September 2025

How to Liberate People Who Didn’t Ask

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, language, the great awokening

Kenneth Minogue once imagined St. George in retirement: the famous dragons all slain, our hero prowls the countryside hunting smaller and smaller lizards just to keep the old vocation alive. That’s the mood of a certain progressive missionary spirit today — still eager to “civilize” the backwards heathens, but reduced to policing syllables. Old Puritan habits die hard. The devil’s snares can be lurking anywhere, even in a vowel.

Behold the latest crusade: liberating Spanish speakers from gendered suffixes they never petitioned to escape. The rhetoric is anti-colonial, but the method is pure colonialism — arrive with a pre-packed moral syllabus, announce that the locals are in peril (they just don’t know it), and commence reforms by decree: You are now “Latine.” You’re welcome. When the ostensible beneficiaries say “no thanks,” as they already did with “Latinx,” the result is not reflection but escalation.

I don’t put much stock in racial categorizations myself, but by the missionaries’ own color-coded catechism, we are watching mostly white American institutions imposing taste, tempo, and terminology on a largely non-white, non-American language community. The word for that, in any other context, would be obvious.

Would You Not Throw Yourself Down and Gnash Your Teeth and Curse the Demon Who Spoke Thus?

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy

Joseph Heath:

All of this is to explain why the young philosopher Kōhei Saitō’s most recent book, Slow Down (a massive bestseller in Japan, recently translated into English), has pushed me to the brink of despondency. Not only is it a compendium of seemingly every bad idea that has fixated the left for the past century, it reproduces, again almost verbatim, the same ecotopian fantasy that I was raised on in the 1970s. The fact that Saitō’s book has been so well received raises extremely troubling questions about the dysfunctionality of the epistemic ecosystem of the left. Why are progressives, who are supposedly in favour of progress, incapable of making any progress when it comes to the formulation of progressive ideas? Why do we insist on recycling bad ideas, rather than embracing new, better ones?

…So when I read Saitō, I evaluate his view based on what he actually wrote in the book. And what he wrote in the book is that we should abandon our efforts to create a sustainable, carbon-neutral market economy, and instead plump for a hazily sketched out ecological utopia, where people just magically cooperate with one another, and we get to keep all of the good parts of the modern economy without having to endure any of the bad parts. Okay, sure, whatever. But here’s the part that troubles me: I’ve heard all this before. Do we really have to have the same debates, about the same self-evidently unworkable ideas, again and again? Maybe I am just revealing weakness of character, but I’m having trouble summoning the requisite amor fati in the face of this latest recurrence.

I keep telling myself I’m done with misanthropy, that I’ve matured into a serene connoisseur of human folly — then along comes the 976th reinvention of Marxism, and I’m back to shouting at the screen like a sports dad who swore he’d be chill this season. “Not this again,” I groan, as if history owes me something new and improved. It doesn’t. History is a rerun channel with better graphics.

I keep fantasizing that we’ll finally refute bad ideas with one knockout blow — Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell videos on loop, eyelids clamped open, Clockwork Orange-style. In reality, ideologies retire the way old tools do: not by refutation, but because a new machine makes them pointless. Witch trials didn’t fade because fearful peasants became better angels; they faded because of unrelated developments such as printing presses, legal procedure, and barometers. If Marxism fades, it won’t be because the intelligentsia finally noticed its track record in reality; it’ll be because some unrelated development makes class-revolution talk feel like explaining a Wi-Fi outage with humors and phlogiston. And since envy and resentment are fundamental human appetites, the hunger that currently fuels Marxism won’t vanish; it will just find a new justification. Ploosa shawnje, ploosa la memshows.

If I’m honest, I’m not just judging the kids; I’m catching my own reflection in the glass. I’ve got my loops too. My particular loop is despairing at other people’s loops — a perverse little perpetual-motion machine powered by indignation. I roll my eyes at utopians promising “radical abundance” without markets or specialization, and then I go right back to hoping for “radical learning,” in which the species notices the last century’s faceplants and decides, collectively, to stop following the same script. Reader, we do not stop. I don’t either. Human, all too human: I keep expecting mankind to become the adult I still aspire to be. Apparently, I still want progress. Intellectually, I know better, but I still half-believe in it, like a lapsed believer who keeps lighting candles “just in case.” But maybe the adult response is smaller and more local: not to cure history of its amnesia, just to carry a pocket notebook of reminders for myself.

