Have You Heard the Good Housekeeping News?

By in fresh hell, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

I mentioned to the Lady of the House that I was thinking about getting a steam mop for the linoleum floors. She suggested I check reviews at Good Housekeeping. So over I clicked, to be greeted with:

I mean, really. Can a fellow not simply research how to get the kitchen floor shiny without having to submit to a struggle session and interrogate his privileging of the dominant paradigm which subordinates floors of color to a colonialist ideal of bright whiteness? Before the internet, there was only one instance in my life when a stranger came up to me in a parking lot and handed me an evangelical tract, which I promptly threw away. Now, the fundamentalist preachers of Diversity and Inclusion™ are standing around the entrance to nearly every website, pressing their literature in our faces, and stashing cookies in our browsers so they can track us down later. I’m tempted to make a wisecrack about whited sepulchres, but I fear in today’s climate, that would only be taken as a covert expression of racism.

Obiter Scripta, no. 103

By in antisocial media, obiter scripta No Comments

The choice was put to them whether they would like to be kings or kings’ couriers. Like children they all wanted to be couriers. So now there are a great many couriers; they post through the world and, as there are no kings left, shout to each other their meaningless and obsolete messages. They would gladly put an end to their wretched lives, but they dare not because of their oath of service.

—Kafka, “Couriers”

There are many interpretations of this parable, but the meaning seems clear and obvious to me: Once upon a time, the blog was the ne plus ultra of social media, or “Web 2.0,” as it was then called. Each blogger ruled hizzorher own kingdom, issuing edicts, jeremiads and stemwinders according to whim. Then came the great enclosure, when we forfeited our kingdoms to move into the gated pens of Facebook and Twitter, where self-expression is limited to primitively reacting to whatever trending “news” is carelessly dumped into the feeding trough. Deleting one’s accounts would seem to be the only logical choice, but doing so would give Zuckerberg and Dorsey the legal right to harvest your organs as a result. (Always read the fine print in the terms of service.) Frankly, I had no idea Kafka was such a prescient visionary. I might have to read him more closely.

Exodus

By in education, foolosophy No Comments

Justin E.H. Smith:

Nor am I being facetious when I say that it may be time to start thinking about alternative institution-building. If universities don’t want to teach and to preserve real humanities, then those of us who do may have to go and do so elsewhere under a different arrangement, one that permits us to pay attention to the things we study in the way that they merit.

This would not be the first time. From roughly 1610 until about 1780, universities were not the centre of the action — newly founded scientific academies and informal salons were. The broad historical shift underway right now echoes the one that was happening then: both periods are characterised by tremendous instability resulting from a revolution in information technologies. The early modern period endured what Ann Blair calls a crisis of “information overload” at least as significant as our own.

Smith is an academic philosopher by trade, but one who has managed to avoid having all the intellectual passion (and writing ability) squeezed out of him. He’s also one of the latest to abandon the neglected inner city of WordPress blogging for the temptations of a slightly-more lucrative existence in the Substackurbs. Personally, I find the newsletter-blog model to be comparable to dining out during the year of the batplague — rather than sit down in a public place and partake, if only indirectly, of the presence and sound of other people, we have our intellectual meals delivered contact-free, straight to our inboxes, where we consume them silently and alone. I’m not a fan of this trend, in other words. But I do enjoy Smith’s thought-provocations, so perhaps you might like to read them too.

Obiter Scripta, no. 102

By in books, obiter scripta, writing No Comments

I have noticed a hundred times, and do not doubt that many of my readers must have noticed a hundred-and-one or a hundred-and-two times, that books with an arresting, imaginative title are seldom worth much. It is to be presumed that they were invented before the book itself, frequently perhaps by someone else.

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

A snappy title does not a book make, it’s true. But for us lesser scribblers, the title might be the snowball we need to get the creative process rolling. It’s a writing prompt I’ve used many times: I come across an interesting phrase (often a song lyric—I never claimed to be a highbrow), and think, “If I had a post titled Such-and-Such, what would it be about?” Then I sit down and reverse-engineer it into existence. I’m not ashamed to say that there are many posts in the archives here whose best part is the title. The fact that many writers and authors don’t get to choose the titles of their articles or books is one of the many reasons why I could never write anywhere else. If I can’t amuse myself with obscure references or inside jokes, well, what’s the point in writing at all?

Obiter Scripta, no. 101

By in nietzsche, obiter scripta No Comments

The buried.— We withdraw into concealment: but not out of any kind of personal ill-humor, as though the political and social situation of the present day were not good enough for us, but because through our withdrawal we want to economize and assemble forces of which culture will later have great need, and more so if this present remains this present and as such fulfills its task. We are accumulating capital and seeking to make it secure: but, as in times of great peril, to do that we have to bury it.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

It would be flattering to think that my reclusive nature was due to latent genius, but no, I’m pretty sure it’s just personal ill-humor. The political and social situation of the present day just isn’t good enough for me. It’s not me, it’s you.

The Permanent False Alarm

By in books, juxtapositions, media/propaganda, nietzsche No Comments

How good are journalists at tracking down and filtering important events? The first internet browser appeared on 11 November 1993 — probably the most significant invention of the twentieth century, after the atomic bomb and the discovery of antibiotics. Do you know what that browser was called? Mosaic. If you didn’t know the answer, you have a good excuse: it didn’t make the news. What were the lead stories on German television that day? Party funding was being reformed. The Israeli prime minister had a meeting with Bill Clinton. The Pope had fractured his shoulder. My point os that neither journalists nor consumers have much sense of what’s relevant.

The relationship between relevance and media attention seems inverse: the greater the fanfare in the news, the smaller the relevance of the event. Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that the items journalists don’t report on are usually the very things you actually want to know!

— Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life

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The press. — If we consider how even now all great political occurrences creep on to the stage silent and shrouded, how they are concealed by insignificant events and seem small in proximity to them, how it is not until long after they have happened that their profound effects are felt and the ground trembles — what significance can we then accord the press as it is now, with its daily expenditures of lungpower on exclaiming, deafening, inciting, shocking — is it anything more than the permanent false alarm that leads ears and senses off in the wrong direction?

— Nietzsche, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” Human, All Too Human

I Didn’t Read the News Today, Oh, Boy

By in augean stables, books, media/propaganda No Comments

The news industry is society’s appendix — permanently inflamed and completely pointless. You’re better off simply having it removed.

— Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life

Dobelli repeats this core insight with various embellishments over the course of 35 brief and amusing chapters. Most news is useless at best and actively misleading at worst. Most of us, as individuals, are in no position to act meaningfully on what we consume through media. Just take this year as an example — how much of the news about the coronavirus has made you any better informed? Wash your hands frequently, wear masks, and practice common-sense social distancing while we wait for a vaccine — has anything you’ve read since March changed this basic understanding? How many studies later turned out to be false or misleading? How many times has “the science” changed its irresolute mind on whether this or that policy is safe or harmful? (And let’s not forget the unforgivable conduct of journalists and public-health officials who destroyed all their credibility by shamelessly playing partisan political games with a pandemic.) The point is not that anyone could or should have been correct from the beginning; the point is that keeping abreast of every breaking rumor or newsflash did absolutely nothing to benefit your life. You would have been better off just tuning it all out and avoiding the stress.

And that’s regarding a pandemic, a rare and genuine emergency. What good does it do to pay attention to all the other effluvia floating by in your news feed?

Thursday Throwback

By in thursday throwback No Comments

[Originally published Nov. 23, 2017.]

After a little reflection, I came to the conclusion that my dislike of waste arises from a whole approach to life that seems to me crude and wretched. For unthinking waste — and waste on our scale must be unthinking — implies a taking-for-granted, a failure to appreciate: not so much a disenchantment with the world as a failure to be enchanted by it in the first place. To consume without appreciation (which is what waste means) is analogous to the fault of which Sherlock Holmes accused Doctor Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia: You see, but you do not observe.

…Attention to and gratitude for socks is not a commonly expressed attitude. And yet I cannot help but think that this habit of throwing things away the moment they become defective leads to an unpleasantly disabused attitude to life. Computers, washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, clothes, out they all go the moment they break down or require repair. I know it is a tribute to our immense productivity that it is far cheaper to obtain a new machine than to repair the old, but in a world where everything is so replaceable, what affection or gratitude develops for anything? What do we notice and appreciate if everything is instantly replaceable?

…I suppose that what I would like is an abundance that everyone appreciated and did not take for granted. This would require that everyone was aware that things could be different from how they actually are, an awareness that is increasingly difficult to achieve.

— Theodore Dalrymple, “Attitude or Gratitude?,” Farewell Fear

I have a distinct memory of being fifteen years old and going with my mom to an office-supply store, where she let me get a cool pen. I remember being aware that the novelty of this pen would be a small but genuine pleasure over the following few days, and I also remember thinking that this was the sort of thing that was considered silly, and that I should keep it to myself. Like socks, being grateful and happy about something as ordinary as a pen was lame and uncool, especially for a teenager. Over the years, though, I’ve secretly retained sentimental attachments to all sorts of humble objects, from clothing to electronics, which had long since outlived their “usefulness” by usual standards.

I recently read Robert Samuelson’s excellent book, The Good Life and its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement. In brief, he argued that Americans in the postwar era had come to believe in a teleological vision of life which took for granted a constant upward trajectory of both material and psychological improvement, and that our post-’60s malaise was primarily due to our inability to understand that this was always a chimera. The pursuit of ever-increasing affluence and convenience eventually produces diminishing returns. People who expect perfection will inevitably be disappointed, and our disappointment has led to several decades of fault-finding and finger-pointing as we attempt to pinpoint who or what is to blame for depriving us of our birthright. We still haven’t gotten to the point of questioning whether we ever had any good reason, let alone right, to expect it. As Louis C.K. said in a popular routine of his, “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.” All we can think about is what we feel was owed to us and wrongly withheld, no matter how much we already have.

Epictetus famously advised that if we are fond of a ceramic cup, we should remind ourselves that it is only ceramic cups in general that we care about, so that we won’t be bothered if this particular one breaks. He applied the same logic to spouses and children, too, a conclusion to which very few people would follow him. Still, even if we keep this line of thought confined to cups (and pens), I feel that the cure is worse than the disease here. The contingencies which make us feel insecure also allow us to feel gratitude if we choose to look at it from that perspective. The fact that all enchanting things will eventually be lost and turn to dust is the very reason why we should be appreciative of having them at all, rather than cursing our inability to possess and control them forever. I wasn’t guaranteed any of this. It could so easily have been different. But it’s here for now, and that’s enough. I’m thankful for all of it.

And I’m Grateful for This

By in animals No Comments

Eleven years ago today — also a Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving — I had to have one of my beloved dogs put to sleep. It was a bleak and depressing holiday.

I took a few years’ hiatus from having dogs after my last one died in 2016. Ever since I was born, I’d never been without dogs in the house. But it takes a lot out of you to keep outliving such close companions, so I needed a break from it. Last month, though, we finally adopted another one from a shelter. We’re calling him Galahad, and we have dispassionately determined that he is objectively the bestest boy in all the land.

We have a lot to be thankful for this year, but I think I’ll make time to reflect on two things in particular: the love of our pets, and the passing of time which makes even deep heartbreak surmountable.

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