Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Dec. 23, 2010.]

“Most people are other people,” Oscar Wilde wrote. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” You get the feeling, somehow, that he thought this was a bad thing. Seems likelier that it’s just an inevitable fact about a species whose members depend for everything on each other. No single one of us has wings, claws, beaks, or any easy way to make a laptop or a catch a tuna. What we have, instead, is our relationships to other people, through which come laptops, tuna, other necessities—and the sense of connection without which we’re miserable. We create a lot of ourselves by imitating others, then, and that’s not only because we lack enough lifetimes to reinvent all human knowledge. It’s also because imitation makes it easier to communicate information and connect emotionally.

Oh, Oscar. You know, it’s certainly an arresting myth, that of the bold artist storming the heavens, rolling up his sleeves, rudely shouldering aside the gods, and plunging his arms up to the elbows into the raw stuff of creation, fashioning novelties out of sheer willpower and breaking the mold immediately after, but it is still a myth. Ecclesiastes was moaning a long time ago about nothing new under the sun. Old wine is always being passed around in new bottles. Plus ça change. In reality, the context matters as much as the content. The originality and innovation is in the arrangement of the parts in the collage, the particular constellation of elements in a specific time or place. And sometimes, originality is an accidental byproduct of an unskillful attempt to imitate something else. Clever people just draw from a wider range of influences and are better at concealing the obvious roots that betray them.
I recently mentioned a friend of mine who imagines “God” to be something like all the knowledge in the universe, actual and potential. So for her, knowledge is pretty much the equivalent of a person’s soul. “What about all your knowledge?” she asked, after I disavowed any belief in a soul or afterlife. “It was never mine to begin with,” I said. I haven’t ever come up with any breathtakingly original ideas. All I’ve ever done is tinker with ideas that other people passed on to me, applying them to the specific circumstances of my experience, combining them in ways that are only unique to my time and place. Any impression I make on other people will influence them in a way specific to them, and so on it goes. We lay claim to our little treasure-trove of influences for a short while, and then they return to the whole, to be refurbished and brought out again in different guises.

May I Present the Semblance of a Doppelganger

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On whether the band has obsessive fans:

Neil: “There’s a point where you can be very flattered by someone and how much they like your band, but then there’s, like, a meter goes off where it goes from flattering to a little bit freaked out. I can’t think of any one [example] in particular. Most of our fans seem pretty level-headed. It’s not like we’re a K-pop band. We don’t have that burden, and I’d like to keep it that way. We’re very lucky in that regard that we don’t have a lot of those horror stories.”

I’m a big fan of Clutch, and Neil Fallon (along with Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse) is one of my favorite lyricists in rock music. I lost count a long time ago of how many post titles here (including this one) came from his lyrics. I wouldn’t call myself an obsessive fan, but I did laugh to see this interview this morning. You see, I have that exact same L.L. Bean flannel shirt. It’s one of my favorites. I also have a very similar beard, though with a bit less grey. I also have a very similar hairstyle, though with a bit more on top. Honestly, I could sit next to him here and cause passers-by to do a brief double-take. And if the Internet is to be believed, we even share a birthday, though one year apart. Maybe I should send him a picture of myself in that shirt along with a rambling screed about how he stole my identity and my songs. He’d probably get some good lyrics out of that. Hopefully the restraining order wouldn’t prevent me from downloading future releases.

Has the Fluid Solidified?

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But it was the regulation of conduct, more than the content of the regulative beliefs, that mainly concerned Jefferson, as his sentence about one God or twenty gods makes clear. And we, the beneficiaries of his thinking, are free to sustain his belief as we choose, in keeping with the best plan we can devise for the coexistence of the two goods mentioned in these sentences: the survival of our liberties and the survival of our morals. There is only a natural difficulty, rather than a logical awkwardness, in trying to combine these goods. There would be the same difficulty whether we chose a religious or a secular principle of combination. Indeed, it is perhaps merely an instinct, or an instinct informed by a reading of history, that finally decides one’s choice of one principle or the other. Like most paternalists, [George] Will has an instinct (which looks to me like superstition) that tells him morals cannot survive without the prop of religious faith. Like most individualists, I have an instinct (which looks to Will like the blindness of enlightenment) that tells me morals can in fact survive without such support.

