Obiter Dicta, no. 48

By in music, obiter dicta No Comments

If Schopenhauer had a religion in his youth, or at any time in his life, it was music. It was in music that he found intimations of a realm beyond the human world. The nature of things, he came to think, was ineffable. Language could not capture the reality that lay behind changing appearances. But what could not be spoken could still be sung or played.

— John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

As Mark Sandman sang, “Music is like our prayer; it helps you reach somewhere.” Likewise, my faith is the substance of rhythms hoped for, the evidence of melodies not heard.

Noteworthies (37)

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• Tim Rogers, “Jordan Peterson and the Return of the Stoics”

• Wesley Yang, “The Passion of Jordan Peterson”

• Kyle Smith, “Ezra Klein’s Intellectual Demagoguery”

• Theodore Dalrymple, “Reading the State of Britain with Roger Scruton”

• Ben Sixsmith, “My Favorite French Intellectual”

• Patrick Freyne, “Where Do Atheists Get Their Values?”

• Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The Church of Grievance”

• Joe Berkowitz, “If You Think You Hate Puns, You’re Wrong”

• David Thompson, “Annihilation Of Bourgeois Life Delayed Somewhat”

• Songs I’m enjoying this week: while listening to Google Play’s “Psychedelic Indie” station, I discovered “Comb My Hair” by Coast Modern (sorta like Tame Impala sharing a ride and a singalong with the Flaming Lips), and “Boys Latin” by Panda Bear (sorta like techno-Gregorian chanting)

Obiter Dicta, no. 47

By in obiter dicta, status seeking No Comments

It is true that in certain acute and painful crises of oppression or disgrace, discontent is a duty and shame could call us like a trumpet. But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards not so bad. The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.

— G. K. Chesterton, “What Is Right With the World“

Sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, discontent is a means of distinguishing oneself. I have higher standards. I see further and deeper. I am too profound to be distracted or mollified by superficial baubles. To be happy with simple pleasures is to risk appearing a simpleton, or worse, to risk being forced to acknowledge how much one has in common with others. Most of our modern prophets are simply trying to reassure themselves of their own uniqueness in matters of both morality and taste.

Or You Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Villain

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

When the Atlantic was publishing 7800-word profiles about Kanye’s genius, I grudgingly endured it. When Slate was analyzing his videos as if they were high art, I patiently withstood it. When some airheaded ditz at the Baffler tried to portray his shallow narcissism as artistic genius, I suffered it stoically. When the A.V. Club — back when they actually published interesting pieces about music and film before becoming just another interchangeable storefront staffed by snarky adolescents in the Woke Mall of America that counts as pop culture writing these days — kept genuflecting before his greatness, I politely overlooked it. Today, I have to say it was all worth it. All of it. I just hope the Internet is sturdy enough to contain the ocean of salty woke tears I’ve seen flowing through my feed this morning, because if the dams burst and that stuff saturates the earth, nothing will ever grow there for thousands of years and we’ll all starve to death.

But still, this isn’t a day for I-told-you-sos. This isn’t a day for noting that I was anti-Kanye years before it was cool. This is a day for laughter and merriment. A day for relaxing after an intense period of work and travel. Now flow, tears, and soak your cheeks! rage! flow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

Noteworthies (36)

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• Douglas Dalrymple, “Jonah In Siberia“

• Jacob Bacharach, “Like a Dog“

• Theodore Dalrymple, “Jeremy Corbyn’s Jewish Problem“

• Matthew Continetti, “The Battle of Woke Island“

• Kevin Williamson, “When the Twitter Mob Came for Me” (may be paywalled, but you can find the URL on Twitter and access it there)

• Bradley Campbell, “Kevin Williamson, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Victimhood Culture“

• John McGinnis, “Explaining the New Illiberal Liberalism“

• David Marcus, “Five Big, Fat Lies Free Speech Opponents Love,” and related, “Nice place you’ve got here…“

• “Progress Man” summarizes Steven Pinker’s new book.

• Truth. Especially about the lizard people.

Obiter Dicta, no. 46

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Sociology (Tocqueville’s discipline, and the one practiced in this book), for instance, has largely been captured by the view that inequalities are the most prevalent and most consequential things around. That view is so forcefully held and so apparently beyond criticism that it has become not only virtually synonymous with the dominant vision of what politics is for but virtually sacrosanct, too. For many sociologists, there just isn’t anything else to care about more than inequality, and there just isn’t anything else to do but to combat it politically.

— James Poulos, The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us From Ourselves

As the saying of unknown origin goes, it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. It’s funny to think that all the ceaseless chattering about inequality is just this century’s version of Freudian psychology, a fleeting intellectual fashion among the intelligentsia, soon to be deservedly ignored. It’s liberating to hear it summed up so concisely like this; it reminds you that there’s life outside this stifling, insular climate of opinion.