A Valid Tribute to Thought Such as Nietzsche’s

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, nietzsche

All this talk about fasting from information presumes two things. First, that we want to be alone with our thoughts. For many of us, constant information has become mental junk food that we consume precisely to avoid our own mind and its anxieties. Second, that we have the mental resources to make solitude productive rather than boring.

— Nate Anderson, In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World

I blame the publisher and that cloying title. I’m pretty sure the Lady of the House sent me something about this book some time back, but I assumed it would be simplistic and self-helpy, so ignored it. But I found it at the library the other day and decided it was worth reading for free. To my surprise, it turned out to be very good.

The only worthwhile thing Foucault ever said, in my opinion, was that “the only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it.” That’s exactly what Anderson does — uses Nietzsche to address the fundamental philosophical question of “How should we live?” He’s not offering yet another academic hair-splitting analysis, nor even a general summary of Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre. He read him intelligently and noticed that much of what he had to say was useful to us in a, well, tech-saturated world. Best of all, he keeps dragging the discussion back to ends, not means. The temptation is to fiddle with “hacks” — screen-time meters, no blue light before bed, whatever — and thereby mistake technique for substance. Anderson asks several times, echoing Nietzsche: What are all these optimizations for? Do the means ever lead to an end, or is “incremental improvement” just a way to stay in motion so we don’t have to ask where we’re going and why?

Our natural state is to be divided against ourselves, a battlefield of conflicting motives and desires, not sure what we want and often not enjoying it when we get it. The missing foundation is self-knowledge. Start with an hour alone — no inputs — long enough to hear what you actually want. Perhaps you must change your life; that begins by refusing the bad-faith alibi that “the internet rewired my brain.” Maybe your supposed goals don’t survive contact with quiet contemplation. That’s fine. Render a verdict, then change what must be changed to serve it.

Elegy for the Mall

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit

Harris Sockel:

People need imaginative, beautiful places to exist, with each other, in public. We need more Garden Courts of Perpetual Spring. What Gruen did, on a core level, was worldbuilding. He created a universe where life was fundamentally pleasant, and beautiful, with majestic fountains and ornate statues and arcing skylights. Millions of years from now, when an alien civilization discovers the ruins of America, they’ll probably wonder what went down in these marble halls. I wouldn’t be surprised if they think they were temples, sites for sacred rituals and ceremonies, the pinnacle of our civilization — and in a way we barely realized while we were living through it, they kind of were.

On Halloween of 2021 we walked into the mall to pick up a pair of pants from Eddie Bauer — discovered and ordered online, of course. The corridors were mostly vacant; only a few stores still clung to life. It was like visiting an old neighborhood after a fire — recognizable in outline, emptied of its noise. I’d spent half my youth here. It used to hum.

As a kid, the first stop was Kay-Bee Toys, where every aisle felt like a dare to your allowance. Fun-N-Games was the arcade, darkened like a cave, lit only by the glowing screens of the video game machines, where you’d swap your quarters for tokens. Spencer’s Gifts came a little later, with the forbidden “18+” shelf we tried to side-eye without getting caught. Our mall was rich in paper: B. Dalton at one end, Waldenbooks at the other, where I bought my first Nietzsche and my first Forgotten Realms novel — two roads out of town, in different directions, both beginning under fluorescent light. There was Harmony Hut, later Sam Goody, where my friends and I learned to weigh a choice: ten dollars for a cassette you might love forever or regret by dinnertime. Sbarro was there too, reliably uncool and reliably satisfying. And there were the big anchors — Leggett-then-Belk, JCPenney, Sears, Miller & Rhoads—where my mother shopped and I drifted through racks like a clownfish through reefs, half-bored, half-content to be among things, amusing myself with my child’s imagination.

