The Shaming of the True

By in the great awokening, tribalism 4 Comments

Winston Smith:

Look, I now look at a whole lot of conservative stuff online, mostly because it’s currently far less delusional than what one finds on the left. That wasn’t true ten years ago. But I rarely see the kind of stuff Todd is talking about. It’s easy for me to avoid the likes of Gateway Pundit (though, again, that site may have become less reliably nutty). It’s easy to avoid substantially nutty stuff on the right. It’s less easy to avoid the NYT, the WaPo, and the rest.

None of this is supposed to exonerate the right for its biases. It’s just to note that (a) the left has them, too, (b) it currently has more of them, (c) it currently has crazier ones, and (d) it’s currently the mainstream, ergo the effects are more substantial. The right can’t get over its Benghazi obsession. But that shit pales in comparison to Russiagate. There’s no right-wing analog of climate apocalypticism–unless you want to count Christian apocalypticism, which is isolated to the conservative religious fringe. The latter is a joke; the former is the extremely consequential orthodoxy. Twenty years ago, the religious right was less fringy, and fought to get one of its pet theories–creationism–at least mentioned occasionally in schools. It was slapped down hard. Multiple leftist theories–climate hysteria, gender ideology in its myriad forms, multiculturalism, anti-liberal feminism, etc.–pervade education at all levels. In many cases, it’s impermissible to even question them. And we’re on a trajectory toward making questioning some of them illegal. We’re lagging behind other Western democracies in that respect, actually.

As David Warren says about the neoconservatives, “their perceived voyage to the Right was a steadiness as the waters passed them by.” And the waters, they certainly have been a-churning past us as we drift toward the falls. When even the author of the Millennial Bible isn’t safe from being widely attacked as a “bigot” for stating a basic biological truth in the most inoffensive way possible, one which would have been considered utterly uncontroversial a decade ago, it’s clear that something has gone terribly wrong, and if there’s any sane people left on the left, they’re keeping their heads down and mouths shut for now.

Naturally, partisans on both sides are convinced that their enemies are possessed of all the power and money as well as military-like precision and effectiveness in achieving their goals. Both sides are convinced that their own side is hopelessly weak, ineffectual, outnumbered, and divided against themselves. For years, I read left-wing bloggers bemoaning how trying to achieve their political goals was like herding cats. When I started reading more conservative voices, I found them telling the same story. As far as I’m concerned, those narratives cancel each other out, and all that’s left is arguing about the metrics. I’m not sure what could possibly serve as an objective standard of measurement to determine which team is winning the culture war and/or which team is crazier. Every individual sees himself as the lonely voice of reason, with the idiots to one side and the maniacs to the other. And yet, just like we can’t all be above average, some of us have got to be in with the idiots or the maniacs. Or — maybe — if we could calm down and take a deep breath, we’d find that we’re really not all that attached to our political opinions, let alone sure of them. We’re just addicted to self-righteousness and argument.

As for me, I reiterate what I’ve said for years. I think of myself as a neo-Taoist, steadfastly opposed to assholism in all its many guises. It hasn’t led me astray yet.

Thursday Throwback

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Five Books interview with James Warren:

But that does sound like Stoicism to me, you know, the idea that you achieve this equilibrium by not being bothered by things that you can’t control.

That’s true, but they differ in an important way. The Stoics aimed to do that by persuading you that various things that people think about are merely indifferent and that the only thing that’s of true value is virtue. Virtue is something that’s not going to be marred by illness or inconvenience or anything like that. Epicurus in contrast thinks there’s an important role for virtue, but virtue isn’t the good for Epicurus: pleasure is the good. So his form of equanimity is one where you remove pain. Pain is bad for Epicureans, whereas the Stoics just deny that it’s a bad thing.

[On that note, here’s this week’s Thursday Throwback, originally published Feb. 15, 2012.]

Sitting in the doctor’s office this afternoon, leafing through a copy of Arthritis Today because I forgot to bring a book along. Wait, say what?

To see the 22-year-old spin, leap and flip across the stage, you’d never guess she has juvenile arthritis, or JA – or that she spent the first half of her life in chronic pain. But Elizabeth, crowned Miss Michigan in June, believes the disease was a gift.