Hands All Over Words I Utter, Change Them Into What You Want to Like Balls of Clay

By in the cult of multi, tribalism No Comments

tribe.png

Sunday, June 12th, 1994 is a date more commonly associated with the beginning of the O.J. Simpson media circus, but what I remember is that the Barnes & Noble in Charlottesville had its grand opening on the 10th, and this was my first time visiting the store. The book I bought that day was Indians ‘R’ Us, a collection of essays and articles by the not-yet-infamous Ward Churchill. One of the chapters, an excoriating attack on the poet Robert Bly, dealt with the topic of what would today be called “appropriation” of Indian culture by white people. In it, Churchill (who, ironically, would later be accused of having fabricated his own Indian heritage) not only argued that white people looking to reject their oppressive colonial European heritage should stick to romanticizing their own barbarian ancestors (“Proud to be a Visigoth-American!”), but that the word “tribe” was especially offensive because it was formerly used in reference to livestock, thus equating non-European people with cattle. Cattle=>cattle cars=>genocide=>Nazi Germany=U.S.A. Q.E.D! Again, 1994. Dylan Matthews and the rest of the Vox Media cohort were probably busy tattling on the naughty language of their seventh-grade peers and doodling heroic portraits of Bill Clinton on their Trapper-Keeper notebooks back then, blissfully unaware that a quarter-century later, their every banal thought would have already been voiced by a soon-to-be disgraced ethnic studies professor. I’m trying to imagine the appropriate inverse of the old “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants” image and failing.

Point is, besides the fact that there is absolutely nothing new under the left-wing sun, by resurrecting this idea, Dylan Matthews, and by slippery-slope extension, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and all the rest of the interchangeable Voxplaining millennial media morons, have placed themselves in rhetorical solidarity with the man who infamously called the people working in the WTC on 9/11 “little Eichmanns,” while implicitly endorsing his own appropriation of Indian culture as well. I’m pretty sure that’s how this guilt-by-association thing works. Now, even those of us who wouldn’t have read Vox even if you’d paid us have to feign an attack of the vapors and loudly announce our intention to withhold money we weren’t going to spend from companies we never patronize for advertising on a website we never visit while patting ourselves on the back for our moral integrity; the offending parties need to be placed under economic embargo until they’re forced to resign; and they can never hold a job that pays more than eleven dollars an hour again. Hey, I don’t make the outrage-mob rules, I just observe them.

How Did My Soul Rise Again From These Graves?

By in antisocial networking, buried alive, writing No Comments

Jason Kottke, in 2013:

The blog is dead, long live the blog

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice.

Jason Kottke, today:

Blogging is most certainly not dead

Social media is as compelling as ever, but people are increasingly souring on the surveillance state Skinner boxes like Facebook and Twitter. Decentralized media like blogs and newsletters are looking better and better these days…

Well, one thing has definitely remained constant over the years: this guy is not a very deep thinker.

Obiter Dicta, no. 45

By in obiter dicta No Comments

If I were to ask myself where and when I have been happiest, I could of course give the obvious answers, as true of me as of everybody else; at some dance or feast of the romantic time of life; at some juvenile triumph of debate; at some sight of beautiful things in strange lands. But it is much more important to remember that I have been intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerest because the quietest places. I have been filled with life from within in a cold waiting-room in a deserted railway junction. I have been completely alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp-post at a third-rate watering place. In short, I have experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditch-water.

— G. K. Chesterton, “The Spice of Life“

I happened to read this passage just after having attended a biannual library sale, one of the high points of my year. There’s this small, brick retaining wall around the back of the library, near the entrance to the nonfiction room. Shaded by trees, surrounded by ivy, invisible from almost anywhere else in the vicinity and unremarkable to anyone who does happen to notice it, it’s one of my favorite places to sit while thinking about everything and nothing. I generally arrive at that sale more than two hours early just to have some time to myself, sitting on my wall, thinking about how good life can be in the most mundane circumstances. I’m already looking forward to revisiting it in the autumn.

Obiter Dicta, no. 44

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If an American should be reduced to occupying himself with his own affairs, at that moment half his existence would be snatched from him; he would feel it as a vast void in his life and would become incredibly unhappy.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Where am I? Delaware? Pennsylvania? Maryland? No, that was last month. New York? Ohio? No, that’s later this spring. North Carolina, then? Sounds likely. Well, whatever the case, from this hotel in Somewhere, U.S.A., let me say that as I continue to have no time for reading online about politics, culture, and current events, I can only laugh in the face of Tocqueville’s ghost. Bounded in the nutshell of my own affairs, I count myself a king of infinite space.

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