January 2019

The Color of Conservative

By in political philosophy No Comments

Christian Alejandro Gonzalez:

Glenn Loury’s calls for personal responsibility in the black community, his defense of patriotism—even his disposition—indicate that he is a conservative. Yet he remains hesitant to adopt the “conservative” label, and especially the “black conservative” label. When I ask him about this reluctance, he replies with characteristic sense of humor. Social pressure, he answers, makes it difficult for professors to come out as conservatives. “When they get finished with you on Twitter for being a black conservative,” he laments, “there’s not very much left of your reputation.”

There has been a significant increase in recent years of posts and articles which mull over the precision, or lack thereof, in political taxonomy. Is you is or is you ain’t? Max Boot’s recent book notwithstanding, this seems to be largely one-way traffic; if there are dozens of examples of conservatives wondering if they have suddenly become liberal or been liberal all along, I’m unaware of them. I figure this correlates with the leftward lurch over the same period known as the Great Awokening, which abruptly stopped the music and left many liberals standing without a seat to endure the jeering of their former peers. Well, throughout history, exile has often produced great poetry and literature. So far, we’re only getting a lot of navel-gazing and linguistic quibbling, but we can hope.

Personally, I find David Warren’s schematic to be as useful and accurate as any: rather than left and right, fashionable and unfashionable; rather than red vs. blue, a color wheel. It sounds almost facetious at first, but as Bertie Wooster would say, he has rung the bell. I examine it narrowly and I find no flaw in it. It is the goods. From now on, I identify as hexcode #587b56.

Bloggers In the Mist

By in socmed No Comments

I want to return to that Alan Jacobs post I linked to yesterday:

Facebook is the Sauron of the online world, Twitter the Saruman. Let’s rather live in Tom Bombadil’s world, where we can be eccentric, peculiar perhaps, without ambition, content to tend our little corner of Middle Earth with charity and grace. We’ve moved a long way from Tim Carmody’s planetary metaphor, which, as I say, I feel the force of, but whether what I’m doing ultimately matters or not, I’m finding it helpful to work away in this little highland garden, above the turmoil of the social-media sea, finding small beautiful things and caring for them and sharing them with a few friends. One could do worse.

I wholeheartedly concur, of course. I’ve been amused for almost a decade now by the insistence that blogs are passé, and I’ve championed the idea of unambitious, self-contained satisfaction within a writing practice for even longer. I realized while reading this, though, that for all the true and necessary complaints about Facebook and Twitter, you rarely see anyone include Reddit in the pantheon of online deities. Doing so would complicate the picture somewhat, I think. (The rise of podcasting and YouTube channels complicates the declinist view of social media even more, given that huge numbers of people are eager to absorb hours of lectures and discussions about weighty topics, but I’m sticking to the mostly-text-based platforms here.)

Let me be fair: there are genuine positives about any media platform. I don’t belong to any of them, but I’m aware that they can be used intelligently. As much as I would love to see Facebook and Twitter disappear, I worry that it’s starting to become a reverse-status symbol, a new countercultural badge, to say so. The negative narrative crystallizing around social media resonates because most people think of pop culture and current events as the cultural center of gravity, the place where all the important action and discussion is. On Facebook, this means seeing your relatives and friends argue vehemently about politics. On Twitter, this means seeing increasingly-unhinged media figures incite mobs to savage the reputations and livelihoods of thought-criminals. On Reddit, though, things can’t be summarized so neatly.

Reddit is somewhat the black sheep of the social media family, referred to obliquely as a cautionary tale about the dangers of too much free speech. Years ago, as the Great Awokening was taking shape, one would easily get the impression from the chattering classes that Reddit was the seedy downtown of the Internet where all the lowlifes lurked, waiting to prey on passers-by. The pseudonymity of the platform played a significant part in that perception, as did the fact that interests are followed on Reddit, not individuals. If Facebook increasingly resembles the Party of 1984, Reddit might represent the proles of Winston Smith’s fantasy, “those swarming disregarded masses” whose anarchic energy could bring the whole dystopian edifice down. (Twitter is just where journalists and other media figures conduct a perpetual Maoist struggle session in sentence fragments.) But as I said at the time, being leery of Reddit is like being agoraphobic — it’s far too diverse and eclectic. For every subreddit devoted to radical politics or porn, there’s the structured format of r/changemyview, which strikes even this jaded observer as a laudable attempt to make online debate constructive and informative, or there’s the general interest of r/askhistorians. If there’s an interest, there’s probably a subreddit devoted to it, and even as the web devolves toward communicating through memes, gifs and emoticons, there are still plenty of people who write well and at length to be found on Reddit. It’s like the entire human pageant in miniature, both good and bad.

