quite obviously from people who had never been there. Their phone rang off the hook with fake orders. Someone on Twitter threatened to burn the shop down. The folks at Memories Pizza temporarily closed their restaurant.

“Punching up. Punching up! PUNCHING UP! PUNCHING UP…!“

Just ‘Cause You’re Right Doesn’t Mean I’m Wrong

By in augean stables, media/propaganda, tribalism

Elizabeth Stoker-Bruenig:

In balancing a systematic critique on a single person’s story, Erdely essentially used a rightwing strategy to make a leftist point. The trouble is only that the right is skilled at this game, and correctly deduced that undoing Jackie’s story would go a long way to endangering Erdely’s larger structural point. It’s an opportunity they never should have been given, both for Jackie’s sake, and for the sake of the victims who really do find themselves struggling for protection within a hostile justice system.

In case you were wondering how the Rolling Stone rape story debacle was still somehow the right-wing’s fault, Stoker-Bruenig is here to bolster your faith. Amidst all the obfuscatory hand-waving, though, there’s a noticeable lack of two simple points. One, for deep-rooted psychological reasons, people will always grasp lessons better when they’re couched in compelling narratives as opposed to dry statistical analysis. (Progressives usually understand this, as evidenced by their almost-religious levels of faith in the dubious idea that reading novels makes you a better, more emotionally-intelligent person.) Rather than bemoaning that fact, perhaps you should simply make a stronger effort to tell the truth in your own narratives. Which leads us to the second point: fudging factual details in service to a “higher” truth is a bipartisan phenomenon, regardless of what partisan hacks will tell you to the contrary.

(Bonus third point: this post of Scott Alexander’s is a far more penetrating look at why partisans reliably choose the most sketchy stories to go to war over.)

…adding, speaking of Alexander, and speaking of lying for a higher truth, he links to this story, of which I had been completely unaware.

Jesus Tie-Dyed for Your Sins

By in atheism, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion

Adam Gopnik:

To a modern reader, the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table can seem undermined by the other part of Jesus’ message, a violent and even vengeful prediction of a final judgment and a large-scale damnation. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet who is preaching the death of the world—he says categorically that the end is near—and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living.

…One thing, at least, the cry assures: the Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down, and the promise wasn’t kept. “Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God,” Jesus announced; but none of them did. Jesus, and Paul following him, says unambiguously that whatever is coming is coming soon—that the end is very, very near. It wasn’t, and the whole of what follows is built on an apology for what went wrong. The seemingly modern waiver, “Well, I know he said that, but he didn’t really mean it quite the way it sounded,” is built right into the foundation of the cult. The sublime symbolic turn—or the retreat to metaphor, if you prefer—begins with the first words of the faith. If the Kingdom of God proved elusive, he must have meant that the Kingdom of God was inside, or outside, or above, or yet to come, anything other than what the words seem so plainly to have meant.

Secularism is all that matters to me regarding religion and society. I got bored by hair-splitting philosophical and theological arguments a long time ago, and unlike many New Atheists, I don’t believe that religion has the power to make otherwise good people do bad things, so I couldn’t care less to harangue people about how logic and decency compel them to abandon their faith. Whatever gets you through the night is all right, as long as you’re not being an asshole about it. On this point, however, I do think it’s worth standing polite-yet-firm. There’s a thin line between metaphorical interpretation and intellectual dishonesty, and people who refuse to acknowledge what Biblical scholarship has revealed about the historical circumstances of Jesus the person are on the latter side, in my opinion.

Hey! You! Get Off of the Cloud!

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, getting and spending, ohferfucksake, technology

Paul Roberts:

But when it comes to consumer convenience, we need to consider whether easier really is always better. Online shopping, for example, is already so effortless that we often don’t remember we’ve ordered something until the package arrives at our door. What happens when consumption becomes even less of a conscious process — when, say, our smart cupboards and refrigerators, empowered to monitor what we’re using, start making buying decisions autonomously?

…As important, might it be possible to make things too easy? Systems like Amazon’s Dash are attractive because they let us skip routine tasks, such as managing the household, which gives us more time for things that are more important to us. But when we eliminate even a mundane task, we also lose some of the mental skills that the task required. Granted, losing the mental skills needed to compile a shopping list hardly seems a cause for worry. But we should consider that loss as part of the broader “de-skilling” of everyday life with the spread of automated conveniences.

Ian Crouch:

As propaganda, the video seems more like a condemnation of consumption than a celebration of it. All that stuff, the same stuff, used and discarded day after day. It’s the kind of montage that a movie director would use to show just how sad and soulless a character’s life was. And the idea of shopping buttons placed just within our reach conjures an uneasy image of our homes as giant Skinner boxes, and of us as rats pressing pleasure levers until we pass out from exhaustion. But according to Amazon, these products represent the actual rhythm of life, any interruption of which might lead not only to inconvenience but to the kind of coffee-deprived despair that we see when the woman realizes that she has run out of K-cups. That’s the real dystopia: not that our daily lives could be reduced to a state of constant shopping but that we might ever have to, even for a moment, stop shopping.

