November 2018

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 bring me the head of nicholas carr, socmed, 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.

Certainty Is the Easy Path

By in foolosophy 2 Comments

Uncertainty — that is appropriate for matters of this world. Only regarding the next are we vouchsafed certainty. I believe certainty regarding that which we can see and touch, it is seldom justified, if ever. Down the ages, from our remote past, what certainties survive? And yet we hurry to fashion new ones. Wanting their comfort. Certainty…[chuckles] is the easy path. Just as you said.

— Billy Knapp, “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna formulated a famous tetralemma, which the modern Zen Buddhist Steve Hagen summarized as: either (1) objects are themselves, or (2) they are not themselves, or (3) they are both themselves and not themselves, or (4) they are neither themselves nor are they not themselves. Hagen used a cup as an example, demonstrating that even such a simple, everyday object cannot be proved to exist by these logical standards. And yet, the cup still remains.

If that seems too pointy-headed and abstract for you, try keeping a written record of every time you have to change your mind on a subject you had felt certain about, or every time you learn that a seemingly-solid memory turns out to be mistaken. It won’t take long before you start to feel a bit skittish, wondering how much you really know anything at all. And yet, we manage to competently function for the most part.

Patrick Kurp suggests that a mingling of humility and defiance is the proper attitude to take toward our omnipresent ignorance. Rather than lament our inability to possess absolute certainty, we should use our ignorance productively, keep ourselves hungry to learn more. We can never cease to be in intellectual motion. Desiring certainty is to wish to become a statue, impervious and immobile. Knowledge is always provisional. And yet, we can remain flexible and ready.

I Break Through All Boundaries

By in identity, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit No Comments

I break through all boundaries. If I see a boundary, I eat a boundary. And wash it down with a cup of hot, steaming rules.

— Howard Moon

John Gray:

This cult of the will did not end with classical totalitarianism. An ideal of self-creation has returned in 21st-century liberalism. Part of the craze for identity politics is the insistence that each of us can be whoever and whatever we decide to be. Not fate or accident but untrammelled choice must shape our identities. It is an illusory vision, since identity in practice is never unilateral. Everyone’s identity depends on recognition by others – a relationship that must be negotiated, one way or another. Yet pursuing a fantasy of autonomous self-creation has come to be seen as the fundamental human freedom. The fact that the demand for recognition of one’s chosen identity leads to the fragmentation of society into warring groups has not diminished the appeal of this vision.

The problem is that identity is being asserted in a cultural vacuum. According to the ruling philosophy of deconstruction, freedom is not exercised within a matrix of practices and institutions. It is found in anomie – the normless condition of insatiable self-assertion that the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called “the malady of the infinite”. Individual autonomy is fully realised only once the structures that helped form identities in the past have been demolished. True freedom means creating oneself, a god-like power which requires that the norms that defined western civilisation be left behind.

I’m of the opinion that all of this identity-fluidity is going to be one of those era-defining oddities we look back on one day and laugh about. Ah, those crazy twenty-teens... I mean, defining reality according to individual will and whim is one of those things that can only be tolerated as a fringe eccentricity; by definition, it can’t become the norm without unleashing epistemological anarchy. But for whatever mysterious reason, this strange dualism is the thing that a significant number of youth have seized upon in this day and age to deal with the angst and confusion that is central to the human condition — “I’m not actually what I appear to be! I’m something else on the inside and you have to take my word on it!” Eventually, some of them will realize that there is no cure for the human condition, and the marketplace of ideas will present the rest with a new identity that promises to alleviate what the old one couldn’t. Ploosa shawnje.

The Lady of the House had a former acquaintance who is, in the parlance of our times, an “otherkin.” That is, this person “identifies” as an extinct apex predator. (How conventional. Always an apex predator! Never an insect or a bacteria!) As I tried to make sense of this (which was new to me at the time) and articulate my disbelief, I offered an analogy. Imagine you had a friend of average height, I said. Imagine that this friend is very sensitive about his height and wishes he had been several inches taller. Now, imagine that he insists that you refer to him as tall when talking about him in the third person. Imagine that he urges you to warn him to duck his head when entering a low doorway. Imagine that he gets upset and casts aspersions upon your character if you hesitate. Wouldn’t you feel like telling him that it would be much better for everyone if he just accepted reality for what it is, rather than trying like Procrustes to stretch and mutilate it to fit his wishes? I feel like I’m being ordered to participate in someone else’s delusion, I said, and I’m not interested.

