Obiter Scripta, no. 62

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, obiter scripta No Comments

I would think it obvious that it is essential to human equilibrium and a true engagement with reality to acknowledge that tragedy is the defining part of human life and to accept the limits (and opportunities) this imposes, both individual and political. The effort to deny tragedy was among the fundamental factors responsible for what happened in the twentieth century. Utopianism defies tragedy—and fails.

Two of the individuals most important to my discussion, T. E. Lawrence and Vladimir Peniakoff, found a kind of serenity in resolute acceptance of and engagement with the violence in our nature, deriving from it what I would call the only true solution, the classical one, identified by Aristotle as the pursuit of virtue, the only proper pursuit for a human being.

Such is an uncomfortable route toward a solution since it demands individual self-examination and renounces the consoling ideologies and utopian illusions of a collective resolution of the human problem. Virtue is an all but totally ignored conception today, when narcissism and the (futile) pursuit of self-esteem are the prevailing counterfeits of individual worth and achievement, with death denied in the search for the therapy of immortality.

— William Pfaff, The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia

Pfaff identifies the First World War as the cataclysmic event in which the old certainties were shattered. Since then, we’ve been frantically pawing through the shards, trying to piece them back together, creating various grotesqueries in the process. He also notes the role simple boredom, a frivolous longing for “something interesting,” played in the destruction. A century later, in the midst of unprecedented affluence, other bored people, needing something stronger than video games, prefer to live-action-role-play as Nazis and Communists to make their lives seem significant. As George Santayana said, that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to: strutting and roaring. The alternative, humility, is more painful than battle.

Prefer Solitude, Alone to Think

By in jests japes jokes jollies, solitude No Comments

See, that kind of mercenary spirit is corrosive to the ornamental hermit ethos. We might be misanthropes, but we’re not greedy. I’m well-fed and left in peace to enjoy my scribbling in exchange for some basic chores. What more do we need? (For any interested readers, I also keep another blog, much less-frequently updated, where I collect quotations from my reading to meditate upon, usually centered on the theme of the tragic nature of existence.)

Battle Lines Being Drawn?

By in conspicuous crusading, the statusphere No Comments

T. Greer:

Let’s be clear about what is happening here. When Wagner accuses Bari Weiss and company of writing their apology tweets and correction letters in order to signal thoughtfulness and moderation, she is excusing herself from any need to actually engage with Weiss et. al. The same is true for most of the “virtue signalling” critiques lobbed at the left: to label an argument a virtue signal is to discredit it without actually having to respond to it. Why would you respond to it? The signaler is not arguing, but maneuvering. Their words are not written in good faith. Their appeals to reason are merely a clever gloss for strategic, self-serving behavior. Reason is a vain pursuit in a world where all reasoning is a slave of narrow self-interest.

As a rhetorical strategy this is extremely effective. This is why we have seen it spread from the right’s ideological fringes, to the centerpiece of conservative critique, and now to leftist attacks on the center. But there are consequences for intellectual life dominated by a theory that no person’s words mean what they say they mean. When words have been reduced to a mask for status seeking, signalling worth, dog whistling, securing privileged interests, solidifying tribal identities, or what have you, then words have been reduced to mere tools in a competition for domination. It is foolish to think they will not be treated as such.

This is a good post. I’ve been chewing on it for a week now. And while it’s always useful to be reminded of the need to be charitable toward intellectual opponents, I’m not entirely convinced by his argument that accusations of “virtue-signaling” are equivalent to the Marxist notion of false consciousness and equally destructive to reasonable debate. Primarily, this is because, for Marx and his doctrinaire followers, class was an immutable, objective characteristic as determined by scientific analysis. Your interests as a bourgeois or a proletarian were defined by class identity, not personal choice or idiosyncrasy. The borders of identity, like the eventual physical borders of Marxist countries, were closed.

In contrast, virtue-signaling is about the effortless and cost-free demonstration of one’s place on the “right side of history.” It’s about individuals striving to keep up with an ever-changing definition of radical chic. The definition of chic is fluid, not fixed, and today’s cool kids are tomorrow’s lame embarrassments. As Kristian Niemietz observed, why does one pundit receive fawning praise for proudly proclaiming herself a communist on TV, while a student group is considered to have committed a faux pas by specifically praising Stalin’s Gulag? If a communist is a communist, how else can one explain this without recourse to the vagaries of fashion? What are people responding to if not the style in which the sentiment is expressed? To accuse Ash Sarkar of virtue-signaling isn’t to say that she “doesn’t truly believe” she’s a communist; it’s to accuse her of using the term aspirationally while not taking it seriously. She’s wrong for thinking that communism can somehow be separated from its history, and she’s contemptible for flirting with it, but no one is claiming that it’s objectively impossible for her to do so because she’s a media figure and not a factory worker.

