identity

There We Were Then; Explain Us

By in identity

Yet Gen X isn’t just a time period; it’s also, as Douglas Rushkoff writes in “The GenX Reader,” “a culture, a demographic, an outlook, a style, an economy, a scene, a political ideology, an aesthetic, an age, a decade and a literature.” It’s a moment, a mood, an ethos and an enduring way of being, the hallmark characteristics of which — anticorporatism, anti-authoritarianism, ironic detachment, artistic independence, an existential horror of selling out and a live-and-let-live philosophy of life — feel like the antidote to a lot of what’s currently wrong in our culture.

In our current moment, when artistic compromise no longer carries the slightest stigma, Gen X has some wisdom to impart about how to preserve one’s principles, even when times are hard. Because for a while now, the present has looked a lot like the recent past: Everything is commercialized, it’s impossible to find a job, rents are astronomical and reality kind of bites. But you can always make art. In romanticizing the past — a time not so connected, distracted, corporate and slick, not so bought in to easy answers — perhaps we’re longing for a world more hospitable to its creation.

— Amanda Fortini, “Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation?”

It’s comforting in a way. The same lifestyle that was diagnosed as doom, gloom and pathological detachment in the early ’90s is now, in Fortini’s telling, “the antidote” to everything wrong with the culture. Give it a few decades and we’ll be reading the exact same argument about some other cohort — probably a misty-eyed essay about how the chronically online Zoomers, with their nihilist memes and gig-economy scars, secretly held the key to happiness all along. Every generation gets its turn to be both the problem and the cure.

I remember watching that MTV town hall in 1994 where Bill Clinton took questions from earnest young people. One girl in particular stuck with me. She stood up and said, “Mr. President, it seems to me that Kurt Cobain’s recent suicide exemplified the emptiness that many in our generation feel. How do you propose to teach our youth how important life is?” Even at the time, on my parents’ couch, I remember thinking: What an inane platitude of a question; this is a person who’s read too many issues of Rolling Stone and Spin. She was self-consciously playing “Representative of a Generation,” fluent in the language of media narratives. (I wonder if she went on to become a journalist.)

That’s what most Gen X mythologizing still sounds like to me. You get the obligatory inventory of pop-culture references: Cobain, O.J., Reality Bites, Clinton’s sax on Arsenio Hall, a mixtape of grunge and “alternative” acts, maybe a respectful bow to hip-hop. Then comes the prefab sociology: all that gloom “resonated” with a generation beset by AIDS, nuclear dread, divorce, declining real wages, blah blah blah. Never mind that Chris Cornell was singing glossolalia in “Black Hole Sun,” or that half the kids I knew were listening to hair metal, nu-metal, country, Christian rock, or whatever was on the jukebox at the bowling alley. They don’t get invited into the story because they’re not culturally significant enough. Grunge is allowed to become the soundtrack of a wounded generation; the rest is treated as embarrassing noise.

You could see the same lazy sociology in the way heroin and Prozac were presented as defining features of our lives. Because a handful of rock singers in Seattle shot up, you would think kids in suburban Yazoo, Mississippi were all nodding off in flannel and Doc Martens between AP exams. The fashion pages even obliged with “heroin chic,” as if addiction were just another accessory to complete the look. It was wildly irresponsible and faintly ridiculous. Drug addicts, in the real world, are not picky aesthetes carefully aligning their substance of choice with the correct subcultural vibe — “Oh, no, no cocaine or pills for me; I’m strictly a needles-and-smack connoisseur.” But the media narrative made it sound exactly like that: if you wanted to be a proper grunge kid, you needed the whole kit — shirts, boots, and syringes. At the same time, you could see the media laying down a template we still live with: depression treated as omnipresent, almost a lifestyle category, with Prozac and its cousins offered as the obvious fix.

The “selling out” talk always struck me as particularly incoherent. No one forced any of these bands to form, write songs, tour, sign to major labels, and appear on MTV. You could always say, “No thanks, I’ll stock grocery shelves, play clubs on weekends, and keep my integrity intact.” The problem was that they wanted to be rock stars and wanted everyone to believe they didn’t really want it. The same people who now praise Gen X for its “independent, semi-feral” spirit are describing musicians who were, in practice, paralyzed by what other people might think. It’s hard to square the supposedly tough-minded, anti-authoritarian slacker with the kid who has a panic attack at the thought of being accused of selling out in a fanzine.

None of this really maps onto my own life anyway. My parents are still together; I never had divorce as a defining trauma. My mother was often home, but I was independent by temperament rather than necessity. When I was twelve, I picked up Richard Hittleman’s 28 Day Yoga off her bookshelf and decided to follow it. For a month, I’d get up at 5:30, shower, do forty-five minutes of yoga, make my own French toast while watching the Disney Channel, and then walk up to the bus stop. I did my own laundry, cleaned my own room, and played outside by myself for hours. There was no angsty latchkey narrative to it; I was simply content to be left alone and trusted to handle it.

Later on, the thing that actually shaped my view of life wasn’t a Nirvana lyric or a Ben Stiller movie, it was Philosophy 101. Meeting Socrates did more for me than sharing a birth cohort with Billy Corgan. The idea of living so that your deathbed self could approve, that your life should be something you could bear to look back on, still makes sense to me in a way that “our generation’s angst” never did.

