Damian

About Damian

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Damian :

Never Again Is What You Swore the Time Before

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender 2 Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

If we try to look on this episode with the eye of a future social historian, on the assumption (by no means certain) that western societies will someday come to their senses and that their social historians will be at least moderately sensible, what will we hypothesise? How to explain that societies that prided themselves on having overthrown superstition and on basing themselves to an unprecedented extent upon scientific enquiry, and that had a higher percentage of educated people than ever before in human history, nevertheless believed in the grossest absurdities? What could have possessed them?

I’m not much for prognostication. I’m content to just marvel at the absurd spectacle of daily events without trying to show how clever I am by guessing how it’s all going to turn out. However, I have been convinced for a while that the trans-cult is destined to fade into ignominy, and that once it does, all the invertebrate progressives who supported it are going to slink away and pretend they never had nothin’ to do with it, no sir. Now, as whistleblowers are followed by attorneys general, and even the Paper of Record begins tentatively pushing back against the pressure of activists, I feel even more confident in my opinion that the modern-day glass delusion is on its way out. What could have possessed them? Well, there are many circumstantial factors that could be cited — activists desperate for a new civil rights crusade, an individualist tendency in liberalism taken to its extreme, social contagion spread by new social media technologies — but, remember, it was only forty or so years ago that people convinced themselves that daycare centers were hotbeds of sexual abuse and Satanic rituals, and none of those factors played a role then. The question assumes that these episodes are the deviations requiring explanation. What if lunacy and irrationality are actually the default setting, and “normality” is the aberration that requires explanation?

Go, Bagehot, Go!

By in language No Comments

Isaac Waisberg:

Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence) on Walter Bagehot:

The first thing to know about him is how to pronounce his name. It is Badjet.

As one whose reading has always far outrun his hearing, this was useful, to have a mental sound file to go along with the text. I’ve never read Bagehot, nor heard him spoken of, so even though I’ve seen his name many times, it never “sounded” in my head. It might as well have been like when Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph for a few years. I see the particular arrangement of letters, I know to whom it refers, and that’s where it ends. (I had read Barzun’s book a long time ago, but obviously this never stuck with me.) Now, though, thanks to an old cartoon theme song, I feel confident I’ll never forget how to pronounce it. 🎶Doo-dee-doo-dee-DOO, it’s Walter Bagehot…🎶

What Brand of Skin Do You Occupy?

By in foolosophy 2 Comments

David Harsanyi:

According to surveys, upwards of 75 percent of adults with tattoos experience at least some remorse about their body art. One of the most common regrets is that they were too young when they got their tattoos. Of course, most of us engage in questionable and embarrassing behavior in our youth, but not all of us are branded with a lifelong pictorial reminder of it. The other most common reason cited for tattoo regret, tied with the first, is that there has been a personality change and the art no longer represents the person’s existence or worldview. Listen, once upon a time you thought Kurt Vonnegut wrote poignant novels and you pretended to enjoy and understand David Lynch movies. No one is pointing fingers here. If I hadn’t been a chicken when I was young, I’d probably have a portrait of Johnny Rotten tattooed on my chest right now. I’d also be desperately searching for a professional tattoo fixer — which is a real thing — to alter that image into Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. To be young is to be ridiculous, but to be walking around in your old age with the vestiges of youthful indiscretion must be torture.

Another leading cause of tattoo regret is that the art was poorly rendered and unprofessional. At some point over the past decade, it seems to me, many Americans began simply showing up at the closest tattoo “parlor” — tattooists work in “parlors” in much the same way that men frequent “gentlemen’s” clubs — and instructing the nice man with the extended earlobe to “do what you will.” The randomness of tattoo placement is becoming more noticeable. People just look messy. Their art looks increasingly amateurish. All I can think is, My God, you’re all going to regret this.

This again? Look, speaking from the ink-stained perspective of middle-age, there are plenty of things I regret more than my tattoos — moments of cowardice, terrible relationships, choices unexplored, things either said or left unsaid, and even those are all dissolved in the healing waters of amor fati. They all played a necessary role in bringing me to where I am, so they have to be accepted as part of the package. Regret? Torture? Ironically, this sounds more like the perspective of adolescence than adulthood, to be incapable of imagining anything worse than looking silly or feeling awkward. If the worst thing you have to worry about as a senior citizen is how your pectoral tattoo looks like a paintball splotch, well, you’ve probably lived a remarkably comfortable life.