The modern version of Marxist false consciousness appears in the form of identity politics, where your ideas and interests are assumed to be determined by your race, class, gender, etc., and you are treated as an interchangeable widget in a demographic category. Virtue-signaling, however, describes a frivolous space where ideas and words are little more than brand logos, separate from their real-world consequences. No personal epiphany or act of will could ever allow a bourgeois shopkeeper, let alone an aristocrat, to become a proletarian. No heterosexual white man can ever be truly woke, no matter how often he flagellates himself for his privilege. By contrast, accusations of virtue-signaling are intended to embarrass their targets into recognizing their hypocritical superficiality and changing their behavior. “Pardon me, but your social-climbing slip is showing.”

If Aristotle was correct that virtue is the mean between two vices, virtue-signaling denotes a lazy attempt to claim the benefits of virtue without doing the work or paying the costs. Russell Brand, the imbecilic British celebrity, is virtue-signaling when he writes a book advocating for some vaguely-defined revolution while giving interviews in which he melodramatically proclaims his willingness to die for the cause. He wants the gravitas of a savior or a martyr, but he isn’t about to seriously inconvenience himself to attain it. Should he actually move to Venezuela and become a guerrilla fighter in an attempt to preserve the dying embers of Chavismo, though, well, he would still be a contemptible idiot, but at least he couldn’t be accused of only caring about looking cool among his celebrity-entertainer peers.

To reiterate what I said years ago, to get any profitable use out of the term, I think it’s best to understand it as being specific to social media. As Greer notes, the behavior of trying to project and manipulate a certain image of oneself has always been around, but the thing we call “virtue-signaling” emerged from a specific context. It’s built on the recognition that social media has created a cultural space for the expression of opinion with a low barrier to entry. We thought talk was cheap until we invented tweeting. Now, any idiot with a smartphone can participate in a worldwide hashtag conversation. The value of having edgy political opinions has plummeted. How does one distinguish oneself in a flooded marketplace? As with all fashions, the distinctions will seem irrational to an outsider. Why is this hemline in but that one is out? Why is it cool to say “I’m literally a communist!” but gauche to say “Actually, the Gulag wasn’t that bad”? The distinction has to seem arbitrary; if it were logical and predictable, anybody could crack the code and appear cutting-edge. And the performance of virtue has to become more creative to stand out. Anybody can feel bad about injustice, but only a select few can wear that look well and receive praise for it.

Greer is concerned that when we lose the ability to argue under the assumption of your opponent’s good faith, we’re on a slippery slope to using force to resolve our differences. I do take the possibility seriously, but as I said, I’m skeptical that this is where we’re headed. I think that with social media, we’ve created a space for people to indulge en masse in fantasy. To me, Sayre’s Law describes the teacup-tempests of our social-media age — the rhetoric is so vicious because the stakes are so small. I don’t think that many people truly believe in the possibility of radical political change, let alone desire it. I think both the tiki-torch Nazis and the Antifa goons still expect their Amazon Prime deliveries to be waiting on the doorsteps of their suburban homes after they’re done brawling downtown. I don’t think any of the media figures caterwauling about fascism honestly expect to have secret police kicking in their doors. Everyone takes for granted the stability of the political system, which allows them to waste their time on romantic fantasies of redemptive violence and heroism. Lord knows there are plenty of pathologies to diagnose in the body politic, but I don’t think this particular concept is one of them.

Out, Damn’d Spot!

By in antisocial networking, revillaging, technology, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds No Comments

Brendan O’Neill:

That Neeson’s expression of regret for his past thoughts counts for nothing in the eyes of the new morality police is striking, and worrying. It points to a streak of very anti-human fatalism in the Twittermobbing phenomenon. The new witch-hunters are not in the business of forgiving people — even people who confess to their one-time horribleness — because they fundamentally believe that people cannot change. That if you once had a racist thought you will always be racist. That if you made a homophobic joke ten years ago, you will be a homophobe forever. This is why they engage in the low pursuit of ‘offense archaeology’, as the journalist Freddie de Boer described the trend for poring over public figures’ every past statement and deed in search of something nasty or embarrassing that might be used against said public figure today — because they think people do not change, that their wickedness is ingrained, that they suffer from original sin and it cannot be washed away.

