January 2025

You Are No Eagles

By in ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening

Like many of you, I’m enjoying the vibes as the Great Awokening wheezes to an inglorious end. In the near future, I hope to spend many beautiful afternoons in the cemetery urinating on its grave. My enjoyment is tempered, however, by the knowledge that stupidity is bipartisan and eternal. This ridiculous species never learns anything for very long. We don’t like to draw measured conclusions and proceed carefully. We prefer to jump on the pendulum and ride it over to the other end. And so here we are, competing to see who can be the most aggressively stupid in the name of being anti-woke. Consider the tangled web of motives and impulses that underlie even the simplest human acts. Consider further the decade-long cultural spasm we conventionally call “wokeness.” How dumb do you have to be to reduce that down to one simple source? Off the top of my head, I can name resentment, radical chic, and status competition among the downwardly-mobile as more fundamental motivations than “empathy.”

Some friends of ours have been having a tough time lately. They had to shutter their small business shortly after the birth of their second child. The husband went back to driving trucks while the wife went back to school for her nursing degree. A few weeks ago, the wife’s brother-in-law died unexpectedly, so her sister (and her young child) are moving in with them. I have empathy for them. It doesn’t amount to much more than keeping in touch with them and looking for any opportunity to be of help, but it’s there. They’re good people who work hard, and I want to see things work out for them. Empathy in this case is quiet, unobtrusive, and patient.

By contrast, let’s take last year’s anti-Israel demonstrators and activists, or the spoiled rich kids who put on their anarchist underoos and rampaged through cities during the Summer of Floyd. Who is naive enough to think that any of them give a wet, sputtering shit about actual Palestinians or inner-city blacks? They’re doing what humans have always done: look for a convenient excuse to rationalize the inherent delight in anti-social, destructive behavior. It’s a performance aimed at an audience of their peers. What did “empathy” have to do with any of that? What does it have to do with the metastasizing mediocrity of DEI? “Empathy” is the respectable Sunday suit that resentment, radical chic, status competition et. al. wear in public, but no one should be fooled by that.

One thread of continuity between woke radicals and whatever sort of “new right” is taking shape is the urge to dismantle the things that make life civilized, more or less. It’s stunning to watch soft, weak people strive to unleash the worst elements of human nature out of some deranged conviction that they’ll be on top of the food chain in the aftermath. As some philosopher warned, he who is not a bird should not make his nest above the abyss.

The Head of Some Old God

By in atheism, books, religion

I have grown weary of the poets, the old and the new: superficial they all seem to me, and shallow seas…Alas, I cast my net into their seas and wanted to catch good fish; but I always pulled up the head of some old god.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Tyler Hummel:

Enter Spencer Klavan, the Oxford-educated classicist, editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and previous author of How To Save The West. His newest work Light Of The Mind, Light Of The World: Illuminating Science Through Faith directly dives into the bizarre transitionary moment we are living through, asking the same questions McGrath asked prematurely two decades ago with the added benefit of hindsight. Klavan is digging into the tidal movements of this moment and asking if the forces of secularism and materialism have become a spent force.

When a book review titled “Materialism on the Ropes” appeared in my inbox, I clicked on it with interest. Frankly, I’ve been feeling quite jaded and bored, intellectually speaking. I find it hard to escape the conviction that everything of interest has been thought and said already. So, did I miss some new developments in religious thought over the last lost decade of political idiocy? Did someone come up with a way to breathe new life into the old arguments over religion?

On this evidence, no. It was kind of fun to see some of my old opponents again, but they’re showing their age. The “God of the gaps” argument makes an appearance (quantum physics can’t be satisfactorily explained yet, therefore…monotheism must be true). There’s the old argument from consequences (materialism logically leads straight to totalitarianism and death camps). There’s even the appeal to (if not authority) fame that we saw a few weeks ago: several high-profile names have recently embraced Christianity (so therefore you should, too). Assuming the review is comprehensive and fair, Klavan’s book isn’t saying anything we haven’t heard before. There may well be some sort of religious revival as the center of cultural and political gravity swings back toward the right in the near future, but human beings are never content anywhere for very long. Faith or no faith, the human condition remains.

Is This Your Homework, Larry?

By in fresh hell, waiting for the barbarians

Ahahaha:

“They”? Are there no mirrors in Sabato’s house? Is there some reason he didn’t say something after having this scoop dropped in his lap, other than the same cowardice and partisan loyalty that motivated the rest of the Democrats? Oh no, not the cold shoulder!

You lied and dissembled and manipulated in the name of preventing a second Trump term, and you got it anyway. You failed your party and your country, and you irreparably stained your honor and integrity in the process. My old martial arts teacher committed honest-to-God literal seppuku in a public park after being outed as what the kids these days call a “sex pest.” He hadn’t committed any actual crimes, but, having publicly tarnished his reputation, he felt obliged to ritually atone for it. I don’t know what made me think of him after all these years…

When Accountants Attack

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies

Thank goodness this book exists. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been attacked at a suburban backyard barbecue by some crazed IT guy with a wrench and thought, “Damn, if only I had studied techniques for severing his femoral artery with my drop point knife!” It’s like a heart-pounding form of l’esprit de l’escalier. Well, next time I’ll be ready.

Lost In the Digital Taiga

By in writing

Erik Hoel:

And this same reaction of “I don’t even know where to look, or where to begin” in the viewer (here, reader) is what I think the very best of blogging should strive for. For you can’t read a very good blog all at once. It is the creation of something so ridiculously large in scope that you can only take it in a little bit at a time.

This is why Substack’s focus on email was more defining and important than even the founders knew, and why it triggered the new Silver Age of blogging. In Michelangelo’s chapel, it is the use of space by the artist that creates the overwhelming effect; filling in such a complex topography means there is detail in every curve and window and feature. In blogging, it is not space that separates the pieces, but time. One email update, one short read, one consideration, one detailed panel. Above it all, the ghost of a greater presence hovers unseen.

In 2025, I want to feel more ghosts of greater presences, here in the last mottes of the internet. It’s time for bloggers to step up.

Is Substack the renaissance of blogging? Then what have people like me been doing all these years, just freely giving our thoughts away for the sheer fun of writing them down? I guess we’re like the Lykov family, refusing to abandon the only way of life we know, and fleeing even deeper into the desolate Siberian hinterland.

When to Read

By in books, lin yutang

One should read the classics in winter, because then one’s mind is more concentrated; read history in summer, because one has more time; read the ancient philosophers in autumn, because they have such charming ideas; and read the collected works of later authors in spring, because then Nature is coming back to life.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

This year, my big reading project is going to be The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant. I’ve encountered single volumes many times over the years, and I’ve always been impressed by the scope of the undertaking, as well as the prose style, which I like to call “mid-century middlebrow.” It’s from a time when it was naturally assumed to make sense to write an eleven-volume summary of Western civilization aimed at a general audience who would of course be interested to read such a thing for the sake of general knowledge. O tempora, o mores! Anyway, eleven volumes — one a month, to finish the whole thing this year? We’ll see.