Oh right, it is because most men hate women, I keep forgetting. (Women do this too with all the sacred feminine workshops but I am less worried about Mama Gena creating an armed militia w her followers.)— Jessa Crispin (@thebookslut) March 23, 2018
What’s it like being Jessa Crispin? Is it like being a bug?
It was once a universally accepted notion that politics grows out of culture — that the profound insights of art, religion, scholarship and local custom ultimately shape the terms of political debate. Somewhere in our history we passed a divide where politics began to be more highly valued than culture.
Its is not difficult to find evidence for this assertion. Take, for example, the rise of single-issue politics and the plethora of political pressure groups and the lengths to which politicians go to court such groups. Above all, there is the shrillness and one-dimensionality of most political rhetoric. The quality of public discourse has degenerated into shouting matches between bands of professional crusaders. As James Davison Hunter has put it, the culture wars consist of “competing utopian politics that will not rest until there is complete victory.” The result, Hunter concludes, is that “the only thing left to order public life is power. This is why we invest so much into politics.”
…The very metaphor of war ought to make us pause. The phrase “culture wars” is an oxymoron: culture is about nourishment and cultivation, whereas war inevitably involves destruction and the abandonment of the creative impulse. We are now at the point in the culture wars where we are sending women and children into battle and neglecting to sow the crops in the spring. Clearly we cannot sustain such a total war. In the end, there will be nothing left to fight over.
— Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human In an Ideological Age
“If there is hope,” wrote Heather Wilhelm, “it lies in the ‘mehs’.”
If there was hope, it MUST lie in the mehs, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population without Twitter accounts, could the force to destroy SocMed ever be generated. SocMed could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the mehs, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow SocMed to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet ——!
There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one. I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to this as an idealist, and this post is my commitment to renew that ideal. I plan to write more here from now on. However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature.
…It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.
He notes that most people simply don’t have time to write at length, which is another strong incentive to stick to the minimal demands of Facebook and Instagram. I would add that even if they had the time, most people are not particularly driven to philosophize about the world and articulate those thoughts in medium-to-long-form essays. As always, that doesn’t mean they’re stupid or shallow; it’s just that regular writing, even of the amateur variety, is a discipline like any other, and very few people have the odd single-mindedness necessary to stick to a discipline with military precision and religious zeal. Most people would want to be compensated for the time and energy they invest in writing with money, attention, or both, and as he says, the centralized web is far more efficient at providing those opportunities. Was it ever about writing per se, or was it just about self-expression? If the latter, well, that can be accomplished through sentence fragments, photos and videos in much less time. As a fellow who would surely know put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Easy is better, easiest is best.
There may well be a fair number of other oddballs out there who can find the motivation to write in nothing more than self-contained aesthetic enjoyment, but, largely by definition, they’re not going to attract notice. Or, to put it another way, there might be plenty of people who are happy to maintain blogs, but blogging itself is never going to be a cultural “thing” again, except possibly in the aspirational sense — having a blog might signify authenticity by virtue of its old-fashioned impracticality, like so many other status symbols. In a best-case scenario, perhaps in the spirit of Morris Berman’s New Monastic Individuals, blogs might come to be another redoubt of those who choose to turn their backs and walk away from the cult of convenience. That will always be a tiny minority, though.
Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human In an Ideological Age:
In biblical terms, a prophet is someone both on the margins of society and yet passionately engaged in it. The prophet is both gadfly and lover of the community. By reminding human beings of the fundamental order of the universe that exists prior to the exercise of will and power, the prophet calls his people back to reverence and humility. And while the prophet is traditionally seen as thoroughly wayward — think hair shirts, locusts, scraggly beards, and bulging eyes — he is, in fact, the castigator of waywardness in others.
Capitalism’s greatest predicament is that several paradoxes of the human condition combine to turn capitalist successes into failures… Take mass education: it was the capitalists and not the intellectuals who initiated and promoted mass education. In capitalist America every mother’s son can go to college. Most capitalist societies are being swamped with educated people who disdain the triviality and hustle of the marketplace and pray for a new social order that will enable them to live meaningful, weighty lives. The education explosion is now a more immediate threat to capitalist societies than a population explosion.
Some “encountering” enthusiasts blamed the only-partial success of the social movements of the 1960s for their turn away from politics. Many asked what the point was of critiquing a system so thoroughly corrupt. They decided to seek personal empowerment instead of political empowerment, and freeing themselves of their emotional “baggage” became their preoccupation.
Others saw turning inward as a natural extension of New Left philosophy. If the personal was political, then it made sense that in order to change the world they first had to find out who they were. Identity, as I have shown, has always been a critical part of movement rhetoric, whether it was the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, or the antiwar movement. The me generation took the 1960s emphasis on identity one step further (or backward, depending upon one’s perspective).
— Eva Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment
I’ve said before that the Great Awokening of our time can’t be understood merely as a reprise of ’60s political radicalism; the self-help/therapeutic/recovery movement ran parallel to it, and continues to do so today. As we’ve all seen, hashtag political gestures like BLM and MeToo are now seamlessly interwoven with demands for safe spaces and the abolition of “hate speech.” Many people have observed that activist politics is becoming more like a religion, and while there’s some value in that comparison, I think it’s probably more accurate to say that those parallel tracks have converged, and activists today treat politics as a form of group therapy, and vice versa. Righteous political action makes the world a better place while also healing the personal wounds suffered under oppressive conditions. If nothing else, it alleviates ennui.
