March 2019

A Process In a Process Within a Field That Never Closes

By in atheism, religion No Comments

Nicholas Frankovich:

Give a non-theistic cosmologist that one free miracle, the mystery of being, and he’ll explain the rest. The rest is what he’s interested in anyway. Those who dwell on the one free miracle, meanwhile, are liable to find that it never gets old, that it moves them on occasion to blurt, mentally or out loud, something like “Oh my God.”

Did someone say “God”? Here we go.

These days the most common arguments for atheism involve the assumption that God is an idealized imaginary person whose name Christians and other monotheists robotically plug in as the answer to the big ontological question, Why isn’t there nothing? Any theists who do that shouldn’t, and no atheist should accept them as spokespeople for what he thinks he’s arguing against, because they’re all too happy to join him in missing the point.

Schopenhauer had it right, I think — everyone arguing about God’s existence is missing the point, because what they’re really interested in is personal immortality. “But if continued existence after death could also be proved to be incompatible with the existence of gods, because, let us, say, it presupposed originality of mode of existence, they would soon sacrifice these gods to their own immortality and be eager for atheism.” Frankovich thinks that atheists don’t spend enough time contemplating the impenetrable mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think about that all the time. It is indeed a fascinating thing to meditate upon. But it’s not the amazing fact of existence that we’re all disagreeing about, it’s the dubious “And therefore…” conclusions being drawn from it. Still, either way, it doesn’t change the fact that upon your death, no irreducible essence of “you” will proceed onward through time with “your” memories and sensibilities. Your “itinerant atoms” will disperse to reemerge in other substances; your thoughts and characteristics will linger awhile among the dreams and stories of your family and friends until they, too, join the great forgetting.

For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes;
As proper people find it strange
That we are changed by what we change,
That no event can happen twice
And that no two existences
Can ever be alike; we’d rather
Be perfect copies of our father,
Prefer our idées fixes to be
True of a fixed reality.
No wonder, then, we lose our nerve
And blubber when we should observe…

— W.H. Auden, “New Year Letter”

Some Useless Information Supposed to Fire My Imagination

By in foolosophy, the madness of crowds No Comments

This state of moral and spiritual provisionality can be fairly unnerving, since it becomes clear how utterly temporary and groping all our most important judgements must be. Perhaps it is fear of this that leads so many people to think that the sign of a thoughtful mind is that it is well stocked with clear opinions on everything important: a view that I cannot but think of as a fiction and an expression of anxiety about how things really are.

— Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age

Several years ago, in the spirit of Montaigne’s skepticism, I rededicated myself to contemplating the basic question, “What do I know, really?” Like Socrates, but without the irony, I had to conclude, “Not much.” Long before Marie Kondo became trendy, I rummaged through the contents of my skull and decided that none of the sociopolitical clutter in there sparked joy. I grew disgusted with my own ability to maintain an appearance of being reasonably well-informed and threw all those flimsy garments in the trash, vowing to go around silently in a monk’s habit of honest ignorance. I’m interested in many things — many more than I’ll ever have time to fully explore, in fact. But that interest rarely leads to certainty. Quite the opposite.

The same people who sneer at consumerism and escapist entertainment and criticize the masses for foolishly pursuing happiness by way of material possessions think that having a mind well-stocked with clear opinions on current events is a sign of sophistication. Some people collect Franklin Mint tchotchkes, others stockpile convictions about public figures and events which they can never hope to influence. Some people line up outside Walmart the night before Black Friday to jockey and jostle over toys and flat-screen TVs, others flock to breaking news hashtags to line up and verbally assault strangers. One group takes itself far more seriously than the other.

I’m proud to say that I have never read a single article about the Trump/Russia brouhaha. I’d been aware of it, of course, in the same way that living in a college town means you can’t help but be aware of a football game going on, what with all the increased traffic, team pennants flapping from car windows, and the dull roar issuing from downtown where the stadium sits. When the Mueller investigation news broke last Friday, I was surprised. Again, not because I was interested or invested in it one way or the other, but because even I had vaguely assumed that with all the dense clouds of smoke wafting over the web these last couple years, there would probably be some sort of collusion fire discovered eventually. Understand, I go out of my way to avoid coming into contact with anyone online who gives off the slightest hint of #resistance! mania, and still I took it for granted that the popular narrative couldn’t be entirely a delusive product of wishful thinking. The progressive media bubble apparently extends much further than I’d suspected.

