By Damian in noteworthies, notorious jbp No Comments
• James Hankins, “How Not to Defend the Humanities”
• Lydialyle Gibson, “The Mirage of Knowledge”
• Sohrab Amari, “The Disappearance of Desire”
• Joanna Baron & Jerry Gibbon, “Good Luck With That”
• Tanner Greer, “Jordan Peterson Saves the World”
• Marc Lewis, “The Addiction Habit”
• Meng-Hu, “Four Juxtapositions”
• Bradley Campbell, “The Intellectual Source of Victimhood Culture”
• Tiptoeing through the comedy minefield (a lament in four tweets).
By Damian in antisocial networking, buried alive No Comments
It’s time to give up on all of this, writing it off as a failed experiment. So here is what I’m going to do.
1. I’m going off Twitter for a month. No, this is not a fake Farhad Manjoo Twitter break, but a real one. At the end of 30 days, we’ll see if I bother to come back.
2. Instead of staring at my phone all the time, I’m going to carry around an honest to goodness book to read. A lot of the time I spend messing around on Twitter is in spare moments when I’m waiting for the kids to get ready for bed, or between sets at the gym, and I have rationalized it by saying this is time when I can’t get sustained work done, so it’s not really going to waste. But I’m betting that’s not true and that I can fill this time with more productive or more enjoyable things.
3. I’m going to go back to what I used to do: checking out a roster of websites and blogs with good information and getting all of my news directly from those sources, not from people posting them to social media. You should do the same.
4. I’m going to spend more time writing at The Federalist, or posting extra material here on my own site—that would be TracinskiLetter.com, thanks for asking—or working on a couple of other projects I have in mind. If you want to know what I have to say, you know where to find me. I’m willing to bet that all of these projects will do me a lot more good than being “Twitter famous.”
Partly what I’m trying to do here is to go back to the future, back to the golden age of blogs. There may be another, better technological solution, and I’m open to hearing about it. But I’m starting to realize that whatever the answer eventually turns out to be, social media was probably a mistake.
I’m still sitting in the exact same spot where I took up residence in the autumn of 2007, still using a Dell desktop to do the majority of my browsing and writing, still keeping folders on the bookmarks bar full of “Blogs” or “Twits” to follow worthwhile sites and timelines. I’m happy to let it remain forever a mystery how people can do anything important on a phone screen, let alone how apps could fascinate anyone but adolescent simpletons. I’ve never been plagued by the fear of missing out that keeps shallow people flitting like anxious butterflies from one tech trend or platform to another. I recognized immediately that the blog format was perfect for my needs, and I’ve never been tempted to chase after the next shiny object. As long as you aren’t interested in making money, getting attention, or having influence, it’s easy!
Anecdotes don’t necessarily mean anything, of course, but lately I have seen several people independently grousing about social media and flirting with the idea of leaving it. Time will tell if more people follow Tracinski’s lead. Let’s just hope blogs don’t become the new vinyl, a hipster status symbol.
By Damian in obiter dicta No Comments
I have set out a dish of bird seed and a basin of water on the balcony. I no longer have any illusion about birdlike innocence. One bully gets into the dish and drives off all other birds. The bullies seem demented and malicious. They skip about pecking at other birds rather than eat the seed. Why don’t the birds gang up on the bully? Is it because of a lack of language? Birds are capable of united action: they flock together and organize themselves into flights to the end of the earth.
It wearies me to think that the senseless pecking is part of the energy that fueled the ascent of life — the manifestation of a tireless, blind drive that will go on forever.
— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath
Very Schopenhauerian of him. Of course, the avian belligerence he describes is indeed often the case. I’m convinced that hummingbirds, for example, use at least three-quarters of their caloric intake merely for driving other hummingbirds away from the feeder. But we recently saw a male cardinal take a bite of suet and flutter over to give it to his sweetheart perched nearby, a courting behavior which is apparently common among cardinals, who also mate for life. Perhaps even birds validate life’s struggles through tiny acts of affection and self-sacrifice which, however briefly, point toward the possibility of something meaningful beyond the senseless pecking.