Now, someone else has used the same comparison in what I can only assume is a masterful job of trolling which went undetected. You see, Slate’s advice columnist is a man named Daniel who was, until recently, a woman named Mallory. (I promise, I read neither advice columns in general nor Slate in particular; this was all passed along to me by an informant.) Daniel’s advice for a reader who claims to have a 5’8” boyfriend who insists that he is actually 6’0” is to pursue a strategy of “acknowledging reality.”

Ah, those crazy twenty-teens…

To Me It Makes Good, Good Sense

By in foolosophy, music No Comments

Nige:

She retired from the music business nearly thirty years ago, with the wise words, ‘All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire.’ In a later interview, she expanded on this theme: ‘You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you’re 150, but rap and rock and roll are really ways for young people to get their anger out … It’s silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have.’ If only more ageing rock-and-rollers knew when to give up.

I’ve thought about this for many years now — is there such a thing as aging gracefully within the somewhat-limited confines of rock music? Is it possible to still use the same basic guitar-based template to express something more profound, more age-appropriate, than aggression, depression and sexual obsession?

It all depends, of course, on how we define rock (or, more broadly, pop) music. It’s not hard to think of instances where Grace Slick’s opinion is inarguable. I can think of many artists who have remained stuck in an image they cultivated as young men, even as it becomes pathetic to see them still playacting in middle- or old age. Certain genres, like Scandinavian extreme metal and gangsta rap, will always be the Lost Boys of Neverland, refusing to grow up or aim for any higher purpose beyond alienating parents and shocking the boorzhwazee. But rock ‘n’ roll contains multitudes; its family tree has countless branches. Was Morphine’s jazz-influenced minimalism adult enough to pass muster? Does Clutch sound creatively exhausted yet? Are TV on the Radio or Modest Mouse defined by a surplus of testosterone? Has there even been a Masters of Reality record that didn’t sound somehow both ageless and timeless? And how would we even classify Beats Antique? I could go on and on and on without doing justice to the diversity within mere “popular” music, so I think it’s rather obvious: an artform that has been around for sixty or seventy years has had no choice but to mature and evolve. Sometimes the critics, just as much as the enthusiasts, are guilty of refusing to allow it to age out of adolescence.

Besides, I take heart to think that even the British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, a man who is practically the embodiment of highbrow taste, a man who colorfully claimed that the electric guitar “owes much of its immense appeal to the obvious fact that it is strapped on and brandished like a livid dildo,” nonetheless professed an appreciation of Metallica, calling them “genuinely talented,” as well as “violently poetic and musical.” Well, then; if he can say that, then I can certainly continue to find something musically redeeming in Godflesh, Goldfrapp, Rob Crow and Joachim Witt.

Obiter Scripta, no. 55

By in books, obiter scripta No Comments

I do not know if this is an emotion universally felt, but I have discovered that I am not alone in feeling what I have come to think of as “Sunday night triste,” a feeling of the blues that comes upon me dependably each Sunday, roughly at dusk. What does this tinge of sadness signify? Expectations disappointed? A yearning for a time now gone and not ever to be recaptured? Regret for the winding down of another week, during the course of which one achieved (yet again!) less than one had hoped? Sorrowful anticipation of still another week ahead? Or is it — simply and more persuasively — sadness at the passing of Sunday itself, one of life’s minor pleasures that is now once again no less than a full six days off?

— Joseph Epstein, “Observing the Sabbath,” Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life

Alone with our thoughts on a day of rest, it sometimes feels as if we’ve paused amid the eternal Heraclitean flow, watching the swirls and eddies rush past without acknowledging us, knowing it’s futile and foolish, but still halfheartedly wishing we could stand athwart the flux and plead, “stop.” Alternatively, perhaps it’s a variation of what John Koenig named “kenopsia.“

A Tree That Is Unbending Is Easily Broken

By in environment, foolosophy No Comments

It’s like Lao Tzu said in chapter 76 of the Tao Te Ching. Our mightiest oak tree (140ish feet tall) didn’t fare so well in the snow event ice storm yesterday. It lost quite a few of its branches.

