extraordinary popular delusions

The Coldness of His Glance

By in extraordinary popular delusions, fresh hell, nietzsche No Comments

Patrick West:

Yet Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence belongs strangely to the realm of metaphysics and dualism. Its fatalism and determinism contradicts Nietzsche’s exhortation for each of us to become our own masters and to become who we truly are.

West characterizes Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence — live your life as if it will recur again and again eternally, down to the tiniest detail — as “basic self-help stuff.” Self-help, of course, is universally scorned among the media clerisy and the sorts of intellectuals who write books about Nietzsche. It supposedly presents simplistic solutions to complex problems and reduces great art to raw material to be mined by the self-centered for banal “life lessons” — all of which is largely true, even if the scorn is overdone for status-signaling purposes. But I had to laugh at the irony here of West presenting Nietzsche as if he were the slightest bit interested in “each of us” becoming our own masters. He wasn’t. I dare say that this middle-class perspective, for lack of a more precise term, of viewing everyone as more or less on the same moral level, of failing to recognize a genuinely 19th-century aristocratic attitude even as it looks haughtily down its nose at you, is just as much a failure of imagination as anything found in the self-help section of a bookstore. What, you think Nietzsche would have been anything other than repulsed by Spiked magazine and its paint-by-numbers pretensions to be the true voice of the democratic libertarian masses? Ah, right, yes, you probably do.

Nietzsche seemed to hint that Goethe came closest to embodying his ideal of the Ubermensch, a man who “disciplined himself to wholeness,” “a spirit who has become free.” He took it for granted that geniuses like Goethe (or himself) came along once every couple centuries or so, and the best the rest of us could do would be to prepare the conditions where such higher types could flourish. They represent the mountain peaks of human existence; most of us spend our unimportant lives down in the valleys. Their work will endure for millennia like the pyramids; the individual slaves who toiled to lay the stonework are justly forgotten. Who could be so ridiculous as to imagine that the ordinary everyman could rise en masse up to the level of a Goethe or Aristotle? Who could generate an incoherent fantasy of human excellence improving cumulatively and indefinitely? Certainly not Nietzsche. For that, you need the stupendous foolishness of a Trotsky. And who could still be so foolish as to lionize a loathsome man who was every bit as monstrous as his fellow Bolsheviks? Ah, right, Spiked magazine. Suddenly, it all makes sense. From the aristocratic heights of Nietzschean philosophy to the fetid swamps of doctrinaire Marxism, it seems that no matter where the self-absorbed Spiked mindset goes, there it finds…itself. How strangely bourgeois!

We’re Just Talkin’ About the Future, Forget About the Past

By in antisocial networking, books, extraordinary popular delusions, unintended consequences No Comments

It is fair to say that the past decade has not been kind to this vision of electronic community, for reasons that were entirely predictable. When Barlow proclaimed that “we are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” it does not appear to have occurred to him that some people might use this freedom of expression to coerce, harass, or silence other people. Thus, the Internet quickly became infested with all of the same sorts of obnoxious people that exist in the “real world,” such as racists, bigots and sexists, not to mention team-killers, smacktards, cyberstalkers and other “griefers” all too willing to invade privacy, steal identities, harass ex-girlfriends or co-workers and generally make life miserable for other people. Worse, they are able to do so by taking advantage of the very features that were supposed to make cyberspace such a utopia: no laws, barriers or borders, no government or police and almost perfect anonymity. The results confirmed Gresham’s law of cyberspace: bad talk drives out good.

— Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

This is one of my favorite books. I included it on my list of books that have shaped my worldview. The Lady of the House has heard me refer to it so many times over the years that she finally decided to read it herself. On last week’s trips to Ohio and D.C., she brought it along and read her favorite bits out loud, followed by pauses for discussion. I know reading is largely pictured and practiced as a solitary activity, but you get a lot more out of a book when you read as a team. The conversation helps more of it to stick in your memory.

