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

By in political philosophy, tribalism No Comments

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

By in thursday throwback No Comments

[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?

Why Do You Like Playing Around With My Narrow Scope of Reality?

By in antisocial media, tribalism No Comments

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

The dysfunctional nature of the two-party, winner-take-all system that dominates American political culture is only magnified by the crisis of our social-media-driven journalism. Those “dark fields of ‘the discourse’ ”—on which we are expected to suit up and join our respective teams—have become ever more dependent on unreported “takes” by underpaid commentators and polemics by ever more ideologically rigid voices contending for virality (or at least visibility) through “likes” and retweets. None of this lends itself to nuance or self-doubt. This, in part, explains how we’ve arrived—far faster than I’d have ever imagined—at the dizzying place where even Barack Obama’s heterodoxy has become a topic of serious complaint on the left.

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Obama observed last October, “you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities.” The statement drew widespread condemnation. “I gasped at what I heard,” Ernest Owens wrote in the New York Times.

“Barack Obama is a conservative,” David Swerdlick argued several weeks later in the Washington Post. Of course, his “perspectives don’t line up with every position now seen as right-of-center,” Swerdlick acknowledged, listing Obama’s policies on climate, Dodd–Frank regulations, and same-sex marriage—as well as his tripling of the number of women on the Supreme Court, antidiscrimination efforts, and protections for young undocumented immigrants—as evidence of liberal credentials. “But his constant search for consensus, for ways to bring Blue America and Red America together,” was more revealing: None of these changes “revolutionized governance or structurally reordered American life. None of them were meant to.”

Recently, in National Review, Peter Kirsanow published a criticism of the New York Times‘ tendentious 1619 Project, the latest gospel to be canonized into the New Testament of Anti-Racism, the guiding scripture for today’s progressives. Michael Harriot at The Root took identitarian exception to it in an article which attacked Kirsanow primarily for being a white man who failed to genuflect before left-wing pieties about race. So far, so typical. The twist in the story is that Kirsanow is himself a black man, which, to any reasonable observer, would seem to render Harriot’s embarrassing tirade null and void. Still, nothing has been appended to the article by way of correction or apology. Harriot’s contribution to the comment section is simply an unapologetic outburst of further invective toward Kirsanow, this time for being a subservient lackey of white supremacy rather than a white man per se. As any black conservative can attest, the only time they are granted ownership of their own opinions is, ironically enough, when they echo the viewpoints of white progressives. Anything else is false consciousness or deliberate dishonesty. (See also when a reviewer at The London School of Economics Review of Books called the black economist Thomas Sowell “a rich white man.”) I look forward to the inevitable notion that one’s mind can be of a different race than one’s body, thus allowing a black man to be objectively racist against himself, for example. Transmentalism?

Also recently, and also at National Review, Kevin Williamson was involved in a frank exchange of opinions with Baytya Ungar-Sargon and Bethany Mandel over a recent NR article about anti-Semitism in and around New York City. The nature of the disagreement centered on whether reporting certain inflammatory statements constitutes endorsement of those statements, or, at the very least, an irresponsible amplification of them. Some commenters reflexively scorn Mandel as typical of “the left,” which would no doubt come as a surprise to her, as she’s a conservative. But once the old tribal instinct gets aroused, you’re either with us or against us, and apostates make just as good kindling as heretics.

It’s like the old legal aphorism about pounding the table. When it comes to today’s culture wars, if the immediate facts are on your side, emphasize the facts. If the immediate facts complicate your preferred long-term narrative, emphasize the narrative. In either case, make sure to emphasize the irredeemable moral and intellectual deficiencies of your opponent. Now, I’m not under the impression that things have ever been otherwise. I don’t think there was ever a golden age of rational, good-faith debate where substantial arguments mattered more than cheap shots and intellectuals shared a disinterested commitment to truth above tribal partisanship. But I do think that the pipeline of practice-becomes-habit-becomes-character is far more fundamental than political issues, and I worry that social media has only accelerated and intensified our worst practices. Discourse, like water, is always following the gravitational pull down to sea level, but social media has leveled the landscape and greased the skids along the way. There never has been a time of universal deceit, but telling the truth regardless of tribal loyalties is still the most radical thing most of us will ever have the chance to do.

You Are Too Shallow, Much Too Shallow to Sound the Bottom

By in books, foolosophy, santutthi No Comments

I haven’t read Clive James (yet), but I have read Patrick Kurp quoting from Clive James, and so far, it has proved profitable:

“It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.”

This theme could serve as my own personal manifesto. Over the years, I’ve found quite a few expressions of the first half of it — the lack of professional ambition, contentment found within humble limits. But the second half completes it — the gratitude for living in a time when great books and music are so plentiful as to be inexhaustible. Lack of professional ambition does not equal lack of interest or passion; a life of unadorned modesty does not preclude an inner vitality. Wifi alone allows many of us to be bounded comfortably in the nutshell of our simple lives while enjoying the benefits of infinite space.