Granted, there are plenty of particular tattoos that most would agree should never have left the realm of imagination; you can google “regrettable tattoos” to amuse yourself with other people’s terrible choices. Personally, I think all neck tattoos look horrible, to say nothing of ones on the face. If I were thirty years younger, I’d most likely see them as no big deal. My own preferences are similarly conditioned by the time when I came of age. But just for the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that one day, tattoos can be effortlessly applied, altered or removed, no different than clothing. You can have an elaborate back piece with full arm sleeves, or take it all off for a bare minimalist look. While I can imagine now how it would look if I had chosen a different color, design, or placement for any of my tattoos, I don’t think I would actually choose to alter any of them, even if some magical new technology did exist to make it possible. The reason being, the commitment is what made them meaningful to begin with. They represent my first attempts as an adult to reckon with what I, and life, were all about, independently of what my family or society in general told me. They represent those first conscious, tentative steps through doors that will close and never reopen. Of course those choices we make in late adolescence won’t entirely represent how we feel thirty years later. Of course they’re often heavily influenced by the maudlin romanticism of youth. But how long are we supposed to hover in suspended animation while trying to keep all options open? How, outside of the messy act of living and learning things the hard way, are we supposed to acquire the perspectives to even judge our embarrassing missteps? If anything, my advice to my younger self would be to lighten up and not take everything too seriously.

Superficial From Profundity

By in foolosophy, music No Comments

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Occasionally, I meet people who are unimpressed by Mozart. They insist that his music is “light” and “simple.” They are irritated by the myth-making around him. They’re so used to hearing about him that they’ve relegated him to being part of the wallpaper. I must confess that I’ve never understood this. In my view, Mozart isn’t a composer; he’s the composer. He’s the Shakespeare of the genre. He’s The One.

The writer Douglas Adams has an oft-repeated line that “Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.” I agree with Adams’s characterization of Beethoven, and I agree with his characterization of Bach. But he’s wrong about Mozart. Mozart doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be human, because Mozart barely was human. I forget who said that they didn’t believe in God but that Mozart made them wonder, but whomever it was, I understand it. The scale of Mozart’s talent is such that it’s almost impossible to accept at face value without wondering whether he was merely transcribing from somewhere else.

Cooke seems to have an Epicurean sensibility of his own, as evidenced by this and his previous appreciation of P.G. Wodehouse. I love Mozart and Wodehouse for the same reason: it’s a delight to watch virtuosos at play, especially when they’re so obviously enjoying themselves.

You Know They’re Going to Come for You and Drag Your Silly Name Into the Mud

By in atheism, history, the great awokening No Comments

Ed West:

The writer Peter Juul has identified three religious strands to the awokening. Most important is anti-racism, with whiteness and white supremacy ‘as the mystical and all-pervasive source of evil in the world’. Juul writes how ‘the concept of “white privilege” stands in for the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, complete with ritual confessions of sin that can never fully absolve a person of their fallen state’. White supremacy is a form of evil that explains all sorts of injustice, however logically implausible.

Then there is climate apocalypticism, which has more straightforward biblical undertones. I’m concerned about climate change — I’m fairly pessimistic about most things — but I agree that there is an obvious apocalyptic element to the movement, which is not backed up by the (admittedly worrying) scientific models.

Finally, there is gender identity, whereby someone’s ‘soul’ might be separate from their body. This last belief is the most recent of the strands, and in some ways the most extreme. It also feels the most obviously religious; the endless wrangling debates about whether someone has a female or male essence is perhaps the most theological our politics has got in years.

That this is proclaimed by people who otherwise declare that we ‘trust the science’, including members of the scientific establishment, makes it doubly strange (of course, what many people say about this is issue in public varies with what they say in private). But then, I suppose, it is only strange if you don’t appreciate that politics and religion are inherently linked.