For years the clever take was that malls were vapid cathedrals of suburban capitalism. Maybe. They were also clean, bright, and, most importantly, kid-friendly. They gave ordinary people a safe, all-in-one place to do the practical chores of life without braving the weather or the “gritty” atmosphere of downtown. You could meet there without an appointment. You could be there without a plan. Even a shy kid could practice a kind of ambient social life: part of a crowd, no performance required.

That’s what I miss most: the unforced togetherness. The escalator choreography. The mall-walker covens at 9 a.m. The smell of pretzels and fabric and new rubber soles. Window displays as seasonal theater. Benches positioned like little harbors where you could sit, watch, and be watched, gently, by everyone and no one. You learned how to be around people before you had to be with them.

It’s different now. We carry our shops in our pockets and our music in our ears. Our parents would never have allowed us to listen to our Walkmans around other people; that would have been aggressively rude and anti-social. Now, in public, the new etiquette is autistic — air-buds like little white corks sealing our heads shut, screens glowing like votive candles on an altar to the self. Even the cashier at the grocery store today kept his ears plugged while dinging-and-slinging, present and yet not. I’m not romantic about the past; I’m honest about the loss. The mall wasn’t just consumption; it was choreography and commons, a climate-controlled rehearsal for civic life.

When we left that day in 2021, bag in hand, I felt the melancholy pride of someone who’d known a place at its peak and the hush that follows. The concourse held our reflections in its polished floor like a memory trying to keep us. Somewhere behind a gate, the old Kay-Bee footprint still existed as a shape in drywall. Somewhere, a dead Sbarro oven cooled for the last time. I don’t need the mall back exactly. I want what it gave even to the shy: a place to be lightly together, to browse our way into taste, to discover ourselves between Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, halfway from childhood to whatever came next.

If there’s a heaven for such places, I hope it smells faintly of cinnamon and shrink-wrap, and the Muzak is better than we remember.

When a Strange AI Calls

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, technology

Devon Price:

In June, an unreviewed draft of a scientific article began making the rounds, examining the relationship between LLM use and brain functionality — and since then, many reporters have incorrectly claimed it proves that using ChatGPT damages people’s brains.

Every few days we get a fresh “AI rots your brain” screed. But as with the old urban legend about threatening phone calls, it turns out that the brain damage is coming from inside the house. Journalists are forever chasing a laser-pointer’s red dot, academics need a headline-ready hook, and readers crave a ritual of self-exoneration. Trace the call and you find the usual suspects — small studies inflated to cosmic claims, EEGs treated like theological icons, and the ancient urge to outsource responsibility for our habits. Simpletons talk about technology like it’s Toxoplasma gondii.

Oral Sects

By in ai, technology, the geist of the zeit, writing

Nitsuh Abebe:

Consider that, for a good stretch of recent history, most of the written material that people spent time with — the stuff beyond signs and menus — was full-on writing-writing: text that somebody sat down and composed, maybe revised or edited, maybe even had professionally printed. And this kind of communication was different from our daily interaction with our peers: You talked to your peers, mostly. Even after the internet arrived, this basic psychic arrangement persisted.

And now it does not — like, at all. “Emails or text messages,” posts and chats, DMs and comments, DoorDashers telling you the restaurant is out of coleslaw: Oceans of communication that used to be handled by speech are now left to lone individuals typing into the internet. Even if you remain a dedicated reader, you may still end up spending more of your time dealing in on-the-fly typings, because that has become the everyday use-case of writing.

There’s been a regime change in the republic of letters. The new state cult is fingered speech, and its hierophants frown at bookish rites. It took several centuries, but oral culture has finally restored its supremacy over the print culture that usurped it. Now we are no longer limited by physical proximity when we want to “talk” to our friends; in a bitter irony, we can do that with our fingers on our phones. The medium of text has been hollowed out and repurposed to carry the idiom of town-square chatter, in a final insult to Gutenberg’s memory. Show up with old-faith orthography from the Before Times, like an em dash, and you’ve basically flashed a countersign from the print ancien régime.