“At the time [of my diagnosis], it felt like the worst possible situation. But, looking back, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says. “Without my chronic illness, I wouldn’t have found my passion for life.”

…“Having [JA] made me appreciate all the little things in life,” Elizabeth says. “I want kids in similar situations to know that having a disease is what makes us unique, and it truly is a gift. You just have to have faith in the silver lining.”

Okay. Having a positive outlook and fighting spirit is a fine thing, of course. Making lemons out of lemonade is a sensible way to cope with the travails of existence. But really, a gift? The best thing that ever happened to you? This sounds like the Stoicism of Seneca, saying that a happy man is content with his lot in life, no matter what it is, or that of Cicero, saying that perfect virtue is enough to keep one happy even under torture. It’s an overly-abstract ideal of happiness independent of actual experience, trying mightily to rationalize unpleasantries away. Sometimes, this forced optimism tips over into the sort of territory Barbara Ehrenreich explored in Bright-sided. Sometimes, a trickster deity voids his bladder into your pitcher, and, well, it might be yellow, and it might be tangy, but all your manic determination still isn’t going to make it lemonade.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: if you want to harness the power of negativity and hardship, you have to let situations be negative and difficult. Redefining every painful experience after the fact to make it fit your conception of positive is just disingenuous. I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis since my late twenties; you want to hear my profound wisdom that resulted from it? Here you go: having arthritis bites. Hope you don’t get it. There are much better ways to learn how to appreciate the little things than to go through years of chronic, debilitating, senseless pain.

Suffering doesn’t need to be redeemed in the end. It’s okay to hate it and want to avoid it, even as you realize on a more abstract level that you can’t, and that we need to have pain and strife and conflict to help define our lives and give them meaning. It’s not all for naught if you end up on your deathbed, looking back with a few regrets. Fighting well is more important.

A Monster of Falsehood

By in books, nietzsche, philosophy No Comments

Callicles accuses Socrates of exploiting the feelings of shame felt by both Gorgias and Polus. It was shame which led Gorgias to make the tactical mistake of saying he could teach his students virtue. And it was shame that led Polus to make the crucial concession that justice is a good thing and injustice a bad thing. In fact, Callicles says, Polus should have said the exact opposite. It is justice which is bad and injustice good. Justice is merely the set of conventional rules that society uses to keep the strongest people in line. The law of nature says the opposite: the strongest person should get the greatest rewards. What would these rewards consist in? Not the glow of self-righteous justice that Socrates so admires, but what is naturally, rather than conventionally, good: namely, power and pleasure. Callicles thinks then, that justice is nothing but a trick for getting the strong to surrender their natural right to seize as much pleasure as they can handle.

Socrates rightly recognizes that Callicles is raising a serious challenge, one more difficult to defeat than anything Polus has said. Callicles, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to no less a figure than Friedrich Nietzsche, the great nineteenth-century critic of (Judeo-Christian) morality.

— Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 1

I’ve heard that comparison made before. I’m pretty sure Roger Kimball called Nietzsche both a modern-day Callicles and Thrasymachus. But rather than being a straightforward advocate for “might makes right” and a partisan of power over truth, I think Nietzsche was much more nuanced and interesting than that.

His infamous distinction between “master morality” and “slave morality” is familiar to any student of Philosophy 101. Less well-known is an aphorism like this one from Daybreak:

It goes without saying that I do not deny, unless I am a fool, that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged, but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.

One could argue that morality has very little to do with rationality as compared to empathy, and as such, that it’s naïve to imagine that we can rebuild morality on a more stable, rationally justified foundation. But leaving that aside, I think it shows that, even earlier in his writing career, he was not interested in simply inverting traditional moral precepts for shock value. Walter Kaufmann, among others, has argued that Nietzsche is best understood as encouraging a drive for power and mastery over oneself rather than others. Nietzsche, the lifelong admirer of Emerson, may have had an ideal in mind like that of Emerson’s Self-Reliance, the rebel and outsider who nevertheless maintains a higher, more consistent ethical code than his conventional, hypocritical critics. Again, this is almost an adolescent cliché now, but if so, that also blunts whatever radical edge it may have once had.

