January 2022

You Keep Lyin’ When You Oughta Be Truthin’

By in free speech, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Brendan O’Neill:

Here’s the thing about Rogan: his success is the least mysterious thing in the 21st-century media landscape. It is the colonisation of the mainstream media by woke elites who all think in the exact same way, and who will hound you off their turf if you don’t, that created the conditions in which a questioning, dissenting pod like Rogan’s could become a global phenomenon. It is the mainstream media’s failures that birthed the success of Rogan and others; it is the stifling of free, frank, deep discussion in the old media that created the space for new media to emerge and flourish. The old hippy Neil Young would have understood that; the newly square Neil Young clearly doesn’t.

I remember a Daily Show skit from way back in the Obama years. The gist of it, of course, was that Republicans were racists. The twist, though, was that they got very indignant if you called them racists, even when they were saying clearly racist things. Jon Stewart’s punchline centered on the amusing irony that they had accepted that being a racist was a bad thing; the problem was that they refused to recognize that they themselves were racist.

Nowadays, progressives have their own version of this cognitive dissonance. They agree that “censorship” is a bad thing; the problem is they refuse to recognize that they themselves have become the censorious prigs they used to mock. They will go through all sorts of mental contortions to avoid admitting that they believe their superior intelligence and morality gives them the right, maybe even the duty, to prevent anyone who disagrees with them from speaking or being heard. They will split any hair and seek any loophole to avoid saying clearly what they mean, because they know it would make them look bad: “You should not be allowed to say that, and you should not be allowed to hear it!”

Censorship is itself a conservative impulse, in that the censors are acting to defend or preserve some sort of intellectual territory or influence. Revolutionaries are always in favor of free this and open that until they finally acquire real power, at which point they predictably turn tyrannical. But maybe it would be more accurate to say that censorship is often favored by formerly-powerful groups who are losing their grip on power. When I was young, the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition were supposedly the big threats to cultural freedom, the hypocritical prigs who wanted to dictate what sorts of books and music and television everyone else was allowed to enjoy. In retrospect, it looks like that brief period was the last, desperate surge of Christian conservatism to preserve its diminishing territory and influence.

All the hysteria over Joe Rogan, and digital media in general, is the product of an elite media class losing its ability to set and control discourse. Like many established, lazy industries, legacy media don’t want competition, and would rather cozy up to state power in exchange for the state “regulating” their competitors out of business. Predictably, their inept attempts to accuse everyone else of being disinformation fascists only hasten the decline of their credibility. It’s no coincidence that they should finally come to resemble the censorious church ladies of decades ago and try to dictate what sort of media everyone else is allowed to enjoy. Once you cross that line and start treating adults as dimwitted children who need supervision and “noble lies” in order to come to the correct decisions, it’s impossible to see any way back to normality that doesn’t pass through your eventual irrelevance.

Married, Buried, Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah

By in marriage, ohferfucksake 2 Comments

Heather Havrilesky:

Do I hate my husband? Oh for sure, yes, definitely. I don’t know anyone who’s been married more than seven years who flinches at this concept. A spouse is a blessing and a curse wrapped into one. How could it be otherwise? How is hatred not the natural outcome of sleeping so close to another human for years?

Unless you plug a propofol drip into your arm every single night, how do you encounter those unwelcome grunts and gravelly snores as anything but oppressive? Unless you spend most of your waking hours daydreaming, how do you tolerate this meddling presence, rearranging stuff but never actually putting it away, opening bills but never actually paying them, shedding his tissues and his dirty socks all over your otherwise pristine habitat?

“Well, speak for yourself. I don’t hate my husband,” one of you holier-than-thou marrieds might announce, folding your hands primly in your lap. Do you think I can’t see your left eye twitching ever so slightly, as you resolve to never let each little irritation add up and move into your conscious mind like a plastic bag floating out to sea and then joining the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

…Marriage requires amnesia, a mute button, a filter on the lens, a damper, some blinders, some bumpers, some ear plugs, a nap. You need to erase these stories, misplace this tape, zoom out, slowly dissolve to black. I start to spend more time in my head. I start to daydream more.

Surviving a marriage requires self-care, time alone, time away, meditation, escape, selfishness.

I find it hilariously ironic that, in this entire pathetic spectacle of therapeutic oversharing posing as an op-ed in the Paper of Record, the only revealing insight is an unwitting one: “I don’t know anyone who’s been married more than seven years who flinches at this concept.” Yes, I’m sure that’s true! Maybe, just maybe, you and your social circle are simply shallow, unpleasant people who would find well-adjusted happiness boring. Sucks to be you, I suppose, but maybe you could at least refrain from projecting your petty indignity onto the rest of us.