If we do include Reddit alongside its social media brethren, one thing we can say in general about all of them is that they represent not the death of blogging so much as the expansion of the comment section. Few people have the discipline or depth to sustain a writing practice of any substance. The model of online discussion now is a crowded pub, where anyone who isn’t shouting or gesturing excitedly will struggle to be heard. I don’t see any point in bemoaning this, unless people are nostalgic for the attention that blogs used to command. As far as technological evolution is concerned, the comment section is perfectly adapted to our new digital environment; the blog was just a necessary link in the ancestral chain. Like the great apes, those of us who prefer to reflect and write at moderate length for a devoted, small audience will have to find our niche in remote forests and jungles, hoping that our descendants don’t completely despoil our habitat or start hunting us for sport.

They Know What’s Best for You and I

By in fresh hell, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

I don’t wanna work for the corporation, but they’re tryna tell me that I must…

— Mark Sandman

Caitlin Flanagan:

You know the left has really changed in this country when you find its denizens glorifying America’s role in the Vietnam War and lionizing the social attitudes of the corporate monolith Procter & Gamble.

The Lady of the House was telling me about a conversation between two Facebook friends over the recent Gillette “toxic masculinity” ad. One person griped about it, and the other responded by saying, “Well, I think it’s great that the message is getting out there!” The message? Who looks to corporate ad agencies for moral instruction? What kind of frivolous egotist is so easily flattered by a barely-concealed sales pitch? And these true believers volunteer to proselytize for the product! It struck me that however irreligious these people consider themselves, their appetite for sermons and missionary work is insatiable. If priests and ministers would adorn their vestments with corporate logos à la NASCAR drivers, they could probably get people to start attending church again.

Noteworthies (45)

By in noteworthies No Comments

• Molly Brigid McGrath, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Frontier Anthology” and “The Useful Errors of Terry Eagleton”

• Jacob Hamburger, “What Was New Atheism?”

• Alan Jacobs, “Social Media, Blogs, Newsletters”

• Speaking of which, “It turns out we invented blogging.” (Previously.)

• Dan McLaughlin, “Boycotts Are Not the Free Market”

• Jane Brox, “Disturbing the Silence”

• Himadri Chatterjee, “Putting the Plebs Back in Their Place”

• Kevin D. Williamson, “Crisis of Citizenship“

Where I Come From (2)

By in omnigatherum 2 Comments

Some new 23andMe results came in. Now I can see specific regions my ancestors lived in:

(Lublin Voivodeship, Silesian Voivodeship, and Podkarpackie Voivodeship)

(Lucerne, St. Gallen and Schwyz)

(Baden-Württemberg)

(Šibenik-Knin County and Sisak-Moslavina County)

(Glasgow City, Leicestershire and Greater London)

I Have a Greater Responsibility Than You Can Possibly Fathom! You Have the Luxury of Not Knowing What I Know!

By in editorial vigilantism No Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

The pedant seeks error, not truth, and delights to find it. Indeed, the search for error may be the entire purpose of his reading, to judge from certain books dating from the 19th century in my possession. In them, the sole mark made by a previous reader is the emphatic underlining, often accompanied in the margin by an explanation mark or some other expression of joyful discovery, of an error, whether of printing or grammar or fact, and of whatever magnitude. The intellectual or moral significance of the error is quite beside the point; it is the fact of error, and of having found it, that is important to the pedant. He is like a predatory animal stalking its prey, pouncing on it when it comes out in the open.

An “explanation” mark? Is this a sting operation to catch pedants? Surely he just left that there as bait?

Last summer, I was browsing through a book, grading it for resale. It was some hardcover fiction novel which looked to be in pristine condition. While flipping through the pages, though, I caught sight of what looked like pencil markings about two-thirds of the way through. Unusual, I thought; who marks in their beach reading, especially if they’re not going to keep the book? There was one line which referred to a character looking out hizzorher office window in Lyon toward the Mediterranean. Our volunteer copyeditor had underlined “Lyon” and placed a pair of question marks in the margin, followed by a sputtering “Marseille? You can’t see the Mediterranean from Lyon!!”

I was tickled to imagine our anonymous crusader, who, as I said, gave the book away, perhaps out of disgust, but wanted to make sure that no unwary readers would be led astray by such a careless lack of basic research. I like to imagine that a stern letter to the publisher was also sent urging corrections to any future editions (maybe even a direct admonishment to the author, accompanied by a map of France). I don’t remember anything else about the book, not the title, not the author. I know little about France and am not particularly interested to know more. But I have to admit: by God, I know where Lyon and Marseille are now, and I know which one is on the Mediterranean. I like to imagine our tightly-wound pedant offering me a tiny smirk, a knowing look, and a tip of the hat before turning back to another book, pencil in hand.

When My Thoughts Start to Feel Like Mine, They’re Taken From Me. It Seems to Happen Every Time.

By in race, the cult of multi, tribalism No Comments

Kevin D. Williamson:

For the Left, public discourse is Lord of the Flies, and victimhood is the conch — that is how they believe we should decide who gets to speak. That’s what the nonsensical business about “intersectionality” is all about. It is at its heart very little more than a reconstitution of old, dumb, primitive, superstitious ideas in the same genus as racism and nationalism, i.e. the belief that certain demographic markers of questionable real-world relevance are supernaturally cementitious determinants of moral meaning. The ugliness and crudity of that view are easy enough to ascertain. There are no political leaders, police officers, journalists, or college professors — only white political leaders, black police officers, gay journalists, disabled college professors, etc. No sensible person believes that we live in a perfectly colorblind society — but it does not follow from that that the most important thing about David Webb is his race. He made the same argument when Areva Martin thought he was white that he would have made if she had known he was black. David Webb is not the variable in that equation.