Yuval Levin published a piece yesterday celebrating the life of the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, in which he says about Lord Acton, the subject of her first book:

Acton’s answer to this problem [of unrestrained individualism] was not to abandon liberalism, but to insist that it be tethered to traditional religion.

This is something I hear often as well. Without a shared religious framework guiding our actions, moral and civilizational decline is inevitable. As a sanguine Epicurean, I can’t help but note that very few of these mostly-conservative laments for a lost religious sensibility even attempt to make the case for its truth. Instead, they imply that it would produce better consequences if most of us could be induced to at least pay lip service to a common ethical outlook rooted in Christianity. Keep clapping so that Tinkerbell might yet live. If not for yourself, do it for the children.

Here, again, Nietzsche is far from the caricature of a gleeful immoralist dancing on God’s grave, happily anticipating the depravity to come. In his famous parable of the madman, in which the madman announces the death of God, he alternates between fear of the immense significance of the deed and disgust at the unworthiness of the murderers who don’t even realize what they’ve done. But earlier in the book, he had already seen it coming. In this aphorism, he offers something of an evolutionary account of truth. Granted that all of our ideas about the world were, strictly speaking, errors, “truth” was the name we gave to those useful, life-preserving errors. But as we pursued Truth, complacently assuming that it would always be identical with the Good and the Beautiful, we discovered that in fact, it is sometimes fatal to those things. We even sacrificed God to Truth, and now we’ve committed ourselves too deeply to go back:

The thinker is now the being in whom the impulse to truth and those life-preserving errors wage their first conflict, now that the impulse to truth has also proved itself to be a life-preserving power. In comparison with the importance of this conflict everything else is indifferent; the final question concerning the conditions of life is here raised, and the first attempt is here made to answer it by experiment. How far is truth susceptible of embodiment? – that is the question, that is the experiment.

The impulse to truth, engendered by Christianity, ironically enough, has also proven to be a life-preserving power, even if it undermines and collapses the old certainties. The pursuit of truth gives renewed meaning to life; many people find a more challenging, heroic mission in attempting to look in truth’s ugly face without flinching. Even in The Antichrist, published in his last few months of sanity, at his most unrestrained and vituperative, we find him in aphorism 38 heaping scorn upon Christianity, not for its defense of the weak and downtrodden, but precisely for its infidelity to the cause of truth, for failing to live up to its own ideals:

And here my disgust begins.—I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called “truth”; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through “innocence” or “ignorance.”

…Everyone knows this, but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people–and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call “the world”? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one’s self; to be careful of one’s honor; to desire one’s own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!

And so we see that even in his final days, his inhibitions weakened by his illness (I’m convinced by the revisionist claim that he was suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumor rather than syphilis), he returned to this stance of outraged idealism, rhetorically overturning tables in the temple of modern bourgeois complacency. In one of the posthumous fragments from his notebooks, we find him spelling out his views on warfare, both literal and metaphorical, while returning again to the fundamental opposition between truth and lies:

I bring war. Not between people and people: no words are sufficient to express my loathing of the despicable interest politics pursued by modern European dynasties—politics which make the incitement to self-seeking arrogance among the peoples, setting them against one another, into a principle, and almost into a duty. Not war between classes, either—since there are no higher classes, and consequently no inferior ones… I bring a war which cuts across all the absurd coincidences of nation, class, race, status, level of education, constitution—a war like the conflict between rising and falling; between the will to live and the thirst for revenge against life, between upright honesty and treacherous lies. If we could do without wars, so much the better. I can think of many more profitable uses for the twelve billion spent every year to maintain the armed peace in Europe, and other means of gaining respect for physiology preferable to field hospitals.

I hope it goes without saying that I’m not trying to offer any definitive interpretation of his philosophy here. As Karl Jaspers and my friend Arthur said, best of luck to anyone who takes on that fool’s errand. I’m only suggesting that the pursuit of that definitive interpretation is far more rewarding than accepting the commonplace caricatures. (Let me also say that I don’t intend to single Adamson out for criticism here; his books in the History of Philosophy series are both informative and well-written, with a spirit of gentle levity not often found in writing on the topic, and I imagine his podcast is similar, though I haven’t listened to it yet. I recommend them to anyone interested in non-academic philosophy. I only excerpted this passage because it was a recent example of something I’d been meaning to gather my thoughts around.)

