foolosophy

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Conjoin ‘Em

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I vaguely remember a wry observation that essentially said most internet thinkpieces can be reduced to two templates: “X is overrated,” or “X is underrated.” I would add a third, “Everyone is doing X wrong.” This is the formula chosen by Kathleen Stock for her contrarian take on gratitude, published at Thanksgiving for maximum provocation. Gratitude done properly, you see, requires a specific benefactor to whom you feel grateful. Stock, a former professor of philosophy who has done nothing to raise the discipline’s esteem in my eyes, thinks that being grateful in a bland, generic sense has become the trademark of yoga teachers, Instagram influencers, and people who want to humblebrag about their privilege — eew, those people. (Clear identification of the outgroup is also a necessary ingredient in this genre.) I mean, I’m sure there are vapid twits who invoke gratitude in a superficial way, but if you encounter so many of them, maybe this just says more about your online browsing habits than it does about significant trends. In any event, I guess I’m just glad that they’re trying, however ineptly, to model an appreciation for their good fortune. Fake it till you make it, and all that.

There are more sinister effects, though. It seems that hashtag-gratitude has an evil shadow:

It surely will not have escaped your notice that there is very little good news around — a state of affairs obviously not helped by awful wars, but not wholly caused by them either. Declinism and doom-mongering are in vogue everywhere you look; and, though they take on different flavours on the Left and Right, the net result is still bloody depressing. Whether it’s the collapse of the environment and the implacable rise of bigotry, or the collapse of Western civilisation and the implacable rise of cultural Marxism, there’s not much out there to put a spring in your step. In fact, it’s almost as if all the despairing and all the gratitude were two sides of the same psychically dysfunctional coin.

“Almost as if.” Nice hedge. She goes on to say:

When gratitude loses its moorings from a proper relation to another person’s intention and responsibility, we end up with nice vibes. When resentment does the same, we end up with increasing amounts of conspiratorial rage. And unfortunately for us, the former doesn’t seem to have the power to cancel out the latter.

Now, I’m not a former, current, or future professor of philosophy, so I don’t know if there’s an already-named fallacy on display here, but it seems to me that if you want to say that unfocused gratitude is somehow directly related to unfocused resentment, with one perhaps causing the other, or both springing from the same source, you’d have to offer some sort of actual argument. Instead, she relies on what I think of as the “argument from aesthetic symmetry” — i.e., you just claim that these two things are “two sides of the same coin,” perfectly balanced and inseparable. Or you portray them as two combatants in a zero-sum battle. The rhetorical image does all the work of argument (what little of it there is in such an impressionistic piece). Many of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams use that same formulaic symmetry to give the illusion of depth. Speaking of which, be sure to read more in my upcoming essay on Unherd, “Why Oscar Wilde Is Overrated.”

The Things We Do For Love

By in atheism, foolosophy, religion No Comments

Man must either fall in love
with Someone or Something,
or else fall ill.

— W.H. Auden

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

We had the annual charity women’s powerlifting event at the gym yesterday. The Lady of the House handled the spreadsheet duties, as usual, and this year she generously volunteered my services to help with spotting and loading the bar. A good time was had by all, though it was a bit disconcerting for me, an average student in math, to have the other guys ask me to check behind them to make sure they loaded the correct plates. Still, under my stewardship, the weights were all correct and the squat rack was adjusted to the correct height each time, so it was a personal success.

Before we started, everyone involved gathered in the group fitness room for a few quick words of encouragement, followed by a brief prayer. The gym owner thanked the Lord for our health and the ability to “do what we love here today,” and asked to keep us safe (given the date, there were words of thanks for our veterans as well). Of course, I’m all for expressions of gratitude, even if I don’t believe in the literal existence of the intended recipient. The ritual, the habit, of being appreciative is good enough for me. I looked at the two ladies in front of me, their heads bowed, one woman’s arm across the other’s shoulder, their other hands clasping those of the women beside them, and thought However we got here, it’s good to see it. Personally, I can reinterpret Christian ideas and practices in a symbolic or metaphorical way, but one way in which I differ from the spiritual-not-religious is that I think it would be condescending to act as if I understand the true symbolic essence of the faith, while all those devout believers are just benighted. I respect the truth claims enough to openly say I disagree with them and call myself an atheist, even if that raises someone’s ire, rather than act like a cuckoo, secretly laying my eggs in Christian nests.