You could reasonably say that this is its own kind of luxury. My dad was a self-made businessman who ran himself ragged with a newspaper distributorship and a property-management firm so that his eldest son could afford to be precious about not chasing SAT scores, professional accreditation, or marketable skills. At the same time, some of the period’s economic story was suspiciously convenient for people like me. We were told, loudly and often, that we’d probably never match our parents’ standard of living, that we were the first generation fated to do worse than our elders, and that this looming downward mobility explained our sullen moping. Maybe the boomers really were ideally placed to harvest the postwar low-hanging fruit of affluence. Maybe we were structurally disadvantaged. But if we ended up “underperforming” by conventional metrics, there was also a good deal of it that was self-inflicted: prosperity breeding complacency, comfort making it easier to shrug and consciously downsize our ambitions. It’s one thing to be pushed off the ladder; it’s another to decide the view from the middle rung is good enough.

Which is part of why these grand generational narratives ring so hollow: they quietly erase class and autobiography and replace them with a list of media properties. In practice, what gets called “Gen X” is usually just the personality type that goes to J-school, ends up in coastal newsrooms, and signals its membership with the correct band and film references. It’s an intra-elite taste profile. Historical astrology.

If there’s one genuinely solid distinction about Gen X, it isn’t grunge, or divorce, or a shared mood; it’s technological timing. We were the last cohort to reach adulthood before the internet became omnipresent. We had an analog childhood and a digital midlife. We learned boredom, privacy, and self-entertainment before everything was online, and then we had to decide, as adults, how much of ourselves to feed into the machine. That’s real. The rest is just décor.

The Codex Files

By in books, identity, socmed, the geist of the zeit

A man walks into a bar with Infinite Jest.
He orders a drink, opens the book, and starts to read.

For a normal person, that’s where the story ends.

For the Extremely Online, that’s where the investigation begins.

Brady Brickner-Wood has a piece in The New Yorker about “performative reading” — the guy in the bar with Infinite Jest or Moby-Dick, the TikToks mocking him for showing off, the mother hens online clucking over whether people are reading “sincerely” enough. It’s written in the lamentable house style: a little Kant and Rousseau, a little Foucault, some David Foster Wallace, an obligatory swipe at “consumerism and market capitalism,” and it’s not very interesting or informative. What stuck with me, though, wasn’t the analysis of the guy with the book. It was the fact that we’ve reached a point where a stranger quietly reading a book in public has to be treated as a potentially suspicious performance at all.

In the early 2010s, remember, this kind of paranoia was still in remission. Social media was going to democratize everything, topple dictators, spark “color revolutions,” forge connections between lonely people, and usher in a global conversation. A decade later, that fantasy has curdled. We now know what the global conversation actually sounds like, and we’ve seen what happens when you give every crank, fanatic and snake-oil salesman a megaphone. Add AI to the mix — deepfakes, bots, autogenerated sludge that can fill any text box on command — and it’s not irrational to feel that the online environment is fundamentally untrustworthy. You’d be a fool not to doubt a lot of what you see on a screen.

But once that habit sets in, once you’ve trained yourself to read everything online as branding, manipulation, or fakery, the anxiety spills over the edge of its container. If you spend all day marinating in synthetic “content,” it becomes harder to believe in the unremarkable reality happening right in front of you. A stranger reading a book in public no longer registers as “man passing time with a paperback”; he’s “performative reading guy,” a real-world instance of the same insincerity you see everywhere on your feed. Once you’ve spent enough time online, the unofficial slogan becomes “Trust No One” — not even the person reading Middlemarch while sipping her coffee. There must be an angle. There must be a bit. There must be content being harvested!

Ironically, books are one of the last cheap, sturdy, physical symbols of “realness” most people have access to in a world of ephemeral media. You hold them. They don’t ping you. They don’t refresh themselves or run an update overnight. They don’t hypocritically promise “authentic connection” while trying to sell you something. They don’t (yet) hallucinate their citations. If anything in modern life deserves to be exempt from the endless fraud inspection, it’s the quiet, analog act of sitting down and reading a long book for no one’s benefit but your own.

So of course the online-poisoned imagination can’t allow that exemption. It has to colonize this last patch of non-digital ground and declare it suspect. If influencers fake their “candid” photos, if brands fake their wokeness, if AI fakes its expertise, then surely this guy must be faking his absorption in Proust. The environment has trained people to assume there is always a camera, always an audience, always a layer of calculation behind anything that looks sincere. The tragedy is that this stance, which began as a sane response to a polluted information ecosystem, ends by making it impossible to recognize a simple, sane act when we see one.

I don’t know what the motives of the man with the book are, and I don’t care. Mixed motives are the human default. Maybe he likes being seen with a big novel; maybe he’s just tired of staring at his phone; maybe he really is hoping some pretty lady will swoon over his endnotes. I want to believe… he’s just reading. But the point is that reading itself doesn’t need to be put on trial. When the culture gets to the stage where even that has to be defended against charges of fraudulence, the problem is not the reader. The problem is a way of looking at the world that has been so warped by screens that it can’t imagine any act that isn’t performed for one.

An Illusion of Unity

By in books, foolosophy, identity

Nostalgia for others’ lives. It’s because, seen from the outside, those lives appear whole, whereas our own, seen from the inside, seem fragmented. We’re still chasing after an illusion of unity.

— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks

What we like about the past is that sense of complete perspective, a story with a beginning, middle and end. We can never have that relationship to our own life without ceasing to be alive. We envy other people’s lives because we only ever see their stories with the jump cuts and edits already done; we’re stuck watching the raw footage of our own. A complete story of you is something other people will tell, if anyone does, when you’re safely out of the picture. So the longing for a sense of unity and completion isn’t just a quirk; it’s structurally impossible to satisfy from the inside. That’s why we get this “nostalgia for others’ lives” and for finished epochs: we’re really yearning for a point of view we can’t inhabit — a narrator who already knows how things turn out, a final edited cut of your own life while you’re still in mid-scene. In that sense, our chronic dissatisfaction with our fragmentary present is just the storytelling brain banging against the bars of time, demanding an ending it can fold everything into. And life’s reply is basically: you can have wholeness, or you can have immediacy, but not both.

