books

Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places

By in books, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Who am I? An illiterate peasant of the Middle Ages was better equipped to answer that question than many people in advanced societies in this century. He may only have lived until age thirty — but he spent his days among family and in towns, practicing a shared faith, and thus developed a vivid sense of those to whom he was elementally connected, not just in the course of his life but before birth and after death. Every one of the assumptions he could take for granted is now negotiable.

— Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics

I don’t think Eberstadt intended this little aside to be representative of her argument, which is that many of the social pathologies that plague us are traceable back to the detrimental effect of the sexual revolution on the family. One can certainly see how people with a weak sense of self could be attracted to fringe cults like gender-fluidity and ethnic pride out of a desire to belong to something, anything, although I don’t think that this is necessarily a rational response to circumstances. Sometimes people are just bored, stupid, or malicious, regardless of how well they’ve been raised. As long as we’re wishing upon a star, sure, it would be nice to make single-parent homes, divorce, and abortion rare and generally unnecessary. But as the above paragraph starkly illustrates, there’s always a trade-off. As long as there’s any freedom to choose, some people will choose unwisely and suffer for it.

On or About December 2007 Human Character Changed

By in books, the cult of multi, the great awokening No Comments

CBC:

She estimates more than 50 per cent of her school’s library books are gone.

In the spring, Takata says students were told by staff that “if the shelves look emptier right now it’s because we have to remove all books [published] prior to 2008.”

Takata is one of several Peel District School Board (PDSB) students, parents and community members CBC Toronto spoke to who are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new equity-based book weeding process implemented by the board last spring in response to a provincial directive from the Minister of Education.

They say the new process, intended to ensure library books are inclusive, appears to have led some schools to remove thousands of books solely because they were published in 2008 or earlier.

“The Peel District School Board works to ensure that the books available in our school libraries are culturally responsive, relevant, inclusive, and reflective of the diversity of our school communities and the broader society,” said the board.

Directive 18 instructs the board to complete a diversity audit of schools, which includes libraries.

“The Board shall evaluate books, media and all other resources currently in use for teaching and learning English, History and Social Sciences for the purpose of utilizing resources that are inclusive and culturally responsive, relevant and reflective of students, and the Board’s broader school communities,” reads the directive.

PDSB’s “equitable curation cycle” is described generally in the board document as “a three-step process that holds Peel staff accountable for being critically conscious of how systems operate, so that we can dismantle inequities and foster practices that are culturally responsive and relevant.”

I would comment, but I’m too busy building an underground library before the Past Eaters figure out what I’m up to.

Whither Are We Moving?

By in books, the geist of the zeit No Comments

It’s strange that a book published in 2021 could already seem outdated, but that’s the case with Andrew Potter’s On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year Is the Worst One Ever. At fewer than 120 pages, it forgoes argumentation in favor of assertion, which leaves the author’s priors standing on their own. If you don’t happen to agree with those priors, it makes the experience irritating.

We’re told that “the bill for our exploitative approach to the natural world is finally coming due” in the form of climate change, which is happening even faster than we expected (allegedly).”Today the antipathy to reason is found predominantly (though still not exclusively) on the right,” he says (there is no mention in the book of the cultish belief in gender fluidity which has permeated all our major institutions). Cancel culture is acknowledged, but only as a reaction against the trollish provocations of the right. Reactionary populism comes in for a kicking — its characteristics include “the rejection of science and other forms of expertise, hostility toward immigrants [and] hatred of the mainstream media.”

This is what I mean about the book’s outdated feel — who, having witnessed the public health establishment commit reputational suicide in the summer of 2020, would not feel suspicious of experts claiming to speak for science? Who, having read the Twitter files, would not feel a healthy hatred toward the mainstream media? And where have the latest nativist protests against illegal immigration come from? Massachusetts and NYC, those…notorious strongholds of of Trumpist populism? As the old song says, there’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear, but it seems evident that the world in which Potter’s version of liberalism made sense is changing fast. Even faster than the climate (allegedly).

Nothing Was Inevitable

By in books, eric hoffer, juxtapositions No Comments

Howe’s prediction rests on a model that at its core is timeless and simple. In fact, it can be summed up by a four-line Internet meme: “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” Howe’s version manages to fill most of 500 pages with further nuance, however.

