books

The Devil Take All the Imitators and Followers

By in books, nietzsche

My goal is not for everyone, nevertheless it is communicable, on account of similar humans as well as because those opposed will gain strength and pleasure from it to formulate their essence for themselves, too, and to realize it as working spirit. I want to help all who seek their model by showing how one seeks a model: and my greatest joy is encountering the individual models that do not resemble me. The devil take all the imitators and followers and panegyrists and admirers and devotees!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

This might be easy to misread as mere hauteur: he’s “not for everyone,” he’s writing for “similar humans.” Lots of people say that and mean, “I’m for a better everyone.” Nietzsche is saying something stranger, and rarer: my aim is communicable without being recruiting. The point isn’t to gather admirers; the point is to create a kind of wake turbulence in which different types, sympathetic and hostile alike, clarify themselves. He would even prefer that those opposed to him will “gain strength and pleasure” from the encounter, because the opposition forces them to formulate their essence — to stop living on borrowed slogans and become, in his phrase, a “working spirit.” (That is: not a mere opinion-haver, but a stance that actually animates a life.) It’s a surprisingly big-picture, almost civic-minded ambition.

“The devil take all the imitators…” The disciple is the least interesting kind of agreement: it’s agreement that produces no new organism, only a photocopy. He’d rather be misunderstood by a live mind than perfectly understood by a dead one. This is why he’s so hard on evangelism. In The Will to Power he asks why idealists, the moment they find some “bizarre ideal,” feel compelled to propagandize for it, almost as if they have no right to it unless everyone else recognizes it too. The hipster and the conformist secretly shake hands. One asks the herd what to like; the other asks the herd what to like so he can like the opposite. Both are still crowd-directed.

Nietzsche’s better alternative isn’t “always be avant-garde.” That’s just a different uniform. The alternative is inner-directedness — liking what you like because it answers something real in your temperament, your needs, your curiosity, your sense of life. If it’s popular, fine. If it’s obscure, fine. If people join you, fine. If they don’t, also fine. The goal is not to found a sect of “Nietzscheans,” but to help people (including opponents) become more sharply themselves. He can sound almost Zen-master-ish — “go away ”— because he knows that the easiest way for a reader to evade the hard work is to turn the writer into an idol. The writer becomes a permission slip to stop thinking. He’d rather you take your own ideal as far as it will go, and then take heart, because others will fly even farther.

The Chair Repair Republic

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

When a man gets frightened or unhappy about the United Nations or the problems of world peace, and wants to recover his happiness, the best thing to do is find some choked kitchen drain and try to clear it. There is hardly a man on earth who is not proud when he sees the water go down the sink smoothly with a clear gurgle as the result of his morning’s labor. Or, instead of committing suicide over the tragedy of Czechoslovakia, one should find out if there isn’t a shaky chair in the house and see if he can’t fix it and make it safe to sit on again. After all, one can save the future of Czechoslovakia only by saving oneself and keeping oneself happy and alive first. The sovereign remedy for world chaos seems to be to provide every household with a hammer and a monkey wrench and a plentiful supply of nails.

— Lin Yutang, The Best of an Old Friend

A man who can’t unclog a sink but is “following world events closely” is basically worshiping abstraction. He has outsourced his sense of agency to headlines. You could substitute Czechoslovakia with Gaza or Greenland, and world peace with ICE, and the lesson stays the same. If we’re realistic about our position in the world, most have us have no power, influence, or money to “change the world” with. As individuals, we can at best be a perfectly placed rivet in a skyscraper, and that doesn’t seem like much, but you might notice a dramatic difference if it weren’t there.

But even Lin’s point isn’t “don’t care about the world,” it’s “stop confusing agitation with agency.” World-scale crises can matter deeply and still be beyond your reach. If you let your nervous system live on a steady diet of catastrophe, you end up trading responsibility for spectacle and calling it virtue. The drain and the shaky chair are a kind of triage: they pull you back into a realm where cause and effect are real, where competence is measurable, and where you can actually keep yourself steady, functional, and sane. Attention isn’t power, and outrage isn’t influence; but a household, a neighborhood, a job done well, a person helped — these are places where your actions register. Get your own water running cleanly first, and you’ll be in a position to be the symbolic rivet you can realistically be, instead of the trembling spectator of events you can’t change.