Bodhisattva, Would You Take Me By the Hand?

By in religion, the cult of multi, the great awokening No Comments

It’s common to notice that much left-wing political crusading is a form of barely-transfigured Christianity, but as we see here, it’s broadminded enough to absorb elements of Buddhism as well. In fact, social justice is to religion as Rome was to its provinces. Practice whatever quaint local customs you want, as long as you make all the proper sacrifices to the imperial Cult of the Right Side of History.

I Lift So I Can Carry More Books

By in battling personal entropy No Comments

Alex Diggins:

This, then, is perhaps the most powerful rebuttal to those who sneer at pavement-pounders and gym junkies. (The writer Mark Greif compares gyms, with their acreage of mirrors and glistening bodies, to “well-ordered masturbatoriums”.) To strive, to struggle, to sweat, is to be a human being in the fullest sense of the word; it’s to move through the world with discipline, purpose and delight. “The erudite body is a good body to have,” observes the philosopher Colin McGinn. Yet as Sweat energetically proves, an erudite book is the next best thing.

I have dual citizenship. I reside in both the land of the Meathead and the land of the Egghead. But as with God and Caesar, Kipling’s East and West, and pizza and pineapple, some worlds are destined by nature to remain apart. It’s a truism that intellectuals always assume that the un-theorized life is not worth acknowledging, let alone living. For them, people, places, and activities only acquire dignity and meaning once they’ve been placed into a conceptual scheme. And so we find here that physical activity needs an intellectual apologia to make it palatable to other intellectuals. But Meatheads have not been waiting for an Egghead savior to come along and provide a theoretical justification for their existence. The gym is its own powerful rebuttal. Some things are too stupid to deserve a cerebral response.

Your Boughs So Green In Summertime

By in fresh hell No Comments

Charlie Warzel:

But this isn’t about Christmas or Hanukkah or any specific celebration. It’s about finding ways to make it through the winter doldrums.

Right now, that’s more challenging than ever. The holiday comedown was hard enough before COVID stresses, variant surges, and school closures. And while plenty of people out there are embracing normalcy, millions more with lower risk tolerance are hunkering down to protect themselves or loved ones or to keep the hospital system from straining. It is, for many, a lonely time.

“It’s been such a difficult few years for everyone,” Jami Warner, the executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, told me. She said that the Christmas-tree industry has seen a substantial uptick in sales during the pandemic years, even despite supply-chain challenges. Warner also assured me that I was not alone and that people are leaving their artificial trees up longer and longer—sometimes year-round. “We so desperately need that light in our lives these days,” she said. “And people are realizing that having them around is a wonderful, uplifting thing.”

The Lady of the House passed this on as a trollish joke. And given that this is the Atlantic — someone recently (and accurately) described it as the magazine of choice for neurotic progressives in New York and D.C. — I’m happy to treat it in that spirit. But as near as I can tell, the self-pity and therapeutic mawkishness are in earnest. You know what’s worse than all good things coming to an end? Retreating to a fantasy world in order to cope with it. How have so many people made it to quasi-adulthood without learning such a basic lesson? Why are so many people so unembarrassed to present themselves as weak and broken, in constant need of comforting reassurance?

Unstated and Unexamined

By in books, nietzsche, religion No Comments

Regardless, that is usually the first order of business in Socratic questioning: find the unconscious judgment that is the “root and nerve” of whatever claim is set forth. You want to get to the bottom of what the argument is really about. Socrates doesn’t usually enter a debate on the terms where it is being fought. He moves it to the level of principle, then goes to work there.

The point can be restated more formally. A classic deductive argument contains a major premise and a minor one. The stock example of a major premise, first used in these words by Mill, is All men are mortal. The stock example of a minor premise is Socrates is a man.  Those two premises, taken together, lead to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal. The major premise is a general principle. The minor premise is a statement about a particular case. Why is this useful to understand? Because the general principle at stake in an argument often goes unstated and unexamined—the “inarticulate major premise,” as it’s sometimes called. The first thing Socrates does is smoke it out.

—Ward Farnsworth,  The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook

I loved that about the Socratic dialogues when I encountered them in Philosophy 101. Geometry, on the other hand, was a subject I loathed when I took it a few years earlier. Still, credit where due: it always stuck with me that when constructing a proof, it doesn’t matter how intricate the individual steps of your proof are if your given is faulty. So much futile effort could be saved if we thought about our given, or our major premise, more closely.

