We Are Robbed Less Wickedly In a Forest Than In a Place of Safety

By in foolosophy, montaigne No Comments

In his essay “Of Physiognomy,” Montaigne wrote about two incidents, during times of civil war, plague, and general lawlessness, in which his life hung in the balance, dependent on the whims of his captors. In the first, a neighbor of his, having made a plan to seize Montaigne’s estate by surprise, showed up at his gate claiming to be on the run from an enemy. Soon afterward the man was joined by some of his soldiers, then more, until around 25-30 armed men were now on the property, awaiting a command from their leader.

He saw himself master of his enterprise, and nothing now remained but its execution. He has since several times said (for he was not ashamed to tell the story himself) that my countenance and frankness had snatched the treachery out of his hands. He again mounted his horse; his followers, who had their eyes intent upon him, to see when he would give the signal, being very much astonished to find him come away and leave his prey behind him.

In a later incident, while traveling in the forest of Villebois, he and his party were ambushed by armed robbers. After taking his money, clothes and papers, they debated for what he said was two or three hours on his fate. Suddenly,

I saw the chief return to me with gentler language, making search amongst the troopers for my scattered property, and causing as much as could be recovered to be restored to me, even to my money-box; but the best present they made was my liberty, for the rest did not much concern me at that time. The true cause of so sudden a change, and of this reconsideration, without any apparent impulse, and of so miraculous a repentance, in such a time, in a planned and deliberate enterprise, and become just by usage (for, at the first dash, I plainly confessed to them of what party I was, and whither I was going), truly, I do not yet rightly understand. The most prominent amongst them, who pulled off his vizor and told me his name, repeatedly told me at the time, over and over again, that I owed my deliverance to my countenance, and the liberty and boldness of my speech, that rendered me unworthy of such a misadventure, and should secure me from its repetition.

Did he really have a face and bearing so noble as to be capable of charming hostile assailants? I suppose it’s as good a guess as any as to how someone could manage to get out of dangerous situations unscathed. Perhaps it was nothing more than luck, of course.

While paying attention to news of the riots over the last few days, I’ve found myself most affected by the random incidents in which others weren’t so lucky. The man in Dallas beaten bloody in the street. The middle-aged pizza shop owner in Rochester and her husband, pummeled by looters while trying to ward them off. The middle-aged restaurant owner in Columbia, S.C., so physically imposing in his polo shirt and khakis that one mighty warrior had to sneak up on him in his blind spot to knock him out, before the rest of his fearless crew joined in the beating and kicking as he lay unconscious. I’m sure there are countless others who just didn’t happen to get captured in the background of some trust-fund anarchist’s Instagram selfie.

Media figures on sub-contemptible news programs like CNN and MSNBC, writhing in the tertiary stage of Trump Derangement Syndrome, have been sharing their hallucinations of invisible deep-cover white supremacist Russian 4chan boogeymen orchestrating all the rioting, but the reality, scarier than whatever insane gibberish Joy Reid is spouting at the moment, is that in many cases, these are simply people from the neighborhood. Last week, they could easily have been content to patronize that restaurant or store like semi-civilized human beings. They could have performed all the simple, mundane rituals of everyday life — nodding to each other, making small talk, exchanging goods and services. Then something imperceptible changes. An event thousands of miles away; a shift in focus; a change in mood; a gathering crowd; an agitating impulse; a brutal act; the exhilaration of release. Lacking the protection of a frank and charming countenance, or simply unfortunate enough to be in the presence of someone too devoid of compassion to recognize it, individuals are transformed into objects and acted upon; lives are violently altered in a moment.

Several years ago, I was on a business trip in Pennsylvania. We had driven hundreds of miles in a couple days, with hundreds more to go. We had been on our feet all day, working hard. My back was aching, I was exhausted, and we were both ravenous. We decided to stop at an Olive Garden in Altoona, I think. I got some kind of pasta alfredo dish with breadsticks and whatever else comes with those meals. The sweet, sweet carb rush took effect, my aches and pains started to subside, and I just silently basked in the glory of being able to stuff my face with cheap, tasty food. The manager came over and introduced himself, saying he just wanted to check and see if everything was to our satisfaction. I assured him that I was never better.

