Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Feb. 4, 2011.]

So, having just emerged from the shower, imagine my surprise as I walked across my bedroom toweling off, my Adonis-like physique exposed in all its glory, only to see a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses ambling right past my window on the way to the front door. I haven’t had any of them stop by here in probably three years! In a moment of inspiration, I seized upon the idea of inviting them in to deliver their spiel if they would in turn allow me to read them some selected passages from Nietzsche and Dawkins. I thought the exchange would make for an interesting blog post (the things I do for you people!) But alas, I was on my way to meet Arthur for lunch and had no time to spare! What a shame to waste such a rare opportunity!

So I killed them and took them with me. We had them sliced and served over fettuccine noodles in alfredo sauce, with a Caesar salad and garlic cheese toast on the side. (“There’s nothing like the taste of a Jehovah’s Witness,” Arthur said. “Naive, but you’ll be amused by its presumption.”) I don’t drink alcohol, so I just had water. Arthur had a soda. Conversation was pleasant, centering on 19th-century authors, the state of writing in a digital age, and the nature of life as bohemian intellectuals in the twilight of the American Empire.

As I was cleaning up the bloodstains on the porch upon arriving home, I noticed where one of them had dropped a copy of The Watchtower, with this issue’s cover story, “The Garden of Eden: Myth or Fact?” The first few pages fluttered in the breeze, hoping to attract a reader. I put it in the recycling bin and came inside.

This Democratical Hurricane, Inundation, Earthquake, Pestilence, Call It What You Will

By in crime and punishment, political philosophy, revillaging, the great awokening, the madness of crowds 3 Comments

Count de Monet: It is said that the people are revolting.

King Louis XVI: You said it! They stink on ice!

Aaron Freedman:

This sentiment is more than just petty contrarianism. Apply it in the real world, and it becomes clear that contempt for cancel culture is little more than contempt for democracy.

After all, what is derided as “cancel culture” is nothing more than a large group of people choosing who and what they want to watch, read and listen to. Though “canceling” on its own suggests the work of the anonymous censor or autocratic TV exec, “cancel culture” reflects the opposite: the public and democratic engagement of ordinary people.

By the standards of sophistry, this is on the same low level as “political correctness just means being considerate and polite,” which is to say, hardly worth the strain of an eye-roll. But anyway, since we’re on the subject, ancient Athens used to practice a form of cancel culture. They called it ostracism. Many people might be familiar with Plutarch’s story of Aristides, who was approached by an illiterate voter looking to cast his vote for a candidate for ostracism and asked to write down the name…Aristides. Uh, what harm has Aristides done to you? he asked, understandably. None at all, replied the man of the people. I don’t even know him. I’m just sick of people always calling him “Aristides the Just.” Twenty-five hundred years later, and people’s careers and personal lives are ruined on social media for equally facile, spiteful reasons.

Safe to say Plutarch and Aristides were wiser men with a keener understanding of the nasty tendencies of human character than Mr. Freedman. And while I don’t want to be here all day naming other examples of men with more brains and psychological insight than some smug junior-varsity Jacobin writing opinion pieces in the Washington Post, John Adams deserves a mention. He also held ostracism in contempt. “History nowhere furnishes so frank a confession of the people themselves, of their own infirmities and unfitness for managing the executive branch of government, or an unbalanced share of the legislature, as this institution.” He wasn’t too enamored of “the public and democratic engagement of ordinary people” either:

Dear Sir
In your fifth page You Say “Mr. Adams calls our Attention to hundreds of wise and virtuous Patricians, mangled and bleeding Victims of popular Fury.” and gravely counts up several Victims of democratic Rage as proofs that Democracy is more pernicious than Monarchy or Aristocracy.” Is this fair, sir? Do you deny any one of my Facts? I do not say that Democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than Monarchy or Aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But while it lasts it is more bloody than either.