Intellectuals will always, always overvalue the need for theory, but again, there’s no need to ferret out philosophical convictions which likely don’t even exist. The “new witch-hunters” don’t have a robust theory of human nature underlying their actions; they’re motivated by the same base incentives and cynical calculations as ever. Liam Neeson is more valuable to them as a target of their insatiable spite than he is as a political ally. Or, to put it another way, all he is to the Twittermob is an entertainer. The entertainment might entail watching him star in a movie, or it might entail trying to destroy his reputation and career just because they can. Social media is the insane, decadent emperor, and we’re all gladiators competing for its amusement. Apparently Neeson’s latest performance has gotten the thumbs-down. So it goes.

We’re living in an age of social norms being in flux. Many would say t’was ever thus, but I’m specifically talking about the sort of flux facilitated by the rapid expansion of personal technology. Let’s recall that smartphones and social media have only been ubiquitous for ten years, if even that long. The effects, however, have clearly been profound and widespread. For our narrow focus here — namely, the birth of a vanguard of Javerts who specialize in public shaming and mob behavior — it’s enough to note the leveling effect whereby a resentful nobody with too much spare time can now easily attack and humiliate a celebrity. Imagine what a rush it must be to see someone famous or powerful having to grovel and apologize because of something you found and publicized from their social media history. Imagine what a heady feeling it would be to be part of a news story, mentioned in the same sentence with your formerly-exalted victim. If Nietzsche were here, he would instantly recognize it for what it is — a flexing of muscles, a testing of strength, an indulgence of all sorts of normally-forbidden urges as people, free from the old norms and hierarchies, recognize a newly-opened path to status and influence and set about exploring the boundaries. New norms are still evolving, but it will be a while before there are any widely-accepted rules about how to behave on this electronic frontier. It’s a tale of two Williams — Golding was much more percipient than Godwin about what is likely to happen in the anarchic interlude between the decay of old mores and the birth of new ones.

Still, not all of the mob behavior is attributable to a new breed of resentful revolutionaries practicing the same old cutthroat political maneuvering. There’s also a different primal reaction that plays a significant role. Some of the critiques of social-justice fanaticism talk about the concept of moral pollution. The reaction to Neeson’s story of attempted vigilante vengeance was visceral, not philosophical. The absolute refusal to countenance any ambiguity resembles a moral germophobia, a reflexive desire to avoid contamination. The easiest way to stay safe is to culturally quarantine all the bad people with their bad thoughts so they can’t infect the rest of us. It would be useless to explain that you can’t catch racism by sympathizing with a man telling a story of being enraged beyond reason by the rape of his friend. They’re too busy frantically washing their hands for the hundredth time today to entertain any nuance.

Perhaps next time in amateur sociology hour, we’ll consider whether the dramatic increase in diagnoses of Asperger’s and autism has any correlation with this widespread social maladaptation and inability to process ambiguity. Also, Marie Kondo: symbol of the zeitgeist? Maybe the trend of denouncing and renouncing the Four Olds (or the Four Unwokes?) is just a political form of decluttering.

…The Point Is to Change It

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That feeling when you click through to read a review of a book about Greek philosophy, only to be jarringly reminded that you’re reading the Nation:

As Adam Smith noted, perhaps with a hint of melancholy, we seem to help each other best when we act selfishly. He may be wrong, but is Stoicism really going to help us overthrow capitalism?

It Goes On Record and Multiplies at That

By in identity, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, tribalism 6 Comments

I’m bothered by the fact
You cannot take it back
It goes on record and multiplies at that

— Virgos Merlot

Joseph Epstein:

Subtlety under political correctness is out. So, too, complexity of character. To be politically correct one must also firmly believe that people do not change: If they were the least racist, sexist, homophobic forty years ago, they must still be so now.

Eh, I don’t think that’s true. The same double-standards of tribal solidarity apply here, as always. The rhetorical jazz hands of justification aside, Sarah Jeong and Joy Reid’s social media histories, for example, didn’t ruin them because they’re both members of the right tribe. They were allowed to “learn” and “grow” when someone less well-connected or less useful to other people’s ambitions (Razib Khan, Kevin Williamson) would have been abandoned. “Belief” can be as flexible as a yogi in service to political maneuvering. What’s more interesting, in my view, is to wonder why so many people go along with this charade. We all know better. We’ve all made off-color jokes and entertained scandalous thoughts. Not one of us would survive the Intersectional Inquisition with our reputations intact, even, or especially, those who are most loudly and fervently denouncing others. So why do we pretend that a decades-old photo or a disowned remark say anything significant about a person’s character? Laziness? Cowardice? Both?