…[William] Bennett went on to characterize the adversarial culture in a manner that more prudent conservatives have avoided since the anti-Semitic campaigns of Europe in the 1930s. He compared its agents to a kind of virus: “Most Americans, of course reject the perverted culture of our adversaries…. Our common culture serves as a kind of immunological system, destroying the values and attitudes promulgated by our adversaries before they can infect our body politic.” Burke was at once less dramatic and more cogent when he conceived of this power of resistance as inertia. The very presence of habits and a way of thinking and feeling to which people have accustomed themselves, explains, far better than immunology does, the ability to survive which their culture may exhibit even in the absence of their knowledge of reasons why it should survive.

…It remains a commonplace view now, as it was two centuries ago, that secularization cannot be had without demoralization. The anti-Enlightenment argument against America has always begun here. It says that we had better act as if we believed religion’s claims even if that forces us to do some fancy bookkeeping. But the reply of our native tradition remains what it always was. It grants that the state Jefferson and Washington founded is hard to live with now as it was from the first. But the role of an intellectual may sometimes be to challenge the common view of things. As Jefferson and Washington believed, America’s unique mission in the world was also to challenge the common view, by showing that a moral life could be established without metaphysical tests or sanctions. A conservative plea may now perhaps be allowed after so many words in reply to those who take the name of conservatives. Our constitutional and secular state, and the individualist culture that has reflected many of its complex qualities, are doubtless not the best we can envision, but they are what we have to begin with and they are worth defending today.

— David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking

****

Casting the bell of culture. Culture came into being like a bell inside a mold of cruder, more common material, a mold of untruth, violence, an unbounded aggrandizement of all distinct egos, and all distinct peoples. Is it now time to remove this mold? Has the fluid solidified? Have the good, useful drives, the habits of nobler hearts, become so sure and universal that there is no longer any need to depend on metaphysics and the errors of religion, on harsh and violent acts, as the most powerful bond between man and man, people and people?

No sign from a god can help us any longer to answer this question: our own insight must decide. The earthly government of man as a whole must be taken into man’s own hands; his “omniscience” must watch with a sharp eye over the future fate of culture.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Obiter Scripta, no. 78

By in antisocial media, bonsai minimalism, calvin and hobbes, nietzsche, obiter scripta, santutthi No Comments

Learning solitude. O you poor devils in the great cities of world politics, you gifted young men tormented by ambition who consider it your duty to pass some comment on everything that happens — and there is always something happening! Who when they raise the dust in this way think they are the chariot of history! Who, because they are always on the alert, always on the lookout for the moment when they can put their word in, lose all genuine productivity! However much they may desire to do great work, the profound speechlessness of pregnancy never comes to them! The event of the day drives them before it like chaff, while they think they are driving the event, poor devils! If one wants to represent a hero on the stage one must not think of making one of the chorus, indeed one must not even know how to make one of the chorus.

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

I think the high priests of commerce, culture, media and athletics have converged for their annual extravaganza as I write this, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Likewise, I think there’s some drama happening up in our nation’s capital which I haven’t paid any attention to. Also, I hear the new bubonic plague is coming to kill us all soon? Oh, and are we still fighting World War Three? Or was that finished last month? Well, anyway, in important news, I spent my day organizing my work space and enjoying this brief burst of springlike weather while looking forward to reading before bed. As Calvin said, the days are just packed.

Finally Climbing This Literary Mountain

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Douglas Murray:

Yet, in some way, great books wait for you, biding their time until the moment you are ready for them. And when I finally took up Grossman, late last year, I knew that I needed to commit a couple of weeks to finally climbing this literary mountain. It took a good deal longer.

Anyhow, I come down from the mountain with the unoriginal but urgent recommendation to every other reader that it is one very worth climbing. Though Grossman’s journalism (including his unforgettable first-hand account of the discovery of Treblinka) is a good place to start, Life and Fate is a narrative without equal. It is the story of the midnight of the 20th century. Rotating between the atrocities in the Nazi camps and the atrocities in the Soviet Gulag system, in the midst of all this, is the centrepiece standoff of the battle for Stalingrad: the axis on which the course of the world would turn.