The Edict of Orthography is posted on every alley wall: Thou shalt not parade thy schooling in public. As Apocryphal Thoreau might have said, the paragraph that punctuates least punctuates best. Let your sentences run on like an interstate fender-bender; ruthlessly prune all your capital letters into lower-case; and if in doubt, just say “lol.” Use two-dollar words and you’ll be stopped and frisked for book-larnin’. When the patrol asks if you “always write like that,” you say, “nah bruh fr fr.” The trick is to talk like a citizen of the timeline — jaded, sleep-deprived, mildly retarded — so the censors don’t smell print on you.

Meanwhile, the old believers meet in back rooms, whispering their heresies: full stops at the end of sentences, em dashes unsheathed, even a semicolon passed hand to hand like contraband. In the street we keep our heads down and code-switch: commas where dashes would sing, “k” where “Okay.” would injure sensitive feelings, a vacantly grinning emoji to prove we come in peace. Not because the rites have lost power, but because we know which empire we’re in.

Pasture On Little Joys

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy

Anyway, give me the Past, give me solitude, give me a dog. The past smells of eternity, in solitude only I have dignity, from a dog alone I get unadulterated love.

— R.H. Blyth, Poetry and Zen: Letters and Uncollected Writings of R. H. Blyth

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People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. Give me a bed and a book and I’m happy.

Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms 

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I derive a subtle pleasure from the conviction that the world does not owe me anything. I need little to be contented: two good meals, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing every day. This to me is a full life.

— Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

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Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet when the pain of want has been removed, while bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.

— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

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He who can pasture on little joys, and gather in his heart the little pleasures he has experienced during the day, and give importance within himself to his little strokes of good fortune passes easily through life, and if he is not happy he can believe he is, and be unaware that he is not.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

The Motion Is the Meaning

By in books, foolosophy

The birds and I both needed the berries for the same reason—because winter strips the woods. Their need was the need of all animals, hunger. My need for the berries and the attempts to preserve the “rural character” of Chatham were the special needs of the human animal. John Keats caught it in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ the poem that contemplates the painted figures of happy Greeks about to eat grapes and make love, and of a musician playing a tune that can only be imagined:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare….

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Preserve this moment forever. That sentiment brought out the supporters of the new land-use plan. The vision fills environmental books and films and turns citizens into lobbyists. Keep this species or that species. Maintain these forests as they are for us. Forget that this forest has been this way for only an instant of geological time. It is our time that counts. Keep the red berries, at least through the winter until we desert them for the carnival of spring. I will not stop reading the brilliantly expressed lines of Keats, but I am glad I stopped believing his conclusion: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. No. Beauty is pleasure, not truth.

If we are going to extend our survival on this planet, we must be sure not to equate truth and beauty. If the robins are going to survive, I must let them have the berries. If I am going to get through the winters of life that surely will be colder and darker than any at Morgan Branch or on the arctic shores, I will have to let go of the red berries and understand that my life will continue to change. I will continue moving on through success and failure, not like the people frozen in their beautiful lives on the Greek urn, but like the birds moving through my woods to avoid freezing in winter.

— Wallace Kaufman, Coming Out Of The Woods: The Solitary Life Of A Maverick Naturalist

If Plato braided the True, the Good, and the Beautiful into a single rope, lived reality tends to fray it. In one sense, Beauty lies — it edits, frames, and pleases even when it misleads. In another, Goodness curdles into zealotry when severed from facts. And Truth, absolutized, can turn cruel or sterile — “nothing but the facts,” even where the facts alone don’t tell us how to live with one another. Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism gives us the vocabulary for this: there are genuine, objective human values that are often incommensurable — they cannot be ranked by a common metric or harmonized without loss. Tragic choice is not a bug in the system; it is the system.

How, then, to act without a master value? Aristotle is helpful here. In Nicomachean Ethics II.6 he defines virtue as a mean relative to us — too much courage is rashness; too little is cowardice. Translate this into Kaufman’s terrain: too much Beauty (as preservationist fixation) becomes a vice when it freezes a living forest to satisfy our taste; too little Beauty becomes a grey utilitarianism that leaves nothing worth loving. Too much Truth (as disenchanted bravado) becomes cruelty; too little Truth becomes fan-fiction. Too much Goodness (as purity politics) becomes inquisitorial; too little Goodness devolves into cynicism. The point is not to split the difference mathematically, but to tune three dials in light of the concrete case: what is true here, what harms or helps whom, and what forms of order/fitness/proportion (i.e., beauty in a broad sense) are we protecting or destroying?