Obiter Scripta, no. 152

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

I have always composed my writings with my whole body and life: I do not know what “purely intellectual” problems are.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

Same here. When I write, I’m not filing papers in a cabinet labeled Ideas; I’m trying to metabolize experience into something I can understand. Often, I’m not even sure what I think until I start trying to write it down. Philosophy as “how to live” begins in the pressure of actual days and tries to make a life more lucid.

Cultivate Our Temperament

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

It is in our hands to cultivate our temperament like a garden. To plant experiences in it, to strike out others: to found a beautiful quiet avenue of friendship, to be conscious of secret views upon glory — to have ready paths to all these good spots in one’s garden so that it may not fail us when we need it!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

I like that he envisions an active role in what most people treat as a given. Temperament not as a horoscope, but more like a landscape — worked, shaped, improved. You don’t have to deny what happened to you, but you also don’t have to treat it as your permanent job title. The modern temptation is to explain yourself until the explanation becomes the self: “My father was aloof, my mother was manipulative — therefore this is what I am.” That story may be true as history, even useful as diagnosis; but it’s a terrible constitution. It turns causes into fate. Nietzsche’s instinct is to demote the past from sovereign to raw material: what can I do with this? what can I plant? what can I prune? what paths should I keep clear so I can reach the good places when I’m under strain? Some experiences you cultivate because they make you steadier: friendships that calm you, habits that keep you sane, small “views” that restore perspective. Other experiences you strike out — not by pretending they never happened, but by refusing them unlimited squatter’s rights. And even the worst things are still compostable. They can become material that, once broken down, feeds something better.

Tomorrow Answers Everything

By in battling personal entropy, books, foolosophy, nietzsche

The unfortunate who all at once want to attain virtue through a transformation! And despair at a relapse! Whereas practice makes perfect.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

January is when my gym turns into a little Ellis Island of self-improvement. New faces. New vows. The staff gives tours to people interested in signing up. I’ve seen a fair amount of them these last few weeks.

I’m glad people are trying. I mean that. But I also start from a skeptical stance, because the whole thing is so heavily scripted. The cultural calendar has a “New Year, New Me” plotline built into it, and plots are hypnotic. They lend borrowed conviction. They make you feel like you’re already halfway changed, just because you’ve announced the intention to change.

I’m not proud of it, but January brings out my inner Snafu from The Pacific — the guy who tells Sledge not to bother learning the new replacements’ names because “they’ll be dead in a few days.” The gym translation is obviously less tragic: most of them won’t be dead, however much they feel like it after a few hard training sessions. They’ll just be gone by February, evaporated with the resolution-enthusiasm. And I hate that this cynical little reflex exists in me, because the decent response is the opposite: be friendly anyway, and help the ones who end up staying.

Transformation is a romance-novel word. It promises a before-and-after montage. It suggests that what you really need is not a new habit but a new identity — some sudden moral molt where you wake up and discover you have become the kind of person who loves broccoli and Bulgarian squats. Relapse, in the transformation story, isn’t “part of training.” It’s “proof you are who you always were.” One missed week becomes an existential referendum. The spell breaks, and the old self trudges back in. But relapse is only catastrophic if you were depending on feeling to do the work.

That’s why I trust the April or September sign-up more than the January sign-up — maybe irrationally. The April/September person doesn’t have a national chorus chanting behind them. No “fresh start” motivation. No holiday guilt. Just an ordinary Tuesday and a decision that doesn’t come prepackaged with fireworks. I could be wrong about this (the calendar is a convenient on-ramp, and I’m sure plenty of January people stick), but the vibe is different: April/September feels like someone quietly taking responsibility rather than auditioning for a reboot.

Motivation is what you have when the gym is new and the possibilities are infinite. Practice is what you build for the day when the gym is crowded, your sleep was trash, the parking lot is icy, your knees feel 10 years older, and your brain starts bargaining: You can go tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. Practice is what happens when tomorrow comes and is not better.

Obiter Scripta, no. 151

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta

Daily I am astonished: I do not know myself!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

According to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud said that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” And yet, here we have it otherwise, straight from the horse-hugger’s mouth. More proof that Nietzsche was ahead of his time: he revealed Freud to be a charlatan even before the old bullshit artist’s career had begun.

“Know thyself” is the foundation stone of Western philosophy. You try to know yourself; you discover an impulse you didn’t authorize; you explain it; then you discover the explanation was also an impulse. At that point you begin to suspect that Delphi wasn’t offering guidance so much as taunting humanity with a red-dot laser pointer and watching us pounce on the wall for three thousand years.