At any rate, this was published in 2004, which makes its pre-Web 2.0 prescience even more striking. In this excerpt, Heath and Potter were referencing Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which, they accurately noted, “reeks of bongwater.” But jokes aside, let’s spare a moment for people who used to think like this. Imagine what a cataclysmic disaster 2016 must have been for them. It’s often said that an old European way of life, with all its dreams and promises, was brutally murdered in the trenches of Verdun and the Somme; a century later, the, uh, “trenches” of the web were likewise filled with the smoldering wreckage of utopian hopes and the mangled remains of naïve early adopters. Twitter was being blamed for providing a platform to help Trump to the presidency, Facebook was excoriated for corroding the distinction between news, gossip and conspiracy theories, and social media in general had become largely associated with ominous, dystopian data-harvesting schemes and virulent mob behavior. Two years further on, and rather than the global agora filled with philosophical conversation that the founders envisioned, social media can be fairly described as a giant kennel full of Pavlov’s dogs, with Trump as the bell.

For tragic skeptics like myself, all of this was indeed entirely predictable. It seems too obvious to need saying, but any future developments in society can only be built on, or extended from, what already exists. That includes flawed human beings and all their ignoble, contradictory motives for action. There never will be a form of social, technological or political alchemy that will produce a purified form of human nature without all the dross of its past. If you promised to build a third floor of a building that can support itself on thin air and doesn’t require a foundation or two supporting floors, you would be rightly thought insane, but if you promise that a new political arrangement or a new gadget will make people behave in predictably benevolent ways, you’ll be hailed as a visionary. In a couple decades, you can expect to find people similarly shocked by the unintended consequences of gene editing. And on and on it goes.

Left Hand Path

By in extraordinary popular delusions, political philosophy, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere No Comments

Damon Linker:

On the other hand, the policy agenda favored by nearly everyone on the American left resembles more than anything else the political, social, and economic arrangements that prevail in northern Europe, and especially in Denmark. Is Denmark a socialist country? If it is, then there is no meaningful distinction between socialism and liberal democracy — at least when the liberal democracy has a generous welfare state and a modestly regulated, mixed market economy. Given the political history of the United States, doesn’t it make more sense for the left to understand itself, and to explain itself to voters, by making connections with the Democratic Party’s own record of advocating for just such an expansive form of liberalism (rather than “socialism”)?

What the left really seems to want is a return to the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a New Deal 2.0 for the 21st century.

Well, yes. To the extent that the American left can be said to have any serious ideas and proposals for achieving their objectives, as opposed to a vague collection of postures and grievances, it seems clear that they’re motivated by nostalgia for the decades between the New Deal and the Great Society. Of course, those golden years produced a generation of spoiled brats who were convinced that they had grown up in a tyrannical dystopia that needed to be burnt to the ground, so, given that human nature hasn’t dramatically changed in the meantime, I’m not sure why people think we’d be any more likely to appreciate a reinvigorated welfare state this time around. Still, though, it’s true that most of the inane chatter about “socialism” is either fear-mongering or status-signaling. The invasive managerial state grows in tandem with technological sophistication toward a Brave New World future regardless of which party is in power. Like generals fighting the last war, political junkies rehash century-old arguments over socialism and laissez-faire as if it’s relevant. Even the wispy fantasy of a Danish-style social democracy dissipates on contact with cultural and demographic realities.

Yet, as Kristian Niemietz has observed on his side of the ocean, people who used to claim to only want to see their society become a little more like Scandinavia or Germany have held a finger to the prevailing cultural winds and started signaling their affinity for something more extreme. (Thankfully, we seem to be behind the trend over here.) Sure, Owen Jones and most of his fellow Guardianistas have always been fatuous fools. And sure, despite the fact that it would be impossible to imagine teen and ladies‘ fashion outlets fawning over anyone who proudly proclaimed herself on TV to be a national socialist (“I’m literally a Nazi, you idiot!”), it’s also clear that Sarkar is embarrassingly ignorant about what she’s actually saying; she’s only bright enough to recognize a high-status opinion that will win her praise from her peers. But slippery slopes have to start somewhere, and the bromides that pass for received wisdom among cultural elites seems like as good a place as any. Why are we, especially those of us who don’t believe in any sort of Whiggish progression to history, supposed to rest assured that experiments with extreme leftism could never happen again?

