Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, “Circus Bazooko”
Twin Temple, “The Devil (Didn’t Make Me Do It)”
ICP, “Headless Boogie”
Resident Evil 4 soundtrack, “Ganado IV”
October 2021
Riches
I am a rich man.
I’ve always been clear about this — I would consider myself “rich” when I felt comfortable buying books at retail just because I felt like it. Yesterday, I went to Barnes & Noble on a whim, and I bought these books just because I felt like it. I didn’t note the titles in order to go home and comparison-shop, or check the library’s website to see if any were available, or put them on a wish list for the next eight months. I thought, These look interesting, so I bought them. In years past, I might have had a sudden stab of anxiety as I realized that I’d just spent money that should have been set aside for a bill coming due. Not this time. This time, there was just the unadulterated pleasure of browsing the philosophy section to the smell of freshly-brewed coffee from the café behind me, “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”
Like most people in possession of imaginary lottery money, sure, I could find other things to buy if I cared to daydream about it. Brand new vehicles? A renovated house? A stock portfolio? Luxury vacations? Those would all just be gravy. I’ve achieved my wealth goal, and it was everything I dreamed it would be.
In the What Now?
On a textbook, no less.
Interlude: Elephant Tree, “Sails”
Now That We’ve Lost All the Reasons That We Thought That We Had
There is no denying that we live in disturbingly anxious and contentious times. Apocalyptic assertions, profanity-laden tirades, public shaming tactics, and crude weapons of moral accusation have increasingly taken the place of rational discourse and the steadfast rule of law. There is something ominous in the air, a faint but unmistakable scent of dissolution. Even before the shamefulness of the Afghanistan debacle, still unfolding as I write, there has been a growing and justifiable disgust with the self-serving incompetence of our leadership classes, and a sense of resignation to a future of ever-growing polarization and irreversible diminution of our national self-understanding. Hard times give rise to troubled thoughts; and when the hardness of the times is in large part a product of our own folly and improvidence, the thoughts are likely to turn inward, like knives in the brain.
— Wilfred McClay, “Has America Lost Its Story?”
****
Although some of these ideals survived the war, they lost much of their intellectual appeal and cultural force. That the West lost confidence in itself was a direct consequence of the war. As Francis Fukuyama remarked, the “First World War was a critical event in the undermining of Europe’s self-confidence.” Or as Jacques Barzun observed, “the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction was the Great War of 1914-1918.”
When the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stated on the eve of the Great War that the “lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time,” he had little idea just how long darkness would last. Richard Overy characterized the decades following the Great War as “The Morbid Age,” one where cultural and intellectual life appeared to be haunted by expectation of a new Dark Age and an end to Western civilization. This was had more than the usual unsettling outcomes associated with a military conflict. It called into question the self-belief of the political and cultural elites of Western societies.
One of the most momentous and durable legacies of the Great War was that it disrupted and disorganized the prevailing web of meaning through which Western societies made sense of their world. Suddenly the key values and ideals into which the early-twentieth century elites had been socialized appeared to be emptied of meaning…One response to this existential crisis was to lament the sense of loss of the old order. But even those who possessed a strong conservative impulse understood that there was no obvious road back to the past.
The power of destruction unleashed during the Great War, with its unexpected and uncontrollable trajectory, and the failure of the intellectual legacy of modernity to make sense of this tragedy undermined society’s faith in future progress. Despite the rhetoric that this was a “War to end all Wars,” it was widely understood that four years of slaughter did not resolve any of the problems that caused the conflict in the first place. Premonition of the war to come in the future coexisted with fears of uncertainty about the capacity of society to absorb internal conflicts. Suddenly, the taken-for-granted assumptions about civilization, progress, and the nature of change lost their capacity to illuminate human experience. The prominent English historian H.A.L. Fisher acknowledged in 1934 that he could no longer discern in history the “plot,” the “rhythm and predetermined pattern” that appeared so obvious to observers in the past. “I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave,” he stated.
— Frank Furedi, First World War: Still No End in Sight
****
Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
‘Cause I’ve noticed all the others
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going
‘Cause I feel like the real reason
Is that you’re quitting and admitting
That you’ve lost all the will to battle on
Will the fight for our sanity
Be the fight of our lives?
Now that we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had
Still the battle that we’re in
Rages on till the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses
But the thought that went unspoken
Was understanding that you’re broken
Still the last volunteer battles on..
— The Flaming Lips, “The Gash“
We Could Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees
This is all in keeping with the current liberal project’s moral goal, which is creating lives devoid of any unchosen obligations and absolutely rife with chosen identities of fanciful and recent coinage. The problem is that it’s the unchosen obligations—or the obligations chosen but whose downstream responsibilities cannot be unchosen—that will give us the only real meaning in life. Family, children, our hometowns, our childhoods, our ethnic identity (if we have one), or the chosen-but-undoable commitments—marriage, joining the military, that company we start, religious faith—are the defining obligations where our selves really play out.
If I were to go back and say one thing to my younger self as a warning from the future, it’s this: the eventual cost of optionality in life—all the commitments you don’t make to preserve your ability to instantly change course—is usually not worth the upside that optionality eventually produces.