Such Is Our Personality

By in bricolage, identity

Just as, with an assemblage of parts, the word ‘chariot’ is used,
so, when the aggregates are present, there is the convention ‘a being.’

— Vajirā Sutta (SN 5.10)

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The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and strong timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

— Plutarch, “Theseus”

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Contemplate continually all things coming to pass by change, and accustom yourself to think that Universal Nature loves nothing so much as to change what is and to create new things in their likeness. For everything that is, is in a way the seed of what will come out of it, whereas you imagine seeds to be only those which are cast into the earth or into the womb. But that is very unscientific.

Constantly think of the Universe as one living creature, embracing one being and one soul; how all is absorbed into the one consciousness of this living creature; how it compasses all things with a single purpose, and how all things work together to cause all that comes to pass, and their wonderful web and texture.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4

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“The mind is a kind of theatre… The identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one… nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions.”

— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.iv.6

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A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality.

— Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

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Between each of his excursions through the biota, X lay in the soil and was carried by the rains, inch by inch, downhill. Living plants retarded the wash by impounding atoms; dead plants by locking them to their decayed tissues. Animals ate the plants and carried them briefly uphill or downhill, depending on whether they died or defecated higher or lower than they fed. No animal was aware that the altitude of his death was more important than his manner of dying. Thus a fox caught a gopher in a meadow, carrying X uphill to his bed on the brow of a ledge, where an eagle laid him low. The dying fox sensed the end of his chapter in foxdom, but not the new beginning in the odyssey of an atom.

— Aldo Leopold, “Odyssey”

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To have become a person means to have emerged contingently from a matrix of genetic, psychological, social and cultural conditions. You are neither reducible to one or all of them, not are you separate from them. While a person is more than a DNA code, a psychological profile and a social or cultural background, he or she cannot be understood apart from such factors. You are unique not because you possess an essential metaphysical quality that differs from the essential metaphysical quality of everyone else, but because you have emerged from a unique and unrepeatable set of conditions.

— Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime

If Only It Was a Single Taste

By in identity, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit

To give style to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed has been concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon towards the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!

It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.

Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits – and they may be of the first mark – are always out to shape and interpret their environment as a free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly and surprising. And they are well advised because it is in only this way that they can give pleasure to themselves. For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I saw one of these garish monstrosities in the wild for the first time this week, flying from someone’s front porch. For the blissfully ignorant, that’s the Progress Pride flag, the “inclusive” upgrade on the old rainbow flag. As increasing numbers of people compete for increasingly-limited attentional resources by inventing ever-more niche sexual identities, I’m sure it will only get worse.

The above aphorism shows some of Nietzsche’s recurring themes in miniature. Life and character as aesthetic phenomenons; the necessity of self-imposed constraints to channel strength and sublimate unruly passions in service to a goal; and the resentment of the weak who experience discipline as oppression and fantasize about “freedom” as the absence of all restraint. I like to think that if he had been riding along with me, he would have seen this abomination as a picture worth all 397 of his quoted words.  You see? he might have said. This is the inevitable result of egalitarian delusions. When equality is the overriding consideration, you end up with chaos. When democracy is the sacred principle, the preference of a colorblind ignoramus cancels out that of a talented artist. When representation is the ultimate goal, nothing can be left out, even if the design as a whole suffers from incoherence. Jacobin ideals predictably lead to the breakdown of social order until people are longing for a Napoleon to seize power and put an end to the anarchy. Oh, for a Napoleon of graphic design!

I’m no Napoleon. In fact, I’d prefer to model myself on Cincinnatus. I will offer my services to society in a time of strife, but thereafter return to my plow, by which I mean my Xbox controller. Be that as it may, here is my version of the flag, in which it is to be hoped that pride can be taken in both identity and appearance. The colors represent our modern bespoke identities, which, yes, absolutely, of course, are all equally special and endlessly fascinating, but the circle at the center represents plain old whiteness, the center of gravity around which they all revolve, the yin to their yang, the master concept without which their slave rebellion would have no meaning at all. As the severely educated have taught us in recent years, “whiteness” doesn’t merely refer to skin color. It is an entire weltanschauung, comprising everything from individuality, the nuclear family, and rational thinking to property rights, punctuality and politeness. Without whiteness to act as the centripetal force, the “againstists” would go spinning off into the void. “Thirty spokes are joined in the wheel; it is the empty hub in the center that makes it useful,” says the Tao Te Ching. It is only just for this to be represented in the new design.

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

By in foolosophy, identity, tribalism

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.

Diversity and Representation Among Deck Chairs on the Titanic

By in books, identity, media/propaganda, race, the cult of multi

There actually is a problem concerning race and journalism in America, but that problem is not an overabundance of objectivity. It’s that America’s newsrooms remain crushingly and embarrassingly white, especially in the positions of leadership, and have proven stubbornly resistant to attempts to diversify. This is an absolute disaster, professionally as well as morally. According to Census Bureau data, while ethnic minorities make up 40 percent of Americans, they constitute just 17 percent of newsroom staff and 13 percent of newspaper leadership. Diversification efforts all too frequently relegate journalists of color to the “softer” sections of newspapers — culture, “hot takes” on the news or entertainment, arts, and lifestyle — or to the online versions of legacy media. It’s shameful. Just as it is a problem that the people tasked with telling the American story don’t report on the lives of everyday Americans, erasing huge portions of American lives from their pages and airwaves, it is also a problem that they don’t themselves reflect America’s racial diversity.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