Which brings us to the real point — as Jordan Peterson was recently wondering, what is the limiting principle of the left? How far is too far in pursuit of equality? Why do so many people still believe in some Platonic ideal of “true” socialism, existing outside of space and time, independent of all the failed attempts made on Earth to realize it? Why are we supposed to believe that a New Deal 2.0 would be enough, and not a springboard for a renewed drive to eliminate all inequalities? Regardless of how overblown the rhetoric surrounding socialism may be in our political environment, one can still be wary of the unreconstructed left-wing longing for utopia. Too bad our fellow travelers never had to go through the equivalent of denazification after the fall of the USSR.

History Sticks to Your Feet

By in antisocial networking, extraordinary popular delusions, technology, unintended consequences No Comments

Katrina Brooker:

The forces that Berners-Lee unleashed nearly three decades ago are accelerating, moving in ways no one can fully predict. And now, as half the world joins the Web, we are at a societal inflection point: Are we headed toward an Orwellian future where a handful of corporations monitor and control our lives? Or are we on the verge of creating a better version of society online, one where the free flow of ideas and information helps cure disease, expose corruption, reverse injustices?

This comes near the end of an article about the unintended consequences of Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. You’d think maybe we might have learned something from the utopian predictions that accompanied each stage of the web’s evolution up to this point, but apparently not. In 1994, I heard people telling me how we’d all be able to access the Library of Congress whenever we wanted. In 2011, I heard people telling me how social media was helping to overthrow tyrants and usher in the slightly-delayed End of History. It turns out that most people used the web to indulge in porn rather than expand their minds, and social media is now being blamed for making the arc of history pull a sharp U-turn. And yet, the faith that flawed humans will finally invent a method or a machine that will somehow transcend the conflicted nature of its creators and solve all problems forever remains undimmed. You know that Solzhenitsyn quote about the line between good and evil running through the heart of each individual? It’s true, which is why wherever we go from here, there we will be. Either/or? No, both/and. On and on forever.

When Harry Became Sally

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Regardless of whether they identify as “cisgender” or “transgender,” the activists promote a highly subjective and incoherent worldview. On the one hand, they claim that the real self is something other than the physical body, in a new form of Gnostic dualism, yet at the same time they embrace a materialist philosophy in which only the material world exists. They say that gender is purely a social construct, while asserting that a person can be “trapped” in the wrong body. They say there are no meaningful differences between man and woman, yet they rely on rigid sex stereotypes to argue that “gender identity” is real while human embodiment is not. They claim that truth is whatever a person says it is, yet they believe there’s a real self to be discovered inside that person. They promote a radical expressive individualism in which people are free to do whatever they want and define the truth however they wish, yet they try to enforce acceptance of transgender ideology in a paternalistic way.

— Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment

The early twentieth-century French writer Charles Péguy wrote, “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” While reading Anderson’s book, I was reminded of that line along with a former reader who used to email me to confess his heretical thoughts on the transgender dogma then starting to take rigid shape on lefty social media. I would chuckle at the desperate way he would always hasten to preface his remarks by stressing that of course he wasn’t saying that trans people should be beaten up or discriminated against by law. There’s a satisfying poetic justice in seeing progressives haunted by their own strawmen.

Of course, he was right to be worried about the social consequences of being found harboring thought-criminals in the attic of his head, even if he was slow to connect the dots and realize that the progressive desire to always appear in the vanguard on “the right side of history,” to maintain a constant posture of indulgent, nonjudgmental acceptance toward “victims” of the conformist, middle-American booboisie, is precisely the Achilles heel being exploited by radical activists. Even Anderson goes out of his way to stress repeatedly that transgender individuals and activists are almost always two different groups with different aims, and the former deserve nothing but compassion and respect. That does nothing to prevent the NYT from soliciting an op-ed contributor to brazenly lie about the book, naturally. You can have the progressive oppression narrative when you pry it from their cold, dead hands.