In reflecting on that unholy combination, it also strikes me that perhaps the main reason why the left-wing clerisy has reacted with ambivalence at best, if not uncharitable hostility, toward Jordan Peterson, is because he challenges both aspects of this Janus-faced worldview at the same time. Not only does he insist that egalitarianism is merely a softer, slower totalitarianism, but his phenomenally-popular “self-help” book advocates a stoic, tragic ideal which encourages personal responsibility and self-confidence rather than narcissistic navel-gazing and finger-pointing. The fact that young men in particular have taken to his message with voracious enthusiasm is maddening to those academics who would prefer them to be “deconstructing masculinity” under their expert supervision instead. How many of these useless middlemen would be out of work if the general public finally stopped being receptive to their message? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? No wonder they’ve moved on to associating Peterson with Nazism; to them, it’s like he’s trying to commit intellectual genocide.
• James Hankins, “How Not to Defend the Humanities”
• Lydialyle Gibson, “The Mirage of Knowledge”
• Sohrab Amari, “The Disappearance of Desire”
• Joanna Baron & Jerry Gibbon, “Good Luck With That”
• Tanner Greer, “Jordan Peterson Saves the World”
• Marc Lewis, “The Addiction Habit”
• Meng-Hu, “Four Juxtapositions”
• Bradley Campbell, “The Intellectual Source of Victimhood Culture”
• Tiptoeing through the comedy minefield (a lament in four tweets).
It’s time to give up on all of this, writing it off as a failed experiment. So here is what I’m going to do.
1. I’m going off Twitter for a month. No, this is not a fake Farhad Manjoo Twitter break, but a real one. At the end of 30 days, we’ll see if I bother to come back.
2. Instead of staring at my phone all the time, I’m going to carry around an honest to goodness book to read. A lot of the time I spend messing around on Twitter is in spare moments when I’m waiting for the kids to get ready for bed, or between sets at the gym, and I have rationalized it by saying this is time when I can’t get sustained work done, so it’s not really going to waste. But I’m betting that’s not true and that I can fill this time with more productive or more enjoyable things.
3. I’m going to go back to what I used to do: checking out a roster of websites and blogs with good information and getting all of my news directly from those sources, not from people posting them to social media. You should do the same.
4. I’m going to spend more time writing at The Federalist, or posting extra material here on my own site—that would be TracinskiLetter.com, thanks for asking—or working on a couple of other projects I have in mind. If you want to know what I have to say, you know where to find me. I’m willing to bet that all of these projects will do me a lot more good than being “Twitter famous.”
Partly what I’m trying to do here is to go back to the future, back to the golden age of blogs. There may be another, better technological solution, and I’m open to hearing about it. But I’m starting to realize that whatever the answer eventually turns out to be, social media was probably a mistake.
I’m still sitting in the exact same spot where I took up residence in the autumn of 2007, still using a Dell desktop to do the majority of my browsing and writing, still keeping folders on the bookmarks bar full of “Blogs” or “Twits” to follow worthwhile sites and timelines. I’m happy to let it remain forever a mystery how people can do anything important on a phone screen, let alone how apps could fascinate anyone but adolescent simpletons. I’ve never been plagued by the fear of missing out that keeps shallow people flitting like anxious butterflies from one tech trend or platform to another. I recognized immediately that the blog format was perfect for my needs, and I’ve never been tempted to chase after the next shiny object. As long as you aren’t interested in making money, getting attention, or having influence, it’s easy!
Anecdotes don’t necessarily mean anything, of course, but lately I have seen several people independently grousing about social media and flirting with the idea of leaving it. Time will tell if more people follow Tracinski’s lead. Let’s just hope blogs don’t become the new vinyl, a hipster status symbol.
I have set out a dish of bird seed and a basin of water on the balcony. I no longer have any illusion about birdlike innocence. One bully gets into the dish and drives off all other birds. The bullies seem demented and malicious. They skip about pecking at other birds rather than eat the seed. Why don’t the birds gang up on the bully? Is it because of a lack of language? Birds are capable of united action: they flock together and organize themselves into flights to the end of the earth.
It wearies me to think that the senseless pecking is part of the energy that fueled the ascent of life — the manifestation of a tireless, blind drive that will go on forever.
— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath
Very Schopenhauerian of him. Of course, the avian belligerence he describes is indeed often the case. I’m convinced that hummingbirds, for example, use at least three-quarters of their caloric intake merely for driving other hummingbirds away from the feeder. But we recently saw a male cardinal take a bite of suet and flutter over to give it to his sweetheart perched nearby, a courting behavior which is apparently common among cardinals, who also mate for life. Perhaps even birds validate life’s struggles through tiny acts of affection and self-sacrifice which, however briefly, point toward the possibility of something meaningful beyond the senseless pecking.
It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.
James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore.