I’m sure Hirsi Ali’s announcement will ruffle some rational feathers. Stuart Ritchie calls it “daft” and wonders how she could possibly be ignorant of all the obvious rebuttals to these silly, uniformly terrible arguments. Well, I don’t know exactly how one would go about arguing decisively, pro or con, that the West is becoming dangerously decadent, self-loathing, and incapable of withstanding challenges from its enemies. How would one “prove” that our nation has used up its allotted great deal of ruin, except after the fact? Likewise, as with Athens and Jerusalem, what does argument have to do with a desire for spiritual solace?  There are certainly many conversations to be had there, but what do I care if we ultimately arrive at different conclusions? She may be incorrect, but is she wrong? I’ll resist the urge to elaborate and trust that you get the distinction I’m making.

If Hirsi Ali were a friend of mine, I would say something like this: most of what you see as good and beautiful, I do, too. I can’t tell you how to handle your need for solace; all I can say is that in my own case, my resolution to the existential angst of my youth didn’t come in the form of an answer, like a religious doctrine, but in the realization that I’d been asking all the wrong questions. The angst disappeared on its own, just like the frustration before I realized I’d been reading the instructions wrong while trying to assemble the bookcase. Of course that bolt doesn’t fit there! This may be more of a logical or intellectual approach than you’re looking for, but hey, there’s a spiritual version of that, too.

As for the meaning and purpose of life, well, I think it’s partially the wrong question, in the sense that meaning and purpose aren’t “out there,” pre-existing, waiting to be discovered or commanded to us. They do exist. In fact, we all largely recognize them when we see them. But no, I don’t think they are inherent to existence. Some assembly is required. On a biological level, it’s all just fighting, feasting and fornicating until we die. Humans, though, ask “Why?” and set about providing justifications. All of those provisional answers — art, music, writing, sport, religion, communal tasks, and the basic care and maintenance of the conditions necessary for them — are something we create and share with each other. Those things all exist and have meaning as long as we keep them alive by practicing them. “Where two or three are gathered together” in the name of meaning and purpose, you might say. It may seem bleak to say that, no, I don’t think there are any guarantees involved. Good and beautiful things can disappear forever, especially if we fail to work for their preservation. All I can say is, well, you know me. I don’t find it depressing or demoralizing. And anyway, whatever you believe, you still have to show up and put in the necessary work.

So we gather together and do the things we love. We put aside self-centeredness and petty concerns and create something beautiful and meaningful to share. I think that’s good enough.

There’s Something About You, Baby, So Right

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Rob Henderson:

In our busy and distracted society, deep reading is increasingly rare. Deep reading changes people. When you interact with people, you can tell who reads seriously and who doesn’t. This isn’t just a matter of mental ability or intelligence. There is a difference between raw cognitive horsepower and time spent immersed in complex and intricate ideas. You can tell the difference between a smart person who reads and a smart person who doesn’t by how they express ideas, the references they make, and the chains of logic they follow. The former often demonstrates a subtle understanding that weaves together insights from various domains. The latter, though sharp and quick-minded, lacks the same depth of perspective or the ability to see beyond the immediate conversation or the Current Thing. This is becoming increasingly apparent among obviously bright young adults who don’t read or read nonsense despite paying large sums of money for what should have been a decent education.

Back in my days of installing satellite television, I had a buddy in the crew named Frank, a country boy from Kentucky who had served in Iraq as a sniper. (Interestingly, one of my other buddies was Mundher, an Iraqi refugee. If you can believe it, we all got along fine without needing DEI strictures and an HR department.) Anyway, during one of our conversations, Frank asked how I’d met the Lady of the House. I said that we were both amateur writers, which perked him up. “I knew it!” he exclaimed. “I knew there was just something about the way you talk!” I can’t recall verbatim how he elaborated, but the gist of it was that I just gave off an impression of being studious and thoughtful even when I wasn’t saying much. I was just happy to have a piece of counter-evidence to the more numerous assumptions I’d encountered throughout my life that I was anywhere from rude to mute to retarded.

State Your Case With Black or White

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Alan Jacobs:

The other day I wrote about the absolute cataract of essays and articles these days proclaiming the death of something — something, anything, everything: capitalism, liberalism, Trumpism, tradition, conservatism, the novel, poetry, movies … the list goes on and on.

Today I’m wondering how much this habit of mind arises from an economic system built around planned obsolescence and unrepairable devices. If we are deeply habituated to throwing away a bought object when it is no longer performing excellently, then why not do the same with ideas? Hey, this thing I believe in no longer commands universal assent. Let’s flush it.

And for that matter why not take the same approach to people? If you’re in Canada and having suicidal thoughts, then you just might have a counselor suggest medically-assisted suicide. You’re hardly worth repairing, are you? Let’s just ease you into death and get you off our books.