If you set aside the citations of studies which make up the bulk of the book, you’re left with what should be a fairly mild assertion, that transgenderism is better understood and treated as a disorder akin to anorexia, not as the latest logical extension of the sexual revolution. Accepting that, though, would mean that progressives would have to stop portraying all critics of “progress” as mindless, reactionary denizens of Pleasantville, and honestly, they’ve been leaning on that crutch for so long, I imagine their muscles have atrophied. They would have to stop reenacting culture wars against the skeletal remnants of the Religious Right and acknowledge that the transgender political project is part of an insatiable, subjective assault on the very concept of a shared, objective reality which will inevitably target them as well as “deserving” enemies. They might even have to admit that there isn’t a clear, bright line between “campus radicalism” and “the real world.” I’m not optimistic about any of those scenarios, so I assume cowardice and dishonesty will continue to be the S.O.P.

Do You Even Believe That There’s a Race to Be Won?

By in extraordinary popular delusions, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Michael Tanner:

We have become obsessed with economic equality at the expense of economic growth. Inequality is said to be the transcendent issue of our time. Yet a society that is rich and unequal still beats one that is poor and equal any day of the week.

I don’t know about “transcendent,” but it sure is ubiquitous, at least. I long ago passed through the semantic satiation stage; now, I think I’m in the learned helplessness phase, where I can’t even react to the pain of hearing progressives yammering incessantly and nonsensically about income inequality; I just lay on the floor of my cage and tremble and whimper as if there’s no escape.

In slogan form, the argument often takes shape as a distinction between equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Exasperated, progressives will retort that they’re not demanding equality of outcome; it’s just that there’s no true equality of opportunity as long as there is structural inequality, i.e. privilege. Many will approvingly quote Anatole France’s famous snark about how the law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor to sleep under bridges and steal loaves of bread. Dig, if you will, the picture of society engaged in a race. The progressive perspective is that “equality of opportunity” still allows too many people to have a significant, even insurmountable, head start through “unearned” advantages. The only way the race can be made truly fair is to bring everyone back to the same starting line. Of course, doing so would entail the very same socioeconomic leveling that progressives insist they’re not aiming for. Equality of outcome by a different name — imposing it “before” rather than “after” the race. And let’s be honest — assuming such “true” equality of opportunity was even achievable, why would you fire the starting pistol and allow the same old inequalities to begin asserting themselves again? Are we supposed to believe that our former devotees of equality, possessing the power to eliminate disparities, would suddenly just shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, we ensured absolutely fair starting conditions, so it’s all up to individual skill and desire now. Whatever happens, happens. Let the best man win.”?

William Voegeli accurately noted that no matter how much the welfare state continues to grow (even under Republican administrations), progressives always insist it’s never enough. More specifically, they never make any attempt to quantify what “enough” might finally look like, or how we would recognize it when we get there. How much GDP is the redistributive state entitled to consume? How many new programs do we need? At what point might we factor in that human beings are never satisfied and always complaining no matter what? A cynic might suspect that such vagueness is the entire point, that it’s all about procuring blank checks and ever-increasing administrative power for you and your party by constantly stoking and inflaming moral outrage. No, it’s not that there’s a danger of progressives actually gaining enough power and ability to eliminate all the privileges and talents that give some people an automatic head start in life; it’s that to the extent that such ahistorical fantasies are relentlessly pursued by people too stupid to recognize them as fantasies, they can still cause an awful lot of damage.

Snips and Snails and Sugar and Spice

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender, political philosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

The Big Lebowski: What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski? Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn’t that what makes a man?

The Dude: Hmmm… Sure, that and a pair of testicles.

Spencer Case:

When gender identity is divorced from biology, the only way to distinguish a male from a female gender identity is to rely on gender stereotypes. We can imagine a woman’s mind in a man’s body, or a biological woman who defies gender stereotypes with regard to preferences and behavior. But try to say something substantive about the gender identity “woman” – something that would distinguish it from other gender identities – without referencing either biology or gender stereotypes. The DSM-5, the most recent edition of American Psychological Association’s guide for identifying mental illnesses, includes having a “strong preference for toys, games or other activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender” among its diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria. Why not assume that children with such preferences are simply members of their biological sex who defy the stereotypes?