Victim of Changes?

By in foolosophy 1 Comment

Forty years ago tonight, I was sitting up with my mom watching New Year’s celebrations on TV. I’m not sure what I was doing up, being such a young tyke, but I remember asking what was going on as the ball was dropping and people were loudly counting down. “They’re getting ready for it to be 1980,” she said. “But I don’t want it to be 1980!” I replied. I’m not sure what the calendrical difference could have possibly meant to me at that point in my life, but it seems clear that the innate conservative insight had already blossomed in me: change is to be dreaded.

I’ve seen a lot of people playing a “beginning of the decade/end of the decade” game on social media this week. For me, on December 31st, 2009, I remember discovering a treasure trove of various electronic music artists to use my iTunes gift cards on, just listening to one great algorithmic recommendation after another. It was a welcome bright spot right at the end of a difficult year, especially with having lost two dogs to cancer just weeks earlier. It was an especially snowy winter; we had gotten over two feet of snow a week before Christmas, and we would get two feet more over the next couple months, which made my driving job extremely hazardous and nerve-wracking. All that music I downloaded around New Year’s made it a bit more bearable.

Little did I know, as I sat there sampling songs, that within two weeks, I would meet the Lady of the House. All right, I suppose not all change is terrible. And sometimes, in a limited context, progress is even possible. Happy New Year.

And You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?

By in battling personal entropy, bring me the head of nicholas carr, ohferfucksake No Comments

Tom Chivers:

Guyenet’s argument is that we’re looking at it the wrong way. First, it’s not that some foods are more fattening because of how they affect our bodies — they’re more fattening because of how they affect our brains. And second, it’s not a particular food group; it’s not fat or carbs or sugar. It’s that we have become extraordinarily good at developing foods which are hard to resist, are full of calories, and which don’t fill us up. Essentially, through the simple workings of market capitalism, the food industry has been steadily optimising for the most obesogenic, “hyper-palatable” foods it is possible to make.

…Luckily, says Guyenet, there is a way around it. But it’s a bit bleak. The problem is not fat, or carbs, or sugar. It’s not ultra-processed foods or crisps or sweets. It’s the fact that all this tasty stuff is being combined in increasingly tasty ways; the problem is that tasty food is really hard to stop eating. “What do we do,” asked Scott Alexander in his excellent review of Guyenet’s book, “when the enemy is deliciousness itself?”

The sub-heading tells us that “Capitalism is cooking up food designed to short-circuit our brains.” Speaking of willpower, I will demonstrate restraint by avoiding the easy joke about how non-capitalist societies have indeed done very well at limiting excess (or even minimal) caloric intake among their citizens. Instead, I’ll just note that it appears Guyenet will be to obesity what Nicholas Carr was to the decline of reading in a digital age: a purveyor of convenient excuses. No, no, you see, I would eat better and exercise, just like I would have read more books, if only “the system” hadn’t rewired my brain, corroded my agency, and made me a slave inside my own body. The good that I would, I do not…

There’s a Buddhist parable of the poisoned arrow, in which the Buddha, responding to someone pestering him with irrelevant metaphysical questions, says:

“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.”

Speculating about the nature of the soul and the afterlife versus simply doing your best to live an honorable life, or endlessly analyzing the origin of obesity rather than practicing moderation in diet and exercise — the Buddha was describing the countless ways we rationalize, procrastinate and stall rather than simply do what we know we need to do to make our lives a little bit easier or more pleasant. We demand that the world itself be changed before we exercise our own agency, an absurdity that should reduce us to helpless laughter at our own foolishness. “But…but…how can I be expected to avoid temptation? Why can’t some benevolent, omnipotent overlord simply remove all temptation from my grasp instead?” We may invoke the jargon of neuroscience and economic radicalism these days to pretend that we’re explaining things more thoroughly, but the dilemma is the same as it ever was: we never work as hard as when we’re trying to avoid necessary, boring work. As Neil Postman wrote, “Like moral theology, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.”

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Jun. 11, 2016.]

Yahdon Israel:

He asked if the books were for class. I told him they weren’t. He asked if I was selling them. I told him I wasn’t. He asked why I had so many.

“Because I’m reading them.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Why carry them all? Why not just get a Nook or a Kindle?”