That tuning presupposes a further lesson from Kaufman’s winter: movement. The desire to conserve a scene “forever” is aesthetically understandable; in practice it often means starving birds. In morality, a pure rule held too long becomes cruelty to exceptions. Keats’s urn immortalizes a moment by arresting it; the woods live by change. The moral is not “beauty is bad,” any more than “truth is bad.” It is that life keeps moving, and values must be re-balanced as the situation changes. What was fitting at noon may be unfit at dusk. To demand that the trees “never be bare” is to miss what winter is for — and what berries are for. The wiser stance is Aristotelian and Berlinian at once: acknowledge the plural ends we pursue, accept their occasional collisions, and cultivate the judgment to steer among them. Let truth correct us; let goodness constrain us; let beauty inspire us — but never allow one to conscript the others.

Obiter Scripta, no. 145

By in books, obiter scripta

In autumn, the sun and objects appear to have a different color, the clouds a different shape, the air a different savor. It seems as if the whole of nature had a tone, a countenance that belongs to this season alone, which is more distinct and sharper than in the others, even regarding objects that hardly change in their substance.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

I come not to praise summer, but to bury it deep, deep under a carpet of leaves. Leopardi’s right: edges harden, flavors bite, the world seems newly legible. Some evenings the air itself takes on a pink-red glow — as if light had been steeped in crabapples — something I swear I see but can never catch on a camera, a color that exists only at the corner of attention.

The Far Near

By in books, bricolage

You don’t have to go out the door
to know what goes on in the world.
You don’t have to look out the window
to see the way of heaven.
The farther you go,
the less you know.
So the wise soul
doesn’t go, but knows;
doesn’t look, but sees;
doesn’t do, but gets it done.

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 47, tr. Ursula K. LeGuin

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To go down into the depths you don’t need to travel far; you can do it in your own backgarden.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

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A man of true wisdom, with nothing but his senses and a soul that’s never sad, can enjoy the entire spectacle of the world from a chair, without knowing how to read and without talking to anyone.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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Most of our perceptions depend on our own minds and not on material objects. Fools perceive almost nothing because they are empty-headed, and their hearts are cramped. But great minds discover within themselves a great number of external matters; they have neither to read, travel, listen, nor labor, to discover the loftiest truths; they have but to fall back on themselves, and, so to speak, turn over their own thoughts.

— Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims: Complete Edition

Call It What You Want, It’s All the Same to Me

By in atheism, religion

Life is hard. Circumstances, conditions, and even our own perspectives change through time. It’s hard to know what the right thing is to do in any given scenario, and we can get weary of exercising judgment and simply want to outsource our agency to a rulebook — which only asks a new question: how do we choose which rulebook; and isn’t the “choosing” the very thing we’re weary of and trying to avoid?

A Christian and an atheist-Epicurean-Buddhist may look at the world together and see things in common: joy, pleasure, selflessness, generosity, beauty. We agree that these things are good and should be preserved and encouraged. We also recognize that they are fragile and can be damaged or destroyed by the forces of evil. I accept this as the price of living. These things only persevere so long as we work to make it so. There are no ultimate guarantees. He, perhaps, contemplates the possibility that these precious things could be lost or destroyed and thinks, “No, that’s too horrible to accept!” So he tries to “ground” them in some sort of abstract ultimate necessity, like God’s existence, which supposedly cannot be undermined or destroyed. To my perspective, this is just a self-told fairy tale, in which everything ends “happily ever after.”

“Something solid” comes from within, not without. People who claim to “believe” in God can still prove by their actions to be awful people. People who profess no belief can live exemplary lives. Clearly, whatever it is we’re talking about, it’s more fundamental than any particular dogma. However you derive your values, whatever they may be, you can only “ground” them in discipline, contemplation, and practice, and reinforce them in a like-minded community. Looking for “something solid” in the realm of belief (or ideology) is just a way of digging up treasure that you yourself buried under cover of darkness.