At least in the Anglo-American world that Howe has surveyed, history appears to move in predictable cycles of about 80 to 100 years that, resurrecting a Roman term for the concept, he calls a saeculum. These cycles each have four distinct phases—or “Turnings”—of around 20 to 25 years that always flow in the same order: a “High,” an “Awakening,” an “Unraveling,” and a “Crisis.” Turnings are driven by the changing of generations, or those portions of the population whose collective character was shaped by coming of age amid the societal conditions specific to a previous turning. Each generation’s character, embodied by one of four generational archetypes (“Artists,” “Prophets,” “Nomads,” and “Heroes”) is largely determined by its proximity to the last Crisis. Howe goes into great detail about each generation, but for our purposes all you really need to know is that Prophets, coming of age knowing only the softness of a spring High, begin to dream of utopia during a hotheaded summer Awakening and rebel against the world that their Hero fathers built, seeking to tear it all down during a quarter-century-long autumn Unraveling. This process culminates in a winter of true Crisis (a Fourth Turning), which a new generation of Heroes must struggle to resolve, after which they establish a new order, leading to another High. And yes: the baby boomers of the 1960s counterculture are our most recent Prophets, which means the millennials will have to be our Heroes.

Don’t be (too) alarmed, Howe urges his readers. We’ve been here before, multiple times in fact, and managed not only to survive but also to thrive. Previous Fourth Turning crises (each occurring about a century apart) have included the Great Depression and World War II, the Civil War, and the American Revolution. Before that: England’s Glorious Revolution, the Spanish Armada Crisis, and the War of the Roses. Each was preceded by the same societal trends we’re seeing now, he argues, offering supporting data. But each cyclical crisis, in the end, gave birth to stronger nations.

Howe is grimly adamant, however, that “sometime before the mid-2030s, America will pass through a great gate in history” commensurate with these past crises.

— N.S Lyons, “Present at the Destruction”

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Once events have taken place, a horde of learned commentators demonstrate that the unexpected was inevitable. Actually, chance, stupidity, and cowardice were chief factors. Nothing was inevitable.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Private Thoughts

By in books, juxtapositions No Comments

This is for a nook in a library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image. Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.

— Montaigne, “On Giving the Lie”

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More than once, too, I have pleased myself with the notion that somewhere there is good Company which will like this small sententious Book—these Thoughts (if I may call them so) dipped up from that phantasmagoria or phosphorescence which, by some unexplained process of combustion, flickers over the large lump of gray soft matter in the bowl of my skull.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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The musical progressives of his time, their ears and minds full of Wagner’s epochal agenda for opera and art and humanity, condemned Brahms’s art as “the private thoughts of a clever man,” writing only for the private thoughts of his listeners. But after the betrayals of this century by one epochal agenda after another, the private thoughts of a private craftsman may be the best thing we have left.

— Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

Wallowing Without Thought

By in books, music No Comments

The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering — wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion — is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.

— Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

I feel seen, and not in a good way!

I’ve always been aware that I don’t “get” classical music on its own terms, and that’s my loss. I’m aware that there are all sorts of subtle nuances that my coarse understanding is incapable of detecting. Like many simpletons, I just know what I like, even if I have no idea what the composer was trying to communicate, or how a composition would have been understood in context. I imagine it’s like trying to follow a conversation in a foreign language, having to rely entirely on tone and body language to have the slightest sense of what’s going on. Well, life is full of trade-offs and opportunity costs, and that just happens to be one of mine.

All Hail the Book Conqueror

By in books 2 Comments

I can’t listen to audiobooks for the same reason I can’t listen to podcasts. If I’m sitting still, I quickly get sleepy listening to someone’s uninterrupted voice droning on (I believe Sun Tzu noted this in the first chapter of his famous book on parenting advice). If I’m active, with an audiobook playing in the background, I can’t focus on it. The Lady of the House can spend all day with earbuds in, listening to books while doing other things. I evidently lack the necessary railroad switch in my brain to do that. Reading books is for the couple hours before bed, when there are no other distractions.

I do sometimes read e-books, but I still feel like something’s lacking in the format. Sometimes the combination of convenience and cost-effectiveness wins out — “I can have this right now, for half the price, or wait a week to get the physical copy.” But it never quite feels the same somehow. I have a better sense of location in a physical book. I often remember where I encountered a particular passage— left-side page, near the bottom, about three-quarters of the way through — which is useful when I want to look for it again. In an e-book, I have no such sense. There’s no physical geography to an e-book; it’s just a blizzard of words in a shapeless landscape. I have to digitally highlight anything I want to find again (admittedly, it is useful to have a menu option to see all of your annotations).

Ultimately, though, in an age of sensitivity readers, I think it’s foolish to trust anything important to the cloud. We’ve already heard of incidents where a previously-purchased e-book was stealthily “updated” to eliminate words or thoughts that suddenly became unfashionable. Eric Hoffer said that the features of an idealist loudmouth always contain the lineaments of a commissar, and Lord knows we have a surplus of that type these days. I’m afraid that sensitivity reading is probably a growth industry. It’s basically a profession designed to absorb the glut of overeducated, otherwise-unskilled orthodoxy-sniffers who can’t do any useful work, so I expect it to expand in the coming years. Buy physical copies of any media you want to keep.