In the autumn of 2018, I expressed an aspiration to “find myself up to my eyeballs in Shakespeare and Russian novelists by the new year.” Well, I was only off by a year, but as this new year completes its first month, I have already read four Shakespeare plays, Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, and now, following Murray’s recommendation, I’ve borrowed a copy of Life and Fate from the library, which I started reading last night. Unfortunately, I am no more wise or profound for the experience so far, but only foolish people expect miracles.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Apr. 11, 2015.]

Alan Jacobs:

But then there are the people Nicholas Carr interviewed, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it — who can’t get back, as Lucy Pevensie for a time can’t get back to Narnia: what was an opening to another world is now the flat planked back of a wardrobe. They’re the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it…I don’t know whether an adult who has never practiced deep attention — who has never seriously read for information or for understanding, or even for delight — can learn how. But I’m confident that anyone who has ever had this facility can recover it: they just have to want that recovery enough to make sacrifices for it, something they will only do if they can vividly recall what that experience was like.

What do I want? What do I need? Why do I want it? What’s in it for me? Thus did the Beastie Boys provide us with a rhythmic, rhyming conceptual framework for investigating those goals which remain unmet despite our professed intentions.

Jacobs talks earlier in the book about the different reasons why people read. Some people are after an experience of raptness, of being immersed in a book to the point of forgetting to eat dinner or go to bed on time. But some are not so much interested in reading books as in having read them — books are merely instrumental, a means by which to have improved one’s character, raised one’s I.Q., or boosted one’s status. (Both tendencies can coexist in the same individual at different times, of course; I speak from experience.)

We understand this in other contexts. Some people genuinely enjoy exercise, and being fit is just a nice bonus for something they would do anyway. Some people would like to have exercised, and would like for other people to see them as fit, but aren’t so keen on actually doing it. They like the idea of being healthy and slender, but they also like the experience of relaxing and indulging. The irresistible force of their vanity meets the immovable object of their laziness.

Being conflicted like that is, I would suggest, much more of a “natural” human state than being highly motivated and disciplined. We vacillate between different impulses all the time. We desire mutually exclusive things and avoid making a hard choice between them. We fear that what we really want isn’t what we should want. Our tastes and appetites change over time. And we inevitably frame our choices in the most flattering way possible. No, really, I would have exercised if not for… Honestly, I love reading books, but these gadgets, see, they’re rewired my brain…

We feel the trembling uncertainty along these fault lines in our character and hurriedly dash back to the safety of such comforting narratives. But it is precisely those cracks in the tectonic plates of our personality which invite us to explore a little deeper. What if you’re not truly the person you thought you were, or the person you’d like to be? Would that be such a bad thing? What are you willing to sacrifice to get there, then?

Till Custom Make It Their Perch

By in atheism, political philosophy, religion 8 Comments

Joseph Loconte:

Virtuous liberty — ordered liberty — is the only kind of liberty for which the American republic was designed. And it cannot be sustained without religious belief. Unlike in France, this was the settled conviction of the founding generation. More than that, it was a doctrine considered axiomatic for political and civic life. “Every just principle that is to be found in the writings of Voltaire,” concluded Benjamin Rush, “is borrowed from the Bible.” Nevertheless, many ignore our debt to biblical religion. The result is liberty without wisdom, the path of folly and madness. Many Americans, indeed, are discarding the duties and the blessings of revealed religion for the empty promises of a counterfeit and degraded freedom.

…What path will we take? Perhaps the welfare of the City of Man really does depend, after all, on our belief in the City of God. Perhaps no political society can survive for long when it excludes those spiritual truths that alone can judge, inspire, and transform our earthly politics. Maybe, more than anything, we need a recovery of faith in what C. S. Lewis called the “far-off country,” a renewed quest for the virtues and ideals of that bright Kingdom that lies beyond the Sea. “Because we love something else more than this world,” Lewis wrote, “we love even this world better than those who know no other.”