At any rate, I spent a little while clicking through various Twitter accounts of those to whom this news was a very big deal. It was like being in a foreign country. Not just because of the asinine, self-referential Twitter slang (which was bad enough, making even serious issues sound adolescent), but because of all the names and events being referenced that had no meaning to me whatsoever. For a moment, I considered how many hours, or days, of my life it would have required to be conversant in all of this, and for what? What possible difference would it have made, other than keeping me in a constant simmer of anxiety and anger? Would I have been called upon to make an epoch-defining speech, or cast a decisive vote? It’s such a strange conceit, this belief that our civic duty requires us to pay close attention to events far beyond our personal control, as if the arc of the moral universe is a spoon we can bend toward justice with the concentrated power of our enlightened minds. Most of us have more than enough work to do in our immediate vicinity, in being better spouses, parents, and friends, but as usual, we’d rather choose abstractions and distractions.

Brash Nexus

By in getting and spending, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

Claire Berlinski:

Arun and Esin finally got through the lines and to the Agora of Humanity, where we agreed to meet if we were separated. Next to the Agora stood a massive Che Rebel Spirit energy drink stand. I was thirsty. “Consumed iced, or mixed in revolutionary cocktails, Che Rebel Spirit perfectly combines that ‘Rebel’ feeling with a unique and ‘Delicious’ taste,” said the brochure. “Be the first to discover a new REBELICIOUS energy drink!”

Despite my best efforts, some of the earlier comments from my old home on Blogspot didn’t complete the migration here. However, I was able to go spelunking through the archives in order to reproduce this amusing exchange I had with a reader nearly nine years ago:

Noel: But grandiloquence in one’s nuncupation can make one appear supercilious, n’est pas?
Damian: Ah, but the true sesquipedalian spirit must not allow its inherent delectation in the myriad forms of badinage to be limned by the pedestrian fears and insecurities of the audience; must hold no truck with those philistines who insist on reducing it to mere fanfaronade.
Noel: I agree, I think. Is fanfaronade a drink?
Damian: No, you’re thinking of FrantzFanonade, the “revolutionary” sports drink designed to quench the most “wretched” thirst on earth.

As you can see, I was ahead of my time. But if any of my wealthy readers would like to provide a little seed capital, it appears there actually is a market for Communist-themed beverages. Even if we don’t get filthy rich, the ironic enjoyment alone would make it worthwhile!

Me and My Friends Sell Ourselves Short but Feel Very Well

By in eric hoffer, santutthi, the statusphere, work, Ω No Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

The kind of person we seek, said the personnel manager, is the one who is perfectly content with his living wage and to do the same thing over and over again. If an applicant showed the faintest sign of ambition, he was immediately rejected.

We are inclined to look down on or even despise people without ambition, but unless we want a world in which everyone is frustrated and resentful, we need them, these unambitious types without special talent. We do not want frustrated geniuses shining our shoes or stacking shelves in supermarkets.

There is nothing wrong, then, with mediocrity and lack of talent. It is an essential ingredient of the human mix. Where it becomes dangerous is where it is combined with ambition, as it seems to be nowadays. The world pullulates as never before—or so it seems to me—with the mediocre who are avid for power.

In his diary, Eric Hoffer noted that the education explosion and advanced technology had produced “hordes of educated nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up being mischief-making busybodies.” He obviously hadn’t seen anything yet. Now, there are millions of educated nobodies who think of themselves as pundits, policy advisers and budding celebrities. It’s only my subjective recollection, of course, but when I was coming of age, it seemed like the widely-shared understanding of the good life was to have a rich inner life — if necessary, in stark contrast to an unremarkable outer appearance. Maybe these things move in predictable cycles, and the early ’90s was just the valley in between the hyper-political peaks of the ’60s and our current decade. It may have been somewhat romantic to scorn wealth, fame and power in favor of personal meaning and modest contentment, but I’ll always prefer it to the contemporary “engagé and enragé” ideal.

Dream of Better Lives, The Kind Which Never Hate

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, religion No Comments

In fact, for many misotheists, love is precisely the centerpiece of their moral philosophy. One could go so far as to argue that misotheists are more likely to foster love for humanity because they have already channeled and contained whatever capacity of hatred they possessed when they direct their hostility against an intangible antagonist—God. There is nothing (or much less) of the bitterness, destructiveness, and violence in the misotheist that marks the determined racist, misogynist, or religious bigot.

— Bernard Schweizer, Hating God : The Untold Story of Misotheism

I’m not sure how to spell the sound of surprised, muffled laughter, so I’ll just say yes, one could go so far as to argue that point — if one didn’t mind looking ridiculous. Who knew that the human capacity for hatred and violence was a finite resource, subject to hydraulic limitations?

On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love for the human race — that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind — is an unaccountable person with whom it is difficult to deal upon any well-known and recognized principles, and who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.

