Outis Niemand
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Posts by Outis Niemand:
Now That We’ve Lost All the Reasons That We Thought That We Had
There is no denying that we live in disturbingly anxious and contentious times. Apocalyptic assertions, profanity-laden tirades, public shaming tactics, and crude weapons of moral accusation have increasingly taken the place of rational discourse and the steadfast rule of law. There is something ominous in the air, a faint but unmistakable scent of dissolution. Even before the shamefulness of the Afghanistan debacle, still unfolding as I write, there has been a growing and justifiable disgust with the self-serving incompetence of our leadership classes, and a sense of resignation to a future of ever-growing polarization and irreversible diminution of our national self-understanding. Hard times give rise to troubled thoughts; and when the hardness of the times is in large part a product of our own folly and improvidence, the thoughts are likely to turn inward, like knives in the brain.
— Wilfred McClay, “Has America Lost Its Story?”
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Although some of these ideals survived the war, they lost much of their intellectual appeal and cultural force. That the West lost confidence in itself was a direct consequence of the war. As Francis Fukuyama remarked, the “First World War was a critical event in the undermining of Europe’s self-confidence.” Or as Jacques Barzun observed, “the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction was the Great War of 1914-1918.”
When the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stated on the eve of the Great War that the “lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time,” he had little idea just how long darkness would last. Richard Overy characterized the decades following the Great War as “The Morbid Age,” one where cultural and intellectual life appeared to be haunted by expectation of a new Dark Age and an end to Western civilization. This was had more than the usual unsettling outcomes associated with a military conflict. It called into question the self-belief of the political and cultural elites of Western societies.
One of the most momentous and durable legacies of the Great War was that it disrupted and disorganized the prevailing web of meaning through which Western societies made sense of their world. Suddenly the key values and ideals into which the early-twentieth century elites had been socialized appeared to be emptied of meaning…One response to this existential crisis was to lament the sense of loss of the old order. But even those who possessed a strong conservative impulse understood that there was no obvious road back to the past.
The power of destruction unleashed during the Great War, with its unexpected and uncontrollable trajectory, and the failure of the intellectual legacy of modernity to make sense of this tragedy undermined society’s faith in future progress. Despite the rhetoric that this was a “War to end all Wars,” it was widely understood that four years of slaughter did not resolve any of the problems that caused the conflict in the first place. Premonition of the war to come in the future coexisted with fears of uncertainty about the capacity of society to absorb internal conflicts. Suddenly, the taken-for-granted assumptions about civilization, progress, and the nature of change lost their capacity to illuminate human experience. The prominent English historian H.A.L. Fisher acknowledged in 1934 that he could no longer discern in history the “plot,” the “rhythm and predetermined pattern” that appeared so obvious to observers in the past. “I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave,” he stated.
— Frank Furedi, First World War: Still No End in Sight
****
Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
‘Cause I’ve noticed all the others
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going
‘Cause I feel like the real reason
Is that you’re quitting and admitting
That you’ve lost all the will to battle on
Will the fight for our sanity
Be the fight of our lives?
Now that we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had
Still the battle that we’re in
Rages on till the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses
But the thought that went unspoken
Was understanding that you’re broken
Still the last volunteer battles on..
— The Flaming Lips, “The Gash“
We Could Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees
This is all in keeping with the current liberal project’s moral goal, which is creating lives devoid of any unchosen obligations and absolutely rife with chosen identities of fanciful and recent coinage. The problem is that it’s the unchosen obligations—or the obligations chosen but whose downstream responsibilities cannot be unchosen—that will give us the only real meaning in life. Family, children, our hometowns, our childhoods, our ethnic identity (if we have one), or the chosen-but-undoable commitments—marriage, joining the military, that company we start, religious faith—are the defining obligations where our selves really play out.
If I were to go back and say one thing to my younger self as a warning from the future, it’s this: the eventual cost of optionality in life—all the commitments you don’t make to preserve your ability to instantly change course—is usually not worth the upside that optionality eventually produces.