Yippee Cahiers!

By in ai, books

For much of the past year, I’ve been making an effort to seek out more aphoristic, fragmentary, short-form writing. I want material that’s more suggestive than declarative, stuff that allows me to play off of it in my own writing. One recommendation that came up was Paul Valéry’s five-volume notebooks, Cahiers. In his book In a Cardboard Belt!, Joseph Epstein suggested that the first two volumes were “more literary and, in a distant sense of the word, personal” than the remaining three volumes, which were more scientific and philosophical, so I set my sights on those, and will let one of my aristocratic patrons secure the other three at some point.

Unfortunately, each volume is typically priced at eye-watering sums. Patrick Kurp confirmed that they are marvels and taunted me with the fact that he lives in civilization and thus can borrow them from the university library whenever he wants, but I, out in the sticks, couldn’t even secure an inter-library loan for them. I resigned myself to setting price alerts in hopes of pouncing upon a used copy accidentally listed for $10.00 instead of $100.00, but my hopes weren’t high.

Don’t listen to the anti-AI fanatics. ChatGPT found me copies from the University of Toronto Press for 60% off, which, with the conversion rate, amounts to them practically giving the books away for a song. It appears that they don’t ship directly to the States, but thanks to my contacts north of the border, I can work around that. I will not be denied!

The Mundane Comedy

By in books, history, literature as moral fiber supplement, the statusphere

Roman Helmet Guy:

But if this answer is correct, it leads us to a troubling conclusion: New books are not worth reading. Why? Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything. Especially not those of us who are likely to get platformed by a major publisher.

…In conclusion I leave you with a rule of thumb for actually understanding the human condition by engaging deeply with a wide breadth of human experience and perspectives: Half the books you read must’ve been written before WW2, half of those must’ve been written before the American Revolution, and half of those must’ve been written before the fall of Rome.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the fashionable line among the cognoscenti was that reading literary fiction makes you “more empathetic.” Whatever the research actually said, the audience mostly heard the part it wanted to hear: Look at how admirable I am — so sensitive, so intelligent, so morally improved by my refined tastes. Now we get “long-ago-ism,” the mirror image of presentism: read “the classics” because modern culture is all groupthink, and old books will make you wiser and set you apart from the ignorant mob. And again, you can watch the audience seize the incentive: Look at how amazing I am for doing this.

It’s a perennial spiritual comedy. The self is infinitely adaptable. It can turn romance novels into “self-care,” and it can turn Thucydides into a caste marker. Either way, the point isn’t the book; it’s the glow. “I only read dead authors” can become its own Reddit — a pre-approved identity with pre-approved contempt.

The sober objection isn’t that old books are bad. It’s that they’re being sold, explicitly or implicitly, as a way to graduate from the human condition: read the right authors and you’ll become less stupid, less credulous, less vain, less herdlike. But no matter whether you read J. D. Robb or Herodotus, you’re still a confused animal, prone to the same rationalizations, the same fits of resentment, the same stupid mistakes, the same posturing and self-deception that humans have always practiced. Reading Thucydides won’t prevent you from wanting to be admired; it may simply supply better words for the desire.

In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James notes the deeper difficulty: the apparently unexceptionable call to support the classics against the fashions conceals a dilemma, because all the classics were fashions once; new classics have to come from somewhere, and may arrive disguised as fashions when they do. That should be enough to ruin any attempt to outsource discernment to a publication date. “Old” is not a sacrament, and “new” is not a sin. Time may alter the odds, but it doesn’t relieve you of judgment. You never get to stop weighing, measuring, and deciding what’s alive and what’s dead.

In fact, the fetish for old books can produce its own refined version of cliché. We mock the man for whom every political event he dislikes is Hitler; the helmeted antiquarian can fall into a classier variant, where every modern event has its precursor in Herodotus. The past becomes a stencil. You get the pleasure of analogy without the burden of particulars. But the particulars are precisely what matter: technology, scale, speed, institutions, incentives — everything that makes this moment different from the ones you’ve read about. The classics are not an answer key; they are lenses, and lenses can distort as well as clarify.