I got Ungar-Sargon’s book after reading an impressive excerpt in the Spectator last month. Her scrutiny of the shifting economic incentives in digital media reminded me of Martin Gurri’s own analysis in The Revolt of the Public. Much of the book is a satisfying attack on the progressive elite for being — if I may paraphrase — a bunch of spoiled rich kids whose monomaniacal focus on other people’s racism serves as cover for their refusal to question their own class privilege. Like mutant Calvinists, they condemn most of their fellow Americans to eternal damnation for the original sin of racism, while allowing their own prosperity and status to stand as proof of the Right Side of History’s favor. Bari Weiss described Ungar-Sargon as a left-wing populist, which sounds about right. Whereas Gurri’s book aimed more at rigorous description, Ungar-Sargon is happy to editorialize on behalf of some vaguely-defined beast called “the working class.” I’m inherently skeptical when a deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, holder of a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley, starts waxing rhapsodic about a chimera like working-class-consciousness, but that’s easily overlooked. It’s enjoyable enough to see progressives being hoist with their own privileged petard. When the class-based left goes to war with the identitarian left, everyone else should just get the popcorn and cheer for mass casualties.

This part, though, is just baffling. Why would you include this unnecessary sop to identity politics in the middle of your class-based polemic? Why would you lazily conflate immutable characteristics like race with point of view? Which ethnic minorities need to be promoted to positions of leadership, and who gets to decide? How do you avoid the same old problem of “meritocracy,” which she rails against throughout the book, where the “minorities” turn out to be the same products of wealthy upbringings and elite educations, different only in their superficial appearance? Why is it only a problem when elite occupations aren’t diverse enough? Here, again, the contrast with Gurri is illuminating — while he sees the old ideal of 20th-century mass media as a dinosaur blinking stupidly at the approaching asteroid of digital media realty, Ungar-Sargon ends her book with an exhortation to “the national liberal media” to “lead the way back to a more democratic, more moral, and more equal society.” The rest of us, in the meantime, have to rediscover the lost art of getting along with people from different walks of life and learning how to agree to disagree with no hard feelings. Again, this seems like an elite problem for the professional class which spends all its time ensconced in digital-media silos. If you want to encounter genuine diversity and learn how to work and get along with very different people, go work in retail or manual labor. Given the trends in media economics, you might have to do that anyway before long.

The White Prog’s Burden

By in identity, race, the cult of multi

Heather Mac Donald:

The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.

Another day, another step closer to reality melding with the Onion and/or a Chappelle’s Show skit.

One of the contractors at work is a white supremacist. He drives a Chevy HD dually truck with “Farm Use” license plates, listens to country music while working, and wears shirts that say “Black Votes Matter: Trump 2020.” Yes, he’s also a black guy, and his father runs a home for troubled youths, but he is still a white supremacist, because obviously, as a progressive philosopher once mused, it all depends on the meaning of “is.” Some of you no doubt think something as trivial as his race can acquit him of charges of white supremacy. What you fail to understand is that the definition of the term no longer depends on such real-world referents as skin color, heritage, or even objective reality. Everything is interior now; haven’t you heard? Kant’s basic idea, that our experience of the world primarily takes place inside our heads rather than “out there,” escaped from the dense thickets of his impenetrable prose into the hands of callow undergraduates, with predictable results. Whether you’re a man or woman depends on your mood in that moment; our progressive political class has come to hold this “truth” as self-evident. In a similar way, the updated definition of “racism” is “anything that offends the capricious racial sensibilities of white progs.” PoCs who refuse to acknowledge their place in the Great Chain of Political Being as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic party are top of that list. Of course Larry Elder offends white progs, who, when you think about it, are the real victims here, as they usually are. Thankfully, their selfless dedication to making the world a better place outweighs the justifiable sense of grievance they carry due to how often the ungrateful subjects of their magnanimity keep disappointing them.

Name the Enemy

By in bricolage, identity, race, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, tribalism

One of the more significant milestones in America’s culture wars is the relatively recent convergence on the term “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) as the label to describe the collection of concepts and ideas associated with American liberalism’s cultural “awokening” on the issue of race.

It’s a significant milestone for a few reasons. The most obvious is that being able to accurately and collectively name a topic of discussion is a prerequisite for actually having that discussion (a point I recently made in an essay on the related topic of cancel culture). And until now, nothing has really stuck. Terms like intersectionality, social justice, and identity politics have had their place in certain contexts, but none have ever been specific or accurate enough to debate the actual ideas of this particular ideological turn in American liberalism. And as for “wokeness,” the term has referred more to a general political disposition or personality (often in relation to issues that go beyond race) and it, too, suffers from a lack of definition or association with a specific set of ideas. And besides not being a very sophisticated term, it’s now most often used derisively, which isn’t a sound or honest place from which to have any sort of good faith debate.

But the other reason CRT’s adoption is an important development is that as these ideas have matured and spread among America’s class of elites and professionals, they’ve begun to make their way into the actual workings of America’s public and private institutions.

— Shant Mesrobian, “Why the Great Awokening Isn’t Allowed to Have a Name”

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But in the meantime, we must understand:

1) Criticizing Critical Race Theory as it operates in 2021 does not require perusing the oeuvre of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the critique is not invalidated by the differences between what articles like that contained and what’s happening in our schools now.

2) Criticizing Critical Race Theory does not mean teaching students that America has been nothing but great. Constructive dialogue about complex and sensitive issues is impossible within the pretense that all matters reduce to binary oppositions. The Elect cannot reasonably insist America be more sensitive in their perspectives while responding to all critique with sandbox logic based on yes vs. no, off vs. on, and Selma vs. utopia.

Quibbles and cavils and performance art over what we call what’s happening in our schools are just that. The urgent thing is not what we call these developments, and pretending you have to be a legal scholar to have anything to say about them but Amen.