And yet, and yet. The fact remains that increasing numbers of people simply don’t believe in the literal truth of Christianity. Their pursuit of truth has led them to the conclusion that the Christian story is not true, however useful it may be. What is to be done about that? Countless essays like this one never attempt an answer. They simply reassert that it sure would be good if they did believe. Can people be compelled to believe for the greater good? Is it good enough to make an outward show of faking piety? I dare say that I’m indistinguishable in my behavior from my Christian friends and neighbors, so what does that signify? That unbelief is not quite the slippery slope to the French Revolution as those like Loconte would have us believe? Or that social norms aren’t nearly as dependent on intellectual axioms as intellectuals would have us believe? Perhaps traditional behaviors endure long after the rationales have become outdated and forgotten. Perhaps there is some middle ground between devout Christianity and bloodthirsty paganism. Perhaps many of us are simply getting on with it, making sense of things as best we can, like people have always done and always will do.

Some Day I Wish To Be Only a Yes-Sayer

By in foolosophy, writing 4 Comments

Jonah Goldberg:

According to legend, when George Will signed up to become a syndicated columnist in the 1970s, he asked his friend William F. Buckley, Jr.—the founder of National Review and a columnist himself—“How will I ever write two columns a week?” Buckley responded (I’m paraphrasing), “Oh it will be easy. At least two things a week will annoy you, and you’ll write about them.”

Buckley was right. Annoyance is an inspiration, aggravation a muse. That which gets your blood up, also gets the ink—or these days, pixels—flowing. Show me an author without passion for what he holds to be the truth and I will show you either a boring writer or someone who misses a lot of deadlines, or both. Nothing writes itself, and what gets the writer to push that boulder uphill is more often than not irritation with those saying wrong things righteously.

Nietzsche noted that happiness is not nearly as contagious as querulousness, and that a single unhappy person is enough to darken an entire household. Negativity is so easy and tempting, an apparent default setting for many people. I’ve often wondered why it seems so much harder to write interestingly about happiness or enjoyable things, whereas a disagreement certainly provides plenty of inspiration. My provisional conclusion is that when arguing with someone, you’re presenting information or a perspective that you feel is being overlooked or ignored. There’s a slight “twist” to the dialogue which seems to naturally appeal to us, a conflict which grabs our attention. But if I were to describe things that make me happy, it would be pretty straightforward and boring. “Today we went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. It was delicious. We had a good time talking and sharing food.” There’s no subtext to dig up, no conflict to excite the reader. It is exactly what it appears to be, and there’s nothing much to say about it. In fact, when you’re happy, you just want to experience it, not reflect on it.

Many years ago, I read a post about kishotenketsu, “a plot structure that does not have conflict ‘built in’, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest.” I’ve thought about it often since then, and in this context, I’m interested by the distinction between contrast and conflict:

Kishotenketsu contains four acts: introduction, development, twist and reconciliation. The basics of the story–characters, setting, etc.–are established in the first act and developed in the second. No major changes occur until the third act, in which a new, often surprising element is introduced. The third act is the core of the plot, and it may be thought of as a kind of structural non sequitur. The fourth act draws a conclusion from the contrast between the first two “straight” acts and the disconnected third, thereby reconciling them into a coherent whole.

I’m just thinking out loud here, but this makes me wonder how I might incorporate contrast, in this sense, into the sort of scribbling I do here. The older I get, the less I want to be exposed to the contagion of other people’s rants and resentments, let alone spread it myself.

There Are No Saints In This Land

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David Harsanyi:

“Consistency” is often an admirable quality because it means you have principles, but consistency doesn’t tell us anything about the ethics or efficacy of the principles you hold. People who spend 55 years rigidly clinging to the same set of ideas they held in their early 20s are often people unwilling to incorporate facts, empirical evidence, and historical lessons into their puerile, utopian thinking.