…You Say I “might have exhibited millions of Plebians, sacrificed to the pride Folly and Ambition of Monarchy and Aristocracy.” This is very true. And I might hav[e] exhibited as many millions of Plebians sacrificed by the Pride Folly and Ambition of their fellow Plebians and their own, in proportion to the extent and duration of their power. Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty. When clear Prospects are opened before Vanity, Pride, Avarice or Ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate Phylosophers and the most conscientious Moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves, Nations and large Bodies of Men, never.

Freedman makes it sound like a simple, rational process. Nothing but friendly persuasion and free choice involved, right? But as Adams would instantly recognize were he around today, the easy gratification of vanity, pride, avarice and ambition play a dominant role in determining who gets canceled, and the mob’s appetite is insatiable. Contempt for democracy? Damn straight. Have you ever met the demos? Wherever two or three people gather in its name, stupidity and mischief will be there with them.

Or Maybe “Capitalism: Endgame”

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Erin Wisti:

After finishing graduate school and learning of the nearly comically unattainable nature of stable jobs in higher education, I struggled to find employment outside of academia. For years I took the brand of low-paying, demeaning gigs commonly tolerated by financially-strapped millennials.

The problems that permeated millennials’ early years are getting worse. It’s no wonder rates of childhood anxiety and depression are skyrocketing at record rates. I’m unsurprised the term “Late Stage Capitalism” has taken off online, unbound from its theoretical roots to become a catchall phrase for the absurdities of the system.

I’m also unsurprised, though for different reasons. I suspect references to “late-stage capitalism” have become popular because of a latent belief in sympathetic magic. Maybe if we keep invoking the phrase in a spirit of hope, the global system of buying and selling which has shrugged off everything from Marx’s pseudoscientific prophecies to endless critiques and deconstructions in academic journals will finally cough, wheeze, and expire, whereupon in the vaguely-conceived utopia that is sure to follow, rewarding jobs for MFA graduates will hang from the lowest branches like plump fruits in an orchard that stretches to the horizon in all directions. But why should we take any chances? Perhaps we can speed the process up by referring to “terminal capitalism.”

Fossilized Remnants of Fashionable Ideas

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During the dozen or so years in which I knew and talked with Oakeshott he rarely mentioned “the founder of modern conservatism” and never with approval. He disliked Burke’s Whiggish faith in progress and much preferred the cool scepticism of David Hume. But Oakeshott’s idea of tradition has many of the difficulties of Burke’s defence of what he described as “just prejudice”. Both of them preferred the tacit knowledge embodied in practices to the abstractions of rationalist intellectuals. They passed over the fact that tacit knowledge often consists of fossilised remnants of fashionable ideas.

The experience of the French arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) may be worth recalling. At the start of the 19th century he was sent to Russia as a diplomat. An ardent opponent of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, he hoped to visit a country that had not been “scribbled on” by intellectuals. What he found was aristocratic elites babbling about Voltaire and Diderot. Then as now, there was no traditional wisdom to which a conservative could default.

— John Gray, “The Closing of the Conservative Mind: Politics and the Art of War”

****

Ennoblement through degeneration. History teaches us that that part of a people maintains itself best whose members generally share a vital public spirit, due to the similarity of their long-standing, incontrovertible principles, that is, of their common faith. In their case, good, sound custom strengthens them; they are taught to subordinate the individual, and their character is given solidity, at first innately and later through education. The danger in these strong communities, founded on similar, steadfast individual members, is an increasing, inherited stupidity, which follows all stability like a shadow. In such communities, spiritual progress depends on those individuals who are less bound, much less certain, and morally weaker; they are men who try new things, and many different things. Because of their weakness, countless such men are destroyed without having much visible effect; but in general, especially if they have descendants, they loosen things up, and, from time to time, deliver a wound to the stable element of a community. Precisely at this wounded, weakened place, the common body is inoculated, so to speak, with something new; however, the community’s overall strength has to be great enough to take this new thing into its bloodstream and assimilate it. Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Jan. 27, 2013.]