This must be what the Fixx meant when they sang, “One thing leads to another.” Naturally, I’m all in favor of blogs being platforms for thought experiments and extemporaneous rambling, but still, I think this one could stand to be reeled in a bit before it starts to resemble the conspiracy meme. I’m pretty sure clichés, hyperbole, and rhetorical laziness in general predate the “economic system,” and I don’t think the increased availability of euthanasia is primarily due to financial considerations. Sometimes, things just have a superficial resemblance without all being causally connected. That’s boring, though. Maybe I’ll change the title of this post to “Apophenia and the Death of Judicious Thought.”

There Is No Why

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Michael Kraus:

The Halloween franchise as a whole stands as a monument to the human capacity for rationalization, our need to explain the terrifying things that happen to us. To borrow Allyson’s words, it’s a way to make us feel better. The same impulse can be found in how we respond in the real world to real-life tragedies and horrors, always looking for that fundamental why. But the totality of the series, at the end of the day, only serves to strengthen the legacy of Carpenter’s indelible original, and makes it more timeless and impactful, even now, forty-five years later. For only 1978’s Halloween, the first, the best, has the awful and powerful wisdom to know that sometimes, there is no why. No reason, no order. Sometimes, bad things just happen. What could be scarier than that?

I saw this tweet last week:

It was being held up for scorn, as an example of a left-wing, anti-Israel appeasement mentality. Stancil is certainly an orthodox leftist idiot, a fact I confirmed by scrolling through his Twitter feed to find this tweet again, but I hardly think this sentiment is particularly egregious. In fact, it’s just a paraphrase of what Solzhenitsyn, an unimpeachable source, said about ideology. Multiple things can be true at once. Why did the Hamas attack happen? There are plenty of particular answers — anti-Semitism, territorial disputes, religious differences, geopolitical maneuvering, an endless cycle of retribution. There are also particular answers to every similar atrocity you could ask about — Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, ad infinitum. At some point, though, you may wonder if anything has truly been answered, or if evil is a convenient name for something that exists prior to, behind, and beyond all of our attempts to rationalize it. Maybe no amount of understanding or anticipation will ever banish it for long.

Race Not to the Swift

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To the best of my knowledge, only once have I ever heard a Taylor Swift song. I was standing in a clothing store a couple years ago while the Lady of the House searched for a pair of hiking shorts on sale. As I became aware of the music, I was struck by how, well, childish it sounded. I mean, the melody was just so monotonous and straightforward, like “Baby Shark” or something. Eventually I was able to make out enough of the lyrics, at which point recognition dawned. I had seen them quoted often enough in my online travels to know who the singer was. I don’t remember now what they were; I have successfully expunged them from my memory. It is possible that I may have heard other songs of hers in a grocery store or something without realizing it, but that stands as my only interaction with the iconic artist of our age.

It’s nothing in particular about her. Likewise, I’ve never heard anything by Kanye West or Drake, Jay-Z or Beyonce, Miley Cyrus or the two Justins (Bieber and Timberlake). I heard Lady Gaga once and had a similar sense of bewilderment as with Ms. Swift. However, I did manage to navigate the age of boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync and former Disney princesses like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera by stuffing my ears with wax.

I’ve also avoided most of the popular movies and TV shows of the last couple decades. At least two people have called me a barbarian for never having seen an episode of Seinfeld. Likewise for Friends, Sex in the City, and ER. Even in the age of prestige television, I’ve never watched any of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones. I did try to watch some of Mad Men but lost interest after two or three episodes. As for the big screen, well, I only recall being in a theater twice in the last couple of decades, once because I was taken along, and once because of my lingering enjoyment of Halloween.

As that last data point shows, I’m not motivated by snobbery or rarefied taste. I think it has more to do with being what Lin Yutang called a Great Recluse, or what the scholar Aat Vervoorn called a “Zhuangzi hermit,” i.e. a hermit immersed in society, hiding anonymously in plain sight. I’m just too caught up in woolgathering to be much interested in staying au courant.

You Don’t Go Out Looking for a Job Dressed Like That, Do You? On a Weekday?

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Rich Lowry:

The Pennsylvania senator is the poster boy — if self-indulgent sloppiness is your thing — for the Senate dropping a dress code that required senators to dress in business attire when appearing on the Senate floor.

Fetterman briefly complied with the rule by making the sacrifice of putting on a suit and tie after he was first elected. Then, he reverted to his standard uniform that makes it look like he just arrived after sitting on his couch, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, watching football games all weekend.

There’s business casual, then there’s Fetterman’s garb. It wouldn’t be acceptable at many fraternity events around the country. Philadelphia Eagles fans dress more carefully on game days. If he showed up at almost any service or working-class job in America dressed this way, his supervisor would give him a stern talking-to and insist that he have more respect for himself, his colleagues, and his customers.