When my generation was coming of age, it seemed like the commonest of sense that many of the general differences between men and women could still be blurred or even erased by individuals who were so inclined. The Lady of the House worked in some of the most typically masculine manual-labor fields when she was younger. She’s constantly doing the sort of “handyman” projects around here that involve trips to Home Depot for supplies, where the workers unfailingly look at me when asking if “we” need any help. I prefer tasks like cleaning the house, doing the laundry, and decorating for holidays. (The Lady says I’m also emotionally sensitive, “in touch with my feelings,” and in the sort of physical shape that, at my age, usually gets a fellow classified as gay.) And yet, despite the fact that in practice, we’re more genderbendy than half of the adolescent posers on Tumblr, we don’t make a fetish of it. There’s no existential angst over whether we might “really” be the other sex. Our biology doesn’t oppress or imprison us.

Had you told me then that in a mere couple decades, we would “progress” to the point where people would define masculinity and femininity by those very same, uh, social constructions favored by nostalgic conservatives and lazy stand-up comedians, I would have stared at you in stunned silence. But here we are. Racially-segregated public spaces and clichéd definitions of gender are now “progressive” stances. There’s apparently no idea so stupid it can’t come back into vogue, if for no better reason than boredom.

The American Civil Liberties Union describes itself as an organization that “champions transgender people’s right to be themselves,” which suggests that transgender activists are motivated by a “live and let live” philosophy. But because the underlying conception of selfhood is so radical, this implies a right to live in a society devoid of gender norms. It is far from clear that most people would flourish under these conditions. “In a culture where transgender identities are not only affirmed, but celebrated,” Anderson writes, “everyone will be compelled to construct their own gender identities, unaided by a common understanding of sex differences and why they matter.” Transforming society along these lines necessarily has implications for the rights and interests of others.

This is what mainstream liberals, the kind who think all this culture war drama is an annoying distraction from the serious business of ghost-dancing the Great Society back into existence, fail to understand. This is much more radical than just another partisan skirmish. The fact that the transgender political project relies on restrictive stereotypes for an epistemological foundation in the absence of biology is really just an ironic side issue. The act of choosing itself, the uncaused assertion of pure will, is the foundation of it. What this is really about is liberalism, as a political philosophy opposed to any unjust limitations upon the individual, taken to its most extreme logical conclusion. It’s not just tradition in the form of, say, fundamentalist religious practices that’s oppressive; it’s the very existence of a common frame of reference at all. Why should I have to abide by linguistic standards that I didn’t voluntarily assent to? Why should society get to have any say over my self-expression? It doesn’t matter if my choices make no sense; the important thing is that they’re mine. If I feel like changing my gender sixteen times a week and demanding validation from everyone else, that’s my choice, my right. Anything that impinges on my ability to do that is tyrannical and oppressive.

And thus the centuries-old drive to liberate the individual from any personal, social, or cultural entanglements that weren’t consciously chosen ends up in solipsism. Well, not precisely — they still technically recognize the existence of other people who need to be scolded and browbeaten into submission. It’s more a malignant form of narcissism. But still, mainstream liberals, fearful of being scooped up by the social-justice tumbrils which they helped set into motion, keep pretending that this is just one more logical, incremental extension of the sexual revolution that no reasonable person could have a problem with. And even if they did find the courage to call it what it is, they’d feel guilty over drawing what, to them, would feel like an arbitrary line — why should Obergefell be the final scene? How do you justify bringing the curtain down now? Who are you to decide that trans people or polygamists or whoever’s next don’t qualify as victims in need of liberation from prejudice and customs? Boy, isn’t it convenient that the revolution stops when you start to feel uncomfortable…! Etc. If individual choice and freedom from irrational customs are good things by definition, it’s difficult to articulate any reason why they should be curtailed without sounding like, *gulp*, a conservative, and if there’s one thing that wakes a typical liberal in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, it’s the thought of being called a conservative by their peers.