Soraya Roberts:

In high school, I lied about why I never drank. “I don’t want to lose control,” I said. The truth—I don’t want to be like you—would no doubt have been less palatable.

I vividly remember being about four years old and asking my dad about the beer he was drinking. He offered me a tiny sip. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but years later, I decided that “cold urine” was probably a reasonable approximation of its taste (I’ve never been tempted to perform the necessary experiment to validate my hypothesis, content to let it rest as conjecture). That was good enough for me. Whatever his motivations may have been, he largely ensured that I made it through adolescence without ever feeling the need to participate in that rite of passage.

Well… if I’m honest, I have to admit that being antisocial was an even greater factor. I would have agreed even then that it would be unfair to assume all drinks would taste like generic American beer. But my innate inability to feel comfortable in groups of people, though more passive in those days than it is now, made me recoil from the aggressively gregarious bonding. “I want you to promise me that you’ll at least try some kind of drink this summer. Please, just try it!” That was my classmate Ian, shortly before the end of our junior year, sounding for all the world like the newly-converted Christian teens who would plead with you that listening to Van Halen and the Scorpions put your eternal soul at risk.

For people who live unthinkingly, security comes from situating oneself in the middle of a group. Encountering a person who has chosen differently can carry an implicit rebuke, a reminder that there are possibilities one hasn’t considered, a demarcation of their narcissistic reach. Loners like me feel importuned by the pressure from those who blithely assume that of course any normal person would like the things they like. People like Ian feel uncomfortable by being forced to entertain the notion that others could see them clearly, understand them plainly, and gently deflect their invitation nonetheless. But that is one of the fundamental steps toward a meaningful individuality: the ability to be genuinely unconcerned with the approval of others, the possession of an inner compass that allows one to make one’s way without needing to constantly check the constellations of others’ tastes and opinions. I’m old enough now to feel reasonably confident in saying that a lot of people never seem to attain that ability.

True story: I encountered Ian again a few years later in community college. He was spending a few semesters there to save money, or so he said. Protesting the unfairness of his situation, he lamented, “I’m not a loser like —” he gestured around at some of the people in our vicinity in the cafeteria — “these people; I’m an economic loser!” What exactly he thought I was doing there, I don’t know, but he must have assumed I shared his plight, a future world-beater temporarily, and only temporarily, brought low, because he then suggested we should try to join a fraternity at UVa. You know, a real college for successful people. Where we could get drunk among equals.

Looking back, it might have been maliciously fun to tell him the simple truth: I didn’t want to be like him.

Whither Liberalism?

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It is possible to envision a stoical and realist liberalism that would accept that freedom and toleration must survive in a hostile or indifferent world. Liberalism would be recognised to be a particular form of life, like the others that humans have fashioned and then destroyed, but still worth defending as a civilised way in which humans can live together.

In practice a stance of this kind is hardly possible. Liberals cannot do without the faith that they form the vanguard of an advancing way of life. The appeal of John Stuart Mill is that he allows them to preserve this self-image, while the liberal world continues to evaporate around them.

— John Gray, “Deluded Liberals Can’t Keep Clinging to a Dead Idea”

****

No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom. The reason liberals like laws is because they give us more time for everything in life that isn’t law-like. When we aren’t fighting every minute for minimal rights, or reasserting our territory, or worrying about the next clan’s claims, we can look at the stars and taste new cheeses and make love, sometimes with the wrong person. The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

…If there is any comfort in its possible extinction, it’s that the practice of telling false likenesses from true ones, good coin from bad—frequently in the company of people we can’t stand—is fundamental to living in the real world at any moment. Empathy and argument are foundational to existence. That’s why the prehistory of liberalism is mostly the history of commonplace civilization, of bazaars and agoras and trading ports—all those enforced and opportunistic acts of empathy, where you had to make bargains and share selling space and find workable commonalities with people fundamentally unlike yourself in order to live at all. That’s the work of liberalism, and even if the worst happens, as it may, it is work that won’t stop, can’t stop, because it is also the real work of being human.

— Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

Reversion to the Mean

By in antisocial networking, books, education, the statusphere No Comments

Peter Murphy:

The third-hand dealing in ideas occurs within a tiny social bubble. Twenty-two per cent of American adults use Twitter. Ten per cent of those produce 80 per cent of tweets. Eight per cent say that what they post is related to politics. In short the class of third-hand dealers is 2 per cent of the adult population. The rest of the people on Twitter and other social media follow celebrities and repost cat videos. Little more than 1.5 per cent of adults comment on politics. Outwardly that tiny figure is almost unchanged from the first stirrings of democracy in the nineteenth century. Then 2 per cent of the population defined the reading public. These were persons with a high degree of literacy who read books. A century ago that group substantially overlapped with the opinion class.

The Public Education Acts of the nineteenth century had the rationale of making the whole population literate and numerate. This justified the expansion of the democratic franchise. The reading of newspapers and then books did expand through to the 1940s. Then began a steady decline. We still have 2 per cent of dedicated readers today. But the project of expanding serious reading not just to the entire population but even to the 15 per cent of persons who make up today’s professional-managerial and technical-administrative classes has died. As this occurred, a gulf opened up between the opinion class and the reading class. The opinion class no longer reads. It emotes.

As Susan Jacoby once wrote, “what has been lost is the culture of effort.” Through a unique confluence of historical circumstances, there was a time when the middlebrow ideal of striving to improve oneself through self-education, especially reading, was widespread and generally respected. That ideal is now generally an object of mockery. Most people don’t care about achievement per se so much as achievement relative to others. Literacy is far too common to be high-status anymore. When garbage collectors and truck drivers can join the Book of the Month Club and be exposed to the same classic literature as university students, well, how are the latter supposed to feel special now? Like a village in Vietnam, they had to destroy the ideal of aspirational reading in order to save it. Now that the garbage collectors and truck drivers are safely occupied with thumbing their phones and reading Facebook memes, books can regain their earlier prestige as a mark of distinction between the screened and the unscreened.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Oct. 21, 2012.]

Geraldine Brooks:

For most couples, this would be thin gruel for a contretemps. But my sister is a bibliophile and married a man of similar passions. They had just completed a house renovation, a feature of which was a magnificent bookshelf that spanned two floors. All had gone well as they placed their novels, histories, memoirs. But schism had arisen over the biographies. She wanted to shelve them alpha by subject, on the grounds that she wouldn’t necessarily be able to recall the author’s name. (Since she is, herself, a biographer, this view seemed both pragmatic and un-self-aggrandising.) But that notion was anathema to her husband, who wanted to follow proper library practice. Heated words had been exchanged.

I’ve had a frank exchange of views on this topic with my own girlfriend, although tempers and conversational temperature remained in check and unheated, respectively. Apparently she considers my method a benevolent sort of madness, though she finds it cruelly amusing to occasionally threaten to organize my shelves by alphabetical order when I’m not around.

You see, I combine a certain aesthetic rigidity with its polar opposite, a full-blown touchy-feely mysticism. On any given shelf, a certain pattern will be unerringly followed: tallest books on the ends, sloping gently down to the shortest books in the middle. All other schematics, such as author’s name, book title, or subject matter, are absolutely subordinate to this rule. Occasionally, I’ll attempt to group a single author’s works together, but if doing so would disrupt the even, proportional harmony of tall-to-short, then they’ll just have to settle for sharing the same shelf.

Over the years, I got new bookcases as the need presented itself, and proceeded to fill them chronologically; i.e., books went on the shelf in order of purchase. Glancing over a shelf could trigger a strong memory of, say, the winter of 2002, seeing all the associated reading material of that time period arranged together (and if I were a frustrated lit major, this would be the place to insert a Pretentious Proust Reference). Most of my bookcases were either mismatched secondhand-shop orphans, or affordable big-box particle-board types.