Now, I know I’ve just described an utterly ordinary scene that all of us have experienced. But I can only ask your forbearance for further adding a maudlin touch to it. My only defense is that it’s the plain truth. I swear, as I looked up at the manager, into what I judged to be his frank and open countenance, I was struck by a surge of emotion that I will translate into prose like this: How wonderful that there should be such a thing as a place where perfect strangers will feed me and show concern for how I’m feeling. Yes, I felt myself getting positively verklempt over the existence of chain restaurants and store managers doing their jobs. I may have blinked back a slight film of moisture. I promise you, if I had any more impressive mystical experiences to describe, I would, but that’s all the fates have seen fit to bless me with so far. I suddenly appreciated, in a way I never had before, all the tiny kindnesses and reflexive politeness that took centuries of stutter-start effort to develop and codify. It could so easily have been otherwise, and yet there I was, surrounded by strangers in a strange land, sated, content, and at peace.

It’s always the case that life is precarious and good fortune is tissue-thin, of course. As I get older, I more often think that I hardly know anything at all. But I do feel increasingly convinced that there’s nothing more unforgivable than those who destroy the fragile accomplishments of civilization, unless it’s those who make excuses for them. It’s the betrayal that kills me.

And If You Need a Little Heat In Your Face, That’s What I’m Here For

By in jests japes jokes jollies, the cult of multi, the great awokening, the madness of crowds No Comments

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

— George Orwell, Inside the Whale

“I’m sorry for endorsing destruction of poor people’s housing. That was not my intention. If it were rich people’s property, that would be all right. Not mine, though. Stay out of Beverly Hills, you savages. Uh, you know what, here, let me just hand this over to my P.R. agent to finish up.”

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”

― Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories

Well, The Truth May Need Some Rearranging

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, the madness of crowds, tribalism 4 Comments

This seems like an obvious truth itself. “This thing that appears good is actually bad, and vice-versa.” Countless examples from viral clickbait to Ph.D. theses have profitably used this formula. There’s an obvious incentive to portray oneself as a seer with unusual gifts of prophecy and insight. As Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations, “men are fond of paradoxes, and of appearing to understand what surpasses the comprehension of ordinary people.” But Adam Smith elucidated one of the most profound paradoxes of modernity, that self-interest pursued within a functioning market economy actually produces more beneficial results all around than a traditional insistence on a straight line between virtuous thoughts and virtuous actions. Was he a member of the “intellectual clerisy” insulting the good, intuitive sense of the common man? Probably depends on whom you ask. Ironically, or paradoxically, many of the very same people who currently think reality is more “nuanced” when it comes to the spectacle of orgiastic violence and left-wing mob rule take the exact opposite perspective when an insight like Smith’s offends their bedrock moral sensibilities. Suddenly, things are exactly what they appear to be again, and how dare you try to hoodwink us with your intellectual sophistries!

Again, nothing new under the sun. Long before social science, aphorists and moralists noted that people often act first and rationalize later. This is a bipartisan, or rather pre-partisan, phenomenon. We decide what we want to do, then invent an after-the-fact justification for it, which can be changed as necessary. It feels intuitively —and satisfyingly — true to reduce people’s behavior to squalid motives. Many of the “protestors” we see smiling exultantly as they exit the shattered windows of a department store with armfuls of goods don’t appear to be too concerned about racial justice or long-term consequences. Many of the progressive media figures offering incoherent, contradictory apologetics for the rioting, as they bravely tweet their support for the destruction of black people’s jobs and neighborhoods from their gated communities in safe suburbs, are clearly displaying the pathetic self-loathing peculiar to the guilt-ridden privileged. And yet, many people who can grasp these obvious truths seem to have difficulty grasping that “the ends justify the means” is an amoral blade which maims the hands of anyone foolish enough to seize it. Truth is always obvious right up until the moment when it threatens to thwart my impulses.

Cynicism about all professed motives would appear to be justified. But undiluted cynicism seems like a moral base constructed on quicksand. Paradox seems to be a fundamental building block of reality.

In some sense, it seems obviously true that George Floyd’s death is identical to those of other black men killed by the police in recent years. And yet, it’s also true that each one of those cases involved completely unique individuals in completely different circumstances. There is a certain abstract similarity we can notice across them all, but it does not necessarily follow that they all blossom from one actual root. This is understandably frustrating for people who want to be able to uproot “racism” or “white supremacy” or “capitalism” and thus solve the problem of white cops using lethal force against unarmed black men in one stroke. No one wants to hear that life is endless Sisyphean maintenance of chores that are never finished. No one feels passionate about an endless game of Whac-a-Mole. Is it an obvious truth or a counter-intuitive one to tell people that in many ways, there is no “progress,” just the same basic challenges and weaknesses presenting themselves over and over again, a constant struggle against inevitable entropy?