Growing up, I heard it from my parents many times. “We just want you to have options as you get older.” (My parents both think of themselves as curmudgeonly right-wingers, so it’s ironic that their advice to their eldest son would be so quintessentially liberal.) I remember when Matt P. dropped out of school in eleventh grade. We were all so shocked. “What’s he going to do about a job?!” we said to each other. It was as if he had boarded a ship to the New World in the sixteenth century. We expected a tragic end for him. (I Googled him and saw that he became a chef, so I guess he avoided homelessness, drug addiction, insanity, and all the rest.) It had been drilled into my head for years — get good grades to get into a good college. Join some clubs, sport teams, etc. to appear “well-rounded” on college applications. Whatever you do, don’t limit your options! One day, when I was about eighteen and in the very process of limiting my options by dabbling in community college while attempting to become a musician, I came downstairs quietly and overheard my parents talking in the kitchen. My dad was talking about me as if I, too, had boarded a ship to the New World, and was steeling himself for the inevitable disaster. I stood eavesdropping for a minute, then quietly continued out the door, realizing that for better or for worse, I was on my own here.
I have no regrets. I am practically the avatar of amor fati. But if I were to formulate a rule about the best environment in which to raise and guide children and adolescents, I would emphasize more muscular parental guidance and less laissez-faire “follow your dreams/passion and figure it out as you go.” When life is comfortable in general, and authority figures act almost allergic to “imposing” their values on impressionable minds, the result is often a lot of confused, aimless wandering while waiting for a “calling” to announce itself via a beam of light from the heavens. For me, luckily, I had such a strong, innate drive toward routine and habit that I was never in danger of becoming pathologically afraid of commitment. I have friends my age, though, who seem to be constantly fluttering between relationships, jobs, and locations for no real reason that I can understand. From my perspective, they give up too easily when faced with obstacles. They’re always on the lookout for something slightly more optimal. They seem reluctant to work within the discipline of limits. But as venerable philosophers have taught, a life well-lived means more closed and locked doors behind you. Damon Linker seems to miss this point — yes, “choosing not to choose” is something of a paradox, like most deep truths in life, but it’s not so much about the initial choice; it’s about accepting the consequences, the “downstream responsibilities that cannot be unchosen.” To be a tree or a tumbleweed; that is the question.
Are You Not Entertained?
Watched the new Chappelle show.
What struck me was how the entire monologue, start to finish, was about the woke politics of this or that protected group.
There’s nothing else to talk about in contemporary cultural spaces.
— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) October 7, 2021
Michael Brendan Dougherty had a similar impression. I suppose we’ve reached the stage of complaining that all we do is complain about wokeness, for lack of anywhere else to go, conversationally speaking. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was; we talk about wokeness because that’s where all the cultural energy is, sadly enough. I’ve started reading Ross Douthat’s book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, which seems to encapsulate a lot of my own thoughts from the last several years. The ideal of progress, which has carried Western civilization so far for so long, seems to have run into the law of diminishing returns. We’re sated with affluence and jaded by our technological marvels. There are no inspiring frontiers to be found. “High” culture almost seems ashamed of its own existence, and even popular culture has devolved to endless remakes and reboots of films and music from decades ago. The parasitical ideology of wokeness has taken advantage of this weakness and paralyzed its hosts — religion, politics, and culture — allowing its young to devour them from the inside. Establishment comedy itself has become just another form of po-faced preaching from people too oblivious to realize that they have become the insufferable tartuffes they used to mock, which is pretty ironically amusing, when you think about it.
I’m not an artist or a thinker. No one will ever pay me for my insights. I’ll never get to thank you for attending my TED talk. But for whatever it’s worth, it seems to me that these complaints about our woke preoccupations miss the point. There will be no “return” to a healthy, inspiring ideal of progress and civilizational self-confidence circa — gestures vaguely at the period between the American Revolution and World War Two — whenever your chosen golden age was. All we can do is make the best of the time in which we happen to find ourselves, with whatever tools come to hand. And so, rather than lament the fact that Dave Chappelle devotes the entirety of his latest comedy special to the trendy topic of transgenderism, we can ask, well, why wouldn’t he? That shit is hilarious.