I don’t know that history is merely “one damn thing after another.” More accurately, we could say, “This again? Are you kidding me?” History displays less imagination in rebooting old ideas than Hollywood does. Is it really so strange to consider that we may be moving back toward a political definition of atheism, as in ancient Rome, in which failure to pay obeisance to the official state cults can get one charged with impiety and exiled from professional life? Not to me. Luckily, the Epicurean injunction to “live unnoticed” was in my DNA from the beginning. I’ve been secretly heresying all my life.  And so I say, to all my newly-minted “atheist” friends:

The Real Work of Epicureanism

By in books, philosophy No Comments

The real work of Epicureanism, then, is cataloguing, organizing, and minding the store of our desires. Remember that Epicurus doesn’t think happiness results from mere subtraction of corrosive desires. We must keep the store stocked with necessary items, which means devoting the time and energy we once expended in corrosive arenas to cultivating the prudence, habits of mind, knowledge, virtuous dispositions, and close relationships with like-minded people that make tranquility possible for creatures like us.

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

I must admit, my ataraxia had been chronically ruffled by my inability to find a pleasurable book about Epicurus to read. I was being deprived of the literary companionship of one of my closest philosophical friends, you might say, and we know how much value Epicurus places on friendship. Thankfully, Austin’s book came along to calm my troubled waters and serve as a corrective to Catherine Wilson’s book of a few years ago. Austin is conversational without oversharing, funny without forcing it, and thankfully, her attempts to make Epicurean perspectives relevant to current issues are only lightly applied, so we are blessedly spared from hearing what “Epicurus” would have thought of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, Greta Thunberg, or Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter. This is one of those rare books about philosophy which I eagerly looked forward to picking up again each night.

Mediocre Talents

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions, nietzsche No Comments

The only fault one can impute to genuinely fine writings is that they are usually the cause of very many bad or mediocre ones.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

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[Beethoven] quoted a contemporary comment on artists: “Unfortunately, mediocre talents are condemned to imitate the faults of the great masters without appreciating their beauties: from thence comes the harm that Michelangelo does to painting, Shakespeare to drama and, in our day, Beethoven to music.”

— Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

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Andrew Tate seems to fancy himself as a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, a strong, powerful individual that has risen above society’s norms and become the best version of himself. But besides both men being accused of misogyny, there is nothing else the two share in outlook. Asceticism and a love for eternal, idealised archetypes at the expense of the ever-changing and evolving world of the senses would have left Nietzsche distinctly unimpressed.

— Alexis Papazoglo, “Andrew Tate, Nietzsche and the Matrix“

The Great Pretending

By in foolosophy 2 Comments

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Which is all a long way of saying that I think that we profoundly underestimate the importance of sports in our culture. I am often told—by progressives and “post-liberal” conservatives alike—that the classical-liberal worldview that I hold is too hollow to survive because, while it creates space for different sorts of people, it doesn’t believe in anything itself. I disagree with this assessment for many reasons, but the most important among them is that it spectacularly misses the point. The American system of government is not supposed to be the source of meaning in people’s lives; it’s supposed to provide a framework within which people can find meaning without being subjugated by the predilections of other people. That being so, the threat is not that the government will remain assiduously neutral and bore everyone into totalitarianism, but that, having been given the chance to take part in a host of unmolested institutions, the citizenry will politely decline to do so. When figures such as myself are asked which institutions we have in mind, we often rattle off a familiar list: families, churches, charities, book clubs, etc. But, perhaps because it sounds frivolous, we tend to leave out sports. We shouldn’t. Sports are a key source of meaning, and, more important still, they serve as a safe outlet for some of the least pleasant sides of human nature.

I agree with Cooke’s classical liberalism, but I’d go further and give voice to a thought that I’ve only considered in a unfocused way up until now: I think the whole point of life is to play, to be silly. Yes, of course, there’s all sorts of serious work that needs to be done first, so that we don’t starve or freeze, but I think humans have done a pretty good job of accomplishing that. Once all that is secured, though, it’s time to pretend. That might mean we pretend fictional characters in movies or books are real for a couple hours, or we pretend that it’s vitally important that the men in red shirts throw or kick the ball to one end of the field before the men in white shirts get it to the opposite end, or we pretend that we’re fighting in World War 2 by pressing buttons on a controller in front of our television. Even animals understand this. My dog certainly is concerned to make sure his bowl has food in it twice a day and that the perimeter is free of unauthorized intruders, but he’s never happier than when we sit on the floor, rolling his ball around the room for him to chase, pretending to desperately want it back from him while he pretends to warn us away from it.