There’s also a more mundane point: the raw material of “human nature” isn’t scarce. You can find it in Target as easily as in Tacitus. The difference is that the Target experience doesn’t come with an introduction by Penguin Classics. Vanity, cruelty, tenderness, boredom, status games, self-serving moralism, genuine decency — the whole human condition is on display in the food court and in the Facebook comments for anyone who cares to look.

But the mall and the timeline don’t arrive pre-sifted. The chaff is still attached to the grain, and the sorting has to be done by you. That’s exactly what the would-be aristocrats resent. They prefer the fantasy of sitting in a chair with a pipe, imbibing the “best of” insights through a curated narrative, spared the indignity of wading through the unwashed muck of reality where the same human motives appear without a classical frame. But if you can’t find human nature in the mall, you won’t find it in Plato either.

So yes: read old books. They puncture the spell of the present. They remind you that your era’s obvious ideas are contingent, and therefore questionable. But don’t read them as a way to feel inoculated against folly. The past is useful precisely because it shows how little we change — and how easy it is to tell ourselves that we have.

I See the Better and Approve It, But I Follow the Worse

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, ohferfucksake, socmed

Michael Sebastian:

I don’t advocate ditching podcasts, ignoring the videos on your phone, or deleting all your social-media apps (though showing some self-restraint would help me). But the decline in literacy, and its many symptoms, should worry all of us. “As you have probably noticed,” James Marriott wrote in his 2024 essay, “the world of the screen is going to be a much choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.” Such a world surely encourages the rise of authoritarianism and an illiberal society.

This compact nugget of clichéd anti-thought appears in an article titled “The Lost Art of Reading an Actual Book.” Yes, God forbid you actually stop the behaviors you claim to abhor in order to make time for the ones you claim to adore! You don’t want to read more; you want an alibi for not reading, served with a side of moral credit. Your revealed preference is perfectly clear: you prefer the algorithmic pacifier, the hyperkinetic feed that makes your brain dribble out of your ears, while you narrate your own surrender as if it were a weather report. “We should worry,” you say, as though the problem is ambient, like humidity, rather than the result of a hundred tiny daily choices you keep making on purpose. And the most embarrassing part is the adolescent tone: this airy, shrugging helplessness, like it would be extreme or weird to close the apps that are devouring your capacity for sustained attention. Do you even hear yourself? If you can’t resist the world’s gaudiest digital harlots, you don’t have a literacy crisis; you have a self-respect crisis. I swear, social media is the whiskey-and-smallpox of intelligent reflection.

His concluding sentence is, “The postliterate age is going to be super lame.” Jesus Aitch. The art of reading an actual book wasn’t lost; it committed suicide.

To the Mind Through the Stomach

By in books, education, foolosophy, lin yutang

A “scholar’s” writing consists of borrowings from other scholars, and the more authorities and sources he quotes, the more of a “scholar” he appears. A thinker’s writing consists of borrowings from ideas in his own intestines, and the greater thinker a man is, the more he depends on his own intestinal juice. A scholar is like a raven feeding its young that spits out what it has eaten from the mouth. A thinker is like a silkworm which gives us not mulberry leaves, but silk.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Lin wrote before we started talking about the gut like a parliament of microbes, but the metaphor only gets nastier and better. Most minds are ecosystems: some are rich with good flora, others are overrun with citation-bacteria that turn every sentence into gas. The difference isn’t whether you borrow. Everyone borrows. It’s whether you ferment. The scholar tends to preserve: he jars the past neatly and labels it. The thinker allows a controlled spoilage. He leaves ideas in the dark long enough for them to change, for sweetness to become bite, for borrowed sugar to turn into alcohol. That’s why some writing tastes “alive” and some tastes “safe.” One has a living culture in it; the other has been sterilized to survive committee review.

He mentions raven and silkworm; you can think of others. There is the ruminant scholar, solemnly chewing the same cud until it becomes an approved doctrine; there is the tapeworm scholar, living off other people’s meals while contributing nothing but appetite. But there is also the bee-scholar, worth defending: he gathers widely and gives honey.