An employee of mine had a stroke a few years ago. If you didn’t know about it, nothing about his speech or mannerisms would make you wonder, “Did that guy suffer some brain damage?” He’s pretty close to normal, but it still affects him. He misplaces things more often than usual, forgets some details, and sometimes has what he calls “brown-outs,” especially in extremely hot weather. He can handle a warehouse job, but it would be cruel and unusual to force him to hold the responsibilities of a U.S. senator.

In Fetterman’s case, I think the amoral sociopaths around him who put him in this position deserve the contempt. The man clearly isn’t fit to function in that environment. We can only hope he improves enough to one day realize how little those ghouls care about anything other than using him as a rubber stamp. Lowry should have focused his ire there rather than take the opportunity to indulge in some petty snobbery. In the abstract, sure, it’s important to dress appropriately for special occasions. In practice, though, many of us manage to live complete lives without ever encountering such occasions. I’m not just saying it because I, too, favor athleisure clothing year-round. I remember seeing articles in the recent past complaining about women wearing yoga pants in public, which struck me as equally stupid. Not everyone wears business attire from 9-5.  Schedules and activities vary widely. A lot of this kvetching strikes me as a yearning for a bygone world where social roles were more clearly defined and regimented.

Grab That Cash With Both Hands and Make a Stash

By in foolosophy, world football No Comments

Barney Ronay:

There have been references in some sympathetic quarters to the Saudi deal as “life-changing” and as such unrefusable, as though only now can Henderson finally afford a car or a family holiday. And to be fair it is transformative. He can go from ludicrously rich to brain-manglingly, obscenely rich in a single stride.

But there is an obvious moral hypocrisy here. The Saudi league is a political project, an attempt to gain influence while distracting from incompatible levels of prejudice and a bloodthirsty human rights record.

Anyone who takes those above-market fees to act as the public face of this (essentially a bribe to forget your remaining sporting ambitions) is knowingly taking part in those political aims. Which is entirely your own business if you happen to like that process, or if you want to ignore it and simply act as an economically rational agent.

But Henderson has presented himself as something else. A much-praised advocate for LGBTQ+ rights (who is now planning to promote a state where gay people are criminalised). An advocate against racism (now doing PR for a structurally racist state). A campaigner for women’s rights (giving the thumbs up for a patriarchal dictatorship).

Taking a stand is good. But it only really hits home when it overlaps with your personal interests. At the first whiff of that sweet life-changing cash all the rainbow stuff has simply been swished off the desk.

…Where does this end? Because once you start to peel this onion you realise how much it stinks. If we really are going to condemn Henderson’s moral shiftiness, we have to condemn also every Newcastle player who professes to care about human rights or the rainbow flag, to condemn the ethics-washing Premier League for allowing this kind of ownership, to ask what internal contortions it requires to make a heartening stand against racism in Britain but also promote the Abu Dhabi outreach project. And also to understand the historic role of sport in British society.

Then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Guardian reader – isn’t this an indictment of our entire society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth every youngster around the world who dreams of being paid astronomical sums to kick a ball around a field one day. Gentlemen!

So, yes — big drama in the summer transfer window of English soccer. It seems Liverpool’s captain, Jordan Henderson is eager to take on a new challenge, I mean, start a new chapter, err, quadruple his salary by plying his trade in the Saudi Arabian league. The Saudis are trying to attract some of the biggest names in the game in hopes of winning a bid to host the World Cup. Having already lured an aging Cristiano Ronaldo and missed out on Lionel Messi, they’ve started aiming for players still at the top of their game. The temptation of Henderson has occasioned much angst among the young and idealistic. But he’s been an ally! He wore the rainbow captain’s armband! He’s made public statements in support of the alphabet people, all of which were completely heartfelt and not at all mandatory exercises in ubiquitous corporate PR! Right Side of History, Right Side of History, why hast thou forsaken us?

As it happens, I mostly agree with Ronay that trying to sort the world into white hats and black hats is a waste of time. We’ve already established that celebrities, athletes, and celebrity athletes are whores by virtue of their efforts to attain their status; now we’re just haggling over the price. If I were idealistic, I might hope that a shock like this might cause people to see the inherent emptiness of virtue-signaling. None of the sanctimonious spectacle — the knee-taking before kickoff, the rainbow-colored laces on athletic shoes, the po-faced proclamations of commentators — has ever been worth a squirt of piss. If Ronay really wanted to stir things up, he could have concluded by suggesting that self-satisfied spectators should most of all be angry with themselves for being simple-minded enough to demand, and be appeased by, such superficial gestures.

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.

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