He knows none of it. To Mr. Hagerman, life is a spoiler.
…He said that with some pride, but he has the misgivings about disengaging from political life that you have, by now, surely been shouting at him as you read. “The first several months of this thing, I didn’t feel all that great about it,” he said. “It makes me a crappy citizen. It’s the ostrich head-in-the-sand approach to political outcomes you disagree with.”
It seems obvious to say, but to avoid current affairs is in some ways a luxury that many people, like, for example, immigrants worried about deportation, cannot afford.
The Lady of the House has a business acquaintance with whom she keeps in intermittent touch via social media. This woman — let’s call her Shelly — is, to judge by her newsletters and Facebook updates, a thoroughly unpleasant person. Each post is brimming over with typical performative spleen-venting about the sociopolitical outrage du jour, and supplemented with performative wallowing in angst/situational depression. Naturally, like all the other #resistance! nonconformist freethinkers, she looks like she was rolled off the assembly line in a social-justice shrew factory, complete with bright yarn-colored hair, hipster eyeglasses, ugly tattoos, and t-shirts emblazoned with feminist slogans. Being terrible people and known thought-criminals, the Lady and I of course laugh at each status update, treating it like a guilty-pleasure TV show. How long until this dunce finally figures out that she’s using “wokeness” as an excuse to flounder in self-inflicted misery? we keep asking after every episode.
Anyway, back to Erik Hagerman, the subject of this aghast NYT profile. This was one of the most unintentionally hilarious articles I’ve read in some time. Avoiding current affairs is a, surprise surprise, privilege! Don’t you know there are information-starved citizens in Africa who would gratefully gobble up all that social media ephemera you’re wasting? Now, to be clear, countless ordinary people live lives of prosaic local and personal concerns without ever paying the slightest attention to the dreadfully important issues of, uh, pussy hats and D.C. insider gossip, but the Times is gravely concerned because Hagerman is a former corporate executive at Nike, Walmart and Disney. It’s all well and good for hoi polloi to busy themselves with trivia and leave serious matters to their betters, but if an Important Person calls shenanigans on the whole charade of being an informed, cosmopolitan citizen, it cuts straight to the heart of the clerisy’s flattering conceit that they matter. External enemies are always necessary for maintaining the faith, but heresy corrodes it from within. We can tolerate, indeed, we require a large outgroup of proudly-ignorant Trumpenproles to define ourselves against, but if one of “us” stops performing the rituals and ablutions of being well-informed and suffers no adverse consequences, what does that say about the rest of us? Make no mistake, the fear is not that society will collapse if a small minority of citizens stop paying attention to news they can’t use, the fear is that the lack of dramatic consequences will prove the utter emptiness of this whole media-class pretense. Like Shelly, Dolnick and the clucking hens he appeals to for sympathy are deeply invested in consuming the very garbage that makes them sick, but they find that preferable to having to face their own insignificance.
Look at the list of “newsworthy events” that Dolnick lists up there. Ask yourself, how many of those have profoundly changed anything about the way you view the world? Did Parkland or the unsolved Las Vegas shootings change your views on gun control or reinforce them? Has any of the skulduggery surrounding Trump and Russia changed your political principles and allegiances or just reinforced them? When was the last time you read anything that made you stop at length to rethink your most basic attitudes and commitments, if ever? For most of us, the ideological foundations of our worldviews were cemented in place long ago; all we’re doing now is laying more bricks on top of them to keep us safe and dry. None of you are going to donate money, time or energy to political causes (especially those of you who are too busy tweeting to have time for anything else). None of you are going to do anything other than vote for the same political party you’ve always voted for, no matter how they perform. Go ahead, read a few more articles about subjects you only half-understand and can’t meaningfully act upon anyway. Send a few more vituperative tweets and posts into the void to convince yourself that you’re “doing something.” Alternatively, you could get over yourself and go focus on something that makes you feel pleasant for a change. Quietly tending to your own garden would do far more to make the world a better place than sharing your ill-informed, dyspeptic tirades with the rest of us. But you’d rather have attention and adrenaline rushes, wouldn’t you?
Lefty friends keep asking me if — or telling me that — I’m a conservative now. But I’m just a liberal who remembers what they’ve forgotten. I remember what it meant to be a liberal back when I really started to identify as one, back around 2000, during Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War. Of course, I may just have been gullible. Maybe it meant something different before that and maybe it came to mean something different after. Maybe it’s all just “tribal” signifiers, all just flags and symbols. But if it is, the forgetting must help, and that just isn’t what I’m good at.
“I’m not a conservative; I’m merely nostalgic for the simple politics and moral certainties of a bygone age, which just happens to correlate with my youth!” That’s not being entirely fair to either conservatism or Traldi, but it’s still funny. Lately, these “I didn’t leave the left; the left left me” pieces are becoming popular again, which is at least one thing that hasn’t changed much from the Dubya Bush years. During the Cold War, it was common for defenders of the liberal West to note the simple fact that it was unnecessary to put up walls and guard towers to keep their populations from escaping en masse. Likewise, it might be useful for these agonizers to reflect on why the traffic in these political conversion stories tends to be mostly one-way.