I’m not a great thinker by any means, but I’ve found meal-planning essential if I want to keep up any decent supply of “intestinal juice.” Left to myself, I’ll snack on whatever’s loudest and sweetest and call it dinner. So here’s a sample menu for humane digestion and steady mental recomposition. For protein, a small serving of Nietzsche — spicy meatball material, best taken in bites, not by the bowl, unless you want to be up at 3 a.m. arguing with God — followed by Isaiah Berlin as the corrective salad that keeps you honest and un-drunk on your own rhetoric. Tolstoy is the slow-cooker stew: a once-or-twice-a-week meal that leaves you full, moral, and slightly inclined to judge your own life. Eric Hoffer is plain, sturdy carbs: beans-and-rice prose. Not fancy, not frosted, but it sticks to the ribs and does what it came to do. Montaigne is the daily bread and cheese: steady, companionable calories that keep you from getting weird. Henry James is the fibrous greens: you chew longer than you think you should, and then you notice your attention has gotten stronger. Samuel Johnson is roast beef and strong tea, for days when your mind needs to sit up straight. Proust is the weekend prix fixe: you don’t do it on a rushed Tuesday, but when you do, the aftertaste lasts for days. And Wodehouse — Wodehouse is sponge cake and champagne. Almost no nutritional claims, just joy and fizz and impeccable timing: a palate-cleanser that keeps the whole regimen from turning into a penitential diet.

Charm and Flavor

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The best formula for the object of reading, in my opinion, was stated by Huang Shanku, a Sung poet and friend of Su Tungp’o. He said, “A scholar who hasn’t read anything for three days feels that his talk has no flavor (becomes insipid), and his own face becomes hateful to look at (in the mirror).” What he means, of course, is that reading gives a man a certain charm and flavor, which is the entire object of reading, and only reading with this object can be called an art. One doesn’t read to “improve one’s mind,” because when one begins to think of improving his mind, all the pleasure of reading is gone. He is the type of person who says to himself: “I must read Shakespeare, and I must read Sophocles, and I must read the entire Five Foot Shelf of Dr. Eliot, so I can become an educated man.” I’m sure that man will never become educated. He will force himself one evening to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet and come away, as if from a bad dream, with no greater benefit than that he is able to say that he has “read” Hamlet. Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading. This type of reading with a business purpose is in no way different from a senator’s reading up of files and reports before he makes a speech. It is asking for business advice and information, and not reading at all.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

When I don’t read (and write) at least a little, I start to feel stale like week-old bread. In some sense, then, it’s a selfish compulsion, but few if any human activities are completely selfless. It’s more realistic to harness vices to better ends than seek to eliminate them.

At first glance, reading for “charm and flavor” can sound shallow, like reading as a way to pick up chicks, or make yourself more interesting at parties. But the common alternative isn’t so much reading for the “right” reason as something even shallower: reading as a grim self-improvement chore, a dutiful march through the “important books” so you can feel properly educated.

“Charm,” in his sense, isn’t really performance. It’s closer to presence: keeping your sensibility limber, so you notice more, say truer things, tell a story better, listen better. There’s a little aspiration in that, sure, but it’s the kind that’s hard to dislike. Like dressing decently, or having good manners. Not a claim to superiority, just a way of being easier to live with and more pleasant to be around. And if reading gives us a bit more flavor, then recommending a book you love is a small way of sharing the meal.

The Gods Love a Screenshot

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, unintended consequences

Chuck Ross:

MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, funneled millions of dollars to a left-wing nonprofit network that supports the nation’s most virulent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic organizations, including some that are under congressional investigation for their ties to terrorist groups, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Scott announced the grant in an essay that cites Hopi prophecy, bird flocks, and sex as inspirations for her latest round of giving.

I once read a fun book called Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids, a compilation of unintended consequences that developed from some of the seemingly-insignificant details of history. I wonder if Jeff Bezos texting pictures of his dingus to a woman who wasn’t his wife might qualify for an entry in future editions. You see, Ms. Scott has had tens of billions of dollars to give away, in large part because Mr. Bezos once trusted the persuasive power of “Little Jeff” more than he trusted cause-and-effect. Whatever you think of the downstream politics, you have to admire the trickster-god mechanism: a libido’s moment of confidence becomes a divorce settlement; a divorce settlement becomes a philanthropic weather system. And somewhere in the moral rubble, one of the richest men on earth can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with horny college students and average Joes everywhere and say, with perfect sincerity, “It seemed like a good idea at the time, bro.” It’s almost heartening, in a warped way: the once-richest man in the world is still spiritually eligible for the same dumb-guy support group as the rest of us.

Whaddaya Reading? Whaddaya Got?

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies

Adam Kirsch:

The problem with these kinds of arguments isn’t that they are wrong; it’s that they don’t actually persuade anyone to read more, because they misunderstand why people become readers in the first place. Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.