By Damian in conspicuous crusading, status seeking No Comments
It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.
James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore.
He knows none of it. To Mr. Hagerman, life is a spoiler.
…He said that with some pride, but he has the misgivings about disengaging from political life that you have, by now, surely been shouting at him as you read. “The first several months of this thing, I didn’t feel all that great about it,” he said. “It makes me a crappy citizen. It’s the ostrich head-in-the-sand approach to political outcomes you disagree with.”
It seems obvious to say, but to avoid current affairs is in some ways a luxury that many people, like, for example, immigrants worried about deportation, cannot afford.
The Lady of the House has a business acquaintance with whom she keeps in intermittent touch via social media. This woman — let’s call her Shelly — is, to judge by her newsletters and Facebook updates, a thoroughly unpleasant person. Each post is brimming over with typical performative spleen-venting about the sociopolitical outrage du jour, and supplemented with performative wallowing in angst/situational depression. Naturally, like all the other #resistance! nonconformist freethinkers, she looks like she was rolled off the assembly line in a social-justice shrew factory, complete with bright yarn-colored hair, hipster eyeglasses, ugly tattoos, and t-shirts emblazoned with feminist slogans. Being terrible people and known thought-criminals, the Lady and I of course laugh at each status update, treating it like a guilty-pleasure TV show. How long until this dunce finally figures out that she’s using “wokeness” as an excuse to flounder in self-inflicted misery? we keep asking after every episode.
Anyway, back to Erik Hagerman, the subject of this aghast NYT profile. This was one of the most unintentionally hilarious articles I’ve read in some time. Avoiding current affairs is a, surprise surprise, privilege! Don’t you know there are information-starved citizens in Africa who would gratefully gobble up all that social media ephemera you’re wasting? Now, to be clear, countless ordinary people live lives of prosaic local and personal concerns without ever paying the slightest attention to the dreadfully important issues of, uh, pussy hats and D.C. insider gossip, but the Times is gravely concerned because Hagerman is a former corporate executive at Nike, Walmart and Disney. It’s all well and good for hoi polloi to busy themselves with trivia and leave serious matters to their betters, but if an Important Person calls shenanigans on the whole charade of being an informed, cosmopolitan citizen, it cuts straight to the heart of the clerisy’s flattering conceit that they matter. External enemies are always necessary for maintaining the faith, but heresy corrodes it from within. We can tolerate, indeed, we require a large outgroup of proudly-ignorant Trumpenproles to define ourselves against, but if one of “us” stops performing the rituals and ablutions of being well-informed and suffers no adverse consequences, what does that say about the rest of us? Make no mistake, the fear is not that society will collapse if a small minority of citizens stop paying attention to news they can’t use, the fear is that the lack of dramatic consequences will prove the utter emptiness of this whole media-class pretense. Like Shelly, Dolnick and the clucking hens he appeals to for sympathy are deeply invested in consuming the very garbage that makes them sick, but they find that preferable to having to face their own insignificance.
Look at the list of “newsworthy events” that Dolnick lists up there. Ask yourself, how many of those have profoundly changed anything about the way you view the world? Did Parkland or the unsolved Las Vegas shootings change your views on gun control or reinforce them? Has any of the skulduggery surrounding Trump and Russia changed your political principles and allegiances or just reinforced them? When was the last time you read anything that made you stop at length to rethink your most basic attitudes and commitments, if ever? For most of us, the ideological foundations of our worldviews were cemented in place long ago; all we’re doing now is laying more bricks on top of them to keep us safe and dry. None of you are going to donate money, time or energy to political causes (especially those of you who are too busy tweeting to have time for anything else). None of you are going to do anything other than vote for the same political party you’ve always voted for, no matter how they perform. Go ahead, read a few more articles about subjects you only half-understand and can’t meaningfully act upon anyway. Send a few more vituperative tweets and posts into the void to convince yourself that you’re “doing something.” Alternatively, you could get over yourself and go focus on something that makes you feel pleasant for a change. Quietly tending to your own garden would do far more to make the world a better place than sharing your ill-informed, dyspeptic tirades with the rest of us. But you’d rather have attention and adrenaline rushes, wouldn’t you?