Growing up in Charlottesville, when the town had a population of 40,000 not including students, I was always quietly puzzled when my peers would complain about the boredom of living in a “small town.” To me, a small town was the sparse collection of buildings we’d see scattered along rural Route 29 South between Charlottesville and North Carolina. We had B. Dalton’s, Waldenbooks, and, eventually, Barnes & Noble, in addition to all the fascinating independent bookstores on the downtown mall. What possible excuse was there for someone to be bored? How much stimulation from the outside world would be required to fill the bottomless lacuna in your head?

As a member of the last generation to reach adulthood without the omnipresence of the Internet, I certainly appreciate how many questions and ideas were stillborn, or simply failed to conceive. When no practical means for satisfying curiosity were available, we settled for idly wondering. Now, in our hyper-fertile interactive media environment, there’s no such thing as a question with a sperm count too low to produce an abundant litter of direct answers and tangential asides. Even for those with the discipline to avoid disappearing down rabbit holes of ephemeral trivia, there are countless lectures, explainers, and free classes available to occupy every moment of spare time. If anything, it feels a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose. I’m never bored. The closest I get to it is feeling a vague sense of guilt for not using my time well, for not making enough effort to fully appreciate this cornucopia of culture.

Anticipation Is Keepin’ Me Waitin’

By in books No Comments

Lynn Garrett:

One of the seminal figures who introduced Buddhism to a Western audience was Alan Watts (1915–1973), and in February, Sounds True will publish a new edition of Just So: The Book, which was released as an audiobook in 2017 and is being published in print for the first time. In the book, Watts (The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are) asks the question, “What would you change if you were God? What kind of universe would you design?” and provides an answer: “If you went through the trouble of modeling your own universe and seeing what comes of it, you’d eventually settle on the exact model we have now.” Editor Robert Lee says Watts’s answer is, “Essentially, we are God, and this is what we have created, and if we were to have billions of do-overs (which, in some sense, we already have), this is the exact version we’d create—just so.”

Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Without Beliefs, meditates on being alone in the company of others in The Art of Solitude (Yale Univ., Feb.). Batchelor describes how when he turned 60, he took a sabbatical from teaching and turned his attention to solitude, a practice integral to the meditative traditions he has studied and taught. Batchelor’s explorations taught him that in a hyperconnected world that is at the same time plagued by social isolation, readers can learn to enjoy the solitude that is at the heart of the human experience.

I’m a simple man. I see new books by Watts and Batchelor coming soon, I pre-order them. Incidentally, I’ve discovered an actual use for Twitter, even without having an account. I use it to check in with some of my favorite publishing houses to find out about upcoming releases, as well as links to related interviews and articles. Book Twitter is much more tolerable than the plague-infested asylum-cum-charnel house that is Politics/Current Events Twitter.  This link came via Yale University Press’s feed. I’m not sure I really needed a streamlined process of being exposed to temptation, but nonetheless…

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Apr. 1, 2015.]

Will Shetterly:

Arguments between theists and atheists make me think they’re both missing the point. People have belief systems. If yours doesn’t make you hurt anyone, it’s fine by me, and it’s even better if yours helps you do good things.

Agnosticism is concerned with the limits of knowledge. Atheism is concerned with the likelihood of belief. Epistemologically, I’m an agnostic. That is, I accept that absolute knowledge is impossible, and therefore there is a logical possibility, however minuscule, that something vaguely called God could exist. Philosophically, I’m an atheist, because knowledge doesn’t have to be absolute to be good enough for everyday life, and I feel confident enough that no matter what we discover about life in the cosmic or subatomic realms, none of it will ever point toward the likelihood of the existence of a bipolar creator god with a prurient interest in the doings of human genitals. I am quite willing to bet my life on that. Pragmatically, I’m an anti-assholist, and since assholes are in plentiful supply on both sides of the argument, I tend to agree that the issue is hardly worth fighting about.

That said, Will is probably preaching to those without ears to hear, because the argument isn’t so much about whether theists/atheists are incapable of doing good because of their beliefs. Most people can grudgingly concede that however stubborn and deluded their opponents are, they manage to live decent lives — for now. The worry is — to take the atheist perspective here for a moment — that theistic beliefs are an intellectual weak link. The chain of one’s moral character might snap at precisely that point if the link is not replaced. If a theist is allowed to retain a vague, sentimental affection for Biblical platitudes or an open-mindedness toward the possibility of life after death, the rust might spread and their personality might give way under stress, allowing some atavistic sympathy for the harshest aspects of Deuteronomy or Leviticus to break through and take over. The argument is that incorrect beliefs are a disaster waiting to happen, and both sides will patiently wait a lifetime, if need be, to claim vindication. As with God’s existence, even a fraction of a possibility can inspire faith.

But intellectuals, both secular and religious, always overvalue the importance of rational principles as opposed to simple, intuitive empathy. The power of logical necessity compels you! Except, in practice, it doesn’t. People cheerfully contradict themselves all the time. Faith or the lack thereof tends to serve as a mere rationalization for what are, deep down, issues of basic character. Kind people can be attracted to the soft parts of Christianity and assholes can be attracted to the supercilious parts of atheism. Decent, humane people do not become raging, intolerant assholes just because of a new logical twist in their thinking. They will find a way to accommodate the new perspective into their basic character as if it had been there all along.