All true, but I would just add that victimhood is part of a two-step process, like a warranty. It’s only activated when you officially register your product — the product, in these instances, being your political affiliation. Victimhood points without an official certification of progressive bona fides are worthless. The leverage, as all our professional denouncers of white privilege know very well, comes from being in charge of deciding who qualifies as a victim. In what I’m sure is nothing but a remarkable coincidence, that power seems to have accrued entirely to privileged, mostly-white progressives. As I like to say, it’s as if members of the Tsar’s inner circle managed to disguise themselves as Bolsheviks and carry on enjoying the same status and perks they always had. Every so often, as in this latest farcical example, the mask slips, to our amusement. It’s really impressive — they could stop mid-sentence in a performative diatribe against their own privilege to threateningly raise the pimp hand to a “victim” who dares to improvise with the script, all without betraying the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance.

Untune That String and Hark What Discord Follows

By in animals, books No Comments

When you think about it, the idea of gangsters emerging from the ghetto to steal “our” innocent pets is really absurd; what’s more, it bespeaks all kinds of race and class anxieties. These sensitive issues also saturate the discourse around pit bull “rescue” campaigns, in which dogs are taken from young black men in the city’s run-down neighborhoods, inoculated, bathed, “altered,” given friendly names, adopted by middle class families, and taken to live in the suburbs. We do to the dogs what really want to do to the barbarians who breed them: make them submit.

— Mikita Brottman, The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Literary, Royal, Philosophical, and Artistic Dog Lovers and Their Exceptional Animals

Jordan Peterson, in his criticism of the social-justice left, often notes their inability to distinguish between legitimate authority and capricious tyranny. For a culture downstream of Foucault, all authority is inherently suspect. There may be several dozen genders now, but power is always binary — you’re either the oppressor or the oppressed. I had to laugh while reading this paragraph, seeing a near-parody of progressivism in miniature — the guilty conscience, the performative hand-wringing, the bad-faith ambivalence toward the comfort and compassion of middle-class life.

A couple pages earlier, Brottman wrote about the mixed results of her French bulldog Grisby’s attendance at obedience school. She admits that she’s inconsistent with discipline, and as a result, Grisby doesn’t respect or obey her as readily as he does her partner, David, who has no problem being properly authoritative. Brottman is leery, though, of the techniques promoted by celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan, “who insists that we assert dominance over our dogs instead of treating them like babies.” She mistakenly seems to think that this precludes affection or rewards; “dominance,” to her, can apparently only ever be callous and unjust. On his television shows, Millan, like Peterson, has to constantly teach people the difference between authority and tyranny. Whether among pets or people, the indulgence of bad behavior doesn’t result in gratitude for one’s permissiveness, it results in contempt and disregard.

I spent many years involved in pit bull rescue. One of my own dogs was removed from the inner city, where he had already been tried and found wanting as a fighting dog. I’m not conflicted at all about this. I have no patience with the shallow relativism that vacillates over whether a life of comfort and affection can truly be said to be “better” than the nasty, short and brutish life of an animal seen only as cheap property or a macho accoutrement. Somehow I had no problem exercising my judgment that “This is wrong, I can do something about it, and I will” without reenacting King Leopold in the Congo. Too many people think angsty self-flagellation and asking “Who are we to judge?” makes them look nuanced and enlightened. In reality, it just makes them look weak. Dogs can instantly tell the difference. Only humans can rationalize themselves into knots.

Obiter Scripta, no. 60

By in obiter scripta No Comments

It is good to go to bed early in Winter, and tonight as we sleep our dreams take punctuation from the thudding of snowploughs as they roll and bluster up and down Route 4, shaking the house yet comforting our sleep: Someone takes care, the solitary captains in their great snowships breasting through vast whiteness, cleaving it sideways into gutter drifts. If we stir as they thump past, we watch revolving yellow lights flash through our windows and reflect on the ceiling. We roll over and fall back into protected sleep.

— Donald Hall, “Winter,” Seasons at Eagle Pond

We don’t get quite enough snow in Virginia to justify it, but I still enjoy the fantasy of having a four-wheel-drive vehicle to drive in the snow (or better yet, an all-wheel-drive Subaru — I love those little tanks). It’s a lingering urge from the days when my family owned a newspaper distributorship and we were often the first ones out breaking trails through a snowstorm. I remember the satisfying feeling of security and preparedness in a vehicle designed for snow, the pleasure of being alert and focused on overcoming the danger of slick roads. Alone in a vast sea of white, I never thought of myself as the captain of a snowship, but that’s a great image, as is that of snowplows as patrolling guardians making the roads safe for the rest of us as we sleep.

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