By Damian in political philosophy No Comments
Lefty friends keep asking me if — or telling me that — I’m a conservative now. But I’m just a liberal who remembers what they’ve forgotten. I remember what it meant to be a liberal back when I really started to identify as one, back around 2000, during Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War. Of course, I may just have been gullible. Maybe it meant something different before that and maybe it came to mean something different after. Maybe it’s all just “tribal” signifiers, all just flags and symbols. But if it is, the forgetting must help, and that just isn’t what I’m good at.
“I’m not a conservative; I’m merely nostalgic for the simple politics and moral certainties of a bygone age, which just happens to correlate with my youth!” That’s not being entirely fair to either conservatism or Traldi, but it’s still funny. Lately, these “I didn’t leave the left; the left left me” pieces are becoming popular again, which is at least one thing that hasn’t changed much from the Dubya Bush years. During the Cold War, it was common for defenders of the liberal West to note the simple fact that it was unnecessary to put up walls and guard towers to keep their populations from escaping en masse. Likewise, it might be useful for these agonizers to reflect on why the traffic in these political conversion stories tends to be mostly one-way.
By Damian in getting and spending, obiter dicta No Comments
One of the underlying problems, argues Professor O’Gorman, is in consumer society brought about by globalised capitalism. Our economy is such that it depends utterly on creating new desires among consumers, whether or not the satisfaction of those desires leads to happiness or anything worthwhile sub specie aeternitatis. Without a constant desire for something new, for something supposedly better, our economy would deflate like a balloon emptied of gas. If a large proportion of the population were to decide that it already had enough to meet its needs, and that it would be no happier if it possessed anything else, economic activity would stagnate at best. It is therefore necessary that there should be a population that is never materially satisfied, that supposes that the next purchase will bring it fulfillment: which, of course, it never does, which explains why so many people go out shopping when they actually need for nothing.
I know these claims well, having made them often enough when I was young and stupid(er). Still, despite my intimate familiarity with the mindset, I find it almost incomprehensible now. Like all religious visions of paradise, it defines itself against the hated fact of ceaseless, omnipresent change which defines our very existence; it imagines a scratch to end all itches forever, a final resolution of all recurring chores. In paradise, our satisfactions will be spiritual and self-contained, impervious to decay. In reality, our acceptance of the need to work in order to consume in order to work is simply an acknowledgement that the least-worst option is often the only realistic one. Smug adolescents of all ages always act like they’re the first to discover that material possessions don’t bring permanent fulfillment. For the rest of us, the transient pleasures of purchases and novelty are valuable insofar as they make one day, one place or one shared experience just a bit brighter.
By Damian in conspicuous crusading, the geist of the zeit No Comments
You doubtless recollect these papers. Here they are. Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. “Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust?…Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?”
— The Creature, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
People are staring to figure out that Richard Spencer has more profiles in major media outlets than he has dedicated followers. https://t.co/WCJ16OLnaw
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) March 12, 2018
Some of us figured that out a long time ago, not that it was particularly difficult. And while I find it funny to imply Spencer being the anguished Creature raging against his creators in the media, in actuality, I’m sure he’s delighted with all they’ve done to help. The anger should be ours, rather. Never forget that these irresponsible morons, these superficial dilettantes posing as journalists, these historical illiterates with their ridiculously self-indulgent “democracy dies in darkness!!!” masturbatory emo hysterics, did their best for the last couple of years to inflate an American “Nazi” movement, which would struggle to fill one small concert venue with all its members combined, into the great Confrontation With Evil of our time. And why? Out of boredom? Out of a need to meet a word count? Out of the pathetic yearning of a bunch of soft, redundant weaklings to participate in something exciting, dangerous, and historically significant? From established mainstream media down to partisan clickwhore sites run by gum-popping adolescents, they all played their role, and they all deserve undying contempt.