— John McWhorter, “You Are Not a Racist to Criticize Critical Race Theory”

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And it’s vital for the rest of us to understand that these kinds of lessons are directly downstream of an ideology that, according to an early Critical Race Theory text, “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of Constitutional law.” For these reasons, CRT insists that what we have always understood as liberal education is, in fact, a lie, because liberalism assumes that we are all individuals, capable of reasoning with each other as equals, where, in fact, we are mere representatives of racial constructs which are part of a permanent struggle between the oppressors (white) and oppressed (non-white).

This is not teaching about critical race theory; it is teaching in critical race theory. And it is compulsory and often hidden from parents. It contradicts the core foundations of our liberal society; and is presented not as one truth to be contrasted with others, but as the truth, the basis on which all other truths are built. That’s why teaching based on CRT will make children see themselves racially from the get-go, why it will separate them into different racial groups, why it will compel white kids to internalize their complicity in evil, tell black kids that all their troubles are a function of white people, banish objective measurements of success to avoid stigmatizing failure, and treat children of different races differently in a classically racist hierarchy.

And this is why — crucially — it will suppress any other way of seeing the world — because any other way, by definition, is merely perpetuating oppression. As Kendi constantly reminds us, it is either/or. An antiracist cannot exist with a liberalism that perpetuates racism. And it’s always the liberalism that has to go.

…The question is: what can a liberal society do when almost all of its educational, media, business and cultural elites have adopted an ideology that believes that liberal society needs to be dismantled? And the answer is: not much.

— Andrew Sullivan, “Don’t Ban CRT. Expose It.”

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The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years of evolution. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes than people who were suspicious of them. People who were loyal to their tribe were more likely to pass on their genes than people who stood apart.

…The combination of acquisitiveness and loyalty to the interests of one’s own group (be it defined by ethnicity or class) shaped human governments for the subsequent 10,000 years. The natural form of government was hierarchical, run by a dominant group that arranged affairs to its benefit and oppressed outsiders to a lesser or greater degree, usually greater. The rare attempts to try any other form of government were unstable and short-lived. The American founders’ idealism lay in their belief that an alternative was possible. Their genius was to design a system with multiple safeguards against the forces that had made previous attempts self-destruct.

America proved that a durable alternative to the natural form of government was possible — a constitutional republic combined with carefully circumscribed democracy. The idea behind that alternative eventually spread around the world, but neither the United States nor any other country that has made it work has ever been out of danger. If we decide that our system for tending the garden needs to be replaced, and if the replacement should prove to be even slightly less devoted to keeping nature at bay, the garden will be reclaimed by jungle within a few decades.

The introduction of identity politics into that carefully crafted constitutional system does not simply distract us from warding off the jungle. It is the jungle, the primitive sense of ‘us against them’ pressing in upon the garden. It not only permits but insists that the power of the state be used to reward favored groups at the expense of everyone else. That view of power is the defining characteristic of the natural form of government that humankind endured until the miracle at Philadelphia in 1787.

…Events since the summer of 2020 make me think it is too late to talk about if whites adopt identity politics. Many already have. That’s the parsimonious way to interpret the red-blue divisions over wearing masks, the widespread belief in red states that the 2020 election was stolen, and the rage that resulted in the invasion of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. This is all evidence that the federal government has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of many whites. If that reaction spreads, the continued ability of the federal government to enforce its edicts in the reddest portions of the nation will be thrown into question. The prospect of legal secession may be remote, but the prospect of reduced governability from Washington is not.

— Charles Murray, “Identity Crisis: How the Politics of Race Will Wreck America“

They’re White Even When They’re Not

By in fresh hell, identity, race, the cult of multi

The modern left is Janus-faced, effortlessly alternating between identitarianism and Marxishness as circumstances require. Until now, many had thought this schizophrenic marriage would be too unstable to endure, with the mutually-incompatible premises and demands of each side destined to end in acrimonious disaster. But what if some political alchemist could find a way to meld the two into a cohesive whole? What if the personal and the political truly were identical?

I give you —

— “multiracial whiteness.” (via Glenn Greenwald. Bonus humorous commentary from David Thompson.)

It Is Only Shallow People Who Do Not Judge By Appearances

By in fresh hell, identity, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening

Poppy Noor:

This is Race to Dinner. A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”

I assume my readers, like me, would like to be independently wealthy so that we could sit around and read books all day. Well, let’s put our heads together and make it happen. As this story makes clear, there are a lot of white progressives with more money than brains who are desperately seeking absolution from their political sins. If there are this many who are willing to pay beaucoup bucks for the, uh, privilege of being told what awful racists they are over dinner, how many more do you think there are who would pay to avoid such public displays of sadomasochism? There’s gold in them thar guilt-ridden hills, is what I’m saying.

My idea is this: we know that progressives are terribly anxious over the issue of cosmetic diversity, yes? You can hardly click a link online without finding one fretting over the unbalanced racial/gender/whatever demographics in one social setting or another. What if there were an app that could provide our people of pallor with the exotic skin colors and gender markers they need to make their next party or conference a woke success? Like Tinder, or Uber, the app would allow users to choose from a database of local contractors according to their specific needs. However you hyphenate your identity, if one of our users contacts you about appearing at a local event, you just have to be willing to stand around and appear mildly interested in the proceedings. The main thing is to provide cover against accusations of the gathering being too white and/or male; hence, we’re looking for visible markers of diversity. Whatever neuro-disabilities you’ve got going on don’t count; that stuff doesn’t show up on a photograph. Anyway, you get the idea. If any of my angel investor readers out in Silicon Valley want to get in touch, we can make this happen.