Regarding Bernie Sanders fans who are appalled at Joe Rogan’s endorsement of him, I agree with David French that they’re fated to be disappointed anyway, so they might as well continue acting like spoiled indie music snobs outraged about their favorite band contaminating their purity by signing for a major label. But regarding the larger point, why do we expect politicians to be paragons of virtue and integrity anyway? When, say, Marco Rubio starts making noises about “common-good capitalism” — which I agree sounds half-baked — why do so many people go flying past disagreement straight to outrage? Where does this sense of betrayal come from? Why don’t we see politics more like a business transaction, where the businessman responds to feedback from the marketplace and tailors his product and marketing accordingly? To the extent that I think about national political figures at all, I don’t want an inspirational figure to believe in, one who will lead me to the promised land; I want one I can do business with. Obviously, the metaphor will only stretch so far. Obviously, even “doing business” with someone requires a certain amount of trust that they won’t be a radically different person tomorrow in response to the latest polls. Surely there’s plenty of middle ground between “paladins” and “thieves, liars, hypocrites and bastards.”But to return to French’s point above, I do think people are expecting far too much from politics and politicians, and it probably doesn’t bode well for the health of the republic.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Mar. 11, 2015.]

Middlebrow bumper sticker in California: IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN DO IT. Yeah, sure. Unless the thing you’re dreaming is impossible. Then, chances are, you can’t do it. But try to enjoy life anyway.

— George Carlin

Leigh Phillips:

And the turn away from modernity and enlightenment has also been coincident with the neoliberal variant of capitalism. Could it be that an unrecognized casualty of neoliberalism has been the forward-looking optimism of both the Left and Right? That neoliberalism and the global defeat of workers’ movements have resulted in a decadent bourgeoisie more interested in looting short-term profits than investing in new technology, research, and exploration?

And if this is true, then retracing our steps back to the fork in the road where we went astray will require a fresh embrace of the logical, the rational, the empiricist, the positivist, the materialist. We might try to remember that once upon a time, it was as incumbent upon leftists to battle superstition and unreason as it was to battle the bosses and bankers. We must be careful to avoid naïve championing of scientism, of course, or worse still, a blimpish, New Atheist–style Enlightenment-mongering that barely hides its apology for empire.

But why must Dawkins-esque bullying and Romulan anti-rationalism be the only choices? We might instead take inspiration from Spock, Surak, and Spinoza, and of course Rodenberry, Nimoy, and the rest of the egalitarian, ambitious, humanist, reason-loving dreamers that gave us Star Trek, and rejoin their battle so that instead of the current innovation-phobic, Earth-bound stasis, humankind might again advance outward to our final frontier.

Indeed, “if this is true”. Rather than being a trifling afterthought, this is in fact the impasse preventing us from proceeding with the plan for an intergalactic socialist utopia. Is it true? Which is the cart and which is the horse here? Did neoliberalism unfairly brainwash and demoralize the masses, or was some form of reinvigorated market worship very likely to come about following the widespread disillusionment with socialist utopianism? Have people cynically embraced greed and selfishness, or have they rationally decided that it is, in fact, logically and empirically justified to focus our attention and efforts on tinkering with “the way things are” rather than attempting to enforce “the way we want them to be”?

But then again, can any human institution truly be said to represent some objective, preexisting nature of things? Isn’t human nature at least partially a creative act? Aren’t some parts of our nature flexible enough to adapt, whether through circumstance or design? Given the right conditions, could we perhaps create a new type of human shorn of barbaric impulses? If so, though, given past experiments, is it rational to trust those who claim to have mapped out the plan and empower them to act on their vision, or will the required gods-eye omniscience forever be out of our reach? In the case of something as completely unprecedented as relocating human civilization to outer space, what would even count as a reasonable plan? What economic and political standards can we even use for guidance?

And so it comes down to a leap of faith in one way or another. Personally, I see no reason to believe that human nature would be any more transformed for the better by reaching the stars than it was by reaching the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Wherever we go, there we are. There’s no escape, even in space, from the inevitable incommensurability of values. Indeed, even here, we see the same old seeds of politicized conflict sprouting in this visionary soil of interstellar brotherhood: Enlightenment, logic and rationality mean seeing things my way. Disagreeing with me marks you as a reactionary. I wonder where that stance will lead us?

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