The signaling charge is the easiest to sidestep. I do have hard copies of books on shelves all around my living room. If I never have people over to my house, though, who am I showing off for?

Want to Want

By in battling personal entropy, books, bring me the head of nicholas carr No Comments

Epicurus thinks that if we’re honest with ourselves, though, it’s more that we want to want greater understanding, freedom from our phones, time to cultivate and maintain close friendships, etc. Or, to be more precise, we wish our desire for these things were more powerful than our desire for less important things. Epicurus might say, “Now, of course you want to walk out the door to enjoy the beautiful fall afternoon with your friends, and it’s in fact quite easy to walk out the door, but people often do not leave because they want to stay alone indoors on their phone more.”

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

Freddie deBoer:

Both authors reference research that demonstrates that, while exercise has a number of health benefits, weight loss isn’t among them; Dimbleby has a chapter titled “You can’t outrun a bad diet”, which underlines the fact that exercise increases food cravings, which prompt eating that undoes calorie loss. This has grown to become a bit of conventional wisdom over time, but the age-old advice to eat less and exercise more is hard to shake.

But what can you do? Van Tulleken suggests… just about nothing. He’s insistent that genetics, the presence of unhealthy food options, and marketing essentially hold fat people hostage. Ultra-processed foods, he argues, “hijack our brains”. Even his brief final chapter on trying to live without UPFs is positively fatalistic, mostly counselling people not to hold out hope. As is the fashion, he laboriously argues that poverty effectively prevents the impoverished from making any decisions at all.

In 2015, when Jurgen Klopp took over as manager of Liverpool FC, one of the major changes he made was to bring along a backroom staff, including a nutritionist and a conditioning coach. Such specialists weren’t entirely unknown in the sport, but, shockingly to me, they weren’t ubiquitous either. Multimillion-dollar athletes at the top level at their profession would still eat the equivalent of fast-food takeout after games, which itself was still an improvement over the not-too-distant past, when players often partied like rock stars. Anyway, Klopp, who had a background in sports science himself, brought a stereotypical German efficiency with him and his staff and set about raising the standards. The club would release promotional videos for the fans, behind-the-scenes stuff, showing the staff at work and having them describe their methods and goals. It was then that I realized I had a serious interest in nutrition and sports science. I couldn’t get enough of it. The Lady of the House suggested one day that there was a gym in town where I could indulge my interest, and the rest is history.

A couple years ago, I convinced my stepson to start doing a nutrition program, even if he didn’t want to train yet. He’s lost seventy pounds since then, without doing any exercise at all. It’s not even a diet, per se. You just learn how to combine the optimal amounts of protein, carbs and fat at each meal to achieve whatever your goal is. True, certain foods don’t fit within the meal plan. He hasn’t eaten pizza, ice cream, etc. in two years. But it’s not like you’re forced to eat nothing but salads. I have more possible variety in my own meal plan than I could ever make use of, plus, because I also train, I get a cheat meal once a week. Point is, it doesn’t really take superhuman levels of willpower and self-control. Best of all, it only costs twenty-five dollars per visit. I go in every two weeks to get my body fat and proportions measured. My stepson only has to go about once a month. Twenty-five, maybe fifty dollars a month, to have expert advice on how to structure your diet and adjust it if needed. Trust me, fellows, this is not esoteric knowledge or unattainable luxury.

I’ve often mused out loud that if I ever had the chance to meet anyone from Liverpool FC, I wouldn’t choose any of the players. I’d want to meet Klopp, of course, but also Mona Nemmer, the nutritionist, and Andreas Kornmayer, head of conditioning and fitness. Oh, for a chance to sit and pick their brains! Dreams aside, though, I still often marvel at the fact that here, in a small, unremarkable town in the middle of Virginia, for an insignificant amount of money, I can still get the benefits of a comparable level of expertise. I don’t blame individuals for not realizing how easy and affordable it can actually be to be fit and healthy. I do feel nothing but hatred for people who profit by promoting the fatalistic message that technology, marketing, genetics, whatever, have robbed you of your agency. We’ve always been constrained by “structural” forces, whether man-made or natural, but within those limits, there’s still enough freedom left to use. As Epicurus knew back in antiquity, though, the relevant thing is whether you actually want what you claim to want. Honesty and self-awareness are, as ever, rare commodities. We’d rather lie to ourselves and pay others to lie to us even more. Anything to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives.

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