I mean, come on. It’s simply funny to watch people desperately try to pretend to be other than they are while insisting that everyone else play along with them. It’s funny to watch the cultural ruling class trip over themselves to praise absurdities for fear of being treated as uncharitably as they themselves have treated countless other people. It’s funny to see our age’s contribution to the perennial human comedy, where the actors go out of their way to avoid self-awareness and, in the process, stumble from one slapstick adventure to another. And is anything funnier than having humorless prigs stand there stamping their feet while insisting that this is not funny and you will stop laughing this instant? Self-deception, vanity, status-seeking, folly; it’s all in there. Wokeness, like it or not, is what passes for religion and politics in our day. Well, then, until the extraterrestrial barbarians come to take over, let’s treat it accordingly and have some fun with it.
A Grateful Universe
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XVIII)
The first library sale in almost two years! I didn’t find any wish list treasures, but I found plenty of books I’m willing to try for two or three dollars. Some of the old crew was there — Muppet Man, Yuri and Svetlana, and Heroin Chic(k), among others. The last of these had a buddy with her who looks a lot like Wesley Yang. He, Muppet Man and I pondered how much respect anyone would have for the political and literary luminaries of the eighteenth century if they were our contemporaries in the age of social media. We agreed that Ben Franklin would probably be in trouble for sending dick pics to various women, Samuel Johnson would probably be furiously editing Wikipedia, and Boswell would be writing all about it for TMZ. It was good to be back.
Interlude: King Buffalo, “Morning Song”
Who Will Save the Sane?
“The thing with Brandon, you know, he’s a good guy, but he needs to stay away from those drugs. He’s seeing things that aren’t there.”
Jeff and I were talking about one of the guys who works for another business in the building. Last week, one of the contractors called me over to let me know that Brandon has been having visual and auditory hallucinations. He wanted me to know about it so that I wouldn’t be shocked by any unexpected bizarre behavior. The consensus is that he’s back on drugs, but maybe it’s some kind of preexisting paranoid schizoid tendencies too. He thinks there are people on the roof talking to him. He waves at nonexistent people across the room. He stares unsettlingly at people “with a Joker smile,” as one woman put it. He talks about being stalked and chased by shadowy figures whom he can’t describe or name. Oh, and he apparently thinks the Lady and I are undercover cops. Or FBI agents. I’m not clear which, and I’m not about to ask for clarification.
I admit this gives me pause. Many things, presumably, are different in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but I imagine undercover cops are not considered benevolent figures there either, especially to drug addicts with guilty consciences. But aside from the pressing self-preservation angle, I’m curious about how, exactly, this all works. How does his brain function well enough to allow him to get up at the right time each morning, operate a motor vehicle, and perform his job (which he reportedly can still do with no problems), but fail him in other ways? What keeps him from hallucinating a Deep State hitman or a shapeshifting alien in the passenger seat of his car, causing him to freak out and lose control of the steering wheel? When he asks someone in the office about an activity last week, an activity that never happened, and they tell him so, how does he process that? Does he think, “Why is she lying to me? I know that happened!” Or does a glimmer of self-awareness appear, causing him to think, “Wow, maybe I should stop snorting elephant tranquilizers”? Or when the owners of the building tell him he’s not allowed to be there after a certain time because he’s making people uncomfortable when they’re alone with him in the building — why isn’t he confused, wondering what he’s done wrong? How does his internal narrator fill in the increasingly-large gaps in the plot?