Like quite a few people in this area, my next-door neighbor has a Confederate flag flying underneath his American one. That alone would be enough to make him persona non grata in the eyes of most bien-pensants, should he ever rise to their attention. But he and his family are good people. He’s given us much free advice and free labor when we’ve needed it. After every major snowstorm here, he gets on his small tractor first thing in the morning and goes up and down the road, clearing people’s driveways for them. When we had the severe ice storm in November, he and his son were awake for more than 24 hours straight, helping to chainsaw and remove all the downed trees in the area. Years ago, when a corner of the embankment by our bridge washed out, he had one of his crew come over with a backhoe and spend several hours digging out the creekbed and filling in the collapsed area (refusing to even allow us to reimburse him for the gas). When we offered to pay, or even feed, the guy doing the work, he told us no. Our neighbor, he said, had been the man willing to give him a job when he was fresh out of jail for drug possession, so as far as he was concerned, he was just paying that kindness forward.

I don’t know why he flies the Confederate flag. I don’t know if it’s just a generic expression of affection for rural Virginia or something more sinister. If I wanted to know, I’d have to ask him, but of course, I really don’t care. I know enough about him to have a sense of his character without having to rely on superficial clues. Again, we all know people like this, and we all know better than to entertain snap judgments and assume the worst. The most corrosive thing about this trend of replacing the personal with the political is that it destroys precisely that sort of nuance which allows people to forgive and trust each other without expecting perfection. In our laziness and cowardice, we willfully forget that most people are too complex to be reduced to a snapshot or a soundbite, even though our complicity won’t protect us when it’s our turn.

“Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is forever,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.

But Me No Buts!

By in language, writing No Comments

Ben Dreyer:

One thing to add: Writers who are not so adept at linking their sentences habitually toss in a “But” or a “However” to create the illusion that a second thought contradicts a first thought when it doesn’t do any such thing. It doesn’t work, and I’m on to you.

Funny enough, I’ve recently encountered the mirror-image problem — using an agreeable word to preface disagreement. The Lady of the House has a cousin who works in marketing for a mega-corporation, and he was telling us how, in recent communication training, they were strongly encouraged to use the word “and” instead of “but” — the latter being too abrupt, too argumentative, too likely to shut down discussion and make people feel unappreciated. “And that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!” you probably said, with an unwelcoming look of disdain on your face. See, that’s why you’re having trouble climbing the corporate ladder. You’re too belligerent and confrontational. Perhaps you need to try some trust-building exercises.

Elsewhere, in Sarah Lyall’s review of Dreyer’s new book, she says:

Meanwhile, the president of the United States thinks “seperation” is a word, once referred to his own wife on Twitter as “Melanie” instead of “Melania” and has explained his personal philosophy of capitalization by declaring: “I capitalize certain words only for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized!” (He also uses exclamation points like a text-crazed teenager, but that is another issue.)

As it happens, a reader emailed me last week, wondering if I had indeed meant to title a recent post “They Know What’s Best for You and I.” I greatly appreciated his discreet efforts to help me maintain a respectable appearance, like a pal calling your attention to the fact that you returned from the restroom with a yard of toilet paper stuck to your heel, but yes, I replied, I was quoting a lyric in that title and thus favored fidelity to the source over grammatical accuracy. (Later on in that same song, Mark Sandman sang, even more awkwardly, “They’re tryin’ to psyche us up for number World War Three.” I can’t begin to explain that one. It’s not like the modifier had to be misplaced in order to maintain the rhythm.) I added, just for the record, that I often disobey the conventional rules of capitalization in post titles as well. This is purely an idiosyncratic, aesthetic choice. Certain articles, conjunctions and prepositions just don’t look pleasing to me in lowercase, so I capitalize them. (I’ve served time as a paid copywriter, knowing and observing all the rules, so in my own space, I DO WHAT I WANT.) The alternatives — capitalizing each word or simply surrendering and going all-lowercase all the time — strike me as equally unattractive.