A trap, Yahdon! Don’t answer that!
His premise is flawed. The logic is pat.
Resist the urge to justify;
Instead, reply with Bartleby,

“I would prefer not to.”

Turn the tables, flip the script,
No, flip the tables, scatter wide
the coins of realm, and thus equipped
with self-respect, retort with pride,

“What sort of man are you?”

Why truckle like a serf to please
the monarchs of our modern age?
Convenience and Efficiency
still lock their subjects in a cage

with no aesthetic view.

Why trickle like a stream pursuing
least resistance to the sea?
One of us should be reviewing
options, but it isn’t me.

****

I read Israel’s essay several days ago, but not much of it stayed with me. Like so many other near-identical essays praising the book-as-object, I agree with the sentiment, but I found myself harboring a vague thought in the back of my mind: wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, if someone just presented an attitude of haughty disdain, rather than feeling forced to justify themselves? What if someone were to simply say, “Because go to hell, I don’t want a Kindle, that’s why, and what’s wrong with you that you even think like that?” I felt a little Nietzschean rage against all those Socratic interlocutors who demand that we justify our passions rationally, that we genuflect at the altar of utilitarian functionalism. It’s simply assumed that technological progress is an unquestionable good, that faster, smaller, sleeker, easier is a moral imperative. Well, no. We should already know that books are a Good Thing. A full bookcase is a thing of beauty. You should be forced to defend your thoughtless assumption that even the tiniest extra effort that can be avoided should be.

And for who knows what reason, I had the impulse to express all this in verse instead of prose.

As for the poem itself, I clearly didn’t trouble myself greatly over rules of form, and I hope you won’t either. Originally, I thought I might aim for a classic sonnet, but the first two standalone lines forced their way in, and no matter how I pleaded with them to leave, no matter how I begged them to consider reshaping themselves, they insisted that this is how they were meant to be, and this is where they were meant to be. Eventually, I gave up and just built the rest of the poem around their recalcitrance. I obviously never bothered to stick to a clear rhyme scheme either. Frankly, I just choose to focus on the positives, such as the fact that I managed to keep it in iambic tetrameter while telling a coherent story.

Carpe Tempus

By in books, foolosophy No Comments

Erik Robinson:

Over the past few years, I have begun to keep track of what I have read through the course of each year by placing every finished book onto a separate “completed” bookshelf. Some years are better than others, but I have been averaging about 100 books a year. Compared to the prodigious rate at which some people read, this may not be impressive; compared to my aspirations for reading when I buy five books on Friday night and dream that I could finish them all by Sunday, it falls far short. And yet, even at the rate of 100 a year, I will look at the shelf and realize that I don’t even remember reading some of the books on there.

Maybe this is sheer careless reading or inattentiveness, but maybe it is true of life more generally. Some reading has stayed with me through years, but I have forgotten the great bulk of everything I have ever read. It is a sad reflection, made sadder when I realize that the same is true of my life more generally. Most of my experiences and feelings have also slipped away from my memory, but at least I can go back and re-read a book – those parts of my life are lost forever.

What a wonderful post. Funny enough, I thought it was going to inspire me to write a little bit about books and reading, but now that I’m sitting here at the keyboard, I find my thoughts going in a different direction entirely.

For most of my adult life, I’ve played a little game with myself around Christmastime. I try to retain at least a few vivid memories of each Christmas and “recite” them in chronological order, starting from the earliest I can remember at around age five or six. I don’t mean I literally deliver a meandering soliloquy out loud; I just mean I attempt to set aside some uninterrupted time to concentrate and systematically reflect on one Christmas after another, to keep the embers of memory glowing. Why? Well, aside from the surface-level answer that it’s my favorite time of year and memories are plentiful, there’s the fact that, in a way, I’m attempting to pause the flow of time, to gather all those Christmases Past and relive them now, all at once, to join the Webster’s Dictionary I got from my dad for Christmas of 1982 together with the Christmas morning I spent watching the sunrise with my dog on the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1996 and the Christmas of 2003 when I spoke to my grandmother for the last time, and so on. A world in a grain of sand; eternity in an hour; a lifetime of disparate experiences gathered under one arbitrary temporal roof to celebrate together. It’s like I’ve constructed a Simonidean memory palace, one decorated with strings of electric lights and fragrant with the scents of pine, peppermint, holly, and sage, with choral versions of carols playing on an endless loop in the background.