It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.

I couldn’t decide which of these I liked better, so I went with both.

The Fly On the Coach Wheel

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, moralizing, the geist of the zeit

Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

On a brief-lived, long-defunct website called The Philosopher’s Mail, Alain de Botton once wrote, regarding our strange habit of news consumption:

For most of history, it was extremely difficult to come by information about what was happening anywhere else. And you probably didn’t mind. What difference would it make, if you were a crofter in the Hebrides, to learn that a power struggle was brewing in the Ottoman Empire?

Much of what we now take for granted as news has its origins in the information needed by people taking major decisions or at the centre of national affairs. We still hear the echoes in the way news is reported; timing is assumed to be critical, as it really would be if we were active agents. If you don’t have the latest update you might make a terrible blunder or miss a wonderful opportunity.

Ease of communication and a generous democratic impulse mean that information originally designed for decision makers, now gets routinely sent via the media to very large numbers of people. It is as if a dossier, with the latest news from Kiev, which might properly arrive on the desk of a minister has accidentally been delivered to the wrong address and ends up on the breakfast table of a librarian in Colchester or an electrician in Pitlochry. But the librarian or electrician might quite reasonably turn round and politely point out that they can’t do anything with this knowledge and that, surely, the files have come to them by mistake. They don’t, but only because habit has closed our eyes to the underlying strangeness of the phenomenon.

A lot of the loudest “global concern” is just misdirected energy: aspirational middling busybodies auditioning for moral significance because ordinary competence feels too small, too boring, too exposing. It’s easier to have a take on Venezuela than to be patient with your spouse; easier to denounce villains abroad than to stop being a minor villain at home; easier to refresh the outrage feed than to fix what’s right in front of you. We laugh at the absurd status and fashion competitions of centuries past, like coiffures de style pouf or crinolines. We haven’t yet learned to laugh at today’s equally frivolous, po-faced equivalents.

I’m not interested in what’s going on in Venezuela, any more than I was interested in what’s going on in Gaza, or Ukraine, or whatever came before on the revolving carousel of shiny objects for people too full of their own self-importance to get lost in a good novel. I don’t say that in an assertive way, as if to put my own egoistic stance forward in competition with the rest. I say it as a rebuke to the civic superstition that we’re obliged to register our solemn opinions for the greater good. I say it because the fact of my interest, or the lack thereof, is utterly irrelevant to any real-world consequences. Not just my interest — yours, too, and every other idiot’s. Online, we’re expected to cast moral votes all day long, as if the right opinion, stated on schedule, were a lever connected to the world. It’s not. Most of this is status competition disguised as conscience. I’d prefer it if people went back to weaving birdcages and model ships into their three-foot-high wigs for attention instead.

Too many people seem to believe in some primitive notion of sympathetic magic, as if emoting toward an issue or event affects it. It does not. Most of us, you and me included, are insignificant and ineffectual nobodies. At best, we could be useful friends, devoted spouses, diligent workers, or involved community members. We might even develop some kind of rich inner life that precludes empty gestures aimed to win the approval of distant strangers. None of us are worth a sputtering wet shit as pundits, prophets, or amateur Secretaries of State, and I refuse to dignify this ridiculous ritual with my respectful attention.

Like a Bird’s Chirp

By in books, history

They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But Machiavelli would say that this gets things backwards. The reason to study history is precisely so that you can repeat it, solving new problems with solutions that have worked in the past. As Machiavelli says in his Discourses on the Roman historian Livy, “he who wishes to see what is to come should observe what has already happened.”

— Peter Adamson, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy

Adamson’s phrasing is a neat flip, but it risks making Machiavelli sound like he’s pre-refuting Santayana. (To be fair, his “They say…” probably refers to the refrigerator-magnet slogan as it circulates, not at the original meaning.) Santayana’s point, in context, is about memory — retentiveness — as the condition for any genuine progress. Machiavelli’s point is what you do with that retentiveness: you study the past not only to avoid repeating disasters, but also to repeat what works, on purpose. And Santayana even anticipates the failure mode: when retentiveness is exhausted, memory becomes self-repeating, and “a vain… repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation.” In other words: not amnesia, but cliché; the historical analogy as nervous tic. “Everything I don’t like is Hitler redux.” It’s a small irony that the pull-quote about remembering is so often remembered without remembering what it meant.

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