foolosophy

The Need for Little Deviant Acts

By in foolosophy, gender, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Sometimes to act against one’s better judgment when it comes to questions of custom, to give way in practice while keeping one’s reservations to oneself, to do as everyone else does and thus to show them consideration as it were in compensation for our deviant opinions: many tolerably free-minded people regard this not merely as unobjectionable, but as ‘honest’, ‘humane’, ‘tolerant’, ‘not being pedantic’, and whatever else those pretty words might be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child in for Christian baptism though he is an atheist, and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations, and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ‘It doesn’t really matter if people like us also do what everyone does and always has done’ – this is the thoughtless prejudice! The thoughtless error! For nothing matters more than that an already mighty, anciently established and irrationally recognized custom should be once more confirmed by a person recognized as rational: it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself! All respect to your opinions! But little deviant acts are worth more!

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

The Lady of the House has a business event coming up. The pre-registration form has a required space for your “preferred pronouns.” One day soon, we’ll all face this choice. I can skip this particular event, but eventually, some intake form at the doctor’s office, the DMV, or any other piece of what Wesley Yang has called the Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus will force us to type something in that field. This is how they getcha — the new trend just becomes part of the no-man’s-land of digital bureaucracy, where old-fashioned notions like responsibility and accountability dissipate on the breeze. What are you going to do, ask to speak to a manager? “That’s just the way the template was designed, sir; I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do to change it, and besides, our tech person is on vacation…”

Most of us are polite and averse to causing a scene. Faced with a choice between embarrassing the Lady in public in front of her friends, or accepting the “he/him” addition to my nametag, well, I’m afraid I’d probably suffer the insult to my dignity. And it would be an insult. I would feel like I’d ratified the absurd notion that I, 215 pounds of chiseled muscle and a glorious beard, could honestly be mistaken for a woman, that I should have to explicitly state my manhood. I can’t whore out my imprimatur to some insane fiction, as loath as I am to start a fight over something so stupid. I can’t dignify this fraudulence with a response. And yet, as I said, we’re all going to face it eventually. Is there a way to thread that needle? Could we enter “n/a” into the form, or maybe “c/o” for conscientious objector? Or maybe the Bartleby option — “I would prefer not to.” Repeat as many times as necessary.

Same As It Ever Was

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy, technology, unintended consequences No Comments

Oliver Bateman:

As a lifelong strength athlete, I have toiled in filthy gyms and basements to maintain my own physical condition. I would like to say that remaining “natural” or practising intense physical discipline offers some intrinsic reward. Unfortunately, it does not; it is a hard-to-follow path made more tortuous in my case by my stubborn unwillingness to take any effective shortcuts (even though the stem cell injections I received worked like a charm). But a resistance to emptying my wallet, and an aversion to some of the side effects from these drugs — cancerous tumours in the case of Ozempic — has hindered my route to body optimisation.

I think Bateman is far too pessimistic about our supposed future of rich Eloi taking advantage of gene splicing and anti-aging technologies to live utopian lives while we Morlocks live, suffer, and die like any other farm animal. Today’s rich people live lives of luxury that would have been unimaginable to even medieval royalty. Are they any happier, more well-adjusted, less prone to stupid decision-making? Of course not. Why is it going to be any different next time? Isn’t this just the photo negative of naive optimism, the idea that more money and technology will “solve” the human condition? I guess you could say I have faith in unintended consequences. Whatever we expect to happen once genetic editing becomes the norm, I suspect that the biggest impact will come from variables we haven’t yet considered. To me, the intrinsic reward of refusing to take shortcuts is the knowledge that those who take them rarely end up precisely at their intended destination.

You Keep Samin’ When You Oughta Be a-Changin’

By in foolosophy, identity, tribalism 3 Comments

I had readers back in the early days of the Awokening who reacted most strongly to my own heterodox opinions about it, rather than the affronts to logic, morality and intellectual integrity to which I was reacting in the first place. One of them would attempt to joke away his discomfort by pretending to be horrified: “You sound like a conservative!” My response was always the same: well, if your progressive friends weren’t such abject, sniveling cowards who prefer tribal identity to honesty, it wouldn’t fall to “conservatives” to state the obvious. Ironically, issues like transgenderism really don’t need to have a political dimension. People of varying political opinions should be able to come together and agree that one does not change reality by changing the words used to describe it. Perhaps we could call it the “reality-based community.”