…But what if there is actual value in running out of things? The sinking feeling that comes as you yank a garbage bag out of the box and meet no resistance from further reinforcements is also an opportunity to ask yourself all kinds of questions, from “Do I want to continue using this brand of bag?” to “Why in the hell am I producing so much trash?” The act of shopping—of leaving the house and going to a store, or, at the very least, of one-click ordering on the Amazon Web site—is a check against the inertia of consumption, not only in personal economic terms but in ethical ones as well. It is the chance to make a decision, a choice—even if that choice is simply to continue consuming. Look, we’re all going to keep using toothpaste, and the smarter consumer is the person who has a ten-pack of tubes from Costco in the closet. But shopping should make you feel bad, if only for a second. Pressing a little plastic button is too much fun.

Just to be clear: these guys are making like Amish elders evaluating what are essentially little wi-fi buttons you can put around your house that will allow you to add everyday-use household items to your Amazon shopping cart. I mean, you could still do it the old-fashioned way, like we did back in my day, and walk around the house with a laptop or a smartphone to make a shopping list. But in our slave new world, you will still get an email to confirm that you did intend to add that item. Your kids cannot accidentally order 700 boxes of dryer sheets by playing with the button. There would seem to be little danger that this will somehow prove to be more addictive than using Amazon’s already-existing one-click option. No one is going to turn into a hoarder and bankrupt themselves ordering 20,000 jars of Peter Pan peanut butter and Welch’s grape jelly because it’s “too much fun” pressing this button. If anything, this would seem to be marginally more useful than those smartwatches that the tech geeks have been fapping over for the last couple years, and I don’t remember anybody seeing those as harbingers of dystopia.

So, yes. Roberts asks if technology like this will “make us stupid”. Crouch, when he’s not standing outside the Dollar General wearing a cilice and urging shoppers to repent, seems to think that most people normally fill in the lacunae in their hectic days by contemplating the essence of the good life, rather than cursing the shitty luck that caused them to run out of trash bags and detergent now, of all days, for chrissakes. Like Calvin’s dad, both sound eager to remind harried consumers how stress and hard work builds character. If this sounds awfully familiar, why, yes, we were just talking about this.

Someone Whose Mind Watches Itself

By in foolosophy, writing

But Orwell himself, very early in his career, argued against this style of reading literature. In one of his first book reviews, in 1930, for example — on Lewis Mumford’s book Herman Melville — he argues that such interpretation (an “unpleasant but necessary word”) is a “dangerous method of approaching a work of art. Done with absolute thoroughness, it would cause art itself to vanish.” Reducing a work of art to an allegorical message, he said, “is like eating an apple for the pips.” In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus also argued against reducing novels to what he called a “thesis-novel, the work that proves, the most hateful of all, […] the one that most often is inspired by a smug thought.” For both men, a novel is not supposed to tell the reader what to think, but rather to create the conditions through which the reader can experience thinking for themselves. This idea became the creative spark that fired also their political imaginations, especially their opposition to totalitarianism.

…And yet, where Orwell is praised for his political judgment, albeit based upon a denigration of his literary imagination, Camus is praised for his literary works (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, after all), but, in the process, he is denigrated for his political thinking — often dismissed as a noble but vague humanism; admirable, but not worth taking seriously.

However, by the time most of the French intelligentsia embraced Communism in the late 1940s and ’50s, Camus had already joined and been expelled from the Communist Party (the Algerian branch). At a time when many others — such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre — were being seduced by Communism, Camus was already aware of its theoretical contradictions and practical impossibilities. His experiences during the purges of the mid-1940s showed him that today’s victims can easily become tomorrow’s executioners. His own political thinking — which, like Orwell’s, was grounded in intellectual honesty and concrete experience — developed early, through his growing up in poverty in working-class Algeria. What Orwell learned only slowly, and from the outside, about poverty and working-class culture, Camus knew firsthand, from the root source.

Camus sharpened his political sensibilities through his journalism, which forced upon him the practice of keeping an open mind, of collecting the facts for himself, and then thinking through their significance and implications.

I have no idea why Camus has been so frequently popping up in my online reading recently. I’d like to think it heralds some sort of pendulum-swing away from ideology and toward humanistic sanity, but it’s probably just a happy coincidence. Whatever the case, it’s good to see. As Arthur said to me:

The toxic ideological dust has settled, and Orwell and Camus emerge with honor from the disgraceful period when the intellectual dishonesty of Stalinists like Sartre was the chic thing. What admirable human beings, as well, which gives moral authority to their humanism. This is why they’re not academically popular, or haven’t been till recently: they distrusted theory, knowing first-hand how easily it become sophistical and a mere rationalization–for example, of crimes against humanity.