My stepson and I talk occasionally about discipline. He occasionally gets discouraged with himself and complains about lacking discipline to be able to do this or that. I usually remind him that discipline isn’t really a noun, it’s a verb. It’s not a “thing” you “get” in order to be able to act; it is the act. It’s not a certification you achieve, after which you can safely forget everything you did to get there. It needs to be renewed constantly. If you stop using your muscles, they’ll wither. If you stop being disciplined toward a goal, your discipline withers. Berating yourself for lacking discipline in general is like berating your bicep for not growing even though you’re not using it. Pick a goal and work toward it. Try to work toward it a little more today than you did yesterday. Maybe in hindsight, you’ll look back and say, “Huh, look at what I did. Maybe I had some discipline after all.” But each day, in the moment, it will always look exactly the same. “I’m tired and I’m sore and I don’t want to!” No one is ever superhuman enough to become exempt from this. You’ll have that exact same conversation with yourself no matter how much you’ve accomplished before. All you can do is try to respond with, “Don’t quit yet. Just one more try. Just a few more minutes.” And when you fail and fall short, as you inevitably will, all you can do is get up and start again. That’s life, day after day.

Much of the rhetoric of grievance is rooted in the devilishly seductive logic of aggregate thinking. The reason why it’s currently considered acceptable to say bigoted things about white people, for example, is because white people, in general, are perceived to be “winning” in some aggregate sense. This seems obviously true in some way. White people, as a monolithic group, are considered to have the lion’s share of money, power, happiness, etc., if we grant the dubious assumption that such things can be meaningfully quantified and contained within a fixed-pie. But again, this is an abstraction that entails nothing useful in the real world where individuals and particulars are what matter, not intellectual categories. When rioters beat a white store owner to a pulp in the streets of Dallas, it does not “cancel out” any past beatings of black men by white racists. Individuals are not identical, interchangeable objects from an assembly line. There is no cosmic scoreboard on which the racial arrears have been reduced. We have not moved one step closer to a state of balance wherein no one will ever want to be cruel or vicious to anyone else again because everything is finally “equal.” It has only contributed to the endless back-and-forth of eye-for-an-eye retribution. Nothing could be simpler or more obvious than the truth that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” but there is no limit to the intellectual contortions people will go through in attempting to argue otherwise. Apologists will find nuance, of course, and claim that while lamentable, these things are still understandable (“inevitable” being sometimes strongly implied). Most things, however horrific, are understandable. They’re still failures, though. You still allowed yourself to believe in the shortcut that was too good to be true, and you failed as a result. This is also an obvious truth, but “obvious” is not the same thing as “easy.”

He Said I’m So Obsessed That I’m Becoming a Bore, Oh, No

By in foolosophy No Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

I sat on the bench and watched the joggers go by before I opened my book. I have never seen a happy jogger, but many joggers seem to me to wear an expression of moral self-satisfaction or superiority on their faces, much like that of evangelical preachers who know that Jesus loves them and they are going straight to heaven when they die. Perhaps I perceive what is not there on their faces from a sense of guilt that I am so physically lazy, thereby shortening my lifespan. I console myself that those who pound the asphalt will suffer, sooner or later, from osteoarthrosis of the hips and knees.

I observed the tattoos of the runners. Proletarians don’t jog, of course, unless they are also boxers, so all the tattooed joggers were middle-class. Why there has been this sudden epidemic of self-mutilation among the educated, I do not know. Looking at the way people dress, even when not jogging, I concluded that our modern mode of dress is the continuation of self-mutilation by other means.

William Hazlitt wrote, in “On the Pleasure of Hating“:

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all round it as dark as possible, so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.

So it is, indeed. I have no objections to people’s petty hatreds. For example, I was amused to see the other day that there are some who would impose a two-year prison sentence on me for cracking my cappellini in half (thirds, actually, though perhaps I shouldn’t admit that without consulting my lawyer) before putting it in a pot of boiling water. Now there is a potentially rich source of conversation. I’m intrigued by the fellow who can even notice such a thing, let alone allow it to drive him to fantasies of vengeance. I have been briefly entertained, which is all I ask for.

Petty hatreds have to be reshuffled, though, or they become stale and boring. Dalrymple has been periodically complaining about fitness enthusiasts, slovenly dress and tattoos for as long as I can remember. It’s a sure sign that he lacked inspiration for a column when he trots out these predictable gripes again. Look, if you can’t find a way to put a fresh spin on it somehow, it’s best to just let it be. Complaints repeated in earnest only make you sound like a tedious grouch. In my view, genuine criticisms should aim to be as objective and descriptive as possible, while rants should be reserved precisely for trivial topics. Dalrymple describes his bugbears here with restrained and measured tones. Perhaps he feels that the candid admission of his own pettiness somehow balances it out, but the effect to me is disappointing. Dostoyevsky already gave us an artistic rendering of the spiteful man who hates things for the bitter fun of it. Nowadays, “look how base and mean I can be” just comes off like another lamentable example of oversharing.