I asked the Lady of the House what percentage of our daily conversations consists of inside jokes or other forms of silliness, and she suggested 70%. Seems reasonable enough to me. At the very least, you might say that the majority of our dialogue is an extended exercise in creative writing. Puns, allusions, zingers, bombast, anything but straightforward talk. It seems like one of the defining characteristics of your most intimate relationships is the amount of time you spend in a shared fantasy world, where little is exactly as it appears.

One Side of a Personality

By in books, foolosophy, literature as moral fiber supplement, moralizing No Comments

Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism.

— George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character. As Ye once riffed (prophetically) during a live performance, “I get my quotes from movies because I don’t read, or from, like, go figure, real life or something. Like, live real life; talk to real people; get information; ask people questions; and it was something about, ‘You either die a superhero or you live to become the villain.’” As clever as that sounds, receiving all of your information from the SBF ideal of six-paragraph blog posts, or from the movies and random conversations that Ye prefers, is as foolish as identifying as someone who chooses to eat only fast food.

Many books should not have been published, and writing one is an excruciating process full of failure. But when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue.

I would defend the practice of reading simply because it is, so to speak, my home. As Michael Oakeshott put it, “What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity.” I have always been a reader and always will be, and as such, the aggressively illiterate types that Williams talks about are beneath my contempt — although, I would add, I didn’t need to know that Kanye West, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Sean McElwee hated books to gauge their lack of character; that should have been obvious to anyone beforehand. All that said, though, I have no desire to proselytize on behalf of the “virtue” of concentration and refinement, let alone witness to the heathens. I know many people who will cheerfully inform you that they haven’t read a book since high school, and yet they are still good people in all the ways that matter. Conversely, I would just point to any number of authors and academics as proof that a lifetime’s immersion in literature doesn’t necessarily do anything to develop character or general intelligence. By all means, spend your time reading. Just don’t fall prey to the conceit (that particularly seems to afflict writers for the Atlantic) that you’re “progressing” in any way by doing it.

If You Want to Be Perfect, Then Go and Donate Your Books

By in books No Comments

Rhiannon Cosslett:

This phenomenon is best illustrated by a poster that for a while was following me around the internet in advert form, under the misapprehension that because I love cats and read books – and, indeed, have written a book about a cat – it had my taste in interior decor pinned down. The poster shows a cat and bears the slogan: “THAT’S WHAT I DO, I READ BOOKS, I DRINK TEA AND I KNOW THINGS.”

Apologies if you own this poster, but to me it encapsulates everything that is smug and middle class about the cult of book ownership. I don’t mean reading – provided you’re lucky enough to still have a local library, that is a pastime that is accessible to almost everyone. No, I specifically mean having a lot of books and boasting about it, treating having a lot of books as a stand-in for your personality, or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one “know things”.

I understand that certain books can feel vital and precious. I grew up in a family where there were a lot of books on the shelves, though we couldn’t always afford new ones. I’ve never forgotten the privilege of that, nor of the position I’m in now, where I am sometimes sent books free of charge. Perhaps that’s why I find the idea of hoarding them rather sad – there’s even a Japanese word, tsundoku, for allowing books to pile up unread. Instead, I choose to donate mine to places where there are people who can most benefit from them, or leave them on the wall outside my house, where they always disappear.

I don’t mean to display my repulsive middle-class roots in front of my betters, but if Mrs. Cosslett spent a little less time humblebragging about how she transcended her privileged past and became a codex Communist, a Bodhisattva of book-donating, a one-woman welfare state for the literary indigent, and a little more time rubbing elbows with us fishwives and costermongers, she might have been aware that the whole “That’s what I do, I [blank] and I know things” meme template comes from Game of Thrones, and is generally used as, you know, a joke. (I even have a sticker on my laptop at work that says, “That’s what I do, I pick things up and put things down, and I know things.” See, it’s funny because I do indeed spend my time at both labor and leisure picking things up and putting them down, whether boxes or barbells, and also because…oh, never mind.) Ah, Guardian, you never disappoint.

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