— James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Obiter Scripta, no. 65

By in obiter scripta, waiting for the barbarians, writing No Comments

It will be very long before political subjects will be reduced to geometric certitude. At present the reasoning on them is a kind of arithmetic of infinity, when the best information, the coolest head, and clearest mind can only approach the truth. A cautious man should therefore give only sibylline predictions, if, indeed, he should hazard any. But I am not a cautious man. I therefore give it as my opinion that they will issue the paper currency, and substitute thereby depreciation in the place of bankruptcy, or, rather, suspension. Apropos of this currency, this papier terré, now mort et enterré, the Assembly have committed many blunders which are not to be wondered at. They have taken genius instead of reason for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer lightning to light.

— Gouverneur Morris, letter to William Short, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, Vol. 1

Oh, that concluding sentence! Those old-time poet-statesmen make me swoon like a teenage girl. They weren’t just lawyers and they weren’t MBA’s: they had literary educations that included a knowledge of Greek and Latin. They knew poetry not as gut-spilling splotches of formless free verse but as a craft with a prosody that included rhyme and meter. They were taught to read it and write it, in English and the Classical languages. They didn’t have TV and the Internet so they had nothing to do with their spare time but read Shakespeare, Gibbon and Thucydides. Three cheers for progress! We have cable news and Twitter.

A Mere Murmur

By in foolosophy, nietzsche 2 Comments

A counter-proposal: the most important things in life are those you neglect in your attempts to appear superficially informed on issues about which you can meaningfully do nothing.

“And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you.”

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Obiter Scripta, no. 64

By in nietzsche, obiter scripta No Comments

The born aristocrats of the spirit are not overeager; their creations blossom and fall from the trees on a quiet autumn evening, being neither rashly desired, not hastened on, nor supplanted by new things. The wish to create incessantly is vulgar, betraying jealousy, envy, and ambition. If one is something, one does not actually need to do anything—and nevertheless does a great deal. There is a type higher than the “productive” man.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Ironically, I re-encountered this aphorism while flipping through books, looking for inspiration to spark some writing after what seems like an endless string of days filled with work and the usual dispiriting effluvia of pop culture and current events. A reminder of wu wei by way of 19th-century Germany. Speaking of Taoism, Po Chu-i famously tweaked Lao-tzu for telling us that “those who speak know nothing; those who know are silent,” before proceeding to elaborate with five thousand more words. Likewise, how dare a man who published eleven books in one decade suggest I’m vulgar and ambitious for wanting to scribble a few times a week? I suppose I’m just a born bourgeois of the spirit.

To Hell In a Handbasket of Deplorables

By in bread and circuses, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Will Lloyd:

The nerds have taken over Hollywood, America and the world. It wasn’t just superheroes either. Zombies, androids, vampires, wizards, aliens, werewolves, intergalactic sagas, Lego, H.P. Lovecraft, Tolkien, board games based on TV shows – though these things were never unpopular per se, they always belonged to children, or to people at the lonelier fringes of the culture. Now they are the culture.

It’s true that a lot of pop culture seems perpetually juvenile. It’s also true that a phase of extended adolescence seems to be the new normal — not just in the case of entertainment choices, but also concerning the delayed onset of careers and families, the traditional markers of settled adulthood. How much of this is a sign of cultural enfeeblement and decadence? Alternatively, how much of it is attributable to the new “problem of abundance” created by technology, which allows individuals an increasing plethora of options with which to customize their lives, even as it disrupts the stability of many career options? In other words, is the end nigh, or is this all just the latest sound and fury in the open-ended evolution of a species with no inherent telos? There are many interesting angles that could be explored regarding this topic. Unfortunately, since we inhabit a deeply-stupid media ecosystem, all slippery slopes must lead to you-know-who:

If many people in a society feel like outsiders and the major mass culture tells them loudly and constantly that this is a noble thing to be, then what kind of politics will you have? There are battalions of pollsters, number-crunchers and political scientists who could explain what happened in 2016 – but a Trump presidency became possible first with the popularity of characters like Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne.

If the Venn diagram overlap between Comic-Con attendees and MAGA-hat wearers didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. It’s like a more mainstream version of intersectionality — all bad things are interconnected. The popcorn entertainment I disapprove of is basically the same thing as the worst political trends in the world. It’s convenient how that’s always the case. Ironically, just a few paragraphs earlier, he claimed that Marvel movies “reflect Americans [sic] paranoia right back at them to pack out theaters.” Apparently they also serve as a foundation to allow critics to make specious, not to say paranoid, connections in order to pack out a word count.

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