Not Quite Conversation, It Was Somewhere In-Between

By in antisocial media, writing 2 Comments

Alan Jacobs:

When you write a Twitter thread, what you are telling me is that you don’t care about your own ideas enough to articulate and display them in a proper venue. And if you don’t have respect for your own ideas, you certainly can’t expect me to.

You don’t have to create a blog of your own to post something to the web. You can use a free service like Rentry — I used to recommend also txt.fyi but I think it’s dead. You can even do what the celebs do and write something in Apple Notes, screenshot it, and tweet it as an image. There are a hundred ways to post longer-than–280-characters writing to Twitter, and when you write threads you are choosing the very worst one.

I’ve said before what an absurd situation it is. People were in such a hurry to abandon blogs and move on to the next shiny tech object, but it seems like every month there’s a new attempt to reinvent the blog under a different name. The Procrustean bed of the Twitter thread is indeed atrocious. But to be fair, I think it’s useful to keep in mind the distinction between formal writing and “written conversation,” which is what most social media discourse is.

Twitter is the online equivalent of a conversation in a crowded pub. It’s not writing; it’s the syntax and cadence of verbal conversation presented in text form. Many people seem to like that sort of thing. People who enjoy laying out their thoughts in multiple paragraphs full of commas and semicolons are unusual, however highly we may think of ourselves. Most people on social media don’t care about becoming better writers, or more rigorous thinkers. They want to be included in what everyone else is “talking” about. They want to attract attention and be entertained. It’s not my preference, but no one asked me, either.

I hate having to send text messages. In fact, I can’t stand doing much of anything in the limited confines of a smartphone for that matter, but again, the world moved on without waiting for my approval. Most people seem to be able to do all their online activity through a phone. Most people seem to love texting, which allows them to have multiple conversations going constantly without physical proximity. If the job is to post text messages to Twitter, then the smartphone would seem to be the ideal tool for it.

I’m just saying, if you find yourself hanging out in a crowded pub with all your friends, and somewhere, among the hubbub and the televised sports and the other demands on one’s attention, an interesting subject comes up, one worth exploring in depth, you’re not going to say to your buddy, “Hey, why don’t we go find an academic setting where we can converse more thoughtfully?” You’re going to want to say it while it’s fresh and immediate in your mind. You’re going to try to express yourself as quickly and clumsily as you can, given the surroundings. If that sort of limitation is frustrating for you, then yes, you should probably think about not hanging out in crowded pubs if you want to have serious conversations. But I can’t really get too critical of people for trying to make the best of it while they’re there.

I wish humans had descended from a less-social species like orangutans instead of chimpanzees, so that maybe more of us would be solitary thinkers who like wandering in the woods and speaking only when spoken to. I wish more people liked reading nonfiction and writing about their thoughts in an amateur style on old-fashioned weblogs. But again, the world has this incredible contrary streak and continues to do things its own way regardless of what I think. I suspect what really raises Jacobs’ ire is his own on-again, off-again relationship with social media, and Twitter in particular. I’ve lost count of how many times he’s publicly sworn off using it, only to announce months later that they’re trying to patch things up again. I can’t change you, baby, but I just can’t quit you either.

U and I

By in books, editorial vigilantism No Comments

Some people enjoy spotting rare birds. Well, the birds around here are pretty common. What I get excited about is spotting unusual typographical errors in my reading. I couldn’t believe my luck last night when this incredibly rare example of a double vowelswitch (Vowelswitchus geminus) fluttered into view! Some have argued that such creatures, if they ever existed at all, had long been hunted to extinction by professional editors armed with sophisticated modern software. But here was one in full plumage, effortlessly shifting from one spelling to another as I watched in amazement! I may never be so fortunate again even if I live to be a hundred.

(And no, of course I didn’t highlight in the book. What kind of monster do you think I am? The red and green marks are purely digital additions to the picture I snapped. No rare texts were harmed during the production of this post.)

A Study Has Shown

By in beards, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

Ben Cost:

Research shows that flowing facial hair might have evolved to help fight-hungry humans better absorb blows to the head, according to a new study published in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology.

“Might” seems to be doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. This triggered a memory, and sure enough, I see it was about eight years ago, in response to similar dubious assertions, that I skeptically inquired:

“Has any man outside of a Chuck Norris joke ever grown such a magnificent bramble patch upon his face that it could absorb punches? This is something I would surely like to see.”