As recently as four years ago, I was still a practitioner of “logical punctuation,” an affectation I have since outgrown, as you can see by the fact that the previous comma resides inside the quotation marks.  I simply decided I preferred aesthetic tradition to logical precision in this instance. Sometimes my aesthetic compass leads me off toward uncharted frontiers, other times back to the warm embrace of accepted standards. That’s not to say I’m a grammatical anarchist, of course. As I told my correspondent, I tend to be a descriptivist in linguistic matters, though not a contented one. I have one client who lives in Italy, for whom English is a second or third language. Swell guy. Very gregarious and communicative. The problem is, his emails read as if they were assembled by a combination of Google Translate and a thesaurus. The words are spread across the page like highway rumble strips, or even speed bumps, which rattle my eyeballs hard enough to nearly detach my retinas as I traverse each line. Nothing makes me appreciate the rules of syntax more than staring into that abyss in my inbox. And yet we hear and read native English-speakers every day who are scarcely any more coherent. There may be no one true way to use language, but I’m convinced that some ways are more false than others.

Sparkling Armada of Promises

By in battling personal entropy, books, foolosophy No Comments

Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life. I eat well, meaning I choose foods that taste good and that will stave off hunger for as long as possible, like protein, fiber, and fats. I exercise—not because it will make me live longer but because it feels good when I do. As for medical care: I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me.

— Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

In her recent article for Harper’s, Lionel Shriver raised a point that I hadn’t precisely considered before. Comparing it to the current enthusiasm for demanding “total social and professional exile” for thought-criminals, she noted that during the O.J. Simpson trial in the mid-’90s, for the infinitely more serious crime of double murder, there was no equivalent demand to give his previous sporting and acting careers the collective silent treatment, to erase them from cultural memory. Were we more mature and sagacious then, capable of handling ambiguity, or did our vindictiveness simply lack the laserlike intensity that social media would later provide?

Anthony Kronman, in his magnum opus Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, explored the theme at length: having posited that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and completely free to act according to his own uncaused will, envious Westerners set out to usurp his throne and claim these qualities for themselves through scientific mastery. But what would we do if we had a God-like power to control and optimize existence? What vision of the Good motivates us, exactly? A life of unrestricted choice, free of suffering? What if our desire to eradicate all the “bad” parts of life, from the personal to the political, is just the immaturity of the perpetual adolescent who only wants to affirm a comfortable life of video games and junk food while wearing earbuds to ignore the sound of the responsibilities and tragedies of adulthood pounding on the locked bedroom door?

Ehrenreich has come to the conclusion that freedom paradoxically comes from relinquishing the obsessive desire for control, from accepting that ultimately “only one ship is seeking us.” A life spent in paranoid anxiety over optimizing one’s health is not worth extra decades or centuries of existence, no matter how many tools we develop to make it possible. Likewise, a life spent enraged by the idea that our fellow citizens are thinking the wrong thoughts or pressing the wrong button in the voting booth is a waste of time. The body politic can’t be purified and indefinitely preserved any more than ours can, and the efforts to do so will be rife with unintended consequences.

Obiter Scripta, no. 61

By in books, identity, obiter scripta No Comments

During this time, he also developed a love of pseudonyms. Franklin penned at least one hundred items under fake names throughout his life: Ephraira Censorius, Patience, the Casuist, the Anti-Casuist, Anthony Afterwit, Margaret Aftercast, and Silence Dogood, to name but a few. Pseudonyms were not uncommon for many eighteenth-century writers, in part because they reduced one’s chances of being prosecuted for sedition and because the writing could be evaluated on its own merits, instead of being subjected to personal attacks.

— Kembrew McLeod, Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World

On the pre-social media web of message boards and blogs, fifteen to twenty years ago, pseudonymity was still common. I loved thinking up a different nym for each blog I commented on. Now, of course, we’ve “progressed” to the Orwellian panopticon of SocMed, where most travelers have their Facebook or Google barcode tattooed on their foreheads for easy identification. This trend has dovetailed with the emergence of the new identitarianism, according to which there is no rational argument, only predictable expressions of racial/gender/class identity. The web has gotten no less vicious with the elimination of pseudonymity; if anything, the fanatical conviction that “error has no rights” has encouraged even more brazen assaults on reputations and livelihoods. Naïve reformers (and would-be totalitarians) insist that transparency is equivalent to honesty; in reality, a world in which everyone is exposed is a world in which everyone is suspicious and reticent. There is no honesty without the freedom to fib. Ask me no invasive questions and I’ll tell you no serious lies.

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