But several years ago, I inherited two beautiful handmade walnut cases as a housewarming gift. Their superior quality and irresistible symmetry dovetailed perfectly with their placement in the great room, and so I did something uncharacteristically bold and radical — I rearranged my books in order to house all my favorites within them. I imagined these shelves as conversation pieces — leaving aside the fact that I rarely have visitors, let alone visitors who share my reading taste, but never mind all that, just humor me here — and thought: which books best combine aesthetic appeal with substance? Which arrangement would both catch the eye and stimulate the brain of any casual browser?

And so I began the laborious process of choosing sentimental favorites and arranging them together in new tall-to-short relationships, seeking to feel some sort of poetic feng shui as I casually ran my eye over them. Once things were arranged to my liking, I committed them to my intermittent eidetic memory, only making the occasional changes after rigorous consideration. Really, I consider this discipline to be akin to bonsai sculpture; I’m just using tree byproducts rather than actual trees.

Yesterday, when I wanted to quote the epigraph to Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, I went to the spot where it had always been — in the middle of the second shelf down, on the white bookcase beside my bed. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t on any of the shelves in that case. A couple of her books were in that spot, in fact. I finally found it in one of the bookcases out in the great room. It was arranged by size, in the middle along with other mass-market paperbacks, but still… “Do you remember moving it there?” she asked, the picture of innocence. “No,” I replied, though now I’m not as sure.

I’ve got my eye on her now. I suspect gaslighting.

What You Oughtn’t to Do, But You Do Anyway

By in antisocial networking, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy No Comments

Abby Manzella:

As I watch the words build without the distracting shot of adrenaline from the phone’s vibration and the laptop’s beep, I think of Pavlov, and how well we’ve been trained like dogs to retreat to our treats. I long for the blue light that sometimes flashes on my phone. Our phones have trained us to receive a dopamine burst even through a signal light. Many of our senses are covered: sound, sight, and touch. If programmers could only figure out how to deliver taste and smell, our food-centered selves would do nothing but tweet.

As I complain, though, I watch the words accumulating and do not open another desktop window.

Brad Warner:

Normally, when you desire something, that desire is hooked to a thought that says, “If I satisfy this desire, my life will improve,” or “I must satisfy this desire or else I will not be happy.” So you chase after whatever you desire in the hope that you can catch that thing and thereby either improve your life or avoid misery.

…But when I say I want a milkshake, I mean it. I honestly do want a milkshake. But I also know that drinking a milkshake won’t really fix anything. It might make me happy for a few minutes. But then it’ll be over and I’ll just have a bunch of useless calories inside me, making me fat. I’ll probably also feel kind of bloated and gross because that’s how I usually feel after drinking a milkshake. I want the milkshake. But, even though I want it — and I mean like I really, really want it — I don’t have that corresponding sense that getting what I want is the best thing that could happen.

Too often, we try to repress or deny desires, which only encourages them. It’s better to look at them directly and recognize, with whatever wisdom we’ve acquired through experience, that whether we satisfy those desires or not, very little will change. This tends to lessen their compulsive hold on us. Still, I don’t know about you, but when I’m truly interested or absorbed in something, I can easily ignore all those little temptations. If I’m easily distracted, it’s probably a sign that I’m conflicted about paying attention to whatever I’m engaged with. I know I’m of a minority opinion here, but whenever I hear the trendy complaint about how Silicon Valley has hijacked our attention spans, I think, well, it seems to me the reality of how you choose to spend your time is being laid bare before you, and the difference between how you act and how you think you should act offends your pride, so you retreat behind the bad-faith claim that your agency has been compromised by forces beyond your control. Sartre may have been an execrable little toad of a man who was wrong about damn near everything, but at least he managed to be right about one important thing. We constantly lie like this to ourselves to protect our self-image, when it would be far more dignified to accept responsibility for our actions (or the lack thereof).

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