So what’s the line of thought here? That men who survived battle without broken jaws had better reproductive success with women? But I thought other studies claimed that beards are widely seen as less attractive to women and a sign of untrustworthiness in general! Wouldn’t that be a net negative as far as evolution is concerned? I suppose I’m asking the wrong questions here. What I meant was, how can I get hold of some of this grant money? I can produce irrelevant information and improbable conclusions as well as any professional!

Sooner or Later You’ll Be a He-Man Woman-Hater

By in conspicuous crusading, gender, non compos mentis, propaganda, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Sometimes, you just have to admire the sheer brass ovaries.

Look, I’ve been alive and paying attention over the last decade or so. If there were any feminists publicly questioning or criticizing the increasingly-fanatical direction their crusade was taking, I somehow missed them. If there were any critics of the simple-minded slogans of intersectionality who were granted a respectful hearing by our media class, I somehow missed them. The only people who dared speak up were publicly canceled, in the parlance of our times, while being slandered as misogynist rape apologists doing the bidding of their right-wing paymasters (man, those guys are behind everything). If there were any clear guidelines about how to distinguish credible accusations from scurrilous ones, they were never publicly articulated. Talk of “due process,” however tentative, was considered a “dog-whistle” of the patriarchy.  Way back in 2014, Scott Alexander analyzed what was becoming an already-obvious compulsion among feminists to pick the absolute worst hills to die upon:

The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?

What’s really amusing is that he probably thought “some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists” was such a perfect reductio ad absurdum that it might serve forever as a rhetorical guardrail, preventing anyone from plunging over the edge into lunacy. That guardrail only lasted, what, five and a half years before Ms. Faludi barreled through it in an eighteen-wheeler, all hopped up on the trucker’s speed of ideology and propaganda?

Now, like many aficionados of the human comedy, I have certainly enjoyed the recent spectacle of the scuttling of the good ship #MeToo in the name of political expediency. Your revolution is over, Faludi. Condolences. The broads will always lose. It’s like one of the Three Stooges with a bucket on his head; you can see it coming from far away, but it’s still funny to watch. In fact, I think I enjoy this reboot of the franchise even better than the original version starring Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and all those other ’90s stars.

But let’s be fair. Contrary to what some have claimed or implied, #MeToo was never a purely cynical exercise in political partisanship. After all, it did bring down a powerful Hollywood Democrat and a sitting Democratic senator. It just turns out that a presidential election is simply a bridge too far. No one is willing to chance losing to Trump again for the sake of principles. Suddenly, idealists see the attraction of lesser-evilism. If we were mature adults, we could talk about this. We could admit that part of the tragic nature of existence is the fact that we’re frequently forced by unchosen circumstances to sacrifice our principles to necessity. But we’re not mature adults, Linda Hirshman’s example to the contrary. We’d rather avoid the up-front pain of facing our compromises squarely and choose the no-money-down, balloon-payment option of investing far, far more time, effort, and pain into denying that there was ever a tragic conflict in the first place, let alone any chastening compromises. We’d rather descend into farce and blame an all-powerful cabal of our enemies for playing some incredibly disciplined long game to manipulate us into this situation so that we can pretend our moral virginity remains intact.

And for what? Who does this benefit? She and her comrades know full well what sort of message they were relentlessly pushing. Those “right-wingers,” real, honorary, and imagined, certainly remember. Absolutely no one is fooled by this, though some will find it useful to pretend to be fooled. And yet, some idealistic part of me is still shocked, no matter how often and predictably this happens, that people would rather go through more trouble to lie than to cut through all those tangled webs and just tell the truth. I can’t help but laugh at the irony that my own feeble idealism would survive after theirs had sold out.

Obiter Scripta, no. 84

By in books, obiter scripta 2 Comments

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a “colourless” day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour. There is also an insulting style of speech about “one grey day just like another.” You might as well talk about one green tree just like another. A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.

…Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless; that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.

— G. K. Chesterton, “The Glory of Grey,” Alarms and Discursions

Purple was my first love, as colors go. “I heard that a lot of babies like purple,” my grandmother said when I told her. Within a few years, I had shifted my allegiance to green. My pediatrician gave me a lime-flavored lollipop after I said so. As an adolescent, I was concerned with trying to appear edgy and profound, so I started telling people that red, being the color of blood, was my favorite, even as I increasingly began wearing black clothes. At some point, purple and I got together again. Basically, I’ve slutted my way around the color wheel, but in middle age, I’ve come to truly appreciate the humble, autumnal greys (and browns, to a lesser extent). Still waters run deep; so do restrained colors.

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