His next-door neighbor, the hunchbacked elm, came through with no ill effects. (It’s not bent under the weight of the ice; that’s how it always looks.)

Most of the town lost power; ours is projected to be back by Saturday at midnight. I lost count of all the downed trees just along the one-mile stretch of county road we take into town, where several of our neighbors were already hard at work with chainsaws and tractors, clearing the road. It was quite a thing, sitting in the dark last night, reading by a battery-powered lamp, repeatedly hearing the sharp crack and dull thud of branches in the forest plummeting to ground. We ended up having to travel to the east side of the Blue Ridge this morning in search of electricity and wi-fi. As I type, we’re fueling our stomachs and laptops at Panera Bread. We’ll probably migrate to a library this afternoon to do whatever work we can.

Our next-door neighbor was driving home yesterday afternoon when a falling tree clipped his truck and tore the ladder rack off. The clerk at Home Depot cheerfully informed us that her boyfriend had called to tell her that two trees had fallen on their doublewide. We expressed incredulity that she was even at work, let alone in bright spirits. “Well,” she said with a shrug and a smile, “it’s his house, not mine.” Besides, she said, they’d been talking for a while about moving. “Maybe this is just God’s way of telling us to get going!” she laughed. It could always be worse, indeed, and there will always be people who handle it more gracefully than you will.

All of this comes about as we’re planning to make some big changes over the winter in the two businesses we run which will involve some stress and belt-tightening for a while. It’s salutary to be reminded, especially at this time of year, to be grateful for what we’ve got without feeling entitled or complacent. The hard and unyielding will fall; the soft and pliant will overcome.

(Addendum: shortly after finishing this, the power went out as we were still sitting in Panera. The whole shopping center went dark. Apparently the outage stretches several miles north. And they didn’t even get any ice over here! I’m becoming convinced it’s me causing it. I feel like a character in a Christopher Moore novel — a confused schmo who wakes up one day to find that he’s been appointed the Angel of Death. Or, in my case, Anti-Electromagnetic Man, I suppose. We’ll see how long this library stays on the grid now that I’m here.)

The Tongues of Men Are Full of Deceits

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Sean Illing interviewing John Gray:

I see you as someone who enjoys exposing the hypocrisies of people who enjoy exposing the hypocrisies of others. Is that how you see yourself?

Indeed. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m resistant to claims by anyone to have complete answers to intractable human problems. I’m particularly annoyed by what’s now called “New Atheism,” and I react strongly against those who debunk the beliefs of others in a way I find bullying and shallow.

The New Atheists — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others — attack religions in the sublime confidence that these religions are myths and that they themselves harbor no myths, but that’s not true.

In many cases, the New Atheists are animated by 19th-century myths of various kinds: myths of human advancement, myths of what science can and cannot do, and all kinds of other myths. So yeah, I’m compelled to attack anyone who is debunking others for their reliance on myths when the debunkers themselves can’t see how their own thinking is shaped by myths.

I feel like that myself. Then again, perhaps we all do. Hypocrisy is that special trait which no one will speak for but everyone will practice. I recall an interview with the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in which he claimed that even wasps, birds and monkeys react angrily to deceit. Unhappily for the human ego, however, he also suggests that attacking the deceiver is motivated by a desire for dominance rather than a disinterested concern for truth. Not everything reduces to biology, of course. Evolution means endless adaptation, after all, and there’s no reason to be ashamed that our higher yearnings don’t have angelic origins. What began as a competitive drive among our fellow hominids may well morph over eons into something very different. Still, I’ve noted before that Gray seems to take particular pleasure in judging other perspectives against his own and finding them lacking; it’s not difficult to get the impression that he just enjoys the thrill of intellectual pugilism for its own sake. That kind of combative skepticism certainly could be a sign of intellectual independence and clear thinking, or it could just be another symptom of fashion-obsessed individualism and the desire to differentiate oneself in the marketplace of ideas. Only we can know our own motivations, but even so, we might just prefer our more attractive rationalizations.

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