Speaking of philosophy, a subject I still adore in a general-interest way, I’ve been making my way through two of Peter Adamson’s books recently. Adamson writes clearly and entertainingly, but when dealing with a subject like medieval philosophy, say, there’s only so much that can be done to make the ideas and reasoning seem coherent, let alone relevant. I admit that I sometimes feel my eyes crossing and my mind wandering while trying to follow the circuitous logical trails. Take, for example, just one passage I read the other day:

And make no mistake, God does have a choice about what He creates. Scotus’ idea of simultaneously open possibilities is meant to apply to God’s freedom as much as to ours. This is despite the fact that God is a necessary being. Scotus, being Scotus, in fact has a clever and complicated proof of God’s necessary existence. I’ll avoid the complicated bits and cut straight to the most brilliant part. After a lot of work, Scotus is able to demonstrate to his own satisfaction that there could possibly be a cause for all other things, which is first and therefore uncaused. In other words, God might exist. From this Scotus thinks he can immediately infer that God does exist. For just consider: obviously a first cause does not come to exist by being caused to exist by something else. So the only way for such a cause to exist is by being necessarily actual. But we know that there is a way for the cause to exist, since we established that it might exist. Therefore, the cause is necessarily actual, so God does in fact exist. As Scotus notes himself, his proof is reminiscent of earlier attempts to demonstrate the existence of God. The move from God’s possible existence to His actual existence may remind us of the move at the center of Anselm’s ontological argument. Scotus’ proof also recalls Avicenna, and his idea of God as a necessarily existing first cause.

Like I said, it may be intricate, and it may be clever, and it may follow logical rules, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this, and so many similar examples, are just instances of what we now call motivated reasoning. “I want this to be true, so let me assume that it’s true and then develop a post-hoc justification for it.” Well, I don’t wish to be rude, but I think I see your problem.

How many there are who still conclude: “life could not be endured if there were no God!” (Or, as it is put among the idealists: “life could not be endured if its foundation lacked an ethical significance!”) — therefore there must be a God (or existence must have an ethical significance)! The truth, however, is merely that he who is accustomed to these notions does not desire a life without them: that these notions may therefore be necessary to him and for his preservation — but what presumption it is to decree that whatever is necessary for my preservation must actually exist! As if my preservation were something necessary! How if others felt in the opposite way! If those two articles of faith were precisely the conditions under which they no longer found life worth living! And that is how things are now!

A Final Story About Stories

By in books No Comments

The Mind of BlackOxford:

Gottschall thinks we can escape what he calls the magic of stories by knowing that they’re stories. Such an escape however would require some sort of final story about stories, an ultimate story like say that of the Catholic Church in its doctrinal statements, or the Fundamentalist’s Bible or the much sought after Theory of Everything in Physics. But these ultimate stories are just more of the same, that is, hopeless attempts to evade the hideous necessity of language through yet more language. Nevertheless Gottschall wants us to have hope, to think that he and we can discern better from worse stories. According to him, the solution is at hand, “We need more reason in the world.”

Where is such reason to be found? Gottschall thinks he knows: “Above all, we need to double down on our commitment to science because science is for standing up to stories.” Has he never heard of epistemology, that centuries-old failed attempt to identify better and worse scientific stories? In other words, his buck-passing solution to what he calls “a pandemic of conspiratorial thinking” has no credibility whatsoever. There is no vaccine (or anti-venom) that can cure us. His book is just another catalogue of useless, largely pornographic, anecdotes about QAnon, Trump, Hitler, Stalin and the various other nutcases who have committed atrocities.

I take the publication of this book as helpful in only one respect – evidence that the the quality editorial staff at Basic Books has deteriorated markedly over recent years.

Oof, that’s a shame. I read Gottschall’s book The Storytelling Animal several years ago and found it interesting, or so I thought. I don’t have it anymore, so evidently, it wasn’t quite interesting enough for me to keep.

(BlackOxford Mind is a collection of the author’s Goodreads reviews, published concomitantly in blog form. Frequently updated and consistently fun to read. You should give it a look-see.)

Views Differ

By in books, juxtapositions No Comments

It’s in this cheerful mood that I read a new book by an old friend, Johann Hari. It’s called Stolen Focus. Like his previous books — Chasing the Scream, his history of the century-long war on drugs, and Lost Connections, on the social aspect of depression — his new book diagnoses most of us as sane and the culture we live in as mad.