The Truth Will Lock You Up

By in books, foolosophy, identity, montaigne

A lie, even the smallest lie, grants the liar a capacious cloak of privacy. In an age of increasing surveillance — our era of technological hyperthymesia, in which each tweet and call, each coming and going, every street crossing and red-light run may be recorded and kept in permanent archive — lying may be the last hope of the individual offering a shelter in which the self may know itself in solitude, unobserved, creating a space into which one can retreat to contemplate one’s life, one’s thoughts, unknown to others, the last refuge of honest men.

— E. J. Levy, “On Liars,” After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays

Knowing what to throw away, and knowing what to keep — according to the troubadour philosopher Kenny Rogers, this is the secret to surviving. Some truths are too precious and fragile to be shared. Montaigne wrote in his essays about the need to cultivate a “room behind the shop,” an arrière boutique, “in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place.” He was conceiving of it as a part of himself detached and separated from the inevitable crushing pain of loss, a safe room of Stoic ataraxia in which to retreat when tragedy and disaster struck. I like to think of mine more along the lines of a secret chamber concealed by an ordinary façade — you know, like a bookcase that rumbles aside when you move the trigger book on the shelf, revealing a hidden passageway. I might not even have anything worth hiding back there, but it’s nice to know it exists if needed.

One recurring daydream I used to have as a teenager was to imagine being able to hide myself — or my consciousness, to be precise — within a tiny part of my own body. I would sit in geometry class and look at a pore on the back of my hand, say, and entertain the fantasy of somehow shrinking “me” down to hide within it, while “my body” continued on autopilot with no one the wiser. “My body” might continue to feel insecure and foolish as events required, but “I” would be somehow insulated from all that. Sometimes my focus would turn outward — I would take notice of a nondescript strip of land or woods near a highway and imagine how great it would be to have some kind of underground shelter there where I could live, hidden in plain sight, too insignificant to ever draw attention. Obviously, this doesn’t reveal anything profound beyond the facts that, one, I was just a typical adolescent shrinking violet, if a moderately more shy and introverted one, and two, that it’s no surprise I had to retake geometry in summer school. But these strange fantasies of deception and deceit were defensive, not malicious. Like most of my peers, I suspect, I never imagined I could actually be “cool;” I just simply wanted to avoid being an object of ridicule. A false front or an escape hatch were my means of evading unfriendly scrutiny.

Still, maybe I wasn’t that weird. The instinct to find close attention threatening and frightening is deeply embedded through the animal kingdom. Sometimes I wonder how well-prepared we are, evolutionarily speaking, for the brave new social media world we’ve created in which we voluntarily expose ourselves to the possibly-dangerous attention of hundreds, thousands, or even occasionally millions of strangers on the gamble that some robust fellow-feeling will keep them from savaging us for for the sheer amoral fun of it. But then again, who’s to say that most of what we see in the online hall of mirrors isn’t mostly deceptive anyway? How many of our profiles and proclamations are unfiltered honesty with no additives or preservatives? Me, I tend toward honesty, but more out of laziness than moral rectitude — I simply don’t have the patience to weave and maintain tangled webs of deceit. But I reserve the right to keep a thief’s lockpicking kit in my back pocket, just in case. I guess you’ll just have to trust me. Ask me no invasive questions and I’ll tell you no serious lies.

Irony Was the Shackles of Youth

By in foolosophy, identity, political philosophy

Marlowe and Raleigh alike were mockers. Or to put it more kindly: they were gadflies, jesting about matters that were too serious for jest, playing with different and contradictory unorthodoxies without committing themselves to any of them, consistent only in their refusal to bow to authority.

— Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

Ryrie’s subject is the emotional, as opposed to intellectual, history of how people in the West came to doubt the Christian narrative. I found the book enthralling, and I recommend it to anyone interested. But this passage actually turned my thoughts toward contemporary politics and my own coming-of-age.

Claire Berlinski wrote a bit in a recent installment of her newsletter about Manufacturing Consent, the famous book by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman. Now, I was born in the early 1970s. I was in high school when the Berlin Wall came down. My twenties began concurrently with Bill Clinton’s presidency. To the extent that I had a political identity, I largely thought of myself as a non-denominational leftie, especially as defined against the bigoted, religious cultural conservatives of my youth, the kind who wanted to sticker cassettes and CDs with parental warning labels and keep those poor kids in Footloose from dancing at their prom. (The Great Awokening of this decade forced me to reconsider a lot of complacent assumptions.)

What really struck me in reading Claire’s post was how much of my lukewarm-leftism, like that of many of my peers, was basically Chomskian in its framework. Anti-anti-Communist, I suppose you could call it; relentlessly critical of existing realities while being evasive about offering workable alternatives; a comfortable, idealistic posture that reeks of (dare I utter the overused term), privilege. For many of us naïfs, Chomsky seemed to represent an intoxicating intellectual ideal — his moral credibility seemed unimpeachable, his knowledge seemed encyclopedic, and his ability to connect disparate dots seemed unparalleled. (Yes, I know; that’s why I say “seemed.”) He seemed to sit above all partisan bias, observing empirical facts, dispensing moralistic judgments. As adolescent Chomskians, we felt secure that in attacking the compromises and sellouts of political life, we were just being like sculptors, chipping away the unnecessary parts to reveal the idealistic essence within. If we weren’t actually optimistic that the best was ever achievable, we were at least smugly secure that the worst was somehow unlikely. It might not have been the End of History after all, but it was at least a Historical Fermata.