Yesterday, we were talking with the Lady’s cousin via Zoom. Among other topics, we talked about Covid denialism, anti-vax fanaticism (a fanatic being one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject, as the old quip goes), and epistemological relativism in general, i.e. why do so many people seem to believe so much crazy shit? I mentioned Brandon’s story, and compared it with the social-media derived lunacy of some of our common relatives. Brandon’s problem, I suggested, was perceptual. He’s literally failing to perceive reality accurately, even before he starts theorizing about it. Jim’s problem, on the other hand, is more conceptual. He perceives events accurately enough, but he builds logical chains of reasoning that arc out into the void, and before you know it, he thinks that there are child sex-slavery rings being run out of Walmart, and there’s going to be a civil war soon because Trump is about to be reinstalled as president, and in Australia, the police are literally tackling people in the streets…yes, but wait for it…and injecting them with the vaccine. Also, everyone who got the vaccine is going to die. (Fact check: missing crucial context in the form of a clear timescale, but technically true.) These beliefs are slightly more abstract, and therefore more expendable. Brandon gets irritated when people suggest that he’s deluded, so they’ve stopped arguing and started humoring him. If we survive several more years despite being death-injected, Jim won’t have an epistemological crisis. He’ll probably improvise an excuse on the spot, shrug, and move on. Likewise, when someone pointed out to him that the picture he saw of Justin Trudeau handing an oversized novelty check, Ed McMahon style, to a terrorist, was just a Photoshop job, he waved it away with a “Bah!” It didn’t sway his opinion that Trudeau was still the sort of knave who would have done that, even if he technically didn’t. The perceptual infrastructure in his mind is sound enough, even if the maintenance man is taking psychedelics. However, if he informed us that the cows had told him that he shouldn’t get vaccinated, it would be time to worry. As long as it’s just Facebook telling him that, eh, whaddayagunnado.
Then again, I know a woman who thinks she communicates telepathically with her cow. I started this post to flesh out my thoughts on the difference between ordinary-crazy and crazy-crazy, but the more I ramble, the less sure I am that I know anything at all.
The writer Bruno Maçães talks sometimes about what he calls the “metaverse.” As far as I know, he hasn’t fleshed it out into a full concept or anything, but in context, you understand that he means the shared fictions, especially those which are media-derived and disseminated, that increasingly crowd out the real world. In the metaverse, we just barely escaped a fascist tyranny, or maybe it was a patriarchal theocracy. In the metaverse, the Associated Press complains that the Taliban “failed” to appoint any female ministers, as if they ever intended to do so. In the metaverse, the “mostly peaceful” riots of last summer were both righteous uprisings of the oppressed and false-flag operations of the radical right, depending on the day of the week; the horrific shambles of the Afghanistan evacuation was a glorious success; and the mass hallucination of Border Patrol agents wielding nonexistent whips against Haitian migrants spreads all the way to the White House itself. Truly, we’ve come a long way from those superstitious, irrational days when Goody Proctor could be denounced for cavorting with the devil in the churchyard at midnight.
So, yes, Brandon, poor guy, is “seeing things that aren’t there.” Immediately afterwards, Jeff told me what he thought was really happening. “He’s seeing our ghosts.” It turns out, he honestly believes there are ghosts in the building. The contractor who originally warned me about Brandon’s erratic behavior backed him up on this. “Oh, yeah. I’ve been working here late at night, and you’ll see something out of the corner of your eye, or it’ll get real chilly all of a sudden…”
“Or your dog will start barking at nothing you can see!” Jeff piped up. “Then there was that time when this guy had this big old flag that started moving by itself, with no fans being turned on…I thought he was gonna piss himself!” Because the building was built prior to the Civil War, he speculates that it may have been used as a hospital during one of the nearby battles, so, Q.E.D, really. Civil War ghosts. It’s the only plausible explanation.
I have no grand conclusions. All I know is that my operating assumption is that everyone is a delusional nutjob once you scratch the surface, and this is why all conversations should be superficial and brief.
Fortune-Teller Favors the Bold
If the definition of political courage is making big calls crisply and effectively, despite obvious risks and unknowable consequences, then it seems to me that President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson qualify right now. They’ve made calls recently that go beyond the usual mush of compromise and calculation and might even merit being called bold.
Biden braved the Blob and got out of Afghanistan. We will debate how he did so, and with what consequences, for quite some time. But he still did it. Obama tried and failed. Trump made a big song and dance and signed a surrender deal. But Biden actually got us out.
This wasn’t inevitable. The defense and foreign policy establishments had plenty of their usual arguments — threats of terror attacks, pabulum about recent “progress,” the avoidance of humiliation — to slow-walk presidents into inaction, but they didn’t succeed this time. Biden had sufficient experience to see through their bluff, and the fortitude to fight back when they raged against the withdrawal. Yes, it was horribly messy; tragic in the ways wars always are. But it had that mystical quality of an actual decision: doneness.
American presidencies do not run on policy — they run on magic.