As for the crusading sort of atheists who feel compelled to badger even the most inoffensive believers, they strike me as the spiritual descendants of Frederick Taylor. In their case, they’re obsessed with eliminating intellectual inefficiency, even if it results in diminishing returns or outright counter-productiveness. Just imagine how much more we could accomplish if only all these valuable neurons weren’t being wasted on metaphysical fantasies and irrational superstitions! Of course, the idea that the world and all its problems can be reorganized and set right by flawless human reason is a fairy tale, a myth, a fable and a superstitious delusion itself. As a rule, it’s best to recognize what “good enough” looks like and stop there.

Things Can Only Get Better?

By in battling personal entropy, poetry 2 Comments

Simon Kennedy:

Middle age is miserable, according to a new economic study which pinpoints 47.2 years old as the moment of peak unhappiness in the developed world.

Let’s see — point-two…one-fifth of twelve months…starting from X, add Y…hmm, it looks like my life was at its utter nadir…last week? Well, if this is the worst, then the worst is not. In fact, I have to agree with Robert Browning:

Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I’ll complain.

My experience being other,
How should I contribute verse
Worthy of your king and brother?
Balaam-like I bless, not curse.
I find earth not gray but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All’s blue.

Roger Scruton

By in the big sleep No Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

In his last and moving article in The Spectator, indeed in the last paragraph he published in his lifetime, he stressed the importance of gratitude for what one has been fortunate enough to inherit. Take nothing for granted, preserve what is worth preserving, understand the fragility of things, remember debts to the past as well as to the future, take delight in the world. Such was the lasting message of this exceptionally gifted man.

When I heard yesterday of Roger Scruton’s death, I sat down with my copies of his books and leafed through them, looking for a representative paragraph or two capable of summing up what he has meant to me. Frankly, there are too many, and my thoughts about them aren’t very interesting for a tribute. Luckily, Dalrymple has done an admirable job here naming the main themes that I, too, will carry with me. Several years ago, I wrote to Scruton directly in an attempt to express my appreciation for his work. He didn’t respond (and of course I didn’t expect him to), but I do hope my letter made him smile.

Rejectification of Names

By in antisocial media No Comments

Christine Rosen:

What happened to our love affair with social media? Contrary to much of what has been written, the story of the last decade of social media isn’t a tale of Russian-driven misinformation but of a misunderstanding of human nature. We have not taken the full measure of the kinds of problematic behaviors we know these platforms reward. We are confused about how to respond to their power to amplify and accelerate scandals and call-out culture. And we are at a loss about how to address their parlous effects not only on citizens but on the politicians we expect to lead us.

Way back when we were kids, most of us, I assume, played some version of the telephone game (I understand some of you may have known it as “Chinese whispers,” and I trust you have already reported yourselves to the relevant authorities for sensitivity training). But for those who didn’t, the idea was: a group of kids would sit in a circle. The teacher, or whoever was leading the fun, would start by whispering a brief phrase to the person beside them. Without pausing to clarify or consider, the second person would immediately relay the message to the third, and so on down the line. When the message reached the end of the circle, it would be spoken aloud, and of course, it had gotten so garbled in the course of its travels as to be unrecognizable. Oh, how we laughed at how easy it is to misunderstand each other.

Way back in the day, there was a blog called Busy, Busy, Busy, by a guy named Elton Beard. He didn’t invent the “Shorter…” template of blog post (for that he always credited Daniel Davies), but he certainly perfected it and made it “viral” before we called it such. As you can see, the idea was: you link to an article or column by the target of your mockery and attempt to summarize his or her point in the most pithy and sarcastic way possible, preferably with a one-liner. “Shorter So-and-So: Everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi.” Yes, technically, a link was provided for anyone who wanted to read the entire article for accuracy’s sake, but in practice, no one ever did that. It would spoil the fun to bring nuance or balance into it. Intellectual property rights aside, the idea soon transcended its origin and became like the air we breathed, among bloggers and commenters alike. We already knew we were right about everything. All that was left to do was have fun with the stupidity of our opponents. Oh, how we laughed at our cleverness.

Oh, how little did we suspect what a basilisk’s egg we were hatching. How many countless dead conversations litter the social media landscape today, having fallen prey to its malevolent gaze. Those practices are so common as to be the rule now. We are indeed too busy, busy, busy to communicate clearly. Rather than engage with someone’s words at face value, we’d rather assume the presence of subtext and engage with that instead. Rather than proceed through a conversation carefully, one point at a time, we’d rather attempt to anticipate our partner’s next several rhetorical steps and call checkmate as quickly as possible. The Calvinist conception of conversation prevails today. Social media has become the telephone game on steroids, and it typically ends with roid rage instead of laughter. But what mirror exists that would allow us to turn the basilisk’s gaze back upon itself?

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