Chomsky, though, seemed a little too serious sometimes. He never seemed to lighten up; he couldn’t watch a basketball game without seeing a modern-day fascist rally lurking underneath. Can’t we enjoy the end of the Cold War and the dawn of the online age? We needed some gadflies with a sense of humor and pop-culture approachability, some mockers to whom we could relate. Luckily, we had comedians like Bill Hicks, George Carlin, and Jon Stewart. Moral superiority with cutting zingers and naughty language? How could we resist? We didn’t have to do much of anything besides taunt the booboisie. We just had to be clever and observant and to crack wise as the parade of fools marched by in public life. It seems only fitting that one of Stewart’s final acts as a jester was to gleefully welcome Trump’s candidacy as a “gift from heaven,” oblivious to what a Trojan Horse it was.

It appears obvious in hindsight that such a respite from responsibility could only be temporary. History’s currents started flowing again. The reality of post-partisan politics and online connectedness has left most observers muttering, “The horror! The horror!” Currently, it’s fashionable for many theoretically-inclined right-wingers (and timid liberals) to lament how capitalism/liberalism was always destined by history’s dialectic to end up producing a society of atomized, isolated individuals wasting away in their loneliness and decadence. Like most fashionable theories, this one is mostly dreck, soon to appear embarrassingly outdated. Millions of years of evolution as a social species is not going to be undone by several decades of affluence and technological trends. We’ve already seen the “atomization” that was going to occur, and it was more cerebral than anything: clever individuals playing with heterodoxies without committing to any of them, consistent only in their refusal to bow to authority. Faced with the competing idiocies of the woke left and the nationalist right, I didn’t have any trouble putting away the childish snark of my gadfly youth. I suspect many more of my peers feel the same.

And Who Is Willing to Destroy a Piece of His Own Heart?

By in foolosophy, identity, political philosophy, the geist of the zeit

Jim Geraghty:

The good news is that when we listen to voices as diverse as Rich, Putnum, Obama, Trump, Carlson, Brooks, the other Brooks, and almost every lawmaker and commentator in American life, they all recognize the same problems in society and all want to figure out some way to make Americans feel more connected to each other; to feel like we have a strong support network around us to help us get through life’s rougher moments. If there’s consensus over the problem, then just maybe someday we could have a consensus over the solutions.

He’s speaking of the fact that increasing numbers of conservative intellectuals and politicians are echoing populist themes recently, complaining of “the market’s” inability to heal us and make us whole. I, being an ornery li’l cuss, would argue that this doesn’t indicate any sort of consensus (let alone the desirability of consensus); it’s not necessarily any more significant than the fluttering of windsocks in a strong breeze. Careerist intellectuals and politicians are capable of recognizing trends and jumping on bandwagons in pursuit of power, influence, and maybe even wealth; even professional conservatives can think of no permanent thing more worthy than getting their hands on the steering wheel of state. When did we feel connected and supportive of each other in society? Pre-1960’s? Pre-20th century? Pre-agriculture? Wherever your time machine lands, there you find professional thinkers and doers lamenting the same perennial themes and flaws in human existence. Pull the blanket up to nestle under your chin and complain about your cold feet. Put on woolly socks and complain that your feet get sweaty.

My personal trainer deplores the trend of people wearing headphones in the gym. She wishes they would make eye contact with each other, and say supportive things like, “Nice set!” She’s old enough (as am I) to remember when parents and mores didn’t allow you the option of placing that audio barrier between yourself and the world; you had to be sociable, or at least be open for conversational business during normal hours. She also has a prickly side to her personality, though, as evidenced by the bitchy little asides she’ll make about other members in particular, or about people in general getting on her nerves, which seems to happen regularly. This person makes small talk about stupid things like the weather. That lady sings too loud while working out. This guy stands around too long flapping his yap in between sets, blocking the way. There’s always something petty to attract her critical notice. (Interestingly, she also seems to be a devout Christian, which raises the obvious question to an ornery li’l cuss like me: would she be even worse about it without religious exhortations to be a better person?)

In Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome illustrates this contradictory aspect of human nature by means of a hilariously ironic scene in a picturesque churchyard, where the narrator finds himself swept up in beatific thoughts about his fellow man:

It was a lovely landscape. It was idyllic, poetical, and it inspired me. I felt good and noble. I felt I didn’t want to be sinful and wicked any more. I would come and live here, and never do any more wrong, and lead a blameless, beautiful life, and have silver hair when I got old, and all that sort of thing. In that moment I forgave all my friends and relations for their wickedness and cussedness, and I blessed them. They did not know that I blessed them. They went their abandoned way all unconscious of what I, far away in that peaceful village, was doing for them; but I did it, and I wished that I could let them know that I had done it, because I wanted to make them happy.

His reverie is broken, however, by the appearance of the old groundskeeper, who thinks that he wants to be let in to see the tombs. Naturally, he heaps abuse upon the old man for disturbing him, the first individual he’s encountered after embracing humanity in the aggregate. “Go away, and don’t disturb me. I am chock full of beautiful and noble thoughts, and I want to stop like it, because it feels nice and good. Don’t you come fooling about, making me mad, chivying away all my better feelings with this silly tombstone nonsense of yours. Go away, and get somebody to bury you cheap, and I’ll pay half the expense.” Ivan Karamazov, with the bitter self-awareness that J. lacks, noted the same discrepancy. One might love those at a distance, in the abstract, but one’s neighbors? How can we seriously love our neighbor, who has a stupid face, who once stepped on my foot, who voted for Trump, who talks too much and sings too loud and…

Our beautiful and noble thoughts make us feel nice and good. It’s pleasant to fantasize about life in a society without dead-end jobs, or opioid addiction, or declining church attendance, or whatever other trendy signifier the sociology-minded are prattling on about today. Who knows, maybe they will weave a blanket policy to cover our sense of disconnected anomie. But then we’ll start complaining that our desire for novelty is left cold and remember just why it was that we didn’t want to have anything to do with our neighbors and their stupid faces and their suffocating, woolly embrace in the first place. “Only connect,” said E.M. Forster, quoted by countless undergrads online looking to capture the spirit of our time. And yet, Forster didn’t mean the phrase the way it’s commonly interpreted in the age of social media. It turns out that the type of “connection” he had in mind, being in touch with our hidden erotic desires, is the sort of thing we’re actually lamenting these days, a symptom of our atomistic malaise. Even the hyper-individualism being attacked by Catholic integralist culture warriors might have its roots in…guess where? The dividing line is not between parties, or states, or individuals vs. communities, but right through every human heart, indeed.