And Yet Two and Two Are Four

By in books

The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.

“Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall … and so on, and so on.”

Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really did contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as true as twice two makes four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities!

— Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

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‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.

‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.

Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’

— Orwell, 1984

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The Underground Man raged against the objective fact of 2+2=4 in the name of unlimited freedom. O’Brien set out to annihilate the independent fact of 2+2=4 in the name of unlimited tyranny. Returning to Dostoevsky, Shigalyov, in Demons, closed the circle: “Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.” As Apocryphal Galileo might mutter, Et tamen duo et duo quattuor sunt.

Little Things

By in books, bricolage, nietzsche

But we want to be the poets of our life — first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

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One should be able to compose a symphony of ordinary existence out of “little things!” Instead of waiting for big ones to happen! The very smallest thing is big! …Little things take the place in life of the “big events”! That is their value, if one can grasp it!

— Peter Altenberg, “Little Things,” The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits

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That’s all there is, just particular people, particular things, poplars and beeches, black lilac bushes, and the mind that watches them, and the sorrow that everything ends.

— Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

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It should not surprise us then when he acknowledges the limited character of his philosophizing in the middle writings. The task of painting what is casually called the picture of life as one set by both poets and philosophers is nonsensical. Philosophers need to show more modesty by showing that what they are doing is providing pictures and miniatures from a single life, from their own lives, “and nothing else is possible.”

— Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Earthbound Wisdom

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After the “Great” War, the very concept of “greatness” — great projects, great motives, great ideas — was under deep suspicion, if not dead in the water. This is perhaps why poetry was the dominant artistic wartime form: life — the good life, bad life, trench life, home life (when you are separated from your family — is made up of the small things poets observe, the all-important details which, as often as not, are made to seem meaningful. As the poets said, and as the phenomenologists and pragmatists had said before them, all the use in life is in the small things.

— Peter Watson, The Age of Atheists

Song In the Tooth

By in books, music

When I imagine a piece of music, something I do every day and often, I — always I think — rhythmically grind my upper and lower front teeth together. I have noticed it before but usually it takes place quite unconsciously. Moreover, it’s as if the notes in my imagination were produced by this movement. I think this way of hearing music in the imagination may be very common. I can of course also imagine music without moving my teeth, but then the notes are much more blurred, much less clear, less pronounced.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

This surprised me, because while I don’t grind my teeth, I do lightly tap or click them together along to music in my head. I don’t do it while listening to music; only when imagining it. I’ve been aware of it, but I never thought of it as significant enough to focus on, let alone wonder if anyone else did a similar thing. I asked ChatGPT about it, and it seems that current research calls it covert articulation: tiny, often unconscious activations of the speech-/singing-related muscles when we imagine sounds. “Imagining music recruits not just auditory cortex but motor regions (SMA/premotor, basal ganglia). Disrupting or down-regulating parts of this motor network can impair rhythm/beat perception; conversely, engaging it tends to help timing. So light, rhythmic jaw clicks would be one more way your motor system ‘locks in’ the beat of inner music.” The things you learn by accident…

Eumenides Deferred

By in free speech, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Christopher Rufo took six months to contradict his own advice. In February, the conservative activist wrote that social-media posts “should no longer be grounds for automatic social and professional annihilation.” This view won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Rufo’s long crusade against left-wing cancel culture. By August, however, he had emulated his enemies, arousing outrage over a journalist’s old tweets. The episode demonstrates not just his own hypocrisy but also why campaigns against unwelcome speech should always be resisted.

Rufo’s about-face reveals something else too: The rules of the culture war are changing. Take it from Rufo himself. “The Right’s longstanding proposal—to ‘cancel cancel culture’—might make for a good slogan,” he wrote in the same essay from February. Now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, he says that conservatives have to be more proactive. “We should acknowledge that culture is a way for society to establish a particular hierarchy of values and to provide a way to police the boundaries,” Rufo wrote. “And then we should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward.”