Growing up, I heard it from my parents many times. “We just want you to have options as you get older.” (My parents both think of themselves as curmudgeonly right-wingers, so it’s ironic that their advice to their eldest son would be so quintessentially liberal.) I remember when Matt P. dropped out of school in eleventh grade. We were all so shocked. “What’s he going to do about a job?!” we said to each other. It was as if he had boarded a ship to the New World in the sixteenth century. We expected a tragic end for him. (I Googled him and saw that he became a chef, so I guess he avoided homelessness, drug addiction, insanity, and all the rest.) It had been drilled into my head for years — get good grades to get into a good college. Join some clubs, sport teams, etc. to appear “well-rounded” on college applications. Whatever you do, don’t limit your options! One day, when I was about eighteen and in the very process of limiting my options by dabbling in community college while attempting to become a musician, I came downstairs quietly and overheard my parents talking in the kitchen. My dad was talking about me as if I, too, had boarded a ship to the New World, and was steeling himself for the inevitable disaster. I stood eavesdropping for a minute, then quietly continued out the door, realizing that for better or for worse, I was on my own here.
I have no regrets. I am practically the avatar of amor fati. But if I were to formulate a rule about the best environment in which to raise and guide children and adolescents, I would emphasize more muscular parental guidance and less laissez-faire “follow your dreams/passion and figure it out as you go.” When life is comfortable in general, and authority figures act almost allergic to “imposing” their values on impressionable minds, the result is often a lot of confused, aimless wandering while waiting for a “calling” to announce itself via a beam of light from the heavens. For me, luckily, I had such a strong, innate drive toward routine and habit that I was never in danger of becoming pathologically afraid of commitment. I have friends my age, though, who seem to be constantly fluttering between relationships, jobs, and locations for no real reason that I can understand. From my perspective, they give up too easily when faced with obstacles. They’re always on the lookout for something slightly more optimal. They seem reluctant to work within the discipline of limits. But as venerable philosophers have taught, a life well-lived means more closed and locked doors behind you. Damon Linker seems to miss this point — yes, “choosing not to choose” is something of a paradox, like most deep truths in life, but it’s not so much about the initial choice; it’s about accepting the consequences, the “downstream responsibilities that cannot be unchosen.” To be a tree or a tumbleweed; that is the question.
Are You Not Entertained?
Watched the new Chappelle show.
What struck me was how the entire monologue, start to finish, was about the woke politics of this or that protected group.
There’s nothing else to talk about in contemporary cultural spaces.
— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) October 7, 2021
Michael Brendan Dougherty had a similar impression. I suppose we’ve reached the stage of complaining that all we do is complain about wokeness, for lack of anywhere else to go, conversationally speaking. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was; we talk about wokeness because that’s where all the cultural energy is, sadly enough. I’ve started reading Ross Douthat’s book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, which seems to encapsulate a lot of my own thoughts from the last several years. The ideal of progress, which has carried Western civilization so far for so long, seems to have run into the law of diminishing returns. We’re sated with affluence and jaded by our technological marvels. There are no inspiring frontiers to be found. “High” culture almost seems ashamed of its own existence, and even popular culture has devolved to endless remakes and reboots of films and music from decades ago. The parasitical ideology of wokeness has taken advantage of this weakness and paralyzed its hosts — religion, politics, and culture — allowing its young to devour them from the inside. Establishment comedy itself has become just another form of po-faced preaching from people too oblivious to realize that they have become the insufferable tartuffes they used to mock, which is pretty ironically amusing, when you think about it.
I’m not an artist or a thinker. No one will ever pay me for my insights. I’ll never get to thank you for attending my TED talk. But for whatever it’s worth, it seems to me that these complaints about our woke preoccupations miss the point. There will be no “return” to a healthy, inspiring ideal of progress and civilizational self-confidence circa — gestures vaguely at the period between the American Revolution and World War Two — whenever your chosen golden age was. All we can do is make the best of the time in which we happen to find ourselves, with whatever tools come to hand. And so, rather than lament the fact that Dave Chappelle devotes the entirety of his latest comedy special to the trendy topic of transgenderism, we can ask, well, why wouldn’t he? That shit is hilarious.
I mean, come on. It’s simply funny to watch people desperately try to pretend to be other than they are while insisting that everyone else play along with them. It’s funny to watch the cultural ruling class trip over themselves to praise absurdities for fear of being treated as uncharitably as they themselves have treated countless other people. It’s funny to see our age’s contribution to the perennial human comedy, where the actors go out of their way to avoid self-awareness and, in the process, stumble from one slapstick adventure to another. And is anything funnier than having humorless prigs stand there stamping their feet while insisting that this is not funny and you will stop laughing this instant? Self-deception, vanity, status-seeking, folly; it’s all in there. Wokeness, like it or not, is what passes for religion and politics in our day. Well, then, until the extraterrestrial barbarians come to take over, let’s treat it accordingly and have some fun with it.
A Grateful Universe
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XVIII)
The first library sale in almost two years! I didn’t find any wish list treasures, but I found plenty of books I’m willing to try for two or three dollars. Some of the old crew was there — Muppet Man, Yuri and Svetlana, and Heroin Chic(k), among others. The last of these had a buddy with her who looks a lot like Wesley Yang. He, Muppet Man and I pondered how much respect anyone would have for the political and literary luminaries of the eighteenth century if they were our contemporaries in the age of social media. We agreed that Ben Franklin would probably be in trouble for sending dick pics to various women, Samuel Johnson would probably be furiously editing Wikipedia, and Boswell would be writing all about it for TMZ. It was good to be back.