As long as status and power accrue to those willing to play this cynical game, it won’t end. As long as dysfunctional people are incentivized to project their misery onto society, they’ll keep seeking political solutions for it. As long as the clerisy keep reflexively genuflecting before anyone who claims victimhood, they’ll keep finding newly-discovered victim groups making demands. Conservatives are at least comfortable with the knowledge that mores and customs will never be “rational” in the sense of being founded on abstract principles rather than tried-and-true practices. Liberals aren’t. Faced with accusations of irrational hypocrisy, of failing to live up to their principles, they’ll continue to back down rather than risk sacrificing their beloved self-image as the heroic champions of the underdog. In a sense, they’ve been living off of cultural savings for a while now, having it both ways. They’ve been able to position themselves as the cool, tolerant, sophisticated alternative to those musty, archaic conservatives, while trusting that unchecked individualism would never actually gather enough momentum to threaten the social cohesion accrued over the ages. As those cultural funds dwindle, the bills are starting to come due. It looks like we may be the ones fated to live in some truly interesting times indeed.

Mr. I.V. Lenin Gonna Make Us Feel So Fine With a Hit of Socialism In the Mainline

By in extraordinary popular delusions, music No Comments

In The Opium of the Intellectuals, Raymond Aron wrote, “It is always astonishing that a thinker should appear indulgent to a society which would not tolerate him and merciless to the one which honors him.” In a slightly more colloquial fashion, Eric Hoffer echoed this with his observation that “people who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.” Hold that thought for a moment; we’ll come back to it.

Recently, I was reading some old interviews with the members of Alabama 3, one of my favorite bands. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at parts like these:

I ask him if he believes that the Sopranos helped them to cultivate their outlaw image, something which reflects itself as clearly in their music as in their personal politics: “It certainly did. I tell you what – we never had any trouble at any gigs in America. We’ve certainly been known to hang around with a few naughty characters both in the states and around London…we formed Alabama 3 with a certain set of beliefs in mind and they’ve always been a part of us right from the start.” Although Larry also points out that they view a lot of the revolutionary spirit within their music as being reflective of a lot of the unheard opinions within UK society as a whole: “A lot of the time we’re not explicitly saying ‘go out and grab a gun,’ but what we are saying is, as our song goes, ‘Mao Tse Tung said change must come through the barrel of a gun.’ The messages are already out there.”

Most of the other interviews contain similar examples of typical rock-star radicalism, a sort of non-denominational Marxism seasoned with Romantic self-destructive decadence (or maybe that should be the other way around). I don’t expect my entertainers to be sensible or level-headed, of course, especially when they’ve written as many brilliant songs as these guys. It’s just that I can’t help but marvel at the cognitive dissonance involved in yearning for a revolutionary left-wing society, as if it wouldn’t immediately execute a bunch of drug-addled, antisocial musicians as socially degenerate elements. For all their clichéd complaints about the bourgeois stupidity of American and British society, at least those tolerate and provide a comfortable living for malcontents who would otherwise, come the revolution, be slaving away in the fields or dead in a mass grave. Ah, well. Hoffer also wrote about the mysterious alchemy of the human soul, in which the base materials of our flaws could be miraculously transformed into the precious metals of art and nobility of spirit — “the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.” Likewise, people who might sound stupid and trite when speaking somehow become inspiring when they pick up an instrument and sing. Only the naïve expect a harmonious symmetry between motive and result. I don’t need to understand how the ingredients combine. It’s enough to just appreciate the magic.

Or Did You Long for the Next Distraction?

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, technology No Comments

Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields.

— Nietzsche

Eric Andrew-Gee:

The lesson we’re slowly beginning to learn, though, is that they’re not a harmless vice. Used the way we currently use them, smartphones keep us from being our best selves. The world is starting to make up its mind about whether it’s worth it and whether the sugary hits of digital pleasure justify being worse, both alone and together.

As I’ve said a time or two dozen, we keep ourselves from being our “best selves;” smartphones are just the latest convenient excuse we strew across our own path. If it somehow becomes widely accepted that phones are no longer considered an acceptable excuse for our shortcomings, we’ll invent another one. That’s the human condition. Sartre may have been a garbage human being, but his concept of bad faith almost makes everything else about him worth it.