The core thesis is this: Create a throw-away consumerist civilization, break families into ever smaller units, add a tech revolution, online addiction, economic precariousness, breakneck social change, endless work, and the collapse of religion and meaning, and yes, people will go a bit nuts. They’ll become depressed; they’ll seek out escapes through opiates or meth; they’ll disappear down rabbit holes of online fanaticism; they’ll seek meaning through work or fame; they’ll tear each other down with glee; they’ll lose the skills for family, friendship, constancy, discipline and love.

Now intensify the isolation with lockdowns. Segregate more thoroughly. Cover faces with masks. Force people to live even more persistently in a virtual world that makes us less connected in a deep way, but more enmeshed in the pathologies of anonymous mobs.

…Hari wants to ban “surveillance capitalism” — making it illegal for social media companies to favor addictive, maddening viral content; he wants a four-day week; he wants to liberate children from over-parenting. He urges us to turn off notifications; leave Twitter; say no to Tinder and Grindr; re-learn the art of reading books or mastering a craft or skill over time; to take walks phone-free so our minds can wander and make connections and remember things that matter. You remember that, don’t you? We used to call it living.

—Andrew Sullivan

****

But that’s all anecdotal: does Hari actually present any evidence that shortening attention spans is a society-wide problem? There’s a study on how topics appear and disappear on Twitter more quickly now than a few years ago; some research on how many distractions office workers experience; and a dodgy-sounding but headline-ready statistic about how often we “touch our smartphones” each day (2,617 times, apparently).

It’s not until more than halfway through the book, page 176, that Hari drops what should be a bombshell: “We don’t have any long-term studies tracking changes in people’s ability to focus over time.” In other words, he quietly admits that there isn’t really any strong scientific evidence for the main thesis of the book.

…Indeed, many of the other causes Hari identifies are rehashings of previous pop-science and pop-psychology books: we aren’t sleeping enough (Why We Sleep); kids don’t play outdoors any more (Free Range Kids and The Coddling of the American Mind); we don’t eat the right foods (a million diet books). Of course, it’s not a crime to write a book that doesn’t provide any new information. But Hari’s irritating, breathless style turns every single fact he “discovers” into a startling revelation, every single expert he speaks to into the absolute best in the world. Hari’s research — a series of interviews for a pop-psychology book — becomes an intense, globetrotting journey of personal discovery. His mind is so often blown that it’s little wonder it has such difficulty in paying attention.

…The book builds up to Hari’s ultimate theory for why we have all these attentional problems: it’s capitalism itself! Our blinkered focus on economic growth, Hari writes, puts us in a rat-race that ruins the workings of our brains. We should abandon the idea of growth, he argues, and aim for what the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel calls a “steady-state economy”.

— Stuart Ritchie

Jump In the Fire

By in tribalism No Comments

Ed West:

More likely, the people with quite wacky beliefs really do believe them, just as Peter Bartholomew genuinely came to think he could walk through the fire; he wasn’t just doing it to own the Normans, or because of audience capture.

Political debate is a status game, certainly, while hypocrisy is also universal, especially among journalists, but the chances are your opponents really do believe what they claim, and this applies even to areas that seem to defy logic. Just as the crusaders, and countless others involved in wars of religion, genuinely did believe they were carrying out God’s will, rather than, as so many historians would have it, it was all about power or some materialist explanation.

We should take people’s beliefs seriously – yet those beliefs are often arbitrary. No doubt many Norman crusaders had a good old laugh at Peter Bartholomew dying of his burns, and the southern idiots who believed him, but had the humble mystic hailed from closer to Caen than Cannes they most likely would have believed him, too.

Whenever some political figure says something provocative or controversial, it’s common to hear others scoff at the idea that they actually meant it. Of course they don’t actually believe that garbage; they’re only saying it to get attention, or because their paycheck depends on it. That’s always a possibility, but the ubiquity of this knee-jerk cynicism indicates that this is just a subtle form of self-congratulation — I see past the subterfuge and camouflage to the hidden truth; you’re a naive mark who probably yells in earnest at the oblivious referee in professional wrestling. It’s also comforting to pretend that money, sex, and power are the only reasons anyone does anything. The world is therefore ultimately rational; nothing ever happens that can’t be explained. I’ve never agreed with this type of thinking, but as I get older, it only seems more evident to me that human psychology is capable of containing all manner of weirdness and willfulness, which is both fascinating and terrifying.