It’s good to read about two guys who were not academic “thinkers” but thinking writers who showed personal courage and held on to humanistic convictions in the face of totalitarianism left and right. They matter, because they put themselves on the line (the question of suicide in Camus, as the article shows, was not a philosophical abstraction, but truly “existential,” that is, personal). There is almost nothing at stake in the academic acrobatics of even a Foucault. Everything is at stake in the writings of Orwell and Camus.

Leave the Spotlight, Dodge the Searchlights

By in books, calvin and hobbes, solitude

Isabel Colegate:

The celebrity hermit, a modern phenomenon, seems to escape the tolerance, let alone respect, accorded to other species of solitary, being regarded instead with indignation and outrage. The reasoning behind this must be the thought that no one would be a writer or an actor or a musician — or indeed prominent in any way — unless their chief object was to be famous, and that therefore they should lay themselves down gladly as a sacrifice on the altar of human curiosity.

Despite this observation, the index of the book shows no references to Bill Watterson, which strikes me as odd. What better example could you ask for?

In the film Dear Mr. Watterson, his mother commented on the creepiness of some fans who not only go out of their way to find out where he lives, but make it known to him that they’ve done so, like it’s a game of hide and seek. It’s like, “You have created something that provides an enduring sense of fascination for me. Now you’re obligated to stay within reach in case I ever want to indulge my curiosity further.” Even I, who respect a desire for privacy to a greater degree than most, have to admit that I would eagerly read more about Watterson the everyday guy if that information were available. Yet, I’m fully aware that doing so would almost certainly add nothing to my appreciation for Calvin and Hobbes. What drives this insatiable fascination, this urge to use someone up until they have nothing left to show or give? Why do we find it so difficult to simply allow mysteries to exist?

There’s None So Blind as Them That Don’t Agree

By in atheism, conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions, religion

Will Shetterly:

Arguments between theists and atheists make me think they’re both missing the point. People have belief systems. If yours doesn’t make you hurt anyone, it’s fine by me, and it’s even better if yours helps you do good things.

Agnosticism is concerned with the limits of knowledge. Atheism is concerned with the likelihood of belief. Epistemologically, I’m an agnostic. That is, I accept that absolute knowledge is impossible, and therefore there is a logical possibility, however minuscule, that something vaguely called God could exist. Philosophically, I’m an atheist, because knowledge doesn’t have to be absolute to be good enough for everyday life, and I feel confident enough that no matter what we discover about life in the cosmic or subatomic realms, none of it will ever point toward the likelihood of the existence of a bipolar creator god with a prurient interest in the doings of human genitals. I am quite willing to bet my life on that. Pragmatically, I’m an anti-assholist, and since assholes are in plentiful supply on both sides of the argument, I tend to agree that the issue is hardly worth fighting about.

That said, Will is probably preaching to those without ears to hear, because the argument isn’t so much about whether theists/atheists are incapable of doing good because of their beliefs. Most people can grudgingly concede that however stubborn and deluded their opponents are, they manage to live decent lives — for now. The worry is — to take the atheist perspective here for a moment — that theistic beliefs are an intellectual weak link. The chain of one’s moral character might snap at precisely that point if the link is not replaced. If a theist is allowed to retain a vague, sentimental affection for Biblical platitudes or an open-mindedness toward the possibility of life after death, the rust might spread and their personality might give way under stress, allowing some atavistic sympathy for the harshest aspects of Deuteronomy or Leviticus to break through and take over. The argument is that incorrect beliefs are a disaster waiting to happen, and both sides will patiently wait a lifetime, if need be, to claim vindication. As with God’s existence, even a fraction of a possibility can inspire faith.

But intellectuals, both secular and religious, always overvalue the importance of rational principles as opposed to simple, intuitive empathy. The power of logical necessity compels you! Except, in practice, it doesn’t. People cheerfully contradict themselves all the time. Faith or the lack thereof tends to serve as a mere rationalization for what are, deep down, issues of basic character. Kind people can be attracted to the soft parts of Christianity and assholes can be attracted to the supercilious parts of atheism. Decent, humane people do not become raging, intolerant assholes just because of a new logical twist in their thinking. They will find a way to accommodate the new perspective into their basic character as if it had been there all along.

As for the crusading sort of atheists who feel compelled to badger even the most inoffensive believers, they strike me as the spiritual descendants of Frederick Taylor. In their case, they’re obsessed with eliminating intellectual inefficiency, even if it results in diminishing returns or outright counter-productiveness. Just imagine how much more we could accomplish if only all these valuable neurons weren’t being wasted on metaphysical fantasies and irrational superstitions! Of course, the idea that the world and all its problems can be reorganized and set right by flawless human reason is a fairy tale, a myth, a fable and a superstitious delusion itself. As a rule, it’s best to recognize what “good enough” looks like and stop there.

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