They run on the superstitious (and, indeed, idolatrous) belief that there is something magical about the person of the president, that he enjoys the powers of at least a demigod, and that the nation’s prosperity and security are mystically connected with his person and his ritual performances in the democratic agon. That is how the 9/11 attacks came to be, in a very strange but true sense, about George W. Bush. They became something more than an event.
When the nation is insulted or attacked, then the president must respond in some symbolically satisfying way or risk losing the Mandate of Heaven.
…After the airport attack — the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a decade — President Biden was politically compelled to do something, lest his Big Man Mojo be seen to wane and the Mandate of Heaven slip from his quavering grasp. That compulsion surely was felt all the way down the chain of command. And it resulted in taking the first opportunity to make a theatrical show of force — in this case, against a car with seven children in it.
…The prevalence of symbolism over all else means that presidents are compelled to act — even when the action is pointless or destructive. Sometimes, that is an ill-considered tariff or a ridiculous promise about Mexico paying us to build a border wall. Sometimes, it is showing up at a disaster scene as though the presidential presence brought with it mystical healing powers rather than resource-consuming distraction. Sometimes, it is the mystical laying of presidential hands upon a Skutnik during the State of the Union address.
Sometimes, it’s a carload of kids being burnt on the altar of muscular executive action.
As I’ve said, Sullivan is excellent sometimes, but at other times, like here, he makes me gasp in disbelief that anyone could proudly hit “publish” on something so eye-wateringly stupid. “Boldness” divorced from skill and practical results is nothing to be proud of, certainly not a freestanding virtue. Like a typical intellectual, Sullivan has once again allowed himself to be awed by empty symbolism. This isn’t surprising. Symbolism requires critics and interpreters to make the counterintuitive seem plausible, a job perfectly suited for those like him. The plain truth of a halfway-senile executive and a humiliated superpower lashing out in weakness to disastrous effect is evident to anyone who isn’t lost in clouds of abstraction. Williamson is working on a new book about the very theme he addresses here, our idolatrous worship of the presidency. One can only hope that the ostensibly-conservative Sullivan reads it and learns something. But who am I kidding? He’ll probably just find himself fascinated by the next book by some idiot Marxist who wants to abolish the whole idea of meritocracy and higher learning.
Interlude: Turtle Skull, “Halcyon”
The Necessary Beating
How did it get to the stage where the liberal Left think a former male U.S. Army Special Forces soldier beating the s**t out of a woman for sport is a victory for equality?
They’re so lost in identity politics they can’t see how ridiculous & misogynistic they’ve become https://t.co/1C5srdOfoF
— Martin Daubney ✌🏻🇬🇧 (@MartinDaubney) September 12, 2021
George Orwell famously excoriated W.H. Auden for the line, “The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder,” in his poem “Spain.” Orwell took him to be a typical example of an intellectual for whom the murder of human beings was just another abstraction on the road to utopia, “the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” (Auden, for his part, insisted this was a misinterpretation, and that he was not excusing totalitarian crimes.) The stakes are a bit lower in our day, at least for now. Progressives, in their omnipresent desire to appear morally superior and more sophisticated than conservatives, are currently required to accept the absurdity of a man beating up a woman for sport and call it progress. The right hook of history is strong, and it lands flush on the jaw of injustice, or something like that. Many, if not most, would admit privately that this sort of thing is grotesque, but publicly, well, there are tribal considerations. As Orwell also said in an introduction to Animal Farm, “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid‐Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.” Likewise, it is “not done” to state the obvious here for fear that removing the trans block would cause the whole progressive Jenga tower to collapse.
In his excellent book The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope, Roger Scruton devotes a chapter to examining each of seven different fallacies he identifies with “unscrupulous optimism.” In a later chapter, “Our Tribal Past,” he offers a more realistic “state of nature” myth to replace the more well-known, but far less-plausible, versions by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, showing how all of these fallacious ways of thinking are most likely the unfortunate but understandable products of life in our ancestral environment, where most of human experience has occurred. Tribalism is the default state of our species. The fact that we have managed to create the cultural space for the “prophet” to appear and attempt to hold us to a higher standard than tribalism is a cause for joy, but this arrangement is fragile and always under threat. Prophets often become scapegoats, the ones who can be sacrificed without guilt for disturbing tribal unity.