I don’t have an abundance of intelligence, courage, or integrity, of course. The biggest advantage I have is being a hermit, and thus largely insensitive to peer pressure. No peers, no pressure! As Robinson Jeffers wrote, “the cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.” Circumstances have made me “conservative,” but I could easily imagine a day when, without common enemies, I could find myself at cross-purposes with the more doctrinaire members of the right. Your integrity should matter more to you than your brand label.

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.

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 There Is Hope, It Lies In the Amateurs

By in foolosophy 1 Comment

Ed West:

That is why I’m proposing an idea, for a sort of club where people come and listen to talks about a particular feature of the western canon — Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Van Eyck, whatever — and fill in all these enormous holes in our knowledge. It would be a bit like an old-fashioned salon, or a Lyceum club. Although there are local salons still running, this would ideally be national. This canon club — I’m open to suggestions for a different name — would initially start in one city, presumably London, but if there was further interest we could help set up branches across Britain (and then even maybe abroad). Each local club would run semi-independently, but the wider organisation would help with arranging speakers and so on.

It might be useful for authors wanting to sell books, but the club could also hire enthusiastic amateurs to just spread their knowledge for the sheer sake of it. Maybe there won’t be any interest in the events, but maybe there will — and I think there is a tendency to underestimate the public’s enthusiasm for culture.

A lot of people want to learn more, there aren’t really any mainstream institutions directing them where to go, and if you don’t know where to start, it’s that much harder. They also don’t like being hectored and are put off by the intrusion of theory, not to mention a very predictable sort of politicisation that tries to fit old works of art into a modern framing. (Making it ‘relevant’ — shudder).

I have no idea if this would be successful, but, like Ed, I think there might be a surprising amount of latent appetite out there. If it catches on, it would surely attract the droves of underemployed theory-spouting entryists who are also out there, but I suppose that’s a problem for a different day. We just wanted to be left alone to read our books and spin our idle thoughts, but as the philosophical troubadour Kenneth Rogers sang, sometimes you’ve gotta fight to preserve your cultural space when you’re an amateur bibliophile. (Words to that effect, anyway. He made it rhyme.) Roll up your sleeves, gentlefolk. We’ve got a life of the mind to save.

My Friends All Are Boring and So Am I

By in foolosophy 4 Comments

Ross Douthat:

Still, when I look back on this music, there’s something about Grossman’s analysis that rings true. It’s not joy at the end of history, exactly, that defines the Hootie-DMB-Counting Crows aesthetic, but maybe it’s what you might call a sense that ordinary life suffices (a key stabilizing sentiment for a liberal society). That you can have a rich human experience, full of joys and sorrows, without the extreme premodern or 20th-century stuff, war and God and utopia and all the rest. (And without racial division, too: The multiracial makeup of the Dave Matthews Band and Hootie and the Blowfish is also important here.) That you can be a fulfilled human person just through the highs and lows of normal-seeming suburban American life. That tropes of early-adult male heterosexual experience like “the yearning to be famous” or “the awesome girl who lets you down” or just “hanging out with your friends and feeling a little sorry for yourself” are all sufficient as grist for the strong feelings that make up an interesting life. And that when those feelings get you down, you can be depressed in a way that’s personal rather than existential, that’s just about you rather than about everything that’s wrong with life under late capitalism or whatever.

I never listened to any of those bands, but I agree that the “ordinary life suffices” perspective was prevalent in the 1990s, and not just because I was young and the world was new, and bliss it was in that decade to be alive and all that. I only realized how much that apparent common sense had made up the background of my young adulthood, and what an anomaly that was, once the Great Awokening began, and I began to wonder what was wrong with all these weirdos who insisted on making everything about politics, one of the least rewarding aspects of the human condition. At this point, it almost seems like a radical statement to say that an ordinary life of simple pleasures is good enough. It’s true, though, and will still be true long after this spasm of political puritanism has burned itself out.

(For anyone encountering the paywall, look, you didn’t hear this from me, but…)

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