The article makes full use of the latest terminology from neuroscience, of course. This is how we like to deny our agency these days, by pretending that we’re at the mercy of our neural pathways and dopamine spurts. But those neurochemical factors were always involved in our omnipresent battles with temptation, even when we didn’t have the technology to observe them. Nothing has changed since Paul was lamenting how “the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The fact that we talk about neurotransmitters instead of willpower or virtue now doesn’t change the fact that the solution is still the same as it’s always been: reflect on your behavior, acknowledge any flaws that need correcting, and start practicing new habits. If you can’t do that, it’s probably because you don’t actually care enough to do so. Admitting that, though — that’s the problem. I remember an old punchline about having never seen someone work so hard to avoid work — similarly, I’m always amused/amazed at how much effort people will put into rationalizing and excusing their bad habits rather than practice good ones.

Look, I’ve had a smartphone for six years. I mostly use it for work, and otherwise it sits on my dresser, untouched, for hours. I don’t surf the web on it. The only game I have on it is a chess app, and I rarely play it. I don’t text people just to chat. Am I superhuman to be able to resist this supposedly-immense gravitational pull of dopamine rushes and novelty bias? I can assure you I’m not. You know what I do instead? I make time to have in-depth conversations with the Lady of the House, and I set aside a couple hours almost every day to read books. There is no possibility of being distracted by a stupid toy phone, no matter how insidious the intentions of engineers at Google, because I’m consciously aware that these are the things I’d rather do than anything else on Earth. If you find yourself repeatedly preferring to thumb your phone rather than talk to your spouse, maybe that says something uncomfortable about the quality of your relationship. If you’d rather browse aimlessly through the app store than read a book, maybe you’re not actually interested in reading, even though some aspirational part of you thinks you should be. Those are the sorts of unsettling questions most of us would rather avoid, even at the expense of our dignity as we make pathetic excuses for why we never do the things we claim to want to do. By pretending to be enfeebled, we somehow, counterintuitively, salvage our pride.

Discipline is a verb, not a noun. It’s not a “thing” you “get” in order to perform actions. It is the consistent performing of actions. You only know you have it in hindsight, when you look back at a pattern of consistent accomplishments. Until then, there’s a hundred tiny trials every day. You can either practice skills and habits to better cope with them, or you can allow them to defeat you and whine about it.

“But you don’t understand!” people like Andrew-Gee will sputter. “Parents are too often on the phone to greet their children upon arriving home! Mothers are too distracted by texting to pay attention to their breastfeeding infants! These are some of the most fundamental, important aspects of our lives! It’s too terrible to accept the implications for our character if being distracted is a choice we’re all making, rather than something being imposed on us!”

Yes, I know. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Better Days Come Around, Get Better

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, religion No Comments

Gracy Olmstead:

Can we sing in the face of adversity? Can we be merry despite our brokenness?

This sort of joy is unlikely—nay, I’d suggest, impossible—without divine intervention. The Grinch who puzzles for three hours in the snow is unlikely to experience exponential heart growth and transformation without some sort of providential awakening. Christmas is “more” than presents and levity because it is really about redemption: about sparse beginnings that turn into happily ever afters, death that results in resurrection, poverty that ends in fullness of joy. Christmas offers us the sort of redemption that can make you sing in an empty house, the sort of joy that can transform a barren heart.

I generally appreciate Olmstead’s writing, but this is an example of one of the most off-putting things about a certain strain of American conservatism — this blinkered insistence, despite much evidence to the contrary, that happiness and fortitude as experienced by billions of people worldwide is just so much worthless fiat currency unless pegged to the gold standard of monotheistic divinity. Experience alone has taught even us godless folks that however bad things might be now, they will almost certainly change soon enough, and probably for the better on the principle of “nowhere to go but up.” No need for deities when contemplative reflection will serve just fine.

Earlier in the essay, she describes her chagrin during a wretched Christmas Eve as she realizes that she had subconsciously bought into the idea that the holiday season should be somehow exempt from the hassles and heartbreaks of the rest of the year. But even as she realizes that festivities don’t have to be perfect to be worth celebrating, she falls back on the biggest happy-ending story of all. As with our holiday plans, so with life in general — the very lack of guaranteed happiness is what gives our joys any meaning at all.

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