Perhaps the spoiled, bored LARPers of both the right and left will get their wish, and we’ll return to political violence, where loyalty to the tribe replaces doubt and ennui. Until then, though, while we have little to fear in the way of threats to life and limb, perhaps we could stop accepting obvious lies as “necessary” gambits in a game of multi-dimensional chess.
Obiter Scripta, no. 117
Resentment and self-righteousness: the two emotions that can last a lifetime and that never disappoint.
— Theodore Dalrymple, Midnight Maxims
I got vaccinated back in the spring. I have not experienced any “lasting effects,” other than steadily improving my lifts at the gym, which I suppose I can live with. I know of several people who are unvaccinated, for various reasons. I understand that we’re all supposed to be angry with them now, for reasons that have yet to be explained clearly to me. I don’t want to see any of these people get sick and die, but I also recognize that the freedom to decide how and why to risk your life is an important one. So, I’m indifferent. Mainly, I’m more concerned about a more perennial threat to societal well-being: the burning desire to hate some outgroup who “deserve” it. I imagine this is an especially heady thrill for progressives, who spend most of their time denying themselves any opportunity for harboring inequitable thoughts. To finally have the chance to let go of all that resentment and self-righteousness without guilt must be an ecstatic release.
And This Gives You Power Over Me?
The sheer unseriousness of Western liberalism goes without saying but it comes into a dangerously sharp focus at moments like these. pic.twitter.com/EezTucYelq
— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) September 8, 2021
If you spend any time sloshing around in the giant colostomy bag for thoughts known as Twitter, you’ll sometimes encounter a phrase, “tweeting through it.” It refers to amusing instances in which an individual, having beclowned hizzorherself, studiously ignores all the mockery and continues tweeting about other topics, hoping for the jeering crowd to lose interest and go away. This seems like a real-world equivalent. Do Western governments seriously believe they can just keep repeating the same mindless bromides about diversity and inclusion to avoid facing up to their humiliating defeat, as if these stupid notions have any purchase outside of the affluent bubble they’ve created for themselves, as if they have any leverage to dictate terms to anyone here? Yes, I’m sure the Taliban’s HR department will get right on that. They certainly wouldn’t want us to invade them again!
What genuinely puzzles me is this: who is the audience for these performative statements? Surely the State Department can’t believe the Taliban cares about Western obsessions with inclusivity and gender-equity. But then, who is supposed to be impressed by this? American citizens? After the sublime display of incompetence, ineptitude, and wishful thinking over the last few weeks, what sort of simpleton listens to this feeble rhetoric issuing forth from an administration with a desiccated, dementia-addled figurehead and feels anything other than mortification? Why do they even bother saying this? Could they actually…believe their own bullshit?
Interlude: Forming the Void, “On We Sail”
The White Prog’s Burden
The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.
Another day, another step closer to reality melding with the Onion and/or a Chappelle’s Show skit.
One of the contractors at work is a white supremacist. He drives a Chevy HD dually truck with “Farm Use” license plates, listens to country music while working, and wears shirts that say “Black Votes Matter: Trump 2020.” Yes, he’s also a black guy, and his father runs a home for troubled youths, but he is still a white supremacist, because obviously, as a progressive philosopher once mused, it all depends on the meaning of “is.” Some of you no doubt think something as trivial as his race can acquit him of charges of white supremacy. What you fail to understand is that the definition of the term no longer depends on such real-world referents as skin color, heritage, or even objective reality. Everything is interior now; haven’t you heard? Kant’s basic idea, that our experience of the world primarily takes place inside our heads rather than “out there,” escaped from the dense thickets of his impenetrable prose into the hands of callow undergraduates, with predictable results. Whether you’re a man or woman depends on your mood in that moment; our progressive political class has come to hold this “truth” as self-evident. In a similar way, the updated definition of “racism” is “anything that offends the capricious racial sensibilities of white progs.” PoCs who refuse to acknowledge their place in the Great Chain of Political Being as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic party are top of that list. Of course Larry Elder offends white progs, who, when you think about it, are the real victims here, as they usually are. Thankfully, their selfless dedication to making the world a better place outweighs the justifiable sense of grievance they carry due to how often the ungrateful subjects of their magnanimity keep disappointing them.