Most of my life has of course been forgotten, and that’s as it should be. The past can be a gorgon if we stare too deeply into it. As Lewis Hyde said in his excellent book A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past, “a pure, triumphant memory will mean an end to emerging life and a fixing of time, everything stuck just where it is (stuck, we might say, in those eternal, unchanging forms).” Nothing can renew itself if it isn’t allowed to disappear. In this case, though, I can’t resist the urge to thwart that natural cycle. If, when my life is over, I should find myself as a shade in Hades, being commanded to drink from the waters of Lethe, I’d like to think that I could find a way to pull some sort of trick to keep the memories of December 25th safe from the water’s obliterating effects, whether to smuggle them with me into the next life, or just to keep them for cheerful company in the netherworld.

Stocking Stuffed

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From the Lady of the House’s sister:

After so many, many years, I think I’m finally convincing people that no, really, I don’t need surprises for Christmas; it’s perfectly fine to give me books that I’ve asked for. I won’t be disappointed! I won’t be bored! Just, please, give me the books!

The Watts book was perfect for a gift — it had been hanging around on the mid-tier of my wishlist for months, but never seemed able to force its way to the front of the line. There always seemed to be something else more desirable when it came time to buy. The Wasserman book might turn out to be more frustrating than I initially realized, but, oh well, forewarned is forearmed.

The glasses weren’t a Christmas gift; I got those a few months ago. Yes, I held out valiantly in my battle with Father Time, but this was the year for buying my first pair of readers. On a whim, I tried on a pair while standing near the checkout in the grocery store and was astonished at how clear the text looked on my prescription bag. The Lady of the House says they make me look “distinguished,” which I’m pretty sure is a euphemistic synonym for “old.”

Merry Christmas to all of you, and thanks for choosing to waste your valuable time reading here!

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published July 16, 2014.]

Leon Wieseltier:

I am not on Twitter. I am not a snob about it. Some of my best friends tweet. Nor do I believe that my absence from the lists makes me pure; I suffer from other forms of digital narcosis. But the interminable hectoring of Twitter, its infinite discharge of emotion and promotion, holds no attraction for me. It is a medium of communication in which nothing intellectually or linguistically substantial can be accomplished. I refuse to operate mentally at its speed: I have already been sufficiently accelerated, thank you. And I hate the din.

And with that showily dismissive, hand-dusting flourish (as well as what appears to be a veiled confession of an addiction to deviant forms of pornography), his bona fides as a man of the digital people reinforced, Wieseltier proceeds to inform us that he nonetheless simply cannot abide an ersatz intellectual like Alain de Botton being dismissive of Twitter, or digital interconnectedness in general, however mildly. You see, de Botton has a new book out in which he voices the, uh, less-than-startling notion that we might do well to take “Twitter Sabbaths,” along with other anodyne suggestions for calmer digital living:

“We need, on occasion, to be able to go to a quieter place…”

“We should at times forego the Twitter feed…”

On occasion! At times! Goodness gracious, summon the constabulary and get this madman off the street!

The ostensible thrust of Wieseltier’s “defense” is that de Botton’s meek advice is actually subversive encouragement to the “haute bourgeoisie” to be derelict in their duty of being well-informed citizens of the world. A good editor might have pointed out that this might appear quite a foolish tack to take, seeing as how Wieseltier had just got done harrumphing about how nothing intellectually substantial could possibly be encountered on social media anyway. Couldn’t this, however inadvertently, be good advice for anyone who wants to be genuinely informed? But he and TNR in general have never bothered to hide their disdain for de Botton or the type of shallow dunces who read him (none of whom are even likely to know how to casually drop a term like “haute bourgeoisie,” I mean, ugh), so I think it’s safe to say that this conceit, like the self-aggrandizing opening paragraph, is merely a way for Wieseltier to signal his superiority (and, by extension, that of the average TNR reader) under the guise of a broader humanitarian instinct. Too bad he’s so clumsy and artless about it. Aren’t highfalutin snobs supposed to be naturally good at this?

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