By Damian in foolosophizing No Comments
News needn’t keep us trapped in the cave. But staying away from news shouldn’t mean holing up in a literal cave, away from any media influence. There’s a balance we can strive to achieve. It’s true that finding nuggets of real gold amidst the trash heap of modern news media will take some work. But I believe, in the long run, that we can be all the better for it.
I’m not sure why this piece exists. I’m not sure who it’s trying to convince, or what it’s trying to convince them of. All it does is restate the basic problem — it’s difficult to consume a healthy, balanced media diet — without offering anything but platitudes to resolve it. The unanswered question remains: as an individual with very limited time, energy, money, and power, where is it reasonable to draw the line with regards to being an informed citizen? What am I going to do with that knowledge? Which media deserve my attention and why?
As Alain de Botton once noted, technology has made the phenomenon of news increasingly strange. Ordinary folks have constant, immediate access to information which they are powerless to act upon, which changes absolutely nothing about their lives, but about which they are expected to express meaningful opinions. Perhaps it’s just an evolved social grooming ritual, a way of reassuring each other that we hold certain experiences and emotions in common in a frightening world. Or perhaps it has become an upper-middle-class pursuit for status, a way for us to pretend that we’re much more significant than we are, a strange conceit whereby we pretend that we need to be informed in the event that a policymaker happens to call us and ask for our tie-breaking opinion. But as Eric Hoffer sardonically quipped, nobodies who yearn to be somebodies usually end up as busybodies, and God knows we don’t need any more of those.
In recent years, I came to the humbling realization that while I knew how to “pass” as well-informed (and opinionated), I really wasn’t. When I stopped trying to keep up and participate in the chirm of online media, I was forced to admit that my knowledge of most topics was superficial at best. As a clever Folk Implosion lyric puts it, “When I said I understood, I only knew where to stand.” Most importantly, I realized that I had much better things to do with my time than accumulate factoids for no better reason than to bolster some vague self-image. Like Candide, I realized that tending to one’s own garden is a perfectly good way to spend one’s time on Earth. It’s especially strange that I should have to write a defense of the wisdom of voluntary limits in response to a conservative writer in a conservative magazine.
By Damian in noteworthies No Comments
• Alan Bellows, “Heavy Water and the Norwegians“
• Nick Spencer, “Enlightenment and Progress, or Why Steven Pinker Is Wrong“
• Ed West, “Open Societies Need to Rediscover Heroic Ideals“
• Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple, “Raised on the Milk of the Wild Beast“
• Barton Swaim, “Churchill, Orwell, and Why We Admire Them“
• Joseph Epstein, “Frivolous, Empty, and Perfectly Delightful“
• Gary Saul Morson, “Foes of Judgment“
• Robert Boyers, “The Privilege Predicament“
• Paul Seaton, “We’re On a Road to Nowhere“
• Eric Cohen, “A Crisis of Liberalism?“
• Andrew Sullivan, “The World Is Better Than Ever. Why Are We Miserable?“
By Damian in augean stables, obiter dicta No Comments
But Pinker is not exactly reliable when it comes to the intellectuals and their ideas. He takes as his guide to intellectual pessimism a book titled The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman, a far-right author whose most well-known book is a rapturously favorable biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
As someone who works with books for a living and has read several of Herman’s in particular, I’m pretty sure that his “most well-known” and successful book is a little tale called How the Scots Invented the Modern World. His Hudson Institute profile mentions five of his other titles, but his biography of McCarthy isn’t one of them, which would seem like a curious oversight in the promotional blurb department. He’s certainly conservative, but “far-right”? No, I fear Bell is merely putting a rhetorical flashlight under his chin to scare the simple-minded children gathered around the Nation campfire. It’s a shame, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Pinker’s book without having to rely on gratuitously misleading guilt-by-dubious-association smears.