Because I Am Attached to You
Here’s my essential point: the purpose of lifting weights is to look better for the vast majority of people doing it, and if this is true of you then you should admit that to yourself and structure your program accordingly. I lift for one reason and for one reason only, and that’s vanity. I don’t lift for functional strength because I simply don’t need functional strength in my life very often. If I did, my priorities would change. Right now, in the life I’m actually living, I don’t work for a moving company, play defensive end, or regularly have to fight off sabretooth tigers. Instead, I’m your typical human being who feels pretty good about himself but still sometimes likes external validation and would like to appear attractive to other human beings even though I’m happily in a relationship, for all kinds of evolutionary and enculturated reasons. For looking good lifting weights has vastly better returns for a given amount of work than cardio. (For me!) So I lift. I suspect many other people lift for the same reasons, even if they won’t admit it.
At Friday’s training session, I leaned back against the wall to catch my breath while my trainer adjusted the weight on the bar for the next set of deadlifts. My shirt clung to my torso with sweat. My muscles practically hummed from exertion as I waited for oxygen to replenish my energy. Undeniably tired, I was also at a peak of focus and alertness. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed sports or exercise knows what it’s like: you feel purified, perfectly tuned, purged of all superfluity. Nothing mattered right then beyond getting my lats set, my hips back over my heels, and my breath timed correctly. Every Friday morning, I feel a slight trepidation when anticipating the afternoon session. Squats today? Oh, man, my legs feel tight. I wonder if I’m going to have to do chain squats, or whether we’ll finish with hack squats, Bulgarian squats, or one-legged machine presses. I don’t know if I’m fully up for it… And each time, all that distracting chatter fades away with the first lift. You know it’s something you should do, you know you’ll feel better once you’re through it, but inertia’s counsel speaks up and tries to offer a defense of his client anyway. Isn’t this just life itself in miniature? The good that I would I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do. Paul sounds like he knew the shame of skipping leg day and eating junk food instead.
In his book Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, Sam Fussell mentioned, in the course of explaining why so many young bodybuilders start using steroids, that it takes around three-to-five years of serious training to develop the deep muscle striations that really make one look impressively shredded. For adolescents or young men, this can seem like an unbearable eternity. For a middle-aged man who identifies with the slow-and-steady philosophy of the tortoise, this is encouraging. Why, I’m halfway there already! But while, all other things being equal, I’d prefer to look fit rather than schlubby, it’s more about taking quiet pride in the effort it took to attain that level of fitness. I don’t go to the beach or walk around shirtless or even have social media accounts where I post flattering selfies. It may not be the most intuitive connection, but this all makes me think of something Michael Oakeshott wrote about the “conservative disposition”:
The general characteristics of this disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. 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: not, Verweile dock, du hist so schon, but, Stay with me because I am attached to you.
A twenty-year-old kid who works for us on weekends asked once, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” He was surprised by the Lady of the House’s response: “Wherever my loved ones are.” If I could have any physique I wanted, which would I choose? The one I grew into, the one I worked for. For me, getting stronger and fitter isn’t a strategy to attract hot babes. It isn’t about competing with other guys to see who has the biggest biceps or the heaviest one-rep personal record on the bench press. When I take that quiet pride in seeing my measurements and numbers progress, I’m not esteeming my resemblance to ancient Greek ideals of beauty, and I’m not pretending that I’m more admirable than any possible alternative. My muscles and I have a shared history together, from arthritic lows to new personal bests in deadlifting. I built that. It’s the affection of familiarity, the memory of time spent working together toward a common purpose, the satisfaction of getting close to your best possible self. If that sounds too precisely narcissistic, imagine books instead of muscles. Would you feel insulted to hear someone dismiss your bookshelves as merely a way for you to impress others with your intellect and erudition? Doesn’t it trivialize the enjoyment of reading to reduce it to a means to an end? So too with a “mere” physical activity like weightlifting. It may not be anything special by objective standards, but it’s mine and that makes all the difference.