On the morning of March 20th, 2003, the beginning of Iraq War Two, I was sitting in the parking lot of a bagel shop, looking at a copy of USA Today, reading an article that left me in stunned disbelief. A few days earlier, in Bossier, Louisiana, protestors had used a huge tractor to crush a pile of Dixie Chicks CDs and merchandise. On March 10th, during a concert in London, singer Natalie Maines had told the audience, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” It was a year and a half after 9/11, and much of the nation was still in the mood for righteous vengeance. This mild statement was perceived as a betrayal to the sensibilities of country music fans, who were predominantly Republicans, especially as it was said in front of a foreign audience. In addition to the 1930s-Germany optics of organizing public destruction of offensive popular art, the band’s music was pulled from radio rotation in many markets. A 2006 documentary chronicled their experience as one of the 21st century’s first victims of cancel culture, although no one called it that yet.

As it happened, that would prove to be the high-water mark for the right’s ability to dictate the terms of cultural discourse. Over the next few years, the basilisk eggs of social media would begin to hatch. The Bush administration went clumsily into that good night, leaving a legacy of disastrous wars and a worldwide financial collapse. The Democrats went Beatlemania over a young, charismatic, mixed-race politician from Chicago. Current NYT columnist Ezra Klein — who, in an amazing example of nominative determinism, got his start writing on a blog called “Not Geniuses” where he demonstrated a Thomas Friedman-like ability to be staggeringly wrong about everything while endlessly failing upward in his career — invented an entirely new shade of purple to splash upon his prose as he gushed:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Yes, they really were that high on their own supply. For a while, they exulted in what appeared to be the triumphant conclusion of a narrative arc that started with the Civil Rights movement. By 2010, smartphones and social media were becoming ubiquitous, and the first spasms of what would come to be called the Great Awokening were appearing as triumphant liberals, dominant throughout cultural institutions and no longer fearing the threat of mutually-assured destruction, attempted to dispense with debate and cement their ideological preferences into place. I think you know the rest of the story well enough. Suffice it to say, a funny thing happened on the way to the end of history, and so, here we are. Liberals are now reduced to weakly calling technical fouls like “hypocrisy!” while conservatives set about methodically salting as much earth as possible in a four-year span so that no more social-engineering schemes can ever grow there again. Woke delenda est.

Williams is narrowly correct that Rufo and the populist right will probably get drunk on power and eventually take things too far. Human nature hasn’t changed since 2003, after all. Rufo is correct that centrists like Williams never seem to come up with any workable ideas for defeating the woke extremists, preferring to hold themselves above the fray while criticizing those who get their hands dirty achieving tangible results. In fairness, it should be noted that this article was written before the Kirk assassination, when Rufo was targeting the New Yorker writer Doreen St. Felix over her past racist tweets against white people, which lends gravity to Williams’ argument. But events have obviously moved on, and now the stakes are higher. Personally, I get the “this isn’t cancel culture, it’s accountability for cheering murder” argument. On the merits, it seems like a standard that should be unobjectionable. Cheering an assassination isn’t in the same moral weight-class as an offensive Halloween costume from 2009. But I’m not in favor of the “Charlie’s Murderers” database being constructed to hold names, workplaces, and handles of those accused of offending. This seems ripe for abuse and personal score-settling dressed up as justice. Today’s bright line (“explicit praise of murder”) will become tomorrow’s penumbra (sarcasm, edgy jokes, guilt-by-association likes).

In some ways, social media is still a new frontier, and it takes a different type of character to tame a frontier; the well-mannered townsfolk will move in much later to set up tea parties and debate clubs. 2010s smartphones plus feeds created territory with speech reach/persistence that old rules couldn’t handle. Early Great Awokening enforcement looked like posse justice: mobs, character assassination, advertiser raids. Now the black hats run the posse, promising peace later. The danger is that vigilantes make bad sheriffs, and frontiersmen don’t always want a town. Some actors gain power, attention, and riches from permanent skirmish. A settled order would put them out of business. So the “rough-and-tumble until norms form” ideal to which Rufo professes allegiance might not self-resolve.