Sure to Play a Part, So You Love the Game

By in identity, socmed

Claire Berlinski:

Here’s how to make journalists stop doing things like “publishing a vaguely offensive thing that a local hero said on Twitter when he was sixteen.” It’s so simple you wouldn’t believe it.

Never, ever click on stories about that kind of thing.

They’re measuring the amount of time you spend looking at stories like that. The amount of time your eyeballs spend on the article or articles about the article is all they care about. By “they” I mean advertisers, and it doesn’t matter if you’re pleased or enraged. If something gets your attention, they’ll show you more of it. They’ll show you more, in particular, of the thing that most enrages you. By reading that story—and—this is key—stories about that story, you’re telling advertisers how to get your attention, and it doesn’t matter if the attention is good or bad. It’s good for them.

I agree. But I’m afraid that this is all a good idea in the same way that veganism is a good idea, and I don’t think the media equivalent of a vegan diet is ever going to catch on any more than the literal one has. The best we can probably hope for is to convince people to invest a bit more of their time, and maybe subscription money, in supporting free-range articles which have been allowed to stretch their argumentative muscles and spread their rhetorical wings, rather than gobbling buckets of deep-fried news nuggets which have spent their short lives on clickbait factory farms, crammed into tiny cages, being pumped full of outrage steroids.

As John McWhorter and Glenn Loury discuss in their most recent conversation, it’s hard to be an individual. It’s not pleasant to constantly set yourself at odds with your peers. People are hardwired to prefer the “warmth of the crowd,” the consoling “group hug” of shared identity. And few people are willing to voluntarily isolate themselves through a principled refusal to participate. “I don’t eat that kind of food. I don’t read those sorts of articles. I don’t enjoy that type of entertainment. I’m not interested in gossip.” Do that enough times, and you might start to feel lonely. And one way that people compensate for that feeling of loneliness is by developing a sense of smug superiority, which isolates them even more.

I’m a fairly taciturn, solitary person. Always have been. I’ve never had a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc. account. For me, the Web 2.0 train stopped at Blogspot station, and I’ve never felt the need to get back on. And yet even I find myself aware of far more cultural effluvia than I care to admit. Why? Because even I, fairly disciplined as well as solitary, can’t devote my free time with monastic rigor to reading cerebral books and thinking elevated thoughts. I love the amateur writing I do here; I love building with words the way other hobbyists like to build with power tools or craft materials. But I’m also an ordinary, boring fellow, and I don’t have enough depth of inner resources to draw on in order to write original, interesting material. So I depend on the conversational prompt of other websites to stimulate my own thoughts. Thus am I compromised. You dance with them what brung you. There’s also the fact that my curiosity is somewhat Whitmanesque — I’m easily interested in subjects both high and low, refined and vulgar; I feel ambidextrous enough to approach topics either critically or reverentially, to attempt either commonsense philosophy or cheap puns.“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” If that occasionally leads me to flirt with popular culture and sample the low-hanging fruits of social-justice stupidity, I console myself with the thought that at least I avoid whoring around with syphilitic Buzzfeed listicles and “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS liberal snowflake!!!” videos on YouTube. I might even balance it out by occasionally, accidentally, writing something moderately profound.

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles,” said Winston Smith. For me, hope lies in the podcasts. If there is a dependable audience for calm, in-depth, three-hour discussions of weighty issues, maybe there’s a quiet revolution taking place underneath all the cacophony of social media and network news.

That Vacuity of Soul

By in bricolage, foolosophy, identity, psychology

In societies such as modern Britain we have means and comforts that our forebears could never have dreamed of. But having achieved them, we don’t know what to do with them, and some people are bored. Bored with their jobs, bored with the lack of struggle, bored with the lack of heroism and purpose that security brings.

So, unsure what to build next, or how else to gain purpose, a certain number of people are finding meaning in self-denial and self-blame. They’re finding ultimate meaning in the call to repent before the imminent, partly longed for, apocalypse.

— Douglas Murray, “The Empty Lives of Extinction Rebellion Fanatics”

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The most general survey shows us that the two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom. We may go further, and say that in the degree in which we are fortunate enough to get away from the one, we approach the other. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between the two. The reason of this is that each of these two poles stands in a double antagonism to the other, external or objective, and inner or subjective. Needy surroundings and poverty produce pain; while, if a man is more than well off, he is bored. Accordingly, while the lower classes are engaged in a ceaseless struggle with need, in other words, with pain, the upper carry on a constant and often desperate battle with boredom… Now, intellectual dullness is at the bottom of that vacuity of soul which is stamped on so many faces, a state of mind which betrays itself by a constant and lively attention to all the trivial circumstances in the external world. This is the true source of boredom—a continual panting after excitement, in order to have a pretext for giving the mind and spirits something to occupy them. The kind of things people choose for this purpose shows that they are not very particular, as witness the miserable pastimes they have recourse to, and their ideas of social pleasure and conversation: or again, the number of people who gossip on the doorstep or gape out of the window. It is mainly because of this inner vacuity of soul that people go in quest of society, diversion, amusement, luxury of every sort, which lead many to extravagance and misery.

— Schopenhauer, “The Wisdom of Life”

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Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

— George Orwell, “Review of Mein Kampf”

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