Should I need to establish my bona fides, the “free speech” tag next to this post will show how long I’ve been on this beat. Even as a default liberal when younger, I argued in vain against the progressive appetite for using astroturfed consumer boycotts as a form of economic embargo against their enemies, and against the hubristic embrace of cancel culture epitomized by that famous XKCD cartoon smugly informing us that “the 1st amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences.” I predicted that they would find themselves in precisely this position if they kept at it. In my ideal world, people would have a high tolerance for offense and the good character to scorn resentful attempts to punish enemies through doxxing, tattling to employers, and the aforementioned fake boycotts. Unfortunately, I’ve resigned myself to the world we live in, where humans are a morally retarded species who are congenitally incapable of learning any lasting lessons from their innumerable follies. Thus, I’ve become convinced by those who argue that free speech is best understood as détente rather than an abstract principle. When faced with an increasingly-aggressive mob, refusing to compromise one’s debate club standards will be taken as a weakness to be exploited, not a kindness to be reciprocated. Free speech as a principle according to the standards of a John Stuart Mill is something of a hothouse flower that requires precise conditions to flourish, like a soil of shared values and norms. We don’t have that anymore.

It took the horrific devastation of the Thirty Years War to set the stage for Westphalia and the genesis of modern liberal notions of tolerance. I’m afraid that it will likewise take a few swings of the cultural pendulum here before people finally get weary of trying to pummel their opponents into submission and relearn how to live and let live. For now, I at least have the bitter satisfaction of echoing Robert Conquest: “I told you so, you fucking fools.”

Gadarene Platforms

By in socmed, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

Cal Newport:

After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world.

To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on.

Enough is enough.

I like the cut of his jib, but I’m not optimistic here. At best, maybe social media usage will become déclassé, a furtive habit you indulge in private. Even that is a tall order.

In the Gospels (Mark 5/Luke 8/Matt. 8), Jesus encounters a man tormented by many unclean spirits — “Legion.” The demons beg to enter a nearby herd of swine. He permits it. The pigs then rush down a steep bank into the sea and drown. The man is restored to his right mind; the town, spooked, asks Jesus to leave. That’s the whole parable in miniature: concentrate pathology in a vessel, and watch it destroy the vessel.

A few weeks ago, in Santa Barbara, multiple urgent-care staff were fired after a now-deleted TikTok showed them joking around exam-table bodily fluids with captions like “Guess the substance!” and “Make sure you leave your healthcare workers sweet gifts like these!” Most of us assume that gallows humor is part of how people in difficult jobs like healthcare keep it together, but obviously, it’s not the sort of thing than can be shared with the general public. We already have enough of a problem with collapsing trust in public institutions without this sort of easily-avoidable stupidity. Still, you can easily imagine that these moronic nurses at least felt shame and embarrassment after the fact. It was still possible to wonder bemusedly what it is about social media that makes it such an attractive flame for otherwise-intelligent moths.

Then came last week’s assassination, and the resulting display of outright psychopathy from teachers, doctors, Secret Service agents, and tens of thousands of ordinary people. Educators and professionals openly cheering a political assassination. I keep thinking: we poured our demons into the feed, but the only things to drown were decency, reticence, and professional restraint.

These aren’t just “bad optics.” They’re a categorical breach of trust in professions that only function when we believe the people in the room are on our side. Healthcare and schools are high-trust environments by necessity. If the clinician treats you as disgusting content for engagement, you won’t be honest with symptoms. If the teacher giggles at a killing, you won’t want her anywhere near your children. The social web turns neighbors into content; it trains professionals to perform contempt as a status display. A society that performs its contempt cannot keep its guardrails.

The platforms didn’t invent our vices, but they did industrialize them. They reward extremity, erase context, and collapse our separate roles — citizen, friend, professional — into one undifferentiated performance. The result is standards at sea level. The pigs ran, but they didn’t drown; our inhibitions did. The townspeople in the parable weren’t inspired; they were unnerved. They asked the healer to leave. That’s us: attached to the herd even as it tramples the garden. Either the herd dies, or the village does.

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